A Fine Bureau

“I just can’t get her to understand why we need these added safeguards… We’ve got a huge responsibility. If we don’t pre-empt the-”

“-cops, U.P. will be sidelined.” She piped up, imitating him with an aptitude borne of their long relationship. “I know, I know.”

“You want a slice of this blue-cheese?”

“Gross, I hate blue-cheese.”

“How? It’s so nutty.”

“Maybe I should invite Stephanie to tomorrow night?”

“I think she goes by Frozen-Lake or some other animistic eskimo name now.”

“Jesus Ted, it’s ‘Inuit’, she’s already pissed with you for saying that all native women have firm breasts in old age.”

“You know they do, to fail to generalise that point would be to misrepresent that whole population. Anyway, I don’t believe that she’s some percentage or another Eskimo. I’m always suspicious when somebody puts a quantity on his or her mixed heritage.”

“Yeah; my grandmother on my father’s side was Lithuanian and my grandfather  on my mother’s side was Polish but I’m pretty sure my paternal-grand-maternal grandparents were of mixed Siberian and Scottish extraction and my maternal-grand-paternal grandparents were stows-away, of unknown origin, on an east Mediterranean pirate ship. So what does that make me? Like one-twentieth Carthaginian or something?”

“I think so, or an eighth and sixpence Proto-Libyan. And by that reckoning; I’m five quarters robot, one quarter hypertensive and the seventh quarter is French, so I take it pretty personal when you say something ignorant like; ‘I hate all blue cheeses.’”

“They all taste like socks.”

“Let’s not continue this, I don’t want my feelings about you to change.”

“Fine.”

“Can I have a coffee?”

“You know where the kettle is”

“Can you make it for me? It always tastes so much better when it’s not coated in the stink of my own effort.”

“You lazy man.”

“A cuppa should be a treat from start to finish.”

“So you think you can talk her around over dinner? Doesn’t seem likely.” She busied herself with the kettle, like a good girl.

“Hard to say… You can’t reason with these people. People like her’re one of the reasons we’re called ‘United Persons and other Individuals’ now. Their reactions have been pre-determined since I refused to vote with them on the randomised car checks.”

“But you support those checks!”

“Yeah but I didn’t want to be seen to be aligned with their bloc.”

“So her reaction to you is warranted. It’s ridiculous, you supported randomised house checks on the same goddamn day!”

“Houses are different.”

“How?”

“They’re idiots anyway”

-/-

‘They’re idiots anyway’, he had too often fallen back on that old epithet. Tina Welles had herself too often fallen back on the converse statement when talking to Ted. Every now and then she occupied herself with the pure ponderousness of their unlikely matching. How, from a disastrous first meeting, they had come to a fruitful marriage. How, from an arrogant and ineffectual bureaucrat, he had become a slightly more effective bureaucrat. At least he thought more about his actions these days.

When Ted cast his mind back to ten years ago, as he was also wont to do frequently, he thought more of sexual conquest and career advancement, these two things being more or less the same. He remembered a feeling of power unparalleled in his life-time, this state being the culmination of a poorly received joke, a dinner-date of uncharacteristic success and a brilliant idea Ted had had in the bathroom.  He, of course, remembered the first night he spent with Tina, at a Latino steak and seafood place, but only inasmuch as this related to his overall feeling of empowerment at that time, and he better remembered the three or four days prior to that trifling event. His head of department, the late David Branderbank, had left the organisation. Branderbank was the most useless bureaucrat to have ever worked at United Persons, possibly to have ever worked ever and an aging holdover from the organisations infancy besides. He frequently applied measured rationale to his work and was prone to ignoring protocol where it broke with reason. To Branderbank, U.P. went still by its first name; “Organization for the Preservation of the Rights of the Individual” and he attempted to adhere to the charter encoded in that title. Branderbank resigned in disgust when a joke he made at a semi-lunar inter-departmental meeting, that U.P. should be forcibly searching its members’ houses, was taken seriously, eliciting not a single laugh. He was also worried they might find the considerable collection of child pornography on his computer.

