Below the Belt
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The story is slight: an experienced “checker” at an anonymous factory compound, Hanrahan, is joined by a novice, Dobbitt. But this isn’t your standard kid-assigned-to-a-grizzled-veteran plot: these two have been isolated from their families for an indefinite period of time and share a cell whose beds offer the choice of boiling or freezing and whose typewriter has a defective Y (“Why?”), impeding their ability to type reports, which no one reads. They try to ascertain from the sound of a buzzer whether their boss, Merkin, is in a good or bad mood and jockey for the utterly worthless boons he can bestow: the right to sit down in the chair facing his desk, the right to be summoned by a single beep rather than a double. The sheer randomness of the environment is encapsulated in Merkin’s reply to Hanrahan when he objects to losing “his” single beep to the newcomer: “Would you want him to have twice as many beeps as you, when you’ve been here so much longer?” Merkin himself is a terrified lower-middle manager who dreams of escaping to an assignment in Spain and who’s determined to prevent his two subordinates from becoming friends.
Like academic politics, where the intensity of the battle is inversely proportional to the importance of the subject, the slightest thing–who gets the first party invitation, who gets the best view of the burning river, and most important, who gets to sit in Merkin’s chair–becomes cause for murderous rage. After Dobbitt lunges at him over some perceived slight, Hanrahan drily observes that if Dobbitt succeeds in killing him, “You’ll get the chair.” In this tale of shifting alliances, with combinations forming and collapsing at a breathless pace, Merkin and Hanrahan first join forces against Dobbitt, then Dobbitt and Hanrahan against the boss. Pawns themselves, they use their absent wives as weapons: Hanrahan tries to persuade Dobbitt that his wife has been unfaithful while Merkin rations the love letters Hanrahan receives from his wife.
