Millionaire City, a short story

In the café where I work, you used to be able to see the ocean. When the student radicals and insurance men came by in the afternoon, both on their way back from important meetings, they were always haloed by the tide of sea-foam as they ate their pastries and smoked their cigarettes at the counter by the door. This is simply how it used to be. I always found the image very romantic, which is why I’m a bit sad now whenever I look out the front window. The job is fine, but I miss the sea. I know it’s still there, but… yeah.

The problem is custard-white; maybe cream. Geometric blocks of vanilla that consume the entire horizon. Two hundred and eleven shipping containers, accidentally delivered to our town, bound originally for Saints-sur-la-Mer. I’m not sure what’s inside them. I really hope it isn’t food, or it’s definitely going to spoil soon. 

I suppose if you’re going to have two hundred and eleven shipping containers filling up your otherwise civilian harbor and block your view of the sea, eggshell white isn’t the worst color for them to be painted. The League needs to get them out of here soon though, not just to meet food-safety standards. If they keep taking up everyone’s view, the kids from the boys-and-girls club will start to get ideas— aerosolized acrylic ideas— very vulgar, permanent, ideas. That is to say, they would make great canvases. There’s also the problem of the logos on the sides. I was fascinated by them so I went to the public bibliotheca on my day off and ordered a few wax radio tapes from a paper in Willemstöel who reported on this exact thing two years ago. 

The company name on the side of the shipping containers, a non-objective abstract interpretation of the League’s initials— OOCL, had been, at some point, painted a reportedly pleasant soft green. Hypatia Green, to be particular, which was the result of two and a half weeks of focus group testing as to which exact shade best achieved the stated goals of being “soothing to the eye” and “suggestive of economic prosperity.” These, of course, were complicated factors to consider, as they as they could indeed carry a massive impact in the brand identity of the Outer-Outremer Commerce League for potentially years into the future, or at least until a new green was necessary to be invented. 

The great tragedy of it all, for them and for me, arrived in the form of an unaccounted-for variable that must have slipped the minds of the quality-control testers and company chromaticists alike. As it (very publicly) turned out, Hypatia Green paint was not only hyper-carcinogenic for the first two months of the application and drying process, but also entirely hydrophilic. That is to say, within three weeks of the rollout of the new shipping container paint jobs, the stylish OOCLs on the side had rusted from their original brand-safe hue to a red-brown smoldering mess, noted by observers at first glance to closely resemble the appearance of dried human blood. 

I’m afraid I do have to agree with them.

Perhaps the most devastating bit of the whole situation, for me alone I suppose, is that nobody’s ever going to get to see Hypatia Green now. It had been invented specifically for those shipping containers— designed as the perfect companion to the cream-white that has since outlasted it. Whenever I look at the bloody mess scrawled on the side of each great metal box in the harbor, I get very sad. Very sad indeed. What a lonely color it must be.

I also learned a lot about the OOCL itself. I had always thought the “Outer” in “Outer-Outremer Commerce League” referred to the region of Outer-Outremer, the place where I live— that is to say— I thought I was dealing with an entity that was a Commerce League operational within Outer-Outremer. As it turns out, according the the radio tape I rented, the first O in OOCL is really just a denominational term, as there’s is also an IOCL, or an Inner-Outremer Commerce League, which exists in defiance of there not being any such actual place as Inner-Outremer. Rather, the Inner-Outremer Commerce League still operates in Outer-Outremer, just in a more short-range capacity.

Also, the two companies are both the byproducts of the original Interoriental-Outremer Industrial Commerce League (IOOICL), which was a nationalized state monopoly in the 40s to capture and exploit new goods and markets in the kingdom’s periphery. The split came after the Social Democrats won the election of 59, wherein the existence of a nationalized company meant to capture and exploit new goods and markets was deemed acceptable within the previews of social democracy, but the being of that company a monopoly was definitely not okay. As such, the League was trust-busted, and the logo that now adorns my view of the harbor was born. 

I think they’re probably working on it, at the very least— the containers and their being here. There’s a man with no hair who arrived a little while after all the shipping containers did. He doesn’t wear a uniform or anything, but I had never seen him prior to the whole fiasco unfolding out there. I think he must work for the company, because a few times now he’s gone out to the edge of the harbor, placed his fists upon his hips, and sighed in a mix of solemnity and desperation at the great mass of  sheet metal and encased consumer-goods before him. He’s very cross with those shipping containers, all two hundred and eleven of them— like naughty pets that got into the pantry when daddy was away. He may not actually work for the OOCL, of course, but that’s the prevailing theory between me and my coworkers. 

Lately though, I’ve been thinking he could also be an artist, who possibly lives in one of the lofts overlooking the harbor, who hypothetically has been painting the sunrise over the sea every morning for years now. In that case, he most likely has only just recovered from the stiff jolt of unwavering terror he must have been felt upon waking in the morning, collecting his pallet and his watercolors, and sitting down at his easel to find two hundred and eleven blood-and-eggshell shipping containers blocking his subject view of the ocean; which means we should definitely feel bad for watching him huff and puff out there every day. 

When I was at the bibliotheca, I also rented a wax tape of an encyclopedia of cities and towns in the Outer-Outremer region. On the day the containers arrived, I walked over on my lunch break and read one of the shipping invoices taped on the door in a little plastic card-holder. That’s how I found out they were meant for Saints-sur-la-Mer. I’d never even heard of the place before that. The wax tape, or rather the encyclopedia of cities and towns it encompassed, proved to be actually quite insightful. As it turns out, Saints-sur-la-Mer is actually a city exclusively for millionaires. I know! I rewound it when I heard it. No further information was even included. All the other cities and towns on the tape listed fun facts and statistics like which explorer discovered them or what the infant mortality rate was, but for SSLM (that’s what I like to call it)— Nothing! I guess when you’re a city for millionaires only, that’s about as fun as it gets. I sure hope the girls and boys from the boys-and-girls club don’t find out about the millionaire city, or they’ll graffiti those shipping containers twice as much as they were probably going to anyway. 

Well,

anyway, 

please don’t tell the kids. And don’t bother the bald man pacing back and forth out there. I think he’s either a disenfranchised artist or an undercover businessman, so either way he’s got a lot to deal with. Oh, and definitely don’t breathe in too deeply next to the lettering on those things. I’m sure they’ll be gone soon. 

Sorry for rambling; I have to get back to work now. Can I get you a cup of coffee?