“I’m aware.”
My Mom’s dead, and I never knew my father. But I’m not about to try and convince Paul my life is sadder than Cassandra’s. I drop it.
*
Gilbert proposes we go to a Chinese buffet, to celebrate his renewed dominance at Spend Easy. Days off are getting pretty scarce for me. Last week Eric poached Matt to work in Meat, leaving Ralph even more understaffed. I’ve been putting in 50-hour weeks.
Matt seemed pretty bewildered at the transfer. “Why does he want a slacker like me working for him?” he asked me, but I assumed it was a rhetorical question.
It does seem like Matt would fit in well with the other Meat employees. He’s quiet, and, like them, doesn’t seem to have much confidence. Although, compared with a couple of Eric’s workers, Matt’s downright chatty.
On the way to the Chinese restaurant, Gilbert suggests we smoke a joint before eating. “The food will taste way better.”
“We’ll only be in there an hour. You’ll be too stoned to drive.”
“Not after an all-you-can-eat buffet, man. Eating kills your high. And I’m gonna eat a lot.”
“All right.”
So Gilbert rolls a joint after we park. It’s a big one—he uses two cigarette papers. It takes us over 10 minutes to smoke, and on my way across the parking lot I decide the universe is exactly the way it needs to be.
The restaurant’s only half full, and the hostess tells us to sit wherever we want. We take a table close to the food. I pile my first plate with egg rolls, chicken chow mein, spring rolls, and wonton chips. And that’s just to start.
Gilbert gets a plate of fried chicken wings. He sticks one in his mouth, and when he removes it, the meat is gone. “Being tasty is a poor evolutionary strategy,” he says.
“I’m really stoned,” I manage to say through a masticated egg roll.
“That’s perfectly consistent with what we know of body chemistry.”
“Yeah? They teach you that in university?”
“Most philosophy students are acquainted with marijuana’s effects.” He picks up another wing.
“Why don’t you finish your degree?”
He shrugs. “University isn’t the only path to success, despite what we’re led to believe. For a lot of people, it’s the path to a fast food career.” His phone rings. He takes it out, looks at the screen, and answers it. “Hello? Hello? Donovan? Hello? God damn.” He hangs up. “Anyway. Universities are no longer these exclusive bastions of academic merit—they’re just businesses. Nobody fails out of university anymore, because a failed student isn’t worth any money. It’s become a culture of lenience.”
“Really?”
He nods. “It’s the way of the world. Slackers prosper.”
We eat five plates each. I take a lot on my last one, and I struggle to get it down—they charge you extra here if you leave food on your plate. Gilbert pays for both of us, and we go out to the Hummer.
“I booked a hotel room for tonight,” he says, “A bunch of us are partying there and going downtown after. You in?”
“Yeah.” I’m not working till 2:00 tomorrow—the hangover should subside by then. “Will they mind us all drinking in the room?”
“Probably. The best part of partying in a hotel is seeing how drunk you can get before they kick you out.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
When I enter the lobby, Gilbert’s waiting at the front desk for an extra room key, so people can get back in if they leave. I lean against the desk next to him. The receptionist isn’t in sight.
There’s a sign on the desk that reads, “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”
“We’ll soon cure them of that delusion,” Gilbert says.
The receptionist comes out with the extra key. “Who’s this?” he says, meaning me.
“My friend. He just got off the plane from Bangkok. He’s staying in my room, and I’m driving him home in the morning.”
“Will you be drinking alcohol?”
“Excuse me,” Gilbert says, “I find your questions invasive. This is my second stay at your establishment, and I may become a regular customer. Is this how you treat all your potential regulars?”
“My apologies.” He passes Gilbert the key.
“Thank you. Have a pleasant evening.”
“You as well.”
Gilbert leads me to the third floor and unlocks room 370. Inside, Donovan is crouched on the desk, staring straight ahead, the backs of his hands resting on his hips.
I walk over to him. He shows no sign of registering my presence. “Hey, Donovan.”
“I’m a gargoyle,” he says in a low croak.
Gilbert shakes his head. “Man, he’s messed up. He’s taken, like, four different drugs since he got here. You wanna smoke a joint?”
“Is this a smoking room?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re not supposed to smoke pot either way. It’s non-smoking, if you really want to know.”
We sit on one of the beds and light up. Gilbert passes me the joint, and as I’m inhaling, Donovan starts making bird noises. I pass it back to Gilbert.
Gilbert inhales, and speaks with the smoke still in his lungs, sounding a little like a gargoyle himself. “You want some, Donovan?”
Donovan coos.
“Come get it.”
Donovan croaks his displeasure.
Gilbert sighs, gets up, and holds the joint to Donovan’s lips. He inhales until Gilbert withdraws it, which is quite a while. After that, he’s silent.
Gilbert gets a text from someone in the lobby, complaining the receptionist won’t let them go up to the room. We go back down to find a guy and a girl, both unknown to me, each holding bags from the liquor store.
“What appears to be the problem?” Gilbert says.
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” the receptionist says. “You’re clearly hosting some sort of gathering.”
