“Mr. Schultz, sir, who among us has not had the fantasy of the slave girl?” Dr. Black said to Andrew. This was his response to a customer taking umbrage over the use of Thomas Jefferson’s image and words in the Fourth of July marketing for Terrestrial Paradise’s “10 Year Garden” Survival Seed Bank Kit.
It was the latest of Dr. Black’s eccentric schemes to attract clientele. There had been an "Eerie Shelves" flyer for Halloween, stoking fears of empty supermarkets. For Christmas, Santa's wishlist included a portable solar charger, lightweight survival gear, freeze-dried foods, a packable sleeping bag, a water filtration system, and a compact camping stove. On Election Day, he dreamed up an ad that warned of supply chain disruptions and indefatigable inflation. During hurricane season, he created a short video, standing in front of a green-screen destruction zone, he proclaimed that ninety percent of small businesses fail within a year of a natural disaster if they don’t reopen within five days.
Andrew had once questioned the accuracy of Dr. Black’s dubious statistics and fearmongering promotions, but those days were long past. “I welcome criticism,” Andrew had been told at his job interview seventeen years earlier. That had once been a tremulous truth, but as their collaboration entered its second decade, the doctor no longer condoned contrary opinions.
Like a twice-beaten dog, Andrew nodded and murmured in agreement with his boss’s rebuttals to customer complaints, ridiculous promotions, and sketchy financial decisions. There was no longer even a silent resistance in the company’s long-suffering manager, only the resignation to carry out his duties with a modicum of integrity.
When he started working at Terrestrial Paradise, it had been the least humiliating opportunity available in a town that deemed Andrew Schultz supremely unreliable. His first meeting with Dr. Black was in a public park adjacent to the St. Joseph River, beside a mounted Civil War-era 6.4-inch Army Parrott Rifle Cannon, on a cold November morning. The odd location was non-negotiable and was chosen by the doctor. While Andrew arrived bundled up in a down jacket and beanie, Dr. Black wore jeans and a blazer over a t-shirt, as if it were spring. He was short and compact, with a craggy, bearded face and long white hair topped by a beret.
“This was the site of Michigan’s first hydro-powered sawmill, built in 1829 by Ephraim Lacey and his son Elijah,” Dr. Black said. “There were mills and factories all along this river. Keelboats ferried goods and livestock day and night before the railroad came.”
“I’m originally from here,” Andrew offered, but Dr. Black didn’t like to be interrupted.
“All there is now is blight. Broken windows, empty storefronts, fat and ugly people. Human ingenuity used to exist here.”
What was meant to be an interview quickly devolved into a lecture on Dr. Black’s philosophy of life. Andrew’s willingness to listen quietly was all the doctor needed to decide he was the man for the job.
“Like Thomas Edison,” he said, “you’ll start by sweeping the laboratory floors.”
If Dr. Black was aware of the stains on Andrew’s local reputation, he gave no sign of it.
The doctor was an extremely religious man who was certain the end of times was just around the corner. How the apocalypse would occur, he wasn’t sure. Instead, he focused on making both spiritual and earthly preparations for impending doom and selling his theories to the misguided and the naive.
Dr. Black had taken a strange, winding path to his prepping fervor. After earning a PhD in economics from MIT in the mid-60s, he spent time in Canada avoiding the draft, where he married and divorced the first of his four wives. He moved to California at the start of the next decade to take a teaching job at San Jose State. It was there he was introduced to hippie culture when he smoked a funny cigarette with a colleague. Objects began flying around the room, and a week later he had a full beard and was teaching classes barefoot. The school fired him at the end of the year for holding classes outside and asking students to hold hands. This was a bridge too far for the straight-laced Econ department.
Washing out of academia and enduring another divorce led Dr. Black to reevaluate his place in the world. Like many others from the counterculture approaching middle age, he came to see the limits of freeform living. Following a growing trend, he joined the Jesus People and committed to exploring the spiritual paths offered by Christianity.
In his new lifestyle, he experimented with a raw food diet and speaking in tongues. When his third wife died from listeria, likely caused by drinking unpasteurized milk, Dr. Black spiraled into cataclysmic thinking. He read an article in the Hollywood Free Paper about the Mennonites of Apirchopolis, a small village in southwestern Michigan.
