4.

“Euech!”

Gordon woke up to the sound of his newly acquired dog barfing a foamy orangish puddle on the floor and his new boss leaning on the horn of a snowmobile in his driveway.  He rolled over in bed and reached for the clock on the nightstand and knocked over the ashtray instead.   The roach of last night’s joint flying across the bedroom into the puddle of puppy puke and it rained ash over Gordon’s arm when he checked the time, which was later than he expected for it to be as dark as it was outside.  Nukiluk barked some more as Gordon got up and mopped up both messes with some toilet paper from the bathroom.

He opened the front door and let his puppy out into the snow room to do her business outside.  She took a leak on the floor before Gordon got one boot on to undo the latch to the outside door, so he decided to let the steaming yellow snow freeze up.  He could chip it out later, if he ever found the ice pick.  Stepping briskly over the cold floor in bare feet, he held a hand up to Mayor Tom in the international symbol for five minutes.

Mayor Tom took off his helmet.  “Dress warmly!  The tour bus is here!”  He waved his arms to indicate that he was the tour bus, and there was no enclosed, heated, actual tour bus.  Gordon waved back and turned to get dressed for the outdoors, nearly tripping over his puppy.  He took a quick shower in water that fluctuated from lukewarm to cold and added soap to his list after searching every bathroom cabinet.  He found dog food under the sink next to the industrial jug of dishwashing liquid, but no dog bowl.  Nukiluk ate his breakfast out of a frying pan as Gordon prepared for the elements: coat, gloves, toque, scarf, boots, and snowmobile helmet, all conveniently laid out in the front hall closet.

Although he had never driven a snowmobile before in his life, he found it pretty much intuitive.  Twisting the handle like a motorcycle controlled speed, braking was just like riding a bicycle.  He blocked out memories of every bike wipeout on Winnipeg’s Monkey Trails, but he still resisted gunning it fullspeed.  He let Tom keep the pace, since the Mayor knew better than him where they were going first.  They zipped right by the large Federal Building and hung a left towards the shoreline.

“Plenty of time to check out the downtown core later,” Tom yelled to Gordon, who couldn’t hear a word he said over two snowmobile engines.  “Or as we call it around here, the downtown core-ner!  First stop, the docks.”

They killed the engines at a place that looked as flat and ice-covered as the rest of the town, but Tom insisted they were at the docks.  “In a few months, when our channel unfreezes and we get open water again, you can actually see them.  There’s not a view more beautiful in the world, let me tell you.  The inky depths of the Arctic Ocean are beautiful and dangerous, full of hidden icebergs, Russian submarines and sea monsters.  Think Jacques Cartier, and George Simpson, those brave men from centuries ago freezing to death trying to find a passageway out of here.  Somewhere on these very waters, Henry Hudson was eaten alive by his own son.”

“I’m not sure that’s what happened to Henry Hudson,” Gordon said.

“Neither am I,” Tom said with a wink.  “Whoops,  I think we’re too far out.”

He stomped on the ground three times, squinted back in the direction of the town and yelped a weird guttural noise that Gordon thought sounded a lot like when his dog threw up hours before.   “Yep, that echo’s a bit slow.  This isn’t the docks, this is just solid ice under our feet.  The docks are about a hundred meters behind us, maybe more west of the boathouse.  We’re standing above open water.  I suppose you’ll get a better look at this place in the summertime.”

“What’s in there?”  Gordon pointed at the giant concrete building behind the boathouse.  The Federal Building was the tallest, but this was definitely the widest building in town by a long shot.  It had very few windows and a lot of industrial garage doors.  Gordon hadn’t seen it from the air because it had a white roof, slightly domed, and must have looked like a hill of snow.

“Oh, that’s the warehouse.  That’s where we store all the spare parts.  We’ve got to cover every contingency, after all.  We can’t go calling in the army every time it snows, so to speak.”

“It’s bigger than a Home Depot and a Wal-Mart put together,” Gordon said.  That was an understatement, it was bigger than even the parking lots of both stores.  Gordon wondered what mysterious and Machiavellian schemes were being accommodated by the ominous structure.

