Merge Econ 11-13-04

“That’s what we pay taxes for, Tim.”

“Yeah, but this pays us money. And what if he has other things for rent discounts?”

“Yeah, but what’ll we have to do to get them? Let’s cancel the lease, Tim. This is too weird.”

“We just got here. You know that we need to be frugal now. Let’s check it out first.” She scrunched up her nose and looked at me with a flaring intensity I was just learning to recognize, but then just as quickly she shrugged and put her hands in her pockets.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s give it a try. That randomized art isn’t too bad, if you ignore the fact that it’s completely psychotic.”

We had met three months before in a Boston hideout during happy hour. I’d been remodeling one of their pool rooms and she was there celebrating her graduation from MIT with a BA in Linguistics. She reminded me of no one I’d known, dressed in earth tones and wore very little makeup. She didn’t need it. I was smitten within minutes. She loved that I worked with my hands, said it made her trust me like she trusted her father.

It was a whirlwind romance and we both decided within a few weeks to save up our measly dollars and move back to Northern California where we’d grown up so we could get married among what little family we had. The reserved aplomb of bankers and city bosses and cars careening through crosswalks had never really appealed to either of us, although we had both tried. We missed the dark masonite coast of Northern California, the wine, the tremendous forests tucked into valleys and splayed across arable hills.

It wasn’t without sacrifice that we came. I left behind a steady job with a major contractor and Sue had turned down a promising research internship, and all I had waiting for me was a part time carpentry gig in Santa Ana. Sue’s plan was to apply for a master’s program in linguistics or organizational psychology and follow her passion for the study of what she called language games. We knew money would be tight, but with the glow of fiancés and the steady promise of a good place, we knew we'd be fine.

The next morning Sue and I walked across the garage to introduce ourselves to our newlywed neighbors in the duplex, Nate and Kate Bell. We'd already talked with them over the phone prior to signing the lease, as encouraged by Greening.

When they opened their door friendship flowed out. Kate was about twenty-five, as we all were, smiled with an almost naive warmth and looked like she played a lot of tennis, although we later found out that she didn’t. Nate, who lifted weights in their back room every morning and was wearing a tight t-shirt, told me later with a wink that she liked that look because it brought them closer.

"Look" he said to me when we first shook hands and he nearly broke mine, "You can use my tools any time, but if you lose them I’ll tell Sue.” He biffed me in the shoulder and winked at Sue as he said it. She gave him a blank stare as only Northern California women can do, then looked at me to see if I was playing along.

“Thanks,” I said.

Sue asked me to go talk with Greening while she started unpacking the duplex, which consisted of four tiny rooms and a single dim bathroom. There was very little extra space, even considering our limited possessions. “Try to get a read, Tim. What’s up with the dumpster?”

I padded across the street, which was a no-outlet, two block affair of distorted asphalt and rows of modest duplexes in varying states of repair on each side. Our duplex appeared to be one of the newer units on the block. The street itself was tucked into the edge of a grove of struggling trees, one of which touched our roof with its spindly fall branches.

I knocked on Greening’s solid oak door and heard the echoes in his place. He opened it up after a long wait, looking at me with curiosity. He didn’t invite me in.

“Hi, Mr. Greening,” I said.

“Hello, Tim. Welcome to the neighborhood. Are you getting settled in okay?”

“We are, thanks. Hey, I wanted to ask you about that incinerator thing.”

He laughed. “That’s last year’s innovation. Do you mind getting rent discounts for doing your civic duty? Everyone in the neighborhood uses it.”

“Well, Sue just wondered, why not just call animal control?”

“Because there is no incentive to call animal control. One must create demand in these situations. It fosters a sense of communal responsibility which in the long term will reduce operational expenses.”

“Oh. Okay. I’ll tell her.” This was starting to get over my head. Greening seemed to sense as much and leveled me a fatherly smile.

“Have you met the Bells yet?” He asked.

“Yes, thanks, they are very decent people, I can tell already,” I said.

“They’re newlyweds, you know.”

I nodded.

“You’ve both got similar energies, perhaps even psychologies.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can tell you’re both reasonable couples, adaptive to life.”

