The Dilettantes

by Michael Hingston

  Just then two guys came up and slammed their fists on the table. Chip’s pen skittered onto the floor.

  “Why didn’t you print my article?” one asked in a low growl.

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” Alex said. “What section was this for?”

  “Opinions. Last week.”

  “Well, the opinions editor isn’t here right now, so I couldn’t really—”

  “It was about the bus,” he said. “Ten things that piss me off about people on the bus. Number one: take off your fucking backpacks.”

  Alex already knew the story, if not this guy’s version of it. At least once a year someone wrote one of these straight-shooting litanies of complaints. They almost always began, “OK,” and petered off somewhere around item seven. Engaging with these kinds of dilettantes was Alex’s biggest source of dread around Clubs Days, where he always felt like an open target. Having a difficult-to-find underground office had its perks.

  “Again, I can’t speak for the editor,” he said, “but from what I heard you had some problems with our edits—specifically, the fact that we would be making some.”

  The guy and his friend banged their fists again in response. It was meant to be done in tandem, but the friend was a half-second too late. They exchanged a quick look. “I wrote what I wrote,” the first guy said, “and that’s it. You put in anything else, one new word or squiggle, it ain’t mine anymore.”

  Those squiggles are what we in the industry call punctuation, Alex thought. Then he thought, Don’t say industry. “Well, we do have rules concerning those squiggles.”

  “That’s his style,” the friend said, backing him up like a jittery hype man. “It’s his voice. Tryin’ to make everyone fit into the same box, man.”

  “You don’t believe in commas?”

  “Commas ain’t me,” the guy said. “It’s bourgeois. ‘Pause here,’ or whatever. Don’t tell me where I’m supposed to pause, okay? Do not do it.”

  They high-fived.

  Alex sighed. These guys were so blatantly testing out their newly sprouted Marxist ideas, seeing how all that ideology squared with the world beyond their classroom. Clubs Days was, if nothing else, a particularly fertile petri dish. “I’d also recommend that in the future you not send in the piece as a PDF,” he added.

  “Number two: people on cell phones can go eat shit.”

  “You’re really going to have to take this up with the editor.”

  “Not good enough,” the guy said, shaking his head like a wet dog. “Promise me.”

  “Promise you what?”

  “That it’ll run next week.”

  “Like I said—”

  “On the cover.”

  Jesus. “Are you serious?”

  “You owe me. It’s my right.”

  “Wow.”

  “To be heard. Freedom of expression. All that.”

  “Yeah,” said the friend, his eyes bugging out a little. “That’s democracy, bro. Ever heard of it?”

  “I thought you guys said you were Marxists.”

  Both of them flinched. “We’re Leninists.”

  Alex unfolded his hands and threw off his slouch. “Let me get this straight. You think it’s your constitutional right to have your every half-baked thought on the cover of a newspaper? You think that qualifies as a public service? Remind me again, what was the one near the end—about the elderly?”

  “Old people smell weird. Number eight.”

  “Ah yes.” On days like this, graduation couldn’t come soon enough.

  “Okay,” the guy said, “listen up.” He hesitated, then leaned in conspiratorially. “Honestly? You seem like an alright guy. I got no beef with you. You’re part of a capitalist machine, and your little newsletter here is a bag of hairy balls, but whatever. Just give me one of these pancakes I’m hearing so much about and you and me will be cool.”

  Alex did a full circle sweep of the Clubs Days grounds. “Who the fuck keeps saying that? We don’t have any pancakes.”

  It was then that Alex realized the Metro’s table was no longer empty. A large green balloon now sat on top of it, being slowly inflated by an automatic air pump. It looked vaguely human, but so far only the torso had taken shape. On the floor in front of it were four stacks of that day’s Metro, evenly spaced and all exactly square to one another. They’d appeared so swiftly and precisely it was as if they’d been air-dropped by a fleet of drone pamphleteers.

  Alex walked over to the table and knelt down by the stacks. “My god,” he said, putting a hand out. “They’re still warm.”