On a whim, he moved to Apirchopolis to ingratiate himself with the industrious religious sect and live in “the old ways.” When salacious rumors spread about the inappropriate manner in which he wooed his fourth wife, Honey, from their flock, the church excommunicated him in a formal process known as “the ban.”
In exile, the name of and idea behind Terrestrial Paradise came to him in a dream. He began self-publishing books about Judgment Day and developed theories on how to survive the rapture. He coined the term “sustainable preparedness,” which called for building up an emergency survival kit. He was among the first to advocate for freeze-dried foods over canned or dehydrated ones. Freeze-drying, he argued, preserved the food’s original shape, flavor, color, and texture. In his first usage of unprovable statistics, he claimed freeze-dried foods retained 97% of their vitamins and minerals. He also fashioned himself as a pioneer in seed storage, promoting the creation of large caches of heirloom and open-pollinated seeds.
Dr. Black began selling his survival kits that included seeds, freeze-dried foods wrapped in Mylar by Honey, and copies of his books. He placed ads in underground newspapers and magazines, as well as in the Whole Earth Catalog. The company’s growth was steady but slow, and he built a dedicated following. When he hired Andrew, Terrestrial Paradise had ten employees and grossed a little over three-quarters of a million dollars annually.
Andrew Schultz never quite figured out what to do with the life he had been given. The Schultzes were a well-liked and respected family in Apirchopolis, a town so small that its football team once had to cancel a season after seven players were injured during the homecoming game against Brandywine. They didn’t have enough able bodies left to field a team. Andrew’s mom was the town librarian, and his father owned a sheet metal shop. He had been his mother’s fair-haired boy, and she overlooked any criticism of his character. His father, on the other hand, had a more grounded view of his only child.
The fly in Andrew’s ointment was that he failed to make meaningful connections. His male peers felt no loyalty to him, and though he was handsome and humorous, girls felt no chemistry with him. Adults, his parents’ friends, his teachers, and coaches, felt no desire to mentor or help him. He wasn’t hated, but something seemed ... off.
The town's suspicions were confirmed in the fall of his fifteenth year. On the day of the homecoming game, Andrew skipped school and robbed the Fifth Third Bank on South Main Street, right in the center of town.
The courts would call it a psychotic break. That morning, Andrew ate his usual breakfast of two slices of dry Butternut toast and a can of Diet Cherry Coke, read The Herald-Palladium, and left the house at 7:45 a.m. as if headed to school. Instead, he went to Arden & Sons True Value Hardware and spent $8.87 on a box of black latex gloves, dust masks, and tinted protective safety glasses. He was next spotted pacing in the public park at Rock Lake from 8:30 to 10:15 a.m.
Around 11 a.m., he entered the bank on South Main. Though his face was obscured by glasses and a mask and his hands were gloved, the bank’s two tellers instantly recognized him. Apirchopolis was a small town, after all. They assumed Andrew was playing a prank as he approached wearing sweatpants, flip-flops, and a t-shirt that read Cleverly Disguised as an Adult, and set two plastic grocery bags on the counter.
“Fifties and hundreds,” he said.
One teller suppressed a laugh but quickly reverted to her training. Though Andrew had no visible weapon, she knew to take no action that would jeopardize the safety of her co-workers or the bank’s customers. She calmly filled both bags with high-denomination bills and tripped the silent alarm.
Andrew fled on foot. Unfortunately for him, the Apirchopolis police station was directly across the street, only 128 feet away. The entire force of four officers and a dispatcher poured outside just as Andrew exited the bank. The dispatcher, overwhelmed by adrenaline, shouted, “Stop right there!”
The officers, stunned by their colleague’s assertiveness, turned to watch Andrew bolt. He blew out a flip-flop before reaching the end of the block, fell, skinned his knee, and spilled money all over the sidewalk. Moments later, he was frogmarched across the street into a cell.
Word of the botched crime spread rapidly, and details were reported in the local paper the next day. Though the publication of identifying information was prohibited due to laws protecting juvenile privacy, everyone knew who the article was referring to.
