THE dream started the same way each time.
I am in one of those winter forests of my youth, trees sparse and bare and with their discarded branches poking through the fresh snow. Next to me is an old stone well, its wooden lid covered in a layer of powder. I look down. My boots are dug in as if I’ve been standing still for a long time. I curl my toes at the thought of being alone in this dormant forest, and so I lift a leg and begin walking in whatever direction I am facing. Just then in the chilly air, I am sure I hear an insect pass by my ear, humming with nasty intent. I jolt and swing an arm wildly in hopes of hitting it.
• • •
The first night I dreamt it, I accidentally slapped Meg in the ear hard enough that she jumped out of the bed. In retaliation she swatted at the back of my head. I woke with a start. Hitting a sleeping person is an act of the innately angry, so I squinted at her through caked eyelids and grunted my displeasure. She was still hovering over the bed in my old t-shirt and her bright red underwear, hand raised like a cat’s paw as if to strike again. We both looked at her pipsqueak arm and laughed. It was 5:45am.
This was also my first day of job interviews. Six years of waffling about Godard being an anti-Semite and the relevance of the Panopticon had left me sceptical of what my Bachelor of Arts could snag me, in terms of work. It also left me with the most beautiful, ill-tempered girlfriend who wanted me to pay rent on a Toronto apartment and not slap her in my sleep. As I stood at the bathroom mirror and considered my prospects, Meg grabbed me by the wrist and thrust my fingers into her hair, coercing me to massage her scalp. Through toothpaste and brush she mumbled, “Just be honest with them.” So that’s what I did.
At the first interview, the human resources lady asked, “What was it about our organization that drew you to apply?”
“Well, nothing really,” I said. “I just need money, and my girlfriend told me you guys would hire nearly anybody with a BA.”
At the second interview, a man wanted to know, “How do you plan to harmonize your transition from the educational domain to your career path?”
I told him, “Marijuana, I suppose.”
The third interview was with a panel of three HR people. Their ringleader asked, “Could you give me an example of how you turned an interpersonal challenge into an opportunity?”
“Well,” I started, “when I was a kid we had this old neighbour who lived next door. One day he gave my little brother shit over something or other, so I went over to his house with a rock. The old dude was standing in the doorway, so if I did anything I knew I’d get in trouble. I was going to play it safe but I couldn’t just let my little brother be pushed around. So I took the rock and chucked it right through his front window.” I leaned back, satisfied with my answer. “Sometimes it’s harder to do the right thing but you have to say ‘fuck it’, you know?”
When I got home, Meg was making dinner for me again. Our apartment had some secret source of heat, possibly from the pizza shop below, so even in that autumn weather we had to keep the windows open. Meg was wearing boxer shorts under the apron she had stolen from work, her smooth legs sprouting out of them.
“How did today go? How were the interviews?”
“Good,” I said.
“Good?” she repeated. “Any of them sound like they were going to hire you?”
“Probably not, no,” I told her and smiled.
Her eyes tightened and her lips pinched together as she put down her knife. It’s hard to satisfy someone who is innately angry, especially with words, so I leaned over and kissed her mouth. She pushed my face away with her spidery hand, but not before kissing me back a little. We ate silently and in anticipation of a nice night.
• • •
I am in one of those winter forests of my youth. I wander away from an old stone well and leave a trail of footprints behind me. Somewhere near my ears, a mosquito buzzes and flits and keeps me on edge. The cold gnaws at me until my body feels heavy. Finally, I part the last trees and find myself in a clearing. Here, I find an old log cabin with a single window and door facing me. Smoke exits from a wobbly chimney and my fingers and toes ache with the thought of being warm again. There is nothing around the misshapen cabin, no garden, tools or footprints in the snow. I stand at the edge of the clearing for a moment and then decide to approach the house. Just then, on the exposed skin of my neck, it feels like tiny insect legs have landed and are crawling across me.
