square

Square



His favorite color was rainbow. I heard him tell his mother, walking around the apartment lake like a gliding swan. She was pushing a baby stroller, comfortable; maybe nervous about the day ahead. The morning was a time for planning another reckless urban day. Most of those days were gone for me. I was going rural.

“Mom, are there rainbows when you die? That’s what I think,” he said.

She frowned, concerned for the morbidity of her child. “I think so. But there are rainbows when you are alive, too, baby.”

“I never see any.”

Poor kid. I see them all the time.

I am the Generation X. I have experience with multicolored apparitions.

 I have trained crack addicts on the streets to deal with the police. For years I have recruited upcoming Ja Ja Rastafari leaders, and drug dealers, and new psychedelics officers, to use them for the company’s purposes. Yet, after meeting the eighteen-year-old Dana, I stopped entirely. That is because Dana was not ready; for me, for drugs, for Astro Zo Deprik, for any of it. I lived in a hip apartment according to my roommate, and stayed there after meeting Dana.

The child and his mother rounded the far side of the lake where I couldn’t hear them. I was on the cement porch pining for a different life. There could be no campaign activity at all.

If Dana wasn’t ready for my campaigns, who would be? She was the prime joy of my life. Dana didn’t like what she learned from me the day she spent with me, and was afraid. She reported her experience to her city community, and everything about me, Razr, and Officer Jones (who incidentally received the report).

 She told them she didn’t like surveillance, even if it was from the pharmaceutical company Astro Zo Deprik. She told them she didn’t want to live knowing she was being watched or listened to by other people. She said she already felt safe.

 Dana might have felt boring, or dull, but that was what helped her survive in a harsh world. She was highly intelligent, and had perseverance. Those qualities are more important than radicalism. She must know that I helped change her life. She must think me to be a terrible person, or maybe even she envies me for being powerful. She may be correct in her thoughts.

There is nothing wrong with Dana, although she had not been very aware of what her world was really like. She was a perfect circle, and I was a dull, burning square.





 SQUARE

Six weeks earlier…

 The universe was burning up. Even in the house you weren’t safe; even as far back as the 21st century. Some people, like Carl and me, could see the world being consumed by flames. The reflection of the light on different objects were our hallucinations. We were wizards who could bend the reflections into interesting shapes, like a square, and create new worlds with our minds inside the inferno. My apartment was burning then from the fire and the banks who watched us, and I needed to leave. I needed to find a hydrant for my mind.

Since your home is owned by someone else, even if you are in a house, even if you own your house, it is best to campaign somewhere else. You believe yourself to be safe and rational in the house but the truth is that you’re still a zit on the man’s back. When you’re in walmarts or driving on a highway, there is no belief that you are in control. You stay alert. You aren’t trying to be cool in those situations.

 Carl was a 26 year old man with an unshaven face, and thick clothes which made him appear short and fat. He became a social engineer after trying drugs in college. He was an expert at image and managing an influential public persona. I was his partner-in-crime. I sat in the huge sofa with a mental fire all around me.

‘I campaign to raise awareness…’ is how I introduce myself to other social engineers. Certain engineers have different lines. They remark back with ‘the priority is to identify each...’ or ‘one weapon we can use...’ or any other catchy, politically correct marketing phrase to identify themselves as active sociologists. Another characteristic of the sociologists was to have the urgency of someone who was dying.

 Carl found the acid and commented that he already felt electrified. I said I had manifested an electrified feeling immediately when the trip started. He gazed headlong into my arm. “What?”

 I told him how I had reached my creative potential just before he came home.

“In that instant, I made a heroic move,” I said. “I programmed drugs we purchased to electrify its users. I called the pharmaceutical house we both know about, and asked if our infiltration of its ranks would go unnoticed. I received level 9 feedback. It’s almost a certainty we can remain invisible forever.”

 He pushed air through his teeth. “Yes!”

 “Before you electrocute yourself with excitement, I suggest we search out any glyphs we need from the stock of our local thrift store.” Glyphs were those items with psychedelic qualities. A teddy bear is a glyph with protection attributes. An acid blotter is another glyph. It has unlimited qualities. With a teddy bear, you can repel the forces of Astro Zo Deprik under your bed sheets. With an acid blotter, you can become an Astro Zo Deprik agent yourself.

