JERUSALEM ENGINE

by

Danny Jacobs

BA (Hon.) in English, Saint Mary's University, 2006

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

In the Graduate Academic Unit of English

Supervisor: Mark Anthony Jarman, MFA English

Examining Board: Tony Tremblay, PhD English David Creelman, PhD English Tony Myatt, PhD Economics

This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

April, 2008

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M Canada To Riverview

11 ABSTRACT

The nine stories in Jerusalem Engine investigate a Maritime present that is bewildering for its characters—a place where regional tradition is quickly being supplanted by a postmodern and global landscape. The call centre, an untapped literary resource in contemporary Atlantic Canadian writing, is an industry concentrated with technology and wired for worldwide communication—a postmodern space where characters experience the sublime through an introduction to technological systems. It is an environment representative of the liminal cultural landscape of current small town Atlantic Canada. The movement from natural resource economies such as mills and mines to business outsourcing ventures like call centres has important cultural ramifications in Atlantic

Canada. Jerusalem Engine investigates these problematic issues through the unique lens of a contemporary Maritime suburbia and the postmodern space of the call centre, rather than through the usual Atlantic Canadian literary paradigm of the rural town.

iii Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Abstract iii

Table of Contents iv

Introduction 2

Works Cited and Consulted 22

Panorama 28

No Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension 40

Greens 54

Too Much Give Under the Skin 70

Off-Call Codes 79

Old Medicines 95

The Anatomy of the Ear 105

Strata 118

Jerusalem Engine 126

CV

iv are the days of miracle and wonder,

this is the long distance call.

—Paul Simon 2

Introduction

In his study of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson defines three major moments

in capitalism, all coinciding with fundamental breaks in what he calls "the evolution

of machinery under capital" (Postmodernism 35). According to Jameson, we are now

in the Third Machine Age, an age defined not by material and visible representation

but by the intangible, by machines "of reproduction rather than of production" (37).

Such machines like the computer are representative of a bewildering "world system

of a present-day multinational capitalism" (37), a postmodern world system we are not quite able to cognitively map. Jameson points out that

The technology of contemporary society is therefore

mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right

but because it seems to offer some privileged

representational shorthand for grasping a network of

power and control even more difficult for our minds

and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered

global network of the third age of capital itself. (38)

Although my stories are not stylistically postmodern, it is important to mention Jameson in the context of my short story collection Jerusalem Engine—a collection of stories that explore the advent of call centres in the fictional New

Brunswick town of St. Agnes. The call centre, after all, is rife with the technology of

Jameson's postmodernity (networks, fax machines, and computers). Joseph Francese, in Narrating Postmodern Time and Space, argues that such a socio-economic shift in contemporary society reorients our perception of place: "the subject of postmodernity is stripped of a traditional sense of place by postindustrial capitalism's ability to 3

quickly relocate people and investments" (2). Such a "traditional sense of place" is

slowly being eroded in the "booming" town of St. Agnes in Jerusalem Engine. In

their inability to fully understand this cultural and economic change in the Maritimes,

arguably a postmodern one, many of the characters in the stories react with confusion,

anxiety, and even awed fascination.

The adverse reaction to the call centre the characters of St. Agnes experience

can be likened to their experience of what Joseph Tabbi calls the postmodern sublime.

For Tabbi, contemporary society and many characters in postmodern literature

experience the sublime through their introduction to modern technology and its

bewildering nature: "Its crisscrossing networks of computers, transportation systems,

and communications media, successors to the omnipotent 'nature' of nineteenth-

century romanticism, have come to represent a magnitude that at once attracts and repels the imagination" (16). As a result of the exposure to technology, particularly the "crisscrossing networks of computers" and "communications media," the subject experiences an anxiety of representation, an inability to fully articulate such a space of wires and networks linguistically:

either the imagination wishes to be inundated in the

network, and thus risks experiencing a loss of identity

or "anxiety of incorporation," or it desires to oppose

or replace the sublime appearance with a linguistic

construction of its own, to "possess" verbally the object

of its anxieties. (Tabbi 17)

Both passive and active imaginative reactions to the postmodern sublime are present in the stories of Jerusalem Engine. Luke, a character who appears in both "No 4

Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension" and "Off-Call Codes," tries to make sense of the

call centre through his extemporaneous philosophizing. A cocaine-addicted yet

intelligent young adult, Luke attempts to simultaneously situate himself in his

surroundings and resist them through his tongue-in-cheek hypothesizing about the

call centre and his fellow worker's place in it. In "No Sharp Turns," Luke says to his

friend Craig during a shift, "When do we draw the line between our workstations and

our bodies? We have become the scripts we read on the screen. Our words the text.

The Word becomes pixel." Although Craig, the narrator of the story, states this was

Luke's typical brand of "jumpy nonsense," the passage illustrates Luke's desire to

"possess" verbally (to use Tabbi's phrasing) the confounding space around him.

In "Off-Call Codes," the reader is told that Luke "had the possibility of

university in the future" and "wasn't afraid to slack off—he could leave anytime."

Although Luke attempts to joke about his place in the call centre and seems a likely

candidate to quit his job at Wavetech, he eventually dies of a drug overdose. His

death highlights his inability to totally distance himself from the perplexing nature of the call centre. Luke's wordy diatribes and criticisms of Wavetech only serve to underline his failure to situate himself in such a space, a technological network that

"remains separate, unfamiliar, other than the semiotic system" ( Tabbi 17). Like other characters in the collection, when faced with the "excess signified" (Tabbi 17) of the technological object (in the case of this collection—the call centre itself), Luke seeks out other excesses such as drugs and/or alcohol to escape an environment that both confuses and paralyzes him.

While Luke attempts to imaginatively "replace the sublime appearance"

(Tabbi 17) of the call centre with his hackneyed intellectualizing, other characters 5

react openly to the call centre with complete bafflement. Mae Roche, an eighty-five-

year-old new to the call centre, is a kind of old-world performer, a half-senile

vaudevillian who claims to have dated the history's tallest man and come from a

family with deep connections to historical curiosities: "My grandmother was high

society in London. A born performer, like me. She knew Joseph Merrick as an older

man. Treated him for his constant bronchitis. Course you may know him as John

Merrick—the elephant man" ("Off-Call Codes"). Mae's stories are questionable, but

her perspective on the call centre is uniquely perceptive:

This place. You think I'm strange. This place is far

harder to understand. How long's it been here? People

walk around like it's always been here. A maze of walls

and machines. No depth to anything. Just screens,

networks. No place for people. I could imagine the

four headed goat, the lobster boy, the Cardiff Giant;

could never imagine a place like this.

Mae, an outspoken eccentric, functions as a figure completely outside technological experience. Rather than feeling the pressure to integrate into St. Agnes' new socio-economic milieu like James Olsen, the protagonist in the title story, she

appears totally remote from it. We are told the place bored her; she "didn't seem concerned with the job at hand. Most of the time, she just sat there, absently rolling the computer's mouse" ("Off-Call Codes"). In fact, there is a suggestion that Mae does no work at all. Because of her lack of anxiety towards the call centre, she can react more freely and with less affect towards it. As an objective witness of the call centre, Mae serves as a kind of critical eye-witness; her comments on Wavetech as a depthless and 6

emotionless place of screens and networks are disturbingly accurate. Mae reaffirms

Jameson's thesis that "the whole new decentered global network" of contemporary

society is "difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp" (28).

While Mae's disquiet towards the call centre is detached, numerous other

characters, as already suggested, are overwhelmed by it. Several characters, unable to

actively oppose the "sublime appearance" (Tabbi 17) through linguistic effort, end up

substituting their disorientation with an almost religious or transcendental awe. Like

characters in Don DeLillo's White Noise, many characters in Jerusalem Engine

experience contemporary technological society as a "powerful force, which seems in its immensity capable of overwhelming the onlooker" (Maltby 507). Religious or spiritual reactions echo Tabbi's notion of a passive imaginative reaction to the postmodern

sublime, what he refers to as the wish to be "inundated in the network" (17). Such an

inundation in the network, Tabbi argues, risks a loss of identity. In Thomas Pynchon's

The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, while approaching San Narciso, sees the sprawl of houses and streets as the circuit board of a radio. When Pynchon introduces the metaphor,

Maas experiences a kind of vague spiritual intimation of what is to come: "she and the

Chevy seemed parked at the centre of some vague religious instant" (Pynchon 14). Maas experiences what can be likened to the postmodern sublime—the centreless infinity embodied in her search for the Tristero.

The concept of identity loss is worked out through my characters' experience of surreal or hypothetical mergers with the technology surrounding them. For example, in the final lines of "No Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension," Craig imagines Luke's soul in a kind of technological purgatory: "maybe he's blinking in the networked wires back at

Wavetech. His lost soul a bouncing image on a thousand screensavers in that grey, open 7

space where we die before we die." Even after his best friend dies, Craig cannot escape

the call centre's influence, and views Wavetech as a kind of liminal space between death

and life. Alvin Conners, a drug dealer and top sales representative at Wavetech, is content

with his job. However, he also undergoes a kind of merger with the technology of the

building. At the end of "Off-Call Codes," while outside on a break, Alvin presses his

body against the bricks of Wavetech and experiences a short-lived feeling of unity: "He

was flat against it now, one with the building—both inside and outside its geometry of

signals, planar and gridded in radio waves."

A similar instance of transfiguration involving a physical change into wave

energy and electronic signals occurs at the end of "The Anatomy of the Ear." The

unnamed narrator in the story works as a PR manager for Wavetech. Once he gets the

inane Boy George song 'Karma Chameleon' stuck in his head, he reflects on what other negative signals can get in our heads, especially in data saturated places like

Wavetech:

And maybe it's the signals I get at work—rows of

Computers emitting waves or particles or rays. I walk

through walls of electronic bumble—air-screens of

invisible noise. I worry for the unnamable corners of

my brain, the small pink and tender knobs, storing

information on wavelengths I can't hear, messing with

my ability to move on to the next song. I worry for the

telemarketers under me—the agents that sweat under

their headsets, two-hundred calls a day. What songs

are in their heads? 8

Like Jack Gladney in DeLillo's White Noise, the narrator of "The Anatomy of

the Ear" is alarmingly aware of the electronic and invisible signals that enclose us in

postmodern society, what Gladney calls "the language of waves and radiation" (326).

Also like Gladney, the narrator views the "electronic bumble" around him with

fearful reverence—a bringer of curses and disease: "A cell phone ad and I'm thinking

about brain cancer, high frequency wavelengths pulsing between fissures and

convolutions in my cerebrum, urging cells to cluster into malignant oblongs." His

fears become even more extreme when he seeks out the help of an exorcist. The

narrator of "Anatomy" is ultimately unable to rid himself of the song—a suggestion

that the technology around him and the 'noise' it produces is inescapable. Like Luke

in "No Sharp Turns," he opts for personal destruction: in this case, a bizarre suicide by exposure to the sound waves of a jet engine—another form of produced noise.

When the narrator decides to end his life, the story switches to third person to stress the disjunction between the narrator and his environment. Like Craig's final image of

Luke, a kind of incorporeal merger with technological processes takes place in the end of "Anatomy." Ironically, in his attempt to escape the "waves or particle or rays" that have stuck in his head, the narrator becomes part of that modern detritus in death:

"Eyes open, he feels himself leaving his body, becoming a nexus of white noise existing only in equation, dispersing over suburbia like a trillion lines of binary code."

These transcendental and religious experiences are explored further, and perhaps culminate, in the title story "Jerusalem Engine." While waiting for his interview at Wavetech, James Olsen meets Megan Laine, a religious visionary who hacks the company's web server to send transcriptions of Christ's words told "unto" 9

her to other call centre employees. Oddly enough, Megan believes religion and technology are intertwined and inseparable in our age; when James tells her his religious mother hates technology, Megan counters:

She has to rely on technology to enforce her faith.

Christianity is now a faith of empiricism. DNA tests

of bleeding statues. Fiber analysis on the Shroud of

Turin. Scientists hunched over microscopes looking

for the ancestry of Jesus.

Megan is the quintessential postmodern subject of the collection, at ease with the networks and data that surround her—the "productive fear" in radios, TVs, and computers that she sees as the latest doors to religious enlightenment. Megan is comfortable asking why "we embrace both our cell phones and our crosses." Unlike Mae

Roche or the narrator of "Anatomy," Megan sees the call centre as a "very spiritual place" where there are "points of communication—loci where visionaries can interact."

She tells the reader that she has "links to other religious websites. There are thousands—a centreless visionary network." Megan believes there is a spiritual undercurrent underlying the noise of contemporary technological society; a self "Call Centre Mystic," she sees, like the characters of DeLillo's White Noise, particularly American cultural theorist Murray Jay Siskind, "that within that incoherent mix of frequencies there is, as it were, a low wavelength that carries a flow of spiritually charged meaning" (Maltby 505).

It is important to note that Megan is not the only character who is welcoming of the call centre in Jerusalem Engine. Mr. Ferguson, a high school art teacher and the protagonist in "Old Medicines," wishes to work at Wavetech after he experiences tragedy. Ferguson sees the call centre in a naive and idealized light. For Ferguson, Wavetech is a safe place where his ex-wife works, a place where she uses acronyms in everyday speech, what

Ferguson calls "her secure call centre diction":

if a CSR's AC is too high, their TL will score them

low on their MPE's. Even worse, if your ACT is over

that of your SCT, you may be put back on SMART.

It was a mild humiliation to be put back on SMART.

In contrast to the chaos and pain of his slowly deteriorating life, he views the call

centre as "closed off like [his] sedan, protected in the hum and purr of quiet order." This

view is quite opposite to the reaction of the call centre as a confusing and often

destabilizing postmodern space. However, it is clear that Ferguson differs from Megan

and would not be saved by working at Wavetech. Megan, although only appearing in the

latter part of the title story, serves to illustrate an important convergence of the traditional

and the present-day—a woman who is both highly religious (like James' conventional

Atlantic Canadian matriarch, Jean) and technologically aware, totally in tune with call

centre life. Numerous characters in Jerusalem Engine are in between two similar poles—

on the verge of integrating into a postmodern landscape but still tied, however tenuously,

to some vestige of Maritime regionalism. These polar opposites are illustrated in the physical structure of Wavetech itself—a building that is both old and new. In the final

scene of "Jerusalem Engine," James Olsen finds himself lost in a labyrinthine area of

Wavetech, "no longer close to the open spaces where the agents made their calls." He reflects that "here it was all hallway, some parts in various states of disrepair and construction, dusted with gyprock pulp." It is a place where the new covered the old, where behind the newly lain wire and gyprock, still lies "an even older wall—plywood 11

that looked to be spray painted with odd numbers and symbols, perhaps codes that told

builders where to put what."

In his book Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction, David Creelman

underlines the literary preoccupation with economic and social tensions between the

past and present in the Maritimes. For Creelman, the Maritimes and its unique literary tradition has been defined by such tensions for most of the twentieth century. He writes that

Maritime fiction writers have shaped their ideological

concerns around the region's deeper cultural

tensions; tensions that have arisen as the region has

struggled through its uneasy transformation from

an intensely communal traditional economy, towards

its fragmented and incomplete existence within a

modern industrial state. (201)

Many key Maritime literary texts have been influenced by such a transformation—a transformation defined by a movement from the rural to the urban, from the local to the global, from the traditional to the unfamiliar.

Such cultural transformations have interested New Brunswick writers for decades. As a province that "had experienced an increased rate of unemployment with each major economic downturn since the Second World War" (McFarland 99),

New Brunswick is fertile ground for exploring the social and economic shifts that characterize Atlantic Canada. I agree with Creelman that a great deal of Maritime fiction can be defined in the context of a relocation from rural to modern. Jerusalem Engine further explores such a shift by using the advent of call centres in the

Maritimes.

Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Bill Gaston's Deep Cove

Stories, or David Adams Richards' Miramichi trilogy, Jerusalem Engine is a portrait

of a small town—replete with recurring characters and locales. However, unlike the

unnamed mill town in Richards' novels or the small towns in Alistair MacLeod's

Cape Breton, the fictional southern New Brunswick town of St. Agnes in Jerusalem

Engine is a contemporary environment, touched by both globalization and rapid

suburban development. As a result, the fixed dichotomy between rural and urban is typically blurred. Many of the characters that inhabit St. Agnes are upper middle

class, residing in suburbs like Riverbend Place, a newer St. Agnes development

"spanning out in neat, groomed rectangles" ("Panorama"). Geographically and socio-

economically, many sections of St. Agnes may more resemble John Cheever's

suburban village of Shady Hill than Richards' dejected Miramichi or MacLeod's rural

Cape Breton where "the lives of the inarticulate and impoverished" (Keefer 161) are the focus.

Jerusalem Engine explores the social and cultural effects of call centres in the

Maritimes, focusing primarily on characters working at Wavetech Inc., "the largest call centre in Eastern Canada" ("Panorama"). Call centres are an important Atlantic

Canadian industry, yet rarely explored in Canadian fiction. "Panorama," the opening story of the collection, is structured as a kind of introduction to the collection as a whole, told by an omniscient narrator who serves as the town's voice or consciousness. While panning the "tessellated geography" of St. Agnes and its neighbouring city of Molsen, the narrator comments on the area's turn towards current commercial enterprises as opposed to more traditional Maritime industry, a

landscape "where the centre has replaced the yard. Shipyards and railyards turned shopping centres, power centres, call centres." Such a passage suggests a loss; and indeed, a number of the older characters in the collection mourn the old ways—a socio-economic milieu that may have been harsh financially, but was based on labour-intensive industries where workers were connected to the material products of their work—jobs such as mill work or logging. However, at Wavetech, as Craig points out in "No Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension," their work "is productless. We deal in the ethereal, the abstract. Data. Figures." From a Marxist standpoint, the characters that work at the call centre deal in exchanges devoid of any use-value.

In the title story, Ben Olsen, the uncle of protagonist James, laments the slow decline of the railyard business in Molsen:

"My father used to take me up to the switching

tower," his uncle had said. "From up there, the tracks

looked like a field of red veins branching out on a lung.

That scene always floored me. Most of it gone now, the

diesel shops and miles of rail.

"Molsen had to make room for that damn

shopping mall and those ugly office buildings." Years

after, James would notice one of those office buildings

had become a call centre—Corpora Technologies, a

large 'CT' on the side of its glass paneled exterior.

If James' uncle is representative of more traditional working values in Atlantic

Canadian industry, then James Olsen is caught between two worldviews. James, a man in his late twenties on the cusp of the twenty-first century, is torn between the

cutting edge enterprise of the call centres and the jobs of his elders—work defined by

labour, not by faceless technology and exchange.

Hardly the spoiled, bored and drug-addled teenager that Luke and Alvin

represent in "Off-Call Codes," James is intimidated and uncertain about the call

centre industry but applies to Wavetech out of a need for employment. His friend

Grady (also the protagonist in "Greens") is a frustrated, beer drinking construction

worker and representative of traditional Maritime working values. Exceedingly

skeptical of the youth in St. Agnes (the reader is told that "any man in their early twenties not living in St. Agnes—who had left or were simply visiting—was, in

Grady's mind, 'some college asshole.'"), Grady romanticizes his traditional New

Brunswicker role of a man's man who cannot compete with the new technologically confident youth culture: '"Can't win,' he had said. 'Slow death of the blue collar worker. We're a dying breed. Isn't there still respect in fucking laying drywall anymore?'" The irony is that Grady is upset about losing a girl and uses the traditional labourer pose to hide his jealousy. Grady also uses any opportunity at the bar to rail against Frank McKenna's movement to implement call centres as yet another strategy to revamp New Brunswick's weakening economy: "Steady work until McKenna cuts off the government incentives and the companies pack it up.

Then we have another broke-down building that kids go to screw and drink in, just like the rail yards." Grady would be a character more comfortable hanging out with

Richards' Jerry Bines or Arvel Burrows in Leo McKay's Twenty-Six. Like these particularly regional personages, he is hard talking, hard drinking, and disenchanted with the town he is from, hating it while remaining stubbornly loyal to it. However, even Grady cannot totally escape the call centre industry. Although he works

construction—a noble profession in the labour tradition—Grady ends up doing a

drywalling job for Wavetech through his company Benson Construction.

Like the mills and mines were in the books of Alistair MacLeod, David

Adams Richards, and Leo McKay, Jr., the call centre is now one of the central

industries in the Maritimes. Whether they work there or not, Wavetech Inc. touches

all of the principle characters in Jerusalem Engine. However, as already suggested,

my stories are distanced from the more rural backdrops of these other writers. Rather

than descriptions of harsh snow storms or pre-dawn kitchens, my stories focus on the

disorientating space of Wavetech, a "labyrinth of windowed offices, grey walls and

computers; utterly contained" ("Jerusalem Engine"). Like the earlier discussed

Jamesonian postmodern "network of power and control", the call centre can also be

seen as what Auge defines as a "non-place", a transitory place that is

the measure of our time; one that could be quantified—

with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume

and distance—by... the complex skein of cable and

wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space

for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that

it often puts the individual in contact only with

another image of himself. (79)

While Jerusalem Engine attempts to distance itself from the common rural

small town tropes that many Atlantic Canadian works have been exploring for the past forty years, I owe a great deal to writers like MacLeod and Richards for creating the cultural climate for writing about the Maritimes. During the writing of this collection, I found it impossible not to draw on themes prevalent in more traditional

Atlantic Canadian fiction, while still trying to explore them from a more

contemporary angle. Themes such as addiction and, more importantly, the characters'

desire to escape their stagnant locale figure prominently in Jerusalem Engine. As

Keefer points out in her critical reading of Maritime fiction Under Eastern Eyes,

many writers of the region focus on the "particularly Maritime dilemma, going or

staying" (236). Such a tension about place, Keefer argues, is apparent in the stories of

Alistair MacLeod: "In choosing to go or stay, MacLeod's characters are caught in a particularly vicious trap. . . MacLeod's protagonists must choose between a punitive

land and sea or the inchoate dark of the world outside these elements" (234). The problem for many of my characters is that the "world outside" is already brought to them through their call centre jobs, if only through the faceless voices of yelling

Americans. Unlike the eighteen-year-old James in MacLeod's story, "The Vastness of the Dark," the idea of leaving is much more complex and ambiguous for my characters; it is not just a matter of the fixed dichotomy between the rural and the urban.

In "The Vastness of the Dark," James is tied to, and burdened by, the past— the land, familial ties, and tradition. Because of such constraints, his desire to flee is extremely urgent; James calls leaving Cape Breton "my deliverance" (MacLeod 26).

The characters of Jerusalem Engine (particularly the younger ones), stuck in what many of them deem a meaningless existence, also want something else—some sort of

"deliverance"; yet for many, the question of leaving or staying is harder to articulate.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the ties found in traditional Maritime towns and families are not there for them. Stuck in Auge's "non-place" represented by the call centre, where "the complex skein of cable and wireless networks. .. mobilize

extraterrestrial space," (79) many of Jerusalem Engine's characters do not see a

simple partition between inside/outside, here/there, or rural/urban. In an increasingly

postmodern Maritimes, these geographical and cultural divisions have been broken

down through spaces such as call centres. Unlike James in MacLeod's story, Craig

Langley, the narrator of "No Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension," does not feel the

stifling ties to his home town. It is relevant to note that Craig is conscious of the region's history; at the end of the story, he reflects on the etymology of the Chatique

River: "The Mi'kmaq called it Chatikwakik before Acadian settlers renamed it. The

Chatique is the river of many names—countless variations on nineteenth century

maps." Craig is clearly disconnected from that history yet still does not feel the urgent push to leave.

Although he does not feel the longing to leave his town, Craig desires

something more than life in St. Agnes can offer. His view of life in St. Agnes and

Wavetech is tinged with bitterness and cynicism:

There are a lot my age—the Maritime phone jockey

Generation yawning across crossed lines from Reno

to Washington. We want quick money without work.

We hate work but hate school more. Our brains jog

through the slog of answering machines with thoughts

of the weekend—the possibility of a quick lay, the

quick thrill of anything. We want quick pay-outs—we

pat our pro-line tickets in our pockets, our 6/49. This

time, man. This time. ("No Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension") Craig's obvious workplace ennui can be likened to that of Douglas Coupland's

Generation X'ers. Craig participates in a kind of day-to-day boredom and cynicism like

Coupland's disenfranchised "postboomers"(Lainsbury 232) featured in works such as

Microserfs. Craig, although unable to articulate it, is also conscious that "the end of

history and the accompanying lack of belief in the future is the liquidation of the project

of modernity" (Lainsbury 235). Craig's days are monotonous and unfulfilling; before a

shift, he experiences that unease particular to miserable employees:

I try not to think about work while I think about work. . . My

Wavetech life's a vicious cycle dictated by the unwavering

glare my workstation computer clock, my dashboard clock,

my kitchen clock—one shift done begins the hour count until

the next" ("No Sharp Turns").

