The Cube People

by Christian McPherson

  I’m working away, lost in some tricky code, when I hear Bruce clear his throat behind me. I spin in my chair and there’s Bruce and a woman who’s about forty-five, wearing a horrific purple and yellow paisley dress. She’s smiling yet not looking at me, but rather just above me and slightly to the right. In her hand she’s clutching the handle of a harness fastened to a panting golden retriever.

  “Colin, I would like you to meet Jackie and Mr. Peaches, the guide dog.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” says Jackie, extending her arm out into the air.

  I stand and take her hand, touching her slightly on the arm to correct her position so she’s facing me and not my cubicle wall.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Colin here will be showing you the ropes. Get you going. Here’s her user ID and temporary passcode,” says Bruce, passing me a piece of paper. When I reach for it, I notice Carla. She has turned in her seat and is looking at Mr. Peaches, horrified. Bruce catches my glance. “Oh,” he says. “Almost forgot, your other cubicle partner here is Carla.”

  Jackie turns, following Bruce’s voice and faces Carla. “Pleased to meet you,” she says, again extending her hand into the air.

  Carla doesn’t move. This is interesting; nobody has ever tried to shake Carla’s hand before. I see one of my co-workers, Jill from the Refrigerator Committee, in the hallway heading to the washroom. She sees the situation. Jill is bright. She pivots and slides gracefully past Bruce so she is now facing Jackie. She takes her hand and says, “Pleased to meet you too.” Then she slips back into the hallway and is gone. Jackie looks puzzled as to why her co-worker came and left from the direction of the hall. I throw Jill a smile and a thumbs-up for her brilliant miniscule charade. She winks back and wanders off.

  Bruce steers a confused-looking Jackie away from a confused-looking Carla and says, “And this is where you’ll be sitting.”

  “Where’s Dan?” I ask Bruce. I haven’t seen the guy in at least a week.

  “Dan’s been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I don’t think he’ll be back. I’ve been meaning to come and talk to you about this. Until we can find a replacement, you’ll need to take over for Dan.”

  This comes as no surprise. It won’t make much difference since I’m doing 95 percent of his work anyway. I think Dan knew in his heart that he would end up on long-term disability. My heart knew it, too. “No worries, Bruce, I’ve got it covered.”

  “Jackie here is going to be working on updating the threshold conversion document. So if you can show her what she needs to do, that’ll be great.”

  Updating the threshold conversion document is about as useful a task as counting grains of sand on a beach – useless and never-ending. Brita never did it for just that reason. I assume Bruce has given her this task because it doesn’t matter if she screws it up or not; nobody ever looks at it. So now, on top of doing my own work, Brita’s work, and Dan’s work, I have to babysit Jackie and Mr. Peaches. Great.

  I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to get Jackie logged onto the mainframe. The LAN people give her the word “password” to temporarily log in with, and she manages to lock herself out by incorrectly typing it. We have to call and get it reset, three times. Turns out she had caps lock turned on. Jackie is extremely slow. Watching her trying to perceive what’s happening on the screen with the giant fish-eye lens is comically painful. It’s even difficult for me to navigate the screen because everything is enormous. Even if Jackie could see, it’s still a nightmare trying to manoeuvre around the LAN to find any document; everything seems to be buried six file folders deep. I spend the next two days just trying to get her set up. I am the Miracle Worker.

  A week has gone by. Sarah has pain in her lower back and isn’t sleeping well. Hence I’m not sleeping well either. I’m washing my hands in the bathroom sink at work. My thoughts float around my mind like a mobile: Is my book scary enough? What if Sammy hates me? Did I forget to take out the garbage? Why do I think about these things? Can I think any differently than I do? Why do I keep thinking about what I’m thinking about?

  I look at myself in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes look back. Dope-smoking eyes. Maybe it’s pinkeye? Maybe it’s eye cancer? A wave of panic washes over me. I clutch the counter. My heart is galloping. Maybe I’m having a heart attack? When I finally calm down and am able to compose myself, I walk over and tell Bruce that I have to go to the doctor. At the clinic there is a forty-five-minute wait. What if they have to remove both my eyes and I’ll never get to see Sammy before she is born? What if I die? Sammy will never get to know her father. I’ll have to make videos for all of her birthdays until she turns twenty-one. The last one will be me in Randy Pausch style expelling nuggets of wisdom: follow your passion Sammy, don’t settle for an office job, you’ll hate yourself and end up dying of eye cancer.

  “Colin MacDonald?” chimes a voice.

  An unfriendly nurse brings me to a little room to wait for the doctor. I stare at the poster on the wall, a cross-section of the middle ear. Maybe I’ll go deaf too? Then there’s a knock and the door opens. A little East Indian woman enters with a clipboard and introduces herself as Dr. Lakhani. She tells me it’s probably just allergies and sends me down the street for tests. Turns out I’m allergic to dogs. Maybe I should adopt a few pieces from Carla’s new wardrobe. She’s taken to wearing a white lab coat, rubber surgical gloves and an air-filtering mask. A rash has formed on Carla’s cheek around the edge of the mask. She looks as if she should be working in a laboratory for infectious diseases. It turns out I am the one who could probably use the mask.

