The Fiction Factory: a Novel

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository

Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations

2018-04-24 The Fiction Factory: A Novel

Jansen, Brian

Jansen, B. (2018). The fiction factory: A novel (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/31862 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106576 doctoral thesis

University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

The Fiction Factory: A Novel

Brian Jansen

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

APRIL, 2018

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of two parts. The first, a critical foreword titled “The

Fiction Factory: On Precarity, Popularity, and Piecing Together Our Stories,” discusses my creative work through a theoretical lens. In it, I draw on contemporary discussions around precarity in cultural and academic work, theories of cultural industries, and scholars of the “ethical turn” in literature—such as Wayne Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Marshall Gregory—to explore questions of agency and ethics in popular fiction. In complicating binaries (the sphere of art versus the sphere of commerce; work versus labour; friendship versus transactional relationships), and by taking Leslie McFarlane

(better known as Franklin W. Dixon of Hardy Boys fame) as a case study, I seek to turn away from sometimes dismissive treatments of popular fiction and offer a more nuanced and charitable reading of the cultural objects—series fiction, ghostwritten thrillers, popular Young Adult novels—that live or die by the marketplace.

The second part of this dissertation is the novel proper, “The Fiction Factory.”

Taking inspiration from a New York Magazine exposé by journalist Suzanne Mozes of memoirist James Frey’s “fiction factory,” Full Fathom Five—a publishing venture initiated by Frey and staffed primarily by young Creative Writing MFA graduates who churn out Young Adult novels according to pre-determined formulae for appalling wages and no credit—the novel imagines a literal fiction factory, a corporation where ghostwriter employees manufacture stories for mass consumption for unremarkable wages. “The Fiction Factory” simultaneously dramatizes the corporatization of the arts and the precarity of contemporary labour (particularly labour in the sector of cultural work). The novel illustrates the cultural pervasiveness of storytelling through a

ii commercial office in which daily business is literally conducted in (and in the service of) stories, suggesting how much, ethically, is at stake in each storytelling act.

iii

Preface

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

Innumerable thanks are due to my supervisor, Dr. Suzette Mayr, for her patience, her guidance, and for random pictures of canned tuna. Thanks are due as well to the members of my committee—Dr. Michael Tavel Clarke, Dr. Jonathan Kertzer, Dr. Jackie Seidel, and Dr. Kit Dobson—for their charitable and insightful readings of my work; to Michael

Laverty, whose passing observation that “man, that’s a great premise for a novel” planted the seed of everything that came after; to the Department of English at the University of

Calgary; to my current and former colleagues therein, especially Tom Miller, Martin

Schauss, Rebecca Geleyn, Jess Nicol, and Rod Moody-Corbett, for variously providing conversation, food, drink, hospitality, and reading recommendations; to my colleagues in the English program and the School of Arts and Sciences at Red Deer College; and to my family, who eventually came to realize that “So, when are you going to graduate?” was not a productive question. I acknowledge the financial support of the University of

Calgary, Red Deer College’s Professional Development Fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, to Roland Barks—you’re a very good boy, no matter what they say—and to Hollie: thank you for the support, always, and

I hope you’ll keep letting me ride your coattails.

Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Preface iv

Acknowledgements v

Table of Contents vi

The Fiction Factory: On Precarity, Popularity, and Piecing Together Our Stories 1

A Scholarly Interlude (or, an Interlude about Scholars) 25

Something Happens 30

The Fiction Factory: A Novel 57

Works Cited 399

The Fiction Factory:

On Precarity, Popularity, and Piecing Together Our Stories

As someone who normally writes fiction, I found myself last year, for the first time in perhaps ten years—in the minutes between teaching two classes—writing a short poem.

A few weeks later, I caught myself doing it again.

Last year, for the first time in my career, I found myself teaching a full, 4/4 course load, on a sessional basis; this year, I am teaching a 5/4/1 load.

In a very roundabout way, my dissertation project, The Fiction Factory (even though it began with the kernel of an idea years earlier) is about how these two facts are,

I think, related, and why it might matter.

It might (and I hate to do this) also be about Donald Trump, or at least what

Donald Trump represents.1

Sorry.

1 I note here that—despite the fact that I am a Canadian citizen working and studying in Canadian institutions and my novel is set in Canada—I lean heavily on US data and trends in this exegesis. I do so for a few reasons that I wish to clarify early on: one is that my area of expertise lies primarily in American literature and culture. Another is that my partner is a dual citizen, and I grew up in a border town (Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, Michigan); my sense of self has thus been very much shaped by American culture (I did not, for instance, take a class in Canadian literature until graduate school; I still measure warm temperatures in Fahrenheit). Finally, I focus on the US because of its influence on Canada and the world—not just in the sense that (as the cliché goes) “When America sneezes, the world catches cold,” but in the sense that I worry about the spread of certain political and social movements into Canada. Pollster Michael Adams’s Could It Happen Here? (2017), for whatever it is worth, examines Canadian versus American and European social values surveys to make the case that such fears are overblown. And yet recent events—the popularity of Rob (and Doug) Ford, Kellie Leitch’s proposed “Canadian Values” test, the Harper-era “Barbaric Cultural Practices” tip-line, the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting—do not instill confidence.

When the votes were finally counted—or, well, when enough of the votes were counted in enough of the places that mattered—it turned out that Donald J. Trump had won the 2016 US Presidential Election in a shocking upset. At no point during the election campaign did Trump lead in the aggregated polling; according to numbers compiled by the New York Times’s Josh Katz, statisticians and betting sites favoured his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, by margins ranging from 71% (fivethirtyeight.com) to 85% (The New York Times’s own estimate) to greater than 99% (Sam Wang at the

Princeton Electoral Consortium, who vowed to “eat a bug” if Trump exceeded 240 votes in the electoral college [A. King]).

Yet Trump did win; Wang, as promised, ate the bug—and a mini-industry has sprung up seeking to explain exactly what happened. I do not want to discount the extent to which the Trump campaign undoubtedly preyed on America’s worst impulses: racism, misogyny, xenophobia. As CNN political correspondent Van Jones put it, in a widely- shared viral clip, Trump’s election was a kind of “whitelash . . . against a changing country, . . . against a black president” (qtd. in Ryan), and there is evidence to suggest (as one might expect) that hate crimes have surged in the wake of Trump’s victory: Voice of

America’s Masood Farivar quotes lawyer Mark Potok, who has acknowledged that the

Southern Poverty Law Centre “had received some 315 reports of racially-charged incidents in the past week [after Trump’s election], more than were recorded in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks” (Farivar). But—and I am certainly not the first person to make this claim—this sort of explanation feels incomplete, and the exit polling

(see Huang et al.), though there remains some statistical noise, may point toward why. To be sure, Trump benefitted from the demographics we might expect, given the above-

2 stated theory: men, whites, the uneducated all swung Republican. But what I found fascinating as I looked over the exit polling, with my own scholarly work percolating in the back of my head, were the demographic swings between elections—a 5-point swing that saw more Democrats voting Republican in this election, for example. And, most shockingly, a 16-point swing toward the Republicans among those making under

$30,000/year: a traditionally reliable demographic of blue-collar Democrats. A demographic that voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama twice, complicating any easy knee-jerk claims of conscious (if not unconscious) racism.2

I do not want to belabour the point, as much has been written on the topic, and it is only a way station on the road to the point I’m driving at, but Donald Trump (arguably) won the US Presidential Election on the backs of economic anxiety among the blue- collar, working poor—what scholar and journalist Richard C. Longworth calls “a rust- belt rebellion” by those who saw their manufacturing jobs disappear (as well as those who saw their jobs replaced by robots, their full-time status shifted to part-time status, and those whose union benefits were decimated), and who thus never saw the benefits of the US economic recovery under President Obama: despite a record 75 months of job growth, and 2 million new jobs in 2016 overall, the number of manufacturing jobs declined in 2016 by 45,000 (Gillespie). According to economist Paul Krugman, working- class whites supported Trump because they felt “left behind by a changing economy and

2 Again, as already mentioned and as will be discussed more below, I don’t want to discount the effects of racism in the 2016 election. For more granular polling data, see the results of the American National Election Studies pre- and post-election surveys. McElwee and McDaniel, interpreting this data, argue that it points to racial animus far more than economic anxiety as the root of Trump’s success. See also Adams (35-37) for more on racial intolerance in the American electorate.

3 society.” As Longworth writes, rust-belt voters “just wanted to be noticed.” “[I]ndustrial jobs,” he adds, “aren’t coming back. Globalisation isn’t going away. Cities will keep growing, the hinterlands shrinking, filled with people who have lost everything except their vote.” Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild tells a similar story in her account of

Tea Partiers and Trump supporters: she describes people who told themselves “a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage.”3

This story is not new, exactly. It simmers in the background, for example, of

Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, the 1946 novel about the rise of a populist governor in the US South. Based loosely on the real-life Huey Long (one-time governor of Louisiana, and US Senator), the novel depicts the political rise of Willie Stark, who begins his public life as a kind of rube, intended to split votes so that the Democratic

Party’s favoured candidate might win election. Upon discovering this plot, Stark delivers a blistering speech in which he acknowledges himself as a hick, who “grew up like any other mother’s son on the dirt roads and gully washes of a north-state farm” (127). But

3 It is again, of course, ultimately difficult to disentangle economic anxiety from troubling issues of race and xenophobia. As the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells points out in his account of Hochschild’s research, the “deep story” that many Trump supporters tell themselves is a story about how “America, which was once characterized by hard work, was now characterized by cheating.” Hochschild’s orienting metaphor is the image of people cutting in line, and it is no surprise that these economically anxious Tea Partiers viewed the line cutters as African Americans, immigrants, women, public servants, and refugees. The phenomenon is nicely illustrated by a dark running joke on the social media platform Reddit, where reports of hate crimes are often met with the sardonic comment that the perpetrator “must have been experiencing a lot of economic anxiety.” As an aside, Hochschild’s argument reads in many ways like an update on and an exploration of an observation widely credited to US President Lyndon B. Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you” (qtd. in Moyers).

Stark ends that same speech by declaring to his audience that “[t]his is the truth: you are a hick and nobody ever helped a hick but the hick himself” (133).

These “hicks’” politics were “partly rooted,” Hochschild argues, in “class slippage.” Trump’s victory is a reminder of the central thesis of scholar Nancy Isenberg’s recent history of poverty in America, White Trash: “the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity” (xv). Now, as then, “[t]he poor, the waste, the rubbish, as they are variously labeled, [stand] front and center during America’s most formative political contests” (xv).

But what of that contented middle-class? How contented is it? How stable is it?

As Isenberg argues, “[a] preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unattainable” (xv-xvi). And Isenberg’s claim here is consistent with

Hochschild’s observation that most Tea Party supporters in the US are actually middle class (more than half earn at least $50,000/year; nearly a third earn more than

$75,000/year); these groups go to great lengths to distinguish themselves from the declassé; and they do so, Hochschild speculates, because they know (or fear) their own middle-class status could crumble at any moment. As she writes, “Being middle class didn't mean you felt secure, because that class was thinning out as a tiny elite shot up to great wealth and more people fell into a life of broken teeth, unpaid rent, and shame.”

She quotes the wife of a wealthy Louisiana contractor: “We have our American dream, but we could lose it all tomorrow” (emphasis in original).4

The US economic recovery under Obama was not necessarily good news for the uneducated, for the very poor, for those working in manufacturing. Bad luck for them, but it’s difficult to argue with the logic of two million jobs created—until we dig a bit to discover how many of those jobs are, for example, part-time or precarious. The underemployment rate in the United States, for example, fell in 2016 to its lowest point in eight years (9.2%), and yet that figure still leaves, according to financial reporter

Patrick Gillespie, more than five million Americans with part-time jobs when they would prefer to be working full-time. Turning to a Canadian example, Statistics Canada reported strong job growth in 2016—growth that was, on the other hand, driven primarily by part- time labour (in fact, the number of full-time jobs created was so small as to be labelled

“statistically insignificant” [“Canadian Job Market”]). Even beyond jobs reports, we have seen gnashing of teeth about generational shifts and the shrinkage of the middle class.

Research conducted in both North America and the UK suggest that millennials may be the first generation to earn less than their parents (Elliot; Carrick); scholar Markus Moos suggests that young adults need to acknowledge that “they’re actually going to have a slightly lower standard of living than their parents” (qtd. in Carrick). He blames the problem on “an increasing emphasis by employers on temporary or contract work instead of permanent full-time jobs” (Carrick), adding that even those in low-paying service jobs

4 I note that much of the work on which I’m drawing here—Hochschild and Isenberg in particularly—also forms the basis of an argument about professional wrestling and the rise of Donald Trump as President of the United States, forthcoming in The Journal of Popular Culture. If you’re wondering why the language of professional wrestling so often seeps into this dissertation, there’s your answer. Sorry.

(fast-food, for example) are earning less than someone working the same kind of job a quarter-century ago. For their part, journalists Dionne Searcey and Robert Gebeloff note that the American middle class has been shrinking for almost fifty years—a process that has accelerated since 2000, as “more people have fallen to the bottom,” tumbling into poverty. Journalist Louis Uchitelle’s The Disposable American explores the logic of an economic system where layoffs have become the norm—in turn facilitating the

“dismantling of company-paid health insurance and fixed monthly pensions” (xi). He asks the question upon which these tendencies hinge: “If we have no value as employees beyond what we can produce in a day or a week or a year of work, why preserve the trappings that go with careers?” (xi).

Economic anxiety is not unique to the poor, it seems. It’s becoming a much, much more common feeling, and the anxiety doesn’t seem unfounded. In Upton Sinclair’s increasingly prescient 1935 satire It Can’t Happen Here, the rise of a fascist presidential candidate, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, is credited in part to the nation’s Depression-era economic anxieties. What’s telling in the novel, however, is that those anxieties are not exclusive to the poor. Even the comfortable are afflicted. The novel’s hero himself, the relatively comfortable journalist-editor, Doremus Jessup—though he nevertheless stands in staunch opposition to Windrip—acknowledges his own financial un-ease; he feels, the narrator tells us, “the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast . . . He could no longer plan”

(104-05). For Jessup, the surest sign of the nation’s woes and its susceptibility to a political strongman are observable in the fact that “[t]he Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean gone out of the America it had dominated” (105). Jessup

7 is on the one hand incredulous, but on the other seems to acknowledge that the rise of fascism is occasioned by a sort of idealism: men and women turn to Buzz Windrip, the narrator explains, not because he is perfect, but because he seems to them the most likely saviour from “the slack indolence, the lack of decent pride of half the American youth, whose world . . . was composed of shiftless distaste for work and refusal to learn anything thoroughly, of blatting dance music on the radio, maniac automobiles, slobbering sexuality, the humor and art of comic strips” (350). The President-Dictator responds to their “deep story”—to borrow Hochschild’s language.

That Horatio Alger tradition Jessup mentions has, of course, long been more myth than fact (and Sinclair Lewis knew it, at least based on the hollow version of the

American Dream postulated in his earlier novel Babbitt; Lewis’s letters explain Babbitt’s desire, having achieved material success, “to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it’s too late” [59]). As journalist James Surowiecki suggests, though US society was more mobile than British society in the late nineteenth century, that’s no longer the case—and it hasn’t been for awhile. Social mobility has in fact remained low for at least the last half-century. Surowiecki writes:

Seventy per cent of people born into the bottom quintile of income

distribution never make it into the middle class . . . Forty per cent are still poor

as adults. What the political scientist Michael Harrington wrote back in 1962

is still true: most people who are poor are poor because “they made the

mistake of being born to the wrong parents.” The middle class isn’t all that

mobile, either. . . . And although we think of U.S. society as archetypally

open, mobility here is lower than in most European countries. (“The Mobility

Myth”)

And Surowiecki’s summation of the data may even be optimistic, for more recent research has postulated that upward social mobility has actually decreased from already low levels in the United States. Journalist Alana Semuels summarizes new research by economists Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, concluding that the probability of falling down the social ladder is now as good or greater than climbing it; the lack of mobility these researchers found, shockingly, even held true for those with college degrees, and might be traced—they argue—to the fact that “the number of jobs at the bottom and the top of the pay scale is increasing, while the number of jobs in the middle isn’t. If there were more employment growth in the middle, those who start out at the bottom might have a better shot at moving up” (Semuels).

Jobs at the bottom, even for the well-educated, suggests that precarity is increasingly becoming the watch-word when we talk about employment; indeed, as scholar Fiona McQuarrie notes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told Canadian workers

“job churn” and “precarious work” are the new normal—that it’s incumbent on us “to get used to” them.

In a working paper for the Employment Instability, Family Well-being, and Social

Policy Network, sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg breaks down some of the categories of precarious work, including temporary contracts, fixed-term employment, hiring through temp agencies, on-call work, and involuntary part-time work (1). He goes on to argue that precarious work is more broadly characterized by insecurity, instability, and uncertainty; by limited economic and social benefits; by limited statutory entitlements, low potential

9 for advancement, and even dangerous or hazardous working conditions (2). The conditions of precarious labour to the working poor, in other words, have trickled up and become common practice in many categories of employment. Indeed, as Kalleberg points out, even “standard” employment contracts have developed a degree of precarity; workers are “uncertain about how long their jobs will last, given the spread of employer practices that use layoffs as a business strategy rather than as a last resort during downturns in the business cycle” (2). We have, Louis Uchitelle argues, “bowed to layoffs as the way things have to be” (ix), and we’ve done so on the backs of three myths: that layoffs promise a payoff, that “the laid-off must save themselves,” and that “the pros and cons of layoffs are entirely measurable in dollars and cents” (ix-x).

Of course, a problem with any discussion of precarious employment, or the precariat (as the class of workers themselves have come to be called) is the way that the term erases swaths of people. As scholar Laura Goldblatt points out in her 2014 critique of the rhetoric of precarity, the term not only elides the global South, but large swaths of the American underclass as well; amidst handwringing around the “exploitation” of (for example) adjunct professors and graduate students, she points out, no one ever seems to mention “the plight of dining service workers, janitors, or groundskeepers at universities.

Their . . . exploitation apparently failed to register either as academic labor or precarity.”

If adjunct professors are the new working poor, she asks, “what about the old working poor?” Tellingly, Goldblatt notes, the term is rarely used with reference to fast-food worker strikes; it is never used to describe migrant laborers, waiters and waitresses, call- center workers, or even sex workers. “Put bluntly,” she writes, the way precarity is used,

“professionals lacking stable employment are precarious, while those in similar

10 circumstances outside of this class position are simply poor.” There is certainly truth in this argument, and there is a kind of dark irony that we have only come to care about precarity once it has trickled up to affect those of us who do not belong the category of the “persistently marginalized” (Isenberg 2);5 indeed, the rhetoric of precarity as a problem of the professional classes effectively illustrates Nancy Isenberg’s argument that

American culture has unconsciously rationalized economic inequality: poverty naturalized, breeding being viewed as “an imposed inheritance,” the poor (particularly poor whites) “classified as a distinct breed” (xvi). This rationalization allowed generations of men and women to think of themselves as only temporarily underprivileged, while nevertheless reassuring themselves that they were not so by nature of their constitution—that they were not “trailer trash,” “rednecks,” “lubbers,” “rubbish” or “crackers” (Isenberg 2). I note all of this to anticipate objections and acknowledge my awareness of the problems of any discussion of the professional precariat, particularly the privileged position from which I write, and I echo Goldblatt’s argument that “[i]t is high time for displaced professionals to organize alongside of, strike with, and support fast food and other low-wage workers.” Solidarity is needed in these kinds of engagements with neoliberal capital; as she points out, “Solidarity, after all, is a precarious formation.

It is about vulnerability, contingency, and the repeated renegotiating of one’s position with every encounter. It is fleeting, changing, and dependent upon the consent of multiple individuals. It is both drudgery and fright.”

5 I recall here a keynote address by a well-respected Marxist critic who interrupted his lecture to harangue the dining-room worker clearing the buffet food warmers from the back of the meeting hall. The worker was, you see, making far too much noise.

Nevertheless, I do want to highlight some of the effects of white-collar

(“professional”) precarity, for it is the argument of my project, The Fiction Factory, that these conditions have—despite their basis in a financialized view of the world—effects which range beyond dollars and cents (in his history of American corporate layoffs,

Uchitelle describes “a layer of human damage that is difficult to quantify, but is alarmingly destructive” [x]); effects that bleed, I would argue, into the world of creativity. Precarity is not a strictly a problem of economics; it is a problem of health (see

Andresky Fraser 18-20; 36-37), for example. But it is also a problem of culture: it affects how art is made (or not made), by whom it is made, how it is consumed (if it is consumed), and even what it looks like.

I admit here to feeling at least somewhat silly working through this argument in light of a recent LitHub essay describing the phenomenon of Chinese migrant worker poetry, penned by labourers on their down-time between fourteen-hour sweatshop assembly line shifts. As Suzette Mayr has written, “because professors are seen as part of a privileged class, there’s little sympathy when one of them feels overwhelmed by the job and feelings of anxiety and insecurity because of an increasingly corporatized university environment.” But I also think it’s singularly un-useful to stay silent because someone out there has it worse, for down that way lies a race to the bottom. As Mayr goes on to argue, “It’s not time for writers to stay out of academia. It’s time we broke down the asylum doors.”

Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser offers a provocative metaphor (Goldblatt, mentioned above, would bristle at its usage) when she describes this state of affairs as a

“white-collar ‘sweatshop’” (15) in her 2001 book of the same name. Even at a time of

12 tremendous market optimism (she began researching her book during the market boom of the late 1990s), Andresky Fraser noticed the glaring gap between “the buoyant optimism of . . . chief executives, business leaders, and management consultants” and the “bleak workplace stories” emerging from the rank-and-file (11). An earlier era in which, she argues, the nation’s largest companies offered “security, comfortable working conditions, the prospect of a balanced work and home life, and a wide range of financial benefits”

(10) has been replaced by a demoralizing and destabilizing regime of “overwork and underreward” (11)—exacting, she claims, “a painful toll not only upon the men and women employed by the United States’ largest companies but upon their families, vital civic structures, and the nation’s society as a whole” (11). The consequences are myriad: workloads have increased to the point where free time has become an “unimaginable luxury” (200), a problem exacerbated by technological advancement; stress-related illnesses have risen at precisely the same cultural moment when corporate benefits packages have shrunk (200); even those who make out well financially report “less time, physical stamina, and emotional energy to devote to activities unrelated to their all- consuming jobs” (201). What Andresky Fraser notes as the “‘death’ of mutual loyalty between employer and employee” (202) has led to marginalization and alienation. And these trends have only snowballed since the time Andresky Fraser was writing: ten years later, economist Guy Standing’s The Precariat discusses the contemporary productive system as a “social factory” (118), suggesting that “labour is done everywhere”; there is no longer such a thing as “work-life balance” (118)—"more work or labour is done outside the notional workplace, in cafés, in cars and at home” and the precariat “are induced to intensify their effort and the hours they spend in their labour, for fear of

13 falling short of expectations” (118). Elsewhere, in his 2003 account of Internet start-up culture, No-Collar, sociologist Andrew Ross observes that the “perks” of employment— at the start-up he shadowed, these included “in-house masseur, video-gaming room, gym membership discounts, regular social excursions” (73)—in fact represent a kind of

“insidious occupational hazard” (19). As he writes:

. . . everything that employees do, think, or say in their waking moments is

potential grist for the industrial mill. When elements of play in the office or at

home/offsite are factored into creative output, then the work tempo is being

recalibrated to incorporate activities, feelings, and ideas that are normally

pursued during employees’ free time. . . . Their occupation becomes a support

system for everything else. (19)

This trade-off Ross describes might have been worthwhile in exchange for job security, opportunity for advancement, or benefits. But as Ross notes, many of the employees thrust into these arrangements were actually independent contractors or free agents (158); in fact, as he points out, by the late 1990s more than 25% of Microsoft’s skilled workforce consisted of “permatemps,” long-term employees on renewable contracts who lacked benefits and were barred from the employee stock purchase program (160). What

Ross calls the “humane workplace” of “feel-good stimulation” has overwritten the “just workplace” with its assurances of protection and security (20).

Andresky Fraser notes too, with a particular sadness, the consequences of this labour model to civic society. She fears that when people are forced to obsess over their work and career, they are no longer able to devote time or energy to the kinds of activities that can “enrich their communities” and add “new dimensions to their own lives” (203).

Andresky Fraser’s focus here is primarily on volunteerism—she notes the US-wide struggle by school systems to find parents willing to coach sports teams, raise funds, and serve on Parent-Teacher Associations. Standing similarly mourns the “squeeze” (129) on relaxation and idleness, wondering what incentives remain to allocate any time to pursuits of leisure. He writes:

One form of leisure is participating in demanding cultural and artistic activity.

To appreciate fine music, theatre, art and great literature, and to learn about

our history and that of the community in which we are living, all take what in

popular parlance is called “quality time”, that is, time in which we are not

distracted, nervous from insecurity or spent from labour and work, or by the

sleeplessness induced by it. A result is a leisure deficit. The time is perceived

as unavailable. Or those in the precariat feel guilty about devoting time to

such activities, thinking they should be using their time in networking or in

constantly upgrading their “human capital”, as all those commentators are

urging. (128)

The loss of opportunities for that sort of leisure is a tragedy. But I want to take the observation further by pointing out that it is potentially not just the appreciation of art that is lost—what might also be lost are the opportunities to generate such art (though if there is no one left to appreciate it, as Standing contends will happen, one wonders what the point is, anyway).

“Every modern artist,” as poet Lewis Hyde observes in The Gift, “must sooner or later wonder how he or she is going to survive in a society dominated by market exchange” (xviii). For Hyde, the value of a work of art operates in a kind of gift

15 economy, separate from the market economy (“art that matters to us,” he contends,

“which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, . . . is received by us as a gift is received” [xxvii]), and thus Hyde acknowledges the necessity, for many, of making a living by the market economy as a means of supporting her contributions to the gift of economy by her art. Literary history offers myriad examples of writer-turned-labourer: novelist Chad Harbach quotes Ezra Pound’s explanation of why so many poets become teachers—“It is the economic factor,” Pound said. “A man’s got to get in his rent somehow” (5). Hyde offers the example of Walt

Whitman, who, to make ends meet, “edited newspapers, wrote freelance journalism, ran a printing office and a stationery store, and worked as a house carpenter” (363). Perhaps the most famous example is Wallace Stevens, an insurance company vice-president and lawyer who wrote award-winning poetry on the side (he had his secretary type up his work, claiming it was his way of “being disloyal” [qtd. in Lavery 484]). Novelist Keith

Gessen echoes the sentiment in his essay “Money,” explaining that there are “four ways to survive as a writer in the United States in 2006: the university; journalism; odd jobs; and independent wealth” (176). Hyde goes to great length to point out that these jobs were—and still are—more about getting by than getting rich (Stevens notwithstanding), about facilitating one’s art (Hyde 362).

But the labour existed, and the terms on which artists and writers engaged it seemed to work—there were “bread-and-butter jobs [to go around], taken out of need and quit when need was relieved” (Hyde 363). Andresky Fraser, for her part, makes a note of what contemporary readers might view as an unexpected resolution to Sloan Wilson’s classic mid-century depiction of white collar work, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

(1955); though tempted by the ultra demanding job his boss offers him, the novel’s hero

Tom Rath ultimately, actually resists that temptation—“It’s just that if I have to bury myself in a job every minute of my life, I don’t see any point to it” (277), he explains.

And what’s even more surprising, writes Andresky Fraser, is that “his refusal does not brand him as a loser or an uncooperative slacker; the corporation can and does accommodate his lifestyle choice by offering a more moderate career path with its own modest rewards” (106). The novel’s solution echoes Hyde’s argument that certain categories of human experience—whether family life, religious life, or artistic practice— aren’t well-supported by market forces (370), and Rath’s decision in the novel to focus on his family life before his job is not unlike the decisions made by artists to prioritize their art over their careers. Hyde discusses the modernist painter Edward Hopper, who worked as a commercial artist, but who would dedicate only three or four days a week to commercial projects, so that he could focus on his painting the rest of the time (361). Or we might turn again to Wallace Stevens who, Clifford Burdge explains, “didn’t fit into the pattern of a senior executive of an insurance company, personality-wise,” but was kept around (Burdge speculates) “because the company was proud to have this world- famous poet as a senior officer” (qtd. in Lavery 486). Stevens’s daughter seems to engage in some of the distinction of market vs. “gift” exchanges when she acknowledges that his elevation to vice president was actually good for his poetic practice: “[A]t last,” she says,

“he felt safe in devoting some of his time and energy to poetry without fear of being

‘passed over’” (qtd. in Lavery 486).

There is an argument to be made that the example of Hopper is alive and well today in what has come to be known as the “gig economy” or “sharing economy” of

17 casual labour—think Uber, Lyft, Fiverr, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, etc.,. A recent New Yorker piece on the gig economy penned by Nathan Heller describes the disparate work of one young person in the sharing economy, one Seth F. who “has been hired to assemble five jigsaw puzzles for a movie set, to write articles for a newspaper in Alaska, and to compose a best-man speech to be delivered by the brother of the groom, whom he had never met. . . . Casper, the mattress company, booked him to put sheets on beds; Oscar, the health-insurance startup, had him decorate its offices for Christmas” (Heller 52-54).

Heller’s piece is well-written and balanced, addressing the benefits and drawbacks of such a model of labour, particularly in institutional and political terms. Heller’s uncritical acceptance of the idea of the gig economy’s “flexibility,” however, presents problems.6

Flexibility is only really flexibility if we can count on it; one of the core problems of the gig economy is that its uncertainty, the fear that the work is going to dry up at any moment, leads us to keep working all the time.7 The problem is arguably felt even more acutely against the background of claims that we are facing a looming “widespread disappearance of work” (Thompson).

A more complicated example might come in the person of Leslie McFarlane, a somewhat obscure Canadian writer, journalist, and filmmaker who is perhaps better known as Franklin W. Dixon—author of the first sixteen books of the Hardy Boys series of children’s novels. McFarlane wrote the novels for the Stratemayer Syndicate, a

6 And I am indebted here to Aaron Giovannone for pointing this out. 7 To apply this line of thinking to the “gig-ification” of academic labour: my teaching load gives me the flexibility to go home and walk my dog in the early afternoon. What it does not give me is the flexibility to focus on anything bigger picture or longer term than the four classes I am currently teaching—even as purely teaching positions have come to expect scholarly contributions as well.

18 literary/book packaging organization that hired freelancers to write series fiction for young audiences (Greenwald xiii). Contemporary accounts of McFarlane’s work emphasize just how little pay he received for this work—about $100 per novel (xi), signing away any royalties or residual rights in the process; had he retained said royalties, he might have been a millionaire several times over. And yet McFarlane, by all accounts, retained no bitterness himself over this fact. He knew, writes historian Marilyn S.

Greenwald, that he was never going to get rich as a writer; it was the “independence, the prestige, and the occasional accolades [which] sustained him” (6), and the periodic cheques for a Hardy Boys project helped sustain McFarlane and his family, freeing him to pursue other creative work—as Greenwald points out, the low per-book fee he received actually wasn’t particularly bad pay by 1920s standards (he could punch out a

Hardy Boys manuscript in under three weeks); McFarlane signed these contracts “with his eyes open” (xi), and in fact pointed out that the work was generally less onerous and more lucrative than writing two cents-per-word stories for pulp fiction magazines (148); with the regular work the Stratemeyer Syndicate provided, McFarlane (who kept detailed accounting records) made as much as $4,000/year in his best years as a professional writer (Greenwald reports incomes of $3,928 in 1928 and $4,085 in 1930 [76; 115])— roughly $57,000 in 2016 dollars.8 Not a fortune for a man with a family to support, perhaps, but a respectable income for a writer with literary inclinations.9

8 This number does not, however, tell the whole story. Not only were other years much leaner (he, too, was hurt by the Great Depression, managing only $1,135 in 1932 [Greenwald 115]), these stats don’t account for exchange rates; some of his work appeared in Canadian venues, but much was published by US pulp periodicals, and therefore paid in US dollars. 9 Another example might help illustrate my point here. Most biographical sketches of the turn-of-the- century American novelist Kate Chopin note that she began taking her writing seriously as a way of helping

For Hyde, these kinds of employment practices are about creating a “protected- gift sphere” (361) in which an artist can practice their craft outside of the (in his view, detrimental) influence of the market.10 The obvious problem—and Hyde quite openly concedes as much—is that the labour the artist performs in order to set aside said protected sphere can, while providing a material living, deaden the soul and damage “the gift” (362). This particular problem was McFarlane’s own, for—though he did publish

(so-called) literary fiction in newspaper supplements and glossy magazines of his day

(amateur Stratemeyer Syndicate historian James D. Keeline counts contributions to the

Toronto Star Weekly, Maclean’s, and Vanity Fair among McFarlane’s credits)—he came to view his Hardy Boys hackwork as a kind of “anchor” (Greenwald 77) in both the positive and negative senses of the word; he died believing (in perhaps clichéd fashion) that his Hardy Boys work had “helped subvert his life’s dream, which was to write the great Canadian novel” (Greenwald xiii); he “never wrote a critically-acclaimed . . . work of fiction” (xiv).

Nor were these anxieties unique to McFarlane, of course: Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road offers a portrait of Frank Wheeler, who fears that his office job for an IBM-stand-in corporate behemoth is suffocating his nebulous ambitions of being an artist. Or we might turn our eye to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House,” his preface to The Scarlet Letter, in which the author mourns that his government

her family address a mounting debt. Contemporary writers must laugh out loud when they read these sorts of sentences. 10 He proposes other ways of doing so as well, including patronage; one thinks here of Charles Bukowski, whose relationship with his long-time publisher is infamous: John Martin offered Bukowski $100 a month, for the rest of Bukowski’s life, to quit his job and write fiction full-time (Vice Staff).

20 appointment has robbed his creative spirit: “all the imaginative delight wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me . . . [t]his was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too long” (22). Yet there’s a level of irony in these two examples—for

Frank Wheeler is no artist; he is vain and self-important, with delusions of grandeur. And

Hawthorne, for his part, undercuts the complaints about his political appointment by telling a (fictional) story about encountering, while serving in this role, a historical artifact that forms the very basis of The Scarlet Letter.

Nor, once more, are these concerns limited to the past, distant or recent. If they have taken on a different tenor, it is perhaps because the kinds of jobs writers are doing have shifted. Given the rise of the creative writing program (Chad Harbach observes that there were only 79 degree-granting creative writing programs in the United States in

1975; in 2014, there were 1,269 [12]), it has come to be the case that perhaps the most common way for a contemporary North American writer to make a living, as novelist

Keith Gessen points out in his contribution to the collection MFA vs NYC: The Two

Cultures of American Fiction, is as a teacher in the university system (176); Gessen reports a conversation with his mentor George Saunders, in which Saunders admits he can only think of two writers in his generation who hadn’t become teachers—an admission to which Gessen wryly adds a postscript, that one of those two—Donald

Antrim—is now himself a teacher of creative writing at Columbia University (176-77;

177n).

Gessen writes that the trade-off of teaching, for working writers, is thus: “the university buys the writer off with patronage, even as it destroys the fundamental

21 preconditions for his being” (177). The bind, he writes somewhat sardonically, is that “[a] writer who ignores his teaching duties in favor of his own writing will spend an inordinate amount of time feeling guilty; one who scrupulously reads and comments on student manuscripts will have a clearer conscience. But he will be spending all his time with children” (178).11 David Foster Wallace notes something similar in his own assessment of “program fiction.” He writes:

Writing teachers are by calling writers, not teachers. The fact that most of

them are teaching not for its own sake but to support a separate and obsessive

calling has got to be accepted, as does its consequences: every minute spent

on class and department business is, for Program staff, a minute not spent

working on their own art, and must to a degree be resented. The best teachers

seem to acknowledge the conflict between their vocations, reach some kind of

internal compromise, and go on. The rest, according to their capacities, either

suppress the resentment or make sure they do the barely acceptable minimum

their primary source of income requires. (76)

The risk, for Wallace, is that this condition actually leads to the recruitment of certain kinds of students (“low-profile, docile, undemanding” [76]) and to the emphasis on certain kinds of easily communicated writerly concerns (“consistency of tense and tone,” as opposed to, say, “depth of vision” [77]).12

11 I’m certain Gessen is aware, though he does not mention as much, that as a student under George Saunders in the MFA program at Syracuse University, he was once one of those children. 12 And this point leads to a potential rabbit-hole that I don’t wish to spiral too far down here, in part because others have put it better. Literary critic Mark McGurl’s 2011 monograph The Program Era makes the case that contemporary American fiction has come to be defined by the spread of university creative writing programs and the institutionalization of creative writing. Even those few contemporary American writers

Gessen uses the word “patronage” (177), but the system he’s describing is not particularly like any kind patronage; Hyde’s most underlying concern in The Gift is that recent history has been marked by creeping erosion between the two spheres, between market and gift, and the rise of the university creative writing workshop seems emblematic of this erosion. As Hyde writes in a twenty-fifth anniversary preface, “we’ve witnessed the steady conversion into private property of art and ideas that earlier generations thought belonged to their cultural commons, and we’ve seen the commodification of things that a few years ago would have seemed beyond the reach of any market” (xii). Hyde mourns “market triumphalism” (377), the move “to commercialize a long list of things once thought to have no price” (377). Universities are among the public institutions “encouraged to think of themselves as private businesses”

(376), funding themselves “by selling knowledge rather than creating, preserving, and disseminating it, as their old mission statements once asked them to do” (377). Chad

Harbach, in MFA vs NYC, charts a trajectory whereby the MFA system comes to embody this kind of market spirit. “A workshop-driven book industry,” he writes, “will become as rational—that is, as single-mindedly devoted to profit—as every other capitalist industry.

The writers, even more so than now, will write for other writers. And so their common ambition and mission and salvation, their profession—indeed their only hope—will be to make writers of us all” (28). Even his fond (perhaps overly rose-coloured) recollections of a time when publishers “waffled between patronage and commerce” (28) are undercut by his sense of where things stand now. There is no real alternative to the MFA model

who didn’t take MFAs or workshop classes (or, alternately, teach in such programs) have been raised on the work of those who have. Even to consciously reject the MFA aesthetic is to acknowledge its hegemony. As Chad Harbach puts it, “We are all MFAs now” (11).

23 because the NYC publishing industry today has itself succumbed entirely to market triumphalism, skewing toward a Hollywood model of “blockbuster-or-bust” (22), replicating “the prevailing economic logic, in which the rich get richer and the rest live on hope and copyediting” (23). The dynamic of MFA vs NYC culture that’s explored in the essays collected by Harbach does not seem to offer a way out for a writer who does not wish to play into this market logic; for even those who choose not to play (who make their living by odd jobs) are still subject to a market economy that (as Andresky Fraser,

Uchitelle, and others describe above) has left people working harder, more tenuously, for longer hours, and for less compensation, giving them less of the time and space needed to practice their craft. Hyde suggests that the gift of the artist is in some sense a gift of poverty—“a spiritual poverty” that understands “our gifts are not fully ours until they have been given away” (364), and he suggests that that kind of interior poverty can compel an artist to “tolerate a certain plainness” (364) in his exterior life.13 But at what point does plainness of life (see Pound’s claim that “[p]overty [in Europe] is decent and honourable” [qtd. in Hyde 362]) become actual poverty? Hyde notes that “fidelity to one’s gifts often draws energy away from the activities by which men become rich”

(365); never mind rich, though, what about simply getting by? What about those who, as

Standing discusses above, “are induced to intensify their effort and the hours they spend in their labour, for fear of falling short” (118), and thus have no time for cultural, artistic activity? Market triumphalism and the financialization of art seem to push this question to the forefront. It’s a problem that the writer/artist team of Alexander Billet and Adam

13 I, like Hyde, want to make clear that I’m not romanticizing poverty; there is, as he writes, “no necessary connection” between the two (365); this fact is correlation, not causation—more a side effect of a culture that lacks institutions to convert between market wealth and gift wealth (365).

Turl have provocatively responded to by declaring that “America hates its artists.

America hates its working-class people.” For Billet and Turl (the latter of whom is, yes, enrolled in an MFA program), the recent fire at an Oakland art collective that killed thirty-six is evidence of this fact. They write:

Thirty-six people are dead. They are victims of an art and music economy that

doesn’t work for the majority of artists and musicians. They are dead because

art has become financialized. They are dead because gentrification is taking

away our right to the city—and pushing artists and young workers to the

margins—especially (but not only) artists of color. And because of

gentrification the urban life-rafts for gender non-conforming and queer young

people are shrinking. You can’t stay in the small towns, but you can’t afford

San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle and Portland.

Billet and Turl echo actress and blogger Danielle Thys, who writes, “We live in a schizoid society that denigrates process and deifies product. We bleed money for the goods creative individuals produce once they’re established. But we do next to nothing— and I mean seriously . . . nothing—to support those individuals in the interim.” A great many artists, she writes, belong to the category of working poor, and for this fact she blames the financialization of art and the collapse of US arts funding.

A Scholarly Interlude (or, an Interlude about Scholars)

If The Fiction Factory was inspired in part by the contemporary prominence of

“workplace” fiction—see Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007), Helen

Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015), David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

(2011), Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (2010)14—it is also indebted to the tradition of the campus or academic novel (Richard Russo’s Straight Man [1997], Julie Schumacher’s Dear

Committee Members [2014], Jane Smiley’s Moo [1995], Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of

Academe [1952], John Williams’s Stoner [1965]).15 The connection between the two traditions is no accident, and not simply because of the skepticism that scholarly work is work (an anxiety that shows up in my novel, but one which I have known many colleagues and mentors to struggle with); the connection is felt acutely given the increasing corporatization of the academic model; a trend that is perhaps already well- embodied in Lipsyte’s aforementioned novel, The Ask. The hero of that novel is Milo

Burke, a development officer (read: fundraiser; note the euphemistic naming) for a bottom-rung American university; what’s telling about the novel is the way its work

14 The presence and language of my novel’s gang of middle-management efficiency experts, it should also be acknowledged, owes a tremendous debt to Nikil Saval’s history of the office workplace, Cubed (2014), as do characters’ discussions of meritocracy and the historical failure of white collar workers to unionize. The career counsellor Gwendolyn and discussions of warehouse logistics, likewise, draw extensively on Alain de Botton’s non-fiction exploration of labour, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009). Indeed, the very cover of that book in its 2010 edition—a disassembled office chair—forms the basis of the prank that begins my novel. Will and Heather’s McDonald’s playpen discussion, additionally, borrows heavily from journalist John Cassidy’s account of the Internet bubble, dot.con (2002). 15 The character Will’s horrific hangover is a related tribute—of sorts—to one of literature’s great hangovers, found early in Kingsley Amis’s campus novel Lucky Jim (1955). I quote in full because I simply cannot resist: Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad. (60)

26 environment completely eschews the conventions of a campus novel despite technically also being a campus novel—Burke rarely encounters students or professors; he toils aimlessly in an institutional cubicle farm. Thus, in what is perhaps a commentary on the financialization of academia, the novel’s setting could easily be transferred to any white- collar workplace and readily succeed.

At the same time, however, that the university has adopted a business model, it seems to me that corporate environments have come to adopt an infantilizing system of perks that mimics the extended adolescence of many students (and, let’s face it, some of their instructors); see Ross’s discussion of in-house masseurs, video-game rooms, and social excursions, mentioned above, and note the language of Google, its home offices a

“campus,” just like a university. The returns and references to university settings are one way my novel seeks to make this connection, but so too is the climate of the Fiction

Factory office itself—it’s a space of extended adolescence where nothing much seems to get done, where characters are constantly refusing to actively make choices; the flatness of the narrative (a kind of dull, episodic evenness punctuated by moments of literal or metaphorical violence, sometimes bizarre and sudden, after the fashion of so much strangely violent, cataclysmic YA fiction) is a way of mimicking the potentially dispiriting flat cyclicality of academia—Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, repeat. Didn’t I tell you not to start essays with “Since the dawn of time . . .”? No? I guess that was last

Fall.

In this sort of flatness, I took inspiration from American poet Randall Jarrell’s underappreciated campus novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954). A sort of meta- academic fiction, Pictures from an Institution is actually a roman à clef about American

27 novelist Mary McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence College (where Jarrell also taught), an academic appointment that formed the basis for McCarthy’s aforementioned Groves of

Academe. Jarrell’s book, as befits a poet and first-time novelist, is beautifully written but loose and utterly—almost admirably—plotless.16 However, that plotlessness, it ultimately becomes clear, is not so much a defect of the novel but part of its point: that nothing much happens at Benton College (the Sarah Lawrence stand-in) and that Gertrude’s (that is, McCarthy’s stand-in) invention of a plot is therefore absurd:

When she told me the plot of her book, it was a Real Plot. It could have

happened anywhere—anywhere except, perhaps, Benton. . . . I said,

“Gertrude, has anything happened to you since you’ve been at Benton?”. . .

“I should say not. Never had less happened to me in my life.”

“Or to Sidney?”

She laughed.

“Or to Flo? or to Jerrold? or to the President? or to my wife? or to me?”

Gertrude laughed in a different way; she saw what I meant. . . .

Gertrude looked at me uneasily, clutching her plot to her breast. I said:

“Nothing ever happens at Benton, Gertrude.” (162)

As Jarrell’s authorial stand-in points out, even the death of a secondary character is off- stage and out-of-state. Yet for all this flatness, for all its meanness, the novel still maintains a cautious optimism about art, if not about the institutional framework in which it’s being crafted or which is serving as its dubious inspiration—the welded statue of art

16 It is also delightfully mean. One teacher, reflecting on her students’ creative writing: “Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane” (63).

28 teacher Miss Rasmussen looms at novel’s end, a magnificent structure that the narrator is deeply moved by and yet struggles to explain how or why. Curiously, though, so too does the sculptor: “She talked to me about the statue for a while, and I saw, not in dismay but in awe, that to appreciate what she said you . . . would have to be an imbecile” (206).

“She was a potato-bug who had been visited by an angel,” the narrator concludes,

“and I decided—decided unwillingly—for the rest of my life to suffer potato-bugs gladly, since angels are not able to make the distinctions that we ourselves make between potato- bugs and ourselves” (206).

I close this interlude with an anecdote. Many years ago, I served on a committee that awarded (I am attempting to keep this vague) a prestigious writer’s prize. And I distinctly recall a discussion surrounding one author whose application had been ranked rather low by the other committee members but quite highly by myself. For—despite one fairly recent award-winning novel, this writer hadn’t “done much” lately. I interjected to point out that this writer’s CV suggested they had been teaching as an adjunct, full-time, in those intervening years, and argued that some writers are going to be productive regardless, that this prize might be well-served providing an opportunity for a writer who might need that time and space. The committee observed that this was a good point, and then . . . moved on.

Fair enough, because maybe the counterargument is that we’re then punishing writers who can be productive even in limited circumstances.

Something Happens

The original impetus for my project was an exposé by Suzanne Mozes that appeared in New York Magazine in 2010. In the piece, Mozes wrote about a project organized by disgraced memoirist James Frey—a publishing imprint, Full Fathom Five— that recruited young writers (usually out of MFA programs and deeply in debt) to write series young adult fiction according to strict formulas (said formulas having been crafted by Frey himself), for an appallingly low wage.17 In the spirit of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and the Hardy Boys, Frey’s pitch was that he was taking advantage of an underserved YA market; he was following in the footsteps of Harry Potter and Twilight. Frey guessed that aliens would be the next big thing, and today there are seven entries in the Lorien

Legacies series (along with more than a half-dozen tie-in books, ebooks, and short stories), all authored by “Pittacus Lore”—a pen-name shared by Frey and collaborators

Greg Boose and Jobie Hughes (and, potentially, others—due to non-disclosure agreements, we cannot be certain). And also in the spirit of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the terms of employment are (in the words of the editors at New York) “brutal”—worse even than Leslie McFarlane could have imagined.

17 In a strange bit of coincidence, a season twenty-three episode of The Simpsons tackled this idea around the same time that I originally proposed it. “The Book Job” follows Lisa Simpson’s discovery that her favourite Young Adult author is not an individual writer, but an actress serving as a front for publishing executives using ghostwriters and market research. Naturally, hijinks ensue. To its credit it is, however, one of the better late-era Simpsons episodes, and features a guest appearance by Neil Gaiman.

The Stratemeyer Syndicate paid about $100 per book, or roughly $1,400 in 2016 dollars. Not a princely sum, but not peanuts. Frey’s work-for-hire contract? Only $250.18

Frey, like Stratemeyer, forbids authors from discussing their involvement in the project, spelling out a penalty (ranging from $50,000 to $250,000) for doing so. To his credit,

Frey provides for the author to receive 30 per cent of the revenue that each project generates, but this beneficence is undercut somewhat by the fine print. As Mozes writes:

The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought

against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could

use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even

if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company

could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the

future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would

“conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer

would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or

biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly

admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.19

And it gets worse—New York quotes one publishing-industry attorney, who points out that Frey’s contracts leave writers on the hook to write additional entries in a given series under the exact same legal terms, and the revenues paid out are subject to numerous

18 Frey, for his part, disputes this number and claims that he does not exclusively go after MFA graduates for his projects; he says that the pay scale “isn’t standardized” (Aydt). The numbers I reference here, however, come from a contract obtained by the editors at New York. 19 One of Frey’s earlier collaborators, Greg Boose, has apparently gotten around this last injunction by obliquely describing himself on his website as the ghostwriter of “two Young Adult novels that hit the New York Times’ best seller list.”

31 expenses (tellingly, too, the contract includes no audit provision) (“Read the Brutal

Contract”). Mozes offers one writer’s description of the arrangement: “a crappy deal but a great opportunity.”

Frey has actually embraced the model of the “factory” (Aydt; Mozes) with Full

Fathom Five, describing the venture as being akin to Andy Warhol’s Factory—artists conceptualizing a work and then collaborating with others to produce it; his company takes that ethos, he says, and applies it to literature (Mozes). Those are Frey’s words:

“artist,” “literature.” Contested terms, certainly, and yet Frey’s multimedia YA “content creation company” (“About Us”)20 certainly feels like a far cry from what we think of when we think of that kind of language. It certainly feels like the market sphere coopting,

“financializing” Hyde’s gift sphere. The “gift” about which Hyde writes has been replaced by the “acquisition.” “The mythology of a market society,” Hyde argues, undercuts the importance of art as a gift, emphasizing instead that “getting rather than giving is the mark of a substantial person, and the hero is ‘self-possessed’, ‘self-made’”

(xix). He continues: “So long as these assumptions rule, a disquieting sense of triviality, of worthlessness even, will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift”

(xix). I note here the rise of a curious corporate position—that of the “Chief Storytelling

Officer.” In 2015, the American business magazine Fast Company profiled the award- winning Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, who had been engaged as Chief Storytelling

20 The company’s “About Us” page further reports that Full Fathom Five “has developed over 50 books, television shows, films, and video games, released through publishing agreements with HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Bloomsbury; film deals with DreamWorks, Warner Brothers and Disney; and broadcast deals with ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, Nickelodeon, Sony TV, Universal Television, OWN, and HBO.” At the risk of sounding like an elitist snob, I chuckled at some of their most recent publications: Fart Squad and Little Shaq: Star of the Week.

Officer to the consultancy firm Wolff Olins (an earlier draft of my project included a character who held one such position; the final draft retains a reference to the job title and some of the sycophantic language of the Fast Company profile). “Hamid’s job,” the profile fawns, is “to help clients learn how to tell their [stories]—or to find out what their story is to begin with” (Grothaus). The same profile observes that the professional networking site LinkedIn lists more than two dozen executives who have held the title of

CSO.

In her lecture delivered as the 2015-16 Distinguished Visiting Writer at the

University of Calgary, novelist Zadie Smith offered her own sense of the problem with which Hyde grapples21—the way that (as she perceives it) creativity has morphed into a strange, capitalized noun, describing “the Creative.” She offers myriad examples, from partygoers describing their work as “creative branding” to students describing their destinies (they were born to be “a Creative”) to Creative Week in New York City (whose slogan declares this occasion the moment “[w]here advertising, design, and digital media collide with the arts”). As Smith suggests, it is increasingly the case that “when a person is described as ‘creative’ it usually means they’ve found a particularly ingenious way to sell you something.” Creativity has become a lifestyle, something bought and sold. And this shift, she argues, has led to students (she, too, teaches in the university system) whose writing she finds “oddly timid . . . aim[ing] to please; . . . seek[ing] to fill some perceived niche.” Think here of James Frey’s pitch: “commercial ideas that would sell extremely well” (Mozes).

21 Smith actually blurbs the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Hyde’s book.

What’s lost in that shift, for Smith, is the sense in which “refusal” ought to lie at the heart of creativity: “a true ‘Creative,’” she explains, should not satisfy demand but

“transform our notion of what it is we want.” To ‘think differently’ (she borrows Apple’s branding here) “necessitates some kind of refusal, and products—no matter how beautifully designed—simply do not have that freedom; they exist only to please.” At first glance, Smith’s language of refusal seems almost in opposition to Hyde’s sense of creativity as a gift; one a sort of present, the other a kind of rebuff or withholding; and yet

I think Hyde and Smith are, in fact, echoing one another—that to embrace one’s gift on the one hand is to refuse the intrusion of the market sphere on the other. While Hyde discusses the day jobs of celebrated American poets and painters, Smith instead turns to

African-American culture: fashion, language, music, and visual arts. She observes the rise of jazz and hip-hop from this minority community. But she also points out the way that this culture is co-opted, “monetized.” “Once an underground, resistant culture,” she says, “now rappers speak enthusiastically of ‘becoming a brand.’” But Smith also discusses Kafka as a refuser, and it is certain to me that Kafka fits neatly into the mould of “gifters” about whom Hyde writes; he toiled at his day job, after all, in the insurance business,22 and the temperamental character that prevented him from sharing his work (he urged his executors to burn much of his fiction) wouldn’t, I suspect, seem to have disqualified him as a gift-giver (or at least gift-haver) in Hyde’s sense of the term (362).

For many years, I was deeply taken by Hyde’s argument (out of which I view

Smith’s, in turn, as a kind of recapitulation); I found in it a certain kind of romanticism; I

22 I cannot decide whether the existence of the collection Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, which collects the written products of his daily labour, is an example of worthwhile scholarly pursuit or an example of market triumph. Or both.

34 still do—the sense of a certain kind of honour in toiling unrecognized, poor, overworked, underappreciated. The reverence with which authors discuss Hyde suggests to me that my experience isn’t totally unique. As journalist Daniel B. Smith writes in the New York

Times Magazine, words like “transformative” and “life-altering” are tossed about freely with reference to Hyde’s work. His blurbs alone consist of a who’s who in contemporary fiction: Geoff Dyer, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith. Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael

Chabon is another devotee (Smith). Margaret Atwood has characterized The Gift as a

“masterpiece”—the best book there is “for talented but unacknowledged creators.” David

Foster Wallace described Hyde as a “true superstar . . . of nonfiction” (qtd. in Smith).

Elsewhere, Wallace has suggested that “[n]o one who is invested in any kind of art, in questions of what real art does and doesn't have to do with money, spirituality, ego, love, ugliness, sales, politics, morality, marketing, and whatever you call ‘value,’ can read The

Gift and remain unchanged” (qtd. in Hyde, “The Gift: Comments & Reviews”). And yet increasingly I find myself struggling with Hyde’s argument; in some ways, my dissertation is the representation of that struggle, depicting a certain kind of ambivalence about the separation of spheres that Hyde (and Smith, in turn) discusses. To be fair to

Hyde, he does acknowledge that art can be bought and sold in the market while still remaining art (xviii). He does not begrudge those who are able to make a living by the sale of their work (359), and indeed he ultimately comes to the conclusion (however tentatively) that gift exchange and the market are less distinct spheres than he’d like to believe—that the logos of the market and the eros of the gift are both parts of the human spirit and ought to be reconciled (356-57). As he writes of the artist who makes his way in the marketplace,

the artist who sells his own creations must develop a more subjective feel for

the two economies and his own rituals for both keeping them apart and

bringing them together. He must, on the one hand, be able to disengage from

the work and think of it as a commodity. He must be able to reckon its value .

. . . And he must, on the other hand, be able to forget all that and turn to serve

his gifts on their own terms. (360)

Hyde even points out that part of the “gift” for the artist is the ability to do the labour of creating that art (248). Good advice! Yet his language elsewhere undercuts this point, because for him, the gift is “a thing we do not get through our own efforts”—it cannot be acquired “through an act of will” (xvi); it is “bestowed” (248). Hyde references folk tales in which “riches that the fairies have given to mortals turn to paper as soon as they are measured or counted” (196), and others where the inverse is true: worthless items turning to gold when received as gifts (196). Most troubling to me, however, is his discussion of the difference between “labour” and “work.” For Hyde, “work is what we do by the hour” (63), ideally for pay; it is “accomplished through the will” (64). Labour, though,

“sets its own pace. . . . [It] has its own schedule. Things get done [when we labour], but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them” (64). And even if we accept this distinction (about which I have reservations, given the implied mysticism of inspiration handed down from on-high), I am left wondering: cultural work—creative writing, painting, etc.,—is labour. But isn’t it also work? Or doesn’t it at least involve work? Is there not an act of will? Does maintaining this distinction between work and labour merely propagate what novelist Richard Ford has described as “the standard dilemma . . . of writing not being considered as actual work by the world around [him]” (viii)—a view

36 he has acknowledged “secretly sharing” (viii) while spending his career actively attempting to disprove it?

I do not think it is Hyde’s intent, but I do worry that his mystical language of gifting and the separation of spheres serves in fact to alienate artists from very real work it is that they are doing. Smith describes the creativity of the resistance in African-

American culture and decries the extent to which hip-hop artists strive to create a “brand” for themselves. Yet how much of that resistant culture comes from a kind of work, a process of bricolage, even, by which communities created something new from what was available to them? One of the key points of journalist Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback, after all, is that the business of hip-hop is inseparable from the music and culture itself.

Selling out is the point, a way of escaping the black underclass. Hence the common refrain of rappers—“Started from the bottom now we’re here”; “I’m out of that Brooklyn, now I’m down in Tribeca / Right next to De Niro, but I’ll be hood forever”; the Notorious

B.I.G. dedicating his album to “to all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustling in front of / Called the police on me when I was just trying to make some money to feed my daughter.” It seems unseemly, from my own position of privilege, to accuse these artists of insufficient refusal, or of failing to respect the gift sphere. At a simpler level, though, maybe the problem I’m trying to work through here is best summed up in a headline from the satirical news site The Beaverton: “Local artist paid with, dies from, exposure” (Duarte Spiel).

Hyde’s sense of the gift is part and parcel of what Andrew Ross calls the

“training” that artists receive in “sacrificial labor” (142). This training, he argues, predisposes them to “accept nonmonetary rewards—the gratification of producing art—

37 as partial compensation for their work, thereby discounting the cash price of their labor”

(142). In other words, he wryly notes, “it is fair to say that the largest subsidy to the arts has always come from arts workers themselves” (142). And one of the further ironies of

Hyde’s point is that the language can be co-opted on the way to the capitalization of art.

Indeed, as sociologist Mark Banks points out in The Politics of Cultural Work, this kind of language has seeped into the culture industry. “The more upbeat accounts of life in the cultural workplace continually emphasise the promise of individual emancipation” (92), he writes. Yet cultural industry firms “promote . . . artistic and creative freedom while at the same time regulating identity and ensuring conformity to rational corporate objectives” (92); “they . . . preach individual freedom, [but] they appear to close down the creative possibilities of selfhood” (93). It’s precisely this problem that scholar

Benjamin Woo discusses in his work on the labour (what Hyde would call “work”) of comics writers and artists; in part of the rush to legitimize comics as art, as a viable field of scholarly interest, critics have erased the work involved. But, as Woo argues, “no matter how formulaic the comic book industry’s outputs sometimes appear, comics simply couldn’t exist without substantial, ongoing creative inputs of writers, artists[, . . .] and editors. Yet we seem to find it very difficult to conceptualize making comics as a labour process or an employment relationship” (“Why Is It So Hard”). Interestingly,

Woo’s research suggests that comics creators report high levels of satisfaction with their work, at the very same time as they acknowledge what many would consider objectively poor working conditions. It’s worth noting here a common tension that arose from those who offered feedback on early drafts of my project, for the question arose again and

38 again: “why would any of these characters subject themselves to this nonsense? It’s simply preposterous!”

But as Woo writes, “even bad jobs can feel rewarding and fulfilling” (“Erasing,” emphasis mine), and he blames this mismatch on self-exploitation: “When the subjective rewards of work are highly valued, one may accept objectively poor conditions, including excessive amounts of un- or underpaid work, in order to ‘follow your bliss’” (“Erasing”).

The characters of my novel stick around, I suggest, in part because they need work (they are largely underemployed millennials, tempted by stability; the lone older staff-member is a blue-collar labourer whose opportunities are vanishing), but also because they’ve at least half-consciously bought into the idea that this labour is not really labour—that if they squint hard enough, writing series fiction is still at least nominally creatively fulfilling.

The looming spectre here is that Woo is simply criticizing people for enjoying their work, but he anticipates this objection by quoting Miya Tokumitsu:

No one is arguing that enjoyable work should be less so. But emotionally

satisfying work is still work, and acknowledging it as such doesn't undermine

it in any way. Refusing to acknowledge it, on the other hand, opens the door

to the most vicious exploitation and harms all workers. (qtd. in Woo,

“Erasing”)

Woo ultimately argues that creative work is a special sort of work. But, he writes, “if a price is to be put on our labor power, then we ought to negotiate that price with eyes wide open.” Woo’s challenge to his readers is to “advance a notion of creative labor as labor, rather than as an expression of passion, in order that creators might better evaluate the

39 costs and benefits of the jobs they take” (“Erasing”). Maintaining that creativity exists as a separate sphere entirely (as Hyde does), or that creativity is a refusal (as Smith does), does not seem helpful to me in terms of articulating creative labour as labour.

Perhaps the examples of I’m thinking—the comics industry, the Stratemeyer

Syndicate, Full Fathom Five, etc.,—are unfair, because they’re examples of producers

(“media industries,” as Woo writes) rather than “gifters,” if that makes sense; they evoke

Hyde’s scorn for the “[Silhouette] romantic novels written according to a formula developed through market research” (xv); that there’s something fundamentally different about the novelist toiling in his home office and the artist on a comics series, and that I am myself guilty of assisting in the creeping march of the financialization of art by even intimating that they aren’t so dissimilar. I have no defense against this criticism beyond wondering to myself, “Why can’t a blockbuster film simply be a masterpiece? Why can’t a romance novel also be a brilliant piece of art? Why can’t a product also be a gift?”

Once upon a time, after all, Dashiell Hammett wrote pulp detective stories and novels to make a living; fast-forward seventy-five years and scholars are trying to rescue him as a figure of the American modernist canon (Gray; McGurl, “Hammet and High Culture”).

Raymond Chandler (somewhat disingenuously, given his aspirations and his education in the Classics) described himself as “just a fellow who jacked up a few pulp novelettes into book form” (qtd. in Krystal), only for W. H. Auden to decide that his works, too, should be judged “not as escape literature, but as works of art” (qtd. in Krystal). It has become almost par for the course to celebrate the artistic merits of Elmore Leonard (“a literary

40 genius,” according to Martin Amis [qtd. in Krystal]).23 Or to use a more personal, more embarrassing example, I might wonder about the fate of John Le Carré, whose 1963 Cold

War novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—despite being a work of mere genre fiction—remains, for reasons I can’t entirely articulate, one of the most moving, heartbreaking pieces of writing I have ever encountered. This paper is not the place for a larger debate about the relative merits (or even the categorization) of “genre” vs.

“literary” fiction, and yet I suppose those tensions are emblematic of the anxieties about the spheres through which cultural work must travel. Banks notes that cultural goods are defined by their “primary emphasis [being] on aesthetic or symbolic value (rather than use value)” (Politics 2), but even he is aware that these categories are slippery, that there are cases where it is difficult to sort out which takes precedence: meaning or the profit motive (Politics 2).

That question—can a product also be a gift—is a big question, and it seems to me that in many ways, it is the question with which many theories of cultural work are grappling. As Mark Banks argues, “while most cultural goods are produced for some kind of market, and would not exist otherwise, to regard them only as commodities is to do violence to one half of the dialectic that renders them recognisable as cultural objects in the first place—their aesthetic, symbolic and otherwise meaningful character”

(Creative Justice 15). Banks helpfully categorizes theories of cultural work into three basic traditions: one, a “critical theory” approach that emerges out of the Frankfurt

School, that views cultural work as “alienating and ‘desocialized’ . . . , a nefarious

23 In discussing Leonard, the New Yorker’s Arthur Krystal borrows a quote from Robert Graves on Shakespeare: Leonard is “really very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”

41 product of the industrialized ‘culture industry’” (Politics 5); two, a “governmental” approach that is “exercised through workers’ own apparent willingness to act as dutiful

‘enterprise subjects’” (Politics 5); and three, a slightly more optimistic liberal-democratic theory that “understands cultural work as a potentially radical enterprise given expanded opportunities for aesthetic critique, (sub)political organizing and the re-moralization of economic practices” (Politics 5). Banks rather tentatively endorses the latter of these theories (Politics 166), pointing out that even if capitalism always wins, there is a kind of intrinsic value in cultural work regardless: “it contributes to the continuation of human expressivity and vital aspects of ‘symbolic’ creativity . . . that underpin quests for meaning and autonomy” (Politics 163). Banks outlines the stance of social scientist Paul

Willis, who argues that all forms of cultural production (however mundane) “enhance the possibility for reflective self-comprehension and social action” (Politics 164).

Interestingly, Willis argues that this possibility is true for both consumers and producers of that cultural work (Willis 76; Banks, Politics 164).

It’s that last point in particular that draws my attention, for in it I hear resonances with some of the claims made in the field of literary ethical criticism. As Lawrence Buell notes in the introduction to a special issue of PMLA dedicated to the “ethical turn” in literature, literary ethics has as its focus a kind of dual emphasis: “readerly responsibility” on the one hand, but “recuperation of authorial agency” (12) on the other. Or, as Wayne

Booth (perhaps the father of contemporary ethical criticism) puts it in The Company We

Keep, “any story told with genuine engagement will affect its teller fully as much as it affects listeners” (42); stories, in other words, affect their authors as much as their audiences. There exists a certain anxiety around this notion of literary ethics, I think,

42 because the language of ethics evokes our sense of good and bad, right and wrong—it hints at the practice of “moralists and censors” (Booth 5) who might ban books for containing the word “fuck” or strip racial slurs from Huckleberry Finn in order to

“protect” readers; it evokes “loaded labels and crude slogans” (Booth 7). In the words of

Marshall Gregory, “Because opinions about life are easy to come by—even the weakest thinkers among us have a lot of them—people often act as if ethical criticism is easy because it seems to invite the advancing of opinions rather than to require the making of arguments” (xv). But an approach to literary ethics, as formulated by Booth and others, seeks to avoid this sort of crudeness which passes off a specific narrative or kind of narrative as beneficial or harmful.24 Instead, these scholars tend to approach reading through the lens of responsibility, a shared responsibility between all parties involved: authors as responsible for and to their stories, and responsible to their audience—but also readers’ responsibilities as well, to stories and for the quality of their reading of those stories. Literary ethicists point out that if we accept the contention that reading can be good for us (which is, as scholar Marshall Gregory points out, a persistent belief of the

Western Humanist tradition, from Petrarch to Shelley to Matthew Arnold [2]),25 it only

24 Though it goes without saying, as Buell notes, that there is heterogeneity in terms of what literary ethics precisely is to those who practice it: “no specific model for inquiry into ethics is shared by more than a fraction of the scholars working in [the field]” (11); literary ethics is a “pluriform discourse” (7). 25 See also, for instance, Suzanne Keen’s Empathy and the Novel, which takes as a starting point the persistent “celebration of novel reading as a stimulus to the role-taking imagination and emotional responsiveness of readers” (vii). Keen’s monograph tempers those celebrations by turning to social scientific research and pointing out that “the case for altruism stemming from novel reading” is often exaggerated (vii).

