The Cube People (2 page)

I hate my job.

My government-laminated ID card dangles around my neck, bouncing and bobbing against
my chest as I walk toward the scrutinizing eyes of the security guard. I pass by him and wait silently for the elevator with other bureaucrats. When I get to my floor, the air changes. It's recycled air, like on a jumbo jet. Something artificial about it. Unhealthy. I make my way through the rat maze of cubicles, listening to the soft clacking of keyboards, the sounds of scurrying insects as I go. When I get to the men's washroom, I'm there. My cube is next to the can.

I sit down on my black five-wheeled adjustable rolling chair with light-green fabric seat and backrest. I look to my right and see my Scooby Doo action figure sitting in the miniature blue foam sofa, a creative innovation of the stress ball that I picked up at a tech conference last week. Shaggy is positioned between Scoob's legs as if he were giving him head. I surmise this choreographed piece of plastic bestiality is the work of my co-worker and only real friend on the floor, Phil. At this I smile. Then I go about brewing myself an against-fire-regulations cup of coffee using my still while my machine boots up.

I work as a computer programmer for the Technology Branch of the Ministry of Revenue Collection (MRC), better known to most folks by its old-school name: The Tax Man.

I drink my coffee black. It matches my personality here at work. That's not entirely true. People like me. They think I'm good-natured and humorous. At least I think that's what they think. Who really knows? I don't give a rat's ass either way. Well maybe that's not really true either. I want people to like me. Sometimes I ramble.

COBOL is my bread and butter. It's an old programming language that most of MRC, the Ministry of Data Collection, and big banks run on. It stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language. It should really be CBOL, but COBOL sounds better. It almost seems as if they put that extra ‘O' there just for me, a hole that sucks all of my time and energy, which has led me to my latest book idea.

More than anything I want to spend my days writing. So why don't I just quit and write? Bills, my friend, bills. I have a mortgage to pay and a beautiful wife. Why should she suffer for my writing career? Suffering for art is one thing, but making others suffer for your art is another. Besides, if you realized how much I hated my job, you would know I'm truly suffering for art. It's not the work I hate (I actually love coding); it's the environment. It's this cubicle land of government hell that I find myself in.

My cubicle is a quad. That means I share it with three other people. We all used to have our own workspaces until the Government Accommodations Initiative to maximize space and minimize spending was thrust upon us. It was sold to us as a great way to foster a team environment. We moved from tolerance to our current state of being: we do our best to ignore one another.

On my left sits Carla, a tall thin woman who has that emaciated vegan look to her. She's completely obsessed with germs – the female version of Howard Hughes. She usually comes in shortly after I do, while I'm in the middle of my morning email review. First thing she does is take a couple of hits off the big bottle of hand sanitizer (the only item on her desk aside from her computer) and rubs her hands together feverishly. Then she retrieves a bottle of cleaner and a roll of paper towel from her filing cabinet and gives her whole desk a hose down. Finally she sits down, removes a bottle of water from her backpack, and has exactly three small sips before removing the dust cover from her keyboard and turning on her machine. I have been witness to this antibacterial ceremony every working day for the last four years. I don't know where Carla lives, what she does in her spare time, or if she lives with anyone. As I said, we do our best to ignore one another.

Behind me sits Dan. I have no idea what Dan does except show up here at the office (occasionally that is, when he isn't incapacitated with some sort of mysterious illness) and talk in explicit detail about the latest medical procedure some butcher of a doctor has performed on his failing body. Recently it's been his teeth. Sometime last week after Dan ate a tuna sandwich for breakfast, he proceeded to lift the side of his upper lip exposing his gums and a green-onion-encrusted molar, the way you would inspect a dog's teeth. He told me how they had to put in a bridge. Needles, drilling, bleeding, pain – for forty-five minutes I listened and inhaled the fumes of Clover Leaf. The next day Dan called in sick.

Next to Dan and behind Carla sits the German feminist revolutionary and chain-smoker, Brita. She's at war with everyone and everything. Her hair is cropped military/lesbian short and today she's wearing a tight, black, studded dog collar, green camouflage fatigue pants, black boots, and a baggy, grey sweatshirt. I'd say that she cusses like a truck driver, but I don't think that a drunken truck driver would cuss as much as Brita. If it weren't for the angry getup, Brita would actually be quite an attractive woman. However, I don't think she has any interest in men, or women for that matter. She pretty much hates everyone. Everyone is a sack of shit, according to Brita, and everyone needs to know that our lazy North American capitalist way of life is causing the poor of the world to suffer terribly, enslaving its children and killing our environment. I do believe that Brita cheered when the World Trade Center went down. She's the female version of Brad Pitt in
Fight Club
.