  A piece of paper was affixed to the front of the table. Most of it was taken up by the Metro logo, a 3D rendering of a globe in forest green. Underneath that, though, was a timer. Oh, shit, Alex thought. It wasn’t paper at all, but an ultra-thin LCD monitor. The timer was counting down to a date just under a week away. Next Monday morning. Their launch.

  “Chip,” Alex yelled, jumping back to his feet.

  The sports editor sauntered over. “Yes?”

  “What do you mean, ‘yes’?” Alex said. “It’s this. They’re here.”

  “That’s an affirmative.”

  “I can’t believe this is really happening. They’re really here. This is a thing now.”

  “Indeed. I must say,” Chip added, “you seemed awfully calm about it before.”

  “What?”

  “When I told you earlier. You hardly blinked.”

  “You—are you serious? How long have you known this was here?”

  “Mmm. Maybe five minutes? It was back at the table. You were watching that lad with the lampshade. But I understand: cool under fire. Not letting them see you sweat. A noble quality, really.”

  Alex stood up and took another quick survey. He was looking for aprons, newspaper boxes, anything in that telltale shade of green— even the monotone catchphrase: “Free Metro.” There were too many people around to get any clear sightlines. A general smell of popcorn and sickly sweet carnival snacks filled his nostrils. Too much noise in general. Too much motion. Between the speakers being set up on the mainstage and the crashes of amateur outdoorsmen brawling and flipping tables over in the row behind him, he couldn’t focus on anything. The talking inukshuk said, “Inukshuk.”

  Chip was still talking, but Alex steamrolled over him. “Did you see someone setting this up?”

  The sports editor chuckled. When his stomach shook you could hear the sound of coins rattling from some unknown pocket. “I dare say, this kind of thing doesn’t set up of its own volition, now does it?”

  “So you did see someone.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Where did they go?”

  Then he saw it. A lst-year approaching from the Rotunda held a copy out in front of her, its pages open and flapping in the breeze as she read. Then, across the mall, two girls with ponytails were smoking and doing the Sudoku. That fucking Sudoku, Alex thought. All of a sudden, rolled-up copies started poking out of back pockets all over the place, each with a green globe blazing menacingly from the top of the cover, perched there like the eye of Sauron.

  Alex saw green spots everywhere. It swept over him like a sickness. He had to sit down.

  Taking cover underneath his own table, Alex propped up his knees and rested his face between them. His stomach muttered expletives; his head swam. No. This isn’t my problem, he kept telling himself. I won’t even be here in six months. This is happening to someone else. Not me.

  The next bits happened in a greasy blur. A big portable stove being wheeled over and propped into place. A string of track jackets being unzipped all at once. Chip briefly crouching by his side, one arm pulling Alex into the slickness of his damp armpit, singing a verse of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The clang of a hundred cast-iron frying pans. A lost, stuttering voice asking if anyone remembered him from last week’s meeting. Sizzling dough. Syrup.

  Alex did his best not to projectile vomit his glow-in-the-dark pop into his own lap. He got unea
sily back to his feet, and came face to face with someone dressed in jeans and a pristine Metro-green windbreaker. The man looked barely older than Alex, and grinned with teeth that were just off-white enough to assure you they were natural. He pulled a megaphone up to his mouth and flicked it on.

  Almost immediately his speech attracted a crowd of people five rows deep. Alex watched in horror as the stacks of free copies were hoisted onto the table by volunteers in head-to-toe forest green, disappearing in minutes flat. The crowd also took in the gleaming, whirring contraption that was spitting pancake batter onto frying pans a few dozen servings at a time. The sizzle alone functioned like a tractor beam.

  With a final hiss of air, the balloon snapped to full attention, revealing itself as a bulbous replica of Rodin’s Thinker—only with a Metro showily inserted into its left hand.

  Breathing shallowly to keep his nausea at bay, Alex shoved his way through the pancake free-for-all that ran directly in front of The Peak’s table. Chip and now Tracy were sitting there, quietly taking in the whole thing; next to them gaped the awkward guy in SFU gear from last week’s collective meeting. He was back to officially sign up for something, but now the pen was frozen in his hand. Behind his glasses he looked just about ready to cry. Alex knew the feeling.