• • •
My neck was in a wicked kink when I woke but I was thankful to have not attacked Meg in my sleep. I kissed the back of her head and she unconsciously rolled away from me in protest. I left without waking her and made straight for the haggard coffee shop around the corner. Over a cup and a newspaper, I considered my grim prospects and used a highlighter to mark anything for which I was qualified to apply.
Around ten in the morning, after all the other customers except me had been excreted, the most well-groomed woman I had ever seen entered the coffee shop. She wore a cashmere sweater and a tight skirt under a short, dark cape. Her boots and gloves were dark leather and her eyes were covered in designer sunglasses. All of it looked flawless and unworn, like the tags had just been cut off. She was absurdly out of place in that coffee shop.
I put my head down and struggled with my highlighting, but soon I was interrupted.
“On the hunt, I see.”
I looked up and saw her standing over my sofa chair. Her hair was kempt and shiny like a crow’s feathers. Her sunglasses were matte black and rested on her pale cheekbones.
I said, “It’s not a job, but it’s dirty and somebody’s got to do it.”
A flicker of amusement passed over her face and then vanished. She wore plum lipstick on her tight mouth and the way her skin moved was the first hint of her being somewhere near middle-aged. “That’s quite a coincidence,” she told me.
“What’s that?”
“Well, I’m hiring,” she said. “Hmm. Are you a believer in fate?”
“Not really, no,” I told her, suddenly in interview mode. “I actually think fate is a load of shit. It leads people down some pretty foolish lines of thinking.”
I could feel a stare coming through those impenetrable sunglasses of hers. Some invisible draft rustled the napkins on the condiment stand. The barista had scurried into the back, leaving the room empty except the woman and me. She swept a single hair that was out of place back into rank, and then she sat down in the sofa chair across from me.
“Good boy,” she said. “You’ll do.”
“Sorry?” I asked.
“You’re right. Fate is a load of shit. I’m here looking for you, specifically.”
“Huh?” Try looking intelligent and saying huh at the same time. It’s impossible. No other words came to me and she continued.
“I asked a friend of mine to call me after she interviewed someone who was exceptionally poor at the process. I told her that I wanted the worst job applicant she’d met.”
With this said she took off her glasses and inspected me. Her eyes were mostly pupil, framed in vivid amber, and her dark lashes formed a hazy almond around the edges. Her face was beautiful and cold, but her eyes burned with startling intensity. I found myself surprised that a middle-aged woman could be so attractive.
“Why the hell would you want the worst applicant? And why not just call me?”
She undid the clasp on her cape and leaned forward, uncrossing her slim legs. The cheap sofa chair squeaked sharply as she moved and her gaze never broke from mine.
“The best deals need to be made in person,” she said.
• • •
Where the forest meets the clearing, I find a snow-covered cabin with a dark, reflective window and an ancient door. I make a path through the deepening snow, up to the face of the cabin, and rap my pink knuckles off the door. All of me is raw and frigid. When no one answers, I gently place my hand on the doorknob. At first I mistake its extreme heat for an icy grip but slowly I feel its warmth seep into me. I turn the handle and feel a rush of hot air across my face. The inside of the house is a single room, dark but lived in, with scraps of cloth in one corner and dirt across the floor. I see a human figure resting in an old wooden chair on the far side of the room. The white noise of mosquitoes swells and fills my ears as I step inside and close the door.
• • •
Meg woke me from my nap by twisting her abrasive music as loud as the neighbours could tolerate. The afternoon sun poured into our apartment while Meg’s anger about me slacking off poured into my ears. When she was sufficiently spent, I told her about my new boss and the job I had accepted. Her mood quickly improved, as did her subsequent choice of music on the record player. We celebrated with real red wine, a joint, and tangled limbs on our couch. And so began the next few months of my life.
The work was both baffling and bafflingly easy. Quite simply, my job was to take job interviews at different companies. Armed with a fine suit and an artificial résumé, both courtesy of my boss, I went from interview to interview and gave human resources departments a deliberately hard time. On a given day, I would move from factory to skyscraper to open-concept workspace, changing fictional qualifications as necessary. My boss chose all of the companies and organized my schedule. Sometimes she required me to be scathing, contradictory, and flippant to the interviewers; other days I was simply asked to be difficult or mention a particular word, like oscillation. Mostly, though, I could act however I pleased.
