“Exactly.” Jake flexed, ready to move on. “And we’re here to deliver the product they expect.”
Marta read the yellow LIVESTRONG wrist band and the tattoo beneath the dense clipped forearm hair: there, for onlookers, a high-rise stack of letters spelled “Fortune Favors the Bold.” Comportment, she thought at random, a fusty principle. And faintly absurd too, like white man’s burden.
“We’ll give you the latest script now, Marta. Take the day off. Look at it and think about what you want to do. Like I mentioned, we’ve got a shitload of work to get done today, so we have to cut this meeting short.” Lora held up the cellphone to indicate the day’s hectic schedule, blocks of different colours along a time line.
“Alright.” Marta wanted extra minutes for interrogation, but Lora had made it plain that the moment didn’t look propitious.
“If the vacation idea doesn’t cut it, you can check out and head home,” Jake said. “It’s a good deal either way. Free money.”
“We’d prefer that you’re nearby, just in case,” Lora said.
“Just in case?”
“Well, you know.”
Marta had no idea.
“You look a bit dazed, hon.” Lora’s expression suggested parental tenderness. “This business is crazy.”
“I’ll stop by later.” Marta turned for the door.
GRUNT WORK
1.
Jake picked up the phone and dialed Nicos once he and Lora brought their schedules into synch. He watched his assistant’s bustling stride toward the frontmost desk.
After the morning’s first outburst—“C’mon, Jake. This is going to be an ordeal, and you know it”—she’d been puffed up and radiating annoyance. Wise with experience, Jake and Chaz hung back as Lora spent her energy on visiting crew, whose questions she met with a cyclonic fury. Earlier, Jake had pointed out the necessity of striking the morning’s appointments: no, he wouldn’t put off the tour any longer, and no, ma’am he wasn’t being superstitious. The location inspection—the physical walk-through of both camera-ready sites—demanded full attention. Now, not later. He’d scrolled through plenty of site photos and renderings, but like porn the images served as a passable substitute only when he couldn’t grasp the real material.
Though stomping around on site and kicking the proverbial wheels reassured Jake with the sheer physicality, the precaution was also smart. A slim volume of gut-souring episodes in his career had hammered home the fact that each level in the hierarchy of delegated activities called movie-making represented a fuck-up in the works. The unambiguous instruction—“Find a cliff-side crash site and build a partially buried spacecraft there”—might seem a no-brainer, but between the executive mouth from high above and a crew ear a few notches below, everyday air currents sheltered anarchic long-chain molecules of Murphy’s Law, whose very essence guaranteed sound wave distortions. The cliff might not measure up, the crash scene look too this, not enough that, or the alien craft put together somehow wrong—mangling proportion, colour, shape, or style took no special skill. Jake’s concern: when and where—not if—the fatal failure of communication would occur.
There’d been no production—nowhere over a century of history—in which an idiotic decision hadn’t hobbled easy progress. Jake would wager a month’s salary on that. Inevitably, things going sideways proved as fundamental to moviemaking as water cooler small talk in office towers. Virtually every veteran accepted that as the nature of the beast and grew cautious—the philosophical crux: Watch your ass—in order to stave off the sort of disastrous miscalculation that stole time and money from the demanding string-pullers who green-lighted work and signed pay cheques.
Jake had witnessed the results of even one wrong step and understood the consequence. Having your professional competence questioned was the first sure razor cut of career suicide. Six months or so later you’d be telling anyone in earshot how you’d “had it with the game” while handing out freshly printed business cards—Certified Real Estate Agent—and throwing catch-phrases like “seller’s market,” “no better time than now,” and “investment in your future” with a televangelist’s wheedling intimacy and undercurrent of desperate threat.
“Hey Nicos,” Jake said. “Yeah, I’m settled. The place? Fine, no complaints. Good views and quiet. Comfy bed. Where are you? Where’s that? Okay, how close?” He held the receiver away to muffle Nicos’ barked instructions. “For sure, fifteen minutes is fine. Finish your breakfast and then haul ass. Don’t bother with parking, I’ll come out when I see you there. Yeah, yeah, I know, just honk if you don’t see me.”
“Where’s the crash site, by the way? Close to the Swinburne compound?” Jake leaned forward to study a map left on the desk by Lora. “Right, what’s that? Hold on a sec, I’m looking. Never mind, the address means nothing to me. Christ, it’s like varicose veins. There’s a million half-assed roads around this town, God knows why. That location might as well be Timbuktu.”
