by Shilo Jones
“Gamble? Not so much.” Mr. Chen leans until he can see into the condo, glances at his cigarette, then at me. He touches his hair, seems surprised by how soaked he is, whispers, “Some time.”
That’s all he says: some time. Out of nowhere, and mostly to himself. Could be a language thing? But it doesn’t feel that way. I have no idea what he means, am about to clarify when he laughs nervously. “We are in Unit 301 in where?”
I find myself smiling a real-me smile. “Unit 304. At the Maquette.”
“I see. So many.”
There are several things my authentic self would like to say. I’d like to ask Mr. Chen more about his town. His work. His home. What he does in his spare time. What’s an average day like? What does he usually eat for breakfast? What does he think about his colleagues, his government, his country? I’d like to ask Ms. Chen the same things. Talk to them. I’d like to…I think I’d like to tell them what it’s like here, for me? And be honest about it? How at twenty-six my journalism dream is starting to feel like smoking a cigarette down to the filter? But I’m working. What should my sales persona say in this situation? “That’s fantastic. Great unit…uh, in-floor heating? Vancouver real estate is always a sound investment?”
Mr. Chen scratches his eyebrow. “Very nice. But my wife and I are looking for a home.”
And whump just like that no life-changing commission, no treating myself or even fixing my brakes.
Mr. Chen flicks his cigarette over the railing, really not appropriate in terms of community spirit? I open the sliding glass door, feeling the fight drain out. Mr. Chen slips into the condo. All that and I didn’t even get a decently controversial quote out of him. Wuxi? Some time? Who cares? Sales and investigative personas. Corrupt developers. Killers. There’s a lot of cloud out there, not much light. I head inside, trying not to think what happens if Vincent Peele discovers who I am.
Ms. Lee opens a pricey-looking leather file folder, writes something with an emerald-green pen made to look antique. Her penmanship is like swordplay, all slash and thrust. Ms. Chen gives me a perfunctory half-wave, wanders into the hall without a backward glance. Her husband, startled by his wife’s unannounced departure, hurries after her.
Ms. Lee and I exchange a not-very-friendly look. I stay the course, remain optimistic, hand the woman a Marigold Group business card. She slips my card into her file folder, and when she raises the folder to her chest my card flutters to the ground. She glances at it lying on the floor. Makes no effort to retrieve it.
I treasure the freedom my business affords.
“Thank you for your time, Ms. Lee.”
The slightest of nods. “We were under the impression your realty is Asian owned.”
“It is?”
“But you’re not.”
“Asian owned?”
Pursed lips become a not-quite-apologetic smile. “Asia is a large place. Thank you for your time, Miss Bansal.”
Carl “Blitzo” Reed
Brand strategy meeting at an as-yet-unnamed organic hop farm/craft brewery in a valley sideways from Pemberton. Huddled inside voluminous orange robes, carrying a carved cedar staff adorned with tinsel, sitting at the head of a table made of rough-hewn planks, under a threatening sky, whispering incantations, brooding on the politics of the street. Thinking about liberation in the form of a brick. Smashed windows, simpler times. Black bloc. Infiltration. Worried my robes make me look like a sunburned scrotum. Worried about toxins, off-gassing, fluoride. Worrying I should be worrying about formaldehyde. Brain in a jar? Worried that flouride and formaldehyde rhyme, is someone trying to tell me something? Worrying about what to worry about next: asbestos, lead, radon, modified genes. STP, TPD, JIDA, IND. Terrified of acronyms, gnomic language, being left in the dark, being left behind. Nostalgia for nuclear, ducking under desks, sirens blaring, musty bomb shelters, those were the days, back when averting catastrophe meant lowering your centre of gravity.
Shit’s gotten complicated.
“Carl? What do you think?”
That’s Michael. Dang it. “Uh…penetrating?”
“About the microbrewery? Where we are? Right now?”
“You saying this was this my idea?”
Surrounded by densely forested mountains, clouds, vales, not to mention nearly a dozen squirrelly youth, entrepreneurial up-and-comers, untested, totally untrustworthy. Lacking secrets or skeletons. I’m feeling exposed. Pinpointed. The whole thing’s staged. Movie studio lights. A painted canvas backdrop. I’m trying to spot the surveillance cameras, listening for the insectile buzz of an Agency drone. Somewhere in Alaska, secluded in a mountain bunker, scarfing Twizzlers, a snot-nosed kid is happily joysticking his way into my mind. It’s all a game to him. None of these people are unreal. I’m feeling painfully certain. If I don’t move, the drone’s camera won’t see me. I last ten, maybe fifteen seconds of absolute stillness, then do an impressive bump of meth off a carrot still sticky with dark, wet dirt.
