Authors: Emily Schultz
As Gordon wandered he found that the image of his wife still haunted him: Chloe standing on the front lawn of the house on Russet,
going deeper
with the manager of Champs as if she had met him before, had shared a personal or troubling experience already. Gordon pushed the mental picture of Chloe aside and attempted to ride the elevator up to Lillian Payne’s floor, Seventy, but his pass card wouldn’t take him there. He wound up down on Six, in the gym.
Gordon stripped down to his undershirt and boxer briefs. He hung his suit inside a vacant half-locker. It slumped upon the hook, green in the green locker. Gordon left it there alone and walked into the workout room.
On the conveyor of the treadmill, Gordon felt everything slide away from him. It was an amazing sensation. His head felt light and clear, his body surged forward without sweat. He ran into the night, seeming never to tire. He clocked over twenty miles without losing his breath. He ran from Russet Avenue, from the Dufferin Mall, from Grenwald, from Chloe, from Dr. Black and that still-remaining box of manuscripts, from himself. He ran toward a hundred heroines in a hundred new Heaven titles.
In the middle of the night Gordon eventually slowed to a walk and pressed Stop. He hit the weight bench. Though previously he had always felt as if his arms would tear out of their sockets if he continued very long, tonight there was an easy, dull rhythm to everything he did. The digital counter kept creeping its way to heavier decimals. Gordon attributed the lack of sensation to the adrenalin of the workout. Back in the men’s change room, he gazed at himself in the mirror. His straw hair and usual dishwater complexion stared back. Something seemed odd . . . he wasn’t sweating. Gordon placed a palm on the back of his neck — dry. Neither could he smell a thing. He headed for the showers anyway, convinced he had simply gone so far beyond stink that he had lost his senses. He let the water wash away the nothing, let his ears flood with the sigh of thrush faucet and the wind somewhere outside.
Again in his mind he saw Chloe cross the grass. Her sleeve fell back from her wrist, exposing the delicate copper hairs of her forearm.
“Are you supposed to be here?” The security guard pivoted away from the portable television that sat inside his desk area. Gordon couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen, where a familiar green scarf encased the ringlets that grew from a familiar head.
“Not really.” Gordon flicked a finger in the direction of the tiny screen. “Can you turn it up?”
“Least you’re honest.” The security guard obliged and the volume jumped. “I shouldn’t have let you in last night, then?”
“We’re talking to Chloe Gold, author of
Goodbye to the Wind
, about her most recent opus,
Hello Twilight
.” The host, a woman with a hairdo in six different shades of blond, held the book in her lap, one hand fluttering butterfly-like above its embossed cover. “Now, Chloe, I don’t want to give too much away, but —”
The camera zoomed and lingered on Gordon’s ex-wife’s features. A tired, practised smile played across her lips. It seemed to him that she had aged even since yesterday, when he had stood not fifteen feet away from her.
“You didn’t forget your cellphone, did you?” asked the guard.
Gordon batted his hand through the air as if he were swatting at flies.
The camera hadn’t left Chloe. “Is it true that the book was inspired by the unexpected death of your ex-husband?” the host’s disembodied voice queried.
Gordon wrapped a hand tight around the moulding that topped the guard’s station.
Chloe gave a nod so tentative that Gordon at first did not want to believe she had.
“I know it’s difficult,” the host went on. As the camera returned to her, she bridged the divide to touch Chloe’s hand briefly. “But try to tell us about that, if you can.”
Without thinking, Gordon too reached out, past the lip of the security desk to the water bottle that sat there. It made its way to his mouth before he noticed the guard’s fat glare.
“You mind?”
“Huh?”
The guard intercepted the bottle before Gordon could drink again. He pried it from Gordon’s hand and set it down on the desk. “Your cellphone —?”
“Never jumped on that trend.” Gordon’s eyes skipped between the guard, who was acting as if he was asking something serious, though Gordon could not deduce what could be serious about a cellphone, and Chloe, who after a moment of meandering, seemed to have redonned her publicity mask. It snapped eerily into place as she nodded with vigour.
“The excuse you gave me? To let you in after hours last night?” The guard raised his palm and waved thick fingers in front of Gordon’s face.