The end purpose of all this, my new boss explained, was in the best interests of the companies where I interviewed. These businesses had actually hired my boss as a consultant to challenge and assess their own human resources departments from an independent perspective. In retail terms, I was the equivalent of a “secret shopper” for glossy, tie-wearing stiffs who were normally above the scrutiny of outsiders. My boss argued that a company’s reputation, its very ability to stave off corporate failure, was built by unsuccessful job applicants as much as it was by employees and clients. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me but then neither did anything about the working world.
I found the work came to me quite comfortably, that it took little effort to show no interest. My first job job interview was with a non-profit organization, and despite my intuitions it was not run by kind, life-loving individuals. After playing it friendly for a few minutes, the interviewer’s shitty attitude and insincere smile finally grated on me. I grasped at the first thing that came to mind.
“You know, you really look like a bird,” I said.
“Excuse me?” she asked in disbelief. I had interrupted her speech about workplace modularity.
“You must have heard this before. You’ve kind of got a big head and then this spindly little neck holding it up. And your face really comes to a point at the end of your nose. It’s just really avian, you know?”
She glared at me icily.
Keeping myself entertained was the key to doing a good job. Every day, I tried to out-do myself from the previous set of interviews.
One day I soaked up forty-five minutes in a prominent English-as-a-Second-Language school by pitching a thriller about “an ESL teacher on the run in Japan for a murder he didn’t commit!” The young man running the interview must have thought I was mentally ill, because he actually, gently explained to me that they didn’t have any connections to the film industry.
Once I challenged an HR guy for a telecommunications company to define the word iterative after he used it three times in five minutes. He couldn’t, so the irony was lost on him.
I even told record company executives that they should give up the war against illegal downloading of music, that transmission of intellectual property carried monetary value but the music itself was inherently worthless. Hadn’t they read Oscar Wilde? I thought it was a good argument.
After a day of making HR interviewers doubt their own career paths, I would debrief with my boss and let her know about each company’s interviewing process and how they dealt with a little shit like me. I finally understood what career counsellors had been telling me all through school: at a healthy job, you are rewarded for creativity in the workplace. Months passed joyfully.
Meg was unsurprisingly pissy that my job was to be a jackass, but that was partly because she spent the winter fighting off one cold or flu after another. She certainly didn’t question the considerable money I made doing it and even took a few sick days away from the restaurant and its kitchen politics. Our little apartment started to fill up with all the material items we had talked about, like a television and a food processor and a rack for holding wine. We went out for dinner and movies, and we slept in late more than usual. One day, while I was playing video games and eating vegan take-out on my new Swedish couch, it finally occurred to me why Meg had so often complained about us being poor.
After four blissful months of work, my boss asked me to meet her at the coffee shop where she had hired me. Surrounded by customers, I sipped on a latté and considered the mystery of my boss. There was nothing personal about our regular debriefs over the phone and nothing but icy evenness in her voice. I didn’t know anything of her personal life and almost nothing of her business aside from my own contributions.
Sometime later, I looked up and was unnerved by how empty the coffee shop had become. Even the barista had disappeared into the back. As if on cue, my boss casually opened the door and made her way straight to me. Both creatures of habit, I had sat in the same pleather sofa chair and she had worn a cape and tight skirt, equally appropriate for spring as it was for autumn. Her outfit was all cream and coffee tones, this time, but no less immaculate.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked. Strange question, if you think about it.
“Ask,” she said.
“I’ve been doing this job a while, now, and I appreciate the money you pay me, but I’ve never met anyone from the company outside from you. Doesn’t anyone else work for you? Or with you?”
She scattered the newspapers off the adjacent seat and sat down. “I’m a little disappointed you couldn’t figure it out for yourself. This sort of work necessitates a very small amount of people in the know.”
