Pollen

The morning after Bradley killed Pete he could not get on the Internet. He tapped at his keyboard, tapped at his mouse, paced around his small bedroom, then tapped at both again and paced some more until finally he picked the laptop up and hurled it into the wall. After shooting Pete the previous night he had uncorked something in himself that now flowed like champagne, from which he had up until that moment imbibed only fleeting whiffs and spurts, and he wanted more of it immediately—more loud crashes, more heavy breathing.

Bradley stood in the middle of the room, panting, basking in the pure rage rising and falling in his brain heartbeat to heartbeat. He savored it until only a few moments later he thought, Wait. Why am I standing here? What’s going on?

Am I missing something important?

This kind of thing seemed to happen to Bradley’s brain more and more. Bradley was one of the last graduate students in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, but he also sold pollen in great quantities, which was lucky for him because the drug was the only thing that could release his memory from the black oubliettes of ignorance into which it fell with alarming frequency these days.

Bradley gazed at his laptop in disbelief, the dent in the wall, the crack in the monitor, the floor around the shattered consumer electronic product as though this were a place that the ghost of a dead computer could haunt, before he finally remembered what he had done just seconds earlier. Without giving it a second thought, he sat down at the desk, opened the middle drawer on the right, and pulled out his own personal stash of pollen, a small plastic zip-bag containing a powder, the bunchy consistency of flour, but so bright yellow that it often appeared to glow in the dark. He arranged the powder in lines on his desk and then rummaged around in the desk drawer for a straw; it dawned on him that he had no idea where he had last left the straw and his rage mounted once again.

The first time that Bradley snorted pollen, it was when he discovered a loose pile of it on top of a bathroom tank in Hamilton Hall and concluded, mistakenly, that it was a new formula of screaming-fluorescent yellow Adderall that an undergrad had simply crunched up in the stall and then forgotten about. Adderall had saturated the American college campus since Bradley himself had been in college, a decade before, but something about the culture had become ravenous since then, almost as though kids went to college and took classes now as a pretext to do Adderall, rather than the other way around—so Bradley thought nothing of it when he saw what he thought was a big pile of Adderall unattended in a bathroom stall, since he had taken similar advantage of the drug in abandoned quantities on numerous earlier occasions in the library, the waiting room of the Health Center, and various other classrooms. There were even times when Bradley had wandered the halls of Hamilton muttering to himself angrily, as he so frequently did, and walked into classes while they were in session at the sight of an unattended pile of Adderall sitting on a desk. Bradley’s students gave him Adderall during office hours almost every week, and he added the cost of the drug to the students’ in-class participation grade.

Bradley’s first response to pollen was that it was too strong. Bright light slingshotted out of tiny holes in his visual field with such speed that they tossed him back into the door of the stall, knocking it clean off of its hinges so that the man and the aluminum square tumbled together onto the damp tiles below. There, the door was Bradley’s magic carpet while his body twitched and his mind soared from one corner of the universe to the next. What Bradley was discovering was one of the reasons why pollen would prove so popular and habit-forming: the first time on the drug is a life-changing trauma from which every user emerges with a brain and nervous system completely rewired to serve no future purpose besides the continued use of pollen.

Bradley’s professor, Hans Werner Andersch, entered the bathroom and discovered Bradley hyperventilating, wings of drool spreading out of both corners of his mouth, his eyelids flapping. It struck the silver-haired gentleman with relief that he had arrived in the nick of time—he immediately went down on his knees, his pants darkening in the drool, and began to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But Bradley’s mind was clouded with visions and glowing interdimensional lines sewing together far-flung regions of thought and emotion so disparate that he now saw his entire previous experience of the world in its miserly proper scale. How tiny, superstitious, and prejudiced it had been. Andersch’s face, topped with his characteristic swirl of silver hair, appeared to him to be the mile-high face of a god chiseled into the side of a mountain whose peaks hid invisibly behind an opaque wall of cloud. Terrified, Bradley wrestled himself free of Andersch’s long fingers, got to his knees so that the two men now faced one another, and flailed his arms so that his hands lapped against the sixty-five-year-old professor’s resilient pectoral muscles.

Moaning, his eyelids still running up and down in time to the pulse of his inner light, Bradley struggled to his feet and stumbled out of the bathroom while Andersch, still on his knees, looked on. More and more it seemed to Andersch that graduate students were abandoning themselves to forms of hedonism so self-destructive that he did not see how anyone could ever consider them fun, which didn’t make sense unless you factored in that becoming a graduate student was itself an act of suicidal masochism. It made Andersch embarrassed to be a part of the academic community and he couldn’t remember why he had ever joined it in the first place.

