Green Earth

Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world generally. He tapped another page. “The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”

Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”

“Profit,” Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created above and beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”

Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”

“Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”

“Yeah, but average? What about all the part-time workers?”

“There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”

“Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”

“You work overtime.”

“Yeah but I don’t get paid for it!”

The men laughed at her.

“They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s”—Anna could do calculations in her head—“sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.”

“What’s the average income?” Edgardo asked. “Thirty thousand?”

“Maybe less,” Frank said.

“We don’t have any idea,” Anna objected.

“Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?”

“About ten? Or is it less?”

Edgardo said, “Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two-thirds of that and gives you one third, then you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it gets to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his much larger share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” He grinned at Frank and Anna. “How stupid is that?”

Anna shook her head. “People don’t see it that way.”

“But here are the statistics!”

“People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.”

“They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.”

Even Frank was not willing to go this far. “It’s a matter of what you can see,” he suggested. “You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.”

“But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one really earns that much.”

“The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hardwired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Edgardo said cheerfully. “We are stupid!”

“I’ve got to get back to it,” Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.

Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.

He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out toward the Potomac—a long view and a nice apartment, rented to Frank for the year by a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasília. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy, and most of the time Frank was there he was asleep, so he didn’t care what it was like.

He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now he looked at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he was by this glimpse into a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity. Were people like this really out there, or were these merely the fantasies of a bunch of lonely souls like himself? The sections devoted to people looking for LTRs, meaning “long-term relationships,” sometimes struck him with force. ISO LTR: in search of long-term relationship. The species had evolved toward monogamy, it was wired into the brain. Not a cultural imposition, but a biological instinct. They might as well be storks.

And so he read the ads, but never replied. He was only here for a year. It made no sense to take any action on this front. The ads themselves also tended to stop him.

Husband hunting, SWF, licensed nurse, seeks a hardworking, handsome SWM for LTR. Must be a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness.

SBM, 5'5", shy, quiet, a little bit serious, seeking Woman, age open. Not good-looking or wealthy but Nice Guy. Enjoy foreign movies, opera, theater, music, books, quiet evenings.

These were not going to get a lot of responses. Frank could have written their ur-text, and one time he had, and had even sent it in, as a joke of course—it would make some of them laugh. And if any woman liked the joke well enough to call, well, that would have been a sign.

Male Homo sapiens desires company of female Homo sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behaviors, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast.

But no one had replied.

He went out onto the bas-relief balcony, into the sultry late afternoon. Another two months and he would be going home, back to his real life. Thinking about that reminded him of the grant application from Yann Pierzinski. He went inside to his laptop and googled Yann to try to learn more about what he had been up to. Then he reopened the application. Recursion at the boundary limit … it was interesting.

Finally he called up Derek Gaspar at Torrey Pines Generique.

“What’s up?” Derek said after the preliminaries.

“Well, I just got a grant proposal from one of your people, and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.”

“From one of mine, what do you mean?”

“A Yann Pierzinski, do you know him?”

“No, never heard of him. He works here you say?”

“He was there on a temporary contract, working with Simpson. He’s a postdoc from Caltech.”

“Ah yeah, here we go. Mathematician, got a paper in Biomathematics on algorithms.”

“Yeah, that comes up first on my Google too.”

“Well sure. I can’t be expected to know everyone who ever worked with us here, that’s hundreds of people, you know that.”

“Sure sure.”

“So what’s his proposal about? Are you going to give him a grant?”