The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  Louise also looks like she has just been fucked. The hair at the back of her head is teased up into total disarray. And for Christ’s sake, her pants are still undone. The wheels in her head begin to crank out a lie, that machinery operating automatically, but it suddenly seems too farcical to pretend. “This is exactly what it looks like,” she says to Ben. “I’m a total fucking asshole.”

  “None of my business. My business is the beer. Where do you want it?” He stands rigid in her foyer, awaiting instruction.

  Louise waves him into the kitchen, zipping up her pants on the way.

  “It’s a strong lager, good for the season,” Ben says as he sets the beer on the counter, next to the maple syrup Elliott forgot to put away after breakfast. “I call it The Chairman Pow. Packs a punch, so be careful with it.”

  “How’s Joly?” Louise settles into one of the chairs to finish rolling her joint.

  “Oh, she’s good. Good good,” he says, but his composure collapses at the mention of her name. Straight away he drops his heft into the chair across from her, which groans beneath him. “Actually, I haven’t seen her. She says she wants to be alone for a few days. It behoves me to respect that.” He nods vigorously to affirm this decision. But he looks miserable.

  Absentmindedly, Ben fingers the pocket bible on the table.

  “You still doing the church thing?” she asks.

  Ben sits up taller in his chair, immensely relieved at the shift in conversation; he reconstitutes his veneer of equanimity. “I keep the faith.”

  Louise points at the bible with her joint. “I’m trying to read it. But it makes no sense. I got stuck on Babel.”

  “Ah, the proto-empire. The world’s first grand collective enterprise. It’s a story of hubris, of course. What’s not to understand?”

  “Hubris. How?”

  “What do you mean how? A people reaching for heaven without the knowledge of God. Classic hubris. And they’re punished for it.”

  “But why is God afraid of them?”

  “What—? He’s not afraid. Obviously. You’re reading it wrong.”

  “Oh.”

  As Louise draws in the pot, her limbs gain weight and her concentration ebbs. But it doesn’t quite manage to blunt her discomfort. She knits her fingers behind her head, feeling the disorder in her hair. Her thumbs dip down the back of her neck, into her blouse, brushing against the tag of her blouse that sits at the top of her spine. “I’m a total fucking asshole,” she says again.

  “Yes, well, aren’t we all. The Bible tells us that upfront. Sinners to the last.” He stands up to go. “But your sins are your own,” he says with a gentle half-smile. “I have no business here. But the beer.”

  Though she can tell he’s sincere, his reassurance of silence is hollow. Because it’s not the affair that’s tearing up her insides. Her sins are far greater—complicity in a thousand more egregious moral crimes that fan out all across the world.

  13

  TODAY’S PRIEST IS the young, exuberant one that Louise most likes. His animated cadence and gestures bring life to the early morning mass. A return to work was impossible without some kind of spiritual buttress, so she rose early and dropped in for this service.

  A whole pew to herself, Louise listens intently to the tortured bible readings, so wilfully opaque in their meaning that she starts to wonder if there isn’t a broader message at play. Perhaps there is something unholy about forthrightness and clarity, something unholy about communication itself.

  Certainly, nothing good ever seems to come from mass communication, from a united people working together on a “grand collective enterprise.” Near as she can tell, the grand collective enterprises involve initiatives like setting up plantations and mines and factories and office towers, and sticking workers inside them, locking them in with slave wages and suicide nets and demands to consume, until every useable human resource has been extracted from them and they drop dead.

  Beneath the newly-painted and already-commodified stars on the church ceiling, a flash of inspiration strikes. God isn’t frightened of people—she really was reading the story of Babel all wrong. He’s frightened for them. Because they will ruin themselves, if they’re given the chance. The world’s multitude of languages is a gift from God, not a punishment. This species, corrupted from the outset, can’t be trusted with the power of communication.

  14

  THE ELEVATOR BUTTONS light up one after the other as Louise shoots up twenty floors. She hurries from the elevator to her desk. She lost track of time sitting in the church—her first day back and already late.

