Nowhere City (3 page)

He also wrote to his parents in Columbus, Ohio. Los Angeles was amazing; you could almost imagine the city growing around you. Wherever you looked you could see the red and orange iron skeletons of tall buildings rising above the palms. The dust of excavation hung in the air, and the noises: the bang, bang, of construction and demolition, the groans of trucks hauling dirt up and down the hills. Even the faint shudders of earthquake or landslide, and the sonic boom as some aircraft broke the sound barrier, seemed to be part of it. The local and state political situation favored this growth because—and Paul went on to explain why. His father was a real estate agent who also owned and managed business properties. He had done well, and was active in civic affairs, but he also found time to read current non-fiction and took an interest in the world situation. In a way you could say—that is, Paul’s father could, and frequently did, say—that his hobby had become his son’s profession. All the same, he was not a bad guy.

Paul’s mother painted, and made pottery; she was in several local art groups, and an expert bridge player. For her he described the wonderful climate, the dry light, the white-walled houses with their orange and lemon trees, the Santa Monica mountains rising smoky green and brown against the north edge of the sky. Katherine’s sinuses were bothering her, he wrote, but he had never felt better. His mother was interested in people’s health. She had trouble with her own (indigestion, insomnia), which sometimes made her a little difficult. Still, she meant well.

Today, however, Paul’s desk was covered with papers relating to Nutting and its works, and so was his bookcase. Last Friday his clearance had come through, and materials had been pouring in ever since. Piles of dusty, bulky manila folders; typed and mimeographed and printed drafts of proposals in binders; statistical reports, financial reports, departmental and individual reports; carbon copies of letters, tables, graphs, estimates, diagrams, and memoranda. Apparently it was intended that he should read every piece of paper at Nutting.

Paul preferred this glut to the previous famine; he had the historian’s love of primary source material, however untidy. He would mine the significant facts out of the mountain of processed wood pulp and erect them into an elegant and accurate record of the spectacular growth of a southern California corporation. He had in mind something which would both satisfy Nutting and (through a judicious use of irony and comparison) interest and entertain other historians. He had no instructions or outline to go by; the company had shown its confidence in Paul by giving him a remarkably free hand.

In front of him now was a large pile of memoranda marked
Confidential,
mostly dealing with office regulations. He leafed through them rapidly.
Confidential
was the lowest security classification; until recently Paul himself had been classified as
Confidential.
There was no lesser rank: just as the smallest bottle of soda one can buy now is the Large, so everyone admitted through the plant gate, and every memorandum, was designated at least as
Confidential.
Most people and documents were
Secret,
and some were
Top Secret.
Like the documents, every employee wore his classification in full view, in the form of a large round plastic badge bearing his name and photograph and the name of the company. Paul had worn this badge every working day for six weeks, and he still felt it to be embarrassing and ridiculous. The wearing of such a label, he thought, implies that one is continually among strangers or fools, like an exhibit in a museum.

Whenever he raised his eyes from his desk, Paul’s attention was drawn to a large notice hanging opposite:

SECURITY MEANS YOU

Making Security Work Requires the Full Cooperation of Every Employee of This Corporation. REMEMBER: Any Danger to Our Security Is Potential Danger to Our Country and Way of Life.

He heard Fred Skinner come back into his office next door, so he shoved the memos aside and went in.

“Ready to eat?”

Skinner did not answer, but continued to sit on the edge of his desk in an attitude of angry dejection. He was a small, spare, muscular man of about thirty-five, partially bald. The photograph on his badge showed him with his habitual monkey-like grin, in strong contrast to his present expression. The badge of Paul, who was now smiling, displayed the opposite contrast. When he had stood before the camera in the Personnel Office he had tried to look serious, and so his photograph had a solemn expression—like that of a depressed twin brother, whose portrait he had chosen to wear over his heart.

“How, Chief,” Paul said. During the last month Skinner had been promoted from Assistant Chief Technical Writer to Chief Technical Writer; this had resulted in some joking with American Indian references.

