When Research got off the bus at 8:48 the next morning, there was a silver-blue airplane high above her head. It had a fish painted vertically on the tail, as if it was diving. The fish was blue, too, brighter than the plane. Brightest blue of all was the sky.
Indoors was mainly grey but the blue beamed in through the enormous window, which someone somehow had washed, inside and out.
She looked into the exact definition of teal, the blogs of MuchMusic VJs that her sons liked, the calorie content of chili, the average woman’s desired amount of oral sex versus experienced. She sent these facts to various editors at Dream Fashion, Dream Teen, Dream Woman. She stared out the window. The sky was a medium blue-green, more blue than green: teal.
She walked through vast empty space between her desk and the window – even the other researchers’ desks had been removed now. She had always threaded through them like a rope through a grommet, and now there was too much space. She had liked her colleagues; everyone boiled extra water in case someone else wanted tea. She had no way of finding them now, out there in their real lives.
Back at her desk, Research found an enthusiastic email from Dream Woman regarding her facts about oral pleasure, requesting further research. The editor did not mention the chili information (surprisingly low fat).
Googling “techniques+cunnilingus” brought many suggestions, but they repeated from website to website, or even within one – “light feathery kisses to the inner thigh” seemed much the same as “light feathery kisses up and down the leg.” She wondered how else to research this, eyed the framed photo of her husband in his canoe, and sent off her report.
She boiled a single cup of water for tea. She ate her yoghurt early. She looked out the window at a helicopter rising, possibly carrying the executive team from an internet start-up with a bold innovation for something. She wanted to research using reality, not the Internet. She wanted to be good at her job and interesting to her family. She wanted to slip through life like a lace through a grommet. She wanted to be someone who found joy in more than just what her husband got up to with his tongue.
She stood up. She left her purse in her file drawer and her coat on its hook, but she nevertheless left the research room at a non-standard break time. She didn’t know where she was going, but she did know what was available to do at her desk: action items she had created for herself. An encyclopaedia of deposed kings, a list of xylophone-heavy musical scores to be matched to the film, plus a half-dozen more websites she’d been asked to investigate for methods of flicking the tip of the tongue to draw out the shy clitoris. Research could not summon enthusiasm. She found the xylophone shrill and most kings deserving of being deposed, and her own clitoris had never been terribly shy.
She went into the stairwell. She climbed one flight, and was already in an unknown world, though the hallway carpeting was the same platinum grey. Research walked passed a door with a Dilbert cartoon on it, then one with an On Vacation ! sign, then a Christmas wreath, then one from which the nameplate had fallen down. She paused by an open door to see someone pulling a computer from the desk. It was the same building services guy that had taken away the phones yesterday, only now his T-shirt read “Flat-chested.” She nodded at him. He blinked, looked around, and then nodded back.
She walked into a kitchen that was the same as the one downstairs but different; like a kitchen in a dream, but unlike anything in Dream Kitchen magazine. Here was a toaster oven instead of a pop-up toaster, Dawn detergent instead of No-Name. In the refrigerator, there were glass jars with rubber tops, which Research liked – so easy to investigate. These jars contained chopped cantaloupe and blueberries. No pudding cups, but many yoghurts. Here, salad dressings separated into homemade oil and vinegar rather than emulsified Kraft Italian.
Research wondered if this was a wealthier floor, or simply one that valued lunch products more? She could afford BioBest yoghurt and organic pita, too, and did – for her family, at home. She never thought about the food she ate alone at her desk.
Thoughtfully, she took her pen and pad and began cataloguing this floor’s milk/cream ratio, its pears and apples, Snackwiches and Lunchables. Research went on to other fridges on other floors, found breast milk, live-culture yoghurt, crème brûlée. Then the small appliances, and then the walls and ceilings themselves – grape-juice spatters, gum stuck above the wastebin, lipstick kisses on a cupboard door (why?). Lists and descriptions of the kitchen configurations of Dream Inc. took her all the way to the glorious weekend: the boys’ basketball practice, a dinner party, a Sunday morning in bed, 69ing with her husband.
On Monday, she began listing contents of above-sink cupboards. She didn’t know what else to do. The economy was blowing up and even airplanes sometimes exploded and a sizeable percentage of women never achieved an orgasm. The Internet seemed to promise solutions but she couldn’t find them there. Problems like money and pleasure and flight were beyond her to answer alone – she couldn’t even form the questions. But she could think of dozens of questions about the people at Dream Inc., and once she started asking, she found she actually cared to know. Even after 5:00, in the grocery store or beside the basketball court, she wondered about her colleagues’ square inches of monitor size, highway or surface-route commutes, and their confusion over dental plans. She wondered about their happiness, their lunches, their lives. These were trying times, and she was curious about how other people were tried.
In the kitchens, Research encountered very few of the people she was researching. Once beside a sink where she was trying to describe the scent of a label-less bottle of dish soap (pine, lavender, and chlorine?), a lady jostled past to rinse an apple. Once a gentleman in a three-piece suit waited patiently for her to finish counting the pieces in his Corn Bran box (158) and put them all back before he poured out a bowl.
