Lyricism in the Hold Queue

We met in a diner that Saunders chose because it had bad coffee and the kind of fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look slightly ill. Bradbury arrived in a linen jacket despite it being February, and he ordered pie. “Pie is the most American thing you can eat in a diner,” he said. “It connects us to the ground.”

Saunders was already in the booth, sitting with a small notebook open and a pen balanced on his thumb. He’d been doodling something — a stick figure inside a cube, or maybe a cage. Hard to tell. “I’ve been thinking about hold music,” he said without any preamble. “You ever call a utility company and they put you on hold and it’s that tinny version of Vivaldi? And you’re sitting there listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played on what sounds like a phone that was manufactured to be hostile to Vivaldi, and meanwhile your water heater is leaking, and the hold message keeps saying ‘Your call is important to us,’ and you know — you know in your bones — that your call is not important to anyone.”

“That’s a starting point?” Bradbury asked.

“That’s the whole story,” Saunders said.

I sat between them and said nothing for a minute, because they were both right and both wrong and I wasn’t ready to say how. Bradbury was already shaking his head, but slowly, the way he does when something irritates him because it’s almost good enough.

“The hold music,” Bradbury said, “is actually where the beauty is. Vivaldi wrote the Summer concerto to sound like a thunderstorm. It was supposed to make you feel the heat and then the breaking. And here it is, three hundred years later, compressed into a tinny signal traveling across — in our story — across the void between Earth and Mars. That’s not degradation. That’s survival. The music survived. The longing survived.”

“But the water heater didn’t survive,” Saunders said. “The water heater is still leaking. And the person on hold — the person calling — they don’t care about Vivaldi surviving. They care about their floor.”

“Put them on Mars,” I said, “and they care about both.”

That was the first moment where the conversation stopped being a negotiation and became something else. Bradbury set down his fork. Saunders looked at me with what I can only describe as cautious agreement, which for Saunders is practically an embrace.

“Explain,” Bradbury said.

“A customer service representative on a failing Mars colony,” I said. “The colony is running out of supplies. Nobody says this directly — it comes through in the complaints. The ration reductions. The filtration system. The oxygen quality. And our person, our ‘you,’ sits at a desk and takes the calls and processes the tickets and follows the script. And the script was written back when the colony was a dream, back when everything was going to work.”

“Second person,” Saunders said, and he was already writing in his notebook. “It has to be second person.”

Bradbury made a noise.

“Ray, listen—”

“I’m listening. I’m listening and I’m thinking about how second person is the coward’s trick. It distances. It puts a screen between the reader and the feeling.”

“No,” Saunders said, flatly. “Second person implicates. It pulls you in. ‘You open the ticket. You read the complaint.’ The reader becomes the person at the desk. They’re inside the system.”

“The system is not where the story lives.”

“The system is exactly where the story lives. Ray, come on. You wrote about houses that keep running after everyone’s dead. You wrote about nurseries that murder parents. You’re not afraid of systems.”

Bradbury took a bite of pie and chewed it slowly, which I was learning was his way of buying time to think. The pie, I should say, was not good. The crust was pale and the filling had that glassy sheen of institutional fruit. Bradbury ate it like it was the best pie of his life.

“I wrote about systems to mourn the people who built them,” he said. “The automated house in ‘Soft Rains’ is heartbreaking because there’s nobody left to eat the breakfast it makes. The house doesn’t know. The routine continues. That’s where the tragedy lives — in the continuation.”

“So your customer service rep,” I said, and I felt something clicking into place, “they continue. The colony is failing and they continue. They open the ticket and they follow the script and they type the response that was designed for a colony that was going to thrive. The gap between the script and the reality — that’s where both of you meet.”

“That’s where the absurdity is,” Saunders said.

“That’s where the poetry is,” Bradbury said.

They looked at each other. Neither smiled, exactly, but something settled.

“Second person,” I said again, carefully. “What if the ‘you’ isn’t a gimmick? What if it’s the company talking to the employee? Like a training manual. ‘You will greet the settler with the approved greeting. You will log the complaint under the appropriate category.’ The corporate voice addressing the worker directly. And then over the course of the story, the ‘you’ shifts. It becomes — I don’t know — the employee talking to themselves. Or addressing someone specific. A letter they’ll never send.”

“Or it stays corporate the whole time,” Saunders said, “and the horror is that it never shifts. The ‘you’ never becomes a person. The company’s voice is the only voice there is.”

“No,” Bradbury said. “No, no. The ‘you’ has to break. At some point the human has to surface through the corporate language. Like a flower through concrete — I know that’s a cliché, I know, but the principle is right. The language has to crack.”

