Vice Nimrod (A Novel of the Tower of Babel) Chapter 2

by Colin Dodds

We continue the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest, with our first Finalist’s second chapter. Over the next three weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our three Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack.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:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

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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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Junior Associate - Communications, Tourism & Mental Felicity

It was a bad job. I might have grumbled, but I was new and didn’t know anyone to grumble to. Atop the tower’s latest yet-unbuilt top floor, I read and re-read a series of announcements to the illiterate interns. The announcements were about the preciousness of the bricks, how each was the product of centuries of divine guidance, how each took a full year to rise from the earth to their divine station in the tower, how each one would outlive the man who carried it, and should be handled with a care bordering on worship.

The top of the tower was incredible, at first. People at the bottom of the tower and in the city beyond believed incredible things about its top—that from it you could scoop out some of the warm substance of the passing moon. They believed that you could hear the gods arguing, making love and conspiring.

Up top, it was all relentless sun and murderous gusts of wind. You learned you could be mortally overheated and freezing to the bone all at once. And you realized that though you were breath-stoppingly far from the earth, you weren’t really much closer to the sky. You came to know others who lived at such heights. They mostly wanted to know about lunch.

The odor of the hot tar woke me up. It lent the morning a feeling of shrill opposition. It was boiling in black-stained vats. Its pungent fumes infiltrated every orifice and shadow. On the site, the food tasted like tar, the water tasted like tar. The joke was that it took the bitumen mixers and spreaders a year away from the job to ever get the stain and the smell out of their skin. Of course, you get used to it quickly enough.

The worksite, like all precincts where the poor and junior lived and worked, was crowded with the handiwork of the communications team. The anti-suicide signs from an earlier wave of interns faded on walls full of exhortations about relentless career advancement, the need to conserve supplies, and the consequences that awaited the careless and wasteful.

Bodies wash off the lower tiers of the tower easily. And the smell passes after a few days, the woman I was replacing had explained. But when people spill bitumen, it streaks the tower. A big enough spill will stick on the tiers below. It makes the whole tower look sloppy, accidental, she said, and costs a lot more to clean up than it does to onboard a new batch of interns.

Atop the known world, I peered out from between the tar vats and brick piles. The palm trees looked like baby spiders, the thousands going in and out of the tower’s four gates vanished to mottled rivulets of shadow. The city below bewildered the eye with its intricacy. Truth is, from the top of the tower, the view is disappointing, because you can’t see how that endless swell of land ever means anything. You can’t see the tower. Without it, the earth just goes on and on. The disappointment, the height and the heat were too much for me that day. I clung to a sliver of shadow cast by an empty bitumen furnace, stepping out only to repeat my announcements to the dead-eyed interns.

Overseeing the construction was a woman dressed in a stiff straw hat tied tight beneath her chiseled lupine jaw. Aside from the hat, all her loose clothing was restrained by what seemed like a hundred small linen straps. She ignored my fellow reader that day, an older guy named Rochek. He’d been doing these announcements for years. But she introduced herself to me as Meconia Dohegson Ozymandias Mansom. I’d never met anyone with so many names.

The interns moved faster and studied their feet when she came near. The interns who had found a way into management, and drove their fellows became especially cruel and loud when she walked past. It made me grateful for my job.

The sun was huge and bright. Damp, uninterrupted heat rose from the tower and washed over us. Plumbing wasn’t due on that level for weeks. We had a few jugs for the whole crew, and Meconia Dohegson Ozymandias Mansom wasn’t about to miss an elevator-load of bricks for more water. By mid-afternoon, interns began to load their gasping, groaning or eerily still peers on the empty down-bound brick elevator cars.

She didn’t seem to mind this development. With each worker lost, the managing interns grew louder and meaner.

I kept on repeating my announcements. But I’d already finished my portion of the Executive Support Staff Water by the time the interns started dropping. The sun continued to climb. And the heat-stricken workers only added panic to my thirst.

Of course, I had water, in the water clock I’d been issued before I rode the laborers’ elevator to the rooftop. The clock was a cheap item, basically two cloudy glass bottles sealed together at their mouths, with a cork on one end, by which it’d been half filled with water. At each turn, the clock told me when to step out of the narrowing shadow and repeat the announcement I’d been given to read. That clock became an obsession. Just one sip, I thought, sensing the consequences dimly.

