The theory went that this garden, one of the centrepieces of the campus, had been designed to represent all of Canada in miniature—but, apparently, only after having its parts shaken up and redistributed like flakes in a snowglobe. The artificial hill in one corner stood for the Rocky Mountains. The scummy pond, split in two by a jagged concrete walkway, was both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which made the little rock island on one side Newfoundland. Any vaguely flat section could be considered the prairies. In another corner, facing the Rockies, sat the skeletal outline of a tall, blue metal pyramid that was quarantined by a thick hedge; this, everyone agreed, was Quebec. The statue of Terry Fox stood for the person of Terry Fox, standing as he did at the eastern edge of the whole thing, just about to launch into his heroic cross-country run—though to believe this part of the theory you’d have to ignore the fact that both his starting and finishing point were inconveniently located in the same place.
As for the rest of the gardens—the reflective egg statue, the little valley-ish thing beside the Rockies—well, even the theory’s staunchest defenders had to admit it was gibberish. But the garden was distinctive nonetheless, cluttered and ornate like a billionaire’s yard sale. Anyone who’d ever been to SFU recognized it in the video right away.
For some reason, the hedge video tickled the internet in just the right way and went viral, linked to by blogs and predatory infotainment sites the world over. There were now parodies of it, as well as video responses, at least two unauthorized T-shirts, backlash, backlash to the backlash, and a contest sponsored by some middle-tier late-night talk-show host. When Alex pitched his idea to the other editors, the video had thirteen million views and counting.
His plan was to take on the guise of an old-fashioned, beat-walking journalist, the kind Alex revered from The Peak’s glory days, and track down the makers of this video. Thereby giving the final chapter of his university career at least the beginnings of a sense of purpose, and at the same time maybe helping save this newspaper he felt such a weird kinship with. As he wandered the Shell halls, trying doors at random and scouting for anyone resembling an authority figure or security guard, he felt privately gassed-up and energized by the whole thing. His fear of talking to strangers was no match for the prospect that he might come back with a real story—one that an average student might actually be interested in reading. For the first time he’d be able to use the word scoop unironically.
And he knew he didn’t have long. The video had been posted three weeks ago—a digital ice age. A more typical lifespan for one of these things was roughly an afternoon, after which it would quietly disappear back into the ether of zeros and ones. All kinds of minigenres for these videos had crystallized—the cute overload, the epic fail (Macbeth’s vaulting ambition for the twenty-first century)—and already, fresh territory was scarce. People had standards all of a sudden. Now they demanded topicality, substance, and production value for their three minutes of leisure time. Even if Alex broke the story wide open, there was a very real chance that nobody would give a shit about it come Monday, Metro or no.
“Will Darfur make an appearance?” Tracy asked. The university government—the Simon Fraser Student Society—had recently launched a massive and omnipresent Save the Children of Sudan fundraising effort; as such, it was frequently on the editors’ minds when they needed a boundary of good taste to cross. “I feel like Darfur should make an appearance.”
“Definitely,” Keith said. “Just Darfur would be funny.”
“What about Darfur Shoplifting from an Organic Market?”
“Red Skull, Newly Elected President of Darfur.”
“You mean the comic book villain?”
“I guess so,” said Keith. “Or whoever. Someone really bad.”
“Darfur’s National Anthem, as Played by Chad Kroeger.”
“Mm.”
“As Sung by Bobcat Goldthwait.”
“Hnm.” Keith thought for another second. “Darfur Beating the Harlem Globetrotters.”
Tracy nodded. “With a No-Look Shot from Half Court?”
“At the Buzzer.”
“On Make-a-Wish Night.”
“While Your Face Is on the Jumbotron, Crying.”
“Because You Had Twenty Bucks on the Globetrotters.”
“Plus You Have AIDS.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “Classy.”
“This is stupid,” Keith said.
“Yeah, kind of.”
