The Towers
OF
BABYLON
MICHELLE KAESER
a novel
© MICHELLE KAESER 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical — including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems—without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge St, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Freehand Books acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program provided by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The towers of Babylon : a novel / Michelle Kaeser.
Names: Kaeser, Michelle, 1982- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190139617
Canadiana (ebook) 20190139641
ISBN 9781988298498 (softcover)
ISBN 9781988298504 (HTML)
ISBN 9781988298511 (PDF)
Classification: LCC PS8621.A41 T69 2019
DDC C813/.6—dc23
Edited by Rosemary Nixon
Cover design by Grace Cheong
Cover photo: iStock.com/ZargonDesign
Image of Iraqi Dinar © Oleg Mit/Shutterstock
Printed on FSC® recycled paper and bound in Canada by Houghton Boston
Contents
Book One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Book Two
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Book Three
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Book Four
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
About the Author
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.
And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do now will be impossible for them.
“Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth.
—GENESIS 11:4-9
Book one
1
“WELCOME, WELCOME, WELCOME! And thanks, gang, for coming in today!”
On a hard yellow chair—wooden, with chipping paint, one of several arranged in a small circle—Joly absorbs this spirited greeting and tries to ramp up a matching enthusiasm. This is her first job interview in months — so what if it’s for a coffee shop!
“Now buckle up,” continues Greg, the manager here at Nature’s Grounds, “because this is going to be a job interview ride like you’ve never had.”
It’s already a much different ride than Joly expected. For one, she wasn’t expecting a group interview—nobody mentioned that in the email. She thought she’d walk in, meet Greg, endure a short, simple consultation in which he would ask her a few logistical questions about her availability, gauge her attitude as upbeat and friendly, then hire her on the spot. But the barista job market seems to have developed over the last fifteen years.
“We’re not a corporate place, we’re not looking for corporate robots,” Greg says, radiating a huge smile that reveals two rows of unusually small teeth. He is pumped! “We just want to get a feel for who you are. The real you! Isn’t that right, Reza?”
“Right,” says Reza, his second-in-command, the weekend manager, flanking him on the left.
“So no pressure, huh? Let’s just relax and have fun.”
Greg pauses, giving the five candidates the opportunity to register this benevolent generosity. The other candidates are all about Joly’s age—thirties—and all looking remarkably self-assured, wearing easy job-interview smiles. Which unnerves Joly, whose stomach is buckling and whose pulse has shot way up. She isn’t good with public speaking—groups of more than three make her shaky. She blames this failing on her small stature, squeaking out at just over five feet, a hair over a hundred pounds.
“Why don’t we start with some simple introductions,” says Greg, fiddling with the fitbit on his wrist. His hair is a touch on the shaggy side and there’s some patchy scruff on his face. His shirt is a light blue button-down, the top buttons left undone and the sleeves rolled up. Coffee-shop casual. But still authoritative. Joly pegs him at something over forty, though pretending not to be. “Let’s go around the circle and get your names … oh and what the hell, maybe a fun fact about yourself.”
Uh-oh. Joly didn’t prepare a fun fact. She prefers those alliterative introductions made up of your name and an adjective that best describes you. Super Sue. Daring Dave. Mysterious Mary. Jolly Joly. She’s got that one nailed down.
“Fun facts are always good ice breakers, eh Reza?” Greg says.
“Mm-hmm.” Reza doesn’t say much, his expression never changes, he hardly moves. His purpose here seems to be to serve as symbolic support, or audience, for Greg. But he is holding a clipboard.
Greg scans the circle, settling his eyes on Joly, to whom he gives an encouraging nod, a signal to kick off the chorus of fun facts.
“Oh. Me? Yeah. Sure.” Fun fact … fun fact … what’s a fun fact about herself? Barista is the job she had as a teenager? Before she spent four years getting an undergrad degree in sociology and three more getting a grad degree in fine arts (creative writing)? Before she went many-thousand dollars into debt to pay for these accreditations? She thought there would be an income premium on higher education—she’s sure people told her that. The same people who encouraged her to “follow your bliss”—her parents, teachers, guidance counsellors, professors, friends, neighbours, popular books, TV shows—everyone, really, except her brother Yannick, who only ever advised her to become a banker. Oh how he rolled his eyes when she applied to writing school—but he’s always been smarter.
Because now, sitting in an interview at a coffee shop, in a circle of smiley faces, reaching for a fun fact, it takes an almost heroic determination not to succumb to the total disheartenment of having sunk all those years and all that money into academics and artistic endeavours only to wind up exactly where she started.
