Authors: Emily Schultz
Georgianne Bitz came into the kitchen and took a tuna-fish sandwich out of the refrigerator. She held it like a dead thing. She went to the cupboard and took out a white plate that had her name on it in sparkly red paint. She cautiously laid the waxed paper parcel on the plate, between the
G
and the
E
. The letters were coagulated like old blood on either side of the tuna corpse. Gordon could see it had been cut down the centre after being wrapped — a white surgical incision. She stared at it, then at him.
“What’s wrong?” asked Gordon.
“What do you have?”
“Tea, but not yet.” Gordon pointed to the renegade kettle.
“Trade you.”
He shrugged. The kettle began to lisp. He went back to his cubicle with georgianne in nail-polish letters beneath his thick thumbs.
The hero had forgotten condoms. Then he remembered the one his friend had insisted he keep — as a joke. But he and the woman of his dreams were camping. A raccoon had gotten into their personal items. He chased the raccoon in spite of his erection. “Come back here,” he hollered. The woman rolled about on the bed, laughing until she cried. When he retrieved it, tricking it away from the raccoon, the condom was still in its package. He leaned in the doorway, suavely, nakedly. “Guess what I have for you . . .” “Whatever it is, it had better be long and it had better be hard.” She had never been so shameless in her life. But looking at him standing there, she could think of nothing to stop her. It was he who was making her this way. It was — oh my God, it couldn’t be —
love
for him that was making her behave this way. As he joined with her, penetrating her to her core, waves of capital-
L
Love
washed over her. It was! It was love!
Georgianne Bitz brought back Gordon’s empty cup. It was blue, with a sea-green band around the top. He handed her the plate.
“Who makes the sandwiches?”
“My kid. Jolene. She’s eight.”
Georgianne and Jolene.
Gordon thought they ought to be working a vegetable stand together, somewhere in Nebraska. “If you don’t like tuna fish, can’t you teach her peanut butter?”
“Jo likes tuna. She thinks she’s doing me a favour. How can I say no?”
Georgianne was tall and toothy. When she spoke, her mouth moved like a horse’s. Gordon thought of Mr. Ed. Ms. Ed. She laughed. He smiled.
“You got a raw deal. A sandwich for a tea?”
“I know.”
Gordon looked into his cup. She had washed it. He hadn’t washed her plate. A halo of dark brown hair floated away over the tops of the cubicles. It was curled like an old lady’s, even though Georgianne was only a few years older than him. Thirty-nine or forty, forty-four tops. Gordon watched it go like some frothed-up chocolate ice-cream shake. She was nice. When he turned back to the hero and heroine, they were already engaged. They had done it two more times — without condoms. That rascally raccoon was cheering them from the cabin window. The lady was having his baby, but hadn’t told him yet. Gordon moved the mug to various positions around his desk. Georgianne was the first woman in two weeks to enter his cubicle without using the toll-bridge token of his ex-wife’s name. He put the cup to his nose and smelled it. Sunlight.
5
Titus Bentley’s desk was stacked with boxes, the paper lips of envelopes emerging from the tops, each biting the one next to it.
“Morning . . .” Gordon hustled by, eager to get his computer switched on, set his voice mail for the day, and head for the kitchenette with its coffee urn and chance of exchange with Georgianne Bitz. Once the computer’s dumb skull was illuminated, he considered himself officially at work.
Above the propped-up house of invoice cards, Bentley returned his gaze with distrust. “Morning . . .”
Bentley’s was the first desk one came to before reaching the Proofreading Department. In Gordon’s opinion Bentley smelled of Elmer’s glue. So far as Gordon could discern, he was Reception. Though whom he received Gordon was unsure. As a rule they didn’t speak. Or at least they hadn’t thus far. Normally Gordon nodded or shuffled past shyly. They had been introduced once, on Gordon’s first day, amid Gordon’s initiation into telephone extensions and reading codes. Bentley had had incredibly cold hands when they shook. Just as Manos had done, he had assessed Gordon quickly, thin face splitting with a smile that was more a baring of teeth. He was as tall as the Thin Man, and about as welcoming too. It was as though it was a requirement in this environment that the men regard one another with bristling ferocity, territorial callousness.