Despite the languor he experiences at Wavetech, he never clearly expresses that he wants something else. After he relates stories about a friend going to Montreal for university and another going out West, he merely responds to these possibilities of escape with:

"But we are alright where we are. We are fine." There is a suggestion of denial. In

MacLeod's "The Vastness of the Dark," James is at best ambiguous about where he wants to go: "I have decided almost any place must be better than this one" (33).

However, despite his reservations and uncertainty, he has gotten further than Craig in his decision to leave. Like many in St. Agnes, Craig is stuck in his life at Wavetech, surrounded by St. Agnes' "New parks. New suburbs. New stores. The skeletons of half- built mini-malls" and does not see or consider any way out.

Like Craig, James Olsen of "Jerusalem Engine" is also reluctant to leave. After losing his job when the rail yards close down in Molsen, James bounced through odd jobs. He put in cupboards for

neighbours, mowed lawns. For a few years, he worked

at the St. Agnes Subway serving cold cut combos to

town workers on their lunch breaks. There were the

days on at Molsen Meat Packers—ankle deep in cow's

blood, sweeping up the blue veined tubes of innards,

never to eat a hot dog again.

However, James does not decide to go out west or to Toronto—typically economic and

cultural holy grails for disgruntled Maritimers in Atlantic Canadian fiction. Instead, he

applies to Wavetech, one of the only places left offering steady employment in St. Agnes.

As suggested earlier, it is the cultural situation of the town of St. Agnes that differs from

a completely rural Maritime environment. St. Agnes is a town on the cusp of a city in the

cosmopolitan sense—a more globalized region than Richards' Miramachi or MacLeod's

Cape Breton. The globalization the town exemplifies is concentrated in places like call

centres. Because of such a socio-economic shift, the characters in Jerusalem Engine are

in a kind of stasis. Such a stasis, both spiritually and culturally, mirrors the paralysis

found in Joyce's Dublin: "the torpor and listlessness that was endemic of Irish society"

that continually "numbed" Joyce's characters (Gibbons 150). For the characters of

Jerusalem Engine, the rural and the urban are not as clearly defined as for MacLeod's desperate James in "The Vastness of the Dark." Both Creelman and Keefer suggest that much Maritime fiction has been defined by feelings of nostalgia and despair for an idealized past. However, most of my characters do not experience nostalgia; indeed, they do not have a tradition to be nostalgic for. Rather than the straightforward choice of escaping some cultural backwater (as in Macleod), the choice for several of my 20

characters is unclear. Instead of consciously choosing to leave St. Agnes, they react with

bewilderment and confusion to his new Maritime landscape.

As suggested earlier, many characters in Jerusalem Engine react to the call

centre with confusion or aggravation as a result of their complete unfamiliarity with

it. Rather than a smooth integration into this new economic resource, the characters

are lost in the facelessness of the networks that define Wavetech. Even

technologically savvy characters, seemingly stripped of all rural Maritime traits, have

a tenuous relationship with the call centre. The unnamed narrator in "Too Much Give

Under the Skin" is a high level IT technician for Wavetech, yet he cannot reconcile his anxieties with the technology he runs at work (a computer program called the

dialer) and the machines that are keeping his wife alive:

Yet I've learned not to trust computers, those stacks of

blinking servers outside my office. Signals gets crossed,

an algorithm misread, and ten thousand people don't

get called. Once when the dialer crashed, we had to

shut down Wavetech for a week. We lost clients,

millions of potential dollars. There are too many

variables. The flawed math of our circuit boards.

The same circuits configured differently

keep my wife alive. These hospital boxes with humming

cooling fans monitor her breathing. A billion pulses

through silicon chips at the speed of light.

I hold her hand, hope the waves continue. The technology of the call centre—the faceless and impersonal interfaces—frequently threatens the relationships between characters in the collection. While Wavetech is not a negative place in and of itself, most in Jerusalem Engine view it with trepidation. Whether directly or indirectly, faced with what Craig of "No Sharp

Turns" calls "that grey, open space where we die before we die," many of the characters in Jerusalem Engine hide in drugs, alcohol or various forms of mania.

Rather than a modern industrial venture such as mills or power plants, the telecommunications outsourcing infrastructure is a more postmodern movement in an

Atlantic Canadian socio-economical framework traditionally defined by strict regionalisms.

Janice Kulyk Keefer ends a chapter of Under Eastern Eyes by telling the reader that "the Maritimes, it would seem, is no longer a country for old men and old paradigms" (238). While I agree that Maritime writers should be broadening the boundaries of their region, I also think that writers must be looking back to their regional literary traditions to see how the Maritimes have been written in the past. Jerusalem

Engine investigates a Maritime present that is bewildering for its characters—a place where regional tradition is quickly being supplanted by a postmodern and global landscape. The call centre, an untapped literary resource in contemporary Atlantic

Canadian writing, is a fitting platform to explore this Maritime present. It is an industry concentrated with technology and wired for worldwide communication—a "non-place" where characters experience the sublime through an introduction to postmodern technological systems. The call centre is a space representative of the liminal cultural landscape of current small town Atlantic Canada. When viewing the call centre as characteristic of our postmodern climate, one thinks of Jack Gladney's meditations on the 22

ATM machine in White Noise, where "the system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with" (46). 23

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Panorama

From the water tower, you can see how the town is on a slight slope—canted, like

an uneven table leaned on by a drunk. I wouldn't say it's a breathtaking scene—woods

spotted with new subdivisions and strip malls. We've always wanted a make-out peak

like the towns in our favourite shows. I guess up here, you could get romantic. But no one

really does. The water tower was recently constructed, and the site of only one fatal

accident. Thomas McQueen—chess team, male cheerleader—dropped acid and jumped.

Hopefully to him, the fall was flight or some magic princess taking him by the hand.

The slanted geography of St. Agnes empties out into the Chatique River. The

Chatique is banked with muck and dying ferns, its standing water polluted. Once or twice

a year, drunken fishermen pull out giant carp—half dead and drying in the silt. The

papers calling them "The Dragons of St. Agnes."

Over the Chatique, looking like a piece of Erector set discarded in a mud puddle

by a spoiled child, stands the Greysville Bridge. The bridge connects St. Agnes and its

neighbouring city of Molsen. You can see the scant skyline of Molsen—the Telcom

phone tower and a few taller buildings black against an orange sky. Like St. Agnes,

Molsen is booming according to the newspapers. It's a hub, they say, a place connecting

the Maritimes. But the only real difference between St. Agnes and Molsen is its malls.

Molsen has the largest single story shopping mall east of Montreal. Home of the Chatique

Shopping Centre, a large lighted sign reads as you come off the 104. Molsen is also home to two Walmart's—one boasting 130,000 square foot floor space. Two Walmarts, three malls, and a sprawl of outlet department stores, dental offices, and restaurants known as a power centre—a modern incarnation of the shopping mall, wide open and wind swept, acres of retail space and glass. Molsen: a city where the centre has replaced the yard.

Shipyards and railyards turned shopping centres, power centres, call centres. From up here, Molsen is a collection of squat cuboids, little plugs of colour—a tessellated geography of rented warehouses and commercial blocks, a landscape of marketable space, boxed and multiplexed.

If you take the highway out past the St. Agnes town limits, south from Gatesbury, you find our only tourist attraction—Wonderpark Slides. From up here the green-blue slides meld together, wrap around one another like a nest of snakes—a bolus of complex intertwining.

A man named Hamilton used to work at Wonderpark Slides. After three years of lackluster service, he was found passed out in the wading pool, his maintenance shirt soaked through, his tools rusting in the chlorine, The Speed Demon slide job left unfinished (leaking recirculating pump). Now an old man in a greasy parka, he stands outside the liquor store and begs. The liquor store shares its parking lot with Wavetech

Inc., the largest call centre in Eastern Canada. The centre's immediacy to the liquor store an important convenience for a number of Wavetech employees.

Hamilton is from the states, says he fought in Vietnam. Most of us don't believe him. Mr. Ferguson, the St. Agnes High art teacher, says he went to school with him.

Hamilton's left hand is atrophied with arthritis, a claw he cradles against his chest. He's a man of few words. Nice day, eh Hamilton?

From the tower, Wavetech looks like an airplane factory, a huge rectangle with a grey-white roof spotted with industrial air-conditioners. Except on this day, one of the warmest in June, the air-conditioners aren't running. Team leaders tell their groups to 30

suck it up (they bought popsicles to keep up morale). Don't let this affect your sales, they

say. This. This unrelenting heat. Wafts of BO and the ozone from overheated

motherboards.

Fran Stokes wishes she could sneak to the liquor store, thinks chilled wine

coolers. A trainee sits with her and listens to her calls—shadowing. Fran has one of those

small battery powered fans from the dollar store. A lot of people at Wavetech have them,

only good for blowing the hot stale air back into your face. "Feels like a sick man

breathing on you," she says to no one. Fran's team leader, a big woman named Brenda,

tells her not to put the fan so close to her headset, customers will hear the noise. Fran's

left ear is hot and itchy under the receiver's foam covering. When customers yell from a

thousand kilometers away, the earpiece seems to only get hotter.

Fran can almost see the air vibrating in the call centre—grey like hot ash. The

trainee that's shadowing undoes one more blouse button; from the heat or because Craig

Langley keeps stealing glances her way, Fran doesn't know. But wait, it isn't Craig

Langley looking at the new girl, this guy's broader in the shoulders. Besides: it's Craig's

day off today.

But it's not Luke's day off. Luke is Craig's partner in crime. Fran overheard

Brenda tell someone that Luke didn't call in. No big deal, that happens all the time with the boys their age. They were young and why not? Fran smiled. They thought she was cool. They said Fran, you 're cool shit. Her daughter, about their age, stays on the internet all day, calls her an uptight bitch.

In another part of the call centre, through a tangle of movable grey walls, Alvin

Conners receives a sales award. It's a laminated piece of paper, made from a computer program designed to produce cheap awards. It reads in bold, To Alvin Conners, Recognition for Top Sales in Telcom Mobility Pre-Paid Cell Phone Packages. His team

stands around, bored in the heat like cows. Jenkins tugs at his shirt, a darker shade of blue

with sweat. A big man, Jenkins, and the heat of the building brings him to the verge of

panic. Jessica makes eyes with whoever will look. Greg regrets wearing a tie, hooks a

finger around his collar and pulls in frustration. Omar squeezes his stress ball, the stress

not abating, never really abating. Rick is too scared to make eyes with Jessica; he lusts

after her, watches the sweat on her while a half erection pulls at his khakis. They're all

thankful to be off the phones, away from Americans.

Today, a Missourian farmer named Mr. York had told Jenkins he was fat. He

couldn't have known.

"I bet you're a tub of shit," he had said. "So it won't hurt to get off your ass and

fix my cell phone plan. I can hear it your voice. You got one of those fat voices, son—

kinda squeaky; pinched-like. If you can't do anything for me, I'd sure like to speak to your supervisor."

Jenkins laughed about it to co-workers after the call but went to the bathroom on lunch break to cry. Alvin had heard Jenkins—his sobs echoed and magnified by the stalls steel partitions. Jenkins had come out red-eyed, gave Alvin a look that said don't tell people, don't ruin me, my life. Alvin didn't tell anyone because Jenkins didn't tell on him when he found Alvin doing coke in the same stall.

The agents are on paid break to watch this small awards ceremony so they applaud lazily for Alvin. But Alvin is hardly there or maybe there more intensely than anyone else. He smiles, but what at he is only half aware. The left half of Alvin's face is beautifully numb. He clicks his teeth together—they feel like pieces of plastic. Alvin's the reason why many customer service reps are pale and sniffing, walking among the monitors in a chemical haze. He puts a hand on the award, shakes his TL's hand mechanically, one eye blinking rapidly. He waits for the snap of the camera.

"It's the money. Good money here. Great money," Alvin always said.

Not the money upgrading cell phone plans but the money selling drugs. The washroom sinks ringed with tendrils of blood and snot. Even the Janitor, a high school kid that works minimum wage and plays his guitar outside on breaks, scouts out Alvin for coke.

In spite of himself, Alvin loves the attention. He would deny he likes Wavetech, would tell you he stays because of the 'business' it brings in. Yet Alvin didn't want to be anywhere else.

Alvin smiles and takes the award in hand. The semi-circle of agents slowly shuffle back to their workstations, to the adjustable horseshoes of their waiting headsets.

St. Agnes High School is surrounded by pines trees and root riddled pathways.

Right now, Billy Mackenzie sneaks out of his summer school math class to smoke.

Inside, in the cool shadows of the art room, Mr. Ferguson takes a nip of Captain

Morgan's Spiced. He hides it in a small hole punched in the side of the female mannequin used for life-drawing. During last period, the bottle glowed amber, beautiful, and spoke to him from the model's hip. The tight punch of booze. He doesn't flinch, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He runs a finger along the bottom of the mannequin's left breast—as nice as some of the students in his class. He knows he should be home, but his apartment is hot and messy. He misses his ex-wife. He takes another drink, sits down to sketch Joan McFaddin from memory. Joan said, "You're cute, Ferguson" that afternoon. It was final period and he was sweaty with booze, for booze.

Her body, more than anyone else in his senior class, looked the most like the

mannequin's. He drew her with a mermaid's tail and from out of the frame, a hand

reached down to graze hers. They were lovers underwater, in a womb.

*

Down a dirt path strewn with cigarette butts, you can reach the St. Agnes Public

Library from the school. From the water tower, you can see the library's spire above the trees. It was built in the late seventies when the town as a commercial force was

relatively young; it looks slightly Ivy League although it houses mostly books by

Danielle Steele and John Grisham. Some of us were surprised they didn't slap a heritage plaque on the front of it—the town council's last effort to make the building seem truly

Victorian. Visitors to St. Agnes assume it's the town's most venerable and beautiful piece of architecture even though it's younger than the Safeway or the Kalmore Rd. Strip Mall.

Our town's one true antiquity: a hollowed out World War II AF10 Cruiser tank displayed on the library's manicured front lawns. Years ago, someone had painted the puzzling "Jeff was pushed" on its dark green side. The town had attempted to wash it off with a myriad of solvents, but it hung on, stubborn, in faded white box script. New residents of St. Agnes wonder just who Jeff was and more importantly, what was it that pushed him. What was he even pushed to do? Some crime of passion? Some act of teenage spontaneity like a robbery or beating? Did Jeff murder a cheating girlfriend with a hacksaw while dancing under a new moon and then bury her under the tank and now hid out in crumbling adobes in Southern Arizona, an itchy-bearded fugitive drinking mescal to numb the guilt? And who had the knowledge of such a crime to write it on the tank? Or maybe it was simpler—could Jeff have just been pushed down? Some kindergarten bully finally toppled? And maybe Jeff-the-bully was alive, a man now,

selling discounted double-wides to retirees in Sarasota, Florida; playing golf with the pale

fingernail of a scar from when he was pushed—the shadow of a decades-old scraped

knee?

It's become a piece of pop culture, the phrase completely disembodied from its

context, written in so many places that some think the tank's not the source of the

vandalism. You can read "Jeff was pushed" all over town—chalked on the side of office

buildings, carved into schoolroom desks: Jeff was pushed.

A few kilometers east of the water tower, spanning out in neat, groomed

rectangles, lie the streets of Riverbend Place—St. Agnes's upper middle class suburb.

Peach Streeter's call it 'Snob Hill'. Mostly young families that host weekend dinner parties—marketing types for Wavetech or executives commuting to larger cities.

Like Eric LeBlanc, who sits at his home office and reads over The City of St.

Agnes zoning laws. Binders and file folders cover his desk—paperwork out on loan from town hall.

The treehouse he has built for his son Ryan has been taken over by teenagers but he can't do anything about it. Technically it is not his property; it's bordering the edge of his lawn and an empty lot owned by the town. Today, he found the dried shell of a used condom and a magazine called 'Nymphos' in the treehouse. Later that night, Josh

Creagan, a trainee at Wavetech, will hoist Brenda, his team leader, into the treehouse's darkness to drink cheap wine and have sex while Eric's family sleeps. Eric, all too alert to the noise coming nightly from the treehouse, will watch Josh push her bulk up the treehouse's ladder while Josh will look up her skirt. She will hang there, bare legs flailing, mosquito bitten. Brenda is big and easy. A ton of fun, some guys say on the call

centre floor. To Eric standing at his window, framed by the night and his reading lamp,

they'll look like an odd acrobatic duo.

Riverbend Place is also home to retired couples like Lenny and Gloria Mackenzie

who sit out on plastic deck chairs, enjoying and complaining about the heat. The

marriage, now in its thirty-ninth year, subsists on small talk—family gossip and the

minutiae of a summer weekend. Lenny awkwardly rubs suntan lotion on Gloria's arms.

Sex no longer there—something teased at, joked about. Pleasures measured simply—a

book fingerprinted with tanning oil, a shower after mowing the lawn.

*

Behind the tower, where the Peach St. extension continues on to the back roads of

Gatesbury, forest stretches out to the horizon. According to city planning initiatives, the

forests behind St. Agnes will become a network of new streets. The air punctuated with the mechanical hiss and crack of backhoes. From up here on the water tower—a reflective black stream weaves itself through the trees across your line of vision. The

stream is one of the many haunts in St. Agnes for teenagers to drink and get high; it's known by many names—The Black Sea, Border's Brook, Snob River. Its banks are lined with old furniture charred from summer bonfires. The fire department dodges trees and scattering teenagers when a fire gets too high, catching the upper boughs of some overhanging fir. Trees blackened around the stream's perimeter. Town Council tried to fence it off—high chain link with orange 'No Trespassing' signs—but buzzed kids found the warnings made it a more enticing place to party. With new phases of Riverbend

Place's development eating away at the St. Agnes' woodland, the stream will soon be filled in for new foundations—Cape Cods with two-car garages. Billy Whitehouse and Tim Mason are smoking dope and skipping rocks into the

stream. 'I Turned into a Martian' by The Misfits plays out of their portable stereo. They

are celebrating two things—their emancipation from grade ten for the summer, and

Reagan Johnson's bloody nose. Reagan was a grad and miserable to every one in the

lower grades. Even the other grads didn't like him. He wore cut-off football jerseys that

showed his pale, meaty arms. His tattoo read "Get Busy Livin, or Die Tryin."

But the last day of school Billy finally ran at him. Reagan told Billy I'm going to fuck your sister. Told him almost every day. "I'm going to fuck her hard, Billy." So Billy clocked him.

"It was like a movie," he said to Tim between puffs of the joint.

Reagan standing cocky and Billy jumping with a flying fist, chaotic, sloppy in its delivery. A dry connect like a baseball bat to a tree trunk. Reagan, a giant in basketball shorts and Raptors jersey, falling back on his ass, cupping his split lip and wheezing between snot and tears.

"A thing of true beauty," Tim said.

"I feel like God. He was crying."

"You sat him down. Like a little baby falling on his diaper."

So Reagan cried. In front of most of his graduating class. He held his face and cried. Not from pain but embarrassment, which in high school is far worse. It happened in the middle of St. Agnes High's airy main annex, where most of the cooler kids sat to eat—blondes tanned year-round and their beefed-up boyfriends slopping plain pasta dusted with protein powder.

You entered the cafeteria through a wide entrance in the annex. The caf was dilapidated—yellowing drywall peeling in the corners and the constant mildew smell of water damage. It was social death for the more popular grads to eat there, separate from the comings and goings of the main annex benches. Only the lesser grades, the lesser people, ate in the caf. Billy Whitehouse and Tim Mason ate in the caf.

Billy wants to get laid this summer. Hitting Reagan in the face, humiliating an

older guy—that could help. Both he and Tim think that that can only help. He has already been invited to some last class bashes—house parties in Riverbend Place subdivisions where older girls danced in leather-couched living rooms, sweating while the vodka coolers they held sweat with them. He takes a long drag from the joint, leans against the trunk of a pine, fills himself with vague and closeted hope.

*

Peach St. leads down to the Chatique, bisecting Riverband Rd. Follow Riverbend along the river far enough and you'll hit the East End—mostly brick apartments and small convenience stores lit dimly at night. The East End also boasts Chap's Pub—St.

Agnes's oldest and roughest bar. From up here on the tower, Chap's is a small brown box, half hidden by a row of apartments and stripped maples.

James Olsen, at thirty-one, sits at the bar alone, neck craned in half-interest to the hockey game on the television above him. He fiddles with the quarters in from of him, half stuck with spilt draught. Sunlight shines through the windows where the black tint has been scraped away—lines of light making "FD + RM," "Jeff was Pushed," a crude heart.

He's been noticing a shift lately, some fault line veering within, a small seismic groan in his chest. He figures it's the fall from the easy graces of young adulthood to a

Chap's regular—content in silences now, the only sound the irregular clink of washed glasses, the muted jingle songs of VLT machines. The others in the bar are the same work shirts he sees everyday—sunburnt men just like him, except older, more comfortable in

the dimness. And he's just like them. Like them in what he sees as the definition of a

barroom regular—that slow faltering into cliche—men riding a shallow wave of

expectancy, waiting for something to happen: a fight, a joke, a gaze of hopeful flirtation.

Sometimes James saunters over to the two stained pool tables, runs his hand along the worn felt. He rarely picks up a cue anymore—blunted and warped things. He pauses

at the side of the table, puts three quarters into the steel slots, delicately. Three years ago,

he remembers running the table with his friend Grady, owning game after game, only

slightly drunk, catching eyes with girls who seemed to latch on to his casual enthusiasm

for the game, his easy chatter. He counts his change. Enough for one more beer. He takes the quarters back out of the slots and pockets them.

*

Down the street from Chap's, Clarence Mayfair leaves his house for the last time.

Not by choice, not because of marriage problems or drink, but because his upper body seizes from a massive heart attack. He falls down slowly on his front porch, his legs still inside the foyer. Clarence imagines someone picking him up, taking him by the hand—it looks like his wife, but much younger. The final thought comes to Clarence in black and white—the first time he saw his future wife, Sharon. Fifty-two years ago, when St. Agnes was still just a collection of farms and Riverbend Rd. was the only named street and dirt came off it in clouds with the passing of logging trucks.

Clarence is hiding from his older brothers. They will try and get him to do their chores, they will throw him in dog shit, make him eat it; so he kneels down, teary eyed, at the edge of their property. Clarence is twelve. He sees her on the side of the road. He has to squint—the sunlight filtering through the bushes. Sharon is fighting another girl, her dress slightly browned at the hem.

Clarence liked that—her willingness to be unladylike. He catches eyes with her briefly

and in the brevity of that moment, can sense her rage tapering off. She pushes the girl

down and walks away, dusting off her hands. She starts to walk toward him but giggles, turns, and runs off.

In his mind's eye, Clarence sees Sharon disappear over the horizon and so he lays his small body back in the bushes to watch the sky, to continue hiding safely. Then a pulse, an ephemeral shift into brighter present time, and it's a crisscrossing of power lines above him. The sound of cars passing. Two birds seem to be fighting, or mating.

Clarence closes his eyes.

*

It's getting late so I think I'll climb down from here. But one last look.

Somewhere on the slope of St. Agnes, riding the tilted math of its shallow hill, two dogs fight over a lost tennis shoe. John McMackin finds a penny. A focusless trill as a hundred people sit down and boot up their computers. And at Wavetech, a glass door hisses as someone walks out into the dead heat of dusk forged like a weight on the heads of passing children. 40

No Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension

My day off from work. I awake, snap out of it to see The Wonder Years on TV.

My favourite episode—the boys plan to crash Steffani Pinciatti's slumber party. They

don't end up going in, but it was about the mission, the boyhood camaraderie. I always

loved the part with the beer. They have three beer, carried among them like religious

talismans. One breaks. Tragic. I check my watch—4:12 PM.

Luke is back at my place. He is always here. I don't even remember him coming

in. He is a permanent fixture. Like an ugly lamp, a hole punched in the wall.

Yet he isn't moving. I ask him to get me a beer. Twice. The Wonder Years made me want one.

"Luke. Lukey. Wake up." He was a little pale—waxy like plastic fruit.

Luke is dead.

This hit me suddenly. Maybe I noticed how still he was. This isn't passed out

Luke. This is dead Luke.

*

Maybe I can find out why this happened. Some kernel of meaning. Why is Luke on my couch, eyes wide to milky nullity, a dead smoke still hanging between his blue- white fingers? I'll rewind to the previous morning. Or afternoon.

*

I open crusted eyes, sore. Dead smoke hangs in window's light.

Need to go to work—the 6 pm to 2 am, the night-owl, the red-eye, the shift no one wants, the one everyone gets. Thoughts of a day off tomorrow. The taste of old blood on the back of my tongue. Michael Douglas Hall is on our TV, muted. Some John Hughes 41 bomb—Hall's blonde brush cut doesn't bode well on this depressing post-drunk afternoon.

"Get up, Craig."

"I'm up." My voice three thousand years old. I'm a dug-up pharaoh, talking through dust and bandages.

