The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  This seems like a trick question. “Um … no, no, that’s fine. So you want me to pick a favourite?” Her nerves are ringing in her ears.

  “Right. Which speaks to you?”

  “Um … let me think …” Pick one, Joly! Hurry! “Uh … the second one?” Middle seems like the safest choice.

  “Okay, okay, and why? What did you like about it?”

  “Oh … well … I thought it was evocative. It made me want a cup of coffee, you know?”

  “Hm. All right.”

  Next up is Jenn: “I really like the last one, the idea of happiness and friendship being wherever coffee is.” Then she launches into a whole story about her childhood and her caffeine-dependent father, a man who was often away on business, but who, whenever he was around, brewed a pot of strong coffee in the morning. As she gets going on how the smell of that coffee was the smell of comfort, because it meant her beloved father was home at last, the rest of the candidates trade oh-fuck-off looks. She ends the story with this gem: “So that’s what coffee means to me. Family. And happiness. Like the Sheikh says.”

  Greg is thrilled—oh boy howdy is he thrilled—sporting a smile that lands somewhere between expansive and deranged. Watching him open up his entire expression to Jenn—the desperate smile, the painfully ingenuous eyes—a strange sympathy sweeps through Joly. The poor guy is just lonely. Like everyone. And this strained, prolonged interview is his attempt to mitigate that loneliness for however long he can. Which explains why they have already been here for almost forty minutes.

  The favourite-quotation question travels around the group, but no one’s response manages to delight Greg quite as much as Jenn’s childhood reminiscence. “That was fun, wasn’t it? Like I said at the start, not the kind of interview you’re used to, but—”

  “Greg, we’re getting short on time,” Reza says, venturing an unprompted sentence for the first time today.

  Greg steals a frightened glance at his watch and grinds his small teeth. “Oh shoot. Oh right. Okay. Let’s wrap things up here. Now that you’ve all gotten to know each other a little, I’ve got one last question. Riley, let’s start with you this time.”

  “Okay,” Riley’s ponytail bobs up and down.

  “Excluding yourself, if you could pick one person you think should advance to the next round of interviews, who would that be? Just a name. I don’t need a reason for this one.”

  “Wait, sorry,” Joly says, the words tumbling from her mouth before she can stop them. “How many rounds of interviews are there exactly? I mean … I’m just curious.”

  “I guess it depends how far you make it in the process. Doesn’t it? Haha. And now that you’ve taken the floor, Joly, you might as well lead us off on this last question. So tell us, who would you put through to the next round?”

  “Oh, hm.” The spirit of this question saddens her; it’s the worst of all the bogus questions he’s asked today. “I don’t really want to throw anyone under the bus.”

  “Not so easy being the boss, huh? Making the tough decisions.”

  “Everyone here seems nice and competent. Good barista potential in all of us, I think. I think everyone should make it through.”

  “I’m looking for one name.”

  “I’d really rather not single anyone out.”

  Reza notes this response without expression. When Greg throws the same question to each of the others, they answer with a clear choice. One name. No one picks Joly.

  2

  THE GUEST BEDROOM in Yannick’s house is wonderfully furnished, with a bouncy queen bed in a rich upholstered frame, matching white side tables and dresser, and a small antique desk, at which Joly sits and reviews the supplementary take-home form that Reza handed out to the candidates at the end of the interview: six pages of short-answer questions, front and back. What complaints did you have about your last boss? What issues have you previously had with coworkers? What skills have helped you stand out in your previous jobs? What does ‘community’ mean to you? Describe what makes you extraordinary.

  Joly trills her lips, slumps low in the chair, and eventually puddles onto the floor, like a child in front of a pile of homework.

  When it comes to her own writing—oh boy, her hilarious, genius short stories—she can spend hours bolted to the desk. Days, weeks, months flying by almost unnoticed! Which is why, a few months back, after emerging from a period of particularly intensive and sensational artistic creativity, she was shocked to discover that her savings had haemorrhaged from her bank account and she could no longer make her rent.

