Heaven Is Small (17 page)

“The usual? What did you talk about yesterday?”

Georgianne shrugged.

“Okay, today then?”

“Asked me when I’d be home.”

“And when will you be?”

Georgianne looked at her watch. It was thin, silver, with little faux diamonds all around the face. She’d received it for her fifth anniversary at Heaven. “Well, finish here at five-thirty, we live up in Newmarket, so depending on traffic . . .” She shrugged again, a gesture Gordon couldn’t recall her using previously.

“Oh, does it get busy out that way?” Gordon played along. “How long on a good day? Forty-five minutes, an hour?”

“What, planning to come for supper?” Georgianne snapped with unusual acerbity. “I’ve only been getting in six hundred lines an hour lately, Gordon. Sorry, but since I’m a little behind” — she tilted her chin — “you should probably go now.”

The next day, at 3:35 p.m. Gordon swung by Georgianne’s cubicle.

“Hey Georgy-girl, call your daughter yet today?”

“No,” she said, frostily.

“Don’t you think you should? See if she liked her lunch? Find out what happened at school, what she wants for supper?”

Georgianne glared at him. “If I didn’t know you, Gordon, I would think there was something a little . . .” She searched for the word, glancing at the cubicle wall that she shared with Manos. Her voice dropped. “. . .
queer
about your interest in my daughter.”

They both held their ground.

“Okay, I’ll call her,” Georgianne said when she saw he had no intention of leaving, “if only to show you that our lives are as regular as anyone else’s. Not that it’s any of your
fu-dging
business.” She dialled. “Hi, Jolene, honey . . . Just wanted to call and see how you are . . . A couple of hours,” she said, as if around a razor blade in her throat. She hung up the phone quite suddenly.

“Mmm?”

“She asked when I’d be home . . .” Georgianne stared at the telephone morosely.

“That’s funny. Didn’t she ask you that yesterday?”

Georgianne nodded. “I guess I’m not there enough.” Her voice broke and she covered her eyes. “I’m a bad mom.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, you must think so, or you wouldn’t have come over here two days in a row to prove it to me.” She began to sob, thick hiccups curling behind her hand.

Even in his more sensitive days, the Chloe days, the days of Gord and Chloe, Gordon Small had not been so good with tears. But now he moved with the kind of ease that comes when one knows there aren’t consequences to touch. He placed one hand on Georgianne’s shoulder — a nubby knit — and held onto it, for as long as needed, as long as it would take for her to stop. She didn’t stop.

“You’re not a bad mom, Georgianne. It’s just that you’re . . .”

She stopped and looked up.

Gordon let go. “. . . dead.”

“Fuck,” Georgianne said, uttering the first real curse he had heard since he’d been at Heaven.

16

An hour later Gordon found Georgianne Bitz with her hands in the kitchen sink. “What is that?”

“What does it look like?”

“A bra.”

“Very good. Gold star.”

“You’re washing your bra in Sunlight?”

“Well, where are you washing your clothes? I mean, if I haven’t been home in eight years, I’m obviously not washing them there, so . . .” Between her furious thumbs the white nylon scrunched with suds. “I — I can’t live knowing that. What’s your secret?”

Gordon looked down. He couldn’t say that he wasn’t washing, that he hadn’t washed the suit — or his gotchies — in however many months had passed since he’d arrived.

He wondered, actually, not counting trailing after Chandler Goods and harassing every co-worker like a post-apocalyptic prophet preaching in reverse, what
had
he been doing?

that evening georgianne came to find him. Gordon looked up, and above his cubicle wall her face, like a bad oil portrait, floated inside the crooked brown frame of her hair, which had come half undone. She had been crying without any tears. The scientist in him wondered what that felt like.

“I don’t know what to do.” Her voice sounded as though it had been poured through heavy cheesecloth; slowly it filtered through.

Gordon turned away from his computer, whose clock read two minutes until quitting time. “You can do what you’ve always done, or you can do something else.”

“But . . . what did I always do?” Georgianne’s forehead scrunched into her eyebrows and the bridge of her nose so that it wasn’t simply a stitch that appeared, but an elaborate archway of lines.

“You went down to the parking garage as if you were going home.”

“How do you know? Did — did you follow me?” Her voice carried a note of suspicion.

Gordon shook his head. “Fleur.”

“But you suspect I’m the same?”

