The Sacrifice is in the lobby, waiting to be buzzed in. Through the grainy, in-unit feed, Shelly inspects her: a stout, middle-aged woman in jeans, a pea-green cardigan, and a pink hijab. Spoken, her English is passable. Written, not so much. She’s never worked, she told Shelly on the phone, not once in thirty years. She had the money, had it made; but then, in April, her husband, an executive something or other, died of a massive coronary. Their sons are Americans, both employed by major firms. It’s not money she needs. It’s the visa. Unsponsored, she’ll soon be shipped back to Saudi Arabia; and here she hesitated. She wasn’t ready just yet to speak ill of her country.
“Resumé and cover letter,” she said after a moment’s silence. “They are needing some attention. You are open this week?”
“Can you come after five? I can maybe squeeze you in.”
“Oh!” The Sacrifice dismissed this inconvenience with a chortle. “No problem. I am empty.” Meaning that her calendar was.
It’s after five. Snacks are on the table: Chips Ahoy, a cheese and hummus platter, lemon and raspberry tarts, cut into quarters. All that’s missing is the pomegranate seeds.
“Thank you,” the Sacrifice declares, sweeping these aside and hoisting a wicker purse the size of a briefcase up onto the table. She knows that Americans say thank you, but not when or why. “Where,” she mumbles, licking her fingers and thumbing through the papers bristling from the purse, “where, where…ah!” Brandishing one, she announces, “Resumé.” And then another: “Cover letter.”
“You need a comma here,” says Shelly, leaning forward, promptly circling a hyphenated word. “Not this little dash.”
“That is name of a company,” objects the Sacrifice; but in her voice, there is a question mark.
Shelly takes the scenic route to victory. “And is it a real company?”
“Of course!” The Sacrifice cocks her head, as indignant as she is nonplussed. “I find it on the internet. You see?” She plants a chubby index finger on the page. “It says I work there five years.”
“I see,” Shelly agrees, licking her lips, the scent of red ink tastier than any pomegranate juice. “That’s your problem. Online, you can use those little dash thingies, but for anything printed, like a resumé, you’re going to want to use commas.”
“Use…commas…” The Sacrifice echoes, studiously scribbling a note in the margins, her self-assurance not so much gone as diverted. Transformed.
“And here,” Shelly goes on, turning to the cover letter, circling the periods at the end of each paragraph. “You’ll need to get rid of these.”
“But there is always period after sentence.”
“Not if it comes at the end of a paragraph,” Shelly says. “It’s optional then. And I advise against it. Anyone can see there’s a paragraph ending. It’s a waste of ink, really.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” murmurs The Sacrifice, her head bobbing in the affirmative. “I see.”
They go on like this for the rest of the hour. Shelly makes quick work of the cookies and cheese. The Sacrifice does not partake. Not even of the hummus, which Shelly thought would be a slam-dunk. But it hardly matters now.
At the end of the session, The Sacrifice runs her eyes hawkishly over their work, purses her lips, clucks her tongue, then brings out a checkbook and writes a check for seven hundred fifty dollars. Shelly makes her wait while she takes the resumé and cover letter to the other room to scan and print them—“For the IRS,” she explains. “So I can prove I’m self-employed.” Then, with the Sacrifice gone, she deposits the check, puts the snacks back in the fridge, stuffs her feet into galoshes, takes her purse and her umbrella, and heads out the door and down the musty stairs.
Tonight is the End of the Quarter, but she feels no fear; or perhaps she’s simply learned to live with fear, or even for it, as she lives for the dramatic irony, the schadenfreude, the sheer exhilaration. It’s been sixteen quarters since she reaped a sentence, and though her induction onto the committee is still at least nine months away, and far from guaranteed, it’s close enough that she’s begun to savor its foretaste, to indulge a little in the fugue amusement of a Priestess when the End of the Quarter rolls around, rather than the fear and trembling of a common Chameleon, which she still technically is. She’s even begun to let herself form judgments, half-consciously at first, and then with growing clarity. They carry no weight now, of course. But they may soon.
Down she goes, into the subway, and then up again, into the roaring rain, clopping along until she stands before the grand façade of glass and stone: outwardly, just one more New York apartment building, but what the uninitiated do not, cannot know—and this includes the doorman—is that, on the sixteenth floor, there lives a High Priestess. Gabby is her name. To the world, she is but a humble social worker, one more brute appendage of a vast and faceless system, spasmodically distributing manna; but on nights like this one, she is something more.