Tom asked Gordon if he wanted a tour of the warehouse while they were there and he passed on the opportunity for fear of looking too interested.  “I’m familiar with what seventy aisles of shelving looks like,” he said.

“Your loss,” Tom said, instantly confirming Gordon’s suspicions of grandiose ruses being carried out within the warehouse, its gargantuan storage capacity, impossibly large to accommodate merely innocent plans.  “I think it’s rather impressive in there, but it’s your tour.  Moving on!”

Tom slammed his helmet visor back down and the two of them hightailed it over to the sewage processing plant, this time driving a little more aggressively down the still-empty streets-slash-trails.  Gordon wasn’t sure he’d be able to fully appreciate this leg of the tour after the excitement and picaresque qualities of the dockyard and warehouse, and because the sewage plant smelled like an outhouse in August despite the freezing temperature.

“This is the main sewage facility,” Tom explained long after Gordon had figured it out.  “Totally eco-friendly waste processing, all new methods, patents still all pending, believe it or not.  Most everything’s septic up here, it would have been hard to properly dig that deep, permafrost and what have you.  Every once in a while, though, something gives.  That’s why the whole town smells like shit today.”

Tom was glib about the stench, but Gordon choked on a gag reflex.  It smelled like the result of a hangover shit crawling out of the john and going out on a night-long drinking bender, then taking another more concentrated shit the following morning.  “I didn’t notice,” he said to be polite.  He wondered if it was scientifically possible to get used to that smell.

They drove to the greenhouse next.  “Now, I know what you’re thinking: there’s no windows.  First of its kind.  We can grow anything indigenous to the continent above the Tropic of Cancer.  Not really sure how it works, other than the basic principles of hydroponics, but that’s why we keep scientists around.  We just heard of another one, a little better and a little bigger, that opened in Siberia last year.  This one’s still state of the art; somebody just went and changed what constituted the art.”

He thought about asking Tom if there was weed growing in there, and if there was, if there was also a subscription service that delivered it pre-rolled to his mailbox like the DVD service, and he had just been put on the week-long free trial list.  He held his questions, even when they were finally in the parking lot of the Federal Building and Tom asked if he had any.

“Well come on, everyone’s waiting.  It’s not like new people show up every day around here.”

His tour through the Makpigat Federal Building was an onslaught of names and faces, people who worked in construction and labour and at the grocery co-op and at the sporting goods store and the guy who changes the streetlamp bulbs and any other light source over eight feet off the ground.  Gorodn learned that the cold makes streetlights go out rather often, and this is his only job until late May when the streetlights become unnecessary for a handful of weeks: all of that Gordon remembered, but not the guy’s name.  Kevin or Charlie or something boring like that.  There was also Glasses, Blondie, Mullet, Nice Legs, Left-Handed Mug Guy, White Guy With Dreads, Tallest Guy In Town, Chinese Guy With A Chinese Name, Eight-and-a-half-Fingers, Deaf Guy, Chinese Guy With A Normal Name, Oleg (no way was Gordon going to forget Oleg’s name), and dozens of others.  He was actually quite glad that Ronald Fleurry was memorable to warrant his name sticking in his head like chewing gum in sneaker tread, so he could always sidle up to him next time they met and ask him the names of the people with no defining characteristics whatsoever, the government men in white dress shirts and women in neutral coloured blouses, the engineers in short-sleeved dress shirts with novelty cartoon character ties that were all to familiar to him from back home.  Everyone was friendly and waved or shook his hand.  Gordon wondered when they were going to ask his robe size and offer him some Kool-Aid.

Tom took him on a tour through each level of the building.  Gordon was expecting a cross between a doomsday bunker and a mad scientist’s labratory, but the Federal Building was as boring as any old office from anywhere else in the country.  There were pictures of family members on the desks and inoffensive modern art on the walls.  The lobby was the nicest part of the place, with maroon leather couches and a security guy with a handlebar moustache, who from then on was called Handlebars.  The sniffling sounds of the one guy with a cold, the muted pat each footstep made on the industry-standard splatter-pattern carpet, even the plastic plants scattered in various coners reminded him that everything was the same, only colder.  People were doing their jobs like it was lame old Winnipeg outside instead of kilometres of barren, lifeless ice, although the two environments were strikingly similar.

