Onboarding in the Tower of Babel ("Vice Nimrod" - Part One)

by Colin Dodds

Welcome, dear readers, to the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. Over the next three weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our three Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.

Our Finalists are:

1. Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

2. Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

3. Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

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In Vice Nimrod, a young refugee from a brimstone-wrecked small town, Ishkebek finds his way to Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, where he lands a job. Through a mix of savvy alliances and good luck, he rises through the ranks, and survives a professionally disastrous friendship with an idol-smashing protege, to reach the rank of Vice Nimrod, Communications. In his words, we learn how Nimrod’s Communications Group deftly handles the inquiries of the neighboring kingdoms, how it spins the burning of Sodom & Gomorrah, and how it finally flounders through the varied crises that make up the Confusion of Tongues.

Colin Dodds is a writer. He lives in New York City, with his wife and children. His novels, scripts and films have won multiple awards. His essays appear regularly at No Homework. And his aphorisms can be found at Forget This Good Thing, now available as an app for the iPhone and Android.

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And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

-Genesis 11: 1-4

We have taken great care to re-articulate and re-emphasize our cultural values and corporate standards consistently and clearly so they can be internalized by employees and result in the kinds of observable, ethical behaviors that we expect.

-JPMorgan Chase, How We Do Business, 2014

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Part One

Onboarding in the Tower of Babel

Applicant

I was new to the Plain of Shinar. The tower shimmied in the heat for three full days. When I finally reached it, filthy and exhausted, I pushed through the crowds to touch its dirty outer wall, just to confirm that either it or I actually existed.

Up close, it was gorgeous, terrifying, impossible—a mountain that spoke a human dialect. Beyond awe, what I felt was a desire so unbearable it made me consider fleeing back to the dusty wastes.

It was summer, and the tower bulged like the pistil of an overripe flower, its million windows full of women of scarcely guessable gorgeousness, full of possibilities that time has proven I couldn’t imagine.

I’ll stop there. It’s almost impossible to describe the tower. You only really see it the first two or three times, and maybe another two, three times more if you spend your entire life around it. The rest of the time, you don’t really see it. Maybe it’s like this with other places too. I wouldn’t know. What I believe, though, is what most in the tower believe: Unique in all of time and space, it may be the greatest single thing ever built by man.

And yet, after a few years, the tower becomes a strange sort of intimate. Your eyes begin to dart where its might and your desires become a clear window upon its own.

This may sound upsetting. But it’s not. It’s a transaction. You agree to it. I remember when I did.

Tilted Arch Park is a half-mile southeast of the tower, set on a low hill. From one of its benches, you can see the featherless eagle’s massive granite wings flex above the south gate, as well as the top eye of the three-eyed lion over the east gate. On a weekday, you can marvel at the traffic in and out of both. The park itself horseshoes around a bright white marble triumphal arch half sunk in the earth. With its carved figures and inscriptions smooth from the floodwaters, it looks like someone dropped a sheet over it.

They’d planted a nice lawn over the muck that had stalled the arch’s tumble. People picnicked in its uneven shadow. Especially around the tower, there was a lot of monumental detritus that people found easier to dress up than to remove.

From my bench, I watched the middle of the tower swallow the afternoon sun. With the cool shade that fell, came a sudden quiet. I knew a negotiation had begun.

Nimrod’s immense tower proposed a simple exchange. Some part of me for some part of it, roughly. And I, with the ashes of my kin still in my fingernails and hair, agreed.

We’re all orphans, but not exactly. My thin reed of surviving family was a surly second cousin north of the tower, in the moss-and-mushroom district (before it was fashionable), with a rag-piled corner he said I could use for sleeping, for a while.

The picnickers packed up around me. And I nodded at the looming beacon of shade, agreeing to its terms. And as of that moment, I had a home.

Candidate

It was a busy day in the tent labyrinth that Human Resources ran outside the jagged-toothed gate of the three-eyed lion. The sun was high. I hadn’t slept much the night before. I remember trying not to look up. I remember trying not to sweat.