As Bradley’s foot touched down on pavement outside of Hamilton, his whole body shrank in direct proportion to the amount of capital that he, as a graduate student in the Germanic Languages department, contributed to keeping the university on a revenue-over-expenditure footing. He shrank so small that he could have walked straight between the molecular constituents of any one of the blades of grass in the two huge lawns at the heart of Low Plaza, the flagship objects of horticultural beauty whose maintenance would be paid for ad aeternium using a trust fund that had been created through Columbia’s participation in the filming of Ghostbusters, many years before. So small did Bradley become that even Andersch’s face, which had towered over him so impressively only minutes earlier, was itself cast in pitiable relief by the giants stomping around, shaking the earth with their massive feet, generating patents in the science departments and consulting fees from the Economics department and the School of Business.

Bradley wandered for hours before he saw anything but money and the potential for future money given physical form by a world dominated by giants and infested by swarming molecular pygmies who, like himself, contributed no money to Columbia besides the funds that they saved the institution through their ability to teach Humanities and foreign languages at a cheap price. These savings were an impressive amount of money, to be sure; but nothing compared to the chemical patents coming out of the Adderall research wing of the Neuroscience department, to cite just one example. Hours passed of which Bradley was totally unaware until at one point he opened a door and found himself in a Laundromat.

The day after Bradley killed Pete, he was far from the only person in New York to be denied Internet access.

Dozens of people were out in the street, screaming for help, when Bradley left his apartment to take a walk and get his mind off his computer. Men and women of all ages—an old hippie matron kept lithe in her tie-dyed shirt from trips to an investment bank gym, a middle-aged man probably with tenure so addicted to his black turtlenecks that he couldn’t put them away even after they no longer flattered his burgeoning paunch, a young woman in a gray hooded sweatshirt with smooth skin and pigtails who Bradley found himself ogling out of his newfound sense of villainous entitlement, dozens of others—all struck the same pose moaning and groping the air with bent elbows and splayed fingers, standing in the middle of the street. He wanted to help them, but he was one of them. The thought dawned on Bradley that he was witnessing something historic.

The way everyone stood around, shouting and whining in the direction of no one in particular, their hands grasping thin air pointlessly, they looked less like people than like individual computers, their own computers, struggling to make contact with a non-human communications network that may no longer have existed. But one by one, they began to notice each other. Bradley began to walk. On Amsterdam, things looked normal until a car going north toward 125th slammed head-on into a car headed west on 120th—the traffic lights, Bradley realized, were also controlled by the Internet. Screams blossomed all around, running feet clapping the pavement from all directions. Bradley smiled.

A lot of people had observed that Bradley had changed in the year or so previous to this because he had become a mean, narcissistic bastard, by his own admission. What it had felt like was a tornado blowing into his house and ripping the front window to shreds so that a vacuum sucked everything out into a high-velocity swirl capable of pulverizing absolutely anything, and never ending. The innermost sanctum of Bradley’s personality was a wide-open devouring mouth with no appetite, just the compulsive and constantly increasing desire to chew. At nights he beat mailboxes with a baseball bat just so they would be hard for postal carriers to open, he made a point of peeing with the seat down whenever he used a public restroom, and he had shot Pete in the back because he had found the young man’s nostalgia unbearably offensive.

And it was strange, too, because so many other people had become pollinated without something like this happening to them. His primary clientele were a group calling themselves the Confessors who operated like an Alcoholics Anonymous for environmentalists, an encounter group working to wean themselves collectively off of habitual waste. It had started one night when he was invited to a birthday party for a graduate student in the English department, and, feeling tipsy and bored by the conversation, invited a girl named Martha into the bathroom to have what he had called some Adderall with him. He huddled with her on the floor while she shook, cradled her head upright so as to keep her from swallowing her tongue, and, when she shed her tremors and floated up into the aether of radical clarity in which he now lived all the time, he smiled and nodded through the breathy half-sentences with which she recounted her visionary journey. Like Bradley, she changed completely, but she and later all of her friends became lifestyle environmentalists who had to keep their drug habit a secret, because otherwise they would have been forced to return the award that they eventually received for Outstanding Community Service from the Columbia Board of Trustees.

Bradley was at that awards ceremony—he stood at the back of the room, his arms folded across his chest, and he nodded and grinned continuously as the medals were presented. He watched the Confessors stand on the dais in the Low Rotunda, staring straight ahead with the empty eyes of ancient gods, until he was asked by security to show his invitation, and was subsequently escorted outside into the cold air.