I thought about this. I was adaptive, and perhaps the Bell’s were, but I wasn’t at all ready to extend that generalization to Sue.

“You'll be getting to know them well,” he said. "The duplex is pretty intimate, and you'll see them a lot. I own most of the block, and I try to encourage my tenants to team up on things. It's an economic theory of mine," he said with his gravelly laugh. "If you consume less, I spend less, right?"

"How so?" I asked.

"We've all got to share to get along" he said. "I price the rent so competitively because then I get a lot of applicants and can ensure they are a fiscal fit. Gotta mitigate our risk, right? Limit exposure as the lawyers like to say. Otherwise people don't get along, and we hate that, right Tim?"

I found myself nodding.

"And if people don't get along, then you know what Tim?"

"What?"

"It's bad for business."

“I guess so, Mr. Greening." I didn't know or much care what he meant by economic theories. I knew we were getting a good deal, even if the guy was obviously a little eccentric. I walked back across the street.

“What did he say?”

“He said that it created an incentive for people to do their civic duty.”

“Hmm,” said Sue. “We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. For now.”

It was on the first day of October, the start of our second month there, that things began to change. I was coming home covered in wood dust sometimes, but not often enough, and Sue had been holed up in the duplex finishing her grad school applications. We were bringing in barely enough to cover rent and groceries, even with the credit cards.

As I stepped into the garage that morning on my way out to the paper, I could hear the low hum of our water heater in our laundry closet. But Sue was still asleep. After getting the paper, I padded across the cold pavement to the back of the garage and opened our storage closet. Someone had installed an auxiliary line from our heater that extended into the Bell's storage closet, where it disappeared. I felt it, and it was scalding hot. Walking outside, around to the window of their bathroom, I could hear their shower running.

They were using our hot water.

I was both puzzled and angry. I bustled inside and woke up Sue and we soon discovered that there was more. The most obvious change - I had walked blearily past it on the way to get the newspaper - was a small black box at eye level on the back wall of the garage. It had two rows of LEDs, one orange and the other blue, stretching to the right matched by a heading in the left hand column. I read the headings: Electric Usage, Elec. Usage Merge & Squeeze, Nature Consumption, Water Output, Water Input, Water Merge and Squeeze, and lastly, the Freeze/Immobility Rate which edged to the right when we moved around. Water Output was flickering to the right, probably from Nate in the shower; Water Input ticked very slightly to the right as we watched. Water Merge and Squeeze was lightly flickering all the way to the left, and the numbers underneath indicated a negative rate. Then we noticed the piece of good stationary taped to our door:

Dear Occupants,

I have been charged with receipt of certain remittances pursuant to your acceptance of certain mobility-exit response grid econometrics, hereafter “merge” requirements (see merge box). Rent deflations as negotiated.

Yours,

T. Greening.

Sue had stayed pretty quiet thus far but she was obviously pissed and her anger made her mind almost visibly churn. This was the first time I’d seen her under pressure and I was impressed.

“What’s it mean?” I asked.

“He’s playing language games,” she said. “This is what I study, Tim. The first step is to develop a persuasive lexicon.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s making the rules by deciding how we talk about it.”

“Why?”

“It looks like he’s going to give us rent discounts if we do what he wants.”

“But what does he want?”

“I’m not sure yet. We’d better talk to Nate and Kate,” she said.

“We just moved in,” said Kate, still in her pink jersey cloth pajamas and matching slippers. “So.. I don’t really know what he’s up to. Why don’t we have him over tonight? He seems like a nice enough man. He was a teacher after all, he can’t be that bad. He’s been talking lately about rent discounts or something if we try to use fewer utilities. Sounds fine to us – saves money.” She was unable to stifle a yawn as Nate walked up in his bathrobe with damp hair, still asleep despite the shower.

“I guess Old fella’s got something up his pipe, eh?” He said.

