THE CAFETERIA WAS CLOSED for renovations and the temporary lunchroom was in the basement. In fact, the temporary lunchroom was actually a meeting room with tables, folding chairs, a microwave, four vending machines, and no windows. Many employees chose to eat at their desks, but some made use of the room.

Clint peeled the plastic off his Crackerz'n'cheze.

“
Cheze
does not look like an English word.” said Anna. She was eating unstirred fruit-at-the-bottom yoghurt.

“Still delicious.” Luddock was eating a mustard-soaked sandwich. The sheer yellow bread revealed the pink of bologna.

“Of course.” Anna reached the fruit layer and beamed into her plastic cup.

“Listen â ” Clint leaned forward “Remember, last Tuesday â ?”

“No!” Luddock waved his sandwich. Bread flapped away from meat. “I download all previous-week memories to the main server at midnight on Saturdays. Frees up disc space for current work.”

“Luddock, no!” Anna squawked, mouth full of pureed berries. “This is not a Tech Support situation. Do not make Tech jokes.”

“Actually, only Tech is sitting at this table.”

“Lunch is our own time. We could be sitting with another department, people who don't even work here. We shouldn't make this a closed conversation.”

“Anna-cat,
how
would we eat lunch with people who don't work here? Unless we walked to the airport?”

Anna set down her empty berry yoghurt and opened the peach. “We might someday end up in a central location, freed from the horrid lunchroom â ”

“Well, it isn't
hor
rid . . .” said Clint. Some cheese residue stuck to the package, eluding the spreader. Clint thought about Virgie safe in her lab, unavailable for judgment, then licked the plastic.

“It's not impossible that we might someday work near a mall with a food court.”

“Dream big.” Luddock sealed his empty Tupperware. “That was very anticlimactic, Anna. Not at all worth quashing my server joke. What were we talking about?”

Clint's Crackerz'n'cheze were just supposed to be the appetizer, but the margarine container of tuna casserole was no longer in his lunch sack. The mysteries of the office fridge. “Tuesday, last Tuesday, my three-month anniversary cake.”

Luddock nodded. “I vaguely recall. Sure was nice of us.”

Anna was eating fast, already down to the peach layer. “A joyous day. You're no longer fireable without just cause
and
you can finally go to the dentist.”

“Dentist, orthopedist, psychiatrist, all your problems are solved now, Clinty. Plus cake.” Luddock was flicking bits of napkin at the finance team. They hadn't noticed.

“No one else remembered.”

“I hate to say it, but not everyone loves you as much as we do, Clinty.”

Clint thought of Virgie's kiss at his door, her hand on his cheek. “No, but, like, management. Mai-Nam didn't give me a full-time offer. My contract ended last week. Technically, I don't work here right now.”

“Oh, but you do.” Anna's curls tossed. “We've got to do that image file migration, and the emphasis is on
we
, buddy.”

“C'mon, Luddock, spitballs?”

Anna flicked one. “They don't actually contain spit. They are actually quite dry.”

“Ok, like, if I'm a real employee,
like I was promised,
shouldn't I have signed a benefits agreement by now?”

Anna nodded. “Did you hear from HR?”

“No, or I wouldn't be asking you. I'd ask them.” Clint had only had half a granola bar for breakfast. He'd given the other half to Anna on the bus.

Luddock was wadding a pear core, yoghurt cups, and snack-pack into a ball. Things were snapping and dripping out of his hands. Anna stood and pulled her skirt neatly over her knees. Clint stood too.

“You can't fight the power, man. All you can do is subvert.” Luddock smashed everything into the wastebasket and clapped Clint's back with his sticky hand, pulling him away from the M&M machine into the hall.

“People with the kind of OSAP payments I got don't subvert.”

“Good point. Before papers have been signed, industrial sabotage is risky.”

“Be fun to set everyone's homepage to porn with sound, though.”

“Hey,
I
might.
I'm
a salary-man.
You
just play the course for now.”