It felt good to be put in his place—he was in Germanic Languages, after all, and there was a clear class differential separating the English & Comparative Literature department, whose outlook was global, from the local concerns that dominated the foreign language departments and restrained them from the unlimited fields of intellectual inquiry that were available to English & Comparative Literature. In fact, the truth was that Bradley believed that if you were to ask him why he had changed, he would tell you that it was because the humiliation of being a Germanist had ground his soul down into a negligible pulp. Even Pete had been in the English department before he was expelled from graduate school for academic incompetence. The day that Bradley had first pollinated, he had dressed in a traditional Bavarian hunter’s garb of green felt hat and Lederhosen in order to make a pitch for Columbia’s expensive, wasteful semester abroad in Germany program. It was a huge cash cow for the university, and the department had put him under a particularly great deal of pressure to sell the exoticism of the land using his own body as a billboard for pro-German advertising messages.

Bradley shook his head—German was a cage for his mind, both the subject and the self-pity that he felt for being associated with it, and he often concluded that it had held him back from opportunities to expand his thinking and create new ideas that might once have allowed him to enter a better life. When he shot Pete, the one thought in Bradley’s intellect was how the baseless prestige of the English department had spoiled the young man.

2.

The I Trust My Boss movement began as a sarcastic joke, but enough people thought it was serious that it eventually became a hegemonic force in U.S. politics.

On the outskirts of Patterson, New Jersey, a construction worker fell two stories when an iron girder that had been improperly fastened gave way underneath him. Saddled with the cost of paying for his emergency care himself, the man demanded that his wife wheel him up to the front of the site, his arms in his full-body cast outstretched in front of him in straight lines like those of Abraham Lincoln on his great stone throne, a piece of cardboard propped in the man’s lap with the words I TRUST MY BOSS written on it in big, black, permanent-marker letters. Passersby took pictures, and one of them made it into the Associated Press; the mass media got hold of it and completely reversed the point that the construction worker and his wife had intended to make when the eyes of a Republican politician welled up with tears instantaneously at the sight of it.

Indiana Congressman Ashley Rowls didn’t stop crying for two hours—he had numerous employees himself, and now he understood why his relationships with them felt so empty and unsatisfying. Very often, Rowls yelled at them, his face turning red and his screams shredding his throat—at cost of considerable pain—just so he could feel anything in what was otherwise a crushing, sucking vacuum of alienation. His employees didn’t trust him, that was the problem—and it was unfair, since if there was one thing that he had earned from them with his money it was their trust.

When Rowls finally recovered, he called a press conference and declared himself the nation’s first I Trust My Boss candidate for President of the United States. Few reporters attended the press conference, and the handful of commenters on the Internet who had taken notice mostly snickered and made derisive comments. But within a couple of weeks, bosses all over the country were passing around I TRUST MY BOSS buttons to their employees and Rowls was vindicated, hailed as a rare political innovator in a system that, to many, seemed totally ossified.

I TRUST MY BOSS legislation moved through Congress at an accelerated rate; unions that failed to include I TRUST MY BOSS clauses in their contracts could not get those contracts renewed; bosses of all stripes, from regional managers to elementary school principals to corporate CEOs to stage managers at local repertory theaters began showing up at their employees’ front doors politely insisting upon the opportunity to search the premises and join the employees’ families for a hot, home-cooked meal.

The day after he killed Pete, Bradley could not get on the Internet because someone had detonated an electromagnetic pulse-bomb that shut down all digital communications networks within a 300-mile radius of Rockland, the suburban county north of New York City where the international investigative team later concluded that the pulse must have originated. Bradley could not stop walking, and he was glad, for the farther downtown he went the more apparent it became that something truly revolutionary was in the air. It had been years since he had seen people act with such freedom, almost as though whatever invisible force had made his computer impotent had also made social distinctions equally meaningless.

If the Internet had been destroyed in a normal world, none of it would have happened—but this was the I TRUST MY BOSS world. A girl in a blue and white apron ran out of the Columbia bookstore onto Broadway, her arms overflowing with books, and from the way she grinned facing Heaven as she ran Bradley could tell that there was no rhyme or reason to why she had stolen these books in particular—they were just the first books she could find between her and the door.

Behind her, a man in a tie ran—her boss, Bradley realized. Meanwhile, a handful of spectators—no more than half a dozen men and women—had gathered around the intersection, cheering her on, chanting Run! Run! Run! and the thought flashed into Bradley’s mind—a thought so new and rejuvenating that for a full second he forgot all German—that as of the previous night Bradley was no longer a person just like any other. On the contrary—Bradley’s force of will, having thrown off the shackles of quotidian morality, now swelled with the hardness to take action in ways that no one else’s could.

After one quick breath he ran for the man with the tie. Bradley took a swing at his jaw, bringing the man’s head down on the pavement with a crack, while the small crowd gathered around them cheered for the escaping girl.