Andrew couldn't explain why he did what he did. It was as if he’d been hijacked, just a passenger in his own body, watching some unseen entity wear his skin and play out a villainous role. This sort of journey out of the body was not a new experience for him. He'd had these supernatural discorporations for as long as he could remember, but this one took the biscuit.
The judge assigned to the case sided with the doctors, ruling that Andrew was mentally unfit to comprehend his actions due to a temporary psychotic state. She ordered specialized treatment. The Schultzes were ill-equipped to handle the emotional turmoil, and the court-ordered psychiatrist couldn’t determine a clear motive. A local legend was born as Andrew shut himself away in his parents’ home, overwhelmed by embarrassment. The high school allowed him to finish his last two years from home to avoid disrupting his classmates. He graduated by the skin of his teeth.
Mrs. Schultz found a small college in Kentucky that agreed to accept him, but he returned before the first semester ended, unable to find the motivation to attend classes. He assumed he could return home and claim his birthright by joining his father’s sheet metal business, but both parents refused. His mother still believed better days were ahead; his father’s refusal was more practical. The robbery had already hurt business enough. Bringing Andrew into the shop would alienate employees and customers who remained loyal.
So, like many black sheep before him, Andrew lit out for the coast. With financial support from his parents, he bought an old Honda Civic and pushed west. He worked a ski season in Colorado, spent two years in San Diego living in an apartment by the highway with deadbeat stoners, tried LA for a bit, and then coastal Oregon. He found no stable employment and no social purchase.
In the winter of his twenty-eighth year, his mother died, still clinging to hopes for her son. Like a ghost, Andrew returned for the funeral, intending to leave before the dirt settled. But the day after her burial, his father suffered a massive stroke.
The Assistant Operator from the shop called with the news. His dad had been telling a joke to a couple of young apprentices when he suddenly lost his balance and then his speech. The doctors assured Andrew the road to recovery would be long and partial. The possibility of his father regaining executive function was remote. To cover the medical and caregiver bills, the sheet metal business had to be sold to the Assistant Operator, and Andrew moved back into his childhood home. His dad clawed back some autonomy, but never his speech; he was fated to be silent for the rest of his days.
With his savings running low and the costs of his father’s care mounting, reality set in: Andrew needed a job. But his local reputation left him with few options. Just when he was about to resign himself to a career in fast food or at Walmart, he spotted an ad in The Herald-Palladium for a managerial position at Terrestrial Paradise.
Dr. Black’s first assignment, given on that cold afternoon in Riverfront Park, was an undercover operation. The doctor suspected his employees were unrepentant time thieves and were pilfering merchandise. Andrew was to pose as a regular warehouse worker, take notes, and report any suspicious activity, all while learning what he could about the job from the current manager, who had no idea he was about to be fired.
The warehouse staff was an intimidating bunch of immigrants with massive physiques who practiced a Brazilian martial art called capoeira. Dr. Black, who as a devoted survivalist, saw self-defense as essential, was a practitioner and recruited them directly from his capoeira school. He paid his workers under the table and offered no health benefits.
“Insurance is a scam that indicates a lack of faith in the Lord,” he often said.
Andrew’s father had raised him to respect the working man. Undermining the rank and file was not in his nature. But he was desperate and couldn't afford the luxury of morals. He put on a smock and began gathering intelligence.
The company’s warehouse was a 20,000-square-foot corrugated steel building that had once housed a plastics injection molding company that had since moved south. Dr. Black had leveled up haphazardly; instead of industrial freeze-drying equipment, he used dozens of home units in various states of disrepair, each of which processed only ten to fifteen pounds of food at a time.
Pallets of Mylar packaging, bags of seed, and fresh produce were scattered about the building with no clear organization. Tropicália music constantly blared from a dusty boombox near the loading dock as workers drummed along on homemade instruments. The production team danced and performed acrobatic feats as they loaded the machines.
