The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  Inventory mismanagement: One ingredient or another is always absent at the sandwich fridge. As I’m sure you understand, this hampers our ability to execute The Poppy Seed’s “sandwich creations” to the letter. The problem stems from Debbie’s complete failure to both a) anticipate the shop’s needs and b) arrange to meet those needs. Her system of assessing inventory needs seems to hinge entirely on her own personal food preferences. She is, for example, unable to grasp that, although she herself is no fan of tomatoes, the broader human community likes them rather a lot. (As an aside, tomatoes happen to be the most commonly consumed fruit on the planet, per metric ton.) The (near chronic) issue of tomatoes is but one example. In the last month alone, we have run out of pickles, lettuce, and popular cream cheeses (plain, herb, dill), among other items. It should be noted that each of these is a food that Debbie does not personally enjoy. When it comes to managing inventory, empirically verified facts about tastes and trends are routinely trumped by Debbie’s own preferences.

  The use of stimulants: Debbie’s mood is consistently and unnaturally jacked up by at least two powerful stimulants: sugar and caffeine. I have observed her ingest two boxes of Wonka Nerds and three Red Bull energy drinks in a one-hour timespan. The effects of the drugs are immediately apparent. She exudes a manic energy that is near impossible to tolerate. She bounces around the shop, heedless of the many and varied hazards that exist in the workplace (knives, hot toasters, sharp edges, etc.). Worse is that she seems to believe that this artificially induced mania is a state to which her subordinates ought to aspire. This manifests in horrendous ways, from an abrasive (and dare I say deranged?) form of cheerleading to frantically gung-ho hand gestures. Further to this point, I must also absolutely insist on an immediate end to her deployment of the chop-chop hand motion, which is both degrading and ineffective as a motivational tool.

  Time management: This is really an umbrella point that must be broken up into sub-point a) Debbie’s incompetence managing her own time, and sub-point b) her incompetence managing her subordinates’ time.

  Store Manager Debbie is clearly frazzled by the demands of her position. How many times has she, in a jittery torrent of anxiety, unleashed on me an explanation about the enormous pressures she’s under, the innumerable tasks she’s expected to complete, and the impossibility of fitting all her required work into her scheduled shifts? Yet sometimes whole hours can pass in which Debbie is neither on the shop floor nor in her office, the two supposed hubs of work activity. Having undertaken the managerial duties myself (in a relief capacity, as you’ll recall), I am familiar with the actual (meagre) amount of work the position requires. I must therefore deduce that Debbie is either legitimately delusional or a hysterical personality. Interestingly, her own anxiety around time management has in no way made her less likely to inflict such anxiety on others. This brings us to sub-point b.

  Debbie has no idea how to manage the time of her staff. If I were to speculate, I would say this is because she herself has no idea how long any particular task takes, as she herself never performs any of these tasks. Her demands on staff are grounded in neither experience nor reason. An example still odiously fresh in my mind:tonight, with less than a half hour left in the closing shift, she demanded the completion of a substantial task (the cleaning out of the basement storeroom, which, under her charge, is always in total disarray) by the day’s end. Concerns about the impossibility and outrageousness of this demand were naturally raised, but Debbie summarily dismissed these with no more than a hand waved in contempt. This is, of course, in keeping with her tradition of gross insensitivity to the stresses she imposes on her staff. Indeed, one wonders whether she may be completely bereft of empathetic capabilities. (Were I responsible, or in any way liable, for this woman’s behaviour, I might recommend psychiatric evaluation on this point.)

  Should you require further elaboration or discussion of these matters, I will happily make myself available. Otherwise, I look forward to their swift resolution.

  Your faithful bagel slave,

  Ben Drummond, B.A., M.A.

  Ben sits back in his plastic chair and nods approvingly. “I could have gone on.”

  “Look, Ben, you do a fine job here. You get your work done. You make the sandwiches right. You’re good on coffee, quick on cash. You only have to be told to do things once. And I appreciate all that.”

  “Thank you.” Ben crosses an ankle over his knee, lets his elbows spill out over the armrests, and waits.

