The Mill

The Mill
        A straw reached up to the mouth of a man who had seen everything. All the neighbors were doubtlessly sucking the same straw.
        Their houses were connected by antennas to the television station. One day, the station would explode, and the television sets with them, and the battles would start. Whoever had worshiped the greatest actor would survive. He clicked to channel nine. “Ho, hum,” he said. The image burned into his eyes.
        “James Swill, the exalted media professional who, yes, has been identified as the next Jesus Christ, Lord save us; James Swill has invited us to view his latest thriller! All glory,” the man on television said. His hysterics continued. “All glory to the evangelical host, James Swill.”
        The man was shaking and a title card replaced him.
        The show was called “Mr. Swill”, and its introduction seemed to predict the truth Charles knew all-too-well: his neighborhood would succumb to the broadcasting supernova, and only the biggest channel would survive.
        “Mr. Swill” was written, directed, and produced by James Swill, the actor who played the protagonist of the show as himself. All of his and the other characters’ lines rhymed with “Swill.”
        “I’m going to make a deal. It’s just what I feel,” James Swill said.
        Charles reclined and started taking notes in his lap. Deal, feel, he wrote. He couldn’t figure out what it meant.
        The mentally handicapped actor, writer, director, producer, and broadcaster James Swill (who also owned the channel that ran “Mr. Swill”) threw a dart to the bullseye behind the camera, and burped out the words, “They did it for insurance cash fraud.” His lisp failed to pronounce the r’s.
        Charles sucked in air and paused the DVR. He wrote, insurance cash fraud. “That doesn’t rhyme with Swill,” he said to the frozen image of James Swill. “And you said it with intonation, like it was meant specifically for your followers to memorize.”
        What message was James Swill meaning to impart with this phrase, insurance cash fraud? Charles carefully sucked Dr. Canne’s into his mouth. He unpaused the DVR.
        Another actor threw a dart behind the camera. He was Swill’s publisher, Neil. ”The deal went downhill. The paper printer had another spiel with the mill. Well, the mill exploded during the grand showcasing reveal.”
        “I will never deal with a mill that conceals its flammable rating of nil,” James Swill said. “I feel the shitheel is a proper sour peel. Was it arson? What was there to steal?”
        The show was black-and-white. “You did reveal the shitheel to bill to the will of insurance cash fraud, Mr. Swill.”
        Charles paused the DVR again and sucked on more Dr. Canne’s. “What the hell am I watching?” he said. A call came through from his neighbor Paul.
        “Hello?”
        “Charles, you must have seen it. Insurance cash fraud is the code word,” Paul said.
        “I picked up on that. It was obvious, wasn’t it?” Charles said. “I don’t know the significance, yet.”
        “Turn the television off,” Paul said. “We shouldn’t expose ourselves to his show too often. We have the code word, and that’s significant in itself.”
        “I agree. I’m switching it off now.”
        Charles took in the quiet of his living room. He pushed down the recliner and set his cup of Dr. Canne on the end table. He needed to feel the sunlight, to help him think over the clue.
        He stepped out the door onto his bare cement porchway. It jutted out into his yard, eight inches above the grass. He had no weeds, and his lime green grass was cut evenly all the way around. A huge yellow sun blinded him from the whole eastern portion of his neighborhood. From the west, a huge pelican swooped downwards to his cul-de-sac (one of about twelve curved cul-de-sacs in his neighborhood) and the bird landed next to his flamingo ornaments. It lurched its beak toward the ground to search for caterpillars.
        This was Faber, Washington. The wind picked up and jostled the flamingo, and swing about the antennas adorning his neighbors houses.
        The antennas were so huge, they reached into the vicinity in the sky where the moon sank into during the day. The pelican flapped slowly, turning its head to the antennas. It paused, with wings outstretched. Another gust rustled its dirty white feathers.
        “I’m so fat,” Charles said to the bird. It froze, then bleated, and took off towards an antenna to light upon. Behind the antenna, smoke rose off the paper mill. “Hey, fella. Don’t let me bother you.”