43 reasonably follows that reading can also be (at least theoretically) bad for us too.26

Gregory adds that the ideas we absorb from narratives “do not lie passively in some arcane corner of the mind . . . but pass instead into the very warp and woof of everyday intellectual and emotional life” (15). And our unease around the idea of an ethics of literary texts, as Booth suggests, is ultimately silly anyway, for “even those critics who work hard to purge themselves of all but the most abstract formal interests turn out to have an ethical program in mind—a belief that a given way of reading, or given kind of genuine literature, is what will do us most good” (5). According to Booth, at least, most ways of reading are thus already fraught with ethical implications, after a fashion.

Lewis Hyde’s metaphor of the work of art as a gift, for example, is (in my view) an ethical reading. Though The Gift mentions neither ethics nor morality explicitly,

Hyde’s argument is—again, from my perspective—ethically loaded, implying what artists ought and ought not do. Despite the way that Hyde’s conclusion tempers his argument somewhat (acknowledging that we cannot fully cut the Gordian knot of the gift/market divide [356-57], that even patrons are subject to market forces [359-60]), the subtext looms; in fact, it is hardly subtext at all: that work which manages to avoid the pressures of the market sphere (even if the artist must him or herself nevertheless survive by the market sphere) are, well, superior (356; 357); that the “poverty of the gift” is noble

(364-65). Hyde values a certain kind of art; he is less interested with art in general than in

26 Keen, again, points out the danger of the “empathy-altruism” hypothesis (vi)—that empathetic responses to texts need not be positive. In examining white supremacist William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries (1978, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald), Keen notes its “representational success in creating a long-suffering white revolutionary character, to whom a certain kind of reader . . . clearly responds” (127); she concludes that “authors’ empathy can be devoted to socially undesirable ends” (128, emphasis in original).

44 his nebulous subcategory of “art that matters” (xvii). Hyde would dismiss the artistic value of The Hardy Boys, of any Full Fathom Five project, of any of the novels produced by the characters in The Fiction Factory.

Which, again, fair enough. I don’t know that he’d be wrong to. But I wonder whether there aren’t other, more productive ways of talking about these kinds of cultural products, in a way that does recognize the labour (or work), that does recognize—to return to Woo’s point about comics and sort of deliberately misapply it to the commercial publishing industry—that “no matter how formulaic” the output, these works “simply couldn’t exist without substantial, ongoing creative inputs” (“Why Is It So Hard”). How do we reconcile Leslie McFarlane’s view that his Stratemeyer work had “less content than a football bladder and no more style than a drunken camel” (qtd. in Greenwald 42) with his recollection that—in spite of it all, he thought “the Hardy boys deserved something better. . . . It was still hack work, no doubt, but did the new series have to be all hack” (qtd. in Greenwald 51)?

To find that language, I want to turn now to two other metaphors for reading ethically; first, Wayne Booth’s metaphor of friendship (which takes inspiration from

Hyde [175n8], and yet seems to me more inclusive), and Marshall Gregory’s nutritional metaphor.27

27 Though I focus on Booth and Gregory, I again reiterate that literary ethics is a vast field—see once more Buell’s “pluriform discourse” (7)—marked by a number of pressing debates. In Plotting Justice, Georgiana Bonita notes, for instance, that literary ethicists tend to fall into two broad categories: those who, like Martha Nussbaum, value the “practice of reading in order to tease out values and norms that are applicable outside the literary text” (17-18) and those who, like J. Hillis Miller, insist “on a textually immanent ethic”—reading as a “transformative act” (18) that “cannot be accounted for by the social and historical forces that impinge on it” (Miller 8; qtd. in Bonita 18).

In order to avoid absolutes and moral proclamations, Booth turns away from consideration of the effects a text has after it has been finished in order to consider the qualities of the experience for readers and writers during the act of telling or listening.

“Instead of asking whether this book, poem, play, movie, or TV drama will turn me toward virtue or vice tomorrow,” he writes, we should ask “what kind of company it offers me today” (169). What kind of friend it has been to me, and what kind of friend have I been, in turn. Booth goes on, then, to offer a taxonomy (inspired by Aristotle) of kinds of friendships (“useful,” “pleasant,” or “self-justifying” [170-73]), and offers some possible measures of so-called “literary friendship” (179)—how much intimacy does the friendship offer us, for example, or how much distance is there between the text’s and the reader’s worlds, how much responsibility a text grants us, or how intense our engagement with the text is (179-80). But Booth isn’t simply offering a checklist of what all literature should strive for; as he points out, we experience these measures in our real-life friendships as well:

Some [friends] offer a lot of whatever they are good at; others offer

precious gems though few. Some dominate the conversation, or try to,

while others offer to play an equal role, and yet others ask us to dominate.

Some open themselves to a bold and potentially healing intimacy,

revealing our own depths or depths we never dreamed of, while others

politely preserve our illusions, applying the “cosmetics” that all “as if”

philosophies say life by its very nature requires. (180)

Booth offers some other variables by which we might judge our reading friends, too: reciprocity, intimacy, coherence, familiarity (182-96). But what I like about these

46 variables (presented as they are in binary pairings) is that they are not absolute; they do not dictate that reciprocity, for example, is necessarily always better than hierarchy. As in our lives, so in our reading: at different times, we need different things.

Booth cannot entirely escape prescriptivism or hierarchies, however, for he does declare that—as in life, so in books—the best friendships, or the fullest friendships arise

“whenever two people offer each other not only pleasures or utilities but shared aspirations and loves of a kind that make life together worth having as an end in itself”

(174). And by this measure, as by Hyde’s, the Hardy Boys or Frey’s ghostwriters fail— any invitation to friendship they extend is an invitation predicated on ulterior motives. It is friendship with a catch. In other words: I want you to like me, so that you’ll buy more of me. These texts fail Aristotle’s test of a true friend as one who “has the same relations with me that he has with himself” (qtd. in Booth 174). Indeed, Booth spends several pages of The Company We Keep dissecting the ethical failures of Peter Benchley’s Jaws

(1974). He writes: “The story tries to mold me into its limited shape, giving me practice, as it were, in wanting and fearing certain minimal qualities and ignoring all others” (204).

But I pause here to wonder how many friendships actually do achieve Booth’s romantic, noble ideal. Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum defends herself from Booth’s opprobrium

(for, she confesses, she celebrates completing manuscripts by kicking back with a Dick

Francis paperback) by arguing that the consumption of popular fiction is a kind of transaction, and a preferable transaction to—say—hiring a prostitute. One activity, she argues, “exploits and debases both a person and an intimate activity” (240); the other is not “doing harm to anyone” for she is treating the popular author “exactly as he would wish, in a not undignified business transaction” (240). Yet even this defense feels tepid to

47 me, perhaps in part because it seems to accept the premise that a popular novel—even the most formulaic of commercial novels—is no different in any substantial way than, for instance, a ham sandwich or a humidifier; moreover, it seems skeptical of the possibility that a popular author might have any desire for her readers beyond a base economic motive. After all, as Banks points out above, even the most generic cultural object doesn’t exist as a cultural object without some aesthetic or symbolic character (Creative

Justice 15).

I add here, in light of Booth’s friendship metaphor, a point I made in my MA thesis, which is that cultural goods (music, art, literature) are a two-way street, both constructing our subjectivity in the world and reflecting that subjectivity (Jansen, “Lists”

121), and I think it’s safe to say that many of my friends are my friends not because of some deep spiritual, Aristotelian bond, but because we like the same things; in the words of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “[t]aste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (6).

Scholar Roberta Seelinger Trites has argued, in the context of Young Adult literature, that we are all so irrevocably immersed in capitalism that capitalist markers have come to replace the expectations of maturity—driving, voting, buying alcohol; these have become the measures of adulthood (Trites 18; Jansen, “First Gift” 19). And I wonder whether the same might be said for how we conceptualize friendships (a relatively new feature on the social media site Facebook announces “friend anniversaries” by looking back on your online interaction; a measure of one’s friendship apparently includes how many of your friend’s statuses you “liked”). If that’s in fact the case, is the invitation to friendship extended by a work of popular fiction so different from our lived experiences of friendship? I note here that for many young people without much social grace, the Hardy

Boys (and books, and books series like it) were a kind of friend. Teacher and scholar

Marshall Gregory notes his own youthful friendship, born out of family dysfunction, with

Mickey Spillane’s misogynistic, brutally violent detective character Mike Hammer (4).

A frequent Booth collaborator, Gregory, for his part, favours a not dissimilar metaphor, what he calls a “nutritional analogy” (191): an analogy that follows the popular maxim “we are what we eat” in order to suggest that “readers’ habitual imaginative diet .

. . is foundationally important for our ethical health” (191). Gregory is quick to also add, however, that nutritionists deal additionally with exercise, and his analogy accounts for a kind of ethical exercise, describing the way fiction “‘names’ the situations of life we respond to, and, moreover, helps us adopt attitudes toward these situations that define our own ethical agency” (191). The goal of the ethical critic, for Gregory, is the goal of the responsible nutritionist: “presenting the most reasonable and carefully thought-out arguments he could muster for healthy food and against rich desserts” (193). The Hardy

Boys are surely empty calories in this metaphor, but what I like about Gregory’s argument is that it neither mounts an elaborate defense for this kind of work nor seeks to coerce readers into avoiding it; implicit in the analogy is the aphorism (attributed to

Oscar Wilde), “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” Chocolate cake may not be nutritionally healthy, but as an occasional treat it will not kill us—and sometimes our emotional well-being or our mental health demands it. In this, the nutritional analogy echoes the variable friendships discussed by Booth. And in his discussion of

49 metaphorical exercise, Gregory actually emphasizes the active role that readers must always take when encountering a work of art.28

As an example of that active role, I might point to work that has been done on

Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series: Kathryn Sandoe’s argument that the series is a

“site of public pedagogy” (iii) about activism and social justice, particularly among female audiences; my own arguments that the series can be read as a call to ethical action

(“First Gift”), and a body of fanfiction that has seen readers rewrite elements of the series that they find problematic. In each case here, the key is the active engagement, what

Gregory would call exercise: Sandoe describes readers bringing their reading into online spaces, and my own reading points out that any ethical lessons the text offers are complicated by the ways in which the novels sometimes dodge complex moral questions

(the way, for instance, the novel’s heroine Katniss Everdeen is never called on to harm anyone who has not already demonstrated ill intentions toward her [33]). For more examples of what this kind of exercise might look like, we can turn to the interdisciplinary scholar Christine Jarvis, whose work has observed how popular texts have been introduced into classrooms and has argued empirically for the transformative potential of popular fiction and culture (“Love Changes Everything”; “The

Transformative Potential”).29

28 What Gregory does not say, but what I also like about his nutritional metaphor is the fact that nutrition is a science always in development—that we revise, correct, and update our food guides, for instance, as the science becomes clearer. 29 As another example, I can acknowledge here that—for all the beauty of its prose, and for all its cutting wit—Jarrell’s aforementioned Pictures from an Institution is guilty of perpetrating seriously retrograde, borderline offensive, attitudes about gender and race. More than anything, I would speculate that this is why the novel has been largely forgotten.

Jarvis’s work recalls, to circle back somewhat, Wayne Booth’s emphasis on the value of what he calls coduction (70-75), a “comparative, communal evaluation” (Keen

63) of texts, “a thoroughgoing particular engagement with [a given] narrative, considered neither as based on nor leading to general rules but as an ever-growing awareness of what is humanly possible” (Booth 76); as he theorizes, “we do not first come to know our judgment and then offer our proofs; we change our knowledge as we encounter, in the responses of other readers to our claims, further evidence” (76). And in her discussions of literary empathy, Suzanne Keen echoes Booth in emphasizing the value of discussion and education. “The affirmation and challenge to convictions that can occur when readers discuss fiction,” she writes, “can be considerable” (146). She goes on to point out that

“cultivation of narrative empathy by teachers and discussion leaders could at least point toward the potential for novel reading to help citizens respond to real others with greater openness” (147).

All of which is to reach the question I was grappling with when I began this project, which is a question that’s still on my mind. Is it possible to sneak some fibre into that chocolate cake? Is it okay that I ate two hot dogs and a glass of wine for dinner, provided I paired it with a handful of baby carrots? Is it possible for your immoral friend to nevertheless be exactly what you need? Is it possible for Frey’s ghostwriters or Leslie

McFarlane or James Patterson’s nameless collaborators to assert some kind of agency, to find what author and historian Studs Terkel has called the search for “daily meaning as well as daily bread” (xi) in this kind of cultural work? Why would—to return to the question raised by my early readers—these characters subject themselves to this awful experience?

To which I sometimes, somewhat cattily, wonder: why would conceptual poets subject themselves to such absurd constraints?

As Woo’s surveys of comics workers suggest, it might actually be the daily bread that’s the tougher part of that equation; even if it is self-exploitation, these cultural workers report high levels of creative fulfillment (“Erasing the Lines”). Banks and Willis agree, however tentatively, that there is value in “human expressivity” and “symbolic creativity” (Banks, Politics 163) despite the fact that “the great majority of cultural workers are precariously positioned, under-rewarded, brow-beaten and drained of political will” (Banks, Politics 184). Banks even notes a kind of “utopian promise”

(Politics 184) in cultural work, however dangerous that term is. The American poet

Michael Robbins explicitly connects poetry to popular music and film in his wide- ranging essay collection Equipment for Living, writing that it is “a prophylactic, not a vaccine” (4); it reminds us that we’re “not alone (a not coincidentally common refrain in popular song). This just in: Everyone you love will be extinguished, and so will you.

You’re not special. Men and women have been living and dying for a long time, and some of them have left records. Those records won’t eliminate your fears; they might help you to live with them” (4). Robbins goes on to connect this definition of poetry to a key scene in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous, in which a tour bus full of angry bandmates, groupies, and journalists comes together over a singalong of Elton

John’s “Tiny Dancer”:

It’s corny, but it’s true: everyone knows the lines by heart, everyone throws

their head back and closes their eyes and belts out the chorus. It works, I want

to say, for the same reason the Kaddish or the Mass works: it conveys comfort

because it is a shared experience, one that reinforces a sense of community, of

“allies who will share the burdens with us.” The entire congregation’s voices

are lifted in unison, in supplication, in awe—the form is universal, known to

all. (6)

Robbins goes on to discuss Def Leppard next to Ezra Pound, Taylor Swift next to

Frederick Seidel, Langston Hughes next to Neil Young. He points out the extent to which our cultural awareness, for example, of the Delta Blues as a genre of music is owed to a chair company—Paramount Records being a subsidiary of Wisconsin Chair, originally formed to release records that could be played on Wisconsin Chair-produced phonograph cabinets (14).

And I further cannot help think about these questions in light of Janice Radway’s

“Reading the Romance” and its argument for an oppositional reading of romance novels that allows women to refuse, however fleetingly, “self-abnegating social role[s]”

(1042).30 There are opportunities for writers to resist, just as there are opportunities for readers to resist, or read against-the-grain, and perhaps the greatest hope for agency in these circumstances, however qualified, comes from an irony pointed out by Banks.

Drawing on the work of scholar Bill Ryan, Banks notes the ironic necessity for capitalists to ensure creative cultural production retain at least some distinctive or non-replicable qualities in order to make sure that such commodities can continue to be marketed and sold (Politics 185). Corporations can never fully control cultural work; the need for some

30 Ramsey Scott’s 2006 essay “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends” offers a template for a resistant reading of the Hardy Boys series; structured as a series of letters to Franklin W. Dixon, the essay takes apart the gaps in the novels, the significance of what is not there (the assiduous avoidance of idleness, for example). It ends with Scott telling the (fictional) Dixon, “I just wish you could have lived outside yourself” (567).

53 creative autonomy persists, and for Banks “[i]t is in this institutionalized permission to rebel that we can identify the key radical potential of cultural work” (Politics 185). He writes:

The need to encourage unruliness, capriciousness and uncomformity in

otherwise rational organizations and firms, simply to ensure that the

ongoing generation of new supplies of cultural goods, not only provides

reassurance that the standardization and closure of cultural work can never

be complete but also offers the further utopian premise that some rogue

elements of aesthetic creativity might one day “cut free” from corporate

chains and help usher in some yet-to-be-specified progressive social

transformations. (Politics 185)

However minor, I reflect here on a constant source of tension between Leslie McFarlane and his Stratemeyer Syndicate editors—his depiction of the Hardy Boys’ hometown police force as “gullible, lazy, inarticulate, and eager to take credit for work they have not done” (Greenwald 59). For McFarlane, this depiction was as much a chance to make a point about the fallibility of authority as it was mere comic relief (Greenwald 60); “Was it written in the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, the British North America Act and the

Constitution,” McFarlane asked, “that everyone in authority was inflexibly honest, pious and automatically admirable?” (qtd. in Greenwald 71). Stratemeyer warned him repeatedly that it was not a good idea to mock police officers, those pillars of their communities (Greenwald 60; 70-71).

In 1959, the original Hardy Boys novels were extensively revised—argot was modernized, offensive references expunged, plots streamlined (Greenwald 245-49).

Having long ago signed away any rights to the series, McFarlane himself was not part of the revision process, though he was dimly aware that they had been updated to reflect

“contemporary language and customs” (Greenwald xi). McFarlane only discovered the actual extent of the revisions31 many years later, when a Toronto Star reporter presented him with the updated editions. McFarlane’s reaction—recounted by that reporter, Bob

Stall—strikes me as a good place to conclude, presenting as it does a glimpse of what agency or ownership might look like, even in such constrained circumstances. For

McFarlane, despite his ambivalence toward his creations, despite the fact that he viewed them as an anchor, and despite the fact that about the nicest thing he could say about his

Stratemeyer work was that he only had to write it, not read it (Greenwald 42-43), was heartbroken by what he discovered. Stall wrote:

The more he skimmed, the more upset McFarlane became. “I hadn’t

realized they’d been so substantially changed,” he muttered. “Thought

they were just updated, streamlined. Utterly changed. It doesn’t bear any

resemblance to the original. I’d have felt better if they’d just been cut.”

(qtd. in Greenwald 275)

The books McFarlane had been autographing, he realized “were not his at all”

(Greenwald 276). They’d been spoiled; “they’re now just these crappy things,”

McFarlane said (qtd. in Greenwald 276). What was his—what he’d put work into, or laboured over (whatever the language we want to use)—was his no longer. McFarlane had once agreed to write the fifteenth entry in the Hardy Boys series only because “he did

31 See Greenwald (248) for an example of one passage, presented in both its original and revised condition. The differences are startling.

55 not want anyone else to write about the boys’ exploits” (Greenwald 142), and yet here, his work had been erased.

It strikes me that if we’re looking for signs of life, signs of passion or agency by the compromised writer making a living in the marketplace, this image of McFarlane in old age is potent. Here is a man who had no illusions about the work he was doing, but who nevertheless betrays, ultimately, how much of him was in that work. McFarlane’s story reminds Greenwald of George Orwell’s impassioned defense of what he called

“good-bad books”: “The existence of good-bad literature,” he writes, “the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as celebration” (qtd. in

Greenwald 140). I’d like to view my project in that spirit, as a kind of celebration of those cultural workers who go unacknowledged, the Franklin W. Dixons who do not get credit but who still put so much of themselves into what they do.

I note then, unsatisfactorily, that I have no real solution to the dilemmas I’m describing. And in fact, I am torn, because I simultaneously, contradictorily find myself believing both that there is something (dare I say) magical about creating art that gets lost if we think of it merely in terms of “work,” and that we ought to seriously think about the genuine work that goes into creating a piece of art, and what’s being lost (whether that be in a “gig” economy generally, or about the creeping demands and tenuousness of work within the academy).

All I can say is that, these days when I’m scribbling these poems between classes, that I feel a bit like the proverbial dog walking on his hind legs: I’m sure I’m not doing it well, but I’m surprised I find myself doing it at all.

The Fiction Factory: A Novel

You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make

love for eight hours a day—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is

the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and

unhappy.

—William Faulkner, quoted in Studs Terkel, Working.

The Disassembled Chair

The bank of overhead fluorescents in this particular corridor had been deactivated, but late morning Calgary sunshine pierced through the beige curtains, dust-specks floating in sluices of light. The room empty, totally empty: those beige curtains, same as the beige curtains in the other beige rooms next door and across the hall, and a rough cream carpet, hexagonal panels of beige butting up against hexagonal panels of other, beiger beige; pebbly, eggshell walls, half-hearted off-white baseboards. No desk, no side table, no dented filing cabinet or commercial-grade shelving units, no potted plant or Newton’s cradle left behind. A vacant, echoic office space, emptied like myriad others stippling the landscape in each bust of each boom-bust, except for one detail that had Will and

Heather’s attention.

A solitary office chair in the centre of the room.

Or what had been an office chair, because the piece of furniture before Will and

Heather had been neatly hand-disassembled, part by part, into its constituent components, arranged artfully on the lightly loafer-trodden carpet: backrest, each arm rest, each castor,

57 even the carefully dissembled lift mechanism—bell, bearings, post, hub, lever— positioned carefully in a spiral, a galaxy of tensile steel and moulded plastic parts, drifting outward from around the tentacles of the chair’s five-legged base. Like a spiral nebula, a universe in miniature, almost beautiful in its way.

No note or explanation. Only the allen key deposited anonymously in Heather’s cube that morning, wrapped in tissue paper and taped and then newspaper and taped again and then placed into a comically oversized shipping box repurposed from an ancient Amazon order, “A to Z” logo concealed under further layers of packing tape, and then finally a layer of festive, aggressively out-of-season Christmas wrapping paper. No return address or identifying details, only Heather’s name scrawled in Sharpie, a deliberately sloppy job, subterfuge by way of the culprit’s non-dominant writing hand.

The package had sat behind her desk, in place of a chair that had vanished or been stolen or, as it turned out, deconstructed.

Will had entered the office that morning, dumped his messenger bag on his own desk, grabbed an empty coffee mug from said same desk, and circled back, following the distinct sound of sawing back down the hall and back through open-concept atrium and into more lanes of cubicles, where he discovered Heather seated pretzel style, attacking the package with a pair of scissors and her tongue protruding, alternating random stabs with more precise slices along the box seams.

She paused long enough to acknowledge his existence and returned to the task at hand.

“Fuck Mondays,” she said.

Will studied his mug, which he had neglected to rinse out the Friday before.

Coffee residue hardened to its enamel interior; the lip stained brown, and bacterial life of a white-ish-green nature thrived in these inhospitable climes.

What he had meant to tell her was, maybe, “You and Garfield, eh?” or perhaps, “I don’t know that the calendar is your biggest concern at the moment.”

But, having returned his attention to her, for she had at last broken through the outer shell of the box and had begun fingering through the mess of packing peanuts like an amateur prostate exam, the best he could manage was to repeat her own words back to her.

“Fuck Mondays,” he agreed cheerfully, hoping his hesitation sounded thoughtful and deliberate, not merely slow. He practiced letting the mug dangle coolly from his pinky finger as he studied her neck; still, he could smell the black, green, and burnt sourness of the cup’s residue.

“You’re the new girl,” he said.

“I’m the new girl,” she agreed, still focussed on her labours. At last she fished out a palm-sized wad of Sun newspaper pages wrapped in Scotch tape and took up the scissors once more. Further jabbing revealed an additional layer of tissue paper and then saran wrap. The ball of material shrunk in her hand as the pile of shreds and scraps germinated beside her. Will studied her neck, the back of the dark pixie cut, the line of her vertebrae.

“If you happen to spot the Sunshine girl in there,” he said. She tilted her head but still did not turn to face him.

“Kidding,” he said.

“Will,” he raised his free hand and gave a half-wave.

“Heather,” she said, returning to the bundle, from which she finally produced the copper allen key, holding it up like a participation ribbon. She grunted, stood, wiped a hand on her leg and turned finally to Will.

“I’ve seen you around,” he said.

She pointed at the key.

“Right,” he said. She cleaned up the mess by kicking at the scraps, pushing them into the corner of the cube.

“You’re probably going to want to follow me,” he’d told her, and she did as he marched her down the hall, through the maze of cubes. He led her up the back staircase— the concrete one with the exposed pipes—and it was in the third room they’d searched on the seventh floor that they’d found the chair pieces.

Heather correctly surmised this was a kind of initiation. Will nodded, told her someone must like her, then cautiously approached the spiral of chairs: considering the visual metaphor at work in the arrangement of the pieces, thinking perhaps of a

Stonehenge, runic quality to the seat’s placement that told of lives lived and wasted. An element of worship, or a way of navigating seasons. He thought, briefly, that it might be a kind primitive clock, abandoning the idea upon reflecting that the office would sit in darkness for all but a few hours each day as the sun rose in the east.

Indicating behind her with the allen key as a pointer, up and down the hallway,

“What’s the deal with the empty offices,” she asked.

“Step one of an”—here he made air quotes—“aggressive expansion.”

No, he thought, surveying the parts: his first guess still fit best in both fact and metaphor, the curvature of nuts and bolts in relation to the larger pieces mimicking those

Time-Life renderings of the Milky Way, as reconstituted by a mix of telescopes, satellites, and artists’ dramatic flair.

Will stooped to one knee and withdrew a pen from his shirt pocket. With the capped end of the tool, he prodded at one of the chair pieces: the left armrest, a foam piece from which four screws had been taken and a joint removed. Gruesome, in a manner of speaking.

The assumption of infinite universal expansion hinged on the assumption that the universe was flat; observation would seem to suggest that the universe’s rate of expansion is actually increasing. And yet, change just a few parameters in your calculations and that assumption comes crashing down: gravity stops its expansion, the universe begins to contract, ultimately collapsing into a final point.

The Big Crunch. A final singularity.

The chair reassembles itself.

Will made a show of prodding the same piece again. Then, corkscrewing his neck back to face her, he joked, “No signs of a struggle.”

She shifted her body weight, leaned into him a bit. Was this flirtation, Will wondered, or friendly banter. “So. Initiation, you said?”

Sheepishly, Will said “That it is.”

“And this is your work?”

“No ma’am.” Will made the Scout Sign, a habit he had ironically picked up from the actual likely culprit. She smelled nice, he thought, like vanilla and fennel and

61 something he couldn’t place; not a perfume—it wasn’t so obvious as a perfume; it just followed her. He enjoyed it, the way it seemed to cut into the institutional tang, cosmic background radiation of mingling lunches, Mountain Man™ antiperspirants, microwave popcorn, and polyurethane plastics, though he sensed that if enough time passed it, too, would recede into the background, a thought that left him frowning. To his embarrassment and shame, he caught himself thinking about how long it had been.

Between the move, which had taxed his patience and his savings; the long hours; the fact he knew so few people. And then having to take on a roommate, which complicated matters; he felt as though he’d gone back to school or moved back in with his parents.

That he was doomed to be putting socks on his doorknob forever. None of which made it any less sad that here he was, ready to pounce on the first new woman he’d spoken to in months. Will was icky, he knew that much about himself.

“Then whose is it?” she asked.

“That would be Raj,” Will said. He was still holding the coffee cup. The chair trick was classic Raj.

“Should we have a talk with Raj?”

Will explained to her the options, as he saw it. She could, in fact, talk to Raj, but that wasn’t likely to get her anywhere. He’d drop his me?-aww-shucks smile and give the

Scout Sign (Will winced) and deny culpability and they’d be back at square one.

Alternately, she could approach HR or admin—their being, in this case, the same single person, presenting unique challenges—but that would do her no favours amongst the staff as the new girl. Or, he concluded, there was the third option, the option that both other options led back to, regardless: she could take her lumps and use the tool she was given,

62 reassemble the chair, move on, and that would be that. Illegitimi non carborundum, right?

It wouldn’t be so bad; most of them had had to do it themselves; the parts of a chair were pretty clearly identifiable and screwing a few pieces into a few other pieces would be good enough to hold it all together. These particular chairs, a bulk purchase from an office supply depot somewhere out in the suburbs, were tolerant of assembly mistakes.

Will even offered to help.

This office could be a strange place, and they were better off sticking together.

“Or,” she drew out the word.

“I’m listening.”

“We’re going to make it someone else’s problem.” She swung around and headed through the door and back down the hall. Obedient, Will followed.

She held the door to the stairwell open for him behind her. He slowed, remained a couple steps behind as they proceeded back down to the sixth floor, tapping her palm along the stair rails. Their out-of-sync steps reverberated in the shaft, accompanied by the groan of the building’s internal organs. Water flushed through pipes and the staircase hummed. Meters and meters of telecom cables and extension cords followed them downstairs, twist-tied together, affixed to the walls, terminating in modems blinking green, bracketed by steel to the unpainted concrete.

She still held the allen key, spinning it between her fingers. “You know, the kids at my last job. They could be cruel, but they weren’t so clever about it.”

“Kids?”

“There was an honesty to their cruelty. Simplicity. You could wrap your head around it. Appreciate it. They hit you. They broke shit. That was that.”

In the vacuum of the stairwell, Will placed her smell: distinctly the odour of the lobby of an upscale hotel. A Sheraton or a Westin, a Fairmont. Not that he’d had occasion to stay at any of these hotels, but he’d been in the conference rooms, sat in the lobbies.

“I guess the corporate climate”—he caught himself air-quoting once more, though she led, had not turned back to listen—“can be a bit unusual.” Try explaining the monthly

Show-Don’t-Tell meeting, the writers (or, officially, “content production associates”) gathering in one of the conference rooms overlooking the Bow for a mashup of creative writing critique and grade school classroom staple. A meeting that once ended with Raj throwing a bowling trophy at Will, the little brass man clipping Will’s eyebrow, necessitating four stitches and conflict resolution classes. Try explaining the running joke that the Starbucks in the lobby was not a real Starbucks but a computationally derived holographic Starbucks simulation chamber manufacturing synthetic coffee-like gruel.

Emerging back on the sixth floor, she paused at the threshold. He bumped into her, apologized, squeezed through the space between her and the wall. Strategizing, or still unfamiliar with the office layout? Then she began moving, with unexpected purpose, speaking over her shoulder to Will as she did so. When she said kids, she meant the kids in her group home. She was a social worker, or had been a social worker. Amidst the glut of MAs and MFAs and other official-sounding letters, autodidact avant-gardists and self- published poets, that already made her unique. She’d worked in a group home on the east coast, a place for homeless or effectively homeless teens. They had turned left and then right at this point and she slowed as they approached a line of melamine cubicle panels,

64 held up a finger, scanned the nameplates affixed to each of the sliding door panels, on and on down the row.

“Big career change,” he said.

She shrugged, settled on an empty cube, told him he was on lookout. It was early enough in the morning that the floor hummed with quiet. Most of the staff rolled in after

9 and stayed late, so-called “flex hours,” Will himself only in so early because a mild hangover had woken him from an erratic fit of sleep long before his alarm had gone off, the cross-downtown walk to work in the bracing morning frost seeming preferable to staring at an apartment wall spooning back mouthfuls of Raisin Bran. Just the right degree of hangover makes for a productive workday was not a philosophy that Will would have openly espoused, and yet here he was.

The nameplate outside the cubicle they had stopped at read, in sans-serif font,

“Gretchen Chaucey, Junior Content Production Associate,” the office itself presenting few signs of being occupied beyond a Velcro lumbar support fastened to the desk chair inside, which Heather quickly took to unfastening, folding its Velcro strips and placing the brace on the desk. The desk was otherwise impeccably clean, inbox and outbox trays emptied; no personal mementos or documents tacked to the straw fabric walls, no marks on the whiteboard, all dry erase markers capped and accounted for. Will considered taking one, just for the sake of curiosity. Instead, he attempted to whistle; it being a talent he’d never mastered, it came out as an amelodic hiss. The hall remained clear, and so he helpfully noted as much, while Heather plopped the allen key onto Gretchen’s desk and began to steer the office chair out of the cube and down the hall toward her own workspace. She pushed the chair in front of her, leaning into it, her hands on the backrest.

Office chair races came to Will’s mind, a perfect complement to the linoleum floors of educational institutions and to late nights in the English department, not to mention surreptitious rye bottles purloined from false bottoms of graduate student office filing cabinets: a tradition which had only ended after the janitor made a note of the empties in the communal blue box and had caught them pushing one another down the long, bifurcated main halls of the department, shaming them by way of a lecture about how much of a pain it was for him to clean scuff marks from the goddamned floor.

“Do you think I should have left a note?” she asked. Over carpet, the chair’s wheels dragged. The chances of any such chair races here seemed slim—no open stretches of linoleum tile he could think of, save bathrooms and kitchenettes. She turned left at the first intersection.

“Wrong turn,” he told her.

She stopped, gave the seat of the chair a quick spin and changed direction. Now

Will led the procession.

He told her she chose the right target for her theft.

“How so?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” he told her.

Another left turn, and then a right, and they’d arrived back at Heather’s office. No name yet affixed to her exterior cubicle wall, but the mess was all Will needed. She rolled the chair into place. It crunched over the scraps from the package she’d torn earlier.

Giving it another spin, she let it swivel around a few times before stopping it and dumping herself, slouching, into it.

It had been exhilarating, he’d told her. She smiled, called it the perfect crime.

“Not exactly,” he told her. He crouched, pulled out his pen once more, and pointed to a strip of adhesive paper affixed to the underside of a chair leg: a number and a barcode. Everything was tagged, and if they figured it out and came looking, she’d be in trouble. All of it company property.

“How much trouble?” she asked.

Will couldn’t say for certain.

“Well, then,” pushing off her desk, spinning herself in the chair, up-pitching her voice, adding a quiver of vocal fry, “It’s crazy, because I’m new and this was just the chair that’s always been here. There must be some sort of mistake!”

“Clever girl,” he said.

“Clever girl,” she agreed.

He had ended up grabbing them coffee, making a run to the kitchenette where he’d finally washed his own mug, erased the fetid smell, grabbed a second mug from the cabinet—screenprinted, in faded blue ink, with the slogan My Kid and My Money Go to the University of Waterloo—and set about brewing a fresh pot of questionably old grounds into the questionably old carafe. He’d bought the same mug—same mug, different colour, different school—for his mother as an emergency Christmas gift, and had taken it for himself when he’d moved out. It sat now in the back of a kitchen cabinet in his apartment. He tried whistling again.

Having brewed and poured, he stirred in packet after packet of milk into his own mug, no quantity of which could effectively lighten the drink’s black, sludgy colour and consistency, returning to her with two cups of the tar-like coffee to find that she had pulled out her computer and was logging on. He set down one mug on her desk, retreated

67 with his own, cautiously, to the corner of her cube. She thanked him. Early, still muddle- brained, he gauged his chances. He asked her why she left her last job.

“I decided I wanted to write a novel,” she said.

“Join the club,” he told her.

“I did.”

“Right.”

“Doing research now.”

“Same-sies.” He might have sat down if there was a second chair in the office.

“But it’s still a big shift, right?”

She stopped, rapped a knuckle on the desk and asked if he wanted to hear a strange story. He waved her on. The early risers just entering the office, passing in the hallway, grunting hello. Their heads bounced above the cubicle dividers. She told him she had a dentist’s appointment back when she was in Halifax. Nothing serious, just a check-up and a routine cleaning. But it fell on Hallowe’en, and when she entered the strip mall where this place was located, she discovered everyone—from administrative assistant to hygienist to dentist—in full-on holiday costume. She’d been greeted at the front desk by Flava Flav, guided to her chair by a Pennywise the Clown, and treated by a

Bavarian beer wench and half-hearted Dracula. She noted “the Dracula-teeth-connection- thing,” as she put it. As she left, her mouth wet and gauzed and numbed, she witnessed a

Frankenstein’s monster in nurse’s scrubs returning from lunch at the Mandarin buffet next door. Heather alone costumeless. Did Will understand what she meant?

He lied and said he did.

What she wanted was a job that did not follow her home. Will stifled a snicker, until she described the night shift at the group home: intake, out-take. Cleaning up after the kids, resolving disputes. Witnessing the kids stuck in the system—there was no way she couldn’t take that home. Here, though, it was different: writing children’s stories was a walk.

“Young Adult,” he corrected her.

“Whatever. Choose a supernatural creature,” she said, “choose a mental disorder.

Go. They write themselves.”

Lacking the benefit of hindsight, this claim did not strike Will as odd. This was before word had spread around the office of the extent of Heather’s preoccupation with mental disorders—indeed, this was before word of Heather’s existence was widely disseminated. It was before they discovered the hulking tome of the DSM-IV in her bottom desk drawer, under lock and key, and before she’d articulated the theory that literature’s great protagonists had in common diagnosable mental illness: Captain Ahab’s monomania was a given (the text practically shouts it!), but what about Bartleby’s case of adult-onset selective mutism? To say nothing about the mental illness she would come to see all around her, on the sixth floor of this office building: general anxiety disorders distributed like gifts to an Oprah audience, 300.02 (according the classification system of the DSM), with (to be more specific) a few instances of caffeine, cannabis (292.89), or alcohol (291.89) –induced anxiety disorders, and a generalizable trend toward adjustment disorders (309) typified also by anxiety (309.24) and depression (309.0). Mild obsessive- compulsion (301.4) with particular emphasis on perfectionism and excessive attention-to- detail—the very same traits, ironically, that had served many of them well in grad school,

69 having ultimately left them unable to untie themselves from their current lots: there was no other explanation for why so many of them seemed to stick around this office, despite how miserable they seemed, than that they viewed quitting as akin to failure and failure was not something they had yet experienced in their young, comparatively privileged lives.

And this was before, too, that they discovered the details of the dentist story changed from telling to telling, and that the details of the novel, too, seemed troublingly elusive. Even with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps Will might have made excuses: who doesn’t fudge the details in the retelling? Who does want to talk about their work in progress? Certainly not Will, who was prone to fits of anguish that manifested in trips down the back staircase to the alley behind the building, where he would sling empty glass bottles at the dumpster and the wall. Indeed, the most significant stumbling point for Will, even had he possessed precognition, might have been how it was that the woman before him who so plainly occupied tangible, physical space (and appealingly so, no less) could be turned so far inward. It was not that Heather was beautiful that distracted, because she wasn’t, even if there was something about her: she was short and well-built, and if his roommate had asked Will to describe her features he might have blanked. And yet she already had demonstrated the ability to take over an entire room.

At the time, however, Heather’s claim raised no alarms. In fact, it struck Will as making a kind of intuitive sense. An oversimplification, maybe, but as far as a strategy for developing plot, it wasn’t too bad. She was a social worker, making use of her knowledge base. He was a writer, which was why he started from the unit of the sentence. He made a mental note to ask her about his current project, a dragon-heavy

70 sword and sorcerers epic. He had received edits which had asked, in pointed terms, why the battles that always loomed in this magical faraway land were always averted by polite diplomacy.

But what nation-state, he wanted to ask, would dedicate its precious resources to fighting wars when its own people suffered so?

More importantly, Will—momentarily lost here—had begun to consider the aesthetics of dirty text messaging, and in particular whether being a good writer disqualified one from being a good sexter. The genre required such a lack of self- consciousness, drawing from a limited repertoire of phonemes: you had the stock verbs, like “thrust,” “fuck,” “lick,” and “suck,” and only a limited number of parts— contextually disembodied by their inclusion in any such communication—with which to apply them. It all resembled a game of erotic dice, and there was a reason why erotic dice were a novelty rather than a staple of bedroom play. Where do you go once you’ve cycled through thirty-six possible combinations? In which corner do you hide when a combination of verb-plus-part turns your stomach? Was this a lack of sexual imagination on his part or an indication of some latent prudishness he would have derided in others?

Will would not have thought himself a prude. He could conceptualize, certainly, a semantically well-crafted sexy message. And yet, like the work of certain tour-de-force

English language stylists, he could see himself being left cold by it: reading the words and thinking, “Yes, this is masterful prose” or (in the case of a sext) “Yes, this is hot,” but not feeling these expressions as anything beyond abstraction. Turning the question around, he approached from another angle. Maybe good writers were bad readers of dirty text messages. Poor recipients of them; writers, instead, might be the sort of people who

71 looked at disassembled chair parts arranged cryptically around an empty room and attained semi-tumescence, as Will realized he had.

“You’re full of questions,” she said. She typed faster than any writer he’d known.

If you wish for people to like you, Raj had told Will, give them the opportunity to talk about themselves. People love talking about themselves. “Just the way I am. One last one?”

“Shoot.” The computer screen had her attention.

“How did you get the job?”

“I guess I called up the owner and I asked,” she said it like a question.

A quiet knock at what passes for a cubicle door, and there’s a body both wide and large and yet impossibly invisible, timid, and a sheepish question, near-whispered: “Has anyone, uhh, seen my chair?”

Will and Heather made eye contact.

“Gee, no!” Heather said.

“Gretchen, Heather. Heather, Gretchen.”

But Gretchen had already rolled out.

“Well, then. It was great to meet you. Welcome to Fiction Factor.” He leaned in to shake her hand and when she turned away from the screen and took his palm in her own and they shook, he noticed hers felt soft—dry, but soft—and that it was a loose, informal shake, and he wondered if his own were so soft and when the handshake ended and she smiled at him he touched his right palm with his left, running his fingers over soft lines.

“Let me know if you’ve got any other questions,” he said. His door, he explained was metaphorically open, though not literally because, in fact, his cubicle had no door.

He could give her his number, maybe? She should feel free to text him any time.

“You’re going to have to tell me what the deal is with this Raj,” she said.

Will hesitated, then told her: “Actually, this is weird. But he’s my roommate?”

“Hmm.”

Will made to return to his own cube, boot up his own PC, check his e-mail, and maybe punt out a few sentences, but on his way out, Heather was pulling a folder of orientation materials from a desk drawer. Will flinched, for on top of the folder, paperclipped to the manila cover, was a glossy brochure that echoed his own greeting.

Welcome to Fiction Factor! it exclaimed: the world’s leading independent publisher of

YA supernatural fiction, home to the finest team of young writers ever assembled. Fiction curated by bestselling novelist and memoirist Joseph Stieglitz. Welcome to their Calgary headquarters. Welcome to where the pork dumplings get made.

* * *

Branding Yourself

Up, down. Up, down.

Hold the magazine out and open at arm’s length and lift it and lower it in front of your line of vision and it’s akin to an optometrist’s eye exam: better . . . or worse? Better

. . . or worse? Always uttered in the lingua franca of eye doctors, a sing-song, drawn out on the final syllable of the first word, followed by a hanging pause and then it drops an octave, in direct contradiction to the rising trill of the typical North American interrogative. The difference, unlike Will’s usual optometric excursions, that there was no need to resort to guessing between lenses one and two, because the difference here impressed itself upon you, as clear as the glass windowpanes peering out at the lower floors of the stone and steel shells, the condominium behemoths being erected on all sides. Like bifocals: lower your eyes to the glossy pages of the high-circulation newsmagazine, bible to the liberal tastemakers, and bear witness to a team of upstarts and rebels arranged artfully around an open concept office, draped over chairs, gathered around tables, a few slumped casually, arms crossed in the back, everyone with a grim, too-cool-for-school vacant scowl, the aesthetic of the furniture mid-century modern with a nod to the space-age fibers and busty curves of today. Disregard the contemporary dress and the multicultural cast and you’ve got a promotional shot from the set of Mad Man 2; wool suits with vests and blue blood ties with matching pocket squares are out. Flannel and cuffed jeans of the boot-cut or skinny variety in. Plaid, untucked. Bulky sweaters on many, across gender (and a few gender-indeterminate, androgynous-by-design). Some thrift store finds—Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil in their best ghetto-swag,

74 repping the Oakland Raiders—others with ironic slogans. Sad Sack. Yes, I Know Guac is

Extra. Desert boots, striped socks, a few Herschel bags tucked beneath tables. Gingham.

Gingham is big right now. Whisky tumblers replaced by steel water canteens (contents unspecified), concessions made to the return of pomade, honey-dripped liberally over a trio of slick, coiffed heads. Beards of varying degrees of practicality, length, and sheen.

On a few ladies, something closer to the decade that clearly inspired the shot.

Everything old is new again. Up-dos, red lipstick and kinaesthetically bright dresses of swirling geometric shapes; flowing blouses and tight skirts, even a pussy-bow there in the back, each garment printed in the spirit of a Magic Eye puzzle. Elsewhere, tank tops with a strap sliding suggestively down a pale shoulder. Sleeve tattoos all around, plastic frame glasses almost standard-issue. Flip the page while keeping it raised before your face and you’ve got more snaps slotted around the three columns of Adobe Caslon: a twenty- something petite, purple-haired woman of deliberately ambiguous ethnic heritage pointing at the screen of an iBook while a seated, (shaved) bald Caucasian in Oxford and jeans types away on same. A gathering of faces from the page before around a patio table outside a Vietnamese-and-beer place Will knows is next door, a few long-necks sweating suggestively in the bright sun as one model toys with the scruff of his beard. Everyone involved attractive but not too attractive. Believably attractive, somewhere above daytime television advertisement attractive but below network sitcom attractive.

Lower the magazine, finally, and you’ll see the same room pictured in that first spread, but something’s off. Everything’s off. It’s later in the day, but that’s not it, not totally. The effect is not unlike those of the clickbait slideshows clogging the web, black- and-white streetscapes of a bygone century juxtaposed by their present-day appearances,

75 only colour-wise the effect is reversed: the drab grey of the real world present in contrast to the earth tones of the high-gloss photos. No bodies in various degrees of repose across frighteningly expensive art-installations-cum-furniture (and repose, by the way, is a hard state of being to pull off: it appears more comfortable, post-processing, in static images than it feels during). No bodies period, and no MoMA furniture: the room is still round, but only because you can’t do architecture after the fact, and the office is still open- concept, but only in the sense that you have to pass through these open-concept quarters to arrive at the banks of cubicles behind the curtain. Zoom in on a lone beanbag, its absent twin ruptured by a curious pen-knife, a few conventional chairs, and shin-high black end-tables, across which are carefully scattered several extra copies of the same issue of the same magazine that Will held in his hands, a few of them already conveniently opened to the page Will studied. Were the walls not round, Will suspected they might also be framed there as well, displayed with all the humility of a Five Guys’ restaurant’s interior design.

The headline of the article Will espies: “The Write Price.” The lede: “Meet the

Rock Stars of YA Lit.” Sprinkled throughout: breathless prose and bad puns about the out-of-this-world idea (meaning alien books) that brought together thirty great minds of fiction under the roof of one, upstart publishing house. But not merely a publishing house! This was “grain-to-glass” publishing. The surest way to control the outputs is to fine-tune the inputs. Will skimmed an article he’d read dozens of times, needled by each falsehood.

“Joseph Stieglitz sits behind his desk in the corner office whose placard

bears his name. In contrast to the elaborate décor of the room, which

reveals eclectic tastes (the statues African, the literature American, the

painting French impressionist), he is wearing only a white t-shirt and a

pair of khakis. Grinding on a piece of gum between his teeth, he shrugs

and apologizes, admitting to having been victimized by a mustard stain. It

is not the first apology that Stieglitz has given in his 15-year literary

career: compared to the amends of his twelve-step program and the

infamous drubbing he received on national television, this is small

potatoes. But now Stieglitz says he’s done apologizing for his past. The

present is a time for action, and the empire he’s building from this corner

office in the hip East Village neighbourhood of Calgary, Canada is his

shot across the bow of publishing convention.”

One of the classics of the “feature profile”: the introduction of the central figure, always verbing some noun: chomping on gum or gnawing on the end of an unlit cigar. Cracking his knuckles, say. Running his hands through a head of hair. A classic one that offers also the opportunity to describe said head of hair. Never mind that Will had never seen Joseph in any sartorial get-up short of bespoke herringbone. But quasi-journalistic ball rubbing deteriorated even from there:

“Borrowing from tech start-ups the idea of the 10xer—the premise that the

very best coders are superstars, capable of achieving ten times the

productivity of their merely competent colleagues—Stieglitz has

assembled a full-time team of international writers, among them MAs,

MFAs, PhDs, and award-winners. Stieglitz reports that his team includes

Giller nominees, GG nominees, CBC prize shortlisters, and Writers’ Trust

winners. He’s certain he’s forgetting some, he adds.”

Writers’ Trust winners who ought not to have been trusted with their winnings, Will felt.

If there hid in this building a GG or Giller nominee, Will certainly had not encountered her; it seemed likely Joseph was fudging numbers here, conveniently eliding the difference between full-time staff and the (purely honorary, and honorarium-dependent, because God help Joe if the cheques stopped coming) “editorial consultants” he browbeat into back-channel support.

Not a surprising white lie, certainly no worse than the lie of a somewhat different shade suggested by the article’s accompanying pictorial spread, that Fiction Factor headquarters were anything other than mayonnaise-white. An unfortunate discovery of the computer age: next to the optic white of a blank Word document, no other real-world white compares.

Will returned attention to the title photograph: aside from Raj and Gretchen, each of whom held suspicious place of prominence, the shot overflowed with a multiracial cast of characters, none of whom Will could positively ID; models, he assumed, brought in for the shoot, the periphery of the frame populated by any remaining full-timers. Will himself lurked somewhere in the background, sulking like a “rock star” or sulking because he wasn’t handsome enough to receive top billing. Some animate corpse of a content producer (intern? temp?) sprawled precariously on a jazzy recliner seat. Granted, it wasn’t Joseph’s fault that his recruitment grounds—creative writing workshops, the basements of Humanities buildings, fluorescent seminar rooms—were paler than prairie

78 winter, and at least the models were paid for their time. Here at least was a commitment to equal opportunity hires in action.

Occupied by the magazine, Will failed to notice Heather approaching, busy as he was raising and lowering the magazine, squinting and closing one eye and then the other.

He didn’t want to say hours had passed, but hours had certainly passed. When he felt a tap on the shoulder, he yelped and shot around. Arms still in rictus as he spun, he struck her above the temple and down she went to the carpet for the count. A buff Field Notes scratchpad discus-ed away, fluttering down to the carpet several feet away.

“Oh, fuck.”

Heather agreed.

He rolled the magazine tight, stuffed it into his ass pocket and knelt to help her.

She rubbed her forehead.

“I didn’t see you.”

“I snuck up on you.”

A hand on her shoulder; then he removed it, extending a palm instead, which she took, and he heaved her up with a grunt. She clenched and unclenched her jaw, blinked a few times in what might have been Morse.

He made a gesture. “How many fingers?”

“Just your middle one.”

“Meet-cute!”

He Jazz Hands-ed. Not even thinking he had verbalized the thought until he strangled the second syllable into something like a hiccup. A less generous observer might have characterized it at as a pubescent voice mutation.

“Huh? Oh right,” she pawed her jaw, despite a kidney-shaped welt blooming pink much higher on her cheek and around her left eye.

“Just it. It reminded me of—I was working on an ad campaign for Montana’s.

Whole series of 30 second spots. Man falls into a smoker. Harried type; on the young-ish side of middle age, still hip: khakis and a button-up. Handsome but not threatening. Or in another, his shoelaces are untied and he trips into the refrigerated bins of meat, the shelves at the grocery store. Butcher aisle. Ribs rain down. Slabs, rectangles, shapes that scream to you meat. A lot of care with the set design to nail that meat packaging aesthetic; you can’t have real meat, because the take-after-take, hours of tumbling into meat, the lights spoil it. The word fetid comes to mind. So you have a set designer with a background in butchery, slicing the haunch from a marbled pink plastic wedge, and then you slap it on Styrofoam and pull the Cling Wrap taut over it—and it’s so taut that on-set you’re having these obtrusive—”

“—Intrusive.”

“These intrusive thoughts about making a dent in the plastic-wrapped plastic flesh with your fingers.”

“Uh-huh.” Heather retrieved her scratchpad, crammed its bent covers into her too- tight front pants pocket. A second trip to the floor, then, as she searched for a pen or pencil which had presumably flown as well. If it had, Will had missed its parabolic flight as well as its landing. She listened as she patted the carpet.

“He’s not hurt, you know, but he’s embarrassed, and he’s playing it off like nothing happened, until he actually pauses and looks at what he’s stumbled into. You get

80 a close-up swoon—swooners, as it turns out, they’re notoriously difficult to cast—and he slicks back a cowlick. Did I mention he has a cowlick?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“It’s not egregious, but it’s there. And so he slicks it back and then you cut to the title card and the tagline. Meat-Cute.”

She located her pen, hoofed herself back upright and managed a charitable chuckle.

As though caught up in his own cleverness, having noticed it for the very first time, Will nodded to himself.

“Anyway,” she said. She trailed off.

“I guess it wasn’t even the first time we’ve met,” he said. He pulled the rolled up magazine out from his rear pocket and drummed on his opposite palm. He enquired after her first day, and she said that it had been strange.

“How so?” he asked.

“Am I supposed to be”—looking around conspiratorially, excavating the missing corners of the round room, and then whispering—“doing anything?”

“Besides the binders?”

“Like actually doing anything.”

“Inertia has its own strange kind of momentum, doesn’t it?”

She supposed that it did.

“Coffee? Maybe I can address any questions. Maybe we can hunt down Raj and introduce you?”

She motioned—lead the way—and he smiled as he passed her and the cloud of vanilla and fennel. She confessed, though, that she was afraid she had already had run into Raj and thanked him for his welcoming present.

“And?” Will winced.

In the elevator she explained that Raj had hand-shushed her and ignored her, engaged as he was in a heated telephone conversation. She had retreated, but observed.

As near as she could tell from the one-half of the back-and-forth she could overhear, Raj had been on the phone with a university administrator, decrying that organization or institution’s reading lists. He’d been stabbing his pen on paper, each stab punctuating each name he cried out from a pre-vetted list, each literary offense: Faulkner, McCarthy,

Pynchon, Wallace, Kroetsch. No, it wasn’t that they were bad. No, it wasn’t that they were problematic, whatever that meant. Strictly that they were dangerous to developing minds, impressionable youths who read these labyrinthine sentences and impossible narratological conceits and took them as models for immediate emulation: Words, he had told the beleaguered administrator, dumped upon words and each sentence more gray than what had gone before.

Then yes, he’d hold, and that was about when she’d retreated, found Will studying a magazine like a Playboy centerfold if the centerfold were an automotive repair manual.

The idiotic magazine had stayed in Will’s hands for the entire coffee journey, wadded as they strolled. Through the plate glass automatic doors which at first had refused to disgorge him. Pause, take a breath, try again. Down the stairs. The front staircase, this time. Still all cement, all the time, but with at least a dab of colour, safety-

82 cone orange, and most of the building’s frontal nervous system (the vessels, the pumps, the arteries—the good stuff) tucked between the undersides of each set of stairs and suspended, latticed grilles. Out through the fire doors into the first floor foyer, into the

Starbucks kiosk, distinct from the rest of the floor by the sudden shift in carpet tone, eggshell to peppy chestnut.

No one would miss one of the stupid magazines—there were a few more on the cream chaise lounges revolving around an administrative island booth. But it was only on autopilot that he’d taken it initially anyway: when you’re in the grocery store and you drop a package of Glosettes into your bag, not even processing. How’d they even get there? Then, next you know, the security desk, which doubles also as the desk where you get your Western Union transfers and your bus tickets, is calling your mom at work. And she’s livid.

Naturally, when Will and Heather had seated themselves at the dangerously tall, dangerously wobbly bar table, he unfurled the magazine, ran the ball of his hand over the spine and felt the staples on his alligator-dry skin once, twice, to flatten its warp, ahemmed, and read to her. He couldn’t have said why.

“Stieglitz contends that by controlling the process step-by-step and by

giving his team the freedom to experiment and even to fail, he ensures that

only the best product reaches market. It’s why, he says, teenagers are

reaching for any book bearing the colorful logo of his Fiction Factor

empire: three black wedges around a central black circle on a yellow

background, the universal symbol for radiation warning, upon which is

embossed an F to the second power. The sales numbers suggest the

author-turned-mogul’s not wrong, either: these books are hot. Radioactive

hot. At one point last year, four titles from the Fiction Factor catalogue

ranked in the top ten of the Globe and Mail’s Paperback Fiction bestsellers

list at once. At no point during the course of the year were there fewer

than two.”

Will’s forefinger skimmed, skipped over a few particularly purple paragraphs, and read on. Even as she sat, grim-lipped and get me the fuck out of here bored, he not sure what else to do now that he’d started. A defense reflex, he thought. Generational: the sense that you don’t talk to one another so much as you talk about, with one another. About the piece you read, about the TV series you’re collectively consuming (mid-consumption), about the n00bs you’re pwning in Half-Life. Except here the sensation familiar more to a thousand bad dates, those evenings on which you carefully curate a meal or a plan-of- attack and you catch yourself more caught up in the other person’s reaction than in what’s actually happening.

“Isn’t this great?”

“Oh, I love this part.”

Will faux-snickered, did his best can-you-believe-this-shit brainpan rattle.

“And in the Uber economy of casual labour, contract hours, and part-time

work, another of Stieglitz’s decisions is turning heads: he isn’t just

bringing a team of writers together under one imprint, he’s bringing them

together spatially, running his entire operation out of two floors in a

refurbished office building in Calgary’s nascent East Village

neighbourhood. Stieglitz is disrupting the disruptors by offering each of

his staff-writers full-time hours, livable wages, and flexible benefits. A

happy writer, he’s betting, is a productive writer. Physical offices are

relics of the analog economy, Stieglitz concedes, but according to him

literature is the last analog art-form. It’s a happy bonus, he adds, that the

conditions at Fiction Factor offer his writers the steady job and stable

incomes they need to focus on their own personal work.”

“The last analog art form,” Will said.

“I know.”

“What does that even mean?”

She sipped a latte, foam collecting in the faint down of her upper lip. She conceded she had no idea, though it had the look of a nice pull-quote. The irony, they agreed—and here’s where Will thought the conversation was turning around, that they might be getting somewhere and that he might at last un-tense his back—being not only that the benefits of the physical office accrued through the means of competition, direct competition being anathema to a certain type of writer, but also that any such benefits accrued were undercut when the physical office filled with germs, found itself covered in effluvia, spreading virus. When employees take long lunches at the Vietnamese place on the corner (Phở Me to You: bilingual puns in the service of international cuisine the surest token of gentrification) and make out with a couple too many brown bottles of

Grasshopper. When they develop complicated entanglements.

“When they fuck.”

“Right,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“No, no. Pregnancy, icky babies, messy divorces. Corporate espionage.”

The best detail of all he saved for last, signalling the black border around the article, sliding the magazine across the round table to her. Not that there was much of a difference any longer, but this wasn’t even journalism. No Cronkite. Not even Malcolm

Gladwell, but rather an insidious little bit of native advertising. Sponsored content in association with JSI LLC (note the initials, the “I” maybe indicative of “Industries” or maybe the first-person pronoun, JS as the I, the alpha and the omega), itself the parent company of something called Libris Mortis, a certain multimedia concern whose publishing arm happened to reside just a few floors above the canted linoleum on which their drinks precariously sat.

If she’d been shocked or impressed by this exercise in forensic bookkeeping,

Heather did not betray it. It seemed only fair to him that she know what she was getting into, but she seemed unfazed. She hummed to the tune of “I’ve already signed a contract.

What do you want me to do with this information?” Maybe all of this was already outlined in the orientation booklet? In point of fact it was, she told him. At any rate, portions of it were in that high-gloss brochure, if you could read between the lines.

Enormous pull-quotes from the article dwarfing the description of the idyllic campus and flex-time. Lies by way of evasive citation. Tucked between fellatial descriptors of the bossman and his global vision, turgid odes to the breakroom foosball table.

The so-called literati wished to compare Fiction Factor to a factory? Well, the pamphlet railed: we welcome the comparison!

Disregard that Fiction Factor disavowed the very same cultural elites it ostensibly, misleadingly, quoted for approval. Never mind that the content officers were mostly

86 humanities dweebs—comp lit, rhet lit, history, psych, soc—whose entire training was in reading of the close sort. Forget that if they had one concrete skill, it was hunting down faulty citations. Generationally speaking, they prided themselves on their ability to detect and Ginsu through bullshit.

Of relevance: Ginsu was a brand of direct marketed knives, sold through TV infomercials. Sales took off when the company renamed them, dropping their original moniker, Quikut, which seriously lacked style. They were made in Ohio, nothing

Japanese about them. So much for bullshit detection.

Still, any press is good press, even when you’re paying for it yourself, and every way was the only way that Joseph Stieglitz—chair, CEO, CFO, CMO, Editorial Head— wanted anything.

Squint southbound from the fourth floor windows, and there’s his giant head, smiling over Calgary in billboard form. Your trusted metro newscaster? Meteorologist?

No, he’s a guy who sells some books. On a particularly bright day, the sun gleans off his heroic white chompers and blinds anyone who enters the men’s bathroom.

“I don’t get why you’re not running in terror at this point,” Will said.

Picking up the magazine, studying (he thought) the full-page photograph accompanying the essay), she said, “I spent two months working on the Swiss Chalet menu. Freelance. You never think of writing a menu as, like, a job? Barring the family- owned places with the laminated printer paper and the apostrophe errors, a menu feels strangely. . .”

“Timeless?”

Sliding the magazine back, nose wrinkled. “Eternal, maybe, yeah. Or perpetual.

Like a Kubrickian monolith that has always been there and always will. The very best ones, they disguise the effort, the care that went into them. Late nights, staff meetings, test kitchen disasters, focus groups, return back to staff meetings, test kitchens. The snake eating itself. And then when it’s done, you don’t get credit. And if you’ve done it well, no one even notices? The goal is to go unnoticed. It’s not like anything else.”

“I thought you were a social worker.”

“I was. That too. I’ve been a lot.”

An intriguing development for Will.

The washroom called him, though. The bank of elevators called them both. A desk with a binder atop it and reams of standards and practices for her, proofs (stet all) for him. He stood or jumped from the high chair. She climbed down as one might from a treehouse. Instinctively he grabbed for the magazine, thought twice and left it.

She said, or recited: “‘Starting with the finest fresh (never frozen) Grade A,

Canadian chickens, we hand-baste, then slow roast them for 90 minutes in our Rotisserie ovens until golden brown—every single day.’”

Holding his piss for the moment: “On second thought, how about phở?”

“We spent three days on that one. You put the first parenthetical in em-dashes, then the ending doesn’t work. But it looks stupid in brackets. And the sentence just has so much information. Too much information. I argued it was redundant. I was vetoed.”

On the topic of phở, she had nothing to say, but Will assumed it was a strong sign when she followed him once more (he realized he could adjust nicely to all this deference), out into what passed for a Calgary spring and next door. Less reassuring was

88 the hunch to her back, the question mark shape her spine took on as she withdrew her scratchpad and pen and began scrawling as she walked.

Right, okay.

Tough to explain the circumstances surrounding the photo, the only part of the fawning magazine profile, oddly, that she actually was curious about (though one might wonder where all those beautiful chairs went). The article did less for her; advertising was advertising, maybe—you come to expect certain conventions from it, particularly when you’ve been behind the scenes yourself and seen the quarter-chicken dinner get made. Post-washroom, appropriately accompanied by beer, and with three-pork vermicelli on its way to his gut, he felt expansive.

“Did I give you my number, by the way? We’re a pretty close-knit bunch here.”

She recited digits. He tapped them into his own phone. Fired off a message to her, a simple ☺, that he heard delivery of in the form of a hoot emanating from her pocket.

She declined to check the message.

“Anyway.”

* * *

The Shoot

The furniture-by-the-hour rental place—who knew such a business existed?—was already out the door with the most expensive pieces before the magazine shoot was done, collecting first the art objects so devastatingly handsome, so clean and elegant, that nary a soul was brave enough to even sit upon them, stand alongside of them, run a finger over them, or, god forbid, put pen to paper on them. Prevailing wisdom suggested that anything whose shape might trick you into believing it was a table by way of (for instance) its stomach-height flat surface was a trap: they all feared of pressing too hard with pen or colouring too far out of the lines. The panoptic gaze of the rental coordinator certainly made them think twice about putting their laptops down. Not even Raj, who normally functioned as a walking, talking id (and who found himself, on that day, in his element like a lizard on a hot rock) would dare cross the withering coordinator. Who knew how the 70 year old wood of the Juhl credenzas, cabinets and desks might react to the heat generated by an overclocked CPU?

Will, demoted to background duty, told by the photographer and then by Joseph to stop doing that with his hands, could only look at his hands and wonder what it was, exactly, he was doing with them. At which point they told him to stop looking at his hands because that was even worse: he looked, Joseph said, like a murderer fresh from the deed, agonized.

Will didn’t disagree.

The photographer Where’s Waldo-d him as far out of the shot as possible, exiling him to what might as well have been the corner of a round room, behind a cabinet tall enough to disguise whatever it was he was doing with his hands. Zeke’s presence deemed

90 demographically desirable (wizened, gray-at-the-temples, the team’s street-smart father figure, elder statesman), he had been directed to crouch elbows-on-knees in the foreground, instructions that—between knees shot from years of standing on factory floors and the cool-dad wardrobe they’d assigned to him of balls-tight Levi’s and a three- quarter sleeve tee, to say nothing of his questionable sobriety—proved for him to be somewhere on the spectrum between difficult and impossible. Each time he tumbled he caught himself on a side table, and the rental coordinator cringed and fingered a mustache nub. What the fuck was wrong with these people?

In contrast to all this teetering and blood-on-my-hands-gazing, Raj turned out to be a study in cool, dominating each shot by force of will, or his entire lack of interest in seeming cool, his presence infuriating Joseph (who saw his value but deeply resented having to rely upon him) and the hired extras (who hated to be upstaged by this Indo-

Canadian prick who didn’t know the word sprezzatura) even if the photographer was slobbering over every frame of it.

First lesson in the Book of Raj: cool is a state of mind that stems from not giving a shit about appearing cool. The Book of Will countered that this was the lie universally put forth by the cool to delude the uncool into thinking cool was attainable, and therefore exercising psychic energy and capital on achieving aforesaid status. Simple advice, but advice which amounted to advising one not to think about a purple polar bear. A man who isn’t trying to be cool doesn’t wear a metal bracelet and, conversely, a person trying to be cool wearing a metal bracelet looks absurd.

“And if you guys could go a few minutes without checking your phones, that would be fabulous?”

Raj, at that point, checked his celly, thumb-tapped out a quick reply to one of his admirers.

“On second thought, maybe one of you could be glancing down?”

Some nameless intern had been brave enough to drape herself over a particularly lovely Hans Wegner sofa (metal legs, high armrests, stripes in primary colours), which was good for a few photographs, but had done nothing to stop the team of artisanal movers from lifting it lengthwise, one to an end, and navigating it out of the office at the precise second specified in the rental agreement. The automatic doors declined to open for them, however, and the backpedaller of the duo bumped it, oof-ed, and disgorged the intern onto the floor, face-first. There she moaned as the photographer rushed over, zoomed and snapped a few shots. Joseph rushed over to strongly discourage the photog from doing so, reiterating for the fifteenth time that day that he’d need to approve the negatives.

To their immense credit, the movers were professionals through and through, polite enough to step over her on the way to retrieve the other pieces and relocate those to the moving truck as well: Eameses, Risoms, Jacobsens, Morgensens, derivatives thereof.

Nordic by inclination if not birth.

Distracted both by the disappearance of the furniture around which this entire publicity campaign had been structured and the Workers’ Comp claim-in-waiting writhing near the reception desk, Joseph lost focus of what had been Job #1 for most of the afternoon: Raj wrangler. Nor did Raj fail to notice that the attention cast upon him had shifted, at which point he went for his props. The sunglasses, knock-off Clubmasters, were a decoy to re-engage the photog’s fleeting attentions, at which point came the flurry

92 of comic props: the whoopee cushion, the rubber chicken, the paper bag wrapped tight around a can of Cheapest-in-the-West™ Mountain Crest lager (Zeke, listing like the

Titanic: “Gimme here”), the presence of an unaccounted-for liquid enough to rile up the rental coordinator and get him involved in the heavy-lifting of items as well. Show on the road, tout de suite! More effective than the physical props were the range of obscene gestures, from shocker to middle finger to pantomimed oral sex (the gender of the imagined receiver fluid—Raj changed it up when his tongue tired of wagging) And as the furniture pieces disappeared and Raj waved his closed fist in front of an open mouth and

Will looked still at his hands, the hired models decided in their wordless model-language that it was time for them to go as well.

