THE FEED
Oh, a little intro
Spending any time in the literary world is like spending
time in the novel The Castle by Franz
Kafka. I recently had a ridiculous encounter with a literary magazine that sent
me back to 2010 when I wrote the story below. It was at the tail end of trying
to get my first novel, A Fish Trapped
Inside the Wind, published in the United States.
Fish had been
taken by editors at three major NY publishers in the mid-noughties. But every
time the marketing departments said no. They didn't know how to market the book.
Let me explain: most major publishers
are now owned by three or four entertainment companies and so publishing is run
on a corporate entertainment model – if it doesn’t sell or can’t be marketed
like a blockbuster movie, then it’s not worth the corporation’s time. Thus,
marketing departments have the final say. Editors have been dropped to a much
lower rung. They are in the position of agents inside their own publishing
houses, trying to convince marketing departments that the books they’ve picked
are viable.
(Which leads to the question: what do these marketing people
actually do? Aren’t they supposed to be creative, find ways to market books?
Yet they only take on books that they already know how to market…this is
sci-fi, we’ll do this formula…this is literary fiction, we’ll plug in this
formula…it’s a bit like doctors only taking on patients that only have certain
symptoms that they already know how to treat…but I digress…)
In grad school, they tell you that no one will publish a
book of short stories. Only novels are marketable, Bucko. This is true enough.
And yet, as soon as Fish was taken by
a publisher, the first thing the marketing department asked was if I had a
solid background of publishing short stories…had I won any prizes? Wait…I thought you
didn’t care.
In Kafka’s The Castle
the protagonist is sent a note through the mail about receiving a job in a
castle in a nearby town. He goes there, but is told that the summons was a
mistake, and is referred to someone else. He pursues an official and is offered
advice by a series of crazy characters on how to gain entrance to the castle.
The poor bastard ends up in the town for months, doing this, trying that. Throughout,
the villagers hold the men in the castle in high esteem and yet do not know
exactly what they do (Marketing departments anyone?). By the end of the novel, it’s
clear he’s never going to get inside. The book ends mid-sentence. Kafka never
finished it. Fade to black.
And so, back in 2010, when it was clear that Fish wasn’t going to be published in the
US (it was published a year later by Parthian Books in the UK), I sat down and
wrote a satirical speculative story about my adventure in the literary Castle-World.
It was called The Feed.
When I wrote the piece I had been living in Swansea, Wales for about six months and was a bit creeped
out by the overt presence of so many CCTV cameras everywhere. Who’s watching
this stuff? I imagined a time when cameras would be in every room of every home
and they would pipe live footage of this or that home to everyone else. Surveillance
state meets reality TV. Then I thought, what if the cameras were just going on
remotely, no one at the helm, all the ones who could run the technology dead
long ago?
Then I pictured two down-and-outers, a bit like Vladimir and Estragon
in Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, who
were desperately trying to gain entrance to the CCTV network, believing there’s
someone picking and choosing who gets to be on the network. They want to be
published!
And so, here’s the story. Special thanks to Gwen Davies of The New Welsh Review who originally
published the story, despite the fact that it wanders around for a bit and has no definitive ending (which is the point). For those of you struggling to get published in The Castle
atmosphere of the US, you might want to expand your horizons, get out of the American Bubble. There’s a huge
English speaking world beyond the US borders…
It's a bit creepy and disgusting. Like Reality TV. But funny (to me, at least). Good luck.
The Feed
EDIT FROM SERIES 4,586, 344; ZONE
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Renaldo opened the curtains, stared
at the slant of grey light across the cement shaft outside the window. Behind
Renaldo, Keets mumbled something in his sleep, slid into the shallow trench in
the mattress where Renaldo had been. Renaldo walked over to the CCTV screen set
into the wall above the sink, watched the feed while he brushed his teeth.
The
same thing had been running on the screen for the past three days: a mother and
teenage daughter who’d recently moved in with the mother’s brother, wife, and
two young kids. From the beginning the brother had had his eye on the niece. And
the girl was definitely giving him looks back. The wife didn’t seem to have a
clue, distracted by the constantly fighting kids. The mother of the teen was
usually gone, out looking for work. You could tell she was worried about her brother
making a move on the girl by the way she looked at him before she left the room
each morning.
