Difficult People

by Catriona Wright

  Difficult

  People

  2018

  Copyright © Catriona Wright, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, info@accesscopyright.ca.

  Nightwood Editions

  P.O. Box 1779

  Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0

  Canada

  www.nightwoodeditions.com

  Editor: Amber McMillan

  Cover design: Emma Dolan

  Typography: Carleton Wilson

  Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,

  ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free

  and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada.

  ISBN 978-0-88971-339-0

  Contents

  Content Moderator 9

  The Unofficial Calculation Museum 21

  Uncle Harris 33

  The Emilies 45

  Lean into the Mic 57

  Constant Weight Without Fins 73

  Love Lasts Forever but a Tattoo Lasts Longer 85

  The Copy Editors 99

  Olivia and Chris 111

  Difficult People 127

  Major Prude 139

  Them 153

  Notes and Acknowledgements 169

  About the Author 171

  Content Moderator

  A toy airplane crammed between open legs, pale blue wings resting against pink labia. A dirty terrier whimpering while boots stomp and kick, and off-screen teenagers laugh. A dick, a bigger, veinier dick. An ornate swastika tattooed on a flabby back. A beautiful woman with immaculate eye makeup of swirling aubergine and charcoal shadows, wearing a tight black dress, both arms lifted, revealing lustrous auburn armpit hair. A pool of blood, maroon and shining. Two girls, at most thirteen, expressions blurred with alcohol or drugs, flashing a group of cheering men. A cockroach artfully splayed on a pillow. Another girl, even younger, eyes puffy and swollen with tears, holding a broken vodka bottle to her neck. A man, hooded in black and on his knees with another man behind him, screaming and gesturing with a rusted machete.

  Clicking and clicking, I deleted most of the customer-reported images and videos, allowing the armpit hair and the cockroach to stay. I glanced at the clock. Break time. I closed my eyes and tried to separate myself from the chaos on the monitor. I imagined blasting the images from my brain before they had a chance to set down roots. I imagined plucking out my eyeballs and soaking them in a vat of antiseptic.

  Opening my eyes, I nodded at my supervisor, who nodded back, tapping her watch as a warning not to exceed my time. I walked down a long aisle between other content moderators clicking and clicking, sighing and wincing, clicking and clicking, shaking their heads and chuckling, clicking and clicking, mumbling and chugging spiked energy drinks. Zoe wasn’t in her seat, probably off on one of her many breaks. She took more breaks than anyone, at least seven a day, and in my darker moments, I suspected she was pleasuring the supervisor for favours.

  The fluorescent lights hummed. The air conditioner whined. In the corner stood a ping pong table in pristine condition, and there were three plump bean bag chairs huddled around a flat screen television, the company’s sad attempt at creating an inviting, homey atmosphere. As if anything could make us want to hang out here more than we had to. Everyone escaped the building on their breaks and we all maintained sterile work areas with no pictures of spouses or kids, no Cathy cartoons or succulents. We feared a porous border, this soiled universe seeping into our own.

  Before I could stomach my egg salad sandwich and orange, I took a short walk outside, through the strip mall landscape whose blandness would, I hoped, soften the impact of a morning spent ensuring the customers who used our app were sheltered from the bestiality, child pornography, gore, filth and infinite misery that swarmed in from all over the globe. Why hadn’t Zoe warned me before I started? Why hadn’t she said anything before I saw my first beheading?

  This job doesn’t appear on career aptitude tests or in teenage diaries. It’s nobody’s first choice. My first choice was English professor. After a childhood of feeling acutely alone, my only escape the many hours I spent at the local library reading novels about magical orphans dying of tuberculosis, I’d considered it my calling to swap literary insights with other people like me.

  I was deluded.

  Ph.D. in hand, I could only find poverty-wage work as a contract composition instructor chastising first-year students for comma splices, and when my class sizes doubled, then tripled, and when I stopped being able to discern an A paper from a fail, and when one pint after work every day became six, and when I showed up to class thirty minutes late after a morning spent rubbing antibiotic ointment on self-inflicted cigarette burns, I was called into the program director’s spacious and sunlit office.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” she asked, misting her aloe vera plant, an enormous green crown.

  “A tenure-track position in Canadian literature became available?” I said hopefully.

  She handed me a pile of student evaluations. “She seems hammered all the time,” read one. “Her grading is totally random,” another. “She should try to dress more professionally, like pencil skirts and lipstick.” Someone had drawn a caricature of me as a bespectacled devil radiating stink squiggles and piercing a student with a pitchfork.

  “At least I look skinny,” I said.

  I left that afternoon, the student’s portrait my only memento.

  The next two months were pizza and YouTube videos of cats careening around on Roombas or tumbling down slides, a fugue state broken only when I received an angry email from my landlord demanding rent. My credit cards were maxed out and my parents—recently retired and still disappointed in my lack of employment, perceived as my giving up on academia—didn’t have the means or desire to support me. I needed a job. I fiddled with my resumé, changing the font from Times New Roman to Garamond, then back again. Eventually I landed some interviews at temp agencies.