The room’s median hotness dropped from a big city 7.5 to a small-town 6.5, a vacuum effect whose suctioning force at last drew Joseph’s attention from his intern’s invisible head wound and imagined agony to the tableau before him. It could not have been what he pictured in his mind when he’d paid for the ad and booked the photographer, and yet what was left at that point—a room devoid of furniture, two staff members on their back (one sipping from a mickey), and another having abandoned his crude miming in favour of the real thing, having tackled the fourth, licking his ear and actively humping while the photographer filled a memory stick with gigabytes of documentation thereof—must have been some portent or omen of the future. Some part of him must have projected forward, seen the iceberg in shimmering waters ahead.

Yet if it was an epiphany Joseph said nothing of it, and if he thought anything at all (and this was only Will speculating), it was perhaps only to wonder how they might

93 fix this in post-production. Even if the verb in its infinitive form, “to fix,” implied a prior wholeness that never existed.

The photographer earned his fee with a masterclass in Photoshop that merged the one acceptable snapshot of each into a cohesive, you-might-almost-believe-this-is-real team photo that communicated everything the accompanying fluff piece could have hoped for:

Cool. Ennui. Cutting-edge. Diverse. Independent and yet unified.

Wash out the colour to disguise the inconsistent shadows across each of their faces. Let the relative beauty of the models do the heavy lifting.

It would be unfair to pinpoint that photoshoot as the point at which the wheels fell off. Sales were still skyrocketing. JSI entertained offers from writers, translators, and printers. Thwarted a takeover. Hired consultants. Fired consultants and then hired more consultants. Advertised for a CSO: Chief Storytelling Officer. Framed it thusly:

“Companies are no strangers to telling stories. They’re telling a story with every press release, every advertisement. Always carefully crafting a message. Fiction Factor is on the lookout for a talented, enterprising individual who can help us develop a unifying narrative. Something all employees grasp that helps them work creatively and independently. Consistent with the model of distributed leadership. Storytelling is a creative way of thinking about strategy. Where have we been? Where are we going?”

Recruited across college campuses. Turned in-house for its CSO, Joseph adding that acronym to his impressive list. The joke went that the brass nameplate on his door was growing interminably heavy and had become a WHMIS issue, workplace health and safety hazard. Referrals which resulted in a new hire were rewarded with an oil portrait of

94 said referee and a subscription to a Bacon-of-the-Month Club (for vegans: Lettuce-of-the-

Month). The discretionary fund that paid for tours, for writer retreats, might as well have been represented by baby-sized burlap sacks with dollar signs on them.

Writers actually wrote. Produced content, in the parlance.

“Say,” the photographer interrupted the collective reverie, “How about we get some shots outside?”

But you don’t earn an MFA without knowing to identify foreshadowing in action.

Joseph reached into front pocket, withdrew a chestnut leather wallet (locally crafted in YYC), and snapped out a corporate credit card.

“Don’t go crazy now,” he’d said.

The intern’s recovery—miraculous, rising as she did from the dead, like a grad student to free lunch, to snatch the credit card from his tobacco-yellowed fingers.

Who knew? He might have been thinking then that God himself could not sink this ship. * * *

Heather Fits In

Heather eased remarkably well into the corporate culture and Will eased troublingly into a habit of strolling by her cubicle several times a day, even at times when doing so required him looping back or going the long way to the john. It wasn’t creepy. It was a bit creepy, but being aware of the creepiness tempered it in Will’s way of thinking. Not that she’d shown any signs of interest, which may have re-escalated the creepy. She had a blog and an Etsy storefront, he discovered, and when an order had been placed for one of her vintage dresses he could tell because her phone made a ka-ching sound and the next day she brought in the item, wrapped tastefully in tissue, a hand-made business card on- top, and used corporate resources to package and ship it out.

In that habit, she was certainly not alone: Will kept a file of up-to-date résumés despite his plagueish inertia, printing them ten at a time on the Xerox WorkCentre, locating a typo, correcting it, printing ten more, then forgetting which pile contained the typos, which was clean. Raj still spent his mornings long-distance calling university literature departments.

Heather also maintained, if only sporadically, a blog—a recent development tracking her cross-country trip by car, photographs of Canadian landmarks of the

TransCanada (scroll through the gallery and notice, always the landmark but never

Heather in-frame: evidence of a solitary journey) and an account of a road trip from East- to-West, culminating in her arrival in Calgary three days before the moving van in which everything sat was scheduled to arrive. All of this misfortune leading to the construction of a t-shirt bed: a yoga mat padded out with soft cotton clothes for both pillow and sheets

96 and lumbar support. Not much here in the way of personal details that Will could infer, especially with the project’s abrupt end (if not erasure) on the evening her FF contract came into effect. A few passing references to the kids at the shelter whom she would miss, a mention of her father (apparently a Computer Science professor who had left his tenure-track job to devote his life to the study of Hinduism). Not much for Will to go on, though he tried.

“Social worker? Vintage dress hunter? Menu writer?”

“Freelance menu writer.”

Still, he pointed out, that’s quite a list for someone in their, you know.

“Age bracket?”

Nod yes.

She confessed to having collected degrees, collected acronyms to follow her name.

Debt? None. Her father was tenured, she was the child and the beneficiary of free tuition incentives. Finish one, go back for the other. Complements of the house, until it wasn’t.

“Oh?”

She’d been partly through the BBA (post BSW, post-BA—next up might have been a BFA; she maintained her membership in the AMA, had insurance through CAA) when her father resigned his post. The victim, he said, of departmental politics. More likely the victim of his own monomania. For the first-time in her student career, a breakdown of tuition fees arrived not so much in the mail (these documents were no longer mailed, either tree- or e-) but by materializing one day in her web account, the

97 school’s “your fees are ready” announcement blast applicable to her at last. Begged her father not to do it, told him in dramatic teen-girl fashion (albeit too old and too well- educated for the teen-girl shtick to seem at all appropriate) that he was ruining her life.

There may have been foot stamping. But even an abstracted academic and doting father, overprotective for reasons she would not specify could see that he’d let this go too far, and his decision was final. She could finish the degree, he said, but she’d be paying her own way. He even offered a loan at prevailing interest rates, but this she took to be a slap, declined, and must have been using a broken compass when she went east, young woman.

“As for dad?”

“Complicated. Lemme refill my coffee.”

She left, brushing by him as she headed toward the kitchenette. Though left alone in her cube, Will observed the classic advice of time travel: do not touch anything, for fear of altering irrevocably the future/present you return to. He stole a glimpse at her computer screen, but there only a Word doc filled with in-line comments. Sentence about chaos and the seeds of discontent. The opening scroll of some space opera. New hires began as proofreaders, low-level editors. In contrast to journalism where one works their way up to editor. One establishes trust that they’ve mastered the rhythms. Crawl before you walk. Correct comma splices before you get the chance to argue over the aesthetic merits of your own.

She returned with a full mug, said “Okay,” and fell into her webbed seat. Her father was a computer scientist and—Will interrupted, indicating some white doughnut

98 powder on her cheek. She brushed the wrong cheek, he corrected her and she wiped the other. Heather licked the finger that came away with the powder.

Wait. There were doughnuts in the kitchenette?

Hold on a sec.

A parade to the kitchenette had already begun at that point, led by Pied Piper Raj, and Will ducked into the procession, bringing up the rear, and after much waiting was rewarded for his labours with the final donut in the box. Zeke, who’d had the jump,

“accidentally” grazed the two remaining double-chocolate with a filthy left hand. He’d apologized, extended the box collection plate-like to Will, who declined. Zeke took both donuts; only old-fashioned glazed remained in the puddle of fryer oil that stained the carton, which he complained about but consumed. But before he could tell Heather to go on, she said, “Okay, so what’s your deal?”

* * *

Will Doesn’t

Will’s father had driven trucks and then managed (and later owned) a warehouse; his mother had found herself a dedicated member of the lower-middle class clerk class, cycling through admin gigs, secretarial duties, starting over elsewhere each time she smacked cheek-first the glass ceiling or her lack of a degree had closed a door. Will’s father was quiet, interminably so; his mother the talker, preternaturally sharp-witted even though she wasn’t well-read and had never betrayed any interest. In fact neither had gone to college.

It had always been assumed that Will would be the first in the family to do so and so he was, though always with the assumption that this was a practical decision—a fact that you needed a university degree these days for just about anything. He’d take a practical degree in a practical field like accounting and he’d return home to run the family business. Return to the cement-floored corner office his father had set up in the warehouse that served as the central headquarters of the shipping company that bore his name—an office he’d fashioned himself, cutting the wooden frame, buying and installing the double-hung windows and doors and pink foam insulation, erecting a ramshackle office that stood in one corner of the warehouse, two wooden walls meeting two interior walls in the northwest corner of the larger structure. Windows spying not outside, but inside, over the expanse of the warehouse floor. It smelled of vanillin sawdust, natural gas exhaust, and musty, copper body odour.

It had been an office where Will had spent much of his youth: after school, clacking on the oversized adding machine which printed its calculations onto a spool of

100 waxy paper, reams and reams of figures on paper as Will mashed the number pad, pleased to see his work transferred to print, sent out into the world as tangible, physical product, its tactility more than compensating for the meaninglessness of the digits.

Listening, as he played the hum and the back-up beep of the Bobcat forklift that roamed outside the walls. Occasionally being tasked, with the promise of a fiver, with sequencing a series of invoices vomited randomly from a temperamental dot matrix, then neatly folding and tearing the perforated, small-holed edges. That being not the time before

WYSIWYG, but before Will’s father had been sold on the enterprise copying and printing setup peddled by the Xerox man, dot matrix being more tolerant then of the hot- and-cold, dusty and dirty conditions of an industrial warehouse.

Will had held jobs before Fiction Factor. More jobs than he could count: teaching assistantships, tutoring. Bussed tables, delivered newspapers, had spent a year shelving books at the Leamington branch of the Essex County library system. For the most part, his résumé as it stood had been pieced together in three month parcels. Proofreading here, ghostwriting there. But through all of those odd jobs, he had always thought of himself as a working writer first, and he had a few scattered publications, regional prizes, and the tortured credit history to prove it. But writing, for Will’s mother, wasn’t work, would never be work. Maybe because she had grown up in a home with six brothers and sisters, each of whom assisted however they could, without pay, her father’s long-haul moving company the moment they mastered the use of their opposable digits. Will’s mother had been answering phones since she was twelve, loading trucks since fifteen. Writing wasn’t a job, it was a hobby, it was fun—a deep suspicion harboured even by the other writers

Will would come to know. It was an attitude manifested in many forms, spanning from a)

101

“I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this!” to z) “Well, of course I’m not getting paid for this.”

Will only met his first real-life writer in university, on the first night of a Creative

Writing workshop, weeks after discreetly filling out the two-page form to change majors from ACCT to ENGL and fitting the three-hour elective between his required intros to

Spanish, Medieval Lit, CS, and Rhetoric. English 334 (“Creative Writing I:

Foundations”), hosted in a seminar room deep in the bowels of the Psych-Anthro-Soc building, a tomb-like architectural wonder of hallways and doors opening onto dead-end walls, Escher-esque staircases, modelled—as the campus urban legend purported—after the misfiring synapses of the human brain on psilocybin. Home of the Psychology department, and no one among that first class doubted the key reason for the building’s thick concrete walls was to mute the sick experiments taking place. But even that first writing teacher, who Will would decline to name, offered among other kernels of wisdom and anecdote (that Scotch angries the blood while bourbon mellows; that he once fought with Douglas Coupland at an art opening in Vancouver: “Son of a bitch put me in his next book, and then had himself—himself! Oh, the writer-as-character, isn’t that fucking clever?—he had himself erase me from the novel. Did me a favour, though, because it got me out of that godforsaken book”)—sorry, he was distracted. Among other kernels, this writer-cum-instructor had articulated his own aesthetic, a defense of his work that sounded unexpectedly defensive:

“It seems to me,” he’d lectured in a seminar, “that all work—labour, I should say—is, you know, generative. My craft speaks to that. I want to respect labour. Respect there’s an artistry. I put it down in words, but others live it.”

102

Will had raised his hand, volunteered that his parents owned a warehouse.

The professor had nodded vigorously. Pawing his comb-over back into place, only for the breeze of the HVAC system to dislodge it, he said, “Exactly! Will—that’s your name, Will? Exactly!” Then, abstracted, as though the classroom had emptied and he was talking to himself, he’d said aloud, “I write novels, but what if I am ultimately judged by contribution to the real?”

Here was the problem as Will saw it from the limited view of his cube desk (on the modular, burlap-draped walls: a few loose thumbtacks; a photograph of a Christmas dinner as a child, happy times; a Vietnamese take-out menu; and a Blue Jays pennant).

Everything he did to distance himself from his parents brought him inexorably back to his parents.

Raj, he knew, faced the same problem. His parents both born in Canada from grandparents who had both emigrated from India as adults. His from Bangalore in the state of Karnataka, hers from Delhi. His parents had both been raised in the capital region and had become career civil servants.

Yawn: they met, fell in love, had children. Here’s where it became more interesting: they adopted a child-rearing strategy their own parents had used with them, wherein each child pays for the next child’s education. One of the few concessions to the

“old country” way of conducting business for a family who had, in the classic fashion of second-generation immigrants, otherwise pursued total integration as their primary end.

God punish the son or daughter who chose a worthless major. It was how Raj ended up in

Electrical Engineering and how he spent five years post-graduation, living ascetically (a basement apartment in the far SW of Calgary; a one-hour C-Train commute each way; a

103 diet heavy in rice, beans, potatoes, splurging occasionally on a gamey cut of meat) and employed by ENMAX to study power lines. There he estimated future electricity usage for the province. Take the location and output of each power plant, how much energy you can effectively transmit without loss. Then compare those raw numbers to population data and demographic trends. He’d reeled off a few short stories during that time (written in pencil at night, typed up during the day), sent them to small presses, received a few bites from smaller fishes.

On the day Raj’s younger sister filed an intent to graduate form, he tendered his resignation from the utility co. and applied to a low-residency MFA. Doing one or the other might have made sense, but both? Particularly on the same day? It must have felt brazen. Confident, would be the generous assessment. Overconfident might be more accurate. No doubt short-sighted and, according to his parents, insane. Everyone entertained those intrusive thoughts now and then: that they might go back to nursing school or move to a National Park and become a white-water rafting instructor. Join up with an NGO and dig wells in Gabon. But thoughts were thoughts, not actions, and these urges were dismissed for what they were, momentary eruptions of the id. But Raj had these moments in which he was all id.

What Raj never appreciated was that his decision frightened his parents and peers not just because they worried for his prospects, but because he had unknowingly put the lie to the notion that these impulses were mere distractions, thoughts to be dismissed out- of-hand and shoved out-of-head. Why shouldn’t they join the French Foreign Legion or work with the handicapped? Go back to Bangalore, reverse the brain drain of India’s

Silicon Valley?

104

Raj destabilized the Earth from its axis and never registered the ensuing wobble, for no other reason that that he had believed he was just a little bit better than everyone else.

A good deal of Raj’s self-esteem was predicated on the belief that there was nothing he couldn’t master, that he understood sacrifice and hard work. At that point, there was no reason for him to assume otherwise: though he loathed numbers, he thrived in his engineering classes through brute force and metaphor, steering into the skid of his own incompetencies by charming professors and by transforming pure math problems into word problems. Surely the opposite of what most of his peers in Engineering 225 were doing, but what were numbers but a vehicle for stories? What was a circuit but a pathway for narrative? Northrop Frye’s cyclical pattern of the four mythoi writ small in the guts of every electrical device. Engineering is defined broadly as applied science. Raj turned engineering into applied storytelling, and his philosophy, counterintuitively, attracted employees who were in search of their own stories. It didn’t hurt that he was handsome and polite. If the success inflated his sense of self-worth, who could have blamed him for assuming that the MFA would lead to an agent would lead to a contract would lead to an advance and a modest twelve-date book launch tour?

It’s broadly true, however, that everyone thinks they’re just a little bit better than everyone else, and the fact that this delusion is so widespread as to have been identified and named (see the Dunning-Krueger effect) suggests that no one of us is so superior as we presume. To wit: Will thought himself immune to the selling power of advertising, until the annual reintroduction of the Angry Whopper at Burger King.

105

Mind, this was all Will’s reconstruction of events up to the point at which their respective paths converged. Perhaps he was only projecting his own feelings onto Raj, but the binary orbit into which Will and Raj stumbled at around that time—career-less planets of roughly equal size simultaneously orbiting each other as well as a distant star neither could name—left him considerable time to study his friend. They met as freelancers; they competed for the same jobs, some more on-the-level than others. On occasions they edited one another’s work, though they couldn’t have known this given the anonymity of authorship, the absence of credit and T4 slip necessitated by the questionable ethics or outright illegality of the labour involved. Raj declined these dubious jobs at first, whereas Will had no such compunction. While Raj edited poetry manuscripts by hard-line men’s rights activists, ghostwrote the memoirs of First Nations elders, and penned a weekly review column in the underground weekly, Will falsified résumés and “ghostwrote” student essays, undergrad and grad alike. American literature, marketing, sociology. “The surface illusion of Lolita, that its contents are ‘an allegedly unrevised, first-draft confessional written during fifty-six chaotic days’ (Appel xxviii), deeply affects the way in which the manuscript is read. By mirroring—parodying, even— the conventions of ‘the titillating confessional novel . . . and the expectations of the reader who hopes Lolita will provide the pleasures of pornography’ (Appel 319),

Nabokov lulls readers into a false sense of complacency.” He could write this stuff in his sleep, but he didn’t, expending genuine effort. He lashed out against censorship and unfettered capitalism. He discovered the history of Ginsu knives. If the work gnawed his conscience, it also appealed to his intellect, justifying time spent in the library and online.

106

It was not too long—measure it in months not years—before the legitimate work dried up and Raj abandoned his scruples in turn.

Both wrote catalog copy. Item #66-4423141 – Snowflake Cakelet Pan ($28.80).

NEW & EXCLUSIVE: “Create intricate mini cakes and top with powdered sugar. Made in USA by Nordic Ware of cast aluminum with nonstick finish.” Items #66-1649441,

#66-57921819, #66-4974309 – Peppermint Bark Cookies ($24.95), Peppermint Bark

Marshmallows ($19.95), Peppermint Bark Cups ($24.95). NEW & EXCLUSIVE:

“Artisan candymakers layer creamy white chocolate over dark Guittard chocolate and then top it with crisp, homemade peppermint candy bits."

Take a drink every time you write the word “artisan” or “artisanal.” Tartan was big that year. Take two drinks, one for each of them, because Raj retreated back into his well-worn asceticism.

Both wrote speeches for upper management in fields they did not understand, many of them glad-handing O&Gers ignoring signs of another coming apocalypse.

Between non-denominational holiday speeches and final essay deadlines, December was their busiest month. Stampede another boon, but late summer fell fallow, August their cruellest season, the tail of a boom-bust cycle that inspired Will’s first-published short story in years: a twice-anthologized, prophetic (but not profitable) vision of a commercial window painter in a speculative near-future who limps along in poverty all year long, season after season, except during Christmas and Stampede, at which time he finds himself flush with cash—those being the only two times a year when anyone wants their window painted. Until, one year, oil crashes and hurting retailers decline the expense of his usual Christmas murals.

107

He’d received pushback from an editor. Wouldn’t it make more sense for

Stampede to be cancelled than Christmas? Even as a recent transplant to the last best place, Will confidently assured her that Calgarians would rather give up Christmas than

Stampede. Stet all.

Raj had discovered an app for creative professionals that allowed him to advertise his services for $5 a pop. The resultant requests were mostly fake reviews on Amazon,

Yelp, or TripAdvisor. There’s a certain art to counterfeiting genuine personal experiences. Be specific but not too specific. Drop names, but don’t over-explain. No one cares that you found yourself staying overnight at the Best Western in Lethbridge on the way to a family getaway in Helena, Montana. Be enthusiastic but not too enthusiastic. No one raves about an out-of-the-way motel. Meanwhile, Will designed advertising campaigns on spec, was offered an internship, and declined said internship for being unpaid. Hired part-time instead. Quit after meat-cute. Picked up a column in the underground weekly opposite-page to Raj’s, his a sex advice column under the nom de plume Kinky Katy. The difficulty for Will, who had put his skills falsifying resumes to use falsifying his own to even qualify for the job, was distinguishing between earnest entreaties and trolls referencing imagined and/or physically-impossible (consent-, contortion- or excretion-wise) acts of sexual debasement.

Raj had more literary successes but fewer dollars. He published a book of poems imagining the India his grandparents grew up and left, written under the unusual formal constraint of abstaining from any research. The resultant image of India a speculative fiction cyberpunk hell-scape-slash-paradise. He published a multimedia short story imagining what the stick figures in IKEA instruction manuals would be saying to one

108 another if they could speak. He had more professional successes too, his first career in

Engineering combined with basic literacy skills making him a sought after grant application writer.

Both tutored. Both penned placards for historical landmarks. They tutored more and they went without dental coverage. Their teeth rotted and their gum lines receded, they presumed—they had no coverage and therefore no way of knowing. They moved in together, in the upstairs two-bedroom unit in a fourplex in a neighbourhood that teetered precariously between low-income and lower-income.

Will copywrote until he copywrote the advertisement seeking his own replacement, and then he no longer copywrote.

They browsed a job-hunting site called JobTropolis, whose tag—“We’ll put you to work”™—seemed to both of them more like a threat than a promise. Will had first seen the commercial during a ballgame, but since then he had shared it with Raj and they periodically loaded it up and watched it, then moused over the Replay button to watch it again. In it, a slovenly bro, not unlike Will in appearance (excellent casting) is sucked into some sort of industrial, lathe-looking-type machine—a modest Rube Goldberg apparatus, if such a creation wasn’t a contradiction. The camera pans to an exterior shot of the machine at work, churning, trilling, and beeping and smoking and shaking before dinging, spewing (through what looks like an oversized cake frosting gun) onto the factory floor a new and improved, gainfully employed Will substitute: suit and tie, gingham shirt, toothsome smile, slicked back undercut hair combed and gelled to maximum smarm.

“Play it again!” Raj cried.

109

Somewhere between the application writing, the tutoring sessions, the essay writing (“Masculine Anxiety in The Sun Also Rises”), Raj and Will lost faith, whether in themselves or in something greater, like the culture, they weren’t certain. They had sworn up and down that they would not become like their parents and to their credit they hadn’t, but look what they had to show for it: a rental apartment with barred windows even though it was second-storey; a book of poems; an un-monetizable underground following for music journalism and/or sex advice; degrees to which they were probably entitled but which for reasons of client confidentiality and academic conduct they could never claim.

They exhausted themselves.

Then, in fairy-tale fashion . . .

They heard tell of a washed-up novelist with a blank cheque who was going on a hiring spree: a fluff piece here, a listserv-circulated e-mail there. The name conjured some Pavlovian saliva and the offer was as tempting as it was personally distasteful.

Its tone pre-emptively defensive, the original e-mail blast explained:

“Many artists conceptualize a work and then collaborate with other artists

to produce it. Andy Warhol’s Factory is an example of that way of

working. That’s what I’m doing with literature. Harry Potter and

the Twilight series awakened a ravenous market of readers and were

leaving a substantial gap in their wake. I want to be the one to fill it.

We’ve seen wizards, vampires, and werewolves. Aliens are next.”

Full benefits? Raj tongued a dubiously soft molar, asked, “Have you had your wisdom teeth removed?”

110

Will conceded that it was less morally suspect than writing term papers for spoiled 1%ers. Even so.

Quoth Faulkner: “It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”

Raj’s advice: Steer into the skid.

* * *

111

Terms of Surrender

Raj took the job with Fiction Factor. Writing that he “took” the job perhaps sounds like he marched in and demanded employment on the spot. And indeed he more or less had, breezing through the aptitude test, the writing test, and the CV scrutineering. The prodigal son returned to the plain-walled office of cubicles arranged in telephonic sequence. Unsurprisingly, he’d aced the interview, become employee #3 in HR records, and it was only a month into his tenure when he recruited Will. Will met Joseph over phở, the latter describing the herby, meaty broth-and-noodle dish as his personal power food.

Joseph valued trust. In particular, he extemporized, trust was about honouring the judgment of his team. Raj spoke highly of Will and Joseph was inclined to accept that endorsement of face value, provided his trial run was a success.

The trial run: he was e-mailed a first chapter outline and told to write the chapter.

Will took a trip to Chapters, lurked (ignoring askance glances) in the YA section for a few hours flitting from Hunger Games to Harry Potter (and that was just the H’s), soaking up first chapters. He C-Trained home, snacked on an Adderall, and wrote the first chapter in a marathon session.

Joseph mailed Will a contract and an orientation package. An accompanying salutary letter invited him to finish the novel that he’d started with this first chapter.

As promised, Joseph mailed Raj something much larger.

The oil painting of Raj shared place of prominence with a framed Engineering degree and an unframed, thumbtacked MFA parchment. Once a month, their diets grew bacon heavy: bacon and eggs for breakfast, BLTs for lunch, bacon as garnish in their

112 evening Caesars. Needless to say, Raj’s ascetic phase passed as suddenly as it has come on. Just like that, the Earth wobbled back into place. Raj had returned home, metaphorically. As a celestial body, the Earth was too big to fail. Raj’s mother cancelled the flight she had booked to Delhi, driven by her own impulses she dared not speak. His father sold the Rossignol cross-country skis he’d purchased brand-new.

It needed to be said: this was not a predatory employment relationship. At least not at first. Will and Raj and the others who followed—Zeke, Gretchen, ultimately

Heather, nameless faces occupying the periphery like a bad ensemble—were adequately compensated relative to their education and expertise. A windfall was not in their futures, but the pay was reasonable and, more importantly, regular. None of them would be buying houses in trendy neighbourhoods or opening RESPs for their hypothetical (or in

Zeke’s case, very real) children, but they had been raised not to need too much. They’d had been taught, through the denigration of the arts and humanities (the death by a million cuts of a million bad jokes about baristas and fry jockeys), not to expect much, and any arrangement that approached much or even glimpsed much in the viewfinder was a welcome allowance. It was a job. It was a job writing. It beat grant-chasing or stringing together six part-time jobs with careful methylphenidate dosing and sleep rationing. For

Will in particular, it beat the experience of being awarded a fellowship only to be informed that accepting said fellowship would result in the termination of a different, existing fellowship. And that, though the existing fellowship was for a larger sum, the newly-awarded fellowship was considered more prestigious by some invisible metric and therefore he was obligated to accept it.

113

In precise legal terms, as outlined to him by the university’s legal counsel: “We find in the body of Canadian jurisprudence no grounds upon which to support your claims of ‘no take-backsies’.”

And the benefits! Oh, the benefits. Dental. Eye. Chiropractic. Will booked appointments for all three to coincide with the first day following his probationary three months. Dr. Hsu set him up with stronger lenses; Drs. Shoemaker and Kerns investigated the source of his sore jaw, correctly diagnosed it as stress-based grinding, and fitted him out with a mouth-guard. $50 deductible, and the rest simply sent out into the ether where someone had apparently agreed to pay.

Flexible hours!

The only downside to the arrangement was the caveat in each of their employment contracts that Libris Mortis and its parent company JSI LLC owned the rights in perpetuity. The rights to everything. Their names would appear on the spine, and their bios and brooding Glamour Shots might appear on a back page (not without a certain degree of touching up), future fodder for a literary Tiger Beat equivalent; write- ups would ID them as esteemed author, and they would tour behind each new release.

News outlets were free to conduct interviews. But ownership of the intellectual property itself reverted to Fiction Factor, which reverted in turn to its parent company and that parent company’s shell company, as did television, film, and merchandising rights. As a result, authors published work whose success they had no direct investment in; rather than hoping to make an impression, then, on tour or in exclusive one-on-one sit-downs with the nation’s literary beat reporters (both of them), they feared only saying the wrong thing. They reverted to talking-points and anodyne blandness rather than risk upsetting

114 the cart. Openly discussing the nature of their relationship with Fiction Factor, for example. Myriad sins for which they could be penalized between $2,500 and $50,000.

Neither Will nor Raj could even conceptualize the high-end of that range.

Additional points of clarification, subsections 4.12 through 4.18: forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with their duties, the word “conflict” itself going undefined and undescribed in the terms of reference. They had no final approval over publicity, photos, or biographical material. Indeed, Fiction Factor reserved the right to use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, and to substitute the writer’s name with a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer would not retain copyright but would nevertheless, in accordance with subsection 3.122 of the employee contract, be held liable for any legal action brought against his or her book.

Let’s be clear here. Each of these terms was non-negotiable, and there were (as

Joseph, kind though he could be, never tired of reminding them) plenty of young writers willing to step up and take their place. Which was true; Joseph’s recruitment cast a wide net, most of it done the old-fashioned way, however, with a down-home charm that he either carefully cultivated or possessed quite genuinely. No one was sure with Joseph where the humanity ended and the artifice began. He was selling craft, though, and so job listings on the web, job fairs, targeted advertising, wouldn’t cut it. Not alone, no

JobTropolis account for him. Instead, red eye flights from Calgary home base to major metropolises and barely-there college towns and everywhere between, to Marriott conference rooms and community centers and basement seminar rooms on university campuses, where he paced back-and-forth, not so much chewing on a piece of Juicy Fruit as wadding it into a little glob and bouncing it around from cheek to cheek by way of his

115 tongue, fielding hostile questions from skeptical junior craftsmen of the written word but winning them over with all the right words: he would paw at the light stubble on his chin, run a hand through that blond hair and point from student to student in a way that they’d have found condescending if there weren’t just something so charismatic about him.

These audiences, mostly kids in their twenties . . . They were broke already and they were somehow plummeting further into debt if that was even possible, and they were too impressionable for their own good. When Joseph had a group of indebted twenty- somethings in a too-warm cement-walled institutional classroom—too warm because all rooms in public institutions are always too warm; warmth is historically the most pressing concern of all bureaucracies, ever—a haze might settle over their circuitry and when the formal Q&A wrapped up he’d let slip that “By the way, I’ve got this project

I’ve been working on,” that there was this untapped market he was looking into, this ravenous audience out there that no one was catering to, that there was a payday to be had for anyone unafraid of working a commercial angle, well, it seemed maybe there was something to it. For every aesthete smirking from the back of the classroom, for every one of those kids not yet cynical enough to cash in his ideals there were one or two discreetly scribbling down the e-mail address he had scrawled up on the chalkboard or whiteboard. The ones who wrote down the e-mail, however, did so sloppily, busy peeping out of the corner of their eye to see whether they were being watched, reputation being everything.

If you can’t do it, I’ll find someone who will. It wasn’t even a threat. It wasn’t even a promise. It was just the practical reality of the matter.

116

Why does someone sign a contract like that? Take also, then, the line-up of students waiting, slobbering in the wings. Why does anyone sign a contract like that?

Ok, so let them put their cards on the table. To be fair, Joseph was underwriting the risk. Flop or smash success, they got paid. And while they wanted to focus on the smash portion of the equation, the flops were more pertinent to the calculus. It seemed only natural that the copyright reverted to the company. After all, IBM owned the patents developed by its employees. They were trading labour for wages and benefits. And how much labour did it actually involve? And was Joseph dumb enough to ever pursue any of the penalties outlined in the signing document? Professional suicide, and even that assumed that any of the measures were enforceable. “IANAL” Raj said (“Please do not say web acronyms out loud,” Will pleaded); he was not a lawyer, he meant, but these contracts did not even seem legally binding. In relevant cases, judges had consistently and repeatedly struck down the viability of non-compete clauses, just to cite one example.

Good enough for Will.

But there was also one more possible explanation for why they both weighed the odds and concluded the language of the contract was a feint. They understood that they were better off domesticated.

Recently, research has emerged observing the very real possibility of epigenetic inheritance, confirming a once-fringe hypothesis that memory is not only passed culturally, but in the blood and bone as well: that environmental factors can affect the genes of your children or, put differently, that trauma is an inheritable genetic disease.

Call it evidence of a collective unconscious or a collective memory; call it supporting

117 evidence for what survivors have instinctively known and spoke and what their biographers have documented.

Will and Raj had spent their teens and their twenties doing their best to escape the darkness and run to the light, or escape the fluorescent light and run to the dark, avoid the cycle that saw them become their parents, had seen their parents become their parents.

Because, after all, they were just a little bit better. But if it was their destiny to come home, as though their lives were a shared fever dream in which the faster they ran from the unspecified monster the more he gained on them? Or another, a recurring nightmare in which Will, equipped for a baseball game, discovered he was in fact in the middle of the football gridiron and about to be crushed by a human-gorilla-hybrid linebacker?

Wade through the layers of subconscious, wipe the blood-brain-barrier muck from his shoes on the stroll in the meadows of his amygdala and consider the possibility that mother dearest was right. Barring a “Staff” or “Technical” as prefix, “Writer” wasn’t a real job. Moreover, deep down around the cerebellum he knew it, though he never would have dared utter it.

Will worried that what was true in his writing must be true in life: that if you can’t say what a character did for a living, where their paycheque came from and how a future might plausibly unfurl for them, then that character was never fully real. They could never be of consequence, never move the reader. They could never carry moral weight.

They would never be “round,” to use the language of that earliest undergrad CW workshops.

* * *

118

On Joseph

Like many recovering alcoholics, Joseph had replaced one addiction for another. Pop psychology suggested that one of the reasons success rates for twelve-step programs like

AA were so shockingly (sub-10%) low was this: when you admit you’re powerless, where do you go from there?

For those who stick with the program (the faithful who “keep coming back” as the program’s argot goes), that powerlessness is redirected into the Power greater than oneself and often then, by proxy, the Power of the program. For those like Joseph who only dabbled with the program, attending Meetings here or there though mostly because

AA gatherings were the last bastion for socially acceptable indoor chain-smoking in public venues, the premise of the Greater Power™ proved a much thornier issue. Others in his position went for CrossFit, started yoga routines, doubled down on slow death by cigarette, or compulsively re-watched Deadwood.

Among those who still had shards of a life to rebuild from, Joseph was one of those addicts-in-recovery who turned his focus to his work, in his case to his pursuit of an ecstatic religious vision of Fiction Factor and what it could become. He turned his life over to YA fiction as he understood it, and there was nothing he would not do for it. In his searching moral inventory, however, it never became quite clear whether F2 was the

God he worshipped or the baby he’d birthed, and so his managerial style was unpredictable as he bounced between these extremes, imagining himself alternately as

Father and Son and—if those—then why not Holy Spirit as well. Every way was the way he wanted it. He wanted personal success and yet he wanted to give back to the writing

119 community. He wanted friends and yet he governed by a firm hand. He trusted his team implicitly and yet monitored their personal use of telephony equipment. Understood creativity could not be rushed but enforced hard deadlines. Voted Liberal, campaigned for Liberals, though he secretly thrilled at the tax benefits that accrued to him under

Conservative rule. Donated vast sums of money to worthwhile charities while sheltering his family’s fortune off-shore. He copped to his own moral failings while criticizing others for theirs. Joseph, like many who had been born into wealth, squandered his fortune, and then stumbled into more, was deeply complicated and deeply conflicted.

A historical example of both his largesse and its fickleness: having spotted a group of homeless making as their camp the ducts above the underground parking garage,

Joseph reasoned that in a recently gentrified neighbourhood like the East Village he was the invasive species, reasoned further that everyone deserved the second chance he had received. Thus, rather than having security scare off the indigent congregation, or bribing his conscience clean with a few dollars, Joseph offered them jobs. Labour of a custodial sort, but a job was a job and he even impressed the gathering by never flinching, reaching out to shake knobby, weather-worn, presumably piss germ-covered hands to seal the arrangement. They shared a ceremonial ciggy or two to mark the occasion of the summit.

A success it had been, too, (the Herald sent out a reporter to cover the story) until a floor lamp went missing, and then reams of paper, and then Gretchen’s thermos. No evidence existed to link the custodial staff to the thefts and no one much complained (what were a few items here and there compared to the chairs being disassembled?), and yet Joseph lost sleep following their movements, setting his alarm randomly every night and making the drive into work to inspect each floor, or returning to work after a meeting to check in

120 on the custodians’ quarters. He made excuses about wallets or hats left behind, contracts he needed to re-read. Played it cool during the day, but the staff could read the toonie- sized bags under his eyes. Cleaning schedules and timesheets became his pocket Bible.

Still lacking in evidence he finally, nevertheless, deemed their continued employment an intolerable prospect and downsized the lot.

A further example, which had not yet but which threatened at any moment to explode. He hired Zeke. Zeke who showed up at the front desk one day with religious fervor in his eyes, as if on pilgrimage, demanded an audience with the CEO, demanded a job, threatened to sleep outside on a bedroll every night in the sub-zero temps until he was hired, because he felt a blip. Incurious as to what this even meant, Joseph played him, turned to an old trick he learned from carnies or professional wrestlers and had added to his repertoire: on the first day of training, you break the new guy’s leg. You think wrestling’s fake? If he comes back when the leg’s healed, you know he’s serious about the business. That’s when you let him in on the secrets. You’ve earned his loyalty for life. Joseph berated Zeke, asked him what made him think he had what it took, kicked him out, stepped over his sleeping form on the way into the building every morning for a week before finally, one day, holding the door open after him and shouting back to hurry up and follow. It wasn’t long before Zeke was writing teenage alien romances with a clumsy hand, while Gretchen was assigned to un-splitting his infinitives.

Gretchen, for her part, had been rescued in a different fashion, rescued from serving scones and cocktails and sundry toothpicked canapés to Canadian literati in the

Ballroom of the Fairmont Royal York. Her size and her balletic quietude, her ability to vanish in plain sight making her a favourite among caterers. Like a bouncer who knows

121 to vanish when the important people are speaking. But Joseph noticed her: he caught up to her to hire her and to ask what the secret ingredient was in the tartar sauce coating each salmon canape.

She mumbled that she didn’t know.

* * *

122

On Will’s Romance

Will’s most pressing concern: he loved indiscriminately. He loved transparently.

Contradictorily, he never gave utterance to these desires, so it betrayed him only through deed. He could not help himself. Never could he help himself.

Age eleven: Will develops a crippling crush on his fifth grade teacher, Ms.

Feldman. Ms. Feldman was not an attractive woman by conventional standards: she possessed a mannish Roman nose and wore garish fake pearls. Her dresses, with their bright summery floor-length patterns felt out-of-season for a good portion of the year, a judgment obvious even to the unrefined tastes of pre-teens. She spoke with a slight lisp.

No matter. Like an obedient dog, a few pats on the head and words of kindness were all it took and Will was hers.

Age fourteen: Soo, the Korean-Canadian girl in Canadian history. Soo, who had always been there, three rows over, but was suddenly there (like certain body hairs, certain fixations). Age sixteen: Jennifer Angstrom, who had dyed her hair blue in the midst of what passed for a punk-rock stage in rural Ontario. Morphing before he knew it into a desire for Kim Olson, who wore ripped jeans, kept her hair in a painfully tight ponytail, and smoked unfiltered Players in the student parking lot. By then he had the capacity to imagine the taste of her smoke-filled mouth, her smokier clothes. Imagine running his fingers over the holes in those threadbare jeans. Another Jennifer, last name

D’Agostini, who lives alone with her father on County Road 22 and who is Will’s first real date in the picks her up and takes her out unchaperoned definition of the term. He wins a stuffed tiger in the claw game at the Podunk theatre in town. They name it Babou.

123

Far-too-skinny Ivanna, curly-haired Susan. Spiky-haired platinum blonde Sheila, who cut his hair and massaged his scalp. Thick, lovely Alana and her permissive parents.

She smokes, like Jen 1 does (greedily, efficiently), but Alana doesn’t skip, and she’s acing every class but Grade 12 Data Management. Will longs to help her, but his attempts only illustrate his own ineptitude. The irony of math class, for Will, is that for someone who works in a library, who reads obsessively and dreams of writing, is that he finds word problems intractable. The football coach turned baseball coach turned math instructor cannot help, with his hyper-specialized questions: “Svenn bought eight baseball caps for his eight friends at a cost of $22.35 each,” one such question reads, and

Will relishes the resultant banter with Alana, who sits in the seat ahead.

“Who buys eight baseball caps?” she wonders.

“A gift? A gag?” he suggests.

“Why for his friends, then?”

“Maybe he is the lowly equipment manager, lying to himself.”

She laughs. Will smiles.

“Why’s a guy named Svenn so into baseball?” she wonders.

Will has more questions, which he vomits up all at once: Will knows that the authentic 59Fifty on-field caps from New Era with CoolEra technology would cost more than $22.35 each, unless Svenn is getting a bulk wholesaler discount or maybe buying them under-the-table. In which case how did he stumble on the deal? And if he is just buying inferior hats, then will his teammates be furious with him immediately or only later, once they’ve sweated through the fabric, leaving a ring of off-white crust embedded permanently on the crown of the cap?

124

Her eyes narrow; Alana makes a seasick face and turns back to the blackboard.

Later, when they’re asked about Professor Watkins and his rescued animals, he’ll prod her with the nub of his pencil. “If Professor Watkins has rescued 17 pigs, puppies, guinea pigs, and rats from his lab,” he reads, “What are all the combinations of rescued pets he could have?”

“More importantly,” he adds cleverly, “how does Professor Watkins’ wife feel about their quiet suburban ranch being turned into a farm for rescued animals?”

He maintains his vigil behind her in Data Management, lovingly sketching the secret place where her hair meets the nape of her neck.

It is no surprise that the confusions of university produce confusions in his affections, that he cannot differentiate his enthusiasm for new political ideas or new modes of expression from the instructors and peers who introduce those ideas, or sometimes even the students sitting in close proximity when those ideas are first presented. His entirely theoretical affection for radical politics becomes indistinguishable from his intensely felt ache for Kelly, the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper who so rabidly espouses those ideas, ideas which have a dual appeal for Will in the way that they simultaneously embrace the generative value of the labour his parents perform while refusing the act of labour itself: an entirely theoretical appreciation that weakens Will’s guilt with regard to the patricide he’s performed, reinventing himself as a faithful political progressive and a good intellectual.

When it comes to sex, Will notices that everyone falls into television clichés.

Creative Writing I Instructor (who would become Creative Writing II and III

Instructor owing to budgetary cutbacks) expresses a borrowed theory that fiction should

125 never be situated within the “frivolous now,” a stance which holds in the first part that brands, technologies, popular culture are all to be treated as anathema to good art because

(in the second part) technology, contemporaneity connect us too vividly. The best stories keep their characters apart and alone, longing; these stories throw roadblocks in their characters’ ways. But in an age when everyone’s actions are reported near- instantaneously by text message or social media, how can these characters ever be actually, plausibly alone?

Will, age twenty-two, approaching university graduation and never without cell in hand, knows that this is a rhetorical question. He knows it is intended as a rhetorical question; he knows first-hand, however, that it is actually a question with a clear answer, posed by an elder statesman whose understanding of the technology he takes such pleasure in deriding is superficial at best.

Will once pitched a novel to Joseph about a dystopia where mind and machine meld, a world in which it is an impoverished young woman who cannot afford her own link who must start society anew after a cyber virus bridges the human-computer divide and divides human civilization.

“Sounds didactic,” Joseph crinkled his nose.

“It’s a project I think I’m passionate about.”

“Then by all means.”

All good.

And then Heather strolled by with her fennel perfume, the pixie cut, the vertebrae countable along her too-thin neck and too-sharp back, and Will discovered himself to be smitten once more.

126

Out came the phone, the monthly plan beefed-up, outgoing (going, going, gone) went the text messages. Demeaning for Will, who thought of himself as a writer first, to be reduced to such sad-sack means of emoticon-driven expression.

Raj reassured him one evening in the office, having commandeered a conference room and an overhead projector for a private screening of Office Space that was to be sparsely attended (no sign of Heather):

“A descriptivist might say that you’re ahead of the curve, in literary terms. You’re using language the way it’s being used out there, in the world.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I do not, really, no.”

Will spun his phone between thumb and forefinger, glass screen cool to thumb, outer shell warm from the heat of his palm.

“Coming to the screening?” he’d written, and he waited anxiously for a response.

“Saved you a spot ☺” he’d added moments later.

He wished he could un-send messages.

Only midway through the film, as the grunts depicted therein beat on a laserjet printer with baseball bats while a lazy rap song slurred in the background did his phone ping, and he had a response.

“Sorry,” his screen read, “Something came up.”

Will frowned, played with the phone. Another ping.

“Coffee tomorrow, though?” Then a smiley.

Will smiled.

* * *

127

An Interlude: How to Explain Zeke

A treatise on the origins of Zeke’s engagement with Fiction Factor LLC, as composed in secret by Will and Raj during off-peak hours, with input from Gretchen and (later, they hoped, a gesture of bringing-into-the-flock) Heather, a collaborative attempt to make sense of how an untrained, uneducated, loutish and possibly mentally ill loner rescued from the front stoop of corporate headquarters like an abused kitten came to find himself upon that stoop in the first place.

Ezekiel Anthony proved to be an especially challenging client, even for a career counsellor as talented as Gwendolyn Symons thought herself to be (was how the narrative began, courtesy Will’s clumsy after-hours keystrokes). She was talented, and her firm belief in creativity and self-development and the human spirit led her to conclude that this man before her was uniquely simpatico, might represent the culmination of her labours, might be the figure around which her book-length study on career as an act of asserting one’s individuality, one’s identity, might finally cohere.

A therapist by trade, Gwendolyn had begun career counselling on the side a dozen years before Zeke first walked through the door, a hobby-horse that matured until it cramped and then overtook her more traditional couples’ therapy practice without ever growing enough to wriggle free of the confines of the raised bungalow out of which she ran it with her husband, Sal—a man of the doting variety, serving faithfully as in-house accountant, secretary, marker of aptitude tests, and who in the days of couple counselling lurked nearby as an illustration of a positive couples’ bond.

128

Yet Zeke—he was a challenge, despite the sympathetic connection, despite the sense in which she believed she understood him, the way he embodied her own professional ethos so clearly. The reason: simply because he was nothing like the clients on which she had built her business. He presented challenges because he was under- educated and under-employed. What was she to do as career counsellor, she wondered, with an unskilled labourer who cold-calls you late at night and leaves a rambling message on your machine, three glasses deep in Beam (a message you hear as it’s being recorded in all its halted self-consciousness on the answering machine through the walls of your home, because your office is your home and vice versa); who shows up at your door after his shift in his steel-toed Caterpillars and work Dickies, stained with industrial lubricant in a shade of electric blue (“Please excuse the Smurf cum,” he says), and asks if there’s a way of paying by installments or paying against future earnings; and who asks if you really are uniquely suited to help those facing “troubling life decisions and occupational choices,” as your website claims. A guy who, when you tell him at first you’re not sure how you can help (all the while extending toward him a plate of cookies which your husband has so thoughtfully baked, and which your visitor takes and chews on daintily), thanks you for your time and leaves, snaring one final oatmeal raisin cookie for the road.

(Raj butts in and unlocks the Google doc, and the enterprise becomes a collaborative doc free-for-all.)

But who then continues to call, every night, leaving messages on the answering machine that go on for five, ten, twenty minutes, conversations with himself. No threats or accusations, not even direct acknowledgement of an interlocutor, only emotional introflexion: stories told without concern for an audience beyond the magnetic tape head,

129 even though some nights Gwendolyn, unable to sleep, would listen to these monologues and recoil in sympathy for the man who spoke them, fall asleep finally and forget she had listened, and listen once more come morning over a cup of tea. At times it was not clear the relevance of his monologue to Gwendolyn specifically, whether it even mattered that she was a career counsellor specifically so much as that her answering machine functioned and would record him for posterity. She wondered whether it was a factor that

Gwendolyn’s voice messaging system was not of the newfangled digital variety, but of the old dual compact cassette sort. She could not erase, mid-message, by dialling 7 and hanging up on the robotic voicemail messaging system voice. She had to let the message run its course. She had to rewind the tape or eject the cassette tape and flip it, or label it and set it aside.

Exclusively late at night—twelve or one in the morning, earlier or later,

Gwendolyn surmised, depending on whether he was working the morning or the afternoon shift—and always quiet, breathy, as if he waited for his family to fall sleep and carried on some kind of late-night tryst. At times he would pause, and Gwendolyn would imagine he had fallen asleep, or was preparing to hang up, but then he would go right on for several minutes more, as if the pause indicated he was in the throes of an actual conversation and had received the response he needed to continue. He slurred at times, half-drunk and half-asleep both. In the beginning, she would delete the message in the morning and try not to think about them or him as she went about her morning consults.

But it was not long before she began setting these tapes aside each morning, notating each in Sharpie on adhesive label, and tucking them into her office drawer. New cassettes were becoming more difficult to find: she ordered a package on Amazon and discovered

130 that they were the wrong head size; she went searching for a Radio Shack, oblivious to the fact that there were no Radio Shacks left.

(Heather inserted a comment bubble in green. “Well, this is maudlin. I’m going back to work. Have you guys heard of work?” Underneath, Raj responded in red: “You think it’s maudlin now?” A second comment followed: a link to an embedded hit counter that ticked upward each time Heather re-logged in to read, if not contribute to, the tale of

Zeke’s woes.)

The messages touched on his work—the assembly of Mustang door pillars—and his annual layoffs after the roughly 200,000 parts (100,000 each for the left and right doors, 160,000 total for the coupe and 40,000 for the soft-top convertible, give or take a few thousand orders here and there) were built each year and the machinery decommissioned to be retooled for next year’s model, at which point production would ramp up again and he would be called back. The messages alluded to a failed campaign to become shop steward for the union, and to a two-week trial as forklift operator from which he stepped down because the pressure on the lift operator was too much for the ten-cent wage bump. It was something he’d argued over and over with his wife, a sore: she said they had a family to provide for, and that every little bit mattered. According to one monologue, he said there was some shit he would not eat and she asked if he was quoting again, called him a prick who was more interested in himself than his family. He told the messaging machine or himself stories about a high school teacher who had encouraged him, though he’d never shown any aptitude for school before or since. The teacher had given him a B when the rest of his report card was filled with well-earned

D’s.

131

He wasn’t dumb, that wasn’t it.

(Will underlined this line. Raj double-underlined it. Neither sought to dismiss

Zeke, not consciously, anyway. Only poke fun at him; for Will at least, Zeke represented the closest link to a concept of labour that had grown increasingly foreign, unfamiliar to his recent experience. But maybe this was cruelty, cliché.)

Will realized a temp was standing over his shoulder, wetly chewing his gum. He shooed the body away, checked his phone (text from DAD: Watch the game?, which is dad-speak for “love you, kiddo”), and returned to his keyboard.

It was that Zeke didn’t care in the same way that most teenagers could be made to care, and as bright as he was, it was a self-absorbed intelligence that ignored the possibilities of the walls closing around him with each successive D, limiting his future options. He noted how dumb it was that a stupid teenager could do something at 17 or 18 without a second thought that would have an irrevocable impact on his future. His speech was riddled with acronyms, the most frequent of them TPT and FT. And he returned— and this is what moved Gwendolyn most deeply, and yet also made her most anxious— again and again to a literary reading he had attended months before, hosted by strangers in an old house in the inner city, a surprisingly elegant old home with heavy bannisters and bay windows, chandeliers capping high ceilings and heavy curtains. Hard wood floors that creaked and dust that floated in the stream of sunlight, he’d stood at the back of the room with his arms crossed, where he could watch each reader at a lectern, only their heads and shoulders visible above the heads of the scattered, seated audience.

He’d read about the event online, went and knew no one there. Did not know whether to knock at the front door or let himself in, so he lingered on the porch

132 pretending to count sparrows in trees until other guests arrived, and he followed them inside. He chose to stand, though there were empty places where he might have sat, and he listened to the readings tensed, choosing not to observe, skittish on behalf of each reader, anxious that each might embarrass him or herself, a feeling so acute that he felt pre-emptive embarrassment for them, though in each instance it was always fine. He was not moved by what he heard, did not particularly like it. It did not compare to the books he read and re-read on his breaks and before and after his shifts. The classics, as he’d been told. But as the initial empathetic pre-embarrassment receded he’d imagined what the feeling would have been if he had been moved by it. Someone more learned than

Zeke might have characterized it as a second-order emotion. He imagined switching places with each reader, and liked the feeling, even if the audience that day was so small that the word crowd or even group or gathering seemed too large, too encompassing. He was in that frame of mind when the headliner—another inadequate word, implying pomp when such a small audience had eyes on him—approached the lectern. A young guy, someone named Joseph, who had just released a memoir, and who captivated the audience of seven or eight with a reading-cum-confession right out of the rap circle at an

AA meeting.

(A comment in red: “On the nose?)

Joseph had blown up weeks after that, but that night, just seven or eight of them in a living room. He’d have been lucky to make back the gas money he’d expended through book sales. Zeke had no idea the publisher would have covered gas money.

Post-reading, he lingered, bought a book (an expenditure which he would need to offset with an OT shift), got an autograph and left thinking about what he’d heard. He

133 took a business card from the man, too, wondering if this was normal. Do authors carry business cards, he asked himself, wadding the card up into his wallet? And why would they hand one out after you’d just bought their book? Isn’t that purchase their end game?

Zeke, who had until that afternoon spent much of his free time writing and then going to shocking lengths to disguise his writing activities, embarrassed that a man at his age and in his social position should still be scribbling in his free time, left that reading inspired, and confused, and demoralized. He did not itemize these feelings verbally, but

Gwendolyn—well-trained therapist—sensed them in his voice. Gwendolyn imagined him, during these phone calls, cross-legged in the midst of a pile of drafts, scraps of papers and notes to self. More likely all of these documents were stored on a computer hard drive, maybe in a hidden subfolder, but Gwendolyn knew that if anyone was still drawn to the appeal of hard copy pen on paper, it was this frequent telephone caller.

She was touched by this image, and yet wanted desperately to steer him away from it.

Gwendolyn’s experience was with the white collars of Alberta. She advised middle managers. She administered aptitude tests that told her clients to get out of Oil &

Gas and move into the spirits business. To escape O&G for fashion, or marketing. From

O&G to environmental advocacy, or from O&G to politics. A few days a week she consulted for companies themselves, coaching managers in the midst of lay-offs, conducting seminars for redundant employees on self-confidence, reassuring them that a man can do all things if he will, that they were the authors of their own stories. That their only stumbling block was their inner voice of despair. Gwendolyn genuinely believed all this, and yet as she ran this session, over and over again more times than she could count,

134 listening to each employee’s detailed plans for his or her own future post-layoff, even she was not immune to that self-same despair. She asked herself whether the world needed as many local tea shops, as many windscreen repair centers, as many Internet bandwidth resellers as the success of her redundant workers’ future plans necessitated. Struck always, Gwen, by the sheer banality of their deepest aspirations. And after thousands of these interactions, when one laid off employee stood up and said that this was a blessing in disguise, a sign from above, and that he was going to dig into his savings in order that he might finally write that novel that had been bouncing around in his head—the one about the beleaguered manager of a chocolate factory, the one that he always knew he wanted to write one day—Gwendolyn hedged and replied, quoting Maslow: “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”

Her husband crocheted Maslow quotations and strung them about the house like a grandmother might Biblical aphorisms.

That particular session crashed, and she never recovered that afternoon. Twenty- two downsized middle-managers left a conference room in downtown Edmonton certainly not thinking that they could move mountains—moving mountains being a central theme of Gwendolyn’s talks, accompanied by excerpts from the biographies of self-made men and women—but feeling as though they’d been crushed beneath one.

In her worst moments, Gwnedolyn thought they wouldn’t be wrong to think so.

Partly the voicemail messages and partly lingering guilt over that one interaction led Gwendolyn to call Zeke and suggest that perhaps she could help after all. They met in

Gwendolyn’s home office as they had before, a cramped near-closet in the back of their house, over which a Paul Klee print dominated. Zeke had managed slightly more

135 decorous dress for the occasion—sneakers (which he’d kicked off at the door, this being a residence) and jeans and a button-up, albeit one which suffered the same belly tightness problem as his work shirt. Periods of conversation elapsed during which Gwendolyn lost herself in the quasi-pubic curls of hairs protruding between buttons, and Zeke spoke while alternating glances between the expressionist décor and the antiquated, nicotine- stained answering machine.

To Zeke, there was something motherly about Gwendolyn, so much so that he began to conflate her with his own mother. The cookies certainly did not help with this.

But rather than this conflation opening him up it closed him down; he grew silent, sullen, searched for strategies that might obtain his interlocutor’s approval. Four, five times he began to tell stories—stories that Gwendolyn had already heard Zeke rehearse to himself over the phone, though she did not say so—only to stop himself and retreat, declaring that these details were boring and irrelevant. To which Gwendolyn was well-trained enough to shoot back with practiced sincerity in both voice and manner, that for the duration of their meetings she was there for his sake. Zeke asked how he would pay for these sessions, and she told him that he was deflecting. The scent of baking cookies lingered in the house; Zeke entered through a side door and wandered through the kitchen into Gwendolyn’s home office.

“Do you remember,” she tilted her pen back and asked, “when you were a child? I bet you were spontaneous. Exciting.”

Zeke sniffled and cleared his throat but did not answer.

“I don’t go in for Freud,” he said at last. One hand sat in his lap, the other pawed at knick-knacks adorning Gwendolyn’s desk. A handful of paperclips, a wad of rubber

136 bands. He disentangled one band and made as though to launch it with his thumb and forefinger.

She said: “One of the most difficult aspects of this work is that my clients need to overcome this idea that somehow they should have known what it is they should be doing with their lives. That it was some deliberate error or stupidity that made them miss their calling.”

“Oh but I know what it is I should be doing,” Zeke adjusted his seat on the folding chair opposite Gwendolyn’s desk.

She was taken aback. “You do.”

“Well, yes,” Zeke said.

“Oh. The writing?” she asked.

“The writing,” he confirmed.

“But what if this very idea of the ‘calling,’” she used air quotes, “is meant to torture us, is a notion that our lives can be revealed to us in ready-made form. Is a lie, in other words, that allows you to render yourself immune to confusion, or regret, or envy.”

Zeke shrugged, crossed his arms.

She noted the defensive posture in her ledger.

He asked, “What are you writing?”

She made another notch, but otherwise ignored him.

“What if you don’t want what you want? What if the grass is greener?”

Zeke said, “I think I know what I want. I don’t think it’s outrageous to suggest that grass is greener everywhere than it is inside a car parts factory.” But he was then

137 more confused than when he had arrived. “So where do you come in here? You help with contacts? Connections?”

“That’s not really what I do,” she tried to explain. “You called us.” She used the collective voice, though it was just her and her husband. It sounded more professional.

Some clients expected lavish headquarters, and the first-person plural was a way of softening the blow. She referred to a PC room where results were tabulated, but the aptitude tests were in fact all marked by hand, usually in the living room while she and her husband watched reruns of Law & Order, and then cross-referenced with a master list kept always in the office safe.

“I assumed you could help,” Zeke said.

“We can help. We have tests,” she said.

“Tests?”

She explained slowly, as though he needed time to process each word. “You state your desires directly, but how do you know those are your desires? The challenge of guiding clients toward more fulfilling vocations is that they’ve internalized concerns about money and status. It’s so hard to think authentically. We prefer a combination of aptitude exercises and free association.”

“Free association.”

“Think of yourself as a treasure hunter,” she offered, recycling a metaphor from one of her undistributed pamphlets, “and we’re like a metal detector. We amplify the blips of joy, you see.” She trailed off, realizing that the metaphor did not cohere. She tried again, “We’re holding you, and you beep when you’ve found metal under the surface.” Again she paused. “Let’s say you’re meant to be a politician—”

138

“I’m not,” he interrupted.

“But let’s say. Maybe long before you’ve joined a party or learned the political process, you get that little thrill from resolving a family dispute? That’s the blip.”

“My wife and I fight a lot,” Zeke said.

“I know,” she said. Zeke sneered. She coughed. “I mean. Just an example, is what

I mean to say. We’re here to find your blip.”

“I know my blip.”

“Well, let’s say that you don’t. Humour me?”

Zeke indicated that he was prepared, for the time being, to humour her.

Zeke twisted his wrist to check his watch as Gwendolyn withdrew a yellow legal notepad, tore off three sheets, and at the top of one she scrawled Things I Like. It was to be only the first of a series of gruelling ten-minute tests in which Zeke was called upon to list anything and everything that he liked, from the grand to the inconsequential. He wrote down Hemingway, Bukowski, economics blogs, bourbon, and women’s shoes.

After that came a list of all that he envied (without envy, she explained, there can be no recognition of one’s desires)—and, she warned, if his finished list did not include the names of at least three close colleagues or friends, she would know he was being evasive and sentimental. Zeke demonstrated no problem naming names. Then finally an encounter with that most respected of career counselling institutions, the Morrisby

Personality Profile, the grey lady of aptitude questionnaires, which asked him to find exceptions in lists and solve analogies, all in the pursuit of answers about his own working psyche. Heavy is to light as [blank] is to [blank]. Look at the string of beads.

139

Look at the first line of six words. Which of these tractor wheels turns fastest when the vehicle moves? Which of these identical cargo ships carries the heaviest load?

When the results came in days later, Zeke having returned after a morning shift, redolent in fresh lubricant, Gwendolyn slipped them across the desk to him in a bound folder and watched as he opened and read.

He read aloud in the stiff monotone of a man who understood but who approached the next word always surprised it was there: “The candidate displays average abilities which would render him well-suited to a range of middle-ranking administrative and commercial posts,” it began, going on to address “a particular talent for marketing and a weakness with numbers and spatial reasoning.” The candidate’s future, it concluded,

“may lie in one of the following fields: the leisure industry, medical diagnostics, oil and gas exploration, or automotive manufacturing.”

“Automotive manufacturing?”

“Yes! Exciting!” she gave a forced thumbs up.

“That’s what I do now,” he said.

“What a great fit you’ve already found!” she said.

He closed the folder and placed it on the desk. “What about the free association?” he asked.

“It’s all integrated into the report,” she said.

He picked it up again, opened, skimmed once more.

“What does this mean?” he asked.

“It means you’re well-suited to a variety of careers, in terms of aptitude.”

“But practically?”

140

“Practically,” she confessed, “You’re a bit more limited by your background.”

He flicked the folder shut, tapped its edge against the desk.

“A bit,” she emphasized. “With a strong recommendation, though. . .” She thumbed through her rolodex, though half-heartedly, perfunctorily, letting each card sit for a moment without reading it, then flipping to the next.

“No oil and gas,” he said.

“No oil and gas,” she repeated.

“Do you know any writers?” he asked.

“Do I. I’m not sure I follow. We’re back at this?”

“I think I want to be a writer,” he said. He stood and gathered his wallet from his back pocket. Unfolding it and rummaging through its contents, he whistled.

“That’s really not what your profile suggested,” she started.

“I think I want to, though. I feel the blip.”

“Perhaps you’re willfully misidentifying the blip?” she offered.

“I felt a blip at a reading.”

Gwendolyn felt that they were discussing the blip as if it were the twitching of a penis for a man suffering erectile dysfunction.

“But your aptitude profile,” she said, gesturing at the official-looking document,

“There’s nothing in there about that. About writing? I understand what you’re feeling, I truly do. But. . .”

He picked through the wallet and she offered, “You don’t have to pay. Consider it pro bono.”

141

He’d fished around, withdrew a few receipts, a pink insurance slip and a wad of unstuck Safeway stamps. Graciously, he replaced them inside the billfold.

Zeke repeated that he attended a reading once and that it really spoke to his sensibilities. He withdrew a crumpled piece of cardstock from the wallet. “Thanks for your time. But I know that what I want is to be a writer.” He extended a hand for a shake and she met his grip and he pumped their hands in exaggerated fashion, throwing her shoulder up and down. His hands were filthy, she noticed, the nails stained to the quick with dust and lubricant and metal filings.

“It isn’t normal to know what we want,” she found herself repeating, but he was already turned and halfway out the door and through the kitchen. She finished anyway,

“It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”

“I read that on the crochet,” he said. “You have a lovely home,” he called.

His voice passed backward through the walls of the home like it had on the answering machine had for many nights before—

(“Do you think this is mean-spirited, guys?” Heather asked in the margins of the

Google document (her contributory bubbles in blue, marked HJ).

“DAMMIT,” Raj wrote. All caps, followed by myriad exclamations.

Raj called a mini summit, a real-live conference. They gathered in the meeting room. Raj stepped out into the hallway and checked in each direction before closing the double-doors inward behind him and taking a seat.

“Here you go commenting. You’ve ruined the illusion of the story,” Raj said.

“Everyone else was commenting,” she pointed out.

“Actually, Gretchen wasn’t commenting.”

142

“Gretchen doesn’t comment on anything,” Heather observed.

“And everyone else,” Raj spat, “wasn’t making us feel bad about ourselves.”

“Yeah, but do you think he might legitimately be mentally ill?”

“We’re just having a laugh. Relax,” he said.

Wait. Gretchen was sitting there in the conference room too?

“I didn’t write anything,” she said, slow to the conversation. “I was just reading. I would consider myself an advocate for mental health,” Gretchen trailed off.

Heather turned at last to Will, silent and pleading.

“Maybe, guys. You know, I don’t know. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s not super nice what we’re doing here.”

Raj threw up his arms, exhaled, sent a chair spinning into the wall where it kicked up drywall dust. “Next she’s going to want us to get rid of the pool.”

“The pool?” Heather asked.

Raj had already left. In his place, only the proverbial cloud of dust. Neither Will nor Gretchen (of course not Gretchen) answered that the pool—the financial, not aquatic sort—had been created to lay wagers on who would quit or be fired next. An Adidas shoebox, taped shut, weighted with loose change and small bills and a miniature ledger on which wagers had been entered in blue pen, all currently locked up in the bottom draw of Raj’s ostentatious roll top desk.

Heather pursed her lips. “K,” she said to their collective silence.

Raj ducked his head back into the conference room. Pointing at Will, and then gesturing a thumb toward Heather: “I just wanted to let you know that I put $10 on her.”

* * *

143

High Times

It appeared, then, that the good times would never end. Fiction Factor was hotter than horse shit. Joseph’s words, repeated verbatim every rung down the ladder until people

Will did not recognize were wandering the hallways repeating “Hotter than horse shit.

Hotter than horse shit.”

Interns arrived.

Will assumed that everyone he did not immediately recognize was an intern.

Raj studied the business news sector, examined e-mails, watched for construction crews whose presence signalled imminent expansion. Construction crews ought only to herald expansion; deconstruction crews, if they existed, were preserved for the role of dismantling. Heather studied likewise, even more ravenously, to the point where she even scribbled notes on every spare flat surface. They reported their findings to Will: the hallways upstairs were filling up with suspiciously faceless people. Raj reported spotting a few of Joseph’s favourite hired models. JSI LLC had announced a contract for translation rights into twelve languages. The usual suspects: your Spanish, French,

Chinese, and so on. But also Latin and Plautdeutsch, and in the fluff pieces reporting on the news that Raj thrust in Will’s face, CEO Joseph Stieglitz was reported as expressing an abiding affection for the latter, which he claimed to have grown up around in Hutterite communities of Western Canada: “Telling stories is about more than the bottom line.

Fiction Factor has always believed in giving back and giving young people the chance to read.” The article omitted the brilliant flash of a smile that would have no doubt followed this pronouncement to an uncritical business press.

144

“Wait,” Will paused, scratched his head. He squinted at the wall over and behind

Raj’s slick black hair.

“It’s coming,” Raj could place where his roommate’s departed thought train was bound for arrival.

“Isn’t he from Toronto?” Will asked at last, jaw set in mild consternation.

“Yes,” Raj agreed, but betrayed disappointment.