"Smokes. Give me smokes," Luke says.

"I can't talk. My throat, my fucking throat." I'm clawing at my throat now, shadow boxing Luke.

"Please. Give me a smoke, man."

"Roll one. There's tobacco on the coffee table."

Luke slides off the couch—a roll of carpet unraveling. He is big. Two of me but that isn't saying much.

And now it's to work, riding the beast down the Kent St. extension. Luke curled against the passenger seat, tapping the glass—fetal with his hangover. We both don't talk, we are both fine with this. There're spots in my eyes from the sunlight through the trees.

Light beats red behind the lids. I'm gritting my teeth. I want to quit my job so bad I think my soul is trying to leave my body. The beast is opened up (as opened up as a '91 Civic can be). My foot on the gas has pins and needles—circulation won't be good this night of nights, the night of my monthly evaluation.

The hollowed hanger of the St. Agnes Shopping Centre looms at the bottom of the hill. Only a small number of stores left. We have The Brew Barn, where you can buy jugs, tubes and kits to make your own beer or wine—play chemist and get your friends wasted on murky Chardonnay. An alteration shop where my little brother Chance gets his jeans hemmed. An outlet clothing store, a Tim's, a Bulk Barn, a video store with a porno 42

section you enter through blue saloon doors.

Wavetech Inc. occupies the rest.

Luke looks at his smoke, loses himself in its red ember. "Just let me out on

Riverbend. I need a ticket." Luke is addicted to scratch tickets. He's won fifty dollars twice, yet has spent thousands. Their ashy residue coats the underside of his fingernails.

I let him off at Needs, drive around a while. I'll be late for work but I don't want

to go in yet. I'm not worried—Wavetech is notorious for lax policy. That's why I applied there. Some of us get stoned and steal office supplies. We don't need office supplies—we

do it because we can.

Coke is big in St. Agnes. Seemed to happen overnight. Stalls always occupied in the men's washroom. Tired boys with their secrets. Taking a piss and suddenly you get a

slap on the back by a pale-faced maniac ready to sell sell sell.

I try not to think about work while I think about work: Brenda's fat ass, Team

Leader Todd's over zealous posturing. Single mothers smoking, gnawing Tim's bagels in the late afternoon sun. My Wavetech life's a vicious cycle dictated by the unwavering glare of my workstation computer clock, my dashboard clock, my kitchen clock—one shift done begins the hour count until the next.

*

We're smooth, we don't care. Our apathy helps our sales. We don't follow protocol and aggravated customers like us. We say "no worries" and "cool". We delete past debts. Last week, another faceless woman invited me to her cottage in New

Hampshire. "I'd love to, but I'm in Canada, ma'am." I erased her existing long distance cell phone charges for her. A click of the mouse—credit histories left to the decisions of buzzed kids. There are a lot my age—the Maritime phone jockey generation yawning across

crossed lines from Reno to Washington. We want quick money without work. We hate

work but hate school more. Our brains jog through the slog of answering machines with

thoughts of the weekend—the possibility of a quick lay, the quick thrill of anything. We

want quick pay-outs—we pat our pro-line tickets in our pockets, our 6/49. This time,

man. This time.

The little money we make in telemarketing is spent on beer or coke or quick jaunts to Wendy's. We walk the walls of Wavetech with out ledgers in the negative. A

game of flawed logic: we start with no money so we figure no net loss.

We live in apartments with dining-room lawn furniture. Or we live with our parents. An economic boom, sure. Molsen is growing and St. Agnes along with it. New parks. New suburbs. New stores. The skeletons of half-built mini-malls. Our bosses and parents tell us Molsen's a hub but we don't know what a hub is. We don't know why it's growing. Where's the money coming from? We're still poor. Our work at Wavetech is productless. We deal in the ethereal, the abstract. Data. Figures. Things are slow for us in

St. Agnes. Things crawl within a fairly mapped-out geography. The liquor store to my house to Miggie 's to 3 AM public park visits to our sag-eyed faces in the mirror.

Bildo, our resident scholar—full ride to Concordia—comes home to tell us about university life. He looks pink, healthy. New girlfriend.

"Man. Come visit at least."

"For sure. Just saving up."

Just saving up for that big blow-out, that last train to Montreal. We'll backpack in

Europe, we'll get the all-inclusive to Cuba.

Friends come back from out West. Big money on the oil rigs. Routabouts and roughnecks moving up to tool pushers and company men. Lose a finger, gain some

muscle. Danger pay. "St. Agnes is a sink-hole, a crossroads. This town. This town dicks

with you, man. Come live with me. The best coke's in Fort McMurray."

But we are all right where we are. We are fine.

*

Gerry must be seventy. He sits in the St. Agnes Shopping Centre's main annex

everyday. Below the plexi-glass skylight a few steel chairs and tables key-notched with

the f-word and crude penises. This airy dome the most depressing part for me. Walking

into work, I pass through slow businesses and slower lives. Bored housewives shop for

discount fabrics and teens in baggy pants hang outside the entrance to shoulder tap for

smokes.

I like to think Gerry and I have a kinship based on hating most things. The thing

is, he probably hates me. But he has no one else to talk to. Gerry wears thick suspenders

and sneaks smokes inside.

"Too hot out," he tells me while lighting up. St. Agnes Mall is so deserted on this

Friday afternoon no one tells him to put it out.

Gerry tells me about his days as a fisherman, a deckhand on lobster boats. His beard is white and stained yellow under the lip.

Gerry—escape artist from death. Told me of knife fights, poisonings. Calamity on the high seas. His accidents. There were men up from Cocagne sick from bad rum, greasy in their cots. Syphilitic boys eating half boiled lobster.

"Once fell right outta a boat, a wave got me," he told me once. "A cold giant slapping me off my feet and then all white. The water seemed slow with cold—frozen but not." He took a sip of coffee, stretched his neck toward the skylight. "They got me from 45

under with a wooden buoy. I hung on for dear life and couldn't feel my arms." The skin

on his arms sagged like rotted fish—the faded green of slapdash tattoos.

I tried to imagine Gerry working the phones at Wavetech. His back bent, bored,

cursing and spitting on the grey carpet. He'd gum up the keyboard with chewing tobacco,

yellow the mouse buttons with nicotine. I liked this idea—Gerry's own little workstation

with pinup girls and hunting magazines.

Yet there were many his age at Wavetech. Fran, who always sat beside me, told

me about her grandchildren. One was getting married. About my age. She showed me a

picture—the girl a monster.

She talked all the time. Her husband had owned a farm. They had a cottage, once.

"We saved up for a trip to the Dominican," she had said. "It was perfect. The

sand..."

Sometimes Fran cries. Calmly puts down her headphones and excuses herself to the bathroom. Doesn't say it to anyone. Just "you will have to excuse me."

I check my watch, tell Gerry I'm late. I enter the steel doors, the weight of eight hours settling in my stomach. As an afterthought, I remind myself to get Luke after work.

*

That was yesterday. Now I'm looking at dead Luke, examining him—the marks on his forehead from the thinning quilt. This day now keyholed for me into one obscure motion of pure act.

So it's back in the Beast, road work ahead. I'm dodging orange pylons with Luke in the backseat. The rest of the coke, gone. What I could find, gone. I keep thinking he'll reach around and grab me by the neck. Full-nelson-ing me, he'll tell me he's a zombie, that he shouldn't have done so much. 46

We started in the morning, twitching with exhaustion. I had bought four thirty- bags off Alvin in the bathroom at Wavetech. He carried it around in frayed cargoes—his pockets thick with tiny zip-lock bags.

"Don't do it all in one night." Alvin's dead-pan. His eyes black rimmed— hazy and steely at the same time, showing genuine concern.

My nose is bleeding. Or maybe not. The Beast's an oven, a cottage closed up all summer. Air like the inside of a mouth, all body smells and chemicals—booze, tar, the dead. Rocks in the pavement reflecting like pieces of broken glass. More pylons and town trucks parked by the median. Six men standing, one working. I'm thinking I feel Luke's meaty arms around my neck, coaxing me to tap out.

I turn around and see he hasn't moved at all. Luke is dead, white foam and blood caked around his mouth and nose. One arm positioned awkwardly behind him. I picture him bent over his scratch tickets, tongue-tip exposed in concentration. Luke's luck has run out. Luke is fucking dead.

Could've been me. I binged like him. One blip in the nervous system, a gene rearranged in his cells to react more violently to the things he put in them. The blood a little too toxic and he shut down. Arteries squeezed and twisted like dishtowels. Over- heated muscle cells dying, heart dying in my cramped apartment. A minor flaw in the genes and Luke, high school football Luke, goes down for the count.

*

St. Agnes: a town of extensions. It's as if all the longer roads willed themselves to keep going, long after well-kept houses and profitable businesses ceased being built.

Most of the main roads—Riverbend, Peach, Kalmore—have extensions. The Peach St. extension marks the end of our town and the beginning of forest interspersed with back 47

roads—sagging bungalows sprouting satellite dishes and peeling Tyvek.

I almost run down a group of teenagers passing smokes and walking eight abreast

on the sidewalk. Smokes, pot, coke. I want something. I lift my ass up, check in my jeans.

Nothing. Not one baggie. Not a bent smoke.

The glovebox holds other treasures—the silver glint of a condom package, bloody

Kleenex, a faded users manual—but no blow.

I'm somewhere out on Kalmore. The skeletal beginnings of a new bank or strip

mall. More town trucks. More men swatting flies in the sun, not knowing I have a body in

my backseat.

The Mountain Goats trebly and too loud on the broken tape deck. I don't turn it

down for fear of hearing Luke, his body. I imagine he sloshes around on sharp turns—his

insides soupy in the mid-June heat. But there're no sharp turns on Kalmore extension.

I'm far from a hospital. I think of mobsters' hasty burials. But my trunk has no lye

or rope or forty gallon drums. My trunk houses a dusty spare, empty Alpines, water-

logged sneakers.

A hot ball of guilt. Did I kill Luke? Snippets of last night, my mind working in jagged fits and starts, like parts of some now broken machine. Half-remembered details:

an upturned end table, line after line off couch arms. Our hummingbird hearts riding the dopamine highway. Morning light through bent blinds. Something about flipping the couch cushions, frantic—lost change? Cell phone? Underneath—a thumbnail, dope baggies, stale Cheerios. Cheerio, Luke.

A stop sign and Luke's head hits the back of my seat. I'm outside the town limits now. I'll soon reach Gatesbury—the back country, municipality of fights, swimming holes. When I was young, my mother used to take us here to swim. Spruce Mile Lake— a large sinkhole where farmers emptied out their outhouse and field waste. Some said the bodies of a hundred cows lay at the bottom. Me and Luke used to dare each other to swim down as far as we could, imagined the ribcages from rotted bovines jutting out of the murk, cutting the bottoms of our feet, poking out our eyes. On the way to the lake, we'd

share a bag of salt and vinegar chips in the back seat, my mom up front telling us the false history of the area.

"Per capita, Gatesbury has had the most serial killers in history. Meat hook

Morgan. The Backcountry Bat. They all grew up around here."

We knew those people weren't real. But we were thirsty with salted mouths and comfortably hot with country air and most of all wanted to believe so we listened and laughed.

I wonder where Luke is now. My mother told me a thing or two of heaven. When

I was a baby, she watched dad die, tumors like beating hearts in the wet folds of his black lungs.

Have to quit smoking. Only noon and on my ninth. My last. Don't remember putting it in my mouth or where I found it. The sun beats at its zenith.

Five years old and I asked her where heaven is. She put down her wine and laughed. "The clouds," she'd said. "When it clouds over, the people we've known and loved are watching us."

Never asked her about days like today—cloudless with their unrelenting haze. I'm under water in a grimy bathtub. I look for clouds over the horizon.

I check on Luke. Luke's cooling body. His cheek slightly burnt from the seatbelt buckle. Does Gatesbury have a morgue? Welcome to Gatesbury, a sign reads. Pop. 1250. A cemetery behind the sign. I

imagine solemn hands clasped as Luke is lowered in his casket. Luke's dead cells slowly

flaking into earth.

At Wavetech, Luke often talked of death. Mind blown on coke, synapses like the

blue sparks under a lightswitch, Luke waxed philosophic:

"We are already dead. This. All This. This is hell," he'd said. "We take calls from

the undead. Every call from the wild plains of middle America represents a sin we are

paying for. Being in this airy purgatory, people move slower. Don't you feel more

exhausted when you walk in here? It's like sand, man. We are lethargic without our

desires. Let me ask you, Craig: Where does that constant hum come from? Some would

argue the air-conditioners, the fans in the computer towers. But I think. I think it's more than that. The hum emanates from some unknown source, from all of us—the consciousnesses of hundreds of CSR's leaving their workstations—souls, if you will, leaving their bodies. Looking for escape. Workstation: just a desk, a monitor? When do we draw the line between our workstations and our bodies? We have become the scripts we read on the screen. Our words the text. The Word becomes pixel."

This was more than Luke said most days. Jumpy nonsense. Luke's up-sell stats surprisingly high that day. Luke read too much Coupland. But probably his questions are answered now, at least for him—out of Wavetech, delivered to some new dead land.

*

Luke's parents are respectable people in the community. His mother makes me mittens every Christmas. She is a big woman with an Irish background, doughy and friendly—a cheek-pincher, a cookie baker. Called Luke "Poopie." His father a liberal, open-minded man—teaches high school. Wants university for his son. "We want Luke to

make his own decisions," he said to me. "We support him in everything he does. We think he'll come around eventually." Luke could do no wrong. If Luke came home drunk

it wasn't his fault—someone had to have spiked the punch.

It would be my fault. I fed him the drugs, they would say. I told him to give up, they would say. I was why Luke almost failed his graduating year. It was always Craig and his influence. But it was Luke who always wanted more. Luke who pushed it.

I need a plan, need to set something up. Suddenly, it's easy. The excuse comes over the horizon: I swerved to miss a cat. Luke can die in a car crash.

I pull the car onto a side road—a small dirt path used for logging, Ski-doo's in winter. With my new plan, I'm calm, collected. I will save Luke and his family from St.

Agnes gossip. My good deed for the day. I will tell them I tried my best to save him, pumping him with my breath while he faded on the car's hood. Luke won't go down as a drug fiend, a flunky.

This'll work. The tree came out of nowhere. I swerved to miss a cat.

I find the tire iron underneath the passenger seat, bloody my hands smashing out most of the windshield on the passenger side. I remember photos from high school assemblies—drunk drivers' girlfriends laid out on the hood, a pool of blood around their torsos, heads. Scare tactics. "This is what happens when you drink and drive," some motivational speaker says. "The boy who did this came out with minor scrapes and bruises—now he has to live with it." But there isn't any booze in my blood. Maybe some coke, but that's pretty much pissed, sweated out, isn't it? We were just out for a drive. I swerved to miss a cat. I get back into the car with Luke still in the back, put the tire iron back where I

found it. I put the Beast into reverse, pull it back on the main road. No more trailers or

bungalows here. Just the ditch and trees. I muster up conviction, will power. I get it up to twenty-five, hold my breath and yank the wheel to the right. The hood dips down, back up. Then a screech like a fork on a plate and then I feel nothing.

*

My head snaps up then falls back to my chest. It's still light. Wasn't out for long.

The airbag didn't work—not surprised. A little blood on my forehead. A minor headache.

Not bad. I can do this. I turn around to see Luke on the floor, both arms twisted underneath him. One leg still rests on the backseat.

I pull him out into the mud of the ditch. The Beast's on an incline, the ass-end of it resting in the ditch, the front fender bent against a pine. I was going too slow, it's hardly a write-off, I think. But this is the plan. I'm a staunch believer in the plan. I tell myself to keep working.

Luke's dead weight is the weight of ten people, fifty cases of beer, a quarry of boulders. He seems to have gotten heavier since I'd brought him down the stairs from my apartment hours ago. As if we become more substantial, more corporeal, as death deepens in our bodies, as our soul leaves, taking its lightness with it. I drag him by his t- shirt, slicked brown with mud. A low hanging branch catches his eyelid, tears it to reveal the opaque curve of his eyeball.

"C'mon, C'mon," I say.

Luke looks good once I set him up. Not good good—good for an accident victim.

Believable. Just like the pictures from high school—he is half out of the car, draped over the hood, arms splayed nicely, damaged head to one side. I hit his forehead a few times 52 with the tire iron, place glass around his body. I even push a few shards into different parts, feel his skin's easy give and throw up. But it has to look believable. This is the

arrangement, the plan I've stuck to.

I lean on the hood and remember to cry. Luke beside me, hardly any blood. A cut

ghost. An expressionless mannequin forgotten in the woods.

*

A thunderhead is rolling in. A few stray drops fall on the destroyed windshield, on

Luke's tangled hair.

My cell phone is still on the passenger seat. I reach in, dial '911', and throw it back in through the window. I need to leave this ditch. They'll track the call, find me eventually.

I stumble down the shoulder of the highway feeling ragged, rung out, wet with sweat and dirt. It's as if I'm transparent with exhaustion, not really here—the rain eddying around me, eroding its own pathways between me and my skin. But I feel good, some form of me fells alright. Luke will be found.

Gerry was still in the mall's annex when I finished my shift last night. Somehow I know he will be there for another decade at least, dusting over but still cursing with his coffee in a small, white cup; his body and words the last remaining property not owned by the call centre.

His imagined history comes to me. I see Gerry, or maybe his great grandfather before him, calling orders on the misting Chatique River. Before pollutants, before the thruway stoppered its ebb and flow, banked it with mud. The Mi'kmaq called it

Chatikwakik before Acadian settlers renamed it. The Chatique is the river of many names—countless variations on nineteenth century maps. I see Gerry or some lean and 53

sun burnt amalgam of his distant past, a kind of collage of Acadian and British roots; traders and shipbuilders alike, cursing men of the sea, swaying on the decks of slipshod shad boats cobwebbed with mud-rotted nets.

So Gerry is still here while Luke died high, curled on my couch.

And what of Luke now? Was my mother right? Maybe Luke is in the clouds, looking down at my overheated and accordioned Honda and laughing.

Or maybe he's blinking in the networked wires back at Wavetech. His lost soul a bouncing image on a thousand screensavers in that grey, open space where we die before we die. 54

Greens

Didn 't leave ya much.

Ya left enough.

—Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats

Grady saw the past few years of his life in textured greens—the windy down of

golf-fairways; the face of twenty-dollar bills quickly spent; and the stained expanse of

tavern pool tables. Sitting at Chap's bar, he wanted a game.

Every Thursday Grady went from his construction job to Chap's for a beer. He

occasionally shot pool with call centre kids while the beer quickly turned into six or

seven. But tonight, it didn't look like there was going to be any action.

Foam webbed up his glass as he took a last sip from it. There were four guys with backwards hats playing doubles eight ball on the farthest table from the bar. Chap's only

had two tables and they all ran like shit. Grady bitched at the manager to get the felts replaced, but what did Rich know about the game? Grady would play at a better place, a decent pool-hall, but he was comfortable in Chap's' familiar subterranean dimness, surrounded by smoke and cheap movie prints. Plus, there was always money to be had.

*

The kids were still shooting. He watched and knew none placed real bets—maybe for a beer or five bucks, but not for long. They didn't know the game. Grady watched them slam the cue ball into their object ball, watched it catch on the edge of the pocket, jiggling between its jaws. In a world where power meant accuracy and success—getting the job, landing that girl, making money for the car—Grady liked that pool was different.

Pool was finesse. He was a man that liked to use force in most avenues of his life. He punched walls. He broke dishes. And he loved the break: a smooth crack—the balls

scattering like cockroaches from a kitchen light. But he knew when to be gentle when running balls. Some shots required a minuteness of touch like a hand passing over a

lovers' cheek. A barely audible click of marble—unlike the dry chok! he heard coming from the far table.

There were fewer guys to talk to at Chap's now. Rows of men used to line the bar, their backs arched with indigestion, nursing their beers and crunching on Sweeney's pickled chilli sausages—pale and phallic things that floated amorphously in a five litre plastic jar of cloudy red brine. Rich used to pack the place. But it only got so crowded because it was the only place to go.

But St. Agnes and Molsen were growing, so the papers said—an economic boom.

He didn't know why and didn't care; he wasn't making any more money. Grady imagined the patrons who hadn't died moved on to sip beer in the big city pubs in

Molsen—re-vamped warehouses that featured faux-Celtic bands, dance floors and antique beer signs on the walls. The boys at work tried to get Grady out. "All the women," they said. "They're crawling."

But Grady had told them he could get a cheaper beer at Chap's and it was close to home.

He never told them the new bars scared him—their loud music and packed crowds an insult to his creeping age. He was getting on thirty and felt out of place at dance bars. His few co-workers leered at passing college girls and slapped five, laughing and carrying on. In these places, Grady sat scowling in the corner, chewing on the straw from a watery rum and coke. Grady was trying to flirt with the new girl at Chap's. He thought other patrons

pathetic when they tried to talk to the bartenders—everyone knew the girls Rich hired

only pretended to be nice. But Grady was on his third beer and convinced himself his

efforts were sincere.

"So how long you've been here?"

"Two weeks."

"You weren't here last Thursday. I would've remembered you." Grady smiled

and winked, but she already had her back turned to resume her game of solitaire on the

new cash machine.

Grady remembered the old machine—the one with yellowed keys that couldn't time the tables. You played all you wanted for five bucks and even then you could get

away without paying if you tipped right. That was a few years ago when he started coming to Chap's. The girls that worked the bar then called him "hon" and thanked him for coming in.

There were more tables too. Grady remembered a span of green, a geometrically sound arrangement of rectangles in perfect lines. That was before the blinking ranks of

VLTs replaced most of them, including the large snooker table Grady loved to shoot on.

He used to imagine jumping across them—somersaulting from table to table. He was never athletic, but as a kid, he wanted to be an acrobat for the Barnaby Brothers' circus.

When he was six he climbed onto his dining-room table and jumped up to hang off the chandelier. After grabbing on to the curved brass with his left hand for a few precious seconds, his grip gave way. He fell and hit his head on the oak table. Lying on his back, he saw the crack in the ceiling tapering from the fixture. Grady remembered 57 that moment as the first time he'd consciously suppressed physical pain to escape punishment.

*

"So what's your name?"

She turned around with a scowl and pointed at her nametag. "Cyndi." What kind of bar has nametags?

"With a 'y'. Nice."

"Yeah."

"Hey. I want to show you my daughter. Cute little thing."

He always showed the new employees at Chap's a photo of Samantha. The only one he had. It was creased across the line of her mouth and bent to the contours of his wallet. He hadn't seen her in over a year. He sent out Birthday and Christmas cards but his ex-girlfriend Julie didn't see any point to writing back to thank him for thinking of his daughter. He remembered her as a new-born—little pink cylinders of flesh that delineated legs and arms. He bought her a pink wool blanket the day after she was born and hoped that she still slept on it, still liked to pull at its satin edges.

Cyndi took the photograph and glanced at it with a twitch of a smile. "Cute." She handed it back and returned to the blue glow of the computer screen.

Feeling ridiculous for showing her, Grady got up with that lumbering pomposity that betrayed his oncoming drunkenness. She probably knew that his girlfriend had left him, could see it in the way he curled himself around a glass. He felt old and tired like the men he worked with.

* Grady's training of Eugene had continued at Benson Construction. Eugene was a

new guy who looked about eighty. He was slow to grasp things. He stood around a lot

and nodded about the weather. But no matter how frustrating it was for Grady, Lionel

Benson seemed to think experience was the only thing that counted in a job like

drywalling or tiling floor.

"Eugene's been in the business for forty-odd years, Grady," Benson had said.

"He's got experience. Just show him the ropes—how we do things around here. He may

be slow on the draw, but he can roof a house faster with a hammer than you can with a

nail gun, sure as shit."

"Mr. Benson, he's half blind and shakes. He gets confused. I'm half shittered he's

about to keel over."

"Just been off the job for awhile. He'll get 'er back. We're lucky to have an old

fella like Eugene."

Grady found he was training more and more men older than himself. He was thirty years old. Most of the guys he knew his age had university degrees.

Earlier, near the close of their shift, Grady had found Eugene wandering around the basement of an old house they had been working on—a flood job on Peach St. Most

of the boys had already gone outside and started supper early, sipping cans of Alpine on the hood of their trucks. The basement looked like it had been used for storage. Hulls of old machines, inoperable and alien to Grady, were stacked unevenly against the room's far wall—bubble-screened computers, the wide mouths of dot matrix printers, the boxy oval of a turquoise Olivetti. There were decaying milk crates full of records with yellowed jackets and boxes of old clothing, the stagnant water creeping up and softening the cardboard. Floating atop the foot and half of thick grey-brown water were pieces of ripped paper and gyp rock, old receipts, Louis L'Amour paperbacks, lampshades, and other basement detritus—things families half-heartedly cling to for relatives or yard sales.

