Authors: Emily Schultz
Two-dimensional swirls of pink and taffy chenille, layers of metallic ink:
CHLOE GOLD.
Go Deeper.
The award-winning author
brings you her long-awaited
Hello Twilight,
a tale of romance and murder that demands to know:
how do you say farewell to a love already gone?
Her name in trademark all-caps, Chloe stood, beyond life-size, leaning against a fence made of driftwood, a different scarf than the one he had just seen her wearing, this one coffee-coloured, half-leashing her ringlets. Her pink blouse was one-third undone, a knotted leather cord nuzzled her clavicle, a camel-toned skirt clung to lithe hips, her slim hand wrapped around an earthy volume, which was, of course, her own.
Gordon stood before her for what seemed a long moment. Though he was not aware that he breathed, he assumed he must have, for soon, though it had been only suppertime when he fled Russet Avenue, Gordon found himself swept up in the morning rush hour.
Pouring down the stairs were thousands of 6 a.m. commuters. Where each normally held a newspaper, a
Sun
or
Globe
or
Star
, today they held only
Hello Twilight
. They descended like rain. Long lines of them pressed past Gordon, took their places on the platform, licking thumbs and turning pages that wept the thick unanimous whispering of
Chloe Gold, Chloe Gold, Chloe Gold
. Gordon let them carry him back down to the platform from which he had come — only a minute ago, a nighttime ago. The aquatic eyes of Poster Chloe followed him through the station, cold and green, from her seat above the stairs, her sunset head thrown back, a trace of a smile haunting her lips like the curling tail of a scorpion.
Northward Gordon rode, northward. The train doors had slid open for him — and him alone, it seemed, the crowd on the platform too engrossed in their reading material to step forward and gain entrance before the doors-closing chime.
Tut-tut-tut-tut
Gordon’s head went against an in-car poster.
Pantene:
Collections that let you shine
had already been replaced by
Hello Twilight
. “Go Deeper,” the poster hissed behind Gordon, its chrome frame pulling at his hairs, sexually, maliciously. “Go Deeper. Go Deeper. Go Deeper.”
PART II
NOVEMBER
Before turning toward the door to her office, Lillian Payne pressed the button that closed the cupboard, and folding louvred panels clicked into place.
“Leave them,” she commanded.
Her assistant stashed a stack of forms on the most available corner of the desk and hurried out again.
In two strides Lillian had retrieved them, wetted thumb, begun a page count, and simultaneously resituated herself before the louvred cupboard. When each page corner had passed by her forefinger and she had satisfied herself that the number of forms matched the number of employees she had hired in the past two months, she pressed the button that again slid open the immense folding doors. Behind them a wall-sized LCD screen contained numerous open windows, each an overhead view of a block of cubicles. Her gaze bounced between the monitor inside the cabinet and the names on the sheets before her.
Small, G., employee #1299, was typed on the top line of the first document.
Date of death:
Department:
Position:
Lillian removed a golf pencil from her pants pocket. In crisp letters she printed
September 22
beside
Date of death
. Mr. Small, G., was about to go from being a temp worker to a permanent one. Lillian shaded in the first few boxes without consulting the immense LCD screen where, in the top right-hand window labelled
Editorial 12-I
, the green-suited shape lurked. She examined the memo attached to his Employee Progress Report.
Memo from Head Office
To: Lillian Payne, Employee #10775
Re: Employee #1299
Please be advised that, as is often common among employees who come to us following an act of misadventure, our agents have noticed some amount of wandering on the part of employee #1299, also known as Small, Gordon, who was hired some time ago for your editorial department. Please be advised that he:
Reports indicate that this employee:
Visited his former residence on Russet Avenue. Saw his former possessions packed haphazardly. Acknowledged that his landlady was incapable of climbing up stairs or rearranging the furniture. Attempted to straighten the spines of boxed books. Noticed the hardwood floor had been faded by the sun. Paced about until he stood at the foot of the darker floorboards that defined where his bed had been situated. Turned his back to the space, lined his heels up against it, threw his arms wide, closed his eyes, and fell backwards.