“Isn’t written German just written German, no matter the dialect?” Heather interrupted, forehead over cubicle wall, at some point having been relocated next to Raj.

Raj perked back up. “Bingo!” he said. “That is my understanding, yes.”

Adding to the corporate wins: JSI LLC’s purchase of British imprint

McFarlacompne & Heisey, by way of a $4 million sliding-scale debenture in which interest rates would slide up and down, such that, for example, if you bought a six percent debenture and the rates went up to 11 percent you got 11 percent. With said purchase, an entire back catalogue of mostly spicy romance, ripe for North American reprints.

“Ought these numbers mean anything to me?” Will asked. A wicked math flashback for him, this all appeared to him, and he winced accordingly.

Will need not consult the trades or the best-seller lists to know these were halcyon days, for he had his own pet theory: when times are good, the meetings multiply. When times are bad, the meetings multiply. It is only when times are pretty okay that staff is left largely to their own machinations.

Had Will ever sat through so many meetings? He had not, and it stood to reason that absence of fear or anxiety or schadenfreude written openly across his coworkers’ faces during these meetings translated to only good tidings for JSI and its relevant

145 holdings pursuant to XYZ on so-and-so date for q value. Their dreamy, incontinent countenances reassured him.

In these sunshiny days there were, at a glance, mandatory meetings and there were optional meetings—but to be more accurate there were only mandatory meetings.

There were lunch breaks mistaken for meetings and meetings mistaken for lunch breaks.

Staff gathered around the kitchenette making it difficult for Will to reach the fridge and fetch his soggy ham on rye sandwich and he would ask, “Is this a meeting?” Meetings to announce partnerships, acquisitions, divestments. Here a meeting to announce that the

British acquisition would be folded into Calgary operations, effective ASAP. Here a meeting to establish a new chain-of-command. There a meeting in which Will crayoned spaceships on yellow legal paper and everywhere meetings in which Raj leaned over and fashioned the spaceships into crude genitalia.

Invitations e-mailed to request cordially (read: require) Will’s presence at a metaphorical ribbon cutting (was that to say an e-ribbon cutting or a ribbon e-cutting?) to establish Fiction Factor’s very own nascent film production division, embryonic

(theoretical, even) at this precise moment, but in talks with Hollywood players who just might join future meetings.

Meetings in which Hollywood players (“liaisons,” Joseph explained) followed through on that threat, via the power of Cisco teleconferencing, reassuring that “we wouldn’t want to do anything to interfere with the productive atmosphere—the creative model—that you clearly have working for you. After all, my kid, Stephen, he’s fourteen—a bit rambunctious, a bit rebellious, but I like to keep my pulse on what he says is happening—he’s fully telling me, ‘Dad’, he’s saying, ‘those Vampire Chronicles

146 books. They’re totally not lame-o,’ which let me tell you is high-praise from that son of mine, proud of him as I am.”

More meetings in which the Hollywood players™ speak in circles: “Yes, just listening, we here think inclusivity is key; we’re all in agreement on that front. The market research has really, you could say, confirmed the first impression that I got from my son, bless him. Fairies would definitely fall under the category of lame-o, and most respondents are unclear on the distinction pixie and fairy, which I have to acknowledge

I’m unclear on myself, but this is why we defer to you creative-types.”

Touch Base Tuesdays where the coffee and doughnuts were complimentary, and

Friday Follow Ups where their absence was palpable. Gatherings memorable only to Will for his choice of snack, whether old-fashioned glazed or plasticky fondant drizzled

Boston cream. A recurring joke: Raj cramming a honey cruller whole in his face and telling Will, Raj’s mouth full of baked good, crumbs raining onto his lap, “April is the cruller month.” Absent his favourite variety, a brick of apple pastry might do the trick:

“Let’s not fritter away the day.”

Will’s ass numbed through meetings to announce the de-escalation of printing contract quotas in favour of Libris Mortis’s acquisition of its own printing press, a used

RUIDA Joseph had tracked down at a high-volume print shop in the Beltline, and had talked the owner down to a paltry $23,000. Small change after a stack of corporate takeovers and new hires. The sequel: a meeting announcing a deposit on a small warehouse in the Southeast, accompanied by an optional-not-optional charter bus ride to and tour of aforementioned warehouse in which Joseph wore an orange hard-hat tilted rakishly despite the absence of any signs of construction in or around the facility. The

147 others looked around for their own hard-hats, found none. “Contracts leave us vulnerable,” he said.

“Who can you trust?”

No one answered.

“No one.” Asking them or answering on their behalf?

“The vision here: we’re inching closer to owning the means of production.”

In the mob of content associates, Will sought out Heather. Unable to locate her, he withdrew his phone and typed to her: means of production?

Echoic in the empty building, he parsed the source of her incoming message notification, a Super Mario warp woop-woop-woop.

Distracted, Joseph scoured the corners of the facility. “I’d requested a shovel.

Breaking ground, etc. How can you break ground without a shovel?”

Raj scheduled a meeting, the agenda for which explained that breaking ground typically happened before buildings had been erected; he circulated the meeting request to Will and Gretchen (who ignored it) and Heather (who laughed). Zeke asked what was so humorous, and Heather took pity and showed him. Shortly thereafter: a meeting scheduled to discuss company e-mail etiquette and use of resources.

And there were meetings, cult-like in the devotional tones in which they were carried out, announcing and refining an ultimate vision: of a day in the not-too-distant future when Fiction Factor could publish a book and then turn around immediately to produce a film version, which would then be guaranteed showings on pay cable television and commercial network television; when it could and would produce and sell soundtracks based on the franchise, develop spinoff television series, producing related

148 computer software (RPGs, FPSs), comic books, toys, and merchandise to be sold in its retail stores; all of which could and would be promoted cross-platform by way of its many media holdings, so that even poorly performing properties could potentially become profitable franchises.

The only concern, as far as Will had been made aware, was a rise in office thefts, a steep increase in mysterious disappearances that never halted (as Joseph had predicted they would) with the termination of the janitorial staff. However, the thefts were trivial in scope, and it seemed as though the items disappearing were items that might have been lost as easily as stolen: Zeke’s There’s Probably Bourbon in this mug, which he said vanished from the sink on which he’d rested it while occupied in the stall. Heather claimed to have misplaced a set of uncorrected proofs until she found them in her backpack, only to claim they had been actually stolen this time, two days later.

Ergonomic wrist guards, condiments missing from the kitchenette.

Will raised these concerns to Heather, who had lobbed out an alternate, super- secret activity (a date? not a date) in lieu of coffee, to which he’d consented without hesitation, until she’d slapped a blindfold on him and guided him into her Pontiac coupe.

“Is this necessary?”

“Absolutely. Super-secret meeting.”

Closing the passenger door on his behalf, he groped for the seatbelt while she trekked around to the other side. Fastened, senses heightened, the odour came to him of a well lived-in car, mingling waxy pine air freshener, stale coffee, dank body, and congealed fat. Then the click of her own door, the whiff of fennel and vanilla, an engine trying-trying-turning over. Generic alternative rock over the radio, turned way down. Put

149 it in drive, and they were off. She drove weavingly, braking and accelerating in sudden rushes that jarred Will. When he made a move to scratch his nose, she slapped his hand away from his face and he rubbed that hand, chastened.

Brightness behind blackness in all directions as he turned his head 180 degrees.

Occasionally the felt—never seen—shadow of a skyscraper or tall apartment whizzing by, fewer and farther between as the ride and the silence yawned.

“Where we headed?” he asked.

She shushed him.

“Right.” Will measured the trip in pop songs and condo commercials. He counted turns. Having lost track he identified the sounds of trains or busses. A few horns blurted.

The windows rattled and the engine meowed wetly, sticky with years of accumulated gunk.

Another attempt to scratch, another slap. Feisty.

“Is this—”

“What did I say about quiet?”

She had never uttered the word “quiet.” Will made a show: checking the dial of a watch he could not see. Heather clucked. The car slowed, made a soft right turn and then a left, easing, he presumed, into a parking spot. He’s counting the steps. Puts it in park.

Turn the ignition, pockets keys, opens her door. On the stroll to free him this time, he heard children’s voices shouting, laughing, and the overwhelming smell of fryer grease, fat, sodium, and questionable meat. Call it a hunch, but Will knew where he was, even if he didn’t know why.

150

His door opened; the catch is wicked-stiff, he can hear that it takes a few tugs, and the un-oiled hinges cry out in chronic pain. She has to lean over to unbuckle him; Will doesn’t help, only makes himself small and coils, inadvertently grazing face on chest.

“Sorry” he says and “whoop, sorry,” she says and he slimily inhales sweat and fennel and processed hamburger, mingled with the smell-less smell of processed American cheddar.

Then she whistles and he’s up and she’s threaded arms with him, guiding him through one door, two, and then another walk—the children’s voices louder, shrieking, and there’s the sound of thousands of plastic marbles grinding, roiling, whishing—and then another door and it’s all even louder, drowning out the “Welcome to—” greeting he was trying to parse on the other side.

“What a date!” he exclaimed stupidly.

“Shoes off.”

While pawing one sole off with his other two, he held his arms out for balance.

He hoped to grab onto her, but she had unhooked arms and departed like a ghost from his side, and it’s all air and burger, polyurethane plastic and disinfectant, melted dairy and children’s farts. He tilted dangerously. Crash, shrieking, the squeal of flesh on plastic and balls pinwheeling. One came to a stop at his toe. A garbage can wired with sounds begging children masochistically, sexually to give it more and the kids are happy to oblige, though the frequency of their deposits suggested it wasn’t only garbage they were depositing into the can.

“You can take off the blindfold,” she said and he did, and he’s where he expected but still cannot fathom why: the McDonald’s PlayPlace, at the edge of the great kidney- shaped pool-slash-pit of multi-colored, germ-warfare balls, Heather presiding as queen of

151 the ball pit sea in its approximate center, arms raised in triumph. A few children, a rival band for control of the pit stood nearby, measuring her claim on the Lake of Ball-topia.

Will spun, checked the “No Taller Than” sign accompanied by a set of rules, found it reached to just beneath his nipples, spun back.

Heather mimed a backstroke, impossible in a sea of balls, and thus she sunk to several fathoms. Then silence, a rustle. Then an explosion of red and green and blue and she emerged, tilting her head up, mouth open and subtly lobbing balls with a hidden hand as if spitting water from her mouth like a fountain. Orbs rained back down into the sea around her.

“Water’s fine!”

Will would have given anything to join in the ball pit festivities as a child, forced as he had been to look longingly upon it from beyond the glass enclosure. McDonald’s itself wasn’t an irregular meal, but his parents—hardly themselves germaphobes, particularly his grit-extolling father—forbid him from entering the pits on hygienic grounds. They’d heard stories: the pool of balls being dredged nightly of cheeseburger remnants, nugget shards and effluvia. Worse, the sea not being dredged. Worse, the legends of the kidnappers who trawled the PlayPlace for easy marks or—oh, and have you heard the one about the little boy who left a literal shit in the middle of the slide so that every subsequent slider’s emotional state ranged from highest joy to deepest sorrow over the course of one trip down the chute?

Will hesitated. With his toe he dipped ever-so-lightly in, as if he were testing the waters of some real whirlpool or watery grave.

“Are we even allowed to be here?” Will asked.

152

The balls stopped launching. “I’ve never been bothered.”

“So you do this regularly.”

“It’s my thinking place,” she confessed.

Will agitated the balls with his toe. She swam or plodded toward him. Violently, she breast stroked balls out of her way, reached the edge of the pool and made a grab at

Will, who recoiled.

A dismissive wave of the hand. “Oh, relax.”

“It just feels. You know about the germs? Kidnapping?”

“Listen, if it makes you feel any better, you can just yell at a kid. Then they think you’re someone’s parent.”

“Does that work?”

Her left hand went up, as if to say “allow me to demonstrate” and she scanned the crowd—wait, was she wearing a diving cap? When had she put on a diving cap?—and picked out a child.

“Hey!” she shouted. The child in question, climbing up the ladder to the tube slide with a deliberate care that suggested unease with heights, hadn’t noticed her cry or registered its direct relevance to him. “You! On the slide ladder! Red shorts!”

The child paused. Pitiably, he made the mistake of looking down from his stoop and betrayed agitation.

“Yeah, you. Pull up your pants and go wash your hands.”

The gap-toothed child considered these orders and their source, visibly battling through a series of competing emotions. On the one hand, he ought to listen to adults. But adults in ballpits? On the one hand, he had reached the age where he’d begun

153 experimenting, however mildly, with the miniature rebellions of middle childhood. On the other: so loud. Were his hands filthy? He almost removed one from a ladder rung to examine them, discovered too-late it had been his strongest remaining link to physical earth, and thrust it back around the rope death-grip tight. Then, finally, one the one hand: he wanted to slide. On the other: he seemed sure he could not bring himself to climb higher; in brief, he was in PlayPlace purgatory, and short of his parents’ arrival or an employee with a prodding stick, he was going nowhere fast.

“Go on! Get!” Like barking orders at a dog. Heather began a new backstroke. The child gingerly began lowering himself one rung at a time. Just as soon as he lowered himself by one rung, he stopped and reflected on what he’d done.

“Try it! It’s fun!” she told Will as she bobbed.

The group of children sizing up Will and Heather metastasized. Even those playing on the periphery of the ball kidney gravitated toward the group, which had quickly become animated. A few lurkers had given up on the vocal garbage can.

Will targeted a chunky, well-titted youngster with a buzzcut waddling in circles around the garbage can, inspecting for the source of its auditory emissions: a dwarf inside, maybe, or a speaker and attached wires.

“Hey you!” Will mustered.

“You got to say it louder than that,” she said.

“Hey you!”

“How’s the poor kid supposed to know you’re even talking to him?” Heather’s phone woop-woop-wooped. She retrieved it from her pocket, breaking the ball-water surface tension.

154

“Hey you. . . . Chubs!” As soon as it escaped, he slapped a hand over his mouth, but he surely won the kid’s attention, as the youngster turned wide-eyed to the adult who’d just called him a name.

Shocked at himself, Will lost steam. “Why don’t you . . . go play somewhere else?”

Kid’s face narrowed into folds, creases. “My mom says it’s baby fat,” he sneered.

Heather, mid-text, said, “Boy, this is really not going well for you.”

Meanwhile, the child on the rope ladder had decided his best course of action and burst into tears.

“You. Stop playing with that little garbage bin. Why don’t you . . . Go find your parents?”

Fat kid sensed weakness. Will reeled. Chubs pawed his hands at his chest, pushing his little tits together and out, made exaggerated kissy faces. Leaning at the waist, leering at Will, “Fuck you, you old fogey!”

Gasps from the Lord of the Flies society accepting membership applications in a sunlit northeast corner.

Glancing back and forth between the kid and Heather, eyebrows raised, pleading. psychically, but she was pecking out a message

“Where the fuck did you learn that kind of language?”

An even louder, vacuum gasp from the gallery; for a kid to experiment with the word, try it out, see how it felt rolling off his tongue; that was understandable. They’d all practiced these words before a mirror . . . But for an adult to repeat it right back?

155

Still the onslaught of child-boob kissy-face continued. The rope ladder crier calmed somewhat, his tears reduced to a sniffle and trickle, and he monitored this development, probing for adult weaknesses that might alleviate his mid-air crisis.

“You think you’re being cute, kid? You’re not being cute. You’re not funny.”

The kid raspberried, adding to the general accumulation of spit and germ in the glassed PlayPlace enclosure. Stomped his foot, removed a hand from his breasts and beat on the trashcan.

“Stop that.”

In a sing-song imitation, “Stop that?”

The other kids “ooooohed.”

“Can’t show weakness,” Heather advised, her phone safely in pocket, or sunk into the Mariana Trench of primary colours. Will, sweating, needed to know what she was recording.

“Shut up, brat.”

Still imitating, still striking away at the trash can. “Shut up, bra—“

“Listen, you little shit. Be nice to that trash can. That trash can is you some day.

Scientists from all over the world are going to study how it is you can keep stuffing shit in that fat mouth of yours and keep asking for more. Go away. Go to a Subway. Eat some fucking vegetables.”

The kid’s lip quivered.

“Jesus,” Heather said.

Tween mouths agape. The entire screed echoed in the high-domed cathedral ceilings of the sacred PlayPlace. The quiver escalated, then a high whine, and then the

156 flood: the kid bawled. On the rope ladder, the first child who had studied so intently followed his lead, and together their bawling drowned the room.

“That escalated,” Heather said.

“I—Yes.” Will gnawed on knuckle.

“You. You showed that eight-year-old.”

“I may have taken that too far?”

“Are you going to join me in the pool then, or not?”

Will hedged. “I think I’ve done enough?”

“Raj wouldn’t be such a chicken.”

“I’ve already done one intensely Raj-like thing today,” he gestured at the kid who’d puddled into a blob on the padded PlayPlace floor, legs crossed, knuckles pressed into cheeks, sniffling. Meanwhile, rope kid seemed to have learned a valuable life lesson: alone he’d be, profoundly alone, and the sooner he made peace with that aloneness the better off he’d be. He climbed gingerly down, no longer occupied by his personal safety.

The child’s fear of heights had been superseded by a deeper existential dread.

“Just get in the pool, dummy.”

Torn between impulses, Will registered and turned over each of the myriad desires besetting him: to try to comfort the kid, take it back, though that would be like unchopping a tree. To run, to Batman (verb: to disappear suddenly and without a trace) and vanish before the McDonald’s staff or a parent or a peace officer entered the

PlayPlace and the gig was up. To marvel in silence at the glass and plastic edifice of this

Toyland retreat-cum-prison and remark on its similarities to a tech start-up. Strongest of

157 those desires, however, remained the intoxicating allure of Heather, or his profound investment of self into a projection of Heather.

“Cannonball,” he managed weakly, unenthusiastically, and volleyballed himself up and into the waiting pool.

Make way for the quote-unquote splash. She waded backward a length and he hit, at once discovering the absence of surface tension and then, soon after, the shallowness of the pool as he hit bottom, his toes coming aground and legs folding awkwardly beneath him. Her show of treading water an illusion, as she’d been resting on her knees, straightening and unstraightening her back, mimicking bobbing. Will recovered, stood, found the balls came only to his waist at best. Smell of child’s sick and tangy grease and crisp shower curtain; he lowered himself to Heather’s height and tried a few lengths.

Back and forth in a straight line and then circling, recalling a childhood game: sprint around the above-ground pool, create a whirlpool, then fight the current. The pit felt slick.

“We don’t have much time,” she said seriously, shouting now over the distance and the din.

Halting, checking the status of the children, planning their ball-pit coup. “The kids aren’t alright?”

Will dove beneath the waves and attempted to impress with a split-leg handstand, spraying balls up and over the lip of the pool.

When he came back up, she said, “Do you trust me?”

“Sure,” he said, disguising excitement. She came closer, he brushed her.

158

“Let me ask you a question. How do you see this ending?” She’d backed off, pulled herself up and sat on the lip of the pool with her legs still dipped in. A nervous cycling motion agitated the balls beneath her.

Will retreated in mirror. “How do you see this ending?” he asked.

“Nothing good,” she shook her head.

“Oh.” Forcing casualness. Hung his head and started sorting balls. Green to the left, blue to the right, red down the middle. An impossible task. Sisyphean: the balls rolled back together, re-mingled.

“None of the math works out.”

“I guess,” he trailed off to chew on white thumbskin. Now or never. Put on your big boy pants.

“All of the numbers they’re throwing around?”

It dawned on him they had different subjects in mind.

“I can’t help but wonder how long before it all comes crashing down.”

“Fiction Factor.”

“Joseph, yes. And the various shell corps and subsidiary holdings,” she said.

“And you brought me here as . . . some kind of metaphor?”

“Listen, could you stop that—” he stopped sorting the plastic balls—“Thanks. Ok, so. No metaphor.”

In lieu of the distraction of sorting, Will picked up one ball at random and squeezed, testing its strength against pressure. The hollow ball dented, warped, but would not shatter or crack.

She clarified, “Honestly, I just like it here. Reminds me of home.”

159

“What you’re saying is we’re heading off a cliff?”

“Think about it.” Her kicks slowed from a thrash to a stable 4/4 rhythm.

“I try not to think about it.”

“Have you ever looked at the numbers?”

Will declined to explain his mathematical ineptitude.

“Do you even like what you do, anyway?”

Always asking questions he could not answer: that was why he loved her.

Thumbnail scratching over eyebrow: “It’s.” Long pause. The trash can chomped on some garbage, said thanks and begged to be stuffed fuller. “It’s complicated. Yes and no.”

“Here’s my problem: I’ve never seen you working.”

Fair point, Will thought. His desk had felt toxic for some time. Deadlines accumulated, but he’d discovered something strange: when they passed, no one said anything. Nothing happened.

“You’ve seen the display case. You’ve seen the proofs, the ARCs, the shelves.

You’ve seen the back catalogue. How many dozens of entries? Like, remember the one where the kid teams up with Shaq to fight the aliens? And then there’s the sequel, with

Lil’ Bow Wow. I guess he’s just Bow Wow now.”

“I mean, I’ve never seen any of you working.”

“You’ve seen what we work on.”

She squinted.

“You’ve edited our work.”

“And?”

160

“So clearly we do work, I’m saying.”

She scratched at the space above her eyes.

“Our process is complicated,” Will said. He extricated himself from the pit, climbing over the side and righting himself, almost reaching reflexively for a beach towel before recalling the pool was dry and he fully clothed.

“Your process is bankrupting you.” No, she corrected herself, “It’s not just your process. The whole business model is insane. How much did Fiction Factor pay for that imprint, whatever it’s called?”

“M&S? $4 something.”

“Million.”

“And where did that money come from?”

“Seed money?”

“Sure. But from whom? And also, seed money assumes . . . ” Heather, the ringleader, leading him along, step-by-step. She’s shouting, to be heard or because she’s annoyed at his opacity he cannot figure.

“That the company is worth that? Or will be worth that? Is this going somewhere?” Will squinted.

“Applause,” she said, but she did not clap. How sardonic of her. Delightful! She, too, stood, brushed her hands on the fronts of her jeans, and they found themselves shouting, echoing across the kidney ball-pit. “And now here’s where the quiz gets tough.”

“I’m ready!”

“I hope so. Who or what does Fiction Factor possess that makes them worth anything close to any of those numbers in the business magazines?”

161

“People!”

“You’re a liability, friend. Try again.”

“Intellectual property. The books, the—”

“In an age when intellectual property means less than it ever has in recent history.”

Counting finger-by-finger: “Office space? A printing press? Warehouse space?”

She mimicked his count: “Leased. A few grand. Leased.”

As though anticipating a trap, the rightful children of the PlayPlace were slow to return to the abandoned ball pit, but gradually they put their toes in, slunk in, and a few even climbed the ladder to the slide and followed its loop-de-loop down into an explosion of plastic. The fat kid had vanished, probably retreating to the safety of a parent’s embrace. The child formerly known as scared of heights still lingered, and eventually he too found his way all the way up the ladder and whooshing down and around the red slide. Heather walked the contours of the pool, joined Will on his side, and they came to sit at a low hard bench.

“Maybe we should eat?” he suggested.

“Good lord, no. That’s disgusting.”

The children bobbed, never quite letting Will and Heather out of sight.

She said, “One word: Priceline.”

“That’s two words.”

“One word. The company.”

“Alright. Discount airfare?”

162

“Sure. Or Pets.com or anything.com, for the story changes only once we pencil in the dates and the hard data. The skeleton’s untouched.”

Her phone woop-woop-woop’ed, which she ignored. Priceline, with its unbeatable deals, and not much more than a wicked algorithm, but by the end of its first day of public trading, valued at $10 billion. Valued higher than every major American airline combined. Airlines own terminals, planes, landing slots. Tangible, graspable: you can physically reach out and touch a plane. Priceline owned software and a couple of servers.

$10 billion, Heather kept repeating. In a year in which they hadn’t turned a profit—had in fact lost hundreds of millions of dollars. And yet the stock climbed higher still, sky-high, stratosphere-high, zero-gravity high, overtaking at least in theory the worth of the entire

US airline industry.

All despite the flashing warnings stated outright in its prospectus. Here, Heather fished out her phone, thumbed, and read aloud, her finger skimming beneath words.

“We Are Not Profitable and Expect to Continue to Incur Losses”; skipping down some: “Our Business Model is Novel and Unproven”; “We May Be Unable to Meet Our

Future Capital Requirements.”

“Oh, and here’s a good one,” she said: “‘Our Brand May Not Achieve the Broad

Recognition Necessary to Succeed’.”

On the spine of each book bearing Will’s name, the three black wedges on a yellow background, a brand summed up in a single image just as Shatner defined

Priceline or Pets.com and its talking sock puppet mascot.

Where were either of those corporate properties now?

163

No need for Heather to finish the story, because he knew how it ended: heartbreak, fortunes lost, stock trading at a buck a share. Never mind the airline industry, not enough capital to buy a lightly-used Boeing 777-300.

Nose crinkled. But the difference, even he knew: they—they being Fiction Factor or whatever banner it operated under in each new market—weren’t publically traded.

“Yet,” she said. What she hadn’t added, he knew, regardless. A difference only of degree, not kind, anyway.

“Why tell me all this?” he asked.

“You care more than you let on.”

“Nah.”

“Okay, fair. But.”

Easy to play along now, she intimated, when life was good or, failing good, not too tough. Sit at your desk, practice that too-cool-to-care air. But when it turned bad, what then?

“What you’re saying, essentially, is that we are in the midst of a speculative bubble around culture.”

She agreed, with one caveat: “If you call what you do culture. We should probably head back?”

She stood and removed her diving cap, mussed her flattened hair. One keen child seemed to be waiting for this break in conversation, signalling the other kids who had taken over rule of the ball pit, and they whispered among themselves.

Sidetracked, Will had not thought to mention the thefts. If he had, she’d have waved him off, pointed out their triviality in the face of a looming crisis. Unless, he

164 speculated that she might speculate, the thefts were just another sign of a sick culture rotting from the inside out.

Instead, Will wondered, following her lead, “Did we already invite you? You coming to our get-together on Friday?”

“Oh? I think Raj mentioned something, yeah. All speculative bubbles go through four stages.”

She listed them off, ticking each box:

Displacement. Tick.

Boom. Tick.

Euphoria. Tick.

On “Bust,” the children hauled back and bombarded the two with plastic balls. A poorly aimed flurry, but an effective assault, as it sent them scurrying, ducking, cursing fucks and shits to the PlayPlace exit.

* * *

165

Never Trust A Man Who Wants To Pay You For Your Work

Will was told by CW I instructor and then every peer and protégé after that, with all the demands pressing on a writer, the best one could hope for was to keep the flame alive.

Cliché, a banal platitude—Will discovered just how banal with each new YA heroine and each new metaphorical flame—yet repeated with such force, by so many, with such mantra-like namaste clarity that its truth value felt so interminable, and those who repeated it so shiny, indefatigable.

What no one told him, he reflected as he sat at his desk, prodding at the HTML corners of the world wide web, reading the ironically florid prose of writing retreats and their mission statements (“We develop multidimensional artists for the international stage in an artistically rich learning environment”), was how closely the flame and the fiscal fed into one another. A lazy twenty-something epiphany, generalizable way beyond the bounds of creative production, perhaps, and especially damning for Will to have blindly stumbled over this truth—stupidly, like a felled tree across a dimly-lit running path— after two decades of watching his parents labour without ever getting ahead.

But true.

Want a scholarship, his advisor had asked him in those more innocent days, tapping a thumb on the library carrel divider, and Will had nodded.

“Is this teak?” his advisor had asked, thumbing the material. Will had written this question down, underlined it. He sat in the adjoining study cube, chair pushed back, craning over into the carrel where his teacher—having abandoned his proper office in the

Humanities Hall for fear of undergrads—had set up his workstation. The logistics of a

166 one-on-one were challenging, particularly with advisor’s long legs tangling in nearby chair legs, but said difficulty functioned as deterrent, and therefore might have been the point. Will had only a few months before been another undergraduate, but an unspoken

“no offense” always painted the crags of his advisor’s face.

“What I mean to say,” the advisor had cleared his throat, placed his hands as if to puppet-master over the manila file folder, single paper-sheet thin, that held Will’s grad school project proposal, “is if you want a scholarship, you’ve got to get a scholarship.”

Like the scholarship within, Will almost wondered, but a pre-emptive, withering glance stopped him, and—between the death-stares of studiously studying students and the occasional hush, for the advisor had set up in the quiet study wing of the eighth floor—then Will heard hard truths, was ripped from Edenic ignorance into something much . . . grosser.

Money followed money, advisor thumped for emphasis upon the table. Will wrote that down. Trick them into thinking you don’t need the money.

“Tell me—” opening the manila folder, closing it, running thumb and forefinger around the contours of his open mouth, inadvertently catching tiny flecks of chum, which he then transported back to the manila envelope, darkening a small splotch—“tell me what’s this project achieving?”

“You’ve read it?” Will managed.

“I’ve read it,” advisor divested of more fleck.

“Well,” Will rested his notepad on tensed knees and gestured at the folder.

“Five committees.”

Will didn’t understand, and indicated as such.

167

“Along the way, you’re going to have to convince five committees that you’re worth their dollars. At least five. Five-ish, let’s say.” Snatching up the folder once more, putting it down with disgust, opened the folder, removing the lone page inside and held it as though with forceps, like a rancid diaper, tossing it dramatically. Unweighted paper, it whipped violently back, jerked by the gust of his own motion and the circulating central heating, and landed on his own lap.

“I’m working on a novel.”

“That’s really not going to make them cum, Will. You need to make them cum.”

A few students glanced up from their scratching pencils. Will’s advisor studied a rash above his watch and decided against itching it.

“So what do I do,” Will asked.

“Fuck, Will. I like you, I really do, but you’re killing me slowly,” pointing at the rash.

Unsteady, Will began to pack his items into his backpack.

His advisor stopped him, apologized.

“You’re working on a big story. You’ve just got to tell the right story, is all.” He motioned for Will’s effects, and scrawled in them. He spoke and gesticulated and licked his lips.

“Committees fund projects that generate profits,” he explained, scrawling this point, writing a neat “1” beside it, and then circling repeatedly the number, underlining it for emphasis.

“Novels don’t make profits,” Will protested.

“Exactly. Which is why you’re not writing a novel.”

168

“I’m not?”

“You’re doing research. Your project is about metaphors for human cognition.”

“Metaphors for what?”

“You’re thinking bottom up. Think top down. Think, ‘how can this be monetized?’ Think, ‘potential applications.’ If it helps, think ‘military-industrial application’?”

Like, Will wondered, “Novel bombs?”

Will’s advisor rested the notebook and paused to consider, exhaling a slight whistle, wheezy through compacted nostrils. “Don’t be glib. But then also, sure, why not?

The US military plays popular music at high volumes on repeat to weaken prisoner resistance. Fleetwood Mac. ‘We Will Rock You’. ‘American Pie.’”

“You’re suggesting my novel is torture?” Will had thought about snatching his notebook back.

Hands up, defensive, as if to suggest you said it, not me. “It might aspire to torture.”

“Those are my only options?”

“O&G is big? Maybe the great oil-patch novel? Sympathetic to the exigencies of the energy industry? We are all, after all, caught between competing impulses. On the one hand to do right, and yet on the other, how to do right, when we ourselves are so infinitesimally . . . speck-ish, if you will.”

Will had protested that he just wanted some freedom, space.

“And you’re not listening to me. I’m practically laying a strip of road for you to get there. Keep the flame alive? Get the hordes off your back.”

169

“Still,” Will said, but even he knew the meeting had finished, had perhaps finished several minutes prior. Behind his advisor, the window looked out on waif-like trees of fragile constitution, brutalist buildings, goose-shaped specks, and a creek splitting campus in two. From Will’s vantage, he studied the health building, stupidly constructed on a mossy islet at the creek’s fattest dogleg, accessible only by a sliver-ridden bridge of porous lumber.

“Save them money or make them money. The way I see it, Will, those are your two options. At least until your name means something. Does your name mean anything?”

Will had conceded it didn’t.

“Thought not. Then you’d be worth keeping around. Trot you out like a show pony. Give speeches to the donors. Obfuscate our institution’s unquenchable financial thirst.” He leaned back, crossed his arm in a manner indicating the finality of his judgment.

“And if I refuse? Like on principle?”

His advisor scoffed, numbered items finger-by-finger. “Rent’s expensive. Food’s expensive. Shoes are expensive. My nasal spray is expensive. Plus it reflects poorly on me, you know. I’d really love to keep you on, Will. But we’re in a hard place. The humanities aren’t sexy any more. We do what we can to survive. Poorly lighted strip joints come to mind. You catch yourself wondering: are you here for the titties, or are you here for the lunch buffet?”

Will could not be certain whether he was the dancer or the lunch. But fine, he thought. He stood, brushed invisible crumbs from the seat of his pants, and held out a

170 hand to his advisor, who remained seated. Thrust the folder into Will’s palm instead of his own hand, managed a “Good talk” and turned his attention to a co-ed crossing the floor, Will unsure whether the wolfish gaze of his supervisor was more taken by the buttocks of the student or the greased-up paper sack of A&W provenance wadded into her hand.

For an answer: he had stood, pointed, “God DAMN IT, there is NO hot food allowed in the study wing!” and Will thought, not for the first time, that he tended to put his fates in the hands of untrustworthy giants.

Co-ed scattered and Will’s advisor scrambled after her, winded by a fight with his chair. “So help me fucking god, if you bought onion rings!” He wheezed wetly, fatly.

Will backed up, back against the push bar of the stairwell doors, and slipped away unnoticed.

Fine, Will thought once more, and that was all he thought for the next several days: down the eight flights of stairs, returning home, ingesting a cocktail of No-Doze and Carling, writing and re-writing a proposal that would make them cum. Scratch those plans for a history of mimesis—too ambitious, both heavy and unsexy, a project dressed up in a potato sack burlap dress. A collaborative novel—had the sex appeal, the wikis and the 2.0s and datastreams; interfaces and “buzz”; but then he wrote in the first instance to avoid collaborating. Scratch that, as well. Three more iterations, three more projects of various legibility: the economics of storytelling? What did that even mean? An investigation of time in story? Power in story? 2,000 words sprayed rapid-fire, a functional Works Cited page, then deleted.

Fortuitously, he found it at last: corporate storytelling.

171

The proposal began, “Corporate storytelling is about winning . . .” and it did not stop winning for two merciless, single-spaced pages. He wrote, incomprehensibly, at one point, that “corporate storytelling relies on facts, never fiction.” His eyes twitched and escalating gassiness nearly ejected him from his own bedroom. He nearly erased the sentence, held the cursor over it, but stopped, and huffed a few laps around the room instead. Did a few push-ups. Monitored the status of a brawl brewing in his sinuses.

The proposal ended with a declamation that “In business, as in life, nothing’s better than a good story.” Will hit “Send” on the e-mail without proofreading, tried to sleep, and when he failed at trying to sleep, he tried to eat himself into a food coma: sprinkling red pepper flakes on refrigerator pizza, eating a few slices of buttered bread.

He called and ordered more pizza. Nothing worked, until he threw up, oddly calm about it, resting his forehead on the cool porcelain between heaves and counting out the seconds like contractions.

His advisor responded after a several-day delay and lied that he’d damn near jumped out of his chair at reading it. An onslaught of links followed: grants for which

Will might be eligible.

“Now, you’re an English student,” his advisor noted conspiratorially, as though

Will were himself not aware of this terminal diagnosis, “But I think we might be able to sneak this grant application into the business stream.”

And indeed they could.

And indeed the money came, it rained, and then more money came. The Associate

Deans said, “Let there be light,” and there was light in Will’s apartment, paid for by tri- council funding, and processed, ketchup-y foods in his fridge as well, and cartons of

172 vermicelli that—showing off like Mr. Moneybags—he left in the rear right-quadrant of the fridge to spoil and throw out without even a cursory sniff test.

The money did more than fill his coffers. It tripped a wire in his brain and changed his approach. Where once he might have simply opened a Word document and begun typing, madly, dosing himself, forgetting the need to eat, sleep, to paw himself or micturate, he found himself instead opening a document, writing the theme as a header, and then watching helplessly.

“Corporate storytelling,” he typed, and then sat back.

Beset by competing urges he could only later have identified: the urge of the faithful student, striver, overachiever-keener, to simply do what had been asked of him.

The parallel urge of his father’s codified ethics, passed down unconsciously, by repetition, by dinner-time lecture, by punishment, to the son. By the running commentary as he turned the newspaper to read beneath the fold. His father, who still ascribed to the unbreachable sanctity of the handshake, the old-fashioned insistence that, stripped of ornamentation and affectation, all a man had was word backed by deed. When business took a turn, despite his hard-won, weary conservativism and anti-labour inclinations, he stewed at the dining room table. Elbows propped, calloused fingers, bulbous and arthritic knuckles intertwined, and lower teeth pressed into upper lip, he did not say a word for an hour or more. Life around the house went on without him. He might have rubbed the skin on his hands raw. Finally, he stood. He concluded that he could not, in good conscience, ask the union to reopen their contract to negotiation. They had struck a deal. It hardly mattered that circumstances had changed irrevocably since. The big distributors loomed, hoping to push him out or acquire him—and then push him out. The entire industry

173 limped. The boys in the warehouse might bleed him out, halal-style, but what else could he do? All he had, he repeated, was his word.

His mantra. All he had, he told Will’s mother over dinner once more, in response to each of her objections, was his word. Will chewed and listened.

All Will had, in contrast, were his words, and the perpendicular impulse that the true calling of any artist was only to cause a little chaos. Raised in an immaculate household as he had been, however, chaos enervated him. Relegated as a child to the cracked concrete of the unfinished basement whenever he produced his Crayola set, made to sit always at an antique desk and forbidden entirely from access to Play-Doh or chewing gum or Nerds candy for their various mess-making capacities, Will inherited here, too, the neuroses of his parents. The school desk was a hobby horse of his father’s.

He rescued it from a school slated for demolition, and spent months sanding and refinishing its craggy, paint-scarred surfaces. He spent hours at the desk, tracing some of the juvenile graffiti he had added to the desk’s undercarriage. When Will visited on

Christmas break, he visited the desk in the basement (new home, same cracked concrete, same musty subterranean corner) and sometimes sat in it. Maneuvering his long limbs into the narrow aperture between seat and table, it might be more accurate to say he wore the desk than that he sat in it. He considered asking his parents to ship the desk to him, for it might contain something he lacked.

Will thought: CV rich, cash poor.

Idea bankrupt.

Cash poorer, then, when some faceless bureaucrats, administrats (Will neologized as his one creative endeavour of the calendar school year), turned off the spigot. “We

174 regret to inform you,” the letter began, and thus Will slouched back to the Humanities building and cornered his advisor, whom he found, fatly slinking, or slinking as a fat man might (though he was not so fat at all)—behind a brick pillar, conceptualizing his exit from the building, past the department office, where the first carafe of bad office coffee was percolating and stinking, past the Humanities theatre, where an Intro to Psych class was milling, and toward faculty parking. When he saw Will, he raised his hands in a you got me motion of surrender and laughed, but his eyes continued scanning for escape routes.

“Let’s walk and talk,” he huffed, and he darted for cover behind the next pillar.

Will followed and explained the situation.

Compelled by self-interest to propagate myths regarding the indolence of poets,

Will’s advisor woke every weekday before the sun rose, procured four cups of XL coffee at the Second Cup drive-thru, arrived and began work in his office before the moon set, mainlining caffeine, and sought to put in three or four hours before the English department office officially opened for business. For the rest of the day, he vanished from the Humanities’ building’s narrow rooms and L-shaped halls, embracing instead a sort of

Witness Protection-inspired presence on campus, alternating library floors and church college outposts, hosting his office hours like a hipster’s pop-up shop, announcing by e- mail blast that for a limited time only he was available in Coutts Hall. Twice a year he delivered bouquets to the girls in department administration, overflowing affairs in lead- crystal vases whose floral selection was as expert and expensive and exotic as it was deeply-coded, pulling from plant species out-of-season and out-of-continent to communicate messages that each of the administration gals thought for her: camellia in

175 pink and white, for longing and more benign admiration; acacia in dazzling yellow, to be read as a secret desire or merely chaste love; dandelions for happiness, grass—grass!— for submission; red roses for love and respect. The arrangement went on, but the request that accompanied it quite brief: if they could find a way to schedule his classes either very early or very late, that would be fabulous.

By this strategy, he maximized student attrition and minimized departmental exposure, for the air of the Humanities Hall during regular business hours he found to be anathema to his nasal health, and this only partially owing to the asbestos removal taking place on the third floor, the inoperability of his casement windows, and the leak of brackish water browning his ceiling tiles.

At an easy jog, Will found it difficult to explain exactly how it had happened, and after several false starts—and several feints by his advisor, purporting to turn down one hall and then cutting across the next, Will in pursuit, projecting his voice—he found himself reduced to listing extravagant, frivolous purchases. A remote controlled quadcopter. Neckties in three shades of red. Four pairs of Levi’s in the same colour.

Single malt scotch, exclusively on the grounds that he had decided to develop a taste for single malt scotch, and then more single malt scotch even though it all tasted faintly brown, and like grazed-upon grass and salt-lick and intemperate BBQ flatulence.

A few undergraduates poured through the heavy fire door leading into the main hallway of the department, chattering, and Will’s advisor spun, pretending to study, closely, a notice on the faculty bulletin board. His nose touched the paper. Will waited, arms crossed.

“Well. Just turn in what you have,” he’d said.

176

Will confessed he had nothing.

“Scraps? Rough drafts?” He thumbed the paper of the notice for an Arts Café, smelled it or just snorted back some phlegm, announced the cardstock’s weight at 80 pounds, maybe 215 GSM.

Sadly, no, Will admitted.

“Nothing?” Imperceptibly, he’d slithered to the door and snuck a foot in to prop the door just a second before it clicked shut. Poked a head outside in both directions, and with finger to lips, he motioned for Will to follow.

They crouch-walked, crab-walked, in military formation. Murder on his joints, particularly his knobby little knees. “Well, the good news, Will: they can’t ask for the money back.” He made more hand-motions: pointing at Will, then pointing right.

Indicating himself, then left. Will nodded, but kept left, kept pace. His thighs burned from the half-kneel. His advisor huffed with exertion, sweating visibly, saltwater drenching the collar of his sport jacket.

“They can’t?” Will whispered.

“Nope.” He held up a hand, stopped beside a humming water fountain. He stood, took a slurp from the water fountain, and resumed his crouch. “They can make your life a bit more difficult.”

“Oh.”

“Just send me what you’ve got.”

“I already said I haven’t got anything.”

“I meant the scotch,” he laughed at himself.

177

They had reached the back staircase and his advisor bounded down the steps.

Will, shorter-legged than his advisor, stumbled, nearly tumbled, twisted an ankle, rasped a knuckle over brick while reaching to steady himself, cursed, flailed once more and caught the bannister, righted himself, and continued his chase through gritted teeth, eyes watering, limping, but his advisor had already vanished, the door swung shut behind him.

Will stopped, sat on the step, and studied the white lines of torn flesh on the knuckles of his right hand, made a fist. Reticles of small red wetness swelled and with the fingers of his left hand he touched them and wiped them away. He wiped too, the sweat from his brow—whether flop sweat or from genuine exertion—and realized he’d likely left a streak of crimson paint across his forehead.

And then the door opened again, only partway, and the rising sun shone through.

Wrappers and sun-baked leaves of brown swept in through the crack, and a disembodied voice spoke to Will thusly:

“It doesn’t have to be good, Will. It just has to be done.”

Will wondered whether this might be a hallucination brought on by acute pain or unexpected exercise, or from the mixture of Zolpidem and VIVARIN he’d been alternating since the regretful letter and the festering dis-ease it foretold. But the pain was not so bad as that, and he felt comparatively level, and his suspicions regarding the genuineness of the experience were confirmed when the voice cleared its throat—hooey, thwap, fluid splatter against Humanities’ red brick exterior—and continued on after an interval.

“Seriously, though,” it said, “I was absolutely not kidding about the scotch. I cannot emphasize enough how serious I am about the scotch.”

178

A good book was a finished book; his advisor had been correct, though perhaps in a way he had not quite intended. Presently, flash-forward to cubed institutional digs, Will continued grazing on a list of 25 MUST ATTEND writing retreats. Right-clicked on the link accompanying each entry, opening a new browser, tabbing between browsers.

“Between sessions, we offer you time to find inspiration and write in an unforgettable setting as well as show you some of Iceland’s natural and cultural sites.” Not bad, Will bookmarked that link. So if it all came full circle regardless, why not skip the agony of the flame and follow the money in the first place: good enough for street-wise Baltimore narcos, good enough for Will, who mistook cash for kindling, and could churn out a space opera bildungsroman at an eighth-grade reading level well enough to fool a few folk about his own level of competence.

The task he found, at first, less challenging than he’d anticipated: take a quote- unquote classic of the genre, pull it apart, examine its innards and reassemble it beat-by- beat. It struck him as humorous, then, that he’d taken after his father in that way, yet only poetically, at a metaphorical remove. Left to repair a lawnmower, install RAM, or apply grout to the wall tiles in his bathtub, Will floundered; show him a story, though, and he could plot it visually from memory, in whichever graph form you’d prefer. An impressive talent, his instructors had conceded, save for the new problems his savantry of plot created: namely that the tautness of the cables he laid left no breathing room; his characters never did much of anything except for what the plot required of them. They bounced along, were jostled, empty vessels fated to journey to the next planet in the star system, only because Alpha Centauri-III was where the Galactic Conference took place, and they had to interfere with the proceedings of the Security Council, though why they

179 might be compelled to rough up a few space senators never added up. A colleague in

Creative Writing I, himself a CS major with a bent for social commentary sf, had compared it to computer programming: Will could get the software to do what he wanted, but only through brute force—page after page of inelegant code which looped back on itself in an endlessly recursive manner. The instructor of Creative Writing II nodded at the analogy but offered a tweak by taking it in the opposite direction. Maybe it was that his code worked, but that it was terse and functioned only within a very narrow set of parameters. No depth, in other words, no transferability or applicability outside of the narrow purview of keeping (in this case) Lieutenant Souillere from reaching the tunnels beneath the POW camp, though that was where the Lieutenant desperately wanted to be, this being the narrative of what Will thought to be his strongest submission all semester.

All surface. Which come to think of it, the professor quipped, jibed peculiarly, ironically, with the subterranean shafts whose construction formed the backdrop for the work under workshop.

Will clicked to the next retreat. “Talent, but also truthfulness generosity of spirit and an awareness of the infinite range of approaches to the literary arts are the traits we look for in both our faculty”—the blurb here, ominously cut off, a victim of late 20th century HTML rendered in a 21st c. virtual world. In the left column, a banner ad in the familiar black and yellow of Fiction Factor, advertising one of Will’s own books back to him.

All in all, not the worst problem to have, in his new field, his lack of a writerly third-dimension, for young people (he imagined, minimizing his interaction with any live specimens in the wild) forgave plot holes more readily than professional peers, youngniks

180 being much more enamoured with surfaces both shiny and worn, and besides which, teenagers were emotional cyphers anyway; readers interpreted his own misperceptions as a writer for the emotional confusion of his young heroines themselves.

So: money buys you time, but it’s a classic deal-with-devil, because what it gives with one hand it takes away with the other, in the form of a shift, of a day at the office:

Just as the spread of railroads normalized clock time in the 19th century, the train station became the locus for the mechanization, the standardization of time, and just as the fact that every human carries a time-piece suggests synecdochically man’s sublimation to temporal technology, so too does money become the locus for walls of time falling in on the faintly claustrophobic Will.

Measurements of time have always been built into human history; time gains historical quality. In Madagascar, a temporal unit exists that is equivalent to the time it takes to cook rice. In Will’s mind, a temporal unit once existed which measured the completion time required for a writing project. It was a hazy measurement, strung together by sense impressions: his head on the cold hardwood floors of his one-bedroom rental, ceiling-pin-prick-counting, disinterested penis fondling, the eye-crossing mist of hangover lifting, the tickle of a stomach, empty, and the vista of days and days stretched empty as fresh canvas, aggressively friendless, jobless, broke but not poor, thanks to a sympathetic OSAP adjudicator, in which he might labour undisturbed, or smoke a J, or watch Sportscentre.

Then that measurement morphed, imperceptibly, when the scholarships poured in.

And it morphed once more when the money ran out. Don’t ever tell Will that time isn’t a social construct.

181

Ask him how long his thesis took to write and he’d shrug.

Ask him how long he took to finish a Fiction Factor project and he’d produce his time-sheet—old-fashioned, pre-digital, foolscap length, green-on-white hours clocked.

Now, he thought, a unit existed which measured only time spent not stoking the flame.

Because that’s what it came down to for him, the feeling that—however hackneyed—he ought still be finding ways to feed that stupid goddamned flame.

He’d finished the thesis, earned the degree. “Earned” a failure of nomenclature, maybe. The defense itself a farce of high seriousness in which the internal-external

Skyped in (“on vacay,” she explained), dopily wearing wraparound sunglasses and a gauche Hawaiian shirt, sipping a tiki drink with pineapple garnish, despite the view through the window behind her betraying the fact that she was nestled in her office two buildings over. Will’s advisor had changed the room of the examination three times, settling finally on a third-sub-basement nuclear bunker-style seminar space of rebar and concrete in the Engineering quad. In the midst of the light grilling, as of a fresh fish, he studied the building in the background of the coarse videophony footage—the building in which he sat, deep underground, considering on screen the building, in the distance, in which he then sat, ad infinitum. Mise en abyme, placed into abyss, might not have been the most technically accurate descriptor of the phenomenon, for being underground meant that he could not locate himself through a window, studying a Sony screen, considering a building in the background, etc., but provisionally at least, it worked. It captured his sense of dislocation, his unmooredness. He both knew where he sat and did not.

182

The English degree had been a lesson in Economics.

His advisor might have posited it as a degree in Compromise. Will wanted to write one novel; he told funding agencies he’d be writing a different novel. Ultimately, they compromised: he wrote neither novel. For this, they rewarded him, put his name in a program and attempted to rent him a gown at a fair price, awarded him another scholarship. For timely completion, the e-mail said. Thick white envelopes arrived in his mailbox, each offering exclusive member benefits for new graduates. Take advantage, one piece recommended, of alumni healthcare benefits from Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Another promised a $1000 discount on a new Ford; some restrictions applied. Jostens speculated that he might want a class ring or photos, or a letterman’s jacket; Will imagined a left arm patch on beat-up cow leather, one which read CREATIVE

WRITING.

Had Will thought about making a donation to his alma mater?

He had not.

Having been rewarded for his failures, he felt no sense of how to navigate the outside world. He returned to the recursivity of the examination room and the Zapruder- quality webcam footage and the building which housed the bunker-ish seminar room. A place which was no place. And when he set about to keep the flame alive, he found that if he had internalized anything from those two years, it was the worst of that recursivity. To begin a project was to try to know that project’s end, and then to place himself at each plateau along the path of its composition. He finished every project before he began it, and by that process he failed to begin any project; he could not help but continue the

183 habit of writing, in the running header, some big IDEA he wished to explore/examine/study/address (to use the language of the institution).

It was what he found himself up to now, in the office, on an early afternoon over which a loud silence had descended.

He wrote WORK in the header, all caps just like that. Hit the return key.

Déjà vu spun in his chair. Craned his neck to observe the bank of frosted fluorescents and counted to ten, returned to his screen to watch the exploding dots in his vision, green and black bulbs in the vague contours of island nations. Kiribati flickered beneath the word WORK. Cuba at the bottom edge of the window, long and supine above the page count (1 of 1), word count (1) and language (English [Canada]). Tabbing over to the Web, he googled “work,” which produced almost 7 billion results, topmost the music video for the song of the same name by Rihanna. Then he narrowed: sociology of work, literature of work, Men At Work (who come from a land down under). A rumbling in his tummy returned him to the open text document, in which he proceeded to cycle through languages, from Afrikaans to Yoruba.

He wrote, after some self-coaxing, “Never trust a man who wants to pay you for your work.”

Buttocks clenched, straight back, wrists flat, he scooted back, reclined, lifted a shirt and probed violently for belly button lint.

Coming up empty, he turned instead to his meagre possessions. In his top left desk drawer, stacks of works-in-progress. Carefully separated, the drawer beneath contained proofs, outlines, spec treatments which each bore the name and logo of Fiction

Factor. Will made sure to keep the two worlds physically separate. He dove back into the

184 top drawer and skimmed out a number of pages. These were not literary works, but poetry of a different, mercenary sort: an accumulated list of Before & After phrases he had been composing for the makers of Wheel of Fortune. Never a fan of the program itself, Will nevertheless appreciated the compression of language involved in this particular category, and had taken to mailing submissions unsolicited to the producers, care of Sony Picture Studios. So far, each had been returned unopened: the first accompanied by a friendly note explaining the legal circumstances that prevented Wheel staff from accepting fan submissions and a glossy 8x10 of Pat Sajak (signed); the second repeating the explanation of the first, this time with signed glamour shot of Vanna White

(signed); with each successive missive growing terser, and star photographs going un- signed—or worse—featuring coded, threatening messages.

Below Pat’s semi-realistic flesh-like face and hand-carved marble teeth, one read in loping Sharpie script:

“Cut this shit out, Will.”

It was signed, “Love and Peace, Pat.”

This one he tacked to the felt cube wall.

Despite his unacknowledged contributions, Will felt, nevertheless, that he was coming into his prime as a Wheel writer, and he skimmed through his best work, each pun separated by a hard return “Christopher Walken Dead” “Common Sense &

Sensibility” “Kanye West Edmonton Mall.”

Will needed a snack; he set out to find a snack, and instead found himself studying the newly minted, newly monstrous Keurig machine, tapping buttons and wondering at the planned obsolescence of coffee. No sign of donuts and the fridge had

185 been freshly emptied of refuse. Even the baking soda—he took a sniff—smelled sparkling new.

Will needed to lose the distractions: he located a conference room and locked himself inside, barricading the doors with rolling chairs. Then, deciding against it, scattering the chairs and pushing the table in their place instead. Then he considered on what surface he could work, and dragged the table back to the center of the desk. At this point he had worked up a disconcerting sweat.

Will needed space, so he found a perch outside, and the wind shwooped his hair around. Flecks of pollen battered his face, and his laptop battery died.

Will needed to be home, alone, because that was where Will got real work done.

Hoping Raj was out, he set off by bicycle, messenger bag slung over shoulder and pant leg rolled up. An affectation, given the bike’s chain guard, but also a habit. He rode south, hit 12th and rode the cycle track west breezing through downtown, his dedicated lane separated by concrete and midget-height stanchions draped in reflective 3M tape. By his peripheral vision shot chic retro diners, condominium towers of an earlier wave.

Chain pubs and their collected hordes of outdoor smokers dwarfed intersections, and groomed bushes of water-wise green, fringed with lamb’s ear and feather reed fenced parks. An awning featured the curious street spelling “Twelveth.” Schools, benches, art installations and squat jerk chicken joints. Chalkboard easels outside the latter advertising the rotisserie special, and a scrap of paper smeared with bird shit, collateral damage of targeted avian dive bombs, promised free ice cream in the name of early spring.

Will’s voyage was a straight-shot down 12th by bike, complicated only by the sudden termination of the bike lane, a poor bit of urban planning that required riders

186 either to veer left and down a side street or to be thrust out, at 11th street, unprotected and unwittingly into oncoming one-way traffic. Despairing of traffic lights and the sequence of lefts required only to return him to the street he already trod over, as he often did, Will rode straight-on, metaphorically white-knuckling while in truth loosening his grip, letting go, and riding balanced, arm free into traffic. He closed his eyes. Horns honked.

Deep breath, exhale, and then he veered up onto the sidewalk and rode onward, through a red light, around a chow chow and its owner, by a few gravel lots, and finally to the brick fourplex whose upper left unit he shared with Raj. By the time he’d wrestled his oversized keys out of his front pocket and into the heavy exterior fire door, while keeping his kickstand-less bicycle balanced with the remaining hand, and propped said door with ass, in order to ease his bicycle inside (he locked it, over the landlord’s objection, to the wrought-iron handrail), he’d caught the attention of his downstairs neighbours, whose door whooshed open with an accompanying cannabis reek.

Yuri gestured inside, toke in one hand, tallboy of Pils in the other.

“Not today,” Will said. “Work to do.”

“Too bad. Your,” he’d searched for the word. In his accented English, settled on

“thing.”

“Right,” Will agreed, figure-eighting the chain-lock around the handrail, through the wheels, and eyeing escape upstairs.

“Well,” Yuri told him now in a miasma of smoke, “Take this. You’ll need this.”

Fat joint inserted in his mouth, he snickered, and reached the now-free hand back, groping blindly (eyes up, as though trying to remember spatially where he’d placed

187 something), settling on said something, and produced another can of Pils. He expertly popped the tab with one finger and presented it as a gift.

Will protested for a moment, graciously accepted, and stalked upstairs.

“Vodka?” Yuri called after him.

Tempting, but no.

The beer sat on his desk, cool to the touch. Yuri did not believe in cold beer; he was cold beer agnostic, had never witnessed a can stay in his fridge long enough to get cold, and so could only speculate as to whether it was possible. It was possible, even, that the preference had some dietary basis, an old-country belief that foods and drinks served too warm or cold angried the digestive system. The nice side effect of Yuri’s belief was the lack of condensation, which was considerate. No dribbling beer commercial-porn moisture formed rings on Will’s accidentally antique, potentially even valuable, furniture.

The down side was the taste, and thus Will felt relatively untempted by the beverage as he set up his laptop rig.

Neither Raj nor Gretchen (nor Heather, he suspected, by only looking at her, but did not know for certain) experienced this sense of time opening before them: they had a task to do, and they did it. He supposed he did not know for certain at all. When they had spare hours, they wrote (he imagined). They disappeared (he imagined) into their cubes or their bed-chambers and they emerged, vole-like, with manuscripts of startling wit and polish. Raj vanished every now and then, but Will preferred a world where the absent Raj was doing anything else. Will felt professional envy, and yet also understood how pathetic he seemed: how flaccidly his rhetoric fell in the face of his persistent failure to

188 perform. Much of his envy, too, stemmed from sheer imagination, masturbatory self- flagellation to assume that he alone struggled. He alone failed to perform.

He corrected himself: Failure to perform, or unwillingness to perform? Anxiety over how his performance might be perceived. The knowledge of an exact arc, predictable and banal, and when he completed his task he would look back and think,

“Gawd, I knew exactly where that was going. Why bother?” A pawed at pudgy little dick, refusing to engage (refusing to engorge) because it was only doomed to disappoint.

None of this was flattering. None of this made him unique or interesting. Leave it to Will to locate writerly metaphors in a dick.

He leaned over the table—he’d been pacing—wrote, “Displacement” on the word processor screen. Turned over the possibility that poetry might be for him and filed it immediately away as a wickedly bad idea.

Instead, he called his mother. Something-something Freudian. She picked up on the second ring; he thought she sounded harried or hurried.

“If it isn’t my favourite son,” she said. She’d mastered Caller ID; Will registered unease at her word choice.

“Hey, ma.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Just saying hi,” Will said.

“Money? Need something from the basement? Because too bad, it’s all gone.”

She laughed with an edge. Stacks of boxes still occupied the crawl-space beneath his parents’ basement stairs: books, abandoned campfire cutlery, possibly a guitar and/or a mismatched ottoman. His mother’s near-constant threat that it was all going to the dump

189 next x. Sub x with “spring,” or “after Christmas,” “after we finish the reno”; rinse and repeat. Christmases come and gone, and the animating spirit of spring cleansing had become less militant in recent years, and thus Will’s stuff always survived. To Will’s knowledge, no renos had been completed, though a few had been started. His father, when stressed these days, which was often, took to planning elaborate construction projects, reaching the demolition stage, and then abandoning them for lack of budget or interest. The basement shower had been crowbarred out years before; since then, the timber guts and piping had been covered only with a drop-cloth which breezed when the heat or air conditioner kicked in.

“Nothing like that, ma,” Will said.

She sighed. Will imagined her looking at her watch. “It’s not my birthday and it’s not Mother’s Day. But dad says hi.”

In the background Will heard a grunt, maybe a burp.

“I can’t just call to check in?” Will had grabbed a broom and dustpan and began sweeping; he found himself chronically unable to speak on the phone without cleaning simultaneously. The phone itself he kept wedged between ear and shoulder, resulting in a kind of wounded, bestial loping as he crossed the floor fsh-fshing dirt and dust into neat ant-mounds.

“Anyway, whatever you want, make it quick. I’m packing,” she said.

“What for?” Will brushed at a smear of sticky brownish fuzz on a tile. When the splotch did not give, he leant into the sweeping motion, grinding bristles over and into the gunk, which must have been caked in. Still it did not give; he made a mental note to break out the vinegar and a rag.

190

“My SkillPath Seminar.”

“You’re saying words,” Will said. He progressed strategically from the kitchen and into the narrow hallway. Digging at cobwebs.

“It’s their annual Conference for Women.”

“Right,” Will studied a desiccated insect corpse and wondered not for the first time what a bed bug actually looked like.

“I’m networking with women like me. Let’s face facts William. I was always running to catch up because I focused so much on raising you.”

This was not how Will recalled his youth.

“But I’m not getting any younger, you know,” she continued. “I think now is really the time for me to get ahead. I have a lot of potential and because you’re all raised and we’re adults here—well, I don’t want to say you squandered it.” She trailed off, but the way she said the word made it clear that was precisely what she wanted to say, and so

Will finished the sentence.

“But I squandered it,” he said. By this point he’d moved onto the shared living room and was taking wild swings in the gap between the couch and the floor. He skirted the perimeter of the area rug. Dank pot resin odours seeped through the floorboards.

She sighed again, louder. Will thought this petulant.

“How’s dad?”

“He’s your father. You could talk to him. How’s Raj?”

“He’s Raj,” Will inspected the crop circles of dust he’d gathered across the apartment. He hopscotched between them, back to the kitchen.

“I like that Raj.”

191

“I know, ma. I’ll tell him you said hi.”

“What do you think? Pantsuit or power-skirt?”

“I am ill-equipped to answer that question.”

“The conference is in Toronto.”

“Hmm.” Will located the vinegar and splashed a few drops on the floor fuzz.

“Do you think your father will be alright?”

“That doesn’t sound like the concern of a strong, independent career woman. Do you know anything about insects?”

“He’s been a bit down recently.”

“So for cleaning, do I just use vinegar? Should I be making a watered down solution?”

“The work weighs on him a bit. How things have been. He’s worried. How’s work?”

“Dad’s old school,” Will reassured her.

“I tell him to take time off, but he won’t. He says it all goes to hell without him.

Last time he took a week off, this was years and years ago, all those shipments of fake llama fur were misdirected to Thunder Bay instead of North Bay.”

“What do they need llama fur for in Thunder Bay?” Will asked.

“They don’t. They were misdirected. I wish you’d listen better.”

“Right,” Will said, “I meant North Bay?”

“I could have used some llama fur. Boss still cut from the cloth of tyrant patriarch?”

192

Will became defensive, and he could not have said why. “He’s not so bad. Show me someone paying writers, and I’ll show you a hero.”

“Not all subjugation is slavery. You still haven’t told me why you called,” she said.

“Aren’t you happy I have a job?”

“Exceedingly, yes,” she said dryly. “Again, your reason for calling is . . .”

Will grew livid, picked a bit at the quick of his thumbnail, said, “Dammit mom! I just wanted to say hi!”

“I’m not dumb, William.” Will hated when his mother used his full name and was about to tell her as much. “You want something.”

This time, he sighed.

“Don’t sigh like that. It’s rude,” she said.

“Right. Truthfully, ma, I do not want anything,” he answered honestly, “Cross my heart.” He touched a socked toe-tip to the floor fuzz and it seemed to loosen. The wet sock he hopped up and down on one foot to remove; flinging it in the direction of his bedroom.

She scoffed and she explained: “You’re lying, William. And you don’t even know you’re lying.” This was the voice of his empowered mother. Good for you, he thought, when she told him about her retreats and her conferences. But did she need to turn its edge to him? “You called because you wanted a pep talk.”

“Can’t just be a good son? Dropping a line?” Will only ever got so far as assembling the dust piles before growing distracted. He thought about making pasta,

193 grabbed for a pot and set it in the sink under the running tap.

“I can hear it in your voice. You sound like lost puppy.”

Karate chopping the faucet to stop the flow, he decided against pasta, but let the pot remain one-quarter full. Instead, he returned to the broom and renewed sweeping.

There was a religious fervor to his sweeping.

“You want validation. You want me to tell you that you’re talented and bright and you’ve made good choices. That you’re a hard worker. You want me to reassure you.”

“Well,” Will conceded.

“So I am not wrong. Will, I’m going to tell you something. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Will rolled his eyes.

“Are you really listening?”

In a childish sing-song, he replied, “Yes, mo-om.”

“The best years of my life—I spent those raising you. I didn’t complain. It was what I had to do. You do what you have to do.” Slowly, syllable by syllable she said this, as though Will were special, needed the repetition. “I—we—fed you. You were always happy. I’ve raised you, and now it’s my turn and—”

She hesitated.

“Frankly, Will, I’m tired. I don’t have time to hold your hand. I don’t have time for pep talks. I’m making up for lost time. You can’t make me ma again. I won’t have it.

I am becoming the me I need to be.”

Will suspected this might be a slogan for one of her clubs. She’d chastise him, too, if he’d called them clubs. Professional organizations, sororal groups, please.

“If you need advice, why don’t you go to your father for advice?”

194

Will imagined the apelike grunts they might be able to muster, he and his father.

Will’s father may have believed that a man’s word was his deed, that all a man had was his word (and so on), but he was suspicious of them all the same: he circled them like a wounded enemy. He behaved as though they might lash out the moment he eased up, and thus used them sparingly.

“That escalated quickly,” Will managed a joke.

“Don’t be clever. It does not become you. You’re smart,” she said. “You were always smart. Sometimes we didn’t know what to do with you. But I can’t hold your hand. It’s embarrassing. Frankly, that’s just how I feel. You want to be liked. You want to be loved. But you don’t ever put in the effort to be worthy of those feelings.”

Caught in an argument he didn’t know he’d been having, Will leaned against the kitchen counter. The broom handle he pressed his breastplate; he felt the pain of the pressure. The speech had a rehearsed quality; she’d been waiting for the opportunity to deliver. He could only imagine at whose prompting.

“But so,” he said slowly, weighing each cracked word, “I am an adult, yes. You don’t cease to be a mother at that point. You’re still my mother.”

“But I’m sure as shit not your ma.”

“So I am, you’re saying,” Will, trying to understand, iteratively, “forbidden from seeking parental instruction or guidance.”

She corrected him: “You’re forbidden from soliciting a parental pity pardon.”

“I’m not sure where this is coming from,” Will managed.

“Frankly, it’s just how I feel,” she repeated. “It’s how I’ve been feeling for quite awhile now.”

195

“You know I love you, ma,” he said, feeling dumb, like he was chewing on a wad of duct tape, only in his stomach—a bit higher than his stomach. Like he’d thought to drink the warm Pils on an empty stomach.

“I love you too, William. But if we’re being honest, a lot of time I don’t much like you. I need to be me. It’s time for me to be me. Grow up.”

2000 kilometers and more between them, their conversational data broken into a digital signal, broadcast over-the-air, making the air thick. Will found it tough to breathe.

“Ma,” Will swallowed, said at last, “I’m the only son you’ve got.”

“And dad’s the only father you’ve got. Call him.”

She ended the call. There is no conclusion to a phone conversation so unsatisfying, he thought, as being hung up on from a phone that cannot be slammed into its cradle. That sudden sound of no sound in his left ear was eerie at best. No match for plastic-on-plastic, the shaking of the electric bell, the loosening of American-made parts.

Yet the disappointment no doubt cut both ways, for how much satisfaction did the slammer him or herself derive from this little act of catharsis? One was liable to break a finger, or at least a fingernail, taking out one’s aggression on a touchscreen smartphone.

