The Dilettantes (11 page)

But with Dave, she’d just lit a cigarette, and felt her expression subtly change. “It just seems like a waste of time,” she’d said, speaking huskily through a beam of smoke.

By mid-October, Alex’s official count had already needed several updates. The
Metro
pillboxes were spreading like dandelion spores, pollinating every corner of
SFU
with bits of freewheeling fluff: from twenty-one boxes that first morning to twenty-five, then to twenty-eight. By the time there were thirty, he’d stopped counting altogether. In every cluster of newspaper boxes,
The Peak
found itself surrounded by green. The
Metro
’s front-page tagline, asking readers to “pass on” their copies once finished with them, led to brittle, crusted stacks piling up on tutorial desks and in departmental hallways. The takeover was quiet, but most definitely hostile.

And as rumours begat newer and more elaborate rumours, word around
The Peak
was that the
Metro’
s distribution army was also about to storm Burnaby Mountain. So far the editors had only had to contend with the paper itself; the prospect of actual flesh-and-blood employees walking around was too scary even to entertain.

“Swear to God? I saw one of them. Okay? I
saw them
. I was in the
AQ
, and I caught this glimpse just before it disappeared around the corner: a green toque.”

“I saw one in my lecture last week! He was huge. I don’t know how he even fit into those little desks.”

“What—you mean like taking notes and everything?”

“Guys. I need you to focus up here.”

“Gave me the absolute jeepy-creepies.”

“They’re coming after us. They’re
targeting
us.”

“Yup.”

“Oh, for sure.”

“And why would they do that?”

“Jesus, Rick, haven’t you even seen
The Wire?”

“Oh my god.”

“Best show ever.”

“Ever.”

“It’s all about snuffing out the competition.”

“Shoot ‘em dead, hide the bodies, take over their corners.”

“Blam, blam, blam.”

“And duh—that’s us!”

“That’s you, maybe. I’m Omar: renegade with a heart of gold. Where’s my shotgun at?”

“No, I’m Omar.”

“As if. You’re D’Angelo.”

“Shut up.
You’re
D’Angelo.”

“Ha, ha.”

“At least I live through the first season. Not like Wallace over here.”

“Who’s he, again?”

“‘Omar comin’!’”

“No, you’re doing it wrong. It’s ‘
O
-mar comin’!’ Emphasize the first part.”

“‘O
-mar coming!’”

“Don’t pronounce the
g
, idiot.”

“‘
O
-mar comin’!’”

“‘O
-mar comin’!’”

“‘Shee-it.’
Remember that guy?”

“This sounds an awful lot like a conspiracy theory. Why on earth would they be out to get you personally?”

“Look, all I’m saying is that every time I press the Coke button on our vending machine, a Sprite comes out instead. Are you hearing me, Rick?
Green
Sprite. A refreshing lemon-lime soda.”

“Not saying, just saying.”

“I
heard they’re owned by a shadowy Asian conglomerate. The
CEO
is this former underground samurai who was exiled from his clan because he loved murdering too much.”

“Well, that’s why you have to always keep your clan in the front.”

“And let your feet stomp.”

“Sounds like someone should’ve protected his neck.”

“Point of order: is it true that cash rules everything around me?”

Four people yelled in unison: “C.R.E.A.M.!”

“This is not why I asked to come to this meeting. Did anyone here read my email?”

“I did.”

“Thank you. So you, at least, understand that we are already quickly losing ground.”

“Sure, but, I mean, how many copies do they even put out on campus each day? Five hundred?”

“No way. More like five thousand.”

“What is this, Mathoholics Anonymous? If you guys are going to sit around and do calculus all day, I’m leaving.”

“Totally. Let’s leave this boring shit to the business students.”

“Or economics, maybe?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Does anyone know which of them handles this kind of thing?”

The photo editor tentatively raised his hand, but nobody noticed.

“Dummies.
SFU
doesn’t have economics courses. Everyone knows that.”

“What? My friend
majored
in economics here.”

“Tell him to reread his transcript. He’s been fleeced.”