  7

  THE WORST THING EVER

  Alex stood on a concrete pathway near the SFU residence buildings, shivering through the fog. Classes had just let out, and students streamed past in both directions. Look at me, he thought, fiddling with his notebook. Out in the field. Just like a real reporter. Ten minutes later, when the crowd had thinned to a stream and then a trickle, he panicked and finally worked up the nerve to flag down a student and explain what he was working on.

  “Oh yeah, I know that guy,” she said, pointing drowsily over her shoulder. Alex found her strangely unimpressed by his press credentials. “I think he’s from Shell. Their front door’s busted, so if you pull super hard it’ll probably just snap open. You didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Tracy!” Keith yelled out. “Help me.”

  The copy editor stuck her head through the window separating the two rooms. “What?”

  “I’m making a list. I need you.”

  Tracy walked around to his side, her energy already flagging, and pressed her teeth into one of the caramels she kept stashed in her desk. “What is it?”

  “Since that guy said my section was the worst thing ever last week, I’m making a list in response called The Worst Thing Ever.”

  “And you want to know if it’s libelous.”

  “No. I need your help making it. You’re the only funny chick in this office.” Keith said this last part unnecessarily loud, spinning around as he did so to face the room. There were a few half-hearted boos; a shoe bounced off the back of his chair, launched from parts unknown. Nobody looked up from their computers, so he spun back. Tracy noticed he was wearing the film crew hat she’d been given as payola—even though she’d never actually given it to him, only left it unguarded on a table for a couple of hours. “Why do you always think it’s libel?” he added.

  “Because literally every time it is libel. Though this sounds pretty okay.”

  “The subtitle is Fuck You Adrian Jones.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Can subtitles have subtitles?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  By every available metric, Clubs Days had been a resounding success. It was the talk of the campus, insofar as anything that actually happened on campus could be considered the talk of the campus—and the most buzzed-about part was the triumphant unveiling of the Metro. A couple of irate phone calls from Rachel to the administration confirmed that the daily’s permit to distribute on campus had finally been approved, effective the following Monday. Only then did the first real wave of chilly comprehension hit the editors: several of their fears were about to materialize. Mainly unemployment. A wave of malaise swept over the office, followed by the darkly comic installation of a big calendar in the production room with the days leading up to the launch Xed out with Sharpie, one by one. It became known as Bizarro Christmas, the day when a magical stranger would show up and take all of their toys away from them.

  Worse still from a PR perspective was that the defining image of the week’s activities—the year before, for instance, being the spectacle of the vice-president of Viewfinder Digital Photography accidentally setting his track pants on fire—was Chip, whose indignation had been eventually trumped by his hunger, and who had devoured an entire stack of pancakes, each emblazoned with a 3D globe grill mark. When a photographer in a green jacket asked him to pose for a picture, Chip gave the camera a big, dumb thumbs-up.

  The image ran on the cover of thousands of Metros across Greater Vancouver the next day. And in an unmistakable act of turf-war provocation, the caption underneath identified Chip as sports editor of “student newsletter The Peek.”

  When she first saw it, Tracy ripped the cover off and stuck it to the office wall for motivation, right next to the calendar. Several rusty darts held the page crookedly in place.

  “What do you have so far?” Tracy asked.

  “It starts out normal,” Keith said, pointing at the screen. “Hitler. Stalin. Super Cancer. Stalin with a Hitler Moustache.”

  “Nice.”

  “Hitler if He Could Shoot Cancer Out of His Fingers. Cake that Is Part Chocolate, Part Poo. A Machine that Scalps Orphans. Stalin Sitting on Hitler’s Shoulders, Wearing a Big Overcoat that Makes Them Look Like One Really Tall Person.” He looked up at her. “That’s it so far.”

  Tracy was silent for a few seconds, processing. “Pretty good,” she decided, turning to leave. “But it already seems kind of long, no?”

