The Commission

Sarge woke with a song in his head, a silly trill of a song. It played like an automated alarm clock he hadn’t set––he even reached for his phone to press stop. He didn’t know when he’d heard the song before or why in sleep it had presented itself as the soundtrack to this ordinary Friday. He didn’t know much about the unconscious. He’d never been one to record his dreams in a notebook kept on the bedside table. On his bedside table was a squat stoneware lamp that didn’t offer much light, and whatever weighty book he was reading on political theory. He much preferred to find his dog-eared page upon waking and pick up where he’d left off than to reconstruct from fleeting scenes the story of something that didn’t really happen. He spent the first twenty minutes of most mornings reading a few sentences repeatedly until his blunted senses began once again to facilitate a comprehension worthy of getting out of bed and starting his day.

But today’s few sentences continued to swim meaninglessly before him as a fairy-tale melody tinkled behind his ears. The lyrics sprouted like uninvited dandelions, so proud of themselves––

Sing for your supper, and you’ll get breakfast; songbirds always eat, if their song is sweet to hear!

What simpering seep! He dressed quickly, replacing his flannel bedclothes with charcoal slacks and a starched, white button-down. He shined his shoes, hoping the methodical buffing would dispel this earworm before it took root––thwap thwap, thwap thwap. The musky smell of polish wafted up at him and he inhaled deeply, inflating his leathery sense of self, immune to such trickling dribble.

The sun had risen but the day was cold and grey and the sky hung low over the river. The bridge’s two towers were obscured by fog. Sarge bought a black coffee. The barista––Tiffany, according to her name tag––was bundled in a puffy jacket, snow gloves, and earmuffs. Sarge had never seen her before, and thought that her indoor outfit was ridiculous. She must be from out of state, new to the vortex, though he couldn’t imagine why someone would move to this town for a job like that. She worked with efficiency, as if taking care not to expend a bit more energy than was necessary. Sarge felt a quarter in his pocket and dropped it in the empty tip jar before pressing No Tip on the register screen. Tiffany stuck out her tongue as he left the shop.

Sarge poured a little of the coffee out in the gutter so it wouldn’t slosh around while he walked to work, his shoes shined, his shirt tucked firmly into his slacks so that he could feel its gentle tug of resistance at his sides, his trench coat fluttering slightly at the hem.

Tiffany watched him pouring out his coffee on the street. He must have gotten a little on his shoe, because he fussed over its toe for a minute before setting off in his fuddy-duddy way, back straight and feet splayed like a penguin.

Tiffany recognized him––Sarge Chastain. He’d been a very visible senior when she was a freshman at Roosevelt, always making noise. She remembered a campaign involving the food served in the cafeteria. It was hard to forget: on one of her first days of school she’d been handed a flyer by a buttoned-up senior that featured a mass of bloated, dead chickens, their legs broken and bent in unnatural ways. Tiffany didn’t even eat cafeteria food. If she ate anything at the time it was usually in small containers or packets brought from home like Mott’s applesauce or those Sabra hummus and pretzel snack cups. Cite Your Sources, his campaign was called. She tried to tune it out, but then one day she’d come home to her mom emptying out the fridge in a frenzy, claiming to have a hundred and two fever and asking why Tiffany insisted on filling their house with junk food. Hundreds of thousands of tubs of hummus were being recalled because of Listeria, found in four separate manufacturing plants. Twelve people died of sepsis and six of meningitis. Tiffany’s mom wasn’t one of them.

She kept her eye on the chickens, though, after that––by year’s end the district decided to move away from antibiotic growth promoters and battery cages. People remembered those posters.

Sarge walked uphill with the wind in his face. He passed the barber shop that opens at 7am every day, where he used to get his hair cut in the mornings by a Russian woman named Masha who smokes from a vaporizer whenever she switches her clippers and doesn’t take any days off. A Russian-American woman, he should say, unless that had become an oxymoron. He hadn’t seen Masha in six months. He was letting his hair grow to the point where he had to tuck it behind his ears, but he kept it very tidy and it made him look older, he thought. Nobody had commented on it.

Sarge saw Masha’s car in the small, strip parking lot, its Police Benevolent Association vanity plate, and picked up his pace a little, gradually losing feeling in his face.

