“I’m getting wet. I’m going inside,” JayCee said.
Jason and Phil followed her.
Patrick wiped the water off his head and found a spot on the balcony where he could stay reasonably dry. He’d brought his wine glass with him. He took a sip. He could hear the rest of them inside, picking up their conversation. Jason was saying, “The Beatles deconstructed the pop song. They started writing verse, verse, chorus, verse, then they broke the template and improvised all kinds of arrangements. U2 followed a similar trajectory —“ Patrick crossed his arms against his chest. He could see three more firetrucks approaching the blue flame. The wind changed direction and blew a spray of water across his face. He lifted his shirt and wiped it off, then he went inside.
What happened next was more of the same. Debbie arrived. Patrick refilled wine glasses. They ordered pizza and discussed the possibility of playing Monopoly or Risk. Phil and Debbie had an argument about how to make real Italian spaghetti. JayCee kept touching Jason on the knee. Patrick kept his eyes open and knew things were being said that weren’t being talked about. He excused himself to do the dishes, tidy up the kitchen. The blue flame went out. The rain stopped. The sun went down. The firetrucks, the police officers and the spectators went home. The next day the newspapers said a miracle happened. A gas explosion blew one house off of its foundation. Two others burned to the ground. No one died. Patrick spent the night on the couch. He woke up hungover.
###
Yes, I Wanted to Say
The root cause of all suffering is faith, T. says. I take the opposite position. T. has an office three floors below mine. I met her in the cafeteria. She was reading Kierkegaard.
I have twenty-five people reporting to me. I used to have ten, but the company reorganized. Most of the time I don’t a clue what my twenty-five people are doing. I confess this to T., though I ought to know better.
“I operate on faith,” I told her.
This is the first time I saw her smile.
I offered T. the example of J. who came into my office three weeks earlier and said he couldn’t come to work any more. He wasn’t quitting. He was following his doctor’s orders. He had hypertension. He was depressed. The doctor had written him a note, instructing him not to go to work until further notice. I called the HR people. They said they would send me the appropriate forms. I told J. to go home. “Give me an update if anything changes.”
“I’m still waiting for the forms,” I told T.
This is the second time I saw her smile.
She asked me a question. I answered it. No, J. has not called me. Technically, he is absent without leave. Though I gave him permission to leave, I haven’t signed the paperwork giving him permission to leave.
On the radio last week was a story about women and their periods. New research suggests that when women are ovulating, they tend to have negative feelings towards other women. If you asked me, I’d say ovulation has nothing to do with it. Of the twenty-five people working for me, seventeen are women. They are professional, intelligent people. They are blessed with creativity. They are people of high integrity. On any given week two or three of them are completely crazy.
The announcer asked the researcher, “How does your conclusion play out in the real world, say in the office?”
The researcher said, “We need to do more research before we can answer that with confidence.” The researcher said it was plausible that women had negative feelings towards one another because they were in competition for men. Especially when they are fertile. Evolution, the researcher said, predicted this.
T. said, “In Alabama they call evolution: ’changes over time.’“ Teachers in public schools, she said, aren’t allowed to use the ’e’ word.
I asked T. what Kierkegaard had to say about evolution. She didn’t know. She refused to guess.
I am thirty-five and T. is twenty-two. That has nothing to do with evolution. It has everything to do with the number of times the earth travels around the sun. I do not think of myself as old, but when I talk to T. I realize I have drifted without knowing it into middle-age.
A month ago T. asked, “You’re not trying to pick me up, are you?”
I wasn’t.
“I’m married,” I said, which made her smirk.
“Yeah, so?”
I have had to admit to myself: I am attracted to her.
Yeah, so?
Let’s just say I am the touchy-feely core of my family; my wife (C.) is the protective outer layer. I am glad to live against stereotype. I encourage all of my employees to be who they are. They think I am being egalitarian; I am being strategic. People are more productive when they are not pretending to be someone else.
I have a two-year-old daughter (F.). She fusses about her clothes. My wife thinks this is adorable. I think it’s adorable, too. What I want to know is, is my daughter going to be more like me? Or is she going to be more like my wife?
It takes me ninety minutes to commute from the suburban home where I live with C., F. and a six-year-old ragamuffin caT. I don’t feel at home in my home. I don’t feel at home in the suburbs, but C. refused to live anywhere else. She put the choice to me: Live alone in the city or with her in the suburbs. At that point, I decided: One can be flexible. What you give up in one area, you can compensate for in others.
My wife works from home. She looks after our daughter. She volunteers at the Salvation Army and reads books to blind people. Visually impaired people, she corrects me. She has never read Kierkegaard. The root cause of all suffering is error, according to my wife. Actually, she never said thaT. I offer those words as a summary of her position. Here is another paraphrase: Error is the failure to live according to rules. And another: Error is the failure to achieve expected results.