I nodded, and she continued.
“I prefer to keep my number of employees to one, which is to say, to you. There have been others before you, of course, and they performed your job admirably.”
“Well, that makes me feel less special,” I told her. “So what happened to them? And if you like to run such a tight ship, then why not do the interviews yourself?”
“I used to be the vector,” she said, “but ultimately I ran out of places to apply where my face was not already known.”
“Sorry, ‘the vector’?”
“Hah,” she let out, more to herself. I could feel her replaying some old memory in her well-groomed head. “It’s my own term for your job. A very inside joke.”
For an instant, the corners of her mouth and eyes became pinched, almost a smile, and I could tell she approved of me in some way. Then as quickly as it had appeared, her face regained its usual, dispassionate composure.
“I remember asking my old boss the same questions,” she told me. “I’ll answer you the same way he answered me. One can only perform your job for so long. Eventually, one runs out of places to apply where anonymity can be guaranteed and I’m required to put a new face in the interview chair. Eventually, one has to move up or move on. Certainly you can see that your job has a lifespan, yes?”
I nodded.
“I moved up, and your predecessors moved on,” she told me.
“And your old boss?” I asked her.
“Forced retirement.”
There was a beat of silence and a hard look from my boss warning me not to probe too deeply on the subject.
“So how long do I have before I’m all used up?”
“Oh, a good while, no doubt. We haven’t even broached other cities yet, which reminds me of why I called this meeting.”
Later that night, I packed my bags and told a feverish Meg that I would be back in a few days. She protested by blowing her nose at me, then curling up in front of our fancy television and watching a documentary on birds. When I was done packing I pushed the tissues off the cushion and fought for some couch space behind her.
• • •
I make my way from the wintered old well in the forest to the log cabin. Inside there is a figure as primal as the house and it is sitting on a wooden chair in the corner. The room is dimly lit. The figure leans forward and in an old woman’s voice it spits, “You are the vector.” When I nod, she says, “This is what you came for.” She raises her gnarled hands and they look covered as if by some dark, textured bristles. I put out my own hand and in it she places a sack that is tied at one end. Whatever is in the sack is alive and hot and tries to squirm away from me. I am forced to grasp it tighter. The sack cries in response and I clench my jaw in nervous tension. On my left hand I notice one black hair has sprouted, long and coarse.
• • •
We always flew business class, comfortably tucked into S-shaped sofas while the average passenger shuffled past us to their cramped, padded lawn chairs in the back of the plane. My boss always accompanied me, finely dressed and usually sunglassed, and had some sort of unspoken rule that flight staff would not approach her under any circumstance. I tried to match my boss by wearing one of my suits even while travelling. We always made straight for the hotel, wherein my boss would disappear and not resurface until the trip was nearly complete. Aside from our phone call debriefings, I’m not sure what she did while we were away or even why she would accompany me at all.
Being a bad potential candidate for a job was much the same in another city as it was in my hometown, if a little more geographically themed.
“Are you looking forward to moving to Ottawa?” I was asked at a federal government job interview.
I replied, “Yeah, I was distinctly enjoying myself too much in Toronto. It’ll be perfect here. This is like The City That Never Wakes.”
Another interviewer asked me, “Do you think your lifestyle will change when you move to Vancouver?” He was a project manager at a graphic-design firm called Figures of Speech.
“Sure,” I said. “I really wanted an excuse to wear Gore-Tex all the time, do more hot yoga, and completely ignore the homeless and drug-addled.”
“Right. Where are you from again? Toronto, aka New-York-but-boring? Isn’t your mayor a piece of peameal bacon that hates public transit?”
“Yeah, but doesn’t your mayor shill organic fruit smoothies to yuppies?”
“Yep.” We both smiled. “Beer?”
He probably would have hired me if I had given him real contact information, not that I would have been able to do the job. My boss reminded me during the debriefing that I wasn’t there to make friends, so I made up for it by being especially cruel during the next interview.