Clint wondered if Anna was glaring because he'd mentioned porn. They went up the elevator, down the hall to the Tech cubes and the long hungry slope of afternoon.

Three weeks passed. Clint started keeping granola bars at his desk, but then a mouse gnawed through a Quaker Chewy Chocolate wrapper, and he switched to canned foods. He kept submitting time sheets and getting paid his probationary hourly wage. He helped Anna finish the art migration and started some menus for the invoice database. He made a PowerPoint about voicemail options. He played the course.

Clint didn't like to sleep at Virgie's during the week because it was so far from work, and he never remembered to bring all the right clothes. When he'd stay, she'd cook something good and
didn't put on a T-shirt to sleep, but Mai-Nam had called him “semi-unprofessional” when Virgie's streetcar made him 37 minutes late, wearing sneakers.

The day he wore Virgie's socks (just black cotton, but they
felt
girlish) Clint noticed an ache at the back of his jaw.

“My mouth hurts,” he said to Anna as she approached with their coffees.

“So you don't want this?” She pulled both cups to her chest, a coffee bra.

“I want it.” He reached towards her breasts. “I'm just telling you.”

“Why does it hurt? Are you stressed and grinding your teeth at night?”

“Dunno.” The first sip scalded him above the molars. “My gums are sensitive.”

“You didn't just say that.” This was Luddock, from his cube. Luddock had a voice that didn't stop at baffles. “You sound 93 and constipated.”

“I think that's an unrelated condition.”

“Feel better, Clinty.” Anna smiled at him with her strong, dairy-white teeth.

He did not feel better that day nor the next, and the morning after that, he woke with the whole right side of his mouth a dull tight throb.

“Ohhaahhh . . .” He meant to sigh, but it came out more of a groan. “Oh . . .”

“What,” said Virgie, from far under the duvet.

“Nothing,” said Clint, but it came out
Nawherm.
He tried again, “Nawtherm.”

Virgie's frazzled braids appeared, her pale half-open grey eyes. “Are you dying?”

“Nah, nah.” That sounded about right. “Too-ack.”

“Toothache?” Her eyes blinked wider, but he knew she couldn't really see him without her glasses. “People don't actually get
those. Not like headaches, come and go, meaningless. When your tooth hurts, something is
wrong
with your tooth. Which tooth?”

She was right in his face, trying to see in his mouth.

“Em fine.”

She reached behind him for her wire rims on the bed stand. Her breasts swung against his chest.

“Open.”

Clint opened his mouth like a baby bird.

“Oh, not good. It's all red and puffy â ” Virgie actually poked in a finger, which tasted salty“ â there in the back. Wisdom tooth. You need to see a dentist.”

“Er.” That should've been
no,
which should've been,
no money.
He made the slippery-fingered money sign.

She rubbed his cheek. “You're in pain, you need a professional to make it stop.” Virgie had the innocence of youth, though they were the same age; staying in school let her stay naÃ¯ve. She had a dental plan through the university. Her parents sent her birthday gifts of cash and flowers. Virgie had no idea about anything, including that Clint was broke or even could be.

The hot shower spray on his jaw softened the pain, but Clint still couldn't really chew his bagel. The first bite he just sucked until it dissolved, which took forever. Then he tried sucking bites with a mouthful of coffee, which was faster, but not very much.

“You're late,” said Anna from under her desk. She emerged ass-first, hauling her power bar, skirt tucked between thighs. “Mai-Nam came by twice and both times I told her you were in the bathroom. Now she thinks there's something wrong with you.”

“There
isth
thomething wrong.”

“Are you gay now?”

“What?” Clint flopped into his chair, which rolled back and almost dumped him.

“Gay? You're lisping.”

“I thin that's homahphobic, Anna,” Clint said very carefully.

“You're probably right.” She stood and shook out her skirt. “I'm sorry.”

“Doan apologize to
me,
it's ther
gay
piple that â ”

BOOK: The Big Dream

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