Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
The letter is an open secret before Stanley and I have finished writing it. The gossip train moves faster than an Amtrak train
rattling along dilapidated tracks.
Google Doc with Stanley in live time. We’re making good progress, but I’m keenly aware of the ticking clock on my phone, just
two minutes left on my break.
Then a notification banner materializes at the top of my screen.
Anya Sobol
URGENT: GSA Interviews (Schedule Attached)
Greetings all,
Recently, the Senior Leadership team has received troubling reports of workplace disturbances. This week, we will conduct individual check-ins with all GS staff to determine h . . .
To determine what, how to survive the day?
Sweat on my skin, unsteady in my seat, I’m certain that I must’ve accidentally ingested polonium, and now I have twenty-four
hours to live.
No, I’m overreacting, catastrophizing. Everything is fine; the museum isn’t on fire. I still have time to fix this.
Because whatever rumors management has heard won’t prepare them for the real thing. When they read the actual, scathing letter,
signed by a critical density of the staff, they’ll be forced to back down, right?
Management will back down. Dagny won’t fire me. The union will keep chugging along, slowly and steadily improving working
conditions for everyone.
Everything will be totally and completely fine—as long as I fix this.
Stanley Pham: Did you get that email?
Saved by my phone, vibrating on the table. Not a new email, just my break timer.
I’ve never been so grateful to get back to work.
When I clamber into Efraín’s red Rivian two hours later, I don’t ask where we’re going. He fills me in on the group chat, which I haven’t checked. He says there’s an emergency meeting.
“Elisha?”
I read the concern in Efraín’s profile. He wants to ask me if I’m okay but knows better than to ask a useless question.
“Do you remember our mock one-on-one?” I ask him instead.
“Fuck, did I ever apologize for that?”
“Did I? We both said things, but—” I look out the window, at endless rolling vineyards. “I’m thinking about what I didn’t
say.”
“Yeah?”
“You asked me a question. Is working at NSX everything I dreamed it would be?”
“You don’t have to—”
“I wouldn’t have brought it up if I—” There’s a stone in my stomach, a cherry pit I don’t remember swallowing. “I never told
you what I thought the job would feel like.”
I steal a glance at him, at his index finger tapping the steering wheel.
“I thought working at NSX would bring me closer to Nuclear Seasons. Like standing inside these sets every day would make me part of the narrative, even if only as an uncredited, blink-and-you-miss-it
background actor.”
“But that’s not how it feels when you clock in,” Efraín says softly, no sharp, judgmental edges.
“Not even when I lead tours,” I confess. “It’s not just that we’re interchangeable parts on the job. I know, now, that’s the gig. But I still thought, doing the job, interchangeable as I may be, I’d feel something, some connection.”
Efraín nods like he understands, and maybe he does. “I know I don’t need to explain ‘alienation of labor’ to you,” he starts,
then proceeds to explain it anyway, which would irritate me any other day. But right now, I don’t mind listening to Efraín
as my personal Marxist audiobook narrator. “The working class doesn’t earn enough to consume the goods it produces. That means—”
“We don’t make enough selling tickets as NSX employees to buy tickets as guests, I know,” I finish, without reproach. “I get
it. I’m trying to be vulnerable, and you’re giving me a lecture.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“I know. Alienation is—”
“No, shit, it’s—” Efraín shakes his head. “It’s meta, okay?”
“You’re telling me you’re using Marx as a meta-metaphor.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the sentiment. Grammar nerd.”
“Points for effort, but I can’t give you full credit if you have to explain your meta-metaphor, which you still haven’t actually
explained.”
“What I’m saying is, bosses are always going to exploit any connection you feel to your workplace, but that doesn’t mean it’s not yours.”
He shoots me a sideways glance.
I let out a shuddery breath.
“Elisha, you do have the chance to be part of the Nuclear Seasons narrative now. So it’s not what you expected. So what? You can write yourself into the script.”
“I’m not sure we should be bowling at a time like this,” I say when Efraín leads me into Punch Bowl’s lobby.
“Don’t worry, Naomi and I just finished our game.” Lola swoops in, easy breezy. “I wouldn’t expect you boys to multitask like
that. We’re just doing happy hour.”
