Heaven Is Small (13 page)

“I’ll bet you get amazing benefits working in mail . . .”

“’Snot bad.” Ames shrugged. “Came to work one day with my dad. Musta been short ’cause they hired me on the spot. I been workin’ mail since I was sixteen.”

Gordon thought he looked it.

“Had to clear eighteen to get benefits, but I been here four years now, and I’ll pro’lly never leave.”

Gordon supposed that was likely quite true. “Worth dropping out of school for?” he asked, for his own amusement.

Ames started going through the mail on the straight drop down, sorting the envelopes by sizes. “Don’t really need tenth-grade math for this.” A couple of envelopes fell over the side, Gordon’s one of them. Gordon picked them up, hiding his annoyance as he bent, then straightened and handed them back to Ames.

“Goodbye, integers,” he quipped.

Ames stared at Gordon, dazed. “Goodbye
?
You getting off here?” He glanced up at the row of numbers, which continued to click down with no sign of pause.

“No, I’m just saying I agree. One hundred percent.”

“Oh. Okay. Sure.”

The elevator hit bottom. The doors seeped into the sides and Ames hefted the big plastic cart through them backwards. Quickly turning, he pulled it along behind him by one straggly arm. It dropped a bread-crumb trail of letters as he went. Gordon grabbed them and followed. If Ames heard Gordon’s footsteps over the rumbling of the hauled load across concrete, he didn’t let on. The tub roared toward a set of coral doors. Ames swung them open, plowing the plastic drum of postage through.

Between the rubber seals of the door, a white, spherical, and symmetrical milieu came into view. Human handlers were sorting and dumping letters into bowling-alley ball-return-style machines that routed the paper materials down twister slides. There was a faint
clack-clack
, like a single metronome in motion. Like Ames, all of the workers were covered from head to toe in ups brown.

Ames wheelbarrow-dumped his load onto a sorting table and a woman with hands like windmills began riffling through it. Soon the packages were arranged by postal code. One stack went onto this conveyor, one stack onto that one, and the salmon fin of Gordon’s writing swam along. He watched it zoom through the bowling-alley technology. At the end of the line a fuchsia square of eye glimmered, read it, logged it instantly, and the envelope dropped out of Gordon’s sight through a slot only two fingers wide.

“Where does it go?” Gordon asked Ames, grabbing his arm and gesturing to the slit at the far end of the room. Ames had been about to leave, the mail cart in mid-rotation.

“Where do you think?”

Gordon stood blinking.

Ames rapped the cart. “’Nother cart like this one. But lined with a bag. They come, they pick up the sack, they leave the cart, off it goes. Each of the bags has the country and region. You got your international, national north, west, northwest, east, northeast, south, and, of course, central. ’Cept that one.” Ames pointed to a slot that looked identical to the others. “That’s interoffice. I take those back upstairs myself.”

“But how do
they
— whoever they are — get them? Where do they pick them up?”

Ames gave Gordon an impatient look. “’S like Dumpsters on the outside of a building.
They
pull up in a truck, unlock the Dumpster, collect the bags, off it goes. Okay, Mr. Sixty Minutes?”

“You ever seen the pickup?” Gordon asked, adopting Ames’s vernacular without meaning to.

Ames scoffed. “What do I care? I’d rather go smoke. Smoke?” Ames offered, retrieving a cigarette package and extending it in Gordon’s direction.

Gordon’s bottom lip flattened. He shook his head. As often as he now ducked out with Daves, he wasn’t convinced about his addiction to holding something burning in the air.

“Do you ever think about where things come from?” Gordon asked Daves. Gordon bent his mouth around the cigarette as if he could capture more of its smoke that way.

“What things?” Daves made a slight dodging gesture, as if Gordon had just thrown a physical object at him from his periphery.

“Manufactured things. Products.”

“All the time, my friend. Be hard not to, actually.”

Gordon looked at him with surprise as he realized that Daves’ cynicism always came out warm as Christmas.

“China. It’s all made in China. Even the things that don’t say ‘Made in,’ they’re made
of
,” Daves emphasized. “I love that, actually, things that say ‘Assembled in’ ‘Distributed by’ — even your damn toothpaste tube. Like, what the hell? The things we consume, the parts and ingredients, come from half a dozen places and meet up in Wherever, U.S.A., and someone there slaps them together for six dollars an hour. Freeeak-ing crazy.”