Conclusion: The company believes the employee is under the impression that he still lives at this residence and that a new bed is to be delivered. He has journeyed there at least twice to sleep on his former lounge. Uses an old manuscript for a pillow.
Please be aware of these actions and, although it is possible they may be altogether ordinary, give this employee due scrutiny before advancing from temporary to permanent employ.
It was a form letter with name, number, and specific details filled in. She had seen it dozens of times. Some employees had a more roving nature than others, some a more questioning one. It wasn’t completely irregular for temps to get four checkmarks. She found they always settled down in their third and fourth months.
Lillian sorted through several reports. Acceptable reading time. Number of manuscripts completed per week: above average. Phone log/attendance: flawless. That was very good — if he had left the office as the report stated, he had managed to get back in time for working hours. Employees often missed days while they were still on temporary status. It was an adjustment period. She saw that he had signed on for Eden Eats, the online organic grocer owned by Heaven Books and operated by one of its sister companies. This was good also: it would keep him at Heaven. She nodded and observed this Mr. Small, G., on the flat-screen. He had complained to some of his co-workers about the reading material and had misfiled several of his time sheets and reports, but the filing had since become more regular.
The standard form for employee evaluations didn’t leave room for a great deal of quibbling — or praise, for that matter
. Seems to be an ideal employee. Has the potential for long-term employ.
Lillian let her hand move past no, maybe, and most likely to check both yes boxes firmly. Lillian was forthright about checking off the boxes in a manner that would require the least follow-up from head office. If anyone had asked her, she would have answered honestly that she viewed her decisiveness as absolutely necessary for the efficiency of the company at large. Worried or weak evaluations only elicited premature investigation and subsequent paperwork. Both cost time and money. Lillian had stood by this belief for forty years without serious adverse consequence.
On the screen before her, Lillian spied her assistant about to knock on her door. Lillian closed the cupboard and let the folder on employee #1299 fall shut as the office door opened.
“I’ve just got word that Miss Chandler Goods has arrived,” the assistant said. “She should be in the office bright and early on Friday.”
“Ms., please,” Lillian corrected. “This is a progressive company.”
“Ms. Goods,” the assistant parroted, “will be in the office on schedule.”
7
At night heaven was quieter than any place Gordon had ever been. Inside that industrial subdivision, with its stretch of shipping depots, its Styrofoam-peanut makers, its factory outlet stores and big-box-style restaurants, the odd residential high-rise like a chancre amidst the naked hills, Gordon expected there to be some noise. Perhaps machinery or midnight whistles, the wizardry of bubble-pop manufacture, or printing presses rolling ink onto newsprint, cars revving or laughter ringing across parking lots, the noise of opened doors and video drone under the big, empty sky. Instead there was a thick wind and simple computer silence. The sound of noise with the human drained out of it, a sound made of nothing but the overhead lights.
Gordon had done what any reasonable man would do if his means of transportation were taken away by a mocking, movie-sized apparition of his ex — he had decided to spend the night at his place of work.
Full of good intentions, he’d actually worked through the evening. It was eleven when Gordon pulled a hand across his eyes. The cubicle air wasn’t dry, nor were his eyes strained from gazing at the outdated monitor, but he slumped back against his chair as if this were the case. There was a rumour that a window hadn’t been opened at Heaven for more than twenty-nine years, and this had happened only when they were being replaced with new ones. Gordon had been reading for hours, following the onscreen text alongside the old-fashioned manuscripts that the proofers pulled from an overflowing shelf down the hall, in the office of the executive who was never there but who was apparently their boss. Gordon recalled the references that had been made when he first interviewed with Lillian Payne:
Young international dynamo.
Transferring over. Head-hunted. Worth the wait.