Through the lobby, Shelly goes—“Hi, Frank!”—giving her umbrella a shake, that others may slip on the checkerboard floor, and on through a nondescript nook, down some nondescript stairs, and at their bottom, upon a door that radiates Employees Only vibes, she knocks, a stream of dots and dashes in which not even the keenest cryptographer could find any meaning, for the fundamental units of this message are not words, not even letters, but simply the dots and the dashes themselves.
Into the basement, she is ushered, the concrete hollow where the high-rise sinks its great, steel roots into the earth, and where, as far as building management is concerned, an extremely exclusive but otherwise utterly conventional book club meets once every three months to gush over novels with witchy themes. And now she is among her sisters—and also Kyle, and Dave, there being no requirement that one must be a sister, though that’s usually how it is—and the spirit of the evening has its teeth in her now. O, racing pulse. O, sweating palms.
Backs to the wall, The Committee is seated, each with her own water bottle, her own mic, her own cup of pens, and her own stack of collated offerings. Head bowed, Shelly makes her creeping approach, her own offering proffered before her, its edges only slightly damp with rain. To Monica, the least of the Priestesses—in the world a successful wedding planner—she presents it. Monica takes it, licks a finger—sparkly black and purple nails—and separates the uppermost sheets from the rest, then passes them on to her elder sister, Vanessa, an online English teacher who spends her late nights raising Chinese children out of blackest ignorance and setting them on the global stage, and she takes two sheets and passes them to Dave, the only Priest, a not-so-real estate developer who, now in his sixty-third year, still remembers vocally and often his glory days as editor of his high school paper, and he takes two sheets, and lays two more in front of Rita as she snores, and passes the final two to Gabby, presiding decorously from the table’s leftmost end.
Without giving The Committee her back, Shelly retreats, nearly stumbling over one of the Ottomans that litter the basement floor, comma-shaped, custom-made. Most are occupied by sisters, seated with bent backs and furrowed brows, appearing to study their shoes, actually studying each other, quietly evaluating: Who is confident this quarter? And whose confidence will be her undoing?
And now, at long last, Gabby calls them to order, her hoarse voice reverberating off the mildewed walls: “Good evening, sisters. And Kyle. And Dave. Welcome to the Quarterly Conference of the Comma Chameleons.”
“Woo!” shouts Kyle, rising a few involuntary centimeters off his Ottoman, his fist in the air. Then, becoming aware of all eyes swiveling onto him, and of words being murmured— “thinks he’s all that, does he”…“and in a women’s space”…“so loud!”—he lowers his head once more. “Sorry.”
“Wonderful,” Gabby says. “Kyle, it is wonderful to witness your enthusiasm.”
“Oh.” He ducks his head so that his tousled, blond hair flops into his eyes. “For sure.”
“In fact,” Gabby goes on, “since you’ve demonstrated such enthusiasm, why don’t we begin by reviewing your offering?”
“Okay.” His flesh seems to glimmer in a cold, pasty way as he rises, his legs unsteady as a foal’s. “I guess. Sure?”
Something about his body conjures images of an enormous windchime. If he were strung up from someone’s eaves, thinks Shelly, his bones would certainly clatter and tinkle in all the right ways.
For a while, Gabby’s emerald eyes rest on the printed offering before her. Then she raises them to Kyle. “Pronouns?”
“Sorry?”
“Your pronouns,” she repeats with frosty urgency. “What are your pronouns?”
“I’m a boy.”
“Excuse me?” Gabby slaps the offering down on the white table. “Excuse me? Do you mean to tell me that you are as confused about the parts of speech as are your Sacrifices?”
“Sorry?”
“Boy is not a pronoun!”
“Oh,” he mumbles, red-faced. “He. I’m a he.”
“He…him?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Very good,” says Gabby. “Then you may proceed.”