Carl and I were active agents.

The brain helmet they provided would help from the twisted abominations that New Zealand could throw at you. Or it would protect from any domestic spies who might take advantage of you and cause harm to the bank. The bank was no more important than a teddy bear in the universal scheme of things. The bank simply owned your home, and therefore you. And therefore us.

 This is why we left the apartment to go to the thrift store on acid. Freedom was under a sky, not a roof. We found a terrible looking home-made blanket and an old seashell. Definitely glyphs. “I like the patterns on the comforter,” Carl said, yet the blanket was perfectly grey.

We drove in our van to walmarts for the campaign. The acid was incredibly strong. I left the blanket in the car. We weren’t agents anymore.

 We were squares.

Zzz

***

 The Poseidon ocean-god emblem was easy to locate. It was in the blue packaging of a new kind of macaroni and cheese. It was perfect for putting out flames. We peered into the lens through which other people see the world, and the disconnect between what we saw and what others could see brought a singular joy that only someone who has been imprisoned in an Astro Zo Deprik experiment, and been freed, can know.

 I activated the seashell glyph by rubbing the calcium. This particular glyph activity only worked in the presence of an ocean-god emblem. After activation, the sound of my thoughts would echo to anyone on any kind of intoxicant nearby. Any stoners, tweakers, and pillheads who might be near would freak out when they heard us.

 The woman right next to us was hilarious, looking at microwavable asian noodles because she was on something and could hear the glyph in her mind. Her mouth twitched and her eyes darted hypnotically straight to the macaroni and cheese. She aggressively put the mac in her cart, to stop some kind of feeling she had. We looked at the blue box behind the first one. The ocean-god emblem jumped to the label of the new mac on the rack.

 We scoped out surrounding traffic with something like sonar from the shell. I noticed that everyone was weirdly slower or lazier than normal. Mondays.

 Carl and the other social engineers and I almost always went completely unnoticed by the public. There simply wasn’t enough knowledge out there about our jobs. The police knew us, but we managed to narc out enough people that they were on our side. We had total freedom for over five years. We didn’t need the acid but when we had it we took advantage.

Our current plan was to benefit the city by causing a team of brokers in the firm across from walmarts to have certain visions. The shared hallucinatory experience would hopefully cause them to second-guess their cheating us out of five-hundred dollars. They would suspect us, although there was no way they could ever know.

We didn’t need to be secretive. Most people who claimed to know of us were committed by their family and friends frighteningly quick.

I saw a teenager coming up to the noodle aisle. He may have been attracted by our summon of Poseidon.

“Nope, that guy can see us,’ whispered Carl.

 He looked directly into my eyes and a hallucination burned a swatch of artwork into my mind. The paintings hung on a bedroom wall; hundreds of hugely detailed and colorful drawings. Orange, green, blue--the colors of Astro Zo Deprik. My shoulder felt a piercing pain just as the boy walked past, with an expression on his face; ready to set off a bomb. He passed between us, and I momentarily doubted I could finish the campaign. I was stunned.

 It is the sort of thing that never happens in the country.

 “This public psychotic experience is over,” said Carl. He replaced the shell to its spot in his cargo pants and zipped his fly. “We gotta get out of here. That could take weeks to put out. He’s probably reporting it right now to the Astro Zo Deprik police team.” I agreed and we checked out our groceries dejectedly.

Anyone who sees us is usually sent by the bank to imprison us. Part of this kind of activity is knowing when to quit, for your own safety.

When we exited through the automatic doors, we realized the boy had set a trap.

Three red-uniformed cops were right outside the exit, staring us down like we had just taken a shit in God’s assigned parking spot. They were talking about Astro Zo Deprik’s new policy of collective research. We curved around them but the damage was done. The poison entered through our ears and into our chemically altered brains.

They worked for Astro Zo Deprik, too.



***



 She felt incredibly boring for her new man. Dana couldn’t say anything interesting, or funny, and was sure he would leave her on account of that. Thinking herself to be a real square, she would shut down with him, and eventually start crying silently.

