Bruce Johnson
Assistant Editor Caitlin Doyle: In Bruce Johnson’s unsettling and Kafkaesque flash-fiction piece “The Slabs,” we enter a world that brings to mind the 1960s television series The Twilight Zone and the more recent Netflix series Black Mirror, wildly popular shows that invite viewers to navigate the line between the quotidian and the strange. Johnson asks us to participate in the story as meta-viewers whose job it is to observe a pair of observers. We watch closely as the two central characters, an unidentified male narrator and a woman named Jenna, scrutinize human subjects for a research study run by a tech company. Tasked with monitoring how individual subjects interact with a device known as a “slab,” a mysterious touch-screen apparatus that fulfills users’ commands, the two of them must report back to the company’s higher-ups on a daily basis (“each night the lab coats revise the software based on the day’s failed commands and push out an update”). As the “slabs” become more effective with each update, the relationship between the narrator and Jenna undergoes its own less auspicious transformation. Johnson leaves us questioning the nature of human appetite in a universe programmed, through increasingly sophisticated technologies, to fulfill our every desire.
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“The Slabs”
by Bruce Johnson
The subjects are in their rooms, and it’s Jenna’s and my job to watch. There’s a hidden camera looking in on each one. All we have to do is press the red button on the console if we see any emergencies. Jenna and me each get a slab too. The buttons and touch screen are disabled. The company wants to see what people will ask these things to do, when they have to ask.
We pass the time making fun of the subjects. There’s the husky bald guy who’s got the biggest dick you’ve ever seen and won’t stop touching himself. There’s the teenager who’s constantly sending videos. In one she pulls up her bedspread, pressing her palm against the resistant mattress. She tells the slab, “Caption: I miss my mattress topper.” She points the slab at the park outside her window. “Take a video. Caption: That dog just shit on the sidewalk.” Then she plops out a breast and says, “Caption: Does this look like a lump to you?”
And there’s the eight-year-old, who is the most comfortable being in a room with the slab. He’s having the time of his life. He watches cartoons with the thing, has it read him stories, tell him jokes, show him pictures of naked ladies. He names it Mom. “Mom, you’re my best friend,” he tells it, and the slab thanks him. The final subject just lies in her bunk with her face to the wall, crying.
We explain all this to the men in lab coats at the end of each day. “Signs of cabin fever?” they ask. “Loneliness? Psychological hardship? Difficulties in device navigation?”
For the crier, sure, all the above. But each night the lab coats revise the software based on the day’s failed commands and push out an update. This overjoys the subjects, that they can now do things that didn’t work before.
The lab coats have us look through a printout of commands from the subjects’ slabs, to see if there’s anything the devices misunderstood.
The sheet says, among other things, Show me guys with no shirts. Click send. Dictate message to Matt Guy from Finnegan’s. Click friends list. Send Whatsapp to Tim saying you better not be with Lisa. Hide this post from Dad. Look up popular gifts for sixty-two-year-old mothers of three. Tell me, why does it feel so good to let glue dry on your hand and peel it off? Send a message to Steve, The lady next door won’t stop crying ha ha. Message to Derek, It was lonely here at first but not anymore, not with this thing they gave me. Tell me, is there intelligent life in the universe? Show me pictures of cute cats. Are any of them still alive? Download this pic from Insta and put me in it. Send sandwiches to my kids for dinner. Tell me a joke. Tell me a story. Tell me why Tamara from school doesn’t like me. Vibrate. Vibrate harder. Don’t stop vibrating, goddamnit. Tell me, Will I ever find love? Is Brad happy now, away from me? Tell me, how did Darwin form his theory? When will the sun cool? Where in the world are leaves reddest in autumn?
Jenna and I start sleeping together, doing our best to stave off boredom. Her slab shows us some lurid videos, and we try some things we see. But when cabin fever starts to bite at us both, we bite at each other in turn. She tells me I have a fat ass. I tell her she should learn to shiver better in bed. By the tenth day we barely speak, except to the slabs. When we happen upon a command they cannot perform—which is rare, increasingly rare—we decide it must not have been that important anyway.
Bruce Johnson is a PhD candidate in the University of Southern California Creative Writing & Literature program, and he holds an MFA in Fiction from University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His work has appeared in Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, The Adroit Journal, The Los Angeles Review, and The Able Muse, among other journals. He lives with his wife and two cats in Quito, Ecuador, where he is working on his dissertation.
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