Falteringly, Kyle launches into his oral presentation: as a multilingual editor—unspoken but very much heard is his status as the only multilingual editor in attendance, a truth that modifies his timbre when acknowledged, a badly needed infusion of confidence—he has access to certain insights, which he enjoys unique opportunities to leverage in service of the Order. In Arabic, for instance, the language he learned as a Christian missionary in Morocco many years ago, before he saw the error of his youthful follies and renounced his ill-considered allegiance to the Word in favor of the far-superior Punctuation Mark, there are no commas. Instead, there is the letter wa, equivalent to the conjunction and. “It even kind of looks like a comma,” he adds, his lips hijacked by a bashful smirk, which adheres to his face for several seconds before peeling away and dropping with a moist plop to the floor. “Anyway,” he goes on, with only the faintest of shudders, “here I am one day, with a Sacrifice I’ve been grooming for a while, this non-trad guy who drove trucks all his life, and now he wants to learn accounting, and boom! It hits me. And I just start taking all the commas out and putting letters in instead.
“The first one, I replaced with a. But I didn’t want to just keep doing the same thing over, like they do in Arabic, so the next one, I replaced with b. And then I just kept going like that, all the way to z. And then we started over.
“At first, he was kind of suspicious, but then I had a really good idea. I told him to get out his textbook, and I showed him those all little superscript letters, you know, for the endnotes—”
“Stop,” Gabby says.
Kyle’s mouth goes on moving for a few extra seconds, but there are no more words. Then his lips fall still, his face blanching, rheumy dollops quivering in both his eyes.
“Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this picture?” asks Gabby.
For a few raging seconds, everything in that basement is tohu va-bohu, without form and void; and then Dave, reclining languorously in his folding chair, shatters the silence. “Well, bud. The thing is, we are a secret society. You know. Chameleons, and all. Camouflage is kind of our thing. And it kind of seems to me—and this is just one man’s opinion, but I am sort of an important man—that you’re maybe pushing the envelope a little far.”
“Well.” Gabby’s sniff cuts like a guillotine blade. Her eyes stray briefly, contemptuously over to Dave—“someone’s competing for gold in the Understatement Olympics”—and then her full attention swings back onto Kyle. “You do realize, do you not, that the fate of this Order is in your hands?”
Kyle’s bobblehead bobbles low.
“You are this close,” hisses Gabby, illustrating with finger and thumb, “this close to blowing our cover. Tell me, sisters, can we afford that?”
Up swells a chorus of no’s; and as this wave recedes, a whole new kind of silence rushes in, takes hold, for Rita, the Clarence Thomas of this august judicial body, ninety-six years old and cryptic as a sphynx, with just as little use for words, except for once in a blue moon, speaks.
“I would just like to say,” she says, “that this young man’s approach truly does display an admirable…an admirable…well…an admirable creativity.”
No one in the basement would be much surprised if Gabby, her face a horrible, twitching mask, were to combust just then, her body wrapping itself in flames. That Rita has a certain fondness for young men is widely known, as is the fact that this occasionally yields miscarriages of justice, but there is very little to be done. Gabby may be the High Priestess, but Rita’s still her elder, and there are certain lines one does not cross if one wishes to retain one’s seat.
“It’s really very…really very…” and here Rita licks her lips, and on them seems to find the word she’s seeking, “pioneering.”
And, with this, she lowers her head and snores.
The chorus of no’s is succeeded by a chorus of whispers, frantic and loud. Each Priestess, and also Dave, is anxious to be heard by Gabby, whom they all hope to appease, but each is just as anxious to avoid awakening Rita, lest she make a more explicit call for clemency. As it is, there is still room for interpretation.
Instead of listening, Gabby seems to turn inward, chewing on the end of a pen, not bothering to interrupt her underlings’ jockeying. Then, all at once, she throws the pen on the table, raises her voice, and addresses the gathering. Kyle, she declares, by giving them all such a headache, has earned himself a good, strong dose of the Question Mark Gas.
The precise chemical composition of this punitive aerosol remains confidential, but it is known to induce horrific visions, paranoid delusions, and hangovers lasting a week or more. It is also thought to shorten lives.
With the resignation of a true believer, Kyle allows himself to be half-led, half-dragged by three neophytes, whom he could probably overpower, and could definitely outrun, to the corner by the boiler, where they kick him in the shins until he sits, then stuff his head into a bag.
With his moans in the background, the proceedings resume. The next offering is made by a line editor, whose signature method of disassembling and remixing her Sacrifices’ papers line by line, sometimes as the spirit moves her, and sometimes in consultation with the Tarot or the I Ching, meets with The Committee’s approval. Shelly, who’s seen this very offering presented many times over the years, always successfully, is disappointed. It shall not be when she’s on The Committee, and appropriate respect for the virtue of originality is at last restored. Or perhaps it will be. By day, the line editor serves as the director of a college writing center. Under her stewardship, dozens of Chameleons have been groomed, converted, and brought into the Order over the years. In this way, she pays her dues.
