Page 2 of A Better World

“I’d like to emphasize how hard I’ll work to make this happen. To make myself and my family an asset,” Russell said.

“No need to emphasize anything,” Jack said as he stood. He didn’t grunt like most seventysomethings. He was creepily graceful. Exsanguinator, she thought.Heads in a freezer.

“Thanks for your time. Someone will be in touch.”

His entourage preceding him like they’d choreographed this, he was at the door. He shook both their hands, firm and with eye contact, but still didn’t smile.

From their window, Linda and Russell watched the men in tight black suits cross the weed-broken sidewalk and city detritus–sprayed lawn: paper waste, dead tricycles, rusted tires. Jack stepped high and wide like all of it was dogshit.

The black van pulled away.

Linda hacked four wet, pent-up coughs to clear her lungs, then asked, “Does this mean you’re getting a second interview ornotgetting a second interview?”

This happened in a different but nearly indistinguishable world.

It was the Era of the Great Unwinding. The institutions, laws, and even the bridges and roads that people had come to depend upon were falling apart. Everything got automated, but broken-automated.You called your health insurance to ask why they’d dropped coverage despite cashing your check, and your complaint got fed into a system that took three months to process it. By then you no longer needed the surgery because your appendix had burst. The on-call doc had saved your life, but they’d done so without getting prior approval from said insurance company, which was using that as a reason to deny your claim. You appealed this denial, which took six months. In the meantime the hospital’s collection agency repossessed your car. This was a thing. It happened in banking, hotels, libraries, schools, the IRS, and every other bureaucratic system. Some version of it happened to everyone.

The weather stopped making sense. Fires and storms raged. Blackouts rolled through the country like waves at a Kings’ Stadium Dodger game. A lot of people stopped making sense, too. They were angry and mad and sad all the time. They were indignant over all they’d lost. They were indignant over what they’d never had. In the absence of knowing how to fix any of what had gone wrong, anger spread like a virus, building from one person to the next. Its expression was a delicious release that felt like action.

This unwinding had been happening for decades, accelerating with every passing year. Then a hydrogen bomb accidentally detonated in the Middle East. For two days all over the globe, smoke blocked the sun. The anger went still. Everything went still.

But humanity is resilient. It recovered from this nearly fatal wound, and it persisted, even as it carried its pain with it. The anger returned. The sound returned. The light returned. People ventured out again, resuming the same arguments they’d been having, only the tone was one octave more panicked.

No one could say whether or how things would get better. They wanted to believe that they would. But the organism, the human condition, was sick. There arose no healer to guide them. No strong, honest Prometheus. Alone, they saw no obvious path to health.

Linda Farmer had been a part-time pediatrician at a free clinic for almost fifteen years. Russell Bowen had been a science adviser with the regulatory department at the EPA. They’d lived in the same Kingsapartment all that time, hoping to save up money to move to one of the gated communities over the bridge in Jersey, but never managing it.

Mostly, heads down, they stayed positive. The world was falling apart, but they were okay. They had a home, they loved their kids and one another, and their work had value.

Their marriage was typical, in that it was unlike any other marriage and utterly idiosyncratic. She talked when she was happy, and also sang, and maintained ongoing monologues with herself when alone. He talked when nervous but was otherwise laconic. She felt things deeply and expressed those emotions. He held his feelings so close he often wasn’t aware that he had any. For instance, if asked a simple question like “Did you like your father when you were growing up?” Linda would have beamed happily and said she’d loved him very much, then described all the good memories she had about him and a few bad ones, too. There were plenty of bad ones. Russell would have looked at the person who’d asked, thought for a moment, and replied with sincerity: “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it,” and been very happy once the subject was changed.

Opposites attract. Linda and Russell complemented one another, each fulfilling a need. And then the kids came along, and life happened faster. They spent less time together. Their differences became a problem.

The years accumulated small crimes between them—words spoken in anger, dismissive behavior, rolled eyes. Sometimes, Linda picked fights. After long, exhausting days at the office, where he was treated badly, Russell didn’t have it in him to fight back, and ignored her. This made her angrier. She teased in a mean way to get his attention. (You’re awkward, nerdy.And once, during a very hot argument that she still regretted:You’re weak.) He retreated deeper. Days later, licking their wounds, needing the house to function, the food to be cooked, the bank statements to stay black, and the kids to feel safe in an unsafe world, they came together. They still loved one another, after all. This love was apparent and deep. So, they pretended the fights had never happened. They left resentments behind them, like a dirty river.

Then Black Friday came.

The news streamies were clever for once, likening Congress to a mad King Solomon, who’d made good on a bad promise and cut the baby in half, rendering both parts useless. The federal government slashed more than a million jobs.

Russell showed up to work and found his entire department weeping like mourners at an Irish funeral. At his desk, he found a box, his name misspelled in Sharpie:Bussel Rowen.No severance. No unemployment. No nothing.

In the face of such an emergency, they put aside their resentments and got along better than they had in years. They were still a team. They were the Farmer-Bowens.

Six months after Black Friday, they were sitting at the dining room table beneath the hanging spoons, itemizing unpaid bills on a yellow legal pad. It had been weeks since their “pre-interview” with Jack Lust, and despite Russell’s many follow-ups, they’d heard nothing.

“We could sell my engagement ring,” Linda said.

“I looked it up already,” Russell admitted. “Even the good places won’t pay more than a few hundred dollars for a half-carat diamond.”

“Oh,” she said, twisting the diamond around her finger, imagining him calling pawn shops, which should not have felt like a betrayal, but nonetheless did. “I talked to Fielding about more hours. She said next month I can do seven days a week, which’ll give me overtime. But it’s only temporary. The clinic can’t really afford overtime.”

“How much is that?” Russell asked. His voice was flat, his movements slow. He’d tried to use his time effectively, sending résumés, making calls, cleaning the house, engaging the kids for the first time since… ever? But he’d lost weight since Black Friday, his button-down shirt hanging off scarecrow shoulders. Without work, there was a hole in him.

“Hmm… an extra two grand next month, but then back to my regular salary—four grand a month. Plus, we’ll all need to be on my health care, so that’ll take us back down to… twenty-five hundred?”

Dutifully, methodically, Russell wrote this out with his mechanical pencil.

“The Jam?” he asked.

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