Jam Read online

  Just as I was getting a feel for the place, I was brought into the stairwell again, and all I could see was concrete jiggling madly around as I was carried up the building.

  “Er,” I said, when my bearers had stopped between floors for the third time to get their breath back. “Maybe if you untaped me I could just walk up by myself?”

  “More than our job’s worth,” growled the guy in front, between pants.

  “Well, maybe you could just untie my feet, then I could help out with the carrying.”

  The two of them exchanged glances. “That sounds . . . reasonable,” said one.

  “Shall we do it?” asked the other.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m just happy to do whatever you want to do.”

  “I’m really not comfortable with taking responsibility.”

  “I could take responsibility,” I suggested.

  That seemed agreeable, and the guy behind me reluctantly unstrapped my feet. They swung down and hit the floor painfully, and after a couple more flights, enough feeling had returned to my legs that I could actually bear my own weight. After that, progress was faster, but there was little conversation. They both seemed a little uneasy about breaking protocol.

  Finally we reached the very top floor of Hibatsu and emerged from the stairwell into ultraexpensive office space with Japanese-style décor. The residents that inhabited this level must have been upper management, because they wore silk ties as headbands, and sparkling cufflinks on the arms of their shirt-skirts rattled noisily against the varnished pine floors.

  My captors took up position on one side of a foreboding black door with a sliding wooden sign nearby that currently read Meeting in Session. It was then that I noticed Don on the other side of the door, strapped upside down to a standing lamp between two office workers virtually identical to mine.

  “Oh, charming!” ranted Don, his face the color of an angry stoplight. “How come the ’tard gets to stand on his own feet?”

  “Did you have permission to do that?” said one of Don’s bearers, in the hushed and slightly excited tone of a schoolboy sensing an opportunity to run to the teacher with a cry of teeelliiing.

  “It was his idea,” said both my escorts simultaneously.

  The door to the conference room suddenly opened and the head and shoulders of a woman appeared, wearing spectacles, a chaste, functional white bra, and a necklace of paper clips as some kind of badge of authority. “You can bring them in n—” she said, before noticing me. Her gaze tracked down to my feet. “Who untied his feet?”

  “Him,” said my front bearer, truthfully. The one behind had been the one to actually physically remove the tape.

  “I just, er,” stammered the culprit, his constant sweating ramping up several notches so that his head resembled a lawn sprinkler. “Thought that . . . it would . . . make it . . . more efficient . . . to carry him up the stairs?”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought!” he said quickly, with ecstatic triumph.

  “I helped!” added my other bearer.

  “We were just about to do it too!” said Don’s front bearer, as the back one busied himself with the tape around his feet.

  “Hey, it was my idea,” I said, hurt.

  “You can just take them off the bars, now,” said the slightly nonplussed woman. “Just leave their hands tied together and show them in.”

  Grumbling bitterly amongst themselves, the guards did as they were told and pushed the two of us quite rudely into the meeting room after the lady, pulling the doors shut behind us. She motioned for us to wait by the door, then returned to the sole unoccupied chair.

  The top-level boardroom of the Hibatsu building radiated wealth and good taste. The oval meeting table was reddish mahogany polished to a mirror shine. A single circular skylight lit up the surface, as well as the foreheads and clasped hands of the people around the table, while the rest of the room was concealed in shadow. It was the kind of setting at which evil shadow governments certainly wouldn’t turn up their conspiratorial noses.

  If the members of the meeting were some kind of evil shadow government, then either it was a pretty low-rent one or we’d shown up on laundry day. They were all topless with their shirts around their waists, sweat glistening unpleasantly off their doughy management flesh. Most of them had some mark of importance—a few had paper-clip necklaces like the woman who’d brought us in, others wore layers of countless elastic bands around their wrists and heads, and one man in the center had an elaborate headdress made from an ergonomic neck rest and several items of stationery.