But she is heroically determined! She won’t be kept down. Chin up, Joly. Chin up. Here we go. A fun fact. “Hi. I’m Joly.”
Greg frowns right away. He looks over at the clipboard Reza is holding and says, “Joly? I have a Jolanda-Lydia.” He pronounces the J like a Y.
“Yeah, that’s me. But it’s Joly,” she says, returning the J to its affricate sound. “I go by Joly.”
The frown on Greg’s face persists—she hasn’t sufficiently accounted for the nickname. “It’s kind of a long story,” she says by way of apology.
No problem for Greg. He’s nodding ferociously, leaning way forward in his chair, his hands on his knees, elbows splayed wide. He wants the long story. And since Joly has nothing else with which to fill the silence, she starts to tell it. “Well, my mom wanted to name me Jolanda—she’s Swiss, so she spelled it with a J.”
“Okay, we’re with you,” says Greg, his whole face lit up with a beatific smile. He nods around the circle. “The gang’s all with you.”
“But my dad wanted Lydia. They fought about it, I guess, and eventually agreed to the hyphenate: Jolanda-Lydia.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
“But no one was happy with that in practice. Too many syllables to get through when you’re screaming at someone to quiet down, right?”
A sharp hiccup of laughter sounds out from someone to her left, a shabby-chic sort of guy in flannel and a ponytail who seems to sympathize with bouts of parental shouting.
“So they abridged it to Jo-ly,” she says, pronouncing it Yo-ly. But why, in a job interview, is she taking up whole minutes telling this idiotic story? Beside her, Reza is taking notes on his clipboard, maintaining an impassive expression that has her worried. She hears the quiver in her own voice as she continues: “And then—”
“And then from there, we got to Jo-ly,” Greg breaks in. “Neat-o! Well, Joly, it looks like your name and fun fact are rolled into one, huh?”
Jolted by the interruption, Joly takes a last stab at ingratiating herself. “Uh … yeah. That’s the kind of efficiency I aim for, Greg.”
Greg keeps his gaze on her for a beat too long, like he’s trying to decide on something—is Joly Nature’s Grounds material, or maybe just a smartass?
The fun facts carry on around the circle, and Joly instinctively gauges her response against the others’. This is why group interviews are terrible. This being pitted against each other. And yet, she can’t stop herself from savouring the realization that she’s come out near the top. Greg certainly seemed more tickled by the etymology of her name than he does by Riley, with his flannel and ponytail, whose fun fact is that he plays bass in a band, or April, who has travelled to twenty-two countries (though when pressed, it’s uncovered that she counts England, Wales, and Scotland as three separate notches on her post), or Jenn, who used to be a competitive sailor. But Greg does have an interest in and a few follow-up questions for Devang, who claims not to have eaten breakfast in over six years.
“Whoa now, just whoa. No breakfast at all?”
“Nothing.”
“No fruit? Not even a slice of bread?”
“Just coffee,” Devang says with a smile that wins Greg over.
“Ahahaha. Well of course coffee! We can’t have you working here if you’re not a die-hard coffee fiend, am I right, Reza?”
“Right.”
The baton of fun facts, having been passed off to all five interviewees, now arrives at Greg, who sits a little taller, grins a little wider, and says, “Well, I guess it’s my turn, huh? All right then, let’s see here. Fun fact about Greg.”
Hmm … this guy, well, he’s not exactly what Joly was expecting in a Nature’s Grounds manager. She had soaring hopes for this place, with its non-corporate ethos. To go by its website, the coffee shop is big into environmentalism. And humanitarianism. They use biodegradable cups, sell fair trade beans, compost the grounds, and use the compost in a little vegetable garden they have out back. The wall art is made by local artists, the tables by local craftspeople. So as Joly was writing up her cover letter, she got to thinking (in that way she sometimes does, where her thoughts spiral through the upper echelons of optimism until they spin off into freewheeling delusions) that this coffee shop might be a fantastic place to work! The perfect place! The staff members probably hang out after their shifts, sipping their fair trade coffees and talking politics and philosophy. Maybe after hours the place transforms into a sort of French salon, bursting with lively discussion and debate, a Café de Flore, and she a Simone de Beauvoir, provoking and being provoked, a kind of exchange that inspires huge, sweeping changes in consciousness! This is where it all starts, isn’t it? At the neighbourhood pubs and bars and coffee shops?
