Leaving Machacago
Harrison Kim
part 1
A thousand cameras watch the inside of the Machacago bus depot, and there are a thousand more outside, where hundreds of homeless tenters sit and wait with their collected lifetimes of material goods. If any possessions are abandoned, the authorities will catch you. You’ll be a labourer sanitizing the streets, a government slave, a blue “H” for “hoarder” tattooed on the back of your hand, bound to Machacago forever.
Because of the cameras and the consequences, no one steals at the Bus Depot, and no one throws anything out, unless it’s to give it to someone else. You can’t board the bus with more than two bags. On the other hand, if you’re a hoarder, like aged Pierre Wayne, you sit atop your stinking pile of blankets and knickknacks and molder in the depot forever while people like me beg, “Will you take my books?”
I must pawn off several sacks of possessions. All I want is my guitar and an extra set of clothes. I’m lucky. I have a connection with Pierre. He lived at the corner, near my apartment, before the authorities seized his house full of crap. I used to mow his lawn and always found it funny he liked trim grass. He walked the neighbourhood every day pulling in scrap metal and old furniture and bits of broken lumber.
After the government raid, he escaped to the bus station, the last refuge of legal junk gathering. Here, travellers are allowed to give their extra possessions to the hoarders, without breaking any recycling laws. It’s some kind of departure loophole.
“Do you have any Hemingway, Armin?” Pierre asks, big salt-and-pepper eyebrows glooming down from his filthy blanket throne. He sits there with a cat cage in his arms, and in the cage a small white animal stares at me with giant blue eyes.
“I have the short stories,” I say, holding them up. “They’re his best work.”
I gaze above Pierre’s ancient, bony frame to the gently curving glass roof of the Machacago bus depot. Then I look down, past the cat cage, where under the filtered light people scuttle about in narrow aisles framed by hoarders like Pierre and his ilk. Every once in a while, a pile topples over and the owner must slide down and rebuild.
“I’ve been here a month,” Pierre says. “There’s nowhere else to go now they’ve taken my house.”
He puts the cat cage on a blanket beside him and hands me a jar of yellow liquid. “Could you pour it out for me?”
I peer up at his hairy arms, and the white-furred animal in the cage stares at me.
“I will do this,” I tell him. “You can’t leave your friend.”
Pierre nods. “I also have some solids in a bag.”
“I can do that, also,” I say.
I know what it’s like to have crap you can’t get rid of. I’m hauling around six sacks of it. The cat’s blue eyes continue to bore into mine.
I carry Pierre’s jar and bags off to the huge bathroom area, scrubbed pristine clean twenty-four-seven by indentured ex-hoarders, who bleach and mop the rows of unwalled steel toilets and urinals. They hum as they work, their droning fills the washroom as I empty Pierre’s goods and cleanse the jars.
Managers in hazmat suits bring out huge magnifying glasses to inspect toilets and sinks.
“Over here, Company Seven,” they command the cleanup team, and the workers shuffle over, humming and grinning. “They’ve been completely brainwashed,” I think. “They’re happy to have a job and three squares.”
There’s been disease, a plague of unknown origin. The last known contact was discovered here yesterday. The government will close this huge place down, which is why I’m leaving now. I don’t want to be trapped by rules, locked in a sterile city or, worse yet, sentenced to being a cleaner for the things I’ve said and done.
Sure, as a cleaner the government gives you free food, free health care and a free apartment with a free TV, even a free pass to the swimming pool on your day off, but you trade your time and your soul.
Everyone at the depot is supposed to wear official anti-disease masks, but many in the milling crowd sport torn shirts hanging from their faces, tied at the back of the neck, or bits of blanket, or even paper bags with eyeholes cut out. I use the cup of an old brassiere, tied with boot laces. Pierre fastens a piece of beige carpet round his nose and mouth. His unkempt grey and white beard pokes out from beneath it.
No one wants to get a disease but, like me, many believe it’s propaganda, or at least exaggerated, and have chosen to leave the city rather than abide by all the cleanliness rules. I’m lucky; I have money for a ticket.
“Armin, I’ll take more of your stuff if you bring me some canned food,” Pierre says.
“I possess a one-foot-high replica of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love,” I tell him, holding it up to the filtered light.
“I’ll take it,” Pierre grins, but another hoarder across the aisle, a skinny woman with sunken cheeks yells, “I need that!”
I give it to Pierre. “I’ll get your food,” I tell him.
I have some empathy for him. There are no statues in Machacago. No museums or graveyards. Everything considered redundant is demolished or cremated or paved over. This bus depot is the last sanctuary for history and nostalgia, hidden under all the hoarder piles.