  “But let me ask you something. Do you think this is the right job for you?”

  “Well … no, of course not. But it’s the kind of job that is available to me.”

  “What do you expect me to do with a letter like this?” Frank flaps the sheets in front of him helplessly.

  “I expect you to address the concerns. Maybe fire this manager? At least wrest all authority from her hands? Retrain her? Personally I’m not convinced it’s possible to transform Debbie into a competent manager, but that is at your discretion of course.”

  “I’m not firing her. That’s not gonna happen. Debbie’s been here a long time.” Frank allows a tired glance at the collectibles befouling the desk. “She’s been very loyal to this company.”

  “That doesn’t make her sane, or humane, or competent.”

  Pinching the broad arm of his glasses, Frank forces himself to sit up a little taller. “You say this is the kind of job that’s available to you. And I’m telling you that Debbie is the kind of manager that’s available to me. You’re a smart guy, Ben. Think about this. What kind of person am I going to get to fill this role, huh? You? What happens if I hire you? Sure, for a while, you’d do a better job than Debbie. But for how long? A guy like you, with your education and your skillset, you’ll be out of here as soon as something better comes up. And something will come up. But Debbie … she’s not going anywhere. You know what a headache it is to find and train managers?”

  “Where am I going? I’ve been here more than a year.”

  “I know that. And honestly, Ben, I don’t know what you’re still doing here. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  Synapses flare in Ben’s brain as he stares at the smiling face of the Chia pet. Because even now—on his worst days—he still toys with the idea of venturing back into the bowels of academia, grinding out that doctorate after all. But the academic system is churning out far more doctoral grads than there are jobs for. The lucky ones manage to scrounge up work as adjuncts, teaching a few courses a year at a smattering of schools, driving around town and province from one campus to another in order to scrape out a living wage.

  Ben, being a natural leader-of-men, once dreamt of a professorship. But such a post, as with so many others, is nothing like what he’d been led to believe. A professor’s work is no longer about instruction. Students aren’t required to learn anything in their courses anymore; they only need to like them. They need to be entertained, and even more critically, they need to say so on their feedback forms and their course evaluations and their online reviews. A rigorous approach doesn’t pass muster with students who review their courses as they review a new restaurant, bar, hotel, or airline. How fun was the course? How easy? How entertaining? How accommodating was the professor? And just like any business concerned with the bottom line, the university heeds these rambling, shrieking appraisals sent out into the void, without, it seems, stopping to think about what might go wrong when a university staffs its faculty based on Yelp reviews.

  Ideologies in academia have shifted. The student has become the Customer. And the Customer must be satisfied. So what is a professorship anymore, really, but another grovelling customer service gig? He might as well be making bagel sandwiches.

  Frank is gazing at him, waiting.

  “School doesn’t suit me,” Ben says.

  “All right, look.” Frank gathers the pages of Ben’s letter and returns them to a faded blue folder that disappears into a drawer. “The overtime situation is a problem. Obviously I
didn’t know that was happening. That’s going to stop right away. I’ll make it clear to all staff that no one should be working when they’re not on the clock.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I know Debbie can be a bit much sometimes. I’ll talk to her. But Ben, try to make it work with her, all right?”

  “I always do, boss man.” Ben stands up and extends a hand, which Frank takes and shakes. “But you really might want to talk to her about the tomatoes. It’s every week with the tomatoes.”

  “Goodbye, Ben.”

  In the corridor outside the office, Ben finds Dickhead Debbie scurrying, in no clear direction, and holding the last quarter of a bagel smothered in pumpkin spice cream cheese.

  “So what was that about?” she asks, her neck torqued, and her features twisted by nervous concern.

  “Just shoptalk, Debbie. Just a bit of shoptalk.”