Sarge’s nose was always so bright red by the time he made it to the office that Andrea, the security guard, wondered if he had a chronic cold, or some type of circulation problem––either way, she held her breath whenever he swiped himself in, her preferred preventative measure. Over the last ten years Andrea had developed a variety of prophylactic practices, honed and vetted through a process of observed correlation and intuitive trial and error. Her grown son lived with her and often fell ill. She attributed this to the frequent administration of antibiotics in his youth, which, while easing his ear infections, must have left him susceptible to resistant bacteria. She spent much of her time off cleaning the two-bedroom apartment they shared with various vinegar solutions, experimenting with the benefits of essential oils and––in her merciless quest for alternatives to past mistakes––other home remedies made from beets, honey, ginger, dates, turmeric, and garlic juice, a drop of which in the ear can help relieve the pain of an ear infection, she read, frowning at her former self.

Andrea, Masha, Tiffany, and Sarge weren’t the only ones up and working at this hour in this one-bridge, two-tower city, but they were fairly representative. One part local government, three parts service. There was also a defense contractor, GenTech, on the other side of the river, about a twenty minute drive, where jobs like Assembly Operator and Flying Probe Technician were highly coveted but barely filled from the ranks of the city’s natives, the people Sarge knew from high school who were living with their parents, in too much debt to conceive of paying for a 2-year technical degree with no guarantee of employment, instead concocting made-to-order soaps with names like Buttery Balm and Soothing Soak in their parents’ converted living rooms for a handful of online customers across state lines.

Though his ex-girlfriend Jessica––top of their class in high school and college––did work at GenTech in an entry-level purchasing job that she got before they’d even graduated. He was surprised she’d been so happy to report the news to him on the day of their commencement, pronouncing printed circuit boards with the sort of practiced emphasis she usually reserved for the names of the foreign authors she read ravenously. Her interests must have shifted: occasional social posts now mostly featured pie baking or herself at work, photos split between a close-up of her face and a spreadsheet that probably corresponded with materials embedded in a missile detection control system on an island in the South Pacific. She was lucky the posts disappeared after 24 hours, Sarge thought; she’d never been discreet, not someone he’d recommend for security clearance.

Sarge passed the glass-fronted library that had been partially renovated five years ago. Its modern façade belied the moth-eaten interiors and ancient HVAC system visible if you took the time to investigate. It was temporarily closed due to contract disputes.

Halfway between the library and GenTech, in an apartment complex on the other side of the river that used to be a Residence Inn, Jessica was just now finishing a book by Tove Ditlevsen. Jessica enjoyed the fact that her 9:30am start time allowed her to sit calmly in her plush reading chair as her roommate boiled water and ate the last piece of Jessica’s berry apple-butter pie for breakfast (so what?) while reciting their daily horoscopes; she could manage old and new interests at once, however much the men she’d known underestimated her.

Sarge worked in the mayor’s office, mostly devising campaigns to ensure GenTech had no reason to shrink their operations, to persuade GenTech to hire more people locally and include hints about the city’s charms in their advertising (amounting to the bridge’s two foggy towers appearing inconsistently in the background of their direct marketing materials), to entice more companies like GenTech to set up shop in the general vicinity. Twenty-minute, forty-minute drive; this side, that side of the river––whatever they could get, whatever it took. Sarge would lobby the state for funds for PEV charging stations on whichever commuter route was necessary. Sarge would work with the school board to change the name of his (and Jessica’s and Tiffany’s) high school from Teddy Roosevelt High to Park Street High School of Engineering and Technology; in fact, he had.

At the time of the switch, Tiffany’s senior year boyfriend Eric had worked as the school mascot, a Rough Rider-turned-Cybercat, before the school decided to abandon a mascot altogether. It would be the first of a series of involuntary job changes for Eric, the most recent of which had taken him to the suburbs of Phoenix, from which he frequently sent Tiffany vintage postcards extolling the transformational energy centers of the Sedona spiritual vortex. Tiffany, meanwhile, saw much to praise in her own comparative consistency, having worked for the same coffee company for thirteen months now, practically a lifetime, while listing her digital art, deemed Futuristic Americana, as non-fungible tokens for the occasional Ethereum.