Recently, I read in the newspaper that Post-It Notes were invented by mistake. The inventor of Post-It Notes was researching different types of glue, and he discovered a glue that didn’t work. It wasn’t until some time later that someone thought of an application for this non-sticking glue.
I offer this story as evidence of my wife’s error. Not all mistakes are mistakes, not all mistakes lead to suffering. It would be a mistake, however, for me to point this out to her.
As a manager, it is my responsibility to ensure that my twenty-five people make certain things happen. Every week, I hear stories about back-stabbing, lying, cheating. I am asked to sort out complaints X. has about Y., and I am responsible for keeping everyone focused on what we have in common.
We have a job to do, people.
We are in this together.
But I have a manager, too (Q.).
Q. told me, “You are good at managing down, but you could be better at managing up.”
He had already told me that I had exceeded all of my targets. He was trying to be helpful.
“You could learn to kiss ass better,” he said. “You’re on target, but you’re not getting the credit you deserve. If you want to advance, you’ve got to sell yourself better.”
We are in this together, I wanted to say to him, but then I remembered Darwin: Things change over time. That’s not just true in Alabama. This made me think: How do you get the changes you want? What changes did I want? If I was to start changing things, where would I start?
The next day, I tried to talk to T. about this, but she interrupted me. She said, “I had a dream about you last night.”
“Oh,” I said. “What sort of dream?”
“Just a dream,” she said, then she stood up.
“I can’t talk now, but call me later, okay?”
I said I would. She left.
I stayed in the cafeteria a while, sipping my coffee. I was thinking her dream was a sex dream. Of course. I tried to think what other kind of dream it could be. Not a memory dream. Some dream about her past. I wasn’t in her past.
Was I trying to p
ick her up?
Was she trying to pick me up?
Q. had told me I could be better at protecting my own survival. I could be better at projecting myself into the future. I tried to think about this some more. I tried to think about what it would mean to have more power, to have real, direct, actual control over my place in the world. My destiny. My fate. It was hard. I had never thought like that before. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Over and over, it led me to one conclusion.
This is crazy. There is no future. There is no past. There is only here. There is only now. I have a job to do.
I went upstairs to see how my twenty-five people were occupying their time.
An hour later, T. called me.
She said, “I wanted to tell you downstairs, but I couldn’t.”
“What? You couldn’t tell me what?”
I reached out with my foot to close the office door. I thought T. was going to tell me that she loved me.
I love you, too, I was ready to say.
She said, “I have a new job. I’m leaving.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“Is it?”
“I mean, it is if you want a new job.”
“I do.”
“Then it’s great, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. It’s just – I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too.”
“Will we still see each other?”
Yes, I wanted to say. We will always see each other. We will be companions with constancy, like rare birds, like old men on park benches. We will be forever seeing each other, circling each other like planets, creating our own constellations, sharing shooting stars, moons and asteroids.
But that’s not what I said. Of course.
I said, “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, too.”
“Oh,” she said. “What’s that?”
“I’m leaving, too.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you, so I was waiting until the details were sorted out.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Far?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you write to me when you get there?”
“I’ll send an email.”
“That would be nice.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, it’s been nice meeting you.”
I said, “Likewise.”
She laughed. “It’s funny,” she said.
“What?”
“Life changes over time, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I said.
But she had already hung up.
The line was dead.
It just went bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
###
Niagara
The boutiques full of soapstone carvings, plastic Mountie hats and paperweights stamped with 3D images of Horseshoe Falls would soon fill with tourists. The cash registers would ring loud. Camera-toting seniors would crowd behind the steel railing and complain about the water-laden air. The arcades would swell with teenagers and buses would line up side-by-side in the parking lot above the Falls.
But on this day, the rushing swell of water fell into cakes of ice; tulips peeked warily through the flowerbeds. The parking lot wasn’t half-full.
In the near-empty lower level of the casino, Lloyd ordered ribs and rice in the Hard Rock Café. He ordered an Alabama Slammer, sipped the sweet drink and watched a bar-screen video of John Lennon in New York City, circa 1975. Lennon in his green army jacket with the red star pinned to the lapel. Working class hero. Lennon about to begin five years of house husbandry. About to retreat from revolution and rock and roll. It struck Lloyd that he was older now than Lennon was then. Everything Lennon was known for he’d already done, except die. Half-an-hour earlier, Lloyd had lost five dollars, his limit, in a slot machine. Five dollars at twenty-five cents a credit gave him twenty credits. He played one credit at a time and won back none.
Lloyd lived in a small condo downtown Toronto that he rented with his long-time partner, Sarah. He told friends that now and again they spoke of marriage and children, but they weren’t looking for more. Sarah worked as a loan officer for a trust company and spent her spare time making pottery. His life was work, home, paycheque, bills: a simple existence regulated by the impulses of global capitalism. Watching Lennon on the television in the bar, he thought that he had arrived at a stable place himself well beyond revolution and rock and roll. Beyond cosmic shifts, transformation.
