Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby Read Free Book Online

that were doing all the work.
    “I like legs,” she said.
    I did nothing to engage her further.
    “This is such bullshit,” she added as we followed the instructions being piped in from the control booth in the ceiling.
    “Think of yourselves as big airports,” the voice said, “with food planes constantly landing — you’ve got to get those planes back in the air. How can we get those planes back in the air?”
    No one was allowed to communicate at all during the training sessions, but she started asking me things with different outfits she would show up in — one day a bright pink nylon vest, another day brown sweatpants and a yellow scarf. The Greeters frowned upon this. They strongly recommended the hunter green mesh jumpers that everyone else wore, every day, without complaint. Each morning they put her farther and farther back in the snack line as punishment. I was ashamed to be stuck with a miscreant, but also secretly relieved and fascinated. I started answering her queries in the best way that I could, which was to wear a poncho made entirely from the bristled, penetrative half of Velcro.
    Three months later, after the graduation ceremonies, I followed her out of the gymnasium. “Say —,” I called out, choking on the words. It had been some time since I’d used my face to talk. The muscles in my throat had gone perilously tender from disuse.
    She turned, holding her right hand to her throat to indicate her own discomfort.
    “I just.”
    “Yes you. May —”
    We strolled, arm in arm, from the center to the tube, trying to avoid conversation, nearly having forgotten what language was for in the first place.
    In the tube I wet my pants while she looked at the schedule, but only drop by drop, letting each bit air-dry before moving on to the next.
    She’d missed her train, so I took her to my apartment, where we washed down pale green meal tablets with foil sacks of dinner wine. I felt small and far away from her on the couch.
    “What — are you?” she said, pointing to my body. It was difficult, in those first days, to understand everything she said — what came out of her was more like a set of breathy, musical notes, whole mouthfuls of them. Pretty, though. I am sure she had the same trouble with my own spittled, mawkish bursts of language. We relied heavily on clothes, sketches, the arrangement of objects in the room to convey meaning.
    “No. I’m — I am an older. This person you see — this? I am older than this. Looks? Like.”
    “Oh. And you — when were you. Terminated?”
    “No. Where I work — they know. They — that I am. An old.”
    She turned to me fully, her voice wavering with tentative, half-turned words. “Geoffrey, what am I supposed — I can’t go back to work — I already, went. And they would not? Let me back in.”
    On someone’s last day at one of the corporations, usually his or her nineteenth birthday, the executives throw something called an unwelcoming party, in which the graduating candidate is forced to perform an exit suite on a horned instrument called an octavinet, a relative of the shofar. The performance ends with the removal of the candidate’s clothing by his or her coworkers and a subsequent session of intense, bodily humiliation. Live burial in a grain casket was often employed whenever shredded dung was in short supply, before both were outlawed. I imagined Marian’s last day — her sudden, awkward shame dramatically exaggerated in the harsh fluorescence of some office lounge while peers looked on, smirking. How she must’ve looked the next day, showing up, unbidden, loitering at the massive glass doors of the Department of Human Interface Engineering. I had deftly averted my own unwelcoming from Corporation Two, some twenty years before, by forgetting not to lean too heavily on the flimsy, rusted-out railing of a tiny smoking balcony. It hurt worse than I’d imagined, and one of my kneecaps went permanently numb, but by the time the casts