  “. . . pleased to report that we were able to get a sample of river water from underneath the jam, and it’s drinkable,” said a skinny, balding man whose turn it was to speak. “A lot more so than before, I’d say. The jam removed a lot of impurities.” The river had contained “impurities” in the same way that Jeffrey Dahmer had had a few minor personality quirks. “We’ve taken down some air-conditioning vents and we’re working on building some kind of well system. We should have a prototype ready by the end of the week.”

  The man in the headdress nodded. “On that note, I’d like to quickly ask David if there’s been any headway in getting the air conditioning back online.”

  A slight murmur of discontent indicated the importance of this matter, directed at a blond young man with a tanning-bed complexion. “Well, Gary,” he sighed. “There isn’t much we can do without electricity, but my team has been researching alternatives. One of my engineers proposed a system of fans powered by dogs in giant hamster wheels, but the major issue there is our limited dog inventory. We’ll keep looking into it.”

  Gary, apparently the chair of the meeting, nodded gloomily. “Right then. Item four on the agenda: two refugees recently acquired by Kathy’s Acquisitions team. I’m also hearing something about a broken window?”

  “Yes,” said the woman who’d beckoned us in. “They came here on a sailing boat that unfortunately put its mast through one of the windows on the third floor. We had them brought in because they claimed to have supplies for trade, but frankly I suspect they may have exaggerated their position.”

  “Hm.” Gary tapped his finger against his lips. “It seems to me that we should murder them.”

  “What?!” barked Don, suddenly alert.

  “Oh, yes, perhaps we should get some input from the prisoners on this one,” said Gary, turning towards us. “Would you agree that murder is the way forward in this case?”

  “No!” yelled Don.

  Gary winced, unclasping his two index fingers and rubbing them against each other like mating worms. “Well, you have to understand that you’re not negotiating from a firm position, here. With the broken window you’re already representing a net loss for us.”

  “Even discounting the man-hours and sticky tape,” agreed Kathy.

  “And I hate to be a stickler for the rules but the Hibatsu Survival Settlement Charter clearly states that any individual who cannot reimburse the company in liquid assets must make it up with voluntary existence suspension.”

  “But . . .” stammered Don. “How are you going to explain that when the rescue teams get here?”

  “Mm. Well, we considered that,” said Kathy. “Our basic decision was that any contributions we make to this disaster’s already quite significant death toll would be comparatively negligible.”

  Don seemed about to launch into some furious tirade when his head and upward-pointing finger suddenly dropped as if his puppeteer had cut the strings. “You know what? Fine. I have honestly stopped caring.”

  I started like a dog-show contestant whose entry had just slumped to the floor and started quietly eating its own puke. “What? No! Don’t murder us! We must have something to trade! What about that bag of stuff we brought?”

  “Oh yes, we have your personal effects here,” said Kathy, beckoning to the shadows. An ordinary tribesman without accout
erments came forward holding our bag of vending machine snacks and Mary in her box. She poked nervously at the transparent plastic.

  “See? We’ve got food,” I said desperately, holding forward a rectangular slice of individually wrapped carrot cake.

  “Yes, yes, you’ve got food in a significantly smaller quantity than the amount we get through in a single day,” said one of the managers, bored. Gary nodded to somewhere in the darkness, and two guards stepped forward brandishing swords made from paper-cutter blades. Don seemed to have frozen completely.

  “Look, what is it that you want?!” I wailed.

  “Plastic bags,” said Kathy.

  “Dogs,” said David the air-conditioning guy.

  “Fresh fruit or vegetables,” said someone near the back. “With seeds in, something we can cultivate.” I thought of my lost apple, and almost burst into tears. I rifled desperately through the contents of my bag, holding out each cake and muesli bar for inspection and receiving nothing but shaking heads.

  “I’ve got a spider!” I declared, options dwindling.

  David sat up. “Could it possibly turn a giant hamster wheel?”

  “Don’t be silly,” droned Gary. “Look at that thing. It’d freak out the whole staff.”