As he considered the touchscreen of his own device, the front door opened and

Raj strolled in, whistling, smacking an envelope in an open brown palm like a fat stack of cash. He spotted Will, who was pointing at the nearest undisturbed dust mound, stepped directly in it, looked down and smiled anyway.

Then he gave Will a head-to-toe scan: one sock, one bare foot, plum red tomato face, mad scientist smile, rheumy eyes, can of cheap of beer.

“You’re home early,” Raj said.

196

“Good news?” Will croaked.

“This?” As though surprised he’d been holding anything. He held it up for Will to study. “Notice of acceptance. Just a little poem.”

“Just a little poem?”

Raj still stood in the dirt pile, careful to leave it undisturbed, as though a cultural anthropologist, studying the mores of his own home. Observe the damaged Will in his native habitat.

“Oh yeah,” he confessed, “I took a Coca-Cola press release and I just ran every word through a thesaurus.” To Raj’s credit, at least he betrayed a certain sheepishness about this decision. Ashamedly, he pinched on the flesh at the back of his neck. Bit his lower lip and stifled an aw, shucks smile. He might have begun tracing widening gyres in the dirt pile with his boot, had not so much accumulated dust sat underfoot.

Will set his jaw. He searched for his best retort, but all he could muster was this:

“Well, that’s something.”

Raj changed tactics. “I see you’ve been cleaning.”

“I have,” Will conceded.

“For the party?” It came to Will’s attention that Raj was rigged up with a backpack, and that said backpack’s contents bulged the canvas material at its seams. And clinking, too. The contents of the bag were most certainly clinking with each of Raj’s most minute postural shifts.

“What—fuck.”

He closed the computer clamshell, rubbed his eyes, ran with the chewing duct tape feeling, and finally took a pull of room temperature beer. It was less than not great.

197

Raj said, “There’s the spirit!”

On to the kitchen Raj skipped, to denude himself of the heavy burden of his bag.

At least, Will decided, Heather would be there. Heather might make it better.

“What do you think?” he nearly asked the garish can of red and green and yellow.

“Transference of your feelings for your mother, who has rejected you, onto another woman,” the can told him, “Nice.”

“Fuck you,” he told the can.

* * *

198

And After All

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a house party if they had ordered it.

“Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud!” Raj had set down the backpack on the kitchen floor, producing further clinks. Kneeling to work at it, he gave the zipper a tug. It only caught on a bottleneck as he attempted to open the sack of goodies. Zipped it back up and back down until it rumbled over the blockage and revealed, inside, a menagerie of high-octane party fuel. A few in glass, more in fat PET plastic (bulbous litre-plus of glacier-something vodka, with short, thin necks and screw-on plastic caps), some random aluminium cans. Will loomed over Raj’s shoulder. He noted to his roommate that the fridge was empty, the cupboards bare.

“No chips,” he said, for example.

“No problem,” Raj replied.

They set up their home for the receiving of guests. Liquor on the kitchen counter, mismatched glasses. Will fondled ice trays; Raj shovelled beers and a token bottle of white wine into the fridge’s darkest recesses. Caught between the BYOB college party and the grown-up dinner party, Raj split the difference: he’d stock the booze, but under no circumstance was he prepared to feed a living soul.

BYOC, he’d explained; bring your own chips. Or ciabatta, or cheese plates, or— he licked his lips—rotisserie chicken. He really hoped someone might bring rotisserie chicken. Will, himself quite hungry from a diet of warm barley soda and not much else

(not even a digital coffee from the digital Keurig), could endorse a juicy chicken.

199

What were they celebrating?

What did you have?

After-work activities had long been augmented by after work drinks, not mandatory but strongly encouraged (though not by management). But not too often, of course, for both financial and health reasons (they told themselves—among them were joggers, vegans, Paleo enthusiasts, and cross-fit converts), and even these were suspicious outings, filled with mental calculations regarding who had paid for a round, who drank the special or the premium, and who called it a night just before their turn to return to the bar. Conversations about the significance of drink choice: premium vs. domestic, wine vs. beer. Who had the happiest happy hour? Well, if you wanted a pint, here was your destination. But that didn’t leave much for the wine lovers, did it? And what about those who wanted only to gnosh on a few hot-wet maple-chipotle chicken wings? Only fair, then, that one day they hit National, and the next they might stroll over to Proof. Zeke professed partisanship for any dive with a “beer + brown” special. The interns were aggressively easy. One night a week became two, three, and Heather tabled for conversation that she genuinely could not remember the last time she had gone more than a calendar day without a drink. She was getting squiggy about it, the non-word she used; Will agreed; Raj agreed; Gretchen said nothing (“hey everyone! Gretchen came out tonight! Good to see you, Gretch!” they cried, and she mumbled that she’d been there every night) and they collectively agreed that they all were not so young any longer. Look around the beer hall and ponder the demographics of a busy bar at 5 PM. Stuck, they were, between tattooed frat brothers, and tailored execs taking calls and twirling

200

Mercedes key fobs. Happy hour dissolved under the rain of a certain shame about who they were and where they were in life.

But when God discontinues a drink special, she opens the Calgary Beer + Spirits

Bodega two doors down from your apartment, and invites you—nay, begs you—to throw a house party.

Not a dinner party (it is crucial that the party “begin” after 8 PM, or guests will expect to be fed something more substantial than tequila shots), but a classic rager, a bro- hemian bacchanal whose ostensible intent was to say farewell to their prolonged adolescence by behaving, one last time, like adolescents.

An Irish wake for their asshole teenage selves.

The hordes descended on Will and Raj’s home (begrudgingly, Will sucked up the dust piles with a vacuum cleaner; he’d contended they were “conversation pieces”), and they cheers-ed, clinked glasses. “I’ll never drink again!” they held their heads and mimed that hungover lie.

“It’s you! Hey it’s you!” Will found himself saying as virtual strangers crossed the threshold, dumped their shoes in a pile (desert boots; Vans; chucks—the ladies at least offered some variety). “How have you been?” and then, mid-answer, he’d gesture at the half-full cup in his hand and he’d sneak off to the kitchen and describe the intruder to

Raj.

“Bald? But, like, deliberately bald? Could grow hair if he wants to? Muscular teeth.”

“Tanned?”

“Well-tanned, yes.”

201

“Don.”

“Gotcha, right.”

Wandering off, then returning: “. . . and Don is?”

Rinse and repeat. Not everyone deserves love; not everyone deserves garden- variety like, Will was thinking between sips. Waiting for the people whose names he actually knew, and one-by-one they did arrive. Fashionably late, a few with gifts of cheap merlot. “I’m into really loamy wines right now,” he’d repeat with each new offering. He held out hope for snacks, ranked arrivals to their face by what came bunched in their palms: a fruit plate? He could work with that. Chips were fine, unless someone got cute with the baked stuff—or worse, air-popped rice petals whose branding invited participation in shared flavour delusions. In every case, guests bee-lined into the kitchen where Raj had set up, playing amateur mixologist, working through a list of clever and lethal high-school originals: whatever’s free + whatever’s handy being an old favourite, but also orange drink + tequila, and a Raj favourite: Crystal Meth, a stolid pint glass of bottom-shelf vodka into which he’d stirred several individual packets of Crystal Light

“Water Enhancer”™. Not yet 10 PM (never particularly quick with analog watches, he took a minute to confirm), and Will was on his second glass of the stuff, which coated his mouth (and caked his lips, makeup-like) in the worst way, inspired senseless aggression, and which spoke to him from the glass, burbling nightmare pink in a voice very different from the Pils, that tonight was the night to make his move.

He was fucking likeable. He bet he was likeable fucking. Ha ha ha. What did his mom know? He was the best to be around. He livened up the place, made people laugh.

202

His joke about loamy wine, for example. Had he mentioned his taste for loamy wine? He had? The bald one had smiled. Don was the bald one.

Recall of names was key to being perceived as likeable.

Zeke arrived. Classic Zeke, empty-handed! Gretchen, too, and other unrecognizable faces, or maybe that was Gretchen; no, he was speaking to Gretchen right now, and then Heather. Heather! Who smiled politely and indicated the drink powder colour of his lips, and then proceeded, like the others, to the kitchen, to congratulate Raj on his newest literary success. Yuri, too. Must have heard the commotion; always game for chaos, Yuri arrived with a handle of vodka. Unlike his beer, well-chilled. The hand wrapped around its neck red from contact with the icy bottle. Will and Raj had been cleaning for hours, and yet Raj must have snuck away at some point to announce his poetic breakthrough on social media. Will decided he needed to take a leak, which he did

(avoid the mirror, he repeated to himself; at this point of the night, the mirror is a trap, and again he laughed to himself), pinballed into the kitchen in search of a glass of water.

His lone good decision of the night, he drank down, greedily, while contemplating how it came to be that their modest kitchen had become the proverbial clown car, into which the entire staff of Fiction Factor had somehow packed themselves, arms and legs all akimbo.

Bodies, well, disembodied, and yet tangled too. And while he sucked at the glass of water

(was he sure this wasn’t more vodka? No, but it was a high school party, right?), he scanned, listened. Caught oddments of conversation loosed like bowels into the hot room.

Will wiped his forehead, returned to the faucet for a refill.

203

Raj and a rando in conversation, foreheads nearly touching, hushed, on the topic of Zeke. How old was he? Did he have a family? What, medically speaking, was wrong with him: the strange outbursts. Who just . . . leaves a stable job?, Raj was wondering.

Will sidled, said too-loud, too close to Raj’s right ear: “Let’s go to the replay and find out!” and then laughed.

He remembered the book in his desk drawer. “Sorry,” he still shouted, “Just, uhh.”

“You alright, bud?” Raj asked. Draped his arm over Will’s shoulder. Will took this as invitation to drape his own back, explain, “Never better,” but he was watching

Heather and Gretchen. Heather grilling Gretchen, like some hard-nosed investigative reporter, Gretchen shrinking.

Gretchen was swirling white wine and explaining, each sentence a question: “I think it’s a nice thing to pay down, when you can, but it’s more an abstraction? Whereas credit card debt? That’s more pressing, right?”

“But you’re not paying those either?” Heather said.

“I’m more anxious about them,” Gretchen mumbled.

Over in his own corner, a kind of jerry-rigged kitchen-table banquette, Zeke grunted, finished his drink.

“Student debt follows you. Doesn’t go away,” Heather said.

“No one much bothers me about it.” Score one for Gretchen.

Will interrupted: “The idea that any country would ever call in its debts? Silly.

Would set off a disastrous chain reaction.”

Heather: “I’m not seeing the link.”

204

Will sipped, nodding along in agreement with himself. “I’m just saying. Do I look like I’m in any shape to have kids to whom I could even pass debt on?”

Zeke was pointing at his empty tumbler in Raj’s direction, rolling his finger in a keep-it-coming motion. Raj let go of Will, and, after an awkward moment, extricated himself from under Will’s leaning hug. He signalled back to Zeke, the two miming drink selection without words.

“They call in my debts, and I’ll call in theirs,” Will said.

“You’re comparing yourself to a geopolitical entity,” Heather said. God, she was lovely.

“Sure,” Will said.

Where had Gretchen gone?

“And saying the government specifically owes you something.”

“What about my contributions—” stumbling over contributions—“to the gift economy of the nation? How do you put a monetary value on the pleasure I give? What is lost when you attempt to translate a gift economy to the private sector?”

Zeke, whose own attention had drifted to this exchange, offered his own hot take:

“I am startled by the stupidity of this conversation.”

“And I am merely suggesting that I deserve to be paid a living wage for doing the labour I was educated to do,” Will said.

“And I am sympathetic to the claim . . .” Heather paused.

“Okay,”

“. . . But I feel that you’re a dumbass,” Zeke interjected.

205

“Fair point,” Will was acknowledging. Then shouting, “This is boring. I’m bored!”

Will proposed picklebacks: unenthusiastic acquiescence from the crowd. Fearless,

Will mixed another Crystal Meth, hold the Crystal, mostly. Spilled some in, some missed, some sat in a mound on the narrow rim of the glass. Empty packets of the stuff littered the counter; the gritty dust of the crystals on his hands and on the floor and he’d just swept! Turned back around to face the room and the room dodged him, so he turned twice more, and there it was: gotcha! And who was the asshole in the suit talking to

Zeke—the coiffed hair, the coat and tie—Joseph? Fucking Joseph. He tugged at Raj’s sleeve: “You didn’t!”

“Relax, chief.”

“I will not relax!” Will insisted, but a sip quelled his thirst and he decided he could not be sure it was his boss. But just in case he shouted: “Hey you!”

“You’re really getting into the spirit of the evening,” Heather smiled.

“Thanks! Thanks m’lady!” Will said. Now or never: “Remember the ball pit?

Listen: we should, you know, sometime—”

But someone else, maybe it was Yuri, was rounding up participants for a favourite drinking game, and Will bobbed.

Zeke and this stranger (maybe it wasn’t Joseph, but just in case, Will shouted after him, “My mom says you’re a misogynist windbag!”; the recipient of this pointed critique averted his gaze) were on the move to the living room, where they studied the shelves of books. Pointed out the real reads, ran a finger over spines, noted the shelves occupied by

206 fewer books and more knick-knacks. Will found his phone in his back pocket and withdrew it to call his mom. No answer.

He texted Heather, “Hi,” heard a hoot across the room and gawped idiotically in her direction. Check your phone check your phone he was thinking—more than thinking, he was visualizing.

These were boom times for Will.

Someone had stuck their iPhone in a dock and had called up a playlist of R&B favourites. Yuri’d darted downstairs, waking his girlfriend (if she’d been able to sleep through the commotion upstairs), and returned with video game console and accessories: cords and controllers x’ing his chest like bullet belts, all of which he unstrapped when he reached forward operating position, i.e. the Zenith CRT monolith that sat permanently anchored atop a cabinet whose doors were no longer hinged or fastened, so to speak, as they were gingerly placed in hopes they would balance. Expertly unspooling wires, Yuri proceeded to knock over one of the doors; he studied the little connectors, snuck a head between the TV and the wall, counted, and signalled that he needed a second. Back downstairs, some shouting (in Russian and English, indecipherable; broom handle banging on first-floor ceiling—she was definitely awake now), and Yuri returned with a different A/V connector contraption, one more sympatico with the monstrous retro television. A breeze from that point on, console plugged in, cartridge inserted, three- pronged controllers unknotted and plugged in. Last step was the television itself; Will located the remote in the couch cushions, between someone’s legs and lunged for it. The

TV bampfed into life; a white cross on matte-black background that supernova’d into low-resolution RGB colour.

207

The game—and Will announced that he was going to absolutely kick all of their asses at it—was called Drinking & Driving; the point of the game the point of all drinking games, but the means involving Mario Kart. The rules, such as they had been formalized: 1. Begin with a full drink; 2. Race the circuit; 3. Finish your drink. The only catch, Yuri added excitedly: you cannot hold both your controller and your drink at the same time.

Yuri positioned himself, cross-legged on the carpet in front of the screen, leaning forward to hit the switch to activate the console. Will joined him, positioning his glass at the ready and studying the controls in his hands. Raj, finally coaxed out of the kitchen joined, as did Heather. Yuri played Mario Kart as Toad; he said, “I always choose Toad.”

Will chose Mario—because he was the hero, and hoped that Heather would pick Princess

Peach, but she did not. She opted instead for Bowser, and Raj—snickering—chose Peach for himself. Yuri selected Bowser’s Castle as they debated strategy. Could you steer with your feet, maybe? Maybe run the race, stop at the split second before the finish line, and chug your drink (Will frowned at his own concoction, and his stomach heaved a bit).

Wait-wait-wait, let me freshen my drink; anyone need a freshening? Will content to sit and wait, breathing, his teeth and gums hairy, checking his phone: no call-backs, no message-backs.

Zeke held some hardcover, said his favourite drinking game was the one where you just drank your beer.

Drinks topped, Heather seated herself next to Will, groaned and went cross- legged. Her jeans practically pasted themselves to her thighs; the carpet stunk of bodies

208 and spilled morsels. Will hated the fucking carpet, and punched it. Raj glanced, asked,

“You want to sit this one out, bud?”

“Suck it,” Will said. He steadied his hands, checked his watch without registering the time, waited for the countdown on the split-screen.

“My problem,” he said loudly and to no one in particular, “is that I refuse to use the brakes.” He thought this sounded wise, repeated it again, to himself.

Euphoria, he thought.

“And you’re a shitty poet,” he slurred at Raj, as a brightly coloured “GO!” appeared on-screen. Taken aback, Raj had mistimed the button combination that produced the rocket start at the beginning of the race; Will cackled, and the various sprites, their karts—Will’s included—shot by Raj out of the gate of the starting line. Will mentally pumped his fist; at his present level of inebriation, this required physically pumping his fist, and he nearly knocked his drink onto the carpet pile. He caught it instead (couldn’t be too drunk! Still got the reflexes!), realized he held both controller and glass, and panicked, he flung the former aside as though it had been bug-infested. On- screen, his sprite stalled, the others rode past him; he squeezed his eyeballs and drank his glass down in one slick, unpleasant inhalation. Pawed for his controller, just out of reach, grabbed it, and was back in the race, building speed in a straightaway. He screamed, “Pit stop!” and the others tensed. Heather paused to take a drink at the end of her first lap.

Will’s sprite took a turn too wide and bumped a wall, losing speed. Raj braked elegantly, drifted through the sharp hairpins. Yuri, middle-of-the-pack, adopted an unconventional strategy: stopping at each turn to put down his controller, take a small, sophisticated

Russian sip, and then resume his journey around the track.

209

Will drove through a mystery box, picked up a blue turtle shell. The blue shell!

The deus ex of Mario Kart. He who possessed the blue shell deemed a pixel god. Will basked in warmth. He was, come to think of it, very warm. He was leaning into turns now, inebriation and excitement combining to reinforce an old habit—physically moving left and right with his in-game movements. He yelped that he had the fuckers now, in his sights; he could see, in his tiny quadrant of the screen, Raj’s sprite foreshortened in the distance, the lead having narrowed. In the reflection of the television screen, a faint scowl turn at the corners of Raj’s mouth. He knew it was coming.

Will depressed the “Z” button. Launched the oversized blue turtle shell, whose homing mechanism zeroed in on the race leader. The shell zoomed, singularly focussed on the Princess Peach avatar in her pink scooter.

It struck her across the bow, sent Raj’s sprite skyward, spiraling up in a bloodless, flameless explosion—as graphic as an all-ages game can muster. The kart drifted, weightless for a split second, and tumbled, somersaulted back down to the animated brick track. Will drove by, giving Raj the real-life middle finger, hit a turn, banked hard—went real-life parallel to the carpeted floor, as if to motivate his little plumber sprite to turn harder, harder—and his last glimpse, his final moment of cognizance, he recalled the next morning, came when he teetered and tipped over, fell face-first into Heather’s lap.

He might have tried to wrestle himself upright, or he might not have, or he might have shouted a witty rejoinder right at her private parts; he could not recall, because at that moment one scene ended and on the next was only projected on a white curtain, with

Parkinsonian shakiness:

“MISSING REEL. Sorry for the Inconvenience –Theatre Management.”

210

A Good Sign

A Good Sign: Will awoke in his own bed, in his own boxer briefs, vomit free and, despite a glimmering hope for the contrary to be so, very much alive.

A Bad Sign: The living feel pain that the dead do not. An incomplete list might have registered concerns: The way he felt. The way he looked, which he knew preternaturally and without need of mirror. The smell rising from his body, redolent of sweet onion dressing secreted through armpit pores. The checklist of shame, embarrassment, and pain. The pain in his head throbbed dull enough to at least allow him to think stupid thoughts; the pain in his stomach presented a more complex problem, for it harkened some mixture of hunger and nausea. It said, “eat,” because still he had not touched even a gram in almost 24 hours. It said, too, “don’t even think about eating,” and so he tried not to. He checked the clock, cried out in pain, considered metaphors to describe his present condition, settled on being crushed in an unhuman crush, a stampede of unwashed Mastiffs. Not his best work, but passable under current conditions. Thought to write down said metaphor and realized that that, too, involved genuine physical movement, however little of it, movement being the very activity he’d just sworn off for the rest of his life. The thoughts of a problem drinker, he reflected: it’s not drinking that’s the problem, it’s standing, walking, existing in the world. Washing oneself and feeding oneself when one’s self felt somewhere rather danker and darker than where one was: a swamp, maybe, or a sewage treatment facility.

The Worst Sign: His phone on the mattress, easily within arm’s reach. He tested the hypothesis. Yes, arm’s reach: no problem, and warm to touch.

211

Remaining prone, lying, uncovered, sweating, he stared up at the ceiling and held the phone at arm’s length, parallel to his face. Dropped it on his face, cursed, then tried again. Skimmed messages. Will realized: today was going to get worse before it got better.

He could not have wrapped his head around how much worse until he ragdolled himself out of bed, and limped into the common area, surveyed the damage. Broken glass, spilled drinks. Cheese congealed over an unfinished pizza; unfinished dipping sauces had hardened. Plates had been stacked, napkins wadded. In the kitchen, empty glasses, empty bottles, and the signs that someone had made a late-night run for reinforcements, in the form of a rack of beer. The fridge door had not correctly sealed shut; the light shone, and the whole refrigerator unit shuddered.

Contemplating the messages he’d sent out to the world hurt Will more deeply than all the parts that hurt him bodily; prodigious output, these collected letters, no one would ever have denied. Though amateurish from a technical perspective. Sloppy. He slumped into the banquette fetally. When you feel overwhelmed, he knew, make a list. It helps. Break the task at hand into manageable chunks.

Options were available to him, he knew: He could 1. Open the second floor kitchen window, throw his phone across the yard and into the back alley. Call the police.

Report a theft and cover his ass, not that anyone would believe him; or 2. He could play dumb, simply pretend that nothing had happened. Delete his outgoing messages. Swear off technology. Avoid eye contact. Or take that thought to its logical conclusion, vis-à-vis possibility 3.: book a flight to Brussels, Belgium; join a monastery; take a vow of silence.

Brew a sweet, yeasty beer. He gagged.

212

Least palatable, 4. He could ‘fess up, make the apology rounds. Mea culpae. Turn it all into a laffer. An excellent stupid story for the next time you get stupid drunk.

His mother, his night, his head still kaleidoscoping in a bad way, Will made a big decision. He was a man of action, now. A man who did right by others.

He began by texting Heather.

Which emoji, he wondered, best characterized the regret he felt for falling into her intimate parts?

He hoped, he wrote, he hadn’t done anything crazy.

Will heard the hoot of an incoming message immediately after hitting SEND. The sound had come from Raj’s room.

Funny, he thought. He also heard bed springs creaking, and a man’s voice, and a woman’s breathing. He heard the sound of his roommate having sex. He heard his stomach coming back up through his esophagus.

Will cast down his phone, lurched to the bathroom, and steadied himself above the toilet, and he wondered between peristaltic movements if they could hear him, from the bedroom, retching.

If they could, they did not seem to mind. Pelvic thrusts continued unabated, each accompanied by a short gasp, an almost coo, as though she was shocked anew with each successive thrust. Like, “Oh, this is sex? Surprising!”

A false alarm: Will’s attempts to vomit were a bust.

* * *

213

Like A Hangover, But For Your Soul

Difficult to avoid another human person with whom you share an 800 square foot, two- bedroom apartment. Short of barricading oneself in a bedroom with a supply of Netflix dramedies, non-perishables, and a chamber pot (and even then, you’ve got to come out some time), commingling is a fact of the renter’s life: the classic two-body problem, by which bodies meet in the hallway, bodies meet in the kitchen, bodies meet coming to and from the washroom or the laundry room or the mail room. In the vestibule. Bodies meet on transit going to and fro. Bladders synch and so too do appetites. Were you just reaching for the frying pan? Because I also was thinking of frying some pierogi? Are you a butter or an oil man? Good, then, no—you go right ahead. It’s no problem.

In lieu of retreat, then, Will responded not with sullen silence, but solicitousness, nicety so aggressive that it circled back into passive-aggression. Will cooked for Raj, a diet rich in processed carbs and butter, potent sauces: heavily apportioned cream and freeze-dried spices. Add water. He cleaned their apartment, even scrubbing the window sashes of accumulated crevice gunk—returning the off-white plastic to its original arctic sheen. He told Raj immediately on that first afternoon, that he understood how matters had shaken out. He recalled the conversation with his mother, but did not divulge its details. Will forked handfuls of congealed pizza cheese from the coffee table, swept up shards of glass and bayoneted the wounded, half-drunk bottles, while explaining his philosophy to Raj, whose eyes flitted, following Will’s hummingbird movement. Raj wore loose pajama pants in black-watch plaid. The twist ties hung undone and he batted them, bored and cat-like.

214

Will: a good feminist. The best feminist. He understood it to be patently un- feminist to declare dibs, and so he hadn’t. Raj’s eyes rolled up into back of his head. Let him continue, Will said, and he continued: he understood that she had agency, was a grown woman and capable of making decisions. And did Raj want any leftovers? Raj did.

Will went on, all the while migrating to the kitchen, examining the fridge. Prepping leftovers like a faithful friend and roommate which, he reminded himself, he was.

Thrusting Tupperware into the microwave, tearing away lids and stirring, meats slopping over plastic lips. Will was disappointed, but understood that she’d done nothing wrong. If anything, he’d been in the wrong, in that he had not represented himself well the previous evening. He’d perhaps taken the theme of the party too readily to heart, and couldn’t remember certain sequences of events, but it had not been his proudest moment.

“I recall, I think, a face and a crotch?”

Grimly, Raj nodded. He crossed his arms and he leaned his lower back on the counter ledge.

“There was a liquor store run?”

“Attempted.”

“Attempted? We were rebuffed,” Will interrogated.

“You were rebuffed. We vouched for you and then you fell down next to a selection of rosés. Then you were rebuffed again, more aggressively.”

“Tripped on a loose carpet?” Will asked, hopefully.

Raj practiced frowning, pupils sunk as though he could look down at the contours of his mouth from above.

215

Will stabbed a fork into the mystery meat and slid a warmed over tray down the counter, in Raj’s direction. Gingerly, Raj grasped the hot Tupperware, balancing it on fingertips and took up the fork for himself. He shovelled bits disgustingly into his mouth.

“Where is all this going?” Raj asked through a face full of hot mush. Pointing at the food, then, he asked, “And what is this?”

“Leftovers.”

“I see.” Raj examined a forkful of what appeared to be tender brown meat, slathered in gravy-like drippings.

“It was in the fridge,”

Raj hmmphed and chewed. He glanced with what Will took to be dissatisfaction, eyes glazed, out the kitchen window.

“Are you dating now?”

Raj nearly choked. “Are we—”

“. . . Dating now. Yes.”

Raj considered the question as such, turned it over like the meat on his cutlery, and did not answer. Will had moved on to prepping his own reheated mystery surprise. A housefly drunkenly figure-eighted the room. Smacked into the window, did another circuit, smacked again. Thwapped.

“We are . . . not?”

“Are you planning on seeing her again?”

Raj put down the Tupperware, wiped his mouth. “We work together.”

“But are you going to see her-see her?”

“I want to punch this line of questioning.”

216

“It’s only,” Will extemporized, flailed his fork, stabbing for emphasis, “I worry about her. Abandonment, etc. Men lacking good intentions.”

“I am punching out of this line of questioning.”

“I don’t want you to hurt her. I think she’s—nice.”

“Good talk,” Will gave the thumbs up. Broad smile pasted to a rotten-fleshed, hungover face. He shouted after Raj, who had extricated himself from the conversation, fleeing to the bathroom and his toothbrush: “I really owe her an apology too. I’m going to apologize face-to-face. Tell her that. Use those words: face-to-face.”

The bathroom door slammed. Will refocused, abandoned his meal in favour of pulling bottles and cans from cupboards and fridge shelves, snapping their lids, twisting their caps, popping their corks, and pouring their contents—new, old, brown, clear, gold, red, his, Raj’s, all of it, every drop—down the kitchen sink. The bottles glugged, the beer frothed as it met chrome of sink, sizzled as it slid down the drain. The pipes sucked it all up greedily; they burped; the odour of every cheap barstool he’d inhabited wafted up, minus the sawdust and peanuts. He lobbed the empties, hook-shot style, at the recycling bin. Hit six in a row, then seven. Each clang of glass and PET and aluminium heralding a new, improved Will. Then a crack, a bottle striking at the wrong angle and shattering into brown dust.

Will understood Raj might not use those words, face-to-face; he might not use any words. He’d have to explain to her in person, and a small thrill and a small revulsion rivered through his beer-soaked gut.

In truth, what Will thought of as a two-body problem was in fact a three-body problem, with an added wrinkle: the third body around which they orbited had vanished.

217

They found as much upon arriving to work on Monday morning and discovering two significant changes. One, that they were greeted by a black box key-fob gadget installed at the front door of the building, monolithic in its black, shiny thing-ness, to which neither Will nor Raj had an appropriate response; two, which they discovered only after buzzing up and Joseph retrieving them—giving Will a steady look all the while, visibly sweating, jaw set uneasily—that Heather seemed to have passed from their lives without fanfare, simply disappeared herself. To say that her cube had been cleared out would be inaccurate, for her desk and her cube had never seemed fully occupied. The counter- space had always been clear; the spongy walls lacked ephemera; a few thumbtacks remained plunged-in-wall, untouched, clustered in a loose, concentric semi-pattern. A kind of spiral galaxy, Will thought.

“Sick?” he wondered.

Raj was more interested in the black box, which had been joined by identical black boxes in the elevator and stairwells. Sans explanation, letter envelopes bearing clitoral fob-wands sat on each of their desks when they arrived that morning. The envelopes bore the return address of the building in which they stood; their names were scrawled in Sharpie, accompanied by their office number. Save for Heather’s, whose desk lacked any such envelope; gone, it was, or had never been delivered. The fobs themselves featured no distinguishing marks. Raj, twenty feet away at the end of the hallway, one foot on concrete, one foot on step-softening gray carpet, had propped open a fire door leading to the back staircase and run the fob over the matte black plastic contraption. The device featured no lights, no openings, no visible wires. Emitted no beeps—the only sign of its functionality was a loud click as the door lock disengaged

218 each time Raj waved the tiny grey fob in front of it. He squatted before the machine, appraised it like a jeweller, felt for screws or a seam, listened for a fan or motor.

“This feels ominous,” he remarked.

“You haven’t talked to her?”

“Not since,” Raj coughed.

“Oh.”

Joseph, coming around the corner, noted dryly that Heather was telecommuting for the time being.

“That’s an option?” Raj asked.

“Given the circumstances.” The boss seemed to be turning over a lecture on impropriety, but decided against it. “We would like to see the environment become more”—he coughed—“professional.”

Will winced.

Raj, on one knee, still fingering the fob said, “One mystery solved.”

“You’re like a child who just discovered his penis, Raj,” Joseph added. “Stop that.”

Will winced again.

Joseph was calling a meeting. “We ought to touch base,” he said. And then he ghosted, vanished himself back down another aisle of cubes.

“Telecommuting?” Will said.

“He looked like dog shit,” Raj said at the same moment.

219

Raj thought for a moment and continued, “Yes. He looked like you felt on

Saturday morning.” He stood, pointed at the little black box, winked, and added, “I’ll be seeing you later.”

Enhanced security. A mandate from on-high, Joseph explained to gathered vassals; they comprised a skeleton-crew who stood at attention around a meeting table.

Raj pointed out “Aren’t you on-high?”

A tense time for all of them, Joseph explained, and that sacrifices would need to be made.

“What sacrifices?” Zeke asked.

“Has anyone seen my fob?” Zeke asked.

Will put his head on the table.

“You’ve had the fob for three hours,” Joseph tapped at the desk like a keyboard.

“Can’t find my fob, boss.”

An intern chimed: “Can we stop saying fob? It upsets my political sensibilities.”

Joseph blew past them. But, Joseph hastened to add, he felt a real need to defuse the tension in the air. A joyless workplace was a dying workplace, even if it didn’t know it, and hard times or not, they needed a break. They needed to boost morale. An outing. A team-building exercise, and he had just the idea.

“Morale is a dangerous word. A word only used in reference to its own absence.

The very word morale,” Raj later explained, “denotes a presence of absence.”

“That’s grad school talk,” Will said.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Raj said.

Will could not.

220

“I only have one question,” Raj said.

“Yes?”

“Do we ever actually do work around here?”

The room dimmed as the sun passed behind a cloud. The others departed for their cubes. Will noticed Gretchen sitting in silence, arms crossed.

No longer detecting human presence in the conference room, the automatic lights switched off. She sat in the dark.

* * *

221

Fishing

“Fly fishing tip number one. Polarized sunglasses. They help you see the trout. Staying low, too. Staying low is important,” Joseph swung his head, from the down-sloping terrain of rich soil and jagged rock below his booted feet and then back over his shoulder at the single file line of acolytes behind him. Every third swing he’d glance at the bundle of fishing rods pressed into his warm armpit, between his torso and his left arm. He assessed each time whether the lines had become tangled and then glanced ahead at where the sticks pointed in space to ensure they would not become snarled in the leaves of young balsam poplar or white birch or green alder shrubs that lined the descent down the riverbank. Trees inclined toward the water, as though leaning in for a drink and others grew at precarious angles away, bullied by the rises and falls of the river waters. He planted one foot and waited to see whether the rocks and the loose soil beneath him would hold and then another step. The thick soles and the weight of his Wellingtons made it difficult to grip earth under his clenched feet. He held his right arm out for balance but would occasionally close his hand into a fist and extended his forefinger to half-point. He identified the trees and bushes as he weaved around and underneath them.

“Wild gooseberry,” he said. “Not poisonous. Red-Osier Dogwood,” his breathing accelerated, “It can spread by root suckering. You can identify it,” he bent his knees to test the strength of the soil beneath him and paused, “by the straggly appearance and the red bark. You can tell this particular specimen is a bit older because you’ve got some white discoloration.” He pointed with more emphasis, though not at any particular spot

222 on the tree. Will, next in line behind in the orderly queue to the river, squinted but could see no flecks.

“It’s important, guys,” Joseph said, beginning again to move, “to know names.

Know the names. Think of it as a core kernel of your job. Really essential,” he pumped his fist as if in strong agreement with himself and then pointed again to the pebbles of loose sand gathered right at the shore where the water crested. “Grus,” he said. He shook his head as if in amazement, “Great word. It’s a fabulous word, isn’t it? So much better than just sand or gravel.”

Will lumbered behind in his rental hip waders, provided gratis by Fiction Factor, registering the unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation of synthetic rubber rubbing against his legs and his genitals. The straps chafed. He felt sweat pooling in his feet and between his thighs and he was itchy in every region, but his attempts to scratch through the thick material imparted no discernable sensation. The waders threw off his balance such that he waddled, penguin-like and with no sense of the placement of his own feet. He teetered and he called to Joseph, who had emerged out of the brush and was kneeling—as best as one can kneel in double-stitched two ply rubber—by the river with his fingers dangled lazily into the glacial water. He asked, “Was it really necessary to enter the river, you know, here?” He emerged from the greenery to stand awkwardly at Joseph’s side. Joseph thrust one of the rods into his hand and Will eyed it with suspicion and then used it to gesture up- and then downriver. “We must have chosen the steepest incline down into the riverbed. And through the trees?”

Joseph kept his fingers in the water.

223

“Right there.” Will pointed wildly, “Straight shot right from the path to the river.

Not so much as a jagged rock.”

Gretchen emerged from the bushes, breathing ragged from her open mouth, followed by an excited Zeke immediately at her heels. Joseph smiled and stood up.

“Teachable moment,” he said to Will, and he took a few steps into the river.

Will said that he did not understand and Joseph smiled wider and pulled down the pair of Wayfarers that had been resting on his forehead.

Will, squinting in the mid-afternoon light, wondered why no one told him he ought to be wearing full-length pants beneath his waders. That should have been fly fishing lesson number one. But this information must have been common sense for everyone else here but him, all of whom must have collectively decided to let him make a fool of himself (Raj had smiled dazzlingly), for he had stripped down to his boxer shorts—which were currently riding and bunching, and he was attempting half-squats to work them out—and pulled on the waders without a second thought. His jeans had been left behind in a crumpled pile just feet away from the pedestrian footpath that followed the contours of the river’s shores. “These’ll be okay here, right?” he had asked skeptically, and Joseph had waved dismissively and said it would be fine.

“People are basically decent,” he had said. The others had abandoned their belongings in the same place. Sweatshirts and running shoes. Zeke a baseball cap, which he had switched out for a boonie cap adorned with clinking lures. A yellow sweat stain baked into its brim.

224

Then Will was in the water, just a step, holding his fishing rod limply and feeling the rocks cutting into the bottom of his feet even through his thick soles, watching as the water moved over and around his olive boots.

Gretchen, not quite yet having dipped her foot in the water, looked constipated with a question she had not yet asked.

She asked it, finally, in a nasal voice, “Is this really effective team-boosting?”

Joseph said, crossly, that morale was everything. He pulled out another of the fishing rods from under his arm and offered it to Gretchen. She accepted it but held it awkwardly, two-handed as a broadsword.

Gretchen sniffled and wiped at her irritated nose with the back of her hand, inspecting it for mucus. Definitely a cold, her immune system having gone off the rails the day after the party.

“Stress factors,” she mumbled to Will and Zeke and Raj, lifting a wadded crumple of facial tissues to the fluorescent light banks of the assembly room to gauge the colour of her effluvia. “Does that look too green to you?” she had asked, and Will and Zeke and

Raj scattered.

Joseph was handing the remaining rods out as stragglers emerged from the trees onto the shore. He kept a final stick for himself, which he shifted to hold gingerly in his palms open before him. The chrome finish of the reel and the butt glinted and the walnut handle was polished to a perfect sheen. The fly line, which he had already spooled around the reel on shore, was neatly run through the reel. He had repeated precisely the same setup eight times because he understood how difficult it was to attach a fly line. He admired his handiwork. The perfect drag and length, the beautiful rainbow coloration of

225 the artificial sinking trout fly lures—nymphs, in fact, much smaller and much more challenging to tie—he had knotted to each line. The improved clink knot: pass the line through the hook and wrap the tag end around the standing line five times. Bring the tag end back and pass it through the loop you left just above the eye, then pass the same end through the large loop. Lick your thumb and moisten the knot area with your saliva. Pull the tag end and the standing line gently at the same time, sliding the coils of the knot tight with your fingernail. Clip any extra length. The rule was a lightly coloured fly in summer, darker in spring and fall, but it was unseasonably warm and he bucked the rules on a hunch. He ran one hand over the surface of the rod. He took the rod in one hand and arched his shoulders and rolled his wrist as if to stretch it.

Will stepped toward Joseph, but Joseph whipped back around to face Will without disturbing the river water in which he stood and he demanded silence.

“Don’t move.”

Will stood rigid. The others gathered at the shore stopped as well.

“Sound travels faster in water. If you move too much, you’ll spook the trout.” He watched the row of PVC-clad skeptics watching disinterestedly from the shore and realized there was no way this army of anglers descending upon the river could be sufficiently quiet so as to not spook the rainbow trout he was after. Nor was the mid-day sun—a concession to his employees who steadfastly refused to rise early in pursuit of their prey—beneficial. He said “never mind.” But then he managed a cheery smile and asked, “Isn’t this better than bowling?”

He added, “Team building, am I right?”

Will decided that both of these were rhetorical questions.

226

This was not baseball he was playing, though he flirted with holding his rod like a baseball bat. Maybe he could cast the line sideways like he was making a home run cut.

“You’ll see, Will, buddy! Better than baseball!”

Will resented the feeling that Joseph could read his mind. He wondered whether his boss also knew that Will could feel a blister forming on the top of his left pinky toe and was marvelling that there was footwear out there less comfortable than the second- hand cleats he wore in Little League—the ones that pushed his toes in and up simultaneously and caused a toenail to tear at the root.

Will supposed, still, basking in the sun and with the coolness of the river at least mildly regulating the heat overload in his legs, that he could see the appeal of the activity

(activity, because he hesitated to call it a sport), even if he had not yet actually attempted it. Or he could see the appeal if he wasn’t surrounded now by the same people he spent each day with, making small-talk as he heated his Michelena’s microwaveable lasagna dinner, splashing in the water and adjusting the straps on their waders and eying their own fishing rods like suspicious foreign instruments.

He lurched forward, but even his most concerted efforts to minimize his wake churned up frothy water. Joseph watched and shook his head in amusement. The river’s depth climbed two, three feet, settling eventually just below thigh-level. The others began following him in, splashing loudly and awkwardly. Will held up the rod as if in supplication and said, “I played hockey. I played baseball. Golfed, even. But I have no idea how to use a fishing pole.”

227

“Rule one,” said Joseph, “Don’t call it a fishing pole. It’s a rod.” He stroked his own. “A rod has guides”—he pinged at the rings spaced evenly along the shaft of the stick—“and you can attach a reel. A pole is just a stick with a line attached.”

“Right.”

“I need to emphasize once more how you must know names. You’ll never get anywhere without knowing names.”

“Right,” Will repeated. “I’m getting an awful lot of chafing here,” he added, gesturing to his lower half.

“A pair of well-fitting waders,” Joseph conceded, “is key. You don’t get that with rentals, unfortunately. We ought to take you to Bass Pro Shops and get you outfitted.

You’ll love it. Out here all spring and summer.” He danced an almost jig in the rolling water to as if to demonstrate the perfect fit of his own. He said more loudly then to the gathering of wet, rubber-legged anglers milling in the water, “You all look skeptical. But soon you’ll be glad that I pre-empted bowling night. I’ll say it again: bowling is fine, but it’s not transcendent. Fly fishing, that’s transcendent. And yet immanent as well. It’s sunny, it’s warm. We’re bonding. This is what our corporate ethos is all about. Alone, but together. Individual character strengthened in numbers. Solitary praxis in conversation with many voices.”

Raj chimed in to ask: “Should I be concerned that I can’t swim? Is that a concern here?”

“You can’t swim?”

Raj admitted he could not.

“Shallow water. You’ll be fine. We’ll buddy system. Will, you’re Raj’s buddy.”

228

“Swell,” Will said.

Gretchen snorted back a wad of phlegm and reflexively reached for tissues in her pocket, finding only her own pair of PVC trousers. She wondered aloud if standing in cool, cascading river water was the best thing for her health and Joseph ignored or didn’t hear her, calling his acolytes forth. And so they, like Will before them, waded deeper into the river, spacing themselves gradually apart under Joseph’s animated hand signals, until they each stood side by side, on rocky river bed and adjacent to the Crowchild Trail bridge—cars audibly whooshing as they passed above, bicycles occasionally dinging their bells as they rolled over the pedestrian deck beneath—with about fifteen or twenty paces between them. Joseph faced them from deeper in the water, holding his rod as though a conductor, and shouting to be heard over the flow of the river and the cars above and the queue of his employees standing waist-deep in the Bow before him.

“Maybe I should have done this on shore,” he said.

Will and Gretchen, closest to him, nodded. Raj was inspecting a puppy who’d come close to shore. Zeke at a distance, closer to the bridge structure above, which trapped voices and vehicle sound and the flow over rock of water into a whirling, cavernous echo shouted, “What?” All along the river, a line of bodies held fishing rods, wore matching rubber outfits. Like an aquatic chain gang or a river-dredging search-and- rescue operation

Joseph said louder, “Never mind,” and he sized up Zeke’s fishing outfit and decided Zeke hardly needed the instruction anyway. He focussed on the others instead, shouting his instructions as he demonstrated with his own rod.

229

“You guys all filed for your recreational fishing licences liked I told you to?” he asked.

Will coughed and Gretchen appeared fascinated by the current of the water around her legs.

Joseph held up his rod and touched the lure hanging very near the tip top. The colourful nymph dangled from the coated plastic line. “This is your lure. I took the liberty of tying your lines and knotting your lures before we got here because it can be a real challenge. It took me a few years to master myself. And it’s different from fish to fish. I remember, you know,” and he sounded reflective though he was still managing to shout,

“after the exposé came out, and I retreated to Montana for the privacy. I was out on

Flathead Lake a lot and they said the secret to catching Kokanee salmon was using corn—white sweetcorn was best: shoepeg—threaded onto a hook.

“Point being,” he cleared his throat and continued to project over the sounds of the river, “you had to thread the corn just right: too high on the hook and the salmon would see it and wouldn’t bite; too low and the hook wouldn’t catch. So you had to space the kernels.”

He paused and scratched under his eye, going on then to explain the difference between conventional fishing and what he viewed as its superior cousin. Unlike in conventional spin and bait fishing, he explained, the weight of the lure was what gave a cast line its distance—without casting his line he mimicked helpfully the overhand flick of the reel that even Will had seen, probably scrolling through sport fishing television programs or, when he was much younger, arriving home to find his dad dozing in front of the late night sports programming—fly fishing actually depends on the heavier gauge of

230 the line to carry the much lighter lure through the air, imitating in the process the way an insect might move. It was much tougher, he said, in part because even a basic cast required both a back cast and a forward cast.

Will scratched the top of his head, felt the warmth of his scalp.

“So what I’m going to teach you today is a basic cast. Are we ready?” Joseph asked.

The silence spurred him and he raised his rod. The audience, watching, did the same.

Joseph limbered up with a few easy swings of the rod. “You’ll watch me first,” he said.

Raj went deliberately cross-eyed and stuck his tongue out at Will.

“You’re going to want to hold the rod with the thumb on top and a nice relaxed grip. You want the rod in line with your forearm. And you’re going to want to start relaxed with the rod tip low.” He demonstrated as he spoke. Will, squinting, mimicked this grip. “If you keep the rod tip too high, you’re already into your swing and you’re limiting the distance of your cast, you understand? You don’t want that.”

“Now. Keep in mind we want the rod tip to travel the shortest, straightest distance, like so,” and he gave a couple of easy swings, “some people say it’s all in the forearm. Some people say it’s more in the wrist. I say whatever gets you there.”

“Now you swing it back with a smooth acceleration”—he pulled the rod back, fluidly over his shoulder, the line arcing high and back, the plastic lure becoming a dot in the cloudless sky—“and then you stop, and pause. Just for an instant. But you need to pause, otherwise you’re going to hear a cracking sound, and that’s the sound of the lure

231 breaking off the line.” He let the lure plop into the water behind him, generating a gentle splash, and then pulled the line back to demonstrate again.

“You don’t want that,” asked Will.

“No, you don’t want that. Lures are two bucks a pop.”

“You don’t want that,” Will repeated.

“We really don’t want to do that,” Raj added, mock-sincerely.

“What you’re looking for here, on the back cast, is you want to generate a bit of curvature on the rod. Some action. That’s stored up energy, and that’s what you’re looking for.” He repeated the backward arcing motion again and they watched the curve in the stick. “Now this time, you’ll notice that just as the arc has reached the farthest point of its motion, as it’s rolling out and just before it’s totally straightened out, you want to fluidly change direction and accelerate back forward. Straight back and straight forward. A nice, tight loop. Smooth acceleration.” He repeated this movement once and then again and then a third time. “And then, finally,” on the fourth time, “you want to slow your speed at the end of the forward acceleration and gently lower the lure.

Minimize the splash. You want to catch the fish’s attention, not spook them. See what

I’m doing?” And he continued the motion. Zeke, hardly paying attention, had already cast his own line and was grinning stupidly.

“Now, why don’t you give it a try?”

Will promptly swung his rod back and jerked it forward and instantly heard the crack about which he had been warned. He raised his free hand and Joseph waded over, fishing around in a chest pocket for another lure. Will watched the others as Joseph worked to retie a lure onto Will’s line. Zeke already had the back-and-forth mastered.

232

Gretchen’s movement was much jerkier, but she seemed to have picked up the fundamentals well enough. Raj, too, though his casts in their loping, time-slowed arc betrayed a dilettante-ish boredom, the sense that he was so instantly good at this that he wished to move onto whatever came next. Gretchen repeated the motion herself a few times and mouthed to Zeke, “What next?” and Zeke pointed out that there was no what next. You periodically recast, but otherwise you watched your lure bob and hoped for the best.

“What are we catching anyway?”

“What are you catching?” Gretchen replied gently. “I’m a vegetarian. I am abstaining.”

“Huh. Never know.”

“I’ve told you twice this week.”

She jiggled her rod and the fly splashed the water. She reeled it back with a nervous jolt and she sniffled.

“Your immune system could use the fish oils, I think,” Raj said.

Gretchen replied that she was a proud vegetarian.

“Proud? First I’m hearing of it,” Raj said.

Joseph forestalled the debate with a gesture, “Rainbow trout. Brown trout. Maybe mountain whitefish.” Satisfied by Will’s progress—having managed a few breakage-free back casts—he turned to his own labours and set out a long, looping cast that landed deftly in the river. He exhaled happily.

233

“You may have noticed I didn’t give you much line.” He kneeled slightly and was watching his lure. “Just safety. Too many of us out here. Too much risk with all that line and all those hooks.”

“Normally you can cast however you like. Overarm, three-quarters, even side- arm. Like a pitcher’s delivery”—looking at Will—“but let’s stick with overarm. Again, just safety. Trying to keep you out of each other’s space.”

“You don’t want rod creep,” Joseph said, watching their collective gyrations.

“Zeke, you’ve got it down. Your rod, Will, I can see it’s sort of creeping forward before you begin the forward cast. That bounce, right like that. You’re killing the momentum with that bounce.”

Unaware of any bouncing, Will nevertheless tried again, focussing on a smooth movement, back and to the front.

“Still doing it a bit, but better. You want to watch that back cast. Take half a step back and watch as it goes. Or you can drift. Stop the rod and then come back a bit,” he demonstrated. He extended his arm and rod further behind him on the back cast. “Our lines are so short, you don’t really need to, but you can. Watch out for the others, though.

Better.” He returned his attention to his own rod.

Will, having semi-successfully cast his own line after a few more experimental swings, was watching his lure bob a scant ten feet in front of him. The others watched with the same expression. Their flies bowed in the water, stretching the line as the current moved them around.

“The key,” Joseph said, “is mimicking the motion of a fly. You have to watch flies to understand.” They were quiet. Joseph himself seemed lost in contemplation. Will

234 felt his legs cramping and could identify each of the twelve metal spikes protruding from the sole of his boot by the pressure they placed on the bottoms of his feet. He alternated weight on each foot, careful to steady himself against the current, which was stronger than he expected.

He repeated to anyone listening within earshot that the chafing was becoming unbearable. Joseph raised an eyebrow and said, “It shouldn’t be that bad.”

Will confirmed that it was that bad.

“Hmm.”

Will felt a tug at the end of his line and did not react and then a few more urgent pulls and then whatever had been there lost interest and his line grew slack once more.

“It’s pretty bad, I’m going to confess.” He bowed at the knees to relieve the pressure of the PVC pants against his upper leg.

“It shouldn’t be that bad unless you’re not wearing pants. You didn’t take off your pants, did you?”

Raj cackled.

“You saw me take off my pants. You said nothing.”

Joseph turned back to his reel, which he jiggled with a kind of professional ease.

The water of the Bow, Will noticed, seemed so much bluer, so much cleaner from the shore or from the 10th Street bridge, before he had ended up with his knees deep into it.

Sediment streamed by and a faint sub-basement smell oozed off the water where it frothed. Flecks of fine white fibre, shredded by the grist tanks of wastewater treatment upstream. They all stood in that tableau, lazy-faced watching the water, sweat down their backs, unnerved by the conversational quiet that held. Only cascading water and the

235 sound of cars, the occasional whiz of fishing line whiplashing back or cars idling on

Crowfoot. The détente broke when one of the interns shouted to ask what they were waiting for. She blinked rapidly when she asked.

Joseph turned attention to the skyline. “What if we’re not waiting for anything?

“There has to be an end-game here.”

“Maybe the process is the point.” A water strider skittered and Will wondered whether this might attract the attention of an actual fish.

Raj wondered whether this sort of lesson required a trip to the river and a day spent away from the office. “Seriously,” he asked, “have we done anything productive?

Do we work? Do we have jobs? Is this a long con?”

“It’s easy to lose perspective,” Joseph said, by way of responding. “You can say all this, but it’s different to do it. We all know that.”

“Why do you like fishing so much?”

“Fly fishing,” Joseph corrected.

Will, rotating his shoulder cuff, repeated his question.

“It’s about hope, maybe.” He rubbed his palm over his facial stubble, expertly teasing the line with his remaining hand. “It’s complicated.” All still half shouted over the noise of gulls and magpies and panel vans honking. Raj was correct. Joseph looked somewhat unexpectedly like warmed over shit, an unusual state of affairs for a fiercely coiffed superstar.

“Sunshine. Quiet. Thinking time,” Zeke suggested. “Escape from the kids and the wife. Channelling your inner man. A beer would be nice.”

236

Will agreed about the beer. Raj acknowledged the potential, hypothetical existence of a flask, maybe.

Joseph bit his lower lip and said yes but he lifted his ball cap and scratched at the crown, the vertex of head where his hair was only beginning to thin, and he shook his head. “But more,” he said. “For me it’s more.”

“Knowing names. It’s part of our job,” Raj reminded him, smirking.

Will thought for a moment that the man before him, Joseph, half-crouched in fast- running river water looked less the cartoon villain than he did in the suit he generally favoured. He certainly looked more tired and maybe only as a result of that, doughier at the emotional edges.

“You can identify an adult rainbow trout by the wide reddish stripe from gills to tail,” he said by way of response. “The caudal fin—that’s the tail fin—it’s only slightly forked.” He raised his line out of the water, lowered it again, and then recast. Back, until the rod curved like the blade of a hockey stick and then fluidly again forward, the nymph tie trailing the line until the final moment when it stopped just above the water level and then dropped soundlessly under the waves.

“You don’t talk about it, you do it. Will, does that sound trite?”

Raj helpfully acknowledged that it sounded trite.

“You know it’s the most important truths that we have the hardest time talking about.”

“But aren’t we getting away from the doing?” Will asked and Joseph did not answer because he did not understand the question.

237

“Here, I mean. Not here-here, fishing. I get what you’re saying. But here”— pointing past downtown to the East Village nestled just-out-of-view behind it. The billboard of toothy Joseph and the FF logo.

“They say you’re never not an addict.” Something beneath the blue-clear water had caught Joseph’s attention. “That you just replace one addiction with another. AA, macramé—”

“—fishing,” Will suggested.

“After the controversy.” He only referred to it as the controversy, Will noted.

Never talked about it in specifics. Joseph’s book and reputation disappearing in tandem.

It must be difficult to discuss being eviscerated by a news anchor on national television, having your famed memoir withdrawn by the publisher until they could verify factual details or—failing that—insert a slip into the as-yet unsold printings sitting in warehouse and a small-print advertisement on the edition notice in future printings that promised a refund to anyone who felt deceived by this work of fiction having been passed off as a true story. All they needed to do was fill out a form and attach proof of purchase along with page 124 of the hardcopy or page 17 of paperback. Will, curious, had skimmed both pages in both editions. He had assumed they would contain some important clue or plot detail that made their tearing out important, but that hadn’t seemed to be the case. They were pages like any other—one, in fact, nearly totally blank save for the spillover of the final sentence of the final paragraph of a chapter.

“After the controversy I headed down to Montana to collect myself. The cost of living is low.” Even after the legal settlement, it was widely acknowledged he had done alright for himself.

238

“Anyway, I rented a cabin outside Bigfork by Flathead Lake and I decided I was going to take up fishing. And that’s what I did. I had never fished before. I grew up in downtown Toronto. Never had occasion to. My parents took me to operas. Luckily there was a guy—the guy I rented my cabin from, he was nice and he got me started, gave me the basics and left me to myself. I set up near Swan River, right where they meet, the river and the lake. It was beautiful out there. I barely saw anyone for months. Drove into town a couple times a week to restock at Albertson’s.”

Will guessed that he was rambling now, feeling philosophical and but let him continue. Ignored Raj, rolling his eyes like a slow-shutter of hands on a clock.

“No Internet. Electricity, but spotty. Wood-burning stove. Big Sky Country, and when you’d look up you knew why they called it that. But then I started wondering to myself, did they call it that because they noticed or did I notice because they call it that?

“We had a snowstorm once, in June. Couldn’t believe it. Drove in to town that week and they were saying some livestock had died. Left outside of the barn overnight because no one was expecting it. The whole town was in mourning, it felt like. I didn’t fish those days, obviously. There wasn’t much else to do. I hiked a bit. I made it my mission to see a Great Blue Heron before I left, but I never did. They’re at risk, you know? Not globally, but in the state. They tag them.”

Will didn’t know.

Joseph was talking to the river, had not so much as glanced up. Zeke had grown disinterested in the story and was back at his line, reeling it in and fishing for his own lure in an overall pocket.

239

“I realized it was the fishing itself that actually mattered. Or maybe not the fishing, but the fishing as an avenue. A reminder, maybe.”

“Of what?”

Joseph did not hear or chose not to answer, for he was then instantaneously busy falling into a crouch as deep as he could manage without the Bow flowing over the lip of his waders and spilling into his pants. He waved for silence and shimmied his torso left and right. He pulled the brim of his cap down close over his Ray Bans and he gestured.

They all watched, losing what little interest they’d still had in their own lines, as their boss stalked his prey. His breathing slowed and he went slack, save for wrists expertly flicking the line and the lure up and down, darting below the surface and then sitting above. Spiralling lazily like the fruit flies Will and Raj watched in their apartment in spring—the ones for which they could never find the source, maybe the downstairs neighbours, but which circled their Kenmore. They retreated, scattering themselves only at Will’s approach and they grew brazen enough to tentatively return as he stood with the refrigerator door held ajar too long, scouring for edibles.

Tense silence and then a splash and then a guttural “hyuh” and Joseph with near simultaneity began to pull the rod back—the ferule flexing, warping to twenty-twenty- five-thirty degrees and then holding there, taut—and to rapidly spin the reel handle to draw in the line. The fish fought some, elevating out of the water and thrashing back under, and Joseph teased and pulled, draining the fish of its fight. And then he reeled in further until it was close enough to grasp. He propped his rod between his legs, tip facing up, and expertly grasped the fish. Holding it tight, he eyed the beast’s puckering mouth, snatched a multi-tool from his shirt pocket, opening with one flick of the thumb the plier

240 extension, and expertly worked their tips in, gently jimmying the barb from beneath the fish’s flesh and unhooking the beast’s mouth—renewing in it a second of reflexive rebellion and then, surrendering, it calmed again. A few bright drops of its blood spilled, hit and broke the water’s tension. Joseph sucked his gums and grunted, unhappily sizing up in the mid-afternoon sun the wound he had left by his imprecise unhooking.

Satisfaction after a moment of close study, determining that the damage was, to his standards at least, minimal. And then, careful to avoid the gills, he raised it from the water.

He held it by the back fin, breathing heavily. It writhed once more, not in only fear or pain this time but suffocating, sucking in non-water through struggling gills.

Joseph waited it out, never loosening his grasp. Its third-wave rebellion petered out as it resigned itself, Will imagined, to its personal apocalypse. Joseph beamed, infinitely pleased. It was not a large fish—perhaps three or four pounds—but Will was nevertheless impressed by this display and whistled.

“Rainbow trout,” he said, eager to name in a way he had not been before.

“This,” Joseph corrected him, sizing up the fish which had hardly put up a fight,

“is actually a brown trout, Will. Though it’s silver, and that’s somewhat uncommon for the species in this setting, you’ll notice the lack of the aforementioned red band. Instead, there’s the creamy white colour to the belly and these almost brassy brown spots—notice the halos—on its torso.” He studied his handiwork and nodded, confirming his guesswork. He kneeled and held the trout gingerly in one arm, cupping his free hand to splash water over its gills, coaxing it back to life.

241

From Will’s vantage it appeared as though Joseph was almost petting his prize.

“Trout are a sensitive species. They’re deeply affected by the, you know, exigencies of their environment.” The trout snaked a bit, flashing signs of life. “You don’t want to just immediately re-submerge it. Especially in colder water, it’s a shock to their system. You want to ease them back in.” He gradually submerged the fish horizontally beneath the surface but still held it, carefully, like a small and fragile creature. The grip Will’s father recommended when he first learned to hold a baseball bat, telling him to pretend there was a baby bird and he didn’t want to crush the bird. Joseph allowed the fish to readjust, shielding it from the current until it was ready to swim away under its own power. And then he smiled as it did so, revived, at last emerging from its stupor, darting away serpentine-like from between Joseph’s loosely clasped hands. He stood and smiled and wiped his wet palms on his waders—having no effect—and then on opposite shirt sleeves. The wetness stained the material a darker colour and it clung to his bicep.

“If their ecosystem is so fragile, why fish them at all?” Will wondered.

“They hardly feel pain,” Joseph said. He was studying his line carefully, ensuring the lure had not suffered any damage.

“They’re highly evolved vertebrates.”

“Are they now?” Joseph recast.

“They share the same neurological structures that cause humans to feel pain.”

Gretchen searched absently for a pocket in which she had stashed extra tissues.

Unsuccessful, she snorted back the excess phlegm. “It’s getting worse.”

“Or maybe this is another teachable moment?” Joseph said after some time. Will imagined how that lesson might go, though it went unspoken: maybe they were the

242 trout—some bearing brighter scales than others, but at root all trout—downstream from an ecologically fragile hatchery, and though tethered now, they would be splashed back down into the currents and set on their way a few yards further along the river, unharmed and yet armed with useful information, a new sort of skepticism toward bait. But Will wondered then, why was it they let themselves so easily be caught? Why did they seem to bite so sharply on the lure, embedded them in their mouths, and seem to grip on for life, and why was Joseph using barbed hooks when even the uninitiated angler in Will knew that barbs were frowned upon by catch-and-release guidelines. Perhaps it was that they were all swimming blindly in the muck, and Joseph pulled them from it into the sun’s direct warmth, but they could not bear it and so had to return to the depths. They were the ones who had crossed over and when they returned had to communicate something of the brightness, the warmth to their gilled brothers? The point, maybe, that there was something admirable, noble, about gasping for air in the sun rather than surviving comfortably in the unclean waters. Maybe that was the mud?

Or maybe they were the anglers, in this lesson, being taught the fragility of what they possessed, or did not possess but of which they were in pursuit. Some ideas ought to be let go? Perhaps it was about the moment, being in it and aware of your surroundings.

Perhaps Joseph was utterly sincere, Will wondered, when he had observed that the process was the point. Alternately, maybe Joseph was goading them. Maybe the lesson was simply that you sometimes do what you don’t want to do, a challenge to their entitlement and privilege. Maybe the only subtext was, and it seemed a real possibility— you are out here, in the sun, on a beautiful afternoon, taking a half-day off work and having a bit of fun in the interests of a team-building exercise, after which I will be

243 handing out Fiction Factor-brand tuques (complete with black-and-yellow radioactive pom), you all have your health more-or-less (forgetting Gretchen’s sniffles), now why is everyone so down? To which, Will decided, he was no longer sure he had a good answer, if he had ever had one. Deciding to put the question to someone, anyone—Heather?—if only in truncated text-message form, he reached for his cell and realized then that it was not where he expected it to be; he had left it in his jeans pocket on shore, unguarded. He cursed and he looked back and even at fifty or so paces the distance seemed onerous, over water and land and through the scrub from which they’d originally emerged. It would be fine there, he decided, Joseph having already reassured him about the pants themselves, and returned his attention to his own fishing rod—not so interested in catching any trout or whitefish for himself, but appreciating the experience as best he could, moment-by-moment, being present.

The afternoon lingered and they fished, Gretchen content to let her lure bob a few centimeters above the surface of the water, until Raj raised the possibility that a fish would leap for it. Horrified, Gretchen reeled in her line. She told Joseph she was done for the day and she turned to set her fishing rod down on the rocky shore adjacent to the river. Will asked if she would run up and check on his pants, maybe grab his phone, but she shrugged and turned back into the water after having dropped off the rod, resuming with arms crossed, her place in the staggered line between Will and Zeke. She coughed, raspy, into her palm periodically and then studied her hand.

Will had gotten no bites, but found he did not mind; not having to reel in a fish allowed him to minimize his movements and thus the irritation of his thighs. He considered that the cool water might feel fine on his flesh if he splashed some down his

244 pants. But then he thought of the toilet paper flecks floating in the water. Joseph caught another fish, repeated the same ritual as he had with the first. This time, however, the unhooking process was more fluid, more expert. No blood spilled into river water.

Joseph’s flannels, rolled up at the elbows revealing hair and deep outdoor tan, were damp now all over from the mix of sea and sweat, caking further against his torso and an uneven line of off-white perspiration ran the rim of his ball-cap.

Raj consulted his watch.

“This is not,” he said, “what I get paid for. I don’t have time for nonsense metaphors.”

Shouting over the noise of the river, Joseph thought aloud in Raj’s direction: “Raj, buddy? It’s kind of exactly what you get paid for, insofar as I am your boss and benefactor and am asking you to be here at this moment in time?”

Raj considered this request, then continued his march back to shore.

“If Gretch can leave, so can I,” he said.

“I’m still here,” Gretchen called.

Raj ignored her or did not hear.

“Check my phone?” Will asked.

“Nah.”

“Fuck you, too,” Will said.

Raj blew a mock-kiss on his nervous tumble back to shore.

Joseph, occupied by his own line, gave Raj no additional thought. Too busy whistling. His tongue protruded and his face held in a private smile that was nevertheless visible, electric, at fifty paces. The deserters lurched in fits and starts out of the river,

245 dropping their rental rods where Gretchen had placed hers, then swamp-manning up the shore and through the thicket of plant-life to return to the noises more typical of the city.

Will shouted back about his pants once more to Raj. Raj turned back and nodded and said something but his words were lost over the water. He returned, moments later and shed of his rubberized pants and whistled. He gave a thumbs up from the shore, shouted “Heather says hi,” and then disappeared back through bushes. Will was satisfied. He called,

“Goodnight” to the spot where Raj had stood, and then there was just rustling. Either he or the wind, the same which wicked sweat from his body but left him cold. Will stood, studying his line and Joseph and listening to Gretchen—arms still crossed, squinting in concentration—shout-mumble-converse to herself or with a disinterested Zeke, who was more intent on snagging a trout but who had thus far been unsuccessful. He had periodically reeled in his line, studied his lure, cut and retied his bait. Cast and then recast. Jaw clenched.

Will experimented with his own cast. Exclusively overhead, first, remembering

Joseph’s warning about their proximity. Going backward to going forward, the fluid shift of momentum he sought but never got exactly right. He understood it intuitively, even if he couldn’t master it, the way he understood how to hold and swing a baseball bat: he knew the theory, understood what he was looking for, even if he couldn’t master the execution: feet slightly wider than shoulder-width, weight slightly shifted to the back leg.

Hips leading the hands. He thought, each time he watched the grace with which Joseph cast, the near golden-spiral as his line rolled out behind him and then seemed almost to tug itself back forward—it seemed like those Bugs Bunny cartoons where a character is yanked off-screen, leaving a perfect body-shaped cloud—that much of the skill set ought

246 to be transferable. Was there batting practice for anglers? He repeated the back and forward cast, adjusting to the sound of the line whistling as it passed over his head. He followed his arm, watched its curvature and felt the muscles contracting in sequence. And he listened to Gretchen and Zeke several feet upstream, catching snippets, filling in blanks.

“It’s a myth,” she was saying.

“Is that so?”

“I was worried about it. I don’t usually get this bad. The colour of it?”

“Right.”

“Anyway, it’s not true. Green or yellow mucus. Doesn’t mean an infection. Old wives’ tale.”

“Who are we talking about again?”

“Me. I’ve got a cold.”

“Sure,” Zeke said.

“It can be totally clear and you can be in a rough way.”

“If you pick your nose, you can puncture a vein and die from an infection,” Zeke finally contributed, though he had not even turned to face her. “Think of how filthy the nose is. It filters out the nasty stuff. I used to come home from work and blow my nose and it was speckled black and gray. Open cut, plus all that grime? Infection waiting to happen.”

