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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Torches and Pitchforks
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Weir made a face like he’d taken a bite of a sundae and gotten an ice cream headache at the precise moment his server showed him video of her farting on the sundae right before she gave it to him. “Okay, I get why we duct-taped Kreiger; I don’t trust the little German madman farther than I could huck him. But why did you take all his clothes off, first?"
Dagney shrugged. “It was the only way he’d let me do it without a fuss. I think he figured once I had him duct-taped to the motel bed that somehow I would be less repulsed by him. And he is in surprisingly good shape, but he’s almost my dad’s age and I find him personally disgusting- so the physical doesn’t much enter into it.” “He’s actually older than your father- merely better preserved.” Sharpe didn’t seem to appreciate the discussion of age- though he wasn’t certain if he was older than Dr. Piers or not. “Doctor, you sure you can handle him?” “Are you joking? I’ve got enough ketamine and pornography to keep him sedated for days-wait.” Dr. Piers adjusted his glasses, blushing slightly. “I did not mean that in a date-rapey way.” Dagney interceded. “I don’t think this qualifies as a date, but I think we get what you meant. Just… don’t go outside until we get back. If things go badly, they’re going to go really, really badly. Protestors have been flooding in from across the country, and even the lowball estimates are putting it at over a million. That’s like half the population of the metro area- it’s going to be like they opened the cages in the zoo after setting all the animals on fire- and that’s assuming all goes well.” “Don’t rape the lieutenant, don’t go outside, and don’t order hookers with the credit card; thanks mom, I’ll be good.” “You’d better, mister, because your grandmother’s gutters could use a good apology-cleaning.” “My grandmother’s been dead for eleven years.” “And yet her drainpipes just get more clogged.” “What’s going on here?” Sharpe asked. “I think they’re doing schtick,” Weir whispered. Dr. Piers hugged her. “Come back safe.” “Doctor’s orders?” “No. You ruined the moment. With a pun. Don’t bother.” “Being safe?” “Or coming back, either,” he deadpanned. “What I don’t understand,” Weir said, “is why he’s got a pizza on his crotch.” Dagney shrugged. “It was the only thing he’d cover himself with.” “Nibble on my sausage!” Krieger called from the other room. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever be that hungry.” Outside it was raining, but it was Portland, so that was a given. Dagney’d convinced herself in a daze on the flight there that the name had to have its origins in a bar, where a man stumbled in and said, “It’s pouring,” and insisted that if the sky was giving him plenty to drink the barman ought to get to pouring, too, some port. It made less sense now that she’d taken a nap. She huddled beneath an overhang, hoping to stay dry as long as possible, only to be hit by a small wave overflowing it, soaking her hair instantly. “Being in the Pacific Northwest is like sheltering beneath a witch’s teat while she’s taking a cold shower.” Weir grinned; his hair had taken on a spikiness because of the rain that made him look more boyish. “You were just looking for a way to work ‘teat’ into conversation, weren’t you?” “Am I that transparent?” “Actually, factoring in the moisture and the white t-shirt you stole from me-” Dagney quickly folded her arms, “kidding, I’m kidding. Can’t see a thing. I mean, there’s clinginess, but the shirt’s not see-through or anything.” The rain seemed to get heavier, fatter and more frequent, with every step. And there was enough wind that it was stayed cold their entire walk. The streets were deadlocked. Protestors had already taken over intersections all over the city, and cars were being abandoned as throngs of people pressed around them as if they were rocks in a human stream. A policeman on horseback eyed them nervously on the corner. He wasn’t there to maintain order, just to observe; he was so grossly outnumbered he was at the protestors' mercy. They seemed to understand it, too, and a few walked straighter for it, but most recognized that the dynamic couldn’t last. They had numbers now, and here, but eventually the police would come, with gas, and shields, mace, dogs. This protest wasn’t going to stay peaceful much longer. It couldn't. Dagney led the way, which was made easier, because the sidewalks had largely been abandoned. The organizers had reasoned that taking over the streets would be a part of their protest, because they could go where cars could, but not the other way around. Cox Tower was the newest skyscraper in the city, and cast a deep shadow across Pioneer Courthouse Square. The building was home to corporate offices, as well as the studios for the local Cox affiliates, both the broadcast channel and regional news. There were also the offices of the local newspaper, The Portlander, and even Vague magazine’s West Coast offices. The front lobby was unlocked, but empty; the door bolted shut behind them. The