On the Economic Productivity of Kittens

The laundromat was Vonnegut’s idea. He’d arrived early and was sitting on one of the molded plastic chairs bolted to the wall, watching a dryer spin someone’s sheets. The sheets were pale blue. They tumbled in a circle that had no beginning and no end, which is the kind of observation Vonnegut would make if he were narrating his own arrival, and since he wasn’t, I made it for him.

Swift was twenty minutes late and unhappy about the venue. He stood in the doorway with the posture of a man who has been asked to attend a baptism in a butcher shop. “You might have chosen somewhere with a table,” he said.

“There’s a folding table,” Vonnegut said, pointing to a particleboard surface next to the detergent vending machine. Someone had left a sock on it. The sock was gray and alone. Its partner was either in a dryer or gone forever. So it goes.

“He says that,” I told Swift. “‘So it goes.’ He says it about everything. Socks. Deaths. Firebombings.”

“I know what he says.” Swift took the chair farthest from the dryers and crossed one leg over the other. He had the bearing of a man who had once dined with earls and wanted you to know this without his having to say so. “The phrase is a capitulation dressed as philosophy. ‘So it goes’ — as though to observe the inevitability of a thing is to have addressed it.”

“It’s not a philosophy,” Vonnegut said. “It’s a noise the mouth makes when the brain has finished trying.”

That was, as it turned out, the argument. Not the whole argument — we were there for three hours, and the dryers kept cycling, and at one point a woman came in with two garbage bags full of children’s clothes and fed quarters into a machine without looking at any of us — but the argument underneath every other argument. Whether the writer’s job is to indict or to witness. Whether irony wounds or merely records. Whether you describe the man drowning or the water.

I’d brought notes, which was a mistake. I had index cards about GDP. About how the phrase “gross domestic product” carries within it the word “gross,” which in an older English meant “large” or “whole” but which now, in the vernacular, means something that makes you recoil, and how no economist has ever acknowledged this coincidence, which struck me as either negligent or honest. I read this aloud and Vonnegut said, “That’s a footnote, not a story.”

He was right. I put the cards away.

“The subject,” Swift said, “is abundance. Not the fact of it. The discourse. There exists a category of man — I will not say ‘thought leader’ because the phrase makes me physically ill — who speaks of ‘abundance’ the way a medieval cleric speaks of grace. It is bestowed. It is coming. It requires faith. Your gross domestic product rises and this is taken as evidence that the congregation is blessed, regardless of who in the congregation is eating.”

“The GDP goes up,” Vonnegut said. “And nobody I know has more money.”

“Nobody you know has ever had more money. That is the biographical fact about which you are most consistent.”

“I had money. I sold Slaughterhouse-Five to the movies. Then I had money and I still knew what a laundromat smelled like.”

“Bleach,” I said.

“Bleach and fabric softener and the particular humidity of other people’s clothes. Rich people don’t know this smell. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a census.”

Swift uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way, which I’d begun to understand was his version of a paragraph break. “What I want to discuss is the mechanism by which a society that produces more than it has ever produced simultaneously produces more people who cannot afford to wash their clothes. This is not a paradox. Paradoxes resolve. This is policy.”

“You want the Modest Proposal move,” I said.

“I want precision. ‘A Modest Proposal’ was not outrageous for its content — children had been starving for decades and everyone knew it. It was outrageous for its tone. It adopted the voice of a man who had solved the problem. The voice of the policy paper. The voice of the man who stands before Parliament and says, ‘I have calculated the nutritional yield per infant, adjusted for regional pricing.’”

“And you want that voice aimed at GDP.”

“I want that voice aimed at the people who say ‘abundance’ when they mean ‘the stock market.’”

Vonnegut stood up to get a bag of chips from the vending machine. The vending machine was next to the detergent vending machine, which struck me as unsanitary and also democratic. He put in his coins and pressed B4 and the spiral turned and the chips did not fall. They hung there, caught between the spiral and the glass, neither purchased nor unpurchased.

“So it goes,” he said, and sat back down without his chips.

“That,” Swift said, and he pointed at the vending machine as though it were an exhibit in a trial, “is your entire philosophy made physical. A transaction completed in every particular except the final one. The money spent. The mechanism activated. The product visible, promised, proximate. And yet.”

“And yet.”

“Your man — the protagonist, the one I assume we are building — he lives in an ‘and yet.’ The GDP is up and yet. The economy is growing and yet. We have entered an age of abundance and yet.”

I said, “The talk show.” I’d been thinking about this for days, the specific vehicle, and both of them looked at me as though I’d coughed during a fugue. “There’s a talk show — a specific kind of late-night format — where the host interviews men who have become extraordinarily wealthy through mechanisms that, when described aloud, sound like satire. Private detention. Algorithmic labor pricing. Data harvesting from hospital billing systems. And the host nods. The audience laughs at the right moments. The wealthy man says something about ‘creating value’ and nobody in the studio asks for whom.”