“This letter seems to imply a bit more than utilities,” Sue said, responding to Kate. “Come on, look at this.” The four of us went over to the box and Sue and I demonstrated the freeze rate effect. “Hold on a minute,” said Sue. She walked around to the backyard, where she’d been tilling in fertilizer to prepare for next spring. As we heard her hand churning the ground with a metal spade, the Nature Consumption LED jumped right – not with each hit though. It seemed to lag by a few seconds. “How in the heck does that work?” Asked Nate, scratching his shoulder with a beefy hand.

Sue came back then and we both marched across the street, the Bell’s following like sleepy pups. I pressed the blue button, as we walked past, just to see what randomized art it would give. It was an overhead shot of our duplex juxtaposed over another random looking background.

“Look, I’ll explain it all over dinner,” Greening said, standing in his doorway. “I’ll come over tonight.”

It was an awkward meal. I had a cold so Sue cooked and she was a terrible cook when she was mad. Emaciated green beans lay across a limpid puddle of gravy in which there resided a barely flavored baked thigh of chicken, surrounded by lumps of boiled potatoes. The food fortunately didn’t distract from the conversation, which was lively. It turned out Greening had been head of economics at a large state university for most of his career. One by one, he elaborately explained each action to the four of us. Although it was often hard to follow his jargon, clearly we’d save money on the rent, which Sue and I were already struggling to meet.

“I’ll be passing the savings on to you,” he said. “In return, you’ll submit to measurement.” He smiled and made quote symbols with his fingers at the end and I felt like one of his students from way back. Sue recoiled at the word “submit.” Basically, all our utilities would be monitored and autoreduced by his In-House Proprietary Mergeware Application if we used too much. He said he’d developed the software to keep track of all the various activities himself, although of course it was confidential. His parameters were set to transfer any rate surplus to the Bell’s account if we didn’t use it, but if we tried to use it during autoreduction then it would be taken from the Bell’s account. He hinted at some future changes that could be more drastic depending on our receptivity to these.

Even though Sue tried to act polite, I knew her well enough to know she was seething inside, thought he was a fool. “Could you explain the freeze rate again, please?” she asked at one point.

“Why of course, Sue. The freeze rate is in fact the most crucial algorithm.”

“So what is it exactly that it measures?” she asked.

Greening looked like he was talking to a small child, amused at its bluntness. “My dear–“ “Only my dad called me that.”

“I’m sorry, Susan.” He paused and looked around at us, smiling. “It measures the mobility of the occupants on a temporal basis.”

“You’re measuring how much we move around? Why?”

“Well, perhaps that is one aspect of the measurement, but also the quality of movement, the heat generated, and above all, as a comparison with overall material usage.”

“So you mean, you compare how much we are wearing things out with how much we move around? What’s so bad about moving around?” Sue asked. I pinched her in the side but she ignored it. We were all looking at her.

“That’s a bit of a negative take on my theory, I must say,” he said, “But the connection is empirically valid, if you are wondering.”

Sue just stared at him. “Yeah, Greening, I am. I’m wondering why in the hell you want to know how much I move around my own place. Are retired economics professors always so invasive of their neighbors?” Greening stood up quickly, looking at me. “Tim, I’m very sorry, but I can’t just sit here and take this from your partner. I work too hard for my tenants to be addressed in such a disrespectful manner.” The Bells rose, stood around Greening from each side, and looked down at Sue, who remained seated, like family friends at an unrepentant adolescent. I started to stand but she glared at me so I started to sit, but ended up frozen halfway.

“Tim, will you get Mr. Greening’s jacket please? Let’s not keep him from leaving if he wants to,” Sue said while walking to the door. I stood up and fetched his wool jacket and floppy old man cap from the bedroom. He summarily shuffled after Nate and Kate, his splotchy neck emerging out of the rim between hat and jacket, illuminated in the single garage light.

Despite this awkward first meal together, things seemed to improve over the next few months. I got a decent commission, and Greening’s incentives were starting to give us room to breath. We began to have the Bells over, or walk over to their place most evenings. I especially liked talking about the latest TV shows with them; I’ve always been an avid pop culture fan i.e., I like to be entertained. Greening himself was an occasional (Sue wouldn’t have stood for any more frequent), if passive, dinner guest, preferring to stand at the edge of the room looking teacherly. Since we were sharing and essentially competing to consume the least, it made sense to pool our resources and plan the usage and therefore we could buy a few more groceries. Why watch two TVs when we’d all be watching the same show? Sue didn’t watch as much TV as us, but would usually come sit on the arm of the couch for a little while with a half smile.