The
family moved slowly about their room, stepping over each other, silent, going
through the motions of getting up. Renaldo spit into the sink, then looked over
his shoulder at Keets.
“Remember when the only thing they showed on the feed
was fucking?”
Keets
remained motionless on the bed.
“Before
that, it was all about fighting. Blood.” Renaldo dipped a cupped hand into the
running water, lifted it to his mouth, gargled, spit. “I can’t even remember
what it was before the fighting.” He turned back to Keets. “What was it before
all the fighting?”
Keets
lifted his head from the pillow. “Death.”
“We’ve
been going about this the wrong way,” Renaldo said.
Keets
threw off the sheet, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, rubbed his thin
grey hair with both hands. “What way is that?”
Renaldo
pointed at the family onscreen. “We need more people in here. It’s the only way
we’re going to get noticed. There’s feed coming in from everywhere in this
district, from the scrappie huts down near the old marina, up to the towers on
Pleasant Hill – every street, lot, alley, hall, room – capturing every fucking
moment of every day. You see what we’re up against, don’t you? The chances of
getting picked are astronomical. We need a gimmick.”
Keets
stared at the cement wall beyond the window.
Renaldo
turned back to the screen. The teen took off her pajama top while the uncle
looked on. “It’s about story now,” he said. “Drama.” He turned back to Keets,
watched him cross the room to the toilet. “And you know what makes good
drama?”
Keets
dropped his shorts, sat on the toilet.
“It
comes down to how many people you can cram into one room,” Renaldo answered
himself. “If there’s enough people stuck in a room, there’s tension. Drama just
comes squeezing out.”
“I
liked the fucking,” Keets said. There was the sound of a turd slapping toilet
water.
“There’s
no tension in this room,” Renaldo said, squinting back at the screen. “We need
tension.”
“Everyone
liked the fucking.”
“Fucking
is yesterday’s method,” Renaldo said. “We have to keep up with the times.”
Keets
picked up a box of crackers that had fallen off the counter next to the toilet,
fished around inside, found half a cracker, took a bite. Onscreen, the teen
dropped her shorts, sat naked on the toilet while the aunt made oatmeal on the
hotplate next to the sink. The mother wasn’t in the room, had already gone off
to job hunt.
Renaldo
shook the clothes inside his pillow case onto the bed, picked a wrinkled grey T-shirt
and a pair of black cotton shorts out of the pile and put them on. There was
the sound of a turd hitting water on the CC feed.
“What
I said before, about getting more people in here,” Renaldo said. “This time I’m
serious. I’m tired of being passed by.” He glanced at the CC eye above the
screen. “It’s my turn.”
The girl finished wiping herself, stood up,
gingerly stretched, then flushed the toilet.
The girl’s aunt stirred the oatmeal, said something to one of the kids. The
uncle, sitting on an upturned green plastic bucket in the corner of the room,
couldn’t take his eyes off the girl.
Renaldo
tapped the screen with his index finger. “Something’s going to happen
soon.”
Keets
wiped himself, flushed, and walked over to the window.
“The
more people you squeeze in,” Renaldo repeated, finger still tapping the screen,
“raises the chances of an unknown factor slipping in. You got to factor in the
unknown.”
“Where
are you going to get all these people?”
“There’s
that guy that lives on the yellow couch in the empty lot next to the arcade.”
“Jello?”
Renaldo
turned to Keets. “His name’s Jello? He’s so skinny.”
Keets
shrugged. “Everyone still calls him Jello.”
“You
think you could find someone to bring in? A girl maybe?”
“I
can get Addy,” Keets said. “She’s got no place right now.”
Renaldo
shook his head, looked back at the screen. “She’s too old. Spent. We need
someone younger, like this girl here.”
The
naked teen walked past the uncle, bent over a suitcase right next to him,
rummaged through the clothes inside, her ass practically in his face. The
uncle’s wife turned from the stove, caught the uncle staring right between the
girl’s legs.
“See
that? See that? If I wiggled my ass in your face it would come to nothing. You
know why?”
“Your
ass looks like a cabbage.”
“If
there’s nobody else in the room to catch you looking, then it means nothing.