After a few sips, the consequences became clear. With less water in the water clock, I was reciting the bricks-are-sacred-and-you-are-not spiel more and more frequently. That dried my throat further, leaving me no option but to take another sip. Soon, my water clock was mostly empty, and I was driving my section of interns half crazy by repeating the company line without cease in a miserable, halting croak.

Finally, Rochek gripped my arm with a violence that surprised me, given his stoop. He whispered at me ‘alright, we get it, laddy buck—you’re a comer—just lay off. Hustling for a promotion is one thing,’ he said in his old-man growl, but I was forcing respectable working men to chase their tails, and that wouldn’t stand.

Disoriented and a little shocked, I held up my clock and croaked about my mistake. He nodded and took my water clock behind the elevator’s crane apparatus.

I’d think the spectacular height would do more to stall a bladder than having another man see you piss. But not for Rochek. He handed the clock back to me a minute later with nothing more to drink, but plenty of time.

From then on, it was only the incredible heat full of subtle smells and the unthinkable distances that overtook me in the stretches between announcements. The communications team and other executive support staff got fresh water and sandwiches after mid-day, while the interns hissed and clawed over a not-so-big basket of bread. After lunch, they started dropping more often.

I eyed my piss-filled water clock with hate and respect. It stank, and it leaked a little when I flipped it. But it gave me a break—it let me watch from some kind of distance the drama that rose with the warm stink from the core of the tower and fell with the stricken and dead interns descending on the hard floor of the brick elevator.

The extra weight on the down-bound elevators, I later learned, sped up the delivery of bricks. So if you could work your interns to utter collapse at the right pace, you could actually optimize your building time. Later in my career, I saw Meconia Dohegson Ozymandias Mansom give a presentation on the tactic, and how it could be applied to other departments.

But that day, in the heat, watching interns drop and convulse, the phrase This cannot last spread from my aching shoulder to my dry throat and made my eyes sting that much more. That day, the entire tower seemed to be drinking carelessly from reserves that were vital to something still more vital, and yet desperately ignored.

I decided I just needed to get some sleep. I decided I’d feel better after I spent some of the money they paid me. And I was right.

Before very long, I got used to the heat and wind and rain and ruthless conditions atop the tower. I came to regard it as part of the deal it had struck with us.

In those miserable weeks I watched old Rochek take his little sips and reiterate his own announcement in tired, measured syllables. What I learned wasn’t the danger of working too hard. Rather, I learned the danger of not being ambitious enough.

Associate - Policing, Sanitation & Internal Communications

The problem was that they were too educated, had enjoyed too many months thinking they belonged to themselves, too many years thinking they were human beings. The problem was that it never occurred to the middle managers in their home countries, or on our end, that they’d rather die than be interns in Nimrod’s mighty tower.

The problem was the interns were a willful bunch who wouldn’t tolerate the long hours, bad food, scarce water and scant dignity that the budget allowed. The problem was that they couldn’t fathom or endure the steady diminution of self that the staggering scale of the tower inflicts on all of us without even meaning to. They insisted on being something, rather than not very much at all.

If not for my position, I might call it an admirable attachment to a noble idea. The problem, for me, was my boss. Her name was Yersinia. My other problem, I would discover, was the word ‘invisible.’

‘Rework it,’ Yersinia said. It was her preferred edit. My ability as scribe had gotten me off the roof. Yersinia had gotten there by knowing the names and predilections of her bosses. And she showed her disdain for both writing and for me by telling me repeatedly to ‘rework’ something, or to ‘wordsmith’ it, or even to ‘language it up.’ I nodded. New to the communications team, and happy to be working indoors, I was impressionable and impressed. Any suspicions that my co-workers in Internal Communications weren’t the brightest bunch were still faint coals. I was intimidated by how comfortable they felt in their surroundings.

I asked how I should rework the piece in question. She said to write it like the other ones we’d done, but to make it fresh. I did that. She said the announcement was a mess. I asked how. She said it just was, shaking her head at the parchment sheet in front of her. The tone, she said, was all wrong.