 Her parents were dull, as well. To them, creativity and intelligence took you further from religion and community, and anything out of the ordinary would prevent the extruding of a long line of healthy girl and boy children. But him: he was a brilliant, broken star. None of his family worked for the government. She envied him and that made her like him more. He was hers. For now.

 Her cuteness when she was with her boyfriend at the park or in the mall did not go unnoticed by the city community, who genuinely wanted to see the couple be happy together.

 To make him like her more, she decided to pretend to be insane. That was her mistake. Insanity isn’t a play toy. She had enough hormones in her system to totally lose control, and lose the love of the community and, worst of all, his love.

They were just eighteen.

 She had bought drugs to impress her boyfriend, but it turns out the pill dealer was a local high school narc. He called the cops who intercepted her on the way home In jail, she started experiencing things she didn’t think could be possible. The hallucinations could be explained by the fact that the narc carried real pills and she had taken one.

The group holding-cell was incredibly unkempt.

 She found a coin on the floor and imagined it had exploded out of her fingertips. Dana almost felt the metal extruding from her hands like the taste of zinc and copper. Was she a metal wizard? How had her mind been zapped into forgetting it?

The people in the holding tank were all drunk or messed up, too. She tried to nap.

Then she saw more coins fall to the ground (from that rastafarian’s pocket?) and imagined herself as a metal wizard again. She wondered why she had been cursed to manifest such low-denomination currency.

The bank owned the jail. They hired the pharmaceutical company Astro Zo Deprik to execute those operations. Astro Zo Deprik agents, working for the bank, were poised with a knife at the jugular of the financial system in the United States. Their purpose was to cut a tiny hole into the bank’s neck and draw your community’s jail budget into their own bank accounts, for compensation to provide ‘special’ security for everyone living in your home. Special security only activated in the case of a war. The war wasn’t nearly over, but for some people, it hadn’t even started.

 When Dana was spotted by the Astro cop, he saw her as a prime candidate for hiring.

 “Dana Coldwell. Please step toward the door,” the intercom played. The cop led her to a room where she made her one call to her horrified parents. They were coming to get her, but not before the cop got her first.

 Dana was going to be the latest member of the national effort to ruin the effect of natural drugs, and implant a desire to do synthetic ones. Once she was hired, there was no quitting or being fired.

She hung up the phone on her parents and stared dazed at the cop’s back. He turned around to look mockingly back at her. The Astro cop gave his offer. If she reported anyone who sells any kind of drug to him, she wouldn’t be tried for possession of a dangerous controlled substance. Of course, she agreed. ‘How interesting!’ she thought. A penny dropped to the ground from the seat of her pants.

 “Sorry sir,” she said.



***



After two weeks, Dana found someone to report. She had heard about him from her boyfriend. The guy had acid. She was going to call him and get him arrested, as was her assigned task from the Astro police.

All she needed was to meet him in front of KFC to make the trade, and she would report his phone number and pass the drugs on to the police. It was easier than she thought. The dealer’s names was “Carl,” but she didn’t catch the other man’s name.

When she got back home, she told her boyfriend, who thought it was all very thrilling. They kissed, and she was happy for a short time.



***



The young girl had gotten Carl. I escaped. Carl thought he could perform some kind of in-jail miracle, and allowed himself to be caught. We were basically immune. The cops hadn’t found our real connection, known as Rasta Steve. The girl was just eighteen. I wrote a note on the fridge:

FREE HER!

 I was being ironic. I couldn’t even free myself. It was part of the joke I had made that we weren’t doing any good. We were still just Astro Zo Deprik experiments. Alone in my apartment, I came up with the plan. I had some blotters left. I was going to need the big guns for this one.

 All societal groups were in a state of stasis. They were frozen and unchanging, except for a slow deterioration of the group’s motivation. In order to effect change on a group, you first unfreezed them, or broke their routine. Then, you introduced the element of change, and refreezed them with the new momentum. It was a lot like kinetics. You rearranged the atoms, and spun them the other direction. Unless someone unfreezed the group again, they would keep spinning for-ever. These pursuits were known as campaigns.

 I called the officers who would help me. They were the good ol’ boys. I marked on my fridge:

FREEze HER!

And stepped outside beneath the blue-green-orange sunset with my badge burning white in the cloud-swept sunlight.