The building was divided by branches of government: Federal on the first floor, Provincial matters like education, health care and snowmobile emission standards were on the second, and the third floor was supposedly Municipal affairs, but nobody appeared to be doing anything up there.  Tom’s office, the farthest door down the third floor hallway, had an elderly secretary who Gordon practically  predicted would be named Gladys before she introduced herself as such.  She had a dish of hard candies on her desk, and Gordon helped himself to one.  He crunched down on it and spent the rest of the day wrestling pieces of Humbug out of his molars with his tongue.

Tom only had one piece of advice that Gordon felt was essential to his future well-being.  Before entering the first floor typing pool room which doubled as a Canada Post office, he held Gordon by the shoulders, locked eyes, and said, “Do not.  Fuck.  With the typing pool.  If this building represents the brain of the town, the old ladies in that room is its eyes, ears, and mouth.  They control the paperwork, so they control your happiness.  All you have to do is remember their names and birthdays.  They like white wine, chocolate, and coffee.  If you don’t follow this advice, God help you: maybe every shirt you order in from then on is a size too small.  They are the only things I fear, and I mean that in an Old Testament, respectful way.  Now go say hello.”

He went inside, smiled and shook hands with each of them as they introduced themselves.  Gordon repeated their names over and over in his head until he was sure he would never, ever forget them: clockwise from the door, they were Marion, Elizabeth, Edie, and , the flight there, how it beat flying Air Canada.  They all smiled.  He asked politely whether or not his house came with a coffee grinder, because he found a bag of whole coffee beans but no grinder.  They said that the whole beans had been a shipping error, and they handed him an official form for the requisition of an electric appliance, subsection Kitchen, subsection medium-sized.  He thanked them all profusely for their help, and backed out of the room with palms soaking the corners of his requisition form.

Tom gave him a pat on the back when they left.  “Good job in there.  You’re safe from any clerical errors for a few months, at least.”

The last stop on the tour was the basement, where Tom said they kept all the computers.  “All the big noisy ones are down here, at least.  I can only assume that’s where you’ll want to start.  Do you think it’ll take long t oconvert this whole town to wireless?  I know many of us are quite excited at the prospect.”

“I really can’t say,” Gordon said. He still had no real idea what he was supposed to do, but he was getting the sneaking suspicion that nobody else knew what he was supposed to do either.  Tom was probably of the same mold as the people Gordon got stuck behind in check-out lines who could barely use their own debit cards, who would swipe it through the wrong way eight times and blank on their PIN number.  He bet the only other person with working knowledge of the town’s communications infrastructure was an acne-ridden thirteen year old with posters of Starship Troopers and Metal Gear Solid on the walls of his poorly-lit bedroom, stale with the smell of dank puberty and the door closed at all times.  His guess was only off by four years.  “I’ve gotta look at both the existing network and all the hardware before I can figure it out.  Best case, you’re gonna need to throw the signal pretty wide to cover the whole town, but you’re also going to need some serious encryption on everything outgoing.  How do you guys e-mail right now, anyway?”

“I’m sorry to say I leave most of that stuff to the younger residents.  Heck, the high school has more computer whizzes than this building does.  I have been living in the Arctic for two decades, which makes it hard to keep up with technology.  Is the rest of the country still using CD-ROMs?  I know that’s how movies come nowadays.”

“Not really.  Everything intangible is basically free on the Internet now.”

“That’s what Guy said too,” Tom said.  “I’m afraid we haven’t been keeping as cutting-edge up here as the borderlands have, but that’s why you’re here.  Anyway, there’s all the boring work stuff to go over, security protocols, probably some more forms the typing pool needs you to fill out, but I’ll just introduce you to our other computer whiz.  You two’ll—”

Tom was interrupted by a beep from the walkie-talkie he carried around clipped to his belt.  “Tom, we got a situation at the school.  UMF, B wing.  You better get down here quick.”