Eugene had been walking aimlessly against the far wall. He was small against the room's piled mess—he reminded Grady of a lost child.

"Eugene," Grady called out, "everything ok?"

After no answer, Grady went to get him. Light from the windows made small, shaky squares on the shallow water.

"Time to call it a day, old buddy."

"Need a smoke, I think." Eugene looked vacant. It was all he had said. "Need a smoke."

Grady had guided Eugene outside the house, his arm lightly on his elbow. He felt frail bone under the layers of cotton work shirts.

God, he had thought, I don't want to get this old.

Grady's only solace, besides Chap's, was his weekends—two days where he slept in until noon and then played nine holes at Pine Corner Links. It was a course with uncut roughs and patchy fairways. He couldn't afford the manicured greens of the Molsen Pond

Golf and Country Club. The Pond was a gated, pastoral place out past the industrial park where pudgy executives paid a two-thousand-dollar-a-year membership to practice their chip shot and sip Corona, limes squeezed in the bottleneck.

*

Grady sauntered over to the group playing doubles and plopped himself down by the table. Three of them acknowledged him with uncertain nods. The smaller one shooting had just made a shot and was skipping around the table like he knew what he was doing. He lined up for the corner pocket, looked up and smirked at Grady, then 60

smashed the ball in. The cue ball tucked behind a nest of balls, leaving him nothing for

his next shot. Grady assessed them. They all had their own cues. Typical, he thought. Got

daddy to buy them a pool cue because they saw the game in the movies. Carrying around

a three-hundred dollar Viking and can't make a ball. He got up unsteadily to get another

draught.

"When I get back, someone have me a game."

"Sure," one of them said, looking at the floor.

*

"That's game, boys." Grady felt younger. The few beers he had won off these

kids increased his buzz and gave him confidence. He couldn't miss. He loved that moment of sustained grace when muscle memory began to overshadow the haze of alcohol. He could see the pathway the cue ball would travel—an elongated 'Z' pattern— resting on the other end for the last shot of the game. Keep the cue ball in the centre of the table. Keep shots open. Keep a good spread. The victories gave him a second wind.

He thought he might even try talking to that Cyndi again. His work-shirt was draped over one of the chairs. Now in a white t-shirt, he hoped the boys could see his tattoos.

"Rack 'em," he said.

Grady leaned down over the cue for the break and scattered the balls. Two low dropped in the same side pocket. "So you guys go to school?"

"Nope," the tallest one said. "Call centre." Grady had been playing the tall kid for some time. The kid leaned his long body against his cue like an old man with a walking stick.

"Figures. One ball. Cross-side." He didn't need to snap it in that fast, but why not? He knew these boys liked loud, fast shots. The only young ones that ever came into 61

Chap's worked at the call centres—inconspicuous glass or brick buildings scattered

around St. Agnes or Molsen, places called Wavetech or Aria Solutions or Corpora

Technologies. The small town that Grady hated but couldn't seem to leave pulsated

around those institutions. Sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers, Grady thought.

College kids telemarketing on their summer vacation, or taking a year off to make an

extra buck. They rarely walked the sprawl of apartments on the outskirts of St. Agnes where Grady lived—giant red brick rectangles with fucked up plumbing.

Grady didn't like these kids' intrusion into Chap's—it made him uncomfortable

and jealous. But they liked the laid back atmosphere, Rich had told him. He didn't

complain often though because he did like taking their money.

Grady squinted through the stagnant cigarette smoke that hung over the table like

some localized ozone layer. "Eight. Side." After sinking the shot, he combed his fingers through his greasy hair and smiled. "I'll have another draught." He looked down at his left hand. Chalk dust was embedded in the lines of his palm—a highway map. "Who's next?"

Grady never played the older guys—the regulars at the bar. The pinched faces that planted themselves in front of the VLTs told of a generation that knew the gravity of a game. Frequenting Chap's to escape their wives and thoughts of a second mortgage, they were too desperate not to win. Most of them grew up playing in bars and would bet anything. They cursed through cross-table banks and impossible cut shots, rarely talking but smoking sometimes a pack in one nine-ball race.

When Grady began going to Chap's, he didn't know who to play. One night, feeling a fuzzy conceit brought on by rum and cokes, he agreed to have a game with an old man he noticed knocking balls around. Grady's game was nine-ball but this guy was playing straight pool all night. Grady asked if he wanted to play eight ball. A

compromise.

"Listen. I play straight pool," the old man replied. "Ever see anyone run a straight pool game? I once ran a guy out without him getting up. That's real nice. Hitting the balls

around doesn't impress me. I want to see endurance."

"You sound like a movie character." Grady agreed to a twenty dollar set. He got up to shoot twice the whole game. The final score was 150-17.

After that, Grady only preyed on people he knew he'd beat.

*

"I'll play him again. He gets lucky." It was the one who had smirked at him earlier—the most arrogant kid out of the foursome. Grady would beat him bad this time.

He was the only one who didn't talk. He was the first one to play Grady earlier in the night, putting up five bucks without hesitation and losing it quickly, only to show another bill. While the others played for two-dollar draught, swearing at missed shots, this kid didn't seem to mind losing. Grady saw this all the time at Chap's. Rich boys without a single idea on how to move the cue ball. Why not take his money, thought Grady. He's got enough of it.

"Luck? Alright buddy. Just rack." Grady didn't ask them their names. Around the pool table, Grady found names superfluous. Billiards was a transaction, an exchange devoid of camaraderie—the black-white, black-white roll of the eight into the shadows of a pocket; a bill thrown across felt. "Watch this. Three down off the break." Grady felt stale and annoyed. His shirt was itching and he could feel a headache coming on from the beer. There was a sharp pin-prick in his lower back. No balls went down.

"Shoot 'em, hot shot," he said.

The kid slammed in two and missed his third, leaving it on the lip. Grady cleared the table. He snatched up the five off the table, felt its coarseness. For a moment, he wanted to give back all the money. He wanted to leave but couldn't. Something just beyond his consciousness seemed to keep him there. Some dark lozenge of jealousy, guilt and resentment in his throat kept him shooting balls. The cue ball had a small chip in it— the shape of an eyelash. He focused on it going through its revolutions on the eggshell white—a slow roll to kiss a rail ball, coaxing it into a corner pocket. It made him dizzy.

The lidded alien green light from the lamps above the table turned a negative red when he closed his eyes

*

Grady noticed something different about the way his opponent bridged his cue about an hour after they had upped the bet. They had been playing twenty a game and

Grady had the kid go to the bank machine twice already. There were tears in the kid's eyes. Not because he was losing the money—almost a hundred and fifty dollars now— but it was the shame of being beaten and not stopping. Grady knew that empty feeling.

He remembered it when he first started playing money games—nai've and cocky. Grady knew what the kid felt but didn't care. He was dead drunk now and had some vague idea of teaching him a lesson. 64

But now the kid's childlike way of holding his cue seemed steadier—a more confident bridge, a smoother stroke. He got down lower, squared his jaw. He looked older—a kid no longer. Grady missed a few shots and then the kid was sinking the eight.

"Now look who's lucky?" Grady said. "I'm getting blitzed here. You might actually win a few." He tossed a balled twenty across the table. It rested in the shadows of the rail. "You should buy me a beer for letting you finish that game."

"That's ok," the kid said. "Now you can rack." He tipped his hat to Grady.

*

"It's all math, really." The kid had started talking with his victories. "I wonder what the great geometers would've thought of billiards in its modern form. Six, carom off the three, side pocket." He sighted down his cue and made the shot, idling the cue ball for a perfect set up on the eight. "To think every shot I make here could be derived in

Euclid's Elements. Eight in the side." Again, he tipped his hat, a gesture he began since he'd started winning.

"Fine," said Grady through gritted teeth. "Twenty again." He didn't know if it was the loses that made him angry or that fact that he didn't have a sweet clue who

Euclid was.

"Rack." The kid broke and ran the table, not letting Grady get up once.

Grady opened his wallet and lifted it up until it almost touched his nose. Through his own breath of stale draught, he could smell the familiar wallet-scent of old leather, sweat and coins. He opened every flap and found his last twenty flattened in a corner like a scrapbooked leaf. He let it drop from his hand to the table. The kid sweeped it up, dropped it into his shirt pocket in one fluid motion.

"One more," Grady said. "Nah man, looks like you might be out of money." He winked at his friends but

they didn't notice. They sipped beers and absently bent paper coasters, tiredness eclipsing

their interest; they wanted women, parties.

"Play me again you little bastard. Play me." Grady's face felt hot with alcohol.

Pulling at his jeans to free his wallet again, he stumbled into one of the circular mica

tables, knocking over two glasses.

"It's empty," the kid said. "Your wallet's empty. I've won back all of my money

and taken all of yours." He said it slowly, with a finality that's usually reserved for

children.

*

When Grady got back from the bathroom they were gone. No one was left in the bar except the bartender. The silence made him mindful of his drunkenness, his defeat.

Cyndi was brushing down the felts. She looked up but Grady didn't notice her glare. He was teetering, using the sticky table edge as a balance. He noticed the stereo system was shut off and he could hear the buzz of a TV on low.

Grady smiled helplessly at Cyndi. As was common when he drank, he began to miss Julie. He thought about the way she used to rub his back when he came home from work, lulling him to sleep. Julie was older than him and somehow wiser. He looked down into the darkness of one of the corner pockets and thought about the arch of her feet; the slight curve of her lip when she thought something was funny.

*

There was a time when Grady didn't mind going back to his apartment and facing the cracks in the walls, the way he would have to jiggle his keys in the door to get in. He never liked books but he had liked to watch Julie read. Sometimes he'd tip-toe in after 66 work. If she was engrossed enough, she wouldn't notice the creak of the door and wouldn't notice Grady peeking around the corner to see her curled up in her favourite chair with the blanket her mother knit and gave them as a house-warming gift. Grady loved the way she held her chin with her thumb and forefinger—nails tapping her bottom lip in thought.

Grady thought her hands looked like the ones in the old paintings of goddesses— smooth with plump shadows around the knuckles. She mostly read crime and Daniel

Steele but the bottom shelf of the living-room bureau was a small corner of academia— her smart books, he called them.

He looked at Cyndi's hands. They were ruddy and cracked from a stream of bartending and dishwashing jobs.

*

"You need to get out of here," Cyndi said. "We're closed. Everyone's gone."

Grady felt like he was in one of those cliched black and white movies—the fallen idol, drunk and brooding. He looked up at a sepia coloured print of Paul Newman and

Jackie Gleason lagging for the break. A crack traversed the length of it, tapering off at

Newman's hairline. Somehow, the romance of his old heroes was lost on him.

"You want to see my little girl again?" Grady had already gone for his wallet.

"No. You have to leave. I can call you a cab, ok?" She held the receiver and shook it like a weapon.

Grady wasn't listening. Her picture was gone. Leaning against the table, Grady tore at his wallet. While taking out overdrawn bank cards and old grocery lists and throwing them on the scuffed hard-wood, it dawned on Grady where the picture of his daughter was. He imagined them counting their winnings, laughing and giving each other shoulder punches. He pictured the kid finding the photo in the folded twenty, tucked

away like a love-letter in a school book, and shrugging before giving it up to the wind.

He wondered what she looked like now. Some small person he wouldn't

recognize perhaps, with new clothes and longer hair. Maybe she was looking up at a

different man now, working her way through the word "Dada".

"Ok. I'm done here," Cyndi said. "If you don't leave, I'll have to call the cops,

and they will throw you out." Her voice was shaking.

He went to calm Cyndi, his hands raised in supplication. "Sorry, I'm sorry. You really are a great girl."

"Just leave."

*

Grady fell down on his way out. So he decided to stay on the floor for just a few minutes. He looked up and saw a man-sized spider web. No, it was a series of cracks. The ceiling was full of cracks. Maybe it was just the pattern and not cracks. It looked balanced to him, with interspersed nebulas of mould—like flies caught in a web.

She would like it, he thought. For one horrible moment, he had forgotten his ex's name.

A fan spun fast directly above him, stirring up the cigarette smoke and the beery air. He tried to slow it down by focusing on one blade but this made him feel sick.

He thought about hanging off of it. He thought about being young and not knowing drunkenness or loss, hanging off the chandelier and seeing the old TV and couch and the dying plants from a new perspective. When he had fallen then, his mother eventually came. A big woman, his mom.

And he remembered her dress—the Indian pattern and its smell of laundry and sweat. He had been so glad it wasn't his father he buried his head in her dress and wept.

Then he thought about Cyndi and imagined going to dinner with her, showing up at her clean apartment with a teddy bear or flowers or those chocolates you could only buy at the little booth in the mall. Maybe she goes to university. Maybe he could take a few night classes at a community college, get a degree, and walk into a white office everyday and then marry her. He wanted all these things.

"Cyndi—"

"Jesus. Go," she said. "Please go." She was standing over him now. "My ride will be here any minute and you're dead if he comes in."

But Grady wasn't listening. He was thinking about the fan, and how if he went to jump for it, it would probably cut off his fingers anyway.

*

Reaching the door to Chap's, he checked his wallet once more, knowing the photo wouldn't be there. Cyndi was beside him. She had helped him up and guided him to the door. He was being guided just like Eugene, like an old man through a water-thick basement.

"Eugene was—"

"Who?"

Grady opened the door and felt winter catch him by the jacket and cut into his face, blowing the sharpness of alcohol into his nose. His heavy work shirt was curled up like a porch dog under the chair he had draped it over. But he didn't go back for it. He was well aware he would call in sick in the morning. Grady palmed the top of a parking meter and let it slowly numb his hand. He felt like someone at a dinner party—the only one not laughing at a joke somehow missed. He remembered Newman as Fast Eddie, staggering in The Hustler, begging ol' Fats for another game.

Grady wandered off, shivering. He knew the photo was gone, but imagined finding it tucked between a sidewalk crack or the boulders of a snow bank. He spent the night eyeing the ground and banging into early morning joggers, their reflector vests flashing in the sun, digital machines blinking light from their arms, recording heart rates at every step. 70

Too Much Give Under the Skin

The Johnsons were coming over, and their house was a veritable Ginger Bread

Palace that time of year—hand-carved Sinterklaas's imported from Belgium, a life-size

Nativity Scene in their front yard. They had a fire-place. They had knit stockings hung with care. They were featured in the St. Agnes Heralds' "Festival of Lights."

The lights I bought were wrapped in plastic vinyl holly. A two hundred pack of bulbs cost a dollar fifty—a dusty flattened box with a crude tree on the front, faded to sepia with Russian characters. I should have known better. Never buy at Buck or Two.

Knickknacked aisles full of cheap dolls and fridge magnets, plastic spatulas that melt into pans, everything a high toxicity level. A woman in a man's coat talking to herself, rooting around in the cutlery. Cheap bulbs burning into the paint of our stairwell. We twisted them around the rail—looking festive and happy at dinner parties. But the lights smoked and melted and then there we were, prying them off the wall with screwdrivers in

February.

Jenn was at an awkward position, one foot above the other on different stairs, her head bent down under the rail, trying to get at a particularly finicky bulb. We were drinking wine that afternoon.

When she lost her balance, I only heard it. I wasn't even there. I was in the kitchen, topping us up, struggling with the cork.

It was one of those domestic rumbles. The kind of sound kids make when you have company—when you're talking stock options and little Andy knocks over an end table in the next room.

There was a short 'Oh' when Jenn fell. 71

Her head was bent up against the wall like she was listening to the pipes. There was spilled poinsettia on the landing and they flowered her hair. A small nub of bone—a grey-white thumb—poked out a few inches below her ear.

*

We met at work. The call centre a surprisingly rich place for romance. Bored humans left to thoughts of sex, their own loneliness. Jenn worked on the call floor so I had the upper hand: the head IT guy, quiet and mysterious. Charming and witty, yet rarely around. I was there to fix things—tame Wavetech's army of wily networked machines, obsolete and unreliable.

She needed new batteries in her phone switchbox.

"It's acting up. Can you do anything to fix it?"

"Sure thing. I'm Mr. Fix-It around these parts." Nervous laughter, lame flirting. I leaned over her, smelled that scent. Citrus body lotion.

I jiggled the wires. "Can you hear anything out of your headset?"

"It's just scratchy, lately."

"Let me unhook it. I'll take care of that." I reached over, my forearm brushing her chest. I was in better shape back then—my arms looked good. "You can just log off for now." I winked. I never winked at women. She liked me. I was the IT guy.

*

I watch the waves go by on her mechanical ventilator—a yellowish green against black. They come few and far between. I watch them travel the screen's darkness—tiny shark fins followed by high-pitched blips. Have you ever watched an old painting? Some duchess or slave-owner in a high-

backed chair. Stare too long and then suddenly you catch a flutter of their crow's feet,

maybe the bottom lip curling to a smirk.

Jenn moved all the time. Or I thought she did. When I was up too long and had

too much hospital coffee Jenn's face was a Magic Eye. She winked at me. She would go

so far as to talk—whisper sweet nothings in my ear.

"She's in a coma," the doctor said. "Rather than pretending to listen, we tell

family to talk to coma patients. Talk about anything. What you're doing at work, for

instance. Things like that."

There are, of course, miracles. A man from Arkansas wakes up after nineteen years, begins to speak. A brain stem injury from a car accident. Says "Mom," then

"Pepsi." Starts on longer sentences days later. "This is proof of a higher power," his mother says to a row of news microphones.

*

Two months ago, Kimberly Burgess put her foot in my groin. It was a bold move, right in the middle of a conference meeting. It was a revelation—the dexterity of her toes as she looked toward the Power Point graphs. No winks or smiles.

Let me say it was an accident. I'm not an adulterer. I saw those guys as slick businessmen seducing their secretaries after-hours. CEO's or COO's with grey hair and tans—fit from private trainers and morning jogs.

I am none of these things—slightly pudgy now, scared, and slow on the draw. My cell phone is old and clunky. I hope for baldness cures.

Yet there I was paying for rooms at the Best Western while Kimberly, sexy and confident Kimberly, nuzzled my neck at the checkout desk, taking my hand, putting it up her skirt. Ironically she's part of the Human Resources department—taking complaints of sexual harassment in the workforce. Presentations on Inappropriate Touching and cat- calling. I think she learned to talk dirty from the written complaints she received.

When I finally do tell Jenn what's been happening with Kimberly, the worst is she won't be able to slap me or hug me or curse me out. I want some reaction. Jenn standing up to throw a tray full of hospital food, to bang her fists on my chest.

*

The pixilated waves pass on the screen. They get slower everyday. Doc tells me they aren't changing.

Jenn's attached to too much—tubes and tape wrap her into the bed. She looks bionic. Beige boxes print vital stats. All this data: why can't they wake her with it?

At work, I monitor the dialer—I helped write its software. This, the machine I know best. The predictive dialer is a magic device in the call centre, modifying phone numbers every so slightly to automatically dial batches across the Continental US based on geographic location and time zone. The key is quantity. The dialer sees how many agents are on the call floor, then runs several algorithms to predict how many dialed numbers at a given time will be statistically the most efficient. There are always numbers ready; in queue—constant beeps into the headsets of agents as soon as they hang up. If there isn't a steady stream, we load in a batch of new numbers. Clockwork.

Yet I've learned not to trust computers, those stacks of blinking servers outside my office. Signals gets crossed, an algorithm misread, and ten thousand people don't get called. Once when the dialer crashed, we had to shut down Wavetech for a week. We lost clients, millions of potential dollars. There are too many variables. The flawed math of our circuit boards. 74

The same circuits configured differently keep my wife alive. These hospital boxes

with humming cooling fans monitor her breathing. A billion pulses through silicon chips

at the speed of light.

I hold her hand, hope the waves continue.

*

Jenn stirs in my sleep. Dreams of her leaning over me close, making a tiny fort for

us with her hair. I awake to find she hasn't moved, imagine the conduits of her veins and

nerves as puddles of standing water like the water in clothespin buckets after rain.

Kimberly moved too fast, slipping hands over me, skilled and intimidating. At work, she pulled me into bathrooms, empty cubicles. Too much make-up—her lipstick

smearing half-moons on my collar—that infidelity cliche.

"You're my fun toy," she said. "My plaything."

Yet then she pulls me down and tells me she loves me. She needs a man, is sick of this, this running around. She wants something serious, she says. She confesses to me about other men.

"I go out to clubs. I am lonely."

I've gone to her many times since Jenn's accident. Afterwards, I cry and swear into the pillows when she is asleep. Her place is clean—the bathroom's faint smell of pot pourri.

At my place, the bottom of my tub grows a shadow of mildew. My toothbrush is worn and splayed, the bristles like a grill brush.

"Jenn will die," Kimberly has said. "You just have to accept it." She has wedding magazines on her coffee table. I imagine she struts in full bodied mirrors, imagining 75 herself in white silk. Taller than Jenn and more beautiful, she looks and looks for a husband, that perfect man—a magazine cut-out.

Once in the middle of the night, Kimberly woke me up with her kicking. Still in the unclear borders of sleep, I thought Jenn had come out of it. We were back at our apartment—she was going to get up and get us coffee soon, we would lull each other with the early morning talk of married couples. But then the snap like a jammed finger into consciousness: Jenn was at St. Agnes General, called a vegetable by some—the life support systems blinking their way into the sanitary hallways. I got up and hopped around Kimberly's room, struggling with my pants.

"I have to go see her."

"She doesn't exist the way you remember her. Stay with me."

Kimberly odd and fuzzy in the dark, propped on her elbows. Her face could be anyone's.

*

Work calls for Jenn weekly.

"Hello. This is Jeanine from Wavetech. Is Jenn Lutz there?"

"No."

"Well, she hasn't been in for quite some time."

"She is a vegetable." I don't know why I say this.

"Pardon me?" she asks.

"A coma"

"I'm so sorry, sir. I have a list in front me. There are no details. Just names of absentees. I get lists. I make calls."

I hang up. 76

I've told them she is in the hospital. She is in a coma, I've told them. But her

accident gets lost in the system. She has too many bosses—people that communicate in

data forms that get deleted.

*

The waves don't slow or speed up—her brain pulses at a low ebb, beta waves wading through unknown darknesses. A physical therapist comes in to massage her

muscles to keep them from atrophying.

"Can I try?"

"I suppose that would be alright." He hands me the cream he uses, tentatively. It

smells clinical like everything else—a balmy tang of vodka and soap.

I take the pliant oval of her calf in my hand—knead it carefully, going from one to the other. Then her feet—that raw topography of skin and tendon, the veins and bumps around her ankles. Then her arms, hands. Slow but frantic, as if I were attempting to rub in consciousness. I will her to feel the slight pressures on her shoulders, the smooth pads of my palms. The work of our nerves similar to the electrical processes of a computer.

I'm a shaman, infusing life into the dead.

"Take your time." This man in blue, this man of creams and ointments and titanium walkers, looks uncomfortable.

I used to massage her shoulders while she sat on the couch, watching TV or reading—my index fingers trailing the dips of her collar bones. But before there was tensed reactions—goosebumps, sighs. Here in this white room there is too much give under the skin.

* 77

It's getting dark outside. The cars in the parking lot thin out—only the families of the truly sick stay late, their cars dispersed at random over the cement expanse. My rusted

Sunfire sits at the periphery. The big nurse that watches Jenn lets me shirk standard visiting hours.

I watch Jenn, the statue of Jenn, until the hospital gets quiet—the occasional squeak of wheelchairs or gurneys; coughs; a barely heard scream from floors above, something like Come back, Mary.

The ring of my cell phone.

"It's Kim."

"Ok."

"Come over. I miss you."

I look away from Jenn, tell my phone I'll be over at one thirty.

*

There's that trick again—a suggestion of movement. This late at night it's usually some detail of her, a quick twitch like paper raised by a breeze. I check my watch: ten after two. I kneel down—the pinky finger on her right hand the size of a child's. The nail is flecked with sparkled pink from when her niece visited a week ago and painted them. It moved, could swear on it. I look harder, shaking with concentration. But I always go back to the monitor's waves, their cyclic regularity.

My cell phone buzzes, plays Mozart's 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.' I didn't realize it was in my hand and drop it in surprise. It lands in the crook between Jenn's right arm and her ribs. I watch her sheets, her skin, move to the nag of its slight vibrations— another machine coaxing her to stir. 78

It's certainly Kim calling but I don't answer it. Instead I lift the sheets, crawl in with Jenn.

She is wearing one of those thin hospital gowns with a small floral pattern. A thick heat comes up from under the sheets. It's odd, because her skin is so cold. A single bed and not much room, but I try to get as close as I can without moving her. I lean into her hair, try to find her the way she used to be—a familiar earring, her subtle smell. I lay on my side curled against her, hold her hand. I remember doc telling me to talk to her— about anything.

"Jenn, this is me. I am here." I feel closed up, embryonic. "I have been messing around on you," I say. "Kimberly from HR. She is waiting for me in Garters. Right now."

I put my hand on her chest, feel a vague movement—a heart beat, a nerve firing. Some layered undercurrent in the flesh. Does she hear me?