The urge to crumple the map into a tight insignificant ball flashed angrily, but Jake let it pass. He’d always despised last-picked-for-the-team scenarios and avoided involvement in practically anything—golf, tennis, karaoke, poker—that he could not master: he saw no point in showing up if he didn’t have a hefty chance of dominance. Love of the game, what bullshit.
Map reading, a subset of sense of direction, was another item he could add to a steer-clear-of-it pile. It embarrassed him to realize that in a dire situation—being lost in the wild during winter with no food or matches, vultures circling, and a supreme urgency to find the trail home—he’d be a lousy person to get paired with. Trudging forward with gung-ho bravado, he’d bellow out his top dog status and mislead fatally, shepherding survivors in a straight line due south toward warm safety when a lazy spiral culminating in hypothermia and carrion birds feasting emerged as the geometric truth.
And salt in the wound Nicos, Mr. Know It All, always stood by with a knowing look. The guy possessed senses on par with one of those mystifying urban legend dogs that shows up at a distraught family’s front door an entire year after being forgotten at a camp site one thousand miles distant. Jake could see no advantage to disclosing that information. He’d let Nicos pilot the way because that was part of a LM’s job description, an obligation reflecting nothing except a lesser rank on the totem.
“Anyway, Swinburne’s compound for a walk-through, then the crash site. See you in fifteen.” Jake felt eager to stop Nicos from speaking; he’d hear plenty from the motormouth inside the cab of the pickup.
“Right, I’m sure it is.” From the restaurant Nicos griped about a rubbery breakfast omelette, the result no doubt of inferior Canadian chickens, eggs, or kitchen talent. “Let’s keep it at fifteen anyway. A few loose ends here.”
Jake re-read an old delivery from Exconfessio he’d been scanning during the call.
Ex A.W. (Vancouver, BC)—
1. I pissed on my ex-boyfriend’s new female roommate’s bed before I moved out.
2. I put dog shit under some asshole’s car door handle (he he he).
3. I threw dog shit at my neighbour’s house.
4. I rubbed my ex’s mom’s hand mirror all over my snatch and asshole before returning it.
5. I hate women who either marry into money or inherit money and have a nanny to take care of their kids five days a week so they can go to the gym (cunts).
6. I hate men that comment on how great of shape these bitches are in.
7. I’m a bitch and an asshole driver.
Jake figured that the final admission counted as two, technically. He deleted the staggeringly vindictive message—he believed in an absolute line between titillating misbehaviour and non-stop ugliness—and emptied the computer’s trash. Today’s confessor sounded dire; the poisonous admitted bitch looked like a juggernaut of trouble from the Fatal Attraction school and gave nothing to savour, only depressing, mou
th-puckering bitterness.
Jake saved the lively confessions and revisited them in the same way as he imagined other people turned to a newspaper’s Daily Smile quotation with its tacky retro humour—“What is practical nursing? Falling in love with a rich patient!”—and kept each of the miniature episodes archived and ordered (and, when restless, reordered too: Righteous Citizen’s “I would be happy to handicap any able bodied person who imagines they have a right to park in the handicapped parking spot” recently losing priority status to Slacker Drone’s “When I worked in an unsupervised position at my current job, I would do things like take off to the casino for hours and smoke a joint on the way”). Intoxicating snippets from the lives of strangers, they never lost their caustic zing. Stitched together, the scenes would make for an awesome, unsettling movie.
The envy-consumed turd handler, though, merely stood out as an unpleasant reminder of how awful and twisted people could grow. The woman—or a guy text-transvestite: Exconfessio made no claims to verify the legitimacy of the confessor, and Jake had read many supposed admissions that triggered suspicion about the writer’s true motivation and real identity since guilt or braggadocio seemed beside the point—reminded him of the coffee mug of Mick, his second boss in the industry: “Yeah, I’m an Asshole. Just Try Me.” Though forthright, the mug’s honesty didn’t compensate for hours spent under the unbearable man’s hairy thumb. At least, Jake hoped, he’d never meet this scheming malevolent creature face to face. He felt leery of anyone who acted like an asshole and patted himself on the back for possessing brutal directness. Such wastes of space made his sac contract tight. Cruelty dressed up as courage: another performance the world could get by without.