Tom went pale.  Gordon asked if it was bad.  “No, everything’s fine,” Tom said as he ran towards the elevator doors again.  “Just a polar bear.”  He pushed the elevator call button about a dozen times.  “Find Emma, she’s in Room C.  She’s good at all that computer nonsense.  Good luck, have a great first day, dress warmly and if you take the last of the coffee please make another pot.  Bye!”

The elevator doors closed and Gordon was left standing in the hallway, still holding onto his snowmobile helmet in his left hand because nobody gave him a place to put it the whole damn time.  He knocked on the door of Room C and heard a grunt form the other side, but it was a friendly and feminine grunt.

The room was lit exclusively by blinking green lights and computer screens, with mazes of wires.  Gordon’s heart sunk a bit, and he knew it would be a lot of work before he got this place into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.

“You must be the Gordon, wizard of the Internet.”  Emma introduced herself and adjusted her Janeane Garofalo glasses, which Gordon knew from experience to never call Janeane Garofalo glasses.  It had been four years since anyone had mentioned that actress in a favourable context.  Gordon peeked at her monitor and saw she had been playing a game of Minesweeper before he showed up.

“I’m a Consulting Retired V.P., Tech Division,” she said.  “What title did they let you give yourself?”

It was extremely hot in that little room, just shy of stifling.  He started to shed his outer shell until he was down to his semi-tucked-in short-sleeved work shirt.

“I’m the senior executive networking specialist,” he said.

“Sounds like I outrank you,” she said.  “So better get to work.”

The idea of working was like going to Disneyworld and being told you had to spend the entire time at EPCOT.  But a career with the federal government taught him that not only was life unfair, but he was to shut up and take the cruelties of his circumstances with an exasperated sigh and an excuse to pass the buck always at the ready.  He was about to start wandering around the servers when Emma blocked him with an arm.

“You know I’m kidding, right?”  There’s not much to do around here, that is, until you really figure out the situation.  I’m a glorified maintenance guy, I’m afraid.  Neil, he was the first tech guy before you, he networked every computer in the building.  I just field calls to help somebody who accidentally went into Safe Mode or figure out why Freecell stopped working.”

“So where’s Neil?”

“Dead,” Emma said.  “That’s why you’re here.”

Dealing with bad news, even this belatedly, always resulted in an awkward moment where Gordon failed to think of an appropriate reply.  People who are used to delivering that sort of news recognize how insincere it sounded to say sorry, and though Gordon was sympathetic towards the untimely (was it?) and tragic (was it?) death of a complete stranger, an apology would only be for his own misfortune of broaching the topic, akin to strolling onto an unmarked mine field.  If anything, Gordon was the one who deserved an apology for being blindsided by such bad news.  How dare the dead man for piling all that guilt on an innocent question.  Saying “there there” was worse than saying he was sorry, and he certainly couldn’t just give here a hug for sympathy’s sake, so Gordon simply said, “Shit.”

“It happens,” Emma already had one arm down her parka.  “You coming or what?”

“What?”  Gordon was still stuck on the news of his predecessor’s demise.  It had to have been this very building, there wasn’t another building around tall enough for a fatal self-immolation.  He wondered if it would be morbid to ask which side of the building he jumped from.  He just wanted to know which side of the building should give him the heebie-jeebies.

“We’re going to the bar,” Emma said.  “Practically the whole town’ll be there tonight to get a peek at the new guy.  More names to forget.  First round’s on me.”

“Shouldn’t I start working today?”

“It’s not like they’re gonna fire you for slacking off.  Consider it orientation week, like college.  I think you should start with meeting real people first and get acquainted with your computer screen at a later date.”

“You’re the boss,” Gordon proceeded to layer up for outside again.  “Can I just check my e-mail and stuff first, real quick?”

“Ooh, so nobody’s told you?”