  One of the sword-wielding guards took Don by the arm. Don didn’t move, but I could see his eyes bulging, as if some base instinct somewhere in his mind was desperately kicking the backs of his eyeballs trying to spur him to action.

  The other guard snatched my quivering elbow and I started violently, my bag of stocking fillers flying from my hand and spilling some of its contents upon the absurdly soft carpet. A rusty paper-cutter blade pressed coldly against the side of my throat and Don and I were dragged towards the door.

  “All right, next item on the agenda . . .” said Gary, consulting his paperwork.

  “Hang on a second. Sorry, Gary,” said the bloke who’d mentioned agriculture. “Is that a banana?”

  All eyes fell to my discarded goodie bag. Among the items that had fallen out was one of the bananas I’d found in the vending machine. Several people at the back of the room stood up to get a good look at the oblivious yellow-and-brown crescent.

  The swords came away from our throats. “Why didn’t you say you had bananas?” asked Kathy.

  “Well . . . bananas don’t have seeds,” I said timidly. “Do they?”

  “Jesus Christ, Travis,” said Don wearily, covering his eyes.

  “Well, I’ve never found one!”

  —

  After the meeting broke up, our hands were untaped and the director of Agriculture and Food Distribution, or Philip as he’d introduced himself, insisted on escorting us up the final flight of stairs to the roof so we could see how our contribution to the Hibatsu society would be used.

  “We made the troughs from sections of air ducting,” said Philip breathily. He was a thin, bespectacled man in his thirties, and he smelled faintly of eucalyptus cough drops. “The soil we gathered from potted plants from all over the building. There was more than enough. I bet you’re wondering what we’re growing in them, aren’t you?”

  Don and I stood with shoulders hunched, arms limp, and eyelids drooping, but the man was immune to signals. The handle on Mary’s box dangled from my hand, Mary herself inside sleeping on her back.

  “Most of the seeds we got from packed lunches,” continued Philip. “But you’d be surprised how few of them had seeds in forms we could use. We’ve got apples there, tomatoes there, and over there is where we planted potato salad. Not holding out much hope for that one, I’m afraid. That’s why we’re really very grateful to have those bananas you brought.”

  I was still dubious about the whole banana seed thing, but I wasn’t about to challenge anyone over it.

  “Hasn’t been much rain lately, so we’ve been watering them with whatever we can spare from the water-cooler stock.” He sighed. “The whole settlement is holding its breath waiting for the river-water pumping system. Literally. No one’s had a shower in days and with the air conditioning off . . . Maybe you noticed.”

  Don and I had been making sure to stand several feet away from him. “No, not really,” I said diplomatically.

  “But once that’s ready, life will be much more comfortable. I understand David’s engineering team even think they could rig up a hydroelectric generator. But from what I understand, the current design would only generate enough power to run the pump that draws the water up to turn the generator . . .”

  “I thought you were just waiting for rescue,” said Don.

  Philip seemed hurt. “Well, we had a few meetings about it. Basically we thought that it’s better to be rescued and feel a bit stupid than to all kill each other six months down the line. And I used to garden as a hobby, so I fell over myself to take this project. Do say something if I’m boring you.”

  “You’re boring us,” said Don in a monotone.

  “Now then,” said Philip obliviously. “I’ll be endorsing the placement of the two of you into our happy little family, but you will need to go to Personnel right away to receive a work placement. That’s Kathy’s department, on the fourth floor. You’ll have to take the stairs. Sorry. The elevators were another thing David’s team were working on, but they fell down the shaft and broke after he tried to get them working with exercise bikes. And the riders ended up getting terrible friction burns on their—”

  He was still talking as we closed the stairwell door behind us. We took a moment to enjoy the silence, then began to descend the stairs. I found myself increasingly disturbed by Don, who walked silently with his hands in his pockets and his face turned down. He didn’t even seem irritated by my presence.

