Bert figured he was at loose ends. Until he could get hold of Benita. Make her pay him some alimony or something. He’d have to think about that.
His feet remembered the way to the shelter, even if his brain didn’t. It was still right where it had been, in back of the old Methodist church, but it had a new sign.
Glusi Center—Life Plans for the Needy
Inside, a pleasant young woman helped him fill out a questionnaire, had him hold his ideogram in front of a machine, then gave him a card that told him where to get his clothes washed, where to get dinner that night, and a bed to sleep in, where to breakfast tomorrow, and where to go to work the next morning. “Free.” She smiled. “All the services are free. And when you go to work tomorrow, you’ll get another card with the next day’s schedule on it, and on weekends, you get weekend cards for recreation activities, movies, or sports. All free.”
“What I don’t feel like working?” he asked, summoning truculence.
“That’s fine. You do what you like. If you’d rather lie around all day, you can do that, but it gets pretty boring, you know, when you can’t drink or smoke and there’s no TV until evening and you can’t loiter.”
“Whadda you mean, can’t loiter?”
“Loitering isn’t allowed. Streets are for transit. Everyone is happier if he’s going somewhere and doing something. If one isn’t working, one should be enjoying life, meditating, recreating, relaxing in some appropriate place. If you’d rather meditate or relax than work, that’s fine, here’s a list of meditation and relaxation centers.”
“And if I don’t want to meditate?” he cried, outraged.
“That’s fine,” she said. “That’s perfectly fine. We’ll find something else for you to do.”
Bert wandered out, feeling aimless. He should, he felt, be really angry about moocow, but somehow, it was all too much effort. The streets were empty except for people obviously going somewhere. And he couldn’t drink beer, or anything alcoholic. And he couldn’t smoke, he wasn’t even fifty yet.
The address sheet said there was a meditation center a block away. He turned left and found the entrance, a plain door with a symbol on the doorway that looked like a head with rays coming out of it. He remembered the building first as a warehouse and then later as a place where Larry’s friend used to store bales of marijuana. Now, however, rows of pillows were lined up on the floor, a few of them occupied by quiet people. Bert sat down.
A voice spoke to him, very softly. “Let’s think about things,” it said. “Let’s decide what we can do today that will be useful. . . .”
Bert tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t work, and the voice in his head said, “That’s fine, we can go when we’ve finished, but we don’t want to go just yet, do we? No. We want to think about being useful . . .” And the voice went on, and on, and on, until it was time for lunch.
“That’s fine,” said the smiling lady at the lunch counter when he complained about too much salad. “Tomorrow, you choose something else.”
“That’s fine,” said the man at the shelter that night. “Here’s your card for tomorrow and a list of other shelters.”
“That’s fine,” said the boss the next morning, when Bert reported and said he didn’t want to work. “You can go to the meditation center.”
“That’s fine,” said Bert a week or so later, looking at himself in the mirror of the room that had his name on it, room 502 at Glusi Housing Center #10. His boss on the painting crew had told him he was doing really well. The food at the center tasted better all the time. “That’s just fine,” he said, trying to identify the strange feeling he had. Really weird. After a while, he decided he felt contented.
Benita—ONE YEAR LATER
About a year later, Benita was in her new office in Washington, D.C., talking to her assistant, Jewel.
“Did you get monthly reports from the Glusi Centers?” she asked, checking a previous item off her list.