Dragnie smiled with pitiless sympathy. “You haven’t been listening, Angel. We just proved that they are insane. Nathan?” She looked pointedly at Banden and made a gesture of appeal. “I think it would be best if you and Angel left in embarrassment and disgrace, don’t you?”
“I certainly do,” Banden seethed. “I have no patience for people who take pleasure in mocking someone not as brilliant as they are.”
“I’m leaving, too,” Angel Human announced. “I don’t like people who don’t love everybody, and who only believe in providing goods and services for money. I think everyone should feel sorry for everyone else, because otherwise you have a mean society.”
Dragnie walked the two young people to the front door. She smiled coolly at Banden and said, “You must be completely humiliated. Well, good night, and thank you for coming.” After they had exited the building she closed the door.
Out on the sidewalk, Angel Human tried to conceal her dismay with a hollow, forced laugh. “Wow, what terrible people,” she said.
Banden did not answer. Instead, he took a few steps to the corner and peered up at the two street signs identifying the intersection. Nearby was that essential utility without which a civilization cannot function: a public telephone booth. Entering it and placing coins in the slot, he dialed some numbers and, when a voice answered, said, “Hello? Is this the government? My name is Nathan A. Banden and I’m at the intersection of Crenshaw and Third…”
They were still standing there when, several minutes later, three unmarked cars and a van roared up and disgorged ten men in trench coats and carrying side arms. The men rushed into the building. Banden dragged Angel into the concealment of an awning’s shadow as they watched the men lead Dragnie, Glatt, and their guests out, forced them into the van, and drove off into the night.
PART III
Non-Being
and
Somethingness
Chapter 1
Fixed for Great Justice
“What is the matter, honey?”
“Nothing,” Nathan A. Banden said. “Just, for god’s sake, you little fool, shut up.”
The chair, which was of the beanbag variety, was of a bright pink color. It smelled of plastic, and of death. It was symbolic of a world in which Banden had recently come to realize that he no longer loved life.
A week had passed since agents of the government had seized Dragnie, Glatt, and the other guests at the party and, Banden assumed, spirited them off to an undisclosed location. Banden now lay sprawled on the crunchily noisy seating unit, flailing about in its impudent grasp, imprisoned within the untidy and faintly repulsive apartment of Angel Human. The television had just broadcast an announcement informing the American people that, in ten minutes, Mr. Jenkins would introduce Miss Dragnie Tagbord to make a very special announcement to the public. “Mr. Jenkins wants you to watch Miss Dragnie Tagbord’s important address to the People, so please be sure to do so!” the “public service announcement” commanded. Banden, determined to avoid viewing the program, had struggled to extricate himself from the chair, but had failed in his purpose.
“Do you need a hand getting up?” Angel inquired.
“No! Just stop talking,” he sighed. “I’m… fine. Just fine.”
Parting her long, straight hair from either side of her childlike, smooth face, she smiled as though speaking to a disgruntled toddler. “Are you looking forward to hearing your friend on television?”
“My friend be damned!” he cried.
“Na-than,” she chided. “You don’t have to bite my head off with displaced frustration. You’ve been such a big grouchy puss lately.”
“Stop talking baby talk! Speak the way intelligent men speak, in complete sentences tidily arranged in elaborate, extended paragraphs making full use of dependent clauses, perfectly articulated chains of logical, sequentially-arranged phrases, a formal and, arguably, somewhat artificial deployment of commas—and inserted sub-comments set off by em-dashes in the service of providing auxiliary but nonetheless logically valid digressions—and, if it were to prove necessary, accurate employment of the conditional tense, I tell you!”
“You say men but I’m not a man. I’m a human woman, which is the proper way to denominate a female individual in our society today.”
“I can’t live like this, I tell you!”
“If you don’t like the beanbag chair go sit somewhere else, silly.”
“Oh, Angel, Angel—“
“Although everybody else that comes here likes it,” she noted. “And I think people are all the same, and so they should all like the same kinds of chairs. Individual taste and personal proclivity just lead to arguments and fighting and wars and stuff. That’s why genius is bad and mediocrity is preferable. I think that and I think you should, too.”
Banden surrendered to the enveloping grasp of the chair, acutely conscious of the reality that he despised existence.
Less than a mile away, in a television studio located in a moderately important building, Dragnie sat on a small sofa in a so-called green room near a sound stage. Two agents of the government, in identical dark suits, flanked her and observed her every move. Across from her, leaning forward anxiously from a folding metal chair, sat Mr. Jenkins, the Head Person of the Government of the United States.
“I must say, Miss Tagbord, I’m rather impressed with how reasonable you’re being about all this,” he said, his face wreathed in a desperate, obsequious smile. “Especially after your initial resistance to making our little speech.”
“Your threat was quite clear, Mr. Jenkins,” Dragnie said coolly. “You did, after all, threaten to hold John Glatt, Mr. De Soto, and the others—including me—in a military prison for an indefinite period of time, without recourse to counsel, under a series of State of Emergency laws summarily passed by you without any consultation with us as the Board of Directors of the United States, or any other acknowledgment of due process.”
“We are at war, Miss Tagbord. The usual nuances of peacetime legality do not apply.”
“So you claim. In any case, John and I discussed the situation and agreed on what we considered to be a rational response.”
“Yes, well, I always figured Glatt for a sensible fellow.” The career bureaucrat sat back and indulged in a chuckle, chuckling. “Mind you, I’m no fan of this embargo brought about by the People’s States. I’m no fan of it at all! But then you and Glatt call this Strike, and the People’s States declare war—well, I mean to say, nobody benefits from any of it! It’s bad for business all the way around. He sees that, and you see it, and, well, I’m just glad you all are willing to help us calm things down.” He glanced at his watch, an overpriced and vulgar instrument of no great precision, and inaccurate below a depth of two fathoms. “Better get yourself together. You go on in fifteen minutes.” He held out a sheaf of typescript. “Do you, uh, want to see the text again?”
“No, thank you,” Dragnie said. “I’ll read it from the teleprompter.”
“Fine, fine. Suit yourself.” Mr. Jenkins rose and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Meanwhile, if you need anything…”
Dragnie nodded. She needed nothing. A single reading of the speech Mr. Jenkins and his speechwriters had composed had been enough to disclose the theme, content, and purpose of this address, both explicitly and, more importantly, implicitly. It called for an end to the Strike. Effective immediately, all actions and policies that had been implemented to subvert the idea of America as an ideal of liberty, equality, and opportunity, in the mind of men, would be cancelled. This would have the effect—and this was patently the reason and purpose behind the speech and the Strike’s cancellation—of reasserting the validity of and the need for government. In return, the forces holding John Glatt and the others prisoner would release them, unharmed. Mr. Jenkins would negotiate a diplomatic truce with the People’s States of the People, the war would be declared over, and, after some token assurances that American manufacturers would take steps to improve the safety of their products, the embargo would be lifted. Life would return to normal—and governments all over the world would be safe, once more, from a threat to their existence.