“The host is complicit,” Swift said. “Obviously. The host is the narrator of the proposal — the reasonable man, the measured voice, asking questions designed to let the answers sound rational.”

“The host is just a guy with a desk,” Vonnegut said. “He has a desk and a mug and writers who write his jokes. His mortgage is reasonable. His kids go to a school that is good but not suspiciously good. He is not complicit. He is employed.”

“Employment IS complicity when the employer is —”

“When the employer is what? A network? A system? The economy? You want to indict the host for sitting at a desk and I want to describe the desk. The desk is where the story lives. The particular grain of the wood. Whether the mug has a logo on it.”

This was the first moment I understood that Swift and Vonnegut were not going to agree about what satire does. Swift wanted the knife in the ribs. Vonnegut wanted the X-ray of the ribs before the knife arrives, clinical and cold, showing exactly where the bone is thin.

We came to the janitor by accident. I’d been talking about the invisibility of labor — how the GDP counts the work of the hedge fund manager and the private detention contractor but has difficulty finding the janitor, not because the janitor doesn’t exist but because the janitor’s work is designed to be invisible. The good janitor is one you never see. The clean floor appears to have cleaned itself.

“That is the premise,” Swift said, and his voice had dropped half a register, which meant he was not joking. “The proposal — the satirical proposal at the center of this — should concern the janitor. Or rather, the janitor’s absence. The economic model that requires his labor and simultaneously requires his non-existence. He must mop the floor and he must not be on the floor. He must be productive and he must not appear in the productivity statistics. He is, in the language of the economists, ‘informal.’ Which is to say: real, necessary, and uncounted.”

“Kilgore Trout wrote a story about that,” Vonnegut said, and I never knew whether the Trout stories were real or invented — they existed in a space between anecdote and parable, and asking which one would have been rude. “Trout wrote a story about a planet where the gravity was produced by a man in the basement of the planet cranking a lever. Everyone on the surface went about their business — governments, wars, love affairs, the whole catastrophe — and none of them knew about the man with the lever. When the man with the lever got tired and slowed down, things floated a little. Plates lifted off tables. People felt lightheaded and blamed it on the weather. Nobody went downstairs.”

“What happened to the man?” I asked.

“He kept cranking. There’s no ending. Trout never wrote endings. He wrote situations and then stopped.”

Swift leaned forward. “That is the wrong approach for this story. A story about the janitor that simply presents the janitor’s invisibility and then stops has described the problem. I am not interested in describing the problem. Every competent journalist in London — or wherever your journalists are now — can describe the problem. I want to solve the problem. In writing. On paper. With the most reasonable, moderate, economically literate solution imaginable. And I want the solution to be monstrous.”

“You want to eat the janitor,” Vonnegut said.

“I want to propose, with charts, that the janitor’s labor be reclassified as a form of atmospheric contribution, like photosynthesis. The janitor does not work. The janitor emits cleanliness. Therefore the janitor requires no wage, only maintenance — nutrition, shelter, the minimum caloric input to sustain the emission. This is not exploitation; this is ecology.”

“That’s good,” I said, and I meant it in a way that made me uncomfortable, because good satire should make you uncomfortable with your own admiration for it.

“It is adequate,” Swift said. “It requires a voice. Not my voice. A contemporary voice. The voice of a man who has been on the talk show and who describes this proposal the way one describes a new app. With modesty. With data. With a brief personal anecdote about his childhood that makes him relatable.”

Vonnegut had been quiet for several minutes. The woman with the garbage bags was folding her children’s clothes on the particleboard table, matching small socks with the focus of a surgeon. The gray orphan sock was still there, and she moved it aside without examining it.

“I want to talk about the island,” Vonnegut said.

“Which island?”

“The one from the notes. Men on islands with kittens. You mentioned it.” He was looking at me.

I had mentioned it. In my preliminary research — the kind of reading you do before you deserve to call it research — I’d come across a detail about a tech executive who had purchased a small island and populated it with rescue cats. Not as a sanctuary. As an amenity. The cats were for the guests. The island had no permanent residents except a caretaker who fed the cats and maintained the property and who, in every photograph of the island, was absent. The photographs showed cats on beaches. Cats on docks. Cats on the deck of a house that cost more than the caretaker would earn in four lifetimes. The caretaker was taking the photographs.

“The caretaker is the janitor,” Vonnegut said.

“The caretaker is the janitor.”

