Elliott’s lip curls as he surveys his work. Is that disgust? He drops to a crouch amid his glossies, elbows on his splayed knees, like a hunter studying the tracks of his prey. “The abject aren’t in the far-flung corners, Lou. My clients, these brides and grooms, their mothers and fathers and friends … the more of their features and personalities I wipe out, the more they like the pictures.” His expression briefly softens, turning almost tender as he touches his fingertips to the photographs, as though he’s remembering the people he has obliterated. “They let me erase their humanity. And they love me for it. They beg me to do it. They pay me to do it. What could be more abject than that?”
“Oh my god,” Louise whispers, feeling a hole open up in her gut. It’s she who hasn’t been paying attention. “You’re miserable, Elliott.”
“So is everybody!” Elliott waves both hands at the spread of smiling, deranged faces. Louise zeroes in on a crucified Jesus, his expression Photoshopped into extreme perkiness, broadcasting nothing but good cheer and relentless positivity from his position on the cross. He might as well be facilitating a team building workshop up there, his arm already raised, poised to jot down corporate buzz words and handy-dandy acronyms on a crisp sheet of chart paper. “We’re all just pretending not to be. Except you, Lou … that’s something you don’t lie about at least.”
Elliott finishes the joint, burning the remaining half of it down to his fingers in one pull, like it’s nothing. How much of her pot has he been smoking? And what about her pills? Those too? Is that why they don’t have sex anymore? Christ, he’s further gone than she is.
Elliott tramps across the grotesque collage of wedding photographs. His sneakers scuff up the faces of his brides as he walks out on Louise, slamming the front door behind him. And so Louise, once more, is left alone in the old living room—stranded amid this wreckage, staring at a defaced Jesus who has nothing to offer her but an absolutely exuberant, upbeat smile.
BOOK THREE
1
TODAY’S SERMON IS weak, as was last Sunday’s, and the one before that. All bland words from the pulpit, all weak brew.
Since his brief, unsuccessful tenure as a doctoral student, Ben has been a faithful parishioner at this Anglican church on the campus’ west end. Its high liturgical style—with clouds of incense so thick you can choke, and a strictly classical canon of music—is all very much to God’s liking. The heavy red brick walls, the dark wooden ceiling beams: pure gravitas. Not even the mighty St. James Cathedral offers as high a mass as this one.
But these sermons are getting hard to stomach. Today more than usual, perhaps because the late summer heat has him shifting irritably in the pew, sweating far in excess of respectful social dictates. His bib of sweat is ruining his finest Sunday T-shirt. And the apocalypse hot wings he ate last night are firing up his digestive tract.
“When I was a little girl in rural Ontario,” the Reverend Roberta is saying, “my mother used to take me to the town dairy for ice cream whenever it got really hot. I always think about those trips when we get scorching days like this one. When the mercury in my little backyard thermometer creeps up into the mid-30s. And that’s been happening more and more in recent years, hasn’t it?”
Oh, yes, yes. Ben can almost hear the creaking necks of the grey-heads nodding around him. Sunday mass is never more than sparsely attended. Those who do show up are mostly old boomers, the WASPy variety—though today a few students from the divinity college pepper the pews as well. There’s also a pair of ancient classics professors wheeled out of cold storage for the service. But by and large it’s the boomers that form the congregation, and they love nostalgic stories about childhood and ice cream.
“I know what some of you are thinking,” says Reverend Roberta, whose ample proportions fill out the pulpit. “You’re thinking, uh-oh, here she goes again, off on another sermon about climate change. And yes, I have been talking about it a lot lately.” She leans over the pulpit to cast a conspiratorial eye over her flock. “I hear I’ve even been called the ‘eco-priest’ in some circles.”
Reverend Roberta pauses to accommodate the polite, expected chuckles. “But our Gospel reading this week has put me in mind for a discussion about our relationship to the earth. In the story we heard from Luke, we have Jesus telling his disciples to be like servants waiting for their master to return, ready to open the door when their master knocks. Now … we’re like the servants in this story. We have all been entrusted with the care of this home—this earth—and we don’t want to leave it in poor shape.”
