Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Read online

  Evan and Justin exchanged a searching glance.

  “We can’t let them win,” Carl said.

  The wind blew. There was a great, shrill creaking sound from above, and as they all looked up, the windmill started to turn. In any other circumstance, the sight of the functional windmill would’ve made Evan proud. But at that moment, he just wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere.

  Dylan Elan Powers The Change

  If every antisocial act is judged as crazy, it leaves little room for society to reflect on its role in creating the antisocial behavior—especially if that antisocial behavior is repeated horrifically, over and over again.

  —Justin Wolfe

  I had my notebook open when Mr. Jackson came to tell me. What a perfectly stupid name for a man with such a perfectly stupid job. He even has the tight, curly hair and the high-pitched, girlish voice to remind of that pedophile singer Mom always loved. I’ve never seen the man without wanting to punch him.

  This time, though, when he busted in on civics class to ask if we could speak, he snuck up on me from behind while I was writing. He had to have seen my drawing, the one with all the stick figures on their backs, blood and fire all around.

  Who cares? People doodle that shit all the time. I’d have been worried about him reading my writing and being on to me, but there’s no way he could ever crack my codes. For a man in his position, he’s impossibly dumb.

  “Um, Dylan?” he said. “I wonder if we might speak in my office.”

  See? Impossibly dumb. Who talks like that? And the way he was looking at me, it’s like he’d lost the class gerbil up his ass.

  I didn’t have a choice. Couldn’t tell him no or I’d cause a scene, and everyone was already looking at me like some kind of unidentifiable stickiness they’d just found on the bottom of their shoe. Thing is, I actually didn’t want to leave class for once.

  Mr. Dockery was talking about civil disobedience, and so of course we were onto the obligatory MLK speech. And it got me onto that bit about how all men are supposedly created equal. That’s what inspired the drawing in my notebook.

  I mean, if all men are created equal, then please explain my father. Or politicians. Or murderers. Or billionaires. Or all those bums the news says are setting up some kind of commune outside of town. If all men are created equal, then why is there such a thing as good and evil? Equality, good, and evil cannot coexist. Either everyone is born the same and follows one of two paths—either toward the good or toward the evil—or equality is a myth. And if everyone follows one of those two paths, what the hell’s the point of talking about being created equal anyway? What does it matter if we’re all the same at birth? Every one of us is drawn to good or to evil. Doesn’t matter at all how we’re born. Doesn’t even matter what we do when we’re alive, because the world is full of injustices, and good and evil controls everything. The only thing that matters is how we die.

  That was why Mr. Jackson came to get me. He looked sick the whole time.

  “Um, Dylan?” he said to get my attention without disturbing the class any more than he already had. What a stupid thing to say.

  And after I agreed to speak with him in his office, he waddled ahead of me all the way down the hall. Every few steps, he would look back with that nauseated expression and ask if I needed anything.

  “No.”

  “Okay. You just let me know.”

  And then he would ask again.

  By the time we finally got to his pathetic little cramped office, I already knew what this was about. More than I dreaded the news, I dreaded having to watch this imbecile deliver it. I sat in that rigid chair in front of his desk—that same spot where he’d asked me to talk about my feelings more times than I could count (like I don’t have enough shrinks asking about my feelings that I have to tell this underpaid, cheap-tie-wearing, curly-haired idiot all about them too).

  He took a long time to shuffle in behind his desk and sit down. He was stalling.

  Just get it over with.

  “Um, Dylan?” he said.

  So I was right, yeah. He told me Dad died. But I was wrong about how I would react. I don’t know why I was expecting to be totally fine with this. The man was a shit at life. Terrible to mom. Terrible to me. The worst businessman who ever walked. Why would learning about his death bring me anything but joy?

  I guess I’d just been expecting his cancer to take him slower, you know? A gradual move back toward the equilibrium of death. Thought there would be the skeletal phase. Then that point where he was too weak to stand. Then where he’s all twisted and sunken in bed, just writhing in pain and waiting. Thought there would be hospice or something. I was actually kind of looking forward to watching all that.

  But no, he just died. Right there in his diner, apparently. Fucking loser couldn’t even do the death part right. The cops found him facedown in his own vomit on the dirty floor behind the cash register because Dad’s, like, one morning regular found him that way. Dad always believed that a man’s measure was his dignity. So if that’s true, then what a perfectly unjust way for a man like that to die.

  Maybe that’s why the news made me so angry. Mr. Jackson tried to stop me from storming out, but he was too pudgy and slow. Dad’s death just brought everything so into focus, you know? What was I even doing in this stupid place? Why would I ever come back? Why would I spend one more minute of my life letting the universe roll me over?

  That shit ends now.

  Chapter 10 That Stupid Fuckin’ Clock

  It’s not the Federal Reserve or even the government that holds the world trapped in economic despair; it is simple public perception. We the so-called intelligent species are convinced that our intelligence has separated humanity from the simple, brilliant forces of nature, the laws of the universe.

