The Situation
A novelette.
"The last raise had been a huge leech shaped like a helmet. It was
meant to suck all the bad thoughts out of your head. It smelled like
bacon, which seemed promising. I had invited Mord and Leer over to my
apartment and we'd fried it up in a skillet. I'd gotten a week's worth
of sandwiches out of it."
In a city where the future has
betrayed the past, a nameless employee struggles to hold onto his job
at the Company, fighting off the predations of the merciless Scarskirt
and his former friends: a transformed Mord and helpless Leer. In
addition, he has to deal with a Manager he calls "Damager" who puts him
in ever more difficult situations:
"Up close, her eyes were
like the glistening grit you find at the edges of drying asphalt. Her
fingers on the desk seemed as long as the legs of a spiny crab. In the
quiet, I could hear the leaf in her chest - just the slightest
whispering shift of dead plant matter against plastic each time it
touched the sides of her ribcage. I wondered if each time another piece
disintegrated into the dust at the bottom of her chest cavity. 'Do you
love me?' she always asked. I could remember a time and a world where
such a question could never have been asked."
Is there a way out? Will he find it in time? What awaits him in the city beyond?
"Her
knife sliced down, up, down, up, down as the fish tried to get away
from her ever more slowly, spurting a thick green blood."
In The Situation, Jeff VanderMeer has written the most chilling, and the funniest, commentary on corporate office life since Kafka and Dilbert.
Jeff VanderMeer
Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer (born 1968) is an American writer. He was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, influenced him deeply. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida. In 2003, Jeff married editor Ann Kennedy.