On his walks to work Sarge tried to think of his reading, to go over an argument or a bit of theory in his mind thoroughly enough that he was kept occupied until he arrived. It was a mental practice meant to stave off the idle, repetitive thoughts that would monopolize his brain space if he wasn’t careful––some small slight from the mayor (there’s nothing wrong with a little levity, Sarge), or the thing he wished he’d said back (why don’t you try that message out on the voters?). Or yeah, that’s our real problem here, sir––not unemployment or toxic waste, but a dwindling sense of humor. Where’s my funny bone? A little levity. Haha, the chickens are dying of botulism. Sarge could rehearse endless variations of sarcasm if left to his own devices.

But today there was a different sort of needling that interfered. He was trying to focus on a few lines from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a text from college he’d recently decided to revisit, feeling a growing need to delineate the “nation,” as Anderson attempts, in light of fraying ties. America was siltier and more formless than ever, like a handful of coffee grounds.

Sing for your supper and you’ll get breakfast!

Anderson wrote of a certain conception of time and place as crucial to the success of the idea of a nation, and how fiction helped give voice to that conception––a novel, with its structure of events that are often happening simultaneously and with a variety of characters that might not know each other, relies on its chosen society to be the firmament that connects the author, readers, and characters, a “hypnotic confirmation of the solidity of a single community moving onward through calendrical time.” The readers, “like God, watch A telephoning C, B shopping, and D playing pool all at once,” but unaware of each other, drawn together by the imagined world conjured up by the author in the readers’ minds.

Songbirds are not dumb; they don’t buy a crumb of bread!

This is the kind of imagined community necessary for a national consciousness to thrive, is the argument, as a nation must be seen by its members as a sociological organism of sorts, moving steadily through history. You are part of a shared temporal landscape that renders your physical landscape, if not interchangeable, at least familiar to your fellow citizen, so that if the writer describes in careful but general enough detail the workers in shops and offices on a Friday morning in a certain American city, the American reader can picture a comparable scene based on this succession of suggestive plurals that represent typical workers, shops, and offices existing anonymously but––meaningfully––simultaneously, and––

So sing and you’ll be fed!

Oh, for the love of Christ! What did this nonsense mean, anyway? Sing for your supper and you’ll get…breakfast? Put on a show, was that it? Was it some oblique commentary on capitalism? Mating rituals?

I heard from a wise canary, trilling makes a fellow willing! So little swallow, swallow now!

It was decidedly anti-feminist, he could tell that much, and he was professedly pro-! What invisible hand was amplifying this insufferable frequency? It made Sarge think of his younger sister Bella and her love of musical, animated films, how she would stream Snow White and Sleeping Beauty with pathological regularity growing up, skipping––or no––sashaying around their rambler while he tried desperately to think of something other than the shrill sounds of fantasy and fairy tale, of dreaming and waking to true love’s kiss. It was a lifelong calling to endear people like her instead to reality.

But what reality, really, was the question at hand. What bounded its horizon? This place, this morning ritual, putting in his time for a man who plucked him from even deeper obscurity––was it part of an invisible whole? Sarge wondered whether the buildings and businesses he passed could fairly be considered American, part of some collective sense of what a coffee shop, a barbershop, a library, a pet supply, a café called Luna are, quintessentially, to people like him in a place like this. Did he see in Luna a café elsewhere, in Michigan, in Texas, in Vermont, in Oregon? Was there his analog out there, walking to work––song in head, coffee in hand––along a characteristic Main Street? If there was, he wasn’t sure what degree of solace that offered. He wondered if his analog, too, should have gone to law school four years ago but couldn’t come close to affording the additional loans, if his brethren was also stuck as the assistant in more ways than one, helping his parents pay for insurance before they hit 65.

As Sarge approached the place he spent the majority of his daylight hours, he immediately noticed a change. He’d always been spatially intelligent, he told himself, or at least good at those visual tests where you spot what’s different between two pictures––there’s a handle on the pot here, there’s an extra petal on that daisy. There was a car in the parking lot that didn’t belong––not a car, a truck. Not electric. Plastered with bumper stickers: old political slogans, cultural catch phrases, public service campaigns. I Like Ike and DARE caught his eye, along with Greed is Good right next to Love is Love and Just Say No. It wasn’t a subtle difference like a handle or a petal, it was a sore thumb. An explosion of irony.

Sarge worried it was a bad sign at the start of a day thrown off track. First they were supposed to meet with the consultant from Ardent Grove about the Superfund cleanup site, next with the new director of the Industrial Technical Learning Center, then with lawyers for the library workers union––but Sarge was always the first to be pawned off on whatever unforeseen distraction arose from the bowels of the citizenry, thereby missing the meetings, falling behind on both the relevant content and relationships, and having even further reason to be––and appear––humorless, unleavened.

