Littering all available wall space was paper. The first reaction Jonathan had felt was of mad bunting, of shredded party crepe with the detritus of a ticker tape parade hurled in for extra chaos. Stapled, taped or otherwise stuck to the walls was enough paper to supply pulp for a run of the Chicago phone book, white and yellow pages. Cutouts, cartoons, dummies, galleys, strips and snippets. Film and photos. Maps. Graffiti. Posters and ad art. Memos and menus impaled on thumbtacks, pushpins, cocktail swizzles, even tournament darts. The closer you got to Capra's office, the more frames you saw: Awards, commendations, appreciations. You could conceivably sit and read the mosaic of any given wall for hours.
Jonathan liked the atmosphere. Capra's place of business was an outpost of common sense in a world of corporate waste; funky, homey, vaguely subversive. Capra had been a product of the Sixties with his eye turned - no boast - toward the Nineties.
Jonathan's corner was next to a laughably unneeded air conditioner blocking a second story window. Once he had nested, and arranged his tools to suit his reach and temperament, he quickly felt as though Capra's was a place he might belong. The stool was locked to accommodate his height. The work surface was slanted to his taste. Bash had presented him with a coffee mug, a Gary Larson job in color featuring cigarette-puffing dinosaurs. Its home was on a slim doodad shelf Jonathan had erected beside the air conditioner. This was where the lame pterodactyl perched. Jonathan had gagged the cooler's vents with gaffer's tape to block the wisps of frozen outside air that shimmied through. When he checked in on the third day of actual time-clocked work, he found that someone had stationed a blue plastic brontosaurus on top of the cooler, with a Post-It note word balloon: SAY HEY DINO BOY.
The culprit had been Jessica, who made her living in the darkroom downstairs. She possessed an incredible thundercloud of frizzy black hair, flawless chocolate skin and a symmetry of facial features that suggested to Jonathan that there was Oriental blood lurking in her mix. She always wore heels to work and quickly cultivated the ritual of hugging Jonathan hello, or socking him on the bicep en passant. According to Bash, Jessica's divorce papers had come through spot on her fortieth birthday, and she had not stopped smiling since. She had the most generous mouth Jonathan had ever seen. It was intended to smile.
After that, Jonathan attracted dinosaur mementos as though magnetized. The walls of his corner were decorated in no time. The nickname Dino Boy stuck - unfortunately. More than once, Jonathan jested that he'd sleep behind his desk at Rapid O'Graphics if he could get away with it.
There was a biting reason for this.
His first night in Chicago, Jonathan had been assigned to Bash's living room couch. At seven the following morning, he listened in a semi-doze as first Camela, then Bash bought consciousness in the shower. Then came the whirr of his and hers blowdryers. Camela emerged after a half-hour regimen of cosmetics, grinned large, and ordered Jonathan to call her Cammy - everybody did. There was no way he could climb into his pants out of her sight. She hovered while he choked down two hard-fried eggs edged with char. Camela explained how crazy she was about General Foods International Coffees. Jonathan convinced Bash to steam him an espresso for breakfast. He did not wish to insult Cammy's cooking, and so avoided telling her that when he woke up, the idea of eating food was only slightly less repulsive to him than soaking his head in the shower. Jonathan was not a morning shower person. He usually did it before retiring. The sheets lasted longer that way. If you had a bedmate, it was pulse-quickening to slide in next to them all smooth and clean and radiating heat from a late night shower. Frequently this could evolve into a capital reason for making the bedding sweaty and tangled.
No problem so far. Just adjustments. Real coffee Jonathan could get at work. If you knew the elixir of life was waiting at the far end of a commute, it was easier to slap yourself awake. Showers at night, alter Camela retired, were acceptable. He was careful not to make any noise. He was amused to discover that his old buddy Bash was a confirmed eater of breakfast cereal. It was two bowls of Frosted Flakes or it wasn't a new day.
They rode to work together.