When I wasn’t harassing human resources, I had the days to myself. Sometimes I wandered the streets but most of the time I went straight back to the comforting regularity of the hotel suite. There, I would order room service and watch the nature channel from my starched bed. At night I would call Meg, keeping her on the line just long enough to annoy her and feel some sense of connection. She continued to sniffle, wheeze, and cough right through the spring and into summer, and her perpetual illness gave her a good excuse to stay grumpy with me.
It was only there, on these road trips for work, that my perspective of my job began to shift. It became obvious that my job was to be a liar, a title I didn’t much like giving to myself. A few times, I brought a book with me but I was always too unsettled to read. The job was moving from fun to calculated and I often wondered what the hell I was doing with myself. Then I would order french fries over the hotel phone and put off that internal conversation until I could get back to my little life of luxury in Toronto.
It was on our last trip to Calgary, perhaps our tenth trip total and our fifth to that particular city, that my anxieties came to the surface.
I found myself in the offices of a law firm. Compared to most of the places we had visited while travelling, this firm seemed small-time. A veteran secretary greeted me and showed me the way to a windowless room embedded in the centre of their dusty office. Shortly thereafter an old man slowly opened the door, a dossier under his left arm. The cut and style of his clothes was neat but as unfashionable as the rest of the firm. Instead of standing to shake his hand, I obnoxiously jutted an arm from my chair.
“Well, then,” he said while settling into his seat. “Let’s start with the facts. How did you hear about the job opening? We were not exactly advertising a position, here.”
“Uh, good question,” I replied. I wasn’t in the most playful mood so I kept my answer straightforward. “I’ve done so many interviews now that I have no idea where I heard about it. Quite frankly, this place is a little more Dickensian than the other places I’ve been applying.”
The old man exchanged his polite smile for something much wiser and harder.
“This job opening was distributed only to long-time colleagues and their articling students. I would say that less than fifteen people outside of this office know about the position. So I ask you again: where did you hear about the job opening?”
Thinking I was getting under his skin, I smiled.
“Well, I guess I heard it from one of your colleagues, then. Does it matter?”
He took one last glance at me, then closed the dossier and began the process of an old man standing up.
“Kindly collect your things and get out of my office,” he said.
I kept smiling. “If this is your office, then I’d hate to see—”
“You smug little child,” he interrupted. “You think this is some joke. You have no idea what you’re involved in.”
“No kidding,” I said with a forced laugh. “I thought this was going to be a law firm, not a funeral parlour.”
Suddenly, and with some unseen strength, he kicked the heavy chair away from him. It slid across the ground with a metallic screech. His eyes, yellowed and heavily lidded, still managed to look angry and sharp. Working for my boss, I’d learned to recognize when someone knew something I didn’t.
“There is a cost to being the vector,” he said.
My smile and my bad attitude vanished. Vector? Suddenly, I felt like the know-nothing graduate I’d been less than a year ago.
“You just flit blithely about and think that you’re harmless,” he went on. “You don’t even know why you’re here. Is she still telling you vermin that you’re actually quality assurance for human resources?”
I looked at him blankly. One of his eyes was watering. Some-thing I had kept quiet was now welling up in me and making my stomach turn. He continued his assault.
“Your generation is perfect for this kind of glorified ignorance. But there’s a cost for you, too, and a cost for your loved ones. Now get out of my building before you do any more damage than you’ve already done. Get out!”
Before I had realized what had happened, I found myself on the street outside the decrepit building. I made my way to the intersection, crossed when told by the lights, and found the nearest bench to sit on. I skipped my two other scheduled interviews and sat thinking for the first time in months.
Hours later I rushed back to the hotel, collected my things, and made my way straight to the airport. By the time I was through security, the evening sky was filtering in through the bay windows. At the gate was my boss, as unnaturally calm as ever. She wore a pencil skirt to the knees and sat elegantly with one long leg folded over the other. She still had her sunglasses on despite the coming dark, and she was poring over a newspaper with satisfied intensity.