Fresh plucked.
“Tasty,” I say, relishing the crunch of carrot, realizing I’m being photo-manipulated, wondering if there’s a cargo container full of alternate futures buried in the potato fields.
“We have a wicked-cool greenhouse,” the pumpkin-haired girl on my right says, eyeing my carrot, then my meth. “Hydroponics. Early harvest.”
“Early Harvest? I met that chick back in oh-six,” I tell her, trying not to reveal too much. “She’s a Burner. That is not a compliment.”
“An empowering solution,” Holdout says, clueless, trying to stay upright on the bucking table. “Free-range creativity.”
Someone mentions the do-ocracy, the gift economy, then reaches for my stash. I smash the offender’s hand, express my discontent for default culture. Explain that, alas, more often than not, violence is necessary. Ask where the brewery’s firing range is. Ask to inspect ordnance. Ask what their battle-tested methodology is for disabling the government’s light armoured vehicles during a real-world shit-hits-the-fan situation. Am met with blank looks, fiddling fingers. An uncomfortably cleared throat or two.
“What? No RPGS? No AKS?” Holdout says. He is a pig, after all.
I glare at Pumpkin Girl. “Drone evasion strategy?”
Nothing.
Holdout, gravely: “Surveillance never sleeps.”
“Indeed. You have to survive to thrive.”
“This is where we part ways,” Pumpkin Girl says, blowing me a kiss. “Violence is never justified.”
“This is where I leave you all behind,” I correct, wishing I’d brought more cash, afraid it might not be clear to her, afraid she might be getting her own ideas.
Ahem, someone says. Then a voice, disembodied, cruel, floats across the gathering. I flinch, stricken. Something about connecting with the consumer. I hiss, waggle my fingers, utter a spell of renewal, call upon the tree of life. Someone boos. The voice continues:…organics are our brand’s unique selling feature…
Pumpkin Girl says wait a minute, organics aren’t unique anymore, we need to go a step further. Micro-niche. Yes, someone else says, but broad enough to appeal. The table erupts in youthful patter: What are our customers feeling when they enjoy our craft brew? The goal is to create emotional resonance, a link between our brew and an imagined ideal happiness, something psychosexual maybe? No, no, we’re targeting Millennials. The goal is emotional rescue. We have to save them from themselves. They’re adrift in anomie. That’s an electronica band? No, a surf break in Tofino? No, an overpass in Langley? Our customers are feeling happy with our product, is the consensus. This is about inclusivity! This is about helping people feel happy. Simple as that. I like it! Me too! Selling craft beer is about generosity, egalitarianism, offering a helping hand, community. Like Gandhi, but responsibly drunk—
Holdout, crunched in lotus: “I want to be reborn a babirusa. Serious horn envy.”
—uh, anyway, so our customers are drinking our craft brew made with locally sourced organic hops, and that’s really radical. I m
ean, fully revolutionary, but not in the sense of, ick, personal sacrifices, or ick, tough choices, or ick, taking a stand. Wait! Are we endorsing a regressive rhetoric? Is the word revolution a bit patriarchal? Twentieth-century? Combative? Angry white male? Or perhaps—just blue-skying here—perhaps there’s an energy that could prove useful? A vitality. Virility? Sipping our consciously created craft beer. That’s a radical incursion. A thrust, yes, to use an outmoded diction. Because it’s a political statement, today, to say: I am happy. I am one hundred per cent committed to my own happiness. Above all else. It’s the new free love, but with less swass. Right, great. Me too!
Voices blur into a maddening natter. I elect to remain unfazed, hover above the fray. Magnanimous. Let the kids battle this one out. I did my time in the trenches. The torch will be passed. But they seem so young, guileless, unprepared. Virginal. Finally a decent train of thought. I do a bump to keep it rolling. The voices continue: an old dichotomy destroyed, steering clear of the aggressive-destructive tendency in conventional ideology, seeking a less-directly-confrontational path, nurturing the mindful consumer-citizen—
“People fucking died so you can have weekends!” I shout at the doe-eyed nymphs, getting straight to brass tacks.
Pumpkin Girl lifts her index finger. “Excuse me, is that even true? I’d like to see citations.”