This papered-over truck, the possession of some would-be chronicler of all calendrical time, was surely only the start of a tiresome constituent story. It was the sign of a person who announced themselves wherever they went, without even opening their mouth––though they will––whose loudness preceded them. Sarge walked up the four meager steps to the barely elevated seat of this minor executive. He pushed through the sticky revolving door. He said hello to Andrea, the security guard. She raised her hand and held her breath.

The lobby was tall, narrow, and warm. There were two Corinthian columns in the middle of it that Sarge did not believe served any structural purpose. It was as if they’d been built there to ensure no one could comfortably congregate in that cramped atrium. But today two men stood on either side of one of the columns and defied the room’s clear hostility to such an assembly. One was the mayor himself, an infuriatingly tall man with the confidence of an old stone obelisk. Sarge could see him nodding vigorously, hands on his hips. His suit was expensive and well-tailored. That was how Sarge’s mother described him from the start––that man is expensive––as if their city were indebted merely for having acquired him. As if he could claim whatever he wanted as his own, simply by pointing, clicking, and dragging. He’d done as much with Sarge.

“Ah, there you are,” said the mayor, catching a glimpse of Sarge as he tried to slip past.

“Good morning.”

“I wanted to introduce you to someone. This is Alex Green from New York. Alex is an artist and here’s here on the APG grant. I told you about this, you remember, I’m sure.”

“How’s it going?” Alex asked, with an inflection that suggested it was not actually a question.

Alex Green was wearing a black, short-sleeved overalls jumpsuit that Sarge was ill-equipped to describe, with a white t-shirt underneath that gave it the appearance of having cuffs at his biceps. Alex, too, was taller than Sarge, which made Sarge more aware of himself physically than he preferred to be.

“Nice to meet you,” Sarge said, turning to look at the source of their discussion and the mayor’s vigorous assent––the back wall of this poor excuse for a Greek revival. At one point there had been a working fountain built into this wall. It had probably been out of commission for a hundred years; its empty basin and sad lion’s head with an expectant “o” for a mouth were together an ode to ambitious but inauspicious beginnings.

“Alex and I were just discussing his plans for our humble abode, Sarge, and I think we’re in good hands. We’ve got our very own Diego Rivera.”

Seeing as Sarge had no idea what the mayor was talking about, it was hard to come up with something relevant to say. Alex Green scratched his head and then ran his fingers through his glossy hair.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “But I’ll try to leave you with a little bit of history.”

“That’s what we’re all about here,” said the mayor. “Don’t I always say, Sarge, we want our constituents to feel in touch with their past and prepared for their future? Without history a place is just…barren. Like a field with no soil.”

The mayor had a tendency to sound like he was trying out lines for potential speeches. Sarge heard him rotate through buzzy words and phrases weekly, like a record chart with only one reporting station, that one voice that had been in Sarge’s head since his senior year of high school, when the not-yet-mayor rolled his window down and shouted, “What’s your name, kid?” while Sarge led a small protest outside of this very building. “How’d you like to come work for me?” he’d said not long after that, interrupting Sarge’s urgent explanation of his cause, a recent strike by workers at a nearby beverage company that had cut wages and eliminated pensions despite growing profits. Sarge had thought an unpaid internship for this upstart politico and his progressive campaign would bring him closer to the levers of power in his state and further his adolescent attempts to put pressure on the companies he saw running roughshod over his lowly river valley. Instead, the offending beverage company shuttered its plant and he’d spent the years since trying to prevent that from ever happening again through some embarrassing combination of coaxing, cajoling, and catering to the private industry that remained.

“Sarge here is your man,” said the mayor. “Whatever you need. He knows the building better than I do at this point. The neighborhood, too––born and raised, isn’t that true Sarge?”

“Yeah, a little ways outside of town, but true enough,” Sarge said. He was determined not to be so brazenly infantilized and summarized, and decided that matching Alex Green’s casual demeanor was one way to display his independence: I, too, can choose whether or not to care about this introduction, I am not compelled to be gracious. He wasn’t sure why he was being offered up to Alex like a lackey, besides the fact that he usually served this unfortunate purpose. But was the fact that something was true about his life justification enough for it to continue?