elevator doors were already open, and they walked inside. Sharpe pressed a button before folding his arms, composed. “Their condo here used to belong to the regional GM, but they bumped him down a floor to have it renovated. Doug said contractors began working exactly a year ago. It would seem they’ve been planning this for some time.” The elevator doors opened. Four terminators, all with Weir’s face, in dark suits, were standing there. It was a little like a dream Dagney’d had the night before, though she doubted any of them were wearing Superman Underoos. They let Dagney walk through, then Weir, but stopped Sharpe inside the elevator. “Sorry, sir, but you’ve got to stay here. Bosses said they have no interest talking to an ancient bureaucrat. They insisted I tell you that.” He sighed, but he wasn’t terribly disappointed, either. He nodded to Dagney. “Send me a postcard of your head in the lion’s mouth.” There was a dimly-lit hall with a single door at the end. Dagney pushed through. The room was dark. They entered to a slow clap, one set of hands, then it was joined by a second. Slowly the house lights came on. “Dagney. Big fan of your work. Though I thought you’d be taller. And you, well, I’ll assume you’re the other star of the show. We seem to be missing a W series terminator, so Wendell or Weir- one of you’s dead and the other is here, in the flesh, though not quite as fleshy as-” Suddenly the room was lit by a projector, playing grainy security tape footage across a large white screen. At first Dagney couldn’t make out what she was being shown, until she recognized something on the pale screen, a dot that seemed familiar… it was a mole on her left shoulder. She turned away. “Amazing, isn’t it? The picture quality is sadly lacking- makes me wish we’d sprung for the HD security system when we’d had it installed, but five years ago? Christ, that alone would have cost as much as the rest of the Foxtrot. Sadly, no sound, but Scott and I like to take turns making the moans ourselves. Tell us, Dag, because inquiring minds need to know; I think you’re more of a guttural moaner, that slow, phlegmmy build until it’s a sound like a Kodiak bear stack-raping a locomotive. Scott likes to believe you’re more feminine, it’s starts light and feathery, and builds, getting quieter but higher pitched until you scream, like a teapot letting you know it’s done being all hot and bothered. Of course, if you’re too embarrassed, perhaps Weirndell could simply confirm it for us.” “Weir- it’s just Weir.” “Poor Wendell,” continued Bruce. “And poor Scott, too. He had a million dollars on the dead man being you. But I take it from your otherwise stony silence that a gentleman never tells. Well, bravo on the performance, anyway. I don’t think I’m too proud to say I learned a few things- we’ve tried a few of them, since. It’s been a very education film. And e-rot-tick. And I don’t use that word lightly. I don’t usually much care for pornography. But this. I could touch my brother all day to this.” Dagney had produced and booted Dr. Piers’ laptop. “Oh, don’t be so modest. I think your film is much better.” Bruce’s voice blared out of the laptop’s speakers: “Scott, if you’re watching this, then you’ve done something typically foolish. This is me, politely reminding you to step back into line. This is as close to a carrot as you’re getting, which is slightly and crudely ironic, since I’m about to give you the stick.” “What the fuck?” asked Scott, staring at his brother. “Not my cup of tea, you understand, but just look at the production values. And that lighting, and the sound design, tell me you brought in some professionals to prepare that blackmail sex-tape.” “You still haven’t come close to telling me what the fuck that is,” Scott said. He was angry, but trying not to lose it in front of people who were watching him have sex. “Just shut up, Scott. Now is not the time.” Bruce stared at his brother a moment more, before returning his gaze to Dagney. “Nixon was infamous for his Madman diplomacy. He all but told the Chinese he was a batshit lunatic obsessed with defeating communism, and willing to burn away their country in thermonuclear fire. It worked, in that there was an end to the war. And it failed, in that he never quite capitalized on the lunacy, never squeezed that little bit extra out of them.” “I prefer a variation. Coldly rational irrationality. Disproportionate response. I make it my business to ensure that whatever you do, we will make your world suffer for it- feed the chopped up little bits of your mother to your raped dog, kind of fucked up. We know about your weird little mutant children, Dagney. I haven’t decided if it’s a better abject lesson to have them brutally murdered, or kept alive to be guinea pigs for research done by inept and unethical med students. Or, and this is just a thought, but I could always have themp chopped up and smothered in salad dressing- that might be tasty. ” “Sadly you won’t live long enough for me to make up my mind. I know, after all of this delightful cross-country foreplay to just shoot you here in our condo,” he produced a .50 Taurus revolver, “is a little anticlimactic, if you’ll pardon the porn-pun, but