  5

  RAIN THUNDERS AGAINST the kitchen window as Ben inhales the flavours of his simmering chicken stew. He revels in the whooshing winds blowing through the open back door, a welcome relief from the last weeks’ searing heat. While fetching the potatoes, he catches sight of his reflection in the mirror on the pantry door, scrubbed out and looking very sharp indeed in his new khaki shorts and black T-shirt with intact sleeves. He notes, with some satisfaction, how his long hair, freshly washed and parted on the left, gives him the look of a professional wrestler—who has only just recently started to let himself go. The soft flowing hair of a Bret Hart paired with the raw magnetism of a Macho Man.

  “Ben, my man,” says Geoffrey, strolling into the kitchen to make a sandwich. “You hear about the $800? Landlord is offering us each $800 to leave by the end of the month?”

  “What? No. What nonsense is that?”

  “He called today. Kata talked to him.”

  “And all she extracted from him was $800? A piddling offer. Piddling. Declined … with extreme prejudice.”

  Geoffrey is silent at the counter as he pulls slices of Wonderbread from the bread bag. But his screwed-up mouth hints at mutinous thoughts.

  “What?” demands Ben.

  Keeping his back to Ben, Geoffrey butters his bread. He drops his head low over his pathetic little sandwich operation, then mumbles, “It’s just that Runkle says we’ll lose at the LTB anyway. Then we’ll wind up with nothing at all.”

  “Runkle says? You’re listening to Runkle now? His life is in shambles!”

  “$800 is not nothing, Ben.” Geoffrey slaps a few slices of bologna between his buttered bread and takes the sandwich to the table. “It’ll help with moving costs at least.” He sends a dreamy glance out the wide open back door. “Maybe I could even get a new bed.”

  “What?” cries Ben, gaping at this misguided youth. “You don’t need money to get a new bed! Who raised you? The street provides you what you need!” Ben bangs a fist against the table, rattling Geoffrey’s plate. “This table! From the alley behind Pizzarella! That mirror!” He waves a wild arm at the pantry door. “From the curbside down the block! Our coffee table, bookshelves, toaster, waffle maker! The street provides! I don’t understand—”

  A loud sizzle from the stove interrupts Ben’s rant and he rushes to check his chicken. The old stove has peculiarities—its knobs fall off and the elements are prone to mysterious spikes and falls in temperature. “Geoffrey,” he says, monitoring the stew closely, “you know that I consider myself your spiritual guide, and I recognize that you are in a period of crisis. But I don’t have time for preliminaries today. I have potatoes to peel and—”

  “Whoa wait, what’s going on with your shorts there, dude?” Geoffrey asks, waving his half-eaten sandwich at Ben’s hips.

  “What do you mean?” Ben looks down, searching the front of his new shorts for an overlooked stain, then cranks his neck over his shoulder to inspect the back—but he lacks the flexibility for a comprehensive probe.

  “No, the hips …” Geoffrey stifles his laughter behind his sandwich. “They’re gigantic. Look! They’re ballooning out.”

  Ben straightens up into a dignified stance, chin jutted out and defiant. “I’ll have you know, Geoffrey, that these shorts happen to be a ladies cut. Because the selection at the Sally Ann is pitiful at the moment. And I’ll thank you not to make fun. Now, as I was saying, I don’t have time for you right now. Joly is due in twenty minutes and my coq is only half-cooked.”

  “Joly’s back? Oh thank god.”

  “I’ve got some hard-boiled noirs lined up for tonight.” Ben points at the stack of library DVDs on the kitchen table with his wooden spoon. “Tell me, young Geoffrey, how familiar are you with the crackerjack detective work of one Sam Spade?”

  But before Geoffrey, still stifling laughter and gawking at Ben’s blooming hips, can respond, the lights overhead cut out. They hear the whir, click, and hum of machinery powering down, leaving the kitchen in an unfamiliar silence.

  “Fuck!” says Ben. He checks each kitchen appliance, frantically flicks at the light switch, does a quick lap around the entire house, but the power is down everywhere.

  “Probably a tree on a power line,” says Geoffrey, standing at the back door, now closed, and watching the storm through its window. “I’m sure it’ll be back up in a few minutes.”