“Sarge is practically a hometown hero,” said the mayor. “He can answer some of those questions you had, just to get you started. I have to run to get prepped for a few meetings––it’s like the Wild West out here some days, you never know who’s coming for you. Isn’t that right, Sarge?” He patted Sarge on the shoulder. “Looking forward to seeing your handiwork, Alex.”

A hometown hero––sounds like someone who peaked at eighteen, whose high school yearbooks contain the best evidence of his life’s achievements. Sarge wondered silently whether his presence was necessary for the mayor’s image––a token, local right-hand man, keeping the principal down to earth and legitimate. This was a common sort of thinking for Sarge at work, self-deprecating while also overestimating his influence.

“Have you ever read about those studies,” Alex said. It was just the two of them now. He was unpacking some of his supplies from two large duffel bags and laying them out in front of him: paint trays, roller sponges, mixing sticks, masking tape, brushes, a tub of sidewalk chalk, two drop cloths. “Where people would rather give themselves an electric shock than sit alone in a room with their own thoughts?”

“No,” said Sarge.

“I think about that a lot,” Alex went on. “Why people choose to shock themselves. I might be tempted. Just to see what it felt like. And then to see if it felt the same the second time. But I don’t think it’s because I don’t like to think. I think it’s because I do like to think, but sometimes I need to be shocked into it. It’s like the literal version of the spark of an idea.” He looked around the corners of the room like he had misplaced something.

“Sorry,” said Sarge. “I think today may have gotten away from me before it even started.” Sarge was busy, alright? A person only has so much time to spare. The minutes could pass in what seemed like a slow drip but before you knew it your day was in a puddle at your feet and you’d spent it talking to a painter about electric shocks. “What is the APG grant?”

Bent over, opening some tubs of latex paint in quick succession with a silver paint key, Alex laughed a little. Then he stood tall and spun the key around on his index finger. “Art for the Public Good. It’s that federal program, started last year. I applied, and now I go where they tell me.”

It was coming back to Sarge. The mayor was right, he had mentioned this––last year.

“And you’re from New York City?” said Sarge.

“Not really. Hey, would you come have a smoke with me?” Alex reached into one of his oversized pockets and brought out a pack and a lighter with a skull on it.

“Oh, no. I don’t smoke.”

“That’s alright, we’ll just talk for a minute. It’ll help get me going.” He hit the pack so one slid out. “I won’t blow it in your face or anything.”

Sarge sighed and followed this perpetuator of twentieth-century ills out into the cold.

“Sarge, huh?” Alex said, lighting up.

“It’s French,” Sarge said.

“Sorry, I know it’s not great to ask about someone’s name.”

“It’s fine, it’s a family name.”

“Yeah, mine too, I’m in a long line of Alex Greens, though the name is probably the only thing we share.”

Alex smoked. Sarge pointed to the truck––“that’s yours, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Hey, would you mind helping me bring in a few more things?” Alex dropped the half-smoked cigarette and stepped on it before making off.

“Uh, sure,” said Sarge. He checked his email on his phone as he walked a few paces behind Alex. There were three messages from the mayor, responses to long threads with many participants that said some version of “see below and follow up, thx,” requiring Sarge to dig for the point in question.

“So, tell me,” Alex said. “I always ask this––if you were to move somewhere else, what would you miss most about this place?”

Sarge was starting to get pissed off.

“Sorry, and what’s the project?”

Alex opened the truck’s tailgate and camper shell. “It’s a mural, Sarge.” The cargo bed had been outfitted for sleeping, to somewhat elaborate effect. From the looks of the schlocky exterior, Sarge was not expecting such a sophisticated setup.

“I’m supposed to pay homage to the local culture and character.”

There was a perfectly sized sink, a shelf for electronics, and carpeted siding. A mattress sat on two long built-in drawers, out of which Alex pulled two more duffel bags.

“I heard you might know where the ladders are,” he said, closing up the truck again. “If you grab that projector from the front seat, I can get this stuff.”