"When I go over there, she will jump on me, tell me she wants it. She talks dirty,

Jenn." I'm sweating, unable to stop now. Under the sheets, Jenn needs details. I get closer, whisper into the coiled skin of her ear.

"We fuck at work. In the men's bathroom. She tells me to give it to her in the stall." I'm desperate. I'm mad with talk and confession. "She is waiting for me right now," I say. "She is waiting in leather."

I reach out, put my hand around the wires leading to the life-support systems; I have no intention of pulling them. I squeeze them, try to feel something but I don't know what—some electrical throb of life, maybe—a transfer. Her lifeline made tactile. The machine. Her. I try to bring her to the surface; act as one final, conductive force. 79

Off-Call Codes

Just do it, the sheets read in large Times New Roman, the small Swoosh

underneath. The team leaders were handing them out to all CSR's in the call centre.

"This is copyright infringement," Alvin said.

"It's one corporation to the next," Luke bounced a stress ball in perfect time.

"Smooth operators. Maybe Wavetech hands out motivational pamphlets to Malaysian

boys in Nike factories—Work hard like the Maritimersl Play harder! A little back and

forth. You scratch my back I'll scratch yours. Picture it—tight bodies in power suits—a

harem of Wavetech Public Relations managers giving under-the-table handjobs to Nike

bigwigs. Just so we can crib their catch phrases in our call centres, free of charge."

"Right. Look at the board. I just made top sales for the night. I'm off for fifteen- twenty. Why not? No one catches the Office Light Knight." Alvin Conners had been

calling himself the Office Light Knight for the last two weeks, a name that only amused him and the kid that emptied the garbages.

"Bathroom break?" Luke said. A short tap of index finger to nose.

Luke logged off his computer. Agent Off-Call Code 518—Personal Time. For a smoke. A fuck. A line. Calls in queue can wait.

*

"Miss Fran Baker. How goes the battle?" Luke said.

"Same old, Luke. Same old."

Fran Baker was thinking about her husband. Marvin died in the middle of the night five years ago. His heart slowed, stopped, under the quilts. Fran thought she remembered feeling him jerk lightly in half-sleep—the moment he went. The next morning she shook him for an hour. The only day she had missed in her nine years at

Wavetech. Fran rarely enjoyed these night shifts, an obligation she shared twice a month with the rest of her team. Call volume was low so she was left to think about Marvin and her kids she hadn't seen in months. She hadn't seen Mary in over a year. Mary: Divorce

lawyer in Calgary. Tells Fran she needs a hobby. Mom, you 're so... idle.

*

Jenkins was sitting by the window tonight. There was a lull in his incoming calls

so he separated the blinds to look outside. A snow storm was picking up. Most inside won't see it. Their shifts will end and in dawn's sun-yellowed quiet, they'll wonder at the doors where the snow came from; curse their cars buried—puffed out like fat snowman cars. Jenkins liked the idea—the only one knowing about the turmoil outside, his private connection with the chaos of winter. Of course, anyone who went out for a smoke would notice the storm, would tell other agents. But Jenkins liked thinking only he knew, only he could see outside from inside. Jenkins spotted two teenagers leaning into the blast, marking zigzags with their stumbling footprints. Within minutes, the prints would become shallow dimples in the parking lot's blue desert. Jenkins thought about what the building looked like to them—Wavetech from the outside during a storm. Wavetech some artic research outpost, banked with shadowed white—knife-edged drifts, man- sized, accumulating on the roofs satellites and antennae.

The beep of a call through the foam to his ear.

"Telcom Mobility, Bill speaking," Jenkins said.

From outside, Jenkins saw the whiplashed arc of one of the kids' arms. An instant later a loud thump on the glass. Snowball.

"Sonofabitch!" 81

"Excuse me?"

"Sorry sir," he said. "Just a little accident here."

"Well you just called me what I don't want to say. Accident or not you are talking to a customer, here." Southern drawl. "Let me talk to your supervisor. Actually, I don't have time to talk to another flunkie just one step up from you on your flunkie ladder.

Telcom, you say? You guys call four, five times a week. You wake me up on Saturdays. I work hard. I need my sleep. I make more in a week than you make all year. You take me off your list, you hear? I say every time: take me off your list. And what happens? More calls."

Jenkins was too tired to care. Take me off your list, they said. Jenkins said, yes sir, yes ma'am. But he didn't know of any list. A list in some intangible database. A list that never changes.

He leaned his head against the window's cold glass, his forehead mashing the blinds. He terminated the call.

*

Mae Roche was new on the floor and wore one of those librarian chains attached to her glasses. She was eighty-five years old. On her first day, she had chosen a seat beside Alvin and smiled at him. Unlike most of the newbies—nervous homemakers, young kids—she didn't seem concerned with the job at hand. Most of the time, she just sat there, absently rolling the computer's mouse. Alvin was cool with this. He liked her stories. She ate her lunch alone. Copper bracelets jingled half way up her forearms and she wore large, feathered earrings.

"Mae is so Broadway," Jenn considered herself a struggling fashion designer.

"She is classic." 82

Mae still dyed her hair, a kind of off-orange, and some called her crazy. She and

Alvin talked about old movies, history, Mae's colourful past. Sometimes Mae wore a feather boa to work. It was originally pink but most of the feathers had faded to white at their tips.

Mae had a habit of cutting to a new topic of conversation without any introduction. She would say, "And another thing is," and continue on without any segue.

Sometimes she would continue a conversation left off days before. Alvin and Luke didn't mind. It especially suited Luke's mode of slapdash, chemical-fueled rhetoric.

"And another thing is, I've been in a few shows," she told Alvin. "Nothing you have heard of, I'm afraid. But plays, films. I could've been a great actress."

"Try me," Alvin said.

"Trust me. Nothing you've heard of."

"Films? Like to watch them someday," he said. "That is, if you have copies."

"And another thing is, I've known a lot of odd people in my day. Called freaks by many. Generations of my family have known people like that. Course we accepted them."

Luke was tapping his watch, growing impatient. He wanted another bathroom break with Alvin, another line. But Alvin wanted to listen to Mae. Alvin supplied most of

Wavetech with drugs, but there was a certain innocence about him. Unlike Luke, who had the possibility of university in the future, Alvin would stay at Wavetech. Luke had his cynical talk about philosophy, diatribes about books he's read. He had put in his two weeks a few days before. He wasn't afraid to slack off—he could leave anytime. He also needed the drugs more than Alvin.

"What do you mean?" Alvin said to Mae. 83

"The odd, the physically bent," Mae said. "They run through the history of my family."

"Like you got a lot of deformed relatives?"

"No, No," she said. "Our genes were, are, rock solid. The Roche girls were all beautiful. I don't mind saying. But we knew a lot of curiosities. I, for one, used to date

Robert Wadlow."

"Who?"

"The tallest man in history. The romance was a whirlwind one. Before he got too famous. Touring with the International Shoe Company and all that. He took a size thirty-

seven. His shoes cost hundreds—and that was back in the thirties. Course, he didn't have to pay."

"Ask her how big it was," Luke was whispering to him, laughing. "Like, how big it was."

"Shut up, man."

"I don't know why you give a shit about this batty lady," Luke said.

Mae seemed to be in her own world now, humming to the ceiling. Luke tapped his watch again, then his nose. Mae didn't notice them leaving. She was humming 'The

Very Thought of You' by A1 Bowlly—the first song her and Robert Wadlow danced to.

He towered over her, his hand enclosing hers like a normal hand holding a pumpkin seed.

*

Fran tried to focus on a magazine. Wavetech stressed a paperless environment but the rule wasn't followed. Agents brought things to read on slow days. The desks were littered with pens, bits of scrap paper, torn up drawings and notes. There was a two-year- old calendar on an empty desk. All Fran wanted was a call. She liked the phones—the 84 friendly anonymity. Not that she didn't like the people she worked with. Two days before, it was Brenda's birthday and she had stayed up later than usual the night before baking a chocolate cake. She did for everyone's birthday at Wavetech. At least the people she knew.

Luke walked by while she absently flipped the pages of her Women's World.

"Luke?"

"Yah Fran? Fran, you know, Fran? You're cool shit, Fran." Luke rapidly tapping a pen against the thigh.

"Thanks, Luke. I just wanted to remind you to wear a neat shirt next Friday. It's

Crazy Shirt Day."

"Fran yah about that I should tell you I didn't pay the fee to be in the social club I know it's only three dollars off each paycheck but I still ate some Greco last month at the social club pizza party in the big staff room and I apologize sincerely for that but I don't think I own that crazy of a shirt anyway mostly band shirts or boring one colour shirts ask the fat guys like Jenkins who sweat all day in shirts like with Dragons on them he probably has a closet full of Hawaiian button-ups."

"Are you ok, Luke?"

"Ate a bad Caesar wrap. Back to sales and what not. Calls await. Have a prosperous night, Mrs. Baker."

"You are an odd duck, Luke." But Luke was gone, moving down the aisles of computer monitors like he was made of coat hangers.

Fran was the president of the social club—organized bake sales, office events.

Wavetech was her life. She had been offered promotions to trainer, team leader. But she liked being an agent, she liked the phones. An easy job and they let her knit. You always

come with a smile, they said.

Fran kept a framed picture of her family at her workstation. Technically, the

workstations were interchangeable—no one had their own. But no one took Fran's seat—

the same seat she'd been sitting in since she started. Josh Creagan, a boy Fran thought

insolent from the start, tried to sit there when he began on the floor.

"This is bullshit," he'd said. "You told us we could sit where we want."

"Josh, take a seat anywhere else." Todd was his trainer. Happy-go-lucky with cell phone, pleated khakis.

"It doesn't make sense, man."

"Take a seat, bro. Just somewhere else. That's Fran's seat."

People at Wavetech liked her, her enthusiasm for the job baffling to most. In a line of work where the majority seemed unhappy, Fran was a welcome anomaly.

It had stopped snowing and a man in a jack shirt came out of the dark clutching himself against the wind. The snow crunched underfoot like Styrofoam. He made his way to the St. Agnes Shopping Centre's covered main entrance—the same entrance employees of Wavetech used everyday. He shook from the cold but managed to sit, light a smoke. "Tell ol' doctor I'm not sick yet," he said to no one. "Coulda took 'im. Coulda took 'im, yes." His nose was bloody and slightly bent and his breath came winded and high and beery through its flattened cavity. He blew out smoke, the tendrils disintegrating fast into a sky with receding clouds. He tried the door and then leaned into the window, cupping his hands over his face to see inside. There was light and warmth in there. He imagined it as a sanctuary—a church or shelter; some crossroads that served soup, maybe. There was movement inside. A shadow cut the light—a hand.

*

Alvin picked up his mouse, took the ball out, put it back in. He focused on a piece of fiber caught between the K and L on his keyboard.

Need a smoke, he thought.

The Just Do It hand-out. Alvin had heard they were an answer to the complaints about extended shifts. Every November or thereabouts, all agents were called to the large open space in the middle of the call floor.

"You know the client needs us to boost our sales," Marion had said to them a few days ago. "I know we can do it." Marion Stevens was the head representative for sales and marketing for the St. Agnes Wavetech location. She talked frequently of the client.

The client—the corporations Wavetech sold for. Multinational conglomerates with reflective glass head offices in Phoenix or San Francisco. Agents huddled in fear when the client came to visit. They knew that when the client was unhappy, mandatory overtime was coming next.

"The client is willing to donate incentives." To Alvin, that meant free calling cards, cell phones, camping gear. He didn't need any of these things. He owned two cell phones already. And Wavetech would probably give him another at the end of the month.

A few years ago, they also gave him a beeper—a pointless device nowadays but a classic accessory for the drug dealer shtick. Despite their uselessness, Alvin loved any incentive prize for top sales. It made him feel important, needed.

"Just an extra hour every night these next two weeks," Marion had said, her shoulders shrugged in innocent repose, as if saying, Not my fault, kids. "But I have two boys at home."

"I'm sorry, Eileen. It's the client."

Just do it.

Luke was kicking around a Nerf soccer ball now, the phone cord from his headset

stretched to its limit. He had ripped up his Nike slogan and taped pieces of it around his

monitor. The Swoosh was upside down and he had written Me with a sharpie on another ripped piece— Just Do Me in ransom note paper squares.

"How long do you think it'll be before we have no say at all I mean like to what

goes on here or inside our own heads?" He was under his desk jiggling a wire in the computer tower, making it hard for Alvin to hear. "I mean just do it. Just do everything that is humanly possible to make that one sale to that man in Toledo who told you already he has a better provider and why the fuck would he need to switch plans. Just do it for a little longer for a few more hours a night babygirl I won't tell anyone." Luke's behind protruded from under his desk—jeans slipping down showing his crack.

"Luke, forget it," Alvin said. "I think I just made a sale to a little kid. Said it was his parents account. But he had the credit card number."

*

For a minute, Mae came out of her inner world to the world around her. For her it was like the sensation of falling prior to sleep, the quick sucking kick back to awareness.

Inside her head—that young, painted world; the popping scratch of records and the purple of feathered hats—then suddenly the flash out of colour. For the first few seconds, it was the blunt stun of complete unfamiliarity. Then she realized: the building. The carpeted walls, the bulletin board, four empty chairs in the corner, all missing elbow rests. In her few weeks at Wavetech, she'd noticed the steady hum of the air conditioning system, a comfort, a background necessity—the low droning F note. But it wasn't on now.

*

Fran tried not to but kept looking at the Just Do It handout. She wouldn't complain but thought it a bit rude—a little paper insult to all agents. Administration could have had more tact. Fran understood the need for mandatory overtime—she didn't even mind. But when other people complained, management simply said indirectly, Just Do It.

Just come in a little early. Just knock off a little later. No problem. Do it. Just.

"These'11 be taped up on the walls," Todd had said, and winked. "We know you guys can reach the goal for the month. The client knows it too. Just do it!"

It made her angry and she began to get scared. Did she love it here anymore? She remembered those jobless days years ago. Marvin coming home from work at his law practice. Even then his heart probably clogged, weakening.

Some days they made love on the living-room couch—Marvin frantic with the day's stress, almost angry on top of her, his dress shirt still on. Then after, she'd feel his back—the tension melting away while he lay there. She would put on a roast, boil potatoes. She had loved those evenings.

Now she ate freeze-dried pasta. She ate from Tupperware containers.

She was still holding the handout, crumpled now. Just Do It.

I don't need to work here, she thought to herself. But then thought, What else have I got? Someone made a print out on the Laserjet that said Jeff was Pushed. Hundreds of copies in the same bold font as the Just Do It handout. Jenkins suspected Luke—it was usually his shit that got them in trouble. They were passed around from some indefinable source. Team leaders were speed walking with purposeful frustration, questioning the younger agents. Jenkins wasn't surprised at the line, or confused about it. It was expected—a now tired cliche. Jeff was Pushed was written all over St. Agnes. Jenkins never thought the saying was funny; he didn't know what it meant and was certain nobody did. Yet people still pointed it out, chuckling, when it was spotted spray-painted on a rock or the side of Sobeys. Jenkins clinched his fists, thought about how he hated

Luke and most of the guys he worked with.

*

"And another thing is," Mae said, "all the great people my family has been associated with. The different. The interesting. Not like anyone around here. People at this call centre," Mae arced her arm in a full one-eighty sweep, dismissing the whole place, "they bore me. I think they bore you too."

The thing was they didn't really bore Alvin so much but he didn't say anything.

"My aunt worked at a circus," Mae continued, "Barnum and Bailey's. She cleaned the trailers, brushed hay out of the big top. Not to say I'm that proud of her.

Would've ended up at a flophouse if it wasn't for chance. A real bailer. She knew a nephew of P. T. Barnum. This man was an expert at hoaxes. Could make a plaster cast of a three headed fetus, paint it up and put it in a jar of flat seltzer and people would pay to see it. Back then it was easy to believe in that stuff. Groups of slick dicks, shysters all— trick you into believing the seven foot whore from Boston was an Amazonian princess.

But letting yourself be fooled—that was the fun of it. "But the point is, we knew different types of people. I was taught to be accepting.

My grandmother was high society in London. A born performer, like me. She knew

Joseph Merrick as an older man. Treated him for his constant bronchitis. Course you may know him as John Merrick—the elephant man. There's that famous movie about him."

Like most days when Mae went on, everyone had stopped listening except Alvin.

He believed her. His head was floating from the coke but he strained to sit still. Luke was logged back in, telling a customer that they had the wrong number even though he was on outbound calling.

"She used to tell me when I was young what he looked like, felt like, up close,"

Mae said. "That puffed and layered tissue was hard as a rock, Grammie would say. She wasn't scared of him like most. Some gagged. Women screamed. His face was enflamed with fleshy bulbs and crevices, reminded one of an organ—a stomach or liver. But my

Grammie liked him all the same. Joseph was polite, she said. Always he managed a muffled thank you when she adjusted his ascot or helped him with his morning jacket."

Mae picked up one of the Just Do It handouts and put it back down.

"And another thing is, Joseph wrote poetry. No matter about his deformities, he was looking for love. A blind woman, he used to tell my grandmother. A blind women would love me. I have a piece of his poetry in my nightstand drawer—on gold-leaf parchment. Falling apart now but the words are beautiful."

Luke wanted to beat Todd. TL Todd. Talk-too-much Todd. Todd who ticks off evaluation forms. Todd who tattles. Tattles to human resources if you talk about wanting to screw the new girl. Boring Todd. Monday Todd. Excited Todd. Luke thought of putting his leg out when Todd walked by with his clip board. Tripped Todd. 91

"I hate that man," he said to Alvin. "He makes me sad."

Luke was still flying from the urinal lines but Alvin could feel that dawn down awful stomach feeling coming on—exhausted but not at all tired. He will have to ask to go to the bathroom and leave for Tim's instead. He would trudge through snow, rain and sleet for a large cup at this time of morning-night. Making that gutsy run for rot gut. One hour left. Then home for not-sleep—that depressive state in between. The winter sunlight burning through naked bedroom windows, no blinds or bed sheet covering.

"Alvin, my main man. Good work tonight! Awesome, awesome, sales!" Todd. He was wearing a Disney tie—Taz. Alvin thought Why a tie at this time of night? Why a tie anytime in here?

"Yeah. Thanks," Alvin said. "Listen. I'll be back. Need to use the facilities."

Alvin left with his hoodie on. When the vast white-cold of the St. Agnes morning hit him, he wished he had brought his vest. It was still dark out and the lights from the St.

Agnes Shopping Centre were dimmed from snow cover. The only bright lights the flashing yellow from an early plow on Riverbend Rd.

Earlier in the bathroom, between coke lines, Luke had said something that struck

Alvin as odd: "These night shifts are haunted."

Alvin supposed tonight did look eerie—a solitary old man blowing on his hands,

Butt Stop receptacles drifted with snow like white tombstones. But inside, in Wavetech, it was cozy; ugly but safe—the ghosts far away. But maybe he was wrong about that.

"Still working at that shit hole?" Eric Dubois had been working at Tim Horton's since high school, long before Alvin got a job at Wavetech.

"Sure as shit. Better than here, man. You're a coffee jerk for night-shifters."

"Take it easy, man. Large double-double?" "Yeah."

"Hey, man." Eric was suddenly whispering, conspiratory. Alvin knew what this meant.

"None left," Alvin said. "Did the last bit with Luke."

"Shit. I work 'til noon. Been here since midnight." He handed Alvin his coffee.

"Apply at Wavetech. Shorter hours. Better pay."

"Never. Long live the coffee jerks."

*

Mae Roche was thinking about her Robert and how his bow-tie sagged like a dishcloth when he leaned down to kiss her, how he died in his sleep. He was eight foot eleven inches. An infected blister—the blood stagnating in the bottom of his long frame.

His brain-sized heart. Her last call one hour and forty-two minutes ago.

Fran Baker stood up and stretched and thought Marvin. Just his name. She decided she wouldn't come back to Wavetech. It came like a wink in her head, it came with his name. She smiled when she entered her logout codes. Bill Jenkins, beside her, wrote out the numbers one to a thousand. He scratched at his headset, chewed on the microphone's foam tip. Luke Mackenzie had his headset off. Instead he listened to Jethro

Tull on his own headphones—'Thick as a Brick,' now into its fortieth minute. He counted the second hand that seemed to keep time with the music. His last made call three hours ago.

*

Todd said: "Alright ladies and gents, time to log off. Excellent night tonight.

Bravo!" He synchronized his watch with his workstation computer. To the second. 93

The air conditioner stutters then flips back on, cuts the silence like a gunshot. A stack of Just Do It handouts get blown to the floor.

*

Alvin stood outside Wavetech shivering and considered walking home. He didn't want to go back in, was certain something about the lights would make him sick—the way their harshness concealed nothing—acne scars, eye-bags.

Instead, he got close enough to the building so that his chin rested on the bricks.

He pressed his body against it with his arms spread, and looked up. The top of the building was invisible through the wind-blown drifts.

Wavetech looked immense, edgeless, like some ancient monument newly forged for the twenty-first century. He was flat against it now, one with the building—both inside and outside its geometry of signals, planar and gridded in radio waves. He pressed his body closer and thought he felt the whole structure hum, the vibrations of a million voices strumming the fatigue-loosened box of his chest.

He pushed off the wall, breathless, looking to regain some perspective.

*

And another thing is," Mae said, "you all think I'm strange—my history. And I know about what you think. I know you don't believe me. You don't understand me. Tall tales, you think. The crazy lady to give you amusement. Bet you think I'm senile.

Someone who talks to the walls outside. But I got this job, didn't I? And a woman of my aspirations, my intelligence? Believe me, this place bores me. I did a year at Shurtleff

College. That's where I met my Robert. I liked his custom-made suits. He always dressed respectable—like one of the professors. He couldn't wear those hideous varsity jackets, thank Jesus. They'd have to skin about six cows to get the leather. But I'm getting away 94 from myself. This place. You think I'm strange. This place is far harder to understand.

How long's it been here? People walk around like it's always been here. A maze of walls and machines. No depth to anything. Just screens, networks. No place for people. I could imagine the four headed goat, the lobster boy, the Cardiff Giant; could never imagine a place like this." 95

Old Medicines

Squinted into the daylight—a small square of sun on my sheets. Started drinking as soon as I woke up. The burnished cap of my rum pointing out from under the bed. The school will need to get a supply teacher I thought and then told Mr. Perkins, illustrious principal, that I had the flu. Now I'm in the car, on my way to get more medicine—those old medicines, just enough for a drop, the ten am buzz, the September blues pick-me-up.

My ex-wife Kathy called last night, not out of love, never love, but duty.

"Hello there, this is Kathy Merrick calling from Telcom Mobility. I'd like to speak to—" A pause, the low background office rumble, "... my God."

"So you don't use Ferguson anymore."

Kathy calling from work, from Wavetech, our benevolent call centre—the odds staggering, cosmically impossible. Tens of thousands in North America to dial, the chaos of numbers confounds—a million combinations chosen from a computer, the picoseconds between signals and somehow it gets routed to my Kathy. My Kathy who hasn't called in months. Fate! I thought, buzzed and mildly optimistic.

"This must be a sign. Meet me for drinks after your shift."

But she hung up. No. The call was terminated, the call was dropped: words the call centres use. No slamming of the receiver; no pressing 'End' and dropping the portable, batteries dancing across kitchen linoleum. The cut was clinical, emotionless. A gesture emptied of its humanity. A click of the mouse—two lines joined, severed.

But the severing started years ago with a much duller blade. The usual bickering—the good plates don't go in the dishwasher, at least you could do the wash while I'm at work. She became irritable, snapped at the wind changing. Acronyms—the language of call centres. Her day is routed, sifted through them.

HR (Human Resources), TL (Team Leader), CSR (Customer Service Representative),

CBT (Call back time), QC (queued calls), AC (After Call), ACT (Average Call Time),

SCT (Standard Call time), MPE (Monthly Performance Evaluation), SMART (Standard

Marketing and Advertising Resource Training). She talked of these constantly, as if they should have the same influence on everyone. In the call centre, talk between co-workers can be clipped, efficient. I gleaned that trainees learn these acronyms quickly—each one having its own weighted logic. For instance, if a CSR's AC is too high, their TL will score them low on their MPEs. Even worse, if your ACT is over that of your SCT, you may be put back on SMART. It was a mild humiliation to be put back on SMART.

Maybe Kathy expected the same linguistic efficiency from our failing marriage. If our AFT (Average Fight Time) was over our CLT (Caring Love-making Time), I would be put back on GST (Guilt and Sensitivity Training). Spread-sheeted idioms of love and sex. It would be easier to manage my tattered life if I translated it into simple linguistic equation. My private sins arithmetized. My IML (Instances of Misplaced Lust) in the classroom multiplied by MFSS (Misdirected Female Student Signals) equals AWI

(Average Weeknight Inebriation).

