Short Fiction: ‘Rules of Special Measures’ by Ben Fountain

“Leaders around the world have passed emergency decrees and legislation expanding their reach during the pandemic.” —“For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power,” The New York Times (March 30, 2020)

There were as many trucks as ever, but now they took things away. FedEx, Amazon, UPS, they all did their part, but more often it was the boxy white Mercedes vans with the high roofs that had started showing up in the latter years of the boom. Plain white, no company name, no snappy logo on the side, which in our hyperbranded times might have briefly struck us as odd, and then they blended into the landscape of everything else. We didn’t know how good we had it, did we? It was so easy, and how quickly we became used to it, the couple of keystrokes that produced the modern miracle of that package on our doorstep in three to five days, then two, then next day, if we were willing to pay for it, and, ultimately—how did they do it!—same day.

Packages, packages, thousands and millions of packages pouring out from what were once called warehouses, but now went by the name of “fulfillment center.” A neat sleight of hand, that appeal to our higher nature; supply-chain magic was about so much more than crass materialism. And, honestly, that’s often how we felt, fulfilled in a not negligible way. Amid the nonstop sales job of modern life we were constantly being admonished not to put our faith in material things, and we tried, most of us, and mostly we succeeded. We were not shallow people. The things in our packages weren’t just, well, things. They were … how to put this? Content. Structure. Emotion. Part of the necessary human fabric of our lives.

The legalities were never made entirely clear to us, but that was true of many things. Life changed so fast, so drastically, that not everything about Special Measures could be adequately explained, and anyway we were too frazzled and generally panicky to process more than the general drift. “Recovery,” it was called, or “Recovery Operations.” The country was in crisis, the economy imperiled; somehow the country and the economy had become one and the same. The whole thing was really quite astonishing. The white van would pull up in front of our house at the most inconvenient time, early morning when we were hustling to get the kids off to school, or evening when we were cooking dinner or checking homework, or had settled in at the kitchen table to grind our teeth over the ever-rising stack of bills, and there they’d be at the front door, two burly Recovery Techs in their dark uniforms—pants and jackets if it was winter, shorts and short-sleeved shirts in summer—and always a third Tech standing out by the van, watching. Unfailingly polite they were, soft-spoken, sympathetic, and huge, the entire cadre seemingly recruited from the ranks of former college and professional football players. They had clipboards, reams of fine-print paperwork, and boy did they know their business. It was always quite specific, what they’d come for, always one particular thing, a lamp, the gas grill, electronics, cookware, and—this was the truly unnerving part—they knew exactly where it was.