Finally she looked up, caught my gaze, and knew something was wrong. She said nothing but motioned to the seat next to hers. We sat in silence until they boarded us. I began to sweat with anxiety. For the first time, the power that my boss carried began to work against me. She had started to feel like a danger.
On our way into the plane, she finally said, “I imagine something went wrong and you don’t want to debrief.”
“Not right now, no,” I told her.
She nodded and said nothing else about it. While handing me her newspaper she said, “For your interest. For later.”
“No, thanks.”
“I’m not asking,” she said.
A lock of her hair had fallen out of place and was brushing against her cheek. I folded the paper and put it in my travel bag. I could feel my boss’ eyes dissecting me through her glasses.
The minute I was settled in my first-class seat, I turned away from the sight of my boss and groped for sleep. Eventually it came.
• • •
The ancient cabin is waiting for me to enter its eye-watering heat. Inside is a woman as old as the cabin, covered in insect hair, and she hands me the sack. It fits in the palm of my hand and radiates heat as it squirms. I leave the house and follow my footprints in the snow, back toward the forest. The thing in the sack causes the snow in my trail to melt and wilts the grass underneath. My hands become covered in dark cilia and my breath rasps with some insectoid rattle. At the edge of the woods, the thing in the sack causes the trees to wither and crack. They tumble to the distant ground and push the snow into the air like a cloud. I follow my path back to where I started, back to the old stone well. The sack squirms with renewed vigour. I know what I am supposed to do.
• • •
I woke as the wheels of the plane sputtered and slid on the tarmac. My boss and I made our way through the airport in silence. Staring at the grey-black sky above the busy taxi stand, a feeling of dread came over me.
“Just a second,” I told my boss. I ran over to a payphone and looked back through the crowd. My boss stood in place while the flow of people carefully moved around her and bent to her will.
Meg’s cell phone rang six times before she picked up.
“The hospital, you dipshit,” she said.
“Are you alright?” I asked. I felt frantic.
She had already hung up.
I deked through passengers and sidled up to my boss. We made our way to a taxi, as per our custom. I was always dropped off first, and I had no idea where my boss lived.
“Home?” she asked me as we settled into an ancient leather backseat.
“Toronto Western Hospital, actually,” I told her and the driver. The driver’s weathered gaze moved off me and onto the road, never making contact with my boss. All I saw of him from then on was a stubbled chin in the rear-view mirror.
Silent tension built across those first ten minutes in the taxi. Traffic was horrible on the highway, the sky was blackening with rain clouds, and I could feel my stomach tying a bow. Was Meg OK? Who was this woman I called my boss? What the hell was my job, really? I tapped my fingers in a rhythm on my leg and my boss carefully polished her sunglasses with the edge of her blouse. Finally, she broke the silence.
“I’m surprised this came so soon,” she said. “It’s always a danger when dealing with older management. I’ll make a note of that firm for future reference. Now I suppose you have questions.”
“Did you lie to me?” I asked.
“Of course. Many times.”
“Why?”
“Because it was in my best interests,” she replied. “It’s the same reason why I employ you: my best interests. Let me ask you this: what does it matter whether you know the truth or not? How does it change the work you do for me and the money I give to you in exchange for that work?”
“I don’t know,” I told her, and it was true. “But I can feel it. It does matter. Maybe if I knew what my job really was, I wouldn’t have done it for six months.”
“Your ignorance makes you innocent. It keeps you free of blame. Doesn’t that come as a comfort to you?”
“Not really, no.” The cars were moving faster around us now and giant beads of rain were starting to pound the windshield. Unbelievably, I noticed a small hole interrupting the hound’s tooth pattern of her skirt. “I wasn’t working for those companies, was I?”
“No,” she said. The skin showing through the hole in her skirt was flush.
“So then who was I working for?”
“Other companies. Sometimes private interests. But mostly just me.”
“And how the hell was me taking phoney interviews in your best interests?” I demanded.
“It helps me take back something that was once mine.”
“And what’s that?”