When the truck broke down we took out a loan to cover the repairs; my carpenter’s sporadic pay and high interest student credit cards were now all we had. We found ourselves including Greening’s many and various incentives into our budgeting. They often involved rent discounts.

You see, after a few months, we’d settled in pretty nicely. Conserving so much together had caused us to spend an enormous amount of our free time with Nate and Kate. We walled up the garage so that we could have a central room in the duplex for both couples to hang out and watch TV together, and generally use less stuff – it really brought down the rent. Nate and I were even giving each other referrals when we could, both being in the service business. Sue and Kate didn’t talk much, but still, we had a lot of meals and shows together, all four of us lined up on our thrift store couch, first in our respective living rooms, and then, a month later after I had finished the woodwork and Nate had put in the plumbing (Greening gave us free rent for a month to do it), in the merge room as we started to call it, because it brought us all together. We had to park on the street then, but the money and socializing were worth it. After conversion, the black box was visible from the television area. Sometimes we’d mess around with it to see what it did. If we all huddled on the couch and didn’t move, the freeze rate would go all the way to the left. If Sue gardened all day, nature consumption would push hard to the right. Mostly though, we just forgot it was there.

We didn’t get out of town much and even with the rent discounts our budget kept us from being very social, excepting for the Bells, of course. Still, life was pretty good.

One evening we were all sitting in our characteristic pose, lined up on the couch like birds on a wire, zoning out to satellite feed of the daily markets summary. Unemployment was way up but interest rates were down or something. We weren’t really watching it, just waiting for the popcorn to finish before we started up the movie.

“I don’t get that interest rate stuff.” Nate said.

“Yeah, it’s weird” I said. There was a knock on the door then and I got up to answer it.

It was Greening. “Hey folks,” he said, even though it was only me that answered the door. He was carrying a picture frame. “Hey Mr. Greening. What’s that?”

“This is perhaps my greatest work, thanks to each of you.” We were walking back into the merge room and everyone heard him say this and turned around. He walked without further comment and began mounting the frame directly above the large TV screen. Through short breath he said “Please forgive the intrusion, but I am so sure you will absolutely delight in this work as have I, that you must allow me to mount it. He lifted up the front cover.

He’d scanned a shot from the video camera feed, from the point of view of the television, of the four of us cold and shivering on the couch (saving heating charges during the winter), a single tan-colored blanket around our shoulders, faces illuminated by the glowing screen. He’d put it through some sort of filter or effect because all the lines oozed together with easy familiarity, giving it a harrowing, gaunt feel. Nate and Kate and I were watching the screen so only Sue was looking at the viewer. She thought it was creepy but Nate and I convinced her to keep it up on the wall for laughs. Kate didn’t seem to have much of an opinion.

But that week, Sue visited Greening three times: once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. She observed that he always left his back porch door cracked, seemed to have a fresh air fetish. Also, “He can’t stand in our kitchen unless the fan is on or the window is cracked,” Kate told us. So, as planned by Sue, the next night we all donned tennis shoes and black caps. Sue’s had a pom-pom.

“You always have to look different than everyone else,” I joked, but she gave me a blank look. Like a line of mice we scurried across the street into his front yard, behind the dense hedge and over his red cedar porch. The screen door was indeed cracked open.

His place was austere. The few pieces of art were all abstract and minimalist; inscrutable. No pictures of wives or dogs, only diplomas and research awards high on acid-washed walls, the most recent almost twenty years old. In one corner of his study, there was an expensive archive quality printer that could print to canvas. We found his laptop which wasn’t plugged into anything although it had an active wireless port. The password that Sue had watched him type the day before didn’t work. “That’s weird” she said. “I’m sure that’s what he typed.” She tried it again but the machine shut itself down. That scared us, so we scurried home feeling ridiculous.

