Burning Down George Orwell's House (7 page)

After an hour, he arrived in a vast new kingdom where dozens of steamrollers and cement mixers, backhoes and dump trucks had gathered around the plywood skeletons of the new subdivision castles. The sound was wondrous: a gas-powered symphony of sonic textures and tone colors. Then it all stopped. There was some commotion, and a man in a hardhat lifted Ray into a pickup and drove him back to the house. The ride took two minutes. He had been so close to home the entire time. The stranger carried him under his arm like a sack of feed corn, ascended the porch, and knocked on the door. Ray's mother answered.

He didn't understand the conversation but understood all too well the worry he had caused. His father would hear about this. He was thrown into the tub, from where he heard his mother hollering at poor Becky because of his transgression.

Not long after that, seventy acres became forty and then later twenty. The civilized world metastasized onto the fragrant fields that had been his personal playground. Ray and
his new neighborhood friends rode their dirt bikes for hours, pissed on passing freight trains, set up their own hobo camp under the interstate. The houses and cars and people continued to encroach upon his childhood home until only a few acres remained and Ray's father fired his last workers and took a job at the factory two towns over.

Ray, a few years later, got accepted into the big land-grant university further downstate and it was during the second semester of freshman year that he first read
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. He picked it up for the first time while eating lunch, and it had grown dark by the time he finished the appendix. The book came as a revelation.

Orwell had predicted
everything
. It was uncanny. His invention of Big Brother had come to fruition in the form of a vast network of conjoined consumers and Ray now understood that he was one of them. How many times had he caught himself wandering through the mall and spending money as a form of entertainment? He surfed the web and purchased things he didn't need in order to distract himself for a few moments from all the bad shit on the evening news. He had been marketed to so constantly and so effectively that he stopped noticing it—until he read
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. Orwell had revealed how the world really operated. Winston Smith's ordeal at the hands of the totalitarian state stayed with Ray for weeks; he couldn't stop thinking about that terror and about how he might live his own life without becoming equally enslaved by the system. That was when he declared a
major in advertising, where his talent for invention—or his “genial wise-assery,” as his father called it—could be put to lucrative use. The decision was more than financial, however. Ray knew that some key to his self-preservation sat hidden among the now dog-eared pages of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.

The book's pseudo-academic appendix “The Principles of Newspeak” served as a detailed linguistic analysis of Big Brother's state-mandated language. By changing the official language to Newspeak, the government of Oceania sought to eliminate unnecessary and redundant words, to make the citizens' vocabulary smaller in order to limit what kinds of thoughts were even possible. The people couldn't revolt if they couldn't even conceive of the word
revolution
. Ray wanted to apply the same concept to advertising. Consumers didn't really want to make choices—they wanted the illusion of choice. By changing the way people thought, he could also alter their behavior, especially their spending habits. It sounded so easy, and it was.

A career in advertising would also allow Ray to escape the growing claustrophobia of small-town life for good. Living away from home in the dorms had rekindled his childhood curiosity. The world intimidated him with its vastness, but he still needed to see all of it. Every inch.

U
PON GRADUATION HE MOVED
to Chicago and in the fall he started his paid internship with the ad agency Logos. The company was known worldwide—it had been responsible
for some of the biggest campaigns in recent advertising history. They had popularized Japanese cars in the American-manufacturing Midwest and convinced vast swaths of the electorate to vote against their own best interests in a presidential election. They had proved that choosing one brand of shitty cola over another was a statement of personal identity. He read articles and highlighted the important info, which he then converted into bullet points. The work was tedious, but easy.

He lived in an otherwise Bosnian enclave on the far North Side. The local community center brought in a wild Balkan orchestra from time to time, and Ray learned how to dance the kolo, albeit with some moves of his own invention mixed in. After he had spent another weekend drinking too much and making out with any number of Yugoslavian girls with lots of
j
's and
z
's in their names who pretended not to understand his English, he crawled back into his cubicle one Monday morning to find an email summoning him to his manager's office. Someone in the elevator had no doubt smelled the homemade rakija still seeping from his pores and dimed him out. Was he still drunk? It was certainly possible. His clothes reeked.

His boss Theodore “Bud” Jackson was one of six executive vice presidents. Ray had gone out drinking with him a few times at a dive where a former Miss Ukraine tended bar. They watched her wash beer glasses for hours and that was far more entertaining than another stupid ballgame on TV. Bud's career had been a tumultuous one. He had started out as a specialist on mail-order marketing and on his way up the
corporate scaffold impregnated an entry-level data enterer who returned to her native Korea. Once a year she mailed him a portrait of his daughter, who he had never met in person. She had to be nine or ten already.

The US consumer market's evolution from analog to digital technologies had required Bud, like everyone else, to diversify his skill set. By age forty, he had become an early adopter of every new technology and helped Logos transition from a traditional ad house into a “creative communications company.” Under Bud's watch,
advertising
had become a bad word. Logos didn't have clients, it established strategic partnerships; it didn't make commercials, it created market-driven branding solutions. It was all very Orwellian—he and Ray thought a lot alike. Along the way, Bud also transformed himself into the industry's foremost snack-food guru. Every obese child in America who reached for a second fistful of chips did so in large part because of Bud's tireless efforts. He was losing a loud argument with the operating system of his computer when Ray poked his head in.

