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futile resistance to the bitter night. A man
behind the counter stared back at Grigory as he passed; his eyes
were black and dull.
    Grigory pulled his
fur-lined collar closer about his neck as he turned the corner onto
Tenth Avenue— no, onto Brezhnev Avenue , he reminded himself—and the wind caught him square in the
face. If only it had been snowing, he might have been able to call
someone at the Committee and beg the evening off, to return home
and crawl back under the covers with Katya and watch whatever was
on the First Channel at this time of night.
    But it was not snowing, and he was
expected to show that he was made of tougher stuff.
    He cut the corner at Holliday Avenue;
though the rules were closely followed in Lewellingrad, and
information about rule-breakers a commodity of its own, he didn’t
think anyone would mind him jaywalking or cutting across the lawn
so late at night. And he loved seeing the People’s House from that
angle, where the limestone columns and sharp rooflines tugged at
each other like dancers.
    He let himself in through a
ground-floor entrance; and up to his office through the back
stairs. He sat at his desk in the dark for just a moment. He loved
this view. His office was in the attic, and he knew that was the
second-worst place to have been assigned (besides the basement),
but it didn’t feel like it, not with that view. Across the street,
illuminated from below with ground-level spotlights that lent its
concrete edifice a beautiful harshness, stood the Justice Center, a
strong Brutalist structure that predated the Revolution but
unintentionally presaged the Party’s arrival. The narrow pillars of
its façade seemed too small to carry the weight of its cantilevered
floors, much as the proletariat once seemed too small to carry the
weight of the capitalist’s yoke. But the building endured, and the
proletariat triumphed.
    Grigory turned on his small desk lamp
and fed his electric typewriter a piece of cheap paper. The
contrast between these two tools of his trade was jarring and
inescapable. The typewriter, a newer model produced by the
Industrial Combine, had memory functions and an auto-spell. It was
black and sleek and looked like it came from the future. It
represented all of the power and industrial might of the Party. The
paper, which was thin enough to trace through, had barely even been
bleached white. It had been designed specifically for use in a
typewriter—a sharpened pencil would tear right through it—and then
sent to a photocopier for reproduction. It had been over-engineered
to the point of serving a single, replaceable function, and was too
fragile to do anything else. Which also, in a way, represented the
Party.
    But am I the paper or the
typewriter?
    He shouldn’t have asked.
    *****
    Morning found him still hunched over
his small desk in his small office. The plaza was beginning to fill
with workers dressed in long coats and thick hats on their way to
work before the sun rose above the housing blocs on the east side
of the city center. Grigory watched them, half asleep, a dull ache
having settled in the middle of his back.
    A knock on his door startled him.
“Come.”
    The door opened with a creak. “Comrade
O’Sullivan, come to breakfast.” His friend Pyotr stood in the
doorway, his cheeks red from the walk to work. “There are duck
eggs.” Pyotr knew Grigory loved duck eggs.
    “ Yes, alright, Comrade. I
could use some coffee, too.”
    “ Burning the midnight oil
again?”
    “ It’s just the farm bill.”
Grigory tried to stretch out his back as he stood.
    “ They need something to
debate today, then.” Pyotr gave him a conspiratorial
wink.
    Grigory sighed as he raised his arm to
show Pyotr out of his office. There was always something for the
Party members to debate; there just wasn’t always a bill to ground
their debate in reality. As a legislative draftsman, it was
Grigory’s job to make sure that didn’t happen very
often.
    “ Yes, Comrade.