  I’m the last to arrive at our weekly group meeting, which now, after the loss of Dan and Brita, consists of Bruce, Carla, myself, Jackie and Mr. Peaches. Bruce is going over a meeting he had with the managers about the sense of urgency and the need for commitment from every employee to reach the goal of Paperless Office 2012. I smell shit. No, it’s not what’s coming from Bruce’s mouth, I mean I smell real shit. I look over and there in the corner of the room, next to the easel with the large sheets of paper used for brainstorming (in most cases it’s a light drizzle), is Mr. Peaches, taking a dump on the carpet. “Bruce, check it out,” I say pointing, interrupting him.

  “Oh my. Jackie, Mr. Peaches seems to be going to the washroom.”

  “Mr. Peaches!” cries Jackie. “Bad dog, bad dog. Come over here.” The dog looks sullen. It slowly comes over and lies down next to Jackie’s chair.

  “Colin, would you mind cleaning that up?” asks Bruce casually, as if he were asking me to retrieve a pen that had fallen on the floor. I’m surprised he has the nerve to ask after he has only recently recovered from fearing for his own physical safety.

  “Yeah I mind,” I say.

  “I’ll get it, just show me where it is,” Jackie says.

  “Why doesn’t Carla get it, she’s wearing gloves?” I suggest. I can’t really read Carla’s expression because of the mask.

  “Colin, please, we can’t leave it there,” says Bruce.

  “You pick it up then,” I tell him.

  “Why is Carla wearing gloves?” asks Jackie.

  “Fine, I need to get a baggy,” says Bruce.

  “I always carry baggies in my purse,” says Jackie. “I’ll go to my desk and get one.”

  “I’ll get it for you Jackie,” I say.

  “Oh, thanks Colin. My purse is in my desk drawer,” she tells me.

  In my lengthy chats with Jackie, I’ve discovered a few things about Mr. Peaches. Jackie, because she does have some limited vision, wasn’t on the top of the list to receive a dog. But Mr. Peaches came along because he flunked out of seeing-eye-dog school from the States. Apparently he barks at pigs. I’m not sure if that’s enough to get you flunked, or if he lacks in some other capacity. I do know that when Jackie takes his harness off there is no evidence of any special abilities. She usually t
akes his harness off for most of the day. Mr. Peaches runs all over the office. I walked into my director’s office the other day and low and behold, there was Mr. Peaches sniffing her crotch. Charming.

  On my way back to my cube I catch glimpses of other people’s garbage cans. They’re overflowing. Rose and Jessica, the two African ladies who clean our offices, are terrified of Mr. Peaches and have basically stopped cleaning our floor. They only work during the day, so the garbage hasn’t been picked up for over a week now. I find the baggy in Jackie’s purse and bring it back to our meeting. I pass it to Bruce. I ask him as he’s scooping, “So what’s the time code for picking up crap, Bruce? Does that go under general maintenance?”

  After the meeting is over, I’m extremely itchy everywhere, like I’m wearing wool pyjamas. I have red blotches which I imagine are hives. Mr. Peaches is sending me over the edge. But then something happens. Determinism. Some people call it fate. Was it always going to unfold this way? Yes. Somebody had the idea that the hundreds of boxes of file folders in the coffee room were taking up too much room. Could they have thought any differently? So they stacked them up to the ceiling. Here’s an interesting fact you might enjoy: Ottawa is built on a fault line. From time to time, the good people of Ottawa experience a rumble: not just a cabinet shuffle in Parliament, but a real live earthquake. As fate would have it, Jackie and Mr. Peaches went to the coffee room in search of a cup when the earthquake struck. A ten-foot wall of boxes, each box being of substantial size and weight, came crashing down atop Jackie and Mr. Peaches. Jackie was rushed to the hospital where they determined that she had a concussion and a broken collarbone. Mr. Peaches went to the vet where they determined he had a broken front leg.

  The next day, all the garbage is picked up, my hives are gone and my eyes aren’t as red anymore. I receive an email from management saying that due to the hazardous situation in the coffee room, everyone will be required to store two boxes of file folders at his or her desk for the time being. Dr. Barnum would be available if anyone desired to talk about their feelings concerning what happened to Jackie and Mr. Peaches. Later in the day, I get an envelope dropped off in my in-basket containing two get-well-soon cards, one for Jackie and one for Mr. Peaches, and a little pouch for donations for a gift. I sign both cards thinking why, because she is never going to see it anyway. I slip a toonie into the pouch and then put the envelope into Carla’s in-basket. A maintenance guy comes by with a cart and drops two boxes of file folders in each cubicle of our quad. After he leaves, I move my boxes to Jackie’s cube. She and Mr. Peaches are going to be off work for quite some time.