  Keith’s voice shot up again. “I know, I know. But, hey—how’s the descent into weirdness? I feel like it’s maybe too fast.” Tracy turned on her heels and slowly came back. This constant need for attention and approval was a tiny bit endearing, she had to admit. Keith and Tracy’s office relationship had begun as a standard copy/humour editor dynamic—a continuous battle of envelope pushing and pulling, with the occasional veto mixed in—but had, somewhere along the way, slowly morphed into actual brainstorming sessions. Once she’d gained his trust, Tracy realized that Keith’s boundaries were all or nothing, pretty well across the board: you were either his enemy, or his very best friend. Something was the best thing ever, or it was the worst thing ever. How she’d managed to make the jump, she still had no idea.

  “Okay,” she said. “So the joke is that people in arguments always jump to Hitler comparisons?”

  Steve spoke up from the cluster of computers behind Keith. “I like to call it the law of the internet,” the opinions editor said. “Give any online discussion long enough and people will start calling each other fascists.”

  Tracy chewed her caramel with care, making a thhuck sound on every upstroke. A group of editors at the next table were busy teaching themselves to build a house of cards with the help of a Russian YouTube tutorial. The production editor was trying in vain to remember the name of a brand of discontinued chewing gum she’d liked as a kid. This theory of Steve’s had a name, Tracy thought. Godwin’s Law. She knew this, and Steve knew this, and Steve knew that she knew this. But she didn’t correct him out loud, because what would be the point? The whole office already knew Steve was a plagiarist. His letters page was a mosaic of repurposed letters from old issues of Time, Chatelaine, and Owl—anything you could find lying around a dentist’s office, Tracy thought. All of his contributors’ names were made up, too.

  She kept her back turned to Steve, and instead leaned in to give Keith’s computer her renewed attention. “We could do a reversal,” she said. “After the moustache one, could it go Hitler with a Stalin Arm?”

  “Hm. Maybe.”

  “For symmetry.” She paused. “Or maybe Two Stalin Arms. I don’t know. Is that funnier?”

  Keith’s face grew solemn as he mulled this new
possibility. Eventually he shook his head. “But then he’d just look like a T-rex.”

  “You sure you aren’t with security? Because I have, like, a hundred bongs on me right now.”

  “Just let me in, please,” Alex said, his neck craned up at Shell’s second-floor balconies, waving his newly purchased notepad like a white flag. “The door won’t open.”

  “No lie: this bottle of Snapple I’m holding? Bong. This bunch of grapes? Tiny bongs.”

  Alex looked around for someone else to help, but the courtyard was empty. Students were either inside or gone home for the weekend. The weak sun was wandering low on the horizon. Fuck. Had he left it too late? Alex glanced up irritably and muttered, “That bottle is half full.”

  The guy scratched his chin, bleary-eyed. “You’re tellin’ me.” He took a long drink and slapped his knee. “Oh man. Do you remember Fruitopia?”

  “Or maybe another mundane one in the middle,” Tracy said. “Bad Christopher Walken Impressions. A Vinegar IV Drip. Ten Thousand Spoons When All You Need Is a Knife.”

  “Fuck off,” said Keith. “You will not stand there and try to feed me Alanis Morissette references. Got it? Not in this post-9/11 world.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Post-Obama world.”

  The editors had agreed at that week’s meeting that they had to fight back immediately, but it was now approaching dinner time on production night and only Alex had come forward with anything resembling a plan. Even he’d admitted to Tracy that it was a long shot.

  At the beginning of the semester, a YouTube clip had started circulating that showed a guy stumbling through a garden at night. He looks around, in that exaggerated way attempted only by drunks trying to appear sober, then climbs up some kind of tall, leafy tree. The camera awkwardly climbs with him. Near the top there’s a brief pause as he takes in the view, then an ominous crack, and then the guy tumbles wildly back to the ground, pinballing off branches and foliage like a pre-industrial Charlie Chaplin. Just as he hits the ground, flopping to a halt somewhere out of the frame, you hear him groan, “Agh, my nards.” The camera pans back, revealing what is now clearly the rectangular hedge, landscaped hill, and general quasi-symbolic clutter of Simon Fraser’s own AQ Garden. End of video.