Bunker Cleaning Lady by Franny French

They only had time to perfect the robot dog, and the robot car, and the robot bank teller, which still eyed people like me with suspicion. And the robot mail carriers, whose knee socks would not stay up. And the robot Walmart greeters, whose human accents weren’t much better than the old GPS bots that put the emphasis on the wrong syllable (“Take a left onto ML … K-Junior Boulevard”). And the robot armed-agents-of-the-state, which, it’s weird, actually did resemble pigs. Before the outside air became unbreathable, they never got around to perfecting the robot house cleaner. That left them no choice but to save people like me, laborers who more and more had gotten used to things not working in our favor.

We, the working class, the not rich, had long known we were on our own in this world. Some of us channeled that into creativity. Prior to living in this bunker, I was employed by a corporate cleaning service. Each day, before work, I rose at 5am to chip away at a play that I’d thought would change the world. That’s when I was an optimist—the first time I was—and refused to sink beneath the words of pessimistic friends parroting sentiments like, “The Earth will still be here, but human beings will die out. And I’d be OK with that.” I would get on my soap box and counter with, “Of course humans will eventually cease to be, but that’ll be a natural thing, and it won’t happen for many thousands of years. But this? Death from human-made, capitalist-driven climate change? It’s a murder-suicide. We must stop the ruling class from wrecking our planet and destroying us all!”

But the capitalist powers-that-be kept a lot hidden from us; things were so much worse than we knew. I tried not to blame myself for having believed that we could overthrow these assholes and improve conditions for the betterment of humankind. Fresh out of hope in the bunker, I viewed life as just a sort of waiting game. My dreams seemed to mock me then. I consoled myself imagining the last thing I had any claim to: my own death.

The rich could not stand the bunkers. It wasn’t worth asking them just what the fuck they could have been thinking when they decided, back when you could still breathe outside, that living underground was an awesome, two-thumbs-up choice. Obviously, it wasn’t. Sure, they had “skylights” that simulated sunshine. Yes, they had water from aquifers they’d captured way back in the 1980s. True, they had stocked larders of food, but it began running out. They did not, could not, understand that, like the rest of us, they were going to have to switch to eating 3D-printed food.

Allergic to the obvious, I guess, there was just so much the rich had not anticipated, like that all the cows, chickens, pigs, deer, and fish would get poisoned and die. Or that, down in the bunkers, claustrophobia would set in. Some of them lost their grip, as in, crawling-the-walls freaking out. One trillionaire went into a crying, screaming rage he never came back from when he finally figured out that, no, he would not be able to ride his horse in the countryside. The shock made all his hair and fingernails fall out. His wife flipped her mind upon the realization that she would never again be able to see the sky. They shared a beam in the ceiling from which they hung themselves. It sounds strange, but I don’t think any single member of the yacht class thought about the fact that bunkers don’t come with views. Of course, I was not wealthy and didn’t choose that place, but even I had to meditate and deep breathe just to stay halfway sane down here. Not that my mental wellbeing was a focus for any of them. I barely had the luxury to consider it myself.

During work breaks, the other bunker cleaning ladies and I would meet up in one of the tunnel coffee shops, sipping on 3D printed coffee that needed a lot of 3D cream and 3D sugar to mask the notes of chemicals that left you wondering if you were being slowly poisoned to death. I couldn’t help but feel sometimes like that might be a good thing—not the slow part, just the relief of death. The 3D cocktails we consumed at the tunnel bars on payday weren’t great either, but they had something in them that made you feel, if not drunk, then at least drunk adjacent. It was a balancing act: Get tipsy enough to be able to have a laugh over what life had become, but don’t have that one too many that would leave you severely maudlin remembering all the people you knew who asphyxiated above ground when the parts-per-million got so high that a coal-like substance formed in the air.