“Okay, then I’ll summarize the email,” Rick shouted, banging his fist against the coffee table until there was quiet. “I’ve called an emergency meeting with the board tomorrow night. Ad revenue is down significantly—no thanks to that stunt you guys pulled on the flower shop owner. So is our pick-up rate. Right now we’re still waiting on some solid numbers to come in, but as soon as we know what’s going on, we’ll figure out what the best plan is going forward.” The noise picked up again in complaint. “In the meantime, if you could try to keep things a little more—how can I put this—reader-friendly, it would make my job a lot easier.” Rick ripped open a package of chewable antacids, popped three into his mouth, and shut his office door behind him to a chorus of boos.

Rachel called them all back to order, and on to new business. The annual spoof issue was due out at the end of November, and the staff usually spent months half-seriously bouncing ideas off one another before frantically making a decision with days to spare; the frantic time was now fast approaching. Notes from the previous meeting read, in their entirety: “Discussion about spoof descended into making fun of dead astronauts.”

Meanwhile, Tracy had all but checked out as copy editor. She’d unloaded the bulk of her editing onto some poor work-study student, and filed the rest from home. There had been no calls, no emails, nothing in the way of explanation—though this would’ve been a formality anyway. Everyone knew why. And since they had no vocabulary in their sardonic rapport for an actual personal crisis, all the other editors could offer her were meek smiles and vague motions of sympathy whenever she came by, which was usually just to pick up a paycheque. She hadn’t technically resigned, and nobody wanted to be the one to force her hand. Only Alex seemed to notice the spike in typos in her absence.

On top of this was the whole Duncan Holtz thing, which nobody quite knew what to do with. Rachel was adamant that this was not news. “Let the
Metro
handle the celebrity gossip,” she said. Without a new movie to peg it to, Suze didn’t see how it qualified as arts coverage, either. Besides, everyone was already used to film stars loitering around campus. Would it be any different if one of them was also enrolled in a course or two?

When Keith found out about the celebrity’s impending arrival, he squealed with delight and declared that
Fang City
, the late-nineties supernatural melodrama Holtz starred in for the
CBC
, was his favourite show of all time. In Tracy’s absence, Alex had taken over dutifully updating the “Keith’s Of-All-Time List” pinned to her corkboard, which by then was a veritable graveyard of contradictions and half-remembered names.

He also wrote an uncharacteristically aggressive Editor’s Voice, after a poll for one issue’s
Peak
Speak asked “Has the
Metro’
s arrival on campus changed the way you consume print media?” and resulted in the equivalent of a blank stare. Alex couldn’t take it anymore. Did
SFU
students really, he wrote, not understand what it meant to support a paper like the
Metro?
Did they not realize that this capitalism of convenience could have a disastrous financial backlash for a certain losing party?

It drew exactly zero response, in print or online. Furious, Alex went onto WebMD and decided he was getting an ulcer. He washed down this diagnosis with a litre of mint cherry ginger ale.

For his free-form Shakespeare project, Alex eventually decided to write a straitlaced adaptation of the early comedy
Measure for Measure
. Sculpting something wound up being too embarrassing to consider in any but the most abstract terms; like most of his
generation, Alex aspired to prickly eccentricity but lived, behind closed doors, in the soft and the unthreatening. Nearly every meal he’d ever eaten could be described as comfort food.

The genre he kept returning to was the Hollywood blockbuster, in all its terse, flexing, machismo-oozing glory. Secretly he’d fantasized about becoming a writer for as long as he could remember. He never imagined himself actually sitting down to work, though—only giving thoughtful, post-Pulitzer interviews to Charlie Rose during which he expounded his many searing opinions about life and art. Truth be told, Alex had never needed an excuse to keep putting off his dreams a few months at a time, like a snooze button. Arm’s length was still a bit too close for comfort.

He settled on a screenplay.

Sitting in various coffee shops around Vancouver in one marathon evening, Alex struggled to piece it all together. His plan was to satirize, to subtly skewer Hollywood rather than coarsely pummel it to bits—satire being irony’s nobler and better-dressed sibling. It was something to shoot for, anyway.

Alex’s odyssey began at a tiny, triangular café located at the spot where Main hit Kingsway in a sharp diagonal. He ordered a large house blend to stay and propped his laptop open in the corner. “Do you have wi-fi?” he asked. They did not. He opened a new Word document. He called it
OUTLINE
.doc. He wrote three bullet points and spent ten minutes adjusting the formatting and font. He tried to guess the passwords of the locked wireless signals his computer picked up from surrounding apartments. He watched two guys with intricately greased-back hair smoke cigarettes outside.