        The road to the paper mill was backed up with automobiles of Swill followers, who believed they worked at Swill’s mill. Charles thought it was a festival of idiocy. “There’s no way that paper mill has so many employees.”
        Charles’ top was balding. The sun baked his head in a pleasant way. Insurance cash fraud.
        Since houses were guarded by the police, any invading Swill scum couldn’t possibly harm the neighborhood’s way of life. Three cops were sitting on Tom’s roof, adjusting an antenna with binoculars occasionally pointing towards the mill to keep an eye on them.
        The protection of this territory was funded through television advertisements. The cops were like agents of peace, providing the service of protection to them all. Charles was an officer, himself. Insurance cash fraud.
        Charles and his neighbors had to pay the police an additional sum twice a year to help with the cost of ammunition and vehicles. It was like house insurance; the cops were there in case a fight broke out between the tribes.
        Aha!
        This “insurance” was fairly cheap, but the cost was on the rise. The community had to drop three officers last month due to rising ammunitions charges. Finally, it seemed to make sense.
        Whenever an officer collected the police department’s bi-yearly sum from residences, it was recorded who could pay and who couldn’t. Sometimes, a respected member of the neighborhood couldn’t pay, but the police still considered those houses to be in the jurisdiction. With this economy, they couldn’t be blamed. But the premium went up for the next payment, to compensate.
        Those premiums were what kept the Swills out of the jurisdiction of the Faber police. Some recent political programs had called for the elimination of these premiums. “Free Police Now!” had been the slogan, delivered by a robotic representation of James Swill. The program lasted eight hours, and received decent ratings despite being a repetitive advertisement.
        “The police should be expecting a personal attack from James Swill himself,” Charles said to the empty air in his yard. “The accusation? Insurance cash fraud.”
        Recently, Swill had been criticising other robotic politicians. None of the politicians were pure robot; they merely had robotic representations in the form of animatronic humanoids or computer-generated images on television. Swill himself had thousands of animatronic robots playing roles for him. The robots destroyed each other regularly.
        Charles had seen inside the local mill during a television feature once when he was spying on the other channels. Swill’s giant robot torso directed the mob of workers, switching to propaganda mode when enough order was found among the rows of machines and their operators. The propaganda eventually aroused the workers again, who would return to chaos. It was a cycle.
        He glared at the thick, smelly smoke which blew in the wind towards his neighborhood. “Useless paper mill,” he said.
        On the program set inside the mill, Charles had been looking for weak points in the factory’s routine. Tom had been a real leader for that job. He noticed that most of the employees didn’t clock in after finally gaining entry into the factory. The scandal was going to be huge, until Swill declared that anyone in Faber could work wherever they wanted.
        One implication of that law was that his neighbors should go to the factory to work. Instead, they responded by burning a huge load of books. The battle took a turn for the dangerous when channel nine started referencing Farenheit 451, and its police state. The neighborhood almost lost a few residents who claimed the neighborhood was illiterate and supported fascism. After all, the police were a huge part of their lives.
        Any kind of fascist accusation was the worst thing for anyone, since the arrest of the last Jewish sages in Israel.
        They were lobotomized.
        Charles took a deep breath, then choked on the smoke.
        Charles had almost been lobotomized, but the police found him and moved him to Faber.
        “Jesus, I thank you for that.”
        The police noticed Charles talking to himself and waved. “Hey!”
        Charles waved and crossed the street. “Hello Officer Kyle and Officer Platt. Getting a good signal today?”
        “Sure am,” Officer Kyle said. “Hey, did you figure out the code words yet?”
        “I need to make a report, as a matter of fact,” Charles said. “It’s about the premiums again.”
        “How do you reckon?” Officer Kyle said. Officer Platt was twisting the metal rods away from the factory.
        “Well, a fraud accusation would possibly force us to protect the Swills. Even worse, we could be replaced, or murdered,” Charles said. “Not much out of the ordinary.”
        The officers understood and waved him goodbye.
        Charles was a little over tense since the resurrection of his wife and children.
He stepped back onto the hot street and began a slow-paced walk around the cul-de-sac, whistling the tune of “The Canne Plan.”