Gordon lifted one shoulder. “She got into her car. She sat at the wheel, staring out past the dashboard. Eventually she fell asleep. I suspect, though” — Gordon paused — “her eyes were open. . . . The same is true of Jill and Jon. I’ve only been down once in the middle of the night. I find it kind of creepy, to tell you the truth. To turn in a circle and see everyone sitting in their vehicles like that, just staring out. Like they’re inside recharging pods.” He shook his head to clear the image from his mind. A thought occurred to him, and he leaned toward her, his hands between his knees. “Do you dream there? Do you remember dreaming?”

Georgianne lowered her eyes, which were heavily wrinkled. Today, for reasons Gordon understood, she looked closer to fifty than forty. “I don’t know. I think I’m in shock. After what you’ve told me, I don’t remember anything.”

“Try going down tonight. See if you do.”

He meant it earnestly, but the smile she presented to him was tired and twisted. “What, are we pathologists now?”

“Well, there’s TV and radio in the gym, if you prefer that. And the Net Division on Floor Fifty-Eight has every entertainment you could want. But if you’re hoping to spend the night there, you’ll have to hurry. It’s not accessible after 5:40, so you’ve got less than ten.”

“Thank you, Gordon.” Georgianne reached out and patted Gordon’s head as if he were a child. “Thank you so much for sharing with me. Tell me something else . . .”

He waited her out. Given the tone she had adopted, he wasn’t about to make any more suggestions.

“Do you know how I died?”

He said nothing.

“So you do, because you haven’t denied it. Let’s see: fire, drowning, illness, unexpected tumor — strike that, I’d definitely remember — stroke . . .” Georgianne folded down a finger with every suggestion. “Suicide, murder, death by lightning, act of terrorism, plane crash, car accident — Ah, there it is, that’s the one. I can see it all over you. Thanks, Gordon. Thanks again. You’ve been a real dear.” She walked stiffly away, leaving Gordon with the distinct impression that one of his few confidants in Heaven had no intention of speaking to him for the rest of eternity.

At around ten at night Gordon rose from his computer and left his cubicle. Pocketing and unpocketing his hands, he ventured around the floor. It was his hope that Georgianne might have had enough hours alone to absorb the trauma and would be willing to talk to him again.

How long do you need to shake off the shock of your own mortality? Is it a longer process than that of other traumas?
he asked himself as he walked through the kitchen. He opened the fridge — as if there would be some tuna evidence of Georgianne there — pulled out an apple that did not belong to him, inspected it, rubbed it against his shirt, and bit, all the while concluding that he himself might be in shock even now. Nonetheless, he continued his search for Georgianne. A part of him wished it had been Chandler who had clued in. But he knew she wasn’t constructed that way. Chandler was hard-wired for denial. It was part of her optimism. He looked for Georgianne in the Design Department, the cafeteria, the gym, even down in the courtyard where he regularly ashed with Daves. Gordon narrowed his eyes at Security as he passed the station, but the guy didn’t look up from the
Auto Trader
he had been reading for three months.

Gordon debated ducking into the parking garage to see if Georgianne had followed his advice. He knew she drove a coffee-brown Saturn. The idea of going down there and wandering among the cars gave him the heebie-jeebies; still, he stepped into the elevator and pressed the appropriate button. When the doors parted, he caught a whiff of gasoline and immediately shielded his eyes with one hand, hit Close Doors, and commanded the lift to take him to the other level of the basement, the one that led to the Passage.

Once, when Gordon was alive, he had wound up in the basement of a hospital. He had gone alone to visit his aunt because his mother hadn’t been able to make it that day. When he went to exit, he’d asked a nurse for directions to place him outside the building, closest to where he had parked. Her instructions, though direct, had unkindly sent him down to the entranceway to the morgue. He had stepped off the elevator and stopped short, as if exiting into a brick wall. He had known the smell of the dead when it hit, and it sent an instant dread through his nostrils and down his throat. It had been enough to make Gordon want to spin right around again and retreat. Had it been a smell, he wondered now, or simply a vibe? A gut feeling? The doors to the morgue were unmarked, yet Gordon had believed without a doubt that that was where he was. A young orderly with a gurney had rattled by at that moment, and though the stretcher carried equipment, not a human form, beneath that pale green cloth, the orderly had given Gordon a look of empathy embedded in warning, as if he did not wish Gordon to see what lay beyond the double doors he was heading toward. He’d jerked his head in the other direction and said simply, “That way.”