  When Joly first moved in here, she was helpful. Yannick and Karen were finishing up the last in a series of renovations on this 2.5 million dollar Danforth-area home, and someone had to be around to let in the painters and the delivery guys and sound system guys while they were both off at their Very Important Jobs. It was a blessing, really, that Joly was unemployed and available to help out. But since then, her position in the house has turned a little iffier than she’d like. She still cleans all 3.5 bathrooms once a week, loads the dishwasher, does the laundry, takes little Yvie to swimming lessons, babysits whenever they ask her to. But Yannick is getting testy. She needs an exit strategy.

  Joly gropes for the Nature’s Ground document up on her desk and gives it another look. Come on now, Joly. Just fill it out. Do it! But her belly turns over at the sight of this document—a literal queasiness. Or else it’s residual nerves from the interview itself. Curled up on her side, she clutches her stomach, winces, and allows a moment of reflection. How did she get to this point? There must have been at least one critical juncture at which she chose the wrong path.

  But then maybe everyone has a shaky decade or two. There’s still time to turn it all around! She just needs her one real break.

  3

  “THE WORLD’S TALLEST slum is in Venezuela,” says Joly, reading facts off her laptop, at the kitchen island, which is cluttered with a confusing array of household crap. The cleaning lady who’s supposed to come once a month has been on vacation. And the dishwasher’s broken again. Everything’s so much harder when the dishwasher’s broken. She’s sure she just did the dishes yesterday, so how is there already another shaky pile in the sink?

  “Uh-huh,” says Yannick, slumped over his bowl of Cheerios across from her.

  “It’s a 54-storey skyscraper.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Did you know that? D’you know about this?”

  “No. I’m not up on my slums, I guess.”

  Joly looks at her brother sloppily spooning his cereal. At 6:10am, it’s really too early to be eating—but 6:00 is when Yannick gets up and Joly can’t stand the idea of him eating alone, so she always sets her alarm to match his. It’s really not so bad today; the summer morning sun is already flooding in, radiating off the pewter-glazed kitchen cabinets. “It’s an abandoned skyscraper,” she says. “That’s interesting to think about, no? Says here they ran out of money before they could finish building it.”

  “Hm.” Drops of milk spill onto the sports section of the newspaper he’s sort of working his way through. He’s not listening to her. But he rarely does. So she doesn’t let his disinterest stop her from talking about what she wants to talk about.

  “And the homeless just invaded it en masse. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Shouldn’t you be looking for a job?”

  “I am looking. Always looking. And actually,” she says with a flourish of her cereal spoon, “I had a job interview just yesterday.”

  “Well-a-well-a-well.” Yannick glances up from the sports page spread out on the white-and-grey marble countertop. Oh, he’s listening now. “Look at you.”

  “Look at me,” she says, savouring this flicker of pride before plunging back into the laptop. “So they call it the Tower of David, this skyscraper.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “Or Torre David,” she says, trying it out with a Spanish accent and enjoying the way the words roll around in her mouth.
She’s long believed that speaking multiple languages holds a civic importance. Knowing a language other than one’s own offers insight into another culture, into a people, and into that people’s way of thinking. And okay, just putting on an accent, however well-articulated, doesn’t technically qualify as knowing a language, but it does provide a window. So she says the words again, really letting the Rs roll this time. “Torre David.”

  “I heard you the first time, dummy,” Yannick says. “What kind of job?”

  “And they say it looks like the Tower of Babel. You know, half finished, half broken. There are no windows in most of it. Just big gaping holes. And thousands of people living there. Isn’t that something?”

  “Joly.”

  “There are no elevators. That’s obvious, I guess. But they’ve built these ramps over some of the stairs. And there are these guys, like cabbies, who’ll drive you up the tower on their motorcycles. Like, if you live on a high floor. And you’ve had a rough day.”

  “What was the job interview?”

  She squints and braces herself. “Barista.”