Ray's probationary internship period had apparently come to an end. Bud offered him a permanent and full time position, which he accepted without negotiation. The salary was an abstraction. At twenty-four years old he would make more money than his father did down at the plant—and without the daily exposure to known carcinogens. That afternoon, he moved from his cubicle into a slightly larger one.

The work turned out to be far less exciting than he had
envisioned. He spent months at a time rewriting the same two or three concepts for the same two or three small partners. A half-trained monkey could have done his job, but he kept his head down and churned out copy. Sometimes after work he would hit the bars with some coworkers or go on the occasional date and bring a girl home to make sweat angels in the bed sheets.

To keep himself intellectually stimulated at work, Ray taught himself new graphic design and web development languages. He played with open-source CGI programs like they were real-time strategy video games; from his cubicle, after hours, he built parody sites for real companies that were more effective and easier to use than their official sites. After that, he created a Big Brotheresque widget that could scan ten thousand status updates—chosen according to specific user demographics—and aggregate their keywords into a randomly generated ad for a product that did not exist, but which 0.78 percent of those people attempted to purchase. He received so many orders for a flowerpot full of dried elephant dung that he considered finding a company to produce them.

Sometimes he would attempt to pitch his concepts to Bud and the others, but most of the time he kept his mouth shut and received an annual 5 percent raise for his efforts. After a few years he had saved enough money to finagle a sub-prime mortgage on a small condo he couldn't really afford, but which offered an obscured view of Lake Michigan. He hated to leave the pretty Yugoslav girls behind, but it was an easy move otherwise. Everything he owned fit into his car—by far
the shittiest one in his new building's underground lot—and it just took one trip downtown. The only decor was a framed black-light propaganda poster in the living room. It featured a man's white face and the words
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU
.

A
T THE COMPANY
'
S ANNUAL
Winter Holiday Fiesta, during one of his many sallies for a drink, Ray bumped into some unfortunate woman so hard that she spilled her wine. The red shower floated airborne for an eternity before finding a place to settle amid her décolletage. He wiped at it with a napkin before realizing that he was feeling up a stranger—a stranger he had just doused in her own pinot noir. A nebula of stains darkened the front of her dress. She looked at Ray, her mouth agape, then looked down at her ruined clothes. They appeared to be expensive. The extent of the tragedy made itself apparent, and she pulled her shawl around herself. Her lips pursed into a slow smile and she laughed once, very loudly, and then threw her remaining wine at him. The stain didn't register on his holiday sweater, so she took another glass from the table and tried again. The splash caught him dead in the face. His eyes stung. He cried red tears that he tried to blot with a sleeve. The woman—a few years older than him and lovely despite the hideous stain—was laughing so hard she had to cram her shawl into her mouth. Neither of them could contain their laughter.

“I'm Ray,” he said.

“Helen.”

“Do you work here, Helen?”

“No, I came with one of your colleagues, but she seems to have disappeared.”

“I want to show you something.”

They shared a bottle of scotch on the roof and watched the falling snow, then warmed each other up in a cubicle over in Billing. She was an English professor at Chicago's most prestigious public university. Her PhD dissertation, as Ray understood it, had reevaluated Romantic-era conceptions of feminine identity and tied them to poetry's apparent origins in ancient mythology and goddess worship. Something like that. She recited from memory “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and by the time she got to:

Ray recognized something in himself that he could only think of as love. When, her stained party dress half-zipped and her underpants missing in action, she breathed

he knew that he wanted to marry her. She moved in a few days later.

Originally from the Virginia side of the Washington, DC, suburbs, Helen Bedford was the warmest, most viscerally kindhearted woman Ray had ever met. She was also the smartest person who had ever been nice to him. Being close to her felt good. She had maintained the lithe figure of her days as a competitive tennis player, but the angles of her face and shoulders and hips had softened ever so slightly over the years. She kept her hair cut short to better show off the premature but, she had said, well-earned grey strands. Ray never wanted to stop looking at her.

Every night after work during the following week Ray drove up to her place in Evanston to help her box all her books up. Her teacups and their attendant saucers matched the plates and bowls and serving dishes. The set had been in her family for two generations. She owned a gravy boat. The two of them sat on her living room floor and wrapped each piece in a pillow of bubble wrap and packing tape. Helen was absolutely gorgeous, but didn't seem to be aware of it. Ray couldn't keep his hands off her. “Stop it—I'm filthy,” she said and pulled him to the rug by his belt. He kissed every curve, every plane, every follicle he could find on her body, and he could find them all. The plastic sheets beneath them went
pop pop pop pop
.

They got married the following summer in a small service down at the parish his parents and sister belonged to and Ray
had to pretend that the mass was something other than a bald-faced farce masked in medieval superstition. Helen's family flew in to the nearest airport and took over an entire floor of a chain hotel next to the interstate. One of her wedding presents for him was a first edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
ordered from a bookseller in London. The gift was made even more remarkable by the fact that she had been secreting away small amounts of money—twenty dollars here, fifty there—since the week they met. Instead of a honeymoon, the happy couple stayed put in Chicago. Ray used some vacation days from Logos and they spent a week building forts out of sofa cushions and watching
The Red Shoes
and
I Know Where I'm Going!

In the fall, she became the acting chair of the Department of English, where she filled in for a sick colleague. Her new responsibilities often kept her at campus late into the night. She also taught two classes, which involved a great deal of preparation and grading, and sat on a number of different departmental committees. With more time on his hands, Ray sometimes went out drinking with Bud, but he also spent more late nights at the office. That was when he began to tinker in secret on the concept that would define his career in advertising.