Gretchen went quiet.

“Did you say something?”

She hadn’t.

247

He returned to tracking the movement that he had traced from a small splash at the water’s surface.

Will had turned to his stance, spreading his booted feet slightly wider than shoulder-width and planting them sideways into the jagged seabed. Repeating the cast.

Naturalizing the movement. But the stance limited the range of his casting arm and so he adjusted it slightly down, into a three-quarters overhand. He watched carefully the range of the line as it arced out up and over his right shoulder.

Zeke crouched a bit to follow a nervous trout in the shadow of the bridge nearby.

Will, experimenting with the angle of his arm now, focussing on the rod moving in as straight a line as he could manage. Three-quarters overarm worked, but he felt himself easing the pendulum swing lower, into something resembling an easy baseball cut—practice swings taken with a doughnut. Gretchen, attempting to translate her own nonverbal feeling about everything. She hemmed. Will’s line flew in a tight curve in his peripheral vision. Back, forward, then dip. Repeat. His speed was building, too, and the efficiency of his movement. The rod’s action carried the force, sending the line out almost parallel to the water’s surface, launching the line farther. Then farther still.

Gretchen asked Zeke if he had a tissue.

“Mine are in my pocket, but I can’t reach them,” she said. In illustration she pointed to the tightness with which the rubber pants gripped her legs and mimed digging for an item in her pockets. “Stuck until I wriggle out of these.”

“Pardon?”

“Tissue?”

“Hmm,” Zeke mumbled.

248

Joseph, had he been paying attention, would have once warned Will to keep his delivery overhand, perpendicular to the water, avoiding tangling lines with coworkers.

But Joseph was involved with another fish. Zeke was, too, having finally spotted a brown trout spiralling indolently around his proffered nymph bait: one moment approaching open-mouthed and ready to bite, the next veering away to circle back once more.

“A tissue?”

“Oh, right.”

All the parts had to work. It was as though Zeke had been returned to his Mustang robot. If the welder wasn’t hot enough, the two pieces of aluminum pressed together clattered uselessly to the factory floor; if the magnetic suction was too weak, the same result; too strong and the machine hoovered in excess bolts and attempted to screw bolt on bolt on bolt. If Will was not practicing a side-arm cast; if Joseph was not lost in the contemplation of his craft or if Gretchen was not sick with head-cold. If Zeke was not so determined to catch that fish.

But instead he was, and he rummaged in his shirt pocket without diverting attention from his long-awaited prey. He withdrew a wadded hankie and tossed it her way, underhand, a few yards distant, without looking. And it appeared to be on its way into her hands until she misjudged its trajectory, or a slight gust of wind caught it and blew it right out of the way of the hand that was attempting to snatch it out of the air.

Will, paying no attention, had fully transitioned into a side-arm cast with the full backswing. No longer interested, now, even in the movement of the line, almost criss- crossing, knotting itself. It was another stroke of random luck that the fly had not snapped off of the lure and fluttered harmlessly into the water. Will was interested only in keeping

249 the plane of his swing even, steady, and the rod whooshed as he passed it across his body, so intent that he did not see Zeke’s hankie miss Gretchen’s outstretched hands and land flat on the water and then ragdoll in the current, carried down the river. He did not see

Gretchen lurch toward the handkerchief, moonwalking almost, slowed by riverbed, her boots, her waders, nearly tipping over with each step like a top-heavy drunk. She stumbled on the sea bottom, unable to find her footing, outsmarted by the whims of the wind and the current that pulled the now soggy cloth out of her reach and gradually under water. And then there it floated, for a moment, in an instant of calm water and calm winds and she took one last lunge for it. Zeke, on the brink of netting his quarry, and uninterested in a dollar store hankie, paid her no attention.

Will only felt the tug at the line and heard the shriek. He didn’t see the hook pierce her face but he felt the tension, the resistance, the biggest fish fighting him off.

Heart striking in the moment and lacking the minute motor skills of Joseph to tease the catch into submission, he yanked the line. Probably only seaweed. The shriek went up an octave.

It was only then, he defended himself later, that he made the connection between the scream and the tug on his line, and it was only then that he saw rhizomatic roots of blood pouring down from Gretchen’s face into the Bow, a flow heavy enough that it sat there like a blanket on the water, undilute. Joseph had emerged from his stupor and was rushing toward Gretchen as the screaming continued, dopplering. Gretchen, bent over at the waist, holding her face, touching the foreign object that had ripped into her cheek, making no attempt to remove it. Every set of eyes on Gretchen. The screams fell to a whimper. Will dropped his rod as though he’d been caught with a stolen gun and it

250 splashed harmlessly in the water. He raised his hands in prostration or proclamation of his innocence while Joseph, kneeling before Gretchen, cut the end of the line with his multi-tool’s knife blade. He left the hook embedded, studying its location, where the barb had caught. “It’s just your cheek,” he told her, “It’s just your cheek.” The repetition calmed her somewhat, though the blood continued to flow.

Joseph traded looks between Will and Zeke. “Phone?”

When he was eight or maybe nine, he swung a golf club and struck a nearby girl, a girl who had strayed too close to his backswing, in the temple. His father, perched over a crying and bleeding form had traded the same looks between Will and the downed child, had issued the same one-word command.

“Phone,” Joseph shouted again.

Will pivoted and darted toward shore, stumbling like Gretchen had before, falling fully into the water twice, chilling himself. He scraped his elbow on a jutting piece of sandstone but still raced forward at a speed crawl, the chafing on his rubber-rubbed-raw thighs now as red as any pain he could imagine. The dirty water spilling into his pants not relieving the pain but almost enhancing the burn. He reached shore and scrambled up the banks through the plant-life, past the tamarack and poplar, the prickly wild rose, dislodging gravel that rolled back downhill into the water, emerging into the pathway- adjacent clearing where they’d left their belongings.

Will’s pants were gone. His phone was gone.

Later, in the ER waiting room, sitting sopping wet—after Will had returned, brambles in his hair but no phone in hand, after Joseph had waved his own handkerchief at Zeke and instructed him to hold it tight against the wound, after Joseph had raced to

251 grab his own cell from the car he’d parked on a nearby side-street—Zeke sniggered and

Joseph, bright red with anger and sun, sitting in the cramped hardback chair beside him, turned to frown. The rank river smell of their clothes nearly overpowered the hospital iodine and bleach.

“What’s so funny?”

“Hard to explain.”

Tersely: “Try.”

“I dunno, boss. I guess, just. That it was the vegetarian who got hooked.”

“Gretchen’s a vegetarian?”

Will chimed in, “First I’m hearing of it.”

Joseph suppressed a smile. “What are the odds this all blows over?” he asked.

Will, still in waders picked at a nascent sunburn, unable even to distract himself by the solipsistic amusements of cellular telephone.

“When’s she coming back?” he said.

“She?”

“Heather.”

Joseph considered, chose not to answer. His lips curled a bit.

“Right, then,” Will said.

“She’ll be back when you get your shit together.”

“My shit’s together just fine.”

Joseph’s phone dinged. He checked it, exhaled. Handed the phone across the waiting room aisle to Will.

252

“Not for long, Will,” he said as Will traced the headline of the document on the screen of the device he held. Swiped and scrolled down a few column inches.

“Oh, shit,” Will managed, taken aback, looked up at his boss.

Dryly, Joseph replied. “Well put,” he said and he tapped the vinyl armrest in

Morse code.

“This is . . . bad?” Will sought clarification.

He made to return the phone; Zeke intercepted and fumbled with the touchscreen.

Joseph put his head in his hands, rested his elbows on his knees, and he exhaled long and slow like a slide whistle.

“It’s not great, Will. It’s really not great.”

* * *

253

The Exposé

Raj read aloud: “I spoke to one legal expert, who told me that the terms of these contracts were unenforceable, and arguably illegal.”

He lowered the phone screen momentarily. Joseph paced, coiled.

“Raj, we’ve all read it.”

Raj returned to the phone.

“I showed a sample employment contract to Jonathan Schoop, Professor of

Contract Law at the University of Toronto, who raised several red flags. ‘On the surface, it appears to be a generous employment package,’ he told me. ‘Full-time status, benefits, bonuses. It’s alluring, but dig deeper and a number of alarm bells go off.’”

Loafers tracked treads in the carpet’s pile. Gretchen, torn between rapping fingers on the conference table and fingering the cottony gauze on her cheek, protecting four new surgical sutures, closed her eyes and leaned back. Raj paused long enough to allow her chair to finish breathing once she had reclined.

“Health benefits, though,” Zeke threw out. Will took the implication of this statement, a suggestion that they all study Gretchen’s recently de-hooked facial features.

The ER doctor joked that her gills would recover just fine, and sent her on her way with a prescription for Tylenol 3s that Raj, interrupting his righteous anger, had attempted to barter for. Joseph had taken the interruption to seat himself on the window ledge. A corona of sunlight framed his rumpled suit, jabbed through hair follicles and gleamed in the geography of his scalp.

“What happened to your face, anyway?”

254

Gretchen pouted.

“If I may?” Raj said.

“We’ve all read it,” Joseph repeated, though he seemed resigned to the rehashing, the retracing, the placement of the contours of a rage so potent, so new and specific and yet so versatile—willing to expand to include any and all slights as though they only now made sense as part of a larger, pernicious conspiracy against them. Will, too, felt this anger, and he wondered at its potency. Nothing that he’d read in the piece was new to him, or shocking, and he had read the exposé twice. First quickly, skimming, finger flicking along the touchscreen (the new issue would not reach newsstands for a few days still, and so they had each bent over their respective screens), and then he read it again, slowly, luxuriating in its call to pious fury. Will had studied the contract, understood the trade-offs involved, and still had signed. Raj, too. Raj had encouraged him to sign. Never had he felt bamboozled by this arrangement. Trapped, maybe, but trapped by his own decisions—the sequence of events leading him here and keeping him here were all his own.

Until this lawyer had given him permission to feel such anger.

“‘A lifetime non-disparagement clause, for example, is highly unusual. It’s virtually unenforceable, and test cases suggest it might be outright illegal. Non-compete clauses of such a length even more so.’”

“Raj—”

Finger up, in a don’t interrupt me, I’m on a roll gesture, Raj homed in on one last sentence.

255

“‘But Schoop is even more concerned by a set of duelling clauses tucked deep in the seven-page contract documents. One of these clauses awards all copyright of all employee creations to the publisher’s parent company in perpetuity, specifying that the company need not even use the name of the author actually attached to the project. The other clause suggests that the creator of the work is nevertheless solely responsible for the content of her creation in the event of legal action. In other words: individual authors are legally liable for work that, contractually, they cannot take credit for and do not own. On this seeming contradiction, Schoop is more succinct: “It’s incomprehensible.”’”

As though surprised at what he’d just read, Raj then let out a mock-respectful whistle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

Zeke chuckled, Raj lobbed his cell onto the conference table where it skittered and slid to a stop by the untouched carafe of water, and with a gambler’s poise, he crossed his arms as though awaiting an answer to a question there was no need to articulate, a question that only hung like damp laundry.

Smile lines twitched as Joseph smirked, and he stood to approach the table, sucking on his lower teeth.

“You’re clever,” he said.

“Thanks, boss.”

“Cleverness doesn’t become you. What I’d suggest is that you reach a certain age and clever really isn’t cute.”

“I think what Raj is trying to say is that we’ve got some questions?” Will suggested.

256

“Fabulous! Because I, too, have some questions! This will work out great, the questions! Who’s first?” Clapping his hands, rubbing his palms, and licking his lips, he began a clockwise circuit around the conference table, pausing behind each of them. He lingered behind Gretchen, patting her shoulder, at which she tensed. Looked down surprised, as though he thought he’d been resting his hands on a chair back. Raj looked bored. Checked his phone and yawned. Will pictured a demented game of high-stakes

Duck, Duck, Goose.

“How about you, Will?”

“Yeah?”

Joseph stood behind him now, and he spoke over Will’s head. “What are these questions?”

Will coughed.

“I don’t want to speak for everyone, boss, but I think we’re feeling, I guess, mistreated?”

“Mistreated.”

“Disrespected,” Gretchen sniffled.

“You’ll have to speak up,” Joseph told her.

“Ethically speaking, yes,” Will stammered.

“And?”

“Well, and that’s not even considering. You know, you read this and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s illegal?’ You know?”

257

Joseph snorted back an annoyed wad of phlegm, and Will half-anticipated a sloppy loogie. Instead, Joseph marched again to the window and withdrew a patterned hankie. He spoke as he dabbed his nostrils.

“That’s not a question, Will: it’s an observation.”

“The inflection there at the end implied question, I think,” Raj offered.

“Allegedly illegal, by the way,” Joseph answered.

“‘Alleged’ is a word, ironically, only ever emphasized by the guilty,” Raj said.

“The confirmed. Murderers and predators,” Will said.

“Child molesters,” Raj agreed. He reached for the so-far untouched carafe of meeting water and the stacked pyramid of plastic cups. Office air had sprinkled over the stagnant water flecks of furnace filter or dust or asbestos and Raj studied these, eventually fingering at a few, brushing them away, breaking the surface tension of the water only to send the crumbs down to the bottom of the vessel. Gretchen cringed. Raj poured a cup for himself and drank it down in one gulp.

“What I’m failing to see is how a contract that you all signed is ruining your life, now that someone’s spun out a fancy yarn about oppressed artists, exploited creative labour. I told each and every one of you to have a lawyer look over the contract.”

“He’s got a point,” Zeke chimed in.

“Did any of you actually hire a lawyer?”

Quiet around the table, save for Raj refilling his water cup to the very lip, nearly overflowing out on the table.

“None of you hired a lawyer.”

“Meniscus,” Raj dabbed at the glass.

258

“I don’t know that I could have afforded a lawyer,” Will said. Gretchen nodded.

“He’s got a point,” Zeke agreed.

“Free legal clinics? Calgary Legal Guidance?”

Will spun. He realized the conference chairs, maybe by design, sat so tall as to prevent his feet from even scraping the carpet. “I thought ‘feel free to check with a lawyer,’ was just one of those expressions you say. You don’t actually mean it. Like

‘let’s do lunch some time,’ or ‘It was great to see you’ or—”

“—or ‘I love you, too,’” Raj suggested.

“Right.”

“Which is to say,” Raj finally turned his attention away from the Solo cup, “that consulting a lawyer and having had the offending articles removed doesn’t change the fact that you put that shit in there in the first place, which constitutes a breach of trust.”

Zeke bobbed: “He’s got a p—”

Joseph violently shushed him.

Zeke retreated, wounded, scowled at his hands.

“Businesses don’t work on trust. And speaking of trust—”

“Here it comes.”

“Clearly non-disparagement clauses don’t work, because one of you seemed more than happy to disparage me for the sake of this hit piece.”

Raj raised his hand like a curious schoolboy: “One question. Is it still called a hit piece if it’s true?”

“Don’t think I won’t find out who it was. Don’t think I don’t already have suspicions.”

259

Bored once more, Raj retrieved his phone.

Joseph recited from memory, pacing, “One Fiction Factor insider described morale as ‘Door to Hell’ low.”

Will sniggered.

“Clever. It’s a clever reference. A good joke. But your cleverness betrays you.”

Raj observed that it was good that journalists protected their sources.

Through vise-gripped incisors, Joseph agreed. Will could not help but feel a pang of sympathy for his boss and the adversarial relationship he seemed to have with the press—like a dog chasing after a car, Joseph chased press coverage instinctually, habitually. And yet, when he got it, when he got too close, like the dog with the car, he had no idea what to do with it, and it blew up, extraordinarily so, in his shitty, handsome face. From his early success, the fawning coverage of his debut, crashing down.

Rebuilding, more accolades for his FF empire. And now this.

“I suspect,” Will finally allowed, cautiously trying it out, “it is of no consolation to reassure you that there’s no such thing as bad publicity?”

Naturally, that raised the question: was there such a thing as bad publicity. They all were mulling it over, these Writerly Knights of the Teak Touch-Base Table. Will knew it. Gretchen might have been wondering whether her wound had reopened, begun weeping. It had. She touched it, held the gauze tighter, but made no move for the double- wide conference room doors.

“We’re a team. And what hurts most, guys, is the lack of respect. I’m hands off. I give you room to operate. I give you benefits. Nurtured you. And you turn around, and you betray me. Now, I’m a big boy. I’ll get over it. But what you need to know is that

260 you also betrayed this company. And by betraying this company,” he slopped it on, “you betrayed each other.”

Arms crossed. That is that, his posture said. He’d chastised the children, taken away their toy, and appeared satisfied enough to move on.

Which lead them to the next order of business.

Fun fact: in the short term, negative reviews actually cause a more significant sales boost than positive reviews.

“That wasn’t a fun fact at all,” Raj grumbled.

Joseph ignored him, “Which is to say, Will, that you’re correct. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to go on the offensive here. What I’m envisioning is a PR blast, which I’ll coordinate. Positive stories. Multimedia coverage. High-profile interviews.

Press releases to set the record straight about what we do here and why we’re such a strong team. Mini book tours. We will pursue all legal options here.”

“Any illegal ones?” Zeke asked with the faraway look of a union heavy.

“Only positive responses, Zeke.”

“And if you’ve got grievances, you need to come talk to me first. Got it?”

Got it, they all nodded.

“Just one concern,” Raj said, “maybe something I should have asked earlier? Can we backtrack? I just want to backtrack for a moment.”

The others rustled in their seats. Eyes rolled.

“Did you know any of this proverbial shitstorm was coming?”

Joseph averred that he was not.

“Fair,” Raj confessed that he was no scholar of journalism. But.

261

“But,” he said, “Due diligence here. Wouldn’t the author have to have contacted you? For background? Can you confirm or deny? How do you respond to these allegations? No comment? Etc., etc. I’m just guessing.” He leant forward, set the phone down, fit one palm into the other and rested them, clasped, beforehand.

“I’d say you’re correct.”

“And?”

Joseph made an empty hands gesture.

“Peculiar.”

“Trust me Raj. We’re combing over everything, here. And we’re going to find the anonymous source.” A shot, straight at Raj, who ignored it. Played dumb.

“If I may, though?”

“Yes, Raj.”

“Before you turn your eyes toward the inside source, cast your eyes upon yourself?”

Someone sniffled. Will did not understand the remark. Nor, apparently, did

Joseph.

“Clever and cryptic.”

“Just saying,” Raj said.

Bending L-shaped over the table, Joseph tapped forefingers against mouth.

“How did Heather get out of this meeting?” Zeke abstractly asked.

“Heather’s not the problem,” Joseph said.

“And where’s Gretch?” Zeke thought.

“I’m right here,” Gretchen said.

262

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” Raj said, “I’ve got to go see HR about a thing.”

* * *

263

The first Human Resources complaint Raj filed against Will alleged an unsafe work environment, or at least this was the gist of the summary e-mail provided to Will upon receipt of said complaint—the name of the complainant, elided, obviously, for FOIP- related reasons, but glaringly obvious from contextual clues.

“The complainant,” the summary outlined, “alleges the creation of an unsafe working environment stemming from what he has called ‘stalker-ish’ behaviour, namely following complainant outside of work hours. The complainant further alleges undue hardship and stress, stating that he/she is sometimes afraid to leave his home or his desk, fearing that the accused will be there. The complainant alleges nightmares.”

“In accordance with HR Policy 3.34-36, the complaint is scheduled to be adjudicated by a three-person panel. The hearing will be set for ______” (Will noted with amusement that HR had neglected to enter a date or time on the boilerplate form, and read on). “If you wish to dispute these allegations, you may do so in writing, up to three days before the scheduled hearing.”

Incongruously, the e-mail’s closing salutation was a hearty “Cheers,” and underneath, more boilerplate. “Fiction Factor’s history of leadership and commitment to employee health, well-being and workplace safety dates back to the very beginnings of the company. Employee well-being is incorporated in every aspect of our global business, from our strategic and business planning to operations. As FF continues to transform and expand into global markets, global economic, demographic and emerging healthcare

264 trends pose challenges to FF’s ability to ensure the health, safety and well-being of its workforce.”

Finally, a pull-quote, attributed to no one: “Advancing the health, safety and well- being of our global workforce is an absolute priority; it’s a commitment that encompasses the environments in which employees work and the communities in which they live.”

Will whistled.

“Nah,” he said.

He went upstairs instead, kicked open the pressboard door marked “Human

Resources.” The door handle crunched the drywall; a puff of chalk exploded, and Will moseyed in. Human Resources was, in fact, a single desk—a single man—and Human

Resources cowered, mustache wilting. A carpal tunnel wrist-guarded forearm shot up in self-defense. At the desk sat papers and an iMac screen and a bagged lunch.

“Jesus,” Human Resources said, “You scared me.”

“You’re Human Resources,” Will said.

“I head Human Resources.”

They both glanced around the small office, windowless. The unspoken acknowledgement here that if this person was now the head of Human Resources, the department had been severed: here was a head, but no evidence anywhere of torso nor limbs. No hidden corners or false walls behind bookshelves. Though Will ran a finger over the shelves of management books to be sure. Will thought, incongruously, of a news story: two drug dealers in urban Detroit concerned that a rival was muscling in on their territory. So they killed a customer—one of their own customers—and chopped him into

265 pieces: head, torso, legs, hands, fingers. Scattering the parts around the block as a warning.

The murderer had eventually been found, tried, and convicted (the judge expressed confusion; if this had been a warning shot to rival gang members, why kill your own customer?), but no one had ever recovered the severed head.

Human Resources coughed and rubbed at his mustache.

“I am disputing a grievance,” Will shrugged.

Human Resources sighed in relief, turned back to the papers on which he was marking tics. Bored, he recited from memory: “Grievance disputes are handled in writing and must be submitted no more than three days before the adjudication panel hears the case.”

“I reject these rules.”

“I reject the validity of your rejection of these rules, son. This is the process. It’s always been the process.”

“Just tell Raj to drop the stupid complaint.”

“The identity of the complainant remains strictly confidential throughout the adjudication process. The complaint itself makes this clear.”

“I know it was Raj.”

Human Resources seemed at least curious at this point, and swung to the desk, hacked at some keys, and read.

“Confirm or deny,” Will said.

“I do not intend to violate the privacy rights of a team-member. Would you like an apple?”

266

Will would. Human Resources opened his sack lunch and lobbed an apple grenade at Will, who caught it, bit into it, and felt a tug of apple skin catch between incisors. He tongued at it. “Written rebuttal?” he asked.

“Typed, submitted in duplicate.”

“Duplicate? You know you can just save two copies of the same file.”

Human Resources pursed his lips.

“Side question: how many people work here, anyway?”

“Surprisingly hard to say.”

“Anyway, you could take dictation. Was this your apple?”

Human Resources frowned.

“Like, am I eating your lunch right now? I feel bad about that. I guess.” Will didn’t.

Human Resources, he thought, seemed to be taking the approach of a parent, letting Will tire himself out.

“Are you taking dictation?”

Human Resources declined.

“The complaint is spurious. I am not following Raj—”

“The complainant,” Human Resources interrupted.

“I am not following the complainant, because we’re both headed to the same destination. We’re both going to work. Where we work. Together. There’s a train. We both take it.”

But maybe there’s another route Will could take? An amicable solution to ratchet down the tension.

267

“We live together.”

“Oh.”

“We’re coming from the same place and we’re going to the same place.” To punctuate, Will pointed at an invisible A and an invisible B and drew a line in the air between them.

“Ohhhh.”

“He’s just screwing around.”

“He’s . . . screwing around.”

“Drop the complaint.”

“But this is much more serious than I thought. This is a domestic situation?”

Will clawed at the skin on his face.

“If this is,” HR paused, tented his fingers, “a—uhh—a romantic situation, there are appropriate forms that need to be filled out to notify us of a relationship between employees. You’re not his superior, are you? That makes things. That—”

“That hesitation.”

“What hesitation?”

“I’m just saying it sounded a bit homophobic, is all,” Will said.

“Absolutely not. We have many . . .”

Will let HR trail off, let the silence linger like an odour. He sniffed, as though to tell HR, “I smell it on you.”

“Now, okay, because I take it that this isn’t a relationship with a superior, the process is pretty streamlined. Just a couple of forms, but—”

“So you’re admitting it is Raj.”

268

“Not as such.”

“Drop the grievance.”

“I can’t do that, Will. Human Resources is required to adhere to a strict code of conduct. We must take every complaint with the utmost seriousness.”

“We.”

“That’s right, we.”

“Fine.”

Human Resources head turned. “Fine?”

“I guess what I came to say, then, is that I’d like to file a grievance.”

“I’m not going to let you make a mockery of the system.”

“Fine, then I’d like to file a second grievance.”

Will turned, took a book from the shelf at random, and flipped through Who

Moved My Cheese. “I’m filing a grievance against you, for creating a hostile work environment by not taking my grievances seriously.”

“Ludicrous.”

“And earlier, when you said ‘Jesus,’ that upset my religious sensibilities.”

Human Resources threw up his hands.

“But maybe I should file that as a separate grievance? What’s your professional opinion. As a Human Resources professional, I mean. Not as my tormentor.”

“This is childish.”

Will took another bite of apple, posed, stood akimbo. Human Resources sat, arms folded, elbows on desk.

“Still outwaiting. Watch me, outwaiting.”

269

Human Resources conceded, stood, and shuffled to an overstuffed metal cabinet.

“I’ll get the paperwork,” he said.

Will placed the apple core on HR’s desk blotter; the fruit’s yellow flesh browning, juice dribbling onto the blotter leather.

Will was bcc’d on the complaint, which informed Raj that an unidentified co- worker alleged an unsafe working environment. In its entirety, the complaint read: “The complainant alleges that every morning, Mr. Chaudarry smiles and asks him/her how he/she is doing; the complainant alleges, however, that both the smile and the question are insincere, and that Mr. Chaudarry does not in fact care, and in fact intends this exercise as a sort of mental torment.” Like the original e-mail dispatched to Will, this missive, too, leant Raj the opportunity to respond—which he did, in much the same way that Will had (or so Will surmised), storming himself into HR and demanding to file a further complaint, which Will received notification of by the usual mechanism.

“The complainant alleges,” it read, “that the accused has been sneaking into the complainant’s office and oversharpening his/her pencils to—in the complainants words—

‘not quite the point where they break, but just about there? So when I, like, go to write, I get the first two or three words and then when I cross the t—crack—are you getting this all down? I really want to emphasize the precision of this e-mail. I insist you record this verbatim.’”

So it went.

“The complainant alleges that Mr. Foster snuck into the complainant’s workstation and changed the desktop background to hardcore pornography. Note that such actions constitute clear violation of Fiction Factor’s sexual harassment policy,

270 although the complainant also wishes to clarify that Mr. Foster appeared too timid to load actual hardcore pornography onto the complainant’s computer and so instead appeared to have loaded Microsoft Paint, selected the ‘free write’ tool, and scrawled the phrase

‘hardcore pornography’ in thick red ink, before saving the file and setting it as the complainant’s background.”

“In my capacity as HR lead, I wonder if you could tell me something,” HR tented his fingers at Will, “When was the last time you actually got any work done?”

“In my capacity as employee, I’m going to have to ask you to pull out a file and record my complaint.”

HR sighed.

“The complainant alleges that Mr. Chaudarry has been deliberately leaving his computer login credentials in places where the complainant will find them, which he describes as both ‘a grave security threat’ and ‘entrapment’. The complainant has suggested that if he/she had, in fact, changed the background of Mr. Chaudarry’s desktop

(and he/she has asked the adjudication panel to make it very clear that he/she is in no way taking responsibility for these actions, he/she is merely posing a hypothetical scenario explaining what might have happened if he/she had), he/she was deliberately provoked into doing so, which constitutes malfeasance on Mr. Chaudarry’s part.”

“Can you stop calling it an adjudication panel? I know it’s just you.”

“That reminds me,” HR said, “I can give this to you in person.”

He handed over a sealed envelope, which Will tore open, never dropping eye contact.

He skimmed.

271

It read, “This letter is to notify you that a grievance has been filed . . . ”

“Hard copy?”

“Changing things up. We in HR like to have fun, too, you know.”

“A laugh riot. Have I told you the story about the severed head?” Will asked.

HR’s reedy brows furrowed.

Will kept reading, now aloud: “The complainant alleges that Mr. Foster has been passing by his/her desk at fifteen minute intervals and asking—in an overly solicitous voice—‘Working hard, or hardly working?’ The complainant alleges mental anguish stemming from these interactions . . .”

“Ooh, that’s a good one. I like that one.” Will observed.

“I’ll just throw it out there,” HR said, “That if you two could work out whatever it is you’re fighting about, that would be better overall for morale.”

“Whose morale?”

“Our morale.”

“Speak for yourself,” Will said. “I’m golden. I’m Pony Boy.”

“I’ve brought my concerns to the attention of our corporate offices.”

Will wondered, Now why did you have to go and ruin the fun. He asked, “Now why did you have to go and ruin the fun.” Tongue drooping, he’d begun fashioning the complaint into a paper airplane, folding it in fourths and then turning it to tent triangular wings.

“The world doesn’t revolve around you, Mr. Foster. I know you think you’re just having a laugh, but you’re causing real people real stress.”

272

HR pushed aside a stack of files and chopped at the desk for emphasis. Will continued folding. “I understand that you’re creatives,” (air quotes unnecessary, based on the curl of his face) “and that we give certain leeway to creatives” (there it was again) “to create. But at some point you have to grow up. You’re not a child, and we’ve all got a stake in this place, and it lives or dies on your work. Do you know that?”

Will tapped the nose of the plane, eyed the measurements and carefully sent it into flight. It fluttered, zagged, and nosedived, bombing into deep-pile carpet. Will made no effort to retrieve the downed aircraft. He imagined all 144 paper passengers onboard, ripped into papery shreds, burnt up as the paper hull twisted and separated from the paper wings and the paper cockpit. Paper investigators searched in vain for the paper black box.

Paper divers combed the fibre tufts for organic remains.

“I’ll be honest here, HR.”

“Would it kill you to use my name?”

“Yes. I’ll be honest here, HR. The fact that you’re telling me this suggests you brought it up with Joseph, but you found his answer satisfactory.” The paper investigators finished their initial inquiry and determined the cause to be paper pilot error, the co-pilot having made a strategy-selection-error, adjusting altitude too rapidly and crashing into the carpet sea.

“Yes.”

They both, then, studied the wreck of the paper airplane. A paper police officer knocked on the door of a paper suburban home to notify the paper wife of her paper husband’s death. She did not cry. Or perhaps she did, Will decided, and the tears gummed her paper body and she disintegrated into twisted, wet, TP-ish flecks.

273

“His response?”

HR exhaled and as he dislodged Joseph’s words from memory, his eyes looked up and to the right and far away. “Creatives need room to create. Let them have their fun.”

“Stock must be riding high, if he’s in that good a mood.”

HR paused and faced Will and put his hands to his head and closed his eyes.

“You know we’re not publicly traded?”

“. . .” A paper monument had been established to mark the site of the paper disaster.

“You don’t even know what ‘publicly traded’ means, do you?”

The Paper President spoke at the ribbon cutting, which took place on a gray and solemn paper day.

HR moaned. Like a goat, Will thought. And Will thought he heard HR mutter, too, into his palm, “Goddamnit.”

Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he then said to Will, “I have a job to do.”

“We all do,” Will said.

He saluted the victims of the paper crash.

* * *

274

Fundraising

Will did not understand business, but he was correct, after a fashion. Publicly traded or not (not, he guessed, as it so turned out—Will had returned to his workstation and began

Googling to confirm), business was booming. Though he’d only been joking, not even parroting perceived wisdom so much as parroting something he’d just heard said before,

Will had actually been correct in this instance. There was no such thing as bad publicity.

Joseph was correct, too, having noted that negative reviews actually tended to stimulate business.

Against-the-grain, incisive brilliance like that is what had gotten him named “One to Watch” by President & CEO Magazine, or so said a dangerously pyramidal statuette adorning the cabinetry in his office.

It wasn’t that Joseph wasn’t furious about the leak or the story—he was fucking livid (his words, in a mass e-mail whose tone seemed to waver uncertainly between disappointed father and pissed-off high school football coach)—it was just that he saw a bright side, a way to leverage bad news into good.

Will crafted an email: “Can I register an HR complaint against the CEO for the use of the vulgar ‘fucking’ in a company-wide e-mail? I would theorize this constitutes a clear-cut violation of Fiction Factor’s sexual harassment in the workplace policy, which I have not read.”

HR responded: “I don’t know, can you?”

Will: “May I register an HR complaint against HR for grammatical pedantry?”

HR: “No.”

275

Don’t lose the thread, though. Bad news into good was Joseph’s game. Hence the new PR campaign. Joseph couldn’t think of a morning show host he wasn’t willing to prostrate himself before—international, national, regional, public. He drank coffee in the basement with twenty-somethings filming their homebrew cable access program dedicated to comic books, smiling ear-to-ear and inflecting arch-positivity in the face of too-long pauses, bad jokes, and seconds of dead air. He organized high-profile donations to schools, charities, social justice campaigns. He dispatched content creators to bookstores for impromptu signings, which explained Raj’s sudden absence, from his desk and from his and Will’s shared apartment.

“The complainant alleges that Mr. Chaudarry did not notify complainant of Mr.

Chaudarry’s absence, leading to undeserved emotional strain while the complainant struggled in Mr. Chaudarry’s absence.”

HR: “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to disclose a relationship?”

Gretchen was sent to local alternative bookstores. Or maybe she was just working away in her cube? Where was Gretchen?

“Right here,” she called.

Joseph penned an op-ed in a national weekly, which is to say he made Will pen an op-ed to which the boss signed his own name, defending Fiction Factor’s strategy and cleverly pivoting to a defense of storytelling praxis: “How do you empower people inside a company to do their own thing, to try to innovate, to not be a completely top-down organization, to be an organization that is creative and inventive? You can’t do that as a

CEO by telling everybody, ‘Here is your set of marching orders.’ It’s just too much. You don’t have the capacity to do that.”

276

Will was dispatched, with novelty cheques, to educational institutions as Joseph negotiated behind the scenes. Part busy-work, part opportunity for Heather to return to the fold, unburdened by the toxicity of Will’s neuroses.

“And by the time you’re back,” Joseph said, “You need to not be so weird.”

So Will sweated and shook hands, felt pawed at, and wondered why he was being dispatched for these high-profile gigs, while University Gift Acquisition Coordinators leaned in, boozily, to whisper thanks and greedily rub hands—let’s talk big picture, they said. Will could not imagine bigger than the figures on those cheques. We’re thinking

Stieglitz School of Narrative Studies. A School of Applied Storytelling, maybe, if he didn’t go in for the naming rights. How does that sound? Take that back to your boss, ask him how it sounds. We think it sounds good, ourselves. We’ve got a figure in mind, but we’re flexible. We’ve got payment options. And needs outside of that narrow purview as well. The writing labs need new computers. The writing labs always need new computers. How about a scoreboard?

How many more zeroes are we talking, Will would ask.

The Coordinators smiled, tight-lipped.

That many zeroes is how many more than too many?

Huh, they’d ask.

What I mean to say, Will would say—I’m no numbers guy, he’d reassure them.

Not good with negotiations. Just how many zeroes are we looking at is all?

These aren’t negotiations, they’d pat him on the back. Funny kid. We’re just having conversations, is all.

Conversations, Will would nod.

277

They’d say, tell him to come in, we can get dirty with the numbers. Show him hard numbers about where a bequeathal goes.

Will thought the word bequeath sounded dirty.

Will texted Raj. “How many years would it take us to make . . .”

Will’s brand new phone pinged with an incoming e-mail, which he read immediately.

“The complainant alleges that Mr. Foster has been pestering with the complainant with mathematical questions based the racist assumption that the complainant’s ethnicity means that he/she is good at mathematics. Furthermore, the complainant alleges that these questions have impinged upon the enjoyment of the complainant’s book tour, necessitating the purchase of room service, to wit: one steak sandwich, an order of frites, and two Old Style Pilsners.”

An addendum: also, mayo is extra. Add mayo to the bill.

Will’s response: the complainant alleges violation of safe workplace protocol for even hinting that mayo might be acceptable as a french fry dipping sauce.

Joseph began to fret that he’d moved too soon on that used press, that SW warehouse. Small beans, when they were pressing full-court to become one of the big players. What was the return policy on a used piece of twelve-year-old industrial equipment. Had Will ever heard of Ali Baba? Not the thief, the character, but the Chinese e-commerce titan. Take a seat and investigate their web portal. Brand new presses, double the capacity. Will wondered whether these decisions ought to involve him.

Joseph said, “We’re on our way to owning the means of production.”

That sounded familiar.

278

Meanwhile, if Will had read between the lines—had read the quarterly reports

(HR would have chastised him: private companies aren’t required to publish their books, dummy)—he’d have understood Joseph’s gambit better. That Joseph was

“overleveraged,” in business speak. Pallets of books waiting for readers stacked neatly in

Joseph’s dream warehouse space. Even Will might have understood that a post-industrial economy did not exactly value product that sits. Back of store shrinks, local warehousing shrinks, distribution centres rise, and UPCs do all the work: there’s only one Nintendo on the shelf in-store, but the computers are smart. The computers are next-level. While you were jerking off in the assistant manager’s office, the computers ordered six more, and they’re on their way from a conveniently-located third-party distribution centre with a twenty-four hour delivery window to 95% of Western Canada’s population. Next step: drones.

Will might have remembered the age of conglomerates, if he’d paid attention in econ: breweries buying up breweries until they realized (cleverly, they thought, at the time) that there was a ceiling on just how much beer people could drink, diversifying then into ceramics, industrial solvents, sports franchises. Institutional drift sets in, rudderlessness.

Joseph bequeathed Will with another duty, that of scholarly emissary.

“You went to grad school, right?” the boss had asked.

“Erm.”

“Simulacra? Deconstruction? All that fun stuff.”

“I have an idea,” Will admitted.

“Good. You’re my emissary. Everyone, meet my new academic liaison.”

279

The room had been empty, or maybe Gretchen was circling.

So flash-forward Will stood, or leaned, really, at the front of a classroom, squinting in the harsh institutional fluorescence, sweating and wondering whether anyone present was noticing him sweating, blinking less for the need to blink than to divert the trickle of saline beads out of his eyes and down around his temples. He wondered whether a headband was appropriate in a classroom setting. He looked at his feet, his boots. The linoleum shone as his forehead might.

“Let’s consider this a kind of public-private corporate outreach,” Joseph explained.

So Will stood, counted students. He’d introduced himself to the professor of this class, but he’d already forgotten her name, and there seemed no structure for how this event was supposed to proceed. Event? The room was not one of those lecture halls with the sloping floor, a theatre palace; he wasn’t the director at the front, explaining his vision pre-screening. He wondered whether he ought to have brought notes, something to read from, or prepared lecture slides. Slide one: here’s a pupper. A doggo. Memes slayed.

But what if they were cat people? Writers were cat people. He forgot what class this was, but when he studied the faces he saw that they were like him in age and cynicism.

Fourteen or fifteen of them, a straggler coming in. That awkward silence at the beginning of class when both parties—teacher and student—feel acutely as though they’re being studied out, watched by the other.

“What class is this again?” he asked the woman whose name he’d already forgotten twice.

280

Workshop. So, great, let’s talk craft. Words and sentences. Composition, schedule. Balance. He can handle that. Do they know who I am? he thinks, but then who is he? The name on the books? Mentor? Rival. Cautionary tale? Expert on the business side.

The winemaker Joseph Edward Gallo had two signatures: one affixed to every bottle of plonk he sold, and the other he used for personal business. A confidence man wrote a cheque to himself in Gallo’s name. Tore off a label, held it up to the sun as a transparency, tracing the letters. Forged the signature and moseyed down to the bank where he was promptly arrested, charged, arraigned. Genuinely a clever plan, Gallo admitted.

Two spheres, two signatures. Will had practiced his signature as a kid; most kids he knew had, too. He thought he’d play baseball, so he presumptuously affixed a number at the end of the scrawl, the “r” of his family name curling into the number two.

The professor seemed to be talking and Will swam, not listening.

Hand up. First question. Will spread his legs, braced his knees, like he’s saying

“bring it.” Then no, he decides, too aggressive. Playing it cool, back to leaning against the whiteboard ledge, thumbnail in mouth. Casual-like, not compulsive chewing. Hoped they believe in lobbing softballs.

“Two part question: would you agree that science fiction as a rule is about the encounter with the Other?”

Shit.

Will said, “Yes,” but he says it’s like a question, stretching the syllable.

281

The student continues: “Second part,” she says. “Is it problematic that the encounter with the Other always ends with its defeat—”

“Well, but okay—” Will starts.

“—I wasn’t finished. Or its reconstitution into the Self?”

She slipped back in her seat, smug, self-satisfied, smiling.

Pass. Next question.

“I want to talk about the hauntological dimension of your texts.”

“Texts? Do you mean books?” Will asked.

The student in question, young, facial shape drowned in curls, scowled. “I suppose,” she snorted.

“But want I’m really interested in is I want to discuss the spectre of Capital and the transcendence of the heroic self-sufficient individual as the pinnacle of the state.”

“Like capital-c Capital?”

“Was that not clear?”

Will turned helplessly to the instructor, who had seated herself in the final tier of chairs, her long legs spidering out. She drew, tongue-out, one eye on proceedings. She gave a half-hearted shrug, as if to say, “I cannot help you and—furthermore—I do not wish to help you.”

“Have you read any Lazarrato?” one asked.

“He’s the celebrity chef?”

“The Marxist.”

“The Marxist chef?”

“I thought we might talk about form,” one student volunteered.

282

Great, he thought.

The student continued: “particularly about how your sentences are bad and you should feel bad.”

Bigger laughs, a few pained expressions—there and then hidden—of something near empathy.

Will paced, head down, chewed at thumb flesh, and finally managed, “Do any of you read, like, novels?”

He consulted the wall-clock, counted its ticks.

“If you have books I could . . . sign. . .” he trailed off.

Go rot.

Projection, or maybe the tomato was hurling right toward him. I worship art, he wanted to say. But I worship, too, he would have to add, at the altar of paying rent. I worship groceries and cellular service. I worship dental coverage and after-dinner drinks slung comfortably outside of happy hour.

“Well. Thanks for your time?”

Slick with sweat, Will slinked escape-ways, cardboard box of remaindered paperbacks in tow. He sat the box on the high-sheen linoleum and unrolled himself onto a bench. Through the porthole window of the classroom, he watched the students rearranging themselves for a workshop.

All he needed: a moment to worship his device. Booted up his e-mail, checked the most recent entry, from HR:

“The complainant,” he glossed the familiar boilerplate and then stopped, surprised: “alleges the creation of an unsafe working environment stemming from

283 harassment of the HR Department Head both inside and outside of work hours. The complainant alleges the accumulation of unreasonable complaints designed specifically to cause the complainant mental anguish. The complainant further alleges undue hardship and stress, stating that he/she is sometimes afraid to come to work. The complainant has felt such undue stress that he has taken a leave of absence until such time as his/her complaint can be resolved.”

“In accordance with HR Policy 3.34-36, the complaint is scheduled to be adjudicated by a three-person panel.” Will paused, because here he found a new wrinkle.

“Given the absence of the sitting panel chair,” it read, “away on temporary stress leave pending the adjudication of an extent Human Resources violation panel, the adjudication hearing is hereby delayed until the findings in that panel have been published.”

Will read the final sentence. Over and over again he read the sentence, delighted, dizzy. He adored the final sentence.

He thumbed back to contacts, scrolled, found Heather, hovered over. He tapped.

One ring and he thought better of it.

Will wasn’t weird any longer.

Sent a message instead.

“Hi,” he wrote. “Just sorry, is all.”

* * *

284

The Thefts

With Heather re-ensconced in her cube and Will feeling sheepish, Raj returned from

Edmonton, and Will returned from his excoriation at the hands of campus activists

(echoing his text message to her face: “Hey, uhh?” “It’s fine.” “Yeah.”). And it was then when, in the times that emails to HR bounced, and Gretchen’s fishing wounds finally began to heal, it was then when the thefts really began. Not just the chintzy stuff. Or maybe when they finally noticed the thief who had been operating unnoticed beneath their very noses. No one could pinpoint the precise moment when they became a problem, the thefts. Items had a way of disappearing, but that was always true. Lunch here, computer printouts there, the action wall of a cubicle shrunk mysteriously by an inch (theft of space is still theft!), whiteboard markers vanished. Hours would spin, disappear on the clock. Time theft. The theft of their days and weeks and months. But it was only after everything else—the fishhook, the exposé—that the problem, like a cankerous mole, metastasized.

To that point, the thefts had seemed petty, even inconsequential, even if the janitorial staff had suffered the consequences. The sort of low-stakes larceny that takes place in any work environment: pens, markers, plates and forks left on the drying rack in the kitchenette. Files you sent to the office printer but forgot to get up and retrieve right away. Tupperware, even, though it’s possible the Tupperware was never stolen so much as it was simply dumped—along with its rancid innards—in the nearest trash bin each time Will lost patience at the state of the office fridge, all of it eventually transported— shepherded, he might say—to Shepard Landfill.

285

Repeating himself: “Shepherded, if you will.”

Raj said, “I won’t.”

Thefts begetting the sort of passive aggressive notes for which the white collar microclimate is notorious, even when the “theft” they referred to was more often accidental than not: Will complaining that someone had been eating his egg salad sandwich; Zeke complaining that the same criminal was taking his own, tensions escalating until it occurred to both that they brought to work identical lunch bags and saran-wrapped sandwiches and that they were each the other’s thief.

To whoever—here someone passive-aggressively added the ‘m’ with red marker—stole my fork: I bring them from home and I’m running low. Please return them? Did anyone accidentally pick some extra pages up from the printer? I’m up against a deadline and I need to go over these proofs. E-mails from Gretchen, mistakenly cc’d corporate-wide, finding their way even to the desktops of contractors and subcontractors oceans away:

To whomever cleaned out the kitchenette on Friday:

That mason jar at the back of the cupboard you poured out was not rotten food

or waste, but a batch of kombucha—or as the Koreans call it, beoseotcha. A

drink of sweetened, fermented teas known for its revitalizing potential.

Because I spend such long hours at work, I thought it best to prepare my

kombucha in the office, where it could undergo the required 7 to 10 days of

fermentation out of the gaze of my unenlightened roommates. That rubbery,

spongy, stringy solid floating in the bottle was not, I assure you, mould or a

sign of decay. Do not be afraid of that which with you are unfamiliar,

286

coworkers. It was the SCOBY, the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast,

working its magic on the brewed, sweetened tea in which it sat. The SCOBY

protects the fermenting tea from the air and helps maintain an environment

inside the jar that shields the beverage from unfriendly bacteria.

I would ask you, in the future, to show more respect for the belongings of

others. Did you know you need an old batch of kombucha in order to produce

another? Now I have no starter tea from which to prepare another batch? I

could buy some, but it would not be the same. I would also appreciate the

return of the mason jar, though I am not optimistic on that front. I regret now

that I cannot share my kombucha with any of you, my coworkers and trusted

friends, as I previously intended. And I fear that my own fragile confidence

has been shaken by this encounter with evil—am I being melodramatic?

Perhaps evil is a strong word, but certainly disrespect—in the world.

To which the replies flew in from all over the office and all over the world, staff weighing in. E-mail responses, mistakenly reply-all’d from the corners of the Fiction

Factor empire. Prompting questions from Raj, like, “Wait. We have a Toyko branch?” and “Why would we have a Tokyo branch?”

And Will might shrug and recommend Raj consult with HR and so they would compose and forward messages—messages upon passive-aggressive messages— receiving at first an acknowledgment of their receipt (HR is currently out-of-office, but will address your concern when he returns), then later nothing, and then finally a notice that the e-mails had bounced: delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists.

287

Please try resending this message later, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.

Questions begetting questions: “Who’s our system administrator?”

“What’s a system administrator?”

So Raj searched the Fiction Factor intranet database for a systems administrator, found an address and reached out. Curiously, another bounce. Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists. Raj stroked at his chin and studied the glyphs of the accompanying diagnostic information, as though he might intuit their meaning. Awful strange, they decided, that the system administrator should be unreachable, but maybe his mailbox was full? Okay, but what’s the office number? No number, Raj indicated, pointing to the spot on the screen, the empty cell in a spreadsheet where a code—2508C,

3100B—should have been. The oil on his fingertip smudged the monitor’s film, distorting the walls of the digital directory.

And as they sleuthed, in came the deluge of e-mails responding to Gretchen’s original e-mail—all declaring a variation of I think you sent this to the wrong mailing list, and responses to those responses noting the subsequent reply-all problem. But also then the British firm with whom Joseph had a handshake agreement over something-or-other felt the need to weigh in further, one office manager commenting that he would stick to good old-fashioned Earl Grey, and perhaps a small glass of Fernet Branca if he needed something bracing. An intern in the Los Angeles field office, responsible for vetting scripts and supervising filming, piped up to observe that the finest kombucha he’d ever had was at Soot Bull Jeep in Koreatown. Another response asking for directions to Soot

Bull Jeep and a reply to that with a link that offered not directions but a redirect to a

288 pixelated, poorly digitized video of a Russian man singing “Trololol,” that message carrying an identical time-stamp as a follow-up email from the information seeker that read, “Never mind, thought you meant Koreatown in Calgary; didn’t see you were in

LA,” and then another follow-up, reacting to the link, that said only, “I see what you did there.”

And Will and Raj wondered aloud again: we have a field office in LA? Was this company simply constantly expanding, consuming, rolling? When you glanced away and turned back, had it shifted? Or was it like the Amityville house—living, breathing, contracting and expanding so as to appropriately horrify?

Why weren’t they in LA? Maybe HR was in LA. Maybe sysadmin, or SA, was in

LA. The cool cats spoke acronym.

An unrelated thread, simultaneously, between supervisors in the translation division wondering when the last time their fridge had been cleaned out—engendering a response inquiring which fridge, pointing out that the second-floor kitchenette was clean enough to eat off of (which people presumably did, it being a kitchenette, as the first reply pointed out), a second reply that it was the first floor fridge being discussed, an email on which the translation services administrative assistant was cc’d unnecessarily, she having already been on the receiving end of every previous message of this thread, and to which she replied: I am not your mother.

Only then, finally, a company-wide warning from someone named Duncan

(“who’s Duncan?” Will asked. “Better e-mail HR and find out!”) that the corporate e- mail client was not the place for these exchanges, and that employees ought to be more scrupulous about who their messages were going out to. He concluded by linking to the

289

Fiction Factor e-mail etiquette policy, which strangled—like a sociopath might his elderly benefactor—the whole merry affair.

And when they came up for air, they found that more was gone. Will’s stash of pens. Not the normal pens, but the gel-writers with the slippery ink, the soaked-through quality and the light-bouncing sheen and texture of wetness even as it dried. A first- edition of Raj’s first book, its place of prominence pre-theft an unexpected betrayal of hidden sentimentality. Advance review copies of Raj’s many other books. Boxes of books unsent to reviewers because what was the point? If you’d read one, you read them all. I’m just a plain girl, they all begin. I didn’t choose to be a hero.

Will cornered Heather. “We okay?” he asked.

“We were okay until you cornered me and asked if we were okay.”

“Touché.”

Weak smile.

The locked glass display cabinet, lined with FF bestsellers on little mahogany bookstands suddenly empty, robbed of both book and stand, even as the display case remained locked. Maybe they were out for cleaning?

Heather’s succulent terrarium—its bed of reindeer moss, river rock and sand— came as a particular blow, signalled new tensions. Raised stakes. No more fun, not like the once-upon-a-time thefts.

The thefts had once been fun, if not for the illicit act itself than for the storms they raised, the controversies that made the white-walled office space less suffocating to those who lived it day-in, day-out. Or maybe it was easier to ignore when times were good— relatively speaking, of course. But times had changed, it was clear. Bodies were hired,

290 though no evidence of said bodies was forthcoming. The cavalry was on the way, Joseph reassured the office in a meeting on Touch Base Tuesday, and they only had to hold on until funds came through at the end of the month. Well, the first of the month, he corrected himself. There was no shortage of willing cavalry.

Blank stares greeted him. Will had just handed over a cheque with digits so multiple his eyes had blurred counting them. The new-ish printing press was churning.

Joseph had hired a consulting firm. The best PR money could buy—“you know the oil executive who murdered his grandparents and lived in their house for three years without ever disposing of the bodies?” he’d asked.

“No,” they’d all said.

“Exactly. That was them.”

He explained. The exposé had been a blessing and a curse, Joseph he noted. They were selling, they were making moves, but it would be awhile before the income showed up on their bank statements, was all. There were suppliers to pay. And with increased scrutiny, they had to be more careful than ever. But there were stopgap measures in place, he reassured them—

“Wait,” Heather had stopped him, “Are we solvent? Are we talking about a bank loan here, or money troubles? And what happened to Gretchen?”

Nearby, Gretchen frowned. Removal of the hook and a few stitches had swelled her cheek. The bruise pressed into her left nostril.

From behind his chair, Joseph told them no, that all was well: they ought not to be worried, because their payroll had been set aside. It was only, he said, that funds were currently tied up in the film productions division and printing equipment. He had tracked

291 down a second printing press and had talked the owner down to $14,000. Rent on their small warehouse in the Southeast. “These are the decisions we need to make if we’re going to become a player,” he said.

“No money?”

“Lots of money,” he corrected. “Just tied up. No liquid assets.”

“Fishing?”

“Out-of-pocket. You all looked like you needed a break. I’m not hurting.”

“The fines?” Will asked, referring to the three $115 tickets for fishing without a licence that had been left on their seats in the waiting room by CPS when they’d gone in to check on Gretchen. Joseph had told them to count themselves lucky they weren’t caught with live bait or it would have been another $287.

Joseph meeped, an otherworldly sound that suggested to Will that his employer viewed these transactions as the cost of doing business, even if he was not ecstatic about it. Will thought, here was a guy who at his worst probably spent that much each day powdering his nose.

Zeke connected the dots first. “Then why not a, you know, cash injection?” Zeke appeared proud of stumbling on the correct term.

“No,” Joseph shook his head, “Business and pleasure. Separate spheres. And you’re foolish if you believe I haven’t already sunk a lot into this operation already.”

Immediately he betrayed regret at having said this. Then, “There’s no need to panic.”

He added, “It’s business as usual. In this unusual business.” A weak smile. “Next order of business.”

“Where’s Raj?”

292

No one knew.

They all turned to Will.

“I am not his keeper.”

Okay. Next order of business, as it turned out, was the rash of thefts. First it was

Zeke’s new Don’t Talk to Me Yet coffee mug, which like the mug before it had disappeared from the sink on which he’d rested it while he was using the stall.

Photographs of Gretchen’s partner and her family were next, pulled from their frames and replaced by stock images. Gretchen had a partner? (“Five years strong.”) Zeke misplaced a set of floppy discs (“Wait. What?”). An ergonomic wrist-pad lifted from Duncan’s desk

(who was Duncan?), about which he sent an e-mail to the intended recipients, pleading for its return. A day later, the ergonomic backrest was un-velcro-ed from Gretchen’s chair, though she kept the information to herself until pressed days later by Heather and

Zeke. The Fiction Factor tuques that had been distributed in the hospital waiting room rather than on the shores of the Bow, as Joseph had planned. Heather’s family photos, the new photos that Heather had inserted in her frames and then, hours later, the frames themselves. A turkey sandwich on rye bread thieved from the fridge, replaced by a typewritten note—the closest to a clue anyone had seen so far—that only read “OM

NOM NOM.”

Suspicion fell at first on Zeke, it being felt that the supposed theft of his coffee- cum-bourbon mug was a feint. But then it was acknowledged that something so diabolical might be beyond the capacities of a man who struggled to make sense of the coffee shop in the foyer—unless that, too, was all part of the act. But no, it was not part of the act. And so suspicion then fell to Will, until Will returned from a meeting to

293 discover that the Blue Jays pennant he had tacked on the burlap of his cubicles had disappeared, as had a sheath of papers in his filing cabinet—his Wheel of Fortune Before

& After phrases. His best work so far, he said by way of explanation, was inspired by the chirping birds outside his apartment window: “Magpie à la mode.” No, he hadn’t written one that had made it to air yet. No, he didn’t even enjoy the program, and weren’t they getting sidetracked? They all decided they were, and renewed focus turned up further discoveries: the gold nameplate in the lobby directing clients of Ustrzyki Imports/Exports upstairs was gone, as was, one lobby barista confessed under Zeke’s suspicious gaze, a carton of cream, carafe and all. “Then again,” she said, “It’s not uncommon for the homeless to come and fish a cup from the garbage and fill it.”

Better safe than sorry, they decided, so they added it to the list.

What about Raj? Where was Raj? And it struck Will—not hard like a fist, but softly as a pat on the back—that Raj had pretty much vanished, if not into thin air then into a storage closet or a boiler room. They took the same train, walked the same route, but then nothing. Missing from his cubicle, his jacket hung on a hook, his screen saver shuddering. And then they’d meet up again on the train home.

Will thought to ask where Raj had been but paused, and Raj read his expression and waved it away as the train jostled them. Will gripped a hanging strap, Raj sat.

“Investigating,” he grunted.

Likely story. Like he might supress his guilt, his anxiety, his generalizable fear of everything, Will suppressed his doubts.

294

Another entry, one morning, prompted by Joseph weaving through the assembly room, squinting. Zeke popped his head out of his cube and asked whether something was up.

“Has anyone seen my day-planner?” Joseph asked. He paused to run his hands over any flat surface available, as if it might be hiding under the laminate.

Zeke shrugged, but others had poked out from their own holes and meaningful looks were exchanged.

They gathered in offices and in hallway corners wondered whether it was Raj.

Will maintained—swallowing that doubt even deeper, feeling it throw off his centre of gravity—that it could not be Raj. It would not be Raj.

“You guys don’t know him as well as I do,” he said.

“How well do you really know him?” they asked.

“Maybe he has a partner in crime?” Zeke suggested. He tilted his head.

Will maintained that he trusted his friend. On the other hand, only Raj knew about the Before & After file. Raj knew the office accoutrements whose disappearance would rattle his former co-workers most. But was that hard knowledge to come by? Were the thefts actually Raj’s responsibility? Were they an expression of Raj’s frustration, or rebellion? Subterfuge? His impotent struggle against the man?

Or if Raj was responsible, and Will still considered it a big if, were the thefts a generative, creative act?

Will lived under the assumption that every white-collar worker had an aborted novel (an aborted real novel)—or a novel that should be aborted—hidden in a desk drawer in his cube or his corner-office. Perhaps it was a failure of vision on his part,

295 solipsism to assume that because this was true for him it must be true for everyone. He had been raised by hard workers, blue-collar types, and then had gone directly into the academy, and so lord knew it was not anywhere firsthand that he’d gotten this idea: it came to him through movies, television, novels. Because he’d never spoken the belief aloud, no one had ever disabused him of the notion. And so it was a belief he held firmly onto, an illusion made even easier to maintain given that he had found himself in an office where this was literally the case—though, in this instance, the novels were not secret but official business, encouraged (within a specific set of plot and character development parameters, at least), even abandoned material reclaimed in bi- or tri- annual hauls—never scheduled, as Joseph valued the element of surprise—when Joseph emerged from his stately presidential office with his tie removed and wrapped around his head like a bandana, his shirt unbuttoned, smudges of eye-black followed at a distance by the administrative assistant, boredly beating pen against an overturned waste-basket grasped between her arm and chest, Joseph chanting and the drum banging as he worked his way from office-to-office collecting scraps of abandoned projects which, he explained, could be sacrificed—burned upon a pyre—to the creative gods and thus be regenerated into new, workable ideas.

What that actually meant, despite the elaborate performance (a few long-time writers getting in on the spirit, chanting “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood” as

Joseph made the rounds poaching abandoned manuscripts), was a memo the next

Monday morning, after a week spent combing these documents, suggesting how these words might be best reincorporated into x or y new project. That an unpublished word was a wasted word.

296

Bemused, Heather noted a certain precedent. “Publish or perish.”

And yet, Will had observed one afternoon in the kitchenette, finally speaking it aloud while unwrapping his egg salad, prodding it with his index finger, reflecting on this sad state of affairs, and finally saying something to her that wasn’t “I’m sorry,” the irony was that permission to do what he’d be doing anyway ruined its appeal for him. What was to be locked up in the drawer, if not for a furtive novel?

She was quiet for a moment, and he considered apologizing again. Considered turning to go. Like are we there yet? Is this still weird? He coughed.

“Not including Wheel of Fortune clues,” Heather said.

“Not including those,” Will said.

“Perhaps in the drawers, we’re hiding bills of sale.”

“Receipts,” Will said.

“Accounting ledgers. Sneaking multiplication in the off-hours.”

“Architectural blueprints.”

“Zeke is surreptitiously building an electric car.”

“Is that true?” Will asked.

Heather shrugged. “Maybe it’s not about the novel, it’s about the secrecy. About the optimism. The novel as satellite dish. Let’s talk about your Wheel of Fortune.”

“Let’s not.”

“Let’s talk about you and Raj,” she said.

“Let’s not.”

“He rebels so you don’t have to.”

297

“Dumb,” Will said, placing the sandwich back down on the table before even taking a bite. “Do you know what Raj used to do?”

“No.”

“He was an engineer before.”

“Oh.”

“He studied power lines, he says. They had him trying to figure out how to estimate how much power the entire province is going to use for the next five years, and how it’s going to be transmitted.”

“Oh.”

“He figured out where each plant was, how much electricity it generated, and how much energy you can transmit through each power line. Then he got population figures; he estimated growth and spread in five year intervals.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad. Doesn’t sound so different.”

“He said it was like solving a word problem from math class: it takes Raj three hours to drive from Calgary to Edmonton. The trip is 299 kilometers, city limits to city limits. What was Raj’s average cruising speed?”

“I always feel crippled by word problems.”

“Me too. Variables. I just want to know why. I asked him: why is Raj driving exactly city limit to city limit? What if there’s a catastrophic event, or a plant fails ahead of schedule? He said it was all already keyed into the numbers. It didn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t sound so unfamiliar. There’s still a novel in my drawer. My novel, I mean,” she said.

298

“Addendum: what is the point of having the novel in the drawer if someone is destined to thieve it?”

She drummed on the door of the refrigerator, “Are we talking metaphorical theft or literal theft?”

“Very literal.”

She thought. “Maybe we are being called on to free our desk novels from the shackles of our desk?”

“Let it go, and if it comes back to you . . . ?”

“More or less.”

“But what’s in that drawer, doesn’t it bleed out anyway?”

“It does,” she conceded. “But is that necessarily bad?”

The thief had stolen Will’s rubber snake, which ruled out anyone who might be afraid of snakes. Unless the thief was afraid of real snakes but not rubber snakes. The thief had not stolen a few wallet-sized photos of Heather’s labradoodle, which she kept pressed into the corner crevice of her computer monitor. That might rule out someone afraid of dogs, or it might rule out someone with too much affection for dogs.

“Want to know my secret?” Will asked. The sandwich sat, untouched.

Heather busied herself rifling through the contents of refrigerator. “Nah.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” she repeated.

“Passive resistance.”

Heather leaned into the fridge, the open-door light a corona around her frame.

299

“I have decided I am embracing the generative potential of the void,” he said.

“Look at this egg salad sandwich,” he pointed at the sandwich.

She looked at it.

“When there was no egg salad sandwich, my possibilities were limitless. I could have had any lunch. Now there’s only egg salad.”

“When there was no egg salad, you were hungry.”

Trying another approach, Will said. “My job is to write. To write, even to complain about said writing, is to encounter an irony, in that it is more writing. I am silently protesting.”

“Though still doing your work.”

“I refuse to taint my art with work and vice versa.”

“What art?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re being ridiculous.” The benefit of any discourse, Heather added, was the generation of more discourse, but Will observed that he did not see the relevance of said observation.

“You’re the one who told me this was all crumbling.”

“I did.”

“I am resisting right now by thinking about a short story that I’m not going to write down,” Will said. “By keeping it in my head, I’ll have kept it from being tainted.”

“Oh yeah?” Heather asked.

“Yeah. Want to know what it’s about?”

“Nope,” Heather said.

300

Will indulged her anyway. “It’s about a poor kid whose parents take him to a toy store exactly once a year on his birthday and they let him pick out his own present. And he agonizes over the decision, you know; he’s seriously busted up about what he’ll pick that year. He realizes so often that he’s gone for something flashy in years past, something lacking in substance. Shiny, maybe, but lacking in functionality. But this year he’s planned it out, see? It’s a momentous decision, a significant gesture, given their poverty. But do you want to know how it ends?”

“Nope,” Heather repeated.

“It ends with the big reveal that his parents have been taking him to a pet store all these years, and he’s been choosing from a wall of chew toys. Isn’t that great?”

Heather didn’t respond. He repeated “Isn’t that great?” and still she did not respond.

“I’ve got another one,” he said. “Want to hear it?”

“Not really,” she said.

“It’s about the dissolution of a marriage, see, but it’s from the perspective of the refrigerator. And the refrigerator can always hear what’s going on, and he’s concerned, but he can only see when the door is open. But, like, when the door is open, it’s also this screaming agony as all the cold rushes out of his body.”

She sighed.

“Come to think of it, maybe I could combine the two stories and just not write one story?”

Heather fidgeted with the lunch sack in her hands.

301

“I’m also working on not writing another story. Here it is: the story, it’s about this couple who volunteers to be the models for an IKEA instruction manual. And the joke is that they’re just sexless, outline-ish globs. But there’s an actual IKEA artist who draws them from life as they assemble various pieces. And so, as it turns out, even the IKEA models get into these horrific IKEA-related spousal conflicts. Or maybe I won’t take a different approach, won’t write down a different version where they’re real flesh-and- blood people, but as they build the AKSDAL, they find themselves transformed into eunuch, two-dimensional IKEA instruction manual human-ish glorbs. Not quite stick figures, but . . . I have no words to describe these. I will deliberately not seek words. I haven’t decided which version to not write.”

Heather dropped the sack on the counter.

Will picked up the sandwich once more, eyed it, took a bite. He chewed thoroughly, deliberately, squinting. He frowned through the mashing of teeth. “Did somebody scrape the mayo off my egg salad?”

Heather, disinterested, was reheating soup in the grungified communal microwave; its stained off-white hull suggested the appliance pre-dated the office in which it sat. The device beeped and she clicked hit the button that sprung the door. She stirred haphazardly, slammed the door and hit the button to add thirty additional seconds to the heating time. She sniffled and snorted back phlegm—“Think I’m catching a cold, too.”

Will threw the sandwich back down into its saran-wrap packaging in disgust.

“The thief has sunk to new lows,” Will said.

“Pardon?”

302

“The thief took my fucking mayo.”

“I’m thinking of quitting,” she said. She sat down across from Will, her minestrone soup steaming up into her face, her nostrils flaring. “If we’re all going down, anyway. It’s just toxic.” Studying him over the steam. “And I’m not just talking about you and Raj.”

He ignored his name. “What kind of monster—?” Will asked, staring, hands crossed, disbelievingly at the dry sandwich.

“I’m putting in an application at the Starbucks,” she said.

“Unacceptable,” Will said. He kicked back the s-shaped school chair with the force of his butt and marched out of the kitchenette, toward Joseph’s office. The egg- salad sat, one bite missing, on the Formica tabletop. On his way he stormed by a stranger holding a stop-watch—or, rather, were Will were being precise in his observations, a stop-watch app on his iPhone—to his small, myopic eyes. It spoke to lax security measures or to the surreality of his situation, or both, that he did not stop to wonder who this person might be.

The team scheduled a meeting with Joseph to express their concerns and when they filed into his office he waved them off as he’d done while fishing weeks before.

“It’ll turn up, guys.”

They pointed out that ergonomic seatbacks, framed photographs, and pennants were not the sorts of items that were easily misplaced.

“It’s not something to worry about, guys. First quarter progress reports are due.

Those should be your focus right now.”

They pressed him.

303

“What are you doing to protect us?” Heather asked.