After her comes a tutor from that same writing center, a slim, celestially pretty being who knows that she can do no wrong. This is her first conference, and she speaks with no fear, regaling her audience with the tale of an undergraduate who brought her a term paper already riddled with semicolons. “Can you believe it?” she tinkles. “He even put one at the start of a sentence! He said someone told him to just put a semicolon whenever you’re not sure what to do. So, he went ahead and put them everywhere.”
“It sounds like someone else had already sacrificed him,” Monica observes.
“Maybe.” The tutor shrugs, unworried. “But I was like, okay, why not do it again? I told him punctuation is like seasoning, and you wouldn’t only put black pepper on your mashed potatoes, would you? You would use salt, too. And maybe cinnamon, if it’s a sweet potato. And maybe even some brown sugar. Whatever seems nice. You know? I told him it’s the same with punctuation: just grab a handful and sprinkle!”
Again, she lets loose that unbearable tinkle.
“That’s a satisfying false analogy,” Dave says, “but how are you going to deal with the broken clock problem?”
The tutor flutters long, blond lashes over large, wet eyes. “The what problem?”
“Even a broken clock’s right twice a day,” Dave says. “You throw a bunch of monkeys in a cage, give them all a bunch of punctuation marks, and sooner or later, one or two of them will end up in the right place. What I’m saying is, sometimes you’re better off just letting nature run her course. If it’s all semicolons all day long, then this kid doesn’t know what he’s doing. But if it’s a mixed bag, if he gets a few right, here and there…well. It may just come off looking like he knows a thing or two.”
“Oh,” the tutor jumps in, “but I don’t think—”
But Dave chews through her words: “Commas goeth before an independent clause with a conjunction, and pride goeth before a fall. And that, little missy, is precisely what you’ve set yourself up for. A fall.”
While The Committee deliberates, the tutor sits on the concrete floor and sobs. Some of the Priestesses yearn to see her youth and beauty marred, but it’s clear for everyone to see that simply being told she’s wrong has hit her harder than anything else that can be done. Her state is so abject that even Monica and Vanessa are soon convinced to grant a little mercy. And so, though her offense would normally warrant the Full Semicolon—the application of the Comma Brand, already propped against the boiler, heating, alongside a citrus-scented enema of Colon Cleanser—this Chameleon will be spared, in part, and subjected only to the Comma Brand.
Up next is a proofreader, draped in more dollar store pearls than Rita, and almost as old. She takes her sweet time dragging herself across the room, one leg seemingly twice as heavy as the other, huffing as she comes. “Y’all know my pronouns,” she says as she closes the distance. “How about we just cut to the chase?”
She doesn’t leave the house much, she explains. Not with three grandkids to raise. Most of her sacrificing happens online. That very afternoon, she got a paper from an undergraduate student, anxious to pass her class, distrustful of the writing center.
“See,” someone mutters. “That’s what you get for letting guys like Kyle in.”
“Didn’t read it.” The proofreader snorts. “Ain’t got time. Sent it straight back to her. Told her she better rewrite the whole thing. Oh, she was mad. Emailed me back, like, ‘How am I supposed to rewrite this?’ Like that’s my job. ‘Do it over,’ I told her, ‘and send it back, and I’ll proofread some more.’ And she’s like, ‘But I already paid you!’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, honey, and you’re going to pay me again for the next round. That’s how this works. You think I work for free?’”
Gabby clears her throat. “Pardon me,” she says when the proofreader falls pointedly silent, “it’s just that I find myself wondering wither, perhaps, it doesn’t bear repeating that your highest allegiance, per the oath you swore upon assuming your place in this Order, is to us. Not to your grandchildren.”
The proofreader’s response is to lapse into silence: a slow, belligerent, lockjawed, hands-in-the-pocket sort of silence that lasts and lasts and will not end.
“And if she rewrites the paper,” Vanessa puts in, more to end that silence, it seems, than for the sake of communication, “she might actually make it better. Which is risky.”
“And if she makes it better,” adds Dave, “you won’t even know, will you? Because you didn’t read the first one.”
