Authors: Emily Schultz
Now Gordon reflected that in some ways public transit, with its pale, caffeinated faces, was ruder than the boob-shaped ice cubes and
Oh Lordy, Who’s 40?
coffee mugs he had been peddling since his divorce from Chloe. There wasn’t one person on the subway who looked like somebody he would want to know. First, everyone came dangerously near to jostling him and no one glanced in his direction. He had to fight for space just to wrap his hand around the pole. Second, everyone was crunched into their clothes — black and charcoal, bile-thick beige and flavourless-as-chalk blue. Everyone wore sensible shoes. There were no urban cowgirls at this time of day, no boys sauntering sweatshirted with their hoods and hand-knocks. Everyone was pressed upright in their plastic seats, creased inside their pants. From the Christie to Bay stops, Gordon watched the ribbing of his dark socks beneath his dark cuffs. From Rosedale to Summerhill, he memorized the brush-scrubbed cuticles of his nails and ignored the sinewy knee-backs of taupe women, pink women, mint-green. At Davisville, like everyone else, he stared straight ahead. He didn’t think of incest or war, cheerleaders or wrestling, the catastrophes of skin or human nature, the jailed semen in his lower half anxiously awaiting release, the way that he had at Whoopsy’s, where the staff worked in environs of simulated farts and oversized blow-up beer bottles. Gordon rattled his way north, airless, lightless. The train began to move at double speed, and Gordon could imagine fields and wildflowers whirring over his head.
He avoided eye contact and memorized the answers permissible to give in any and every interview situation. He pulled out a folded piece of paper with blue lines on it, torn from a spiral notebook. In his tight scrawl:
Gordon had taken down this last quote directly from the Heaven web site because it had struck him as particularly strange. He was not sure how Heaven had come by these statistics, yet he found he did not doubt them. So far as Gordon had been able to divine, Heaven was proud: love was winning out over cheap sex and sustenance. Or not love really, but desire for romance. Gordon thought about those words:
desire
for
romance, not actual romance itself.
The train broke from the tunnel that had separated it from a nacreous sky. The tracks ground upward toward grass, and the grass waved the train on, letting Gordon and his co-travellers pass — the thousand or so of them in a capsule, hands clasped together, silent save for their hidden hearts. Gordon’s chest constricted each time he thought of standing at the base of Heaven’s stairs, of walking toward that building, closing in on his appointment.
He stretched his neck and looked up and down the car. They had lost some along the way. The woman with the bumpy, fist-sized knees had gone, taking her sculpted bronze hair with her. The Korean lady with the floral blouse and broad, padlocked face had disappeared too. The man who was constantly turning his wedding band seemed to have escaped with her. Now, positioned in a seat beside-yet-facing Gordon’s was a fellow in a pinstriped suit, his eyes downcast in spite of the light pouring in all around them. The man’s eyebrows were like dark tildes.
The train plunged underground again. A clatter of stops. A huff and puff of stop and go. A man across from Gordon held a Hindi newspaper on his lap, its letters shaking between fingers that folded and refolded its sections. He did not appear to be reading, simply rearranging. The whole ride, he and Gordon had stood and sat periodically, bound by an honour code to which no one else seemed to subscribe, judging who was worthy of their seats by the number of lines in their faces, the height of their shoes, or the weight of their bags. Gordon felt a kinship with him. They had stood together twice. Once for the pregnant business-coordinates blond, her belly like a second briefcase. She’d taken the other man’s seat. Again they’d stood for the blind man who lacked a dog. Everyone else rode without looking beyond feet, newspapers, romance novels. Gordon had forgotten that people still read — well, dozed and read, read and dozed, shuffled and dozed, read and shuffled.
He now paid close attention to the women in the car with novels, looking to them for keys to what lay ahead of him. One actually held against her chest the much-thumbed pages of a throbbing Fabio and his maiden, red dress half undone, a wanton collarbone that seemed to split the cover in two. Gordon’s eyes rode this reader’s features. Her pupils never took in his gaze. She was dolphin-shaped, humped beneath her white shirt, jade jewellery mottling her throat and ears. Her hair formed a silver halo around her face. The questions Gordon wanted to ask her! Her, and all of his fellow travellers, sliding as they did, gracefully, awkwardly away. Each station led to other lives, from which he was forbidden.
