Friday, April 23, 2010

Oh My God

Oh My God – Snailhouse (listen in new tab)

Tuesday morning. This is how G.T. loses his job.

G.T. sits in Val Percy’s office and wonders how he got there. Of course, he knows how he got there, in a literal sense, like when people know how it rains. It’s a more Sibylline how, something closer to a why.

Val’s office is thick with well chosen austerity, as if a Victorian banker’s room had been transplanted and refinished with fearful memories of G.T. grade school principals. Authoritarian, with restrained flair.

She takes off her reading glasses, sets them on her desk beside the papers she was reading. Her hazel eyes, sharp and imminent, study G.T.’s face. It makes him self-conscious; he touches the side of his face, feels the tender skin around his eye.

“You had quite the weekend.” She’s direct. G.T. is relieved. His first three meetings had been painfully inflated by the thin altiloquence of executive pretence and privilege.

G.T. smiles. “I can’t deny it.”

He started at Percy, Bors, and Galahad Marketing in their call centre on the third floor. Since January, he moved from the cubicle farm to a shared office, through a few long weeks on the international sales circuit. Despite his inner recalcitrance, he found himself on the fast track, swept up by the quick money and two-handed handshakes.

But, it was his Friday night heroics that really made his name.

Monday morning, he was called from one executive to another. All of them, eyeing his shiner, told him he had balls. All of them qualified that statement with loose criticism that distanced them from G.T. Val was his fourth meeting. There wasn’t really anyone higher up the ladder left to push him out the door.

G.T. sits back in the high-backed leather chair Val had pointed to distractedly when he walked in. The chair yields in bizarre ways, causing him to squirm noticeably to keep his back from curving unnaturally.

Val watches him, her face composed with a vague look of displeasure and benign resolve. It causes G.T. to suddenly question how much he’s mattered to this company.

Val: “How’s your eye?” Something about her concern feels propped up, as if her interest in his well-being is provisional and will soon be taken down, carried away by men in grey overalls and put out back. The question feels non-recylable. G.T. knows now for sure that the fix is in. He feels oddly calm about what is about to happen.

G.T.: “Fine. Sore, I guess. That put a steak on it thing didn’t help much.”

Her expression remains set. “Well… [a long pause, during which she rubs the bridge of her nose] So, you attacked an executive at one of our largest clients.”

G.T.: “I like to get hands on with the clients.”

Val coughs a laugh. “Gregory, don’t make jokes. They called Monday morning. They called Bors in Tokyo, too. I have no idea what time it was there. Anyways, this guy at Agravaine, Gla- Glosh-”

G.T.: “Gloucester.”

Val: “Yeah. He’s got pull with half the board, Bors especially. I’ve never met him, but he does have one of those names, though.”

G.T.: “Like a Shakespearean villain?” He finds himself getting increasingly glib.

Val ignores his little flippancy. “Ok. We have to bend on this one. Agravaine is too big to us to have them complaining about your drunken shenanigans.”

G.T. points at his black-eye. “To my defence, it was their goons that gave me this.”

Val: “It doesn’t matter. We have to let you go.”

G.T.: “I figured.”

Val: “But, we won’t hang you out to dry. You’ll be taken care. A good severance and all that.” She reaches into a drawer and pulls out two envelopes. She holds them out so as to force G.T. to leave his sit to collect them. He sits back down. “One’s your dismissal. The other, it has a list of people you should call when your severance runs out.”

G.T. looks her straight in the eye, taps the envelopes lightly against his temple. “Thanks.”

Val: “You never liked it here, anyways.” It is a statement laden with sad affinity.

Security is waiting for him in his office. The two men watch silently with crossed arms as G.T. packs things into a box someone had left on his desk. His office mates had left post-its on their monitors that read “Back in 15”, or more likely whenever G.T.’s done and gone.

G.T. didn’t really need the box. Everything he wanted to keep fit into his satchel; the rest is tossed into the waste bins. He looks around the room as he slings his bag over his shoulder. The guards follow him to the elevator and ride down with him.

G.T.: “You guys do this a lot?”

Guard #1: “Sometimes.”

G.T.: “Was I fast?”

Guard #2: “Like in comparison? You’re ok. The last guy took forever. He cried.”

G.T.: “Really?” He can’t imagine shedding a tear over this place.

Guard #1: “Yeah. An older guy. I think he stole or something?”

G.T.: “Oh, yeah. That must have been Sammy. Who’d have thunk he’d cry.”

The elevator chimes the first floor. The doors slide open. G.T. is followed into the foyer, where he’s watched as he hands in his security.