“Yeah, Cattleman?”

It was company policy for employees to call each other by their first names. Fred Skinner, as if in deliberate contravention of this policy, called his friends by their last names; they called him “Skinner.”

“I’m hungry. Say.” He gestured at a disreputable object on Skinner’s immaculate desk—a dirty, creased, half-charred piece of paper. “Where’d you get that?”

“A guy in Systems found it on the road, outside the north fence.”

Paul looked closer. Most of the paper was burned black or scorched brown, but he could make out:

learning period in which practice sig

adjustment of the outputs is accomplis

improves in efficiency, that is, in fr

Hence varies with each particular real

Another legible area farther down the page was covered with equations. He frowned, puzzled.

“Outside
the fence,” Skinner repeated, “‘constituting evidence of an unauthorized conveyance and/or removal of classified documents from the premises of N.R.D.C.’” Paul still looked puzzled. “Not to tax your brain, it probably blew out of the incinerator.”

“Ah.” The security system for pieces of paper at Nutting extended from birth to death. Paul was allowed to use the wastebasket in his office only for envelopes, cigarette packages, newspapers, and so on. When he wished to dispose of any classified piece of paper he had to get up from his desk, walk down the hall, and place it in the special Classified Trash Container, located in full view of Howard Leon’s office. Ordinary trash from the wastebaskets was collected by a city garbage truck; classified trash was ceremonially burned once a week. It was Fred Skinner’s job to supervise this process, which meant that he had to stand out by the incinerator every Friday afternoon and watch while two classified janitors reduced the documents to ash. “So that’s why it’s burned,” Paul said, and smiled.

“Wipe off that grin. This could mean the end of a damned important career. Mine.” Skinner did not grin himself; he grimaced. “I think Leon’s planning to get me for this.”

“To get you? But hell, he just promoted you.”

“Yeah, but he has to pin the blame somewhere. When there’s a breach of security, you have to turn in your pals if you want to save your own skin. You’ll find out.”

As usual, Paul could not be sure how serious Skinner was, or whether (behind his tough-ironic tone) he was serious at all. “So what’s going to happen now?” he asked.

“Whadayou think? Skinner is going to prepare-an-extensive-report-on-the-problem and make detailed recommendations. What’s going to happen after that is the question.”

“Maybe nothing,” suggested Paul; even his brief experience at Nutting had led him to expect this outcome. “If you make the report good and long.”

“Got any ideas?”

“Yeah; I think we should go to lunch.”

“Good idea. Let’s eat civilian.” This meant, not in the plant cafeteria.

Skinner took down his old Marine raincoat from the hook behind the door, though it was not raining. It had not rained in Mar Vista for one year and three months, as a matter of fact; but this stained and worn coat, which did not match the
Esquire
polish of Skinner’s other clothes, was one of his props.

Skinner and Paul passed the two obvious eating-places outside the N.R.D.C. gate, both much patronized by other employees, turned a corner, and entered the Aloha Coffee Shop, a small building set between two giant feather dusters on thirty-five-foot stems: fan palms.

Over sandwiches, they discussed what Skinner might say in his report on the burned piece of paper. “It has to be long. And we’ve got to dream up some completely new approach to the problem. Something that’ll knock them flat.” Skinner pounded the flat of his hand on the table in demonstration.

“What the hell, I’ll think of something,” he concluded in a worried tone.

“It’s all crap anyhow,” he announced a little later. “But hell, there’s crap everywhere—everywhere you go you got to eat crap—only at Nutting we really get paid for it. In the academy you make the poor bastards eat crap for nothing.”

An early bond between Paul and Fred Skinner had been that Skinner was also a former (or as he put it, renegade) college professor. He had taught English for seven years at a local university without attaining tenure, and when he left abruptly he had been followed into industry by three of his graduate students, causing some consternation (or, as he put it, a fucking big blow-up) among his former colleagues. Skinner’s resentment of “the academy” was still considerable, and he liked to express it. Paul didn’t mind that, but it irritated him when his friend insisted on personifying the enemy as “you.”