What have we here? Is the good Reverend set to spring off into a true invective? With robust directives for her flock? And warnings about the personal sacrifices that will be needed to stave off the complete annihilation of the species? Are we to be graced with a rare meaningful homily?
No. Not even the mildest call to action. Instead, the good Reverend carries on with pastoral childhood stories—she works in an anecdote about rotary phones, a reference to a Joni Mitchell song, then finishes with a bizarre allusion to Peter Mansbridge, hitting a trifecta of pop-culture touchstones.
The boomers love it. As they love everything about themselves. A generation of narcissists. Sociopaths. Who have plundered the world, gorged themselves on its riches, and are now leaving it to burn. And despite all this—despite being the most selfish, destructive, and all-around worst collective of humanity ever to walk the earth, who may actually succeed in eradicating the species—they still insist on being pandered to, which the good Reverend, a proud boomer herself, is happy to do.
But the Reverend’s feckless preaching soon ends and the mass falls into the firm, guiding hands of tradition. The choir leads a sung recitation of the Nicene Creed—Merbecke’s sixteenth century composition. Suitably grave. Righteous. Good stuff. The harmonizing voices soothe Ben’s irritability. He plucks an offertory envelope from the pew-back in front of him and searches his pockets for loose change. All he has is a ten-dollar bill—a higher percentage of his net worth than he was ready to cough up. But alms must be given. For months the church has been fundraising to fix the rectory roof. Every Wednesday, while preparing the community dinner, Ben listens to the drip-drip-drip of leaks splashing onto the kitchen counters. This week’s bulletin features another sad plea for roof donations, so fundraising efforts must be glacial. With a wince, he stuffs his tenner into the envelope.
Before the offertory plate comes around, however, the congregation is brought to its knees (on padded kneelers now) for a communal confession. “Let us humbly confess our sins to almighty God,” says Reverend Roberta.
As ever, the week has given rise to a thick catalogue of sins, which Ben silently confesses in broad strokes. Then he lingers on the single sin that won’t stop gnawing at his conscience: the lost child.
But what else could have been done? Beyond Ben’s economic and emotional limitations, and his total lack of good parental examples—his own parents a pair of violent drunks—there are ethical considerations about bringing a child into a world soon to be plunged back into medieval times. Even the Anglican Church concedes a moral preference to abortion sometimes. Let the child go in peace, rather than come and suffer. The abortion was the least wrong decision, he’s sure of that. But certainty is not the same as absolution.
2
AT THE BAGEL PIT, Ben is put on sandwiches for the afternoon, which is better than being on coffee, a post that draws far and away the most frequent and trying customer complaints—this drink is too hot, it’s too milky, it’s too sweet, it’s too foamy, is this really two shots?—but sandwiches is no choice post either. It means standing in front of the sandwich fridge for hours, in front of its radiating coolant, which leaves the shirtfront damp, the skin clammy, and the stomach numb with cold by the end of a shift. The plum gig is cash.
The order sheet in front of him, for a Meredith, calls for smoked salmon on sesame seed. He halves a sesame bagel, runs it through the conveyor belt toaster, slathers both halves with a perfect
amount of plain cream cheese and fans smoked salmon neatly over top. A tomato is supposed to come next, but they’re out of tomatoes again, because Dickhead Debbie, the store manager, never orders enough. To compensate, he adds an extra generous load of the red onion relish, garnishes the whole thing with capers, and two pickled beans rather than the prescribed one.
“Meredith,” he calls out.
A woman in her early forties, several years older than Ben, with a swingy ponytail skips up to the counter. But at the sight of her bagel sandwich, plated and ready, she frowns. Must be the tomato. Ben can feel the complaint forming on her lips, so he looks back down at the sandwich deck, and gets busy on the next order in line.
“Excuse me?” Here it comes. “I wanted it on a rosemary bagel.”
Ben does not make mistakes on sandwiches. He crushes this job when he’s on sandwiches. “Order sheet says sesame.” He holds up the sheet with the sesame box clearly ticked. QED.
“I know. I know I might have said sesame. But I meant rosemary. Do you mind changing it?”