Ninety minutes later he was at an all-night coffee shop way up Main, where he ordered a scone. The cashier asked him if he wanted it warmed up, then tried to high-five him. Alex saw an obnoxious girl from the previous semester’s Classical Mythology tutorial and
stridently avoided eye contact. At his table, he read the local alt-weekly, which had begun life, decades earlier, as a self-proclaimed pinko rag staffed by a bunch of
Peak
alumni. He thought about writing one of those theatrically hostile letters to the editor that could win you two free
CDS
from the bestseller list. He reread two acts of the play. He thought about which
CDS
he’d ask for if he got published. He wondered if Tracy was okay. He realized his table didn’t have an outlet for his laptop to plug into. His battery died.

A long walk and a quick trip on the B-Line later, Alex strolled into the JJ Bean on Commercial Drive. He ordered a raspberry oatmeal muffin and an Earl Grey tea—“Could you add a shot of raspberry to that, too? Just to see”—and sat at the big ring-shaped table in the middle of the shop. He plugged in his computer and re-opened OUTLINE.doc. He made another new document: DRAFT.doc. He flicked between the two documents, taking pleasure in the butterfly-tilde shortcut Steve had taught him just the week before. He reread the rest of the play. He wrote a rough prologue, then deleted it with another flick of his wrist. He tried to download a pirated version of Final Draft. He googled “Final Draft” to make sure he was thinking of the right thing.

At a minimalist café a few blocks further down Commercial, full of people who looked like they’d rather be smoking, Alex ordered a cappuccino. He sat down in a perfectly round chair at a perfectly square table, took a sip of his drink, then spat it back, disgusted, into the mug. Why the fuck did he keep coming here?

He headed back up to Commercial and Broadway, side-stepped the circles of teenage hoodlums in front of the A&W, and took the SkyTrain downtown. Green pillboxes at every turn. He thought about ways to fight back. Tactics both high- and low-road. Varying degrees of smear campaign. Two crumpled
Metro
s sat on the seat next to him. Alex walked in the door of a coffee shop near
SFU’S
Harbour Centre satellite campus. He pawed at his stomach and decided he should eat something more substantial first. Down a block, he came to the site of another familiar turf war: the Battle of Dollar Pizza.

One of Vancouver’s unofficial claims to fame was its business model of selling slices of pizza—at all hours of the night—for a buck apiece. Though
business model
might be stretching the truth a little; it was generally accepted that these grubby shops were either fronts for clandestine drug empires, or relied on teams of homeless people to supply them with wheels of stolen cheese, or both. Sitting side by side on the corner of Pender and Seymour, in the heart of the downtown core, were two of the most visible players: 2001 Flavours and
FM
Classic. Everyone had their preference, and the allegiances ran deep.

Alex was a lifelong 2001 Flavours man. He ordered three slices and a can of pop, gave the cashier a five-dollar bill, and got change back.
Maybe co-existing isn’t so bad
, he thought, looking at the lineups spilling onto the sidewalk at each place.
But then we’d all have to become cocaine dealers on the side, too
.

He wiped the last remnants of grease onto his pants and walked back, satisfied, to the coffee shop near Harbour Centre. Alex sat down next to an outlet and plugged in. He asked if they had wi-fi; an owl-shaped Italian man at the next table over said yes, they did. He logged in, re-cracked the spine on his copy of the play, and re-opened DRAFT.doc, keeping his half-drunk can of pop displayed prominently on the table. If anyone asked, he bought it here.

He cracked his knuckles one by one, then started writing.

This habit, of working on essays while nomadically jumping from shop to shop, beverage to beverage, was a fairly recent development. For all of 1st-year, Alex had had a set routine, carried over from high school, which involved barricading himself in his bedroom two
days before the assignment was due and listening to Philip Glass soundtracks on repeat until dawn. He wrote furiously—at least seven hundred words every hour, punctuated by an actual egg timer—with no revisions. All edits were to wait until that final next day, after a buffer of twelve hours’ sleep. This was before coffee, too; in the heat of those early writing spurts Alex drank gallons of green tea, out of what had once been a plastic flower vase.