Liberating the Sheeple, Chapter One

JESUS SAVES

Emmeline Reiner’s last cigarette drooped from her pursed lips as she sat in the square nook of the open window from her dumpy third-floor apartment. She was in a right foul mood. Someone had been nicking cigarettes off her, she knew it. Her fingers probed the empty belly of the pack, as if one were hidden somewhere in the creases of the cardboard. She’d have to go out today.

What a pisser.

Below, an old woman stood on the corner sidewalk, holding a sign that read: JESUS SAVES. Emmeline rolled her eyes. Jesus saves what? Money by switching to Geico?

Although it was a hot mid-August morning, the old woman wore a raggedy winter coat and a kerchief around her head, as if it would save the pathetic fluff of hair she had left from the humidity. Emmeline pulled the last drag of her cigarette and tossed it out the window into the tiny patch of grass in front of the apartment. She went to close the window but stopped upon seeing a Ford pick-up slow to a halt beside the old woman on the corner.

The driver was a no-good kinda guy from the looks of him. He wore a greasy mullet and sunglasses. He hurled a Big Gulp at the old woman. Then he gunned it down the street. Emmeline squinted, making out the figure of the old woman behind the billowing dust from the pick-up.

When the air cleared, there she was, standing on the corner like a stop sign, drenched in red soda. She was still holding her sign, which looked suddenly eerie, with little red rivers flowing off its edges, imbuing the background with stains the color of watery blood. Poor old bat. She might’ve been ignorant but she sure as hell didn’t deserve to be Big Gulped. Emmeline coughed. The old woman turned her head toward the window, narrowing her sad little eyes.

Emmeline shut the window with a bang and pulled down the shade. Some people in this world. Some people made no sense.

In the kitchen she poured a day-old coffee from the pot and eyed the calendar on the front door. What day was it? She peered. Wednesday. Oh, hell. That meant work. She moseyed into the living room to find her teenage daughters slumped in darkness, like gargoyles, hunched behind glowing screens. Isobel, the elder, more embittered spawn, chugged from a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, her puffy face illuminated by the multi-colored lines of scrolling text from a chat room on the computer screen. Genevieve, the obedient, more tolerable of the two, read from the Bible in front of the TV. A talk show played behind the screen. The host unfolded a notecard and shook his head. After a dramatic pause, he shouted maniacally, “You are NOT the father!”

On stage, a frazzled, twenty-something  leapt from her chair and began wailing into her hands. The would-be father made fist-pumps. The audience members did ‘the wave’. 

“Bullshit!” cackled Emmeline, startling Genevieve from her reading.

“Do you ever find out who the father is in these damned shows?”

Genevieve shrugged.

Isobel swiveled around in her computer chair and said, “Who the fuck cares?” with a mouthful of chips.

“Does it matter?”

¿

Lewiston, Maine was a grim little city. The folks from the greener parts of Maine started calling it ‘the Dirty Lew’ some years back. Emmeline supposed this came from how unhappy people were around these parts. Nobody smiled. Nobody laughed. Nobody whistled in the streets. In the summers, children ran around pretending to shoot each other. Hassled mothers slouched languidly out their windows, rolled cigarettes in their wrinkled fingers, maybe two or three hard drinks deep. Among the wilted apartments, the downtown was littered with the empty storefronts of failed Ma and Pa shops, all boarded up and stickered with For Sale signs. Leaving the apartment meant passing through this failure.

Emmeline sighed and threw herself out of her apartment and into her rickety Toyota. She peered out of the driveway. The old stained woman was gone.

¿

 

Nestled within the confines of an old, vacant Ames department store was Great Falls Sales. This was where Emmeline worked part-time for cigarettes and rent money. The job itself was pretty monotonous. Two days a week, she sat there for a good six hours straight, calling old cranks who never had the money to buy what she was trying to sell. This month’s special product was called Memorall, a supplement that increased one’s memory. Despite sitting through a grueling two-hour training session on the product, Emmeline was still not quite sure how it worked. Luckily, she read from a script. They all did. Everything was scripted at Great Falls, even the answers to questions people asked.