Bradley’s foot on the man’s chest belabored his breathing, but Bradley could tell he was out to lunch—his eyes closed, his head rocking back and forth like coffee oscillating in a mug on its way between an office kitchen and a worker’s cubicle. He might as well have been looking into a container black with some opaque fluid, that was how much humanity he could see in the twisting, sweating case of skin and bones pressed flat beneath his shoe. So this was what had become of Bradley’s empathy—it frightened him seeing so little to distinguish the human being below from a bag of garbage—but his heart rose when he realized that the crowd around him had grown both in size and in the passion with which they cheered him.

Bradley sensed history urging him to make a statement, so he drew a deep breath, summoning the boomingest movie-orator voice he could, and declared, " ‘I Trust My Boss’ is over!"

All around him, arms shot straight up into the air, veins shot out of faces taut with screaming exhilaration.

He had to repeat it, he couldn’t resist: "Over!"

Minutes later, far overhead, a couple of officers in a police helicopter watched Bradley with his head high on his straight shoulders, pounding the air with his fist, leading a growing crowd of hundreds up Amsterdam Avenue leaving a trail of shattered glass in their wake.

Frank was Bradley’s supplier. He had been using pollen much longer than Bradley, since Frank had been with the army in Afghanistan, where the United States had prescribed the drug to Frank and many other soldiers on an unofficial mood-controlling basis, and the hallucinations had gotten so intense lately that Frank had felt no need to surf the Internet. Frank’s mind had become like an entire Internet unto itself, an Escher-esque labyrinth of enigmatic, impossible images whose true meaning Frank had both devised and kept hidden from himself for no reason besides the sheer entertainment of exploring the knots of worlds coiled upon worlds that they waved at him, like a series of handkerchiefs out of a series of windows.

For this reason, Frank sat in the small office at the rear of the massive Laundromat on 125th Street, that his father had given him to manage after his return from war, unaware that there was anything special about this day.

The phone on his desk surprised him when it rang—he figured it was a wrong number or some prostitute from deep in his father’s dissolute past calling through every number in her purse in a crazed please-give-me-some-money gambit, so he picked it up. He had increasing difficulty talking to people these days, because he had given up hope that his accelerating descent into pure, incoherent insanity could ever be reversed, and so he would not have picked up the phone had he not been totally convinced that a real conversation would be unnecessary with whomever this person was supposed to be.

Frank pressed the receiver into his ear without saying anything, not even Hello. He wanted to hear what this person had to say before saying anything himself.

"Frank! Frank!"

Frank recognized the speaker as Bradley, but wondered how he could since the voice sounded so different from Bradley’s. Bradley had a pretty normal pinched, bland white-guy voice, with this typical vaguely high-pitched way of sounding like he was choking on his own balls even when he seemed to be at his most confident, but this voice sounded different. It sounded both computerized and like it belonged to a chorus of a thousand small children all singing Frank’s name simultaneously, like an entire small town populated only by children had gathered in their central square to send Frank a message through a Vocoder. So the question on Frank’s mind was: How had he known that this was Bradley?

Um, Frank said.

Laughter on the other end. This is it, Frank, said the children. The City of Lost Children, Frank thought. "This is Code Azure—you remember? You remember that scenario we talked about? The one that we both agreed would never, ever happen?"

No, Frank said.

Bradley was screaming. Why? What were all those voices in the background? Maybe that was the reason why Bradley was talking so loudly, because, otherwise, Frank would not have been able to understand him over all of that background. It felt good to think, one thought following after another like a subway turnstile ticking with every entering passenger, a rare sensation that Frank had learned to savor because his brain usually felt like a baking cake expanding in all directions with no end in sight. It was amazing how good it felt on those increasingly rare occasions, getting that gassy, doughy blob moving in a straight line.

Frank forgot who Bradley was and hung up the phone.

Bradley felt nervous, then infuriated—his crowd of followers had grown to hundreds in just ten blocks, up to the last working pay phone that he knew of in New York City (Amsterdam Avenue and 116th St., on the intersection where the gates opened onto College Walk and the grim concrete-steel slab of the Law School loomed from across the street) so he could call Frank, and now he could tell from their belligerent chatter that the crowd clearly wanted to resume marching, but he was their leader and he still needed to get a supplier on the phone.

It charmed Bradley that their chanting made no sense—one that had taken hold was March on the Boss! March on the Boss!, but how was anyone, let alone a giant crowd of people with (most likely) a very diverse assembly of bosses, supposed to act on this? Whose boss? March on the guy how—like, trample him? It was like listening to people taking their first stumbling steps as critical thinkers following years of mental immobilization, and Bradley found their effort-making cute, like watching a kid riding a bike without training wheels, falling, and slamming his head on the pavement.