  —Justin Wolfe

  The first time Evan White saw himself on network television, he fluttered right into an out-of-body experience. There he stood on TV, if only for a passing moment, a version of himself no more than two months younger than he was presently, and yet this image could not have looked further removed from reality. Evan gulped back the nervousness about the prospect of watching himself say something sublimely stupid on television and tried to take comfort in the likelihood that 99 percent of this interview would be about Justin anyway. The shot of himself that he just saw? Probably it would be the only one that would even air in this segment.

  He could hope anyway.

  “Did you see yourself there, Evan?” Valence asked.

  Evan nodded but did not break his wide-eyed gaze at the screen. As much as he didn’t want to see himself again, he couldn’t turn away, for fear that he would miss any more flickers of his image onscreen. He wondered if this was how celebrities felt when seeing their wax statues at Tussauds for the first time: tickled and flattered, and yet also bewildered, maybe even concerned that this was in fact how they looked in real life, this strange donut of emotion all covered in a light glaze of skeeve.

  “Looking good there, brother,” Valence bellowed.

  Evan could not agree. He thought, in that fleeting glimpse of himself, that he looked exactly like a wax statue—albeit one that could walk alongside Pete Smiley with that weird, loping gait of his. Did Evan’s walk really look that funny? When this was all over, he would have to investigate.

  And now there it was again, that stupid walk. This time, the image of Evan was leading Smiley up the hill toward the admin shed while the camera bobbled behind them. Evan knew that he would never be able to walk again without thinking about the act. Forever, it would be like he had to pay attention to every little move he made, as if he were watching himself on camera at all times.

  “There you were again!” Valence all but hollered. “Sure hope I made the fuckin’ cut, you know?”

  There were four of them in the farmhouse living room: Justin, Evan, Nora, and Valence. The latter was seated in Dan Pastor’s old La-Z-Boy some four feet away from the sofa Evan shared with Nora on his left an
d Justin on his right. Because of this arrangement, whenever Valence opened his mouth, he wound up talking across Justin’s line of sight. This appeared to bother the Farm’s benefactor a great deal, an annoyance he showed by peeling his lips back to one side like a dog weighing the pros and cons of letting loose with a growl.

  The video edit mercifully cut away and settled on a quick image of Nora’s lovely face as she spoke animatedly about spontaneous entrepreneurship, her hands dusted with floury batter.

  “You look so pretty,” Evan heard himself saying. The words escaped his lips before he could consider whether he and Nora had reached the point of their relationship where public flattery was something she might consider acceptable. His blush died quickly, because it sounded like she hadn’t even heard him.

  “God, I hope that’s the only time they clip me in,” Nora said wryly.

  “You think they’ll run our spot first?” Valence asked. “Or they gonna blow through the usual, you know, uh, news and shit?”

  He asked this question of Justin, whose annoyance only appeared to grow every time someone talked above the volume of the program—something that had been happening pretty much constantly since they’d first sat down to watch.

  “Anyway, this just a teaser, right?” Valence added. “This ain’t the actual story they’re runnin’ on us. ’Cause it’s fuckin’ well pretty fulla holes.”

  Now, finally, Justin made his first appearance on-screen, and it was to deliver the end-all hot-take, the sound bite designed to keep viewers tuned in past the opening credits. “This isn’t an experiment,” he said, sounding more confident than he looked. “This is a new reality. The economy we’re growing on this Farm is going to change the world completely.”

  “Aw, yeah,” Valence whooped. “The big man bringin’ shit.”

  From Justin’s reaction, Evan could tell that the supposed big man didn’t agree with the sentiment that shit had indeed been brung.

  The edit cut away to the iconic ticking clock that started and ended all commercial breaks on 60 Minutes.

  “God, I hate that fuckin’ clock,” Valence said.

  “Val, do you think maybe you could can it for a while?” Justin said finally. “I mean, for like, maybe five minutes. Or hey, better yet, how about for the duration of just this one television program?”

  Valence’s expression was one of either alarm or bemusement, but it certainly wasn’t contrite. “I don’t know, boss. Staying quiet for any length of time’s kind of, you know, like, challenging for me. How long’s this fuckin’ program anyway?”

  Everyone turned to look at Valence in a way that pointed out the sheer stupidity of the question. Again, Valence responded with that unreadable expression of charming obliviousness.

  “It’s sixty minutes long, Val,” Evan said charitably.

  “Aw, right!” Valence tumbled into laughter. “Sixty fuckin’ minutes. Haw!”

  “I just hope they get it right,” Justin said, chewing his nails.

  “Shit looked good to me so far, boss.”

  “Pretty sure I heard the words ‘basic income’ three times in that twenty-second teaser. They’re gonna get all the details wrong. I can feel it.”

  “The semantics probably won’t matter to the average viewer anyway,” Evan said. “As long as they understand where we’re coming from . . .”

  This failed to make a dent in Justin’s broodiness.

  “Yeah, it’s all about public perception,” Nora agreed. She shifted her arm, in the process brushing against Evan’s and sending a shiver of excitement through his chest. “Looks to me like the spin’s pretty positive so far.”

  Justin shrugged off all efforts to cheer him up and returned to his turd-like demeanor.

