by McLay, Craig
In short order, I had cleared out my belongings and decamped to The Wellsley, although I doubt that I will be here for long. Hudson also believes that he is being watched closely and is keen to mount another expedition as soon as possible. Because of his notoriety, it is not possible for him to simply disappear as I have done, and so much of the planning has fallen to me.
Hudson was tremendously excited about the map and the partial translations of the scrolls, which he says explain much of what he saw during his previous expedition. Few have set foot where he has gone. Indeed, the interior of Greenland is as remote to exploration as the moon itself and much of it is as yet unseen by human eyes. I cannot say anything more about it here for fear that this letter may be intercepted and read before we are aboard and underway. I will do my utmost to write again before I leave. Until then, I am, as always…
Yours,
T.
∅
1st February 1923
The Calliphon
Pip,
I have asked my man (although he is not that in any sense of the word) Gilbert to hold on to this letter until two days after we have left Portsmouth, so by the time you receive this I will be somewhere in the dark and frigid north Atlantic, steaming west.
After years of preparation, during which time I have endured an avalanche of mockery, doubt and derision, I finally feel that my ultimate destiny is, if not within my grasp, then at least within hope of discovery. This vessel is little more than a Portuguese fishing tug, but Hudson is confident that it will be enough to meet our needs. He knows the captain, a small man with bare, ropey forearms and skin the colour of pickled Kalamatas, from a previous expedition and has vouched him reliable. As I do not speak a word of Portuguese and only met the fellow for the first time five minutes after climbing the wobbly gangplank to gain entry to the ship, I am obliged to take him at his word on that point.
The last few weeks have been madness and expense in equal measure. We have booked everything under false names and moved our supplies in the dark of night using covered lorries, horse carts and even wheelbarrows (when obliged to move sensitive items through narrow closes). Only yesterday was all loading completed.
I am writing this from my tiny cabin, which is on the starboard side and close enough to the engines that I am compelled to stuff my ears with cotton to be able to sleep or think straight. At least I have a view through one of the small portholes, although it isn’t enough to alleviate my seasickness, which has left me feeling physically wretched even as my mind and spirit soars. A dull reminder of our prosaic duality, I suppose.
It is just before dawn and the ship will be underway in less than an hour. I cannot tell you how anxious I am to cut all connections to land and be on our way. Not just to be free of those who might seek to stop us, but to finally start a journey…not only for myself, but for all humankind.
Hudson and I have been reviewing the maps and the scrolls over the last few days and stumbled across something astonishing that completely upends many of our previous assumptions. As you know, there is no shortage of supposedly respected people who have called my work amateurish, fantastical, even supernatural twaddle. I always did my best to ignore such chatter. I knew that my search for Piotrsgete was far too important to be derailed by doubters, dullards and lesser men.
Now I think we may know what it means.
All of those years of crawling through dusty tombs, enduring baking heat, choking sand and lethal scorpions…of hacking through fetid jungle swamps…hanging on for dear life to some icy crag ten thousand feet up the face of a frozen mountain pass…even negotiating the Byzantine multiple filing systems of the Society archives…the purpose of it all has become evident.
This journey is going to be the greatest in the history of human discovery. Although I have every confidence that we will return, this is a step into the ultimate unknown, and I didn’t want to take that without first letting you know what it is all for.
As with many discoveries, it was right in front of us all along. I had been looking through a previous draft of one of the translations when Hudson pointed out th
PART II
The Weather Underground
-1-
A Buddhist will tell you that when you are considering life, the best place to start is with death. When you are considering death, the best place to start is insurance.
That’s me.
Or, more to the point, that’s where I am. I am a Policy Fulfillment Analyst for Firmamental Insurance Group (a division of the Hudson International Group). Don’t ask me what my job title means because I don’t have a clue. I started with the company eight years ago as a Policy Fulfillment Clerk in the audit department, but the company has gone through so many rounds of restructuring, downsizing, “right-sizing” and expense re-allocation analysis that I ended up here.
I don’t have the kind of job that they write kids’ books about. I’m not a police officer or a fire fighter or a crane operator or a game designer or even the host of a reality TV show about people trying to get away with filing phony property claims. I have the kind of job that most of my coworkers – at least, the ones who are left – don’t understand. It’s not the kind of job most kids fantasize about doing, and with good reason. It’s not the kind of thing I fantasize about much, either. I got a desk clock last year as part of an employee appreciation initiative (“If you want to stay an employee, smile and take the damn clock. It’s free. We’re only deducting its value from your paycheque as it is considered a tax-deductible benefit and the pinko regulation-happy government makes us. We strongly encourage you to vote them out.”) The battery died three days after I got it and I didn’t replace it because it seems much more appropriate for the place where Time Stands Still.