"Confessors/New York Times," answered Constance, who worked as the Confessors’ secretary in the office that they rented in the New York Times building.

Constance! Constance, thank God.

Bradley? She giggled—Bradley and Constance enjoyed a pretty decent rapport. You sound scared!

The crowd had transformed from a sausage-shaped tube of anti-authoritarian rage into a bull’s-eye of concentric circles centered on Bradley himself and his pay phone. He sensed that they could turn on him at any moment.

A girl in a Pizza Famiglia polo shirt holding a pizza box—on which she had scrawled the words FUCK THE BOSS in the seconds after she had first spied the crowd moving up Amsterdam, and then ran out to join them without looking back once at her screaming supervisor—made eye contact with Bradley.

I need Meg, Martha, Karen, anyone, Bradley panted. Tell them it’s a Code Azure. They’ll know what I mean.

How do I get hold of them?

Use your imagination, Bradley barked. Just tell ‘em bring the package, the whole package to the Ding Dong Lounge ASAP. It’s the biggest fucking opportunity any of us have ever had and I’ll be damned if we’re gonna lose it!

Bradley slammed the phone down and turned to face the pizza girl, feeling satisfied with his call and at peace with himself.

Um, hi, she said. She offered her hand, which Bradley accepted. I guess you’re in charge here, right? I’m just asking because it seems like everyone wants to start marching again.

Right away, Bradley seized on the idea that she wanted to usurp his position, so he acknowledged the request by hoisting his arms, punctuated with fists, into the air and screaming, "Follow me!" as loud as he possibly could.

Everyone cheered.

The pizza girl marched just behind him as they marched up the broad avenue. The truth was that Bradley hated working with women, and this kind of passive-aggressive competitiveness was the basic reason. The feeling he got whenever he witnessed Karen, Meg, and Martha sniping at each other, undermining one another in front of their followers and bossing around Karen’s pathetic twin brother Jason was that they must all live perpetually on the threshold of experiencing humiliation so deep as to be life-threatening. Such were the stakes attached to absolutely every decision they made together, no matter how petty or small, scheduling decisions, decisions about using different-colored paper for photocopies—Bradley would rather be buried alive than expose himself to other people like that, where you feel naked when fully dressed because people are always looking at you in ways that probe your body for nodes of domination.

For right now, Bradley was indisputably in charge. He chanted with his flock: March on the Boss! March on the Boss! Their collective voice coalesced into a roar in the canyon of the street. Visions of himself in a long, black cape, mighty lightning antlers twirling out of his temples, licks of flame invisible to humans but not to demons (Bradley’s true peers) dancing in the deep black obsidian orbs of his eyes, clapped before his mind in euphoric flashes. Cheers screamed out of the windows of the apartments and offices overlooking the avenue; a man threw up his window and ran down the fire escape to join them, with dozens from the same building following suit when they saw what he had done. Bradley looked to his left and saw a woman in a city bus driver’s uniform; then, looking to the right, he saw a city bus, parked dead in the middle of the street, traffic backing up behind it while passengers marched out to join the driver, their faces twisted masks of rage enlivened by the insouciance of just-released prisoners.

At last, police sirens—but where? The buildings made it hard to tell where sounds were coming from. He only needed another 30 minutes, tops, and none if Meg was at the Ding Dong already—everyone resented Meg because she was so rich, but the truth was she had it on the ball more than the others did and they wouldn’t hate her so much if that weren’t the case.

Meg . . . I need your help, Meg.

The Ding Dong was a good choice because it was close, pretty spacious inside, and Bradley had gotten kicked out of there recently so it was time to show those assholes a thing or two about losing serious money. The door was locked; sure it was, it wasn’t even 11 am. Bradley thought about the crowd and what it would take to keep control over them, and he remembered Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing—he noticed a metal garbage can in between the Ding Dong and the adjacent building, picked it up over his head, and marched in the direction of the bar—like the Red Sea parting before Moses, the crowd made a path for Bradley, chanting Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!

And that he did. Jumping and laughing as their shoes crunched the glass, they poured inside. Bradley was the last to enter, wondering if it was really he who was overlord over this horde after all, or if it was not the exclusive basis of his power that he obeyed their every whim. Whatever it was, they had a relationship that worked and Bradley wanted to take it to the next level.

Bradley noticed the pizza girl jump behind the bar and immediately start tossing bottles of all kinds of liquor out into the grasping upraised hands of the crowd. Bradley was proud of her, and also relieved—she could be the leader all she wanted as soon as Bradley was done with his Code Azure.