“What? You think they gave us that shit of their own volition? From the goodness of their hearts? Here, they said, have two full days to yourselves! La-de-da! Next up, a living wage! You think they stopped using six-year-olds to sweep chimneys because they had an irreversible crisis of conscience? You think we can’t regress”—I snap my fingers—“like right fucking quick? They will pounce, you hear me? Pounce. You are either predator or prey. You wanna talk universal suffrage? Yeah, because no one got bloodied fighting for that. Time to pick a side, you sanctimonious, thin-skinned little wisps.”
“Wisps?” Holdout says. “Or WASPS?”
“Yes, like those guys, but considerably less substantial. Everywhere and nowhere. Which makes them even more dangerous. I’m getting freaked.”
Holdout looks around, anxious. “Feeling surrounded? Hard to put a bullet through a cloud of mist.”
“Excuse me, no,” Pumpkin Girl says, “it’s actually very easy.”
I resist the urge to smack her with my staff, afraid it’ll whoosh right through her.
Holdout rubs his nose in a pile of meth, snorts, says it is odd, how the only clearly defined feature on these kids is their lips.
“Weird purplish and bright red or blue lips,” I say, noticing. “Like berry stains…no, like stains from those lollipops you wear on your finger like a huge ring. Like they’ve been sucking saccharine all day long.”
Pumpkin Girl harrumphs. “That was then. Things are so much better now.”
“And who do you have to thank for that, missy?”
Silence again, perfect and absolute except for Holdout’s snuffling. A dozen sets of elven eyes glare at me. Making me feel guilty about making them feel. Is everything worth doing best done alone, forget the ethos of radical acceptance—
Clapping. From the other end of the table. It’s Michael, AKA Troutman, my long-lost comrade, making me shiver. Still got my back, old friend, right where I like you.
“The give-us-your-weekends speech,” Michael says. “Been a while, Blitz. Thought you’d forgotten.”
A kid with a purple faux-hawk who introduced himself as crazydays18 lifts a marketing plan handwritten on hemp paper, sniffs: “To return to point, if we might? Organic remains a powerful buzzword. What we’re doing effects real-world change.”
“Did you just say buzzword?” Holdout says, eyes beading.
“This guy’s been planted to misdirect,” I tell the others. “Tread careful.”
crazydays18 giggles, pours some drugs into a hand-carved wooden goblet.
I shake my staff at the sky, feeling over the weather, while the disembodied cyber-nymphs prattle about differentiation, mark-ups, contemporary lifestyle choices.
“A powerful collusion is occurring,” I observe, thankfully shielded from drone strikes by my flowing robes, which are secretly made of metalized Mylar, “between technology and corporate interests. You all are proof of that. Consider, if you will, the internet. The world’s largest shopping mall.”
“We have a more nuanced view of capital,” says crazydays18. “Its aleatory, potentially transgressive flow.”
“Shop the Revolution,” Pumpkin Girl says cheerfully, pointing to the slogan emblazoned on her T-shirt, prompting me to hitch myself to another sizable bump. “Which is why this hop farm is such a radical project, Mr. Reed. Blitzo? We’re modelling alternatives outside the—”
“Robot!” I shriek. Across the valley, Mount Currie the Mountain Spirit grumbles that he’s looking forward to Singularity, says at least robots can be programmed to pack out their toilet paper.
“But isn’t this why you invest ethically?” crazydays18 asks. “Isn’t this what Green Lead is all about? I mean, forging mindful investment partnerships? Cultivating the next big thing?”
The assembled wait for a response while I consider the viability of biological weapons–dealing. Must be more interesting people in that line of work. Full-bodied Eastern European men and women who remain uncowed by body hair, still believe in sin, and fuck like it’s wartime, bombs away. Not these guileless, moonbeam-walking selfies who fuck like spoiled kittens lapping at a saucer of milk. Seems high-stakes vencap has lost its charm. Been co-opted. I point at Holdout, leave him to explain what we’re about in thirty seconds or less, knowing the kids’ll tune out the last twenty seconds anyway.
All eyes turn to the pig.
“Fuck if I know where this is going,” Holdout says, “except I’m real hungry.”
“Besides, what about the state?” crazydays18 says, buoyed by my silence. “The true source of repression? Taxes? The military industrial—”
“Owned. Outmoded. Overridden. You need to stay current. All is almost lost, and that’s when shit gets good. Subvert! Disrupt!”
“Who has the time?”
“True. I’m like, totally swamped.”
“Waaay too much on my plate—”
I loom, stab my staff through a MacBook screen, watch the sucklings flinch.
“Fraktur,” Pumpkin Girl says, awed as she traces a rune through Holdout’s drool, a gesture I find strangely soothing.