You see? That’s the common element in these recent feeds. We need more people.”
EDIT FROM SERIES 4,586,789; ZONE 638-A (loop strand includes
ZONE 638-B)
Renaldo pulled Keets out into the
hall. “Jello just sits there on the end of the bed watching the feed,” he said,
shooting a glance at the CC eye at the end of the hall. “And that scrap-girl
you found down at the marina never does anything but eat crackers. She hasn’t
even taken her parka off. Not once. What’s the point?”
“I
think Jello’s the kind you got to make do something,” Keets offered.
“Tension
should arise on its own,” Renaldo said, “in the natural course of things.”
“You
could start a fight.”
Renaldo
rolled his eyes. “Blood is yesterday’s method. We’re going to need more
people.”
They
found another scrap-girl who called herself Mez, a bit younger than the one they
already had – fourteen, fifteen? – working through the refuse bins behind the
shell of the Trafalgar Hotel on the east side of the bay. When they spotted her
Renaldo quickly pulled Keets aside, breathlessly told him they needed her, that
she could easily pass for a sister of the girl on the feed, “so keep your mouth
shut and let me do all the talking.”
When
Renaldo told the girl what they were playing at, she laughed, told them there’d
already been a few others hunting the grounds around the bins the day before,
scavenging for scrappies that looked like the girl on the feed.
Renaldo’s
eyes narrowed, suspicious. “Why didn’t you go with them?”
“They
didn’t offer anything I haven’t had before,” she said. “What have you got?”
Renaldo
pulled a stash of Beef-o packets out of his coat pocket, dangled them in front
of her face. “There’s more where this came from.”
She
lunged for the packets and he jumped back, laughing, knowing he had her. He
tossed a packet at her feet. She quickly tore the package open, stuck an index
finger into the grey powder, then licked her finger clean. Keets winced.
“No
tricks,” Renaldo said to the girl. “Just a couple days of your time.”
He
sent her back to the room with Keets and continued on down to the dunes in front
of the old civic center, where he found two boys huddled over a twig fire
willing to come home with him. The tall skinny one called himself Niz; the
shorter one, Bust.
Keets
was boiling a pot of Beef-o for everyone when Renaldo got home with the two boys.
Everyone was watching some feed of the wife and kids standing in line to buy
Beef-o at the Double M. Eventually it switched back to the uncle and the niece,
alone in the room. She was spread-eagle on the bed in her underwear, watching
the screen. Niz and Bust sat down on the floor on either side of Jello, and started
watching with the others.
Keets
looked away from the screen, disgusted. “She’s just watching herself,” he said,
pouring the gray-brown liquid from the pot into three separate mugs. “It’s boring.”
“They
give the ones on the feed something different to watch,” Bust said, pulling a
box of crackers out of Jello’s hands, digging into it.
“Then
how do they know they’re on?” Renaldo asked the boy. “How do they know they’ve
been picked?”
The
boy pulled a handful of cracker bits from the box. “I don’t fucking know,” he
said, stuffing the crumble into his mouth. “Maybe they don’t.”
Renaldo
grabbed the box of crackers out of the boy’s hands, tossed it across the room
to Keets, then sat down on the bed next to Mez.
On
the feed, the uncle slipped into the room, crawled onto the bed beside his
niece. The niece pretended not to notice. He began talking about his needs. What
he really needed in life had so far eluded him. Apparently, this girl was the
cure.
“It’s
all just talk,” Keets said, lifting two steaming mugs. He looked around the
room. “We only have three mugs, so we’ve
got to eat in shifts.”
Mez
and Niz stood up at the same time, reached for the mugs.
The
uncle started to fondle the girl and suddenly she looked scared. Renaldo raised
his eyebrows.
“Now
that’s an interesting twist.”
EDIT FROM SERIES 4,587,112; ZONE
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“Just when you think the niece has
blown the uncle off for good,” Renaldo said to everyone in the room, pointing
at the screen, “she starts flirting with him again. You see? They’ve got a game
of cat and mouse going. We need that kind of tension.”
