We made it everyone! On this, the 500th episode, a commissioned original from a Drabblecast favorite– Shaenon Garrity.
Episode Art: Bo Kaier
Your Local Repairers of Reality
By Shaenon K. Garrity
When Oreos came out in Red Bull flavor, Jojo decided it was time to take action. There were bigger problems in the world, obviously, but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Yes, that was how she would explain it to people.
“It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she told Philia over Indian takeout.
“So what are you going to do about it?” said Philia. “Write to the Oreo company? Or the Red Bull company? Tell them to stop combining their products into weird flavors? You could organize people, get a campaign going.”
“You think they’d listen?”
“No.” Philia picked onions out of her palak paneer. “But it might be educational.”
Philia taught fourth grade. Every year she made her students write to their congressperson about an issue that mattered to them. Most kids picked the environment or world peace. Once a kid picked Bigfoot research. Philia didn’t care what the issue was, as long as her kids learned how to advocate for it.
But she expected a little more of her wife, because she added, “There are bigger problems in the world.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s not even really a problem. You can just not eat the Oreos.”
“That’s not the point. The point is…it’s wrong, somehow. In a correctly functioning universe, Red Bull Oreos wouldn’t exist.”
“You need a purpose,” said Philia.
Which was true. Philia’s job filled her life with significance and left her too exhausted to think about Oreo flavors, but Jojo was on her third year at a design company that produced less and less design. What had started as a passably creative job had turned into a daily slog of explaining to management why the latest brief couldn’t be filled by typing keywords into an AI, then explaining to creative why they had to fix the hallucinatory mess the AI had produced when management went ahead and did it anyway.
“This town is full of people who think they know what other people ought to be doing,” Philia continued. “Grab a flier off a telephone pole and see where it leads.”
So Jojo did.
The telephone pole was in front of what had been the only art supply store in town, Philia’s go-to for colored pencils and stickers, before the rent went up and it became a permanently deserted building. Apparently it was more profitable to keep the space empty. Probably a tax thing. Jojo didn’t understand tax things.
The pole was feathered with fliers, but the one that drew Jojo read
REAL THINGS MATTER
MAKE THINGS MORE REAL
VOLUNTEERS WELCOME
with a number repeated on strips along the bottom. Jojo tore one off. She tapped the number into her phone, wondering as she did why she’d bothered to tear off a strip. She paused, unsure what to text. At last she wrote I’d like more reality, please.
The response came quickly. Thurs. starting @ 6. Same place.
Jojo was already out of her depth. What place? I’m new.
Same place you’re at now. With the cat on the roof. There’s a door around back.
Jojo looked up. A big plaster cat, orange paint faded to parchment yellow, crouched grinning on the roof of the former art supply store. Jojo hadn’t noticed it before.
Another text followed. Don’t worry. We have snacks.
A few hours later, when Philia was falling asleep on her lap over a saucy historical drama, Jojo’s phone dinged one more time. BYO booze/drugs. No smoking.
And that was all until Thursday.
***
There had once been a mural on the back wall of the former art supply store, but between wear, tear, and graffiti it was impossible to guess what it had been. The door was a stainless-steel security job. Jojo pushed on the handle and wasn’t sure she was happy when it opened.
Inside, in the sudden warmth, people worked on things that seemed to give off light. They mostly looked young–well, college young–or old–well, retirement old. Not many of them looked in between, like Jojo. The young and old had more volunteer time, she figured.
No one greeted her. Everyone seemed too busy. At a card table, a few people stared at a clutter of objects. Another group was knitting black-and-silver blankets. One woman slowly and carefully painted a leaf red.
Except where shelves had been pushed aside to make room for this work, the space looked about the same as it had when it was an art supply store. The same industrial shelves stood in rows. The walls were still spattered with paint. After picking her way around, Jojo found a table set with a bowl of oranges, a bucket of Trader Joe’s alphabet cookies,a pitcher of iced tea, and a twelve-pack of assorted craft beers. She set down the bottle of cheap red wine she’d brought.
“Hey, are you busy? I need a partner to tare the mirrors.”
Jojo turned. It was one of the college-young people, a girl with a wide mouth and a startling amount of hair. “I’m not busy,” said Jojo.
The girl led her to an area where sheets of glass had been set up on easels. “I’m Peanut,” she said. “Is this your first time here?”
Jojo nodded.
“Okay, so I’ll do the first marks. Sit there.”
