The Compensation Bureau

By Ariel Dorfman

“I have created for each of you a fate, one tailored specifically for your needs and desires. Each of you has a defining moment—not before, not after—when a wrong turn or decision led to the disastrous outcome that you and I mourn. To isolate that malignant moment is an exacting, exhaustive process, which only the most well-trained and competent professionals, armed with the most sophisticated of predictive models and processing power, can accomplish. You can put your trust in me, as you would in an expert surgeon, a surgeon of the soul.”

On a distant planet overlooking Earth, the nameless protagonist of The Compensation Bureau is one of a team of Actuaries at work on the innovative Lazarus Project. Conceived in response to the shocking violence observed in humankind, the project identifies people who have wrongfully died at the hands of others—whether victims of war, hate crimes, or random brutality—and attempts to compensate for the cruelty and pain they faced in life and death.

But balancing the accounts for the sufferings and wrongdoings of humanity proves hardly a clinical exercise. The Actuary soon finds himself personally invested in the project’s mission, and the goals of the project itself are complicated as the fate of Earth’s inhabitants becomes more uncertain. The Compensation Bureau explores the power of individual and collective action, from a writer hailed by The Washington Post as “a world-novelist of the first category.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781682192641

Ariel Dorfman

Born in 1942 in Argentina, ARIEL DORFMAN as a young academic and writer served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. During this time he became know more broadly as co-author of How to Read Donald Duck (1971) from which he includes snippets in the Tarzan chapter of Hard Rain, his first novel (1973). Hard Rain won a literary prize in Argentina that allowed him and his family to leave Chile after the Pinochet coup. In exile, Dorfman has become famous as a prolific writer and fierce critic of Pinochet and other despots. He defines himself as an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist (Hard Rain, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Mascara) , playwright (Death and the Maiden, Widows, Reader), essayist (The Empire's Old Clothes, Someone Writes to the Future, Heading South, Looking North), academic, and human rights activist.

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I will not abandon them, even if my heart is heavy with their stories, even if the woman who gave me the courage to bear so much grief, even if she is long gone. She would have wanted me to continue caring for them, these distressed souls she might have proudly called her sisters and brothers if she had been given the chance to meet them.

And continue I shall, as I reiterated to my Supervisor a few moments ago. I will solider on with the Lazarus project, I said. And, of course, also respectfully asked him, as I have done for some time now, about the status of my recurrent request to be re-assigned to a group of candidates that I can attend to more expeditiously, once I have been given leave to no longer carry such an excessive burden of desolation.

He answered enigmatically, though with a strange sadness in his voice, that the end seemed to be in sight, and before I could probe him as to whether he was referring to uncertain rumors that are circulating about a possible investigation by a High Commission of Inquiry, he cut me off, apprising me that my application for a transfer had now reached the very top of the administrative ladder of the Bureau, to our legendary Chairperson herself, and that, considering the level of satisfaction with my achievements in surveys by those I have assisted of late, she seemed positively inclined towards my petition. I know I am not the sole Actuary to suffer from this sort of fatigue, but none of my fellow agents has such a stellar record as a pioneer, few of them volunteered from the very start. And reliable sources have informed me that my lone indulgence with the woman who—, well, suffice it to say that I have atoned, spent my season in the worst of all possible Hells, was readmitted to this post without preconditions.

So I am convinced that my flaunting of procedures has been understood and forgiven. Our Chairperson just about told me so, in our one personal interview. Even mentioned the manual that is employed to help train novices for this job, how it is based, in part, on my experiences and suggestions.

More reason to show no sign of reluctance or lassitude now, as I meet my newest charges, all of them more than deserving of a second chance at life. There is, given our current shortage of personnel, no other Actuary available to manage and run this impending session which, as all that I coordinate, has been designed in its entirety by me.

Who else is aware of each detail, each moment, each incident, garnered from the lives of this specific batch of one thousand individuals before their untimely death, who else has minutely, excruciatingly figured out what would have happened to them afterwards if they had not died in that cruel and unfair manner? Using the same diagnoses and methods with which I had plumbed and predicted the prospective lives of the last post-mortem thousand I greeted yesterday and the next thousand I will greet tomorrow, on and on, I must go on until I am relieved of my responsibilities.

Closer to them, to these human beings arrayed in front of me, motionless, with no sense of what is about to transpire as soon as I push the Lazarus button that will awaken them, closer to them than their families and most beloved friends ever were, closer than their rivals and most abhorrent enemies, I am the one who, having witnessed those lives from inside the arc of their aborted existence, was then allowed the privilege of imaginatively performing the next phase of that existence, their journey as it might have been, what they never got to fulfill for themselves.

Now comes the thrill of the instant when they realize that what I am offering them is true, that is their reward and mine, there is that, but I cannot hide from myself and even less from my Superiors who, from time to time, review my work—perhaps they are doing it at this very moment—, no, it is impossible to hide the toll this has taken on me over the centuries I have been on the job. Centuries, I say, a word like today and yesterday and tomorrow, words I pronounce even though it is clear that time does not run in this place as it does on Earth or anywhere else, with the very term centuries, or millennia, or eternity itself, meaningless in the final run. Everything meaningless, at least For me, except the stories that ended when they shouldn’t have, the stories that are about to be completed. Everything meaningless ultimately, I must admit, but her voice that is still with me, even if her voice, even if …

I sigh and push the Lazarus button, answered by the familiar stirring in the once dormant multitude, like a breeze winding through trees that understand that spring is about to arrive, the whiff of pollen on the verge of spreading. They are my saplings, these people, even the oldest among them, my buds