“What if it cracks only once?” I said. “What if the whole story is this controlled, careful, procedural voice — the ‘you’ doing your job, the ‘you’ following protocol — and then there’s one moment, one sentence, where the real person surfaces? And then the procedural voice closes back over it?”

Saunders was nodding. “Like a sinkhole. The ground opens for a second and you see how far down it goes and then it closes.”

“That’s beautiful,” Bradbury said, and he looked genuinely surprised that he’d said it.

“Don’t put that on me,” Saunders said. “I don’t do beautiful. I do the thing that’s so sad it wraps around to funny.”

“You do beautiful all the time. You just pretend it’s an accident.”

Saunders opened his mouth and then closed it and wrote something in his notebook. I leaned over to look and he covered it with his hand like a schoolboy. “Private,” he said.

I asked about the complaints. What are the settlers calling about?

“Everything and nothing,” Bradbury said. “The light is wrong. That’s one. On Mars the light would be different — thinner, pinker, wrong in a way you can’t name. Someone calls to complain that the light in their housing unit doesn’t match the light they were promised. And it’s a real complaint and it’s an impossible complaint and the service representative has to—”

“Has to log it,” Saunders said. “Under what category? There’s no category for ‘the light is wrong.’ There’s ‘Lighting — Interior — Malfunction.’ There’s ‘Lighting — Exterior — Request.’ There’s no ‘Lighting — Existential — The Entire Quality of Light on This Planet Is Wrong and I Miss the Sun.’”

I laughed. Bradbury didn’t.

“That’s real, George,” Bradbury said. “That’s a person missing the sun. Don’t play it only for comedy.”

“I’m not playing it only for comedy. I’m playing it for the gap between the feeling and the form you’re given to express it. That’s what I write about. That’s what the whole Saunders project is, if I’m being honest: people who have enormous feelings and are given tiny, humiliating forms to put them in. Complaint tickets. Customer satisfaction surveys. Performance reviews. The feelings are real. The forms are jokes.”

“The forms,” Bradbury said, and he was staring out the window now at the parking lot, which was empty except for a pickup truck with a cracked windshield, “are the Martian chronicles. I wrote about people who went to Mars and brought all their junk with them. Their picket fences and their church socials and their comfort. They couldn’t see Mars because they’d papered it over with Earth. Your complaint form is the same thing. It’s a piece of Earth laid over a Martian reality. And it doesn’t fit. It was never going to fit.”

“So the story is about a form that doesn’t fit,” I said.

“The story is about a person inside a form that doesn’t fit,” Saunders said, “and the question is whether they realize it.”

“Whether they can afford to realize it,” Bradbury corrected. “Because once you realize the form doesn’t fit, once you see Mars for what it is instead of what the brochure promised — then what? You’re still there. You’re still on Mars. The supply ships have stopped and the oxygen recyclers are degrading and you’ve got a shift to finish.”

“Do they have a name?” I asked. “Our person?”

“Names are important,” Bradbury said.

“Names are a trap,” Saunders said. “You name them and suddenly they’re a character instead of an everyperson. Second person works because it resists naming. ‘You’ is all of us.”

“‘You’ is nobody,” Bradbury said. “Specificity is dignity. Le Guin taught me that — though she’d say she taught me nothing, she’d say I already knew it and was too sentimental to use it properly.”

“We can give them a name the way the company gives them a name,” I said. “An employee ID. A designation. And then later, much later, maybe another character uses their real name and it lands like a punch.”

“Or nobody ever uses their real name,” Saunders said. “And that’s the punch.”

We sat with that for a while. The waitress came and refilled Bradbury’s coffee and he thanked her by name — Linda — without looking at her nametag, which meant either he’d been here before or he’d memorized it when we sat down. I noticed and Saunders noticed and neither of us said anything.

“I want the ending to refuse to resolve,” I said. “The colony is failing and the person processes one more ticket and the story ends. No rescue ship. No collapse. Just the continuation.”

“That’s my ending,” Bradbury said. “The automated house. The routine continuing past the point of purpose.”

“But with a person inside the routine,” Saunders said. “That’s the difference. Your house doesn’t know. Our person knows. They know the colony is dying and they open the next ticket anyway. That’s not automation. That’s something else.”

“Heroism?” I said.

“Don’t you dare,” Saunders said. “It’s not heroism. It’s — I don’t have a word for it. It’s what people do. You go to work. The world is ending and you go to work because what else are you going to do? That’s not noble. That’s just Tuesday.”

“It’s both,” Bradbury said quietly. “It’s noble and it’s just Tuesday. That’s the thing you don’t want to admit, George. That there’s nobility in just Tuesday.”

