1.
Gordon sat and waited in the lobby outside of the office of a man powerful enough to have an entire lobby outside his office. In his nine years of employment he had never known a federal government building to be this nice on the inside, which impressed and worried him at the same time. The carpet had not charged him with enough static electricity to jump start his car battery. The chair he was sitting in, upholstered in leather, had no gum stuck under the seat cushion, at least not until he deposited his flavourless piece there as soon as he was sure the stern-looking receptionist was not looking. The copy of the Free Press on the coffee table was from that very morning, not like last Saturday’s paper collecting dust on the coffee table in his apartment. There was real art on the walls, including one giant Group of Seven landscape taking up an entire wall, and a water cooler with both regular and extra-cold taps. Gordon did not know why he was there. He figured he could ask whoever he was there to see, but he didn’t know who that was either. He became less calm.
He fiddled with his ugly tie and wondered why ties only became pleasant to look at when they cost more than he was willing to pay for them. At least it covered up the coffee stain on his shirt. His grey pants were notable for having a freshly-pressed crease down the side of each leg, even though he has never touched them with an iron. He felt out of place in this lobby, which was bigger than his apartment, like he was an imposter to his own expectation, a man wearing sweatpants inside a fine jewellery shop. If he was approached by a well-tailored man who asked him in a gentle whisper to leave the premises, he would have nodded and left without making a scene. No one did, even when he accidentally slurped loudly from the side of his mug, not the flimsy conical paper cups shoved into a spring-loaded dispenser but a real mug. He took advantage of this opulent water cooler right when he came in and went back for a refill ten minutes later. Now he wanted a third, but he wondered if the receptionist noticed him drinking all that water before, and if she would relay that information to her boss.
Gordon first interrupted the privacy of the receptionist when he showed up for his job interview fifteen minutes early. She had the air of a not-too strict Catholic upbringing, something Gordon trained himself to recognize early for the sake of time and pain. Her eyes said she was well-read and icy. Gordon thought about flirting with this imaginary version of the receptionist, but even in his head it didn’t go very well. He was too antsy to develop a more fulfilling fantasy, so his eyes drifted over to the humongous Group of Seven landscape on the far wall.
Although he recognized that it was a Group of Seven, he knew nothing more about the Group of Seven. He tried to remember any of their names and drew a blank even though he was pretty sure that there were really as many as eleven people in the Group at one time. Gordon wished he knew more about them; he admired their works but found it difficult to tell the difference between the merely technically solid and true masters. It was also how Gordon felt about soccer players. Gordon knew more about the type of people who owned Group of Seven paintings, or at least thought he did, for more than his appreciation of art was his intense distrust of his own surroundings. He needed more sleep, but another glass of water was the best his surroundings had to offer.
He ambled over to the other side of the room with the dual intentions of looking for the artist’s signature and sneaking a third mug of water while the receptionist’s head was turned. He didn’t want to sabotage his chances at choosing what’s in the box, his mystery job, before the start of the game. He had already filled out a hundred pages of personality tests and a thorough physical exam, with the lung capacity ball in a tube test, and the heartbeat sensor pads that had left two asymmetrical bare circles in the middle of his chest hair. None of this was standard procedure when he was first hired by the federal government. The amount of interest his employers had recently taken in his urine made him nervous. He also had to phone his mom to ask for the maiden name of his grandmother, and that turned into fifteen minutes of listening to news about his brother and a reluctantly accepted and invitation to Friday dinner. Hadn’t this screening process tortured him enough? He briefly considered bailing on this bad scene altogether.
After all, this interview was just an address and time in his work e-mail account. The e-mail was sent from an account named Admin Govt. It would surprise him a lot if Admin Govt was the real name of the interviewer. He put up with the secrecy after he asked his boss whether or not he knew anything about this and he hadn’t heard anything, meaning it was much better than both their jobs. Even after the physical continued into Gordon’s lunch hour and he had done so much treadmill running that he could almost see the dangling carrot of a possibly amazing new job in front of him as he ran in place. Whatever job it was, it demanded a lot of extra-curricular work from IT specialists.
He jumped when the phone on the receptionist’s desk broke the silence. She answered the receiver with lightning reflexes and didn’t say a word before hanging up. “You can go into the Brigadier-General’s office now.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did you not catch that? The Brigadier-General is ready for you.”