“James Swill is possibly the least attractive royal baby since the Hapses,” he declared, saying the words to songbirds in a yard, much smaller than the pelican. The two birds flew off in offense.
James Swill always played himself. His appeal was the strong meta characteristics of his actions. He referenced himself in all of the plots, and spoke normally, with no dramatic edge at all. He couldn’t act.
“Narcissist,” Charles said. Swill’s television shows were vastly popular with a majority of the American population since the Wreck almost eight years ago.
James Swill started his own religion in the aftermath of that great catastrophe which ended the lives of most of the true government leaders on Earth. Charles was going out of his mind with thoughts of revolt.
Step after step, Charles let his anger build up into a fury, until he was shouting.
“Swill’s a tyrant! We need to kill Mr. Swill!” A group of kids joined in behind him. He waved for them to join in shouting.
“Kill Swill! Kill Swill!” they said in unison.
        He circled the neighborhood and reached Tom’s house at the other end. The children wandered off, being distracted by the multiplicity of bird fauna.
        Charles knocked on the door. “Tom! It’s me, Charles.”
        The front door opened to a crack and Melissa, Tom’s wife, peeked her head through. “We’re watching for clues, Charles.”
        “I’ve figured the clue out. I need Tom to come down to the station with me to report it,” Charles said. Realizing he hadn’t been in control of himself, he stopped short and coughed.
        Melissa peered through the slit, wide-eyed.
        Charles second-guessed himself.
        “Sorry, Melissa. I guess we should discuss the report with the other officers before making a report,” he said, red-faced. “I’ve been having problems with Hate Sickness recently and I think I got a little out of control.”
        “With your wife and children inside the paper mill, I’m sure it is hard not to fuss about things,” she said. The door opened all the way. “I have some iced tea if you want to check in our fridge. But I’ll need to go back to the tube for now.”
        Charles accepted the offer and entered. Posters adorned the entrance hall: depictions of the man, Dr. Canne.
        Tom was laid back in his recliner in the living room. Charles gave a minimal wave and entered the kitchen. He rested his entire weight on the counter, and reconsidered his behavior.
        He thought he might need to take a vacation from the papes. Checking channel nine dialogue was mentally straining. It was something he obviously couldn’t handle. Had those kids realized that ‘kill’ rhymed with ‘Swill’? “Am I totally losing it?”
        On one hand, exposing himself to Swill propaganda was dangerous. On the other, he was protecting future generations from the cognitive dissonance of the retarded celebrity. He was keeping them out of the paper mills across the country.
        He gently poured the tea.
        James Swill was the antichrist necromancer that the advertisements had talked about. Charles took a cold sip and shivered. Swill wanted Charles’ corpse.
        Melissa came in when the program was over. “We think he’s going to target the police, too,” she said. “Do you want us to make a report with you?”
        “Thank you, Melissa. Yes,” Charles said. He set the cup on the counter. The moist surface of the glass dripped into a puddle around his hand. The liquids were rejuvenating his mind. He sighed. He had been nearly psychotic this morning.
        “Let’s go.”
        After filing the report, Charles returned home and made some notes about Tom’s observations of that day’s show.
        Tom told the superior officer, Sergeant Knox, he thought that the security officers like the police and other agents would be depicted as politicians. “In order for the Swills to take us to trial, they could easily force us to claim we represent our community politically,” he said.
        He wrote down, Officers do not represent the people of Faber.
        A public figure isn’t involved in security. The Swills have it backwards, he wrote. Our job is to protect public figures from Swills. Dr. Canne, for instance.
        Charles didn’t have the skills, nor the motivation, to take on the days’ problems.
        All of the papes he recorded, either television scripts or personal notes, came from a paper factory. He bitterly purchased the paper at the local store, which kept the boxes of legal pads and graphing paper in storage. His job as secretary required office supplies. He would much rather be adjusting antennas or patrolling the cul-de-sacs, but since his mental disturbances, he was cross-stationed to work at home. In this job, he joined the women.
        The phone buzzed. It was Tom. “Charles, I wanted to ask if you wanted to take my shift tonight.”