“Right, yes, sorry.” Gordon forced himself to focus on the guard’s meaty face.
“I felt this incredible guilt at first, as though it was my fault —” said Chloe.
“Don’t do it again.”
“This book is more a reaction than a tribute though. . . . It just came from my guts. I’d abandoned another project I’d been struggling with for years, and then this one came so fast —”
“No,” Gordon replied firmly before it appeared safe to turn his attention to the small screen again.
“Is she one of ours?”
“No,” Gordon replied again. “Not any more,” he added wistfully.
The guard’s paw depressed the Off button, and Chloe became a dark reflection of the lobby. “Look,” the security man growled. “Lots of folks got trouble. Not my business. But if you really can’t go home at night, I suggest you try the concourse.
The Passage
,” he emphasized when Gordon gave him a blank look. “Half the county’s connected underground. Shop the friggin’ night away. Sleep in your car, for all I care. Just don’t wander my building. That’s what I get paid for.”
Gordon felt his head nodding on his neck, nearly as vigorously as TV-Chloe’s had.
8
Four days and three manuscripts later, it was raining. Sleety drops pelted the windows and reminded Gordon that outside Heaven dawn was arriving. His computer clock gave the time as 6 a.m. The security guard’s rounds were minimal, Gordon had learned during that first stay-over, and he had managed to spend four full nights in Heaven. For four full days he had asked himself if he had misheard the interview with Chloe on the lobby television. Or had he gone mad? Either way, he rationalized, he should be more upset.
But
upset
wasn’t the right word for any emotion that Gordon had experienced. He knew this. He hadn’t cried since the day Chloe left him. That day he had sat at the top of the stairs in their rented row house. He hadn’t been able to bear going down where he would see the living room half-empty. So he’d sat at the top, where he could see a six-foot patch of carpet at the bottom, and he’d stared at it — an orange and red striped rug, $49.99 from IKEA — for three hours. The stripes appeared and faded in varying stages of blurriness, breath cramping his lungs like that of an old man walking uphill. The quick leave. The slow wheeze. Finally he closed his eyes, and when he’d opened them the stripes were gone. Chloe had rolled them up and taken them while he sat there bawling. He had thought she would come up and say something to him before she left, something comforting, offer a last embrace. But, like now, he told himself, there was nothing to be said.
Through the Floor Twelve blinds the outside landscape looked like a grey, beat-up cat.
The previous evening before quitting time, Gordon had managed to slip up to the Internet Division to print out a blurb from an online book retailer:
A dead ex-husband. Unfinished love. Only Gold can pick up the pieces and show the absences in our lives with so much presence.
The publicity page Gordon printed out contained the publication date, the number of pages (548), the black-and-white author image with its eyes like thumbprints, and two-line reviews from all the bigs —
Publishers Weekly
,
New York Times
,
Chicago Review
,
Guardian,
Globe and Mail
. The publication date especially gave Gordon pause. The online retailer had bungled the year. Or else, in only a couple of months, time had passed for Chloe, it seemed, at double, triple, quadruple speed. Since September, when Gordon had left Russet Avenue for Heaven, years seemed to have gone by. He recalled that first, endless transit ride.
Gordon stared down into the smudgy reproduction of Chloe’s eyes. Every once in a while over the years, he’d asked himself if he still hated her. But when he found himself imagining
not
hating her, being happy for her success and her new life, it was akin to swiping too quickly with the razor at the spot on the very end of his chin. He pulled back from it, reeling.
Hate was a complex thing; it was like looking into a mirror. Chloe wasn’t the same kind of writer that Gordon had been. She didn’t look for approval. When they were living together, Gordon had always barked out lines like a performer of dinner theatre, needing to hear them aloud even as he wrote them, needing Chloe to hear them too. Although Chloe wrote quickly, frenetically, stacking up pages in the amount of time it took Gordon to write one or two, she tended to pull her manuscript pages from his hands, squeaking, “It’s not ready!” and grabbing the pen and inking over the printed lines herself. The less she looked to him, the harder he argued against the very premise of her project, let alone individual lines of prose. They had once quarrelled for a whole hour about split infinitives. Or rather, he had quarrelled. It was unlike her not to argue back — she was supposed to; it was the part of her that was unquestionably Chloe — but she hadn’t. And when she didn’t, it lit something in him, and he raised his finger in the air like a Bible salesman calling on God to make his point. He had been right, he justified his actions now. Even with only two years on Chloe, he could see that her book was trite and juvenile, the work of a twenty-six-year-old.