“All right … how about this for a fact,” says Greg. He leans back in his chair and stretches his legs out into the centre of the circle, crossing them at the heels, letting his khaki pants ride up his shin an inch. Joly is sure she can see him flexing his calf. “I just ran my first marathon last month. Ran the whole thing. Pretty good time too, if I say so myself. About three and a half hours.” Which Joly figures means something over four.
Greg scans the group’s faces for signs of awe, but all he gets is polite nods. “Any runners here?”
Only Jenn, the ex-competitive sailor, raises a shaky hand.
“Oh yeah? You run?” he says.
“Yeah, sort of. Sometimes.”
“It’s crazy addictive, huh? Once you get into it?”
“Yeah, definitely. I’m not up to marathon level yet or anything,” she says, really working him now. “But maybe one day. I hope!”
“Oh you can’t just up and decide to run a marathon, no. You have to train. Follow a program. It’s actually a fairly enormous commitment.” Greg interlaces his fingers and cracks his knuckles. “It can take some people years to get in the right shape for it.”
“I’d definitely like to get on a training program.”
“Oh yeah, you absolutely should, absolutely. I’ve got a great program I can tell you about and talk you through. We’ll have to do that sometime. But I don’t want to bore the whole group with a running clinic. Haha.” As Greg checks his fitbit watch, he forces a grimace, an exaggerated yikes expression at how they’ve all gotten carried away with this marathon talk. “And we really need to move along here anyway, don’t we, Reza?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, but wait, wait … we forgot about you. Want to give us a little intro? A fun fact about yourself?”
Reza looks up from his clipboard, but it’s only his eyes that move. “My name is Reza. My fun fact is that my parents are Iranian refugees.”
Greg turns solemn in the wake of this one. “You see, this is the kind of diversity we have here,” he says. “That’s what makes this place so interesting to work at. Iranian refugees, musicians, breakfast-abstainers, elite marathon athletes. It takes all kinds, doesn’t it? Takes all kinds to build a community. And that’s really what we’re about here. Community.”
The candidates send out dumbstruck stares, which bounce right off Greg. For the next few minutes, he describes the guiding principles of the coffee shop, a lecture that soon detours into his own personal history—including a passing mention to having made his high school honour roll—and then into his career in coffee. He sits perched on the edge of his chair throughout, his knees bouncing and his hands flying out from his body, so whipped up is he by his excitement, and finally he arrives at a place where he’s ready to put some actual questions to the group.
“Every good CEO, from those Google guys to Oprah, they all like to ask curveball questions in job interviews. Now me, I don’t always like to take advice from those corporate types, but
I do like the idea of mixing things up. So I’m gonna throw you a bit of a curveball myself.”
Greg zeroes in on Devang, who’s scratching an itch on his left shoulder. “Ah … ah … aaah, you’re looking a little tight there, Devang. But don’t worry, buddy, this one’s gonna be fun.” Greg claps his hands together, agleam with excitement. “Okay, so here’s what’s gonna happen. Reza’s gonna read you three quotes. All quotes by famous people, quotes about coffee, okay? You with me? Everybody with me?”
The coerced murmurs of assent rally forth from the interviewees.
“Okay, so Reza here will read the quotes, then I want you to tell us which is your favourite. And why. Something to get your brain thinking a little differently. So Reza? What’s our first quote?”
Reza flips to a back sheet on the clipboard and begins: “Number one: ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ T.S. Eliot,” he reads.
“That’s the poet T.S. Eliot,” says Greg with a lift of the eyebrows and a strange sucking sound. “Famous poet. What’s our second quote, Reza?”
“Number two: ‘Ah! How sweet coffee tastes. Lovelier than a thousand kisses. Sweeter far than muscatel wine.’ J.S. Bach.”
“Interesting, interesting. For all you music lovers, eh Riley? And number three?”
“Number three: ‘Where coffee is served, there is grace and splendour and friendship and happiness.’ Sheikh Ansari Djerzeri Hanball Abd-Al-Kadir.”
“Whew, there’s a name, huh? A real mouthful. Say that name five times fast. He was a Sufi mystic, that one,” Greg makes a weird gesture toward Reza with his chin. Reza must be a kind of mystic too? Or Reza, being an export from the Middle East, must be well educated about Sufism in general and this coffee sheikh in particular? “Of course, I don’t expect anyone here to know who all these people are. I didn’t know myself. I just looked up the quotes online. But they are pretty good, huh? Some real doozies there, right Reza?”
“Right.”
“Okay then. So let’s get to it. How ’bout we start with you, Joly?”
“Oh, me first again?”
“Would you like me to start with someone else? Give you more time to think it over?”
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