“No, I heard you,” Gordon wiped up the condensation left by his coffee mug on the finished wood surface with his shirt cuff before she could get to it. He smiled politely and continued. “Why am I being interviewed by a Brigadier-General?”
“He was promoted from Colonel last year, in January.”
“I don’t understand why the military wants a programmer. I only applied for this job posting because it sounded interesting, then you made me fill out all those forms, and run in place and pee in a cup, and all I’m asking for is a little heads up on what’s behind that door.”
The secretary sighed and went back to typing. “One, I don’t know why you’re here either. When things are top secret like this job interview is top secret, it’s usually best when the parties in question, in this case you and the Brigadier-General, don’t tell anyone. Two, his time is very valuable, and right now you are wasting it. And three, I did not make you pee in a cup. I do not deal with pee, at all, your pee is a whole other department. So don’t ask me again. Your pee is none of my business.”
“This isn’t an ambush, is it? Tell me why you took my pee.”
“You can go into his office, now,” she used the electric pencil sharpener for punctuation.
“He didn’t even come in the door,” Gordon said.
“He uses a different entrance. Please get in there, right now.”
Gordon approached the double doors with caution, unsure of which handle to try.
The receptionist read his mind and said, “The door on your right.” The sound of typing filled the lobby and drowned out Gordon’s mumbled words of thanks.
Upon entering the Brigadier-General’s office and spying no other door in the room, he looked at the likely candidates for entrances to possible secret passageways. Two bookcases on opposite sides of the room were the classic choices, with a yank on a certain book the whole thing could spin into the wall leaving the room minus a bookcase but up one fireplace. That was too easy, of course, but he was left with few other options. There were no giant one-way mirrors, or any fireplaces, or floor-to-ceiling paintings, just small framed pieces, maybe Group of Seven, bookshelves, and a large rug that Gordon suspected had a trap door under it. There was a chair for visitors, wooden and unpadded, surely designed to be uncomfortable. The imposing silhouette of the Brigadier-General sat behind his proportionally massive desk, backlit against the only window in the room. He didn’t cast a shadow, he eclipsed the sun.
“Have a seat, son,” he said, a voice that shook the paintings crooked and turned Gordon’s stomach, too full of water. He was a man in clear violation of mandatory retirement rules, but nobody would tell him to retire for the wholly legitimate fear of being defenestrated or disembowelled for their insolence. He looked like he wrestled lions on the weekends to stay fit for his Monday night sparring sessions with silverback gorillas. His human body was just the beta version for a future bronze statue in his likeness. His shoulders were wide enough for half a dozen pigeons, each.
Since waking up ninety minutes ago, Gordon had two cups of water and coffee each. His nerves pushed all that liquid through his system in record time, and he started to squirm in his seat. He had ten minutes tops before a bathroom break. Those hopes were dashed when the Brigadier-General produced a file folder stuffed to burst with paper in three different colours and annotated with at least five different colours of sticky notes. The Brigadier-General flipped to the first page marked with translucent purple arrows and nodded. “Some weather we’re having, huh,” he said, not looking up.
Outside, waves of snowflakes ran laps around office buildings and dinged off the window like bugs on a windshield. This was all typical of a March morning in Winnipeg, a terrible city all year to be sure, but one that gets extra depressing in winter. As soon as it gets too cold for mosquitoes, and the Prairie winds get real fierce, Winnipeg becomes a de facto hell-frozen-over. The only thing he dreaded more than the interview itself was the walk back to his car across Portage and Main, scientifically documented by the government as the windiest intersection in all of Canada. When he was nine, he swears the wind picked him up and moved him a foot and a half to the right, dropping him on the street and into oncoming traffic. Now every time he crosses that intersection he darts full-speed across and hurdle jumps over the snow bank on the other side. On the off chance that he slips and performs a vaudeville pratfall for his street corner audience, it’s too cold to laugh, because a deep breath of air is guaranteed to freeze the back of the throat and start a coughing fit. Heaven help those who don’t plug their car heaters in at night. Everybody is sore from shovelling out their driveways and tired from arriving at work when it’s still dark and leaving when just getting dark again, they all just mope and trudge through the snow like they’re on thought control pills in a futuristic dystopia movie, before masked vigilante gets around to defeating fascism by smashing all the TV screens.