  On her desk, a stack of file folders. Attached to the topmost folder is a note from Nicky in her round, bubbly script: Welcome Back! It’s written on a sheet from a bright red Zing!® Iced Tea notepad, with the Zing!® header, the cartoon bird in the upper right corner.

  To delay the beginning of this workday, she exchanges hellos with Jerry, who’s already well into his morning candy. Wine gums today. She can tell it’s wine gums by the way he’s chewing. A drawn-out chew, part smack and part suck.

  She takes a long sip from her thermos, then stares straight ahead until the first email alert of the day disrupts her. It’s from the CEO, Charlotte (Charlie), with the subject line, “Another tick for UpTick”:

  Dear UpTick Team,

  I want to congratulate everyone on their hard work with the audio billboard pilot project. Happy to report that early numbers are better than expected. Looks like we have a huge hit on our hands! BRAVO.

  Inspired by this success, the strategic leadership team is looking at other innovative billboarding models. Next week we are holding preliminary consultations about olfactory billboards (more to come on that!!). Our vision is to become the city’s first truly multi-sensory billboard company. Fingers CROSSED!

  This has been a challenging time for all of us. As we have all been working so hard on the audio launch, we have also been grieving the loss of one of our own. RIP Neil. So let’s dedicate our revolutionary new audio billboard to Neil. I hope they’re serving up a big frosty glass of iced tea for you in heaven!

  So proud of the team,

  Charlie

  CEO and President

  UpTick Media

  Louise’s insides shrivel; she drops her head into her hands and concentrates on the floor tiling. She feels half-dead.

  “You get in late today?”

  Looking up, she finds Rob—his arms crossed, his face serious, even grim.

  “What? No. I don’t think so.”

  “I came by earlier, you weren’t in yet.”

  “Uh. Well. Traffic. The DVP was backed up for miles.” Not her best lie. A bit risky. She’s not the only who takes that route. But he’s not actually listening.

  “Nicky and I want to meet with you. My office, okay?”

  “What about?”

  “Eleven.” He’s unusually brusque. No jokes about her still being on vacation time. No hilarious updates on office gossip she missed. No perching on the edge of her desk, leering and lingering.

  “Uh, okay. Sure.”

  As he moves along, Louise starts to wonder if maybe she fucked something up in her absence. Neglected something? Maybe they’re making cutbacks. Is she about to get fired?

  “What do you think that’s about?” asks Jerry, the shredded remnants of the green wine gum floating around in his mouth.

  “I don’t know. Did I miss anything important?”

  “Nope.”

  ROB IS SITTING behind his desk, holding onto his stern, all-business expression. “Let’s wait for Nicky,” he says.

  “How ’bout a general idea?” asks Louise.

  “Show some character, Lou. Wait it out.”

  She doesn’t like being alone in an office with Rob. Especially when he’s toying with her, just because he can. She turns her focus to the broad leaves of the palm plant in the corner.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” says Nicky, waddling her way into the office a few minutes later an
d heaving her enormous body into the chair next to Louise. “Emergency potty break. They’re becoming pretty frequent these days.” She passes a hand across her belly to underscore the point: the baby is to blame.

  “Wow, he’s really growing, huh,” says Rob, staring at her belly, then her breasts.

  “I know, I’m starting to fatten up. For real. But we’re on track. I’m coming up on week thirty-one.”

  “That little dude is on his way,” says Rob, still struggling to stop his eyes from flickering toward her colossal breasts.

  “So—about this little dude right here.” Nicky piles her hands on top of the ridge of her stomach.

  “Nicky’s going to be taking mat leave early,” Rob says.

  “Oh? Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Nicky. “The little one’s just being fussy. Doctor says I should already be on bedrest.”

  “Which brings us to you, Lou,” says Rob. He chooses this moment to let his stern expression crack open into a whitened smile. “We want you to take over as Communications Manager while Nicky’s away.”