The Peak’s production-room phone rang, and Keith made a quick dive for it, knocking over the latest iteration of the house of cards and making the group of junior editors throw up their hands in quick but muted frustration. The production editor, who sat right next to the phone, got there first. It was Alex, she announced, and relayed a few details. “Says he’s on the right floor—uh-huh. Okay. And he’s getting close. Yeah. Is that it?” She hung up the phone uninterestedly and went back to crafting the perfect status update. Tracy thought back to the Metro’s unveiling at Clubs Days, and the look on Alex’s face from behind the pancake lineup. She’d felt upset, sure, but nothing compared to him. He was livid. She didn’t think he’d sat still for more than a few seconds since then. Meanwhile, it was all she could do just to corral this room long enough to get a newspaper made before the sun came back up.
“You hear that?” she said to the editors, pulling Keith off the floor and back to his chair. “Looks like our big exclusive is coming through after all.”
“No way,” said Steve. “He’ll never find anyone. It’s too late. And besides, the whole idea is boring anyway.” The others mumbled something without looking away from their computers. Possibly in consent, possibly protest; Tracy couldn’t tell. Music blaring out of three different sets of speakers fought for everyone’s attention: the sugary rush of The New Pornographers from one corner, dissonant Swedish jazz from another, while a bunch of rappers inside Keith’s laptop warned that they were not to be fucked with. Meanwhile the affable but soft-spoken photo editor was experimenting with different-sized flashes, giving everyone fuzzy purple dots on the inside of their eyelids.
“You don’t know that,” Tracy said to Steve. “At least he’s doing something. The rest of us are just sitting here, hoping it all goes away on its own. The truth is we’re all fucked come Monday.”
Back in his seat, Keith wriggled out of Tracy’s grip on his shirt. “I hate to say it, but Steve’s right about this one,” he said, and stood up to address the room. “If I could have everyone’s attention.” A few people turned to look at him. Mostly, the bustle of production day wore on. The printer buzzed and spat out pages-in-progress. Through the news cubicle’s window, Rachel could be heard doing a phone interview. Rick was in his back-corner office, working with the door closed and locked. The house of cards went up; the house of cards fell down.
“Hey! Buttflaps!” Keith flipped his chair over, making a dull plastic thud on the carpet. Its wheels spun in the air aimlessly. “Who here thinks Alex is going to get this hedge story thing?”
The production editor kept her eyes fixed on her screen. “He better,” she sighed. “Otherwise we’ve got no cover.”
“Thanks, mom,” Keith said. “God. Anyone else?” The associate news rookie scurried past him, grabbing a stack of long sheets from the printer and power-walking them back to Rachel’s desk. A pop song about pharaohs and chess pieces kicked in. The rappers reminded everyone that fucking with them was still unadvisable. “No? Anybody?” Keith sat down, overjoyed with himself. “In your face.”
“They’re ignoring you, dummy,” said Tracy on her way back to her own desk, where a fresh stack of copy awaited her. “You know, finishing their sections? So we can get out of here at a reasonable hour?”
“You should do a story about my dick! Ha!”
Alex inhaled calmly, methodically. He needed to keep an open mind. He had to remember not to hate the reader. “Thanks. We’ll consider it. Again: do you know where—”
Another guy in a polo
shirt appeared in the next door over. “You from the newspaper? I got an idea. Why don’t you do a story about my dick?”
“Your friend just said that.”
“Oh.” He looked genuinely sad.
The process at The Peak worked like this. A new issue came out every Monday morning that classes were in session. Assuming, that was, that the delivery person got them out on time. So let’s say Monday afternoon. For the satellite campuses, sometime Tuesday would’ve been nice. The new issue then circulated for a few days. Mid-week was the editors’ meeting, where the next issue was planned, content for each section shared, and any floating in-house content assigned. All of this got written onto the back room’s blackboard with bright cigars of sidewalk chalk. For some editors—opinions, humour—these meetings were basically just a paycheque hurdle, since they never received any content at all until at least Thursday night.