In terms of coding styles, Brita and Carla are pretty much on the same page. Carla's code is aseptic – every IF, END-IF and TO are all lined up, everything easy to read, very clean. Brita's code is sparse, raw, and as a result also very clean. Dan, on the other hand, well, his code works okay but it's often convoluted, hard to follow and generally a mess.

There are seven emails in my inbox. One from Operations telling me that one of my batch jobs abended last night – a fancy way of saying that one of the programs, for which I'm responsible, broke down. I note the program name and delete the email. There is an email about a fundraiser bake sale for our Christmas lunch, even though it's only July. I delete it. There is an email from management that the amount of photocopying on the floor is too high, and to please use the photocopier responsibly. I delete it. Tracey, a girl I used to work with who now works for the Ministry of National Safety, sent me a piece of chain mail: if I forward it to ten people my wish will come true in ten minutes. I delete it. Somebody I've never heard of is going to be Acting Director, replacing somebody else I've never heard of. I delete it. A friend has forwarded me an MPEG of something entitled “Monkey Balls,” but I'm firewalled here at work, so I delete it. Finally, there is an email from Phil wondering if I can get away sometime this week and hit the Werner Herzog retrospective at the Bytowne Cinema;
Fitzcarraldo
is playing on Thursday. I write him back that I'll check with Sarah. I delete the email as Carla walks in.

Squirt
,
squirt
goes the hand sanitizer.

As I've mentioned, I want to be a writer. Science fiction/horror, this is my genre. For over eight years now, I've been pounding away at the keys, even m
anaging to get a few short stories published – well two exactly, and one poem in an online zine. Not much I know, but you have to start somewhere.

I've received some positive feedback from editors such as “Almost went with this one, but ultimately the round table voted against it,” or “For what it's worth, some of the editors said it would make a great movie. Good luck with your writing.” Can you call that positive? I cling to the tenuous.

Mostly my rejections have consisted of form letters differing only by logo: “Thanks for your interest in our press, but at this time our publishing schedule is full.”

Last Christmas I finished writing my first novel,
The Cube People
, representing three years of work. The protagonist, Setrac Sed (that's Descartes spelled backwards – not genius, however I was having fun) awakens on a raft, floating down a river and lands on the banks of Cube City, not knowing who he is or how he got there.

The people of this idyllic society worship the Cube. The Cube is a supercomputer that keeps track of all atoms within the walls of Cube City. Hence, the Cube knows or can predict what is going to happen to everyone and everything within the city. The Cube can prevent all accidents, all crime and all illness. Each citizen has a micro-processing chip implanted in his head to help the Cube keep track of all potential thought patterns.

I built in a love story with Setrac Sed and a woman named Zia. It turns out that the Cube knew that Zia was going to start a revolution in the future, which would ultimately destroy itself and the city. The Cube found multiple revolutionary pathways amongst its people (my fancy sci-fi way of saying, if the revolution hadn't begun with Zia, then somebody else was going to lead the revolt; it was inevitable). The Cube's solution to stop the revolution from happening was to send in Setrac Sed, who turns out not to be a man, but an android built by the Cube. Analogous to God sending Jesus to save us, the Cube sends Setrac Sed. What the Cube can't predict is the Cube itself. That is to say, the Cube can't keep track of its own atoms, its own thought patterns. Therefore, the Cube wasn't able to foresee that Setrac Sed would fall in love with Zia. Thus, this leads Setrac to kill his father, the Cube. Oedipus – who doesn't dig Greek tragedy?

Yeah I know, a little geeky, but I am a computer programmer after all. I find determinism fascinating. Imagine if there were a super computer that could keep track of every atom in the known universe. If you believe that atoms and molecules behave in certain set ways, then in theory you could predict exactly how everything was going to unfold. That super computer could map out your entire life. It would know for example that on July 17, 2026 at 1:23 p.m., you would be thinking about getting yourself a chocolate or maple walnut ice-cream cone, the choice you would make, and what kind of cheeky banter you would make with the clerk as you paid.

So what? That's what my wife would say. Poor Sarah. She doesn't care for science fiction. Somehow, I've managed to get her to read everything I've written. I'm a horrible speller. Sarah is God when it comes to spelling. So I say, thank God.