Jojo sat in the indicated chair. Peanut took the standard artist’s position behind an easel. She uncapped a blue Magic Marker and peered at Jojo through the glass. “Hold still. I mean, not totally still, you can talk and stuff, but enough so I can trace you.”
Peanut began drawing lines on the glass, short lines and swooping lines. After a while, Jojo said, “Sorry, what are you doing?”
“Have you ever looked in a mirror and thought you looked wrong? Not like yourself?”
“Well, yes. I suppose it’s because of the light. Or because I’m getting old.”
“Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen something move that shouldn’t be moving?”
“Yes, but that’s just a trick of the–”
“Have you ever looked in two mirrors reflecting off each other, and in one of the reflections, way in the back, there was a hooded figure or something kind of like a raccoon?”
“No!”
“Well, all those things are caused by reflections going off bias. It’s natural for them to get a little disjointed over time, but these days, you know…” Peanut added another mark to the glass. “This is a simple way to anchor your image, so your reflection stays you. What made you come here?”
Jojo grabbed on to the part of the conversation that made sense. “Red Bull Oreos.”
Peanut thought about it. “Yeah. They’re not very real, are they?”
“How’d you get involved?”
“Okay, so? I was a camgirl. You know what that is?”
“I’m not that old.” And into girls, Jojo didn’t add.
“The site I was on didn’t allow full nudity, so it was pretty tame, just lolling around in lingerie to put myself through college. The classic American story, right? Then the algorithm changed to block overtly sexy stuff from showing at the top of the feed, so suddenly lingerie was a liability. But, here’s the thing, swimwear wasn’t. You see where this is going?”
“I think so…”
“Just like that, all the camgirls switched from underwear to bikinis. Same amount of skin, no too-sexy penalty. Until the algorithm caught up. The new rule was, swimwear only made it through if it was worn in a pool.”
“So…you all got pools?”
“Wading pools, yeah. We were all sitting in empty wading pools squeezing our tits. Then the algorithm figured that out and added that there had to be visible water. And it was then, trying to do a burlesque show in a Dora the Explorer wading pool while holding a pitcher of water, that I had a revelation.”
“What was the revelation?”
“That this was stupid.” Peanut licked her thumb and wiped a line of ink from the glass. “More to the point, it wasn’t real. I wasn’t a person anymore, I was like a robot or an alien trying to act like a person from incomplete information. I was a thing the algorithm burped up. What even was the algorithm? Who came up with this? That was when I realized reality was breaking down.”
“So you stopped being a camgirl?”
“No, I found a channel where I could take my clothes off for money like a decent person. You ever stripped?”
Jojo snorted with laughter. “I was never the right shape for that.”
“You’d be surprised. The thing is, I think sex work makes you more real. But people will get freaked out and try to make you less real for doing it. You gotta be careful. I think I’ve got your image pretty well anchored. See what you think.”
Jojo got up and walked around the easel, even though she could see through the glass. Peanut had traced a pattern from her shape. It didn’t look like a human figure, but somehow it looked like Jojo.
“Now do me,” said Peanut.
***
Next Thursday, Jojo named the nameless mushrooms.
“New fungi are discovered all the time,” said Conrad, one of the chatty seniors sitting around what had once been the store checkout counter. They had opened Jojo’s cheap wine and were in a merry mood. “They’re given scientific names, but that’s not the same as being called something.”
Ti, enthroned in a weedy armchair, held up a photo. “Kirin’s Footprints. What do you think?”
“If we remember it, it’s a good one,” said Conrad.
Jojo sifted through the pictures. Some were photos or printouts. Others had been cut from magazines. There were a few slides. She held a slide up to one eye. “This one’s fuzzy and brown. Teddy Bear? Cappuccino?”
“Cappuccinos and capuchin monkeys,” said a tiny old woman perched on a stool, “are both named after the Capuchin friars due to their coffee-colored, hooded robes.” She smiled beatifically and returned to staring at a large picture of an unsettlingly phallic mushroom.
“You see?” said Conrad. “One name links a monk, a monkey, and my afternoon coffee. If we find the right names, we plant deep roots. This is groundwork.”
“Teddy Bear’s Table,” said Jojo.
“I like that!” said Ti.
“It doesn’t really make sense, though.” Jojo squinted through the slide again. “Teddy bears are fuzzy and brown. They wouldn’t have fuzzy brown tables.”
“Names don’t have to make sense. Does your name make sense?”