        Charles sighed. “I can’t. Hate Sickness.”
        There was a certain level of stigma to Hate Sickness that Tom was often guilty of continuing. His wife, Melissa, was understanding. Hate Sickness happened whenever James Swill personally intervened in your life. It was a curse, or, Charles thought, the loathing was simply too great to handle. On top of everything else in the world, losing his family to James Swill added a psychotic element to Charles’ personality.
        “But can you take the job?” Tom asked.
        “No, I’m sorry,” Charles said. “I can barely sit still at my recliner. I have these bouts of intense rage and I almost broke my tube by throwing a lamp at it.”
        “Oh,” Tom said. “Well, get to feeling better and drink plenty of liquids.”
        “That’s the plan,” Charles said, and hung up.
        He lurched over to the fridge and opened up its lighted oasis. Drinks; bottles of Dr. Canne’s, sheep’s milk, purified mountain spring water. He reached for the Dr. Canne’s.
        “‘Hand stands for Dr. Canne’s!’” he said. It was the slogan for the soda.
        He chugged the drink and sat down at his recliner. He dozed off with the pen and paper in his lap. A brief nightmare jolted him upward. It felt like he was going to disappear, and so he had reflexively woken himself.
        Something about sleeping made the void in his life seem all-too-real. After a minor panic attack, he attempted to fall asleep again, praying to Jesus for a good dream. The Dr. Canne’s fizzed on the end table.
        Ten years ago, he had been twenty five. With no wife, and an excellent job, the world seemed to have treated him right. His obsession with zombies was typical of his age group. He loved porn, and lived happily in Faber, Washington near his parents. His dad was a cop, and his mother taught at the local college.
        After the Wreck, his dad was murdered, and his mother left the state. She would die about eight years later. Suicide.
        He met his wife Alice soon after his dad lost his life. It was a marriage of desperation, but he had gotten lucky. The radiation exposure from the Wreck had left them relatively unharmed, like most people in the northwestern state. But chaos and community upheaval required a partnership, and he was pressured to have children. The population of the country was cut in half, unless you counted the mutants. There were three million mutant humans in America at the end of 2038.
        The effects of the radiation were huge.
        When the space station split into four sections and crashed onto earth, most governments thought a nuclear attack had been initiated, and weeks of crisis weakened their power. As the effects of just the space station were discovered, it was almost too late. The nuclear program had been re-initiated, and taken into the hands of rebel mutants. The space station had housed over 900 thousand tonnes of radioactive material, which was spread across the earth. Pockets of humanity survived.
        The nuclear winds weren’t filtered until Charles was thirty-two in 2041. By then, small areas like Faber were overpopulated and completely taken over by mutant media groups.
        Or, in James Swill’s case, by mutant media superstars.
        The television automatically clicked on, waking Charles. The telephone buzzed again. “Err, hello?” he said.
        “This is Tim. Sorry, I talked to Sergeant, and you have my shift.”
        “God damn, Tim. Alright,” he said. He let the phone drop and checked the set.
        The show was entitled “Sun Drop.” Charles knew instantly what the show meant. It was a threat from James Swill that unless they gave up control of their communities across America, he wouldn’t hesitate to drop a nuclear weapon on their heads. As a necromancer, he would be one of the few survivors. And with that many corpses, his power would be nearly unlimited.
        The screen showed a man his age at the paper mill. He looked just like Charles, with red hair and tiny ears.
        He said, “Got future shock? Join James Swill at the mill. It’s like the future shock pill.”
        Charles vomited Dr. Canne’s onto his ottoman.
        “When is ‘Dr. Canne’s Plan’ going to be on?” he asked the actor. He checked his watch. He had four hours left of “Sun Drop.”
        The movie was repetitive. After three hours of the same actors, and the same lines by James Swill, Charles became agitated.
        “I’d slice his leg open and suck his blood,” he said with vitriol to the picture. The actors didn’t respond.
Further along in the movie, he concerned himself with the actual plot of the movie, and reviewed his notes up to that point. He took a deep breath, and tears welled up inside him. “I think I might know what this movie is about.”