“Impressive,” Gilbert says. “Not only were you born before yesterday, but you’ve apparently developed some dynamic powers of perception since. You’re correct. We are indeed gathering.”
“And you’re drinking alcohol.”
“That’s right. Is that against hotel policy? I was under the impression policy endorsed it, given the mini fridge bristles with booze.”
“You’re allowed to drink. You’re not allowed to have a party.”
“I haven’t said anything about a party.”
“What are you doing, then?”
“I find your constant inquiries into our personal affairs distressing, and I’m considering relaying them to your manager. But if you must know, we’re holding a meeting about starting a YouTube collective, in hopes of generating advertising revenue with which to supplement our incomes. During this meeting, we will determine the type of content we want to produce. Will that be enough private information?”
“I was asking in a professional capacity.”
“I should certainly hope so. Come, lady and gentlemen.”
The hotel room fills up quickly. Someone brings a CD player, and turns it up really loud. A minute into “Paper Thin Walls” by Modest Mouse, a guest from one of the neighbouring rooms comes over and complains about the volume. Gilbert puts an arm around his shoulder, offering him a beer and a joint simultaneously. He stops complaining.
There are over 20 people here, which is a lot for a small room with two twin-sized beds and a desk. Donovan remains perched, motionless, which was weird at first but now seems like a valuable civic service. He’s conserving land.
With Donovan in gargoyle mode and Gilbert focusing mostly on the female population, I have no one to talk to. I focus on drinking, with the hope it will give me something to say. No luck so far.
Eventually Donovan comes down off the desk and starts arranging lines of coke on the bedside table. He takes out a 100 dollar bill, snorts a line, and hands the bill to the guy next to him.
Gilbert calls across the room. “Donovan! Delete my number from your ph
one!”
Donovan looks hurt. “But we’re friends. We should be in each other’s Contacts.”
“Our friendship is being taxed by the fact that your phone keeps pocket dialing mine. If it happens again, I’m throwing it in a lake. Yours, I mean.”
Donovan sees me, and seizes my shoulder. He peers into my eyes as though he lost something in there. “I have a rule,” he says. “Never snort coke unless you have a 100 dollar bill to do it with.”
“Why?” I say.
“So you have enough money to buy more. Duh.”
I go to the washroom, where people are giggling behind the drawn shower curtain. “I need to piss,” I say.
“Thanks for notifying us,” someone says, and there’s more giggling.
“Can you leave?”
“No. But we won’t look.”
“Fine.”
I unzip my fly and glance behind me. Two people are peering around the curtain. They see me and withdraw from view, giggling.
As I wash my hands, I hear someone flick a lighter, and then I smell pot. “Hey,” I say. “Can I get in?”
“Sure. But I get to sit on you.” A hand pulls the shower curtain across, revealing a girl sitting on a guy at one end of the tub, and Cassandra sitting at the other end. She’s the one who spoke.
“You smoke?” I say.
“Yep.”
“Since when?”
“Grade 10.”
“You smoked pot in grade 10 and I didn’t know?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “I didn’t want to tell you. You were so innocent.”
“Were you ever high around me?”
“I’ve been high pretty much constantly since I started.” The other two laugh. One of them passes Cassandra the joint.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to process this until I’m also high,” I say.
She stands up. “Sit down. Under me.”
I do, and she hands me the joint.
“So,” the guy says. “How do you two know each other?”
“School,” Cassandra says. “But we work together, too.”
“Where?”
“In a grocery store.”
“What’s that like?”
I adopt a British accent. “The grocery store is fascinating on every level. It even has its own unique vernacular. To describe a fellow employee as ‘sick’ is to suggest his work ethic is such that it may be indicative of a mental illness. To praise another’s work as ‘best kind’ is to say that either the task is superbly done, or the task matters so little that whether it is done well makes no difference whatsoever.”
Cassandra laughs. “What the hell, Sheldon? You’re so weird.”
Gilbert enters the washroom. “The time of our exodus is come. Hotel management has been contacted, and police involvement has been threatened. We’re going downtown.” He points at me. “You’re baked out of your tree. How do you expect to dance with these fine ladies in this state? You need to drink more.”
“I don’t dance.”
“Don’t worry,” Cassandra says. “He’ll dance.”
“Good girl. Now. Out of that tub.”
*
I don’t get home till 4 AM, and I wake up 10 minutes before my shift begins, hungover. I spent the night dancing and doing shots with Cassandra. She’s much better than me at both those things. At the end of the night we smoked another joint in an alley, and I vomited.
A new hire is waiting for me by the punch clock. “Ralph told me to wait till you got in. He wants you to train me. He told me you’re the hardest worker.”
“Oh. Sorry I’m late.”
I show him how to front, and then I start on the overstock. Working hungover actually isn’t that bad. I feel kind of fantastic, actually. Sure, my stomach seems likely to empty itself without warning—possibly on a customer—and my head feels like it’s gone a round in the cardboard compactor. But these symptoms are accompanied by an unbridled optimism I haven’t felt since I first decided I want to be a writer.
I keep remembering how it felt to put my hands on Cassandra’s waist.