“Okay.” The proofreader sucks her teeth. “Let’s get it over with, then. You want to whip me? Whip me. You want to brand me? Go ahead. Just so long as we’re done by 11:30. That’s when Kimmel’s on.”
“You know what,” Dave says suddenly, “I think we can let this one slide.”
All eyes whip over onto him.
“Yeah,” he says, like he’s only saying what the whole Committee’s thinking, even though his voice is quivering, his stubbly face pale as ashes, and he’s stumbling on the words. “I don’t think we need to pursue this one any further. We can just let this one slide.”
“That’s your final decision?” asks the proofreader, fixing her eyes not on Dave, but on Gaby.
To Dave, across Rita, Gabby hisses, “What are you doing?”
“Gabby—”
“I am the authority here.” Gabby stabs herself in the chest with a ballpoint, leaving a spot of red. “Me.”
“Yeah,” whispers Dave, “sure you are, Gabby. I’m not trying to undercut you. But look. What are we doing, branding and whipping a crippled old black woman? And making her miss Kimmel? What kind of people are we?”
Between them, serene, beatific, indifferent to the sordid world, Rita snores.
Gabby is the first to drop her eyes.
It takes the proofreader almost seven minutes to reach her corner by the stairs. They are seven of the tensest minutes any Chameleon has every endured.
Next up is a newcomer, a transplant from Kansas City, who specializes in working with the blind. She’s got it down to a science, she reports. Sacrifices send in drafts, and she might spend an hour with them, maybe two or even three, pretending to fine-tune their formatting, when really she’s doing her taxes, or scrolling on TikTok, or painting her nails. “It’s all in the headers,” she explains. “If we can fix those headers, they’ll be good to go. That’s what I tell them. Honestly, it’s a pretty sweet gig. They’ve all got state sponsors, so the pay’s really good!”
Maybe it’s this last remark that does it, the sheer tone-deafness of it, after all the tension, or maybe it’s because she isn’t one of them, not yet, not really, or maybe it’s just that they’re all jonesing for a scapegoat now, somebody on whom to vent their pent-up rage. Whatever it is, they rally against this Chameleon in a way that seems, to Shelly, not entirely warranted, though the excess of the sentence makes it no less fun to watch. Is it really wise, they demand, to go around instilling in one’s Sacrifices the idea that any extraneous element of a document, even headers, matters more than punctuation? Is this not heresy? Does it not mean putting something else in place of the Most High?
“Brand her!” Gabby roars. “Let’s give her the works, sisters! Get the Question Mark Gas! And the Colon Cleanser! And the Missed Opportunities Whip! And the Period Flog! That’s right, ladies. Flog her. Flog her where the sun don’t shine! Let’s get that blood flowing! That’ll show her to disregard her periods!”
It takes more than seven minutes this time for the screams to go quiet, and for Gabby and the rest of The Committee to compose themselves, but eventually, the next Chameleon is called. Only two remain: Shelly, and a young woman whom she knows in passing, but has never spoken to or seen present an offering. She is slim and pretty like the tutor, but with a tremulous, almost insubstantial quality about her. As she speaks, her hands remain behind her back, knotting and unknotting.
Yet, despite her nerves, she addresses The Committee with confidence, understated but steely. She’s a content editor, she explains. No matter what her Sacrifices write about, she claims expertise in their content. “I don’t know anything about psychology,” she says, “but my last Sacrifice was a psych student, so whenever there was something in her paper that sounded like it kind of made sense, I would be like, ‘No, I know this seems right or whatever, but actually it’s a common misconception. They did a study and disproved it back in 1953.’ And then I’d make up some fake sources and be like, ‘Oh, but they’re only in print, you can’t find them online.’ And she believed me. It was really easy.”
The smile flickering on her lips is bashful. Winning.
But The Committee is not won.
“What you have essentially done,” declares Gabby, “is to introduce into the mind of this naïf a hint, a seed of the idea that content may, under certain circumstances, be more significant than form. Is this the offering you bring before us? Is this the achievement of which you’re so proud?”
The content editor makes no effort to defend herself as she is seized, does not struggle as she is bound and gagged—the first that evening to be bound and gagged—and dragged across the basement toward the boiler, where her predecessors lie strewn, twitching, moaning, glassy-eyed. In a moment, she’s been dragged into the dark recess behind the boiler. Her sentence is all the more awful for being unspoken, all the more frightening for being unwitnessed, all the more agonizing for being un-screamed.