As the train became more and more empty, it occurred to Gordon, not for the first time, how limited his life had become.
The train stopped abruptly inside the dark tunnel — making piercing rusted sounds, scraping, and then silence. The lights went out.
In the dark, Gordon brought his fingers up to his chest pocket. Beneath them, beneath his suit jacket, and beneath a layer of shirt pocket hovered a one-by-one-inch box, and inside it, the tiny white tablets that had become a kind of touchstone. Although Gordon took them only once daily, over the years he had developed a nervous habit of feeling for them to be sure they were still there, camped close to his chest. Before Gordon could begin to worry about missing his connection or being late for his interview, before the conductor’s voice could come over the speaker, they were off again. The subway lights flickered to full blast, and those who were left blinked and laughed and said, “Oh!” The train harrumphed forward. Gordon wondered who it was who had died at that remote station, and how far down the tracks he had been yanked. No wonder no one made eye contact.
His regular routine had meant that he rarely travelled outside a thirty-minute radius. Over the years Gordon’s friends had fallen away as they moved to more distant climates and began that most selfish of all things: the raising of children. They had emigrated. To a country of prams. Gordon had limited himself to confidants within the closest range. At night at the Brass Taps, a bucket of beer could be shared with Grenwald, the manager of Champs Sports, one of the longest-standing stores in the mall. Like Gordon, Grenwald was perpetually broken-hearted, a long-time girlfriend having left him three years back to pursue a career in acting out west. Unlike Gordon, Grenwald perpetually saw action. His banter on both topics — love and sex — was about as entertaining as a roast beef sandwich with Swiss. It filled the time, and the stomach, and then Gordon would exit, feeling warm, full. Go home to his adopted grandmother/landlady and the ball game.
Mrs. Ashbridge could barely climb the stairs, in fact had not since the day she had shown him the room for rent. Even then she had stood at the landing and gestured, puffing, one hand on the rail. “There’s the bed, and the
divan
,” he remembered she had called it. “The kitchen” — she’d pointed to the clothes dresser atop which a variety of three-pronged appliances sat. “The bath.” It had come furnished, the bed and a blue settee dominating the room. The bed was an iron frame from 1945 and a mattress that had been replaced some time in the ’70s or early ’80s. To these items Gordon had added an oversized television, an old-fashioned typewriter whose ribbon always dried out before he could use it, and a bookshelf stacked with his motley finds. At night he would take a walk around the block to inhale sweet basil tokes — the instant tingling of a thing that, rolled in paper, brought another life to Gordon’s life. In the mornings, when his mouth felt mashed with weeds, the Vivatex tablet would find its way into his palm and from there down the hatch, usually amid a mouthful of instant coffee. Inside him the medication emitted a time-released happiness. It felt like a pleasant but constant yawn.
Now Gordon tried to picture the unknown of Lillian Payne, the human resources director who would interview him today. Would she be blond or brunette?
He imagined Lillian Payne sitting beside him, replacing the wheezing businessman with the Lolita-like softness of a slip-knot. Her small white hands were tying themselves around each other like two silk scarves. Awaiting Gordon was a platoon of short-skirted women at desks, all wet behind the knees, and constantly wet between them from reading romance. The pinstriped man got off at Lawrence, and Gordon could feel himself surging ahead, sailing on, on, and on toward something more
something
, though he didn’t know what.
Deposited abruptly on a grim platform where he was to catch his final bus, Gordon found himself alone.
He wished he smoked. He stood and stared off in the direction that he supposed the bus would come from — a patch of gummy wall turned in from the street to the half-covered station. Beyond it Gordon could see an oblong stretch of sky, less pearl than before, the rain having ceased sometime between downtown and the place he now inhabited. Gordon had left home over an hour before and, if he were lucky, would complete his dreadful journey within the next twenty minutes. It occurred to him that he did not really know where he was going. It could take five more minutes or five more years.
