Authors: Emily Schultz
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed, her eyes wide. Arms whirled, legs split, spike heels kicked.
The woman landed indelicately across Gordon’s crotch, one leg over each of his shoulders, panties within view, his own back end planted perfectly atop the meshed manuscripts of
Sweet Surrender
and
Overtaken by Passion.
A hurricane of pages hurtled over their heads, smashed down around them.
“This is
no
way to meet,” the woman said without a hint of sarcasm, her lips just inches from his, their eyes locked.
“Gordon Small, proofreader, full-time,” Gordon said, proud to be able to swear off temp status. He offered her his hand after extracting it from beneath a heap of
Love on the Range
.
She shook it as politely as possible under the circumstances. “Chandler Goods, head of Editorial, just relocated from Heaven Paris.”
“My . . . boss?”
“Yes, I —” She glanced down at the crotch of her underpants, suddenly realizing they were so present.
Before Chandler Goods could move and before Gordon had thought about it much, he leaned forward and sealed his lips to hers. He had kissed a couple of women since Chloe — bungled set-ups or pickups that had ended abruptly after he’d lunged forward and planted a juicy one — but it had been a long time. Flicking his tongue between Chandler’s teeth, he felt no resistance, and deepened the kiss. Sitting atop the trembling loins of a thousand imaginary virgins and suitors, she tasted like rose petals and paper dust — mostly the latter. There wasn’t the awesome wetness he remembered from long-ago kisses.
Pulling back for a second, he muttered, “It’s almost the same.”
“What —?”
His mouth engulfed hers again, as if it were a cheese puff or a sausage roll offered up in a grocery aisle taste test. For the first time since Gordon had come to Heaven, he thought he felt his heart kick distinctly, twice, in his chest:
Chand-ler
. He had definitely gone nuts, he decided in the middle of the second kiss.
Chandler Goods seemed to come to her senses, separating her bee-stung lips from his and extracting herself from his rigor mortis lap.
“Who did you say you were?”
She backed slowly off Gordon. She pressed her fingertips to her temple and turned on her heel toward the window, where the bleary day was quickly breaking. When she spoke again, her voice trembled. The words came out fast and furious. “It’s not even seven o’clock. My intention was to get a jump on all this.” She gestured at the dishevelled manuscripts cascading out from where Gordon sat. “Not to get jumped.” The words caught in her throat. “You come in here, spy on me and — with absolutely no provocation . . . no, really,
none
whatsoever — molest me.” She turned and bent, jammed a finger in Gordon’s chest. “Who do you think you are?”
Much later that day, Gordon leaned forward, hooked his lips with index fingers, and ejected tongue from mouth so that it stuck straight out. In the Floor Six locker room mirror, he watched his image do the same. He plunged forward recklessly, let his tongue make contact with the glass, but when he retracted it, it left no saliva. Neither did the mirror fog when he attempted an impromptu zerbert, buzzing his lips against its silver surface.
He had spent several hours checking himself, but every hair was as he remembered it. Loosely muscled arms, like white gym-shoe laces, dangled from his shoulders. His pale, tufted gut — which had always varied between gaunt and paunchy depending upon where he was eating — was, to Gordon’s delight, on the thin side. Gordon’s body was, quite simply, as
his
as he had ever known it — though it had ceased to digest or secrete. Gordon recognized that when he had been eating during those first weeks at Heaven, it must have been out of habit, for now he had gone five days without food and had not experienced one pang of hunger or thirst. Habit was psychology. Habituation, a simple form of learning, the adoption of repeated patterns of behaviour. Children had habits. Animals had habits.
Even the insane,
especially
the insane, have habits they do not stray from,
Gordon told himself. It was habit too for the mind to conjure the smells and tastes it wanted to remember, the smells and tastes it associated with the names or shapes of things.
His skin did seem remarkably translucent above the three-day beard that lent him the air of a yellow Easter rabbit. “You should stand a little closer to a razor, son,” the Whoopsy’s franchise owner had perpetually told him. In its usual fashion, Gordon’s blond-brown hair was combed half over his forehead to hide the recession and shagged out behind his ears. His lips were still full, red and rubbery, not unlike those candied wax lips he had bought as a child from a bin for a quarter, chewed on, and then spat out. His eyes were like dark cracked marbles, but if they hinted at his mortality he suspected it was no more than they had during his life. His nose still hung with the bravado of a large appendage, and as for that other appendage, it appeared to function as well as any of those belonging to the heroes in Heaven’s books — it was serviceable, though he did not seem to be able to achieve a medical definition of release.