***



 Mobilization was underway. This was the plan: I had three cops going undercover to the girl’s house to sell her some painkillers. I was parked outside watching and listening in. Her cell phone records were easy to find on the darknet. Timing my arrival was important, but I had a strong feeling this girl and her family were the perfect victims.

 The situation was going to be a PR disaster. The girl Dana was supposed to rat out three men who sold her drugs to the Astro police.The cops selling her the drugs were members of the local community, nearly as unaffiliated with the pharmaceutical company that anyone can be. Of course, my guys would eventually press charges in a more bureaucratic way than the Astro police. The slower method was much more effective for community leaders than raiding people’s houses.

 If Astro Zo Deprik didn’t show up immediately, I would impersonate an Astro agent until one would be forced to come.

 The warm grey rain started to pour.

 My guys had been there for twenty minutes. I arrived in my red suit and tie in the van, and clicked on the mic monitor. I could hear the girl talking.

 “So, you guys can go whenever,” she said. “My boyfriend is going to be here pretty soon.”

 These guys were experts at stalling. They learned how in college picking up girls and procrastinating with teachers.

 “Just tell us when you feel the drugs,” Officer Jones said. “We don’t want you coming back and telling us we sold you bunk shit.”

 She mumbled something and I heard a shuffling, like of her jacket or shoes coming off.

 “Well, do you guys want something to eat?”

 I spoke into my microphone into the officers’ ears. “Tell her you want to take some of the pills. You want to insufflate them.”

 In ten minutes I could hear each one of them snort the white powder into their noses.

 A common misconception protects government officials, especially ones involved in controlled substances, from being accused of using drugs. This is the misconception that the officers don’t feel above the law. In fact, I have met a policeman who didn’t do some kind of drug, natual or otherwise, since I lived in a rural area.

 Astro Zo Deprik would have already be there if they would come at all. They had taps, too, and would have known about this deal for hours. I decided to exit my vehicle and approach the house behind it.

 Knock knock.



***



 She didn’t recognize me and thought I was with them.

 “Um, my parents are coming home in like an hour,” she said distantly as I entered the portal. Her parents were both working. I knew they wouldn’t be here for another three. “You can go see your friends in the kitchen if you want.”

 I was electrified again. I whispered to her, “I am with the police. You have done a good job. I will be arresting those men after I determine if they’re carrying any weapons. Thank you, Dana.”

 She panicked and tried to tell me to leave. “Can’t you do that later?” she said.

 “I can’t, no,” I said and walked through the deco living room and into the kitchen. “Hello, boys!” They fake-jump started for the exit. I tackled one of them and cuffed them with toy plastic cuffs. He could get out if there was an emergency. “You son of a bitch!” I shouted and raised up to the others, who had ran off exactly as planned. “Dana! Do you have a cell or home phone?”

 Her freaky little brain probably exploded internally.

 I tied Officer Jones up and stood face to face with Dana. “Phone please.” She pointed to the kitchen counter through the doorway as she was beginning to hyperventilate.

 I called a fake number and started talking very, very quickly. “We have the suspect, yes it was Dana, yes she will be getting the promotion, no I don’t think we can get the other guys, oh you want me to try to find them?” I stared her down questioningly. “Dana, do you mind if I set up operations inside this house for approximately one half hour?”

 With tears in her eyes, she shook her head, no…

 “Yes, she has agreed. Yes. Yes. Thank you, sir.” I hung up the phone. Officer Jones was doing a good job of pretending to trip out. “Dana, do you know about those other men? Anything at all about them?”

 I think she was trying to rationalize the whole thing in her mind. It wasn’t that big of a deal, she was thinking. Maybe she was thinking about the promotion I had mentioned in the fake phone call. “No, they were just guys I heard about.” But yes, I noticed she was hysterical. Her voice was trembling. “Is he dangerous in there?”

 I approached the pills she bought on the counter and said, “No, he’s fine. He won’t be bother us. Tell me, what are these?”

 “Painkillers,” she said affirmatively.

 “Probably not. Did you take any?” Her face turned blue. “If you did, that’s just part of the job. You might need to take a few days off of school to detox, however. These most definitely are something besides painkillers. Possibly ecstasy. Mixed with heroin.”

She rushed to the sink and threw up.