“Ma’am, I already made the complete sandwich. Exactly as directed to by this order sheet.”
She scrunches her face into a pout. “I know. But do you mind?”
“Yes, of course I do. Do you enjoy doing the same job twice when you’ve done it correctly the first time?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve ordered it on sesame and sesame you have received. That concludes our transaction.”
This collapse in the customer-is-always-right ethos requires serious computational effort on her part. Is this sandwich guy being rude to me? I’m a Customer. Capital-C.
She plunks an elbow on the counter and leans in. “Let me speak to your manager. Where’s you manager?”
“Well now, ma’am,” Ben says, laying out steak strips on the toasted halves of a poppy seed bagel, “that there is a difficult question. Our dear leader Debbie makes but scant appearances on the floor.” He feeds the steak-and-cheese bagel back through the toaster. “But you’re welcome to wait around and see if Godot turns up.”
“What? Can you—just go get your manager. Please. And right now.”
“Afraid not, ma’am. Can’t leave my post. As you can see, I am incredibly busy tending to the lengthy sandwich queue.” Ben nods at the single other person in line, a teenager eagerly eyeing the counter.
“Are you kidding me? This is … outrageous. What’s your name?”
Ben points to the nametag on his shirt, which reads Staff.
“I asked for your name. I’d like to know your name.”
“Ah, but I’m sure you can appreciate my bind, ma’am. I can only presume that had the higher-ups wanted me to give out my Christian name to every Tom, Dick, and Harry … and Meredith, they would have provided me with a personalized nametag. But they haven’t. So here we are. Staff.”
“I … I …” The woman stumbles through her fury, and eventually chokes out a few oaths and imprecations about Ben’s future at The Poppy Seed, as well as her future patronage, then charges out of the place in a grandiose huff, her sesame sandwich unclaimed on the counter.
The policy with “defective sandwiches” is to throw them out, since eating a mis-made sandwich amounts to gross workplace theft. Management came up with this policy out of concern that any alternative policy would spiral into serial abuses, with insidious staff members clambering over each other to accidentally-on-purpose prepare faulty sandwiches, thus helping themselves to free meals. Horror. No, it makes much more sense to chuck perfectly good, freshly made, $10 bagel sandwiches into the trash.
Ben sets the sesame sandwich onto one of the lower shelves of the fridge, tucked up against the wall and saved for later, for whoever’s hungry and likes smoked salmon. Despite the policy, most staff members save the defects—all the staff members do, except Paulie, the middle-aged Filipino, the new-ish immigrant, with a family to support, three children and a wife jammed into a one-bedroom apartment in Parkdale, to say nothing of the extended family in the Philippines to whom he regularly sends money, a portion of his every paycheque, a tithe. Paulie does everything management asks of him, rendered servile by his terror of being fired. Because if he gets fired, what then? Who’s going to pay the rent then? And feed the kids? And send money home?
“What did that woman want? She want your name?” says Megz, sliding over to him from coffee. Megz is the stage name—and preferred name—of Megan, the spoken word poet, an occupation apparent from her appearance, the asymmetrical haircut and the constellation of tattoos, including Fuck the Patriarchy on her forearm, and Lush Words on the back of her neck. “I hate when they want your name. It’s totally invasive. This one time, I had a guy chatting me up at the counter, and he just kept saying my name after, like, every sentence. Like, can I get a coffee, Megz? Thanks, Megz. Megz Megz. Creepy, right?”
“Downright scandalous,” says Ben.
“You don’t have to worry about the creeps as much, being a man, but still. I always give out a fake name now. Laurie. Ha. That was my best friend in kindergarten. Laurie.” She laughs at her own subterfuge and drifts back over to coffee.
DURING EVENING CLEAN-UP, Megz blasts a mind-numbing playlist of pop music while she dances around the coffee equipment, slapping the machines with a cloth and pretending she’s wiping them down. Ben tidies the sandwich station and Lyle, the twenty-something ginger with the button-down shirts, clean-cut hair, and a streak of anger that runs even deeper than Ben’s, sweeps the shop floor.
“Fucking Dickhead Debbie,” Lyle grumbles. “She’s got me scheduled for tomorrow.”