I do not do so, Paul thought now, and he looked away from Skinner down the aisle between the booths, observing the back of their waitress as she walked away from them, balancing a loaded tray with professional skill. At the end of the room she pushed the swing door open with her hand, deftly catching it against her round arm and shoulder as she turned to steady the tray. Then she gave the door a neat shove with her foot and vanished into the kitchen, under an arch of crudely painted tropical fruits and flowers.

Paul enjoyed watching this waitress. She was young, and even pretty, with a chunky but good figure under her coarse starched green and white uniform. Moreover, there was a kind of charming proficiency and directed energy in everything she did which was lacking at Nutting. Some of the secretaries in the Publications Department were pretty and some were competent, but not both. Apparently girls who were both pretty and competent were not sent to Publications, but were routed instead to Systems or Administration. The secretary who Paul and Skinner shared was neither pretty nor competent.

Paul kept his eyes on the kitchen door, and in a few moments his waitress reappeared. Again she flipped expertly round the door under the painted garlands, with a half-smile of concentration on her tanned, snub features. Not a drop spilled from the brimming glasses on the tray.

“Off in a hot dream world,” Skinner said loudly. Apparently Paul had failed to answer some question; he had not really been listening for some minutes. “Well, I’m going to get on back and get started on that report. Have fun.” He put a dollar down on the table, and went out.

Paul looked at his watch. Hardly half an hour had passed since he left the plant, so he sat on, finishing his sandwich.

“More coffee?”

“Oh yes, please.” One of the better things about Los Angeles, Paul thought, is that when you buy a cup of coffee you always get as many free refills as you want. He smiled gratefully at the waitress as she poured it. She smiled back, showing white but crooked teeth, and remarked:

“Hey, you forgot your book today.”

“That’s right,” Paul agreed.

Until last week, he had found his lunch hours at Nutting embarrassing. Though he was always welcomed in a friendly way by the other Publications Department people in the cafeteria, as soon as he sat down with them their conversation faded into inanities, for they were afraid of inadvertently mentioning some Nutting secret in front of someone who was merely Confidential, and who might (they knew about Reds in Eastern universities, after all) turn out to be a bad security risk. All except Skinner were so obviously uncomfortable with him that Paul often chose to eat alone in the Aloha Coffee Shop with a book.

“Aw, too bad,” the waitress said, resting her coffeepot on the table.

Paul made a conventional gesture of rueful resignation.

“Listen, I’ll tell you what; I’ll get you a book, soon as I finish with the coffee. I’ve got one out back ... Nah, that’s all right. No trouble.”

She was away before Paul could stop her; he was left to wonder what she would bring him, and then to speculate amusedly on a culture in which any book was the equivalent of any other. The incident was typically Los Angeles, he thought: in Boston or New York even a very stupid waitress would not imagine that he read the same books she read; nor would she step outside of her role to bring him anything not on the menu.

He must not and did not smile. In a way it was a challenge; an individual was trying to treat him as an individual, not as a mechanical task. He must rise to the occasion and behave in such a way as not to discourage such acts. There had been other hints of this attitude; for instance, the direct, curious gaze and speech of garage mechanics as he drove across the West. (“Where you from in Massachusetts? I got an uncle back there.”) They seemed not to have classified him, other than as a person. How unlike New York, where every stranger is an object to observe or dodge on the street; or Cambridge, where one does sometimes speak to strangers, but only if they are obviously of one’s own caste.

Well, he must behave like a native too. He had already resolved that while he was in Los Angeles he would do his best to follow the local mores; he wanted to create as little as possible of what sociologists call “noise” or “static.” Not only for the sake of better reception, but in order to preserve something which he was beginning to find agreeably unique.

The waitress had finished pouring coffee and gone back into the kitchen, and now Paul remembered reading in some sociological text that for the working classes the word “book” means anything printed which is not a newspaper; every magazine is a “book.” Maybe she would bring him a copy of
Look
or the
Post
rather than some popular love story.