Heaven Is Small (14 page)

“What makes a man take up smoking in Heaven?”

She looked around as if expecting an answer. The pencil had left thin red streaks up and down the white skin on the back of her neck. She let the pencil fall to the desk. There were further notes.
Training without incident, one write-up for proofing errors making it to print.
Tendency to linger beyond work hours
. She had not yet made a notation that this “tendency” had recently escalated to staying at work overnight. There was no check box for that. Although she had not gone through them minute by minute, the surveillance records showed not much more than reading, all-hours reading, and occasionally writing, but nothing that fell outside of ordinary office behaviour . . .

“What makes a man take up smoking in Heaven?” she asked herself, and the room, a second time.

13

Daves’ head bobbed over Gordon’s partition. His gaze fixed on the written reprimand from Chandler, which Gordon had thumbtacked into the cloth surface of the cubicle wall.

“You gotta watch that, my friend,” Daves warned. “Goes in your permanent file.” He gestured to the ceiling. “HR,” he whispered.

“Oh?” Gordon set down his pen.

“You know, Lillian Payne had a hyphenated name before she got divorced.” Daves continued to whisper. “Payne-in-the-ass. But seriously . . . word is she got her job by screwing over the guy who had the position before her. No one knows what happened to him. Disappeared.” Daves reached out and loosened the write-up, the tack falling as he did. “Hide that in your desk drawer. There’s good heat and there’s bad heat. That’s the latter. People have been terminated for less.”

“No worries,” Gordon said, borrowing one of Daves’ favourite sayings.

Daves gave him a surprisingly serious look, rolled Gordon’s desk drawer open himself, and dropped the warning inside. He made a gesture toward his mouth with two fingers slightly parted. Gordon nodded, and the two of them ambled past row on row of garlanded compartments, bristling green doorways crowned with lumps of mistletoe and fists of plastic holly berries.

“Thirty percent,” Daves muttered over his shoulder.

“Thirty percent?”

“Jewish.”

“Pardon?” They reached the elevator, where Bentley gave them a pointed glare.

“Our workforce,” Daves explained, swiping the two of them into their downward journey. “I’ve been asking around and I’ve calculated it. I talked to Design and Internet, and while certainly you’ve got all the printers and sales nerds, if you estimate the entire building based on our three departments, which are, you must admit, drastically different and therefore broad enough to be an acceptable sample, almost a full third of the company is Jewish, and yet —” He held up his arms to demonstrate his point. The Muzak that accompanied them down was “Silent Night.” Wordlessly, “’round yon virgin mother and child” dripped across the mirrored cell, which was strung with gold tinsel, one lost white angel suspended in the centre from a T-bar.

“You didn’t ask me.”

Daves raised two hands palms up. “You Jewish?”

Gordon shook his head. “You?”

“Half, my dad. Mom’s Catholic. Very.” He rolled his eyes. “Still, it’s a matter of principle. This ritualized notion of celebration. It’s been thrust upon us supposedly to keep good cheer and build community within the company. Down on Floor Four they have a whole gingerbread city made of cardboard. You know why?”

Gordon shrugged and watched the numbers click down.

“Competition. Floors Four through Eight have a contest. The sales floors always have to compete. It’s part of their workmosphere. They each chip in and then they divide into teams and vie, with decorations, for the pot. It’s not low stakes either. They probably drum up enough that the winners could vacation together. But guess what.”

They hit bottom and stepped out. “What?”

“You know anyone who’s taken a vacation yet this year? I mean, it is the freaking holidays right now. Isn’t this when you’d think people would want to vacation? But we have quotas to make. Essentially, that’s what they are. Quotas. And right now they’re giving out overtime. So who doesn’t want to make overtime? So that means nobody’s taking vacation days. Do you know that Americans take less vacation time than any other western country? That’s a fact. Why? We feel like we can’t. We don’t have time. It’s built in to our workplace psychology. You know it. But hey, no worries. Who needs a day off? Not only that —”

Daves stopped talking long enough to light the same cigarette he’d lit the last time they came out into the sky-patch parkette. When Daves opened the package, Gordon had noticed, there were always three — just like in his own bug box of Vivatex, there were always seven, an unending prescription. Daves put the smoke to his lips, then lit another one off it and passed it to Gordon.