“I picked your favourite subject.”

“And don’t get me started on nafta,” Daves continued as if Gordon hadn’t said a word, “or we’ll be here half the afternoon and written up by Chandler, no doubt.”

“I’ve been thinking . . .”

“Let’s forget about Mexico for the time being. If the gluten for pet food can come from the other side of the world — no inspection standards — and that winds up getting mixed and bagged in Kansas and shipped to God knows —”

“Like it’s arrived from another dimension. For all we know.”

Daves paused, as if he’d finally heard Gordon. He bleated the
Twilight Zone
theme. “This is what I’m always trying to tell you.” Daves slapped his palm with the back of his other hand, the smoke clenched in the midst of his wide grin. “How can your work have meaning if nobody knows what your work is? It’s the tree-falling-in-suburbia thing. If no one hears, how do you know it’s made a sound? You used to be able to say you were a carpenter or a salesman or . . . That meant something. Everyone knew what that meant. You say you work in publishing, media — people have no idea. Do you write things? Do you make web pages?”

“No —” Gordon attempted to interrupt. “We’re getting off track.”

“Do you make digital animations? Do you physically glue the books together?”

“No one else but us knows” — Gordon began to pace the courtyard — “that this building exists.” The only way to keep Daves from interrupting him seemed to be to keep moving. “No one knows that there are seventy floors, that HR, IT, Foreign Rights, and Publicity and Promotion are at the top and Printing, Distribution, and Sales at the bottom. No one knows that Proofreading and Design share a floor. No one knows we’re located at 12205 Millcreek Industry Park. No one even knows where Millcreek Industry Park is. You Google-Map it and see what you get. No one knows about this friggin’ courtyard.” With each step, Gordon’s voice rose.

“Hey, no worries.” Daves put out a concerned hand as Gordon passed him. “Other book companies do.”

“Yes, yes.” Gordon continued his rounds. “But they’ve never been here, have they?”

Daves admitted that no, he’d never heard of any of their competitors visiting. “But . . . the readers know.” He said this brightly, and to Gordon’s ear it sounded with the same assurance with which believers speak of God.

12

“‘And when she did she, her face burned.’ Shall I continue?”

“Please,” Gordon murmured.

Chandler grimaced, forcing one lip corner down so Gordon could see an out-of-line tooth in the bottom row of her otherwise perfect mouth. It floated like a white life preserver against a bank of gum. “You’re missing obvious things. Here’s page 26, same book: ‘He would make love to her as she had never been made love to her before’ . . . It’s like you’ve got a love triangle in your brain, these typos always with the extra
she
or
her
.”

“Oh, yes,” he admitted, but Chandler merely swivelled that red silk bottom in her rose leather chair and continued to the next sticky-noted page. There was as little privacy in Chandler’s office as there was in Gordon’s work area, or likely
less,
what with one reader or another coming in every hour to pluck a new script from the tower that had been only slightly rebuilt since Chandler’s appointment at Heaven. Still, whenever Gordon was there, he felt an impetuous clashing of desires, which he attributed to their first encounter, and to his ongoing experiment to see if he could experience genuine hunger, desire.

As Chandler lectured him on conditional tenses — “
was
versus
were
” — her office held the ever-tremulous glow of a glass cage. It was 70 percent glass: floor-to-ceiling windows stretched behind her, and wire threaded the panel beside the door. The ceiling was a white plastic checkerboard panel, all light fixtures beyond it.

Our gangerous hearts. Our phosphorescent surrounds. A belief in incarnation and paper clips, a simple perfect joining.
Gordon held a finger aloft, dug in his pocket for his miniature spiral pad, and took the thought down to use in his writing later. Chandler assumed he was noting his carelessness. She smiled slightly and waited until he had finished writing before tearing into another mistake with an editor’s gusto.

“Page 65, ‘
Marty
must have thought . . .’ The heroine’s best friend is named
Marla
. You make it sound like she’s gallivanting with multiple men. Not to mention that you’ve confused the words
release
and
realize
throughout the novel. I actually got a letter about that one, Gord.” Gordon could tell Chandler was trying hard to be serious when she whipped the actual letter out of the desk and mashed it into the surface in front of him.