sometimes business demands sacrifices. The terminators outside are waiting for a phone call. When they get it, they’ll come in here, chop your bodies into little pieces then spirit them away. It’ll be like you were never in the city. Then they’ll go to your hotel room and pick up the good doctor and the bad lieutenant.” “But there’s no rush, aside from the fact that you’ve perturbed my brother, which means I’ll have to shoot you somewhere it won’t kill you quickly. But I’ve been dying to talk. I mean, that’s the trouble of orchestrating such a grandiose clandestine design. I’ve painted my masterpiece, but if I show it, to anyone, it’ll be ruined. Except the pair of you, who’ve caught glimpses through interlaced fingers, and who, as I mentioned, I’ll be shooting momentarily.” He set the heavy Taurus down on a table behind and between them; Weir took in the distance, but knew they were still too far away to make a play for the revolver. “Now I imagine Krieger’s stolen some of my thunder already- he always was a cock-block- but what’s always disappointed me about the man is his limited scope. It’s always about the particular operation at hand. But sometimes you have to look at the larger poetry of something to appreciate it. Krieger, about the only word he ever glommed onto was ‘synergy,’ and I know the babbling market-speak that word so often implies, but what it means, in a nutshell, is that we’ve done what the old steel barons did: own every aspect of the process by which a good goes from creation to consumer. Some of our products are still physical, largely remnants of our father’s concerns, and of course potential my brother recognized in business cycles, but most exist in the area of ideas.” “We own think tanks, where ideas and policies are born, like the Legacy Foundation. It’s not so much about creating sound policy as the perception of sound policy. The illusion of choice. We sell a world view. We disseminate that worldview through our own media, filtered through ‘local’ stations and papers, obscuring the source. And that world view is, generally speaking, self-fulfilling. The tethers that bind society are fragile, based upon mutual trust and expectations of prosperity. You tell enough people that the economy is crumbling and it will.” “But tonight is my aria. World leaders will piss all over themselves because the little people are all mad as hell and no longer willing to take it, so tomorrow they buy weapons. The next day, anyone not sufficiently friendly with them and their countries buys weapons. Increasing military build-up and tension create conflict. Which fuels the cycle. It’s an elegant perpetual motion machine, where our ideas perpetuate and create as many problems as they solve, and every time the carousel revolves, we make even larger sums of money.” “I can see you disapprove. I’ve heard politics summed up as the art of the possible: if I can, why shouldn’t I? But it goes beyond that. For the viability of the species I have a moral imperative to. If I can amass wealth, I should, because only by forcing people to fight over resources will we find our true potential. So why not apply the same to economics? So long as I can find workers willing to take a 5% pay cut so I can invest that money in expansion, why wouldn’t I?” Dagney saw a foothold in his rambling. “Yeah, but that’s a convenient fiction. The economy grew 90% in the last forty years, but average wages have gone up less than 40%. You’re lopping off 50%- at least if you’re keeping pace with the average.” She looked down to make sure she hadn’t worn her “I can haz maths” LOLcat shirt (she hadn’t), then assumed a defiant pose. “What a socialist little bitch. It’s disappointing, actually. Like finding the chess-by-mail champion you’ve just beaten is autistic- that they’re utterly unimpressive in every other aspect of their lives.” “That seems like an unnecessarily dickish thing to say,” Weir said. “Was that in poor taste? Is it so wrong to acknowledge that some people are, we’ll say, incomplete. Imperfect, if you’d like to be coddled. But there’s a world of difference between disagreeing on philosophical minutiae and someone whose understanding of the world is so completely and fundamentally wrong. That’s why I thought autism an excellent metaphor; a disease of broken people who function only partially. It seemed apt. Because that’s what her ‘compassion’ is- a mental disorder.” “Do you know how people become worthwhile? Creating things. And I don’t mean parasitical little worker ants, toiling away in a factory, I mean actually building new technology and ideas. Entrepreneurship lifts people out of obscurity and poverty. Rather than teach men to fish, you’d rather just redistribute the fish others have already caught. And by robbing those who know how to fish, you destroy their desire to continue. If you continue to cross the men who hold up the world, it's only a matter of time before Atlas will shrug.” “Are you done?” Dagney asked. “I’m assuming from your rant you think you’re John Galt. First off, Galt is a character from a terrible, polemic novel. Also, Galt was a genius, an engineer with revolutionary ideas for technology that could have changed