  “You know,” I said, after a cough. “I was kind of hoping, if we came here, we’d finally meet some normal people.”

  Don didn’t reply verbally, but gave a short nasal snort as some kind of automatic response. That was something, at least.

  “I mean, yeah, the mall would be full of ironic hipster kids wrapped in plastic bags, that makes sense, but I’d have thought people who work in offices would be sane.”

  Finally I touched a sensitive-enough nerve that he spoke, albeit quietly and without emotion. “Not the people who get to work before rush hour. Only three kinds of people do that. The suck-ups, the insane, and people who enjoy their work. Actually, make that two kinds of people.”

  He fell into silence again, tramp-tramping down the concrete stairs ahead of me in a steady, gloomy rhythm like a pallbearer on a treadmill. I felt a strange desire to provoke him, somehow. An angry or sarcastic Don was something I could deal with.

  “Lots of stairs, aren’t there,” I commented, as a sign indicated we’d passed the thirty-fifth floor. “It’s the sort of thing that could really make you angry, isn’t it.”

  Finally he looked at me. There were darkening lines under his perpetual glare. “Why do you keep talking?” he snapped, or at least tried to snap. It came out more like a thump.

  “Don, are you all right?” I said, voicing my concerns.

  “I . . . don’t know,” he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I was just starting to think that I’m never going to get my build back. And then, when they were going to kill us just now, I felt very relaxed. Now I just feel like I stopped halfway through jerking off.”

  I decided to stop talking to him, if only to mull that analogy over in my head. We continued in silence down to the fourth floor.

  Now that I wasn’t seeing the lower-level dormitory/cubicle farm from the underside of a pole, I could detect an air of tension. Workers stood in small groups with arms folded, carrying on private conversations that were promptly suspended whenever we passed through earshot. Had someone been playing a honky-tonk piano in the room, the music would have stopped as we came in the door.

  Don asked the nearest resident for directions to Kathy’s office, and he answered with sullen passive-aggression, as if we were asking directions to the boudoir of a woman with whom he
was in unrequited love. It was a marked contrast from the cheerful toiling of Philip and his small gardening crew on the roof. Perhaps it was something to do with the lack of fresh air.

  Kathy’s office door was wide open, in an emotionless gesture of welcome. She was behind the remains of her desk shuffling through some indeterminate documents, and ushered us into the room with one hand, without looking at us. Like the cubicles, Kathy’s office had an impromptu bed in the corner made from bits of cloth and shredded paper, and two buckets that I didn’t like to think about on the opposite side of the room.

  “Hello-nice-to-meet-you-I’m-Kathy,” she said automatically, practically all as one word. She chose not to bring up her part in our most recent brush with death, so we didn’t, either. “I’m the Personnel officer at Hibatsu Survivors, so my job is to make sure everyone in the settlement has somewhere to be where they can be the most productive. And happy, obviously, if possible. So let’s just start with some friendly casual small talk. Names?”

  “He’s Don,” I said.

  “He’s Travis,” said Don.

  “Right, that will suffice.” Kathy ticked a little box on one of her papers. “So what sort of skills do you think you have been developing in the post-jam survival environment?”

  I saw Don’s eyes rotate around inside their sockets as he mentally backtracked through the last seven days. “I dunno. We’ve kind of just been making it up as we go along.”

  “I found some bananas,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Kathy, wincing patronizingly. I’d never been very good at reading the mood in job interviews, but I could tell this one wasn’t going very well. The way she was tapping her pen on the desk was making me wonder if the paper-cutter option had been completely discounted.

  “And we’ve nearly figured out how to sail our boat properly,” hazarded Don, visibly embarrassed at the exaggeration.

  “Well, we have had difficulty finding ways to advance into the surrounding city to find salvage,” said Kathy, a finger to her chin. “Apparently it’s possible to swim through the jam if you seal yourself in plastic, but that hasn’t been a tenable option for us.”