The girl sat back and ran a finger around her beard. “Good stuff.” Hubert, Etc was sure she was smiling.
“That’s a cool bed-frame,” Hubert, Etc said, for lack of something better to say.
“One of the best,” she said. “They had a ton of profitable lines, but bed-frames were the best. Big with hotels, because they’re practically indestructible and they’re feather-light.”
“Why aren’t they making them anymore?”
“Oh, they are. Muji shut down the plant and moved to Alberta six months ago. Got a huge subsidy to relocate – Ontario couldn’t match the deal. They’d only been here for a couple of years, only employed twenty people all told, their two-year tax-holiday was ending. Place has been empty since then. We can do the whole line from here, all Muji’s furniture, including white-label stuff they do for Nestlé and Standard & Poors and Moët & Chandon. Chairs, bookcases, tables, shelving. There’s an empty feedstock plant in Orangeville we’re hitting for the next party, raw material for the supply chain. If we don’t get caught, we can do enough furnishings for a couple thousand families.”
“You don’t charge for them or anything?”
A long look. “Communist party, remember?”
“Yeah, but, how do you eat and stuff?”
She shrugged. “Here and there. This and that. Kindness of strangers.”
“So people bring you food and you give them this stuff?”
“No,” she said. “We don’t do barter. This is gifts, the gift economy. Everything freely given, nothing sought in return.”
It was Hubert, Etc’s turn. “How often do you get a gift around the same time as you’re giving one of these away? Who doesn’t show up with something to leave behind when they take something?”
“Of course. It’s hard to get people out of the scarcity quid-pro-quo habit. But we know they don’t have to bring anything. Did you bring anything tonight?”
He patted his pockets. “I’ve got a couple million bucks, nothing much.”
“Keep it. Money is the one thing we don’t take. My mom always said money was the crappiest present. Anyone trying to give or get money around here, we sling ’em out on their butts, no second chances.”
“I’ll keep my wallet in my pants.”
“Good idea.” She was kind enough not to notice the double-entendre that made Hubert, Etc blush. “I’m Pranksterella, by the way.”
“And I thought my parents were screwed up.”
The beard wiggled inscrutably: “My parents didn’t give me that one,” she said. “It’s my party name.”
“Like Trotsky,” he said. “He was Lev Davidovich. Did an independent history unit on Bolshevism in the eleventh grade. This is much more interesting.”
“They say Old Karl had the right diagnosis and the wrong prescription.” She shrugged. “Putting the ‘party’ back into Communist party makes a difference. Jury’s still out. We’ll probably implode. You guys did, right? The zeppelins?”
“Zeppelins explode,” he said.
“Har. De. Har.”
“Sorry.” He stuck his legs out and rested against a guard-rail that creaked, then held. He realized that he could have gone over and fallen ten meters to the concrete floor. “But yeah, the zepps didn’t work out.” They’d made perfect sense on paper. All these time-rich, cash-poor people with friends all over the world. Zepps were cheap as hell to run, if you didn’t care where or how fast you went. There’d been hundreds of startups, talking big about climate-appropriate transport and the “new age of aviation.” Despite all that, there was the inescapable sense that they were in a gold rush, a game of musical chairs that would end with a few lucky souls sitting on enough money to stop pretending to give a shit about any kind of aviation except for the kind that came with champagne and a warm eye-mask after take-off. A lot of money sloshed around, a lot of talk from governments about nurturing local talent and new industrial reality. The talk came with huge R&D tax credits and more investment money.
Three years into it – during which Hubert, Etc and everyone he knew gave up everything to scramble to put huge, floating cigars into the sky – the thing imploded. Just a few years on, it was retro-chic. Hubert, Etc had seen a “genuine Mark II zeppelin comfort suite” in a clip on super-fashionable decor. A painstakingly restored set of flying dormitory furniture was refitted for two rich, stationary people, not dozens of itinerant flying hobos. Hubert, Etc once spent three months in a co-op that was building the prefab suites, ready to slot into airship platforms. His sweat-equity was supposed to entitle him to a certain amount of time every year in the sky on-board any ship carrying a co-op unit, bumbling through the world’s prevailing winds to wherever.
“Wasn’t your fault. It’s the nature of the beast to believe in bubbles and think you can just entrepreneur your way out.” She unclipped her beard and her glasses. She had a fox face, lots of points, grooved where the heavy glasses had rested, sheened with sweat. She wiped the sweat with her shirt-tail, giving him a glimpse of her pale stomach, a mole by her navel.
“And your people here?” He wished for more beer, realized he needed a piss, wondered if he should hold it in to make more.
“We’re not going to entrepreneur our way out of anything. This isn’t entrepreneurship.”
“Anti-entrepreneurship’s been tried, too – slacking doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“We’re not anti-entrepreneur either. We’re not entrepreneurial in the way that baseball isn’t tic-tac-toe. We’re playing a different game.”
“What’s that?”
“Post-scarcity,” said with near-religious solemnity.
He didn’t succeed at keeping his face still, because she looked pissed off. “Sorry.” Hubert, Etc was one of nature’s apologizers. A house-mate once made a set of cardboard tombstones for Halloween, hung like bunting across the kitchen cabinets. Hubert, Etc’s read “Sorry.”
“Don’t sorry me. Look, Etcetera, at all this. On paper, this place is useless, the stuff coming off that line has to be destroyed. It’s a trademark violation; even though it came off an official Muji line, using Muji’s feedstock, it doesn’t have Muji’s license, so that configuration of cellulose and glue is a crime. That’s so manifestly fucked up and shit that anyone who pays attention to it is playing the wrong game and doesn’t deserve consideration. Anyone who says the world is a better place with this building left to rot—”
“I don’t think that’s the argument,” Hubert, Etc said. He’d once had this kind of discussion a lot. He wasn’t young and avant garde, but he understood this. “It’s that telling people what they can do with their stuff produces worse outcomes than letting them do stupid things and letting the market sort out the good ideas from—”
“You think anyone believes that anymore? You know why people who need furniture don’t just break down the door of this place? It’s not market orthodoxy.”
“Of course not. It’s fear.”
“They’re right to be afraid. This world, if you aren’t a success, you’re a failure. If you’re not on top, you’re on the bottom. If you’re in between, you’re hanging on by your fingernails, hoping you can get a better grip before your strength gives out. Everyone holding on is too scared to let go. Everyone on the bottom is too worn down to try. The people on the top? They’re the ones who depend on things staying the way they are.”