The Candy House(27)
* * *
This morning, our entire unit—six teams in all—is summoned for an unscheduled meeting in the Sand Garden. Based on past experience of unscheduled unit meetings, this one has an 86 percent chance of indicating a problem, a 9 percent chance of indicating an unexpected reward, and a 5 percent chance of indicating a personal tragedy in our ranks. All 273 of us file into the Sand Garden and lounge there, waiting for Avery to arrive. When the waterfall that normally trickles over the pile of sharp black stones is switched off, our team members exchange worried glances. Something big is afoot. O’Brien looks as confused as everyone else.
Our unit leader, Avery, is a nonbinary I have never seen display emotion of any kind in a public setting. Now visual indications of stress are evident all over their person: hair hanging lank and unwashed, dark circles under their eyes, sweatshirt stained with egg on one cuff; and mascara and lip gloss, the only makeup they wear—absent from their face.
“We’ve completed a deep analysis of recent proxy bafflement,” Avery tells us, “and have determined that a new generation of hermit crab programs has been designed specifically to elude our proxy filters. That fact suggests the direct involvement of one or more members of this unit actively working to help eluders exempt themselves from our count.”
Bafflement refers to the specific ways that proxies avoid our detection. Eluding and proxying aren’t illegal, but if someone at Harvest is working to help the eluders baffle us, thereby tainting our data with a statistically significant number of vacant identities and thus compromising the quality and accuracy of our work, that would fall under the rubric of industrial crime. Which explains why Phil and Patrice, our ombudsmen, are flanking Avery, looking more like cops than I’ve ever seen them look.
“We will be conducting an investigation,” Avery says. “We will interview each of you individually, and we would welcome any confidential information you’d like to impart at any time. While I don’t want to sow seeds of suspicion, I must ask you to adopt a certain watchfulness. If you have reason to doubt the commitment or loyalty of anyone on your team, please share that information with us.”
Avery is using a code that only I and other native counters are likely to comprehend: The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite!
Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.
Decoded, Avery’s message boils down to this: An impressionist is fucking up our data out of some romantic notion that by doing so, they are helping to foment a revolution—when really all they’re doing is screwing up our count and jeopardizing our jobs. So keep your eyes peeled for typicals who seem to be up to no good, and let’s get the fucker out.
* * *
6.28 months ago, or approximately three weeks before M started dating Marc, I was working in my cubicle when she rose up over our shared partition slowly, her eyes appearing first and then the rest of her face. Her eyes, when those were all I could see, looked like the eyes of a golden cat. As I was staring, transfixed, her whole head bobbed up and she said, “Peekaboo,” and began to laugh, and I laughed, too, and the fact that I was laughing made her laugh more and the fact that she was laughing made me laugh more, and I strove to calculate the exponential effect of mutual laughter because I felt like I was drowning, and a little illustrative math would have grounded me. But our laughter was too much to illustrate. That was the beginning.
M’s boyfriend, Marc, is a typical—a misleading term because, among counters, typicals are atypical and always a minority. At times I’m cheered by the thought that M can’t possibly have as much in common with Marc as she does with me. On the other hand, my parents and sister are typicals, and not only do I love them, but I specifically love the fact that they are typicals! Last month, when I hiked with my sister to a waterfall and we sat side by side on some rocks, I liked knowing that Alison was thinking something as simple as “how beautiful,” rather than trying to calculate the density, speed, distance to the rocks below, and the volume of water falling. But the glow of appreciation that I felt for my sister swerved into torment at the thought that the same glow of appreciation must be what M feels for Marc! She must think, It’s easy and relaxing to be with Marc. She must think, Being with Marc reminds me that there are other ways of seeing the world. She must think, When Marc looks at me, I know that he’s thinking I’m beautiful, rather than trying to count the secondary freckles on my nose.
This succession of thoughts so distressed me that I had to lie down beside the waterfall and curl in a ball.