The First Few 2011s
What does it feel like when time stops? Kind of familiar. An excerpt from The Reign of the Anti-Santas.
Audio by David Foley Jr.
The humans carried on with their usual shenanigans. The Nameless Distributor knew what the elves earned in the workshop, and offered slightly more to work in the airport warehouses. When the elves didn’t bite, the Nameless Distributor raised the prices of everything shipped into the Pole, until it got the workers it needed. It was dirty business, but not the dirtiest. And it wasn’t the biggest problem.
There was a feeling in the air. For the elves, it was like the blood in our veins was flowing the wrong way. Some elves even knew what it meant. Dread like bad weather—a sudden drop in the barometric pressure of the world’s heart. Even a human could sense it. Just over a decade into the internet, millions of people could register that something was off in a million indirect but public ways. Someone, and maybe everyone, was going to get hurt.
I called Lanyard. He was busy but said I should come and see him if it was important. I got on a plane. He was staying at a vineyard in southern Oregon where he had a timeshare that let him say he was a part owner. I took a black car along the gorgeous coast until it became tiresome, and I feared I might owe alimony to the chatty, mournful driver.
Poor Lanyard. He was almost sixty years old and desperate to have anyone believe his life was working out beautifully. Everyone had told him he was okay. And so he became what he was supposed to be. And by looking and acting that way, he deserved what he was supposed to want. But in the slack moments, you could see the truth of how he felt, which was betrayed—another sad, hopelessly hopeful child in a $500 polo shirt. The whole time I was there, his wife was saying high-voltage hellos as she came and went from one spa treatment to another to a tasting and back. The place was beautiful in a perfunctory way. It would photograph well and satisfy the blinkered requirements that its spiritually predatory guests might have of beauty.
On the veranda, I tried to explain the peril to Lanyard as I understood it. Admittedly, I’d gone to human schools. And I didn’t know the astronomy, the physics, the math, or the real history nearly as well as a real elf. But I knew humans, and I knew that it would take a whole hell of a lot to get them to listen, even a professional listener like Lanyard. I tried to explain what Santa actually did, crisscrossing the planet like he was drawing a spider web across its surface, depositing gifts with miraculous speed and silence. And I tried to explain why it had to happen that way.
So I talked about fucking, which humans can never hear enough about. Santa’s flight on Christmas Eve is like fucking, I said. The flight and the delivery of so many gifts to so many children was, like fucking, a rare and structured crescendo of intense desires. It could only be fulfilled under a willing suspension of disbelief. Like fucking, Santa’s flight was a well-tended mystery, embellished by ritual misdirections, playful ruses, funny MacGuffins and adorned with red herrings. As in fucking, the exact mixture of magic and mechanics is unknown. But both are necessary. Its constituent parts are only ever clear when one is missing, and the whole endeavor falls apart. And as with Santa’s flight, life would soon dry out and even end if it stopped.
That’s more or less what I said.
“Basically, without Santa making the trip and giving presents, time as we know it will stop moving,” I told him over giant glasses of oddly spicy red wine.
“Sounds pretty abstract.”
“It’s not. If Santa—or someone like him—doesn’t deliver presents to millions of children on Christmas Eve, it will basically be 2011 forever.”
“First thought—as an old man in a young man’s game, maybe that’s a good thing.”
“Clever. But the smooth and orderly flow of time is something that people rely upon. If it stalls, all kinds of problems come up. And I’m not totally sure what they are. I heard that this happened for a while before I was born. But it’s no good.”
“The thing is, 2011 is shaping up to be a good year for the company, too,” Hubyard said, washing down a bite of calamari with a gulp of pinot noir. “I’m going to have a hard time selling it upstairs. They don’t like taking orders from operations they’ve acquired. And anyway, who needs time? When I started, people still thought we needed department stores, record stores, and downtown streets full of stores with this and that. We disrupted that. We’re very pro-disruption.”
We elves pride ourselves on being patient, but something about his glibness made me believe a year on the veranda wouldn’t help much. So I was indelicate.
“When your little mail-order website took us over, you may have thought you were getting some potentially valuable real estate and well-entrenched intellectual property. But it’s not like that. You bought the stopper of the bathtub, and now, you and everyone you ever knew or cared about—living and dead—are at risk because of your carelessness. The year you call 2011 may look like a nice place to retire now. But after five or ten years, you’ll be begging for death.”
“How do you know that?”