And believe me, I own up to it, my inability to groove myself into Kathy's boiled- down languages. The rhetoric of her call centre life was beyond me. I told her to leave me alone; in fits of rage I told her that her life was meaningless, totally unproductive. "You sit all day ripping people off," I said. "Let me ask: do you get off on American anger?"

But it is the life I am leading that's meaningless—my sexual cravings for students, my disgust with their kitschy art. I never hit Kathy. But I wanted to—Kathy smirking in our bedroom doorway; poised, prim and trim with a glass of Shiraz. 97

I used to sketch her naked. I was tasteful and romantic. Saw her a while ago at the

Sobeys still looking curved. Used to tell her she had a Renaissance body. The plump roundness of Botticellis. She complained about her weight but she was full and healthy— the dip of her hips, the breasts slight rises when laying down. A Renaissance body. But it was the ugly stuff I liked; secret malignancies—a developing vein, the mole shadowing an areola.

I hate myself more than she does. Hence today—my joyride to lined up bottles in a well-lit room, their gold seals and tassels.

*

Which brings me here, idling at a crosswalk, white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. Should've taken the scenic route, nixed the high school's street. I'm cursing Joan

McFaddin late for Homeroom, tits pushed against tank-top by the weight of her bookbag.

The booze has gotten bad. There are bottles hidden in the art room, under collapsir 0 installation pieces, behind canvases. A boy from my tenth grade class found a half polished quart of Prince Igor wedged in the drying rack.

I pull over a little past the bus-loading zone, roll down my window, try to shake off the shakes.

In class, she sees me red-eyed and guilty. Joan McFaddin blows me kisses in the halls. She is in on my secret, will tattle in the little girl's room, will tell my colleagues— gossip mongers in khakis and shapeless dresses.

Yesterday she tells me, "Art's my passion."

"You should pursue it," I said. "You are very talented, Joan." And of course she isn't. Paints weak still-life's on discarded furniture—a futon covered in orange baskets, 98 sunflower arrangements. "It's, like, transposing beauty onto everyday things," she said.

"Things we just, like, sit on."

Signs her name with a heart. I give her A's, watch her ass shake over to my desk for more Conte.

Joan won't make it on her own. I want to kiss her forehead, tell her she can stay with me when she graduates. I'll make herbal tea and crapes, tell her You can skip school today—we '11 lie in bed like Lennon and Yoko. Joan fails English and math, takes the low- level classes. Skirts the college courses in short skirts.

She'll work over a doctor for a wedding but in the mean time, I'm thinking the phones for her at Wavetech. We tip out our school, pour our graduates like draught down the gullet of the telemarketing super highway.

*

Since the house was sold, I've started going to the washroom in other homes. I don't steal anything; just flush their toilets, use their soap. Kathy and I planned on kids but had none. I pee among cups of neon toothbrushes, waterproof bath books, Flintstones vitamins. The comforting warmness of suburban bathrooms.

Sometimes they have skylights.

I surround myself with those house sounds I took for granted—the hum of a kitchen water cooler, the click of a penny tap-dancing in a dryer's cylindered hull.

Standing over their toilets, I imagine the bump and skid of playing kids on the floor above me, existing in some ambiguous, echoing geography of carpet and hall— playrooms where adults are not allowed. Oh Kathy, you call them down for dinner.

* 99

I'm still pulled over and I can smell my own body, its oozing pores. There are buses pulling up in front of me but Joan and her followers are close. I have a clear view.

Joan passes my car, gets picked up by Tony Pellini wedding-style. Bringing her over the threshold of the sidewalk. Black thoughts of running them down. Tony Pellini, slick track star, gutted on the grill of my Volvo.

Back in the day I was interesting, passionate about my abstract canvases. I drank at parties and made love in bathrooms. Tentative orgies on studio floors—paint on naked knees, wooden brushes wet with us. A liberal college where I dated an older woman named Still. I was brazen, never tired. Now the battery is low. I'm running on dust.

*

"Let's get drunk as Ferguson tonight." A loud voice from the group that has joined Joan and her suitor. They're congregating. I'm still pulled over with window cracked, ducking down and straining to listen.

This is new: they know. They know about the booze. Maybe they all know. Do the other teachers know? Does Perkins know?

Drunk as Ferguson: they don't want that. Falling into bed, tears of self-pity while

I clutch Kathy's old pillow. The drunkenness of a drunk is not the care-free drunk of a teenager. They are looking for what they don't want. The guilt and shame of throwing up in offset halls. Dribble of piss on my Dockers. Nothing fun when I fall. The difference is need, the desperate hold of rum's sugared lull. To be drunk as Ferguson is to sleep the sleep of tragic kings, graying in unwashed sheets.

They drink Jager-bombs, they drink blowjobs, orgasms—candied innuendo to be gulped down, tipped up at strobe-lit dance clubs. Drink names to determine what will happen at the after-party. Some weekends, I slouch in the shadowed corners of clubs, 100 careful not to be noticed, watching out for "Hey, is that Ferguson?" I've seen boys take body shots off the volleyball team—leggy seniors with fake IDs and matching tube-tops.

I've thought can I have a taste?—not the booze so much as the chemical tinge of sweat and perfume between the cleavage. Maybe Lizzie, the captain, will dig me, I've thought.

Maybe she'll let me into her and I'll be seventeen again, panting with her, uncondomed and forceful—the flourished agitation codified in new found sexuality.

In my car, I'm distracted totally now; I watch them laugh together.

A boy I recognize as Alex Peterson is doing me, I know it. A believable impersonation, even tries my nervous walk, arms straight and locked at the elbows, hands in the pocket. They are doubling over now. Tears of laughter streaming down Joan's face.

Why am I still here? I put my car into gear, a little too fast. A short squeal of tires.

*

I barely register when my head hits the roof—don't recall speed-pumps this far down the street.

I look in the review mirror; see something roll out from the undercarriage. It's small but not that small—I see jeans, a pink sweater. Sparkles from a handbag reflect in the sun.

The image of her rolling, settling against the curb on the far side of the road somehow incongruous with the common spatial arrangements of our lives. She rolled out of day-to-day cause-and-effect—broke the fated time-space tubes we travel in. It was how she rolled, like something bagged and totally inanimate: a scarecrow, a dufflebag full of tools. Her hair uncoils into a sprinkler's puddle. A large rip down the side of her light sweater reveals the strap of a plain bra. She's small, almost too small for high school. But I recognize her. Not from any of my classes but a regular during lunch breaks in the art room—shooting the shit with students finishing up late projects, animated and gesturing with a soup thermos. Now her arms bundle up against her head like she is sleeping or counting for hide and seek. She doesn't move, her miniature body upsetting the day.

Screams from the group. Joan's voice the highest, cutting through the morning.

She tries to run out onto the street; Tony holds her back.

"No, no, no." A mantra under my breath as I pull over. I think I'm sober but my buzz is still there, a little stale, but still there.

I want to hide under the seat, blow my head off.

A big man runs out of his car to the body. Almost gets hit by a truck with an

AC/DC decal. A blonde beard. Faded jeans. Knit sweater with mallard. Even under his sweater I sense the muscled stout of Nordic strength—bale throwers, keg tossers. Not the call centre cut. He'll kill me. What if he keeps a bat or tire iron in his trunk? I imagine my windshield spidering inward. I can't breathe. I'll end up dead, my skull concaved like a pottery bowl. He lets out inhuman howls—a noise somehow deeper than the wide flex of his abdominal muscles could produce.

He stands, backs away from the girl with his hands on his mouth. He steps forward to hold her again, but falls back on his haunches instead. There's a slackness to his body that's anticipating some further outburst. Like a face before a sneeze. Once again he gets up and teeters back and forth, eyes slightly glazed in the sun. He spins, arms extended at half-mast in weak supplication. It's as if he's carrying out some sort of performance art in the street. Head tilted upward, sharing some secret woe with the sky.

His movements unpatterned but not purposeless, almost tribal. Some egoless pantomime—the keening shuffle for fallen hunters on Saharan veldts. 102

His daughter. Suddenly, the image of him packing her lunch this morning before

driving her to school—too old, now, for the Hello Kitty Lunch Mate.

*

I'm a secret alcoholic. Cut out the shape of a pint bottle into a coffee table book—

Birds of North America. Think I saw it in a movie once. Hard work, the cutting, getting it even; but I thought there was a certain romance in its deceptive nature, its covertness— the wayward detective hiding a whiskey bottle.

Yet the bottle always disappeared. I figured I must've drank it and forgotten. But

Kathy knew my hiding spots and I knew that she knew but we loved each other and I thought that it was really all about that.

*

"It can't. You can't do that," the large man says to no one. But I did. I killed his daughter and now he is on the ground, large hands framing her face.

"I'm going to get out now. Of my car." There's a certain casualness to talking out of a parked car, its easy back-and-forth—the asking of directions, the offering of rides.

The weight of this situation demands a more visceral form of talk but I can't seem to move.

I'm scared to leave the secure cocoon of my car's leathered interior. Sedan. From the Italian, Sede. Covered chairs carried on the backs of henchmen. Safe and enclosed.

Impervious to death, to the meaty haymakers of grieving men. I depress a black button to my side. The low drone of a rising window, the inner groanings of a car door. I watch him through the glass—through a spatter of week-old sneezes. I have the radio set to the baroque channel, something to do with me being an art teacher. I'll wait it out while I listen to the slow harmony of hurdy gurdies and harpsichord. The man will go inside 103 eventually. Police will come, wrap him in shock blankets and apologize softly to him.

The man: outside. Me: washed in renaissance calm, inside my breezy sedan, my Volvo.

A newspaper clip from weeks ago comes to me: something about two Wavetech employees. Best friends with drugs. An overdose and the other friend trying to set it up like a car accident. The car in the photo hardly damaged, up against a tree somewhere out in the sticks of Gatesbury. I wonder if Kathy knew them.

"Mr. Furguson." It's Tony Pellini, who's crossed the street, entered the passenger side door. "What happened, man?" Tony calling me 'man' in his confusion. The tentative respect of formal address forgotten. I feel flattered, like I'm a buddy.

"I hit her. I killed her?"

"We called an ambulance. I have a cell phone." He holds it up as if I need proof.

As if he didn't show me, the rescue wouldn't take place.

I look at Tony and start to cry, start to really lose it. Outside, the other kids are circled around the girl. I can see her feet—one flip flop missing. I cry into Tony's shoulder, mumbling something like, "Can we stay in here for awhile, this car?" This has become important. I have my thermos of coffee. I have my pine scented air-freshener shaped like a painter's palate.

In the rearview mirror a picture of misplaced suburban death: housewives out of morning baths gathered around the presumed father—Nordic patriarch—cradling the girl like some reverse pieta. Men in suits late for insurance jobs shaking their heads.

"We have to get out of here," Tony says. In control. "You need to give a statement once they get here."

"I hit her. What will I say?"

"I guess whatever happened." 104

I wish Kathy were here to calm me. Kathy and her secure call centre diction.

Kathy. I need more acronyms to talk myself through. Inside: Wavetech's walls and the calls to people we don't know. Closed off like my sedan, protected in the hum and purr of quiet order.

"Tony. Do you have gum?" But Tony isn't with me anymore. He left the door opened. I reach across to close it, to keep things out. 105

The Anatomy of the Ear

I've tried lots of things. Some cure—like how looking at a light makes you sneeze. Or drinking water upside down rids you of hiccups. A release. This is not happening.

I woke up with a song in my head and it's not going away. That fucker's colorful sarong of cut-up garbage bags, or whatever he wears. Thick slashes of eye-shadow that almost reach his temples. Terrible dancer and stupid hats. Yes, I've watched the video since—some theory that the visual input will cut out the audio. Again. This is not happening. What is Karma anyway? Can you change it? Make it more to your liking?

Obviously not. The song, evidently, is in my head to stay.

The anatomy of the ear. I looked it up. Victorian diagrams in the public library on microfiche. Fat-lined woodcuts bleeding off the page. Fig. 7: Tympanic membrane. Fig

15: Malleus. The Malleus is also called the Hammer. One of the ossicles—some of the smallest bones in the body. Bones the size of ant legs vibrating so we can hear

Beethoven, or the scratch of a lighter's cog against its flint.

Except something happened when I woke up two months ago to 'Karma

Chameleon.' Signals jammed. Cochlear hairs vibrated to their own tune. Those little bones locked like a broken pocket watch.

*

Where is Sheila, he thinks. She is gone and he knows this. One of her high heels pokes out from the closet and he kicks it into the back with the shadows and mittens and saved Sobeys bags. 106

Sheila is with Max and he also knows this, or thinks it. He wonders if Max ever had something in his head that wouldn't come out. Max is too positive and somehow this means that songs flow through him.

*

Two months ago: so it's seven in the morning and I'm singing Culture Club in the shower, even though Morrissey has come on now, telling me to hang the DJ. Eighties in the Morning on CI07.9 and Goldman Jake tells me it's going to cloud over, so get out those raincoats, folks, and curse Mondays. 'Karma Chameleon' is making me bob my head while I dry off.

My coffee tastes worse than booze or bile. I want to call Sheila, tell her to come back, tell her about the promotion, tell her we can get a dog. But she is in bed at 'the new place' with Max, snoring with her mouth open. Her snoring wasn't repulsive; it wasn't sawing logs—it was airy and light, something I loved. I called her last night and she hung up.

The morning news scratches out of the little kitchen clock radio. They tell me a hundred-ninety-four dead in a plane crash. Some static cuts in, then something about free weekend long distance and no roaming fees. A cell phone ad and I'm thinking about brain cancer, high frequency wavelengths pulsing between fissures and convolutions in my cerebrum, urging cells to cluster into malignant oblongs.

Maybe I talk too much on my Nokia. That's why this song is wracking me. I've juiced my brain with too many microwaves so now the bad things stay in. Now 'Karma

Chameleon' is going to ruin my Monday and I'm thinking about flipping the flip-phone in the wastepaper basket. 107

And maybe it's the signals I get at work—rows of computers emitting waves or particles or rays. I walk through walls of electronic bumble—air-screens of invisible noise. The small pink and tender knobs, unnamable corners of my brain, storing

information on wavelengths I can't hear, messing with my ability to move on to the next

song. I worry for the telemarketers under me—the agents that sweat under their headsets, two-hundred calls a day. What songs are in their heads?

At work, the boss is telling me the proposal is shit but I hear New Wave instead.

It's wedged in my brain like an ant in a wet sponge. The new girl has a skirt on. I'm talking to her about a TV show I hate and suddenly she breaks in with I love that song! I ask what but realize what I'm mumbling.

"Sorry," I say. "It's been stuck in my head all morning." No big deal; it's fading.

A minor inconvenience.

But too late, she's singing it into her stapler. I'm thinking, maybe I'll get to fuck her. Mondays.

Desert loving in your eyes all the way

*

A Power outage. He calls the operator to get the time. Asks her, What do you do on your days off? He tries for a casual, tired tone. His most flirtatious. She hangs up after his underwear comment.

*

I work PR for Wavetech Inc. New Solutions for Business Outsourcing. I walk on the call floor every day to give pep talks to out-of-work loggers and bored home-for- summer college students. Hundreds of people wired to their monitors. Millions of wires wired to the wall. Moveable walls merely dividers. Thousands of square feet. Billions of 108 signals—a matrix of credit card numbers, address changes, order forms, weekly reports, weekly evaluations. All online. All data. Paper free environments with the steady hum of polite apology into the headset to the dialer to the great unknown to the customer in Tulsa or Jacksonville or Bangor. Single moms that had good secretary jobs lost to what is left.

Good pay. Paid training. Decent dental. Buzz words painted on the walls. Innovation.

Insight. Imagination.

The shopping mall has been replaced. The K Mart and Sears have been eaten.

I like my job, though. I write up a new "Motivation Strategy." I have my own cubicle with a photo of my parents. On the wall, I have a framed lake scene titled

Ambition in a pleasing font. I like this new girl and I'm thinking I don't mind humming

'Karma Chameleon' on this dreary Monday morning.

*

But now it's almost two and I take two Tylenol, hating Boy George. Hoping he overdosed but knowing he didn't. Saw him on MTV—a little bloated now, a little saggy around the jowls, but still made up, still club-kid pretty.

I'm thinking Hamlet. Stuffy high school rooms from years ago. Boy George as

Claudius, dropping this poison in my ears.

I'm thinking Blue Velvet. Ants climbing the waxy appendage in a suburban field.

A camera closes in on the ear. Into the scenes inside.

*

After a week I'm humming the song through gritted teeth. Sleeping with cotton balls in my ears. This is a fruitless endeavor. Let my thoughts wander for one second and it slips in. It's the weekend, at least. Over beers I ask my buddy if he gets songs in his head—sucky ones that grab him with their light choppy pop. 109

"I whistled Air Supply for three days straight."

"What song?"

"Does it matter? Goddamn nightmare."

I guess it doesn't. I ask how he got rid of it.

"I got laid the night it left me," he tells me. "Slept like a baby. Woke up smiling; whistled Zeppelin on the way home. 'Kashmir'." He's a good whistler. I've heard him.

"But Karma Chameleon? That's the worst," he says. "Hate it. Hate that tune."

"How did you know?"

"You were belting the chorus when you came back with that pitcher."

*

Two weeks after that I'm at the doctor. Because I don't know what else to do.

He's a small man—his head looks like a potato. He laughs, proffers sleeping pills. I dig.

But the song is my waking nightmare. I sleep alright but start my day with Boy

George. Shower with Boy George. Get my poppy seed bagel and check the sports page with Boy George.

Then the pills stop working. They just make me groggy and the song in my brain seems to get louder. I need something stronger—coloured anti-psychotics with lots of y's and z's in the name. Exhausted, I take out my record collection—play anything. Ice-T.

Motorhead. Fucking Herman's Hermits.

*

He stands outside her apartment, tries to gauge where she sleeps from looking at the building. 12th floor. Her room is in the back and he's not sure where. This bothers him more than he would have thought. He looks at a dumpster stuffed to the top with corrugated cardboard. He drops the flowers. A ten year old boy will find them wet and 110 pulpy against the curb the next day and imagine giving them to his teacher. The boy looks at the bra section in the Sears catalogue and pictures Mrs. Lowenstein in baby blue.

*

I try to kill this thing with facts. Fan trivia. I surf the internet message boards, read anything about Culture Club.

Boy George owns approximately 730 hats, 678 of them cowboy style.

Three young boys were trampled in a Liverpool record store on the release date of

Colour by Numbers. One suffered a punctured lung and herniated disk. Date: October 9th,

1983.

Born George Alan O'Dowd.

But, alas. He's still in here, his voice in Dolby 5.1 surround.

I start seeing things. Visions in blurred eighties Betamax. Everyone in the line for

Tim's wearing gaudy make-up and jewelry—fifteen people before work in flashdance technicolour, waiting for large double doubles.

I called Sheila last night. I've called her a lot since the song began.

"I like the song," she says. "Remember the cat?"

"I swerved. I didn't kill it."

"I know. But the song. It was playing on the radio." A pause. Dead air— background sounds of reality TV. "You were drinking."

"Right... Coffee this afternoon?" I ask.

"You know that wouldn't be fair. Listen, I have to go."

"I miss you." She didn't quite catch that I don't think. Ill

Her new guy volunteers at homeless shelters and jogs before work. I jog to catch the bus.

You come and go, you come and go

*

A month passes so I try a priest. My buddy recommends a friend of a friend—a new age type. Kicked out of Seminary school for 'unorthodox practices.'

"Unorthodox practices?" I ask my buddy.

"Exorcisms. But what does it matter? He can do anything. Little girl in Halifax, cured her from a demon. She was schizo—put her goldfish in the Microwave. Put the dog in a freezer. Now she goes to Brown. Top marks."

So now I'm thinking my pal is schizo but I'm at the end of my rope.

The priest doesn't look like I want him to. I imagined some emaciated nonagenarian that brandished Sir Thomas More. This guy looks homeless—certainly no cassock. He has a pony-tail. Must be at least three hundred pounds, maybe three-fifty. He wears a poncho that makes him look like a tent.

"Nice records," he says, thumbing through the milk crates.

He pulls one out. "Jefferson Airplane. Can we put this on?"

Don't you have a job to do? How could this guy send Boy George running? He has one of those Victorian doctor's black leather bags. This reassures me. I think the guy in The Exorcist had one.

"A song stuck in your head, then?" He looks around my apartment like he is planning to bug it. His name is Roberts.

"I know how that sounds."

"No, no. This is fine. Anything can be exorcised, if done the right way." 112

"I'll try anything." He just stares at me. "It's 'Karma Chameleon.' By Culture

Club." I don't know what else to say. Did the song title even matter?

"Ouch." Ouch? I consult the wisdom of the Church and I get this? I wanted a thoughtful tug of the moustache, maybe something like Hmm, yes. Early eighties pop music. A common case that I believe can be cured with the right amount of holy water, diligent prayer and, of course, the power of the Holy Spirit.

"What do we do now?" I ask. He's just sitting on my couch with his legs crossed on my coffee table. Should I offer him a drink?

"How long have you had this, my son?

"I don't go to church. Does this matter?"

"Jesus Christ does not care if you go to church or not," he says. "You are still one of his children."

Maybe I should've consulted a Buddhist, given the song title. Incidentally, the song started up again when he walked into my apartment.

Father eventually lays me down and starts routing around in his little bag. He pulls out a vial and starts sprinkling it on me while feverishly spitting Latin and I think of the anatomy of the ear, all those little slivers of flesh and bone with their own long names.

His book is not the Bible. It's a huge leather-bound volume with gilt lettering on the spine. He holds it with both bands, his nose almost touching the pages. Like he was trying to eat it. Malleus Maleficarum. Malleus. Where have I heard that before?

"The Hammer of Witches," he tells me. He flips a few yellowed pages towards me—blotchy Latin and crude, violent woodcuts. 113

"It's a treatise on prosecuting witches," he says. "Late 15th century. You may be possessed with a witch-like presence. In the time of the Maleficarum's popularity, you would've been burned at the stake for your condition. Of course, we're not that barbaric

anymore." He finds this quite amusing.

"What exactly are your beliefs?" I ask.

"That's quite a question. However, yours may be more important. It is your gods and demons we need to focus on."

My god and demon is Boy George, androgynous and smirking—a sexless churl, dancing in the fire with me.

Ten minutes pass of the exorcism before I stand up and put my hands on his shoulders. I felt like I was calming down a drunk.

"I don't think this is working."

"Well, give it some time." I would give it all the time in the world but I keep hearing 'Karma Chameleon' and it's lost all meaning.

If I listen to your lies would you say I'm a man without conviction.

Not one more second, I beg. Beg to whom? My brain has broken it down into its component parts. It's not a song at all anymore. It's a feeling—elemental and concentrated like a pressure point or soap in the eye.

I give Roberts a fifty and he leaves. I don't offer refreshments.

*

He drinks in a corner and spills draught on his shirt. He listens to the sounds of the bar, the voices melding to one, raucous din. He concentrates on the accent of the

French bartender, its lilt. But it doesn't help. He misses Sheila and his own humming drives him to scotch. 114

*

The song played on 107.9 and now it plays me. I stood in front of the lunchroom microwave set to 'High' this afternoon for fifteen minutes. Waves refracted off me and I think I felt it. I imagined my bones in blurry neon green, heard the uneven click of a

Geiger counter.

My skull is a loosely glued clapboard box with a hornet inside. It's a mason jar filled with Lysol.

Yesterday at Wavetech I shoved a call agent out of their seat, told them to take a smoke break. I would man the phones for a few hours. One noise to block out another. I logged in, waited for the beep, told faceless voices to say anything, anything at all.

I call Sheila again. She laughs so I yell.

Every day is like survival. You're my lover, not my rival

*

I have an idea.

The airport is a twenty minute drive away. I have a bike and I need the exercise.

Sheila says so.

My bike is in the garage with a flat but I can make do.

Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon.

*

He gets to the airport in three hours, tasting salt and iron. His muscles are drowning in lactic acid, calves bottles of boiling oil, thighs knotted Christmas lights with the wires stripped.

He smells fetid. His ass is soaked through with silt and grass thrown up from the back tire. Yet he feels animalistic, keyed up, rarin' to go. 115

*

Sound can kill. One man stood between speakers in a sound proof booth at Utah's

West Desert U.S. Military Testing Facility while scientists flicked the switch and it's said that he vibrated, became frequency, facial features blurring with sinusoidal regularity. His eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled where he stood.

Another man could hear too much. Dropped pins were hammers goose-stepping in time. Clapping hands were hundreds of volcano eruptions that would bury ancient

Greece in hot, grey ash. He had an enlarged eardrum—a rare genetic mutation. Imagined silence would be like warm water flowing over him. So he stuck a screwdriver in both ears and the second attempt came a little too close to the brainstem.

Yet another heard 'Moondance' in an Irving Big Stop on the anniversary of his wife's death and remembered when they first met in college. That night, he died of a broken heart.