I asked what about the tone was wrong. She looked at me, sad and angry. She was middle-aged, with a powdered face taut from years of quiet panic. Her broach was heavy and tugged at the fabric of her starched gray tunic. It looked like a hand-axe made by someone with a short attention span.

As she looked at me, I had the sense she didn’t see me. Rather, some nightmare I wouldn’t understand until years later seemed to unfurl directly behind my insignificant form. The wind was blowing from the south. She told me to look at the other scrolls about employee fulfillment and relentless career advancement, and to make it sound like them.

The great triumph of Yerisinia’s career, and her life, had been overseeing the update of the Vision and Values statement for Internal Communications. She spoke of it frequently as the kind of glittering success none of us might live to witness even if I, like her, worked every waking hour, and some of the other ones too, for the internal comms cause, whatever it happened to be that day.

The scroll in question would go to Junior Associates, who would read it to yet-more lowly interns on the upper floors who had taken to leaping rather than piling bricks and tarring the seams.

“In Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, we all strive for the highest possible safety standards every single day, consistent with the swift and steady ascension of...” it began. Then a few paragraphs on the investments the Tower Operating Committee had made in employee safety and health. Only once the listener was tired of listening came the abstract, tangential mention of the recent rash of jumpers. The fact that a hundred men dashed themselves to pulp in a month rather than submit to a lifetime of minor promotions to nowhere went unmentioned.

Yersinia said the opening line was strong enough to keep. She said it quietly, loathe as she was to admit that I wasn’t totally hopeless. I’d learned a few tricks in those weeks. I’d learned the aim wasn’t to communicate at all, but to cultivate enough ambiguity that the people at the top could have it both ways. As for the people below, who were being communicated to, the aim was for them to feel as though they’d been given some kind of answer, without giving one.

But Yersinia knew the trade far better on that day. And I accepted that. I was a buttoned tunic and a shut mouth in those very early days. I leaned in to learn the latest thing I’d done wrong.

She tapped a painted crimson fingernail like a talon on the parchment, pointing to the word invisible. That was a word the tower would never use in an announcement, she said, and especially not to interns. She snickered at my idiocy.

In the announcement, after detailing the loving care of the Operating Committee, the announcement informed the interns that the workplace idols watched always, and that neither their gods nor the ones dear to executive management would guide them up the invisible ladder to the next world if they leapt. Rather, they would wander the wilderness without surcease of wailing and so on. It was a short paragraph, followed by several more about the programs offered by the Relentless Career Advancement For Interns program.

But the ladder is invisible, I argued meekly.

Yersinia took my comment as another opportunity to speak to me like I was a child with a head injury. This isn’t the priesthood, she said. We are the internal communications function of the Policing, Sanitation & Internal Communications division of Nimrod’s mighty tower, she said, slowly. It is not for us to tell people what is visible and invisible, she said. It is not for us to even say if anything that’s invisible even exists. That’s for Priesthood, Socialization & Mission Marketing, if they’d even touch it. But she doubted they would. With that, she sent me off to rework it once more.

Each poster, memo, announcement, greeting, training manual and sundry material we created had to pass through a minefield of forbidden words. Internal comms had formal and informal bans on so many words and phrases that it took me months to comprehend the vague outline of the logic, and another few months to actually believe. For instance, nothing could ever be said to improve—as that would imply that things had once been lacking.

Whether it was safety standards, architecture, efficiency, intern training, bitumen consistency, professional development, brick hardness, management effectiveness or communications strategy: Things could only be first-rate, world-class, kingdom-leading, exceeding pre-flood excellence, best-in-category, or striving for some combination of those. ‘Striving’ was a safe word. Everything living and inanimate in the tower was striving in some way or another, according to us.

I had just begun to know this, but couldn’t quite accept that this was how someone who included communications in their title would want to communicate.

I looked at the parchment for other parts to change. And Yersinia looked at me from behind her fine desk of wood, so pale it seemed to float, like I was a crooked-eyed orphan she wanted to return to the Field of Wailing.