  But the last time a squall like this struck the city, the power was down for days in certain neighbourhoods. And it was not because of trees on power lines. It was because a Hydro One station flooded. Because the city’s electrical grid, a relic from the fifties, is a network of aging wiring, failing cables, rusting transformers, and exploding circuit breakers. The power won’t be back for hours, at least.

  With arms akimbo, in the middle of the kitchen, Ben looks at his half-cooked stew, at the unpeeled potatoes, and at Geoffrey. “Fuck!”

  When Joly is fifteen minutes late and not answering her phone, Ben starts to worry that she might have bailed. But at thirty minutes late, and still no response to his texts, he sits with his face glued to the living room window, listening to the ominous howl of the wind beating on the trees and bushes. A maple in the neighbour’s front yard has already lost a bough, which now lies dead across the street, blocking traffic.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” says Geoffrey from the corner chair, where he keeps banging on the keys of his laptop, hoping this effort will restore the internet. “It’s gone … it’s just gone,” he repeats mournfully.

  Filling out the living room are Marko and Runkle, playing Jenga at the coffee table, where they have been since Runkle came up from his basement bedroom bringing news that it had started to flood.

  “How could she be fine?” says Ben. “You’ve seen Joly. She’s a wisp of a girl. She’ll be tossed around in these primordial winds.”

  On the sidewalk, a woman twice Joly’s weight is wrestling with her umbrella and losing the contest. But there! Down at the end of the block—Joly! Staggering into the wind. Ben’s stomach slackens; he jumps up, brushes crumbs and beard dandruff off his shirt and rushes to meet her at the door.

  “I’m afraid … there’s no food,” he announces, hanging her red raincoat over the banister to dry. “Or TV. Or power of any kind.”

  “Oh,” Joly says, rainwater dripping from her hair and face.

  He can’t tell from her tone if she’s disappointed or merely spent from the trek through the storm. “I can rustle us up something to graze on. But the coq … the noble bird is already back in the fridge.”

  A thorough scouring of the pantry shelves and the fridge turns up an adequate spread of snackables—bagels stolen from the pit, sandwich bread, discount deli meat, a tin of corned beef, humus, and a variety of cheeses and pickles. They bring the spread into the living room and set it on the coffee table, where Joly, much quieter than usual, gets in on the Jenga game.

  “Say, I liked your story, Joly,” says Marko, delicately placing a Jenga tile on the top of the already-leaning tower.

  Joly launches to attention, standing up on her knees, ready for t
he blessing of a compliment. “What story? Which one?”

  “That one about the rhino-cum-bureaucrat.”

  “Oh yeah? You liked it? What did you like about it?” The praise turns her fingers to jelly. She topples the structure the moment she touches it.

  “You know … it’s funny,” says Marko with a one-shouldered shrug.

  “Yeah. It’s funny,” she agrees, and Ben rests a proud paw on her shoulder. Her strange little stories tickle him. Trenchant observations in them all. The woman is underappreciated by this culture of deviant philistines.

  During the rebuild of the Jenga tower, a lively mouse hurries along the wall behind the TV. Runkle spots it first and waves at it with his pickle. “They’re everywhere now,” he says. “$800 to leave this dump is starting to look pretty damn good.”

  “Mm-hmm,” says Marko.

  “Runkle, my brother,” says Ben, “this dump has sheltered you through your darkest days.”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  “How long is the internet gonna be gone for?” wails Geoffrey at his laptop.

  “Expect to see more of all this in the coming years,” Ben says, resting his chin on Joly’s shoulder as she contemplates her next Jenga move. “More storms, more violent weather patterns, more blackouts.” He sweeps an arm at the dark and menacing world outside the windows. “Take it in, my friends. Take it all in. We are living in the twilight of Western civilization.”

  AROUND EIGHT, WHEN the light has faded, young Geoffrey and Marko, the basement contingent, spread out blankets and sleeping bags on the living room furniture in case the basement flooding turns severe overnight. Ben leads Joly upstairs by the light of his cellphone. He scrolls the frequencies on his battery-operated radio until he hears classical music—Haydn, if he’s not mistaken—then he settles down beside her on the foam mattress.