With great difficulty, Sarge carried the unwieldy overhead projector inside; he kept having to stop and get a better grip. It looked like it came straight from a 3rd grade classroom in 1995, or at least from Sarge’s conception of such a classroom, having lived through only the slimmest sliver of the last millennium. While something sharp dug into his solar plexus, he thought of a couple artists he knew from right here in town whose talents were languishing. One was a dog walker who did intermittent, freelance website design. The other was addicted to Xanax and sold bikes, last he checked. He’d met both of them at one of the sad, local Chamber of Commerce meet-and-greets where everyone swapped business cards in order to throw them in the nearest public trash can. “And what are you selling?” he remembered being asked. “Oh, I’m just here from the government,” he’d said, meaning it to sound cheeky but ending up sounding imperious, like some sort of watchdog for that gathering of desperate underemployeds.

What did Alex Green have to offer that was so inimitable it needed to be imported? Sarge decided that after he put down this hulking relic, he would quickly leave the scene and try to make the day’s first meeting. Superfund site. Persistent organic pollutants. Longstanding polychlorinated biphenyl. He hadn’t memorized these terms for his own benefit!

Sing for you supper!

“God dammit,” Sarge said under his breath, dropping the projector on the floor too hard, causing the glass to crack. Alex didn’t notice.

“So you’re not going to tell me then?” Alex asked.

“Tell you what?”

“What you’d miss about this place.”

The atrium now smelled like cigarettes.

“I don’t think about it that way,” he said. “Andrea, over there at the front, can help you find the ladders. I’ve got to get started on my day, but it was nice to meet you.”

––

The meeting was underway and he couldn’t very well barge in. So Sarge looked up APG online. When applying, you had to select one of ten categories of art, then select a subgenre, submit a portfolio of work that illustrated your distinctive voice and style, write a 500-word essay on how you think art helps move America forward, demonstrate a loss of income over the past one to three years due to circumstances outside of your control, and indicate how often and far you’re willing to travel. The grants ranged from $1,500 to $15,000, depending on the scope. There was a list of grants ongoing, by category. It surprised Sarge how easy it was to find Alex Green this way. He’d have thought there would be some degree of secrecy around who was getting this money, some discretion for fear of artists being harassed by disgruntled taxpayers.

Sarge was not one of those disgruntled taxpayers. Sarge thought artists deserved to work in hard times, the same as any other professional. Maybe not the same, but similar.

There was a new stack of letters on his desk. The letter on top had a sticky note attached––Famous Faith’s! Local staple? Loan forgiveness to help keep doors open??

Sarge had gotten food poisoning at Famous Faith’s once. He hadn’t eaten pot pie since.

Highlights of Alex Green’s portfolio were available to scroll through, along with a short bio. Not his essay on the future of America vis-à-vis art, unfortunately.

He was from Montclair, New Jersey. Montclair had a median household income of $142,400. He’d gone to New York University, studied art history and studio art. Graduated the same year as Sarge, 2021. Had since lived in Austin, Portland, Los Angeles. Published a book called From Fresco to Fresno. The book had 67 online reviews. He’d done a mural there, a woman as big as a mountain blowing wind for the wings of a flock of dark birds. Fresno was near Yosemite, it turned out, which Sarge had never visited. Sarge had never visited many places.

“Sarge––could have used you in there,” said the mayor. “Thanks for that demographics chart.” He walked by with his deputy, Melanie, a somewhat brusque lawyer who had gone to Harvard. She was only a few years older than Sarge, though to Sarge she looked a few years younger. He felt like Melanie always decided to multitask whenever he started to speak. She had clerked for a district court judge in Chicago before taking this job, and seemed to be public policy shopping for herself; she had a new area of expertise every week. After the mayor’s second term was up in 2 years, she would probably leave this town for good and join some East Coast firm or civil rights group that would no doubt be party to a high-profile Supreme Court case within a year or two about freelancers’ union rights or the government’s right to buy up flood-prone properties to lease, thereby winning lawyer bingo by 35.

And Sarge? Would he go work for the mayor at his next gig? He hadn’t yet announced if he was running for governor. He might decide to return to his hometown of Walnut Creek, California, after all, to be a big fish in a bigger pond.

So sing and you’ll be fed––oh yeah! Just sing and you’ll be fed!

The day barreled on. The Industrial Technical Learning Center would coordinate with the city on PR related to its new workforce development program. Sarge would create an overview of skills listed by local employers in job postings and run an analysis on how key words corresponded to compensation. “Have you thought about a degree in data analysis, Sarge?” the mayor asked him. “Maybe you could use one of these courses!”