My job mostly consists of listening to complaints from Herbert J. Sternhauser the Third, an irascible Manitoba pig farmer who calls an average of 17 times per week to dispute one or many aspects of the policy we have underwritten to insure his commercial agricultural operations. He didn’t like it when we made clause FCO1981 (Damage Caused By Rectal Probing Perpetrated By Alien Or Extra-Terrestrial Party Or Entity) mandatory coverage on his last renewal. He didn’t like it when we denied his claim for a septic tank explosion (he hit the tank in error while shooting at a man he believed to be an intruder but who was in fact his cousin Gottfried) last year. And he didn’t like it when we switched the official language of all his policy wordings to Farsi (we sent him advanced notification of this change, but, due to a system error, the notice was sent in Esperanto).
I’m not sure why he hasn’t cancelled his policy and gone elsewhere. Firmamental seems to be doing everything they possibly can to get rid of him, but he stubbornly refuses to go. The farm has been in his family for four-and-a-half generations (if you count the great-uncle who briefly ran things before he fell into a pen of Australian razorbacks that were being specially engineered for some sort of military application and was eaten alive in under five minutes). Firmamental has insured the farm since the beginning. Firmamental bills itself proudly as a company that was originally started by a small collective of farmers. It’s a key platform of their marketing strategy and it’s remarkably close to the truth, provided you make the teeny-weeny substitution of “Swiss and London banking conglomerates” for the word “farmers.”
I used to dread Herbert’s phone calls, but lately they’ve become the highlight of my day.
“Dammit, Simms, what the heck are y’all smokin’ over there?” He starts all conversations this way. It goes without saying that we are familiar enough with each other by now that we communicate exclusively on last-name basis.
“Hello Mister Sternhauser. How are the pigs?”
“Godawful stink, Simms. Dunno why’n hell I got inna this business. Damn things’re in heat an’ humpin’ so much it’s like late-night cable two-four an’ seven out there.”
The hayseed accent is a put-on, incidentally. After the first few phone calls, I did some research and found
out that Herbert is or was a board-certified oncologist who studied at Johns Hopkins. I asked him about this a while ago and he told me he got tired of watching ninety percent of his patients drop dead and wanted a change. It was a toss-up: go to dental school or take over the family business. He went with the latter because he preferred pigs to the thought of sticking his fingers in people’s mouths all day. We have not spoken of it since.
“I trust that everything is satisfactory with your Firmamental insurance experience?” I am instructed to ask this during every single phone call by my supervisor, about whom more later.
“No Simms, I sure in the hell ain’t totally hummered by the grand Firmamental experience,” he says. “What is this great festival a shit y’all got here on line 221?”
I flip open a copy of his policy wording, which, not coincidentally in the least, I happen to have sitting next to the phone on my desk. “Hmmm. Let’s see. I’m guessing that you’re referring to the addition of FCO9666 as a mandatory coverage.”
“That’s the one, Einstein. Ya get a lot of consequential loss due to livestock bein’ possessed, do ya?”
“I believe our underwriters –”
“I can’t even pronounce this last one. Evil spirits, supernatural entities or…what in hell is that?”
“Djinn.”
“Djinn? Fuck’s a djinn? Why doncha spell it G-I-N like normal folks?”
“It’s not the drink. According to the National Farm Underwriting Manual, it refers to an Arabic or Islamic creature made of smokeless and scorching fire.”
“Well, pardon me, Mohammed, but I ain’t never seen no smokeless and scorching fire characters paradin’ about my pens in a hijab lately. Get a lot of those, do ya?”
“As you know, Mister Sternhauser, our actuaries are amongst the most forward-thinking in the industry.”
“As you know, Mister Simms, you’re chargin’ me two hunnerd an’ tweny-eight bucks fer this load of ectoplasmic horseshit.”
“Yes, you’re absolutely right. I do apologize for that, Mister Sternhauser. The charge for that endorsement is not supposed to apply midterm. You’re not supposed to be charged for that one until your next renewal. I’ll fix that and have new documentation out to you right away.”
A sigh. One of these days, the man is going to break. “Christ on a cricket pitch. How many defects is that now, Simms?”
“Counting this one? Sixty-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight.”
“Shit, son. I think you’d have an easier time of it trackin’ the things that work instead of t’other way round.”
“Well, there are always a few bumps when you introduce a new system.” This is another thing I have been instructed to say. I have been instructed to say this in a light, jovial manner. These phone calls are often recorded and replayed for coaching and/or training purposes to assist me in reaching just the right level of light jovialness. It can be difficult, even for a trained and highly attuned ear, to detect even two parts per million of sarcasm in such a statement.
Which brings me to my supervisor.
In order to understand the full existential horror of working for an insurance company, you really do need to meet the man who calls himself Gotoguy @ Firmamental.
If you were to look up the definition for “company man” in the dictionary, you would see an image of his face looking back at you because he paid a sizable amount of money to have the word and his face inserted into the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary as a paid definition. You will also see his face smiling confidently back at you from the definitions of “team player,” “business ninja,” “visionary leader” and “bovine pedophile” (I paid for the last one).
