Heaven Is Small (21 page)

Gordon cleared his throat. No one looked over from Design. No one came out of the production office. Over the partition wall he could hear Jill talking on the phone to her sister — or at her, or some idea of her: “You wouldn’t believe the amount of calcium contained in sesame.”

Jill had a habit of calling people up and offering them advice for which they — likely — hadn’t asked. Today she was explaining why eating sesame seeds would absolutely save her sister’s cuticles.

“Buy a package for your spice rack. You can sprinkle those bad boys on salads, chicken, add it to your granola in the morning, you name it.”

It was an ordinary day in Heaven.

Gordon cleared his throat again. He coughed. He put four fingers over his voice box and felt it. To no one in particular he said, “Hello . . .

“Hello. My name is Gordon Small.”

He continued to stand, blinking, in his cubicle, wearing a concentrating face. Presently he flicked open the exploited drawer. He removed and tossed aside the literary journal, which flipped up on its square-bound spine. Beneath it was a sea of uncapped stick pens. Gordon selected one, scrawled on a Post-it to ensure that the pen had not gone dry, recorded his message, slapped the note onto his computer monitor, put the pen in his jacket pocket, and left his cubicle.

The monitor shone through the melon-hued Post-it, illuminating a fast-scrawled spiral and a phone number without a name. As the computer fell to sleep, the screensaver moon rose around the edges of the sticky.

PART IV

JANUARY

19

There were 10,775 employees working in the Heaven Book Corporation Building. Lillian Payne reminded herself of this fact as she sat staring at her e-mail inbox. Sixty-four messages sat stacked upon one another: Google Alert after Google Alert. In the past two days they had gone from a couple to a crowd, and the brouhaha had only just begun. Instinctively Lillian knew this, in spite of the Head Office directive that she hold steady and wait to see if the hubbub would fizzle out of its own accord, as so many online scandals did, playing out briefly among a few devoted conspiracy theorists. Lillian drew her shoulders up to her ears, then let them fall again. When she did, she had made her decision. The troublemakers in the company — all and any — would need to be rounded up and questioned. Blogs and message boards were buzzing, and now an actual print article was circulating on the sly around
her
office building, not to mention the sixty-four alerts in her inbox. It was time.

In the top right corner window on the screen, a woman’s head sprang up like an orange tulip from the surrounding snowlike drifts of paper. Her hand reached out and raised the receiver on her desk to her ear at the same moment that her voice crawled into Lillian’s.

“I need to see Gordon Small. Send him up to HR,” Lillian commanded after returning the woman’s greeting. Lillian looked down at a pile of manila folders, already thumbing past Small’s to the others. “Can you spare him? . . . Yes, now . . . Excellent.” The receiver fell back into its cradle and Lillian rose, approached the immense monitor. She watched a strange dance of flirtation and self-consciousness occur between her two employees in the quarter-cut window. In their respective televised sections Workman, E., Fast, J., and Bauer, V., remained hunched before their computers, nothing changing but their finger positions as they scrolled, typed, or plucked M&Ms from dishes on their desks and transported them to mouths that existed beneath the crowns in Lillian’s view.

Onscreen, in the lower section of the Editorial 12-I window, Small, G., and Goods, C., tap danced around a sheet of paper — their shapes merging briefly — then parted ways. Lillian’s news obviously delivered, a squat green figure was left alone on the edge of the screen. Lillian leaned forward, peering at the top of Small’s dishevelled head. She counted the beats of his immobility with her metronome tongue. An odd nausea expanded inside her.

Utterly illogical,
she told herself. Physicality was an illusion. She twisted at the waist until her straight, dancer’s shoulders were at right angles to her hips. Then she uncoiled and stretched in the other direction.

She glanced at the LCD screen: the man still had not made a move toward their appointment.

Lillian had neither eaten nor drunk a thing in decades. Even though she knew it meant nothing to anyone else, she prided herself on her restraint, her ability to shake off the routines of mortals. She liked to keep a fresh cup of coffee on her desk, though, which she moved around like a fragrant paperweight, particularly when others were present. When she saw the physical pause that resulted from her directive to Small, G. — he had passed, finally, from one onscreen window into another — she left her office and retrieved a newly wetted mug, which she held securely in both hands and contemplated.

