Dream Village
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
5/26/92
There is a man who has worked his entire life at Safeco, supervising the composition of claims-rejection form letters. He conforms precisely to the company dress code and its other rules of behavior. Every evening he patiently sits in the line of cars waiting to drive the four blocks from the parking garage to the freeway on-ramp. As the years have gone by, he’s developed the distinctive look of a lifelong insurance man — the Norelco-shaved double chin, the thinning hair combed over sideways. Only the tape deck in his Accord betrays his double life. It plays his own music, lilting folk ballads and stirring anthems about the good life in a very special place.
He spent his whole non-working life writing, drawing and building documents and objects relating to his ideal society, a community he had been imagining since his childhood in ever-greater detail. A place where everyone is cordial and hardworking, where all laws are thoughtfully obeyed, where intense emotions are kept in check for the good of all through multiple layers of social controls. Where families are kept intact because unnatural lusts are successfully sublimated into good deeds and productivity. His basement has become totally occupied by a sprawling tabletop scale model of his fantasy village, detailed down to the level of which houses belong to which workers at which farms and factories. It’s a quiet little village. All the houses are close to the grassy common, the recreational field, the church, the school, the town hall, the main street of small shopkeepers. There are no cars, only delivery trucks used by the farmers and shopkeepers. Rolling hills at the edges of the scale model imply fertile farmlands off in every direction beyond the town. The only industries are the farm-processing plants at one edge of town and a mystery factory along the road leading out of town. He still hasn’t decided what this factory will make, but it’s something that brings money into the community and supports a healthy, alert workforce.
Every Sunday, he gathers his scale-model people into the church; he dresses in a Protestant minister’s robe and delivers a different sermon each week from a pulpit near his model church building. Every week he types up a one- or two-page “newspaper” for the town, on his old manual typewriter, detailing the community’s marriages, births, deaths, school lunch menus, economic health, and justice system. It’s a pretty dull sheet, since no shocking crimes or scandalous behaviors can ever exist there.
When he’s not working on that, he’s painting artworks that symbolically express the community’s aesthetic beliefs, paintings that tell stories about the heroic founding of the village and the quiet heroines and heroes who live in it today. Some of them are action scenes, showing the rescue of a trapped child, the building of the church, the first town meeting some 50 years ago. One painting shows the women of the town’s most prominent family, one standing in front of another, going back generations to one of the town founders; all are wearing white robes, all are looking directly at the viewer with a noble countenance that could also be interpreted as a maternalistic stare-down. The women towards the back are painted as apparitions, to denote that they are now deceased. All are based on his mother and women from his family, except for a young woman and girl in the front. They represent a divorcée who turned down his offer of sex, and her daughter. Every woman who has rejected him becomes a painting, a character in the town. He creates some of the paintings in his imagination after the women decline his pleas; others are based on live sessions with paid models obtained through the local art schools. The young models invariably love the flowing billowy costumes he gets them to wear. They usually agree to a quiet dinner with him, but have in no instance ever agreed to his nervous but polite after-dinner propositions. They turn him down as respectfully as they can; a few have even agreed to another modeling session for him, but then don’t show up. He paints the women as the spiritual and political leaders of the village, holding council meetings in their white robes, making speeches while simultaneously nursing infants.
There are children in the paintings and the tableaux and the “newspaper,” happy children who play all the time without making too much noise or beating up on each other, who study rigorously, who eagerly help out with the family chores.
The existence of men in the utopia is revealed mostly through implication (the presence of children in the paintings, names mentioned in the newspaper). The figurines on the streets of the scale model include many men, but every scene of work activity outside of the factories is dominated by women and children.
While painting, he plays his tape of the soothing community folk music, recorded by musicians he found at the Folklife Festival. His growing library includes wedding marches, funeral dirges, playful children’s tunes, sweet love songs, upbeat motivational ditties for the workplace, sentimental mother-and-child ballads. He writes every song with a specific person and situation in mind. The factory anthems sing of the glories of hard work without mentioning the product these workers are making. The personal songs are written in the character of one specific townsperson. The most poignant are the love songs he writes for each of his models, none of whom has ever heard their song. And the songs for children, singing of the proud compassion he holds to all of his imagined offspring, the gifts he will give them, the family love they will share.