Back at my desk, I could think better. Situated about as far as possible from the floor’s outer and inner windows, it pressed against the tight brickwork of an elevator shaft. For the part of the day when I was not being lambasted, criticized or pitied, I labored to the sound of steel chains gently scraping and the pale, wistful moan of the air as it rattled heavy wooden doors set on iron casters whenever those small rooms approached and vanished. It’s a sound worn into every memory I have of that time, a song I hear whenever I think of my career. It remains the secret name I have for the hopes, desires and illusions that animated and identified me for most of my life.

After a week of decreasingly chastised revisions, Yersinia reluctantly agreed that I had managed to capture the tower’s Executive Tone. But lest I think my job was safe, she remained mildly outraged that it took me so many drafts and so much of her nonsensical instruction to get there.

The Executive Tone is coldly polite. It neither exhorts nor pleads. It wills the addressee to do or think a certain thing in the expected fashion. Without emotion or inflection, the tone assumes that every aspect of the reader or listener’s existence will be subjugated to the blithe and often-unclear intent of the tone’s issuer.

Intern Relations & Junior-Builder Motivation took a month to revise and approve the script. The final announcement eliminated all mentions of suicide, and added quotes from the Vice Nimrod of the division of how proud they all were of the safety and advancement programs available to interns.

By then, the boldest of the interns were dead. The remaining workers had either been swayed by the promises of the Relentless Career Advancement representatives, or had quietly given up on being anything but something that survives—if there was a difference.

Associate - Workplace Piety, Communications & Kingdom Marketing

Communications was merged into yet another division, and Internal Communications received a new Executive Vice Nimrod, a guy by the name of Jerrozeboth Shamanad Laddorrah. As anyone who’d spent time studying the top lines of their ID tablets, or scrutinizing the ceiling of the hall of the org chart knew, this was a big step down for the executive, who told us just to call him Jerr. It could only be a modified retirement, or a gesture meant to inform his enemies on the Operating Committee that they needn’t bother having him killed.

For some reason, he took an interest in me, which probably saved my job. Without him, I never would have made it to Managing Nimrod. He taught me how things really worked, and how the work of Workplace Piety, Communications & Kingdom Marketing played into it. After so many years, it spilled out of him—the big picture and the small. I was junior enough to trust with a few candid words.

“Just kick it off with an ‘In an effort to,’ then go to ‘maximize the potential’ then something about ‘streamlining’ so people get the sense that we’re saving their jobs by moving them to a smaller office on a lower floor, or, gods forbid, the annex,” was how he’d assign an announcement. It bored him.

I got to know Jerr while he dictated the communications strategy around the announcement that the tower’s offices were reorganizing. I remember the day I asked, aghast, if we were moving to the annex. The annex was a series of low office buildings outside the tourist-swarmed West Gate of the Horn-Spined Bull. Being sent there was an indicator that your team wasn’t exactly integral to the tower. To me, it was an exile, if not a variety of death.

He smiled. We all loved the tower, but for different reasons. Jerr, I think, loved the conspiracy of it all—the play of knowing and not knowing, of having and lacking power based on a loose word let slip.

That’s not public information, he said. Seeing the panic on my face, he finally said, no, but we’re moving down a few levels. I asked if the division was in trouble and he said no, it’s just part of how the tower works—it needs more materials and more interns from farther away to grow, so it has to placate more kings. So the tower has to offer them flashy apartments on the good sides of the high floors, which means everyone else has to move. The principalities get our space, and so we move down, lose a few offices, share a few desks, and everyone who matters is happy.

At least we’re not going to the annex, I said. That’s the spirit, he said.

With that, he walked me through the order for the usual public folderol—the maximizing, the streamlining and the bit about the tower being a creation-wide leader, an ageless brand to whom all is possible, never to be scattered across the face of the earth, and so on.

I asked about the details of the move, like who’s going where and when. Leave it out, Jerr said. The plan was to put out the announcement without specifics and to have the Managing Nimrods take the temperature. If there’s grumbling, the Operating Committee will probably vote to strip a few perks, maybe charge everyone a little more for office coffee, reduce the oil for the lamps, slow the elevators, maybe something worse. Then Communications put out a few more equally vague announcements about streamlining and efficiency.