Camela was Rapid O'Graphics' interface with the outside world and ringmaster to the switchboard circus. She deflected intruders, greeted visitors, kept up a pleasant phone face, oversaw anything that lived in a file folder and tried to keep workaday bullshit out of Capra's flight path. She ran errands and distributed paychecks. She was the butt of cautious little jokes by the upstairs crew, who were privileged not to have to share a floor with her. Jonathan sensed the brand of group hostility that never truly grows, goes anywhere, or catalyzes action. Camela was easily the most officious of Capra's employees.
She, Bash and Jonathan rode home together.
He was good with reassuring banter and kept on his company manners. Past Day Three there were no more complimentary breakfast eggs to worry about; she was just so busy and he would understand, right?
Six days in, Camela began going to bed earlier. Sometimes she would clearly summon Bash to attend her. Jonathan thought of a slice of spoiled Suthrin whitebread, snapping her fingers for a slave. The second time it happened, Bash lumbered out of the bedroom and gave Jonathan an exaggerated shrug that said he did not really fathom what was going on, either. Then he switched on the ceiling fan, ostensibly to circulate the building's costly heat more efficiently„ Jonathan realized the fan was supposed to mask the noise coming from the bedroom. The building was newer; the walls were garbage. Camela woofed like the Little Engine That Could when she was being fucked. She was one of those romantics who had seen too many soap operas and not enough porn, concluding that a definitive moan should accompany each manly thrust… as though to earmark it for later filing.
Jonathan's gut untightened only after Camela had gone to bed. He and Bash burned oil, working their way through Bash's CD collection and many sixpacks of Quietly Beer. By the third week it was clear that a competition for Bash's attention and leisure time was afoot, and that Jonathan was winning.
'She wants to have your babies,' Jonathan said. Quietly Beer had a nice, nutty afterbite. It was light enough to permit consumption of several bottles without a breath-stealing bloat. An overproduced synth tune called "The Killing Love' was rolling out of Bash's Quattro monitors.
Bash shook his head. 'The one thought that turns my morbid attention toward Mr Vasectomy. I know that if I brought that back up, she'd talk about adopting kids. She's got the next thirty years all blueprinted.'
'With or without your consultation?'
Bash made a face. 'What do you think?'
Long swig, held and swallowed. Jonathan cleared his throat. 'I think Camela's cruise control was engaged a long time ago, and nobody ever bothered to disillusion her while she was laying plans, and now all of those plans have stacked up, accumulated weight, and are about to tip over and squash one or both of you.'
'Mm.' Bash's hyper-talky persona had stepped out. He groped around in the clear plastic bag at his side and brought up a fortune cookie, which he cracked and devoured. He glanced at the slip of paper without reaction and tossed it into a clamshell ashtray on the coffee table. Filling the ashtray, amid dead butts with Camela's bubblegum-flavored lipstick staining the filters, were enough fortunes for a crowded busload of people. Some were half-burned. Bash bought the cookies by the bagful from a restaurant supplier. He could plow through fifty or more while watching a movie on videotape, always checking the fortunes before he threw them away, as though on a quest for some ultimate revelation, or a single prediciton more perfectly suited to his life.
Bash's reaction to the expression on Jonathan's face had said:
You are the only person who finds this compulsive consumption of fortune cookies weird; I bet lots of people like 'em. So there, kimosabe
.
'Camela strikes me as the sort of woman who was meticulously programmed to snare herself a husband,' said Jonathan. 'As though the only way anyone would want to spend time with her was by being lured, tricked. Mommy says learn to apply makeup well enough so that your prey does not see the pit covered with jungle leaves.'
Jonathan was being cruel and he knew it. He had seen, from Camela's wardrobe, that she had hit the stage in her twenties where strategic concealment was more important than diet. The dressy stuff she wore to work was layered to hide the runaway widening of her thighs. Scarves with brooches would come next, to cover up the chin collection. The straight cut of her suit coats diverted the eye from the sprawl transpiring in the butt zone. Jonathan kept this observation to himself along with a few meaner ones. Bash was pretty large himself, no skeleton. But surely he saw that Camela was not the sort of woman to deny herself anything, from double desserts to a prefab family.
Perfectly fine, if that was what Bash wanted. His discomfort and reticence suggested otherwise.