The Learning Center wanted GenTech to sponsor one of their programs, fill in some funding gaps––they could even partner with high schools to have an apprenticeship of sorts, a feeder program. “Sarge, you could look into that, right, maybe talk to your contacts at the district?” “Of course, sounds like a great idea.” It sounded like vassalage.

Hawks and crows do lots of things, but the canary only sings, she is a courtesan on wings!

That was a new one.

Sarge’s mother called him at lunch. He’d managed to exit the building without encountering Alex, though most of the lights were off in the atrium and the projector lit up the back wall with an elaborate sketch, a sketch marred by a gash right down the middle from a crack in the glass. But you could still tell how the sketch incorporated the lion’s head, onto which two workers wearing protective visors appeared to be soldering some sort of metal crown. The crown was adorned with an intricate design of snaking parallel and overlapping lines and repeated squares and circles, to which wires were attached that travelled up the wall and connected to two large batteries. The batteries in turn were depicted as a hub of much human activity, and Sarge could make out a dizzying assembly line of hard hats, commuters, nurses, doctors, farmers, air traffic controllers, astronauts, satellites in the distance, all bathed in spotlights emanating from these batteries, and hemmed in by a row of craggy mountains on either side, a valley of devotion to this newly electronic lion. Sarge hated it. He turned and nearly slammed into Andrea in the dark. She’d been staring at the projected image with her head tilted for many minutes and was so flustered at having her face come that close to Sarge’s that she made a high-pitched shuddering sound before scurrying to her post behind the security desk, brushing off the front of her jacket like she’d just encountered anthrax. Before he pushed through the sticky revolving door Sarge heard her say, with tentative conviction, “You know, Sarge, I’m not facilities.” Sarge turned to tell her that of course he knew that, why would she––but his phone buzzed and instead he answered the call from his mother.

“Hi honey, how are you? How’s your day?”

It was dark outside, too; the fog had gotten heavier, the clouds grayer, and there were no spotlights lighting the way to ingenuity.

“It’s fine mom, pretty busy. What’s up?”

“You’re not going to believe who I ran into just now.”

“Who?”

“Well, you have to guess, don’t you? Three guesses, come on.”

“Was it Bella?”

“Your sister, no! What? She’s at home, what do you mean?”

“I’m just kidding, mom.”

“It was Jessica Walsh. On her lunch break!”

“Oh, really?

“She looks so grown up, Sarge, even prettier than I remember her, and she has this great job, over at GenTech, did you know?”

“Yeah, mom, it’s the same job she got when we graduated.”

“Oh I don’t think so, honey, she was promoted, some kind of manager, though god knows of what!”

“We’ve talked about this, they manufacture electronic equipment, like those green circuit boards you see––”

“You two were close for such a long time, it made me all nostalgic, Sarge. I couldn’t believe how grown up she looked, I had to get out some of those DVDs I had made when you were in middle school, you remember that? You two were in this production of––wait, I had it here somewhere––oh, here it is, The Boys from Syracuse! What a fun show, I watched the whole thing. You could sing! Why’d you ever stop singing, do you remember why?”

“I don’t remember that at all. Are you sure that wasn’t your other son?”

“Oh ha, ha, of course you remember it! Here, fall of 2010, so you must have been in the…6th grade?”

“Wow, you did that fast, mom.”

“You should give her a call, I told her all about the mayor’s office and how well you’re doing there and how important you are to him––”

“Oh god, I really wish you hadn’t!”

“What, I’m not allowed to be proud of my son?”

“Listen, mom, I have to go. Just getting a bite and then I’ve got more meetings, you know.”

“Oh, sure sure, OK. Um, listen, Sarge, I hate to ask this, but do you think you could spare any like you did in November? I know it’s a lot to ask, but you know I just had this gum procedure done, and my deductible, I mean it’s criminal! They lower the premium, what difference does it make if I’m paying seven thousand––”

“I know, mom, I know. Can we talk about it later, though? I’ll call you when I’m home?”

“Okay honey, sure, that’s fine. Anyway, I was just calling to tell you about Jessica, really, isn’t that a riot, the two of you; you should come home, we’ll watch the DVD. The songs came right back to me, you sitting at the piano practicing, ‘sing––”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll come home this weekend? I’ll call you later, mom, I love you!”