  What followed was approximately fifty-two minutes of uncomfortable, edge-of-the-seat silence broken up only intermittently by one of Valence’s off-color remarks. The small group labored through a six-minute segment on troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, watched a retrospective on Trump’s evisceration of a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates, and then sat impatiently through the puff piece that often preceded the final commercial break. Something about a resurgence of woodland rodents.

  Evan might have enjoyed this rare opportunity to take in a full hour of television in one sitting—particularly given how he had Nora by his side, and Nora’s presence always made him feel like a giddy schoolboy through these six weeks post–Jekyll Island. But instead of enjoying it, he spent every moment of the program fretting about when the segment would finally start. He kept thinking that if he allowed even a blink, he would find his waxy mug starting back at him as soon as his eyes reopened. Not knowing which jump cut would give way to the story about the Farm was causing Evan PTSD flashbacks to gym class dodgeball as a kid. Yes, waiting for yourself to show up on television is a little like waiting for the jock-bully types to finally pick your noodle-armed ass to join their utterly meaningless and yet weirdly life-shaping dodgeball team.

  “The economy is a system like any other,” came the words. And there was Justin, in three-quarter closeup, looking as earnest as the hour had been long. “It is a machine. And like a machine, it’s engineerable. If we engineer the proper inputs, then we can better predict the outputs.”

  “You’re saying that the economy you have developed is predictable and stable.”

  “Predictable and stable, yes.”

  “Shit,” Justin said under his breath. “I told myself not to fall for that trick where they give you a leading question just so you’ll repeat the sound bite.”

  The Justin on-screen had already moved on to insisting that the driving concepts of this economy were not nearly as difficult to understand as they seemed—about how it’s all a matter of placing value in real money instead of debt—but Smiley had already started leading him toward what he clearly believed to be this story’s juice.

  “I want to talk about the residents of the Farm,” he said.

  On-screen Justin gave a good-natured laugh. “That’s all anyone wants to talk about.”

  Smiley didn’t miss a beat. “For good reason. I’ve had a chance to meet a few of them. They are, shall we say, colorful.”

  “We certainly have our share of fun personalities here. But we embrace that. Our differences contribute to the entrepreneurial spirit.”

  “Great line,” Valence said.

  “Quiet, Val,” Nora said, rapt by the show.

  Now they were listening to Smiley in voiceover while the video parsed through a series of images of the residents. There was Laz, helping Ivanka to the machine shed. David showing Shillfo the proper way to hold a scythe, the latter man looking utterly terrifying with an honest-to-God symbol of death in his hand. There was Nora and Muna sharing a laugh in the kitchen. And finally, Valence Newton, in all his nose-bloodied glory.

  “Hell’s yeah!” Valence said.

  “Shhh!” Nora shushed.

  Smiley’s voiceover was discussing the basics of the Farm—how they took in homeless people from around the country, set them up with a daily direct deposit that they used for lodging and food, and then sat back and waited for all that free money to spark entrepreneurial growth.

  “So they were all living on the streets?” Smiley asked On-Screen Justin.

  “Not all of them,” On-Screen Justin corrected. “Not literally anyway. Some of them lost their jobs to automation and wound up homeless. Others hit the skids during the Great Recession.”

  “Ugh,” Real-Life Justin said. “I knew they would use that quote. Hate that expression.”

  “Others immigrated from impoverished countries, only to meet with more difficulty here in the US. And we have more than a few residents who lost everything because they couldn’t afford their healthcare debt.”

  “And you offer them opportunities to better their lives?”

  “We offer them opportunities to better their lives.”

  “Fuck,” Real-Life Justin said. “Did it again.”

  Evan’s
heart leapt when his image flickered across the screen. He was standing there beside Meryl, lecturing on savings, but fortunately, they’d muted his voice.

  “The effort is more than just talk,” Smiley was voiceover-ing. “Residents receive collegiate-level instruction on subjects from money management to growing a business to flipping pancakes.”

  There was Nora again, flipping a pancake on cue while Muna watched.

  “And you should hear them talk doctrine.”

  The video cut to Laz, who looked comically dolled up, his hair pulled back into a ponytail so tight that it lifted his eyebrows, his on-camera makeup applied by the pound, his eyes glassy and alert.

  “It really is simple,” Laz said. “Justin and Evan have designed a system where money comes in unimpeded, and we’re free to spend it however we choose. And that’s what it’s all about, right? That’s what we all want?”

  “What is it we all want?” Smiley asked, not following.

  “Freedom. The freedom to pursue happiness. Isn’t that how it goes?”

  “This Farm is the American dream.”

  Laz laughed. “Long as your version of the American dream involves sleeping on cots next to a dozen former hobos.”

  “The living quarters looked quite nice to me.”

  Evan experienced a swell of pride at this.

  “That’s true,” Laz said. “I tell you what, everyone who lives here gets a clean bed in a room that’s cleaned every day. We have access to excellent food, provided we’re willing to pay for it, and let’s call it decent food for free.”

  “Aw,” Nora said to On-Screen Laz. “Thanks, Laz.”

  “We work how and when we want to work,” Laz continued. “And the work is always rewarding, because it contributes to the greater good of this community. We can open businesses. Build things. Make things. Improve our lives and the lives of others.”