“A Monday?” says Ben. “You don’t work Mondays.”
“I don’t. No. And she knows that. But she’s got me in here all night doing inventory. She screwed with my days off again. On purpose. That stupid cow hates me.”
Dickhead Debbie does hate him, probably because she heard him call her a stupid cow. She popped into the staff room right as Lyle was verbalizing, with impressive expletive flourishes, his workplace discontent to Ben. At “that stupid cow,” Dickhead Debbie expelled a quick cough, glowered, then fled. “Shit,” said Lyle, feeling so genuinely bad that he sought her out in her office to apologize. Dickhead Debbie accepted the apology with a curt nod, but has since expanded her response to include screwing with Lyle’s shifts—scheduling him for days she knows he’s unavailable, cutting down his hours, and a host of similarly petty retaliations.
And as if on cue, here comes Dickhead Debbie now, bouncing from the kitchen to cash out. Her walk is a series of bops and bounces, up, down, up and down, her head bobbling on top of her thin, reedy body. In one jittery hand, she carries an energy drink, the tiny can cracked open and presumably already near-empty.
“Everything here good good good?” she says. This is a tic Dickhead Debbie has—repeating words, twice, sometimes three times.
“No,” says Ben. “We are, once again, out of tomatoes.”
“Again?” Dickhead Debbie skips over to the sandwich fridge and looks down at the empty tomato container. “Are you maybe being too generous with the tomatoes, Ben?”
“No, Debbie. I am being very stingy. One thin slice and only when it’s an explicitly stated ingredient in the ‘sandwich creation.’ Exactly as you told me.”
“Well, okay, I’ll order more.”
“We are also low on the dill cream cheese. Again.”
Her eyes dart to the cream cheese selections; the twelve displayed varieties are always supposed to be kept topped up, because the Customer likes to see an overflow, a wealth of creamy cream cheese piled thick and high, challenging the confines of its container.
“Okay. More dill dill cheese. But I see we haven’t moved much of the pumpkin spice. I thought the pumpkin spice would be doing better. Lyle, have you been pushing it?”
“Yup.”
“Every order, okay? I want to hear you letting each and every Customer know the pumpkin spice is out now. And for a limited time. Okay?”
“Got
it. Pumpkin.”
Dickhead Debbie helps herself to a plain bagel from the bagel racks, which she smears with the sickly sweet pumpkin spice cream cheese. It’s children who typically order the pumpkin spice, the same children who sometimes order whole cups of whipped cream.
“Want me to ring that up for you, Debbie?” Lyle asks.
“What? No, no,” she says, a flush rising over her face. “I’ll punch it in later.” Then, with a sharp tilt of the head: “Where’s your Ask Me About My Favourite Bagel button, Lyle?”
Lyle gestures at his hip, where the big button hangs from the bottom of his untucked shirt, the standard issue button, required of all employees, meant to promote friendly conversation with the Customer.
“It needs to be higher. Up by the chest pocket. Up up. We want the Customer to see it, don’t we?” Her focus slides over to Megz at the coffee station. “Oh my god, Megan?” she says, her face reflecting a newly discovered horror. “Have you been wearing that all day? That … button?”
Megz glances down at the Vegans Taste Better button by her shoulder, next to the store-mandated one. A big fan of button culture, Megz has taken to complementing the Ask-Me-About-My-Favourite-Bagel number with her own selections. So far the staff have been treated to a This is What a Feminist Looks Like button, an Eve was Framed button, even a beef buster button once, which didn’t go over well, because the implied judgment irked some of the roast beef- and steak-ordering customers.
“Yeah,” says Megz. “You said we could wear buttons.”
“But that is … suggestive. Take it off.”
Megz flaps an exasperated wave around the empty shop. “We’re closed.”
“This is a workplace. It’s inappropriate workplace attire. Take it off, Megan.” Having irritated every individual employee, Dickhead Debbie swoops the cash from the register into her deposit bag. “Oh, and guys? Before you all leave tonight, I want the storeroom in the basement cleaned out, okay? We’ve got the new merchandise coming in next week and we need to clear out some room.”
The Towers of Babylon Page 13