Good Ground - Excerpt #1

While I realize that this might be confusing to read outside of the context of the rest of it, I'm still interested in off-the-cuff reactions. Basically I'll set the scene just by saying that the novel takes place in the Hamptons of Long Island, and that there's a very chi-chi organization called the Northampton Hamlet Town Board which is dedicated to the ideal of founding and running a whole town for a certain stratum of the rich and the elite. For instance:

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At 3:30 a.m. every morning the bakers of Hilsbeck’s Deli gather to enter through the deli’s rear door, the first obstacle to which is the two keys needed to unlock it, one key on either side of the door and far enough away from each other that no one person can unlock it, this being an adaptation from Cold War missile launch command centers. At 3:30 a.m. in the morning the needed synchronization can be a difficult feat, with some bakers choosing to steady themselves by leaning their foreheads up against the cold brick and just listening for the signal to turn their key, half-dozing. Once they’re into the main room they enter, one by one, the hyperbaric flash chamber, strip nude, don goggles, and wait for the generator, which powers up slowly and with the warbly rising note of an electric guitar about to overload, and finally flashes like a camera’s flash, this process searing off in one painless instant the baker’s outermost layer of skin and with it any sort of bacteria that could potentially find its way into the bagels. Off-color comments about this wee-hour nudity and skin-searing process are rare and, if encountered in recent Hilsbeck’s hires, quickly nixed with blank looks. Everyone’s responsible for their own flashed-off skin, which in the next room is airblasted from their bodies, sending onto the floor a dry white snow that they’ve all got to broom off to the shallow brushed-steel gutter that runs the perimeter of the airgun chamber. Estimated cost of the isolation booths and decontamination installations was vague but rumor had it was somewhere in the tens of millions. Then it’s a smaller shower room with jets embedded in the walls firing scalding water with an antiseptic solution; those who’ve been around Hilsbeck’s long enough know that it’s a good idea to keep their goggles on, considering the no-nonsense chemical compounds in the solution. Dressing in the Hilsbeck’s white jumpsuit is next. If Long Island were ever to be nuked, Hilsbeck’s would be, for those who knew about and appreciated the extent of its safety measures, the most logical place to find safety. When you think about it, it’s strange that according to the Charter there’s no need for hairnets. Getting all five or six bakers into the kitchen and front counter area takes about twenty minutes, although if something happens with any step of the sterilization process, a clogged water jet in the shower room for instance, they are to contact the NHTB Standards of Service Dept. Under no circumstances are they to proceed into the food preparation area until a tech crew’s been dispatched and the chambers have been fixed and everyone’s been properly decontaminated. These crews are actually surprisingly swift in coming, as though they’re constantly on call the way firefighters always are. Then baking. The bagel dough that’s been chilling overnight’s unsealed from their vacuum-locked stainless steel vats, which are stored in ceiling-height refrigerators with two thermometers inset in its door, for redundancy. The front counter area is manned by a cashier and prep person who, although pals with and sometimes related to the rest of the crew that had arrived and gone through the whole decontamination skinflash process, tends to be somewhat distended socially from the rest of the Hilsbeck’s crew. By the time the first hungry people appear at the counter—construction workers on their way to some seaside estate, usually, and sometimes staffers of local hotels and caterers, who know what their patronage of Hilsbeck’s will mean for their various business concerns—the crew’s boiled, seasoned, quality-tested, and sent at least a gross of bagels through the airlocked chamber on a conveyor belt that is, on its return trip, constantly being irradiated and dusted free of crumbs. Before it became the norm, morning TV news anchors loved to estimate the crowd of mobile diners in line with their open Posts, idling with bottles of juice taken from the refrigerators that are right there on the floor, reached somewhere into the 200 range. Think Zen is one of the mantras drilled into each Hilsbeck’s staffer mind as they strain to be become practiced in those swift and expedient motions that define the efficient food-service establishment—egg and proscuitto bagels wrapped in wax paper like a geometric model of some thorny math problem, napkins slipped into paper bags with the speed with which a criminal divests himself of hot dollar bills. Twice an hour, no matter how far out of the door the line of morning diners goes, one of the front assembly staffers is to leave their post in order to cart a ladder to the front door, ascend it with a spray bottle full of a gentle soap and water combination in one hand and a chamois cloth in the other, and there at the top giving a thorough polish to the plaque on which, in a protruding oval of black obsidian, the golden words “Northampton Hamlet Chartered Institution” are expertly inscribed. The plaque never needs the polish, but it’s in the rules, and it’s considered wise to direct attention up there as often as they can.