Orwell's Grave

"Four verbs," Aetna says -- Edna. Edna -- Aetna -- is from The Far Side, roughly pyramidal, sits beside me or across the table in the War Room at LISA M-F 8-5 and jokes with the dozen or so of us who've survived the recent eighty-some percent attrition rate.

The supers kicked back my Friday batch of documents today; I must have looked perplexed.

"They'd really like everything that happens in these documents to fit under four verbs," she continued. I'd really like that, too. LISA gets the documents from ECorp, her only customer after five years of happy corporate marriage. ECorp seems to get them from all over. They're from the NRC, Zzptech, Westinghouse, Bechtel: resumes, discussions of steam generator corrosion, redundant signatures for shipments coming & going -- it's hard to tell which.

Four verbs. The super actually walked over to my desk to mention that the word accident did not exist for LISA: "We call that an incident. No. Accident, if there ever were an accident, I'm not a highly enough placed official to chew you out about it." Then, walking away: "And that's not to imply that there is such a thing."

Does this sound like something I was supposed to have known?

So imagine, George Orwell writes a book, calls it 1984. He gets it published, even read, read so much his folks incorporate his words into daily English. I'd call that time for brews and congratulations. But no, the people he would burlesque use his piece as a guidebook -- to the extent that no one in charge anywhere at any time during six weeks of training could say or would say, "Yo! Asshole! four verbs."

So why write why move? Hey, go ahead, buy a place in Seaside or San Anselmo and let the wind blow when Zztech opens the pressurizer and "blows it out" for cleaning. I'll go write loveletters to carp.

Aetna took it better. She does:

"Don't worry. This sort of work is hard for people like you."

She must have meant to be comforting: she near-swallowd the guffaw when my eyes bugged. Like me? Am I unzipped? Should I shave my whiskers, or does that look like I'm trying to hide?

I barely talk at LISA. I try not to look long at anyone or swing my shoulders as I walk. Maybe she saw the bicycle I lock to a phone pole outside the office lot. I had not taken Aetna to be perceptive. So clearly she has perceived more than I and is willing to be generous.

"No, really," she went on, "What is it you do?"

Eat, sleep, move when poked. Until five seconds ago I smuggled documents out of the information service of a nuclear energy facility.

"I mean, do you paint, do you write?"

I flatter myself -- but, well, you see.

"You're not invisible, you know."

"No." I don't have a third eye either. Is this something everybody sees?

"Oh, Jack, you're fine. But all this regularity has to just bug you, this business of having to classify things just the way we-all do, of having the supervisors review each little thing and send things back when you would normally classify everything some way no one even imagines."

No one even imagines?

She talks on to smooth my nerves, but the gestures hint broadly that she knows nothing of what would make me nervous, then:

"People know things about you, Jack, just like you know things about them. Sometimes we find it easier to not speak. Don't we?"

Do we?

I need to be misunderstood. I need someone who doesn't care:

O gentle reader, do not leave!