Sue shifted her focus to research, but the three of us grew less interested lacking any proof. She finally turned up mention in a 1985 article of a theory disagreement at the Berkeley Economics department between “..The forceful Greening and the rest of the department which obviously trends humanist, shunning his behavioral approach.” The jargon got too heavy for me after that, but Sue read the whole twenty pages. She took the truck and drove down to Berkeley one day to talk with the author. When she came back that evening she sat at the kitchen table with the cup of coffee between her hands, staring straight ahead.

“Why won’t you tell me what he said?” I asked.

“Because you don’t get it.”

“Try me.”

Another exhale. “He said that Greening was brilliant. In ’84 he ran a double blind with human subjects adhering to a poverty modeling theory. There were lawsuits but the university hushed it up and shuffled him out, but apparently he was connected enough to get a fat settlement.”

“But poverty modeling sounds like a good idea to me.”

“Right.”

The next night we were all in the merge room beneath our portrait when we heard the roar of an engine coming from up the street. It was a busy street, but this was louder, more uncontrolled somehow.

“What is that?” asked Nate, getting up and going to the window. We all followed him just in time to see the jeep careen into the dumpster in front of Greening’s house. The dumpster amazingly remained intact, and dispensed a receipt upon impact that stayed fluttering in the dispenser. I wondered what the art looked like.

Greening came out later, excusing himself for the late hour. He talked to us about the protocols. Since, he said, the accident had occurred at 12:30 am, he had looked at his data and it showed an abnormally high danger coefficient for midnight and into the early morning. Therefore, for our own safety, only two of us could be gone at a time, he said, and a strict curfew of midnight was now needed, with a generous rent barter the incentive, of course. At that point, with the new discount, we’d be paying almost nothing to live there. “Greening, what’s your incentive?” I asked. “You’re practically paying us to live here then.”

“No, I’m not,” he said. “You’re paying me more than you know. In art, in theory, and…in practice. This is the best practice I could possibly ask for. And besides, you guys are almost fully merged. From a numbers standpoint, you’re pretty much one couple. So congratulations, right? You proved my theory.”

“Practice for what?” asked Sue, jumping to what he said earlier. “What in God’s name could you be practicing for that would keep us locked up like lab rats?”

“Well, I can’t disclose proprietary information now, can I, Sue?” She turned on her heel and swished back into the house.

Later, she told me it was like a prison. But the wreck had jarred me considerably, Nate and Kate too. We just wanted to relax, we didn’t go out that much anyway, what was the worry. But Sue was adamant. So I sat down with her in the bedroom, to talk about it.

“Baby, your Freeze Rate is pushing our bills up. You work so much in the garden that our Nature Consumption is through the roof and it’s being autoreduced onto the Bells again. Can’t you relax a little more?” Her bangs had fallen into her face and a few were trapped by a moistness on her cheek. I reached to wipe it away but she knocked my hand to the side. I smiled, to let her know it was okay, we had some differences but it was okay.

“What happened to you?” she said.

“I think you’re missing the point. It’s like Greening says, there’s a great merge coming, and we are a part of it now.”

“How can you believe that shit? Don’t you see you’re losing me?”

It was raining that last night, a cold Northern California soak. I fell asleep with Nate and Kate in the merge room and we woke up to the sound of Sue pausing at the coffee table nearby, then swishing out the front door, which she left open. I woke up and looked at the coffee table; she’d left a receipt from the dumpster, probably from the crash. It showed Nate, Kate and I asleep on the couch juxtaposed with a pair of warped headlights.

We filed outside under the awning in our slippers as she put two duffle bags in the back seat and got in the cab. I guess I wasn’t surprised. It takes sacrifice, a real eye to autoreduction. You’ve got to be willing to do that and not everyone is yet. I felt pretty bad, but I was smiling while I waved because I wanted her to know it would be okay, she’d realize soon that Greening is right: there is a great merge coming, soon we’ll be one frugally, and we’re working towards it every day, God willing. I only wish it was a little easier, that sacrifices did not need to be made.

* * *