Fifty-Four: Zyn City (10-12-2023)
People walk around with a chiseled scowl on their face, jaws forever clenched to brace the relentless tide of the city they are helplessly trapped in. Emigration is impossible, to move is to abandon the sliver of reality that is best understood, and sacrifice all wealth, socially and monetarily, to restart elsewhere. Cold water out the shower pipe cuts the scalp every morning, flashing awake a man who will don his own discontent countenance and bear again the wall of a city he is bounded in.
He used to work the most glamorous life afforded to the underclass, where he could wear an impractically soft shirt and tailored pants, clack away on a computer in air conditioning and fluorescent buzz, but his simple transgression of noncommitment, his overfocus on the practicality of his work, did not align with a machinated master plan for social reorientation of the workforce. Powerpoints and seminars and small group trainings, nauseated repitions of taglines and crafted public-relations bait grinded away his dignity, and a predictable unexpected phone call told him his job no longer existed. There were simply too many people moving numbers from one page to another sheet, and costs needed to be lower.
So he trudged off, back to the same apartment he could already barely afford, and dug up viable work. He was once more a pusher, no numbers but boxes and bottles. He was on his feet all day, a prop in the play of customers' delights. There is no great heroism in this monotony, he refines and perfects his pace and technique, no one can put a box on a shelf like he can, and yet, no great reward comes. Another paycheck, broken down by day and hour, every little task, step, and box movement priced out to the penny. He is a machine.
So he lets his bathroom shower rot away. A man with time cleans, a man made of time loses the value. What good to him is clean shower? He is dirty when he enters no matter. Six days a week, filthy shower, rotted rusty pipe, the same shirt, one of three, the same breakfast of dry cereal and fatty milk, the same bowl and table and bowels. The same walk to work in the same city he was a promotion and raise away from exploiting and reaping, he now wakes and sows for his masters, old comrades.
In fiction there is a fantasy of the metropolis as opportunity, its grime a source of potential adventure, but here he suffers only a step above the roaches and rats. and his effect on the city, his antiheroic effort is reduced to eating an egg in a break room and standing in the rain with a cigarette at night.
He found a bar he liked once. He thought, maybe, he'd chop with the regulars and exchange stories and moan over their woes. The regulars, at what he presumed to be some underground wateringhole, were the same besuited and salaried young professionals he had been cut off from. They come to wear real people once were to partake in a play of poverty, and dance merrily full of liquor to the thought that they too struggle and hustle and grind their joints on the shop floor, only to nurse their hangovers and return to their climate control and drop ceilings.
He's home from work. His own pretend play plays out, he drinks nine dollar whisky straight from its plastic handle. The microwave buzzes with a frozen dinner. He can cook, he wants to cook, he owns the cups to pour his drink into portions, and yet he doesn't. Is it because he sees this self-disrespected in his escapist fiction? Does such self-abandonment feel good to him?
His forks paws at his food under the soft glow of his kitchen lights. Even with no savings to spare and no budget for anything beyond survival, his stomach is full. For the same price as a his coffee before, he can spoil himself with a full meal, fully ensaturated with fats, as he does too often for his lunch. The fluorescent-backed plastic sign glows to him through the front window of the store he is enslaved at, and he is a moth to the light of his own destruction.
His phone screen, slashed across with a crack from his own clumsiness, dings awake. Check Out This New Job Opening only On LinkedIn! An old manager of his is hiring for data entry, entry level. His mind carries the thought for a moment. There's no use chasing that carrot.