Gordon didn’t smell the tang of the terminated now; he was one of them. But the trancelike austerity of the parking garage at night, with its concrete and arrows and all its unseeing eyes, sent him into the same state of uncanny quivering. It made his ears well with static. It raised the hairs along his spine and rocked his stomach from side to side. Was it his form of denial, to not be able to join the rest of the dead?

He exited instead into the first basement, located a garbage can, and disposed of the sticky core that was left of the apple. Then, tentatively, he edged along the Passage and pushed open the door of the bra and underwear manufacturer he’d spotted on an earlier trip. Row on row of machines clacked behind a partition. When she spotted him through the plate glass, a woman with a clipboard exited the workroom to stand behind a counter. “What do you need?” she yelled over the racket of needles plunging through polyester.

Gordon wasn’t sure. Mentally he was picturing Chloe’s breasts — he still knew her size — and comparing them to Georgianne’s. But the process of deducing that Georgianne was likely a few inches larger around and a cup size or two up also required Gordon to picture Georgianne’s breasts in his hands, to physically weigh them against Chloe’s.

“What do you need?” Clipboard barked again.

“Something for a friend.” She gave him a look as if that went without saying. “C, I think.”

“Thirty-two? Thirty-four? Thirty-six? Forty?” The woman ran through the sizes like a football quarterback; Gordon expected her to add a “hup” to the end. Instead, with exasperation, she produced a number of garments from the bins behind the counter and he pointed dumbly to the ones that looked right. He took three, to be on the safe side. All were white, since he didn’t want his gesture misinterpreted. As he swiped his debit card, he pictured the plain brassieres neatly arranged in a row on Georgianne’s desk. In his mind a neon sticky note attached itself to one vacant mesh boob. What would he write on the Post-it?
Downstairs, First Basement, Tunnel A.
Or maybe,
An apology
.

Afterward, lavender shopping bag in hand, Gordon headed toward the immense mailroom where Ames worked and communication conveyor-glided.

Like the stitchers in the sewing factory next door, the postal workers laboured all hours. Their energy and noise buoyed Gordon, and every so often he came down to the tunnel just to hear the clack of their machines and the sound of their laughter. Why they seemed more human, less repressed than all of the workers up on Twelve, he could not say. Perhaps it was because they weren’t helping to create fantasy twenty-four hours a day; they were simply moving. Their fingers whirled over postal codes. Their minds remained their own. He had learned that if he leaned in, dressed in his suit as he was, the inhabitants of the mailroom were likely to assume one of two things: that he was a lost employee from upstairs or that he was managerial, visiting from somewhere off-site, sent in momentarily to check up on them. In either case, he was pleasantly ignored.

Tonight he had only barely nudged open the doors when a bulbous woman turned around to face him. All abdomen, she stood at the table nearest him, a sheaf of envelopes in her hands. On the bottom she was wearing the same shade that cloaked her co-workers, a below-the-knee chocolate work skirt. Unlike them, she had been permitted to wear a bone-coloured cotton blouse. Wraparound, it tied on one side, the fabric lingering tautly upon the ridge of her inflated belly, riding up just enough that Gordon could see a white stretched smile of skin. Gordon caught himself, placing his hand securely upon the door as if he might fall back through it otherwise.

The woman was about his age, with a long Irish nose, her complexion roseate and freckled, flushed from the pregnancy. Her eyes were watery blue. Her cornsilk hair had been tied into a makeshift bun, and floating strands escaped around her ears and eyes. She shelved the letters she was holding upon her abdomen as they exchanged looks. Her mouth pursed with expectation, as if Gordon had come specifically to speak to her. But the certainty of her death, the unfairness of its occurring only weeks before her delivery date, crumpled him. He had nothing to tell her. Behind her the fluorescents droned and the envelopes threshed through other hands, sounding like birds flying. Tonight it was the saddest, most resonant thing Gordon had ever heard: the sound of paper being shuffled through the fingers of strangers. She bestowed on him a warm but wistful smile, as if she would rather be somewhere else, and turned her nine-month torso away again, the would-be child inside it gently brushing the workroom counter, possibly placing its tiny fetal toes against the surface through the membrane of her flesh. Long tables and grey conveyors carried language away, away, away.