  Louise stares at their eager smiling faces, both waiting for her to express gratitude and delight.

  “Surprised, huh?” says Rob, showing his top gums: a healthy pink.

  “Well yeah. A little. I thought you were bringing in someone new. I thought you were interviewing already.”

  “We did meet with a few people. But no one who was a good fit. Till Nicky suggested you.”

  “You’ll be great,” says Nicky.

  “You’ll get the salary bump. And the title, of course. But you’ll be looking at a lot more responsibility. You need to know that coming in.”

  Rob spends the next ten minutes elaborating on these responsibilities and assuring Louise that he’ll be right there to help her “work out the hiccups.” He discusses “the upcoming challenge” of marketing the audio billboards, how this feature is going to be “a game changer,” but how they’re going to need to “iron out the marketing strategy,” because the idea is still new and most of their clients have no understanding of directional sound technology. To this end, he’s set up a meeting for Wednesday so they can “hash out some strategies,”and he wants Louise to be “the point person” for that. They’ll “touch base” about it tomorrow.

  “The three of us will communicate about the transition over the coming weeks, but for now … let’s celebrate! Lunch at Barolo!” Barolo is the trendy Italian place where the office dweebs go for lunch when there’s a pretence for taking a lot of time. Barolo is code for boozy. And boozy, with Rob, is code for sexually inappropriate.

  “Congrats, Lou,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to this.”

  BACK AT HER desk, Louise takes slow, steady sips of water. She doesn’t bother to look at the folders or open any documents on her computer. She rolls her chair toward the window. Down on the sidewalk, a half block to her right, she watches victims of the audio billboard passing through the sound beam.

  “Hot day? How about a cool iced tea? Zing!”

  “Hot day? How about a cool iced tea? Zing!”

  “Hot day? How about a cool iced tea? Zing!”

  From this angle she can’t see the billboard itself, but its effect is clear. One after another, pedestrians stop short in the street, their heads swivel, searching … searching. Where is that coming from? Who said that?

  “Lou?”

  She spins in her chair, and sends an arm out wide, knocking over the empty glass of water left on the edge of her desk. It rattles around on her desk, but it doesn’t break.

  “Whoa there, slugger.” Rob sets the glass upright, smiling one of those smug smiles in which the tip of his tongue protrudes between the teeth. “Daydreaming, huh? Don’t go wrecking the place now that you’re a higher-up.”

  She looks at the glass and says, “Oops.”

  “Barolo time. Let’s hit it.”

  “Right, right.” But her mind is still down on the street and her thighs feel stuck to the chair. “You go ahead. I’ll catch up. I gotta … do some stuff. Use the washroom.”

  “Sure, and call Elliott, I bet, huh? Let him know the good news.” He claps her shoulder, holds his hand there for a couple of seconds before he ventures a squeeze; then he takes off.

  Louise looks at the stack of folders in front of her, at Jerry’s candy wrappers on the desk across from her. At Nicky’s note, delivered on Zing!® stationery in a bubbly cursive. At the wall clock by reception, which she’s spent hours looking at over the years, watching the smooth arc of time slipping by. Poison, all of it. A slow poison corroding her soul.

  She grabs her own Zing!® notepad, rips off the top sheet and scrawls out a single sentence just under the bright cartoon bird. She looks it over, adds a word, and tapes the note to her computer monitor, where the bright red paper will draw the eye of whoever happens by. I quit. Zing!

  15

  LOUISE ZIGZAGS AROUND the house, passing relics of her childhood and adolescence in every room she enters. This place is a tomb, one she’s been haunting for years. But she’s not dead yet. No, she’s surging with life, she can’t stop moving.

  When Elliott gets home from the framing shop, she’s still pacing in the living room. He sees her there, once again at home when she should be at work, and asks dryly, “Sick again?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I quit my job today,” she says, facing him dead on.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I hate it. So I quit it.”

  He drops his shoulder bag onto the ancient hardwood floor. “You … just decided to quit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t think about discussing that with me first?”

