When Olanna O. Odum was promoted to standards editor at the Times, she found herself laughing. The job description had said they were looking for someone with “strong, sharp judgment” and “meticulous attention to accuracy.” Olanna cared little for these things. She wanted more money.
Olanna did not have a middle name, and did not have any fear of coming across any other, competing, Olanna Odums in the journalism industry with whom she might be confused. She merely found that the use of a middle initial made one appear more legitimate.
Olanna was quite concerned with appearing legitimate. Legitimacy meant cocktail parties, and apartments with a view, and large paychecks, and other forms of capital obtained in other, less legitimate ways, from other legitimate people.
This was how she met her husband. At a cocktail party for alumni of her university, those who were living in the city. The university produced people who had either gone on to win Nobel Prizes, or appear in Wikipedia articles for famous enslavers and Nazi eugenicists. The university would be proud of those alumni who belonged to either camp, so long as they were notable.
Olanna’s husband was Amanda’s husband when they’d met. He had attended her university five years before she did, so she did not recognize him. He was a recent law graduate, and said that he was planning to go into politics. She said that it would be quite pitiful if he failed. Something about campaigning was terribly gaudy.
He said that he would get sponsored by the right PACs, and they could purchase a primary election for him when he was ready. Olanna was intrigued by this. Amanda’s husband was intrigued by what having a diverse-looking spouse might add to his campaign. He articulated this to her, and Olanna said this was the incorrect usage of the word “diverse.”
The next year, Amanda’s husband became Olanna’s husband. She did not take his last name. She refused to start from the beginning with her bylines. He did not take her last name. He found the prospect of this to be emasculating. She found him to be ugly.
Olanna was of a good-looking sort. She exploited this in many places, but had never needed to do so in the workplace. She understood what was wanted by those big moneyed men who owned them, more so than anyone else seemed to. What the big men wanted was too dangerous to express over emails or documents. It would come across too vulgar in writing. They relied heavily on implicits, which were often either overlooked or misunderstood. But Olanna always understood.
The office resided in a tall glass building in Midtown Manhattan, where a few red specks of paint remained out front from a recent political demonstration. Olanna felt a sharp disdain for the facilities workers who failed to wash it out in its entirety. Each day she walked in and out of the office, expecting the workers to have come back and finished the job properly. After a week passed, she began to fear they never would.
Olanna did not like the sight of blood red paint. She liked the money she made and did not like for it to be announced as blood money. She was not a politician and she was not a military man. She did not call for missiles to be launched or bombs to be dropped. The buttons she pressed were on a keyboard, she deleted adjectives and changed verb tenses and replaced nouns with synonyms that carried different connotations. She was an editor, her hands were kept clean.
Her promotion had meant lots of more money. Olanna hated touching money, it was filthy. She once read online that bills and coins carried more microbes than a toilet seat. She carried only credit cards to evade this. Lots of 1s and 0s, numbers that moved to and fro. She had respect for Wall Street bankers like her father, whom she hadn’t spoken to in years. They had little reason to correspond. But she respected him. He, too, understood that they were merely pressing buttons on keyboards, pushing around characters on a screen.
When Olanna began with her standards editor position, she quickly learned the rules from the big moneyed men, and quickly enforced them. There were certain nouns which were taboo, but only in certain contexts. Words like children were only invoked for groups the big men liked. Words like terrorism, invoked for groups the big men didn’t like. Passive voice was preferred for one group, active voice used for the other. Olanna was a quick learner.
Her assistant was a quick learner, as well. Recently churned out from graduate school in New England. He had a large frame and large ears to match, which seemed to boost his attentiveness, Olanna was convinced. He knocked on her door each morning and asked if she wanted anything. Most days, black coffee and an aspirin.
This day, she requested he come inside her office, and close the door behind him. She needed him to do a few more tasks, one of which involved submitting a work order for facilities to come and clean the remaining specks of red paint outside.
He said he couldn’t remember seeing any red specks. She told him he should be concerned for his declining memory. He laughed and said he would be back soon, for the other tasks. Assistants like Olanna’s were often skilled writers and editors. They were willing to fetch coffee if it meant being able to tell people they worked at the Times. They were willing to do many things.
Olanna was the last to leave the office. She liked to postpone her arrival home. At the high-rise apartment in which she lived, she’d begun to receive renewed and unwelcome attention.
Olanna’s husband had an illegitimate child from a previous affair during his previous marriage. He was pestering Olanna about having a legitimate one together, with increasing frequency and urgency. He said that it was important, that people found politicians to be distrustful when they didn’t have at least two children, that it was un-American.