“Good,” I said. “I’m going to interrogate the one I captured in the living room. You must observe as a witness.” I wanted the Astro agent to arrive during the interrogation. I was wearing a high-level red suit, and wouldn’t be touched by them. I just hoped I had enough time to deliver all the information to Dana for the full effect.

 I grabbed a pen and a grocery list from the fridge to draw on the back. “Sir,” I said to Officer Jones, who was writhing on the couch in the living room and moaning. “Sir, please answer some questions. Do you know your own name?”

 Dana was quietly observing me, and him. I wrote down all his answers to some basic made-up questions. When I was done, I asked Dana for a larger sheet of paper. When she retrieved it from her room, I went to the coffee table and began drawing.

 “Dana, I want you to see this.” She came closer. “See these squares? These are houses.” I silently drew a bunch of squares in a row. “These houses are your neighborhood,” I said. “If this is your house, which house did these guys come from?”

 She told me they came from over five miles away.

 “Okay. Well I want you to know, that none of these houses,” I said, and looked directly into her eyes, “are real. They are just squares. The representations we make for things like houses are there to help us understand them.” I drew a circle. “This is you, Dana. A nearly perfect circle. These men,” I drew pointy zig zag lines, “Are like this. Do you understand?”

 “No,” she said promptly. This always made me feel a little less confident. Why couldn’t she understand? The acid wasn’t making me that crazy.

 “Okay, pretend the circle is in a square. When the circle is in the square, it is safe,” I said. “When these zig zag people are in the square, your circle is not safe. So please, never invite these kinds of,” I lost my breath because of a strange sensation that I wouldn’t have time, “people into your square again, okay?”

 “Um, yes sir,” she said quietly. “I really won’t.”

 “Okay, good. Now, I have something to tell you. The squares are not what you think they are. They are not houses. They are portals to different lifestyles.”

 “What?”

 “Just imagine for a moment, that if you move from one square to another, that you feel totally different, despite being exactly the same.”

 “Okay, um, I guess.”

 “Actually, your neighbor across the street lives in a completely different cultural, social square than you do. And what makes that different? I’ll tell you. It’s the,” I paused to get the words right. “It’s the angle that you observe the square by. Does that make sense?” Officer Jones had stopped writhing and was looking at me through squinted eyes. “The square is shaped depending on how you look at it.”

 “Okay, that makes sense,” she said. “Like the observational, um, angle. Or something. But what does it mean?”

 “It means that whoever knows about you and is watching you, is how you live in the square. But you’re a circle, and you’re the same shape from any angle,” I said, desperately. I really needed to get through to her before the agent arrived to arrest us.

 “Oh, that’s cool. I see what you mean.”

 “Good. Now can you relate that to your life? I can give you a hint. There are a lot of angles from which your square is being viewed. Lots of perspectives.”

 “So my life is going to be different all the time?”

 “Possibly. Do you ever feel that way?”

 “Yes. Yes! All the time. I feel great in the mornings, and terrible before I cook lunch, and then kind of spacey after I eat.”

 “Are you aware of quantum physics?” I looked into her face, burning red from anxiety. Her eyes kept shifting to Officer Jones.

 “I’ve heard of it.”

 “It states that as soon as you observe a particle, it changes. The changes you experience every day are because you’re being watched by Astro Zo Deprik agents, the other police, your friends, your community, and all kinds of different groups. Trust me, it’s hard to get used to, and also you must know what’s going on or you’ll go crazy.”

 “Hmm, that sounds wrong. What if nobody’s watching me?”

 “Someone,” there was a banging on the door. “Someone is always watching.”

 Boom! The door burst open. “Freeze!”

 Most fortuitously, it was Razr who came from Astro Zo Deprik. The look on his face as soon as he saw my red suit was classic. I said, “She deserves a promotion.” I knew Razr. He was supposed to be one of the most intimidating of the agents.

 He put his gun down and said nothing for a long time. Dana was scared out of her mind. “Who is he?” she asked me. I didn’t answer.

 Instead I spoke to the agent. “She knows everything. The spies will get to her if you don’t protect her.”

 Silence. He finally rustled in his tracksuit to bring forward a notepad.