On the night of his first shared meal with Tina, the then-young Ted Orson, recently promoted to head of his department at United Persons, walked home humming, the taste of Brazilian spices and burnt red-meat a seemingly perfect accompaniment to his lingering mild drunkenness. He fell asleep dreaming of a pair of soft breasts, held loosely within a thin cotton shirt.

The thought of that cotton shirt and its contents filled Ted with a sexual power he’d never before experienced for the entirety of the next day and a half and might have lasted longer had he not received word from home that his parents’ dog, to whom he’d become quite attached, had died. Nevertheless during those 36 hours he undertook some of the defining acts of his tenure as head-of-department and, vengefully motivated by the memory of sexual rejection three weeks prior, voted against a proposal to conduct randomised car checks on U.P. members.

-/-

“I suppose I can tell you now because they’re gonna announce it official-like tomorrow… I’m being promoted.” He announced with gusto. She, more or less, was disinterested, and certainly uncertain as to why he was telling her on their first date, like it meant something. Tina didn’t even know from what and to what he would be promoted. He had been a little edgy, a little inappropriate all night. Like maybe he just learned how to talk and was enjoying it, a lot.

“Ahuh” she gave him nothing.

“I’m not sure you get it. I’ll be getting voting rights, I’m right up there, well not right up there, more middling, but on the top half of the line between the bottom and the top now. With a vote. I can change the whole process, if, of course, it came down to a balanced vote, I’d be right up there, from the top to the bottom they’d be waiting. How’s your shrimp?”

“It tastes like the ocean. Not in a good way.”

“Man this guy is spanish, I mean a true goddamn Spaniard, they don’t usually fuck up the shrimp”. Ted was sure the chef was Spanish.

“I think it’s old or something.”

“Maybe the tides were bad yesterday and today and it was two days they couldn’t go out and that shrimp is three days old. That happens. I once knew a guy who was a professional fisherman for 2 years. Eighteen months really. In his gap year, but it was a long gap year. But this chef is seriously, like he only speaks Spanish.”

“So this promotion?” An inquiring tone was all she could do to, without the air of a disciplinarian, stem the tide.

“Tomorrow. It’s all hooked-up. Are you a member by the way?”

“No.”

“You really should be.” He assumed as patronising a tone as possible. He’d seen other guys do it, a fatherly arm around the shoulders, like they mightn’t get their dinner if they don’t look after you. He’d been studying them for a while. Women. Ted hadn’t had so much success until now and even then, only modest. Earlier he was in his bathroom, ritualistically showering, shaving, plotting. Plotting in a way that would betray his casually affected stance now, should Tina have been looking while he prepared. At least he always felt powerful in the bathroom, especially in his bathrobe, tied up neat.

“I’ve always felt pretty powerful, given my position, you know on a world-scale, if you work for U.P. you’re always up there. But now, I’d say I was in the 95th percentile, maybe higher if you factor in African children and Iranian women and everything… do you think they count?”

“For what?”

“On the scale of world-power.”

“Probably.”

“Probably 99th percentile then.”

“Ninety-nine is a bit high, you’ve got no power over me…”

“Yeah but you really should be a member and you non-members benefit from our work so there’s some power in there. I don’t mean that like, childishly or anything, but you would get access to better jobs, better housing. You know in the last 50 years U.P. has done as much for the individual as the U.N. did for countries, probably more efficiently. I don’t know if you can verify that.”

“I can’t get in.”

“Uhh?”

“Too expensive.”

“But it would pay for itself when you get a decent job, better transport, everything.”

“The assessment would cost me almost a years wages, I might not even get admission with my record. I can’t not eat for year. Anyway, who can be bothered.”

“I can probably help you with that now. I’ll look into it.”

“You don’t even know me”

“I know you well enough.”

“Well you might be overestimating the effects of your little promotion.”

“I suppose we’ll see.”

“Don’t you think this whole U.P. experiment is going to fail anyway? Aren’t you gonna run into a wall, when the cops can’t do anything at all? You can’t have lawlessness.”

“Listen, I agree. I mean, If we don’t do our job then U.P. will be sidelined. I agree with that. But if we can pre-empt the cops – like, what we don’t have now, say, is a way to check houses. All it takes is a few big police departments to point that out…”

“So you want U.P. to be able to search my house?”

“No, no, no, no. You’re not a member.”