“Yea, Winter in Winnipeg,” Gordon said. He couldn’t tell if this was an off-hand comment or the start of the job interview. If it was, he wished he had elaborated.
“So you’re pretty good with computers, eh?”
That was as vague as an interview question got, so Gordon decided to recite straight from the cover letter to his résumé. “I know how to code for HTML, XML, a bunch of other languages you’re probably not interested in, but I assure you, I know my networks too. I like to think I don’t just make computer programs, I build solutions. I helped set up my building’s Intranet a few years back but that system got abandoned halfway through, actually, but after that I did some tinkering with the subnets over at-”
“Don’t bother,” the Brigadier-General waved the answer off. “I don’t know a damn thing about computers, I let my grandkids figure it out for me. Hate it when my kids hand the phone to the little brats. I can hear them rolling their eyes through the damn phone line.”
Gordon thought his interviewer was starting to loosen up, so he slouched in his seat, an easy task when his seat had less friction than a wet Crocodile Mile. “Kids these days.”
“Fucking kids talk down to me about the damn machines like they figured out how to make Helen Keller stop biting people. I’m sorry I’m never learned how to forward an e-mail account, kids, by the way, how are the German lessons going? What’s that, you’re not learning German in school? You’re fucking welcome,” he sighed. “Damn things give them all the attention span of houseflies. They can’t see anything through to the end anymore. But hey, not all of us can kill a man with two thumbs and a ring finger.”
Gordon sat straight up again. “Can you really?”
“I lost my wedding ring twice that way,” he said. “What’s the time, by the way? Is it ten yet? You want a scotch? It’s Canadian, but at least it’s aged.” The Brigadier-General didn’t wait for his answer and pulled two glasses from his desk drawer.
Drinking before noon was only something Gordon only did on Sundays. Maybe he had to accept it, or maybe that rule doesn’t apply to civilians. He decided he did not want to end up on the wrong end of the man’s ring finger. He could smell the scotch the moment the bottle was cracked, and it made a shiver run through him.
The Brigadier-General handed him his glass. “Your pee is clean, in case you were wondering. Well, clean for the stuff we check for.”
“What kind of stuff don’t you check for?”
“Ice? For the scotch?” Gordon waved the offer off. “Good man. By the way, what’s your running long jump like?”
“I can make it over the snowbank on the curb outside,” Gordon said as he took a sip. He coughed loudly, harshly, and tasted his own phlegm, still burning from the drink.
“That’s more of a high jump,” he said, making a note on a page with a translucent green plastic sticky. He tipped his glass back and downed it without pulling whiskey face. “Ever do any archival work?”
“I helped digitize and catalogue some Group of Seven stuff when I temped at the gallery. I was just admiring the,” Gordon trailed off and gestured in the direction of the lobby.
“The Lawren Harris in the lobby,” he finished Gordon’s thought. “Damn good painter. Kept at it ‘til his ticker went bust.” He tapped his own chest with one finger. It made a dull thump that could have been a Kevlar vest, if Gordon hadn’t already supposed that the Brigadier-General had been born bulletproof. “Next question, describe in detail any family history of schizophrenia. Try to keep it under fifty words, I’ve only got three lines on the sheet here.”
Gordon fidgeted in his seat. Soon he’d be dancing in place just to hold it in. He would have to run out into the lobby when this was all over and hope the receptionist was good at giving directions. “None. Look, I’m just going to go-”
“You’re not to type who likes getting the run-around. I can see you’ve had just about enough, so I’ll cut maybe ninety percent of the bull straight out from here on out. We just needed to assess if you were the right man for the job. The post comes with unique physical and psychological challenges in a harsh and inhospitable environment.”
“Sounds like high school,” Gordon said. He was standing up to a man who could undoubtedly kick his ass across the country in a cross-country marathon of ass-kicking. All he knew was he needed to pee very badly, the symptoms were growing exponentially harder to ignore by the minute, and his interviewer had been giving him the run-around since he stepped foot into his Bond villain lair of an office. Every reply from here on out would be direct and short, just like when the cops asked him questions through the car window at a Checkstop program.