Once he’s outside, the guards head back in. “Thanks, guys.” They ignore him, leaving him on the far off planet of Doesn’t Work Here Anymore.

Out in the sunny mid-morning. He is in a valley banked by blue and green glass. He reaches into his bag and pulls out the envelope Val gave him, the one with the numbers. He turns it in his hands thoughtfully as he walks. Before taking the stairs down to the subway, he lets the envelope drop indifferently into a waste bin.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Bombs Bomb Away

Bombs Bomb Away – Elephant Stone (listen in new tab)

Claire called a general staff meeting for Monday night. Café Ulysses had never had one before. For the auspicious occasion, she closed a little early and had Danielle push four tables together to form a sort of larger round table.

Claire stands by the door. It’s 9:00. She flips the sign from Open to Closed as K walks up. She opens the door for him.

K: “This is gonna be fun, isn’t it.”

Claire: “I’m excited.” She genuinely is.

Since Saturday, she’d turned the store inside out. She had pulled two old floppy pink notebooks out of her closet and then filled one, penning in list after list. Diagrams. Quick math. Contact ideas and numbers. Shift restructuring. Anything that she thought she might help.

By the time she was done, she had dismantled the ligaments of Esther’s Ulysses. After the gutting, Claire inscribed the first faded Hilroy with a new anatomy of the café’s future. The second is for the proceedings of tonight.

Zoe slouches in. She’s in her PJs. “I’ve been studying. Will this take long?”

And then Camille, the international student, saunters in with his usual cavalier smile. He sits, draping himself over a chair, calls out to Danielle to make him an espresso.

Danielle snorts at him, hands on hips. “The machine’s clean. You can make one, if you want to clean it.”

Camille: “Well.”

Claire: “There’s some fresh drip if you’re desperate.”

Camille: “Desperate times, indeed.” He pulls himself up and heads around the counter.

Lucile arrives next. She has been around since Claire started. She’s older, but shuns any responsibility. She’s married with two kids under four. She comes here to escape.

When Annette (she’s a veteran, too) arrives, she stumbles on the bottom of the door frame. She smiles coyly, tries to laugh it off. Lucile shoots her a cruel smile. They’ve never gotten along. Claire has to schedule them on opposite shifts.

Lucile: “At the bar?”

Annette: “Yeah. They’re waiting for me around the corner. Wanna come, mom?”

Claire has always imagined that they’re each jealous of the other.

Last to come is Hera. She bends over outside the door, hand to her chest. Her face is flushed. She ran from the subway stop to be close to on time. She comes in, locking the door behind her.

Claire waits in her chair for everyone to get a coffee and settle in. They make small talk. Hera and Danielle trade jokes. Camille slides in beside Annette, tries to chat her up. Lucile talks to Zoe about the cats out back. Claire looks from face to face. She doesn’t know if they’ve ever all been in one room.

K sits down at her right, pulling his chair awkwardly in, bumping the table with his knees. He looks down at the two notebooks she’s produced from her purse. He moves the grab one. Claire smacks his hand.

Claire opens the blank notebook to the first page. Places a pen beside it. She clears her throat. Stands up. “Ok. Let’s get started. I’m sure we all want to get home sometime tonight.”

Nervous laughter.

Her whole life, she’d never been much of a public speaker. She can talk to any one, one to one, customers, boys, anyone, but get up to make a speech and her throat starts to close in around her words.

She opens her mouth expecting no sound. She knows the facts that matter. “I don’t want this store to close. I’m sure that we all feel the same. But, we all know Ulysses hasn’t been doing as well lately.”

She is interrupted by a loud rap on the door. Without looking, Danielle, her arm hanging callously over the back of her chair, yells loudly: “We’re closed.”

But, K is out of his chair (making a loud scraping sound that causes Zoe to cover her ears in annoyance) and unlocking the door. G.T. comes in, sits at one of the tables against the windows.

Claire: “Do you want to join us?”

G.T. waves his hand as if to bat the idea away. “Ah, no. I’m not a voting member.” He gives her a reassuring smile.

Claire’s mind flits back to Saturday morning. She composes herself once more. Deep breath. “Ok. Like I was saying…” Her talk goes well. Well enough. She knew everyone wouldn’t be on board for all the changes right away. But, it’s a place to start, at least.

At the end, she asks for any last suggestions. Hera’s hand shoots up. Camille laughs.

Danielle: “You don’t have to raise your hand, dear.”