The
uncle was back on the bed with the girl, about to make another play, when the
mother suddenly walked through the door, home early from work. There was a lot
of yelling. The uncle threatened to kick
the girl’s mother out if she didn’t start minding her own business and the
mother threatened to chop his balls off some night when he was asleep if he didn’t
leave her daughter alone. The girl screamed shut up, shut up, everyone just
shut up. It was all very effective, engrossing.
There
was nothing engrossing happening in Renaldo’s room. The day before, desperate
for something to happen, he had beat a rhythm out on the window ledge, shouting
the lyrics to Snuff Bang’s latest tune, “Murder Riot,” trying to get everyone
to dance. The only one who ended up on his feet was Jello. The old man shuffled
around the room for a minute or two, then collapsed on top of the scrap-girl
from the marina. She stormed out of the room.
EDIT FROM SERIES 4,587,526; ZONE
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Keets pulled Renaldo out into the
hall, gave him an ultimatum: something had to happen in the next twenty four
hours or he was kicking everyone out.
“You
can’t do that,” Renaldo shouted at him. “The room’s in my name! I make the
decisions here!”
Keets
folded his arms across his chest, looked down at his shoes. “We’re almost out
of crackers.”
“We’re
getting close, I can feel it,” Renaldo pleaded. “It takes time to build
tension.”
“We’re
running out of Beef-o,” Keets said. “And it smells like something died in
there.”
“So
we switch to Plan B.”
Keets
continued to stare at his shoes.
“If
nothing’s going to happen on its own, we’re going to have to make it happen,” Renaldo said. “I’ll have to make something up, get everyone to act it
out.”
Keets
frowned, shot a glance at the CC eye at the end of the hall. “Are we allowed to
do that?”
“Are you kidding? It’s
probably how everyone else gets on the feed. I can’t believe I didn’t see it
before. Letting things take their natural course is yesterday’s method.”
EDIT FROM SERIES 4,587,532; ZONE
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Renaldo coached them one by one out
in the hallway, gave them their roles.
To
Niz: “You really want to fuck Mez.” Niz shook his head: “But I want to screw
the girl on the feed.” “It’s not about
what you really want,” Renaldo shot back, “it’s about how you’re going to act
when you go back into that room.”
To
Bust: “You want Niz, but he wants Mez.” Bust stormed off down the hall: “Why
can’t I be the one who wants Mez?” Renaldo had to coax him back to the room
with the promise of extra Beef-o.
To
Jello: “You are constantly trying to find a way to steal more Beef-o packets.” Jello
didn’t understand. “I’m not stealing Beef-o,” the old man insisted. “No, I
know,” Renaldo said, “but when you go back into the room I want you to steal
some.” Jello looked confused, but nodded.
To
Mez: “I want you to walk around in your underwear, give Keets the eye.” “What
kind of eye?” she asked. “You know, like the girl on the feed does to her
uncle.” “I don’t like Keets like that.” Renaldo sighed. “No, I know. I don’t
think the girl on the feed likes her uncle that way, either. Look, she’s
playing him. You see? I want you to play Keets.” “Why would I do that?” the
girl asked. Renaldo shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe because you think that’s the
only way you’ll get more Beef-o packets.” “Is that true?” she said. Renaldo
didn’t answer.
To
Keets: “I want you to deny Mez all food.” Keets stared down at his shoes,
nodded. Then Renaldo told Keets he was going to make a play for the girl, like
the uncle on the feed. Keets stared down at his shoes.
When
Renaldo walked back into the room everyone was busy watching the feed. Mez sat on the edge of the bed in her
underwear, arms crossed over her skinny chest, looking cold. Renaldo sat down
next to Mez, put a hand on her bare thigh. She announced that she loved Keets
and slugged him, sending him sprawling onto the floor beneath the sink. Then
Niz was grabbing Mez, professing his love. She pushed him off, repeated that
she loved Keets. Meanwhile, Keets was immobile, rigid with stage fright,
staring directly at the CC eye above the screen.
Bust
pulled Niz off Mez, disgustedly confessed his love for Niz right into Niz’
face, which made Niz slap Bust upside the head. Bust slapped Niz back. Jello
pushed Keets to the floor, began ransacking the cabinet for the last packets of
Beef-o. Keets, shocked into action, lunged at the old man and the spindly old
man jumped across the bed, packets of Beef-o in his hands, screaming he was
just doing what he was told, he was just doing what he was told.