“It’s ridiculous,” she continued. “You can’t turn on little old ladies in Minnesota when you edit the wrong word into the love scenes.”

“Did I really?” he queried innocently.

“Yes!” she scolded, leaving the piece of correspondence on the desk and flipping intently through the flamingo pink volume in her hands. “Page 101, ‘The most violent of male pleasures was blasting through Vincenzo. It was obvious Antonia felt the same way as she pitched against him in a fever, whimpering, her body saying
more, more, more
. Vincenzo braced himself for one final thrust that would bring them both to climax and send them over the edge. “
I love you
,
”
Vincenzo groaned, as he came to
realise
inside her.’ ‘Came to
realise
inside her’”? Chandler slapped her palm sternly on the desktop. “Come on, Gordon. With your mistake the hero seems like he has a mental disability and has only just clued in to the fact that he’s engaging in intercourse!”

Gordon swam in the words (
pleasures, fever, thrust, climax, intercourse
). He squirmed. “Is it
realise
with an
S
rather than a
Z
?” he managed.

Chandler nodded.

“I thought it was a British thing,” he said, lamely.

Gordon’s explanation fell on ears as porcelain as prayer hands. The lustrous Chandler went hurriedly on, barking out his errors. “Page 117, missing period. Page 138, ‘their hands en
twinned
.’ Page 146, ‘poured her a glass of wind’ —
wine
, I think it is. Page 170, ‘plunged the top of his tongue into her dewy core and heard her cry of
leasure
.’ ‘Leisure,’ Gordon? Did you maybe mean
pleasure
?”

“Oh yes, most certainly. Pleasure.”

“And ‘top of his tongue’?” She stuck hers out at him. Pointed, it came to an eloquent pink V, so vulnerable above her chin. She gestured to it with one finger, and Gordon let his eyes feast upon it. He wondered how long she would let him look at her tongue, and he bit his own. Hers disappeared. “
Tip
, Gordon,
tip
of his tongue.”

Gordon raised his eyebrows.

Chandler’s shoulders fell, and for a moment she looked almost submissive. “I really hate reprimanding my friends,” she whispered, gazing across the desk at him with sad doe eyes. “Please don’t do this. Don’t make me do it again.”

She sighed and picked up the novel again. “Here, let’s finish quickly so it’s over and we can pretend this never happened,” she murmured, gentler, a tad defeated. “Page 172, ‘A sensation like a giant fish striking his chest’ — that should be
fist
. Page 188, ‘in the bitch of excitement’ — that should be
pitch
. And for your big finale, on page 196,
clitoris
is quite usually spelled with a
T,
not a
D
. If I didn’t know you, I’d suspect you dropped these in on purpose. But there, we’re done. Come back when you’re my friend again, and in the meantime, do your job,
please
.” She edged the book and the letter from the irate reader across the desk for Gordon to take to remind him of his misbehaviour. He picked them up along with his official write-up, which was the same shape as a parking ticket. He had been written up by Chandler Goods, and good was exactly what he felt.

Gordon shifted around inside his clothes before he stood. As he shuffled back to his cubicle, he fetched the letter from between his proofing ticket and his badly done novel. Holding the letter up, still in its envelope, he examined the return address, written in a blossoming blue hand:
Mrs. Abigail Mabey
, from the Twin Cities. Postmark,
December 1
. And stamp. A cardinal sitting on a pine bough.

Part III

DECEMBER

The camera trained on the courtyard showed employee #1299 accepting a cigarette from his co-worker. Lillian could feel two deep lines forming on her forehead. She tapped the golf pencil against her teeth twice. She strode to her desk, where she found the corresponding file.
Small, G.
Flicking past his laughable resumé, she came to some jottings she had made during their interview.
Non-smoker.
She turned and surveyed the monitor again. It was definitely him — she could tell by his quickly creasing suit. Onscreen, he cupped one elbow with his hand and the smoke seemed to rise from their union.

An odd sensation crept up behind Lillian’s ear and she placed a hand there firmly, as if trying to catch an insect. When the feeling didn’t go away, she used the pencil to scratch the back of her neck.