The line was long and the woman from human resources wasn’t impressed. The look on her face was something I wouldn’t learn to decipher until much later. It was the look of someone who’s seen your face—your exact face—a dozen times before, probably saying the exact same things.

She wore gold dust on the black hair of her forearms, and a thick layer of makeup. Scrutinizing the clay tablet I’d given another similarly suspicious middle-aged woman two weeks before, she said she didn’t recognize the deity of the temple where I’d worked in Shinursba. A rural deity, she asked. No, I think that he has a shrine in the tower, I said. She said it must not be very high up. I said I thought it was high up, though I didn’t know which landing it was on. My cousin had told me to use the word landing when referring to a floor in the great tower.

The Human Resources woman, her lips wet with wax and her face dry with powder, told me that if I make it to the next round, not to say “landing.” I asked why not. She said “floor” was the word now. A bad batch of interns last year—a lot of jumpers, she said, so no one says “landing” now.

She told me that I must be looking for something in the Priesthood. I said not necessarily, said I’d take anything available. I said the bit that I’d rehearsed the night before about my literacy and numeracy, my adaptability and willingness.

She said good, and informed me that all the open positions in the tower depended on the wind for the moment. I nodded, not having the slightest idea what she was talking about. She let me nod like the rube I was, before she decided to give me a break. The wind is blowing from the south, she said, and if it keeps up through the next full moon, there will be a Festival of Layoffs.

So, you’re not hiring? I asked. We’re always hiring, she said. During the festival, every department in the tower has to let go of a quarter of its staff in the darkness of the new moon. Departments like the Priesthood usually hire back most of those people at the next full moon. It’s a collegial department, a little sleepy. The point is there’s not much turnover there, she explained. But then there are other departments, like communications. She offered to send me to interview for a position there. I said, sure, great, of course, please and thank you. She asked what I’d say to them and I said the literacy, numeracy, adaptability and willingness part again.

No, she said, that won’t do it. The woman who’s doing the hiring wants someone with strong internal communications experience, preferably in a court, or the military, or in engineering. She stared down at the tablet in front of her without moving for so long that I began to wonder if she could read, and asked where I was from again. I said Shinursba.

She scowled, and told me that when I was in Shinursba—when there was a Shinursba—maybe an army passed through. She said that maybe that army was full of mercenaries with divergent agendas, maybe with a barbarian flavor to some of them. Maybe I worked closely with the general and his executive staff to craft compelling, high-impact directives to a diverse body of troops that led to deeper corps-wide cohesion, while increasing efficiency and boosting morale to all-time highs.

She said the last part like a question. I asked if it was a question. She told me to think about it, and to be ready to give that kind of answer in the interview.

She said she’d send someone to let me know when the interview would be. She said it was nice to meet me, and paused for a pregnant moment. I told her my name. Right, she said, and wished me luck.

Probationary Junior Associate - Communications, Tourism & Mental Felicity

More than being hired, more than riding up several floors in an elevator only moments after discovering such a thing existed, I was shocked and amazed by the Anti-Abomination Orientation. It was a daylong recitation of what should have been obvious to anyone who grew up in a self-respecting, idol-handling civilization. The content of the orientation hardly seemed worth mentioning, never mind the scrolls, the catered lunch, and all of the candles. The auditorium was on the shady side of the tower, and there must have been a thousand candles. Like the rube I was, I spent the bulk of the day marveling at all the candles.

New to the tower, what I remember best is how impossibly pretty all the women were. Skin painted, blemishes and pockmarks filled, smoothed or never incurred, limbs perfumed, makeup impeccable, hair gleaming in the day and soaking up the night. Each was more maddening than the last. Impassive, sophisticated, full of casual disdain in the corridors and avenues, they seemed as unobtainable as life is long and the tower is high. An idle meander across a market floor left me alternately intoxicated and bewildered.

The young Human Resources woman running the Anti-Abomination Orientation was no exception. She looked out on the class with eyes wide and clear, their whites brighter than anything on the sixth-floor conference center. She spoke about defilement, which was all I could think of, but differently.