When he had redonned his green suit, Gordon flipped off the change-room light and exited the gym, walking through an expanse of black. The weight machines in one corner looked like a small factory of stacks and scaffolding against the light thrown up from the street lamps below the window. “Hello, twilight,” he said as he crossed the floor. Outside the glass the concrete cul-de-sac that stretched away from the building looked dark and damp. He attempted to whistle, but found that he could not draw a breath that wasn’t attached to a word.
9
“Should be here by now.” Daves peered earnestly out the glass doors.
Gordon paced back and forth in the lobby with him under the peevish gaze of the security guard.
“Man, this is
torture.
I swear to you, this happens with delivery every time I’m working late,” Daves muttered, checking his watch.
“Every time?”
“Sure.” Daves bounced back and forth on the great rubber soles of his hiking shoes. “I can taste the pepperoni already. An hour, an hour and it should be free.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little weird, Daves, that 2-4-1 Pizza can’t find a building this size? With so many people who work here, there must be tons of takeout.”
Outside the doors, sunset was bubbling on the grey horizon like a bright, thick sauce just about to burn itself onto the bottom of a pan. It was almost six, and the tower rose above them. Most people were already gone or sweeping final files into drawers.
“Wouldn’t they call if they couldn’t find it?” Gordon suggested smoothly. He wondered if Daves suspected what he, Gordon, increasingly thought might be true about the state of things in Heaven. Tonight, from Gordon’s side of things, pizza was not pizza. Pizza was hypothesis. “Maybe I should head back up and see if there’s a message.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed,” Daves said, his eyes never leaving the cul-de-sac in front of Heaven.
The hairs on Gordon’s forearms rose like a row of soldiers.
“How long have you been here?” Daves scoffed, turning for just a second from the glass doors. “The phones.” He made a punctuation sign with his eyes, waiting for Gordon to get it.
Gordon fiddled in his jacket pocket for the quarter that had crept its way into the lining, though the suit jacket, however wrinkled, remained too new for this to have happened. It was his only way to stall, to keep the look on his face from betraying his disappointment with Daves. Something about the phones was all Daves had to tell him?
“Have you ever heard them ring?” Daves challenged.
Gordon gave up on the invisible coin. “People are always on them —” he began.
“Calling
out
.”
They both stared out the doors. The light from the sunset painted them, filtered past their two shapes into the dulling foyer.
“I’m sure I have,” Gordon insisted.
“Very, very, very occasionally,” Daves confirmed. “It’s unnerving, is what it is — an office building with no ringing. It’s just not right. I haven’t heard an outside call since I got here,” he declared, “and that’s a helluva lot longer than you’ve been here.”
In spite of himself, Gordon liked the way this kid was always reminding him of his place.
“There are calls within the building, see, from one extension to another. But you have to be from a different department or you’ll go direct to voice mail. See, I can call
you
direct, because I’m in Layout, but you can’t call Jill without it hitting her machine, because you’re both Proofreading. The idea is that cross-department calls are likely to be more important than interdepartment ones, which are often personal. Ringing through to the message system,” Daves explained, “means our work isn’t interrupted. You can call out or you can pick up your messages, but you never get the ring. And outside calls? Forget it. The whole life of Heaven revolves around production. High wages are the instrument used to select and maintain in stability a skilled labour force suited to the system of production and work.”
“What? Is that Gramsci?”
“So the phones don’t ring: coercion outweighs consent.” Brow furrowed, eyes still trained on the distance, Daves detailed his argument, holding up fingers. “One: work lacks intellectual content.”
Gordon nodded; that it did.
“Two: mechanization. Three: routinization and simplification of tasks. What’s your job?”
“I — I read.”
“Anything else?”
“No. But —”
“Four: fragmentation. Oh sure, you can pick up the books off the shelf when they’re done, but it’s not like you were there for the cover’s
fine
photo shoot, were you? Ever meet any of our randy authors?”