Saunders didn’t answer for a long time. He doodled another stick figure in his notebook, this one with its arms out, like it was trying to fly or maybe just stretching after a long shift. Then he said, “Fine. But if we make it noble, we make it funny too. The nobility and the absurdity have to coexist. If the reader cries, they have to also be laughing. If they laugh, there has to be a lump in their throat.”

“Agreed,” Bradbury said.

“Agreed,” I said.

“Good,” said Saunders. “Now. The rations. Let’s talk about the rations. Because there’s a memo about reduced rations and that memo is going to be the funniest and saddest thing in this story.”

“Explain,” Bradbury said.

“Okay, so the colony gets its supplies from Earth. Or it did. The ships have stopped — not officially, because nothing like that is ever official. The supply chain just sort of evaporated, the way everything evaporates when the money dries up. And now the colony administrator sends out a memo about ‘adjusted caloric allocations’ and it’s full of language like ‘optimizing nutritional throughput’ and ‘phase-aligned dietary restructuring,’ and what it means is you’re getting less food.”

“And the customer service rep,” I said, “has to handle the calls from people who got the memo.”

“Right. And some of them are furious. And some of them are confused. And some of them call to ask a question that’s really a different question — they call about the rations but what they’re really asking is: Are we going to die here?”

“And the rep can’t answer that,” I said.

“The rep doesn’t have the category for it,” Saunders said. “There’s no ticket type for ‘existential terror.’ There’s ‘Provisions — Complaint — General.’ There’s ‘Provisions — Inquiry — Reallocation.’ There isn’t ‘Provisions — We Are Going to Starve — What Do I Tell My Daughter.’”

Bradbury set down his coffee. “That’s real. That’s — George, that’s exactly right. The cruelty isn’t in the shortage. The cruelty is in the form you’re given to report the shortage.”

“The form is the colony,” I said, and I wasn’t sure what I meant until I’d said it. “The colony was always a form. A structure someone built on Earth and shipped to Mars and it didn’t fit and they made it fit anyway, and now it’s cracking, and the cracks show in the complaint tickets.”

“So the tickets are the narrative structure,” Saunders said. “Each section of the story is a ticket. Or opens with a ticket. ‘Ticket #4471: Settler reports persistent odor in Hab-7 corridor.’ And then the second person kicks in — ‘You open the ticket. You read the complaint. You know about the odor. You’ve been smelling it for weeks.’”

“I love that,” Bradbury said. “The ticket as a poem. The ticket as a fragment of a world.”

“It’s not a poem, Ray.”

“Everything is a poem, George. That’s my whole point. The complaint ticket is a poem because it’s a person reaching through bureaucracy to say: I am here. Something is wrong. Please acknowledge me.”

Saunders looked at him for a long time. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, it’s a poem. But it’s also a ticket, and tickets have resolution fields and priority levels and SLA requirements, and there’s comedy in that. There’s comedy in a dying world that still has SLA requirements.”

I asked about the progression. Where does the story go?

“It goes down,” Saunders said. “Each ticket is worse than the last. The complaints escalate from annoyance to fear to something past fear. And the ‘you’ keeps processing them. The language stays controlled. The procedure holds. Until it doesn’t.”

“Or until it does,” Bradbury said. “Maybe the procedure never breaks. Maybe the last ticket is the last ticket and the story ends and the ‘you’ is still at the desk and the procedure is intact and the colony is silent.”

That image hung in the diner like smoke. The colony is silent and the procedure is intact. I wrote it down.

“What about the other workers?” I asked. “Is the rep alone?”

“Increasingly,” Saunders said. “People stop showing up. Some have left — transferred to other duties, gone to work the greenhouses, just stopped coming. The office empties around the ‘you’ the way a party empties. You look up and the desk across from you is vacant and you’re not sure when that happened.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s good.”

“One more thing,” Bradbury said, and he was looking at the window again, at the parking lot, at the cracked windshield of the pickup truck catching the late light. “Mars. Don’t forget Mars. The planet has to be in this story. Not as a backdrop. As a presence. The dust, the sky, the color of the horizon at seventeen minutes past sunset when the blue appears in a sky that has no right to be blue. The character — the ‘you’ — they have to see it. Even through the office window. Especially through the office window.”

“Between tickets,” I said.

“Between tickets,” Bradbury agreed. “In the pause after one complaint and before the next. That’s when they look up and see Mars and for a second the form falls away and there’s just the planet. Just the fact of being somewhere no human was ever supposed to be.”

Saunders was writing fast in his notebook. He didn’t look up.

Bradbury ordered more pie.