“And the kittens are the GDP. Soft. Photogenic. Evidence of abundance. You can hold a kitten and feel wealthy. You can photograph the kitten and post the photograph and the photograph becomes more valuable than the kitten, which was already more valuable than the man who feeds it.”

Swift’s eyes had narrowed to the point where I wasn’t sure he could see. “The proposal,” he said, slowly, “could concern the island. The economic proposal. The modest suggestion that all surplus labor be relocated to islands where their primary function is the maintenance of luxury wildlife for the photographable enjoyment of —”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Vonnegut said. “If you finish that sentence, it becomes a plan. Leave it as a sentence that almost gets finished. That’s worse.”

“I will finish every sentence I begin. That is the difference between irony and cowardice.”

“It’s the difference between a wound and a scar. A wound is open. A scar is a wound that has been explained.”

I thought Swift might leave. His posture had shifted to the angle of a man preparing to stand, and his jaw had set in a way that reminded me, absurdly, of the vending machine spiral — something mechanical in its determination. But he didn’t leave. He exhaled through his nose and said, “The talk show host interviews the man with the island. The man with the island explains, with warmth, with data, with a slide deck, that the island generates eleven million in annual tourism revenue and that the caretaker is ‘part of the ecosystem.’ The host asks about the cats. The audience says ‘aww.’ Nobody asks about the caretaker. The segment is six minutes long. The caretaker has been on the island for nine years.”

“Nine years,” Vonnegut said. “So it goes.”

“Do NOT say ‘so it goes’ about the caretaker.”

“I will say it about everything or nothing. That’s the deal. You don’t get to choose which deaths are serious enough for silence. The caretaker’s nine years are the sock’s missing partner. They are the chips in the vending machine. They are every number in the GDP that refers to a person who isn’t in the room when the number is read aloud.”

The dryers had stopped. The laundromat had that particular stillness of a machine at rest — not silence exactly, but the memory of noise. The fluorescent light above us buzzed at a frequency I associated with government offices and hospital corridors, which is to say, with places where you wait for something to be decided about you by someone you will never meet.

I asked about the “so it goes” problem. The refrain. Whether the story needed one.

“Every story has a refrain,” Vonnegut said. “Most writers just don’t notice it. Something the prose keeps doing, a gesture it returns to. Mine is obvious. Yours will be hidden. But it’s there. The story will repeat something — a phrase, a number, an image — and each time it repeats, the context will have changed, and the phrase will mean something different while sounding exactly the same.”

“‘Abundance,’” I said. “The word itself. Abundance, volumes one through three, or twelve, or forty. The word ‘abundance’ repeated until it stops meaning anything. Until it’s just a sound. A-BUN-dance.”

“That is what happens to all words,” Swift said. “But some words are murdered faster than others. ‘Freedom.’ ‘Innovation.’ ‘Sustainability.’ These words have been worked to death and their corpses are still being paraded at conferences.”

“‘Abundance’ is on that list now,” I said. “There’s a whole genre of manifesto — techno-optimist, abundance-mindset, build-more-everything — that uses the word the way a priest uses ‘grace.’ As a thing that is always arriving and never here.”

“The janitor lives in the gap between the arrival and the here,” Swift said.

Vonnegut looked at the vending machine. His chips were still there, pressed against the glass, suspended in the machinery of a completed transaction. He stood, walked to the machine, and hit it once on the side with the flat of his palm. The chips fell.

“That’s the ending,” he said, picking up the bag. “Someone hits the machine. The thing falls. Nothing changes. The machine still works exactly the way it worked before. The next bag of chips will also get stuck.”

“That is not an ending,” Swift said. “That is a resignation.”

“Name one ending that isn’t.”

Swift opened his mouth and closed it. He looked at the dryer, which was still now, the blue sheets pressed against the glass in a shape that resembled, from certain angles, a map of no particular country. He looked at the woman who had finished folding her children’s clothes and was carrying them out in the same garbage bags she’d brought them in, which were now clean and also still garbage bags.

“The ending,” Swift said, “should be the proposal. Stated plainly. Without commentary. The most reasonable, moderate, data-supported suggestion for what to do about the janitor, delivered in the voice of a man who has confused the GDP for a conscience. The reader finishes and does not know whether to laugh. That is the ending. The not-knowing.”

“I can live with that,” Vonnegut said.

“I did not ask whether you could live with it.”

“Nobody ever does.”

They left separately. Swift first, through the front door, not looking back. Vonnegut stayed to eat his chips. He offered me some and I took a handful and we sat there in the buzzing fluorescence, chewing, saying nothing, while the machines around us waited for the next load of someone else’s laundry.

I still had my index cards about GDP. I left them on the folding table, next to the gray sock. They belonged there more than they’d ever belonged to me.