“There is no threat to protect you from. Building security is fine,” Joseph tented his fingers and leaned back in his chair.

“Tell our missing stuff there’s no threat,” Heather suggested.

“A few misplaced items hardly constitutes a threat. But I can see you’re all passionate about this.”

The group nodded.

“Check the cameras,” Heather said. She assumed there must be cameras.

“Check the passkey access times,” Zeke said. He did not understand the technology involved, but this sounded like a reasonable request.

“Will,” Joseph said, “Do you think Raj is responsible for all this?”

“No,” said Will.

“Do you think Raj poses a threat?”

“No,” Will repeated, though less confident than before.

Joseph waved them out of his office. “I’ll talk to the janitorial staff,” he ceded.

They left the meeting and gathered around the water cooler to express their frustration with the wall that had been thrown up before them. But then, that afternoon,

Zeke called over Will and Heather and pointed to Joseph’s closed door.

“I saw security go in there twenty minutes ago,” he whispered. “They’re still inside.” Will sidled to the door but heard nothing.

The thefts, though, did not let up, slowing only after a few weeks because there was little left to steal: no one brought their sentimental memorabilia from home. Cabinets and drawers were assiduously locked, laptops under constant surveillance.

304

Paranoia took its toll. The thefts, in combination with the dismantled chairs in empty offices, an increasingly common sight each morning when they stumbled in to work, cast a pall.

Zeke took up guard in the lobby with a logbook, monitoring the comings and goings through the spinning front doors. He was also, he added, keeping an eye on that so-called Starbucks.

A text message from Will’s father: “How’s work.”

“Hard,” Will typed back. “You?”

“I just realized something,” Raj said, late one morning, arising from nowhere, as if out of the mist. Chinook wind and city grit rattled at the heavy-duty floor-to-ceiling window panes. The resultant dull howl was like a dog’s moan, like its nails clacking. As if to forestall questions regarding his random disappearances, he’d brought a peace offering—a bright yellow box of fried chicken, sodden with kidney-shaped rings of grease, smelling of fryer oil, trans fats and scorched flesh. Plopped it down on Will’s desk with a thwack. Will opened the lid, wisely closed it and set it aside on a pile of manuscript papers, which began to sponge up the pooling lipid leakage. Will’s personal philosophy dictated there was nothing good about devouring fried chicken in front of another human being. The experience is too pornographic, the immediate aftermath in his gut too explosive.

“Yeah?” Will asked.

“If Human Resources ceases to exist,” he trailed off, assuming Will would finish the thought.

305

Will frowned dumbly, massaged at a pain in his mouse wrist, thought about the corn grenade’s explosion of deep-fried flavours.

“. . . How is it possible to hire anyone?”

“Right,” Will said.

“And . . .”

“It’s early. Humour me.”

Raj cursed under his breath, finished the thought: “It’s like almost noon. You’re about to face-fuck some fried chicken.”

“And.”

“How is it possible to fire anyone?”

At last, Will got it, but he was taking it in a different, darker, colder direction.

“How is it possible to quit?”

“So you’ve been?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The ceiling vent coughed, kicked, spat, and settled into a steady chug as though trying in vain to reject the box’s odours from its own circulatory system and finally relenting. Raj stood, hand tucked in rear jeans pocket for a moment, and then managed a,

“Well. I’ll. Leave you to—” and he gestured to the box, pained expression, embarrassed for Will. He backed out slowly, hands up, as though Will had tasted flesh, gone feral.

Play it cool. Slit-eyed glances side-to-side, Will cracked the folded cardboard and greedily rubbed palms.

306

Drumstick gone, thigh gone. Corn grenades vanished to explode in someone else’s stomach. They’d all been there, haphazardly piled and carefully boxed. The thief left only a bed of flaccid, damp potatoes? How? And what kind of m—

Will stopped himself, aware of being caught in a loop. Swatted at the box, pushed it away. Warped words on wet piles of paper palimpsested and he crossed his eyes to make out letters through letters, like a memory of his mother tracing cartoons. Holding an image up to the storm door window, backlit by afternoon sun, she would place a thin sheet of legal paper in front, and outline its features.

Do not seek to explain the thief.

Maybe Heather had the right idea.

* * *

307

Raj Is Out

What’s the worst writing job you’ve taken for pay?

They gathered in the breakroom to debate the question, sucked back coffee and licked powdered doughnut fingers. Raj sought out and sniffed from a carton of milk, dabbed at the chalky milk-rim of the soggy vessel.

Gretchen wrote government copy for electronic road signs.

“Buckle up!” she said.

Okay, but what was the slogan? Oh, it was buckle up? Okay.

Raj said he didn’t take work of which he morally disapproved.

Now Will just knew that wasn’t true.

Student essays? The Williams-Sonoma catalogue?

Will’s meat-cute advertisement reigned until an intern upped the stakes.

(“Who are you again?” Will asked.

The intern shrugged, bit into his doughnut, spoke with his mouth full.)

Ad copy for a Bible camp.

Not bad, Will admitted. He could imagine: An affordable, high-energy Christian summer camp experience! Horseback riding, archery, rock climbing, campfires, chapel, tetherball, night games, cabin group Bible studies! Prepare for the end times with survivalist lessons in riflery and campfire cooking. The children, the Squirts, encouraged to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, draw pictures of bearded men they imagine are God, but their spelling is as weak as their theology: I love Gob! they declare, or Gad.

“How do you justify it to yourself?” Will wondered.

308

By way of answer, the intern explained only that the sleeping commons was called the caboose. He enjoyed the caboose. And he was saying—the worst part, he was saying—they’d stiffed her on her fee, when Joseph ducked through the fire door and stormtroopered the room, determined, annoyed, asking teeth-clenchingly for an audience with Raj, who was at that moment slugging milk directly from the carton.

Lowering the container, he licked at his milk mustache suggestively, smiled.

Joseph blamed Raj. For what did he blame Raj? He blamed Raj for everything: for the thefts, the collapse of deals (the deals, they realized, the deals were collapsing), the collapse of desk chairs, for the mental break of his HR vet and right-hand-man. Blamed

Raj for the remainders when doing long division. So much of Joseph’s life, Will figured, had been taken up by an abiding distrust, dislike, disdain for Raj’s seeming otioseness, his recalcitrance, the stupid smirk that never fell off his stupid face (Will could only speculate here). Not entirely wrong to, in the estimation of his colleagues, clouded by similar suspicions. Even Will’s patience had gone anorexic. His theory, on the one hand, that those who claim their indolence loudest are among those working hardest in secret, butting gradually with the feeling that maybe—maybe—Raj was actually just a run-of- the-mill asshole of the falling upwards variety. Raj, for his part, like a cartoonish professional wrestling villain, pounded around the office, stalking, footfalls like muffled gunshots, wide-eyed, half-crazed, gesturing exaggeratedly, as if to say yes, yes. Give me your hate. I thrive on your hate; Raj was the child who grew up rooting against Hulk

Hogan. Not because he had some affinity for the Iron Sheik, in fact he deplored the cheap stereotype, deplored the inability of his youthful peers’ inability to distinguish an Iranian from an Indian, but—instead—just because the bad guy is always more interesting.

309

Maybe that’s why his writing was more interesting, because he was himself but a few degrees away from playing out racial stereotypes and trampling, spitting on a Canadian flag. “You’re welcome,” he’d cry, exaggerating a regionally unlocatable but unmistakable inflection and cadence, “you’re welcome!”

The question was why Raj hadn’t been fired sooner, or, alternately, why he hadn’t quit. The answer to the second question, easier than the first, was that Raj wasn’t Raj without performance. He defined himself by his audience.

At a conference, or a reading, a hastily-gathered open mic maybe, once, Will remembered a naïve questioner asking a panel of readers what it was about poetry that so warmed their cockles. Scoffs and harrumphs ensued and the nature of the question was thoroughly deconstructed. Spittle-spat-flew and the questioner made to feel stunted, physically and intellectually eviscerated. He shrank, reddened. Poetry was necessary!

Poetry was not a luxury! Have you read Audre Lorde? Have you read Woolf? How could

I not be a poet! And but then, the third panelist, purple-haired and acne-scarred, triangle- faced and gap-toothed, shrugged, and said: “I just like the attention, mostly.”

Raj was not that speaker, was not precisely like that speaker, but he breathed the same air as that speaker.

Artistry suffused everything Raj did, though not so pretentiously so as that might have sounded; in his flair he found a trait that others found charming at first, tiring later, then increasingly annoyed, before the masses turned on him, vilified him. A joke taken too far the culprit, or an easily falsifiable lie about a trivial matter (“I was born in

Bangalore,” or “My twin died at birth” or “I love you”). Raj didn’t mind, because annoyance, hatred, were the same to him as love, adoration, friendship—all as long as

310 someone was watching: not a voyeur himself, but the inverse, some reverse scopophiliac.

And as a poet, sure, there’s the brief glimpse of fame (“fame”) with each new publication, with each reading series, or grant, but the solitary practice of writing wasn’t so much for Raj. If he was to go, his masterpiece was going to be a final blowout, some grand fireable offence, he thought, and he’d rally the troops around him and close out his tenure with a dramatic speech delivered from a dangerously wonky rolling computer desk: they may take our working lives, but they’ll never take our freedom.

As for why Joseph kept Raj around, the reasons were twofold: one, Raj was very good at his job, or at least good at the writing part of his job. Raj played poorly with other children—he was liable to dump sand down drawers, push the smaller kids from their prone position on the monkey bars—but, left to himself, he produced good work. A prodigy of words and sentences. Utterly inept with his word processor (size 14 Arial, why not?), but prose that felt upsettingly good. Will (as many self-described writers, he assumed, secretly did) classed his peers into two categories: those who made him want to go out and write (either because they were so bad or, more generously, because they were good enough, and he thought “I can do that”), and those—much more discouragingly, strangely—who made him want to self-immolate, so marvellous and impossible to equal their sentences were. Sentences that Joseph whistled appreciatively over before condensing them, contorting them in the name of reader-friendliness. Mailer once stabbed his then-wife with a rusty knife. Ben Jonson killed a man. Rimbaud was a smuggler, Flaubert a pedophile. Can bad people make good art? Raj was no monster; just a pain-in-the-ass; his crimes were paltry—stealing (allegedly), disassembling desk-chairs

(allegedly), lying (definitely), and cruelty (no comment); he was clever but mean and

311 ironic (“cleverness does not become a grown-man,” Will’s father told him), but his existence and his works said the two, the good and the bad, sure as shit can go together.

The question, even, was flawed: badness and goodness don’t refer in this riddle to the same thing. For the artist, badness is a moral quality or judgment; for the art, goodness a term of aesthetic merit.

But the other reason Raj stuck around was anthropological: When the king of a nineteenth-century West African tribe sensed his people were frightened by some invisible evil, a plague or a poor harvest, he sent men out to purchase for him a “sickly person.” This sickly soul was dragged down to the river’s edge, townspeople following, taunting the victim and crying, “Wickedness!” The townspeople drowned their sacrifice in the river and cheered, believing their terrors died with him.

In Thailand, people selected and threw a “debauched woman” over the city walls.

Leviticus tells us that the ancient Jews would anoint a goat and set him loose in the desert to die.

Raj was scapegoat. Raj warded off an undefined evil.

Raj was safe, until he wasn’t.

Joseph publically put Raj on notice. Raj immediately left the office and sat down at his desk—closed the flimsy cube divider and set to work with Photoshop and, fighting through his computational incompetence, producing and printing some three-hundred posters.

Wild West “Wanted” signs on a background of gnarled wood and nails, ostensibly bullet riddled with Raj’s daguerreotyped face smiling smugly in the crosshairs. Dead or alive, the copy read. But the word wanted had been struck out, replaced:

312

“On Notice.”

Raj set several copies on Joseph’s desk, and Joseph did not so much as glance at them, forearming them across and into a wastebasket. So Raj left once more.

And Raj came back an hour later, calm as autumn, fiddling with an allen wrench.

“It was me.”

“What was you?”

Raj pointed the wrench at Joseph. A hex on you! “I fed them the story. I’m the anonymous source.”

Joseph exhaled, erupted.

“Is this a confession, Raj? Am I to take this as a confession?”

“I thought that was clear.”

“The guilt finally got to you?”

Raj described body parts and told Joseph to perform certain acts on them.

Joseph suspended him on the spot.

“You’re sending me to time out?”

Joseph stood. He resembled a bouncer. His memoirs claimed that briefly he had been.

“I’m not a high school student,” Raj said, “Just fire me if you’re going to fire me.”

Turns out you don’t need HR to hire and fire. In fact, cutting out HR cuts out the middle-man. So Joseph did fire Raj, and Raj beamed as he strolled to the bank of elevators and pressed the down button. Will and Heather watched. Heather sniffled— whether tears or a cold, Will wasn’t sure—and Joseph threw up his hands and marched

313 back to his office. He shook his head the entire way, as if to say “Good riddance.” At the same moment, Raj was sticking his head out from inside the elevator doors, beatific expression on his face, and declaring his own, “Good riddance!”

Later, Will would ask Raj, would wonder: “So, did you do it?” and Raj would incredulously reply, like an offended debutante, “How could you even ask that question!”

But he said it with such a smirk that Will doubted the answer, doubted himself, decided at that moment that caring took too much brain matter. So instead, he would ask, “What now?” and Raj would casually let slide that, well, he wasn’t super worried.

“Maybe it’s you who ought to be worried.”

What’s that supposed to mean, Will would ponder. What’s that supposed to mean?

It all took too much brain matter.

But going back, back before that conversation, in the quiet that followed only just after Raj had descended by elevator, Joseph emerged from his office, tensely, or as a tense person feigning casualness, with an announcement for the stunned writers who remained, that this was a tough time for all of them, and that sacrifices would need to be made.

“But morale is also important,” Heather anticipated.

“Morale is important,” Joseph agreed.

A ropes course, they wondered? Maybe shoot a game of pool. Leadership retreat.

“So,” he clapped his hands together, “how ‘bout cosmic bowling?”

Will, dryly: “It’s out of this world.”

* * *

314

Efficiency

Joseph wasn’t concerned with thefts, because Joseph was concerned with staying afloat.

Tens of thousands of dollars tied up in aging printing presses, hundreds of thousands more in office space and warehouse space and land deals for said space and who knew how much in inventory—pallets upon pallets of novels in cardboard boxes, boxes in turn stacked together into neat four-by-four cubes and assiduously wrapped in commercial- grade shrink wrap; more pallets, waterlogged, that had been carted to the landfill after the

’13 flood wiped out the pre-existing inventory (these pallets present only in a phantom sense, the subject of a prolonged struggle with an insurance company, even after Joseph had urinated on the stacks of wet books and claimed a sewage leak as the cause of damage); still more pallets, these unwrapped, of books returned, their covers torn off, as the warehouse manager and Joseph fought by phone, fought and sought a way to salvage what remained: recycle and re-use the paper, the warehouse manager had suggested, but

Joseph urged him to think outside the box about what sat inside the boxes. A mass-scale conceptual art project? Did the warehouse manager know that books made for surprisingly effective insulation? Perhaps they could re-bind these editions with new covers—new titles, even—and try again with the same consumers who had rejected them the first go-round?

Heather was of course correct. The company was broke, yes. But only in a technical sense, and so Joseph was correct too, though also in only a technical sense.

They were, as the expression goes, cash poor but asset rich, and were—even Joseph finally conceded, though he simultaneously suggested the culprit was a filing error, after pay-day passed and only half the staff received their direct deposit (and Will suspected

315 only half of those noticed, writers not historically being good with numbers types; Will himself only alerted to the situation when Gretchen managed a weak cough and hemmed and hawed before saying, “It’s the strangest thing . . .”)—in desperate need of a short-to- medium-term cash injection. The sort of transaction that would, normally, present no problem for a thriving medium-sized business, but which came to vex Joseph. Joseph, who, though his own private wealth provided the initial start-up funds, was loathe to contribute more now that (though he would never admit) failure seemed—if not assured, then—at least on the table in a way that never seemed possible for a man as confident as he was in himself. Joseph who, though born to charm the struggling twenty-somethings whose classrooms he visited, whose places of menial work he dropped in on unannounced, seemed preternaturally incapable of charming bank managers. For even when the numbers added up, even when the business plan was complete and filed in a timely fashion, i’s crossed and t’s dotted (old banker joke, ha ha), projecting as it did current revenues and potential growth for the next three-to-five years, presenting their current B/S with no BS, arguing with eloquence—as only those who’ve had money can argue about more money, because they, personally, have nothing to lose with regard to money—for why Fiction Factor was a safe bet, the applications returned one after another returned, request denied, request denied, the common denominator being that no bean- counter behind any bank branch desk could figure out what it was Fiction Factor did, precisely, no matter how many times Joseph held his office phone to his ears and tried to explain it. Nor did the arrest record help, nor did people’s long memory of the moment, many years ago, when Joseph was excoriated on national television for peddling fiction as truth. A memory that must have evoked certain vibes, certain long-term reverberations,

316 leading bankers to wonder whether Joseph wasn’t piling fiduciary lies upon fictional ones. But then weren’t all lies fictional ones?

Government funding agencies were already out—FF had grown too big, too quickly, had become too international; a loan shark seemed, even for Joseph, extreme, and it hurt Joseph’s sense of writerly vanity to imagine that no loan shark would even be interested in the care with which he had crafted his business case. The bank of mom and pop long ago dried up, along with his parents’ very bones, buried.

And so it was, cornered, that feelers went out in every direction Joseph could manage, and that contests were entered in the meantime, no prize sum too small for him to line up as an entrant, begging for dollars from panels of judges—business success stories offering symbolic philanthropic aid to mostly college business students. And there was Joseph, brazen in his willingness to take dollars from the hands of budding entrepreneurs.

It was by way of this kind of recklessness, this spirit of there being no sum of money too small, no guideline too degrading, that Joseph found himself, ultimately, coaxed into and mere days away from appearing on a certain nationally syndicated television program, where he would be laid prostrate before a panel of angry millionaire business savants, pleading his financial case. It was then, at last, when an angel descended from the heavens.

The angel could help.

The angel would help.

The angel investor was willing to offer a substantial cash infusion, provided only that a few very small changes were made.

317

Joseph called to cancel the television appearance, relieved that he had escaped finding himself once more on national television, once more enduring the scorn of embittered talking heads.

He cut the deal and the pay-cheques recommenced and he felt relief that he had no longer to keep a web browser directed to the bank’s website, clicking refresh to monitor the depths of red into which the company had plunged. For the first time in weeks, he sunk back into his Aeron. Crisis averted.

It was business as usual, but the phrase “business as usual”—like the word morale—was a phrase that usually denoted its absence. Thus began the time of the stopwatches.

Reinforcements came, as Joseph had reassured, but not the reinforcements Will and the others sought or expected. Reinforcements came not in the form of junior writers or editorial hands, but in the form of middle managers, efficiency experts, personnel management and human resources liaisons, white collars swarming every office nook in search of inefficiencies. At least, they all agreed, these new hires would ease the burden on HR, what with HR not existing.

Heather, for one, would look up from her desk to discover one such clock- counter, unsmiling, and she would pause, and the clock counter would tap a button and wait. And she would scratch her cheek and the clock-counter would squirm a pencil and pad out of a chest pocket, absently tapping the small booklet against his stomach, inhaling and exhaling through the nose. And Heather would whistle a bit, looking back at her computer, scrolling through pages of precious doggos. Finally, turning from the scratch on her cheek to one at the bridge of her nose she would ask, “Can I help you?”

318 and the warm body before her would tap the stopwatch app once more, flip open his notebook, scribble a number, and about-face to leave, returning the notebook neatly to his pocket.

“Who was that?” Heather asked a now empty office.

A rumour emerged that the company was being bought by an integrated digital media firm out of California, that the presence of the stopwatchers marked the furtherance of efforts to downsize.

A day later, the stopwatch-watcher returned to Heather’s desk.

“Can you explain the packages?” he asked.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The stranger made a note. “The packages?”

“I have them delivered here. I work late.”

The stopwatch-watcher made another tic. “How many times, would you say, on average, you use the washroom in a day?”

“What?”

“I’ll put down four. Four seems reasonable.”

“No—”

“And how many times, would you say, on average, you take a sip from the water fountain?”

“This is insane.” She sat back and shook her head. The swivel mechanism in her chair creaking as it eased back.

“Two? Let’s say two.” Making a note of this invented fact, he added, “Two is low, you know. It’s important to stay adequately hydrated.”

319

“But then wouldn’t I need to use the washroom more?” Heather asked, frustrated.

“This strikes me as pathological.”

“Excellent point. Let’s revise your washroom number down to three.”

“Is this some kind of defense mechanism?” she said. “We can talk about this. I’m a registered therapist, you know.”

Another tic.

“And just—if you could be as precise here as possible—how many times a day would you say, on average, on a typical weekday, do you find that your duties bring you up to the sixth floor?”

“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she said.

“Often? I see.”

“You’re obsessed with numbers because they allow you a measure of control over the world.”

“At twenty meters, that’s about, let’s see, twenty-eight paces down the hallway?

More if you take the stairs, but I bet you don’t take the stairs.”

The efficiency expert was now bent at the waist, peering under Heather’s desk at her trousers or her feet, and Heather reflexively tucked them beneath her chair, springing the swivel mechanism which launched her forward.

“With the length of your legs—we can cross-reference the HR charts to get more accurate results—let’s revise that to thirty-one steps. Five, six times a day? Thirty-one times six—and that’s not counting the return trip? Or the steps on the sixth floor?”

Adding the numbers on his notepad, “Three-hundred-seventy-two steps?” Then an aside, to himself, “Has any thought been given to how space is being utilized?”

320

That was how efficiency became the (stop)watch word. Lines etched themselves deeper in Heather’s face. The lines around her mouth drooped impossibly; she aged years in a matter of days. The principles of scientific management reigned anew. The stopwatch became totemic. The middle managers multiplied. Will found them in corners and crevices, in stairwells and elevators. Maybe it was the same middle manager, because it was impossible that so many should seem to have infested a few floors of cozy office space. On the seventh floor slurping hot coffee, tongues scorched, studying the layout, the aging equipment sitting unused, layered with tarps. They infiltrated the e-mail server with helpful tips, the dramatic readings of which were anything but efficient.

“I’ve” one read, “noticed that little attention has been given to the selection of pencils. Remember that some tasks require soft lead, others hard lead.”

“It’s come to my attention” another noted, “that there’s been a widespread adoption of gel-writer pens; given, however, the cost of said pens, combined with their short lifespan relative to the classic Bic, and the frequency with which pens are misplaced, might I recommend a shift in practice, a concession to austerity?” And it was not long before those gel-writer pens were misplaced—by the thief or by the efficiency experts, no one was certain, but sometimes, it seemed, snatched right from a pocket or palm—and a new (the same?) middle manager wandered the floor of the assembly room handing out packages of Bic pens. They had names like Tad and Aiden and Randy and

Chad and Trent. Did anyone actually name their kids Tad or Trent?

“Tad is the name of the guy who tries to convince your girlfriend to cheat on you at a party, while you’re stuck at home with the flu,” Will said.

“But if she goes along with it, what does that say about you?” Heather wondered.

321

“Aiden definitely has a trust fund in his name.”

Another treatise, on the topic of the water fountain read, “The average person should drink water at least five or six times a day. If each writer were compelled to walk fifty feet to, and fifty feet from, the fountain, five times a day, each one would walk over five hundred feet a day. Multiplied by a team of ten, twenty, thirty staff writers, the distance would be 15,000 feet, nearly three miles!”

And soon the glugging water fountain found itself relocated, from a shaded corner, to the center of the assembly room.

Private e-mails too, to Heather, adopted a similar tone: “Have you noticed,

Heather, that when you are rushing through your work, you toss papers in a disorderly heap as you go? That it is only when you’ve finished, we’ve observed, that you pile them in an orderly manner? Have you given consideration to piling your work neatly as you go?”

Or another: “Heather, have you given thought to the deliberate pace you use when mailing documents. First, you carefully moisten the gummed end, then press it down, then you pound each stamp with your fist. Did you know that we have a team of experts who can train you in matters like these, improving your efficiency by up to four times?

Did you know that the difference is not only speed, but—more crucially—the elimination of waste motions?”

Then another: “Heather, have you noticed that when typing, you have the habit of continually turning your head to check your doorway, as many as four or five times for each sentence? That you are twisting your head eight or ten times a minute, over 500 times an hour? That putting a stop to this motion will increase your working speed and

322 decrease fatigue?”

It was not long before a peppy intern was wandering the fifth floor, mobile workstation in tow, an aged A/V cart with a lame wheel, his laptop and stacks of paper and a wireless phone, his cash-box, his ledgers and keys, robbed of his office; the first act of his new, roaming position, he was informed, was to distribute a pamphlet to which a

Tad or Chad had taken a liking, a document that heralded the time of the stopwatches and middle-managers—an 1880s religious pamphlet titled Blessed Be Drudgery.

Our desire for culture and leisure, it argued, could only be guaranteed by “our own plod, our plod in the rut, our drill of habit.” Our lives, it explained, “depend on our drudgery.”

And as they chewed over the pamphlet, the stopwatch watchers turned their attentions to the rest of the team of writers, reproducing the results they had achieved with Heather, wandering through the cubes of the assembly room floor with itchy timer fingers.

At first they watched, quietly, gathered by the bank of elevators, the entire assembly floor in panoptic view, occasionally closing ranks to whisper and jot notes, monitoring that continued for days and left the staff in unease. Heather contemplated her

Starbucks application, for what did make her most excited to be a member of the

Starbucks team and what was her greatest flaw?; Zeke remained too on-edge to perform any task but stealing to the bathroom for a nip of Kentucky Straight and returning, mildew-eyed, to proof the latest entry in the Bloodwar Chronicles saga, until his pint bottle disappeared from the vertical compartment of his desk. At which point, dried out and paranoid, he tossed aside the proofs and wrote feverishly, at a pace no one had seen

323 of him for months. And the efficiency expert adjusted the frames of their glasses and clucked their tongues, discussing amongst themselves this unlikely discovery.

But while the monitoring continued, so too did efforts at building bridges. Slap with the back of the hand; caress with the palm.

Joseph stopped Will in the hall to tell him, “You’re doing great work, by the way.”

Will beamed in spite of himself.

And Joseph likewise scheduled intramural softball matches (not cosmic bowling, it turned out), though their first two games—the first against Cenovus, the second versus a team of ringers from TransAlta—were both halted by the invocation of the twelve-run mercy rule. That in spite of Will’s attempt to shape the team after his own vision (an attempt that failed, though Will was glad to incorporate the company team’s three-quarter sleeve baseball shirts into his regular fashion ensemble, and Heather was glad for the aluminium bat, which she said she was going to place next to the door of her Forest Lawn apartment). But the whole exercise was flawed from the beginning, given they lacked even the nine (ten, if you were playing in a league that allowed for a roving outfielder) players required to field a team, and were forced to augment their roster with the intern in

IT (the Bangladeshi sent their regrets; they speculated that their talents for cricket would have served them well) and friends-of-friends. Nor was ultimate Frisbee the answer, for no one was precisely certain what made Frisbee “ultimate,” and Will was not happy that the three-quarter sleeve baseball shirts were being reused for an entirely different sport, even though the pun that formed the basis of their team name was baseball specific. If there was one facet of the sporting game they could win at, it was puns. Nor were the

324 questions of the opposing teams deemed good for morale: to be asked “what is it you guys do anyway” and not have an answer ready for them or for yourself is a troubling exercise.

“We’re writers.”

“Like technical writers? Journalists?”

Not really either. It’s difficult to explain.

“Ad copy? Marketing?”

Not quite. We write books.

“Freelancers?”

Think of us as an integrated content management and delivery system in both the new and old media sectors. How about you?

Then there was the ropes course, during which Zeke wrenched his back being hooked into a harness, while quiet Gretchen became stuck in a tree and decided it was too much trouble to cry out for help. Forgotten, she was left in the woods overnight, found the next morning clinging to a branch by the ropes course manager.

And the less said about the recreational shooting range—Joseph got the idea from a radio ad that said they were great for corporate retreats, and to visit their website at pullthetrigger.com (“Well, that sounds ominous,” Heather managed)—the better.

But gradually, as Joseph willed the team together, the efficiency experts submerged their toes deeper and began a more rigorous ethnographic project, though surprising all by flocking only to Gretchen and to Zeke, leaving Will unobserved. They prodded Gretchen and Zeke, picked at Gretchen’s scabs, withdrew their watches and made calculations: words per minute, sentences per hour. Chews per minute of snacks or

325 food. Steps on the way to the Xerox copier-printer, pages printed per second. Washroom breaks per day, smoke breaks and yawns and coffee cups per afternoon, creative dead- ends per hour, adjectives per paragraph, puns per page.

And as Zeke and Gretchen underwent the battery of tests, Will cowered and wondered, “Why aren’t I being timed?”

“Am I on the outs?” Will asked.

“Are you dispensable?” Heather wondered.

“Is this the end?” Will wondered.

And so he stormed Joseph’s office, interrupting a meal of poached eggs, to ask:

“Why are they only efficiency testing Zeke and Gretchen and Heather?”

Joseph, wiping his upper lip with a napkin, but missing a fleck of orange-yellow yolk, “Nothing to worry about.”

“It sets a troublesome tone about who is and isn’t needed in the office,” Will tried to explain.

“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” Joseph returned the napkin onto the plate. “It’s nothing. Just getting a sense of the pace at which work happens. Something we’ve never taken stock of, you know? The thought had never occurred.”

“It’s making me nervous,” Will conceded.

“I could see how it might. Insensitive of me. You’re my Honda.”

“Honda?”

“Reliable. Zero maintenance. Still on the road.”

“I bet I work faster than Zeke, anyway,” Will boasted.

Eyebrows raised, Joseph asked: “Do you?”

326

Will nodded.

“If you insist,” Joseph capitulated, standing up behind the expanse of mahogany,

“I’ll give the go-ahead to monitor you as well.”

Will, satisfied, left the corner office—Joseph called after, “Remember! Embrace the drudgery!”—and then returned, lemming-like, to his cube and sat and typed a few words and thought and then stood up and walked toward the nearest cubby, feet whooshing.

“Shit,” he said.

A white collar sidled in close and clicked the start button on his stopwatch, interrupting his moment of expression.

New rules flushed down from above—books standardized at 224 pages, for the sake of even working on the new Fiction Factor press.

The bullpen rearranged into a grid of concentric cubes, laid out as though it formed the grid of a telephone keypad, albeit with a newly placed water fountain at the very center of it, the grid quarantined into nine discrete sections. The seventh floor abandoned to nature or the landlord, no one was certain, and the sixth floor purged of its disassembled furniture in favour of a space—a center, they termed it, or an institute— dedicated to the study of corporate efficiency. Manifestos circulated decrying the arrogance of the classic architectural belief that form follows function, embracing instead the maxim that form follows finance. Small offices partitioned off from corridors with framed, milk white sheet glass; larger offices divided into a T with room for reception, files, and a secretary whose position went unfilled. Office space henceforth reduced to a calculation of dollars per square foot.

327

Experiments with the lights—dimmed one day and at peak brightness the next, floating between extremes—revealed only to Will that it was a hassle to accomplish anything when a room’s illumination could not be counted on for consistency. At its brightest, he tossed on a pair of supermarket shades, balanced over his eyeglasses; at its darkest he stood, bumped his thigh on a table, groped toward the kitchenette, bumping his arm on three more tables and his waist on a newly installed potted plant—the potted plant was new, and how was it going to survive in the dark?—where he asked anyone present whether they might not have a pair of night-vision goggles hidden away somewhere.

Zeke somberly shook his head no. Heather, who’d relocated her computer to the kitchenette, as the one place of stable lighting, said she did, but they’d been stolen by the thief, along with her other pieces of tactical gear—vest, belt, breathing apparatus.

“Alright, then,” Will said. Will turned to navigate back to his desk, by touch. And then stopped. “Wait. You had tactical gear?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I was totally lying.” She sipped from a cup of tea, typing with a free hand.

“Right, then,” Will said, and he resumed his blind journey.

But so the light adjustments continued until one day they stopped, settling on a low-level, half-strength flicker that cast shadows over desks and exacerbated the above- inaudible whine of fluorescent lights, but was deemed—officially—a boon to the creative mind, which needed places to hide, darkness to explore, shadows in which to play.

Unofficially, middle management conceded they could find no connection between illumination levels and productivity. But, they added, in a confidential report, the experiments revealed something more interesting: it was not the intensity of light that

328 impacted productivity, it was the perception on the part of the writers—aided by the frequent light adjustments—that they were being watched. Accordingly, mass updates were pushed out to all FF computers, a patch that did nothing but generate a pop-up window at intervals, two-to-three times a week according to a random number generator, that informed users their Internet activities were being monitored by IT for misuse.

IT, by that point, had been decimated, reduced to a staff of outsourced

Bangladeshi programmers and a high school intern spending his work-study assignment trolling Internet forums, and had no resources for any such monitoring.

But the patch worked, disseminating out through computers and then through employees themselves, their own psychological software updated by the release. Though bugs were reported, namely in the form of the newfound frequency with which writers ducked their heads into Joseph’s office—when he was around, for Joseph’s newest talent seemed to be making himself scarce—and asked for reassurances that their most recent

Google searches were not resulting in them being put on a list, were not targeting them for termination or a harassment suit.

“Boss,” Will asked, “I just Googled automatic weapons. I needed to know the standard magazine capacity of an AK-47” he said, sheepish, rubbing the frame of the door to Joseph’s office. “Turns out it’s thirty rounds.”

“Hey, boss. I just Googled synonyms for busty,” Zeke said. “Seemed important.”

“I may have just been looking at Russian mail-order brides?” Heather said, as though not sure herself. “Research. Long story. Not important.”

“Again, boss,” Will returned, “Spent what’s going to seem like a preposterous amount of time researching the Ruger MP9. I needed to know whether it was open bolt.”

329

“I was on a tween message board. I know that sounds weird, right, but bear with me?” Zeke said.

“Just doing due diligence on artificial insemination, you know, for one of my characters,” Gretchen said.

“Turns out then I had to look up what open-bolt and close-bolt even mean,” Will said.

“I was just straight up looking at pornography, and I feel really bad about it, right? Mea culpa.”

“Researching side effects of medical stitches,” Gretchen admitted.

“Oh,” Joseph looked up, “What happened?”

And the light experiment worked, too, albeit unintentionally, for Zeke remained on edge, nervous that at any moment the experiments would begin anew, and he began bringing a Maglite from home as a protective measure. He locked it in his filing cabinet every morning and took it home with him every evening. And in between he wrote furiously, the bend in his spine becoming more pronounced as he leaned in toward his computer screen, as though being absorbed by the monitor and his work and the world he was crafting, though that may have been an illusion; it may have been only the effects of the dim light on his eyesight or his sciatica flaring up.

The potted plant, newly installed, taken away and replaced by a newer potted plant, taller and brighter and polyester-er, the switch made after an intense barrage of cost-benefit analyses determined that the net benefits of the increased atmospheric oxygen were not worth the cost and time expenditures watering and trimming the leaves and occasionally churning the potting soil of the philodendron. Even three minutes spent

330 watering per week times was over two hours a year better spent on-task. And what of the weeks when no one was in? And what of the cost of a watering can? What of the cost of replacement in the inevitable event of the plant’s death—for nothing was meant to occupy a space like this for long. Not to mention the plant funeral. No, plastic was the way to go. Look how the artificial leaves lit up the office, they explained, fingering the filmy polyester skin, ignoring the more conventional ways an office might be lit up, by banks of fluorescent lights operating at full capacity.

Dental coverage cut (“We had dental?” Zeke had asked, running a tongue over a reddish sore on his upper gums). Massage therapy, long cut, was extra-double-cut. Flex funds stiffened. Eye coverage reduced but not eliminated, an olive branch extended to the pasty-faced near-sighted nerds who’d lost optical power by virtue of years of white cursors hovering over empty pages of an empty Microsoft Word document. Contracts terminated on only a few weeks of notice, fees and penalties deemed the cost of doing business—the handshake agreement with the British publisher deemed unnecessary in a globally connected world, contacts in Los Angeles rendered obsolete by the rise of

Canada North as filming destination—Vancouver a capable stand-in for a rainy-day

Boston or New York once you erase the Canada Post mailboxes in post-production;

Calgary covering the entire range of the Great Plains, and Hamilton a competent stand-in for the much-needed end-of-the-world settings, provided you fixate on the skyline driving south over the Skyway Bridge. The Amityville House breathed in, just as earlier it had exhaled, grown. Translation services receiving a last-minute reprieve only after arguing their case that machine-aided translation had not yet progressed to the point of replacing

331 the human element; but, they were told, keep their metaphorical bags packed, because the day was coming.

Glocalization, they cried!

Machines were, however, deemed sufficiently advanced for other purposes: an automated machine replacing the human voice of the lobby receptionist; a coin-operated digital Keurig machine replacing the old honour-system Keurig (“Please,” a note read above the new machine, “either pay or bring your K-Cups from home!”); standards and practices slashed to a skeleton crew, augmented only by a executable JavaScript routine, developed by the very same aforementioned high-school intern with computer science ambitions, that trawled manuscripts for offensive terms, using as a cross-reference the

Wikipedia lists of ethnic slurs and English-language swear words.

Explaining how it was that Heather had returned to her an entire chapter with parts of two words circled and bolded: “Les hits.”

And then another chapter, that one featuring prominently a character whose name was the diminutive form of Richard.

The program, the intern confessed, needed tweaking. And so too did Microsoft

Word’s grammar and spelling function, the other machine which—in conjunction with another intern, this one less motivated, but really into Twilight—came to replace all but the most junior of corporate copy-editors (the senior copy-editors having been generously bought out despite the brazen crime of having held on long enough to climb the pay- scale).

Will anticipated that next adjectives would be cut, lost in the shuffle. Sorry, adjectives, but why are you taking up that extra space when a more precise noun could do

332 your job in half the space? Adverbs, too—best of luck on your future endeavours, they’d say, but all those l’s and y’s are taxing the machine components of the new-old printing presses into which so many corporate assets were tied.

Zeke suggested that they would be next, replaced by the proverbial monkeys at typewriters, robotized and automated just like the Keurig.

Will, however, disagreed. An infinite number of monkeys, he said, sounds expensive.

Zeke said he supposed that was true.

And besides, Will observed: they were ignoring the fact that—ironic as it seemed—it takes the work of humans at typewriters to produce monkey shit.

* * *

333

The Strike

So they struck. Or they striked; Will struck a subcommittee to send Gretchen to a computer terminal to look up the correct term for the past tense of “strike,” in the sense of a labour dispute. She had no answer for him despite having been gone for upwards of a quarter-hour.

“What were you doing, then?” he asked.

“Just checking my tumblr,” she said.

Speaking historically, in the one-hundred-fifty-plus years of the office as we know it, white collar workers almost never unionized by virtue of two reasons. Reason one is simply that they operated under the assumption that their work required a certain degree of talent, knowledge, skill that made them immune to the whims of the blue collar, industrial workplace. They were not a cog in a machine, but individuals.

The second reason, related to the first, is the conscious or subconscious belief that the white-collar environment is a ladder, the last genuine meritocracy, where hard work, intelligence, and talent translate into success. A big win means a bigger office, means a bigger paycheque. When true talent wins out for hard-working individuals, what’s the need for collective bargaining? What’s the need for scheduled pay benchmarks?

But what happens when hard work doesn’t win out in the end? What happens when there are too many men and women at desks for them all to climb the ladder? What makes knowledge workers immune from becoming cogs? What is it that makes the very concept of seniority-benchmarked pay schedules so odoriferous to the office jockey?

How hard does the myth of the meritocracy die? How long does its ghost linger,

334 wandering Earth unsatisfied as a broken intern wandered the office with his travelling workstation?

Will didn’t know any of these facts, never explicitly asked these questions—he was no labour historian, even if he had encountered the occasional strike action in his father’s warehouse, had no personal opinion about unions at all, really—but he knew them, even if he couldn’t articulate them, and it was these sorts of questions he’d been struggling with for weeks. When interfacing with Joseph seemed to achieve nothing, when carefully worded letters received no responses, what options were left?

“You could just quit,” Heather said, confirming that she had, in fact, received an offer of employment from the Starbucks in the lobby and was mulling her options.

“No can do. Lots of calls from home. Gotta make the family proud.”

“To be clear, have you answered the calls from home?”

“I have not.”

Instead, Will, despairing upon having read the extensive requirements for starting and certifying a union, having never been good at paperwork—“Hey boss,” he’d ducked his head into Joseph’s office, “just doing some research on organized labour. Nothing to be worried about ha ha ha ha”—settled on a simpler, more visceral solution. Occupy

Joseph.

Or, more accurately, Occupy Joseph’s Office. Calling it Occupy Joseph’s Office avoided the “striked/struck” dilemma.

Having stormed out of the lunchroom one afternoon upon discovering that while

Gretchen’s kombucha jar had been mysteriously returned to its place in the back of the cupboard, the tomatoes had been removed from Will’s sandwich by the thief, Will

335 trooped back to the assembly room floor, proselytizing cube-to-cube, Heather following, she curious where this all might be going. The others took her presence as sign of tacit agreement with Will’s stated aims, and so they themselves fell in lock-step in turn, an acknowledgement that it was easier to follow a likeminded crew than a lone ideologue.

Their goals were simple, Will stated, not explaining that that was so because he wasn’t precisely sure what their goals were. But he was sick of the thefts, sick of the stopwatches, sick of the moving goalposts on bonuses and assignments, sick of being cubed. Sick of wage stagnation in the face of real-life inflation, sick of moving office locations to keep one step ahead of gentrification and rising rents. Sick of the lack of credit, sick of the abscess he could feel on a rear molar (though this, he conceded, was a pet cause). And until these concerns were remedied, they’d occupy by Joseph’s office, day and night. Rig up red lights so those viewing from the streets had a visual symbol of the struggle being enacted behind closed doors. Sing folk songs that articulated the struggle. They would invite interns to join them; they would invite administrative assistants; they would invite the stopwatch watchers who had begun lingering in the dark corners of the office, offering hands as if to say, there’s more to life than mere efficiency.

There wasn’t, though, at least not for the efficiency experts.

The proffered hand was slapped away, and with the knowledge that the efficiency experts were no doubt at that very moment alerting Joseph to the percolating insubordination, Will’s timeline—never given particular flesh in his mind to begin with—had to be accelerated. It would be only hours before Joseph returned to his office and all bets were off. Who was with him, he asked.

336

Zeke was torn, his loyalty to Joseph for rescuing him from a literal factory floor butting up against his affection for old-school head-busting union tactics; he was in, he decided. Heather shrugged and said why not. Gretchen, too mousy to speak, followed quietly. Others followed but gawked at the screens of their iPhones. Were the interns with him? The interns were with whomever brought food. Will took up a collection for cash— after all, a proper sit-in ought to remain well-stocked—and sent Gretchen to the grocery store for essentials. There being only one real store in the neighbourhood, more corner than grocery, she returned with three boxes of Corn Flakes and a Styrofoam take-out carton of vermicelli from the noodle house.

“We go in,” Will explained, “And we don’t come out until our demands have been met. Do we understand?”

“We need banners. Sleeping bags? Markers? Toilet paper?” Zeke suggested.

“No time!” Will overrode him.

The milling crowd murmured their acceptance of Will’s leadership and the march began down the hall—through the doors to the assistant’s office and by the assistant, who stood at attention as they filed by.

“He’s not in, guys. Guys?”

Will kicked at the door, hoping to break the lock, appealing to his own sense of drama. But the door was not locked and so flew open and Will lost his balance, stumbling forward and falling into Joseph’s spacious executive suite. They poured in. Heather bee- lining for the Aeron chair, others for the mid-century modern loungers set up in the corner for conversation. Will sat on the deep pile carpet, cross-legged, running his fingers through the fabric as though it were hair, wondering what he was doing. Others migrated

337 to the windows, gazing out over the city. Zeke marched straight for the antique roll-top desk in the corner, a conversation piece positioned next to the bay windows, testing the latch on the tambour. “There’s Scotch in here. I know it.”

“Why would there be Scotch in there?” Will asked.

“I can smell it,” Zeke said.

“We’re not here to take personal property, guys. We’re making a point.”

“I give it an hour, and then I get Scotch.”

Heather, meanwhile, was rummaging through Joseph’s actual desk, finding nothing but loose-leaf papers, old corrected proofs, manila envelopes shunted aside, unopened. She read aloud the return addresses. Publisher’s Clearinghouse. She thumbed that one to the back of the pile. Royal Bank of Canada. Revenue Canada. Someone in

Bigfork, Montana. Wait. Sony Pictures Studios?

Will’s ears perked.

“Movie deal stuff?” she suggested, hesitating on the envelope, thick with paper.

She waved it like a fan.

“Wrong studio,” Zeke said, hovering near the roll-top. “We work in-house.”

Will stood, strolled over to Heather and snatched the envelope from her. Inserting a finger in the gummed-down flap, he tore the package open, withdrew the contents and studied the first page. He licked his front teeth, began to chew at a thumbnail and then threw the papers down. He paced.

“Sony Pictures Studios is the producer of Wheel of Fortune,” Will said.

Heather gave him a how do you know that glance. She gathered up the pages and read. She looked up at Will, back at the papers, then up at Will.

338

“They’re paying him for a Before & After clue,” she said. A few heads turned.

“They’re paying him for my Before & After clue.”

“Honest Abe Vigoda,” she read from the page, steadying it at arms’ length.

“Drawer cull,” Will explained. He cursed. Nods around the room.

Will withdrew his cell-phone and made a call. “We’re doing it, Raj,” he said.

“We’re in his office.”

No response on the other end.

“Hello?” Will asked.

“Right now?” Raj finally managed.

“Right now. You at work?”

“That was quick.”

“Decisive action,” Will suggested.

“I bet you’ve got no food, no practical supplies. You haven’t planned any kind of rotation. Security?”

“We have food,” Will reassured him. Zeke, near the roll-top, was eating Corn

Flakes by the handful from a box.

“We have less food than we’d like,” he conceded.

Will looked up. “Zeke, friend? That’s got to last us awhile.”

Zeke shook the box, put the carton down, considered it, and returned his attention to the roll-top.

“Screw this,” he said. Withdrawing a Swiss Army knife from his pocket, he engaged the screwdriver tool and, in a fluid motion, spiked it directly into the latch holding the tambour shut. Wood splintered, and the slatted wood rolled right back,

339 revealing a set of four crystal tumblers and a bottle of 25 year old Glenfarclas. Zeke had uncorked the bottle and poured himself three fingers, knocking them back dramatically before Will could even protest.

“Sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” Raj said over the line. “How are your parents? I’m designing a bridge. You should tell your mother that. She’d appreciate that.

You haven’t talked to your parents in awhile. How’s your dad?”

“I’ll call you back,” Will pressed the button and ended the call, returned the phone to his jeans pocket.

Zeke smacked his lips, exhaled the alcohol burn with a low whistle and was pouring himself another dram when Joseph cowboy-sauntered casually in.

“And just what the high hell is going on here?” he said, though, through a smile, a high, cheery voice, as though speaking to toddlers.

Zeke froze mid-pour and whisky splashed over the edge of the tumbler.

“Zeke, you’re paying to fix that lock. You’re also paying for the Scotch.”

Emboldened by drink, Zeke asked why a recovering alcoholic would keep a bottle of expensive Scotch hidden in his office.

Joseph, unapologetic: “That is an antique roll-top. Georgian. The historical period, not the nation or the state. Ridiculous disrespect for property. Even recovering alcoholics entertain big-shots. Big-shots love Scotch. I’m disappointed, Zeke.”

Zeke, chastened, replaced the bottle and the tumbler on the desk.

“For god’s sake, at least use a coaster!” Joseph shouted. Zeke, head bowed, did as instructed.

“This is cute,” Joseph stuffed his hands in his pants pockets.

340

“We’re occupying your office,” Will managed. It sounded dumber when he said it aloud, and he scanned the room to find a mass of faces, eyes averted.

“You are the ninety-nine per cent? Looks more like criminal trespassing.

Destruction of property, maybe?” Joseph observed.

“We’ve got issues, J.,” Will said.

“Issues? You’re telling me. By all means, Will. Let us have it.”

“Well, we feel underpaid. Underappreciated.” Will’s mouth cotton, forgetting the lengthy list of complaints he’d assembled minutes earlier, the impassioned speech that set off the occupation. “Bathroom breaks? Offices. That. You know, stopwatches? We’re not in favour. We’re against them, you could say,” He chewed his fingernails.

“Eloquent. Anyone have anything to add?”

Silence.

“I thought so. So Will’s your representative. At least Gretchen didn’t buy into this foolishness.”

Gretchen cleared her throat.

“Oh. We can talk about all this, but first comes first: I need you guys to vacate my office. This break-in, it’s not in good faith. We can negotiate, but I need a demonstration of good faith.”

“If we leave, nothing changes,” Heather said. She swivelled in the desk.

“You have my word,” Joseph said.

“We’ve had it before,” Gretchen said.

“We’ve had it before,” Will said over her.

341

“We want a promise of upward mobility,” Heather said. “Health coverage restored.”

“Have you seen our margins? I’m paying you what the market will bear.

Compensation is generous.”

An intern mumbled feebly that margins were fine. He’d seen margins.

“We want the cubicles out.”

“Sorry, guys. Mandate from on high. I fought for you, long and hard, I did.”

“You’re the boss.”

“In a narrowly defined sense of the word.” Joseph was pacing, shuffling across the carpet. His assistant watched from just beyond the threshold of the suite. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. The efficiency guys, they’re upstairs tête-à-tête-ing and they’ve decided I need to break this insubordination, but quickly. They’re saying I need to come down hard, demonstrate my authority. They showed me charts, honest-to-god charts, where fear was on the y-axis and productivity on the x, and then another one that projected what happens if I let this slide. A red line shooting south. Bottoming out, I believe is the phrase. Would have fallen right off the page if they’d extrapolated further.

“But I’m not like those efficiency guys. I’m a creative, like you. Sure, I pay them.

I pay for those fancy charts, but I don’t think it’s all reducible to a number.” He leaned against the wall. “I appreciate there’s more than one way to skin a lion. So I’m going to play ball. I’ll give you guys three hours. Three hours work? Speak amongst yourselves.

Have your fun. Maybe we can have a chat when I come back.” He turned to leave, stopped, strolled over to the roll-top desk and gathered both the whisky decanter and tumbler in his big claws.

342

Addressing his assistant, who hovered and observed, silent, he asked, “Aline, have you ever tried 25 year old Scotch? It’s really quite something. Here.” He thrust the tumbler of brown spirit in her hand. “Keep an eye on them. I’ll be back.” Padded footsteps on carpet down the hall.

“What now?” asked Zeke.

“It’s a trick,” Will suggested when Joseph was out of earshot. There was agreement, and the group took up the theme of what next, settling on a plan of action in which they formalized their grievances in numbered form. Lacking pens, Will recorded them on his phone, stopping to type and re-type, cursing AutoCorrect. They passed three hours that way, quicker than they’d imagined possible, rearranging themselves around the office, draping themselves over furniture, reclining into the fabric carpet, eating all three boxes of Corn Flakes, leaving only the carton of vermicelli unconsumed.

And as promised, Joseph returned, looking as though he’d only taken a nap in the interim. He walked into the office, in fact, with a limp suggesting one of his legs had fallen asleep braced against a filing cabinet.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen.”

Heather stood. “We’ve assembled a list of demands. Will, can you—”

Joseph raised a palm. “Not what I was looking for. Are you prepared to vacate my office, I meant.”

“Not until our demands are heard,” Heather said, indicating for Will to begin reciting.

343

Will read, nervously. “Point one: We demand fair consumption. I think that was supposed to say compensation. Point two: in accordance with point one, we demand overtime lay commensurate with our efforts. I think that was supposed to say pay.”

“AutoCorrect,” Zeke explained.

“Stop.” Will stopped. Everyone stopped. Gretchen fingered the material of the curtains. “I’m so disappointed in you all. Refusing to acknowledge how very lucky you are. If you’re not prepared to leave my office, there’s nothing else to be said.”

He turned to leave once again, and the group braced itself for a long, hungry night. Then Joseph paused, came back. He smiled, circled his spacious office, stepped over bodies, half-sat on his desk. “Except this. First one out of my office gets a raise—”

Zeke darted out, leaving a Zeke-shaped vacuum in the room that the office air rushed to occupy. He was gone before Joseph could finish his thought.

“—and the last person out of my office is fired.”

Joseph stood, walked calmly to the threshold and watched as the remaining bodies spilled out as quickly as they’d entered. Will hung back, guilty.

But Heather had also hung back. She studied Will.

“Sweet scene. Creepy if you’ve got the backstory, but sweet-ish. I’ll say sweet- ish.” Joseph said.

“It’s alright,” Will told Heather. “Go ahead.”

“Noble sacrifice! But will she accept? Clock’s ticking!” Joseph narrated; he tapped the face of his watch, a motion stolen—unconsciously?—from the efficiency team.

“No. It’s fine,” she told Will.

344

Joseph, in the voice of a sports broadcaster, “Is she really going to sacrifice herself for the man who punctures faces with fishing lures? Who’s basically a stalker?

Tune in!”

“You sure?” Will asked her.

“I’m certain.” She nodded, patted Will on the shoulder. Will understood. He held his head up and skipped by Joseph and out of the office. Without turning back he heard what he had expected: Heather telling Joseph that she was done, she was quitting. No hard feelings, she said, but she didn’t need this, it wasn’t worth it. And then she followed out on Will’s heels. He held a hand out behind himself, his left, she reached out with her own and squeezed it.

“Is that vermicelli?” Will heard Joseph ask.

“I just shot it, one big gulp. Tasted like burning,” he heard Aline say. He imagined the twitch of annoyance creasing Joseph’s face.

So ended the famous Fiction Factor sit-in, all three hours and forty-two gruelling minutes of it.

Zeke, chain-smoking outside, criticized what he referred to as the “limp-dick strike.” He asked, “Do you want to send a message?” Will wasn’t certain what he meant by sending a message, and without Heather to consult, was leery of siccing an attack dog he wasn’t sure he could call off.

“Send a message how?”

Zeke mimed what seemed to be an explosion with his hands, lit cig dangling between forefingers. “All I’m saying,” he said, “Your labour is being undervalued? Join the club. Do something about it. That limp-dick strike? That sit-in? Do something. Give

345 me the go-ahead. You’re not worth anything until you make yourself worth something.

Assert your value by sending a message.”

“What kind of message?”

“All I’m saying is violence, you know. I don’t approve of violence. But violence gets stuff done. You get my drift?”

Will headed back inside. Zeke shouted after him, “Just give me the word!” And

Will paused and said back over his shoulder, “I don’t know what the word is!”

Zeke stubbed out his cigarette in the wall-mounted ashtray. “Just remember this conversation, is all I’m saying.”

As they strolled through the foyer, a bean-counter tapped a button on his stopwatch. When Will veered toward the Starbucks, the bean-counter pressed again, and made a note on a clipboard.

* * *

346

Regime Change

The final straw came for Gretchen not on the day that the printer stopped working for her, but on the day after—the day the UPS man with the great legs delivered her a small unexpected package, sealed in corrugated cardboard and wrapped in three layers of packing tape, absent any return address, and containing only a note on University of

Calgary stationery that was folded neatly in half. All too familiar for Will. On the half visible when timid, sniffling Gretchen finally tore through the packing tape and the box and the paper fluttered to the floor, it read: if you want to use the printer again, follow the trail of clues.

On the reverse, once unfolded, it read: just kidding, I re-mapped you to the Xerox upstairs.

Gretchen showed the note to Will. He sniffed.

“An old game of Raj’s,” he explained.

“Raj doesn’t work here,” Gretchen said.

“Well, he might have. I mean. You know. One last prank?”

“What the fuck,” she said. Will was taken aback. She tore the note in half. “This is so fucked. This is beyond the pale.”

With a keystroke, she accessed the Print menu on the document on-screen. Then she took the back staircase upstairs, strode down the empty hallway, giraffing into empty offices whose doors had been swung wide open, abandoned rooms. Will trailed as she followed a faint sound that grew as they neared and after three misses, she found her target. The overhead lights in this office were off, but sunshine pierced the curtains. The room was empty, totally empty—beige curtains, beige carpet, white walls—except for a

347 gray monolith all-in-one printer-copier and a few cables tethering it to the network, the grid. The device hummed, chugged, spat out 8.5” x 11”.

Will approached, took a sheet, cut his forefinger on its edge, and dropped it. He cursed and put the cut to his mouth to suck at the blood while he studied the page— prodded at it with his foot. Blank on both sides.

Gretchen went down into a squat, as though she was leading a huddle, and dipped her head. “I have nothing to describe this,” she said to herself. It struck Will as odd that the copier was the breaking point, but then he supposed people were different in ways he didn’t understand. He tilted his head and tried to look at the device objectively. When he stared long enough, thoughts of institutional violence came to him, mechanical brutality.

It seemed somehow less funny than Raj’s usual play.

The catch tray by this point had overloaded and now the machine spat blank pages directly at the floor, pausing to groan as each cassette emptied, the feed shifting to size

A2, then A3.

Will tried to agitate away the feeling: “It’s just a laugh, you know. You can’t take it personally.” He picked up another paper, studied its blankness, and placed it back.

“It’s,” she trailed off. She tried again. “This place is poison.”

Will thought that sounded a bit dramatic, and said so.

She nodded and stood and took a breath.

They walked side-by-side down the dim hallway, toward the fire door demarcating the stairwell.

Gretchen had cleaned out her desk by end-of-day. They thought so, at any rate.

Quiet, reliable, always flying under-the-radar Gretchen had disappeared herself as in a

348 magic trick, her workload divvied between the remaining staff writers in an increasingly echoic fifth floor office. How many of them even were left? Names appeared on e-mail chains and figures lurked in the shadows, but it seemed as though it was only Zeke and

Will. They promised her they’d keep in touch. She said, grimly, “Right.”

Will thought that everyone says they’ll keep in touch, but no one means it when they say they’ll keep in touch; nothing good ever comes from keeping in touch. Either the ex-employee rebounds, in which case those left behind are jealous, angered by the departed’s vitality and the way their world has opened up for them. Or the departed party never gets over it, in which case their presence is a constant reminder of the survivors’ own fear, their own guilt—a cross between a reminder of your own mortality and a symbol of the arbitrary unfairness of the universe. By the time Gretchen was out the door, the duo that had gathered to see her off had already forgotten her office extension, her e- mail address, her hobbies and interests. Did they ever even know her hobbies? She was married. Or engaged? Liked a good steak. Or no, she was a vegetarian. She didn’t join the strike, so she deserved it. They hoped they’d never see her in the streets, never have to make small-talk, but they did agree: if they should run into her, they were confident she’d look better, stand taller.

“I never much liked her,” Zeke said.

“I remember how she always drank the house wine,” the best Will could muster.

“Always?” Zeke asked.

“The one time, she did.”

Will paced. Zeke tossed and caught a stress ball. It thwapped against his palm.

“How did this happen?” Will asked.

349

Zeke stopped tossing the ball, thought seriously for a moment about the question for a moment.

At last, he offered: “We’re in the midst of a regime change.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Confuse the enemy until they’re not clear where their opponent is even coming from—outside, inside, north, south, boss, peer, former co-worker. If Gretchen isn’t safe, who is?”

Will whistled, half-impressed, half-horrified.

“Have you thought about what I said? You know, a few weeks ago?”

* * *

350

Starbucks

“And then you put on one last pot for the end-of-day. Did you know,” Heather asked,

“that the term ‘meritocracy,’ was actually only coined in the 1950s? It’s a recent phenomenon.”

She spoke, wiping a countertop with a damp rag, pushing around rather than picking up Rorschach puddles of slopped coffee and spilled fruit frappes. Will sat at a low circular table nearby. Legs splayed, his laptop open and occupying all available table-space and so he held his coffee cup, half-balancing it on the distended belly that resulted from his low, slouched posture. One leg of the table at which he perched was propped by a few packets of sugar and a cardboard coffee cup sleeve. He kicked his foot at this packrat nest of items and observed as the table listed starboard. His phone rang; he silenced it through his jeans pocket.

The café was empty aside from the two of them. They’d achieved peace, or something like friendship. The door to the lobby was propped open and infrequently the elevator doors would ding open and a person would hurry past, not looking in. Just inside the door was a chalkboard on which was written “Welcome to your ______Starbucks,” the blank upon which Heather had written, with her lovely penmanship, ‘East Village.’ A few low, leather couches in the lobby were in line-sight to the counter, unoccupied. Zeke had resigned his post monitoring the store from the couches. Heather’s acceptance of a job offer had forced him to reconcile two contradictory beliefs: one, that the Starbucks was a simulation, staffed by robots; the other, that Heather was a real-life, tactile, functioning human being. Will was concerned by his behaviour. Someone had suggested that something had to give. Nervous Gretchen maybe, before her departure. Heather

351 agreed. Psychologically speaking, she explained, individuals will often double down on their incorrect beliefs when exposed to information that contradicts their worldview. She predicted the escalation of his Capgras delusion, to encompass the belief that his peers were one-by-one being replaced by shapeshifters. Yet even she could not predict how any such belief might play out, practically speaking, and everyone had to concede that Zeke had become quieter, seemingly less aggressive, heroically productive in his work.

The late afternoon rush had run its course and Heather cleaned. Brewing one final pot of coffee for any stragglers before closing shop for the evening. Applying cling-wrap over plates of sugary baked goods in the glass display case; scrubbing dirty blender jars in the chrome commercial sink, freeing them of flecks of fruits un-macerated, clinging to their walls; washing the massive tureens emptied of their Pike Place roast and preparing enormous packets of fresh grounds in anticipation of tomorrow’s morning rush. Gurgle of the drip maker and whir of the fan of Will’s computer, odour of over-roasted beans mingling with organic waste and napkins and stir-sticks wafting from the missile-shaped garbage receptacles stuffed to overflowing.

“How so?” he asked. He felt his phone vibrate, tingling down his leg. He shook out the leg awkwardly, as though working out a cramp.

“Sounds like an old word. Latin. Greek. Both, actually, which is maybe appalling, etymologically. But it was coined in the ‘50s, and it wasn’t meant in a positive way.” She tossed the rag in the sink, where it landed with a thwack, and ducked behind the counter for a moment, emerging with a replacement, cleaner, with which she absorbed the gloopy countertop slop. “It was a dystopian vision. ‘Every selection of one is a rejection of many,’” she recited.

352

“Meaning?”

“Meaning when you award intellect and achievement, people get left behind.”

Will sipped, “No. I meant meaning what that has to do with you in particular?”

She shrugged and adjusted the strap of her apron, retightening the knot.

“The idea that work should be fulfilling is a relatively recent historical invention.”

“Thanks, Wikipedia,” he said. He was staring at his laptop’s screen. “How does

‘Suge Knights of the Round Table’ sound?”

She stopped pushing the rag in circles. “Pardon?”

“For Wheel of Fortune?”

She brought the rag over to the sink, rang it out, left it to dry balanced on the faucet. “Given the spelling, it doesn’t seem fair?”

“Shadow of the colossus?”

“I don’t even get that one.”

“Shad? It’s—I guess you’re right,” harrumphed and he held down the backspace key and watched as the letters disappeared, first one at a time and then entire phonemes, leaving the word processor page blank. His phone vibrated in his pocket again and he ignored it. It had been vibrating on-and-off for most of the day. When he stared long enough at the screen, close enough, letting his eyes cross and glaze, he noticed, he could count the individual pixels of the computer screen, each of the hundreds of thousands of little dots. And he could connect each of those hundreds of thousands of dots to little switches that said yes or no for any input he could possibly imagine. He took another sip of his coffee and sat waiting as Heather scrubbed the espresso machine’s steam wand with another rag to get the large deposits of grime, unscrewed its tip and dug inside with

353 a handy cleaning brush attachment. She studied the resultant gunk on the brush-tip and frowned. Then she mixed a solution of water and detergent in a Pyrex bucket in the sink, into which she plopped the wand to soak. She removed the sprouts from the espresso machine’s portafilter and disassembled the cover, dropping the basket into the same bucket of water and detergent.

“Have you ever thought about Gretchen?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Little one? Quiet?” Heather tried.

“She was very large.”

“Right. Linebacker. Quiet?”

“That’s the one. She left.”

Heather grunted. She swished the basket around to soak it sufficiently, withdrew it, studied it, resubmerged it.

“Aline too. Downsized.”

Another grunt.

“Do you hate it?” he asked.

She turned back to face him. “Hate what?”

“Three degrees and you’re serving hot and cold drinks?”

She hesitated. “What other kind of drinks are there?” she said. “I get to go home at 5pm every day. Can you say that?”

“I can’t,” Will conceded.

“I’ve already made shift manager. Can you say that?”

354

“I think I got a promotion once? No money, though.”

“Benefits?”

“What benefits? Eye care, if you squint. I do, because I’m afraid of doctors.”

“Opportunities for advancement?”

“I see your point,” Will said.

She returned to the espresso machine, refitting components, but watching him in the reflection of the machine’s chrome surface. She said, “Joseph hasn’t been in.”

“I suppose he’s avoiding you?” Will suggested.

“Grande Americano, room for cream.”

“His order?”

“How’s he doing?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Will said.

“No?”

“I’ve been avoiding him by staying close to you.”

“Only reason you’re doing that?” she asked.

“I deserve that.”

“I worry about him. You don’t worry about him?”

“I worry his human programming has a bug,” Will said.

“He’s under a lot of pressure.”

“I worry some of his slime will rub off on me?”

“He really does want the best for us. He’s trying,” she said.

“I worry about who he’ll target during the next full moon.”

355

She sighed and she pulled the steam wand out of the bucket. She inspected it, sniffed it, rinsed it, expertly reassembled the device. She did the same, methodically, with the portafilter. Stepping back through a set of employees-only doors, leaving Will briefly alone with his computer, and then she returned with a mop and bucket on wheels splashing scummy water in its wake. Rolling it toward the door, she left it there for later, with the mop precariously balanced against the wall, and strolled back behind the counter.

“The vassal never worried about getting pleasure from the work of tilling his land or raising cattle. Probably never considered the thought. But it’s strange,” she said.

“We’re anxious about how our work gives us no pleasure, and then we go home and we work some more. We work on our gardens. We work on ourselves. We work out. We work on our novels. We work at soup kitchens.”

“I don’t get it,” Will said.

“Neither do I,” she said. “You want a refill? I don’t want to waste the pot. We’re supposed to brew one last pot at end-of-day and we get, like, five customers.” She held up a near-full carafe and gave it a short, demonstrative shake. Liquid sluiced inside.

Will nodded. She came around from behind the counter, took his cup, returned to fill it, and handed it back. “You ever check JobTropolis?” she said.

“I do,” he confessed.

“And?” she asked.

“It’s rated my profile as ‘All-Star.’ I have an All-Star profile. I don’t know what that means.”

“That’s good,” she ventured.

356

“I don’t know that it’s a measure of anything but the amount of private information I’ve given them.” Will tabbed over on his computer to a browser already open to the site. He scrolled, “The job listings recommended to me include overnight shelf-stocker, Wal-Mart greeter. . . . Lots of acronyms. Maybe I can do something in IS?”

“Information . . . security?” Heather guessed.

Will shrugged to indicate she knew as well as he.

“A Wal-Mart greeter’s core competencies include customer-focussed interfaces.

Implementation. Cultivates, gathers, assists. Process guidance and expertise are musts,” he read.

“Do you know any Wal-Mart greeters?” she asked.

Will said he didn’t.

“Have you ever tried it?”

Will said he hadn’t.

“Is it necessary to scorn those who do what they have to do get by?”

Will confessed that it probably wasn’t. “Everything else here has seasonal or temporary in the job title,” he said.