Friday was production day. And a day it was. In other words, forget about scheduling classes then, even in the morning, before anyone else bothered to show up to the office. It was the principle that counted, and in this, the editors’ usually haphazard loyalty was unshakeable.
Production day had its own internal protocol. When an editor decided to run a particular story, he or she gave it a quick once-over before adding it to the stack on Tracy’s desk. Eventually it would come back, red-penned and full of lovingly sarcastic marginalia, and from there the corrected file was imported into the layout program. Many an hour could be spent on the next step, wherein the story was cut up, formatted, and laid out on the digitized page. The section editor then stole photos from the internet, inserted captions and text boxes as necessary, and fine-tuned everything at a meticulous and frequently glacial pace. When things weren’t going an editor’s way, doing layout felt like trying to build a sandcastle with both hands asleep. (More than once Tracy had spun in circles in her chair while waiting for new pages to edit, complaining to Suze, “Isn’t technology supposed to make this go faster?”) Once everything was lined up, the page got printed at full size and sent off to the copy and production editors for approval. It’d come back with new sets of red and purple corrections, respectively, and the whole process got repeated for final.
All it took was someone like Keith to throw the whole operation into disrepair. To call his sleeping schedule erratic would be putting it lightly. In fact, Keith claimed to have never known eight unbroken hours of sleep since elementary school, when one night he discovered a marathon of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman on late-night CBS. It was an awakening, subtle and inscrutable, his version of the Virgin winking back at him from a tortilla. Many hours later, as the first rays of sunlight hit his living-room curtains, he stood up like it was any old morning and sauntered off to school. In recent years Keith had taken to all-night raves, and took sprawling, coma-level naps to make up the difference. Production unofficially started at noon, but he never arrived at the office until an hour or two before dinner.
“Don’t worry,” he yelled to the retreating Tracy. “My section is going to be awesome.”
“Really.” Her voice was muted through the wall. “What else is in it?”
“It’s simple. I’m going to—”
The front doors flew open as a middle-aged man in tasteful brown slacks and a lot of frown lines on his forehead stormed in and looked around. “Who’s in charge here?” he bellowed, and held up a page from the most recent issue. “I paid good money for this ad, and I do not think it is appropriate for this picture of a—this—well, this penis to be sitting there next to it. I think a full refund is in order, not to mention some sort of printed correction.”
Keith turned his head only slightly toward him. “Shut the fuck up, dude,” he said. “Whoever you are, nobody likes you.”
The man in tasteful slacks looked stunned for a second. “I am the owner of Tom’s World of Flowers, young man,” he said. “That’s who I am. Now: where is the fellow I spoke to on the phone when I bought the ad? Your business manager?”
Keith now turned to him fully, and crossed his arms. “You’re looking at him.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m the business manager. And according to my calculations, you are a date rapist.”
“What? Who do you think—”
Keith cut him off again. “Listen, you want to be useful around here? Help me think of funny things that rhyme with Vagisil, or else fuck off and get me a ginger ale.”
“Never heard of him. You sure you got the name right?”
“I told you. I don’t know his name.”
“Actually I think you’re in the wrong building altogether.”
“Shit.” Alex looked around frantically. Time was running out. “Really?”
“Look, I’ll level with you. I don’t ‘go’ to this school.” She did air quotes and then kept walking.
The rest of the editors whooped and clapped. Keith started a chant of Va-gi-sil and beckoned with both hands for the others to join in. The tasteful-slacks man turned purple, unable to get another word out. Back at her desk behind the window, Tracy slouched down in her chair. Not the time, guys, she thought. The man took one last look around the office, in search of any flickering signs of support. Not finding any, he turned to leave.
“Guys! What on earth is going on out here?” Rick had emerged from the cocoon of his office and stood at the edge of the production room in disbelief.