The inside of Great Falls was a dreary labyrinth of cubicles with computers and most of downtown Lewiston’s working population attached to headsets, many of them yelling into their microphones at the hard of hearing. Emmeline slumped through the maze to find an empty cubicle, audible pieces of the script bouncing on and off the walls, creating a tornado of noisy sales pitches that swirled into the metallic rafters. She found her seat and logged into the computer, already craving a cigarette. Sprouting from the top of her cubicle’s back wall was a mass of grey curls. A raspy voice croaked from beyond.

“No ma’am! CRED-IT CHECK! CRED-IT. CREDIT!”

The grey curls bobbed up and down. Susie.

“YES, WE WILL CHECK YOUR CREDIT.”

According to Emmeline, Susie was the most tolerable co-worker. She, like many of the older folks, absolutely dreaded technology, could only type with one finger, and shared an intrinsic resentment for supervisors half her age. Emmeline coughed.  Susie looked up, nodding a hello.

“It’s not free, ma’am. The ad says it’s RISK free.”

Susie made a gun with her fingers and shot herself in the head.

When Emmeline put on her headset, someone tapped her on the shoulder. It was Kenny, her twenty-two year old supervisor, flamboyant and relentlessly animated about everything. Kenny looked like the type of guy in advertisements for cell phones, so comparatively clean-cut that you wondered why he was working there. His voice was high and had a jangle to it, as if he was always whining.

“Hiiiiii, Emmeline. How’s it going?” he sat at the empty chair next to her cubicle and tilted his head toward her, as if they were girlfriends.

“It’s another day,” she said.

“You’re up for a performance review today.”

Emmeline stiffened. This was bad news.

“Can you follow me?”

            Kenny escorted her to a back room. Inside, the walls were grey and windowless. There was a table and two metal chairs, one of which was occupied by a man in a suit that she wasn’t quite sure if she recognized. He motioned for Emmeline to take the adjacent seat. Its metal feet screeched against the cement floor as she pulled the chair back.

            “Emmeline Reiner, yes?”

            To Emmeline’s horror, she realized there was gum in her mouth. She swallowed it down with a nod.

            “You understand the importance of the scripts we use here, don’t you, Ms. Reiner?”

            Emmeline sighed.

“Of course. It’s just that people don’t want to be talking to a robot, you know?”

“But they’re not talking to a robot, are they, Ms. Reiner? They’re talking to a human being. They’re talking to you.”

“That’s all well and fine. I understand. It’s just that sometimes people think they’re talking to a recording and get frustrated with me. I’d be frustrated, too.”

The man scribbled something illegible on a pad of paper.

“You see,” he folded his hands, “There are legal reasons why we must read from the script and only the script. I have no doubt that you can find ways to be personable while still adhering to the script we provide. It is your job, after all.”

He smiled, baring small square teeth so bleached that they shone like diamonds. The sense of finality in his voice suggested that Emmeline’s job relied on her compliance.

“I understand,” she said, defeated.

“Great. No more slip-ups, okay? This will be considered a formal warning. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.”

The man shook her hand with firm, icy fingers.

            When she returned to her cubicle, Susie spun around and around in her chair. Emmeline put on her headset and began dialing numbers.

            “Hello?”

            “Yes, hello, is this Mr. Robert Greco?”

            “Eh, who’s askin’?” he coughed into the receiver.

            Emmeline’s eyes glazed over, the script blurring on the screen ahead.

            “My name is Emmeline. I’m a representative for Memorall—”

            Click.

            This went on for hours. In the break room, management had arranged a basket full of free Memorall samples. After a much-needed cigarette, Emmeline stuffed a bunch of them into her pocket. Back at her cubicle, Susie was doing the Macarena and yelling into her headset.

            “Yes Ma’am! That’s thirty-nine ninety-nine. No, thirty-nine. THURR-TEE NINE.”

            Emmeline ripped open a Memorall sample and tossed the supplement down her throat. It left a bitter taste.