“You have an attractive nose,” I tell her, feeling chivalrous, imagining a bestriding, handing her both carrot and—
The story of our brew begins in a verdant garden…
“Where the hell is that disembodied voice coming from?” Holdout interrupts.
“Change verdant to bountiful,” the kid beside me says, making me blink. Bountiful, British Columbia? Vas deferens. Illegitimate spawn. Seer stones? Christ in a teepee? Got me a couple’a all those!
The kid at my elbow continues, “The label should read: The story of our beer—”
“Brew,” Pumpkin Girl corrects, indignant. “Beer is for Bridgers.”
Self-righteousness and an inability to recognize what’s at stake. That’s what irks me most about these nymphs.
The story of our brew begins in a bountiful garden…
I ask the kid his name.
“Frisk,” he answers.
Many enthusiastic nods of assent for the word bountiful. It appears another consensus has been reached. As to what, I can’t quite say, never mind remember how I voted, but it’s nice to be on the winning side. I wave my staff, bless the gathering, exclaim, “We should all have sex, or whatever the next thing is, to seal the deal.”
“I have plenty of sex,” Pumpkin Girl says, “but not with you.”
Holdout, suddenly irrepressible, frolics across the table, scatters MacBooks, overturns crystal decanters of GHB, gobbles a platter of lightly poached river-caught salmon and still-warm bannock while eyeing my crushed ketamine and flirting with a golden-haired princess nam
ed Zen who introduced herself as the hop farm’s earth electress.
Michael’s at the far end of the table, returned to being boring, reading the farm’s hastily scrawled financials, squinty-eyed, ignoring the parade. I zap outward, link to Holdout’s mental field, issue a command, make my piggy-muffin charge Michael, scatter the paperwork. Ponder the link between druidism and international currency trading. Something about castration anxiety, no doubt. Michael yelps, tips off his chair, prompts me to stand, smash my staff on the table, and shout, “Roar!”
“Pooh-pooh,” Holdout sniffs, jealous of being upstaged. “Populist.”
I sit down, satisfied, and in the prolonged pause I remember my sixteen-year-old daughter, Hannah-fannah-bo-banna, her life at Appleby, so far away. I wonder what she’s eating, if anything. My hands begin to shake. There must be an emotion for this.
Michael picks himself out of the mud, vanishes, reappears directly in my face, filling my field of vision, eyes bulging, screaming, “This was your idea! A fucking organic brewery, Carl? We’re Green Lead. Lead? This isn’t leading! This isn’t even advancing. We were going to change the world. Clean energy. Perpetual motion. Space colonies! Mythopoeics! Now another brewery…no, not even that, a potato field full of needy grubsters for eight point three million—” Michael presses his hands to his face, mutters something, looks around wildly. “I shouldn’t be here. Wasting my life with you. Peele’s waiting for us to sign on the Solstice property and I’m out here freezing—”
“Fresh Plucked,” I say, imperial, stroking my goatee, on target, anticipating an imminent counter-counter-insurgency in the form of a speedball—
“Fresh what?”
“The name of the brewery, you lump. I christen this exciting new venture: Fresh Plucked.”
The kids cheer my name: Blitzo! Blitzo! Michael spittles. My skin superheats, fuelled by past regressions, melts my business partner and former best friend on the spot.
“It’s settled then, Michael? How are the numbers?” Michael-the-Defeated-Puddle gets petty, refuses to answer. “Fine then, be shitty. I for one like this project, Mr. Zenski. We need to think smaller. Micro-politics. Locally sourced. This carrot has a unique story to tell. I want to know who sowed this carrot, in what garden plot—GPS-coordinate accuracy, please. I want to know how long this carrot was in the ground, what nutrients it was fed, who tended it, was it stroked, how often the skies rained and sunned, was there a non-denominational or maybe politely neo-pagan celebration of gratitude when this carrot was harvested. Nothing wrong with having the wealth and privilege to cultivate intimate relationships with my food while the rest of the world goes hungry. Can’t fault it. Not without sounding like a dick. Jeesh, Michael Zenski, you’re a cynical old dinosaur. Be happy like me! Where’s the ketamine? Whoa! Sure, I’ll share. Here, do a bump off my staff. Man, you all look so sparkly and light-soaked. How do you get that glow? Is it a powder you shake on your skin? Aerosol? CGI? I’m terrified of scalpels. Men in masks. Can one of you cuties tell me the creation story of this meth? We’ll talk defensive perimeters later. Let Team Blitzo show you the ropes—”