“The truth is that I don’t. I never lived through it. But I know elves who did. And you know what they do? They make toys every day. They do what Santa says. That’s because nothing else matters as much as making those colorful little bits and bobs and doing what they can to launch Santa into the darkest night of the year when all of time is tempted to give up and turn back.”
“I mean, that’s not science.”
“Seriously, Lanyard? Science? What do you know about science? You turn the lights on, and you’ve heard it’s science. But how does it work?” I asked. And he dutifully stammered nonsense so nonsensical that even he had to apologize midway through.
So I asked him how time works. This was unfair, but fuck it.
People were forever befuddled by time. It was like a big flaming hand in their faces. Poor mortal bastards never developed the right language for it. They were always killing time, buying time, surprised and undone by time and running out of time. They were always consumed with expanding their kingdoms in space, while time hunts them down. They’d live 2011 for seven or eight years and act like they hadn’t. I’m almost sympathetic. There are subjects I tend to fumble too simply because I can’t stand to look at them.
Anyway, I continued.
“I am telling you right here and now that the reason time continues is because a magic man flies across the night skies on or around the shortest day of the year, giving out presents to children. And you are the managing director who is keeping that from happening. Unless you get your head out of your ass very soon, everything you ever cared for or thought mattered will soon erode into a mass of nonsense. And you will be lost and helpless, along with everyone else, possibly forever,” I said, possibly exaggerating. But he was buying it.
“What are we talking in terms of budget?”
I quoted him a price for a new Santa, repairs to the reindeer facilities and the materials the workshop would need to get to full production. On the Nameless Distributor’s quarterly report, it wouldn’t stand out. And he said he’d see what he could do. What he could do was better than nothing, but only barely. He shared the proposal, which got lost in translation and watered down as it passed from one working group to another. Somehow, it ended up with the marketing people.
True to form, the Nameless Distributor released its “We Are All Santa” campaign, in which humans from all walks of life (excluding only the poor and bearded older men with ruddy cheeks) appeared in TV and online videos, with smiling faces proclaiming, “I Am Santa,” and in some unfortunate cases, explaining why.
That was Santa for the first failed Christmas of an unending 2011.
The early 2011s
When I was a kid, our class would go on a tour of the workshop every year. Me and a bunch of hulking, oversized human children ducking under the low doorways, laughing at the undersized tools they found. Some years, there might be another elf in class. One year, there were two.
I remember the bicycles. Hundreds, even thousands of them, coming together in small, nimble hands in a single, massive open room of workbenches. It was quiet, with no clanging of tools, just a lot of clicking as they tested the bicycle chains. The loudest clicking was when a bicycle chain wouldn’t consistently catch on the gear. And when the gear doesn’t catch the chain, the wheel won’t turn. Pedal like crazy or don’t pedal at all—it doesn’t matter.
That’s what happened in 2011. The chain wasn’t catching, and the wheel wasn’t turning. Humans kept pedaling. Unlike the humans, the elves knew what was happening, but they kept pedaling, too. They didn’t know what else to do. They thought if they worked harder and made more or better toys, the rest would figure itself out. That was hard to watch, but it gave them something to do. And the Nameless Distributor, which had no concept of making anything, was utterly perplexed by the elves’ prodigious production. All the toys went to a warehouse by the airport, piling up or shipped to other warehouses. Their work started to feel like a hobby.
The seasons came and went, filled with unseasonably warm or cold days. It was easy to lose track of what time of year it was. Heartbeat followed heartbeat, but the order felt wrong. Minute followed minute, but there was no way to be sure.
By the second 2011, I did my job slowly, tentatively, as if I was recovering from something or saving my energy for something else. Every day felt the same, muted. It was also starting to wear on people, though they couldn’t say what. They’d say things like, “Is it already Wednesday?” or, “Is it only Wednesday?” “I can’t believe it’s Wednesday” constantly. People did the same things, thought the same thoughts, fought the same fights, and gained and lost the same ten pounds. People looked in the mirror—why were they older? Why was everything so brand-new but also so grimy and broken? Tell them anything, and they’d say, “Oh, right.” They knew exactly enough to fake knowing what was going on. “Why is he still president? —Oh, right.” “How did I go broke so fast? Why did I get rich so fast? Oh, right. How did my kids get so big so fast? Oh, right. Ha, ha.”
But it wasn’t innocent. Things got worse. The entire planet was like a goldfish in a bowl when the water doesn’t get changed. The fish start eating more and more of their own shit. Every new thing was a regurgitation of something else, a reminder of something else, a collage of memories in a cookie-cutter form.