“An ecological niche,” she hissed. All the pretense of politeness had drained from her voice and only venom remained. For the first time, her face matched the burning of her eyes. The blood was swirling at the surface of her cheeks. “I’ll tell you what: take tonight to get caught up on the news and to get your attitude in check. If your sudden flare-up of moral indignation subsides, I’ll expect you at work on Monday. If you can’t stomach your role in my business, simply abstain from getting in touch. But I won’t warn you again: do not think you can talk to me like some wretch in the HR department.”
I turned away and watched the fat droplets of rain race down the window. The taxi sped along and zig-zagged through the downtown grid. As we reached the intake entrance of the hospital and I started to exit the cab, my boss put out a hand and touched the sleeve of my coat. My whole body froze and I was acutely aware that she had never touched me before. I could feel the heat of her hand through my suit even though I was getting pelted with rain. Then she spoke.
“Let me just say this: ethically speaking, it doesn’t matter whether you do the job or not. With or without you, someone will be doing the job. I will get what I want. Why not let it be you? Why not benefit from the inevitable? And believe me when I say the benefits will only get better.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Remember our conversation about fate? Look, I’ll consider your offer. Thanks for the taxi.” As the cab sped off, I could see her eyes burning like two bright embers in the window of the car door.
I was soaked by the time I got into the hospital. Tired attendants pointed me through a labyrinth of beige and white into a small room where Meg was resting. She looked clammy and there was an IV drip feeding into her hand just behind the bony knuckles. I touched that hand and smiled at her. She stirred a little, faintly smiled back, and then gave me the middle finger with her free hand. For an innately angry girlfriend, that’s true love.
The nurse came and mentioned words like hyperhidrosis and lymphadenopathy and idiopathic. I felt like an idiopath listening to her. She explained that Meg would be monitored overnight and I told her I’d be staying. Finally, she left us to sit and drip. Meg didn’t say much and neither did I.
After Meg turned away from me and slept, I pulled out the paper that my boss had given me. I was surprised to find it was a compilation of financial sections from a few different newspapers. Of course, the financial news was mostly bad: one paper reported that an upstart telecommunications company was collapsing after a promising start, that one of Canada’s largest non-profits was failing to find donor support, and that an international ESL school was closing its foreign branches. Even wealthy Calgary’s prospects were drying up, according to one headline.
It was the Calgary article that finally made the connection for me. I scanned the article for company names and checked them against my day-planner, just to be sure. I checked the other papers and found the same results. I had taken job interviews at every single struggling business that was mentioned in those financial sections. Every one. And I had not visited any business that was mentioned to be doing well or staying strong during this recession.
I looked up from the smudged newsprint. Meg was now curled up like a cat, her paw poking out of the sheets. Testing one last hypothesis, I grabbed her phone from the bedside tray and scurried into the hall with my day planner. It only took two rings to reach Vancouver.
“Hello?” the voice on the other end said groggily.
“Yeah, is this the dude from Figures of Speech?” I asked.
“Ugh. Call us back during our business hours.”
“Are you still in business?”
“Is this a joke? We just moved into a bigger building, for Christ’s sake. Who is this?”
I closed the phone and made my way back to the seat beside Meg. Even if she had been awake, I wouldn’t have known what to tell her. I folded up the papers and put them on the floor. The muscles in my body began to protest with exhaustion; it had been a long day and now it was physically catching up with me. I closed my eyes and massaged my eyelids with a thumb and forefinger, causing snowflakes to swirl and twist through my vision. Finally, I slid back in my chair and slept.
• • •
I know what I am supposed to do. I start at the stone well and walk through the snowy forest to the log cabin in the clearing. Inside is an ancient presence who has been calling me in the language of insects. With her bristled hands, she passes me a small cloth sack with some vile thing inside. I leave the darkness of the cabin and make my way back to the forest. The path behind me withers and dies. Finally, I return to the well, its grey stones jutting a few feet out of fresh snow. I am supposed to remove its heavy wooden lid and drop the sack into the well. With my free hand, newly blackened with mosquito hair, I touch the lid. The wood dries and cracks, making it easy to push into the snow. My boots have been replaced by the tips of thin, jointed legs, and the forest floor near me has been replaced by dust and dead grass. I stand beside the lip of the well and look down into a darkness that is older than even the woman and the house. The thing in the sack is writhing in my hand, trying to free itself and plummet into the abyss that feeds this place. This is my entire purpose, to drop the sack into the well, but still I clutch the thing in my hand.
