The Workday

Baruch brought his child to the manufactory to see how they were all made, how Baruch and even little Elisha were made. Other parents took their children to their jobs; Amnon was going on a beat with his parent, a fast-rising detective. Isaac had a hellion’s time at a meeting of business executives, diving under the table and clinking on the hoity-toits’ feet. Elisha’s parent was one of the few working here, making more persons every day so they would never be outbred.

“This is where new little persons are technically born,” he said. Elisha still agog at the manufactory floor. Huge expanses of concrete he and his friends could play independent games of murderball on. Great lights that hung so high in the ceiling they were like quiet-buzzing suns. And down the center of this enormous expanse the line itself. Looking down he saw dead-looking little children with missing pieces always moving toward him. A grating buzz sounded and they moved up with a whoosh. As soon as they stopped a team of persons who looked no different from his father rushed around them and in the clink of hands and parts some new limb was on the child, or he got a brass skin, or new eyelids. At the end, before Elisha’s still gaping mouth, they poured in the ichor and gave the children a hard slap on the back, which roused them up to their feet and put gloss in their once-dead eyes.

“I came out of here like all these kids?”

“Yes you did. I was down there eight stations. I put on each one of those fingers you love to chew up at sport, mister.” They were walking aside the line now. The crash of everything, huge numbers of new children being put together all at once, was unparseable. Soon they walked by the station with the fingers. Elisha had thought there would just be barrels of fingers, five huge heaping barrels—“No, ten,” he corrected himself—out of which the worker would scoop out handsful, some clattering to the floor, and plug them on the little stubby palms of the child. But this person, who only passingly looked like his parent, held a broad wooden pallet with little iron hoops and channels stapled onto it, into which he carefully put a finger from each of a handful of wide basins.

“That was my job not too long ago,” Baruch said. He nodded at the person who now had his job and motioned toward Elisha. “But Barnard is doing better at it than I ever could.”

“Did you really put on my own fingers?” Elisha was looking at the filling jig and all the shiny new digits. He itched hard to look at his own but felt them fing in place instead. The scratches and ruination of the ball pitch was in the very grit of the movements, which he at once relished and regretted without knowing fully why.

“Indeed I did. And I knew at that moment that this little person I was helping to make was to be my son, and I took extra special care and gave him extra special fingers.”

“Nuh uh,” Elisha answered. His smile was at once uncontrollable and unnoticeable.

“Yes huh.” They began to walk back further.

To young Elisha, the machinery, the flatness of the walk, the just-barely-hittable recession of the walls, though they stayed delightful, waned less daunting. Upon each stop at a new station, he wandered further from his father’s hunting words scamping hands and head up above each worktable. The conveyor moved with an affected mechanicality, sudden fluid bursts and sudden inelastic stops. He might put a scuffed finger so close to it, the violent spastic rollers, the oiled iron slats, without mingling it with the unbuilt persons.

The line made two narrow turns as it anfracted up and down the manufactory. Midway across the middle leg the very skeletons of the persons were laid out on a jig. Elisha managed a liberal tap on a thigh fitting on the unruly fagot-pile of the person. Tin and iron! The thought of rapping on his own members and drawing the same dull clink gave him a delightful grue.

“O father, are these young persons dead?”

Baruch had been explaining keenly about rivets. The workpersons here were a bit grimier but still performed with the smooth-rolling grace of their kind. One of them, fitting an arm, smirked.

“Well, no, they are not really dead.” Baruch then looking on the skeleton. Bones dark and whorly with patina. The mannikin jangled a bit and even jumped in its jig as new bits were socketed in. The head sans its works was a hollow stamp of metal, with nothing but the dull slats of the conveyor shining out its eyes.

“That’s actually a very philosophical question,” he restarted. “Although by our own definitions, they could not be dead, still an analogy is likely.” Baruch had seen some battle, and had seen a little of the insides of persons once by definition alive. Dark and whorly with scorch. Works smashed out and grass jutting through the eyes. Though it belonged to all to share the burden equally, still he thought a little of his child coming into his personal allotment, and let his own soul ooze a little for it.

He then caught Elisha again reaching to tap a bone, and scurried away with him, chiding his “grubby fingers.”

All along the rest of the middle line there were only parts. There were nets of stringy pipes sagging under their own weight. There were little clockwork widgets of exquisite brittleness, whose miniscule parts Baruch shielded against the expirations of his son. Around the last turn and along the final stretch of line the parts had even less familiarity. They seemed but a random assortment of rods, gears, plates, axles, chains, bars, levers, and worms.

Baruch tired even of hearing himself. They walked the last hundred yards without talking, without almost even looking askance at the line. He led his son up to his office, whose long, perilous staircase Elisha might have enjoyed if he were less bored, and they luncheoned at his desk turned away from the window that looked down upon the whole floor.

“Does your parent work in a neat place?”

“Yes. Really neat. I especially liked seeing the new person come off the line. But they could not say much to me.”

“No, child, they come built with very limited knowledge.”

“So if you don’t actually build the little persons anymore, what do you do here?”

“You know how at school, even if everyone’s well behaved and does their work, you still need the teacher there to make sure everything goes well, and to help out if any problems come up?”

“So you’re like the teacher?”

“Yes.”

