David Thayer

I went back to page one of The Working Dead to tighten, and eliminate some characters to bring the story up. Part of the plot involves a decree of nationalization by the government of a country that I chose at random, or so it seemed back when I plotted this out. That it’s Venezuela seems like I’m piling on the Pat Robertson bandwagon, poking Hugo Chavez in the ribs with the Big Stick of downhome diplomacy, but that isn’t why I chose Venezuela. A long time ago I had a minor work involvement with the Guri Dam down there, wherein Henry, then my boss, informed me that he was flying to Caracas ( Henry had a very large office with windows and we sat in a huge bullpen. He was an Ivy League fellow who wore garters on his socks and he’d ask people to come in to see him using me as the interlocuter. Henry once asked me to send Peter in, and when I told him he was on his way, Henry said, “On his way? On his way where?” For months Henry believed that Peter had gone somewhere, probably Venezuela, and he would scold me, reminding that he asked me to “handle” Venezuela, not Peter.)

That’s why I chose Venezuela.

We had a guy from Brazil in our unit, so he handled Brazil. Sometimes we’d all be laughing in the bullpen when an executive would appear demanding to know who handled Venezuela. That was me. They’d point to me. Even on the subway, or reading the paper I was handling Venezuela. A guy in the next row was from Buenos Aires so he handled Argentina, while a lady from Honduras handled that. I had the Guri Dam and that was in Venezuela. I had the Itaipu Dam on the Parana River between Brazil and Paraguay, and then the Bandama River dam which I think is in the Ivory Coast. The guy in front of me had studied Spanish at a university in Italy and spoke fluent Russian. Every third phone call to our company was from his ex-wife, and it fell to me to make excuses why he couldn’t come to the phone. Around this time Henry came to believe there was someone living in his office.
Whenever something went wrong Henry would ask me to explain it to him: why doesn’t geothermal power work? It works in Iceland, I said. Henry was surprised and asked me to handle Iceland, maybe do a write up so he could present his findings to The Board. Generally though, these sessions ended on a down note. He once asked for a list of countries shaded pink in the Rand McNally World Atlas. Poor little Iceland was pink. So was Peru. Venezuela was green. The Amazon was purple, the world was flat. We got paid every two weeks. We handled things.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 7:29 am and is filed under Working Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.