“— but these fools down in sales are spending all their extra time, I mean breaks, lunches, coming in early mornings, staying late — they don’t do this during work hours — to decorate the freaking cages they sit in so the company can turn around and post a mini-feature about their enthusiasm on the corporate section of the web site. They’ll get their pictures taken. Big whoop. What kind of reward is that?”

Gordon longed to hear profanity in Heaven — a good
fuck
, a drawn-out
shit
, even the odd
bitch
or
bastard
. But lately every time he opened his mouth to say one such word some other word replaced it, rolling off his tongue before he had realized it.

Daves motored on. “They’re not making any extra money. It’s not money from the company. It’s from their own pockets, and they willingly sign themselves over to it. For what? A pat on the back from the Man. Suckers! If it was the lottery part they were interested in, they could just pass the hat every Friday and have an instant sweepstake, without the expenditure of all that energy, don’cha think?”

“But . . . maybe they’re just amusing themselves. Maybe they don’t give a Shinola about the Man — they’re just looking for something more rewarding to do. How interesting is what we do here, Daves, and what do people really do at home anyway?”

“Huh.” Daves tilted his head back. He bounced from mountain boot to mountain boot. “Huh,” he said again. “The value of the end product, not being alienated from it. I guess if you decide of your own volition to build a manger, the manger has a different value than
Naked Incorporated
. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I’ll buy that. But, holly throughout the whole corporation, the Christmas carols — you gotta admit, it’s still a bit dictatorial.”

Gordon admitted it was. “Especially if you’re an atheist.”

“Oh, I am,” Daves was quick to add. “I mean, I’m
ex
-Catholic. I was never confirmed. They’re not getting me. Once it’s over, it’s over. That’s what I’ve been saying since I was fourteen.”

“Mmm.” Gordon stooped and sifted through a handful of snow. He felt a sensation. It burned his naked hands, but it didn’t hurt or turn them red the way it had when he was alive. “I don’t know.”

“You got some theory?” Daves nodded, smiling.

“No,” Gordon replied. He dropped the cigarette, which sizzled a thin, deep hole into the snowbank at his knee. “I’m not committing one way or the other.”

“Oh, that’s good. That’s rich, covering all the bases.” Daves laughed.

Daves was about to head inside again when Gordon stopped him with a question that was simple and direct. This was always the best way to approach Daves. “Do you really want to see what can be done to rock the system?”

For once Daves didn’t say anything. He gave Gordon a quizzical look.

“Who reads the books after you typeset them?”

“You’re the last eyes, Gordo.”

“No one in Production or Design?”

Daves shook his head, a slow grin blooming across his jaw.

“So technically, with the exception of the first and last pages, which might get looked at in sales, we could write anything between the covers and still have these books wind up in stores. . . . As long as we stick to an accurate word count,” Gordon pressed on, “so that the books come out to their standard length, 192 pages, no one will know except the readers? And even the readers won’t until the book has come home in a shopping bag or arrived via the mail book club. Am I right?”

Daves took out another cigarette, a dangerous act, since it was the very last in his pack. He lit it, cupping one hand around the tobacco and the other around the flame. “It’s risky,” he said finally, nodding, “but definitely, definitely possible. The sales team is supposed to read them, but they are . . .” He walked around the courtyard and came back, looked Gordon in the eye, and smiled around his cigarette “. . . very distracted this week.”

Gordon began to hum “It Came upon a Midnight Clear,” and Daves held up his last cigarette like a conductor’s wand.

14

Gordon was in deep space.

Smile-shaped constellations, the florid orange pudenda of Venus, the flecked irises of spiral galaxies, the light echo of a star shedding its glow on a tower of dust: within the fourteen-inch confines of his screen, the universe was full of allure — and ghosts. The screensaver photographs of whirlpool galaxies and globular clusters rose upon his monitor, majestic and still, then faded into moon, boomerang nebula, and finally Gordon’s old friend Earth. It was just a screensaver, but as he watched, Gordon felt the ecliptic passage between awe and apprehension.