“How many new persons do they make per day?”

“Nearly a thousand.”

“So—how many of our persons are defunct each day?”

“That’s a good question. It obviously changes day by day. But probably only about five or six hundred.”

”So why do we make so many more?” Food in rivulets, eyes on nothing in particular. Baruch watched the little squeaking rivet-holes and saw the grown Elisha in shiny plates. What kind of decisions would Elisha make? If he looked out on the sea whether he saw steel and bombast forever hidden just beyond the farthern limb.

“We need more persons every year. As the economy grows, as our country grows, we need more.”

“Who decides we need more?”

“A group of very smart people—”

“Like you?”

“I can hope someday,“ Baruch says, gently dislodging his son from the stool, “but there are much smarter people there now.” Out the door.

Near the beginning of the line. Wires and crooks of metal, L-plates and rivets, all the working persons working even more swiftly, more interlockedly, without the visitors butting in. “Hey I bet I could be one of those smart persons.” Around the bend and the finished young persons booted off the line. A tall bin off to the side they hadn’t stopped to see before. Baruch walks Elisha past it without looking. “Back to academy now, got my speech to give. Yeah, you could be one of those smart persons. I would vote for you definitely.”

They took the Sapphire Line Bus. The seats were plentiful. Baruch jumped through a civics manual trying to connect up disparate sections. Elisha watched the city pass. It’s not enough to have an interior life. He had this image: wretched thousands of young persons just off the line in a long array, but by some mistake they all had the same clockwork. They all had drops of the same batch of ichor in their vein. And so when the first one tried to move his right arm, two hundred others raised an arm, or kicked out their leg, or even slipped out their brassy tongues. And when any one tried to walk the whole group collapsed and in the pile there was nothing but limbs flailing in the air. And when any one tried to think—even as Elisha was thinking now—the thoughts were lost among a hundred disparate images, a hundred blaring sounds, a hundred tastes of vanilla and barley and boiled moss.

And his father had built him, but he’d built so many others. He spent years making little persons like him. He knew they were all made alike but persons end up all different. Compare his Dad to Isaac’s drab father. How could he have known how Elisha was to come out? Elisha didn’t know, even. His father had told him, “You’ll never hurt for opportunity”; he hoped his son would be an engineer. Elisha loved bridges and big works and the guts of buildings being thrust in the air, but he also still liked the little park by their apartment, and going to the sea, and scuffing himself up with the other schoolchildren in the afternoons at the plaza just out of schoolmaster’s sight. And how could he know he’d be an engineer, when all signs pointed pretty clearly to professional play-companion? “Ne’er-do-wells,” as Baruch was prone to call the few corroded hulks that wandered about the neighborhood. It would be so easy to be a failure, if he only tried.

School where Baruch felt far too big, the corridors just above his height, just beyond his span. It was a new school but he remembered his own, in this and other ways very similar. But in his former instar the halls were sized just fine and he found it a skosh difficult to imagine the adults as ungainly, marching among them with so much authority, with what looked like scroogeful economies of movement and little squeaking.

Waiting by his child’s desk for his turn to speak, practicing his words. Joshua’s parent clearly losing the children. He was a city counselor, the law was his great organizing thought, his only good metaphor, his proud product. Was that so complicated as a new person, or a manufactory for making them? Conscious of Elisha’s constant fidgeting, but then of every child’s constant fidgeting. An overflow. When Baruch had worked up to the spot of pouring in the ichor, he never scrooged a drop. Fill them to the very top, give each one the capacity. As each would have to shoulder his allotment let him have his full ration. Swinging his legs, rapping his fingers, exercising with inaudible clacks his jaw. Certainly compared with the children he had an economy of movement. Still he felt compelled during the last obsequy on the duties of law-givers and -receivers to examine on his own hand the slick operation of the little plates around the joints. To move his fingers in a wave. To think of its power nonetheless, the lubricated action on something meaty instead of tin and brass.

At their block of flats Elisha came in only long enough to hastily write some impressions of his day down so that he could write and re-write his report the next day. Then he was out such that there was a corridor of cool, disturbed air through the flat and just by Baruch’s tarnishing flank. The parent cutting tubers, slicing bread, putting out the bowl of oil. Fall having come on quickly and the two persons being busy with sitting in chairs and doing sums in falsely-lit workrooms, now the sun faded it seemed prematurely and even the leaves stripped from the trees couldn’t preserve enough to save the sky from having a lustre of fading gravity. The same window looked out on the common field where Elisha and the others were horsing around glintless.

Their spontaneous assemblies and then riotous degenerations were repeated erratically. Baruch imagined they would be talking about their days at their parents’ respective employments. Who knew with young persons though. Having his hand in their very building gave him no more special expertise, any more than a person, having set a bird in flight in one direction, could know a day later its peregrinations. Once free of the ground swept along by whim and wind alike. It hardly seemed to matter even to direct in the first place, but what a grievous negligence it seemed not to! Some other persons were more rambunctious than Elisha, but in the little muddy scrums he squirmed from the bottom of any piling. This Baruch admired.

After a bit twilight would endanger play although they would still all protest as their parents bade them in to the big block of flats on the river. Settle in to a supper and studies and night’s rest, then see the young ones back to their schools in the morning. It was one thing they could give them.