Heaven Is Small (15 page)

He had Manos’s attention now. “The last time I
what?
”

Gordon let the word fall. “Defecated.”

“When was the last time I defecated?”

Gordon nodded.

“Yes, I just wanted to make sure that what I thought you said is what you said. . . . I’m not answering that.” Manos stood up and made to leave his own workspace.

“Wait, Jon. I’m serious.”

Manos paused but didn’t sit down again.

“Since I’ve been in Heaven, my caffeine intake has gone up ninefold, and — nothing. I don’t think I’ve expelled in the two and a half months I’ve been here. How can I be swimming in all this coffee and not output any of it? I’m not the only one, either. It’s like we’re all on speed out there — how do you think we read so fast? We’re a reading factory on Fast Forward. But have you ever once heard a sound — a
peep
— in the men’s room?”

Manos was listening now, shocked, but listening.

“I dare you. Go into that men’s room and just stand at the sink and wait.”

Manos stared at Gordon, a horrified expression fastened to his mouth.

“It’s nothing but a powder blue holding pen. Men in the stalls. Nothing’s happening.” Gordon gestured with one hand, flipping it over to show the two sides, palm up and palm down. “We come out, wash our hands, use that liquid lemon soap as if to prove to ourselves that something occurred worth cleaning up, but when was the last time you remember actually sitting down, contorting with the effort of —”

“Enough,” Manos rasped as he pushed past Gordon and out of his own cubicle.

Gordon watched as fleur packed her purse with an empty Tupperware lunch container and two new Heaven titles from the freebie shelf. He pretended to be engrossed in the freebie shelf as well. She didn’t bother to snap the purse shut, simply hooked its black straps over her shoulder, the salad-oiled plastic nuzzling the crook of her armpit. She folded a lightweight orange leather jacket over her other arm as if she didn’t intend to wear it. “Nice clothes, bad skin,” was what Gordon had heard the other women in the office say about Fleur when she was out of earshot.

“See you tomorrow,” she said over the cubicle wall to Jill.

Gordon armed himself for the elevator ride with three randomly plucked titles. He let Fleur pad toward the elevator in her open-toed pumps, which, he realized for the first time, were incredibly out of season. When she had a fifteen-second lead on him, he followed, scuttling in just before the elevator doors closed.

“I would’ve held it for you,” she said as if she had been accused of something.

“It’s okay.” He smiled and looked down at his hands. Two of the books he held were from the Secret Hearts imprint; the other was from Second Love, a line that featured mid-life romances and the carousing of divorcees. When he glanced up, he saw that Fleur had followed his eyes. “Mom,” he explained with a shrug that he hoped conveyed just a touch of embarrassment. “She likes the mysteries.”

“I worked on that one,” Fleur said, examining the spine. “It’s cute.”

“Cute’s good.”

Fleur smiled weakly. “Weekend plans?”

Gordon shook his head. “You?”

“The girls. Bar. A new one I read about.” She continued to smile idly as others got on and rode down. When Gordon and Fleur exited into the parking garage, it was natural for them to walk together. She clicked across the concrete beside him. “You don’t usually drive, do you?”

“No,” he replied. “Just today.”

The disruption to routine didn’t seem to faze her.

The parking garage had an alphabetical organization to it: concrete pillars hung with large placards: A, B, C. Spots were assigned to employees alphabetically. Fleur’s surname began with
J
, so it was natural that she would come to her spot before Gordon arrived at his. They walked silently, and Gordon felt a strange sense of déjà vu as the bone-coloured lines of the spaces flashed past. For a second, even though Fleur was within arm’s reach, he felt alone. The stale air of the parking garage seemed as if it belonged to another garage in some distant time and place. By the time Fleur had rummaged past her salad container and pulled out a ring of noisy keys, Gordon recalled that it was a garage on Bay Street he was remembering, but not why he had been there.

“Thanks for walking me,” she said. “I do sometimes find it creepy down here.”

“No . . .” Gordon paused. “No problem.” His look was inquiring, but she was busy unlocking a hatchback. “Creepy how?” Glancing about them, Gordon noticed for the first time that the lights contained sodium vapour bulbs, that both he and Fleur looked greyish beneath them. His suit, which he knew to be olive, had turned to charcoal. Her orange jacket, smoke.

She got in her car, closed the door, strapped herself in, and waved as Gordon headed off casually in the direction of S.