Titus Bentley held a weird grimace in place following his “Morning . . .” At six feet four he would have towered over Gordon even more if he hadn’t had a self-conscious stoop to accompany his livery lips and penetrating black-hole eyes. Bentley’s hair swooped over his forehead like a dead crow, a tuft sticking up in the back just before the halo of baldness. His eyes narrowed as he watched Gordon, as though he hated him intensely for no reason but Gordon’s existence. At that very moment — and every moment Gordon could recall being in his presence — Bentley seemed as though he were thinking of twisting Gordon’s neck like an old grease rag.
In spite of himself, Gordon hurried past Titus Bentley, muscles in his throat constricting. At his cubicle Gordon tossed his jacket over his hook, snapped on his computer, and headed for the kitchen. Partway there he turned and headed back to his workstation. He had forgotten his coffee mug. He ground his front teeth together. He hated himself for his fear. Bentley was just a scrawny, vertically surplused freak. He thought he owned the department only because he owned Reception. Gordon could say “Good morning” every day if he wanted. In fact he would, he promised himself, if only to irritate Bentley. Gordon grabbed his Georgianne-graced cup so quickly that it rolled off the desk. He caught it before it could hit the carpet.
Gordon pushed the door to the kitchen hard, practically hitting Georgianne Bitz, who was carrying her own mug —
I Heart Mom
— full to the brim. “Oooh!” She jumped back, a small burp of black coffee escaping the rim and falling between them. “Fu-dge,” she blurted, a mom-style obscenity. “Did I get you?”
Gordon shook his head. “Sorry.”
They cantered around, he trying to politely extricate himself from her path and she turning and heading back to the counter, where she freed a square of paper towel. She wiped around her cup with no-nonsense efficiency. “What’s up, Gord?”
He shrugged, moved toward the coffee urn reluctantly. He pressed the lever and filled, Colombian Supremo, while she leaned back against the counter staring at him. There was one other guy in the kitchen — Design — and one of the token Design women, small and dark-eyed. She and Gordon exchanged glances, like strangers sharing some brief moment of affinity. But ultimately all Designs were alien to Gordon, and Proofreadings to them. Even now the two moved around each other, plucking cream from the same fridge, sugar from the same cupboard, without speaking, another language separating them. The Designs’ was one of pixillation, rgb/cmyk, jpeg/tiff; Gordon’s and Georgianne’s was comprised of single quotes, double quotes, solidi, commas, colons, question marks, exclamation points. It was early yet, 8:32 by the microwave clock. Georgianne and Gordon could talk freely here.
“You ever start the day in a perfect mood?” he asked. “One thing happens and you’re thrown off?”
Georgianne gave an exaggerated tight-lipped grin, cocked a finger on her free hand at her coffee mug.
“Oh, I see.” He blushed. Chloe had once told Gordon that he was incredibly cute when he blushed. But given his height, and Georgianne’s, he was certain he looked like a squat stuffed apple.
“Kidding,
kid-
ding.” She put on a fake fast-talking voice, slightly misty, semi-Southern. “Who was it? You want, I’ll take ’em to task. Say the word, Gord. I always carry a pearl-handled revolver in my purse.”
Impossible, coming from a woman with hands wrapped around
I Heart Mom
, the hollow skin beneath her eyes pink as plucked chicken. Was he insane?
“Thin Man. He’s a mean one. Mean as tomorrow.” Gordon looked to see if it would land.
“Ugh, Titus,” Georgianne groaned, making a fairly unattractive sound in the back of her throat even as she smiled. “Be glad you aren’t a woman — he’s even worse.” She wrinkled her nose, gave Gordon a wink, and backed out of the kitchen, using her bum to open the two-way door before he could ask her what she’d brought for lunch.
She had a kid, maybe a husband, and she was too farmwife in the looks department for Gordon. She’d given him a sandwich and a laugh, but nothing more. He chided himself for seeking an office romance so early in his new job. Whoopsy’s had done something to him, he told himself — buried him under a set of not-for-the-parlour games while Chloe had become more and more distant, rising behind him like an evening star.
Jill Fast trucked into the kitchen and depressed the coffee lever and claimed the sugar bowl simultaneously, as if the Designs couldn’t be trusted with it. She called to Gordon cheerily, “Get your pay?” Stationed one cubicle over from Gordon, Jill was in her late twenties, with straight blond bangs and brown dog-eyes, but a tendency to bite. Given the generosity of her lower half, she wore her clothes a shade too snug. Gordon could always see her panty lines. She gave off the insecure air of the prom queen’s best friend.