The head of Proofreading, Copy Editing, Substantive Editing, and Acquisitions — nine and a half floors of the Heaven building. The mysterious woman from whom Jon Manos took his directions.
When Gordon finished one manuscript, an eight-hour dedication, he went and immediately pulled out another. There were three piles, one extending up the set of shelves, the other two solid towers sitting in the middle of the floor and reaching respectively to Gordon’s chest and to his waist. Proofers were supposed to pull from the tops of the piles, but as long as the manuscripts bore the same due date, a person could take any one he wanted without too much trouble. Gordon habitually scanned their titles, authors, and sometimes first pages for goodies and baddies, though truthfully he had lost track of the difference after the first few weeks. Tonight he glanced anyway.
Gordon had developed a simple set of rules to live by at Heaven. Avoid manuscripts beginning with mild profanities such as “God!” “Damn!” “Double damn!” or worse, substitutes like “Horsefeathers!” “Granny’s garters!” and “I don’t give a flying fig!” It was almost certain that these books would be steeped in minor calamity and the characters likely to refer to each other’s sexual parts as
bits,
buns, rods, bosoms, honey-pots,
and
backsides.
Avoid manuscripts beginning with scenes of capture. If the female was endangered or imprisoned on the first page, a multitude of modern-day torn-bodice scenes would follow. The male character would almost always be irritatingly wealthy, in the end rewarding his prisoner of love with access to his mansion, his kingdom or princedom (kept secret until the climax), and his heart. Avoid books beginning in emergency rooms. Gordon would have welcomed the doctor–patient scenario, but most plots set in hospital revolved around doctor–nurse romance, and Heaven’s female authors
did not
understand the notion of the naughty nurse. Heaven’s nurses were healers, not feelers. They wore cardigans and ate eggs for supper. They were guaranteed to possess quaint ideals, live alone in large houses — just waiting to fill them with children — and of course waiting for the Mr. Right who could provide those children.
Dr.
Right, Gordon corrected himself as he flipped through one of these prescribed scripts.
He managed to secure what appeared to be a romantic jewel heist. Called
Night in Paradise, Paradise on Earth
, it was set in the tropics and included among its cast a Shakespeare-spouting parrot. It would not be hot; of this Gordon was almost certain. But the author was quoting Shakespeare where most quoted only Dr. Phil. Before midnight, however, the parrot had misquoted
A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, a tangential character was speaking in bad patois, and out of habit and frustration Gordon was rubbing his eyes again. He decided to explore his own Night in Heaven.
His colleagues’ desks were littered with personality, fragments of their daytime lives: Kinder toys, a plastic Madonna, clipped cartoon characters mounted on a cubicle wall, a coffee cup with an unwashed lipstick stain. What passed beneath his trailing fingers were used napkins, pocket change, the tabs of pop cans, eraser grit, the decapitated caps of pens, and scrawled sticky notes. What passed beneath his straying eyes were push-pins, collages of cheap sentiment, valentines and birthday cards stapled onto corkboard, magazine articles wrinkling at the corners, and paper dust, paper dust, paper dust.
Gordon discovered that the Designs were a vague presence even at night. A flock of them had lingered on in his periphery until eight or nine o’clock, and now two remained, popping silently in and out of their blue-walled world as Gordon edged around Floor Twelve, carrying his coffee mug as a kind of justification for his presence. A man in white pants and a black sweater glanced up at Gordon with some surprise, but then bent back again over his cutting board without worry. Gordon ventured down to the cafeteria and found a young cleaning woman wearing an immense set of headphones, an old transistor radio planted atop her cart of rags. On the same floor two duct men were peering up at the ceiling, several drop-tiles taken down and leaning against the thin side of the ladder. Beside them a large red case, presumably full of tools, perched on a counter. Gordon wondered what tools were used to keep a building of Heaven’s size filtering and functioning, but the burlier of the two coveralls stopped speaking and gave him a pointed stare, as if waiting until Gordon had passed.