He had walked only as far as K before he concealed himself on the other side of a pillar. The hatchback still hadn’t started its engine. None of the cars in the garage had started their engines, even though people were entering their vehicles all around him. Gordon wondered if each driver was waiting for the one next to him to exit. When he ducked around the pillar to look back at Fleur’s spot, she was still sitting in the driver’s seat in the same position he’d left her, a slightly strained smirk on her face, staring straight ahead.

An hour later, all of the other cars were full — and none had moved.

Gordon headed back to Fleur’s vehicle. He stood in front of it, staring through the windshield. She stared back at him but gave no indication of seeing him. He walked over to her side, crouched beside her window, and peered in. Her head didn’t turn. He tapped the glass. He pressed his face against it until his nose and cheek mashed. He turned backwards, bent, and knocked his bum against the window three times in succession with a slight hip-shake. He tried the handle, but she had locked it after herself. He withdrew. He turned in a circle, taking in the sheer number of cars, of heads against headrests, of eyes.

Gordon followed the cubicles in order. When collecting data, one should be systematic, he told himself. He did not think of his method as hunting and gathering so much as provoking and proving. Observing reactions. For Fleur, there was a stack of mauve sticky notes, each scrawled with an identical message. Every morning he thumb-rubbed one onto the face of her computer:
How did you sleep?
For Carma, there was a stack of e-mail messages in Gordon’s drafts box preprogrammed to be sent each afternoon at 5:27, three minutes before day-end. For Erika, there was a music playlist Gordon had downloaded and recorded up in the Internet Division: nineteen tracks of death. For Rachel, there was a memo advising her to make careful note of the number of times per day she urinated (Gordon already knew the answer: zero). For Jill, there was a bowl of rat poison Gordon had located in the basement — though he doubted there were any actual rats in Heaven. It looked so pretty next to the sugar canister in the kitchen. For Fiona, a birthday card with a skull and crossbones pencilled beneath a trite humourous Shoebox message.

It ought to have been easy for Gordon to convince himself of his shadow existence, especially when he had all the evidence. He did not eat, drink, or sleep any more. He did not bleed. He did not excrete in a normal manner. He did not sweat or salivate. He did not breathe. He did not process pain. His bones and muscles were malleable place holders. He still perceived smells and tastes, and had enough circulation to produce a firm reaction of arousal, but he believed these sensations to be little more than memories retrieved from some part of his brain that still longed for life. Echoes. It seemed that whatever was left of Gordon was up to him.

He could see bentley loosening. Every day Bentley was waiting for him. And every day Gordon delivered his standard hello. Their greeting had grown from an obligation into an insult, then had progressed into a strange territory between friendship and conniving, falling so distinctly in the middle that even Gordon wasn’t sure if he meant it genuinely.
Everyone wants something,
Gordon told himself.
If you want to know what, look for whatever it is they don’t have.
Thinking back over the games Bentley had played with him, Gordon deducted, power. But also, friends. Strange, he thought, how Bentley’s desire for one seemed to cancel out the possibility of the other.

“Morning,” Gordon trilled as he approached the podium. He stopped and leaned upon it, inquiring about the type of vehicle Bentley drove, coveting it aloud, though the vehicle Bentley referenced was as ordinary as the next. Gordon shook his head, repeated Bentley’s brand again, as though it were smoother than sliced bread.

He determined to shake in a few derogatory comments over the next couple of days about Chandler’s work habits and perhaps her entire gender, and in less than a week’s time, Bentley would be his fastest friend.

Gordon watched chandler through the webbed glass: her hand upon the computer mouse, the last three fingers raised slightly, pinky out as if taking tea. Her face was awash with the screen’s glow and her eyes had a questing look to them. All whites. The skin about her eyes was stunningly supple, without wrinkles. Her mouth was a tender pink ring, without lipstick, smooth, just gloss. Gordon watched the mouth change as he swung into her office, his fingers still hooked around the door frame, a simple lean-in. Poised for greeting, the words that came out of his mouth to change the shape of hers were
“Bon matin, nous sommes morts.”

She wrinkled her brow at him.

The next day, the same scene, but in English: “Good morning, we’re dead.”

Chandler’s lips gripped themselves up into the corners. She paused, then gave Gordon a tentative wave.

And the next day, again in French:
“Vous êtes morte.”

A head nod.

English: “You are dead.”

A finger gun sent him on his way.

French:
“Oui, vous êtes encore morte.”

A blank stare.

English: “Yup, still dead.”