Last night Gordon had automatically clicked on the space where the web site asked if he’d read the novel and would he like to rank it. He gave
Hello Twilight
a one-star rating. A moment later he’d realized that if its content was indeed based on him or his death, it was surely worthier of attention than her first novel. He clicked again for a five-star rating, but the site had recorded his first answer and would not let him vote twice.
He had then placed an order for
Hello Twilight
to be delivered to Heaven Books, 12205 Millcreek Industry Park, Floor Twelve, Attention: Gordon Small. In spite of a wallet teeming with pay stubs, he was skeptical about his credit — whether it would be good — but when he returned to his cubicle, he found he had received a confirmation e-mail.
Gordon took the publicity page for
Hello Twilight
and placed it very carefully inside a book that he believed no one would ever think to consult: an Australian dictionary of slang, between the entries
bull bar
and
bush oyster
. In turn he hid the book in the back of his bottommost drawer. It seemed safe beneath an atlas and a stack of magazine articles on grammar that had been photocopied and presented on a weekly basis, one by one, to Gordon and his co-workers by Manos, and occasionally by Erika — Manos’s helper in spite of her own lack of understanding of the English language.
Behind the sound of rain Gordon could hear a shuffling coming from the editorial office at the end of the hall. He knew with certainty that there was only one other person left in the building. In the lobby eleven floors below slumped the security man, dozing. The Designs had all disappeared by midnight. Even the cleaners had cleared out. It was morning now, but early, too early for Bentley. Floor Twelve was filled with displaced air. Gordon sensed movement, though he saw no one.
Straightening up, he wound around the partitions toward the office where he usually picked up new manuscripts. In sock feet he padded softly through the hushed Heaven morning. Inside the office of the supervisor of their supervisor, Gordon spotted her. He saw her first through the glass panel to the left of the door, then from just inside as he entered quietly. He was stunned that the elevator doors could have opened — even once — to deposit her without him hearing.
The woman had wedged herself atop a stepstool and braced one knee precariously on a great stack of paper. Her backside was poised up, up, up on this pedestal of romance. It seemed to Gordon that the manuscripts he normally drew from in the second and third piles were rubber-banded into a kind of staircase leading up to her behind — which, he observed, was quite thrilling in shape. Encased in the ruby fabric of a tight-fitting skirt, the ass wiggled, engaged in the task before it. Ample in the best sense, the rear swayed as its owner retrieved and repiled, pitching manuscripts from the very farthest reaches of the first, never-ending shelf. Dangerous work. Over the woman’s shoulder, pages came loose and cascaded to the floor as she discarded whole scripts, some furred with dust, pink work slips still attached to them, deadlines several years past.
The woman possessed legs the colour of milk, one extended and flexed tautly as she balanced, the other tucked underneath her, a black circular high heel spiking out from beneath the convex, complex ass. Floating to the floor, manuscript fragments:
“I love you,”
“No, I you,”
She wanted him to take her. Here, now . . .
Quickly and completely . . .
He inhaled sharply . . .
Gordon realized he too must have gasped, because the next moment, the woman turned. Her heel sought a foothold where there was none. With the twist and the woman’s shock at seeing him, the stack of manuscripts beneath her loosened. Gordon watched: sixty-nine rubber bands snapped simultaneously and the next two weeks of Heaven work leaned, Tower of Pisa–like, and lurched into one mess of romance. Authors kaleidoscoped into one another. Sex occurred with first meetings, heroines landed atop heroines, marriages got parked beside mid-story faux breakups that would now find no resolution. French kisses occurred in front of Grandma. The roping of rodeo horses was tied to bedroom scenes in instant bondage sessions. The candles in a seventeenth-century chandelier in Italy were set ablaze and heaved into the air as a nineteen-year-old in present-day Brooklyn removed her brassiere for the very first time before a companion.