From his hotel room window, Lloyd could see the Falls sparkling behind beams of coloured lights. Earlier in the day he’d stood with his hands on the iron railing only feet from the falling water. He’d looked into the storm below and felt small. Uncertain. The Falls, unchanged; its bowl of thunder and cloud of mist, ever-changing.
Immediately outside his hotel was a wax museum.
He phoned Sarah and told her the wax museum reminded him of a visit he’d made to Niagara Falls with his family over twenty years earlier. He remembered drifting with his brother through the side streets and back alleys, behind the low-rent motels and tourist shops. In the days before the casinos. They spent the afternoon away from their parents and avoided the Falls and the crowds. Their afternoon highlight had been overhearing an American husband and wife talking about “how real Canadians live.” Twenty yards past the couple, his brother turned and yelled, “Watch out for the polar bears.” He pointed in the direction the couple was heading. “Two blocks that way.” Later, their mother asked them if they’d seen the “waxed Wayne Gretzky.” They hadn’t but laughed at how that phrase twisted their tongues.
In the wax museum window now, Gretzky was long gone. In his place Angelia Jolie wore the silver skin suit of Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft. Her breasts full, her bright red lips pouting. In her hands, a revolver pointed at pedestrians.
He was in Niagara Falls to arrange last-minute details for a conference of his employer’s sales force. The company had recently changed owners. Was it a take-over? A merger? No one seemed to know. Lloyd didn’t see what it mattered, though he knew the Charmer wouldn’t have sent him on such a menial mission. The Charmer was Zeke Pinion. The company he’d founded with $1,500 and his father’s maxed-out gold VISA was first named Digital Translation Services, then Digitrans, then simply DTS. Now, its name and future was uncertain except for the fact that its new owners were Texans.
Tomorrow would be the conference and an announcement, he thought, about the future. Layoffs, probably. The new owners, Lloyd felt certain, had purchased the customers, not the employees. He remembered what Pinion had said to a meeting of the entire company when he’d announced he’d sold his controlling interest. There are two types of people in this world: Those who think about doing it, and those who do it.
At 11:30 p.m., Lloyd sat on the edge of his bed in his boxers, the darkened hotel room behind him. The phone rang. It was Jackie, the L.A.-based director of marketing to whom everyone in the Toronto office now reported.
She said, “I’m in the lobby. Can you meet me for a drink?”
Two days earlier, she’d told the Toronto staff by video phone, “We don’t want to impose on you our ways of doing things. We want to learn how you do things, then make decisions about how we move forward from there.” She would later tell Lloyd her parents had been organic farmers and she’d completed her undergraduate degree before her seventeenth birthday. She was twenty-five, trim, pert, California blonde with a cliché million-watt smile.
Lloyd said, “I’ll be right down.”
They moved from the lobby to the hotel bar, empty except for the two of them.
The first thing Jackie said was, “I want you to know it’s no coincidence you’re here. I want to talk to you, and I want you to know that you’
ve been chosen.”
Lloyd shrugged. He looked towards the bartender. Ordered a rye with Coke.
He raised his drink to Jackie’s.
“Tell me something about yourself,” she said.
“Is this an interview?”
“No.”
“I prefer to imagine that it is.”
“Think about it however you want, however it makes you comfortable.”
She was close enough for him to smell her perfume, a soft scent of lavender. He thought she’d probably been drinking before she called him.
He said, “Something about myself?”
“Anything. Do you play hockey?”
“Not any more.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Playing aggravated my knee. Made it hurt.”
The television over the bar was showing a baseball game. Had the season started? Maybe just.
She said, “What do you want to do that no one has to ask you to do?”
“That’s a pretty personal question.”
She finished her drink and ordered another.
She said, “You don’t have to answer.”
He thought about it.
He said, “Eat, sleep, drink, breathe: the basics.”
She laughed. “I thought you’d start somewhere higher. Reading or watching kung-fu movies. Polkas. Curling.”
“This time of the day,” he said, “I’m a simple man.”
She smiled.
She said, “Here’s a hard one. Are you ready?”
He nodded.
“What’s your answer for life?”
“I didn’t know there was an answer.”
“Pretend there is.”
“Renovate. Keep renovating. Life’s all about renewal.”
“What’s the story with your former CEO?”
“Did you hear we called him The Charmer?”
“No! That’s wonderful! Why did you call him that?”
“The nickname is descriptive. He was a charmer as well as The Charmer. Very charismatic. Could talk a dog off its bone.”
“He built a good company, too, or we wouldn’t have bought it.”
Wandering the Earth: A Selected Stories Sampler Page 6