Most of the time, it was pretty chilly down in Bunkerland County, as we called it, but in some of the lower pockets, you felt the geothermal whoosh coming up from the center of the earth, where certain rich twit buckaroos, more than you would suppose, insisted on exploring, and then—go figure!—got boiled to death. I had to keep reminding myself not to use logic and reason to try to get in the minds of people who have none.

Another thing the trillionaires had not anticipated when there was still time was that there would be no art there. Some of them tried to make their own. I shook my head in disbelief at how good it wasn’t. Yet people like me, when asked, were compelled to fib and affirm some greatness in it. This is where they wanted our opinions, and we gave them false praise and sometimes (though very carefully) a little constructive criticism—only when they asked; and we all knew they did not actually want a real answer. But if you landed it right, you could critique their art and still hang onto your job. The trick was to make them feel grateful while satisfying that little thing in yourself that wanted the art to not suck so bad that it made it hard to find the words for pretending.

My “artist” boss made these shoebox-sized dioramas of scenes from her privileged childhood. Her nostalgic self-expression did not even rise to the level of decent kitsch. Even her rich friends couldn’t relate, as if they didn’t know they were seeing their own narrow lived experience in those depictions of girl with boarding school friends, girl alone in limousine, woman getting injected with Botox. My boss churned out dozens of pieces in a kind of mental frenzy, each one just sitting there, gathering dust and silence, looking vaguely like scenes from bad theater. I pretended to like them because I couldn’t afford to get fired and possibly end up homeless in a bunker hallway or, worse, locked up below in the debtors’ prison, dangerously close to too much geothermal heat.

Meanwhile there was art being made in the bunker, but not by the rich. It was the underground art of the underground, if you will, and we did not share it with the trillionaire class. Nor did we share our stories. And I swear to God, the rich lose their gray matter also from a lack of good tales. I was happy to “starve them out,” culturally speaking, to keep art secret from them. Aside from the acquired “masterworks” and indigenous artifacts they packed in their scramble down to mole country, they never thought to think they might need ongoing art to survive; like, if you want theater, you need a playwright and some actors to put it on. But if I’d had time to care I wouldn’t have. I was in a bunker. I was a cleaning lady in a bunker. After my boss and her husband stank up the bathrooms and I’d go in to clean, I couldn’t even open a window. So, you can imagine how, just based on the smell of their shit, I had no sympathy for them.

At work, I didn’t bother to speak unless spoken to. Within earshot of me, my boss voiced to her wine friends that my silence was a golden quality. The truth is, unless I was bullshitting her about her dioramas, I didn’t care to converse with her. None of it mattered anyway. Walking through the sunless labyrinth, you saw cracks in the concrete. The robot armed-agents-of-the- state rounded up some of us for saying it, but Bunkerland County was slowly caving in due to all the flooding of the fire-scorched earth above. Water, heavy with toxins, found paths of least resistance, bearing down. Another thing these bunker geniuses hadn’t factored in or searched on the web: hydrostatic pressure, which could crush concrete walls. No one knew how much time any of us, rich or poor, had left. I for sure didn’t plan to waste my last breaths trying to talk sense into the senseless. Already we were buried alive. Cleaning up the thoughtless messes of the simple-minded, so many times in my head I rehearsed my end: I would toss my mop, tear off my pink uniform, and open my arms to welcome death in a wall of water, which would envelope me quickly, thunderous and explosive as a standing ovation.

But then, like a chorus from the wings, came the words: “Let’s fight. There’s always a way. Is there anything to lose when there’s nothing to save?”

I was a worker, and I knew just what they meant. We did fight. And there was a way. Science is also an art. And engineering. We figured out the technology and rocketed out of there, till we were a convoy burrowing through a series of wormholes in deep space, moving at the speed of survival, so fast the words were flying off my thoughts. We landed on another earth. Gently flowing rivers. Trees exploding with flowers. Air so clear. We all stood still together, watching the sky swooping with a script of birds. In every one of us, a dam was breaking.

Franny French

Image: Wormhole in space with light shining at the end from Pixabay.com