Lillian lowered her head and let her lip trail its dark line, but didn’t drink. It was the closest she had come in years. There were plenty of discontented employees, she told herself. Of the 10,774 (not including herself) she could think of at least 500 who might engage in low-level sabotage. Small’s wife was mentioned in the article, and it would be a strange twist of fate indeed if the man were entirely innocent. Still, she had not achieved her advanced position by venturing guesses or taking haphazard actions. When Lillian looked up, Small’s shape was emerging from the elevator on her floor. She rose and closed the doors of the cabinet that housed the LCD screen, the coffee mug handle still floating in her hand as she rounded her desk and found the knob of her office door.

“Come in,” she said to Small’s blinking visage. He clearly had not expected her to anticipate his arrival so accurately. They were always blinking.
Why do they blink so much when they have no reason?
she never ceased to wonder. She turned her back to Small, G. Human habit was still one of the great mysteries to her. The power of addiction appalled and fascinated. “Do you know why you’re here?”

Small, G., took this in the philosophical sense; when Lillian turned back around, she could see that he did. She reminded herself to choose her words carefully. She watched him fold at the knees into a waiting chair he had not yet been offered. She set her cup upon the tidy surface of her desk with a resolute and satisfying
clunk
, and remained on her feet for just a second longer before lowering herself to his level.

The two of them sat examining each other for a moment. Small, G., was definitely worried. His eyes scrunched at the corners and one eyebrow twitched. He resembled an oversized, slightly blind mouse. It was not how she remembered him from the interview. He had been high-strung then, but not lacking in charm. A wonder, really, considering the circumstances of his death.

“Am I under review?” he now peeped.

She slid the folder from the side of her desk to the centre and folded her hands schoolteacher-style upon it. She closed her eyes. When she reopened them, she said slowly, “We are
all
under review.”

“But my work — my work performance,” Small, G., stuttered. “Is — is there a problem?”

“Perhaps.” Lillian opened the file on her desk. There were the co-worker complaints. People grew tired of sitting next to one another; many good employees at Heaven had had complaints filed against them. When she had assumed her role in HR, making the shift from the lower levels, there had been a folder of unfavourable charges as thick as her thumb. Lillian took her time leafing silently through the complaints, letting Small, G., shift in his chair while she picked up her pencil and quickly marked a column of boxes that fell in the middle of the sheet — 3s on a scale of 1 to 5. She put little faith in complaints.

Finally, having decided the trail of reason she would follow, Lillian reached out and laid a finger on the mug on her desk, as though it were a touchstone. It was a piece of Heaven branding from the 1980s, a row of hearts in mauve, mint, banana, and sea blue.
H-e-a-v-e-n
wound around the rim in cursive. She had always been rather fond of it. “Do you consider a complaint of sexual harassment to be a problem?”

“I don’t understand.”

Rather than meeting her straight-ahead gaze, Small’s eyes fixed on the folder, which had his name on it written in reverse order — the way Lillian preferred to identify all her employees. It was accurate, and it kept her alert.

“A serious formal complaint has been lodged against you. Whether or not you consider that to be a problem I don’t know,” Lillian replied, opening the folder. “Mr. J. Manos — your direct superior — reported that he did not know if you were making an invitation to him or issuing a threat . . .”

Small, G., said nothing.

Lillian continued evenly, “You instructed him to stand at the sinks in the men’s room and listen carefully while washing his hands?”

Still Small, G., gave no answer but merely sat blinking. Lillian wondered if this meeting would indeed be easier than she’d expected. She began to relax a little. She laid the paper down. “The implication, he felt, was that you might be lurking in the stall in a predatory manner.”

Small’s face shifted visibly, his eyebrows engaging in a two-step with each other.

“Yes or no, is this what you said to Mr. Jonathan Manos?”