She had begun to half-heartedly oblige, to sleep with him again on occasion. Olanna didn’t care for children, but her husband was on the precipice of importance, anointed behind closed doors for a lengthy career in Congress. She aimed to extract this importance and use it to aggrandize herself. Or at least invest in the right stocks.
At work, the freelance journalists they liked to contract were complaining over email. More rules had been erected. This time: adjectives. They couldn’t call events “horrific” or “gruesome” or “unspeakable” unless they had occurred to approved groups. Restrictions were also imposed on other such charged adjectives, also depending on the subject and object.
This is what Olanna called them in meetings and confidential memoranda. “Charged” adjectives. Charged with what, she was unsure. But she knew the big men wouldn’t like them, unless used tactfully.
Olanna sometimes thought of Kant, and the categorical imperative. She’d studied this at university. It meant it was wrong to do things like lie or steal or kill, even if you thought you had a good reason for it, like lying to hide your child from a killer. Or stealing bread when starving. Olanna found this moral principle to be amusing.
One could always find a loophole, and lie without lying, kill without killing. Anything she wished to steal, she would attain in other ways. These were ways in which she kept her hands clean. No red specks.
Her assistant came into her office again, and had grown accustomed to closing the door behind him. Olanna wanted more black coffee, among other things. She preferred them quickly before the workday and then again, after. Assistants were supposed to be the first to arrive at the office, and the last to leave. Olanna’s assistant was not to leave until she was satisfied with his work.
Olanna’s husband was now expressing dissatisfaction with her lazy performances in bed. He seemed to believe her lack of ardor was considerably injuring their chances of conceiving. He said this, in fewer words. Olanna did not care to quote him.
They were arguing more now. He said if she could not hold up her end of the bargain, they would have to reconsider finances. She would have to start contributing to the bills. Olanna found this comical, her husband wasn’t exactly paying rent himself. He had inherited the apartment. He had inherited most of what he liked to boast about, including his admission to their alma mater.
He was still paying spousal support. He hadn’t signed a prenuptial agreement for his previous marriage, but had made sure he and Olanna signed one, right away. Olanna only cared to read titles and headlines, and did not have a lawyer at the time to parse through the fine print. She wouldn’t know the contents for certain until they divorced.
Back in the office, more rules. These had become more complex, they had evolved to integrate ratios. They had to maintain a strict 16:1 ratio, on the metric of reported death. For every death mentioned of one group, death of the other had to be mentioned 16 times. This became increasingly difficult. The 16 group had so few deaths to report, the 1 group, so many. But Olanna was paid a large check every month, one with many zeroes, transmitted through 1s and 0s, to manage difficult tasks like these.
She could contort sentences into grotesque shapes, ones that looked alien only because they defied what was human. They would sound mucky in her mouth and look unnatural to the eye. But the muck was something the big men approved of. It was a sign of utter subservience.
In the place of black coffee, Olanna received an email directing her to meet with HR at once. She had violated a policy of employee conduct. No, she had been accused of violating a policy of employee conduct. Or rather, she was being asked about having overstepped some personal boundary or another.
This would be a lengthy and tiring process. She would have to show up to many meetings and fill out lots of paperwork surrounding what she had done to another employee. EDIT: She would have to have some conversations with staff about what had happened to another employee. EDIT: She was happy to initiate some important conversations about the work environment.
Upon leaving the office, she saw that the red specks of paint still had not been scrubbed clean. She felt she might turn violent soon. She did not understand why this had not yet been resolved.
At home, Olanna’s husband came to complain again. He said that he knew she was seeing other men behind his back, that he could smell it on her, and also that he went through her phone.
[REVISE the previous paragraph]
At home, Olanna’s husband came to complain again. He revealed his obsessive tendencies and impulse to violate her right to privacy. She found him to be ugly.
Among other reasons, she wanted him to die. She knew he deserved it and though maybe she did, too, she couldn’t die. It would create a paradox. She was meant to report on other people’s deaths, to determine which ones were important enough to be named. These important people had legitimacy, legitimate by birth and not through work. Olanna worked hard for her legitimacy, it was never her birthright. But she had obtained it. Now she was to document death in ways which made it easier to proliferate death. It was her job. To determine who was brutally killed, and who had merely, somehow, died. To sign off on headlines for the beheadings of babies who had never existed. It was her job and she was paid well for it and she got to say she worked at the Times.
When it all got out she was not afraid. Her job was safe. She understood what the big men wanted. She could say whatever she desired to her staff, so long as their articles never, ever said the word genocide.
[DELETE the previous section]
Red specks would not perturb her. She was someone with strong, sharp judgment, and meticulous attention to accuracy. ◆
Homepage Image Credit: Bria Lauren, Aunt Yvette (interior), 2020, from Gulf Coast Summer/Fall 2021, Issue 33. 2