He gazed about the vacant station.
“Hello,” he said aloud to himself.
The T shape of the station roof carried his voice across the platform, with no one but him to hear it. “My name is Gordon Small . . . I’m here for the interview. . . I’m here to see Ms. Payne. If you could just tell Lillian I’m here for — Human Resources, please. Lillian Payne. I’m thrilled to meet you. I’ve been looking forward to this interview because — Why would I like to work at Heaven?” Gordon’s voice built. “What would we have without romance? Love is all around us; I think I understand that without having read as much of the genre as some. But really, it’s spelling that matters.” Gordon tried a finger in the air. “Deadlines. I am a great organizer. Detail-oriented. Perfectionism is my greatest fault. No.
Start again.
” Gordon’s index finger dropped. He stared at the oil-stained cement where the bus would pull up, at the blank schedule mounted on the pillar to his left, at the vacant ticket booth.
“Hello,” he said. His voice skidded across the concrete like some misused piece of rubber.
Louder.
“Hello. My name is Gordon Small.”
2
Heaven loomed. Gordon had just two minutes to spare as the final lurch of the bus ejected him onto the curb with lethal precision. In spite of the time, he paused, stared up. He couldn’t help but consider the Egyptians. It had taken them more than twenty years to construct the Great Pyramid at Giza, the premises where their king would be buried. In comparison, the housing for Heaven Books was perhaps not a major accomplishment. But only if the two were compared scientifically, side by side. By pedestrian standards, Heaven was mighty. Its glass façade entered a cloud and mirrored back the sky. Though the day had been ducking its head in and out of fog, revealing a kind of twilit morning, the tower rose undeterred, defiantly sparkling. He couldn’t understand why he’d never heard of it, why the building hadn’t been named a national landmark. The Great Pyramid had been constructed by hand, but a lot of cranes had obviously been needed to build Heaven.
The building was surrounded by a moat of printing and packing houses, a cul-de-sac of one-level industrial plants. Taking stock of the way he had come, Gordon noted that, besides Heaven, the bus route seemed to serve only a Good-2-Go cafeteria, a Print Three, a cardboard manufacturer called Box It in Seven Seconds, an outlet store for Nine West shoes (which Gordon imagined jammed with brown rows of odd-shaped leather toes under sullen fluorescents), and a desolate Motel 6.
As Gordon snapped to attention and passed the gold sign emblazoned with Heaven’s company logo, he fixed his reflection with an equally gold, frightened grin. The company letters were carved two knuckles deep. In his reflected image Gordon’s ears hugged either side of the lower basin of the
a
. Without further delay he ran up the concrete steps.
Inside the lobby a vacant-eyed security guard was posted behind a mirrored desk. The setting struck Gordon as resembling a little girl’s jewellery box, and for a second he envisioned the guard turning in circles on one toe. Instead the man crossed his arms over his blue cotton chest. Gordon showed his ID and filled out a requisite form while the man called up HR’s Lillian Payne on a telephone that didn’t require any dialling. Then he leaned back, waiting. Gordon waited with him. They both stared at the elevator doors, watched the small bright numbers click down. She was travelling from the very top. Floor Seventy, Floor Sixty-Nine, Sixty-Eight, Sixty-Seven . . . The doors were silver against a brushed velvet wallpaper of pale pink. Floor Fifty-Two, Floor Fifty-One . . . A slim silver trash can stood at attention to the left. Floor Thirty-Three . . . The wall gave way to hallways on either side. A light-box hovered, jutting out about a foot above Gordon’s head, on which the word women glowed, a white beacon in one alcove. In the other, men, dimmer, one of the bulbs burnt out. Floor Fourteen, Floor Twelve . . . The ceiling vaulted overhead in carved half-circles, art deco in plaster, mallish. A set of unclimbable steps. Floor Five, Floor Four, Three, Two . . .