“No.”
Ti held up a photo. “What about this one?”
“Is that really a mushroom? It’s jet black!”
“Striking, isn’t it? Black outside, white inside. What should its name be?”
“Not Oreo.” Jojo thought. “Dragonmallow?”
“A distinct possibility,” said Conrad.
“What’s the point of coming up with these names,” said Jojo, “if we’re the only ones who will know them?”
“Tell people!” said Ti.
“Make them memorable,” said the little old lady.
“If they’re true names,” said Conrad, “the mushrooms will know.”
***
“Do I have something on my face?” said Philia.
“No,” said Jojo. “I’m just looking at you. Seeing your lines.”
“Getting old and wrinkly, huh?”
“Not that. It’s like…your silhouette, sort of. It’s something we do at the art store.”
“I don’t understand anything you tell me about that place.”
“Me neither. But do you ever feel like the world around us is getting more…fake, somehow?”
“Everything but you.”
“Aww.”
“And my kids.”
“What do you do to get a grip on reality?”
“Assign construction-paper collages. Few things are as real as construction paper.”
***
Jojo spent a few Thursdays with the naming crew. Then Jomel, who carried an air of authority for someone who looked maybe sixteen, asked to borrow her for the crew that remembered days.
“You take a day,” he explained, squatting in a pile of deaccessioned library books, “and find one memorable thing about it.”
“Just one.”
“That’s all it takes to prove that day existed.”
An old man with a stormy gray Afro handed Jomel an index card. He glanced at it, nodded, and filed it in a tin box.
“Here.” He gave Jojo a card from another box. On it was typed DECEMBER 28 1879.
“I just have to find something that happened on this day?”
“That’s right.”
Jojo picked through the books. Many were old encyclopedias and almanacs, the kind that had still been common when she was a kid but weren’t seen anymore outside of library reference rooms, if there. There were history books, sort of. Notes on the Origin of Petroleum in Russia. Records of the Beefsteak and Chowder Club, Bangladeshi Branch, 1870-1879. Footprints in Fresno: An Ambulator’s Account. Sewing Machines: Their First Hundred Years.
“We could do this faster on the internet,” said Jojo.
“You don’t want to go fast,” said a woman sitting on a pile of encyclopedias, poring over The Story of The Akron-Canton Airport. “If you take your time, you’ll remember. Besides, the internet’s been losing reality. You can’t get reliable history there anymore.”
“What happens if a day gets forgotten? We lose the history on that day?”
“That, sure, but besides that history gets less real. You feel it, don’t you? The past seems wiggly? Causes disconnected from effects?”
“Remembering helps fix that?”
“Lots of things help. Are you one of the ones who came here because you’re a helper, or because you feel helpless?”
Jojo’s gut twitched. “Helpless. I think my wife’s a helper.”
The woman nodded. “I was in your boat. I’m a clerk at Walgreens,” she added, as if this explained volumes.
“I’m not sure what I do anymore.”
“Today I freed the toothpaste.”
“The toothpaste?”
“They locked the toothpaste up in one of those plexiglass jails. Half the stock is under lock and key now. And, you know, a customer has to buzz for us, and we come and open up the jail and let the shampoo or the multivitamins or what have you out.”
“Yeah. I’ve had to do that. Shopping, I mean–I’m not a clerk.”
“Today they locked up the toothpaste. And I thought, this isn’t real. Or if it is, reality’s gotten out of whack. So during my shift I unlocked the plexiglass door and let people pick out their own toothpaste if they darned well wanted. Aha!” She stabbed the book with a finger. “The day Kukai entered samadhi! Does anyone have a pen?”
Jomel handed her a pen. “Good find, Maebry. How’re you doing, Jojo?”
“Still looking.”
“Don’t despair. The nineteenth century was busy.”
“No, wait.” Jojo’s heart skipped a beat, something she didn’t think hearts did, and certainly not while reading a book entitled Great British Railway Disasters. “On December 28, 1879, the Tay Rail Bridge in Scotland collapsed, killing 75 people. It’s the fifth deadliest train accident in British history. Um, that part might be out of date, it’s an old book.”
“You can leave that out,” said Jomel. “Just jot down a sentence or two about the bridge collapse.”
“A man named William McGonagall wrote a poem about it that some people considered the worst poem ever written.” Jojo read for a while, stifled a laugh, kept reading. “Sorry. People died. But listen:”
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
“That’s amazing,” said a girl digging through encyclopedias nearby.