  “We’ll call you,” a human resources manager named Barbara or Brian would say, shaking my hand, and then I would spend the next week with my phone on my pillow or in my pocket, the ringtone turned up as high as it would go. I would ask my parents and friends to dial my number, just to be sure my phone wasn’t broken.

  Then, on a particularly low day, I received a Facebook message from Zoe, a high school friend. Even though I hadn’t spoken to her in over a decade, I still knew a lot about her because we followed each other on social media. For example, I knew she was recently divorced and had a two-year-old son named Aiden. I knew she drank green smoothies and favoured yoga pants with celestial or geometric prints. I found it strange that she’d contacted me after all these years, but I had fond memories of our time on the swim team together and I assumed she was in need of a friend. It’s difficult to meet new people as an adult. I agreed to have coffee with her at a place near my apartment.

  Zoe, in sweatshirt and intergalactic leggings, greeted me warmly, though it seemed to take great effort. She ordered two extra shots in her latte. Jumpy
and frazzled, she bore no resemblance to the girl I remembered as bright, witty and fierce, a girl who guzzled Southern Comfort and dared all the boys to arm-wrestle. She looked exhausted, almost haggard, with jutting cheekbones and pronounced bags under her eyes. She spoke in wistful jags and digressions about our mutual friends, often forgetting people’s names or ending stories abruptly, which at the time I attributed to new motherhood. Her dishevelment charmed me and made me trust her more, relieved she wasn’t the healthful, optimistic dynamo she played on social media.

  “I heard you might be looking for work,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “The academy, the economy, you know how it is…” I blathered self-consciously, unable to overcome the suspicion that my inability to secure a tenure-track job somehow indicated a profound moral failing rather than circumstances beyond my control.

  “I might have something for you at my work.”

  “Really?” I said, taking a long sip of my drink in a bid to suppress my eagerness.

  “It’s tiring,” she said pensively. “But the pay is great and the people are wonderful.”

  When she spoke, she avoided eye contact, which I assumed was because she knew I had a Ph.D. and was embarrassed to suggest something that didn’t align with my higher self, unaware that I had already given up.

  “It can’t be worse than reading the same paper three hundred times.” By tiring, I thought Zoe just meant dull, repetitive.

  “Right,” she said, laughing too loud and for too long. “So you’re ready then?”

  Later that week, Zoe prepped me for the interview with strict and exacting instructions: “Describe a time you felt pressured at work,” Zoe asked in interviewer mode, her posture suddenly impeccable.

  “What exactly will I be doing?” I asked. When she’d first told me about the job, I’d gotten the impression it was more or less guaranteed as long as she gave a recommendation, so this role-playing struck me as redundant and potentially demeaning. It turned out I still had some residual pride.

  “Data management, data entry, cataloguing images, archiving,” Zoe said, flustered, her voice raised. “Are you going to take this seriously or not?”

  I suspected there was more to it than that, but I didn’t want to push her, not when she was so clearly aggravated and when I so clearly needed employment. Besides, I knew how hard it could be to describe your work to someone else when you knew so much and your interlocutor so little. I’d spent years in a dusty carrel enraptured with my thesis on chronology in Alice Munro stories, which I suspected no one, not even my committee, had understood.

  On the day of the interview, I arrived fifteen minutes early, freshly showered and lightly caffeinated. I assured the interviewer—a severe man I never encountered again—that I coped well with stress, that I didn’t take my work home with me, that I sought help whenever I felt overwhelmed, that after watching horror films I slept deeply with soothing dreams of beaches and children frolicking in the surf. This person I’d concocted sounded like a sociopath. I got the job.

  A calico cat with singed whiskers snarling at a man holding a candle to her face. A circumcised dick, an uncircumcised dick. A teenage boy daring another teenage boy to lick a horse’s scrotum. Two women in vintage wedding veils kissing each other. Three men blustering for the return of slavery. A naked, blindfolded woman yelping in a cage.

  I deleted and deleted, letting the wedding picture, a welcome flicker of happiness, stay. It didn’t seem possible—I thought I’d reached a plateau of numbness—but the work was getting worse, the breaks a breathless sprint and the clicking hours a relentless slog. I’d been there for two and a half months. When I first started, I would plead with my supervisor to call the police, the government, anyone who could help these people, but she simply waggled her bob at me, bemused and condescending, and parroted the line about the company’s privacy policy, referring to page thirteen of my employee manual.

  Sometimes I recognized people: neighbours, former math teachers, cousins, friends—I once saw my father de-quilling a porcupine—but after a minute or so their noses would shift, their eyes would switch colour and they would become strangers.

  “Ever seen anyone you know?” I asked a colleague, Martha, when we were drying our hands slowly in the bathroom. I would have asked Zoe, but she’d been ignoring me. Every time I tried to approach her, she would slither off on yet another break. Maybe she was ashamed of herself.

