“I have another appointment, Mr. Minton,” Laird said.
I went home and reread thirty of the Simple stories by Langston Hughes as they were chronicled in back issues of the
DRINKING MY BRANDY, THINKING ABOUT MY FRIEND and the banker named Laird, I fell into a doze on my bed.
In the dream I walked up to a man at a workstation on a vast production line that had thousands of workers busily laboring on either side. The conveyor belt was so long that I couldn’t see an end in either direction.
“Hello, Paris,” the worker said to me.
“Hi,” I said.
“My name is,” he said, and then he added something, but I couldn’t hear the name over the roar of the machinery around us.
“What did you say?”
“I said,” the worker replied, and then he added something I didn’t understand.
“What are we supposed to be doing here?” I asked then.
On the conveyor belt were oddly shaped mechanisms made from all kinds of metals, wood, cloth, and paper. Every mechanism was unique. They were obviously pieces of larger, insane machines. The workers moved the devices as they passed without adding anything or making any substantial change to their structure.
The nameless worker was looking at the line too. He was smiling.
“What are we building?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“That’s right. You see, this production line has been growing for the last few years because the war is over and all the veterans need a place to work. It’s so long that it crosses over the river into the next state, goes north for Lord knows how many miles, and then crosses back over and down to here.”
“Past us again?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“So all of these things just go round and round?”
“No. Uh-uh.”
“Where do they go, then?”
“Here and there along the way there’s checkers,” the worker said.
“Checking for what?”
“To see if any of the”—he said a word that stood for the gadgets on the conveyor belt, but I couldn’t make it out—“have gone bad. And if they have, then they throw that”—he said the word again—“into the discard bin.”
“But that’s a waste of time.”
“For them,” the worker agreed.
“But not for you because you have a job?” I asked.
“Well,” the worker said, “that’s part of it. I mean, it’s not much pay but it’s enough for about a half of my expenses. But I live on less, because after the checkers throw out the”—that word again—“I go and pick ’em up and take ’em back to my place.”
“But what use are they?”
“None,” he said, “right now. But later on, when they run outta stuff to put on the production line, they gonna have to come to me to buy all them that I took home. That’s when I’m gonna be rich.”
I started laughing then. I laughed so hard that I fell down on one knee. Workers started turning around to look at me. And even though I was laughing, at the same time I was in mortal fear that I’d lose my job.
A bell rang. It was a long, monotonous ring that seemed to be an omen of great danger.
“What’s that?” I asked the nameless worker.
“Shift change,” he said. “Shift, shift, shift.”
16
I ANSWERED THE PHONE as if I had never been asleep.
“Yes?”
“That you, Paris?” Fearless asked.
“What time is it?”
“Mornin’ sometime, but I don’t know when exactly.”
I was fully dressed. The empty bottle of brandy was on the stool I used for a night table. I could see the last of