Renaldo helped Bust pull Niz off Mez,
then cupped his palms on her breasts and repeated very loudly how he had needs,
needs that had eluded him his whole life, needs that only she could fulfill.
She screamed. Keets followed Jello across the bed, pushed him up against the
window, grabbed the Beef-o packets out of his hands while Jello continued to
cry that he was just doing what he was told. Niz pulled Renaldo off Mez
screaming ‘Get the Fuck Off Her You Stupid Fuck’ and Renaldo rolled under the
bed, hands over his ears, eyes closed, moaning “No, no, no…blood is yesterday’s
method…”
EDIT FROM SERIES 4,621,003; ZONE
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“Potts and Gluck,” Renaldo said to
Keets as he walked into the room. Keets kept his eyes on the feed: four men
playing Russian roulette around a small table in a dimly lit room.
Renaldo
sat on the end of the bed next to Keets. “Potts and Gluck,” he repeated. “Do
those names mean anything to you?”
Keets
lifted a mug of Beef-o to his lips, took a sip, and continued to stare at the
screen.
“I
ran into Mez down by the water today,” Renaldo said. “You know what she told
me?”
Keets’
shook his head, eyes still on the screen.
“She
says she met a scrap-girl who said she used to bunk with a couple of guys who
make the arrangements in our district to get on the feed. Their names are Potts
and Gluck.”
“Potts
and Gluck,” Keets repeated.
Renaldo
stood up, walked over to the pot sitting on the hotplate, ran an index finger
around the inside of it, and licked the Beef-o off his finger. “You see? It
wouldn’t have mattered what we did. It’s all rigged. By these Potts and Gluck
characters.” He sat back down on the bed, gave Keets a big grin. “But she told
me where we can find them.”
Keets
looked over at Renaldo, confused. “Who?”
“Potts and Gluck. They know
the people who determine who’s on the feed and who’s off the feed. If we do a
good trade, I bet they’ll put a word in for us. That’s how it works.”
Keets
frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“I
know we don’t have much left to negotiate with, but I’ve got to try. It’s my
turn.”
EDIT FROM SERIES 4,621,007; ZONE
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Renaldo and Keets stood at the edge
of an old playground in the hill park above the Double M, watched a couple of
kids play on the jungle gym for a few minutes before Renaldo got Keets to scare
them off. “I don’t want anyone getting in my way,” he explained to Keets. “Not
this time. We’re too close.”
When
the kids were gone they sat down in the dirt next to the jungle gym, stared at
the chains dangling from the swing set bar. Someone had hung a shoe at the end
of one of the chains. It moved slightly in the wind.
“How
long you think we’ll have to wait?” Keets whispered.
“Until
they show.”
Keets
stretched out, fell asleep.
An
hour later, a couple of figures moved around at the edge of the playground. “Potts
and Gluck?” Renaldo called out, waking Keets, who shot up into a sitting
position, blinking into the darkness.
“That’s
who we came for,” one of the figures
said. They sat down on the opposite side of the jungle gym, talked between
themselves for a few minutes, then lapsed into silence.
“Things
weren’t this complex when there was just fucking on the feed,” Keets whispered.
“I don’t know why they got rid of the fucking.”
“Shhh.”
A
few hours later, the two figures on the other side of the gym got up,
stretched, and shuffled off. Near dawn, just as Renaldo was nodding off, two
more figures appeared at the edge of the playground. Renaldo called out again,
waking Keets a second time. But it was only two more looking for Potts and
Gluck. Renaldo fondled the packets of Beef-o in his coat pocket. The chain
holding the shoe creaked.
“I
liked the fucking,” Keets whispered a few minutes later. “Everyone liked the
fucking.”
“Fucking
is yesterday’s method,” Renaldo whispered back. “This is how things are done
now.”
***********************************************
Meanwhile,
there's a new story of mine
in the current issue of
called
The
Noise & The Silence.
Along with stories by
Julie
C. Day, Val Nolan, T.R. Napper, Mel Kassel & Michael Reid
Order a digital copy of the issue or subscribe here.