Hera drops her arm. “It’s just that I have a pretty good idea. You didn’t like it before, Claire. But, I really think it’ll help.” She reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a folded photocopied flyer. She flattens it quickly on the table. “Seriously, everyone, two words: Café Olympics.”

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Fair Verona

Fair Verona – Dan Mangan (listen in new tab)

Monday morning and the neighbourhood library branch is a slow crawl. The usuals are less frequent now that the weather’s nice. Though, by summer the heat will bake the city and drive them back. Outside the glass doors, Toronto grinds forward into the week, like always.

Ten o'clock. The library is all but empty. K and a co-op student from the Western’s Librarian program, Leslie (who thinks she knows everything, has boundless energy, and makes a lot less money doing K’s job) are the only staff on duty.

Leslie is done in a few weeks. K doesn’t hate her, but he will be happy to see her alacrity back on the streets of Ontario’s flimflam London. The boss, Eleanor, the “lets shake things up around here” replacement, is at a community outreach meeting. K doesn’t remember where or with whom. There will be a memo, assuredly.

Leslie completes some busy work on a promotional display about gardening. She wanders over to the reference desk, where K stands looking at his hands, palms up, fingers spread on the counter. He doesn’t know how long he’s been doing this.

Leslie: “Did someone ask about palmistry?”

K furrows his brow in soft mockery, but doesn’t look up. “No one’s here.”

Leslie: “I can see that. I was just… well. Nevermind. Do you know anything about palm reading?”

K: “Not a bit. I was just seeing if anything has changed.”

Leslie: “And?”

K thinks for a moment. He wishes he’d kept better track, maybe made a photocopy for future comparison. “I’m not sure I’d be able to tell.”

Leslie sticks her left hand under his face. “This is my life line. And this is my love line. And this is the number of kids I’ll have.” She traces along her palm with her index finger, pausing briefly at each landmark.

K: “Where did you learn that?”

Leslie: “Some woman in Grand Bend read my future once.”

K looks from her hands back to his, squinting, trying to drag an image from his memory: “And?”

Leslie shrugs. “She said it’d be a mixed bag.”

K: “A conservative gamble.” And why not, he thinks. Who’s got anything figured out? Three days ago, he felt like he was running smooth. But, it was a long weekend.

Leslie turns as the door opens. An older woman with a cane walks in. She smiles at Leslie and wanders into the fiction stacks. Seeing an opportunity to do some good, Leslie pushes off the counter and heads after her.

A few moments later, K hears her say: “Can I help you?” He can’t make out the reply.

He leans on his elbows. He doesn’t want to be here today. He wishes he could go see Maura. He’s desperate to speak to her again. But, she made it clear she needed a couple days’ space. She will call him. He must hold his imperturbation.

He showed up at her place Saturday morning. He was nursing a hangover, and found her wracked by a worse one. He started to make her breakfast. At first, she sat silently, head down, turning a cup of coffee in her hands. He started to tell her about the party. After all, he had shown up with more than one story he wanted to tell. Her absence from his last few days needed correcting through exposition.

His back was turned when she started. It was quiet, a shaky preamble. As she spoke, she gradually got louder. It took K a few moments to realize that she wasn’t going to wait for him to stop talking. Her words plowed through his chain of thought, a rogue wave of regret, fear, and uncertainty he didn’t know she possessed.

He turned around. She told him everything about the island and Edmund. What she remembered about the bodies. The years of wandering and nightmares. As she spoke, she looked straight through him, the cabinets, the wall, the city. Straight out, ignoring the curve of the planet. Out into space. And when she was done, she cried.

Maura felt beyond him, and K was at a loss.

He didn’t know much about real tragedies, only the minor sins and infelicities that had typified his life. Well mostly. He felt like maybe he has at worst one life’s blood on his hands. He was an accessory… involved by tacit collusion.

The thought made him drag Maura up into his arms. She sobbed into his shoulders. He held her to him. His hand on the back of her head. His fingers dove under her black hair.

Then she pushed herself away. She said quiet thanks and kissed him on the lips. “You should go, ok? I just need a few days. I’ll call you.”

She looks in him eyes through her smudged glasses, slightly askew from being pressed into him. “Ok. Call, ok?”, he said. She smiled weakly. He found it almost impossible to force himself out the door, but eventually he left her with the half cooked breakfast.

He didn't realize at first that he was waiting by the phone. Saturday afternoon, G.T. called. He went on about Claire. It sounded like he was finally going to break up with Brae. Later, K’s parents called. He listened absently about the garden, and the city ripping them off over garbage removal. His baby nephew was sick, but is better now. Reminders to make calls to grandparents.

