Twisting Topeka Read Online Free Page B

Today and
every day.” Grigory closed his office door behind him. He didn’t
bother to lock it.
    *****
    Breakfast was pleasant enough. Many of
the Konza Oblast Party Committee members were in attendance, making
a show of greeting each other and the Committee staffers. Grigory
tried not to be disdainful of their fine suits and clear
eyes.
    Pyotr regaled him with the
latest rumors on each one as he walked by. This one had a new
mistress; that one’s youngest son received permission to go to
university abroad; this other one was mounting a campaign to run
for the Central Committee; that other one had secretly celebrated
Christmas ( Can’t you see his new
pocketwatch? Pyotr asked, pointing at the
man’s waistcoat.)
    But for all the pomp, the
Party-sponsored breakfast was a little meager. There had been duck
eggs, as Pyotr had promised, and bacon, and griddle-cakes, and some
strawberries that must have come from Mexico or somewhere. But the
thin and gray-skinned kitchen staff ensured no one—not even the
Oblast Secretary who came downstairs for a few minutes towards the
end—received more than a modestly-sized portion.
    Pyotr ate quickly and
excused himself; as a Liaison Officer for the Security Committee,
he had several things to finish up before the Party Committee began
its first meeting. “Just a few reports.” But they both knew reports
were never just reports.
    Grigory walked back to his office
alone. The People’s House was over a hundred years old, but the
former occupants had obscured its mural-covered hallways and built
offices out into the open spaces. The Party had been restoring the
building almost since taking up residence; but there was still a
lot of work to be done, and not a lot of room in the Oblast budget
to complete the work. A carpenter avoided Grigory’s glance as he
walked by.
    The sun had risen high enough to cast
Grigory’s office in a bath of orange light. He was about to step
into that pool of sunbeams, though it promised no warmth, when he
realized the draft bill was missing from his desk.
    He quickly closed his door and took
stock of his office. Everything was where it was supposed to be;
everything except the bill.
    Not that bill. Not that
one. Not today.
    It was a joke. He hadn’t
meant anything by it. He still had plenty of time to fix it. It was
just that in the early hours of the morning, when the bill was
close enough to completion that his sleepless-ly fuzzy brain
couldn’t choose between orneriness and celebration, he’d changed
some of the words. A lot of the words.
    It hadn’t been a bill on
the desk next to his typewriter when he left for breakfast. It had
been a manifesto .
An indictment. A rumination and a prescription. A scathing review
and a heartfelt sermon. It was everything he knew he shouldn’t say,
most of the things he knew he couldn’t say, and quite a few of the
things he knew he wouldn’t have said if he hadn’t been called in so
late on such a cold night.
    It wasn’t a bill. It was a
confession.
    Changing his name had been easy; Pyotr
had done it, too, and Katya had once been Catie. He could call his
state the Konza Oblast and its capital city Lewellingrad with
stumbling; he had learned the new street names and mostly got them
right the first time. He enjoyed looking through the House of
Prototypes catalogue that came each fall, if only because Katya
always told him he had the perfect frame for the newer styles. In
all the little outward ways that anyone who was paying attention
would notice, he had remade himself to fit squarely and securely
into the new order. But changing his beliefs had been
harder.
    Even after ten years as a Party
member, he wasn’t a communist. This deficiency hardly surprised
him; he had never cared for the parties that had once vied for
control of the state, and he hadn’t much cared in school when they
learned about the parties that had come before—although this newest
one had been smart to invoke the battle cries of Mary