Free We Are All Crew by Bill Landauer

*
    At dusk they light the bonfire with torches and old newspaper (I wonder what they call newspaper—palm leaves, maybe?) and the fire grows up and licks the tall logs.
    Seabrook leans against the cage. He’s been leaning against the cage most of the day. And he’s been staring at his crucifix key chain, rubbing it with his thumb. That’s Seabrook. He’s all the time gloomy, quiet. Friendly when you talk to him, a blur of limbs when he has a chart or technical readouts, but sad and soundless the rest of the time.
    “I hope this doesn’t taint your opinion of the Tamzene , Mr. Brubaker,” Seabrook says. “Once we get out of here, we’ll drop you off at the next town and call your father.”
    But that seems unlikely as we sit here watching the fire burn. I want His Eminence to burst in with some guys with submachine guns to take out Shwo-Rez and these hunter guys. Not so much the other homeless people. I’m not sure why, exactly. They don’t seem so crazy anymore—just in need of some serious grooming. His Eminence says the homeless are animals that you can’t feed too much, or they get fat and spoiled. I’m not sure where he gets the farming imagery from, or when he might have tested his theory of feeding them too much. But if he saw the little Shrub Kids, maybe he’d understand that they’re prisoners too.
    Still, they stuck us in this cage, and some of them are acting like mental cases.
    I ask Seabrook what he thinks might be wrong with them. He agrees with me that it isn’t the homeless people’s fault but Shwo-Rez’s, and maybe a handful of others. From what he knows of Lynnbrook, a few years ago the town faced an air pollution disaster that killed off a lot of people, forcing the company responsible for the disaster to close down. The closing cost a lot of Lynnbrook residents their jobs.
    “But how does that explain them acting like we’re ghosts or something?” I ask.
    Seabrook is sulking again. More than that—he has his crucifix in his right hand, and he’s rubbing it so hard he’s shaking with the other. Something has him pissed off.
    “Well, it’s like His Eminence says, I guess,” I say. “They’re all a bunch of wackos.”
    “Who?”
    “Bums. Homeless. These people. Following everything that Shwo-Rez guy says just for some cardboard cribs.”
    Seabrook shifts his weight from his right foot to his left. He opens his mouth to speak and then closes it.
    “Sometimes I forget who I’m talking to,” he says eventually.
    I realize I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth again, and I apologize. But he just gives me this uncomfortable smile and says it isn’t his place and that maybe I should talk to His Eminence about it. About what, I’m not sure.
    “Besides,” he says, “what they’re doing isn’t so different from what your d—what some people in the government do every day.”
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s good policy to pretend nature doesn’t exist. In fact, in some offices it’s a fireable offense to consider rocks and trees and animals and air as real things. And nobody bats an eye. So why is it such a surprise that a government official would do the reverse and pretend that buildings and litter and civilization don’t exist?
    “You can fill people’s heads with all kinds of nonsense,” he continues, and even though he is talking to me, it’s like he’s not anymore. He looks back at his crucifix key chain. “People will believe anything.”
    * * *
    “SHWO-REEEEEEEEEZ!” shouts someone from the crowd. It’s just starting to get dark, and Shrub People are filling the courtyard. And here’s the Shrub King, moseying along out of his cardboard box palace down the main corridor toward the bonfire. Shwo-Rez is a pile of flesh that ripples when he walks. He smiles and nods at the collected Shrub People.
    A yell goes up, then falls, then rises up again in a chant: “Shwo-Rez! Shwo-Rez!” Some of them start acting like Beatles fans in a black-and-white movie, screaming