  “Oh Jesus Christ.” Yannick throws his spoon into his bowl; the clang echoes around the cabinetry.

  “No, no, it’s a cool place,” she says, still trying to believe this is true. “And tips are supposed to be good. People tip baristas now.”

  “Who tips? I don’t tip.” He returns his half-assed focus to the newspaper.

  “Because you only ever buy drip coffee. You don’t have to tip for drip. Now check this out: it’s, like, gang-controlled, this tower. These gangs run the whole operation. You have to pay them to gain entry.”

  “You can tell I’m not really listening to you, right?”

  “But there are regular families who live there too. Just ordinary working people looking for a home. That’s interesting. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

  Yannick looks up at her once more. “Joly, I don’t know. I guess so. But I also sort of don’t care.”

  “What?”

  “Look for a real job.”

  “But no one ever calls me back. And you know, I’m not even sure I’d like most of these ‘real jobs’ I’ve been applying for. These dumb admin jobs at these boring companies.”

  “Of course you don’t like the jobs.” He gets up from the island, abandoning the sports section. He doesn’t read as much as he used to. Not books, not articles. Not even the sports stats.

  “Right. So, like, what’s the point of applying, you know?”

  “What? What are you talking about? Nobody likes their job. Don’t you know that? You just go to work, then come home, then collect a paycheque and otherwise pretend it never happened.” He deposits another pod into the coffee machine and waits with his arms firmly crossed. “Christ, I hate my job.”

  He says this all the time, how he hates the long hours, hates his boss, hates the dummies whose slack he has to pick up. But he also seems to revel in the imagined prestige of his work, the gross culture of finance. She’s seen him out with his work buddies, swearing and laughing and racking up thousand dollar bar tabs. That’s a required part of the lifestyle, he tells her. And he likes that part, she’s sure of it.

  “This fucking vinegar deal is gonna kill me,” he says, slouching on the marble counter, watching the coffee dribble into his cup. “I’m gonna be working straight through the weekend again.”

  Joly looks up from her slideshow of life inside the Venezuelan slum. “Well, wait, so you’re not coming to baseball then? Again?”

  “What did I just say? I gotta work, dummy.”

  “But no one should work on Sundays.”

  “Thank you, Joly. You pick that up at one of your bullshit Occupy rallies?”

  “Didn’t have to,” she says. “Sunday, day of rest.”

  The Sunday baseball games at Christie Pits are a tradition for them, have been since forever. Their parents used to take them to watch the games when they were kids, and although the practice fizzled some when Yannick hit his teenage years and developed weekend interests that didn’t include hanging with his parents and his little sister, it was Yannick himself who resurrected the tradition a few years ago, just after his own kid was born. “Traditions are important,” he told Joly then. “We can’t lose ours.”

  For a whole season, they packed up the family every Sunday, along with a six-pack and whatever friends they could round up, and they spent the afternoon on the grassy hill overlooking right field. But now Karen spends most of her weekends up in Thornhill, parading Yvie off to her parents. And Yannick, for one reason or another, some work or family or social obligation, hasn’t been making it out to the ballpark as often as he used to. Of the four games so far this season, he’s only actually been to one and a half. But still, every Sunday Joly wakes up expecting the tradition to endure.

  “You gotta come this week,” she says.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ll try.”

  “Oh.” Her disappointment is physical. It’s in her deflated chest and her sloshing belly. Though the belly thing might be something else. She’s been trying to decide all through breakfast whether she’s queasy or not. The Cheerios aren’t sitting well. Or maybe it’s the unpasteurized milk that Karen has been getting through some shady online network, ever since she read that raw milk provides a perfect cocktail of nutrients for pre-pregnancy.

  “Jesus, I said I’ll try,” Yannick says, a little too loudly, at a volume amplified by guilt, or maybe just impatience. “Can’t Lou go with you?”

  “She’s coming. But I like it when there are more of us.”

  “Can’t your communist boyfriend go?”