Sarge went to Luna to get a quick tomato soup. So quick he burned the top of his mouth and felt skin blistering and peeling all afternoon. He might have tried to smooth things over with Andrea if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the pain and then with avoiding Alex, who was standing at the projector now, holding a giant tablet on which he was making swift edits to a digital version of his monstrosity. Of course, thought Sarge, the projector was just another signifier of vintage eccentricity, more bumper-sticker disguise for his chronic wealth. At least the mayor wore his money on his sleeve, on his wrist, wherever he could hang it.

The mayor was waiting for him with a question, reclining on the antique, camelback sofa in his office. He waved at Sarge through the doorway while Melanie sat there next to him, thumbing away at her phone. “Sarge, do you know anything about the geology of this area? Our artist in residence was asking. Interesting guy, don’t you think? First question I’ve gotten in the office about rocks.”

No it isn’t, thought Sarge.

The lawyers for the library workers came with their hackles up. “You don’t happen to be an accredited mediator, do you Sarge?” the mayor joked after they left. “Then what good are you!”

Eagles and storks are twice as strong, all the canary knows is song!

“Who knew ventilation was so important to librarians?”

But the canary gets along! Gilded bird!

Sarge put his head in his hands.

“You alright there, bud?” the mayor asked.

“Fine, just a bad headache, and I’ve had this song stuck in my head all day. And I’m…cold.”

“Have you had coffee today?” said Melanie. “Sounds like caffeine withdrawal to me.”

Sarge thought of his barista that morning, bundled for the arctic. Tiffany had just then finished her shift and was perfectly comfortable on her walk to the bus, sipping a frozen, decaffeinated confection out of an extra-long straw, imagining faraway red rock in undulating, striated patterns, nothing like the dark anthracite grays that Alex Green had begun to mix to help further illustrate the local culture and character.

––

“Sarge, before you go,” said the mayor. Sarge had just stuffed the stack of unread constituent letters in his bottom drawer and was on one knee, rubbing off a stubborn scuff on his left shoe. He looked up to find the mayor towering over him.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your hair. It’s getting pretty long and scruffy, don’t you think? Don’t want to look like we’re skipping town to start a Zeppelin cover band, right? Maybe it’s time for a cut?”

“Right,” said Sarge. By the time he got to his feet, the mayor had walked away.

Outside, Sarge buttoned his trench coat top to bottom. He saw Alex smoking again, walking back from his truck, already paint-dappled. He tried once more––in preparation for his walk––to stave off sarcastic thoughts with lines from Benedict Anderson, who was waiting for Sarge on his bedside table. Something about the cultural products of nations––not just novels, but all forms of art. They were meant to inspire love, Anderson wrote, even self-sacrificing love; yes, love for the nation, however silty and formless, love for its promise, in spite of every reason to hate it. As Alex approached, Sarge saw him in a new light––a traveling propagandist, rootless. A field with no soil, a gilded bird.

“Hey, do you know where a guy can get a good meal around here?” Alex asked. It was a joint he was smoking this time.

“Famous Faith’s,” Sarge said. “You’ve got to try their pot pie.”

“Aha! I found the thing you’d miss,” Alex said, and he patted Sarge on the shoulder as he sauntered past, dropping another half-smoked thing on the steps.

“I’m not facilities,” Sarge wanted to say.

He walked fast, pumping his arms, gaining speed––it was downhill this way. Anderson flew from his head. It was too cold for this damn coat, he thought. He thought of Jessica Walsh, of her supposed promotion. He checked her recent posts: a berry apple-butter pie and a laughing girl he didn’t know making a peace sign. He thought of his mom’s gum disease, of the $4K in his bank account, not really $4K at all. He thought of the mayor, of his endlessly thoughtful suggestions. Led Zeppelin! I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your references, he could have said. They’re getting a little long in the tooth, don’t you think?

Sarge made it just before the barber shop closed. The jingle of the door opening was a childhood sound, like the gulping of a bathtub drain or the trilling of a baby bluebird inviting Snow White to sing.

“We’re about to close, sir.”

“Hey Masha.”

“Who’s that?”

“What do you mean, it’s me, Sarge.”

“Sarge? You look like an anarchist!”

Sarge looked at himself in the wall-to-wall mirror and tucked his hair behind his ears.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Sit, sit,” Masha urged. “What is this? What do I do with this?” she said, clicking her tongue, running her hands through the mess.

“The usual.”