The Educational Colony
(with apologies to F. Kafka)

I guarded the door.  I read the paper.  I smoked, paced.  Inside, they were signing the contract with the newly-hired  super and they didn’t want anyone to disturb them.  I could hear the machine, efficient, buzzing, and I could hear the low moan.  From time to time I cracked the door.  There were three of them working the machine.  The contract consisted of three main parts: the public, the personal, and the concealed; therefore, the machine was multi-tiered.  At the top ran the pens for the public.  There were settings for expert calligraphers, eighteenth century, Gothic.  The points of these pens gleamed under the overhead lamp.  Next came the personal.  These were more blunt, wider and thick with flesh.  Finally, came the concealed.  These pens were hidden, known only to the Machine Writer, a masked man who operated from behind a console.  One arrived at the post of machine writer through inheritance.  The current man is the twenty-first in a long line of talented ancestors. 

I could see the super’s head hanging out of the machine.  He was bald, wore Ben Franklin glasses and his eyebrows moved up and down constantly.  He said: “Dear me!” over and over, only there were times when he seemed genuinely happy to say it.  Then, his voice would drop, and he would sound seductive.  His eyes would roll around in his head at an alarming rate; I was afraid he was going to have an ischemic stroke, the bane of most new supers; but soon, he would squeal, giddy noises, some muffled, some issued from the corners of his mouth as the pens   moved—click, clack, click, clack--from person to public to concealed, each evoking a different response.  One of the board witnesses wiped the super’s brow with a handkerchief.  He had to stoop.  At eye level, he would look deeply into the super’s eyes; then he would stand back up and say: “Yes, I believe so!” and make an entry into a spiral bound notebook that had the super’s name on it.               

In the last century they attempted to reform the contract.  The Byzantine patterns, the polysyllabic vocabulary from another less efficient era—they tried to remove all these; but they failed.  More fixed than marble, more fragile than a reputation, the machine won out with the result that the new super’s contract sounded as bizarre and other-worldly as some theological treatise written in the scholastic era.    

I pulled my pilfered copy of the previous super’s contract out and tried to read one sentence: “Should said employee determine by his or any other’s cognizance (henceforth recognized as the parties of the acquiescent) that equal opportunity under board law is a worthy, but unreliable claim; and in so far as the realization of said idealistic notion is seen by the party of the implacable as an impediment to that which one may truly without hesitation describe as the wishes of said party, let it be henceforth recognized by all those whose opinions in this matter expect to be in conformity with and under guidelines of the previously prescribed statues in the State Code (q.v. B,112,47) that under no circumstances will said employee be permitted to call upon the above mentioned notion in the defense of his case.”   

My relief arrived.   

“I wonder if they’re past the ‘Should said employee determine’ clause yet, he asked.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“The board witnesses moan, too.”

Later the witnesses emerged, wiping their hands of blood.

“Did it go well,” I asked.

The head witness, an ancient man with the face of a fish and wheezing breath whispered:

“We have a signed contract.  Let the learning begin

Lance Levens

Email: Lance Levens

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