  “My first month here I saw my husband fucking a poodle, my daughter chugging bleach and myself jumping off the Golden Gate bridge,” Martha said, giggling breathily.

  I scowled at my reflection in the mirror. Where did those zits come from? Was one of my eyebrows more arched than the other?

  “You get used to it,” she continued, in a quieter more serious tone. “I’ve never actually seen anyone I know—I don’t think. I go through everything so fast now, it’s a blur.” She threw her paper towel in the trash. “Just pretend it’s a Game of Thrones episode. That’s what I do.”

  After Martha left, I stood in the bathroom for a moment longer examining my face in the mirror, the constellation of freckles on the bridge of my nose drifting upward, my lower lip shrivelling.

  I couldn’t understand why Zoe had done this to me or why she refused to acknowledge my existence. Was it punishment for some thoughtless thing I’d said or done? Was it from back in high school? Did I give off a vibe of such profound detachment and mental toughness that she thought I wouldn’t be affected by this? It was difficult to accept that she experienced the work any differently than I did. Anyone would be traumatized. If we commiserated, maybe the days would seem easier.

  I wrote long email drafts, casting her as an executioner, a tyrant, a devil, begging her to be honest with me. Had I annoyed her or let her down? I came to work on time and I did my job so why was she treating me this way? My confused anger merged with some of the images on my screen. Bad thoughts involving pitchforks and blowtorches. The only way out of this oppressive feeling, the only way to achieve closure, I told myself, was to confront her.

  I texted. I called. I got to work early and stayed late, lurking, hoping to corner her. And one morning, four months in, I got my chance when I spied her in the parking lot. I hustled to the front door and locking both hands to the frame, barred her entrance. She sighed, her frail body seeming to deflate.

  “Fine,” she said.

  I almost hugged her, she looked so fragile. Seeing her standing there, I doubted my intentions, worried I was unfairly projecting all my rage and disappointment onto her, someone who was, after all, just a human woman, who was probably hurting, too. I blinked, trying to re-invoke a furious righteousness.

  “Why?” I said in a tiny voice. “Why me?”

  “Look,” she said. “You can’t tell anyone. Management only trusts a few of us. They think it would be bad for morale.”

  “What are you talking about?” I suspected she was going to hand me some pills, anti-anxiety meds or a micro-dose of MDMA. I welcomed the idea.

  “The breaks,” she said. “I can get you more breaks.”

  I removed my hands from the door frame.

  “You just have to refer someone,” she continued. “Anyone.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed hard.

  “I use social media to recruit,” she continued. “Whenever someone whines about their current job or mentions a recent firing, I send them a message, meet them for coffee and casually bring up the job, coach them on their interview, and if they’re hired, I get another thirty-minute break.”

  Thirty minutes? That’s all I was worth? And to think I’d met with her out of benevolence, believing she was as lonely as me.

  “Most of them quit within the first two months, but apparently that’s actually way, way better than the old turnover rate, back when the app still relied on job sites. And even if your person quits you still get the break. None of my other recruits has lasted as long as you.”

  I felt a sick and unwelcome surge
of pride about my superior stamina. “I would never do that to someone,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Sure, fine, whatever. I need to survive. I need to feed my kid. And there are worse jobs out there. We get paid well and we’re doing a valuable service. Let’s not get hysterical. This isn’t grad school. We’re all adults. Nice jacket by the way.”

  I looked down at my new leather jacket, the most expensive item of clothing I owned: buttery soft, the caramel colour so rich it almost glowed. Disgusted, I moved aside and let her enter the building.

  I declined the few party invitations I got, then stopped receiving any. Small mercy I didn’t have a spouse—my libido, never particularly robust, had withered entirely after the things I’d seen. I sometimes wondered if that’s why Zoe and her husband had split up, but I couldn’t speak to her, not yet. I didn’t want access to intimacies that would nuance her and make it harder to maintain my anger. Still, if I could have, I would have asked if she thought the job had affected her relationship to her child, made her more vigilant or afraid as a parent. My future, weakly imagined and fading at an accelerating rate, no longer included kids. I wouldn’t have been able to leave them with a babysitter, or with anyone, to ever let them out of my sight, not after my anxieties had been stoked by all the cruelty that skulked, undetected and unpunished, through the world.

  I should have left the job, of course. And many evenings, half-thawed on Merlot, my computer warm on my lap, I searched through job advertisements, law school admission procedures and college program descriptions. I envisioned a life suffused with a sense of purpose and meaning and resolved to start anew, only to wake the next morning on the couch, hungover and overwhelmed by the immense effort such a change would require, those alternate selves dissolving in the sunlight.

  I reassured myself that the job had important benefits. The pay was good, three times better than the contract teaching job I had before, good enough for me to buy a new car and to move into a bigger and less roach-infested place, and I liked being able to tell people, particularly my parents and former classmates, that I worked in tech now. I used the word career. It made my life sound fuller, plusher, as though I was riding an inevitable trajectory toward lasting affluence.