It worried him, all of a sudden, that Frank or Meg might not know what a Code Azure was . . . Bradley had spent a lot of time trying to devise cool codenames for hypothetical scenarios, but he had always suspected that his various colleagues and contacts in the pollen trade had spent more time making fun of them than committing them to memory. Code Azure was Bradley’s favorite, and the one that he had considered least likely to ever take place, because it meant the opportunity to dose the entire city of New York all at once, creating a fully addicted city population totally in thrall to new visions both real and imagined, but, he reasoned, nothing short of full-scale economic collapse or the failure of some major element of the infrastructure (such as the Internet) could put that into the realm of possibility.

If it ever happened, Bradley had dreamed, it would mean the chance to wipe the slate clean. What made pollen so amazing was that it permitted one to think with complete rationality for the first time in one’s life—everything else about it that made it feel so wild were only consequences of this root effect, the Windex effect of scouring the lenses of the mind to absolute transparency. It was hopeless with a crowd this big, but he waved his hand to get the pizza girl’s attention anyway, because he was depressed and—now that he and his followers had at last struck upon their destination—he needed a nip of booze to get himself back in the zone. Here he was, in a moment he had fantasized about on a daily basis, with utopia pretty much bagged up and ready for checkout, and all he could think about was all the money that he was going to make. If paradise on earth was to be achieved in the next day or so, Bradley had now become so cynical that it looked like he was going to end up experiencing it vicariously through the ecstasy of another revolutionary enthusiast or not at all.

3.

The thing about pollen was that it made you want to organize. Frank hit on the idea of selling it in New York using a connection that he had through the Walter Reade hospital on his first day back, when he stood on the curb outside of LaGuardia with a big duffel bag in hand, as his dad walked up to him wearing a huge button that said I TRUST MY BOSS.

It struck Frank as bizarre to have black people involved in what was essentially a pro-slavery movement, but you also have to figure that a boss is basically a boss, regardless of their appearance—or so Frank reasoned, in an effort to show the man some charity—and their interests align accordingly once a certain line has been crossed.

They were in the back of a Lincoln towncar, Frank watching maple, oak, and birch trees pass under the blue autumn sky while Joe, his dad, rattled on about how great everything felt in America now.

It truly is morning in America, Joe said. It feels like anything is possible.

He smiled and then said, by way of a conclusion, "I trust my boss."

Joe owned a chain of Laundromats and was involved in various real estate investment schemes, a big thing since Harlem was up for rezoning and stood to get as bourgie as anyplace else in Manhattan in the very near future.

Who is your boss, Dad? Frank asked.

God, Joe said.

Oh, Frank said.

And so it was that I Trust My Boss had coalesced from a disparate series of speeches by politicians in need of a slogan, to a program of consciousness-raising by a handful of crypto-fascist managers in workplaces in the South and Midwest, into a nationwide cultural movement that combined economics, religion, and the sense that Americans’ basic patriotism was at stake in this question of trust for their social superiors. Turn on TV on Sundays and you would catch preachers in stadium-huge megachurches asking folks in cheap-looking clothes, either haggard from malnutrition or heaving under the girth of too much cheap fast food, lined up on a big stage giving humble testaments, one after another, to the way they felt the presence of God at work embodied in the sweet, graceful soul of their boss in his (His?) infinite wisdom. What Frank found particularly galling was the way the politicians handled it: in what was ostensibly a representative democracy, you had a parade of white men getting up and saying that they wanted to be your boss, and people actually rewarded them for it with votes and donations of all different sizes. Frank had just spent two years in Stankonia observing a society where leaders acted like bosses, for real, and he had thought that one of the reasons he and everyone else had booted up over there was to stamp that out forever. Something involving democracy—and look at what he finds going on here, not just under everyone’s nose but in the open mouth of anyone who had anything to say.

When they got to their townhouse on 130th, Joe gave Frank a packet of organizing materials to study in preparation for taking over day-to-day management of two of his busiest Laundromats. As instinctively as Frank felt disgusted by I Trust My Boss and absolutely everything about America on what was supposed to have been a great day for him—he had been looking forward to getting back since he set foot in Stankonia, and now that he was he felt disappointed beyond words—he had to hand it to folks, there was a lot more to I Trust My Boss than just slogans and evil ideas. Someone had gotten the idea to deploy organizing techniques that had evolved from decades of use by the civil rights and labor movements, and repurpose them so that the point was to get workers to trust their bosses, rather than defend themselves against them. And a lot of the time, the workers didn’t buy it: they’d find the idea just as nonsensical as it seemed to Frank, so you had to keep talking to them again and again before they either quit (Fat chance, in this economy, as Joe reminded Frank, laughing) or gave up and signed an I Trust My Boss card.