That night, he sat on the couch and drank ginger tea as he watched old movies on TVO. In one, two now-dead stars tried to fall in love again. K regretted that he hadn’t told Maura that Shannon had come to see him. Instead he’d been forced him to file it under “Some Other Time, if Maybe it Matters." The idea seemed complicated, and he wanted to keep things simple.

Sunday, was indolent and overwrought. His feet up on the couch, he tried to parse everything. This new Maura. Shannon. Claire and the threat to Ulysses. He read. Watched old TV shows on DVD. Went for a walk. Ordered Thai food. No one called.

And now he stands in the library, studying his hands when Leslie comes back.

K: “What did she want?”

Leslie: “Books where cats are the detectives. People are weird.”

K examines his palms one last time, before shoving them in his pocket: “I suppose our lives don’t bear much scrutiny.”

Leslie scratches her forehead. “Ummm. I just meant that…”

K: “It’s ok. You don’t really get used to the stuff that people bring up around here.”

Monday, April 19, 2010

On Directing

On Directing – Tegan & Sara (listen in new tab)

Her feet drive hard into the sidewalk and spring her away from the earth with each stride. She imagines herself making small craters in the concrete. She’s found her pace as her skin begins to glaze with sweat; her shirt and running shorts cling to her skin, damp with the early morning spring air.

She breathes out. In. Her lungs fill with cool wet air from last night’s rain. Her mouth forms the words: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” They sound thin, harsh with exertion. The sentence collapses. Each word collides into the other, a Doppler pile-up against her lips, before they slide across her reddened, runner’s blushed cheeks. They curve and roll over the headphones stuck to her ear by sweat. Then they are lost in the vortexes created by her bobbing pony tail.

Shannon started running after she moved in with her parents. The doctor told her the exercise would help. Give her something to focus on, something to pull her out of her head. Before the abortion, she’d been a creature of infinite terrifying density, and after too. But now, right now, she feels like she can shake that off each time she bites hard on the cliché: harder, faster, push yourself. She wants to be a current, an article of flow and flux.

Today will be a long run. She’s training for the coming gauntlet of charity 10k races. Maybe a 20k later in the summer.

Really: she has a lot to purge from her mind. Each stride, each cycle of breath, her mind spins. She wants to lose herself in her repetitious body, but it’s too early in her run for that.

Later. Don’t think about it.

She counts footsteps out loud, repeats mantras, encouragements. But between each assertion of not thinking about it, her thoughts wedge in.

Why see K now? What did you expect?

She wanted to see him the moment Claire told her about K and Maura being together. Claire had waited a long time to say anything about it. She is a good friend that way. How is her store doing? Shannon hasn’t been since Claire bought it.

She turns a corner, heads through an empty suburban park. No one is out this early on a Saturday. The isolation helps.

Over the last few days she dissected her visit with K. Everything he said about his life, the library, Ulysses’s. The sparse way he discussed Maura. His body language as he listened to Shannon’s account of slow improvements. The old jokes. The new ones.

He’s the same; the same scattered goofball, holding onto a few too many threads. The same irresistible way he makes connections between everything.

It doesn’t matter. She can’t interpret any one thing’s importance.

Except: as he walked her back to the subway they held hands (for like 45 seconds). Unconscious habit? Where does that come from? When he realized, he let go and apologized, scratching absently at the back of his head (as he always does). She liked the shaky familiarity of having K near her - of the casual firmness of his hand holding hers, their fingers knitted. Even for those brief moments.

The intimacy is a tempting, well-tread path, now neglected and overgrown with peregrine change. He said to call him sometime. She wants to and doesn't want to. She utters a curse on the static pull of this indecisiveness.

She passes a  faded plastic and metal play structure that sits where the park path forks (or reconnects). She's happy she doesn't have to make a decision right now.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Hello It’s Me

Hello It’s Me – Todd Rundgren (listen in new tab)

The old clock radio crackles alive, doing its best to make its low, muffled and dispersed noise, drawing in the weak, aging oscillations of the AM band.

It’s a familiar and lonely sound. Like visits to old age homes; music sitting almost quiet, almost in stillness. Songs we all know the words to, but would never ask to hear. Like memories we wish we could shoot into space, but instead they just bounce around the stratosphere of our brains.

Maura’s mouth is pasty, dry. Her nose is crusted, smells faintly of vomit. Her stomach is scratched bare, suddenly cavernous and empty. She puts a hand to her forehead, finding that her arm is surprisingly weak and that her forehead throbs ungratefully when she touches it.