The defilement unit took up one of the bigger course scrolls, which we were supposed to read as she spoke. Having worked mostly with clay tablets, I fumbled the hand-worn horn handles on the scroll. Adrian, another new Comms hire, snorted as I struggled to keep the unfurling mess in my lap. He forced a laugh when no one picked up on his snort.

Everyone from my second cousin’s wife to the old men in the mushroom-district taverns told me that the tower was an unforgiving employer. And there were other ways in the Plain of Shinar to make a living, they said.

But there was no question for me. Nimrod’s great tower was the only thing huge and imposing enough to blot out all I hoped to ignore. Being an inextricable part of it was all I wanted. Those days, even at home, I spent my idle moments feeling the ridges on the ID that Human Resources had given me to hang around my neck.

It was a hand-sized tablet of sturdy glazed clay that bore the stamp of Nimrod, with his bow pulled taut atop a stylized tower. At the bottom was my name, title, division and department. Between Nimrod and my name were the names of the Vice Nimrod, Executive Vice Nimrod, Executive Commanding Vice Nimrod, Executive Directing Vice Nimrod, Executive Managing Associate Vice Nimrod, Managing Nimrod, Associate Manager and Senior Associate who connected us and filled the vertiginous gulf in power, status and importance between the Mighty Hunter and myself.

Symbolic power aside, it allowed me to skip the hours-long lines to get in the gate, exempted me from the suspicion of the police, made me desirable to women who would have otherwise denied my existence, and got me into the far cleaner employee elevators. In the most practical sense, it made me a full person.

Squeezing the ID with my free hand in the hall, I reminded myself to focus. There was, the doe-eyed, lazy-legged associate goddess told us, a Defilement Marshall on every floor. You were required to contact him, or her, she said, smiling to break up the tedium of the recitation, if a workspace idol had been defaced or otherwise altered within two turns of the water clock after you observed the damage.

Some of you may worship strange gods, or even a single God, she said—please consult the employee handbook on non-sanctioned prayer during office hours. A few nervous newcomers reached for a scroll. But I’d given up trying to understand the ways of God and the gods weeks before.

I never saw that fresh-faced human resources fawn after that day. She’d get a promotion or two, maybe make it to something like Managing Nimrod of Workplace Piety, before she was knocked up by some Plumbing, Sanitation & Tax Collection middle-management drone with family in the bitumen cartel and she’d stay home with the kids in a lower floor or in some pseudo-villa on the outer rings of the city. Her fate was as sure as the bricks rising on the same elevator that carries down the interns. Her life—all of our lives—are just so much small talk pasted on blind force.

My name is Ishkebek, but that’s just more weather, filler, grease for the axle. I’ll need your forgiveness to make it through my story. As a fragment, I have a habit of speaking in fragments. It’s all a farce, except for the tower. The tower is real.

I don’t guide a plow or pile cheap houses or bake bricks or shape bricks or haul bricks or lay bricks or tar the seams. I don’t command armies or mend pipes or hold a sword to orient the interns. I am what the ancients would have called an unreliable narrator, but not because I mean to deceive. I’ve simply gotten too good at lying, and deceive even myself without meaning to.

My father steered me toward this line of work. We weren’t rich, and by the dismal standards of our backwater, I was a boy genius.

“A stonemason is destroyed by his work, the farmer eaten by the food he grows. There is no profession that is not a thief. Only a scribe steals more than he has stolen from him,” was a quote my father had heard once. God knows where. My father was a stonemason.

Restless in the droning orientation, hands sweating with the effort not to spill scrolls of due diligence onto the polished floor, I asked my father’s ghost if he ever had to sit through anything so pointless as the Anti-Abomination Orientation. No, he responded. And after a pause, he said “But I never got paid so much to just sit there, either.”

Such absurd nonsense, I remember thinking, as I tried to coax deeper attention from the Human-Resources beauty, imagining she could see my keen intelligence and powerful, rebellious spirit. She didn’t. She seemed to wilt as the day went on.

Such unbelievable nonsense. I nearly went so far as to mouth the words.

But two years later, with rumors of reorganization sweeping the whisper-crowded corridors of Internal Communications, I volunteered to become the floor’s Defilement Marshall.

I had to fight for the position, actually. And I did.