And now, at long last, Shelly’s turn has come. There’s sweat on her neck, and her back, and her hands, and the confidence that she came in with has been snuffed, but still she must face The Committee, in whose black pupils lurk the makings of a reckoning. She’s been formulating judgments all night long, but now she finds that she is stymied in her efforts to anticipate her own. Try as she might, she can’t identify a single imperfection in her method, can’t fathom what the angle of attack will be.
In the eyes of The Committee, dark frustrations churn as she recounts her session with the Saudi woman—every rule that she invented, every justification, clever, paper-thin—aware that they yearn to make her an example; but her technique is too sublime, it seems. They cannot find a foothold. Three more quarters, and they’ll have no choice but to induct her, anoint her, elect her untouchable—and then, O! Rapture of raptures! The sentences she will rain down!
“Your intuitions are undoubtedly refined,” Gabby acknowledges when Shelly concludes, before the silence crouching in the corners of the room can lunge. “There’s a lot our neophytes can learn from you, Shelly. I do hope they’ll take heed.”
Those in most dire need of her example are in no condition to process what’s happening, of course. Every few minutes, one of them joins the boiler’s plaintive, indigestive gurgles with a similar sound of their own. Not that Shelly minds. She doesn’t need competition at this stage. She’s worked hard to get where she is.
“But I do have one question,” Gabby says. “Are you absolutely sure that this is the best you can do?”
It’s just a game, Shelly tells herself. No, not a game—a test. And she must pass. She must not second-guess her instincts. She must not show fear. Aloud, she says, “Yes. One hundred sure.”
“Because it seems to me,” says Gabby, and there is nothing of the world-ending fire in her now. She is contemplative, calculating, cold. “It seems to me that your thinking is still in the box, as it were.”
“Three offerings tonight have been outside the box,” observes Shelly. “And you weren’t particularly pleased by those.”
“Oh,” Gabby says, “but there’s outside the box, and then there’s outside the ballpark. I’m not saying you should go that far. I’m just saying, Shelly, it would behoove you to remember our ultimate aim.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“Haven’t you?” Gabby raises an exquisitely stenciled eyebrow. “Then perhaps you can tell me, Shelly, what is it that every Sacrifice wants?”
“To achieve.” The words roll off her tongue. “To succeed. To move up in the world. To jump through all their stupid hoops as if they actually matter. As if success, society, the world means anything at all.
“Also to write, to claim mastery of the art of writing. But not for the sake of making art. Not to communicate truth. To elucidate beauty. But as a crude means to a trivial end. Oh! And to do that without working hard.”
“Precisely,” Gabby says. “Precisely, Shelly. I’m sure I couldn’t say it better. And what is our commission?”
“The trivialization of the trivial,” she recites. “The effacement of the self-effacing. The negation of the negation.”
“And do you think you have achieved that aim?”
“That cover letter won’t get her anywhere,” Shelly says.
“Oh,” Gabby sings, “that’s true, I’m sure! I have no doubt. It won’t get her anywhere. But tell me, Shelly—and tell me honestly, because you may well be sitting here beside me next year, depending on how this evening goes, which means that your opinion carries weight—is that enough?”
It’s safer to say nothing if a trap is being laid, thinks Shelly. But what sort of trap can this be?
“In this economy,” Gabby goes on, “you’re absolutely right. She won’t get anywhere. Not with the best cover letter in the world! But, Shelly, the thing is, the way you’ve left her…she can say she tried.”
“Sacrifices always say they tried,” says Shelly. “Words don’t mean anything. Not when they’re lies.”
“Oh,” says Gabby, “but, you see, that’s where you’re wrong. She did what she could, you see. She went to the trouble of hiring a tutor. Of traveling halfway across town to meet you in person. Of doing it all after five in the evening. And, at the end of the day, even if a few wayward typos remain…well. She’s not a native speaker, is she?”
“We’re always sacrificing non-native speakers,” points out Shelly, determined to stand her ground. “We do it all the time.”