Sanitation was lacking. Andrew found rodent droppings beneath pallets, in dimly lit corners, and under tables. The polite rules of hygiene, to say nothing of the locally and federally mandated ones, were loosely followed. Still, the team performed as a community and got the job done, albeit inefficiently. They prepared elaborate, family-style lunches using ingredients indeed pilfered from company stock and took daily “sunshine breaks” to smoke grass and gossip.
Moved by their camaraderie, Andrew couldn’t bring himself to file an honest report.
Dr. Black didn’t visit the warehouse during Andrew’s undercover week. He worked from a small stone cottage on Emerald Lake, on the east side of town. The neighboring homes, modern vacation properties owned by suburban elites from Indianapolis and Chicago, towered over the modest Black residence. It was after Labor Day when Andrew arrived to file his report, and most neighbors were gone for the season. A thin plume of smoke rising from the cottage chimney was the only sign of life along the lake.
The place looked like it belonged in a Grimm’s fairy tale. Hoarfrost coated the grass and dry stack wall. The heavy wooden door creaked open to reveal a large room filled with books. Couches and chairs were draped with blankets, probably to conceal their age. Everything was arranged around the massive stone fireplace.
Andrew was greeted rhapsodically by Dr. Black’s wife.
“Nathan has told me so much about you,” she said, embracing him.
This surprised Andrew since the doctor had never asked him a personal question. Whatever information he’d shared with his wife must have been scant. Still, if she knew about Andrew’s regional reputation, she didn’t seem turned off by it.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Black,” Andrew said.
“Please, dear, call me Honey.”
Honey wore a long denim dress and had her long gray hair braided down her back. She wore no makeup and no jewelry. Andrew got the sense she didn’t get out much.
“I was just watching the cats this morning,” she said without prompting. “Nathan won’t let them in the house, but I feed them on the porch. I worry they’ll freeze, but they always seem to find warm spots. I wish he’d let them in the basement, but he won’t. Lately, I think I’m beginning to understand their language.”
She spoke rapidly, hardly pausing for breath.
“You don’t say,” Andrew replied, glancing around for the doctor.
“I started to figure out their word for water. They come onto the porch, rub against my legs, and look up with pleading faces saying, ‘eeeeeemow.’ Then they drink from the ceramic bowls I keep on the porch for them.”
She lit up as she shared this as if confiding a playground secret.
“Then I noticed when they watched the birds in the garden, their heads followed them, and they’d make a noise like, ‘roooooomeeeyow.’”
Andrew felt like he was hallucinating.
“Yesterday, Nathan caught some fish for Sunday dinner and put them in the trough out back. The cats sat there all day, dipping their paws in the water. Then, Jessica, she’s the big fat tabby, looked up at me and said, ‘eeeeeemow roooooomeeeyow.’ I realized she was saying ‘water bird.’”
“Leave us,” said Dr. Black, who had silently entered the room.
“Okay, dear,” Honey said cheerfully. “It was so nice to meet you, Andrew. Have you read The Dissident Disciple by…”
“Go,” Dr. Black said again, more firmly.
“I’m going, I’m going,” she chirped as she disappeared down the hall.
Andrew followed the doctor into a study that smelled musty, like many of the old boathouses and stone structures on Apirchopolis’s chain of small lakes. Dr. Black sat behind a desk cluttered with paper. Binders filled with records formed a horseshoe around him. In those days, no company business was done on a computer. Retail orders came through the US mail, and handshake agreements were made with farmers and vendors instead of acquiring the required paperwork. All of this was strictly below board to the IRS and the FDA.
Andrew sat in a decrepit faux leather chair, facing the doctor’s yellowing beard. At first, he thought the odd coloring came from chewing tobacco. Later, he’d learn it was from brushing his teeth with turmeric and coconut oil.
“What have you found out, Mr. Schultz?”
“You have a good team working for you, sir.”
“Andrew, please. No more ‘sir.’ Call me Dr. Black.”
“Okay, Dr. Black.”
“You saw nothing out of the ordinary? Nothing that concerned you?”
“I honestly didn’t.”
Through the window, Andrew saw a car pulling into the gravel driveway. It was the outgoing manager. The man slammed his door and stormed toward the cottage, rage written on his face.
Dr. Black made no move but emitted a strange humming noise, like a cross between a groan and a song.