Just a few months ago, I sent the first three chapters of
The Cube People
to eighteen different publishers. Sarah helped me address and organize all the envelopes. “After all the help I give you, you'd better give me a baby,” is what she said after we'd dropped all the packages at the post office. Did I tell you she was wonderful?

I'm restless. I always have to be working on something, writing. I've begun a new novel entitled
Hungry Hole
. It's a horror story. I work on it when I can, which is mostly in the evening, though sometimes I write at work. I have a lot of down time at work. There seems to be a lot of people with a lot of down time at work: e-Bay shopping, blogging, planning their vacations. I write. I don't feel bad about it. I work hard when there's work to be done. Plus I'm fast, which probably contributes to my free time. I just don't have the motivation to be a “Peter Cann,” our resident Tech-3 on the floor. He's the man you go to when you can't figure out a difficult computer problem. He knows our mainframe system inside out. He's been here for decades and always makes time for you. Visiting Peter's cubicle is always an experience because he also has a worldly knowledge of many things: art, history, philosophy, you name it, Peter Cann can tell you about it.

I have no passion for my work. Doing the kind of code maintenance that we do in my shop is strap-a-sponge-to-your-
chin-to-collect-the-drool boring. Your brain leaks out of your ears. It's worse than watching
Nashville
in the crappy seats of the Mayfair Theatre with a drunk and raving Phil beside you extolling the virtues of Altman's cinematic genius. That reminds me, I need to email Phil back about Thursday's film. Sarah gave me the okay.

The phone rings here in my office. It's the clinic. They've lost my sample. I have to go back in tomorrow to give them another cup of my essence.

A Novel by Colin MacDonald

Ryan managed to hit the goddamn beam,
again
, on his way down to the cellar.

“Fuck,” said Ryan.

“You okay honey?” asked a snickering voice from the top of the stairs.

“Remind me to pad this stupid thing, or get my legs cut off at the knees,” replied Ryan as he continued to descend, rubbing his forehead, into what Gillian called, “
The-Amityville-Horror
-serial-killer-pit-of-hell.” Two bare light bulbs illuminated old wooden shelves, boxes marked “office” and “bedroom” and Gillian's hardly used exercise bike. The flaking white walls exposed the rust-coloured underbelly of foundation, like the skin of a scab-ridden burn victim. Hunched, Ryan staggered to the little room in the front of the house inhaling a funk of mould, century-old sewers, mushrooms, earth, paint cans and cardboard.

On his way back he didn't notice the small crack in the concrete floor. He tripped, managing to smash the last Mason jar of hot and spicy dills.

“Shit,” said Ryan.

“You okay honey?” asked Gillian again, this time with an even deeper laugh.

“I'm fine, but I managed to lose the last of the hot and spicys. Sorry.”

“It's okay, just grab some of the extra garlic ones, and get another bottle of wine.”

As the Rolling Stones' “Gimme Shelter” became louder, so did the stoned giggles of Dean and Marsha. He envisioned Gillian dancing barefoot with her glass of wine being beautiful, entertaining, being her usual self. He looked down at the mess he'd made. A tiny stream of brine trickled toward the crack, pooled momentarily at its edge – surface tension holding for a second – then broke and dribbled into the earth.

He cleaned up and brought Gillian her pickles. Dean and Marsha attacked the jar like savages. Gillian sexually deep-throated her pickle causing everyone to laugh to the point of crying. The pot was good.

“You might get some pickle action tonight buddy,” said Dean as he nudged Ryan. Gillian winked at Ryan. Ryan smiled back.

All of a sudden, loud barking could be heard coming from underneath the window at the side of the house. “What the hell is that?” Dean asked.

“That's Spike, our crazy neighbour's pitbull.”

“Jesus, friggin' thing sounds possessed,” laughed Dean. “What's it doing?”

“Whenever somebody walks by on the street, it runs up and down between the houses as if it was one of Satan's very own hounds. The little bastard actually managed to get out once and bit me on the ankle.”

“Good lord,” said Marsha, biting into a pickle.

“Why didn't you have the thing put down?” asked Dean.

“I told Bill, that's the neighbour, I told him, ‘Bill, if that dog ever gets out and bites another person, I swear to God I'll get him put down.' Bill said that was fair enough.”

Everyone sat stoned, listening to the dog growling and running up and down beside the house. “I don't see anyone walking by,” commented Marsha.

In the basement, the crack opened a little more.