Small, G., moved uncomfortably. “Yes . . . but the scenarios he is implying were not my intention.”

Lillian selected a pen and began to write. “‘Not Mr. Small’s intention.’ Was the conversation work-related?”

“In a manner.”

“What manner?”

“What are the consequences of this complaint?” Small, G., dodged.

“The consequences” — Lillian set down the pen, lowered her eyes — “are inconsequential providing there are no further complaints.”

“But . . . ?”

There. This was what she had anticipated.

“But,” Lillian acknowledged, tilting her head to one side and leafing through a stack of papers, “there
have
been other complaints.”

Small, G., nodded.

“Suddenly, Mr. Small, you don’t seem too surprised. Why is that?” She fixed him with what she knew to be her cold-sweat glare.

In response, Small, G., wound his hands around the armrests. “The question I asked Mr. Manos was of a personal nature,” he admitted, staring up at her. She saw that his jaw was now locked with resolve. “But the conversation was also work-related. It was regarding the personal habits of my co-workers, a question that was worrying me and impeding my ability to do my job. It is difficult, you must admit,” Small, G., elaborated, “to do your job well if you feel your own habits or behaviours are not in step with those around you. The number of acceptable bathroom breaks, for instance . . .” His voice trailed off.

Lillian made a note.

“If I may ask, what —” Small, G., leaned forward. “What are the other complaints?”

“You tell me, Mr. Small.”

Nothing.

Lillian turned the page. “A Ms. Fiona Christiansen detailed a rather unusual choice of birthday card that you had given her. Did you give her a birthday card?”

Small, G., nodded.

She quickly moved on. “Fleur and Carma insisted that you continued to leave the same messages every day even though each confirmed receipt of said messages and asked you to desist, and a Ms. Erika Workman is convinced, based on your musical tastes, that you want to kill her.”

There was a pause, during which Small, G., gripped the armrests more fiercely.

“You are not denying these actions, then?”

“I think Erika should not read too much into popular music. I —” The man stuttered and glanced away from Lillian. “I am very absent-minded. Especially when I have been working hard.”

Lillian sat up straighter and leafed through the file before her. Although she did not believe in feelings, a feeling had been growing inside her. She could sense its vague presence rearranging her stomach, her uterus, pushing against her bladder and bowels. Even the base of her spine. It had been so long since she had had the opportunity to process a feeling of her own that she was not entirely sure which one it was — endangerment or bemusement? So she sat up straighter and plunged on. “According to your time sheets, your productivity is down, and in the short time you’ve been at Heaven Books, you’ve been written up once already for carelessness. But yes, I am aware of your tendency to stay on at your desk quite late into the evening.”

“Where should I go?”

Lillian put the papers down. For a moment she found herself indexing all that she had said and done in an effort to comprehend how Small, G., had arrived at such a simple, direct, disruptive question. She said nothing, letting her next move form in her mind. Then, “Frankly, Mr. Small, that is not my concern.” It came out with a slight smile, even as the strange and solid feeling inside her crackled, gaped like breaking ice. “I have a copy of your contract here. This is your signature?” She slid the papers toward him.

Small, G., tugged at them eagerly and stared so long at the papers she suspected he was reading the document in its entirety, including its finest print.

“You agree here” — she gestured, for the sake of efficiency — “to be present between the hours of nine and five-thirty, five days per week. And here you agree that you do not have privileges to access any floor that is not your own, nor to remain in your cubicle nor in the areas of the gym, cafeteria, nor lobby beyond the hours of six at night nor before the hour of eight in the morning, nor on any weekend, without express consent from your supervisor, department head, or from HR.”

“So where should I go?” the man in the green suit repeated, firmly but quietly. To Lillian’s ears his voice carried a terrible earnestness.

“It is my experience,” she advised him, “that finding one’s way to one’s car is the standard response to the end of the working day.”

“I don’t own a car.”

“You have heard of carpooling? Millions of North Americans —” she began.

“Are we —”

Something about his expression cut Lillian short, against her better judgement.

“Are we even
in
North America?”