The Stringers, page 22
***
“Wake up, kid.”
I opened my eyes. Tom had come back with a small table and a chair, which he placed in the center of the room. He left and returned with a sheet of paper and a pen and placed them on the table. He then came to me and examined me intently and I suddenly realized my headache and other ailments were gone.
Something else had changed, too, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. There was a renewed sense of clarity, my senses sharper. When I looked at Tom I heard the faintest of sounds coming from outside the window, which I wouldn’t have heard prior.
“Yep,” he grinned, showing off several gold-filled teeth. “You look a lot better, kid. Eyes got their color back. I’m guessing you feel better, ain’t you?”
I was going to correct him for using “ain’t” but restrained myself and told him I had improved immensely since yesterday.
“Swell.”
“Swell? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Good. Nice. Wonderful. Whatever you want it to be.”
He gestured at the table. “You know what these are?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not that stupid.”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me! We have some fellas who don’t know a twig from a two-by-four. Ever use them?”
“No. My father did. He liked that sort of thing. It was a hobby of his.”
“Well, it’s no hobby here. It’s part of the job. Did your father ever show you how to write?”
“No, but I watched, sometimes.”
“Better than nothing, I guess.”
He handed me the pen and plopped a tattered, well-thumbed book on the table and opened it. The pages were stained and greased along the edges. I looked at the title. Common Sense by Thomas Paine.
“A political statement?” I asked.
“No. Just one we’ve used for years.”
“What do you want me to do?”
He pointed at one of the greasy, well-thumbed pages, tapping it with his large finger. “Copy that, word for word. No mistakes.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want me to do this?”
Tom glared at me though there was still a grin in the corner of his mouth as he licked his lips. “Are you going to ask me questions every time I ask you to do something? No wonder the ISA planned to throw you in the slammer. You won’t shut up and do what you’re told.”
“It’s because I shut up that they planned to throw me in there. They wanted me to get my father to tell them whatever they said, and I wouldn’t.”
Tom appeared as if he wanted to inquire further about it, but he stopped himself and looked once more at the book.
“First things first, kid. One, do what I tell you. I’ve done this more times than I want to count, and I hate math, so that works. Two, asking questions is good, but only if they’re useful ones. Some idiot once said there’s no such thing as a dumb question, which was a dumb thing to say. There are dumb questions and they’re dumb because they’ve got nothing to do with anything relevant. And learn when not to ask questions; just listen and do what I tell you to, right?”
“All right.”
“Good. Now copy this entire page down right now. Remember, no mistakes and no errors. We don’t make mistakes and we don’t issues corrections. That’s one of our rules. You’ll get to learn our rules eventually.”
I picked up the pen and held it in my hand, trying to imitate the pose I imagined my father had held at his desk inside of his study. But my fingers were unused to holding it and when I tried to write with it the pen slipped out of between them and bounced off the table. Tom snatched it before it hit the floor and handed it back to me, chuckling.
“Well, this is going to be fun!”
He then told me I was holding it wrong and needed to place it between my thumb and my middle finger and rest my index finger between them. I tried holding the pen and struggled to maintain a grip foreign to me. It seemed absurd that it could be so complicated to do something as simple as hold a pen, but as I went to hold it like Tom said, it kept slipping out. Undeterred, I kept working at it, slowly pushing it between my fingers.
Half of the trouble was resisting the urge to slam it down and give up. The whole effort made me feel infantile, especially when Tom demonstrated it for me and made it appear natural and effortless. But I hadn’t ever used a pen in my life. There was no reason to. Father had done it out of an interest in the lost art, but practically speaking it was a worthless skill. I had been raised on thought processors as a child, immersed in ever-changing technology.
Tom didn’t make it any easier for me, either. Every time I tried to write down several letters from the text he would reach down and guide my shaky hand, which frustrated me further. It had always seemed to have given my father a peace of mind, as if the process itself was as enjoyable as what he actually wrote. To me it was unnecessarily difficult.
“Why can’t I just use a thought processor?” I asked. “This is ridiculous.”
“Didn’t I just tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“We don’t use thought processors. Remember? We don’t use Prizms.”
“Then what do you use? What’s next? Are you going to ask me to carve on a cave wall with some sharpened stone next?”
“Ha! Not quite. We got plenty of stuff for you to learn how to use. But you’ve got to figure this out first, or the rest won’t be worth a penny.”
I spent the next hour or so copying what I could. Tom left me to finish it in peace when it became obvious that his observation only made me self-conscious about it. The exercise was fatiguing for my hand, and I had to take breaks every several minutes to let it rest. My wrists tired quickly. By time I had completed two paragraphs my forearm muscles also ached.
Experimenting with various methods, I settled on a simplistic manner of copying. As I wrote, I scanned the entire sentence to be copied, then wrote it down completely. I then checked it again to confirm I had transcribed it correctly before moving onto the next. I focused less on what the words and the overall content meant and concentrated on getting the copying done without errors. Thus, I didn’t read the text itself until I grew curious as to what Common Sense was about. I had heard it mentioned in one of my American history classes, but the teacher had done so merely to state that Paine had later written another pamphlet attacking religion and for that he had been persecuted in America and forced to go abroad.