Gilbert starts at 5:00, and so does Tommy, who’s working his last shift. This prospect hasn’t lightened his mood any.
“I used to feel important,” he says to us. “Like it was my role to warn people. For over a year, I tried to convince everyone they needed to stop putting off the important stuff. Now, though—now I just feel dumb.” He sighs. “My parents are sending me to see a counsellor.”
Gilbert places a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “You need a new apocalypse.”
Tommy takes his eyes off the floor. “Huh?”
“Come up to the break room with me.”
Not wanting to miss this, I decide to take my first break, too.
“The sun won’t explode for billions of years,” Gilbert says once we’re all seated. “But the world will end, and likely a lot sooner than later. As in, really soon.”
Tommy’s barely daring to breathe. “Really?”
“Sure. There are plenty of doomsday scenarios to choose from. You have the mundane ones, like oil depletion. You know—all the conventional sources are exploited, we’re scrambling to meet demand, alternate energy sources aren’t even close to replacing it, yada yada yada. Then you have the slightly more exciting apocalypses, like globetrotting antibiotic-resistant viruses, hitching airplanes everywhere and killing billions of people. But I think you need something you can really sink your teeth into.”
Tommy’s rapt. I kind of wish I’d brought something to snack on.
“Check this out,” Gilbert says. “Total. Machine. Takeover. Within no more than a few decades. All right? Some futurists predict we’ll have AIs as smart as us by 2035. Computing power doubles every two years, so it’s only a matter of time. But it’s not just about artificial intelligence. This takeover started thousands of years ago.”
“What do you mean?” Tommy says.
“As technology advances, humans get less advanced. It’s the way it’s always been. We’ve been slowly handing over our talents to machines for a long time. It started with the invention of writing, which saved us the trouble of remembering things. As the use of text became widespread, our memories got worse.
“We invented calculators—very useful, but we’re not as good at math as we were. Now we have Google, and we’re working on cars that will drive themselves. Soon we’ll have apps that tell us how to behave in order to attain a preselected personality type. By the time smart machines arrive, humanity will be a shade of what it was, with only a fraction of the capability it started with. It will be laughably easy for AIs to take control. Nature gave us intelligence, but we didn’t know what to do with it. So, we’re giving it to machines.”
“Will they destroy us?”
“Maybe. It’s impossible to tell. We can’t predict what will happen in a world with beings smarter than we are.”
Tommy stands up. He’s smiling. “Thank you, Gilbert.”
“I haven’t told you everything. And the only way you’ll learn the rest is if you continue working here.”
After that, Tommy’s mood improves dramatically. He attacks the overstock racks with gusto, and I actually hear him whistling as he pushes his first cartload onto the sales floor. As for why Gilbert bothered, my guess is he’s consolidating power—ensuring Frank can never threaten his dominance again.
By eight, I’ve run out of positive thoughts about my hangover. I feel dragged out, kind of depressed, and worried I’ll fall over if I don’t take my second break right now. I grab a bag of chips and trudge up to the break room.
I open the door to find Cassandra and Theresa sitting side-by-side at the table.
“Hey Sheldon,” Cassandra says. “Have you met our new cashier, Theresa? She’s officially awesome.”
Theresa looks at me, stricken, and I expect my expression’s similar. Cassandra’s smile fades a little, and her gaze drifts from my face to Theresa’s.
I walk over, hand extended. “Nice to mee
t you.”
“Nice to meet you,” Theresa says, her voice little more than a whisper.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cassandra visits my apartment, and the first thing she does is stand in the living room, hands on her hips, and ask me the last time I cleaned it.
“Um, it’s been a while, I guess.”
“We’re cleaning it. Right now.”
“Can we get high first?”
We go out to the shed. Cassandra sits on the stool near the window and takes out a joint. “This always puts me in the mood for cleaning,” she says, lighting it. “Makes it feel like an accomplishment.”
I shake my head. “I still can’t believe you smoke pot.”
“Could say the same about you.” She shrugs. “I have fun, being high. It makes pretty much anything fun.”
She holds out the joint, and I take it.
“Remember how down on myself I used to get?” she says. “In junior high?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, when I’m stoned, I criticize myself less. It’s nice.” She takes the joint back. “You and Theresa sure had a moment in the break room, the other day. What was that about?”
“I don’t know. We had a moment?”
“You think she’s pretty, don’t you?”
I don’t say anything. Every answer seems like the wrong one.
We go back inside, and Cassandra pours some Mr. Clean in a bucket and fills it with hot water. Then she starts wiping down every surface in the house. She directs me to clean out my fridge, and throw away the stuff that’s gone bad.
When we finish that, she puts the bucket of water on the coffee table, and we sit on the couch. “This is a bigger job than I thought,” she says.
Marcus Brutus jumps up and puts his head in the bucket. He thinks better of drinking from it, though, and jumps back down.
Cassandra leans forward and picks up Cat’s Cradle, which is sitting next to the bucket. She opens to the last page and begins reading out loud.
“God, Cassandra. Not this. You still do this?”
Taking Stock Page 18