She thought perhaps the rest of the staff was clinging to their desks to avoid detection by the outsourcing committee. Her approach was the opposite, avoiding all the research requests on the pleasures of rimming and stock images of mahogany veneer. She knew if she kept providing those things, someone would notice it was the same over and over, and ask her to stop with three weeks severance. She wanted to offer something new.
As days passed, Research got braver, her questions more intimate in a way that had nothing to do with oral pleasure. She tried inquiries into daily urination volumes (not as much increase relative to proximity to water coolers as she had expected) or favoured workplace plants (climbing ivy, though cloth cubical walls were unclimbable, and most of the ivy wound up straggling over the floor of high productivity cubes or strangling the computer systems of low productivity cubes). She counted one-panel cartoons on bulletin boards (so much Herman, after all these years). She felt that this was useful information, or at least interesting. At least, she was interested.
Sometimes she did sit alone in the research room, though she felt like the tallest tree in a lightning storm. She tried to keep up with what the Internet offered, but that seemed to be mainly variations on the direness of the economic downturn (not as bad as the Great Depression . . . or was it?) and that some women liked their vulvas cupped in their partners’ palm. Her husband had always been more of a brusher than a cupper, but for the sake of research they tried both in rapid succession, with no significant variation.
This became her life, and her life became ok: counting ivy leaves and learning the CBC3 DJ rotation and sparks-behind-the-eyes orgasms even in the missionary position, contrary to all the best research. She researched cupboards and conference rooms, haughty brand-managers and under-appreciated finance specialists. There were 74 angry people in that building, 111 disillusioned, 56 remarkably naïve, and 12 beyond all reason. There was some overlap between categories.
One Wednesday, at the end of a hallway blocked by a dead dieffenbachia, Research found a staircase to the roof. Wednesday was the day of lowest absenteeism, on average. She pushed aside the plant, climbed the stairs, and thought about the researcher with
his history of wok-fried bok choy and the other researcher with her hipless yet somehow voluptuous stride. She wanted to know how they were. She wanted her sex life to solve all the problems in her marriage. She wanted to fly in an airplane as if the sky were a grommet she could thread. She realized she was not going to get any of these things.
There was a small door at the top of the stairs that was obviously normally locked with a half-dozen padlocks and bolts, but was currently slightly ajar. She went out in the sunlight, seven stories closer to the sky then usual. A tiny silver jet arced above.
Various-sized metal boxes, wires, and poles were scattered over the tar-gravel rooftop. At one of the poles was the building services guy she knew – today his shirt said, “I know your Facebook password.” He was scrabbling at a small metal box attached to the pole, twisting something inside it with a pair of pliers.
“Hello,” she called.
The back beneath the thin shirt clenched. He turned, squinted into the sun.
“I’m from Research.” She walked over. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“What? Why?”
She picked her way over a few wires. “Why not? What are you doing?”
He shivered; seven stories made it windier. “Trying to fix the service disruption.”
“Service disruption?”
“The Internet isn’t working? For the whole building? Didn’t you notice?”
“I haven’t been online much lately. Nothing interesting.” She shrugged. “What is your job?”
“Uhh . . .” she thought she saw blue light ream up his arm as he twisted the pliers, but he doggedly kept talking. He was, she realized, not much older than her sons. “Maintenance generalist.”
“What do you . . .” Nothing seemed exactly imperative to know, with the wind and the sadness on the boy’s face as he wrangled with the wires. One suddenly snapped and the end dropped below the box with another blue wave. And no one even knew he was up here, and everything seemed worth knowing. “What do you eat for lunch, most days?”
He knelt and gazed up at her. “Butternut squash soup, oftentimes. It comes in tetrapaks, $1.99 at No Frills. I heat it in the microwave, and buy a Jamaican patty from the cafeteria. And a Coke.”
“Sounds good.” She meant it, and meant to try it. “Also – ”
More wires sproinged out of the box, seemingly spontaneously. The wind was picking up even more, but that couldn’t have been why. He stood, pulling wires against his stomach as if his own intestines were escaping. “Do you have roof clearance?”
“. . . I’m Research. I go everywhere.”
“If you don’t have clearance, you should probably – ” he dropped his pliers.
“ – could you please?”
She said, “I appreciate your time,” but his face remained tight and nervous. So she went back to her ergonomic chair in the windless skyless research room. She ignored the red light of her voicemail. She was deleting emails unread when the phone rang.
“Hello, you’ve reached Research.”
“Well, hellow there, young lady! Why doncha come down to our office to make your report? We’ve ordered in a pastry platter.”
“Report?”
“There’s fruit, too, if you’re watching your weight.”
“I didn’t know . . . .”
“Of course not. You’re very slender! But you know women . . . .”
“I – ”
“Of course you know women! The tongue is one of the strongest muscles in the body! We’ve read the cunnilingus and airport notes that you saved to the server and we’re very excited to hear more. So just you come on over to the executive wing, k?” Click.
She stared out the window where yet another plane from somewhere was careening out of the sky to nowhere. No, to Pearson International Airport, Mississauga. Mississauga was someplace. It was documented.