The human threshold of pain is 130 decibels.

*

There is a man in orange on the tarmac—a bright blip on a sea of black.

Don dons high density ear defenders and helps direct the traffic of a thousand commuters, drunk vacationers and anxious relatives. He exists in departures and arrivals—a constant witness of going-to's and coming-from's. He looks out towards the south control tower—it weaves and blurs in the horizon's heat. Ted, his son in grade 4, is in love with his teacher, Mrs. Lowenstein. He asked Don about sex the other day. Bryan, his eldest, landed a scholarship to Dal. Lynn said beef stroganoff for dinner tonight, his favourite. Don smiles—considers these small assurances of his own safe, familial nucleus. 116

He is thinking about this when he turns around to a wind-burnt man wielding a tire iron.

His grin! Don thinks, then goes down.

*

Max adjusts himself in his cramped seat. Should've got first class, he thinks. He stares at stock tips on his laptop, tries to focus on the small figures slightly shaking from the engines rumbling on either side of him.

The man behind Max is snoring. Sheila snores and Max's wife does not. And Max knows he can't leave his wife. There is no work in St. Agnes for a podiatrist, anyway.

Plus there's Sheila's ex to worry about—Sheila thinks he's losing it. Max made a point to stay away from him.

So Max had the fight with Sheila that he knew was necessary. He is going back to

Toronto. To his wife and his lovely daughter.

Max looks out the window and squints at a man coming unevenly towards the plane. Thinks he recognizes him.

*

He is wearing Don's protectors when he approaches the 747. His ears are hot under the coverings, muting the deafening whir of dual turbines.

He feels it now. The engine's sonic vibrations. Yet he's encased in these industrial earmuffs and 'Karma Chameleon' skips on the chorus.

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dream... Red, gold and green,

Red, gold and green.

The plane is surprisingly clean and new—tons of flexed metal bolted with bolts to withstand snow squals, thunderstorms. This close, the plane didn't make sense to him. Its 117 size seemed incongruent with its purpose—how something that large can cut over clouds at 800 kilometers per hour, carrying hundreds to Cancun or Beijing, vapourizing errant seagulls.

The spin of the turbines blow at his hair. He places his hand on the car-sized cylinder—the cyclone underneath, devouring jet-fuel at gallons per minute, jars the bones in his arm. A low buzzing in his vertebrae—the sound shakes his very being. He feels an empty, sucking pop deep in his head and then the wet warmth of blood. It's still not enough.

He looks up into the moon and takes off the ear defenders.

A rush of wind and then blackness. And a long, high C.

People nose up to the small oval windows and watch him collapse under the runway lights. The dead weight crack—skull to pavement.

Eyes open, he feels himself leaving his body, becoming a nexus of white noise existing only in equation, dispersing over suburbia like a trillion lines of binary code. 118

Strata

Bill Jenkins was here to kill himself. He gauged his fall, the fact that it wouldn't kill him. This wasn't the Golden Gate—he didn't know if anyone had ever tried to end their life by jumping from The Greysville Bridge.

Jenkins remembered hearing that Old Metal Man was the name the shipbuilders and traders gave it. The last bridge in a genealogy of bridges destroyed by storms and high tides—wood and stone constructions not meant to last. Old Metal Man the last standing against northern gales; river scows piloted by drunken men, slamming its buttresses. Winter car accidents chipped at its trellised sides like infections. These small disasters shrugged off while it stood at attention—the painted and frozen skeleton of a dead snake.

The fact was Jenkins couldn't swim; he might flail a few seconds and get sucked into the Chatique River's opaque sediment. Looks like baby poo, his little cousin used to say from his booster seat, packed in his uncle's Dodge Caravan with the rest of his family on the way to some Sunday family picnic. Jenkins never wanted to go—confusing events where his father and uncle got drunk and wrestled in the pine needles—but he could never make up excuses to stay home. The fact was he never had anything better to do. By fifteen, he was already two-sixty and not funny enough at school to be the token "fat guy" among the popular crowds.

It was only after he started working that Jenkins began to try on the comedian mask. During his first weekend job at Wendy's, Jenkins joked about his "puddin' tits."

After a few laughs from co-workers, he kept at it, insisting Puddin' Tits be his nickname. 119

He knew they laughed at him—hatred mostly. He laughed too, not really confused about the situation but kidding himself anyway.

He began to notice things. For instance, he was sure Tammy Wayans gave handjobs to all the boys out back. Among fly-swarmed garbage and vats of spent grease, he imagined she'd reach into their pants and awkwardly buck them while talking about nothing in particular: movie stars, her homework. All the boys got a toss except him.

Then they started inserting "you're fat" while talking to Jenkins.

"Jenkins? You're fat. Can you empty the garbages? You're fat."

"Did you check out the Leafs game last night, Jenkins? You're fat."

Jenkins acted like he didn't hear it at first. And then he tried to do it himself, things like, "Well, time to clock out. I'm fat." But no laughs. Although he couldn't participate, he knew he was crucial to the jokes that kept things going. So he stood and smiled sheepishly—the egged statue that everybody gathered around.

It got really bad when people stopped caring, when his weight stopped getting laughs. Other more confident guys became the jokers—smooth and gangly seniors who could do Will Ferrell impressions; who dressed in drag to hockey games; led school spirit assemblies. When Jenkins lifted up his shirt and pushed his tits together in St. Agnes

High's main annex, the seniors just looked away, embarrassed.

"Put it away, Jenkins."

*

After graduation came the call centre. It was an entirely new space; a place

Jenkins felt comfortable in. He saw it cut off from the outside. Even though the same type of guys who made fun of him worked there, he wasn't bothered as much. Wavetech: 120

Jenkins shaking it in between rows of computer monitors, making women with their

coffees laugh out of their seats.

Fran Baker, a lady in her sixties, was his only friend. Even Mae Roche, a woman

who Jenkins suspected was fully senile, poked his belly whenever he passed her workstation.

"Lardy boy," she said, "I must say you move fast for someone of your stature."

Once, Jenkins squeezed himself into the bathroom stall with one of the night shift

agents. He figured if he tried cocaine he might fit in. Within the hour, his clothes were

soaked through. Jenkins, already a fast and nervous talker on the phones, was a mess of

facial tics and disjointed speech.

"You need this cell phone plan and I'm here to sell it because your phone now isn't right just the roaming charges are over the top I see here but I can save you money we're talking about huge percentages unbelievable you'll be able to buy another car or some new clothes it's your best choice if you want to save with us here at Telcom

Mobility."

Scratching at itches that weren't there, Jenkins complained of a stomach ache and went home early.

*

"You remind me of Chris Farley," Laurie said; she seemed genuine when she laughed at him—her dimples and retainer. But she liked Alex in the Telcom Mobility division of the call centre. His back rippled when he leaned down to pick up her dropped pens, fix broken switchboxes. Jenkins caught her staring at the band of Alex's boxer briefs that stretched over his abs when his shirt hiked up. Jenkins heard stories of them 121 making it in unused conference rooms but didn't believe it. He hid his erections when he thought of them pumping behind closed doors.

Alex talked to Jenkins a lot. It made it worse because Alex was friendly to him.

When the other guys at Wavetech kept undoing his switchbox during calls, Alex told them to lay off.

"He's a good guy, fellas," he said. "Grow up."

"Hey buddy," he said after, "a few of us are going for beers tonight if you're up for it."

"Maybe. I'm pretty wiped." But Jenkins wasn't wiped. He thought about going and the sweat in his shirt pooled at his belt. He wished Alex made fun of him, poked him and said you 're fat. He hated him.

*

At night, Jenkins beating it in time to the radio—low pop tunes he imagined that

Laurie liked. Laurie from last year's beach staff party: the tendons in her legs leading up to her crotch, the bumped flesh around her bikini line. And then it's Laurie behind

Wendy's. Her bucking flanks tanned deep brown, her hair sweat-thick and tousled, a sow's hair. Laurie becoming hard, more vixenish with each stroke, her face an angled topography of pure urge. It doesn't look like Laurie from Wavetech—the face was the rutted face of Tammy Wayans in her Wendy's uniform; it was the shy smile of the nude on the bent ten of clubs he kept in his wallet all through high school. Now Jenkins is thinner, his arm is the roped arm of Alex, snatching at Laurie's thighs, biting her ear.

Laurie is screaming and he doesn't stop, feverish with the smell of grease, digging his fingers into her sides that are now giving too easily under his hands, sides becoming whorled with black hair—his own sides, sides his uncle used to call his spare tire. He 122

comes into his hand quick and short and guiltily, comes the way he would inside of her,

too quickly. He's back in his bed now and totally himself.

*

Yesterday was the day to tell Laurie how he felt. All that day thoughts of beauties

falling for the fat guy—sitcoms where toned soccer moms playfully slap the hands of

portly husbands grabbing for another pork chop—loveable goofs. And maybe Laurie

would love him all the same: jitterbugging in loud shirts, spinning his headset around his

index finger like a bowler hat.

Jenkins walked through the aisles of Wavetech with his clothes a shade darker

with sweat, the strained balloon of his heart working double time, beating out images of

Laurie behind his eyes.

"You look anxious today, Jenkins," Fran said.

"Nothing wrong with me, Fran," he said. "A little tired maybe. I don't know.

Seems hot in here."

"Ok, buddy boy. Let me know if you need to talk about anything." Jenkins knew

Fran, a grandmother many times over, liked him. She had told him he reminded her of her nephews she only saw at family reunions—tongue-tied scowlers she helped to steal cakes. "And remember to dress up for Halloween this coming Friday. You always have lovely costumes. The social club is baking pumpkin cookies!"

In the lunchroom—Laurie dabbing at a PB and J. Her face had a sunless glow like a baby's. Jenkins sat down beside her. He leaned nervously toward her, the tubed fat of his arm against the slightness of her elbow and all those perfect, delicate bones. Her smell made him dizzy—a mix of watermelon perfume and peanut butter. Laurie was pale but a 123

healthy pale, a country-girl pale—a shade of pinkness. Jenkins looked at his arm beside

hers—easily three times the girth at the wrist. Jenkins' arm was pale too, but the pale

tinge on the infirm; the pasty hue of dough that turned waxy yellow around his body's

many creases. He looked at his skin and thought of soap, dried-out and crisscrossed with

hair.

"Hi Jenkins, how are you?"

He would tell Laurie how he felt, tell her everything. He'd tell her how he thought

about her all the time and that she looked good even when he could tell she wasn't trying

to look good, or maybe she was he didn't know, he'd say, and he didn't care, he thought

she was beautiful. And he'd tell her he loved the way she put on her headset, how it

sometimes got tangled in her hair when she tried to take it off. Jenkins would tell her

about Alex and how he didn't respect her. Jenkins wasn't sure about this. Alex had

always been nice to him. He didn't care, he would continue to her: How Alex was cocky and flirted with other women all the time, even the older receptionists—how it was going around that he was going for drinks with Sherry who was in her late thirties. And how could Jenkins know that that is what she liked that about Alex—his brashness and confidence—and that by telling her his thoughts and anxieties about Alex, how he was smooth with other women, it would only solidify Laurie's attraction to Alex.

But instead all he said was, "I think you look really pretty."

"Jenkins, you're sweet, but—"

"I have to go."

*

Two seagulls spun around over the Chatique, helixing each other in the wind. No one else was on the bridge—Jenkins a quick flash of red windbreaker to a passing car. 124

Jenkins considered the banks of the river—the layers of mud and rock eaten away by the polluted water. Before the thruway ruined its flow, fish filled water flowed under the Greysville Bridge. Small flashes of gold in the dark green—the thrashing bellies of

Atlantic Salmon caught in northern currents. Now there was nothing, the reflectiveless film of its surface—an apt place as any to jump. Jenkins would disappear in the murk, only to rise again on his death's anniversary to terrorize summer lovers—an amorphous monstrosity smelling of earth and freshwater.

On either side of the river, miniature promontories edged over the brown water in sharp formations. Jenkins thought of the banks' waved strata—layers of packed mud unmoved for millennia, translucent fish bones and fossilized oyster shells braking off from the sediment—an inch every hundred years. Strata. Accumulation. A week before,

Jenkins helped load an eighteen wheeler with old technology. It was time off the phones, fresh air—team leaders drew names for people to help out. He and Alex worked side by side. Alex easily hefted two computer monitors at a time, working at twice the pace of

Jenkins. "Wavetech is getting an overhaul," Alex said, "We have to keep up. Systems become old the minute we take them out of the plastic." What we'll leave behind—layers of glass and plastic. Obsolete computer towers and the dead boxes of dust flecked laser printers. A million feet of fiber-optic wire, coiled and encased underground like ammonites.

*

Jenkins snapped out of it to the sharp snap of a truck losing its mirror. Drivers complained the lanes were too narrow on The Greysville Bridge, a danger. Made to carry the boxed width of horse drawn buggies, it didn't bode well for the veering chaos of rushed commuters. Every day someone lost a rearview mirror to one of its slanted pillars. Jenkins never liked taking his mom's car over Old Metal Man—sagged and heavy with old board and steel rivets, green with old paint and rotted algae that rode the surf in from the Bay of Fundy. Driving over its eighty-year-old frame, he heard the grunts and sighs of an old man easing into a bath. Going over particular rough spots in its two hundred yard span, he questioned his safety, the sounds becoming truly strained, his mind making wandering connections—the beating of clapboard shoeboxes, the shaking of old typewriter frames, the raking of chains across woodstoves—a tensed symphony of unhinged steel.

The rearview mirror from the truck had landed only a few feet from Jenkins. He picked it up and turned it in his hand. The mirror was totally gone, leaving a hollowed half-oval of tempered plastic and sprouting wires. He threw it into the Chatique.

After he jumped from the bridge, maybe they wouldn't find him. Jenkins imagined his parents looking, calling Wavetech; and then rain jacketed policemen fanning out behind St. Agnes' new subdivisions, meticulously wading through back fields and shallow streams, parting reeds like hair, scouring the undergrowth for torn clothes, the white hint of a leg bone. He thrilled for the taper-off—the last few months of search when his name appeared less and less in the papers. And then a jump ahead to some unknown future, a dusty excavation by creatures exploring our dead planet.

Jenkins: one wing of his wide ribcage sticking out of the mud like an upturned hand. 126

Jerusalem Engine

The manila envelope that held James Olsen's resume bent against the wind. He stood outside the doors of Wavetech Inc. freezing his ass off, wondering whether he should even go in. He'd used some word processor wizard to help him build up his resume. It took him hours just to figure out how to do it, what to put on it. The sections for Work Experience and Education seemed particularly daunting to him. He didn't recall ever doing up a resume until now. His only real job was working at the rail yards in

Molsen. And that job was gotten through his uncle Benjamin.

"You bitch once," his uncle had said on his first morning at the yard, "they'll tell you to go the fuck home."

"We can just thank the Lord that He found my son work," his mother had said.

And finding work had been hard enough in St. Agnes and Molsen in the eighties.

According to James' mother, it was both God who was punishing Maritimers for the recession, and God who found them work. In her small but severe voice, she told anyone who would listen that the hands of the Almighty were at work in all the comings and goings of the people she knew—the people she knew amounting to the meagre social simmer of St. Agnes. It was the Lord who cursed Manfred Olsen with a stroke because he drank too much. Larsen McCurty's acne was the mark of sin because he stole panties from the girl's change room. How she knew that one, James could never figure out.

James' father used to say that "Jean wielded that phone like a weapon. You can't keep her off the horn. Her and the hens." Roy Olsen was a large man—slim but hunched in taut muscle. He was the type who looked brooding, almost menacing, bent over breakfast tables and tax receipts. In a mind's eye still cadenced by child memories, James 127 saw his father constantly haloed in the blue haze of Export A. "That mother of yours.

Talk, talk, talk." To Roy, all his wife's friends were what he called hens—nameless women with tight curls that traded stacks of second-hand Harlequins. Once, James overheard his mother berating St. Agnes High School, the thick black plastic of the receiver large in her small hand.

"James got an F on his history paper," she said. "Can you believe that?

Apparently, Moses wasn't an historical figure in Mr. Perkins' mind. News to me! ...Well

Marilyn, that is exactly what I said. He's the principal for crying out loud... I may just do that. And between you and me, I helped him write it. I wrote the darned thing myself...

Well this is what I heard too. Perkins. He does jog around down an awful lot with that tanned fella. I saw him in a pink tie, once. And he's divorced to boot.... Agreed. Between you and me, it's really all they hire, that school: liberals that talk without much to say."

She would deny it, call herself humble—a quiet lady who kept to herself; but Jean

Olsen was the undisputed core for town talk and petty hearsay, a story-teller of unfounded information. He wasn't a reader, but James always thought his mother would make a good novelist.

*

James was a teenager when he started at the rail yards and was constantly ribbed by the older men. Although mostly in jest, there was an undertone of something else— anger or resentment at James' youth. Most of the guys were quiet, unhappy. It was if everyone working there knew the yard was going to shut down at any moment. When

James started, the place was already in various forms of dilapidation—the rusted flatcars and freight boxes tagged with graffiti, brown factory shops torn down or boarded up.

Overhanging the operation was a general sense of something wholly diminished. Crews were smaller than the prewar days of the steam locomotive shops—gandy dancers and car men slicked black with oil, wielding arm-length pipe wrenches.

"Used to be six thousand working these yards," his uncle had said, pulling into the parking lot. "Boys full of grease, happy as pigs in shit. My father worked the steamers— removing boilers, changing valve gears and coupling rods. His hands burned raw from hot steel. Good work though. A community of brethren. Now it's all diesel cars, has been for the past thirty-odd years—need maintenance maybe eight, ten hours a month. They don't need us like they used to."

On the first day, James had almost gotten in a fight with the foreman, a large red- faced brakeman everyone called Merry. He grabbed James by the shirt and yanked him away from a heavy duty electric drill. James was working two bolt holes in the side of some sheet metal.

"Could've got yourself killed!" James was holding the machine improperly, his worn jack shirt dangling over the spinning carbine.

"The motor in that thing'll tear the guts out of you."

"Well if this cocksucking equipment wasn't thirty-five years old, I wouldn't have to worry about exposed parts jumping up to rip my skin off."

"Excuse me, pretty? You best get the fuck back to work."

"Prettier than you, that's for sure. But I'm sure the faggots like to pinch those rosy cheeks a' yours."

Merry grabbed James and they were swinging each other around by their workshirts, kicking up dust and discarded engine parts. Luckily, Benjamin ran over to break it up before any punches were thrown, his welding mask still flipped down. 129

The rail yards shut down after James had been working there for two years. It had begun its steady decline in the sixties. Now the area was parking lots and a quaint VIA

Rail station—a small orange building where booking clerks, among candy machines and fake plants, checked luggage for trips to Halifax or Montreal. The red iron sprawl of the yards were dug up, hundreds of truckloads of rail and wood hauled away to unnamed scrap sites.

In times of boredom or desperation—too drunk at Chap's bar or before sleep—an image from that final day at the yards came back to James. The picture was of Ben, his uncle, sitting on a stack of plywood with his head in his hands, sobs racking his small frame. James had never seen his uncle cry, or his father for that matter. There was something disconcertedly incongruous about the scene—open weakness juxtaposed against a place usually defined by so little emotion, by short grunts about the weather or wages. Before he knew what he was doing, he walked over to Ben and put his hand on his shoulder.

"My father used to take me up to the switching tower," his uncle had said. "From up there, the tracks looked like a field of red veins branching out on a lung. That scene always floored me. Most of it gone now, the diesel shops and miles of rail." Years after, the city built an office building where some of the old rail yard used to be. James knew it was a call centre now—Corpora Technologies, a large 'CT' on the side of its glass paneled exterior.

"So this is it, I suppose," Ben had said to James on that last day. "I'll be some bored, now."

* 130

That was eight years ago. Since then, James bounced through odd jobs. He put in cupboards for neighbours, mowed lawns. For a few years, he worked at the St. Agnes

Subway serving cold cut combos to town workers on their lunch breaks. There were the days on at Molsen Meat Packers—ankle deep in cow's blood, sweeping up the blue veined tubes of innards, never to eat a hot dog again. He even stood outside of Dayside

Toyota dressed as a circus clown, holding a sign advertising their blitz on Corollas.

James had seen the article about Wavetech in a newspaper at Chap's. They were hiring two hundred new employees.

"Looks to be some work there, eh?" Grady said.

"Looks like not bad work," James said. "Money anyway. Says all you need is your high school."

"Well then I'm out." Grady shook into his drink, a forced and gravelly guffaw, phlegm-stringed and hacked—the laugh of the cancerous, the emphysemic. "All over the news. McKenna. Don't know about him. Never trust politicians myself, especially when it comes to jobs. And no thank you. Don't want to sit around talking to people I don't know over a computer."

"Decent money," James said. "Papers're saying up to 15.10 an hour"

"Yeah. Well. McKenna's our saviour. Pulling us out an economic slump, they say. I don't buy it. You may—you're young. But I don't. We've been toast since the late eighties. Been no work for too long. Don't think he can do shit if you ask me."

"I guess."

"Speak of the devil." Grady nodded at Richard, the manager and usual bartender of Chap's, to turn the TV up. 131

"We are rapidly approaching the new millennium," McKenna said; his voice was calm, confident. "Telecommunications will give New Brunswick a brighter economic future in a fast-paced, technology-based world. These will be skill-based jobs." His voice

seemed weakened cutting into the dense air of Chap's.

"Chirping," Grady said. "All it is. Flapping his mouth. Job security? The turn- over rates in those places's so high. They'll come here and then they'll leave. Millions of taxpayer's money down the toilet. Steady work until McKenna cuts off the government incentives and the companies pack it up. Then we have another broke-down building that kids go to screw and drink in, just like the rail yards. Don't they give these jobs to the

Pakis? The A-rabs?"

"Jesus, Grady, take it easy," Rich called from behind the bar.

"Oh and you're some angel, Rich. You get sweating when a black fella walks in your bar."

"Two more draught. Then you're cut off."

"You always say that, Rich. Anyway—McKenna will get his workers. But they won't be working for the wages they say they're getting. Hell, maybe I should bring a resume down there. Just for the hell of it. Maybe I'll see some old buddies." Grady was hitting the table, again hacking with laughter. It cut short when he looked at the TV soberly—McKenna shaking hands with an assembled crowd. "Turn that shit off now,

Rich."

*

James checked his watch. The interview was in thirty minutes. He had been outside Wavetech before sun-up. Nervous and unable to sleep, he had left his apartment and wandered Riverbend Rd. in the grey hours of early morning. The snow hadn't been 132 plowed yet. The entrance he was told to go into was at the back of the building. James

could see small dirt paths between the pines lining the parking lot. If you took the north path through that woods far enough you would come out a block from Chap's. It occurred to James now that he had stumbled through this parking lot countless times on his way back to his apartment. He'd probably even pissed his name in the snow with Grady right where he was standing, laughing drunkenly while their booze fumes evaporated in the winter air.

That night at Chap's, Grady was drunk and reluctant to finish his tirade, even after

Rich turned the channel to the Leafs game. "They'll be openings soon on my shift.

Construction—now there's good fucking work. We got drywall jobs all over St. Agnes and Molson. Hell, we even got some commercial job up in Shediac. But no, you sit on your ass all day talking into a phone, typing at a box."

"I'll think about it." He would, but a part of him didn't like the idea. James was sick of labour. He wasn't big like Grady, didn't like lifting things—the awkward heft of wood or shingles.

"Well, do what you want. Or work at a box, believe McKenna's shit show. My construction offer is on the table. I'm going to shoot some pool." Satisfied with his speech, Grady stood up and downed his draught, slamming it back on the table.

James watched Grady place a five on the pool table. Grady was good but James knew he would lose. They had grown up on Peach St. together and James knew Grady better than anyone, could gauge his volatile temper. It wasn't the drunkenness that would throw off his nine-ball game—it was his anger. Anger with the jacked-up draught prices at Chap's, with his job, with the town in general. 133

And anger with women. Years ago, Grady was dumped by Julie, his high school

sweetheart, for "some college asshole." It was obvious to James he never got over it. Any man in their early twenties not living in St. Agnes—who had left or were simply visiting—was, in Grady's mind, "some college asshole." It didn't matter whether they actually attended college. It was the name he used for people not stuck like he was.

"Can't win," he had said. "Slow death of the blue collar worker. We're a dying breed. Isn't there still respect in fucking laying drywall anymore? I'm making good coin.

Women. Who knows what they want."

James thought Grady's pride was naive. There was no romance in staying in St.

Agnes, tipping draught with men he went to high school with and their fathers. He wanted to punch Grady when he talked like that.

James wasn't dense enough to think Wavetech would give him the future he wanted. But it was a start. The newspapers said the money was good. And the work was easy.

Standing under the morning sky, James took off his lambskin gloves and looked at his callused hands. They were yellow and waxy under the parking lot lights.