“You ever been up North? We have a little town up in the territories that needs some work done, setting up the Internet and whatnot. I can tell you that it’s cold as shit and they don’t get cable, but you get to ride a snowmobile to work in the winter, and all the seals you can club. Order anything you need and it gets sent by priority mail. I’m pretty sure they got a whole damn squad of computer geeks like you up there already, you’d fit in fine talking about your video games and dragon books, that sort of thing. Of course, the government pays for the move, most of the cost of living, you’re won’t be on the hook for four dollar instant noodle bowls. Your savings grow, you get to have an impressive sounding job title, and you get to work in one of the most special places on Earth. I’m serious, Gordon. There’s really nothing like it. All you have to do is say yes and sign some confidentiality papers, and it’s a done deal. It’s an easy decision. The only caveat is the strict confidentiality. As far as anyone outside of this room knows, this town, and your new job, they don’t exist.”
“What if I’d rather stay at my job now, in Winnipeg?”
“Both you and I know that nobody in the history of mankind has ever wanted to stay in Winnipeg. Look son, I’m not some used-car dealer with a shit-eating grin come to sell you some rust bucket.”
Gordon braced for the inevitable discussion about undercoating.
“I know you’re going to accept the offer,” the Brigadier-General said, convincing because he has not broken eye contact with Gordon for the whole interview. It’s like sonar reading Braille but the man has mastered it, and he believes everything he reads. Gordon was going to say yes, of course. That was the worst part, that he was right. “Even before you said yes, you said yes. Everything in this folder I have here points to you saying yes. Your job history, your test scores, the notes the doctors made on your hospital chart when you got hit in the head with a stick on the playground in the winter of 1981 and needed three stitches. Most people say yes as soon as we get to the part where the government flips the bill. Of course, if you don’t say yes, we can forge your signature, put a burlap sack over your head, and next thing you know, you’re kicked out of an airplane, somebody tugs your parachute cord, and the story ends the same way.”
Then the Brigadier-General laughed like a burst of machine gun fire, quick and suppressive. “I had you there for a second. But the job is real, son. All I need is to hear you say it.”
“Yes,” Gordon said. “Let’s get going.”
“Well, you made the right choice! You’ll love it in Makpigat. I haven’t been up there in years. Fucking freezing there. You’ll be ready for it, though, after living in this hellhole all your life. Another whiskey?”
“No thanks. Gotta go.”
“Say hello to Tom for me when you get there. And don’t forget to carry some rocks in your pocket, to throw at those goddamned dogs,” the Brigadier-General said. He gave Gordon a bone-crunching handshake from across the desk. “Thank you, Gordon, for doing this the easy way.”
Gordon fled the room and danced in place, leaning on the receptionist’s desk as she handed him form after form, each with little red sticky notes where he had to sign. She would not confirm that the secret entrance was behind the bookshelf on the left, even when Gordon said, “Come on, it’s so obvious.” She just clicked the back of a pen and handed it to Gordon, who skimmed and initialled the bottom of his confidentiality form and flipped it over onto the completed pile along with all the others.
She swiped her pen back and said, “Any questions?”
“Washroom?”
“Down the hall to the right,” she said. “But you won’t make it, and you don’t actually have to go. The extreme sensation of the need to relieve bladder contents is just one of the onset symptoms. You’re gonna wake up tired, but some potassium will clear the clouds.”
“I knew you did something to my pee.”
And the next thing Gordon remembered was waking up in a nice (but budget-conscious) hotel room with a thumping headache and a fruit basket sitting on the desk. The typewritten card stapled to the cellophane wrap told him to eat the bananas first, for the potassium. PS: The drugs were in the water cooler. The mugs must get everybody. Gordon was pissed, as if everyone else paid attention during the Don’t Drink The Water lecture on the first day of spy school. Another crazier part of him liked the secrecy, embraced the emboldening idea that acts of manifest destiny had converted into his good luck. It was a crazy, stupid thought to have, maybe a side-effect of the knock-out drug, a feeling that would pass like the dizziness every time he stood up.
His schedule for the next week had been printed out on the hotel letterhead and placed in an envelope on the bed, a combination of basic survival training classes, arranging for the shipping of his personal items, his family dinner on Friday that he knows he can’t weasel out of now that it appeared on the schedule, and one last night as a free man in the provinces before leaving for his two year-long contract job “building solutions” in Makpigat, Nunavut.
This might even turn out to be a good idea.