I look away from the well. I am in one of those wintered forests of my youth, trees sparse and bare and with their discarded branches poking through the snow. It is an unspoilt place. It is not a place I want to poison. “Fuck it,” I say, and my voice is dry and rasping. I turn about and break into a run, back toward the log cabin. The path is easy to follow, a streak of brittle brown surrounded by whites and greys. My back itches and my legs feel weak from the run. Finally I reach the threshold between forest and clearing, the cabin in the centre of my compound vision. At the door of the cabin I see the silhouette of the insect woman. I clench the sack in my misshapen fist and pull back. And then with all my strength and a few steps for momentum, I throw the sack as hard as I can toward the log cabin. It leaves my hand and sails in a smooth arc, wriggling all the while. There is a moment of silence, of holding my breath. Then I hear a shattering as the sack breaks the window and a thud as it hits the floor inside. If I could still smile in satisfaction, I would. Instead, I take my miserable body back through the forest and to the edge of the stone well. Flakes begin to fall as I sit down next to the well. I feel a blanket of snow settle on me and keep me comfortable in my last moments.
• • •
When I awoke, Meg was already dressed to leave and collecting her personal things. I had missed a visit from the doctor; Meg was free to go but would have to come back for an appointment the following week. I took off my tie, threw it in the room’s garbage bin, and slung Meg’s purse over my shoulder. We made our way to the dingy hospital entrance and grabbed the first cab I saw. In the taxi, I slunk down in the seat so Meg could put her head on my shoulder. I touched her forehead with my fingertips and found she was no longer damp. She was almost receptive to my affections, but then regained her composure and slapped my hand away from her face. She had a reputation to uphold, after all. Then she gently put her arm on my thigh and rested.
I made tea when we got back to the apartment and Meg was sprawled across the couch by the time I left the kitchen. I slid in behind her with little fight and we watched the nature channel. It was a show about disease and epidemics.
“Appropriate viewing,” Meg joked.
My body was in horrible shape after a night of sleeping in a chair, so I drifted in and out of a dreamless state. I had some vague memory of a forest, a well, and a house in the clearing, but it was becoming distant and intangible. Instead, I enjoyed the warmth of the sunlight streaming in and the softness of Meg next to me.
The amplified sound of insects coming from the television dragged me out of my stupor. On the screen were close-up shots of bugs. The show cut to a bearded old scientist who had been sat in front of an exotic locale, a mosquito feeding on the back of his hand.
“The severity of any communicable disease is limited by its form of transmission,” he said in a shaky voice. “If a disease has to pass directly from person to person, then it has to keep its host alive long enough to come in contact with other people. That means a directly transmitted disease cannot kill its host, or at least not too quickly. But a vector frees the disease from such restraint.”
For the benefit of the camera, the old man lifted his spotted hand with the mosquito atop it. “This little vector can carry a virus from person to person very quickly but is not susceptible to the effects of the virus. That means the virus can grow much faster or become lethal but still be successfully transmitted to another host. All the while the mosquito goes about its own business, unaware of the contagion it carries.”
Meg yawned with boredom. I kissed her on the back of her neck.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jay Hosking currently lives in Vancouver. He's been long-listed for the CBC Canada Writes short story competition for his efforts. When not writing fiction, he teaches rats how to gamble, works on his PhD in neuroscience, writes/records/tours music, and walks the dog. His debut novel, Three Years with the Rat, is forthcoming from Penguin / Hamish Hamilton in summer 2016.
LF #053 © Jay Hosking. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, October 2013.