The world is blurry. She fumbles for her glasses, finding them with relief in one of their three usual spots. She looks at the dusty, browned garage sale clock radio, slapping uselessly at it to turn it off. The button appears to be jammed. “Stupid thing.” She regrets the one dollar she’d paid for it.

It’s 8:30, Saturday. The drapes are closed. A crack of sun sneaks in, making a line across the floor. Over the bed and her almost naked body, before disappearing in shadows. She must have slept over the covers.

She tries not to smell her own breath. The taste of stale rye and sick mix uncomfortably. She wonders what she had been thinking. Maybe she hoped she’d wake up with more resolve, a sense of strength. But, really she just wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep so soundly and securely, so surely cupped in the cold hands of dreamlessness.

But her dreams were warm with hurt and too familiar. Three days since she realized Edmund was in Toronto. Two restless nights during which she tortured herself and twisted the knife further for doing this to herself. The third night she flattened herself with whiskey.

Brae watched her get drunk, offered her consolation. But Maura couldn’t tell her everything. She wanted to. But the words still choked in her throat and cruelly pooled in her mind at night.

And like the last two nights, she dreamt (Are they dreams if they happened?) about a pacific island.

She was fresh out of school, then. The O’Baird family was a legacy of seafarers and travelers that fueled her blood. She wanted an adventure.

At 22, she signed on with a company that worked with indigenous peoples in those places the multinational companies caress with their wet mouths and sharp claws. She was sent to some far flung island to help people fight forced relocation by oil companies.

Exotic locales, peoples in need, the endless battle of the righteous. It was eye-opening.

And then she fell in love. Mr. Edmund Gloucester walked up to her, unstrugglingly handsome in the tropical heat. But even then his eyes were clouds, behind which a hotter sun burned. They met in a bar on a beach, one of those shacks that leaned against the forest, your feet sinking into alabaster sand as you got drunk.

Two months on the island and she was swept away by him. One day after a few weeks, he stopped her on the road, made her come back to his hotel room and he confessed his heart. He worked for one of the oil concerns, Agravaine International, and he was risking his job by seeing her. She realized she was, too.

When she kissed him, pressing her body up against his, it didn’t matter. They were on fire for each other. They were in love. It was bigger than everything. It didn’t matter.

But, it did. Soon, she was spending less time on the job, less time paying attention to the white men and their translators sent by the oil men.

And then Edmund suggested they head to Sydney for a weekend. He had the time off and would foot the bill if she couldn’t afford it (she couldn’t, not on her pitiful martyrs salary). Her colleagues were off island to help coordinate a different project, and she hadn’t left the island in four months. She went. He proposed to her in the nicest restaurant she’d ever seen. The ring slid on with casual care. It fit snug with somnolescent weight.

Years later, she still isn’t sure that Edmund wasn’t in love with her. Maybe Agravaine played him, too. It’s irrelevant now, indistinguishable from the fact that while she was in Sydney (on a trip that was unblinkingly extended three days), the oil company undid all the work she and her colleagues had done.

When she got back. They were loading people on busses. Bull-dozers were standing ready. Some of the community elders stood their ground with their wives and children. They were unprepared to leave. As the buses rocked and rumbled away, these people stood, staring down tractors and armed men.

Maura stood helplessly with her colleagues, cordoned by angry company men with rifles. It looked like it would stay static and angry forever, but there was a scuffle and a young man from the village grabbed a gun and fired. The bullet bounced harmlessly off a bulldozer’s blade, disappearing in a puff of sand.

It was a cue. The men with guns fired back. Thus, their problem with the locals was solved. The village had been there for over a hundred years, maybe more. And it was gone in a little under an hour.

That night she went to see Edmund. He said he didn’t know anything about it. Maura’s mind was torn with rage. She couldn’t hear him, his eyes and his words didn’t match. She threw his ring at him hoping the diamond would gouge a hole through him. Instead, it bounced off his shirt, landing heavy and small on the floor.

Then she quit the aid agency and went to teach English in Taiwan and then Africa. The faces of the dead villagers followed her night and day and then stopped once they felt satisfied with the weight of her guilt. It took three years. The next week she moved back to Toronto.

In three days, Edmund had unraveled everything she tried to put back together.

She listens, prostrate in bed, to the song the radio offers. It is an old jukebox favourite of Edmund's. They slow danced to it once. She quickly puts that aside.

There is a familiar knock on her door. She knows it’s K.