Gordon shuddered at the thought. “Maybe we should phone again.”
“Our product is lust and our activity is up. A bona fide industrial plant stands above you, my friend,” Daves continued cheerfully. “The wheels of romance turn with Fordism.”
“I thought you really liked your job.”
Daves nodded as if he did, but what he said was, “Bottom line: work speeds up.”
Suddenly “The Camptown Races” sounded across the lobby. Daves dug in his pocket and pulled out a pulsing, cantering cellphone. It shone in the last light. “Why do you think I always keep this on me?” he boasted to Gordon’s shocked expression. “Y’ello!” Daves barked into its silver mouth. “Yep, that’s us. . . . Yep, we’re right here at the door. . . . I don’t see your car. Which door you at?” Daves’ face clouded and he craned against the glass. “Yeah . . . that’s right, that’s right, but — but where
are
you?”
Daves wrapped his hand around the door handle. “We gotta go outside,” he said around the phone, “flag ’em down. He says he’s on Millcreek, but he must be circling in the visitors’ parking lot.”
Gordon peered past Daves. There was the phone call, but no delivery car was to be seen. He didn’t remember crossing a visitors’ parking lot when he’d come for his interview. Daves was wrong; the car simply wasn’t there.
Daves pulled on Heaven’s door handle, but it didn’t budge. The security light on the side turned orange.
Security Bear was instantly beside them, all stubble and heft. He shook his scratchy hair back from his scratchy face and fixed them with a stare that said
Forget it
. “This time a day I have to swipe it, then sign you back in. You
know
I’m not authorized to do that after hours ’less you got a overtime pass.”
“We just want the delivery. You want a slice? Hell, have half the pizza,” Daves offered.
“Love to.” Security Guy didn’t move. “But you got rules, I got rules, we all got rules — whatcha gonna do?”
“I don’t have to be here,” Daves snapped.
Security just looked back at him.
Daves let his lips sputter. “Come on!” he demanded of the guard.
When Security didn’t move, Daves jabbed his head to one side like Grenwald. To Gordon he mumbled, “Damn, we’re never gonna get that extra-large.” Disgusted, he clicked off the phone and tucked it under his shirttail. He leaned against the glass with a last withering look outside. “And I thought that Madam Chow’s was incompetent. Hell, out here everyone’s incompetent. I can’t stand it, I gotta smoke.”
It was the first time Daves had mentioned his vice. He and Gordon headed behind the elevator, back past the glowing women’s-bathroom hallway. Gordon followed Daves out a magenta door. Beyond was the darkening glass of an exit. They wound up in a courtyard in the centre of Heaven. The building was literally all around them. Seventy floors above them hovered a thirty-by-thirty-foot square of sky, complete with the last pale streaks of a late November sundown. There was no wind in this vertical tunnel, but the cold hit Gordon like a shock, like a snowball, like something hard, joyous, and straight out of his youth. They were actually outside. The air was crisp as an ice puddle, yet Gordon couldn’t see their breath. The sky was far away, but so real, stoic, and grand that it reminded Gordon of a lion in a zoo. He stood staring up into it, almost welling up, nostalgic for sky.
Next to him Daves removed a crumpled pack of smokes from his flannel pocket. The outdated packaging caught Gordon’s eye. Daves held it out to him.
“Sure.” Between Gordon’s fingers the cigarette felt slim and satisfying. He leaned into the flame but found he didn’t have the breath to drag back on it. Daves flipped his Zippo closed. As old as the packaging was, the tobacco didn’t taste stale. Gordon held the cigarette close to his mouth and let the smoke drift lazily and of its own accord over his lips. He could still taste, and the taste was like metal and wood, a memory of stealing away outdoors, adolescence.
He repeated what Daves had said in the foyer. “‘They’re all incompetent out here.’ Where do you live, Daves?” Would Daves go as foggy on the question as Georgianne Bitz had the time Gordon pressed her for directions to Job City?
Daves attempted a smoke ring but the smoke just wafted out of him, and immediately afterward he looked self-conscious — which Gordon hadn’t thought possible — and wandered around the courtyard with the cigarette clamped between his lips, hands in his pockets. “Thornhill,” Daves said, coming back around.