I tried to keep my apartment spic and span and minimize my clutter, but it wasn’t enough. The inspectors found dust mites and cockroaches, old, framed photos and sentimental knick-knacks. I’d said too many seditious things caught on cameras and spread all over the Net, pointing out contradictions in disease information, questioning the mask rules.
At least once a week, the police questioned me. “You are one of those who will spread the plague,” they said, “unless you reform your personality.”
They noted my unshaven face, and my insouciant tone of voice. These meetings left me exhausted and empty. I’d lived off my inheritance until it was almost gone. There were few employment prospects for a rebel.
“With your reputation, best job you’ll find is cleaning sidewalks with a shoe brush,” one officer said.
* * *
All I need is my guitar, my diaries and a few pens and cups. Maybe a set of clothes; they’ll let me on the bus with that.
I bring Pierre a box of beans I buy off a homeless vendor out in the tent camp.
“Why did you choose your stuff over freedom?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer the question. “I want you to take my cat,” he says. “I will take all your excess possessions if you take my cat.”
On the huge screen set into the bus depot walls, a beautiful announcer speaks. “The city is almost cleansed.”
She says this in a calm, mellifluous voice. Everyone looks up, for the sound dominates, despite its smoothness. As soon as she’s finished her spiel, there’s a clanging, many bells from all directions, a yelling, then a creaking. The bus station floor begins to move.
I stare at Pierre, sprawled on his pile above me, his hands over his ears. The pile jiggles. I smell a moldy rankness as everything shifts.
“Hey!” yells Pierre. “What’s going on?”
All around us, the other piles are also moving.
There’s a groaning, a snap, and Pierre’s heap begins to sink. I step back, hanging on to my guitar and bag of clothes.
Everything’s dropping straight down as the floor opens in front of me. Blankets and stuffed toys and black plastic garbage bags full of who knows what slide by, down into the huge hole that’s widening in the station floor.
All around me, other piles are sinking fast.
I stand with others on a narrow band of stable tile.
The hoarders must decide fast whether to abandon their piles or go down with the stuff.
The lady next to Pierre disappears with a scream as her possessions enfold her.
Pierre’s given up trying to throw anything off to save it. There’s immense gouts of hot air that push everything right back.
“Take the cat, take the cat!” he screams.
I reach out and grab the cage, grab his hand too, and pull him off the pile when it’s sucked into the open hole. As fast as the stuff disappears, the floor unfolds itself and lies flat again. The group of cleaners comes bounding over, their handlers direct them to mop up the ooze that remains.
“Come on, you dirt haulers. Get sterilizing!” one yells.
“Yes, we are the dirt haulers!” yells one cleaner, and the others chime in, chanting: “Haul that dirt, haul that dirt!” as they work. They attach a huge hose to an opening in the newly exposed floor.
I look at the cat’s face within the cage. Its face regards me, and its mouth opens in a silent Miaow. I set the cage down.
“My stuff, it’s all gone!” Pierre gasps. He stands swaying, wringing his hands. As he teeters back and forth, six guards in hazmat suits rush over, two grab his arms, two start taking off his clothes while the others turn on the hose.
“Get out of the way!” one guard commands, as another shoves me aside. I grab the cat cage, my guitar and bag. All around me, the hoarders who didn’t go down with their goods are being stripped and sprayed.
“You better get out of town fast,” another hazmat guy with a huge clean-shaven chin tells me. “This fellow’s a hoarder, but the government’s coming for your type next.”
“What do you mean?” I ask him. “What type am I?”
“The wrong type,” he says. “The dirty type.”
He nods towards the ticket wickets. “Now go, before we have to clean you up, too.”
“It’s okay,” Pierre tells me. “I have nothing to go on for. You have your life to live. Be a true human. Be in control.”
The last I see of Pierre, he’s being deluged with water, under the hoses.
I shove my spare clothes into the cat cage, to make “Stumpy” — the cat who’s only got a stub of a tail — more comfortable and to squeeze my possession numbers down to the required two.
I step to the ticket wicket. Behind it, a tall woman stands, wearing black gloves and a face shield. Through the filtered opening, I ask for a ticket.
“Where to?” she asks in a high, quavering voice.
“To the closest mountain village,” I tell her.
“That would be Tatla Lake,” she says. “Are you sure you want to go there?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, here you’ve got a free place to stay, free food if you need it, as long as you stay clean.”
“I know that,” I say. “I’m done with free.”
Copyright © 2025 by Harrison Kim