“Va-gi-sil! Va-gi-sil!” The chant now joyously filled the office. Keith waved his pencil around like a conductor. Even Rachel joined in, rhythmically tapping her still-live phone against the window from the other side of the glass.
Rick stormed down to the doorway and offered his hand to the tasteful-slacks man. “I’m so sorry about this,” he whispered. “They’re good kids, really. They just sometimes forget that their computers are connected to a printing press, and these little inside jokes eventually make it out to the rest of the world.”
“In all my years,” he spluttered. “This kind of thing is extremely unprofessional.”
“Absolutely. You’re 100 percent right about that. Please, let’s sit down and talk for a minute. I’m sure we can find a solution.” Rick clutched his stomach with his other hand and winced. Then he righted himself, and led the tasteful-slacks man through the chaos of the production room back to his office. “Isn’t it time for dinner or something?” he hissed to the editors over his shoulder. “Just get the hell out of here so the grown-ups can talk.”
“Oh, thank god,” Alex said as another door, on another storey, slid coolly open. He wiped his brow even though he was not technically sweating. He had to admit that his resolve had been wavering a little there, but now it was doubly, triply reinforced. “You’re real. Tracking you down has been—”
“No worries. Come on in, man. What do you want to know?”
For dinner the editors went upstairs to the Highland Pub. What the Peak office lacked in horizontal real estate—its two neighbours being a parking garage and the meeting room for droning Christian singalongs—it made up for in verticality. Up one flight of stairs was a coffee shop owned by the student society, and also the last remaining place you could still get London Fogs for a reasonable price. Up one more was the Pub.
The editors pushed three tables together in the middle of the main floor and grabbed a stack of menus off the bar counter. The Pub was constitutionally incapable of turning a profit, and therefore chronically understaffed. You got used to doing things for yourself.
One large conversation about Rick’s outburst in the office splintered immediately into five smaller, unrelated tangents. A Canucks game shone out from the various televisions. Keith ordered five beers before sitting down.
The guy grinned, his teeth gleaming white. His chin was a right angle. A row of bobble heads nodded along from his desk, next to a tastefully overflowing laundry hamper. The whole scene looked like an Axe Body Spray commercial.
“What do you mean,” Alex said, his own imperfect jaw clenching, “you want t
o get paid?”
Two of the younger female editors vigorously compared sex lives, using cutlery as props, while Chip did several back-to-back spit takes from two seats over. Tracy was trying to convince Rachel that The Little Mermaid was actually a feminist cartoon. The web editor shared a plate of yam fries with the associate news rookie and listed his twelve favourite web comics, in ascending order. Keith asked whoever wandered past their table what they thought was the funniest thing about Darfur. The photo editor stuck his earbuds in. Suze and Steve playfully argued over which animal Rex Murphy most closely resembled: raccoon or platypus. (Everyone else assumed the two of them were covertly sleeping with one another—no platonic banter was that cute.)
“She loses her voice. The female lead is literally and metaphorically mute, and this is how she wins the man. You call that progress?”
“Go back and watch it again. Ursula is a commentary on the patriarchy—she even says, ‘The men up there don’t like a lot of blabber.’ She’s calling attention to it. My god, it’s obvious.”
“Number four is Penny Arcade. It’s weird how they draw themselves so thin and cool-looking, but I still like it.”
“I say raccoon. Final answer.”
“Yeah, you would say that.”
“Then my legs were kind of—well, I can’t do it here.”
“I think you’re giving the talking cash registers at Disney way too much credit. That they’re capable of making ‘commentary’ about anything.”
“Hey buddy—yeah, you. Know any good Darfur jokes?”
“Platypus all the way, lady. It’s the nose.”
“Number three? Maybe Achewood. Obvious.”
“You’ve got to take charge. At a certain point I had to tell him, ‘It’s not a rabbit’s foot, babe. You don’t just rub it for good luck.’”
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