She took her notepads, her printouts from the Transit Authority and Men’s Health. Bits of tar-gravel transferred from her shoes to the carpet as she walked.
Two men were sprawled on a couch in the executive suite. From the quarterly update meetings, she recognized them as the company’s CEO and COO, Mark and Sanjeet. There was a tray of muffin halves and Danish slices on the desk. The sky outside the big executive window was dark. Yellow-green lights flashed at the airport. She wondered who had ordered the catering, who the caterers were, and where they ate their lunch. She wondered if she was in the mood for a carrot muffin.
Sanjeet clapped his hands together like thunder. “So! What’s the report?”
Research said, “Many people in this company work very hard, eat healthfully, and keep their desks tidy.”
“Yes!” said Mark. “Like you!”
“No, not like me. In different ways. There are many ways to do everything.”
“Indeed! ” cried Sanjeet. “We are eager to know about the many paths, for example, to multiple orgasms. That article for Dream Woman was . . . powerful!”
“There is more to life than a carefully sucked clitoris,” said Research, fact-checking herself as she spoke.
Mark’s eyebrows lowered. “Of course. Like your airport research, very lofty. Were you sending it to Dream Vacation? Little thought-piece for the snowbirds?”
Research swayed. “There is a woman on the third floor who has memorized the photocopier manual. She works in logistics, but she has a small-machines certification. Everyone knows her, everyone calls her when the copiers bust. Her name is Marie.”
The men looked, simultaneously, dismayed. “We employ a service company for those machines.”
“Where are your notepads? How are you going to record what I’m telling you?”
A plane shuttled to the ground, red and yellow lights blinked, footsteps passed the door, a flash of conversation about “overseas workflows.” The men said nothing.
“Yoghurt is the most popular snack food in this company. Even the lactose intolerant eat the soy stuff, like Katri at Dream Romance. Her favourite is raspberry.”
“Aren’t you interested in adventure, travel, pleasure?” Mark shoved half a raspberry Danish into her right hand.
“The airport is right there.” She pointed at the window. “I see people travel all the time. But it doesn’t have much to do with me.”
Sanjeet shook his head. “We are Dream Magazines. Our magazines have nothing to do with the people who read them. That’s what they like about them.”
“It actually might not be. We don’t know everything about everyone yet.”
The windows in that office looked out onto thick purpling clouds, dancing with flecks of green lightning. She wondered who in the building had remembered an umbrella, who was unembarrassed to wear galoshes, and whose evening barbecue would be ruined by the rain. Sanjeet had just said something, but his mouth was full of muffin and she didn’t quite get it – something about sexual freedom. She nodded, said, “Sounds fascinating.” As soon as Research escaped this meeting, she could check the all the coathooks, whatever closets she could find, conduct an exit poll at the front door, and have rough estimates on all these rain matters by the end of the day. And then she could start the rest of her work.
To: All onsite employees
From: Social Committee
Re: Holiday Party
Friday 7:45 a.m.
Dear Dream Team,
It’s November and you know what that means – many of you have missed the RSVP deadline for the Holiday Party. The deadline has now been extended until next Wednesday, but if you have not responded by then you will be UNABLE to do so, and therefore unable to attend the party.
Please note that you CANNOT RSVP by replying to this email – you MUST open the online form via the URL which was provided in your personalized invitation email. If you no longer have your invitation email you must contact a member of the Social Committee for it to be resent. You CANNOT use someone else’s to respond to the invitation – the links are personalized and will save your dinner order (beef, fis
h, or vegetarian) and your guest’s name.
Thank you for your cooperation,
The Social Committee
LONELINESS
THE CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER had something going on with one of the senior marketing managers. The fact that no one knew did not make the situation exactly comfortable for either of them, but it did make it manageable. They managed to smile pleasantly at each other over Styrofoam coffee in meetings, to hand each other brown plastic stir sticks. They managed to keep their public conversations restricted to profitable innovations in kitchen-cabinet refacing. They managed to keep the flirtation so low-key they almost did not notice it themselves. Or so either would’ve claimed, if asked. Neither was ever asked.
He did not work in Mississauga, in the Canadian branch office where she engineered pitches, sketched designs, wrote copy, took small uncatered meetings with subordinates who complained bitterly about substandard pens and lack of creative scope. He worked in head office, in a big American high-rise, in a vast and carpeted corner office where he could have had tapestries and sculpture, mounted fishes and trophies, or at least a couch and a minifridge, if he were so inclined. But he was not so inclined. Except for the Starbucks thermos, the photos of his kids, the extra ties and Rolaids, his office was as blank and impersonal as a model kitchen.
The American CFO’s duties required him to come to the Canadian office only for quarterly presentations, and for years, so he did; Mississauga was only malls and Marriotts, and his children missed him. But then, one third-quarter close, his winter-chapped hand accidentally, absently, absorbedly brushed a wool-and-nylon thigh, and he began to find more conferences, more general meetings and updates, worthy of his time. He began to accumulate Air Miles, and she stopped answering the smiles on Lavalife. He stopped phoning his ex late at night, and she started buying lingerie in candy colours.
The Big Dream Page 12