Jeremy had sent just one bit of trivia. A slow week, Jake guessed.
The subject line: “FW: ‘Roid rage?”
“Muscled Pumped and Raging - 38
I’m a ripped, very well muscled guy looking for other muscular guys only! If you’re fat, fuck off! If you’re soft and flabby, fuck off! If you’re thin and don’t work out, fuck off! I’m only interested in other guys with the mojo to dedicate themselves to work out and invest in what they have. If you have the cojones to not be offended by this ad, then I’d like to hear from you.”
Jake thought he might have seen this hulking tool at the gym, fatuous and infantile in his unending self-absorption. He imagined the swaggering testosterone worshipper trapped in an elevator with the hateful could-be hag from Exconfessio. It’d be a caged death match for sure, bloody, despicable, and no-holds-barred—Japanese fighting fish in a puny tank but substantially less graceful.
“Hey, Jake, your chariot awaits,” Lora yelled from the kitchen. “Jake?” His phone gonged seconds later: “Hey, did you hear me?”
“I’m on it, panic button. What’s up with you, anyway? Did you forget to take your meds this morning?”
“You know I take them religiously. ‘A centred worker is a productive worker.’”
“Man oh man, I wished you’d never taken that seminar. Motivational speakers are just cult leaders minus the polyester suits. It’s best to avoid contact with them. Besides, the whole deal was probably underwritten by PharmaGen BioLabs as a cheap human trial experiment. You sound like you’re about ready for the grape Kool Aid. Hello?” Jake spoke to a dead line.
“We’ve been over this, Jake.” Lora stood glowering at the doorframe. “We all have our crutches, Mister One Night Stand.”
Jake related anecdotes from time to time during morning lulls at the office. He selected bits cautiously and even toned them down, an educated guess being that if Lora—for whom going braless would be a tour-though-the-wild-side act of sexual bravado, and who grew pursed and distant whenever he used the word monagony and visibly unsettled the one time he had in the spirit of earnest but jokey disclosure categorized himself as trysexual—discovered that she had been exposed to the iceberg’s mere tip, she’d be appalled (low probability), astonished (high probability), or merciless as Ming with jibbing (100% certainty).
Lora embraced the rare poetry of birds that mate for life. Her visionary’s third eye wide open, she’d call for the looming conclusion of Jake’s galavanting; the stars predicted the sea-change as plain as day. And he’d be wise to prepare for the moment true adulthood began. “Your horoscopes have been making that claim for years, woman,” Jake always replied, “time to find a better system. Tea leaves maybe. Tarot cards.”
“Okay, okay, touché, Madame.” He stood. “I should get out there or Nicos won’t shut up about it. I’ll call from the second site and we’ll get a game plan in order for the afternoon.”
He disconnected the laptop and pulled open a drawer. The tussle with Lora reminded him about his own daily regimen. He grabbed two chubby capsules from the messenger bag and washed them down. He’d been assured by the natural pharmacist that the arginine, tongkat ali, and catuaba bark combo added up to a “surefire male enhancement.” On a whim, he’d also bought a year’s supply of Enzyte after catching ads on TV promising suburban guys that they’d be walking hard-ons, the envy of all the other Joes on Pine Crescent and secret wish for the unfulfilled Janes.
While the vision of a pill-popping middle age drew his breath short, the strong throb of a lower centre of gravity possessed supreme appeal. And naturally, years of searing inbox spam promises—“So hard you can break an egg”; “Become the sex magnet of your ’hood”—had branded unguarded bits of primal cortex. As with in-your-face D-cup cleavage, Jake found a too visible big package to be crass but unnerving provocation: people typically stared and turned away nervously, primly judging the display to be crude while helplessly responding to the voluptuous contour over and again, animal instincts triggering a gush of saliva and compelling them to bend over and take a sniff, or else cop a feel.
Jake had used up half the pill supply. Each day he swallowed the doses half-heartedly: he hadn’t noticed the constant hum of enhanced vigour or suffered terrible side effects; he figured there must be something to them. Still, placebos yielded positive results. Everyone understood that.