 He approached Dana and started his speech. “We are loyal to you. You have apprehended a suspect which through subsection c of ‘Officer Promotion,’ in the Astro Zo Deprik handbook, demands that you receive a promotion. Furthermore, you have received intelligence that must follow rank. Once the promotion is in effect, after approximately one hour, you will be under full protection of Astro Zo Deprik. You will be privately monitored twenty four seven. Please do not be alarmed. We are only here to help you,” he said. “Certain spies have been attacking our unit recently, and this protection we offer to all active agents. Your new title is Agency Representative. You may use any powers afforded to your title. Those include loan predetermination, loan forgiveness, choice of medication, and other benefits including protection from foreign forces during emergencies. Most of your privileges as Agency Representative will be second-nature. Do not fear anymore. There isn’t much you can do wrong.”

 I smiled. Another promoted agent.

 “We will eliminate any other monitoring in order to improve your quality of life,” the agent said. “Our group will be there instead.”

 “Wait, so I have no privacy now?”

 “You’ve never had privacy. This is simply our mutually beneficial solution. It is the highest quality surveillance and is meant to prevent disturbances and protect you, solely. Do not be alarmed.” He signed the notepad, removed the carbon copy, and gave it to her. He then turned to me. “You. I will do everything in my power to stop you. You have my word as written in article 5, subsection a of the Astro Zo Deprik handbook!”

 I had gathered the page which I had drawn the squares and stuffed it in my handkerchief pocket. “I’ve never read the handbook. And Dana?” I approached the exit. “Welcome to the company.”



***



The city creates an illusion of being an organized environment for learning, earning a living, and supporting your nuclear family. The boring life of a city dweller can be made interesting by shopping in malls and in walmarts, especially for coffee and for cell phones. Being entertained is the best way to keep your house from catching fire during a war.

Connected by road arteries, the living body of a metropolis appears clean and fit. The first intellectual decision for the inhabitants is to identify the real problem-people. The second necessary decision is to assume these problem people are beneficial to the city; they’re the social engineers. The less advanced may live in fear of everyone else, or move to the country.

The country is supposed to be a very dangerous place for idiots to go to burn themselves out.

My city roommate was a social engineer, too. He and I lived in a problem area, full of weak-minded people. The rent we paid was low.

“Back,” he said locking the door behind him with a pointy smile that gave away his endeavor to screw with the neighbors. “Better lock the door.” My roommate Carl was taking off his gloves.

I thought once again that I should have moved to the country.

Carl untaped the white open sign on the inside of the door. We had bought it at walmarts during one of our campaigns. He turned it around to say ‘open’ and re-stuck it to the metal door of our tiny apartment. I was sitting on the couch watching him. He waited just a second to say anything.”I saw the teenager from walmarts that led us to the police. He was with the military in jail. He seemed totally oblivious. Unscathed, unlike me, inside the holding cell, stuck sniffing farts for our Rasta Steve,” he said and waited. “What did you do in my absence?”

Dana didn’t get away unscathed. The other city police, who worked either for Astro Zo Deprik or out-of-town agencies, came down hard on her report about me. She was propped in front of the entire state for a few days, and lambasted as being a hoaxter.

 I tried to help her from my apartment over the phone in what little way I could, by calling in and reporting a similar story to hers about surveillance and Astro Zo Deprik. But my claims were muted by the news station.

I needed to leave the city because of the report Dana made, which incriminated all of us, including Carl and Officer Jones. There was nothing else I could do. Perhaps Razr was right: I should have been stopped. But I’m proud to have met Dana. She was accepted into college where undoubtedly the local police, and of course Astro Zo Deprik, read every text she sent to her boyfriend.

Impatiently, Carl asked again about what I had been doing.

“I want to talk to you about my will,” I said.

“What will? Your parents’? Your parents are still alive,” he said. “Do you mean your living will?”

That instant my resolve kicked back. The second he said ‘living,’ I began my final campaign.

I asked, “Do you think I should pass on more stuff to my children? Or do I have enough stuff?”

“At forty, I suppose you could have more stuff,” he replied. “You really shouldn’t be worrying about your will. Plus, you have no children.”

“I’m not forty,” I said. “I’m forty-one. And yes, I do. I have one.”

From the country, the city appears smaller.