'She was bugging me about when you were going to leave,' Bash said. 'Find a place of your own.' He killed his Quietly and rose to fetch two more, taking along a fortune cookie to fuel his kitchen run. Jonathan did not get to see the fortune. When Bash came back he was rubbing his forehead as though he was nursing an alcohol headache.
'I wish there was a slot in this damned building,' Jonathan said. They'd had this talk once before. 'That would be the best of both worlds: I wouldn't be in her way, we could still mesh for work, and everybody gets a little more privacy.'
'Last vacancy was a studio, two months ago. But you might be too weird for the management. In their eyes Cammy and I are an upwardly mobile couple. But if I was by myself I don't know that I could get in here, either.'
Jonathan and Bash had investigated several of the local rental agencies. Most held some very strange conformities in high priority. One desk jockey had emphasized that approvals for listed units were based strictly on availability… and that Jonathan's haircut, of course, had no bearing on any decision that might or might not be made. Jonathan had been struck slackjawed. Bash, livid, had loomed closer, throwing the rental agent into a large shadow, and had gently opined that perhaps the agent's receding hairline and bad vision were a consequence of fucking too many barnyard animals as a youth.
Scratch one more agency.
Week Three bled into Week Four. Presumably Camela had hit her period in one of these four weeks. Jonathan noticed no difference. Was she this hostile all the time?
'I mean - I like having you, Jonathan,' Bash said. 'Hanging out and catching dinner at restaurants and seeing movies at grindhouses downtown is my language. Cammy always knew that.'
She had started calling him Jon, knowing it annoyed him.
'Maybe she chose to ignore that. Doesn't fit into her master plan.'
'Yeah.' Bash cracked another fortune cookie and dropped the fortune into the ashtray.
Beware of offers that are too generous.
'She's local, right? I mean, you met her here?'
Bash nodded. 'She applied for the desk job at Rapid. She had a fiance in the city, Robert Somebody, who dumped her. All her furniture was in storage. I was looking at a rent bump in Russet Run I really couldn't afford solo. Melanie and I had broken up; I was going out with waitresses from the Apple Pan, for godsake.'
'Yow, jailbait city. You one daring dude.' Jonathan decided to have a fortune cookie. A man is known by his deeds.
'So, Melanie was gone, anyway. Camela shows up. We took lunch. We did bed. She said, wouldn't it solve a lot of problems if we moved in together? Partners. Maybe a genuine relationship could develop here. You know, a relationship is what you do while you're looking for someone better to come along. I thought her little-girl lisp was cute. I still do, sort of. I don't know. Somewhere between takeoff and landing this plan to grow old together popped up… and to date, I have done nothing to countermand it.'
He unleashed a beery sigh, gathering air in his big hands as though trying to mold it into a shape, make his problems physical so he could wrestle them, fight to win. Bash had always disliked if-come, blue-sky shit. He massacred another cookie.
Marriage requires much serious consideration.
'Amen,' he said to that one.
'Is this a woman you look at and say, 'I'd like to spend the rest of my life with you?' ' Jonathan fiddled with the snow globe. The dead were reburied by snow.
'Nope. Not at this moment.'
'You're hedging.' Jonathan exhumed all the dead with a shake of his hand. The snow resembled whirling curds of cottage cheese.
'Yup.'
'Then both of you guys are waiting for the penny to drop. You're trying to outlast each other, because nobody wants to take the actual responsibility for terminating the relationship.'
'Doesn't everybody do that?'
Jonathan conceded. 'I'm beginning to think it doesn't do any good to stand and watch a relationship shrivel and rot and finally drop off the tree. Even when it turns to compost, goes back into the earth, you try to convince yourself that it's still there, and nothing really has changed. Hope springs eternal. Guilt, too. But when it's over, it's over- I'm still not very good at it, but I'm learning.'
'You're worse at it than I am,' Bash said. His new beer was drained to the dregs.
'We're talking about you and your roommate, big guy.'
Bash had a new sparkle in his gaze that said he was ready for a Terminal Turbo. 'Don't obfuscate. I am bigger than you, squirt. Half squirt.'
'Oh yeah. Beat me up. Change my opinion.'