Robot Butt contributor Michael A. Ferro‘s novel TITLE 13 (Harvard Square Editions) is available now, and we’ve got the synopsis and a fresh excerpt for you right here:
Heald Brown might be responsible for the loss of highly classified TITLE 13 government documents—and may have hopelessly lost himself as well. Since leaving his home in Detroit for Chicago during the recession, Heald teeters anxiously between despondency and bombastic sarcasm, striving to understand a country gone mad while clinging to his quixotic roots.
Trying to deny the frightening course of his alcoholism, Heald struggles with his mounting paranoia, and his relationships with his concerned family and dying grandmother, all while juggling a budding office romance at the US government’s Chicago Regional Census Center. Heald’s reality soon digresses into farcical absurdity, fevered isolation, and arcane psychological revelation, hilarious though redoubtable in nature. Meanwhile the TITLE 13 secrets remain at large, haunting each character and tangling the interwoven threads of Heald’s life, as the real question looms: Is it the TITLE 13 information that Heald has lost, or his sanity?
—
HEALD WOKE UP with a pain in his ass and in his head. He rolled off his futon and rose to his feet, then set about the arduous task of assembling himself for yet another day at work. Heald had long since ceased folding and unfolding his futon back to its proper sitting position each night, opting instead to nestle himself into the Heald- shaped crater that had formed in the cushion. Gazing at it lovingly now, he wished that he could climb back in, despite it being about as comfortable as a sack of broken hammers. But no: he had important government work to do. Moreover, he needed to earn money. With all the turmoil in the Department of Commerce, civil servants had been dropping around him like the flies in his sink, but he would strive to avoid their fate.
A stink filled the air that Wednesday morning as Heald walked to the Brown Line L stop. It was just hot enough this time of the morning that each of the city’s downtown dumpsters had their putrid contents heated to a slow simmer that allowed for peak offensive smells. The aroma invoked a number of strong feelings and emotions within Heald, many of which were violent and dangerous when coupled with the groggy aftermath of alcohol- induced sleep and a forced to too-early rising. Olfactory molestation should be a crime in Chicago, punishable along the lines of grand larceny, for Heald had certainly been robbed of his joy.
Among the usual suspects, from dirty diapers filled with copious amounts of baby discharge (How does a tiny human make that much feces? Heald wondered), to the plethora of cultural dishes that could only come from a melting pot town such as Chicago—everything from curdled Indian yogurt coated in yeast to spoiled sausages down on Maxwell Street that may or may not have actually already passed through a human to the strange fruits from the Far East that never seemed to ripen yet somehow could catch an unbelievable price at the Treasure Island food market—all of it, while inspiring Heald to clothespin his nose, somehow made him grin. He stepped up the platform to the raised tracks of the Brown Line.
As the train rolled Heald ever closer to his office, he sat among the other riders but felt entirely isolated. He supposed that everyone feels as if they are trapped in a bubble at some point. While in that bubble, sitting and mulling over their precarious situation, the rest of the world keeps on revolving as if it has gone on and forgotten about them entirely, for it has. The individual is left to float above the planet while they watch from high above, delirious, as everything appears to flow along with minimal effort underneath them, like a stream through a low basin after a steady rain, clearing clouds above.
These bubbles can be filled with items of a pecuniary nature. They may also be filled with heartache, poverty, anger, booze, oppression, grief, madness, or perhaps any combination of the like. The helpless passengers inside feel condemned to their bubbles, powerless to influence the individual fate that each one eventually floats toward, regardless of the hope for something else on the inside. Each of us—each thing crying out and grasping for a sharp object to pierce our bubble with—knows that deep down, outside of our own little sphere, it is the same existence and circumstance all around the world. We cocoon ourselves in these things, eventually settling within them as our homes, thinking they are singular or perhaps unique to us, but we share them inside and out with everything that surrounds us. We own our bubbles—our hives of emotion—and there are entirely too many of them. If we do break free of them, we could lose them forever, and as much as we implore ourselves to truly believe that this is our sincerest wish, in reality, we are far too terrified of falling and landing within someone else’s cocoon…someone else’s world that might not share the comfort and familiar anxiety of our own. There is no parallel universe that we seek, no other way
to see or feel something, because forever and now is the only way it can be done in our minds. Our existence is within one large lottery ball machine, our bubbles feverishly blowing around, bouncing comically off one another; the machine is filled to the brim with our individual worlds, and while we pray and we hope for some divine interposition to draw us near the top for selection, what is the prize?
The train screeched to a stop and Heald’s bubble popped. His office was in the Jomira Transportation Center, the central travel hub of the city’s downtown area, just across the street from the famous Union Station. (Is there a Union Station in the world that isn’t famous?) Workers came from Chicago’s suburbs and as far as Wisconsin and Indiana, all on the Midwest’s largest rail system, the Midway Line. Between Jomira and Union Station, over one hundred of the massive double-decker trains came in every morning from across the land to drop off the droves of businessmen and women to their hives for the day.
The first two floors of Heald’s building, along with train platforms themselves, were a monument to American consumerism, with all manner of high-end coffee shops and juice chains and sausage-and-egg-patty pushers who were desperate to feed you the pork while you fed them the bacon. The building also housed two corporate newsstands, both owned by the same company, each even sharing the same name and sign, just one floor apart. The sad state of the world seemed to be suggest that soon everything printed would fade away.
This truly disappointed Heald. How funny it would be, he thought, to have some future alien race come to our unpeopled planet to find that all physical records of man’s social life had vanished over a relatively short period, as if we had decided to start covering our tracks for some reason after the turn of the twenty-first century. As if humans had grown so embarrassed, perhaps even disgusted and disheartened with their own actions, that we collectively decided to no longer keep physical evidence and just left everything to drift into the electronic winds—no material proof, no eyewitness to corroborate the mistakes that we made and chose to ignore. Those aliens would find Plato’s writings, the great works of Shakespeare and Homer, even the proud documents of the founding fathers, but please, for the love of their alien gods, let them not find evidence of our social media accounts…
The end of man, Heald assured himself, would not go down in history books, because there would be no books in the physical world for it to go down into. It would happen live and through electronic news feeds, stored away into some server warehouse, somewhere that might not make it through the crisis. All of humankind’s greatest and most wondrous achievements throughout history will have existed in some form of print or permanence, one way or another, yet, the crux of humanity’s slip into non-existence from sheer disregard for thought would likely forever be lost in an electronic grid, some inaccessible data storage container or a server locked away in a chilly warehouse deep in some remote region of Idaho.