“Maybe the issue,” she suggested, “is that we’re lagging behind the rest of the world. We’re caught up in the romance. You say you go into this with eyes open, you know what the contracts say, you know the pay’s not great. No benefits. But there’s still that little thrill that jolts for you, the small bit of esteem you hope to get. Admiration. You think, if I’m a writer, I’ve got to be a writer 24/7.”

Will said that sounded familiar.

357

Heather ignored him. Will still scrolled, absent-mindedly. “An unpaid internship.

It also says here I can take a survey to improve the accuracy of my job matches. It will also upgrade my profile to Hall-of-Famer?”

Heather walked out from behind the counter once more, closed the glass doors to the coffee-shop and locked them. She retreated to the back, grabbed some coin rollers, returned to the cash register and withdrew the cashbox. She sat down at a table and began to sort and count. Bills stacked neatly, coins in small piles. She kept a running total on her phone.

“You want to challenge people, right?” she said.

“I guess,” Will said, though in fact he felt torn on this matter. He continued scrolling.

“Then you can’t expect them to accommodate you at the same time.”

He held up a finger. “Here’s something,” he said, “Chief Storytelling Officer.”

She stopped counting.

“Companies are no strangers to telling stories,” he read from the blurb accompanying the release. This sounds familiar, he thought. “They’re telling a story with every press release, every advertisement. Always carefully crafting a message. Suncor is on the lookout for a talented, enterprising individual who can help us develop a unifying narrative. Something all employees grasp that helps them work creatively and independently. Consistent with the model of distributed leadership. Storytelling is a creative way of thinking about strategy. Where have we been? Where are we going?”

“A slogan is not a story,” Heather protested.

“But you have to admit,” he said.

358

She sighed. “Would it really be any different?”

“You were just saying, though. We have to think differently. Catch up with the world?” Will, sick of the vibrating in his pocket, pulled out his phone.

“But it won’t make you happy.”

“Mmm.”

“All I’m saying: whether it’s here or at Wal-Mart or Suncor. Do what you do well, but don’t have any illusions that it’s anything more than what it is.”

“Hmm?” Will wasn’t listening. He was checking his phone. Three missed calls from home. Another from his mother’s cell. A voice mail message. A series of texts. The most recent one said CALL ASAP.

Another: IT’S DAD.

When he left the café without a word, without telling her, she was about to say to him that she got to decorate the sidewalk sign that stood outside the building every day from open to close. She supposed that was a way of making people happy, and that—in however small a way—it made her happy, is what she would have tried to articulate. But then wasn’t that the same kind of thinking that led her to Fiction Factor in the first place?

It all felt very complicated.

* * *

359

Left and Leaving

The air circulator sputtered out on cue, at 7pm, and the Tetris-tile banks of fluorescent kicked shortly thereafter, cost-cutting cloaked in environmental advocacy, and Will puttered, window-to-window, left to relative darkness punctuated by ghoulish red emergency EXITs—fore and aft staircases—and hazy screensaver glow and the soft airplane aisle-like illumination of so many individual LED lamplet strips. Please take a moment to locate your nearest two exits, keeping in mind they might be behind you.

Too easy to acclimate to the fricative fizzle, wheeze of office HVAC, forget the air’s being replenished, exchanged, moisture wicked and airborne bacteria expunged or accumulated, legions of L. pneumophila, legionellosis. Tougher with a ventilation duct above one’s desk, air blowing always in the precisely wrong fashion: cold in winter, hot in summer, not at all when Will needed it—when an office plant (pre-polyester, pre-silk, when office plants had been planted, not placed) dies, stagnates, and sodden earth idles and stinks, when passing perfume or cologne adheres to porous walls, when a vicious fart lingers—but not impossible. Testament to man’s adaptability, his tolerance for fuckery.

Will’s never thought about HVAC. Maybe Will ought to have. Instead, Will paced east to west, west to east, tapping windows, counting steps, line drill in slow- motion. Odd that it came to this. Incompetence, laziness, at least one case of inflicting bodily harm, abuse of HR best practices. The policy papers and the efficiency experts, his own inefficiency (legs up on the desk, thumbing through a mis-addressed issue of ATV

Rider magazine: “this is what writing looks like”), even the noodle-soft strike, the sit-in.

No firing, no discipline or re-education, just hands-off.

360

He’d get with the program. He’d adjust.

No big bang, no proper rising action, no narrative tension. No standing on desks, no “take this job and shove it.” No explosions, fist-fights, no SFX or sex on desks.

Instead, the opposite, for Will, just diminution into nothing, a big crunch precipitated by the call from his mother. Summoning him home.

Something had happened, popcorn unpopping, exploding in reverse, imploding back into its hull.

Will heard now the ffff-fffft of his shoes over carpet, heard the misaligned wheel of the cleaning cart grindingly piloted by the only other person remaining in the building at this hour. He listened as the wind whip-shreds at the tempered glass, the faint warped steel-drum ping as he tapped the window on each lap.

Everyone gone, at least for the night. Many for longer, many for good. Raj,

Gretchen, Heather. The intern with the squiggly eye, whomever she’d been. Zeke held on, but Zeke had left with the dinner rush, the happy hour rush, gnoshing wings somewhere as dark as it was unhappy.

Everyone’s gone but the cleaning woman and her duster wand’s shush-shush.

Everyone’s gone, and soon he’d be gone. He had a roller carry-on at his desk, but he’s not at his desk. Its wheels wouldn’t roll, and it was filled with undies, shirts, a few books. He had a plane ticket and a bus ticket, and it made little sense for him to be here tonight. He’d resigned, put in his papers, packed his things. What didn’t fit—most of it, that is—Raj had been tasked with distribution by Kijiji. When Will’s phone vibrated, there was Raj, negotiating, even though Will said he did not care. Does not care. Take any offers. Just get rid of it. What’s the point.

361

Raj had explained there was an art to all this, that no one wanted a free bedframe.

What they wanted, and wanted badly, was a $40 bedframe that they could talk down to

$20. Bonus marks for a story, or a picture of a pet they could shoehorn into the accompanying photographs. Accordingly, Raj was busy pricing their wares. He’d spent the day trawling the humane society for the derpiest little doggo he could find—“I’ll name him Will, after you,” he’d said. Out of luck without landlord approval for pets, though, he was crafting narrative nuggets and plopping them into Will’s incoming messages folder.

What it took to notice the HVAC was its absence.

“Bed, virtually brand new. Driven by a little old lady, only to church and back.”

Will disregarded the suggestion, disregarded Raj’s proposed price structure. He ought to be there with Raj; it would make more sense to be there with Raj. Jobless now, and cheap, and the only bus that swings by the airport in time for his early flight was the milk run departing at 4am. The depot’s a block, maybe two, from their fourplex, and he knew he’d have to walk back sleeplessly through the dark streets, through summer windstorm grit, but here he was across town, having wandered aimlessly—what he thought was aimlessness—back to work, back like a compulsion, having discovered (in a succession of escalating improbabilities) that his key-card remained active, his office untouched, his network login credentials valid, and that the building sat empty.

He and the cleaning woman, whose cart he skirted on the way in.

He could take a cab, but he won’t because, well, $40 he’d never see: selective frugality.

362

In the fourth floor fridge he found a tube of yogurt. Cube to cube in darkness Will walked, sucked, sought.

Found cleared desks, blank walls, scrubbed. A few pennants survived, maybe, a few curlicued photos of family, friends, Scotch-taped beneath screens like reminders of a world. This is not everything, they said. This is not the end. Will thought the true measure of a desk’s inhabitant lay beneath, in the drawers, in the tangle of plugs and power strips, phone chargers pulling phantom juice. He tested a few drawers, rattled them, and they’re locked, no surprise, but the little chrome mechanism holding them shut was cheap, and it’s not difficult to jimmy them, spewing their contents like food poisoning. Shook the handle, alternating pushes, pulled, lifted and depressed, felt the catch rotate and the drawer roll rattlingly open. Will fished, slurped yogurt, pawed, took, left, knew where to go for the good stuff. Judicious in his selections. A box of cigarettes here. An enamelware mug there. Nail polish in two shades: seashell taupe and juicy magenta.

Books. Chapbooks and paperbacks, hardcovers and paperclipped manuscripts. Found a fleece sweater and pulled it over his head. A fountain pen, sans ink.

He left the drawers open as he finished each piece of reconnaissance, a reminder of where he’d been and what was left. In Zeke’s desk, he found a small glass bottle of corn whisky, glugged a few fingers into his new enamelware, felt power. Will strolled and sipped and exhaled fumes of the horrible fire that waterfalled down his gullet. When done, he left the mug on a ledge, returned to his adventures, accumulated more and more.

Set a beat-up Flames cap on his head at a tilt. A few back issues of Rolling Stone, a set of binoculars. Car & Driver magazine. People. Not the lit mags, the New Yorkers, the

Walruses (Walri?) he’d half-anticipated. Did he even know the people he worked with?

363

Their ability to divorce their work from their lives, to be interested in cars, crafts, cross- stitch, Springsteen. Master of all he surveyed, Will understood what might tempt the thief. No doubt a temporary substitute for everything missing, but satisfying, strangely.

Except Will now held in his hands a virtual basket of items that weren’t his, and could not fathom what he might do next.

So he returned to his own cube, dumped the pile of items from his haul into a mound at his feet, shaped it with kicks, went out for more. Packratted paper, unplugged telephones (wondered since when does a phone need three different jacks feeding into it?). Staplers, scotch-tape, a rolodex. A carafe, stained brown like caffeinated teeth.

Detoured to the washroom to take a leak and considered as such the U-shape of institutional toilets. Still the wind kicked outside, still quiet inside except for the hum of a few PCs, spinning disk platters installing updates. Busses passed now and then, the only real traffic, wheezing their compressed air as they curtsied to discharge the feeble-bodied.

The cleaning woman, he thought and hoped, had gone home, or moved on to another floor. Struck by the urge to seek her out, ask her about herself. Did she have a family?

Another job? An education? How did she support herself in a place like this? It’s an absurd question, he knew, but he couldn’t shake it.

For all his imaginative powers, Will failed to imagine anything else. His reflection in the window, his reflection in a computer screen, his reflection in the bathroom mirror—the same stupid, slack face and no sense of what’s next.

Will’s phone jumped with messages from Raj, about his bookshelves, his bed, his

Nintendo. Much of which Raj intended to keep. He may have been negotiating a price right now in Will’s pocket. “OBO”—stands for “or best offer.” In effect, Raj, having

364 posted the ads, negotiation with himself. Value Village wouldn’t accept the IKEA Poäng by donation, as it lacked a crossbeam, its structural design suspect, unsound even at forty years old and hundreds of thousands sold. Unwanted Poäng lined the alleys of urban centres. But Will moved on: climbing atop a desk and prodding at an individual ceiling tile of white speckle, angling it gingerly and pulling it down. Dust and insulation, chalky white flecks, filtered down as Will stepped from the desk—one-two, desk to chair to floor—and returned to his office, where it goes on the pile. To the kitchen, where he unplugged the microwave and lugged it, too, back to home base, straining a muscle in his right shoulder. On and on again. A silk plant. Further afield, a few lightbulbs—the long, cylindrical fluorescent variety, light hilt-less sabres—he leaned against his cube walls.

The light bled out and something like darkness approached. Will had assembled a fort, an empire of things, sorted, radiating outward from his ergonomic masterpiece of a chair (that is, someone else’s chair, which he added to his haul). He sorted and sweated, his face flush and his feet rested on another chair, a second chair, this one his own, or was his own. Accordingly, he cared not about the dirt and dust he tracked on the cheap leather. He plugged in the microwave and set the timer to 99:99, as high as it would go.

Empty, the platter spun and rattled, rattled and spun.

Will at rest, until he’s not.

Security shift change at 10pm, he discovered, which was good to know for future reference. Heard the commotion and studied from above, the angle cutting off one party of the transition conversation, but there’s an exchange of some kind, a tip of a hat, a fist- bump. No twirling of batons. Off one party went toward the nearest bus stop. Will

365 worried, briefly, sat stone-still, but the replacement had no interest in making rounds. No footfalls. Probably settled down with a book, maybe a thermos and Will had lucked out.

When a phone bleated, Will, startled, checked his watch, wondered whether he had drifted off droolingly in this marvel of a chair. He sat contorted, chin on chest, elbow bent into the armrest, weight pressing against it, and the pain in his shoulder was worse.

But he tugged himself out and investigated, stepping carefully over the microwave, whose timer dinged at precisely that moment, sending him thumping to the floor. He scurried, recovered, and traced the ringing phone, padded down the hallway, loping on a leg that drifted to sleep until he found it and he hesitated, about to pick up the receiver, cradle it, when it occurred that he stood in Heather’s vacated cube, that it was empty, unoccupied, had been for weeks, and that the phone was the only furniture left.

Unconsciously or not, Will had kept a wide berth, hadn’t tested the drawers. Hand hovering now over the phone, halted, and in that moment the ringing stopped and then an interval Will didn’t remember and the little green light, Gatsby-like, illuminated above a rubbery button, indicating a new voicemail.

Quick to it: receiver to ear, he hit the button. Greeted by an automated voice, feminine and geographically non-descript.

“Please enter your four-digit password.”

Will waited. The machine outwaited.

“Please enter your four-digit password.”

Will tries 1-2-3-4.

“The password you have entered is incorrect. Please try again.”

4-3-2-1.

366

Nothing doing.

How many tries before he’s locked out of the system?

Tried his own passcode, and the voice—polite but firm—rebuffed him again.

The building’s address? His own address? His birthday. Her birthday.

The voice was patient, accommodating, seemed prepared to let him go on trying, but not having anything so far.

He said, “Please?”

The system did not recognize voice commands.

“Please enter your four-digit password.”

Was that creeping irritation in her voice?

“I just. I don’t know the password.”

“Please enter your four-digit password.”

Will knew he couldn’t try all night. He fingered the lock on her desk drawer, cradling the receiver between ear and sore neck, and with his other hand, finally, double- tapped the hook mechanism, giving up, retreating to an even dial-tone.

Will had read about phone phreaks, blind kids on analog machines, kids with perfect pitch who could dial a number without hitting a button, could reproduce the sound of each number, could hack the system and get free long-distance, drop calls and bypass security measures with a well-timed hum. Listen to the out-of-service message, the intercept message, in different regions, different countries different languages.

I'm sorry; the number you have reached is not in service, or temporarily disconnected. The number you have reached is not in service at this time. This is a recording.

367

We're sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.

Le numéro que vous avez composé n'est pas disponible de votre region.

It’s all useless in a digital system—IP telephony, it’s called—but Will couldn’t help it. The tone persisted. He hummed. He moaned, grunted, made tongue-on-teeth fart noises, but his mouth was dry and the sound he produced resembled no fart he’d ever heard. He also, he knew, had terrible pitch. And so, when the dial-tone finally stopped, a soft click and then silence, as if to say “haven’t you had enough? Maybe it’s time to go home,” he set the receiver back down on the cradle.

Nothing in the drawers, either, Will had seen to that, resorting to his now well- practiced shake-push-pull method of burglary. Drawers ground open, but nothing inside, only the cracked-wood smell of pencil shavings. Whether she’d cleaned them out or management had cleaned them out or they’d been empty to begin with, he couldn’t tell.

But the bright voicemail light still shone, and pulled Will, compelled, and he again circled back to his own desk, lumbered over his nest, picked up his own phone, dialled her internal number, what was her internal number. He heard the ringing aisles away.

No answer, which he’d expected. Why would she answer? How would she answer? Still, some disappointment.

Studying the voicemail message like test prep, signs of regret, stress, distance, professionalism. Only, instead, a distracted, anxious reply, the voice of someone who’d

368 like to not be talking on the phone, peppered with umms and uhhs and implied question marks at even the obvious moment, like she’s forgotten her name.

And then that familiar automated voice takes over. Leave a message after the beep.

Will hung up before the beep.

Dialled again.

And again.

The job won’t save him. Art won’t save him. She won’t save him. Clinically, he watched himself dial. Knowing something cognitively doesn’t change how it makes you feel. “Feels before reals.”

One last time. This time, waiting for the beep.

Beep—

Didn’t know what he’d say, but started: “Hey Heather.”

It’s all he had.

“I’m here late and it’s funny, your phone just rang. Someone left a message. It’s crazy that they never disconnected your number.”

He paused. He paused too long.

“Are you there Heather? It’s me, W—”

He paused too long and there’s another beep, and there’s that voice again.

“If you’re satisfied with your message, please press one now. To listen to your message, please press two. To rerecord your message, please press three. To delete your message, press seven.”

369

Will considered the three minutes of silence. Pressed one in spite of himself, and then immediately called the number again, waited again for the beep.

“—Will,” he finished the thought.

Again he paused.

“There was another accident. An accident. Amazing how long you can drift along, doing what’s expected. I have to go home. I resigned. My dad did something. My mom says it’s bad. Won’t tell me what. But I have to, I guess I have to take care of the business.”

He hung up, relieved. Not so much telling her, if she could ever even listen, but just saying it. And he realized how unfair it was to put all that emotional labour on her, this stranger he had a little thing for, this weird creepy obsession like somehow a beautiful person fixes everything else that’s wrong. He thought he had to find a way to delete those messages before she had the chance to hear them, but he’s helpless.

Will sat one last time, considered that there was no way to put everything back in its place.

Best bet, he decided, is to stage it like the thief’s last hurrah, scatter the goods, add to the chaos. Rip the fleece. Instead, though, Will rested his eyes for a moment, and when he came to it was 3am, the pile remained, he had got specks of ceiling tile insulation in his hair, and he had less than an hour to walk the hour walk to the

Greyhound station and catch his bus and catch his flight and catch a ride home with mom in her beat-up Chrysler and figure out just what it is he’s doing.

* * *

370

The Fire

Here was how the police had reconstructed it, working backwards from the charred and desiccated shell of a commercial property:

Will had said no, a definitive no, but Zeke had felt the blip once more, and Zeke was not one inclined to ignore the blip. And then when Joseph had said it, had said that he’d rather burn the place to the ground than lose it. . . . Zeke knew that Joseph would say that it was just an expression, but Zeke knew all about the way that the subconscious leaked through, the way our conscious actions couldn’t help but betray our deeper feelings. Zeke was attuned to the blip, had learned all about the blip from his therapist.

The blip had led him to noticing those tics in the Starbucks, the mannerisms that led him to conclude that all was not quite right. Zeke could pull double-duty: do a favour for a mentor and prove to the others that he was not crazy. There was something wraithlike, uncanny about the Starbucks and its employees. Even Heather. She was an imitation, her mannerisms just too perfect, just too spot-on Heather. He wasn’t the only one who noticed. J. had given him the curt nod, the unspoken I see it too. It was all wrong, but

Zeke decided he could make it right, that he could purify by fire. Sear away the lifelike flesh, leave the robotic remains.

No camera footage: the investigators rubbed their foreheads when they discovered the CCTV setup was local, feeding its footage only to a videocassette recorder in the basement that had been melted into a Boschian nightmare sculpture.

Luckily, one break in the case: a digital record of Zeke having used his very own passkey to gain entrance into the building. It was late at night and a firm wall of cloud

371 was sweeping in, down from the mountains in the west and the wind kicked at, hurled the garbage in the streets and the building was, thank god, empty, save for a janitor who smelled smoke from the second floor and got herself to safety by way of the back staircase.

Starting from the moment of entrance onto the premises, the details grew sketchier, but detectives groped, pieced the story together, clumsily at first, then more confidently, and did so thusly: Zeke removed his jacket (it’s in the small details, report- writing), balled it around his fist, and punched through the glass doors of the East Village

Starbucks, which was accessible from the lobby of the Fiction Factor headquarters. He brushed away the loose shards of glass, entered the coffee shop and—ignoring the boxy, screaming security alarm contraption and the tactile dysfunction of its keypad, the same device presently notifying local authorities—pushed over a few tables. He swept through into the kitchenette, never stopping to consider the palpability, the physical realness of the equipment he ran his hands over. He was, however, taken aback by the absence of a stove, for he did not know that all the little pastries were trucked in from across the continent, ready to consume. He had hoped for gas burners, but forced to improvise, he persisted: activating the pastry toaster and flipping the switches on the coffee makers for good measure, and listening to the music of empty glass carafes sizzling, Zeke then went about the task of locating a supply closet, combing through it for alcohol-based cleaners.

Finding a plastic gallon jug of pink liquid, he doused the room. A second jug, this one yellow-ish, followed it onto the floor and walls, tides of two liquid confluent in the grids of grout. And then he wadded up a handful of brown, 100% recycled paper towels, set

372 them ablaze with his Bic lighter, and dropped them into the nearest puddle of the isopropyl cleaner.

Investigators said Zeke did not stop to watch his handiwork; he did not watch the puddle of flame grow, connect with other puddles, catch on equipment, or—trellis-like— climb the walls. He did not stop to watch the ceilings go black or plastic drink containers melt and shrink, black, into themselves. He did not watch the fire spread across six floors in fits and starts, devouring thousands and thousands of Fiction Factor manuscript pages, finished books and uncorrected proofs. He did not witness the bottle of superpremium scotch whisky in Joseph’s office superheat and shatter, high-proof liquor further feeding flames. Zeke instead simply stepped over that first puddle of fire and left the way he entered. He must have walked home, returned to his family.

It was at his modest home where the detectives found him, where he answered the door smiling, stroking a gauze bandage on his hand, and announced he had heard on the news, that he was happy to cooperate with the investigation. Until he pieced it together, figured out he was the one under investigation.

A goddamned frame-up, and he blamed Joseph.

East Village smelled for days of ash, plastics, and burnt fibreglass. The Fire

Department contained the blaze as best they could, but the building was full of paper, full of flammable goods. It bloomed like a forelorn lantern in the half-dark city night. Even where the flames did not reach, smoke damage left entire floors unsalvageable. The structure remained intact, but the building smoked overnight like a sputtering campfire; glass could be heard to shatter; embers careened down to the street intersection below where neighbours gathered to watch: some in pajamas, many having gone to the effort of

373 dressing. A few evacuated from nearby buildings, but most drawn to the flames and sirens as compulsively as Raj to irony or Zeke to drink or Will to the sorts of situations he knew would not make him happy. A few in the gathered crowd sipped from mugs of tea or coffee, a couple nursed bottles of beer or glasses of red wine they’d poured moments earlier, when they had settled down for the night. There was a festive atmosphere, like an early autumn bonfire. An older man, in slippers and a flannel housecoat, repeated the same joke to each neighbour he passed: “You get the marshmallows,” he said, “and I’ll find some sticks.”

The CFD established a perimeter as the flames burned themselves out, a rectangle around the adjacent structures monitored by a few men in turnout trousers and unzipped coats, their helmets angled backward and chinstraps loosened. The gawkers spied, pointed, talked amongst themselves, wondering what had happened, and what kind of work even went on in such a non-descript space. Still, most were unconcerned: an event like this the cost of gentrification, a reminder to be aware of how they navigated their presence in this neighbourhood.

Investigators briefly pursued the theory that Zeke was only following the wishes of his friend and boss, but those were quickly abandoned. It was abundantly clear early in the investigation that Zeke was classic NCR; if there was a crime in the case at all, it was that Zeke’s illness had been left untreated for so long—that he was laughed at, mocked, made the comic relief. Transcripts of interviews revealed a startling lack of compassion: his coworkers acknowledged his disorder, the belief that his baristas had been replaced by robots, but not one person they reached out to could explain why they never treated it seriously. It was a put-on, they said. They ignored that he was clearly self-medicating,

374 because he was old-school, from a time when men were men. It never occurred to them to wonder why a middle-aged factory worker would quit his job and change career streams to something so bizarre as a science-fiction author (science-fiction author being the best understanding the investigators could come up with in describing what he actually did).

His wife had reached out so many times to so many people and heard nothing, received no assurances, no explanation for why he was out of the house and out of contact for whole nights, days at a time. The lead detective, hardened himself, nevertheless marvelled at the lack of compassion. The psych evaluator wasn’t going to use the phrase

“ticking time bomb,” but only because the more apt metaphor was that of an old, active landmine, bound to be triggered by just the right high-stress event—losing his job, the psychologist speculated, or losing the support of a mentor. The result: a total mental break.

The lead detective briefly wondered if all this pointed toward collusion, a conspiracy, and asked for clarification. He considered the possibility that this madman wasn’t beyond speaking divine truth. The detective had access to Fiction Factor employee records, Starbucks employee records, records of the building management firm. Joseph, that made sense to him: the former owner, maybe a bit angry at having been pushed out of the venture he started. And Heather, she was still working in the

Starbucks—hell, she’d worked for both companies, he realized. Fired, or she quit, and then working in a coffee shop? Who would ever want to work in a coffee shop after having a real job? It made sense. Connect the dots and the only remaining explanation, however unlikely, was the truth—that’s how the line went. Was that Sherlock? But this

375

Will had been gone for months. Abruptly resigned and left the city, unreachable. No sign of him, as if he’d never been there.

But with the pressure from above to clear cases? Working three concurrent arson cases and already back in the rotation. Reports overwhelmed the inbox/outbox, blurring the two shelves of the sharp-edged rack on the edge of his desk.

CPD forwarded their files to the Crown’s office and closed the case. The building owners collected their insurance payout but, in consultation with its occupants, declined to repair or rebuild. The building was razed; in its place, condos, lofts, apartment-living in the heart of the city.

Telecommuting is the future of work.

Beyond that spark, hot and white and brief, seared in that detective’s brainpan— doused, because what purpose is there in messing with a slam dunker when there are so many stone-cold whodunnits out there waiting to be thrust upon him—no one so much as asked where Joseph had been that night. He’d have had his alibi, no doubt, but no one asked.

Nor did anyone ask Gretchen.

No one ever noticed Gretchen. No one noticed when she stole Zeke’s passkey the day she quit. No one noticed when she slipped into the building that night, just as the investigators assumed Zeke had, and that the rest of their conjecture had been more-or- less spot on.

If they’d gone to Gretchen’s house instead of Zeke’s, they’d have found not gauze on a knuckle but a fishhook face-wound, infected and weeping, and a four-inch burn on her right forearm.

376

The End

Will heard from the basement the doorbell, heard it again in cheery musical succession.

Heard movement, a door cracking enough for a conversation.

“Aren’t you fellas supposed to be in pairs?”

And he heard the reply, muted but familiar: Joseph asking “Pardon?”

Dish detergent smells masked recently finished meal: chicken. Roasted, and beans overboiled to ammoniac bitterness

“And that’s an awful nice suit for a publisher.”

Will drifted to the staircase, spied up.

“Presentation matters,” Joseph said with some deliberation.

“It’s not very humble, is all. You’re not practicing what you preach, is my feeling.

And you smell like cigarette smoke. Would you like a mint? Some Febreze? Is that allowed?”

“Is what allowed?”

“Smoking,” she said.

“I’ve been trying to quit.” Then changing the subject, “But so you recognize me?” he asked. “Your son—”

“Not personally, no. But you’re easy to spot. We don’t get many visits from strangers here.”

“Right. But I’m still—”

377

She cut him off. “You can leave the pamphlet,” she said, “But I’m afraid I’m busy. Maybe another time? I do like skimming the Watchtower sometimes. Alive too. It’s fun for me. I’m something of an amateur theologian myself.”

Will realized the mistake. He put a hand over his mouth.

“You think I’m with the church?”

“Eschatology is sort of my jam. You didn’t bring any pamphlets? Which

Kingdom Hall do you belong to?”

“I’m not with the church,” Joseph said.

“I don’t understand,” she said. She opened the front door a bit wider. Will snort- sniffed and called, “Who is it?”

“A publisher,” she shouted back.

“A publisher?” Will asked back.

“I’m not a publisher,” Joseph tried.

“He says he’s not a publisher,” she relayed down the steps.

“Well I am a publisher,” Joseph tried again. “I was a publisher.”

“He seems confused,” she shouted to Will. Then turning back to the door, “So you’re lapsed? Are you having a crisis of faith? Do you want to come in? I’ve always been curious about the New World Translation.” She opened the door a few centimeters wider. The cloistered foyer, the carpeted staircase leading down to the basement, the electric fireplace beneath a mantel surface knobbed with knick-knacks and photographs.

Pictures of infants and animals, scenes from weddings next to tourist tchotchkes: vaguely

Caribbean necklaces, a coconut carved into the face of a monkey. Postcards from the

Rocky Mountains.

378

“I’m not a Witness, ma’am,” Joseph explained.

“You’re not a publisher?”

“I am a publisher.”

“Are you ill?” Will heard his mother ask.

“I am not. I am a publisher of books. Was a publisher of books.”

Will called from the basement: “Mom?”

“Religious books?” she asked.

“Not religious books, no.”

“Okay,” she said, “I understand! Why didn’t you say so? I haven’t encountered an encyclopedia salesman in so long,” she said. “You should come in! I remember when my mother bought the first volume of the World Book Encyclopedia! We wanted the whole set. And all the Great Books, but we just couldn’t afford it when I was growing up. Seven kids on one salary? But I read that first volume over and over again, you know? Aardvark to Applebaum, if I remember! But you don’t have any books with you. Did you leave them in your car? Where’s your car? Oh, I bet it’s all digital now. Please, please, come in?”

Will ought to put a stop to this. Calling “Everything okay, mom?”

“No, no. It’s quite alright. Maybe another night? You’re right that I’ve misplaced my—my samples?—I was actually wondering if I could speak with Will.”

“Will?”

“Your son?”

“What a silly thing to do, misplace your samples.”

“Absolutely, ma’am.”

379

Will had already climbed the first steps, could view the interaction at the door.

His mother shook her head, opened the door wide and leaned on the bannister of the stairwell as she yelled unnecessarily down. “The encyclopedia salesman wants to talk to you!”

Joseph stood outside the threshold as she wandered back into the living room, plopped herself down on the couch and picked up a magazine.

“Rich—that’s my husband. He’s not here now. Went out. My husband and I, we saw the place a few years ago. The original owner backed out. Bought it for a song. Close to the warehouse. Beautiful place—”

Will interrupted. He was at the head of the steps, jaw set, looking at Joseph.

“Mom.”

“What were you doing down there that took so long?” She laid the magazine in her lap.

No answer for a moment, as Will took a breath, sized up his former patron as he stood before him. Hair ever-so-thinner. Otherwise identical. Will himself in t-shirt and jeans, barefoot. His hair swept back awkwardly on-top of itself and out of his eyes too tenuously to be a deliberate style choice, as though he had been putting off a haircut for too long. It occurred to Will that he had never noticed he was taller than his former boss.

This made him smile. Joseph misread the smile and pushed a hand out to shake. Will ignored it and it lingered there in the air like the ammonia odour until Joseph scratched the back of his neck and returned it to his pocket.

“What’s he want?” he jerked his thumb in Joseph’s direction.

“He wanted to speak with you,” she said matter-of-factly.

380

“About what?”

“I’m right here,” Joseph suggested. Leaning forward to interject himself into the conversation.

Will ignored him. “About what?” he repeated.

“He said he was an encyclopedia salesman,” she offered.

“Publisher,” Joseph tried to correct.

She shot him a look. “You said you weren’t a Witness!”

He started to explain and stopped when he realized a smirk criss-crossed her face, laugh-lines.

“He didn’t say what he wanted,” she admitted. “I assumed it was about the warehouse?”

“What did he say about the warehouse?”

“I didn’t say anything about the warehouse,” Joseph offered. “I actually just came to talk?”

Will silenced him. On Will’s thumbs, flaps of skin, chewed raw. “Why would he be here about the warehouse?”

She said nothing.

“Why the warehouse?” Will grilled his mother. Looking from his mother to

Joseph and back.

And she set aside her magazine and stared him down. Chewed at the inside of her lip and opened her mouth as if to speak. Then she stopped, picked up the magazine and said in as motherly a voice as she could muster—even Joseph, who had never met this woman before in his life could sense the baldness of the lie—that it was nothing, dear.

381

“You,” Will turned his attention to Joseph.

“Me,” he smiled. “It’s been awhile.”

“What do you want?”

“Can we talk?” They faced off at arm’s length. Will’s mother was pretending to distraction but peeking over the magazine, spying, rapt. “You’re a hard man to find.”

“I told you where I was going when I left.” Will wiped his mouth. He instinctively raised his thumb to his teeth.

Joseph asked, “You’ve been writing?”

Will ignored him. “Are you getting the band back together?” he leaned against the bannister.

“No,” Joseph said, “I just wonder if we could talk?”

“Call? E-mail?”

“Grand romantic gesture. I brought flowers but I left them in the car. A handle of cheap bourbon next to it.”

“Bourbon’s more Zeke’s style,” Will suggested.

“The nice thing about booze in a bottle with a plastic cap is you don’t have to worry about sitting it on its side. No cork, no decay. You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” Will asked, inspecting his thumbnail.

“We’re done.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve gone out of print. Sort of.”

“I was never in print. Not really.”

“I’m out,” he said. “It all blew up. You didn’t read anything about it?”

382

Will said he hadn’t.

“Burnt to the ground.”

“Interesting choice of words.”

“No, literally,” Joseph explained. “Zeke burnt it to the ground.”

Will opened his mouth.

“That’s why I want to talk,” Joseph said. “You have some time?”

Will checked his watch and slit-eye side-stared his mother. Joseph understood.

“Go for a stroll?” he asked and Will at last nodded. Will turned and spidered down the stairs. Once he reached the bottom he grabbed a pair of shoes from a rack and stripped a jean jacket off a coat hanger. Hopping on one foot at a time he slipped each shoe over a bare foot. Joseph whistled. Smiled at Will’s mother. She smiled back, no longer even pretending to occupy herself with the magazine.

“I think I’ve figured you out,” she said. She thought for a moment, tapping her finger on the arm of the couch. Carefully. “You know Raj, then?” she asked.

Joseph smiled, “I know Raj,” he confirmed. He corrected himself: “I knew Raj.”

“He worked for you?”

“He did.”

“I never did like that Raj,” she said.

“I fired him,” Joseph said.

She cough-snorted.

“Serves him right,” she said.

Will bounded back up the stairs. She leaned in toward Joseph cautiously. “Can I get you something?” she asked. “I’ve been a dreadful hostess. Tea? A beer?”

383

Joseph assured her he was fine and Will told her they were stepping out for a few moments. She reminded him not to forget his keys and he jangled them. Then she said, to

Joseph, “You know, this will embarrass Will. But when he was a kid, we had a three-ring binder. Twenty-six pages, one for each letter of the alphabet. When he learned a word, could spell it, we put it down in the binder.”

“Mom,” Will said.

“He came home from school one day, said he could spell banana. Took three tries, but he got there.”

“Mom,” Will said again.

She put her hands up in surrender. They made their way outside, then, Will’s mother calling after him to use the side door when he was back because she might go to bed.

And Will and Joseph exited, strolled down the steps and the driveway, and stood in the middle of the street, no sidewalk here though a path had been marked for one, the ground levelled and strips of plywood driven in to demarcate its future contours.

Dispersed streetlamps of suburbia taking shape, suburbia-in-the-making, suburbia-in- gestation. Paint-by-numbers homes built to two or three sets of specifications. This one a mirror image of the one that came before, door on the right, attached garage on the left; this one with an extra storey, domestic spire of fairy-tale fancy poking out of a sleepy four-bedroom, owners having paid extra for an exterior façade of stone to complete the castle aesthetic, for they surely believed a man’s home truly was his, etc., etc. Here an empty lot, earth upturned, rimmed by clumps of dandelion and wild mint and vetch, an electric hook-up ready and untouched, listing into mud in the front yard. Signs declaring

384 will build to suit, real estate placards nestled between homebuilder placards and myriad cheaper placards bearing amateurish touch: advertising landscaping, house painting, roofing, driveway paving and window replacement. Warnings to prospective buyers, all of them, of what might go wrong, what might not have been budgeted for, where homebuilders cutting corners are liable to skimp.

“Lead the way?” Joseph suggested, and Will headed south at a brisk pace. Joseph had to hop, skip to catch up.

“Still following the Jays?”

“What do you want?” Will repeated.

“I tried to understand the appeal of baseball. I really did. Too clinical for me.”

“What do you want?”

“Mind if I smoke?” Joseph asked. He pulled a crumpled carton from a breast pocket, withdrew a cigarette and placed it in his mouth. Will’s said nothing. Joseph patted himself for a lighter, found one and grabbed it. He lit up the stick, took a draw.

“Still trying to quit. In rehab, you replace one compulsion with another. I’ve said this before? But it’s like one of those playing card houses. You pull out any one card and it falls apart. Fly fishing and smoking. It’s a strange house of cards. I’m anxious right now, you know.”

“Burnt the place down?”

“Eventually, he did. I tried to quit once. Not too long ago, actually.” He exhaled and the smoke hung in the windless air before him. He stepped through it. “I switched to mints. Suck on a mint every time you’ve got a craving. It worked for a while. Smoke free

385 for six months.” Will betrayed no interest. He kept walking; with his lazy gait, his shoe soles dragged across the concrete road.

“Then I went to my dentist and he took one look at me,” Joseph continued.

“Asked if anything had changed. I said I’d quit smoking, and he said, ‘Go on . . .’ and I said I was sucking on mints as a replacement. He asked if they were sugar-free.”

“They weren’t sugar free,” Will guided the story.

“They weren’t sugar free,” Joseph confirmed, “And I was supine in that dental chair and he took off his surgical mask and he was fiddling with that tartar scraper and he said that it was great I’d quit smoking. But speaking as a dentist, he said, I’d actually rather you go back to cigarettes than keep sucking on these candies. Said I had caries in

14, 15, 35, with signs of potential trouble in 44 and 45. Tried sugar-free mints. In fact, he suggested it. But the texture wasn’t the same.”

Will grunted and stuffed his hands in his jacket pocket. They walked. Joseph asked if he had a destination in mind.

“Wintergreen,” Will said, nodding his head at the side of the road, toward a row of un-cleared lots. “Buttonbush. Mountain holly. Not to be mistaken for winterberry.”

“Know the names,” Joseph said.

“What are you here for? Seriously, though, Zeke?” Variations on Will’s chorus.

“But I guess there’s something I can show you.” He said to himself, “We should have seen that coming. Whatever happened to Gretchen?”

“Gretchen?” like the name didn’t mean a thing to Joseph.

Joseph puffed on the cigarette. The paved road ended and they crunched over gravel, over dirt. He still smelled ozone but no storm had yet materialized. He studied his

386

Kenneth Coles, one step in front of the other, gathered they’d be a write-off. The dirt path veered to meet up with an actual road, and they followed the curvature that placed them on actual sidewalk. More empty lots, more newly-built homes. In the distance a few brick buildings: a supermarket, a fish and chips place, a liquor store lit up like Arbor Day. All of the other signs unlit, even relatively early in the evening.

“Do what you do well, but don’t have any illusions about it,” Will said. Cars passed. Pickups, SUVs, slowing around a curve where the speed limit dropped to an impossible 20 kilometers per hour, lowlights refracting off a guardrail.

“They took the back catalogue and they retooled it.”

“Retooled?” Will asked.

“Removed objectionable content.”

“Makes sense,” Will said, “I felt icky writing that stuff anyway.”

“Simplified the language. Simplified the plot.”

Will rubbed his nose.

“Removed entire characters, subplots. Victims of strictly standardized page counts. You wouldn’t recognize your own words. I heard a rumour they’ve got a machine, a computer that takes a text and it can simplify the language to any age group you want. You double-down by targeting children as well as teens. If it’s not something teens want, maybe it’s something parents want? Probably just a rumour, though?”

“I thought you said it burnt down.”

“The office burnt down. The idea lives, such as it was.”

“Right,” Will kicked at some dirt.

“Figured you deserved to know.”

387

“It’s strange here,” Will said. “Something I noticed when I moved back. It can feel absolutely still and yet you can hear the wind in the distance, absolutely clear. You didn’t do anything to stop this?”

“Powerless. I told you. Your problem was that you listened, but you never listened. You’re looking at the latest casualty of the Fiction Factor empire.” As if to demonstrate, he stopped, turned to Will and made a head-to-toe look-at-me-now gesture with his open palms. “You seriously hadn’t heard?”

Will continued marching, forcing Joseph to catch up once more. “What happened?” he asked, though he indicated no real curiosity. As if he felt the need to say what he thought was expected of him.

And so as they walked, Joseph explained. Joseph explained that the angel investor he’d found was less an angel that he seemed. Miracles come with strings attached. That the efficiency experts who swarmed the office were only the beginning. That as morale fell, so did projected revenue, which led to the angel investor chewing over the numbers, declaring the need for more efficiency experts, who inserted themselves suppository-style even further into business, leading to even lower morale and even worse projected revenue. The catch of austerity measures is that they only ever lead to more austerity measures. Sure, we’ve been austere, but it hasn’t worked: we need to be more austere.

Joseph signed the papers readily, cut a deal with an angel investor, though not entirely without reservations. And the press release he found in the trade journals the next day declared, in Joseph’s own written words, words he had never himself put to paper but words for which he was receiving credit: “We’ve held out for partners that share our

388 commitment to quality over quick return and who are interested in growing a business that we can pass on to our children.”

“Many investors,” it read (and he recited back to Will, verbatim), “see that approach as old-fashioned, but we’ve taken time to find a group we’re proud to call partners.”

The reference to children hit close to home for Joseph, who didn’t have any that he knew of, but who felt at that point about Fiction Factor the way some people he knew thought of their kids: they fuck up and they fuck up, and you’re always there to lend money. To bail them out. The love for something you’ve created is unconditional and you’ll do anything to save it—even if it’s from itself. And that’s the best part and the worst part about unconditional love, somehow at the same time.

He and Will walked. They had passed the grocery store—a hulking chain newly built, maybe the largest non-hothouse, non-wind-turbine structure for kilometers in any direction—and cut right, then left, jaywalking the carless lanes of Main Street. Past an old-fashioned small-town apothecary, through a more established residential neighbourhood. Joseph had killed his first cigarette, smoking it down to the filter, and lit up another.

Will nodded. The night was damp and warm and beads of sweat were forming under his jacket.

Joseph said, “It’s like when I was using. You get so used to waking up every morning feeling like absolute shit that eventually it seems normal? It seems normal to sit around on your couch waiting for your guy to show up so you can stop sweating and throwing up? Or maybe you want to quit, you know, and you promise yourself you will

389 after just this one last time? It felt like that. Like I was tricking myself into thinking everything was fine? That I was taking their money, and using them. Doing something right with it.”

Will said he understood the feeling.

The board of governors held a secret board meeting, where they voted him out.

Forced out of his own company.

Will whistled. “So what happened,” he asked.

“Mediation.”

“Anticlimactic,” Will observed.

“They bought my shares. Bought me out.”

“So you’re doing alright, is what you’re saying?”

“The company will be dead in a year.”

“And the fire?”

“Zeke was loyal. Torched the place.”

“Jesus,” Will said.

“He did it at night, at least. Empty. Fire originated in the kitchen of the Starbucks.

Broke in, cranked the burners, pulled all sorts of wires. I’m guessing. Don’t know the specifics. Electrical fire, maybe? He knew what he was doing. I honestly think it had more to do with the Starbucks than with us.”

“And Zeke?”

“He’s getting treatment,” Joseph paused. “I guess the irony of it was that they didn’t care about the physical space. He probably actually did the new owners a real solid, you know?”

390

“Wrapped up awfully neat.”

“You’re not wrong.”

The macadam ended and they stepped over a shallow sewer ditch at the edge of a

U-storage property. Over soft, dewy grass they trod until they reached a six-foot chain- link fence that circumnavigated an enormous single slope steel warehouse building off of which flecks of white paint peeled.

“Is this where we’re headed?” Joseph asked.

“Did you ever ask what I’ve been up to?” Will said. “And by the way, you might want to put out the cigarette, being we’re entering a commercial-industrial site?”

Joseph swatted his half-smoked cigarette back toward the sewer ditch, where it plopped and sizzled. “I decided I was done chasing trends.”

“Learned your lesson?” They followed the edge of the chain-link fence, over a well-worn path of flattened grass.

“I headed back down to Bigfork. Went back to the cabin. Realized there was something missing.”

“Fly fishing,” Will said, unenthused.

“Fly fishing,” Joseph confirmed, ignoring or missing Will’s tone. “Rented the same cabin from the same guy. Needed to clear my head. But it was strange. Like a beautiful coincidence. My first morning out there on Flathead Lake, I saw a Great Blue

Heron. A slow-flying glide into the water, and then he just stood there, ankle deep. And then while I was watching him, out-of-nowhere, there was another. Circling up above. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Mmhmm,” Will said.

391

“So I pulled off the waders right there, and I drove into town and I found the guy who rented me the cabin. He worked in a hardware store, just a main street-type storefront operation. Like those small branches the big chains open in places that can’t support the big box store?

“Yeah.” Will pointed vaguely to indicate the one he was aware of here, a few streets over.

“And I said I wanted to buy the cabin, then and there. Name his price.”

“And?” Will thought he knew where this was going, but asked anyway.

“He turned me down. I said I wasn’t kidding. Said I’d pay twice what it was worth. Three times. Told him again and again to name a price. Just kept saying it wasn’t for sale. I said he’d never have to work another day at the hardware store.”

Will, again. “And?”

“He turned me down. I was pleading. He said he liked the hardware store. Said it was a nice enough way to spend a morning. Said it wasn’t for sale, and that was final.”

They reached a gate, which Will opened with an RFID fob he waved in front of a box that resembled an intercom.

“So I packed up my equipment that afternoon and I left. I had the cabin rented for another month. I just left it empty. Didn’t tell the owner I was leaving,” Joseph said.

They passed into a walkway between two more fences that funnelled them toward the warehouse building. Will said, “The trucks come in from the road that rings the other side. Dock level loading doors. Hydraulic levers. The whole she-bang. This is the back entrance.” They reached the building and—with a physical key this time—Will opened the heavy door that led into the warehouse proper. He flicked a row of switches next to an

392 antiquated clock-in machine and lights blinkered and hummed awake. He strolled a few feet to another set of buttons and punched one that began to lift the warehouse’s bay doors so they might look out on a fenced-in back yard of mangled storage racks, stacked pallets and faulty forklift parts. Industrial-grade plastic wrap flapped a bit in the breeze. A few empty, dented tanks of compressed natural gas and puddled oil or puddled industrial lubricant.

As the overhead fluorescents warmed, they beheld together the scope of the building’s interior. In the far corner, abutting two walls, a plywood structure with a door and a window looking out onto the warehouse floor that resembled a haphazard lean-to.

A minimalist office in which Joseph could identify a figure sitting. Against the far wall, terminating in a row of four closed loading doors, the truck bays, by each of which were stacked an assortment of crates, pallets, and steel cages overflowing with industrial-grade doohickeys used for mechanical processes Joseph did not recognize or understand

(“Casters,” Will said, following his gaze), upon each grouping of items, affixed Scotch tape, a piece of printer paper with a seven-digit number. Nearer, closer to the entrance by which they’d arrived, there sat a row of parked forklifts and pieces of equipment waiting to be either installed or disposed of: fan parts, insulant, a condenser. A few smaller steel cages, small enough for a person to lift. Milk cartons and corrugated cardboard boxes bearing the Heinz wordmark. A short conveyor belt in a state of disassembly. But the rest of the space was occupied by row upon row of shelving units, storage racks with plastic- wrapped pallets stacked two or three deep, the aisles just wide enough for a forklift to manoeuvre.

393

The figure in the office, manager-cum-night-security-guard had pulled himself out of a comfy early-evening nap in his chair and spied out the office window. Will waved at him. He waved back, placated, and returned to his seat. The structure was clean, near spotless. Not even the familiar odour of gas left by forklifts operating indoors. The place was old—the flaking paint outside and the weak tracks of lighting were evidence of that—but it smelled new, smelled antiseptic. Clean and hollow. If they spoke too loud their voices would echo.

“Mostly office supplies and springs,” Will said, “Chair parts. Casters and backrests. Armrests. No one needs office chair parts at two in the morning. We get the parts from all over, and then we ship them to one of the big dealers. They can put

Assembled in Canada on the packaging that way. We do car parts sometimes. The little pieces. Seatbelt enclosures. Only when the big guys have excess inventory.”

“This is why you left?” Joseph asked.

“This is why I left.” He pointed at the parcels waiting by the loading docks.

“Those numbers correspond to destinations. 02092-04. That’s Windsor. 02093-01 is

London. We’ve got an entire database of numbers, but we don’t have much use for most of them anymore. Leamington, Amherstburg. Wallaceburg sometimes. We’re small time.

There’s a diner a couple blocks away. They’re hurting. The drivers used to hang around there before and after unloading.”

“What happened?” Joseph asked.

“When my father bought the property,” Will explained, “that bike path we crossed was railroad track. We’re two blocks north of the docks. It’s a straight shot across to

394

Sandusky or even Cleveland. 45 minutes to the busiest border on the continent. Location, location, location. Hub of the North American auto industry.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t need to tell you the story. You know the story.”

“I know the story,” Joseph conceded.

“And you know it gets worse.” Bad to worse, that is, on the day Will received all those phone calls and those texts. Was his father distracted when, filling in for one of his lift operators who’d called in sick, he had missed the chamfer of the block pallet and knocked his tynes into a bin, sending it toppling onto the materials handler crouched, performing inventory below? Was it a freak accident? Rich hadn’t driven a lift in ages, but it wasn’t like he was untrained. He had all his certifications, all up-to-date. He was a stickler for the rules, had been ever since Will could remember. He knew exactly what he was doing.

The handler should have heard the lift coming and stepped away. Then again, if he hadn’t, Rich should have cut the engine and warned him. The bin should have been balanced better on the pallet. A nudge shouldn’t ever be able to knock over a bin of heavy parts. Wrong place at the wrong time? Will still didn’t know. The handler had survived, albeit with permanent nerve damage and frequent headaches, and could not remember the details of the incident at all. The Ministry of Labour was still compiling its findings, and their decision hung over them. So too did the lawsuit, but even before the decision came down, their insurance premiums had risen sharply, punctured their sense of comfort.

“That’s when they called me home,” he said. “After the accident. I resisted at first. Even before the accident, I ignored calls. Avoided them. Tried not to think about

395 how bad it was. And then. We were limping before, and we’ve been limping along since.

Holding out.” Will said. He rapped a hand on the wall against which he leaned. Joseph walked in tight circles, looking ceiling-ward at the array of lights, a few of them sputtering. “Every time the phone rings, we try to guess whether it’s the bank or an offer on the property.”

“Where’s your dad now?”

“At the long-term care facility.”

“Visiting the guy who’s suing him,” Joseph said.

Will chewed at his thumb. “I guess that’s not the way my father sees it.” Through the bay door he strolled into the adjacent yard belonging to the warehouse and tucked hands back into jeans. Winged insects blitzed into the building, swarming around the high-up light fixtures. Joseph followed him out, stood next to him and traced the path of the railroad tracks-turned bike trails. A small campfire crackled and smoked not too far away. Will pointed and explained that some of the migrant workers held impromptu picnics along the trails. Tucked their bicycles just off the route and used whatever was handy for kindling.

Joseph goggled at the warehouse that climbed immediately before them, its single slope roof like a blade slicing into twilight, the whole steel structure blotting out the ovoid moon. Will was still following the billows of black, vegetal smoke a few hundred yards in the distance, listening for cracking branches and the sounds of quiet Spanish conversation.

“You’re not selling the place?”

“Like I said, we’re getting offers.”

396

“Thinking about them?” Joseph asked.

“They seem low,” Will said.

“I think it always feels that way,” Joseph said. “The offers, are they enough to pay the outstanding bills?”

Will didn’t answer.

“Do you enjoy being here? Day after day? Your morning starts at—” Will could see Joseph reading his hair, his slouch, the bags under his eyes—“6:00? 6:30? You can’t enjoy it.”

“God no,” said Will.

“Then what’s your asking price?”

Will sucked on his gums.

“Seriously. Name your price.”

At last, Will said, “I think if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

Do whatever you do well, but don’t have any illusions about it. A trailer truck roared as it passed nearby and a foghorn blew out over Lake Erie. Will felt like quoting

Gatsby, but instead followed after Joseph, who was already marching through the bay doors and back to the heavy rear door. The security guard ducked his head out into the central room of the warehouse and watched as Will flicked each bank of fluorescents off one by one. Then he returned once more to his chair, and to the crossword puzzle he’d left half-finished on the desk beside him. He picked up a pen and thwacked it against the wood pulp paper. Sometimes on his shift he read; sometimes he listened to the radio, or did light calisthenics, loping from one side of the building to the other and then back, tagging each wall with the tips of his calloused fingers. Sometimes he brought his laptop

397 and caught up on TV. And sometimes, when it was particularly quiet, he would pull out his pen and he would find a few sheets of single-sided copy paper in the white recycling bin next to the computer Will had booted down for the evening, and the security guard would draw on the reverse of some typewritten pages of unpolished prose that Will had cast aside.

398

Works Cited

“About Us.” Fullfathomfive.com, 2015, fullfathomfive.com/about/. Accessed 5 January

2017.

Adams, Michael. Could It Happen Here?: Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit.

Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Almost Famous. Directed by Cameron Crowe, performances by Kate Hudson, Patrick

Fugit, Billy Crudup, Zooey Deschanel, and Frances McDormand, DreamWorks,

2000.

Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. 1955. Penguin, 2010.

Andresky Fraser, Jill. White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its

Rewards in Corporate America. W.W. Norton & Co., 2001.

Atwood, Margaret. “Masterpiece Theater.” Los Angeles Times. 25 January 1998,

www.lewishyde.com/system/resources/BAhbBlsHOgZmSSIsMjAxMS8wMy8yN

i8wM18wMl80N185Nl9BdHdvb2RSZXZpZXcucGRmBjoGRVQ/AtwoodRevie

w.pdf. Accessed 6 January 2017.

Aydt, Rachel. “How James Frey’s ‘IP Factory’ is Re-Imagining Book Packaging.”

Publishing Perspectives, 17 January 2013.

publishingperspectives.com/2013/01/how-james-freys-ip-factory-is-re-imagining-

book-packaging/. Accessed 5 January 2017.

Banks, Mark. Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work, and Inequality. Rowman &

Littlefield, 2017.

---. The Politics of Cultural Work. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

399

Banita, Georgiana. Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11. U

of Nebraska P, 2012.

Beaumont, Matt. e: A Novel. Plume, 2000.

---. e2: A Novel. Plume, 2010.

Benchley, Peter. Jaws. Doubleday, 1974.

Billet, Alexander and Adam Turl. “The Ghost Ship is our Triangle Fire.” Red Wedge, 12

December 2016, www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/ghostship. Accessed

7 January 2017.

“The Book Job.” The Simpsons, written by Dan Vebber, directed by Bob Anderson, 20th

Century Fox, 2011.

Boose, Greg. “Books.” www.gregboose.com. n.d., www.gregboose.com/books.html.

Accessed 6 January 2017.

Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. U of California P, 1988.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans.

Richard Nice, Harvard U P, 1984.

Bowe, John, Marisa Bowe, and Sabine Streeter, editors. Gig: Americans Talk About

Their Jobs. Three Rivers P, 2001.

Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA, vol. 114, no. 1, 1999, pp. 7-

16.

“Canadian Job Market in 2016 Propelled by Part-Time Work as Full-Time Jobs Faded:

Statscan.” Global News, 6 January 2017, globalnews.ca/news/3164417/canadian-

job-market-2016-part-time-work-full-time-jobs-statistics-canada/. Accessed 6

January 2017.

400

Carrick, Rob. “Gen-Y’s Pain is Real: Paycheques Tell the Tale.” The Globe and Mail. 27

November 2013, www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-

finance/household-finances/gen-y-wages-the-pain-is-real/article15638656/.

Accessed 6 January 2017.

Cassidy, John. dot.con. 2002. Perennial, 2003.

Charnas, Da. The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. Penguin, 2011.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic, 2008.

Corngold, Stanley, Greenberg, Jack, and Benno Wagner. Franz Kafka: The Office

Writings. Princeton U P, 2015. de Botton, Alain. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. 2008. Emblem, 2010.

Drake. “Started From the Bottom.” Nothing Was the Same, OVO, 2013.

Duarte Spiel, Jacob. “Local Artist Paid With, Dies From, Exposure.” The Beaverton, 17

April 2015, www.thebeaverton.com/2015/04/local-artist-paid-with-dies-from-

exposure/. Accessed 7 January 2017.

Elliott, Larry. “Millennials May Be First to Earn Less than Previous Generation—study.”

The Guardian, 18 July 2016,

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/18/millennials-earn-8000-pounds-less-in-

their-20s-than-predecessors. Accessed 6 January 2017.

Farivar, Masood. “Hate Crimes Surge After Trump Victory.” Voice of America, 14

November 2016, www.voanews.com/a/hate-crimes-surge-after-donald-trump-

victory/3596298.html. Accessed 15 November 2016.

Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End. Back Bay, 2007.

401

Ford, Richard, editor. Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work. Harper

Perennial, 2011.

Gessen, Keith. “Money (2006).” MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,

edited by Chad Harbach, n+1/Faber & Faber, 2014, pp.175-84.

---. “Money (2014).” MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by

Chad Harbach, n+1/Faber & Faber, 2014, pp.187-205.

Gillespie, Patrick. “A Record 75 Straight Months of Job Growth Under Obama.” CNN

Money, 6 January 2017, money.cnn.com/2017/01/06/news/economy/december-

jobs-report-2016/index.html. Accessed 6 January 2017.

Goldblatt, Laura. “A Specter is Haunting Precarity.” Full Stop, 23 April 2014, www.full-

stop.net/2014/04/23/blog/laura-goldblatt/a-specter-is-haunting-precarity/.

Accessed 7 January 2017.

Gray, W. Russel. “Jimmying the Back Door of Literature: Dashiell Hammett’s Blue-

Collar Modernism.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 41, no. 5, 2008, pp.

762-83.

Greenwald, Marilyn S. The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the

Stratemeyer Syndicate. Ohio U P, 2004.

Gregory, Marshall. Shaped By Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives. U of Notre

Dame P, 2009.

Grosthaus, Michael. “Why Companies Need Novelists.” Fast Company, 1 May 2015,

www.fastcompany.com/3045216/why-companies-need-novelists. Accessed 6

January 2017.

402

Harbach, Chad. “MFA vs NYC.” MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,

edited by Chad Harbach, n+1/Faber & Faber, 2014, pp.9-28.

Harrington, Joseph. “Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of National Insurance.” American

Literature, vol. 67, no. 1, 1995, pp. 95-114.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, edited by Leland S.

Person. W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.

Heller, Nathan. “The Gig Is Up.” New Yorker. 15 May 2017, pp. 52-63.

Hillis Miller, Joseph. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Trollope, James, and

Benjamin. Columbia U P, 1987.

Huang, Jon, Jacoby, Samuel, Rebecca Lai, K.K. and Michael Strickland. “Elections

2016: Exit Polls.” The New York Times, 8 November 2016.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/ 08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html.

Accessed 14 November 2016.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. 1979. Vintage,

2007.

---. “The Gift: Comments & Reviews.” lewishyde.com. n.d.,

www.lewishyde.com/publications/the-gift/comments-reviews. Accessed 6

January 2017.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Viking,

2016.

Jansen, Brian. “Lists of All You Left Behind.” MA thesis, University of Windsor, 2011.

---. “Yes! No! . . . Maybe?: Reading the Real in Professional Wrestling’s Unreality.”

Forthcoming in The Journal of Popular Culture.

403

---. “Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, and Utopia as Process in Suzanne Collins’s

The Hunger Games: ‘It’s The First Gift That’s Always the Hardest to Pay Back.’”

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 18-41.

Jarrell, Randall. Pictures from an Institution. 1954. Penguin, 1959.

Jarvis, Christine. “Love Changes Everything: The Transformative Potential of Popular

Romantic Fiction.” Studies in the Education of Adults, vol. 31, no. 2, 1999, pp.

109-23.

Jarvis, Christine and Vivien Burr. “The Transformative Potential of Popular Television:

The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Journal of Transformative Education,

vol. 9, no. 3, 2011, pp. 165-82.

Jay-Z. “Empire State of Mind (featuring Alicia Keys).” The Blueprint 3, ROC Nation,

2009.

Kalleberg, Arne L. “Measuring Precarious Work: A Working Paper of the EINet

Measurement Group.” The Employment Instability, Family Well-being, and Social

Policy Network, November 2014,

ssascholars.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/einet/files/einet_papers_kalleberg.pdf.

Accessed January 7 2017.

Katz, Josh. “Who Will Be President?” The New York Times, 8 November 2016.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html.

Accessed 14 November 2016.

Keeline, James D. “The Writings of Charles Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977).”

Keeline.com, 6 December 2016, www.keeline.com/McFarlane/. Accessed 5

January 2017.

404

Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford U P, 2007.

King, Alexandra. “Poll Expert Eats Bug After Being Wrong About Trump.” CNN, 12

November 2016. www.cnn.com/2016/11/12/politics/pollster-eats-bug-after-

donald-trump-win/. Accessed 1 December 2016.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Anansi, 2003.

Krugman, Paul. “Seduced and Betrayed by Donald Trump.” New York Times, 2

December 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/seduced-and-betrayed-

by-donald-trump.html. Accessed 6 January 2017.

Krystal, Arthur. “Easy Writers.” New Yorker, 28 May 2012,

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/28/easy-writers. Accessed 7 January

2017.

Lavery, David. “Imagination and Insurance: Wallace Stevens and Benjamin Lee Whorf at

the Hartford.” The Legal Studies Forum, vol. 24, no. 3-4, 2000, pp. 481-92.

Le Carré, John. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. 1922. Dover, 2013.

---. It Can’t Happen Here. 1935. Signet, 2014.

Lipsyte, Sam. The Ask. FSG, 2010.

Longworth, Richard C. “Disaffected Rust Belt Voters Embraced Trump. They Had No

Other Hope.” The Guardian, 21 November 2016,

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/21/disaffected-rust-belt-voters-

embraced-donald-trump-midwestern-obama. Accessed 6 January 2017.

Macdonald, Andrew. The Turner Diaries. National Vanguard, 1978.

405

Mayr, Suzette. “How the Confluence of Mental-Health Issues and an Affinity for Horror

Novels Led to my Latest Book.” Quill & Quire, 4 July 2017,

quillandquire.com/omni/suzatte-mayr-how-the-confluence-of-mental-health-

issues-and-an-affinity-for-horror-novels-led-to-my-latest-book/. Accessed 10

August 2017.

McCarthy, Mary. The Groves of Academe. Harcourt, 1952.

McElwee, Sean and Jason McDaniel. “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote

Trump, Racism Did.” The Nation. 8 May 2017,

www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-make-people-vote-trump-

racism-did/. Accessed 10 August 2017.

McGurl, Mark. “Making ‘Literature’ of It: Hammett and High Culture.” American

Literary History, vol. 9, no. 4, 1997, pp. 702-717

---. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard U P,

2011.

McQuarrie, Fiona. “‘Job Churn’ and ‘Precarious Work’ Don’t Have to be the New

Normal.” The Globe and Mail, 8 November 2016,

www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/job-churn-and-

precarious-work-dont-have-to-be-the-new-normal/article32704805/. Accessed 5

January 2017.

Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. 1853. Melville House,

2004.

406

Moyers, Bill. “What a Real President Was Like.” Washington Post, 13 November 1988,

www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-

was-like/. Accessed 20 February 2018.

Mozes, Suzanne. “James Frey’s Fiction Factory.” New York, 12 November 2010,

nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/. Accessed 5 January 2017.

Notorious B.I.G. “Juicy.” Ready to Die, Bad Boy, 1994.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford

U P, 1990.

Penn Warren, Robert. All the King’s Men. 1946. Mariner, 2002.

Phillips, Helen. The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Henry Holt, 2015.

Radway, Janice. “Reading the Romance.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Rivkin and

Ryan, eds. Blackwell, 1998, pp. 1042–49.

“Read the Brutal Contract from James Frey’s Fiction Factory.” New York, 12 November

2010,

nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2010/11/read_the_brutal_contract_from.html.

Accessed 5 January 2017.

Robbins, Michael. Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. Simon & Schuster,

2017.

Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Basic Books,

2003.

Russell Hochschild, Arlie. “I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s

What They Won’t Tell You.” Mother Jones, September/October 2016.

407

www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters.

Accessed 30 November 2016.

Russo, Richard. Straight Man. 1997. Vintage, 1998.

Ryan, Josiah. “‘This Was a Whitelash’: Van Jones’ Take on the Election Results.” CNN,

9 November 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/politics/van-jones-results-

disappointment-cnntv/index.html. Accessed 14 November 2016.

Sandoe, Kathryn. “Hungry for Justice: The Hunger Games and Developing an Activist

Identity in Woman Fans.” Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2017.

Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. Doubleday, 2014.

Schumacher, Julie. Dear Committee Members. Doubleday, 2014.

Scott, Ramsey. “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.”

Southwest Review, vol. 91, no. 4, 2006, pp. 550-67.

Searcey, Dianne and Robert Gebeloff. “Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out

Instead of Climbing Up.” New York Times, 25 January 2015,

www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/business/economy/middle-class-shrinks-further-

as-more-fall-out-instead-of-climbing-up.html. Accessed 5 January 2017.

Seelinger Trites, Roberta. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent

Literature. U of Iowa P, 2000.

Semuels, Alana. “Poor at 20, Poor for Life.” The Atlantic, 14 July 2016,

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/.

Accessed 6 January 2017.

408

Smith, Daniel B. “What Is Art For?” The New York Times Magazine, 14 November 2008,

www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/magazine/16hyde-t.html. Accessed 6 January

2017.

Smith, Harrison, ed. Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930.

Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952.

Smith, Zadie. “Creativity as Refusal.” An Evening with Zadie Smith, 11 February 2016,

MacEwan Hall, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.

Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

Suroweicki, James. “The Mobility Myth.” New Yorker, 3 March 2014,

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/the-mobility-myth. Accessed 5

January 2017.

Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel

About What They Do. 1972. The New Press, 2004.

Thompson, Derek. “A World Without Work.” The Atlantic, Jul/Aug 2015,

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/.

Accessed 10 August 2017.

Thys, Danielle. “Judgement and the Ghost Ship Tragedy: America Has Abandoned Its

Artists.” Medium, 7 December 2016, medium.com/@thys.danielle/judgement-

and-the-ghost-ship-fire-thoughts-on-art-and-artists-in-america-4-min-

28d7de09cb43. Accessed 6 January 2017.

Uchitelle, Louis. The Disposable American: Layoffs and their Consequences. Vintage,

2007.

409

Vice Staff. “‘I Never Saw Him Drunk’: An Interview with Bukowski’s Longtime

Publisher.” Vice, 20 June 2014, www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7b7wmg/bukowskis-

longtime-publisher-i-never-saw-him-drunk. Accessed 6 January 2017.

Wallace, David Foster. “The Fictional Future.” MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of

American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach. New York: n+1/Faber & Faber, 2014,

pp. 73-80.

---. The Pale King. Little Brown, 2011.

Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “Arlie Russell Hochschild’s View of Small-Town Decay and

Support for Trump.” New Yorker, 20 September 2016,

www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/arlie-russell-hochschilds-

view-of-small-town-decay-and-support-for-trump. Accessed 10 February 2018.

Walsh, Megan. “The Chinese Factory Workers who Write Poems on their Phones.”

LitHub, 1 May 2017, lithub.com/the-chinese-factory-workers-who-write-poems-

on-their-phones/. Accessed 22 February 2018.

Willis, Paul. “Invisible Aesthetics and the Social Work of Commodity Culture.” The

Sociology of Art. David Inglis and John Hughson, eds. Palgrave, pp. 73-86.

Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Simon & Schuster, 1955.

Woo, Benjamin. “Erasing the Lines between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work in the

Comics World.” Spectator, vol. 35, no. 2, 2015, pp. 57-64.

---. “Why Is It So Hard to Think About Comics as Labour?” Comics Forum, 9 December

2013, comicsforum.org/2013/12/09/why-is-it-so-hard-to-think-about-comics-as-

labour-by-benjamin-woo/. Accessed 10 January 2018.

Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. 1961. Vintage, 2000.

410