the world; he was also a dick-punch who believed that life had been so mean to him that he destroyed society. John Galt is a spoiled brat having a nuclear temper tantrum. But for the sake of argument let's look at your claim to Galthood.” “What have you created? You call your employees parasites but you leech breakthroughs off scientists and engineers. They file patents that your company then owns, leaving you free to discard the Galts at your leisure once you’re sure they’ve laid their last golden eggs. You’re not John Galt- you repeatedly kick John Galt in the balls while stealing his ideas. Of course, some of the people who’re no longer useful to you you just have killed- like Martin Fox.” She paused. “Unless you just meant that you’re selfish, and then, yeah, you’re fucking John Galt.” “What the fuck’s she talking about, Bruce?” “It’s from Atlus Shrugged, remember, I read it to you in bed.” “You know that isn’t what I meant.” Weir’s mouth dropped open. “Holy shit, he didn’t know.” “What happened to Martin?” “Martin was a dickbag, Scott. He tried- tried and failed- to hard-nose me. I can handle a little assness from you- we’re brothers, and when it comes to business you’re right 90% of the time. But he wanted money just because he thought he could take it from me. I gather, from what the Sheriff told us, and from what her reports said, that Krieger didn’t do as he was told. Not exactly.” “But you didn’t have Krieger just play hardball, did you? He was our cousin- our fucking blood.” “Jesus H. Christ. Do you see what you’ve started? The blubbering. And the gibbering. God Almighty. You didn’t care that Martin was blood, you just wanted to fuck him.” “You’re an asshole. He was our family.” “Family? You mean like Tom and Carey? You don’t remember pushing your other brothers out of the company? You don’t remember giving them a pittance, and then another pittance more after they sued us? What the fuck has family ever been to you but another means to your ends?” “That’s not fair. They didn’t understand business. They just wanted to play king of the castle and rule over their little fiefdoms. They were bleeding half of our company dry just because they couldn’t be assed to learn the first thing about running a business. And we didn’t kill them. That pittance we gave them was our profit margin for a full decade. What could Martin have wanted? A million? Two? Five? You blow that much on blow- how could you kill somebody for that?” “Technically- and I know this’ll sound like splitting hairs, here, but I didn’t kill anyone. I mentioned a problem to a subordinate in the company, and the problem was solved.” “Problem? So he went from being our cousin, who we spent an entire summer growing up dick-punching, to a problem. When will I become a problem? Hmm? When I stop being fiscally useful? After I make a couple of bad calls and cost you a few million dollars? When do I cost too much to keep alive? Or is it not that fucking simple with me? Can’t kill the golden goose, not so long as he might have one more egg to give? So I’m safe until, what, my mind starts to go. Or until I decide maybe dad’s politics don’t make sense anymore.” “I think this discussion is best had amongst family,” Bruce said. “Weir, lest you get any ideas about harming us, I think it’s best you throw yourself out the window and cripple yourself.” Weir turned, obediently, and walked over to the window. He could see down on the street, small black dots of people streaming between cars. It was difficult to tell from that height, but the way the light shattered across the falling rain it looked like the street was dotted by fires. “Dagney, I had hoped to have a little more of our little back and forth. It was really quite fun for a while. But I guess it’s time I shot you.” Bruce turned towards the table where he’d set the Taurus, but it wasn’t there. It was in Scott’s hands, pointed shakily at him. “What are you doing with that?” He fired. The bullet tore open Bruce’s throat, splashing Dagney across the face with his blood. Bruce collapsed like Wile E. Coyote after the cliff disappears out from under him. Scott fell to his knees, tears falling down his cheeks. “I fucking loved him- I loved them both… When did he turn into such an evil fucking cunt?” Weir turned away from the window, his mouth gaping. “Holy shit.” “Weir? Jesus, I thought you were going to jump out the window when he asked.” He jogged across the room, and knelt down beside Bruce. “Nah. I just didn’t want them to know the whole hypno-suggestion thing didn’t take. I was pretty sure I could get to him before the gun went off, but I couldn’t risk him getting a shot off in your direction. I mean, you’re the mother of my child. Ren? I don’t know, is it weird if I claim the spud? Anyway, I had a feeling things were headed where they went. Seemed the best thing was to let it play out.” “I’ll take that,” Dagney said, easing the Taurus out of Scott’s fingers. It was heavier even than it looked. Weir put a hand to Bruce’s neck, then clamped down on his throat. “Dag, you should call 911. Because he’s still alive. You know, until the rest of his blood falls out.” |
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