They heard Honey excitedly greeting the man at the door. Then his footsteps thundered down the hallway.
The door burst open. The svelte Brazilian stood in the frame, glaring.
“After four years, you fire me with a letter?” he said in indignant and accented English.
Then he spotted Andrew. Recognition flickered, followed by contempt. No further explanation was needed. He turned and left without another word.
Dr. Black had no comment and made no apologies for the intrusion; he continued the conversation as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“You’ll open the warehouse at 8 a.m. tomorrow.”
This would be yet another contemptible act for Andrew to live down in his hometown. Since returning to Apirchopolis, the whispers behind his back singed his ears wherever he went. He avoided town as best he could by driving many miles out of his way to buy groceries and never stepping into a bar or restaurant within the tri-county area. To do his banking, an act which filled him with dread, he crossed the state line into Indiana.
Still, he could not remain invisible. After the meeting with Dr. Black, while standing in the produce aisle of a distant Meijer, he felt someone’s eyes on him.
“Is that Andy?” a woman’s voice said.
His hands went numb, and he dropped the zucchinis he’d been comparing. Slowly, he turned around.
A woman in a velour tracksuit and a tank top that read Wine: Because No Good Story Starts with Someone Eating a Salad stood there, with a shopping cart. A small child sat in the baby seat.
“Holy shit, it is you,” she said. “Tom is never going to believe this.”
“You must be mistaken,” Andrew said, barely audible.
“No, I’m not,” she replied, her voice rising.
Andrew abandoned the zucchini and bolted for the automatic doors.
Over his shoulder, he heard her laughing to herself and saying, “Fucking psycho.”
On his first Monday as the new boss, it was clear the employees had heard about Andrew’s two-faced, backstabbing ways from their recently fired manager. He considered offering a rousing speech, a humble explanation, or even an apology, but ultimately, he said nothing. He simply stepped into the role of supervisor and hoped they would fall into line.
And they did, more or less. While they offered him no help or favors, they also didn’t rebel. The workers did the bare minimum, showed no loyalty, and brooked no friendship. Andrew, in turn, made no criticisms. And so the years passed; five, ten, fifteen of them.
As Dr. Black aged, turning seventy-five, then eighty, then eighty-five, his thoughts grew foggier, his ideas more troubling, his defiance of legality and decency more brazen. To everyone’s surprise, Andrew thrived in the chaos. With the original warehouse crew either moving on or returning to their home countries, one by one, the witnesses to Andrew’s iniquitous rise disappeared. Eventually, no employees remained who remembered the odious way he had secured his position.
Dr. Black, though never affectionate, came to depend on Andrew. As his mind drifted deeper into the weeds, he only cared about the business in scattered moments. When a wild marketing idea, a delusion about manufacturing equipment, a harebrained scheme to sell moldy pomegranates, or a plan to accept payment in gold and silver surfaced, Andrew did his best to carry out his boss’s vision within reason.
He built workarounds to keep the company afloat. He dragged Terrestrial Paradise into the modern age with a website and an online ordering system. Quietly, he acquired liability and workers' comp insurance behind Dr. Black’s back. He filed I-9 forms, incorporated the business, and learned to handle taxes.
Even the most paranoid customers became, in a strange way, a source of satisfaction. After years in the shadows, Andrew found joy in being the calm, competent voice on the other end of the phone. He didn’t mind spending an hour with a woman in Millinocket, Maine, who swore the Powdered Egg Pouches tasted like they contained lead. When a man from Whitefish, Montana, reported that twenty of the ninety-seven cans of Freeze-Dried Buttered Broccoli he ordered were dented, Andrew gently assured him there was no risk of botulism and persuaded him to buy twenty more plus a case of Freeze-Dried Mashed Potatoes.
For the first time in his life, Andrew felt good at something. Useful. Necessary. In his hometown, he was a punchline. At Terrestrial Paradise, he mattered. By year seventeen, he ran every aspect of the business and even managed Dr. Black’s personal finances. With no heirs and no known family beyond Honey, Andrew allowed himself to believe that someday, the business would be his.