        He was going to call the Sergeant but he had to be sure.
        The police were dressed in suits in the show. They walked with legs pushing forward, like soldiers, and went door-to-door. It was what they were selling that bothered Charles.
        To distract himself, he wrote: second attack on police in one day, March 23rd 2044.
        The police were soliciting for insurance.
        Each person rejected their offers, and it became a musical. “Bill until a kill!” the men were singing. The song was a chirpy rehash of a classic. Charles’ mood went in the opposite direction of the music.
        Dr. Canne had never mentioned an instance where the Swills would criticize a single community in one day. Charles was confused, and another panic attack ensued.
        He started his mantra for these times. “Dr. Canne can! Dr. Canne can!”
        Dr. Canne wouldn’t be on for another thirty minutes.
        The soldiers in suit and tie started shooting at the houses, and then, without any explanation, were outfitted as police officers. Charles looked closely. It was the exact same actors. He saw the man that looked like him.
        “Dr. Canne can!” he said with raised fist.
        The Sergeant called. “Your shift is cancelled,” he said.
        “I’m in line for Dr. Canne, mister man,” said Charles. He was becoming hysterical.
        “Someone is on the way to your house. Hang tight and turn off the television,” the Sergeant said.
        “I ran! I went bam. I’m going to get jammed, Sergeant man,” Charles said.
        “This could be a false alarm, but Tom has been stationed in superior defense with the neighborhood patrol,” Sergeant said. “There’s going to be an attack. Can you stay in your home until help comes for you?”
        “I can. And so can Dr. Canne.”
        “It’s way too soon for a Dr. Canne rapture, for anyone. You may be in extreme danger.”
        “Dr. Canne’s the man,” Charles said.
        Charles hung up the phone and launched himself from the chair.
        Dr. Canne enthusiasts wanted to match the level of mass hysteria that meta actors like James Swill had captured in the public. Nearly the entire population was damaged in some way by radiation, and even the more healthy people were susceptible to any cult of personality. The matching devotion to Dr. Canne versus James Swill’s followers was supposed to be a strong defense in the case of a takeover.
        Charles at that time believed Dr. Canne to be the reincarnation of Jesus.
        Strange men were found to be roaming the neighborhood. As Charles crossed the street, one of the newcomers approached him.
        “Are you an insurance agent?” the man asked.
        “Absolutely not,” Charles said. In the sunlight, he was regaining some composure. He shook his head and said, “Have you seen channel nine tonight?” He imitated a Swill.
        “Oh yes. James Swill has outdone himself with the new production of ‘Sun Drop,’” the Swill devotee said. He threw a strange looking roped ball into the air. “Are you a resident of this neighborhood, sir?”
        “No, just visiting,” Charles said tightly. He turned and made a path towards Tom’s house. The rubber ball hit him in the head. “Ugh!”
        “I think you’re an insurance agent,” the Swill said. “Insurance agents don’t make for very good politicians. I’ll make you my next homicide victim, instead.”
        Charles started running towards Tom’s house. If Melissa was home, he could electrocute the Swill!
        The roped ball swung around his neck, and he fell to the pavement. The swill approached him, and just before Charles’ face was kicked into the curb, he saw Melissa running out of the back of the house with Officer Kyle. The neighborhood was evacuating.
        Charles’ blood bubbled onto the sidewalk.
        Months later, Charles recalled the incident as if it was a dream. The robotic torso of James Swill compelled him to stay at the press. “Will bill nil, or jail cell will kill!” the robot commanded.
        Charles fumbled for the stamps, his purple hands cold and without feeling. What was he trying to remember?
        He stamped the wet paper with a watermark, sheet after sheet.
        He remembered a woman, and a small child. And he remembered a Millissa.
        Submitting his work at the end of his shift, he checked the watermark. It had to be perfect, or he couldn’t join the entranced crowd. It said, “Faber, Washingtill: Home of the Future Shock Pill.”
        Charles began his glorious nightly rapture. An animatronic representation of the Officer James Swill raised its arms, and Charles raised his, and the love he felt was only matched upon seeing the Lord himself, Jesus James Swill.