His real name was originally Orenthal Tibbs, but he changed it to Gotoguy @ Firmamental when he was promoted to Acting Supervisor of Policy Fulfillment and Direct Mail Services because he thought it might draw more attention from the big wigs and speed his ascent of the corporate ladder. It’s not an email address (although it is also that). The “@” is his actual middle initial. He has so many professional designations (CIP, FCIP, CRM, CHRP and a CBRA) to go along with his Diploma in Sexual Harassment Prevention that his emails appear to have come from either a highly decorated war veteran or a fraudulent plastic surgeon.
I don’t believe that he has any life outside of the company. He gets in every morning at six A.M. and doesn’t leave until nine or ten at night. He joined every committee that would have him and was a member of no fewer than eight company-related recreational sports and leisure teams until an incident six months ago. He had been sneaking into an all-female Zumba and Aquabics class popular with one of the IT directors when he slipped on the tile and tore his anterior cruciate ligament. It was only when they were loading him into the ambulance that they discovered that the perky redhead they had all known as “Daphne” was actually a 38-year-old man who only waxed the lower half of his legs. After that, he was officially advised to refrain from all contact with female employees in a non-work and specifically changing room setting.
Despite that setback, he refused to take any time off, going so far as to schedule that year’s performance evaluation meetings during his ligament surgery. Mercifully, this lasted for only 20 minutes before his doctor decided that he should be anaesthetized, the result of which was that I received a higher-than-expected “Dynamic Achiever” rating in the Team Interoperability category as he was losing consciousness.
I have no idea what he was like before he came to work here. I don’t know that he does, either. The man is so pathologically desperate for promotion that there is no aspect of his identity he is unwilling to erase to get him even a millimetre closer to his goal. I have no doubt that there is no one he wouldn’t betray, blackmail, backstab or even bump off to get what he wants. The previous holder of his job was killed by a hit-and-run driver who was never caught. When I checked the claims records, I noticed that Oren had reported his own car stolen two days prior and got a new one the following week. Coincidence? Sure, why not? In the field of vehicular homicide, I’m sure they happen all the time.
I still call him Oren. I do this in part to bug him and also because I just can’t bring myself to use his new name. I can get away with this because I knew him before he changed his name and I keep “forgetting” to use the new one because the old one is so familiar. I don’t want to talk to Gotoguy @ Firmamental. I would rather pretend I’m talking to whatever tiny particle of Orenthal Tibbs that might still exist within that walking corporate echo chamber.
“Mark!”
Speak of the devil. I hang up the phone and look up to see Oren looking at me over the blue Lucite half-wall that separates my desk from the three others that make up my quad. There used to be 12 other employees in this department. Now it’s just me. Expense reduction was a key pillar of last year’s Presidential Mission. Since it would be uncompetitive to raise premiums to make up for losses due to the growing number of catastrophic storm claims, we were told we would need to find those savings from within. What started out as pruning has turned into something closer to corporate Seppuku.
“Hey Oren. What’s up?”
Something is up. Oren did not address me using one of his daily affirmative nicknames (“Maximizing Mark,” “Problem-Solving Simms”) and he didn’t show that microscopic flicker of annoyance he always shows when I use his old name. In fact, he appears to have no blood flow to his face. The man looks like he just saw his own dead body and realized that he is now just an entity floating in the air above it.
Oren opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a grunt. He coughs several times and leans forward on the partition, holding on to it with white knuckled hands.
“I just got a call. Hudson wants to see you.”
George Hudson is the president and chief executive officer of the Hudson International Group, the parent company of Firmamental Insurance. He is rumoured to be 122 years old and kept alive by a wide array of biomechanical implants and experimental treatments. He is so rec
lusive that in my eight years here, I have never even come into contact with another employee who has even seen a picture of him.
My first instinct is to assume that the person who brings such news is joking, but Oren is not the joking type. Oren’s idea of funny is limited largely to the outtake reels of corporate training videos in which he has volunteered his services as a background artist. Based on that and the look on his face, I know that this is the real deal, but I still don’t believe it. Why in the hell would the head of the largest insurance company in the country want to see me? It’s not to fire me – Oren could (and would happily) do that all on his own. You don’t get a personal audience with the CEO on your eight-year employment anniversary, which for me doesn’t come up until the end of next month, anyway. Unless I unwittingly pulled some sort of golden ticket out of one of the vending machines or a recently commissioned DNA test has revealed Hudson to be my father, I have no idea why he wants to see me.
But I am about to find out.
-2-
According to the Frobisher Survey of Executive Compensation, the results of which I read at my desk while killing time between phone calls from Mr. Sternhauser last week, George Hudson has made more money by the time his personal butler has brushed his teeth for him on the morning of January 1 than I will make in my entire life.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to make so much money that it makes the news. You never see headlines like “Analyst Signs 40-year $2 Million Contract With Firmamental,” and with good reason. Thousands of people do not pay money just to sit and watch me do what I do. In fact, to force anyone to watch would probably be considered a form of torture. If a pro athlete or movie star was being paid that kind of money, we’d wonder what they were doing wrong. Some people get paid more than that just for having their picture taken.