  “I did not, no.”

  She’s prepared for anything, long past the point where she can guess what Elliott’s reactions might be. What she gets is a tremendous sigh. Then he disappears into the kitchen, only to return a moment later with a baggie of pot.

  “Are those my drugs?”

  “Where were you last week?” he asks, breaking up the bud on the sideboard.

  “What?”

  He starts rolling a joint with an expertise and efficiency that surprise her. “Not at work, were you? Marguerite sees you at the coffee shop.”

  “Wasn’t me.” She shuffles in place next to the coffee table; her palms are getting sticky. “I told you that.”

  “I catch you at home the next day—”

  “I was sick—”

  “The window screen thrown into—”

  “A raccoon!”

  “So I got to thinking. And I called your office asking for you.” He’s never called the office—he always hits up her cell. Oh fuuuuuck. “You know what they told me?”

  A hot flush spreads from Louise’s chest to her forehead. “Uh … they might have said …”

  Joint rolled, he’s circling her now, closing in. “What did they tell me, Lou?”

  “… that I was … uh …”

  “What?”

  “… on vacation,” she mumbles.

  “Vacation!” he thunders, sending both arms up above his head. “Imagine that!”

  He lights up in front of her and blows the smoke into her face. But she’s grateful for this hazy shield, hoping he can’t see her withering behind it. Her face burns with white-hot embarrassment.

  Elliott stays silent, allowing her to squirm in her own shame. He should say something. Yell at her! Scream! But he prefers this approach—an error. In the charged silence, Louise’s shame, like all of her emotions, soon transforms into irritation. Her whole charade, the tedium and inconvenience of it—all for nothing! “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asks in a low voice.

  “I was waiting for you to say something. I didn’t think you’d make it through the whole week without coming clean. But you did!” He settles back against the sideboard, smoking the joint with his arms crossed. “Who does that, Lou? How do you lie to me about something like that?”
<
br />   The way he’s leaning there—so smug, so self-righteous. Louise can feel her irritation blossom into fury. As though he’s unblemished in all this! As though it’s not his fault she felt forced into the lie in the first place. “Me lie? What about you?

  “What about me?”

  “You lied about your whole personality! These fucking weddings!” A dam breaks inside her head. She swipes a photograph off the sideboard, the pile of his most recent prints, and whips it at him. “What is this shit?” Amid the deluge of anger roaring through her, Louise grabs another photograph and whips it at him. And another! Whip! Whip!

  “How is this who you are now?” she screams, shooting an entire stack straight up into the air. Brides flying! Blonde brides! Brunette brides! Fair brides! Dark brides! In Cinderella gowns! Empire waists! Mermaid cuts! Satin and tulle and crinoline! Crystal embellishments and diamond jewels! Pearls and rose gold! Grooms in beige suits on tropical beaches! In jet-black tuxedos in country clubs and waterfront halls! At banquet tables overflowing with filet mignon and lobster and halibut and towering weddings cakes! Centrepieces of garden roses! Orchids! Calla lilies! A catalogue of conspicuous consumption rains down on Louise’s head.

  “What happened to documenting the abject? How did you shift from that to this?” Whip! Right at his head! “It’s one fucking vanity project after another.”

  “Vanity?” Elliott gapes at her, like she’s the maniac. “It’s not vanity, Lou.” He kicks around the photographs, then digs his sneaker against one particular shot—a close-up of a bride at her dressing table, affixing a droopy earring—a (conflict?) diamond—to her lobe. “These people want everything Photoshopped out. Every blemish. I work at their faces for hours. Until each is this … like … like a perfectly hollow representation of a human. A placeholder. An approximation of a person. Totally blank faces. With artificial colouring. I tweak the colour of their eyes sometimes. And their lips. Their skin. I alter their bodies.” He runs the tip of his shoe over the bride’s eye and cheekbone. “It’s not vanity. How could it be? These people hate themselves.”