  “He’s working on Sunday. Also, Ben is not technically a communist.” Joly has learned, after many exhausting discussions with Ben, that the distinction is important. Ben is not a communist. Although it’s an easy mistake to make. Because he does lean pretty hard to the left. In a way that’s obvious from even a few minutes of conversation with him. But he’s not a communist. He’s explained to her many times about the nuanced distinctions between various branches of left-wing ideologies. “He’s a social anarchist,” she corrects.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the fucking difference?”

  “I think it’s mostly a branding thing.”

  “But both those brands suck.” Yannick gives her one of those headshakes that conveys both his bafflement and disappointment with her, then throws back the rest of his coffee and plunks the empty mug down beside his empty cereal bowl. “All right, I gotta go.”

  Once he’s gone, Joly decides to do a bit of cleaning, to make herself useful, to remind her brother that she’s good for something. But halfway through the stack of dishes, the murmuring in her stomach erupts into an urgent, screeching nausea. She makes it to the bathroom just in time to puke up her morning cereal and raw milk. A few specks land on the hand-painted tiles of the bathroom floor.

  She spends the next fifteen minutes lying on these tiles. It’s not so bad down here—the tiles are warmed by a radiant heating system. Her stomach starts to settle, but the room smells foul. It’s not just the lingering notes of puke, it’s also the soaps and air fresheners and that weird cinnamon toothpaste that are blending together into a surprisingly putrid stink.

  It’s the third morning in a row now that she’s hurled, and this time she starts to worry in earnest that she might be knocked up.

  4

  NO WAY! IMPOSSIBLE! Sitting on the plush carpet of her bedroom, Joly peers at her stomach and tries to imagine an actual human slow-cooking in there. Nah, can’t be. It’s never happened to her before, for one. No close calls, no real scares. She has a system, a good system, based on cycles and timing and instinct, and so far, this system has been flawless—so flawless that Joly has even wondered on occasion if she might be barren.

  But pregnancy worries, once entertained, are hard to shake loose. So when Joly hears Karen and Yvie leave for the day, she sneaks up to
the third floor, to the master bedroom and through to the ensuite, to the drawers in which Karen keeps a trove of pregnancy tests so that anytime she’s even one day late or thinks her breasts have swollen or that “things just feel different,” she has a test on hand to settle the question, hoping, always hoping, for baby number two. A handful of times now, Joly has sat with her, side by side on the edge of the clawfoot tub, waiting for the test to deliver its (inevitably negative) result, and for Karen to heave out a smile and say, “That’s okay, next month.”

  Now it’s Joly’s turn to pee on the stick. She does. Then she waits … and waits … and waits … then looks.

  Oh boy.

  5

  “WHAT AM I gonna do?!” Joly canters around Louise’s wide back deck as she wails. Despite the twenty-minute sprinted bike ride to Don Mills, a boundless energy pumps through her limbs. The ride up left her drenched, sweat stains at her armpits already the size of saucers. It’s unseasonably hot—again. Unless this is just what pregnancy is like? Disrupting hormones? Spiking sweat glands?

  “Well to start,” says Lou, splitting open an apricot. “I think you should probably talk to Ben.”

  “Are you crazy? I can’t talk to Ben. Not without a plan. You know how he is. He’ll bamboozle me!”

  Ben’s imposing bearing, his great height and weight, his booming bass voice, and his vast breadth of knowledge have always rendered Joly helpless. She can’t squirm her way out of any debate with him.

  Also … she and Ben did once discuss this possibility—the possibility of a system failure. It was a short conversation in which they both agreed the problem would be handled quickly, tidily, reasonably. No one would weep or shriek or lose their mind over a simple in-and-out medical procedure. But that was a few years ago, when she was still in her twenties. Now that she’s stormed through the door of thirty, the abortion instinct doesn’t ring out quite as loudly as it once did. Right now, marching around Lou’s deck, she is surprised—and a little alarmed—that she can’t hear it ringing at all.