The salary was low for the work required, but he had never been qualified for the job to begin with. No one else would have given him a chance, so he accepted the imbalance.
The morning of the Thomas Jefferson email, Dr. Black, who hadn’t set foot in the warehouse in years, arrived unannounced, accompanied by a young man who was holding a motorcycle helmet and wearing a one-piece riding suit.
The contrast between him and Andrew was unfair. The guest’s hair was long, raven black, and flowing; Andrew’s was graying, thinning, and receding. As the stranger scanned the dingy facility, he looked unimpressed, even a little repulsed. Though Andrew had worked hard to address the building’s organizational chaos and rodent issues, the warehouse retained a lingering funk and sagging charm he could never afford to eliminate due to budgetary limitations.
“Andrew, I’d like you to meet Harry Fletcher,” Dr. Black said, gazing up at his guest with admiration. At six and a half feet tall, Harry Fletcher towered over the diminutive doctor. “He’s a chef, he’s celibate, and he’s a Native Indian. You can tell by his posture, by his very presence, that he’s a true husbandman of the American soil.”
Andrew looked up from the steel tanker desk he had rescued from a yard sale and dragged into the warehouse years ago. It sat like a battleship on the unsealed concrete floor, surrounded by towering stacks of inventory, the throne from which he ran his little kingdom. He felt the intruder erase him from memory before a word was exchanged.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” Harry Fletcher said dismissively, already turning his back.
Dr. Black continued showing his guest around and left without saying goodbye.
Andrew tried to return to his workday, but his blood was boiling. Dr. Black had no friends or business partners who might explain this newcomer’s presence. In a fit of rage and anxiety, he told the Brazilians he was leaving early. In seventeen years, he had never done that.
He drove to the VFW, where his dad spent every afternoon drinking beer, watching sports, and sitting in silence with the bartender and the other regulars. Since he couldn’t drive, his dad walked the mile and a half to and from the bar down the country highway. It worried Andrew, and he braced every day for the call saying his father had been hit by a car, but the call never came. With no other way to get the old man to exercise, he did not put up a fight about it.
Sunlight briefly lit up the dark bar as Andrew entered, then faded when the door shut behind him. The old-timers turned on their stools to see who had arrived, made passive note of the new customer, and then returned to their beers. Andrew found his father at the end of the bar and sat beside him. The bartender, who looked even older than her clientele, asked what he was drinking.
“I’ll have whatever the old man is having. And get him another.”
The bartender looked at Andrew’s dad for approval of the order. Mr. Schultz nodded.
Andrew had lived with his father in near-total silence for seventeen years. Even in the days his dad could speak, they’d barely talked. All his life, Andrew had wanted guidance and yearned for affection, but his father had been as incapable of giving as Andrew was of receiving. As he sat beside his father now, he didn’t know what he was hoping for.
“I think the doc’s going to fire me, Pop.”
His father didn’t move. He kept watching the television, where two analysts were arguing about a game. Andrew took a sip of beer and hung his head.
Then, to his surprise, his father tousled his hair.
Andrew looked over, stunned. The old man never turned his way, he just kept staring at the screen.
At their next weekly meeting, Dr. Black made no mention of Harry Fletcher. Andrew presented the sales numbers, crop forecasts, and pending HR issues. Strangely, the doctor seemed more engaged than usual.
The following Saturday, Andrew tended his humble garden at his parents’ house. The herbs had wilted, so he pulled up the sparse oregano, rosemary, and thyme. The kale looked good, as did the carrots and peas. Gardening was new to him. Though he disliked both planting and eating vegetables, he couldn’t deny a certain satisfaction in growing his own food.
Maybe there was something to the lifestyle he’d spent so many years selling.
As he smiled to himself, the mailman arrived, greeted him by name, and handed him the day’s mail. Sandwiched between an Indiana Michigan Power bill and a flyer from Sunset Coast Cannabis was a letter in a plain white #10 envelope with a return address he knew well.
May 14, 20__
Andrew Schultz,
Your services at Terrestrial Paradise are no longer required. Effective May 18, 20__, your employment has been terminated.
Enclosed is your final paycheck.
Sincerely,
Dr. Nathan Black
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