He could remember riding in his mother’s red Polara, her hair a platinum fountain above the headrest. From the back seat he would stare up endlessly into the blue sky, knowing that beyond it was black, and beyond that, what she assured him every Sunday existed, the pearly gates of eternity. And here Gordon was on Earth-not-Earth, and he had arrived here with an application.

Outside the windows of the Heaven Book Company, if Gordon stood and gazed at the sunset, he could see that same maculate moon rising, huge and ordinary. On his screen, when he stopped scrolling, there was Rhea, a moon of Saturn, cratered, dating back 4.5 billion years; Titan, Saturn’s largest lunar body; and Tethys, its ancient surface of ice unchanged since the birth of the solar system. Gordon could watch the actual sun set through Georgianne Bitz’s horizontal blinds or he could adjust his rolling chair and sit before a Saturnian sunset, the sun below the ring plane and the whole planet little more than a red construction-paper cutout of what a planet ought to be. The Milky Way was something molten, turquoise, a scar of smoke in an LCD sky.

Meanwhile, Daves’ screen was filling up with never-ending pipes, labyrinthian, cobalt blue. In Erika Workman’s station, a psychedelic corona of light twisted and jellyfished. Jill Fast had a magnifying ball that bounced around her screen identifying random text:
“Oh no!” she gasped. “Oh yes!” he assured her . . . familiar sense of anxiety and despair . . . struggling with a thickness in his chest . . .
In Georgianne’s cubicle, palm trees swayed over dinted sands and two white chairs faced ever eastward, then disappeared into a lone desert isle, forlorn rock face clouded with green. On Manos’s monitor, an other-side-of-the-screen hand was pressing a never-realized message upon the screen.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so,
Gordon found himself thinking
.

What do the others know about Heaven?
Gordon wondered. He pushed back from his desk and wound his way through the cubicles, scanning the tops of his co-workers’ heads as if he had X-ray vision. When he arrived in the foyer, he slapped his palm down forcefully upon the tall crescent desk.

“You must know just about everything about everybody,” Gordon told Bentley. “Working Reception, I mean.”

“It’s much more than Reception,” Bentley responded warily. “It’s assistant to the head of Editorial.”

“Oh?” Gordon lingered at the podium.

“As you well know, I help coordinate payroll. I help traffic manuscripts between Copy Editing and Proofreading. I also input all of the worksheets for Chandler — not that she’d care to give me credit for that, but you did notice that you were being paid quite regularly long before she decided to make an appearance. I like to think . . .” Bentley made that clacking sound in the back of his throat:
ta-ta-ta.
“Let me just say . . .”
Ta-ta-ta.
“Well.” He settled upon this single word as if it were a sentence articulating his point. “I tend to consider myself the caretaker of this department.”

The payroll part at least was true. After achieving full-time status and direct deposit, Gordon had been able to forgo the sorry-ass trek to Job City in the basement. Now his pay stub was prepared by Bentley, either handed to him as he exited the elevator or slotted neatly onto the top of his inbox. Convenience in Heaven, as on Earth, was a privilege.

“So . . .” Gordon rubbed two fingers across his mouth as if something had just occurred to him. “What you’re saying is, you’ve had access to employee records for the entire department for some time — at least until Chandler arrived, that is. That’s something.” Gordon gave a slight head shake.

“Jon.”

“Gordon.”

“Let me ask you something.”

Manos glanced at his watch. “Ok–ay . . .”

Gordon gave him no room to change his mind. He pulled up a rolling chair inside Manos’s cubicle.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Small?”

Jon Manos called everyone Ms. and Mr. — Mr. David, Ms. Workman, Ms. Bitz — occasionally shuffling up the first names and the surnames: Ms. Erika, Ms. Jill. So how could Gordon take offence at
Mr. Small
? Part of him did, nonetheless. Was it the way Manos looked at him when he said the surname? Some flicker at the corners of his lips?

“Let me ask you something,
Mr. Manos
,” Gordon parroted. He leaned in and Manos leaned away ever so slightly. “When was the last time you —”

“Is this a personal question? Because I draw the line at —”

“The last time you —” Gordon’s mouth made a straight line across his face and he let his eyes bulge ever so slightly.