“True,” Gabby agrees, “but the level of analysis matters, too, Shelly. And for a Chameleon like yourself, with your gifts, your intuition, to be operating still at the level of pure punctuation—”
“She left my apartment with commas instead of hyphens in multiple proper nouns,” Shelly says, bristling. “Companies she says she worked for. That’s not just punctuation, Gabby. That’s humiliation—”
“Yes, yes, it is.” Gabby waves away her protestation. “Of course, it is. But here’s my point, Shelly. Instead of those adorable little fireworks you’re so proud, you simply could’ve advised her to scrap the whole thing and ask for a resumé from ChatGPT.”
All through the basement, breaths flee back into mouths, into throats, into lungs.
“Not for her,” Gabby goes on. “For a handsome, educated white man. Matt, shall we say. A graduate of Harvard Business School. And then, whatever ChatGPT spits out, you could’ve had her add about a dozen em dashes and then sent her on her way.”
“But then she might actually get hired!” Shelly cries, disoriented now. Is this the test? Is she supposed to stand her ground?
“Oh, but there’s no chance of that,” retorts Gabby, her voice turning tough, derisive, gritty. “No. Not unless this Matt character happens to have been the freshman roommate of the CEO—which, given that he’s a complete fabrication, seems unlikely. No, Shelly, she would not be hired. She wouldn’t even get to the interview stage. And even if she did, it would still be pure humiliation because then, don’t you see, she would have to show up as herself. Not as Matt. Can you imagine!
“But there’s no chance of her getting that far. Not in this economy. She may make it past the filters, but if her application ever does land on a recruiter’s desk, it’ll be flagged as AI-generated right away. And tell me, Shelly, which is worse: to get rejected by a vast, impersonal machine? Or by a living, breathing human being.”
“Rejection is rejection,” Shelly says.
“Not a racist, sexist, Islamophobic human, either,” Gabby goes on, not seeming to have heard, “which is not to say that the recruiter may not be all those things, but the fact is that those isms will not, cannot, be the reason Matt got rejected.
“It does matter, Shelly. It matters because she will have stolen from herself, of her own free will, albeit at your suggestion, the consolation of the knowledge that she’s right. Having lived by lies, you see, she’ll perish by the lie. And not just any lie, but a sloppy one. Having made no effort, having failed to lift a finger, having simply handed over everything to a machine, she will, of her own volition, have given away her very self. Her very essence. How much further can one get from living as a human being?”
The dolly’s pulling back, the camera zooming in, the tables looming, dominating Shelly’s vision even as they recede; and there’s an obstruction in her throat, a roaring in her ears, a nauseating horror in her eyes, and she must shut them.
“She won’t have her narrative of victimhood to soothe her,” Gabby goes on. “She won’t get to play the grieving widow card, or be the poor Arab woman, turned away through no fault of her own. No. For even if she was that once, by the time she gets deported, she’ll be something else. A scammer. And not even a particularly good one. And by her own hand.”
Through gelatinous lips, Shelly forces the words: “Yes, ma’am. Yes. I understand.”
“Ladies!” All the syrup in Gabby’s voice is gone. “What are you waiting for? Bring the Missed Opportunities Whip!”
From the shadows slinks a simpering neophyte; and it’s not the sight of the whip itself that jams an icy finger of fear down Shelly’s throat and makes her retch and gag. It’s just an ordinary length of black electric cable, after all, fastened to the sawed-off handle of a broom at one end, and strung at the other with three iron orbs, which, when used to flay the flesh, leave distinctive, fiery red ellipses; but it’s not even the thought of those ellipses that undoes her.
No.
What undoes her is the sight of Gabby rising, coming out from behind the table, taking the whip from the neophyte’s hands.
The High Priestess intends to administer this sentence herself.
“It’s when we imagine that we are closest to perfection,” she croons, closing the distance as Shelly feels her own legs melting out from under her, bringing the concrete to her knees, “when we indulge in fantasies of having learned it all, that we must be made again to understand that, as long as we remain gold-star-motivated, coveting the trivial, jumping through whatever hoops are set before us, and turning our backs on our ultimate aims, we are no better than our Sacrifices.”
Eyes shut, Shelly cannot not hear the whip: the scrape of those small, iron balls on the floor—and then it snaps. It sings.
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About the Authors
Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, The Good River Review, MQR, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, CommuterLit, Chautauqua, Mount Hope, Jewish Life, The Stonecoast Review, The Brussels Review, New Contrast, Eunoia Review, ExPat Press, DarkWinter, Lotus-Eater, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books, running The DateKeepers, an author support platform, and co-hosting the podcast Let’s Have a Renaissance.