“I thought it was 75 lives,” said Maebry.
“I suppose he was as good at math as he was at poetry.” Jojo smiled down at the book. “More people need to know about this. I want to know if it’s still the worst poem, or if someone’s written a worse one.”
“This is why we do the work,” said Jomel.
“Tomorrow,” said Maebry, “I’m going to open all the merchandise jails.”
“You’ll get fired.”
“I’ve been fired before. I’ll be fired again. At least getting fired is real.”
***
At work, midway through an explanation of why the company’s AI couldn’t generate accurate wall-art maps from no data, Jojo said, “No, this is no good.”
“That’s what we’ve been discussing,” said the executive in charge of project rollout.
“I mean this whole job is no good. It’s not real. I was doing real work when I started, but at some point it turned into…this.”
“Don’t get existential on me,” said the exec. “This needs to be resolved by end of day Friday.”
“No it doesn’t. Nobody needs this. Nobody needs a website to generate a map of their vacation with branded icons at each site they visited, then sell it to them as a framed print. If they really want a map, they can make it themselves, which by the way is more than the AI can do.”
The exec’s lip twitched. “There’s been an impression for a while that you’re no longer fully engaged with our mission.”
“Not fully, no.”
“There may be another workplace environment for which you’d be a better fit.”
“Maybe.”
“Is there any chance you can get the map thing resolved before you go?”
“It’s literally impossible, Susan.”
The exec sighed. “Oh well. At least I can blame it on you on your way out.”
***
Getting fired was real. Unfortunately, paychecks were also real, and suddenly Jojo didn’t have any.
“In a perfect world, a family of four could live on a teacher’s salary,” said Philia, “but we live in a fallen world and I can’t support two women and a fern.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” said Jojo. “Reality is set up all wrong.”
“I’m not disagreeing, but we still have to live in it.”
Jojo braced herself for a future salty with ramen dinners. “There may be an opening at Walgreens.”
***
The art store was overrun with chickens. Someone had set up a pen for them, but they kept getting out. “Watch out for their poops,” said Ti. “They’re bigger than you’d expect.”
“Why are there chickens?” said Jojo. “Never mind, why do I ask why there’s anything.”
Peanut was checking her phone. “There’s a reality storm on the way. The whether reporters in Vacaville are telling us to shore up the levees.”
“Is that ‘whether’ with an H and no A?”
“I know, it’s corny.”
“What’s a reality storm?” Jojo asked.
“They come in all shapes and sizes,” said Ti. “Some happen naturally. Some are deliberately started by our opposite numbers.”
“Our what?”
“The groups making things less real. You didn’t think Red Bull Oreos happened on their own, did you? I think you should catch that chicken.”
Jojo scooped up a speckled hen that was strutting by, innocent of the world. Or she tried to scoop it up. In a breath, the chicken wasn’t where it had been. It scooted and darted, stopped and started, burbling the whole time. After a long and embarrassing chase, Jojo worked out a method of coming at it without looking like a hawk about to swoop. The chicken settled down as soon as she picked it up. It was softer than it looked.
Jojo found Ti talking to the knitting team. “What do you want with it?”
“With what?”
“The chicken.” Jojo jiggled it in her arms. It went brrk.
“Put it in the pen, I guess. It’s not for me. It’s for you.”
“For me?”
“For centering. Chickens are extremely real.”
The knitters nodded. They were piecing together what looked like a star chart knitted into an enormous afghan.
“Ti, there’s something I’ve been wondering.”
“Mm?”
“Who runs this?”
“This cell, or the whole operation?”
“Either one.”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody.”
“Or everybody. Yes, let’s say everybody.”
“Yeah, okay, it’s a collective, but who organizes it? Who came up with these…activities?”
“Different people. We figure out things that work and pass them along.”
“But who answered my text when I joined?”
“I don’t know. Probably Peanut. She’s always on her phone. Peanut!”
Peanut walked by, working a cat’s cradle. “Yeah?”
“Did you send Jojo the welcome text?”
“I sent her three welcome texts. I forgot to tell her about the snacks, and then I forgot to tell her about the booze and drugs.”
Jojo didn’t want to ask the next question. “Ti, are we doing anything here, or are we just a bunch of crazy people?”
“I’ve thought about that,” said Ti, “and I have two answers. Which one do you want?”
“Both.”