He shook his head.
“Well, today’s the day!” she sang. “Is it your first?”
Nod.
“When you first start, they make you wait. Talk to Titus.”
Gordon gritted his teeth against the rim of his cup, hid his scowl by tipping it into the heat of the brew. Millstone. “Bentley?”
“Yeah,
duh
. . .” Jill’s sweetness ran out quickly. She released the sugar bowl and slithered out.
The foyer had a wan light, a different fluorescence than the rest of Heaven.
Titus Bentley had dry patches on his palms, flakes of loose skin around his knuckles, and nails like dried wallpaper paste. As he crab-walked his scruffy mitts through the
S
’s, an indignant heat rose in Gordon’s cheeks. “Oh,
that’s
right,” Bentley drawled, as if he had just remembered. It was obvious that whatever he was about to reveal he had known before Gordon had even said “good morning.” “You’re not here yet.” Bentley huffed and shrugged, lurching his shoulders. “Still temp.”
Gordon fixed him with his best blank glare.
“All Heaven employees are on contract for their first two months.” Bentley peered from beneath his birdlike brow. Even when he dripped sympathy, he looked like he wanted to crack Gordon’s spine. “It was in your contract. Or didn’t you read it?”
“When do I get paid?”
Bentley made a stalling sound in the back of his throat, drawing out Gordon’s suffering as long as possible. “You can’t pick it up here . . .”
Ta-ta-ta.
“But you’re paid already . . .”
Ta-ta-ta.
“You’ll have to go over to . . .”
Ta-ta-ta.
“Job City.”
“Well, where’s that?” Gordon felt himself becoming petulant. He hated having his time wasted — especially his lunch hour — by one as reptilian as Bentley.
Bentley closed his file box. “It’s in your contract.” He smiled, teeth like pinheads.
Gordon found georgianne bitz’s cubicle, wedged into the farthest possible corner from his. Her chocolate-Coke hairdo fizzed up above the pink fuzzy walls. Gordon stood behind her, regarding the back of her neck. He leaned into the cubicle, one hand balanced on the divider.
“Where’s Job City?” he whispered.
She spun in her chair in alarm, a pair of horn-rims decorating her nose.
I Heart Mom
sat empty on the desk beside a cardboard cup of soup. “Twice in one day . . . Don’t
do
that!” She snagged a Kleenex from the box, wiped her tomato lips, and hit the garbage basket with it on the first shot. “What do you need?”
“Job City.”
“Right. That’s what it was — with Titus.” She set her glasses on the desk, jabbed her thumbs between her eyes, her head down. “How to get there . . .”
“Is it far?”
“No, no, right around the corner, but . . . How can I describe it? It’s been so long since I had to go there. Telling you would be like trying to give precise directions to my high school.” Gordon thought about interjecting some flattering comment dubious of her age, but decided against it. She closed her eyes again. “I can see it, but it’s like a dream. Okay, here’s what you’ll do. Take the elevator all the way down to the basement —”
“The basement?”
“The first basement, not the second basement —”
“What’s the second basement?”
“Parking garage. First basement, follow the arrows through the passage —”
“The passage?”
“It’s what the girls take. Every time they go for shoes. You know,
the
Passage
. It goes underneath.”
“Well, can’t I just go outside? It’s nicer.”
She turned her chair toward the window and, lips slack, stared through the tinted glass across the expanse of concrete. A bra and underwear manufacturer’s logo made an orange stick-figure splash against their parking lot. The sky was overcast but bright. A burning bush shed small red leaf-petals in a perfect circle on the grass. It was a hollow, floating morning, the day still trying to figure out what it wanted to be. They both looked up and down the expanse.
“The thing is . . .” Georgianne’s voice faltered. “I don’t know how.” She pointed to the curving roadway, in the direction from which the bus had brought him to Heaven. “It’s back that way,” she said, her voice thimble-sized. “That’s all I know.” Her shoulders sank into the rose tweed of the swivel chair.
“It’s okay,” Gordon told her. “I’ll take the Passage.”
She gave him the instructions. Blue arrow to red arrow, red arrow to yellow. Left underneath Nine West, past the glass doors of Print Three, and after that either the first or second door on the right. Job City. It would be labelled, she said.