After three paragraphs I stopped and rested and inspected my work. Since it was my first time using a pen, I didn’t know how well I had done. No matter, it was plain even to me that my handwriting left much to be desired.
Actually, that was not quite accurate. It was terrible.
My hand shook as I wrote the letters out, giving them an erratic, serrated appearance as though it had been written during an earthquake. Some of the letters like the a’s and o’s weren’t fully formed. I also wrote out my q’s and g’s in the wrong direction several times.
I corrected the mistakes and then proceeded with the rest of the page, baffled at how slow I was going. Had I had my thought processor, I could have finished not just that one page but five pages in the time it took for me to get a single page done.
I get it. But I refrained from asking myself too many questions. I took Tom’s advice to heart and tried once again on the page. After the third try, I managed to get it done devoid of errors and misspellings.
Satisfied I was finished, I sat back in my chair and breathed slowly. I could scarcely decipher the words on the paper which resembled the penmanship of a five-year-old child just learning how to spell.
Tom came back into the room and looked at the paper from the doorway and laughed, but when he saw me frown he cleared this throat.
“Sorry.”
“I’m sure your handwriting is just as sloppy.”
“Actually, it isn’t. Watch.”
Taking a seat on the spare chair next to me, he grabbed a fresh sheet of paper from the pile on the table. Without giving the book so much as a fleeting glance he scribbled out the same page I had.
I observed in disbelief as his hand flowed across the page with poetic sense of motion, and the same pen I had fought to control moved seamlessly from left to right, producing words in a smooth fashion, with curves at the ends of the letters and a soft scratching sound resonating in the air. As he finished the last sentence he capped the last letter with a wavy swirl and then dropped the pen in front of me.
I sighed and shook my head.
“It’s a cinch, kid,” he said. “You just have to practice it. I must have written this page out a thousand times, no joke. I memorized the whole passage by heart so I didn’t have to look down at it.”
“Why I am learning this, again?”
“Here’s the gist. We don’t use modern technology, for a bunch of reasons. One of them is the feds. They’re all kooky about their control of the Net. They control it, pure and simple. No contest there. But it’s also their Achilles’ heel. They’re totally dependent on it. They need it. Without it, they’re blind as bats, who actually aren’t totally blind, and deaf as snakes. They can monitor every single electronic transaction sent around the world and know who sent it and who to, as well as what you ate for breakfast, all for good measure. If you’re writing a story on one of those thought processors, it’s not going anywhere beyond that file. But if you’re writing it down on a piece of paper, they can’t do a thing about it. So this is how you’re going to be taking notes. You’ve got to learn how to write and get it down right the first time, get me? No mistakes. That’s one of our rules. We never make corrections because we get it right. Corrections are for second-rate hacks who don’t know their own business.”
“What exactly will I be doing?” I asked.
“Didn’t they explain that to you?”
“Not exactly. I wasn’t given a formal description.”
“Then listen to me,” Tom said. “I’ll give you the shortened version for time’s sake, because we don’t have all day to squawk like a pair of blackbirds. A stringer is the guy who gets the facts to a story. We figure out what’s going on, what the ISA don’t want us to print, but we do anyways and then we write it and it gets published. A stringer has to get to the story before it goes dead, know what I mean? As a stringer, you’ve got a lot of problems to deal with. One of them is the ISA. They are not enamored with us, as you’ve discovered. We’re supposed to be the bad guys. We’re not the good guys, I suppose, but we’re not the bad guys, either. I guess it’s better to be entirely in the gray than completely in the black. I can’t remember who said it, but they said something like this: Anything that gets printed that nobody has a problem with is just PR. For it to be a news story, it’s go to make somebody angry, preferably somebody who’s up to no good, right? That’s real reporting. The truth isn’t a pleasant fact, and that’s a fact!”
I shrugged, to which he clapped me on the shoulder.
“As for this little exercise I gave you, you did it all right, for a first timer,” Tom said. “Now do it again.”
“Again?”
“Did I stammer?” Tom asked.
“No.”
“Then what’s the confusion?”
“I just wrote it as you asked,” I said.
He paused, looked down at the paper. Then he clapped me on the shoulder again.
“Good. Now get it done, only better and make it more readable.”
“Why do you have to be able to read it if it’s my notes I’m taking?” I asked.
“Because you never know if someone else has got to read it for a story because you got double tapped in the head and spine by the feds, but just before you departed this lovely world you handed off the notes to one of your pals, like me, and if it’s five minutes before deadline I don’t want to have to spend a second of that time trying to figure out what in the hell it is that you wrote, especially if it’s got your blood all over it.”
At first I thought he was joking, but no smile appeared.
“I’ll be seeing you, kid,” he said as he got up and walked to the door. “What do you want for lunch?”
“Something edible.”
“We can do that. A lot of good food here. It’s the International District, you know.”
