by
Lucia Berlin
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CD wrote about his brother. Most of CD’s stories had been about him when they were little. The years they were lost to each other in different foster homes. How they found each other by chance, in Reno. This story took place in the Sunnyvale district. He read it in a quiet voice. None of us moved. It was about the afternoon and evening leading up to the Chink’s death. The details about the meeting of two gangs. It ended with Uzi fire and CD turning the corner.
The hairs were standing up on my arm. Mrs. Bevins was pale. Nobody had told her CD’s brother was dead. There wasn’t a word about his brother in the story. That’s how good it was. The story was so shimmering and taut there could only be one end to it. The room was silent until finally Shabazz said, “Amen.” The guard opened the door. “Time to go, gentlemen.” The other guards waited for the women while we filed out.
I just realized that I’m doing that last assignment again. And I’m still doing it wrong, mentioning the body, telling you that they killed CD the day he got out of County.
Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren’t at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You’re reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.
It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I’ll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it’s more likely I’ll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty. I parked my car around the corner because there was someone in my usual spot. Later when I saw the empty spot I wondered where I had gone. It’s not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.
But there’s never enough time. “Real time,” like the prisoners I used to teach would say, explaining how it just seemed that they had all the time in the world. The time wasn’t ever theirs.
I don’t know why I even brought this up. Magpies flash now blue, green against the snow. They have a similar bossy shriek. Of course I could get a book or call somebody and find out about the nesting habits of crows. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn’t feel?
These are pointless questions. The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.
Few speak of paradise now, except as something remote enough to be impossible. The ideal societies we hear of are mostly far away or long ago or both, situated in some primordial society before the Fall or a spiritual kingdom in a remote Himalayan vastness. The implication is that we here and now are far from capable of living such ideals. But what if paradise flashed up among us from time to time—at the worst of times? What if we glimpsed it in the jaws of hell? These flashes give us, as the long ago and far away do not, a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become. This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it w hen they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this era's potential paradises is in hell.
[...] Many no longer believe that a better world, as opposed to a better life, is possible, and the rhetoric of private well-being trumps public good, at least in the English-speaking world. And yet the yearning remains—all the riches piled up, the security gates and stock options, are only defenses against a world of insecurity and animosity, piecemeal solutions to a pervasive problem. Sometimes it seems as though home improvement has trumped the idealistic notion of a better world. Sometimes. But utopia flares up in other parts of the world, where hope is fiercer and dreams are larger.
It's not as though hunger did not exist in San Francisco before April 18, though it was less visible and less widespread; the city was in 1906 a many-tiered society with enormous opulence at the top and grim destitution at the bottom. It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after. One reason was that you were not focused on long-term plans—giving away thousands of pounds of meat was, of course, not profitable for Miller & Lux, but in the days after the disaster there were no long-term plans, just the immediate demands of survival. Another is social: people at that moment felt a solidarity and an empathy for each other that they did not at other times. They were literally in proximity to each other, the walls literally fallen away from around them as they clustered in squares and parks, moved stoves out onto the street to cook, lined up for supplies. They had all survived the same ordeal. They were members of the same society, and it had been threatened by the calamity.
Employer-employee relations were turbulent all through this period. A story by the Argonaut, which served the elite of San Francisco, complained in July of "the extreme scarcity of house servants, although there are many thousands of people out of employment. The Relief Committee frequently receives communications asking where all the female servants have gone. According to General Greeley, it seems the relief camps are full of idle domestics." The general remarked, "The sooner this feeding of able-bodied m en and wom en is stopped, the better it will be for the city." The Argonaut admitted the following week that there were few "drones" in the camps, though only six of one thousand wom en accepted employment when it was offered to them. The Bulletin had run a more sympathetic piece, "The Dignity of Labor," in late May, which itemized some of the callous treatm ent m eted out to women servants during the earthquake and reported that w ith the dearth of servants "mistresses who have been the severest of taskmasters . . . have been forced into the position of the scorned menials, and a strange world opens before their startled eyes." The journalist Jane Carr saw the disaster as a great leveler and liberator, though not everyone was eager to be leveled or happy others had been freed from drudgery.
lmao mask off
Google uses contract labor, in a manner similar to Amazon; to save money on labor by making employees as disposable as possible. 'People would be asked to leave at a day's notice,' said Danielle. 'We were employed through a subcontractor company and they reserved the right to terminate at any time or for any reason. There was a climate of fear ... People worried about making mistakes that would get them fired, people worried about not being able to keep up with the work quotas the team leadership started making us have to fulfill, [and] people worried that the new leadership wouldn't 'like' them, and that that would get them fired,' she added.
Contractors tend to be much lower than the salaried employees' wages, Danielle explained. 'We didn't really talk about salaries, but there were full-time Google employees doing the same thing as contractors - we just had different statuses. Those employees could make three times what a contractor did. That felt bad.'