Putting down the packet on their marble living room table, walking up the stairs to his old bedroom, and, laying out a couple of bright yellow lines on his dresser, Frank reflected wistfully on the plum job that Joe had said would be waiting for him back in New York. Joe had said that Frank would be able to take it easy for a while which he really deserved because he had risked life and limb for America out there. In reality, Frank was walking into a shitshow, the only two Laundromats in Joe’s chain that had resisted I Trust My Boss; all the other ones had been certified I Trust My Boss-majority by the National League of Registered Bosses (NLRB), yet these were the biggest and most important and they remained in thrall to a handful of ungrateful rabble rousers. Joe figured that Frank might make some more headway organizing them than could Joe himself, since Frank was a veteran and people thought that sort of thing was cool.

He’d served his country for two long years, narrowly avoided death countless times, and here he was again, back where he started—in his bedroom listening to Public Enemy as though every lyric Chuck D ever wrote were about his dad and nothing else. The only difference now was a vision, Harlem, her streets filled with people who’d had enough, inspired by justice and fueled by rage. He closed his eyes and chanted along with them in his mind.

From the roof of the New York Times building, the sounds of the city blended into a nourishing and rehydrating salad—sirens, helicopter blades, roaring crowds, squealing tires, breaking glass. Bradley tried to take a bite, but couldn’t savor it as much as he wanted because the question irked him, Did we do this, and he couldn’t find an answer.

Standing right at the edge of the roof, Bradley looked downtown, toward Battery Park. Police had cordoned off the entrance to the Staten Island Ferry terminal with a line of flashing-light cruisers that extended from one end of the island to the other in a continuous arc, which from Bradley’s vantage point looked like a smiling face taunting the rest of the island. The government had herded bosses of all stripes, thousands of them, onto the Staten Island Ferry for their own protection against the crowds rising up against them all over the city. Fast food restaurant managers and investment bank CEOs were rubbing elbows down there, wringing their hands in terror while they waited for a ferry to take them to safety. Bradley didn’t know where they were going—he had heard rumors of Staten Island, but there would surely be at least a small crowd of boss-killers waiting for them at St. George terminal. Meanwhile, a huge crowd had gathered on the other side of the police cars, impatient for revenge, enduring repeated blasts of pepper spray and rubber bullets to send one or two crazed kamikaze boss-haters running up to the front of the line, diving over the hood of one of the cruisers, and into a cloud of flying batons, every couple of minutes. There was no way the cops could hold all of them back, they had too much heart.

Bradley stood on the roof of the New York Times building with Karen, the most businesslike of the Confessors. I just got another fax, she said. The crop duster is airborne.

What about the giant fans, Bradley said.

No word yet. Karen put her hand on Bradley’s shoulder. You’re not worried, are you?

Bradley stepped away. Karen’s hand drifted down to her waist like a falling autumn leaf.

Not yet, he said, But I might be soon. All that’s fueling these crowds now is humiliation and that’s not enough to keep them going forever.

They have to go to sleep at some point, she agreed.

Not necessarily—that’s where we come in.

She grinned and winked at him.

Holy shit, Bradley thought. Does Karen like me?

The walkie-talkie in his hand crackled; he pushed down the button and held it up to his mouth.

Talk to me, he barked.

Don’t talk to me that way, Radhika said.

I’ve got some twitchers down here, Gottfried said. Gottfried meant that he had gotten some strangers to use pollen for the first time, and they were now experiencing seizures.

Not me, Martha said. Bradley could barely hear her, there was so much screaming and sirening in the background.

People feel so liberated, I’m having a hard time getting them to take drugs! Martha shouted over the din.

Meg? Bradley’s nerves tuned up and his posture, normally slack, went straight as a mirror. Meg? Where’s Meg?

A low crackling, like distant, rolling thunder digitized and reproduced in a very primitive video game, preceded what sounded like hundreds (thousands?) of voices harmonized into a single, musical hum.

Can someone tell me what the fuck that was? Bradley shrieked, his voice getting high.

"It’s Meg, Karen sulked. Fucking Meg." She turned and walked halfway across the roof of the New York Times building and then stopped to bite her thumbnail. When she found that there was no nail left to bite, she sank her teeth into the tender pink skin of her finger and steeled herself against her welling tears.

"Om, said the multi-voice. Om."

Radhika, Bradley tried to calm himself down, How are we on Madison Square? Have any other cops, um, spotted you?

Radhika laughed. Other cops, she repeated, switching the emphasis from cops to other.

Seriously, how is the crowd looking? Are they concentrating?

"Om," Meg’s magical multi-voice repeated.

Fucking Meg, Karen repeated. She took a big bag of pollen out of her pocket and tried to figure out where she could cut up some lines—that was the only way she could deal with Meg anymore. It made sense, since the drug was the only thing they’d ever really had in common, it was what had brought them together, and she’d consider herself most lucky if it could someday drive them apart.