“Smart. Answer one: it’s better to do anything, no matter how mad, that adds beauty and kindness and meaning to the world, than to give in to apathy and despair.”
“And answer two?”
“We’ll find out how real all this is when the storm hits.”
***
On Wednesday morning, as she scrolled through sad job listings, Jojo got a text. High noon. Be with the realest thing you’ve got. Practice what you’ve learned.
Is this Peanut? Jojo texted. But there was no answer. She checked the time. Eleven-thirty.
She called Philia. “Can I meet you for lunch?”
“Why?”
“Reality storm.”
A pause. “It should be all right. The staff knows you. But I’m on cafeteria duty.”
Philia had taken their car to work, so Jojo biked to the school. She watched reflections in store windows flicker by. She passed clusters of mushrooms and called out their names.
She parked her bike and signed in at the office. Eleven-fifty. She could feel a chaotic energy building, but maybe that was just elementary school.
Down in the cafeteria, Philia had made her a tray. “You lucked out. It’s nacho day. Care to explain what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen in about five minutes.” Philia picked at her nachos. How real were nachos? The chips were pretty real but she wasn’t sure about the cheese.
A shout went up. Kids were running, knocking over chairs. Philia was up in an instant, striding after them. Some kids were pooling around the cafeteria windows, while others ran straight out the door. Jojo craned her neck over the diminutive crowd. The soccer field had been invaded by chickens.
She went outside. The soccer field was beyond redemption. Kids were chasing chickens, kids were chasing kids, chickens were relishing freedom. The laughter and squawks mixed with the honking of car horns in the street, where Ti and the knitters were holding up traffic with a display of their knitted celestial map. Ti was holding an astrolabe and directing its position.
Philia clapped a hand on Jojo’s shoulder. “Jojo. Are you part of this?”
“No! Well, yes, but I didn’t know they’d do it. Or at least, I didn’t know they’d do it here. Oh no, I have to do something too!”
And the reality storm hit.
Nothing changed. Everything changed. Were colors dimmer? Were shapes flatter? Was there a plastic taste in Jojo’s mouth? For a moment the school was gone, had been gone for years and replaced by nothing. Then it was a highway, what were they doing standing in a highway? And then there had been a war.
“Something really is happening, isn’t it?” said Philia.
Jojo took Philia’s hand. That helped. She took a breath. That helped too. But then there was a moment when nothing meant anything, not the chickens and not the stars, the school had no history and the children had no names, and Jojo knew she wouldn’t like whatever was coming to inhabit that nothing.
She took another breath and shouted as loudly as she could.
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
Philia squeezed her hand. She remembered all the other people working to give the universe meaning. She reached out with her free hand, touched the foundation of reality, and gave it a little spackle.
Then color returned and kids were chasing chickens. “Help me clean this up,” said Philia.
***
The next day was Thursday. Jojo went to the former art supply store, but it wasn’t an abandoned building anymore. Of course it wasn’t–why would a landlord leave a space like that empty? It was an art gallery, and it was open late for a reception. Jojo went in, drank cheap wine, and examined a sculpture of an unsettlingly phallic mushroom.
“We always showcase local artists,” said a woman in whitewash-spattered jeans. “In this show, all the art is of native plants and fungi. This one is called Grandmother’s Dildo. Don’t look at me, I didn’t name it.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Jojo. “Tell me, does this gallery need a director?”
“We’re a small operation, and we already have one.”
“Ah.”
“We could use an assistant director, though.”
***
Jojo looked for Peanut and Ti and Jomel and the rest of the group. She visited all the Walgreens in the area. But she didn’t see them. Maybe they’d moved on to another place where reality needed shoring up. Or maybe she wasn’t looking in the right places.
At Walgreens, she noticed that Red Bull Oreos were gone. But pumpkin spice had been added to Slim Jims, so reality wasn’t entirely safe.
For a while, she was too busy at the gallery to think much about it. She painted and matted and framed, and she usually worked the closing shift. She got to know a lot of artists. She started sketching for the first time in years.
One evening, sitting at the front counter alone, she found herself staring at a fresh sheet of paper. She didn’t want to sketch. She needed to do something else. She selected a Magic Marker.
REAL THINGS MATTER
MAKE THINGS MORE REAL
VOLUNTEERS WELCOME
She cut tabs on the bottom and wrote her number on them. She went outside and pinned it to the telephone pole. Then she went to the back room to see if they had any construction paper.
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