“I’ll take the orange chicken and brown rice.”
“Swell.”
***
I spent the rest of the day rewriting that passage in Common Sense until it grew nauseating to glance at it. Repeating the same motions with my fingers again and again and again, and growing more accustomed to the pen pressed between them, the fine nib scribbling onto the thin white surface became more legible. I watched in a primitive curiosity as the ink saturated the paper, intrigued by the foreign scratching sound that discreetly resonated throughout the room. I stacked the completed copies next to me and like a house under construction, the pile grew taller and taller. Remarkably, when Tom brought in the orange chicken I found myself unable to quit. A strange passion had been kindled within me, and an art which I had been little exposed to I now embraced, eager to improve my skill.
As soon as I finished one copy, I started on the other, and gradually I glanced less and less at the page. Eventually I stopped looking at the page altogether and wrote from memory. Oppression is often the consequence but seldom or never the means of riches; and though avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.
At some unknown hour, I stopped and looked down at what I had written dozens of times and it occurred to me that for whatever cosmic reason or purpose, this was how a writer was supposed to write—with his own hand.
With no sense of time and perpetual darkness in the window due to fog and thick, robust clouds pouring rain continually throughout the day, I worked and rested in intervals until my wrist could hardly be touched and the edge of my elbow was as red as merlot as I lifted it up from the tabletop and dropped the pen on the book and gazed at my work. I admired it as I enjoyed a glass of milk.
My hand instinctively went for the side of my head, excited to inform the whole world about my accomplishment, but before it touched I put my hand down and felt grateful that the headaches had gone away, but also the Prizm. I missed the convenience it provided, but not as greatly as I had anticipated. It had made things effortless, such as writing. No question there. But there was a sense of achievement in what I had done. I hadn’t thought of these words. I had written those words with my hand, not merely thought of them. Somehow, it made them feel more authentic, more real, and as I lifted the copies up and gazed at them I felt a pride I had never experienced before.
Tom came back in with dinner and as he set it down he looked at papers with a small grin. I was beginning to reconsider my opinion of him. At first he had struck me as apathetic to all else around him, save for his work. Gradually, however, he revealed an enthusiasm for training me, taking a personal satisfaction as I progressed and improved my abilities.
“Good work, kid,” he said. “I think you’ve got the hang of it for now. No need for me to help you out, though you want to keep practicing it when you can. Normally I’d spend another day or two with this, but the boss wants you getting started, so this is somewhat of a crash course.”
“What am I going to do tomorrow?”
“Just wait. Be patient. I never saw someone in such a hurry to get knee deep in our kind of work.”
“Might as well learn, since I don’t have a choice.”
“Good mentality. I like that. Motivation. A man’s got to be motivated if he’s going survive in this world.”
I gazed around the room, noting its sparseness, and then gestured at the open door.
“Can I eat out there?” I asked. “I feel like an animal in a zoo.”
“Nope. Sorry, kid. Rules are rules. I can’t let you out of here until you’re finished.”
“Why? I got to move around. I’ve got to talk to someone.”
“You’ve got me.”
“Yes, but others. I need to be around people.”
Tom smoked a cigarette as he leaned back in his chair, turning to blow the cigarette smoke out through the door. He had a relaxed pose, the sort of openness you expected from a close relative.
“That’s the point of this, kid. We’re not keeping you in here because we enjoy tormenting you like those bastards in the ISA. And we’re not doing this because we don’t trust you. Far from it. Had we not trusted you, McCullen wouldn’t have bothered to spring you out like that. No way. Not in a million years. He sees what I see in you, kid. You’re not the type to be threatened or bribed into doing something you don’t believe in.”
“It seems to have worked for him, seeing as I’m a coerced employee of his.”
“Don’t do that to yourself, kid! He gave you a choice, as pathetic as it was. He would’ve let you go. Trust me. He’s done it before. Those idiots who went didn’t last a few hours before they came crawling back asking for mercy and bowing before him like he was Saint Peter or something. You had a choice, but it wasn’t one you wanted. Anyways, the reason we’re keeping you held up in this room like a monk in a cloister is to condition you.”
“Conditioned to do what?”
He paused, frowned as he searched for an adequate reply, then nodded his head as he spoke.
“Conditioned to un-condition yourself. Sounds like it don’t make sense, but listen for a moment and hear me out. You’ve spent your whole life living in a world that is all about constant, continuous human interaction. The moment you wake up you put on your Prizm and turn it on and it has the news and the weather and sports and a billion things people have to tell you, anything else you want. If you want to have a chat with your friends, they’re always at your fingertips, or if you want to go find someone to talk to on the Net about something on your mind, it’s always there. If you get your kicks from it, there’re always the girls on these sites, right? I’m sure you don’t go to them, but the point is there’s always someone to talk to, or something to do. Except, it’s all fake. It’s not real. Sure, the people are real. They’re flesh and blood. But they aren’t real people in the sense that you ever actually are around them. They’re actual people, but it’s not the same as talking to someone in person. It’s different.”