Radhika, talk to me! Bradley saw with fear the galloping acceleration of his own anxiety exceeding his ability to control it. He needed anything—a cigarette, some more pollen, some more booze, anything, to restore the calm and joy that he should be experiencing at this moment, for which he had waited all his life.

I told you, Bradley, don’t talk to me that way.

Late that morning, Martha, Karen, Radhika and Gottfried had arrived at the Ding Dong in time to find Bradley off to the side of the ecstatic, writhing crowd, pacing in a corner, hashing out contingency plans, muttering under his breath, a bottle of Death Bile clenched in his black-gloved fist.

We’ve got a problem, he told them, his face red with rage, frustration, excitement, inspiration, and alcohol. People are moving too fast. They’re spreading out so wide, we won’t be able to get enough of them together to be able to dictate the outcome of these circumstances.

Radhika and Gottfried, on one hand, and Martha and Karen on the other, each responded most strongly to a different part of what Bradley had said. Radhika and Gottfried were Bradley’s colleagues in the Department of Germanic Languages, and had in recent time gradually settled into roles as his associates in the pollen trade. Their minds immediately fixed around the questions of speed, space, and control, and how to maximize the distribution of pollen in this extra-special, one-time-only, Internet Blackout pollen promotion so as to produce the maximum number of future customers. Martha and Karen, by contrast, were graduate students in the Department of English & Comparative Literature, to which all of the other language departments at Columbia were subordinate, as well as founding Confessors—Martha and Karen thought of themselves as big-picture people, so their minds fastened around the question of the outcome and what kind of post-Internet Blackout world the Confessors would most like to dictate now that they had the opportunity.

Martha cupped her chin in her hand and tried to visualize a future anterior, a that which we will have done, to follow the melee. She envisioned the Empire State Building transformed into a giant greenhouse, in the same shape as before but now a giant tower of glass teeming with green life, blasting fresh oxygen into the city through its thousands of open windows.

Gottfried lit a cigarette. Everyone looked at him—The old rules are gone, he said. We can smoke indoors now.

For a few minutes Radhika had struggled with the feeling that she had forgotten something important, and, when she realized what it was, panic rose in her to a fever pitch. She needed to be somewhere else, she knew.

"We need to get people into the same space, Bradley forced through his slammed-shut teeth. We need to get them to sit down and take drugs."

I’ve got an idea! Radhika shouted. She clapped her hands and kept them together until she was sure she had everyone’s attention. Whom do people run away from instinctively? The cops. I say we steal a couple of cop cars and use them to corral as many folks as we can into one location, and then dose them once they’re all together.

Martha shook her head. I don’t know, she said. "That seems kind of beside the point of this whole thing, right? People are finally throwing off the shackles of this Boss thing and being themselves? We need to incorporate the dispersed and horizontal nature of this spontaneous social uprising into the methodology of how we co-opt it. No?"

I’ve got it, Karen said. Let’s get a crop duster and drop pollen on the city, dose everybody en masse, let the chips fall where they may!

She laughed.

Martha laughed, too, and pointed at Karen. I like it, she said.

We’ll do both! Bradley shouted. Better safe than sorry! Radhika, you go steal a cop car and call Frank’s people. They’ll help you get the pollen to . . . where?

Madison Square Park, she said. That’s perfect, it’s an easy park to circle and a lot of avenues converge there.

Great! Bradley shouted.

Radhika turned and ran out of the bar, pushing revelers out of her way with no qualms.

Bradley asked Karen, Karen, how can we get a crop duster?

Meg, Karen said. Her family’s got connections at the Chicago Commodities Exchange. They can get one here in three hours flat.

"Oh my God . . ." Bradley began to cry. Like the sun rising in the dark of the night, the image of a lone plane raining pure reason down on New York City while the most epochal social uprising that he had ever witnessed ascended to meet it burned the mist of doubt and fear clear out of his consciousness—until it all rolled right back into place a few seconds later, holding him down. Karen put her hand on his shoulder while Bradley’s whole body shook with sobs.

Hours later, Bradley waited for Radhika’s response, watching Madison Square Park from the top of the Times while unearthly sounds crackled forth from Low Plaza, at Columbia, where Meg had gathered followers old and new to do pollen and await the new era.

I don’t see police lights down there, Bradley said. But I see a crowd . . .

Right, Radhika said. They’re all moving into place, no lights or sirens necessary. People are still scared of cops, bosses or no bosses.

Radhika was in the back of a cab, dangling a cigarette out of the half-open window watching people running back and forth across Broadway by the dozen while the cab inched forward. The thing she had promised to Bradley about impersonating a cop was an extravagant lie, she had no intention of ever actually doing that, but she didn’t feel guilty because she had a