It was time to go in. He leaned into the metal door, smelling the clean office smell of running printers and Windexed computer screens.

*

Megan Laine was thirty-two but looked older—her face was gaunt, almost expressionless. She was solemn and small and looked like the type who baked, wore rouge and lavender—a woman antiqued before her time.

She sat beside James in the Wavetech waiting room with a stack of binders— training information and computer manuals. She told him she wasn't waiting for an interview. She was on break and liked to meet possible newbies. She had been at the call centre for years. She had the top measured words per minute at Wavetech. It was impossible to know how this got out—some errant kernel of knowledge and fact that evolved at institutions like call centres.

"A one thirty-four," she told James. "Although that isn't much. The world's fastest is somewhere around two hundred. At any rate, the speed helps me tell my visions."

"Excuse me?"

"My visions. I know I say that with an overabundance of pride, of ownership. My visions. But it's visions for everyone, to everyone. The Lord Jesus Christ speaks to me. I have a website."

"God talks to you?"

"He talks to all of us," she said. "But I listen."

"Right. Mom does too."

"God bless. God bless. I will tell you something because you have that kind of face. The face of a sheep, a little leaguer. I know these things. The Son of Man speaks to me. Of course I know these things. So I will tell you."

James looked down at his resume to hide his embarrassment.

"I do something quite ingenious," she said. "I use Wavetech's web server to promote my visions. I have internal passwords. I hack the newsletter. I carry codes. I'm under the radar, clandestine. Upper management types cringe when they see what Jesus has said unto me each week. They think it's an outside force—a bloated commercial hacker maybe, a geek terrorist trying to subvert the communications infrastructure. A criminal and a man. This is probably an aggrieved ex-employee, they say. Aggrieved. This is the word they use. But what's ironic is I like my job—the opportunities it affords me. I bring Nanaimo bars to the social club BBQs. My team leader invites me to lunch.

"Every week a myriad of Wavetech agents in our seven locations read my mystical conversations, my heavenly transcriptions. A young man in our Mississauga location cries when he reads Christ's words told unto me. He sits in his workstation and weeps for our future.

"I hear Jesus at odd times—He tells me about our fears, about how His next visit won't be pretty, so to speak. This all sounds haughty—full posturing and brag. But I want people to hear my message. His message, Amen."

"I thought most religious people don't like computers," James said.

"Technology and Christianity have much in common. It's about fear, awe. We fear technology as much as our own spirituality—the smiting hand of God. Y2K. Floods.

The apocalypse. It's all mixed in. But why do we embrace both our cell phones and our crosses? We need fear. It's productive fear."

"Mom hates technology," James said. "She doesn't embrace both."

"But in some ways she does. Like many, she has to rely on technology to enforce her faith. Christianity is now a faith of empiricism. DNA tests of bleeding statues. Fiber analysis on the Shroud of Turin. Scientists hunched over microscopes looking for the ancestry of Jesus."

James fidgeted in his seat. He wanted to leave, go to Chap's, talk hockey or women. He pictured Megan on her days off, tapping out passages on her keyboard, bug- eyed and malnourished; a hunched ascetic in a tiny room filled with stacks of half emptied computer towers hemorrhaging blocky circuitry; her screen bathing her in an

LCD glow—the extraterrestrial light of glow-in-the-dark Mary statues. 136

"When does He talk to you?" James said. "Does He talk to you at work?"

"Funny you ask. The visions, His voice, come to me frequently here. The call centre is a very spiritual place. Let me explain. We do the same thing everyday—in a way, we talk to the same person fifty, one hundred times a day. There is no movement towards some event, some death. It is a plotless place. This feeling of boredom and repetition breeds belief, faith. Religious attachment lifts us out of that sense of non-being, that sense of suspended time we experience when making our calls and sales. At

Wavetech we need God, if only to break the shiftless day-to-day.

"There are points of communication—loci where visionaries can interact. I have links to other religious websites. There are thousands—a centreless visionary network. I have other call centre connections, too—'The Call Centre Mystics' we call each other.

Listen: an agent working at Aria Solutions in Halifax sees the Madonna and Child on her workstation computer. Another at our Wavetech location in Windsor sees Christ's face in the bled lines of a botched inkjet print-out—blotted, shroudish. Reports in call centres around the Maritimes, around the world—visions spat out on fax machines, aberrations of code in e-mails—the hooded Virgin, her tilted head; the Son, scrounged with upturned eyes. Ecce Homo.

"Here's the address to my website." She handed James a folded piece of paper.

"You'll find a record of all my past visions. And keep an eye out in the Wavetech newsletter, it will come up when you log on—I will be known only as 'The Bishop.'

Many at Wavetech are already making the pilgrimage while not moving at all. His words and the words of the Mother, hypertexted and boundless. Thousands of computers linked in networks, in call centres. This is the new Christianity." James looked at her, trying to find some sense of mischief in her face—a bored

secretary trying to hoodwink him. But Megan was deadpan. James thought she was

attractive in a homey way. He wanted her the way he wanted the lovely girls from high

school—the pale and overdressed ones, clutching poems in stickered notebooks, crushing

on their male teachers.

"What do you do here?" James said. "You a customer service agent? You got any

work to do?"

"I think your name is being called," she said.

*

The woman who interviewed him was named Shelly. Shelly was slim and hoop earrings dangled against her neck. She wore a black sweater vest with a white blouse underneath, fitted and stylish—her business casualness and professional coiffure down to a T. James felt slow, hickish in her presence—an ass-pinching dullard. The process went quickly—easy questions about how he would handle an irate customer, how he would describe his work ethic. James imagined they went through dozens of applicants in a day—guys just like him, sitting nervously in polo-shirts and wrinkled dress pants. He did a computer test. He'd used Windows a few times at friends' houses—he even had an e- mail address. His typing proficiency was low—he stumbled through writing a timed paragraph, typing with pointed index fingers, but managed to pass. After a few questions about sales experience and computer skills, Shelly surprised him.

"If your criminal check goes through, you can expect a call from us next week.

Everything seems to be in order here."

"So I got the job?" James felt silly, over-eager when he really wasn't. Shelly chuckled, slipping his resume into a large file folder. "Nothing is set in

stone," she said. "But put it this way—I don't see any reason why you won't be on the phones in the next few weeks."

"Thanks." He forgot to ask about pay.

James had no idea why they chose him. Before entering the building, James viewed the call centre industry as something close to inaccessible. If you needed connections to get on at the yard, he thought getting a job at Wavetech would be next to impossible. He assumed anyone he knew working there had some special skill that had got them on. Now he was going to sit at a workstation, have a computer. It was a threshold he never thought he would cross. Sometimes James went into the mall to get

Tim Horton's and always walked by the windows of Wavetech. It was an odd, shadowed place to him—always closed off with white office blinds. He saw employees enter with electronic scan cards. And, in spite of himself, he wondered what went on in there. Its interior was a fuzzy image in his mind—a concept outside his plane of experience. The call centre represented a mythology of the future he wasn't quite a part of. Now he would scan in with the rest of them.

*

Hours after the interview James stood swaying outside of Chap's. Some part of him registered that it was getting dark out. He'd missed lunch—the only thing now in his stomach was draught and the soft, cold beans from that morning. He also recalled having a shot of rum with Barry, a local drunk he had worked with at the yards.

"Something about you I like, kiddo," Barry had said to James, nearly falling off one of the scuffed stools in Chap's. One of Barry's suspenders had come undone and he kept trying to reattach it to his jeans. It would snap back, nearly taking his eye out. James had decided to go to the bar for a few cold draught after the interview. Just a couple. To celebrate. Hours ago, on his way through the path behind St. Agnes Mall, it occurred to him he needed new shoes, a haircut, a few more pairs of dress pants. Now, his optimism diluted with a day's worth of alcohol, he knew that he didn't have money for any of those things.

"You're gonna do just fine, boy-o," Barry said. "Just fine." It occurred to James that Barry looked like Grady. Or Grady looked like him. An older version of Grady—the sarcastic lean of a smirk rounded at the edges with a few more creases. But the resemblance wasn't familial. It wasn't blood semblance but the semblance of environment—hard work or no work and smoky nights in paneled taverns. A lot of the old fellas looked like Grady. Like us, James thought. We'll move into their skin before we know it, he thought. We're halfway there. "You'll do jus' fine, I'm telling you," Barry said again.

James wasn't so sure. Especially now, walking home to his apartment at four thirty in the afternoon, head spinning. At least it was Friday. Lots of guys he knew got tanked everyday of the week. And why not?

He had left Chap's when it started to fill up. The younger weekend crowd only reminded James of something he used to be a part of. They laughed around the pool table and played drinking games with playing cards. The guys rested their hands on the lower backs of their girls—girls in tight sweaters and tighter jeans. A lot of them probably worked at Wavetech—making enough money to scrape by, get drunk on the weekends.

They seemed happy, and that's all James had to go on. 140

There was blood on his jacket arm. James had almost forgotten: leaving wasn't his own choice; he was asked. "And take your drunk father with you," Rich had said. But

Barry wasn't his father.

It was that kid's blood on his arm. The kid was being mouthy. The tussle took place at the front, right up at the bar. James was getting himself and Barry another pitcher. The kid kept elbowing him in the back.

"Stop. Stop, you shit."

"What the hell did you say to me?" The kid whispered in his ear.

James put down his fresh pitcher on the VLT machine beside him. Without looking back James threw his elbow with all his weight behind it. He felt the nub of the kid's nose, along with his glasses, snap under the quick stab of his arm. A quick gasp from the kid and he went down, rolling on the floor and holding his face. James saw a

Wavetech scan card now flecked with mucus and blood hanging from the kid's neck.

Outside and away from the screaming kids at Chap's, James looked over at the brick building of St. Agnes Mall, most of it now leased by Wavetech. The building looked ominous in the oncoming dark. There were still hundreds inside, making calls and receiving them, the low tap of countless hands drumming across keyboards. He didn't feel good about his new job anymore.

In his drunkenness, James perceived some kernel of vital knowledge to his person: he wasn't like that kid he hit that afternoon, his friends and their girls. They were young, they knew how to talk to people, how to navigate Wavetech and McKenna's

"fast-paced, technology based world." When Shelly called to offer him the job, he would turn it down. Grady was right: Wavetech would probably shut down. It was no place for a rail yard worker. At Wavetech, he'd have to deal with kids like the one this afternoon. He 141 didn't even own a computer. He didn't know how to sell shit. He decided he would ask

Grady about that construction job. What else could he do? That is what he did, had done.

There was a shallow comfort in that—cursing through flood jobs, tearing apart moldy basements. He'd roof houses in the summer, get in better shape, earn a tan. Him and

Grady going for beers after doing overtime.

But maybe it wasn't what he wanted—he didn't know. He thought of eight hours a day with Grady, his developing gut and cat calls, then the shift-end drinking that would surely take place. Grady, left forearm draped out of his pickup, driving half drunk in the sun. Maybe he should just stick with Wavetech. I spend enough time with that guy, he thought. He didn't know what to do.

James turned away from Wavetech, his shadow jumping along the rutted snowdrifts as he walked.

*

James turned on his TV, saw McKenna on Live at Five. His face, along with everything else on the screen, was tinted red. It was if the conference room he and his cronies were in was submerged under blood-stained water. He hit the side of the box but the picture didn't change. The TV had once been his parents. They had given it to him knowing he couldn't afford his own.

"We don't watch the thing—always bad news, anyway," his dad had said, heaving the bulky Magnavox into James' arms.

His parents had never liked technology. His mother barely hid her view that new technologies were a clear sign of end times. She didn't know what the internet was, but was sure it harboured some sort of inherent evil. 142

"That McKenna," she'd say, her hands raised in supplication, "getting involved in tele-whatever-you-call-it, it's no good. That isn't work."

"Well Jean, it's work for our boy." James' father, with fifty years in carpentry,

still knew the value of a job opportunity. He prided himself in reading two different

national papers—he knew when the economy wasn't looking so hot.

"That isn't work. Idle hands are the Devil's tools, Roy."

"First of all, mom, my hands won't be idle," James said. "I will be taking care of people's accounts. I'll be making data entries. I'll have my own login codes."

"Whatever that means. You'll be sitting all day's my point."

He remembered stories his mother, a well-read woman, had told him as a boy.

Odd bed-time stories about cloistered monks preaching the return of Christ. Franciscans co-opting new technologies, thinking it would bring them closer to the perfection the

Lord would want from them, to triumph over the Antichrist. Roger Bacon sketching early concepts for airplanes and automobiles in dusty chapel rooms. Her stories, with their biblical diction and sad men, scared him and comforted him at the same time. And it was always the enlightened that got in trouble in his mom's versions. "The Lord wants only our hearts, Jamie," she'd say. "Men with bombs and planes don't help us any. Especially at the time when He comes to judge us."

Watching McKenna, James wondered if he didn't inherit some of his mother's millenarian anxieties. The idea of the call centre intimidated James, but there was something else. It was only a few years until the twenty-first century—maybe these new spaces were a sign. He imagined Christ descending from the clouds in a blinding light— the way his mother said it would happen, "like the most beautiful sunset." Bland cliches from his youth, but still frightening to him. Would He smite those who sat at computers, 143 those who became small gods when they connected across data lines James didn't understand? The call centre seemed a purgatorial place to him in the low light of his apartment, unnatural. Not the realm of work or play, but something new.

The bible he had since Confirmation was in a drawer in his kitchen. He knew exactly where it was—covered under car magazines and spent matchbooks in that token drawer for built-up household detritus, always a few drawers below the cutlery. James remembered the priest handing it to him with both hands, his fingers so pale they were almost a light blue. "This is a great gift," he had said. James had looked through it with mild interest—the only bible he'd ever owned. It was one of those editions with the black plastic covers, the only lettering on the front spelling out Holy Bible in gold.

Upstairs, he flipped through it at random. It opened to the Book of Chronicles, an obscure book he was never forced to study. He looked down, read the first passage his eyes found:

And he made in Jerusalem engines, invented by cunning men,

to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and

great stones withal. And his name spreadfar abroad; for he

was marvellously helped, till he was strong.

He dropped the book, then felt silly and put it back into its drawer.

James' drunk was turning into a dull, crawling thing in his head. He chuckled to himself and turned off the TV, McKenna's face fading out to a small red-white birthmark that stayed on the screen.

*

James grabbed at his phone, still half asleep, knocking the cradle onto the floor in the process. It was 10 AM. He had slept on the couch again. His room had become a 144 repository of old things—mounds of dusty work shirts and boxes of unpacked kitchenware. His bed was the centre of the mess—there was a dresser missing its drawers atop of it, along with a broken record player, its receiver and speakers. Since leaving his parents house, James felt as if he were in a perpetual state of moving-in.

"Hello, James. This is Shelly from Wavetech, Inc. How are you?"

"Who's this?"

"Shelly Murphy. From Wavetech. I gave you your interview."

"Oh, ok."

"I'm happy to let you know we can offer you a position as customer service representative for Telcom Mobility. Congratulations. It starts at 8.70 an hour and goes up to 9.50 after the training period."

"Wait, the papers said 15—. Anyway. Listen, Shelly? I'm not really cut out for call centre work. I'm sure it's a great job but I'm good for now. I got a construction thing."

"Are you sure? It's a great opportunity—" But James hung up.

*

James got a call from Grady a few days later.

"Got some bad news, buddy."

"You don't have any work for me," James said.

"It's just we don't need anyone right now. Benson's been hiring all these old fellas. Experience, he says they have. I'm sorry, James."

Somehow, James had a feeling it would happen this way. He'd known Grady since high school and he'd always been unreliable. There had been many times where

Grady said he would get him things—booze when they were underage, dates when they 145 didn't have any. Grady: moody and overweight, scratching his unshaven jaw, leering at the college girls. But James knew it wasn't really Grady's fault so much as his own frustration. Grady just personified for James that time of his life—a kind of late-nineties slowness—the daily exhaustion of opportunities that didn't pan out. He would have to crawl back to Wavetech.

*

One his first day, James was brought into a room lined with computers. There were about ten other people—all sitting awkwardly, spinning in swivel chairs. One looked about eighteen, snapping gum. She smiled at James.

"First call centre gig?" she said.

"Yup."

"Have fun." She twirled her gum around her index finger; to James, the gesture made her look tremendously bored and sexy.

"What do you mean 'Have fun'?"

"Just try and stay through training, at least."

"Right."

"Me, I'm doing the rounds."

"The rounds, eh?" James smirked.

"Perv. No. I mean, the rounds. Applying to all the call centres in St. Agnes and

Molsen just to do the training." She leaned forward conspiratorially. "Tons of people do it. You just stay for the paid training before they give you shitty on-floor hours. You doze in your seat for three, maybe four, weeks, then quit when they send you on the floor to make actual calls. This is the fourth call centre I've hit up this year."

"We should go for a drink sometime." 146

"I won't be here long enough," she said.

James noticed another trainee—an older lady who folded her arms around giant breasts, her squat, spandexed legs dangling from her chair. She looked around the room with terror in her eyes.

The next to show up was the kid from the bar. His nose was encased in a small plastic device. There was a small purplish dab of bruise under each eye. He wore new glasses and tried not to look directly at James.

"I'm Chris," he said. "Your trainer for the duration of the training period."

*

James and Chris got into it on the second day. It started when Chris shook a magic marker in James' face, asked him to please come up and finish the drawing of the model Wavetech employee.

"Not much of an artist," James said to his shoes.

"Oh c'mon, I bet you're a regular Picasso."

"Nope," he said. "Not doing it."

"No pressure. It's just how you view the model employee here at Wavetech. Do you think you could be a model employee, James?" Chris smirked, although James could see it hurt him to. When he smiled, the plastic brace rode up the bridge of his nose.

"Ask someone else," James said.

"Do you think a model employee assaults people?" Chris' smile was now a false grin. His cheeks flushed.

You flew off the table, man. Literally launched off it. This James heard from one of the trainees he ran into days later at Chap's. You went for his throat. 147

James was bigger and Chris had his guard down. He collapsed underneath him. It felt to James like he jumped on a small teenager—all flinch and bone. There was a commotion around them—fifteen trainees half-rising from their seats in shock. The gum chewer, her construction paper nametag reading "Becky," leaned back, re-crossed her legs under her short skirt. "Finally something exciting," she said.

James pulled Chris up from under him. "Fight, buddy! You didn't at the bar. I'll give you a chance." They had each other by the shirt, Chris' polo torn at the shoulder.

Trainees watched the tense staggering of two men who wouldn't let go of each other.

They walked into the stand that held the newsprint. Brown sheets floated to the carpet— coloured point-form lists done in Chris's cramped printing: Common Rebuttals for Up-

Selling, Benefits of Telcom Cell Phone Plans, Common Harassment Issues. The sketch of the model employee was half finished—his headset was on and he was sitting up straight in a chair—Model employees don't slouch, it read. They also don't chew gum and always wear their headset while logged in to their workstation.

It struck James as odd—fighting in this context. James was not a stranger to fights—he couldn't remember how many he and Grady had started or jumped in on. But they normally happened in the dimness of barrooms, the wooded back lots of garages, house parties. He could see too many details—the sweat breaking out on the kid's forehead, his eyelashes wet with tears of anger and adrenaline. There were discolorations on his scan card—scrubbed bloodstains from the incident at the bar.

"Alright gentlemen, break it up." Chris was the first to turn towards the voice at the door.

"Megan, this—" 148

Fragments of his nose brace cut into James' fist. James remembered his uncle saying a nose broken a second time bleeds worse—she opens up like a waterfall, he had said. An arc of blood sprayed a row of computer monitors. A women now stained across the chest danced in silent scream, shaking her hands in a disgusted flutter, alternating between "Gross" and "Oh my god"—her voice high pitched, metronomic.

Megan Laine, saviour and visionary, calmly led the woman by the shoulder and out of the room.

Chris writhed on the floor, the collar of his shirt soaked through with his own blood. "I'm pressing charges. I'm pressing fucking charges." Tears were streaming down his already swelling face.

Megan was now herding the rest of Wavetech's new trainees out of the room. The hallway was now a confusion of men and women yelling for security and idly rubbernecking—peeking on tiptoe into the training room.

Becky giggled. "Can we go for a smoke break" she said.

"Listen," James said to Megan. "He was egging me on. I shouldn't be here, anyway."

"The Lord forgives," said Megan.

"Not that shit again."

"But He does. Plus, Chris was bound to get his."

"That doesn't sound very Christian."

"What can I say?"

James left the room, shouldering through the crowd outside the door. He wondered if he would still be paid for the two days he was in training. Maybe financial would find some loophole, some contractual aberration that allowed for the withholding 149 of wages in the case of violent employees. He forgot where the exit was. Wavetech was an unknown labyrinth of windowed offices, grey walls and computers; utterly contained.

There were no windows to the outside. James saw Wavetech as some modern mansion, with all the dead-ended wings and moveable walls of haunted castles. Every hallway's ceiling bisected with glowing tubes, some naked of plastic covering, pulsing like headached temples. He could tell he was no longer close to the open spaces where the agents made their calls—here it was all hallway, some parts in various states of disrepair and construction, dusted with gyprock pulp—its incongruities with the rest of the polished, overly clean building indirectly suggested escape. It was somehow familiar to

James. He couldn't tell if this area of the building was being destroyed or renovated.

There were tools and paint, left over sandwich wrappers and pop cans—evidence of construction. Yet there were parts of the hallways, alcoves, and rooms that seemed old— an archaic sheen to them. He sat on a paint can. He wished he were outside, surrounded by the streets and houses he knew.

James noticed an odd abnormality in the wall across from him—a three foot span where plaster and gyprock was half torn exposing the struts and wires inside the wall.

Behind that, there seemed to be an even older wall—plywood that looked to be spray painted with odd numbers and symbols, perhaps codes that told builders where to put what. Or perhaps the mythical language of the builders, ways to mark themselves—runes on Asiatic temples. How old is this building? James thought. Before Wavetech, it was part of the St. Agnes Shopping Centre, and before that, did it exist? Did this room exist?

It took him a few seconds to see a darker pattern that had formed—Christ's face in gaunt and blurred agony, three feet high. James guessed it was the result of mould, water-damage, or some other environmental irregularity—the chaos of natural phenomena. He wished Megan were here to somehow gauge its importance, read the shape's crude significance.

James leaned in. From too close a distance, it was merely a stain—the ill-defined shadows of stained basement walls and carpets. Closer still, its edges were spotted, irregular—tiny green-black flourishes. He stood back again, hand on chin. Did it really look like Christ? The face was partly obscured by the shadow of the outer wall. It was an unforgiving rendering, not beautiful in the least, James thought. This Christ was sepulchral, somehow condemning.

Something he read in the newspaper some weeks ago came back to him—another miracle, a vision. He can't believe he didn't think of it when he met Megan. But it was one of those things read and immediately forgotten, a daily variation like an odd piece of junk mail, an important historical date; something stored in the periphery of our brains, an informational hiccup to be thrown out if unused. He had bought The Times and

Transcript to read about McKenna—his grinning face on the cover, hazy. But it was the small piece in the Life and Times section that he remembered now. Mavis Oldes from

Connecticut—Elvis fan, decorative plate collector, heiress to a fortune in Styrofoam manufacturing—found Jesus on her French toast. In swirls of egg white and cinnamon,

Jesus with crown of thorns leaned his head in questioning devotion. "I fell to my knees on the kitchen floor. I didn't feel silly. I don't think anyone should. This kind of stuff happens for a reason. I'm giving most of my money to charity, now."

"I saw Jesus once," his mom had said to him during a childhood bible reading.

"His robes were that blue you can't look at—like the blue at the bottom of a candle flame." James never took her seriously. He always thought it was symbolic religious talk like the "Jesus is in all of us" bumper stickers he saw on rusted station wagons. Besides, 151 his mother said things like that all the time. If she could meet Megan, his mother would listen to Megan's talk of visions with squint-faced awe, even jealousy.

The room was lit by one grilled construction light left on by workers gone home.

Although bright, it gave the Christ image a shadowed look. The image had the odd effect of moving in and out of some plane of perception or belief. At one point, it looked like nothing at all, a washed blemish. Yet, a slight tilt of the head, a moment where attention waned and came back again, it was the Christ, a near perfect black and grey likeness.

James heard doors, footsteps.

"Jesus. James?" It was Grady's voice. "What the hell are you doing in this part of the building?"

"What are you doing here? You don't work here." Then it made sense to James:

Grady was doing a construction job for Wavetech. "So, helping to put this place together?"

"They're looking for you. You kicked some guy's ass."

"Same dick techie I hit from the bar. He's my boss or something."

"What are you looking at? I need to put up new dry wall on that side."

"Do you see anything?"

Grady looked at the spot where James was staring. "Water damage," he said.

Sliding over a sheet of drywall, he covered the hole. CURRICULUM VITAE

Candidate's full name: Daniel John Jacobs

Universities Attended: Saint Mary's University (2002-2006) BA (Hon.) in English