I said we were scaring people. But he said no, never—if we scare people, the good ones will move on to greener pastures, because they can. It was more about instilling dread. Dread tended to freeze people where they were. You can’t go wrong with general, pervasive dread, he said.

As usual, Jerr was right. By the time anyone knew where their offices would be moving, we were riding infrequent and packed elevators to offices where we drank watery, expensive coffee and grumbled ever more softly in dim offices. More than once, I heard someone from a department relegated to the annex say they were glad to leave the tower. I nodded and was glad I didn’t have to tell myself that particular lie.

The relocation took two years and ground us all down. We sophisticated professionals in Internal Communications, more or less versed in all the latest politics, architecture, culture and business, spent our days discussing the best way to communicate tower policy about absconding with a desk lamp, or the unsanctioned switching of an office chair, or the pilfering of parchment. Then we held yet more meetings to brainstorm and craft communications on the coffee pots that had vanished or relocated during the move.

The meetings, usually with some jaded Managing Nimrod of Human Resources, Career Development & Population Verification, revealed a deep misery. It was something I hadn’t bothered to notice since my days reading anti-suicide communications to construction interns. These were, after all, office people, who were inside the tower. Human resources delivered the hundreds of complaints about prematurely removed coffee pots. It was easy to see that they weren’t about the coffee pots. The complaints were in part, the spiteful response of helpless underlings to their callous managers and an uncaring fate. These were mid-tower people, their positions so secure or insecure that they could count the loss of the office coffee pot as a mighty affront, and perhaps the last straw.

Our initial response, written by those of us junior enough to share some of the fiery rage of our supposed colleagues, was cordial and almost apologetic. It may have lacked Nimrod’s Executive Tone. The grumbling, the time-wasting and continued meetings about coffee pots and their trivial equivalents persisted.

Jerr oversaw the next round of communications, which focused on coffee pots brought from home. And it delivered all the policy-and-damnation insinuations the Executive Tone had to offer. That quieted the office grumblers. The short but bold statements hung by every elevator bank, speaking more of termination than coffee. The meetings stopped. Coffee flasks appeared on desks.

“There’s no power without desire and no desire without fear,” Jerr said at the time. “Increase one and you increase all.”

I didn’t understand that one at the time, so I made sure to remember it.

The silencing power of those communications on my peers only confirmed my own breakneck brown-nosing and backstabbing career trajectory. I wanted more of that power, even if just as its wordy custodian.

When we finally moved offices, it was like Jerr had promised—lower down and in closer quarters. Being a comer, I had a desk near a window; being junior, that window faced the inner courtyard, with a view of the dizzying concave wall of small windows and the conical heap of broken masonry at the center of that forbidden central precinct.

The department, as a whole, was jammed in about half the space they had before. The ones who lost their offices in the move started to look tired all the time, and seemed to get sick. Yersinia’s hair thinned, and her efforts to cover the bald patch made it hard to talk to her without getting distracted, which was dangerous, as she’d turn vicious in an instant. But I was close enough with Jerr that, aside from sniping in a staff meeting, she didn’t go after me the way she had.

The quarter-floor that our division shared with Ambiance Continuity, Number Management & Policy Observance was dark and strangely gorgeous. There are a few like it in the tower, the walls full of arcane and mysterious friezes, frescoes and tracery.

The inner wall of our section was dominated by a deep-relief scene—a group of men, gathered in three-quarters profile. One pressed a gimlet into the straining skin of the sky, which dimpled and broke slightly. Another man held a finger up to the gimlet, gathering a drop of fluid from its edge. A third man, with a finger in his mouth, stared off. The carving was exquisite, fascinating and perverse.

Like everything, though, I didn’t notice it again after a few weeks.

Huge buttresses and pillars of mismatched brick interrupted the ancient frieze and all of the other carvings that ringed the outer wall of that floor. The walls, with their faces and filigree, someone explained to me, had been carved to celebrate that this was the top floor, the last word.

But some disappointment or later imperative drove the tower higher and required the ugly supports for the floors above, which covered much of the art. Ours was one of several such floors.