Her eyes remained fixed on the screen.

Encore en français: “Bonjour, la mort.”

She stood up, crossed the space in two strides, and closed the door, nearly on his fingers.

On the seventh day, Gordon rested.

“It’s not enough.” Daves offered up the printed files of their secret project. Blocking the entrance to Gordon’s cubicle, he flipped through the layouts and spoke quietly but without paranoia. “I mean, it can be, if you don’t want to knock out as much of
Darling Deception
, leave a bit more than the first and last page, plunk your text somewhere in the middle, say. But, uh, I think that’s more likely to confuse the reader. Wha’d’you think?”

“I can write some more,” Gordon assured him. “How much?”

Daves shrugged, slapped a palm against his jeans, eyeballs slanted toward the ceiling, accessing the part of his brain that was good with physical space, estimation. “You’ve already got a hundred pages, so . . . another hundred?”

Gordon nodded.
Not a problem
. “When does it start thinning out around here for the holidays?”

“Well, I’ll be in. Buncha the Designs will too. Should get pretty quiet soon though. Say we’ve got about a week ’til the office is clear. Bear in mind, even once we push this through, it’ll take a while to get out. There’s some lag time. I mean, Heaven distribution is something, but it’s just the nature of shipping, and then receiving and stocking once it gets to the stores. You ever work on that end?”

Gordon shook his head. He’d done enough ordering for Whoopsy’s, but he didn’t think he could equate it with bookstore experience.

“From what I can tell, book-club readers are gonna get theirs first. I’d say, once it goes out the door . . . probably about a month before management gets wind of it.”

Manos’s capped head bobbed outside the cubicle opening, and Daves greeted him with a head nod without breaking a sweat. “See the top of this page, how it falls in layout . . .” Daves leaned into Gordon’s cubicle, opening their fake manuscript randomly and pointing with his thumb. The way he leaned blocked the pages from Manos’s view. “Should there be a paragraph break? You’re the proofreader, you tell me.” Manos passed without incident.

Gordon arched his eyebrows at Daves’ ingenuity but said nothing. He flipped the pages, examining his own words typeset. He had been judicious in his use of profanity to be sure it didn’t pop from the page, causing undue suspicion in the casual skimmer.

“You know, that’s some freaked-up horse pucky there, Gord,” Daves remarked, hooking one elbow over the partition, borrowing some of Gordon’s least favourite Heaven Books slang. “Kinda makes me worry about you. It’s, uh, it’s good writing, and I’m happy to help, don’t get me wrong. I just . . .” Daves shook his head. “It’s a novel, yeah? Fiction? I mean, it
is
fiction, right?”

“I had a book once . . .” Gordon said as he stared at the page.

“You have a book?” Above Gordon’s head Daves was suddenly all smiles, as if Gordon’s flights into fancy could now be forgiven.

“I did.”

“That’s amazing. So, this is, like, your follow-up?”

The page that lay open before them contained a full run of suicide statistics. Gordon had included them for reasons even he himself didn’t comprehend. The line about 20 percent of U.S. suicides being from toxification (poisoning and overdose) jumped out at him. As did the causes: depression, pain (physical or emotional, non-correctable), stress (grief, guilt, failure), crime, mental illness, substance abuse, adverse environment, financial loss, sexual issues (including unrequited love and breakups).

“You might say that.”

15

Time was longer in heaven. Boredom had driven Gordon to many dull and desperate things in his lifetime: whistling, learning to spit far distances, marijuana, masturbation, masturbation involving fruit, alcohol, prescription drugs, several combinations thereof, overeating, undereating, shoplifting, medieval literature, Roland Barthes, William S. Burroughs, pornography, acoustic guitar, foreign films, and even sports in his youth, though on the field he never held much more command than a blade of grass. In the latter part of high school and shortly after, there were even girls — girls for practice. Practice girls. Nice girls he should have thought himself lucky to get. Girls with big teeth and small breasts. Girls who probably went on to be knockouts when they were more confident and had dated guys less selfish than he. (He’d wondered at first if Chloe might be one of those, and he hadn’t always returned her calls, as if to convince himself she was.) But of all these things, by far the most impetuous cure for boredom Gordon had ever attempted was his current self-imposed reading of romance novels. Still, it beat watching the TV in the Floor Six gym, which broadcast business and health reports he wouldn’t have paid attention to while alive, and which doubly lost their meaning after death. Options were limited. Gordon had his own mind to entertain him, or the romance novels.