Knees, heart, hair, career, looks, sex appeal, good fortune: sturdy’s a white lie, a feeble house of cards that can collapse into flat debris at any moment. Years ago Jake had shared philosophy over beers with Randall, the accountant Warner Brothers had sent to supervise the weekly budgets of a superhero series, the studio’s globally syndicated moneymaker. Jake’s senior by a half a decade, the man spoke as a war-weary veteran: “You know what, man, one day you wake up and you notice your skin. It’s different, looser, like the elastic waist of old underwear. Sagging steadily and then, I guess, just gone. Bibs and diapers at Sunset Manor creeping nearer every day.” When Jake attempted to counter the accountant’s fatalism, Randall had brushed the logic aside as smoke and mirrors, the fruit of relative youth: “Come talk to me when you reach my age.” You can keep your resignation, Jake had thought, viewing such passivity as a fatal character flaw.
He tugged at the legs of his jeans and passed by Lora. Spillage: going full commando with low-hangers could be painful. “Oh, where’s good coffee?” he asked.
“Working, Jake, working.”
Outside, Nicos sounded the horn at the impatient regular intervals of a New York City cabbie sent over from Central Casting. “You’d better run,” Lora said. “Christ, any minute now a representative of Oliver’s finest might show up here waving a badge. Say hi to Nicos for me. And Jake?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying my Christmas present, really, and I know you like to smell pretty, but we could all live happier here with you applying one less splash of Terre in the morning.”
“Okay, ma’am.” Although firm, Lora’s mothering was well intended.
“Talk to you soon.”
2.
A Red Bull canister fell and clattered on the asphalt as Jake swung open the door. He tossed it into the pick-up’s empty b
ed. “Hey, Pig Pen,” he said, observing the litter—balled napkins and food wrappers lining the dash, empty energy drinks crowding the floor, and Styrofoam take-out strewn alongside water bottles on the bench seat. Nicos maintained the lustrous exterior of his vehicles with the anal-retentive standards of a military boot camp CO, but expressed a profound shift in philosophy for interiors. The weird split always struck Jake, who thought a mid-point between extremes seemed realistic, closer to cosmic balance; anyone comparing his desk and bedroom would notice matching tidiness levels.
“Hey, boss, you know me. I like to nest.” Nicos swept discards to the floor and patted the seat. “Okay princess, here’s a safe place for your hairy Royal Doulton ass.”
Jake, bested by the subordinate’s rapid-fire brain, slid into position without a reply. Nicos revved the engine.
“We ready to rock now?”
“Go.” Jake sniffed, relieved that the interior’s air-conditioner blew away any stench from Nicos’ putrefying snacks. As for the heavy smoker’s residue, he’d just man up about that and hold his tongue. He unlocked the phone and tapped out a message to Lora: “Tell me again, why’d we hire this guy!?!”
A life-of-the-party personality, Nicos’ compulsion to talk ballooned exponentially when he’d passed long hours alone. Jake calculated that the Location Manager must have been solitary overnight in a motel and likely granted minimal contact during breakfast despite firm efforts at the quick fix of chatting up the waitress or diners at nearby tables. Sharing the cab now would not be too different from circulating in a room of desperate speed-daters eager to spill as many words as possible in their three-minute allotment of “Let me tell you all about me, please.” Stalling for time was possible, Jake could see, but texting work missives could grab only a few moments of privacy.
Nicos’s mouth switched on as he shifted out of Park. “The compound’s not even ten kliks away, right,” he said, louder than necessary, “but the crash site is a fair bit of a haul. It’s out of the way for sure, but I figure the pay off is worth it. You’ll see. It blew me away, that’s for sure. A-f-ing-mazing, considering what we had to work with, anyway. It’s not exactly the Himalayas out there—it’s a fricking desert, well kind of a desert, technically the Osoyoos Arid Biotic Zone, whatever that means, but everyone says Okanagan Desert—so finding a sheer mountain face was no small feat. I mean, c’mon, Christ, talk about unreasonable expectations. Dunes woulda been a cinch. Even CGI woulda been easier, way easier.” Nicos turned to face Jake, drawing attention to the sloping Bob Hope nose—another incongruous item for slow-day office speculation. “But I lucked in anyway, chatted up these hippie wannabe dudes on longboards and they told me about this retired gravel pit that I would never a found by looking at any map. Sometimes I’m pretty impressed with myself. Yeah, it’s a gift, that’s all I can say.”
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