It’s strange, the four of us sitting at the same table where Efraín first announced we were a union.
Because our union isn’t just the Four Musketeers; it’s Stanley, TJ, Jaime, and Eden, too; it’s everyone who might join once
they realize there’s something to join. Unfortunately, no one else could make this emergency meeting with zero notice.
“So, what do we know about these interviews, or whatever Anya’s calling them?” Lola asks.
“I thought you would’ve heard something,” Efraín says.
“Me? It’s my day off.”
“But you’re the one who knows everyone,” I counter. “A social leader par excellence.”
“Why, thank you, but no,” Lola demurs. “I only know what’s in the chat.”
Naomi has her laptop out, taking notes. “Our best intel is the text Stanley got from Dan. Between Thursday and Friday, Anya
and Billy will pull each GSA off the floor for a ‘conversation’ about whether we’ve been approached by other coworkers about . . .”
“Rabble-rousing and troublemaking?” I suggest.
“It’s all good trouble,” Efraín protests, “like John Lewis—”
“I know.” Under the table, I knock my knee against his. “But management only hears the ‘trouble,’ and they’re going to exploit
that fear of getting in trouble.”
“Like getting called into the principal’s office,” Lola says.
“It’s simpler than that,” Efraín says. “Where’s the power in a union? Solidarity. What defines a union, legally? Collective
action. What makes a collective action? Two or more employees engaging in concerted activity. Together. So of course they
want to split us up.”
“The prisoner’s dilemma,” I say. “It’s a classic interrogation technique. If you have a group of suspects, put them in different
rooms. Tell them the first one to talk gets a deal. Imply that someone else is putting all the blame on you.”
“So,” Lola says, “good cop, bad cop where the cop pretends to be good by gaslighting you into believing that your friends
have already betrayed you . . . so you betray them first.”
“All cops are bad,” Efraín mutters.
“I said the cop pretends to be good, didn’t I? They’re still the bad cop. They’re all—”
“Bad cops,” Naomi finishes.
“Bad bosses,” Efraín adds.
“The good part—” I hesitate. “The least bad part is that we know their union-busting playbook. We know what they’re going to ask.”
“Yeah,” Lola asks, “but what are we gonna do about it?”
“Simple,” Efraín says. “We lie.”
“Lying is unethical,” Naomi states.
“So is illegally interrogating your employees for unionizing. If they ask questions they’re not legally allowed to ask, then
it’s legal to lie to your boss about unionizing.”
I should fact-check that, but I can’t fight the anxiety crashing over me.
The longer this discussion goes on, the more I realize that our letter might not be enough to stop these interrogations from
happening—especially if we can’t get people to sign the letter because they’re scared of what management will do to them when
it’s their turn in the interrogation chamber.
This is all my fault.
Management is retaliating against the union and threatening my friends. Because of pronoun buttons the union made for my sake. Because I’m the one who split myself from the group and walked into a room alone and let Dagny get in my head. Because, when it came time to fight, I froze up.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Efraín reiterates. “We have a right to organize and no obligation to declare it. We haven’t
manipulated or intimidated our fellow workers.”
“We should reach out personally,” Lola says. “Make sure everyone knows the score.”
I is for inoculate, I think, too little, too late.
“Good idea,” Efraín says. “We can answer questions. Do some hand-holding.”
He reaches for my hand as he says it. I don’t know if it’s a joke or an act of reassurance. Does he think I need hand-holding?
Maybe he doesn’t realize he reached for me at all. Still, I look at our hands on the table, our fingers laced together.
I think about the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s a trust fall, isn’t it? You have to trust that your ride-or-dies really would die
before they’d betray you.
No one at this table knows I’ve already betrayed them.
Not in words. I didn’t tell Dagny anything; I didn’t agree to tell her anything; I won’t tell her anything when my turn comes. But Dagny’s going to use my meeting to demand everything I know, and when I refuse,
she’ll take everything away from me.
My only advantage is that she thinks she turned me. She won’t make any big moves until she talks to me. I don’t work again until Friday.
That means I have time.
I trust that my fellow workers will hold steady and survive the prisoner’s dilemma. But I don’t need to complicate matters
by making them worry about me, not again.
This is my personal Kobayashi Maru, and I have to solve it on my own.