  Three months later…

  From the Hole Emerges Life

  The last three months have been hectic. Sarah’s up every hour to pee and her back is killing her. Sammy’s been kicking nonstop. Apparently she never stops moving. Well actually, she did last month. Sarah called me at work and said she hadn’t felt Sammy move since one o’clock. It was 2:30 when she called. I told her to relax, that she’d be fine, just give it some more time. We, of course, ended up in emergency at the Civic Hospital sitting around the waiting room for three hours, only to discover that everything was perfectly normal. Sammy began to kick away madly when the nurse put the heart monitor on Sarah’s belly.

  I’ve been sleeping on the couch the past few nights because Sarah is up all the time. She’s ten days overdue. We’re going to the hospital today so she can be induced. So hopefully, I’ll be seeing little Sammy soon. The car seat has been installed and the hospital bag was packed three weeks ago: a couple of pairs of pyjamas for Sarah, her bathrobe, toiletries, infant diapers, a baby blanket, an outfit for Sammy to wear home, and the video camera with extra tapes and batteries. When we pull into the parking lot, which is still under construction, Sarah blurts out that she is scared.

  “What are you worried about?”

  “What if something happens?” she asks, squeezing my hand.

  “Listen, whatever happens, happens. But this is a good hospital with very knowledgeable doctors and nurses. They have all the fancy equipment in case anything should happen, which it won’t.”

  “How can you be sure? What if the cord wraps around her neck? I think about that all the time, Sammy being strangled by the cord,” Sarah says, grabbing her belly.

  “What is it?” I ask, because I can tell by the look on her face that something is wrong.

  “Nothing, I just haven’t felt her move in a while.”

  “When’s a while?”

  “Just a second,” she says pushing on her belly with the palm of her hand.

  “When? When’s the last time you felt her move?”

  “Maybe an hour ago.”

  “Jesus, let’s go.”

  The round suction-cup end of the video camera’s viewfinder rests against my eye socket as the word “REC” flashes in red in the upper right hand corner of my visual screen. “Tell us what’s going on,” I ask Sarah who’s sitting in a lavender hospital chair with two straps around her torso monitoring Sammy’s heartbeat and her own possible contractions.

  “Jesus, Colin, do you have to film this?”

  “Hey, Sammy’s going to love this when she’s older.”

  “I don’t want all this on film.”

  “Why not?”

  “Fine. Film away,” she says, looking away from the camera at the wall.

  “Sarah has just had the insert placed into her cervix to soften it and hopefully this will get things moving along. Sarah is being monitored in case of uterine hyperstimulation, which means she would have contractions right away. Nothing is happening at the moment.” I pan over to the monitoring equipment, then pan back to Sarah and zoom in on her face.

  “Can you turn that shit off?” she asks.

  After forty minutes of nothing, they send us home. We stop for lunch at the hospital cafeteria because Sarah is starving. She orders a cheeseburger and fries with gravy, but manages only to eat half before she says she’s full. Her stomach is being squished by Sammy sitting on it. I anticipated this, so I only bought a small salad.

  As soon as we get in the door, Sarah rushes to the washroom to pee. “Colin, it fell out!” she yells calmly.

  “What, the insert or the baby?”

  “Very funny. The insert. What should we do?”

  I call the hospital and they tell us to come back in. So back we go. A different doctor comes in and reinserts the insert. “There, that ought to do it,” she says. We head back home.

  “I’m having pain,” says Sarah on the way home in the car.

  “Are you okay, should I turn around?”

  “No, no. They said there might be a little discomfort associated with the insert. I should be fine.”

  When we arrive back home for the second time, Sarah seems quite uncomfortable. “I don’t know Colin, it seems really intense, cramping. I’m going to take a bath to see if it takes the edge off.” She does this for a while, then she says, “Jesus, maybe the first time when they monitored us it wasn’t in. Then they put it in properly and they didn’t monitor us. You know, Colin, I think I’m having contractions here. Phone the hospital!”

  I phone and they tell me to tell Sarah to take the insert out. So I do and she does. She gets out of the bath and gets dressed and we drive back to the hospital. When we hit the maternity ward, Sarah is writhing in pain. We are taken to a room where a doctor can check her out. She gets undressed again and puts on a green hospital gown which is open all down the back. As soon as she sits down on the examination table, there is a small almost-inaudible pop. “Something happened, I’m all wet,” Sarah says. I can tell she is doing her best to stay calm.

  “Relax honey,” says one of the nurses. “Your water broke is all.”

  Sarah looks scared. I have no clue what to expect. I too sometimes think about the cord wrapping around little Sammy’s neck, but I’d neve
r tell Sarah that. “You’re fine baby,” I tell her in the most soothing voice I can muster. “You’re going to do great.”

  The doctor checks her and tells her everything is fine, tells Sarah to relax. After they put a plastic IV lock in her hand, they take us to a birthing room. She’s contracting every minute. She’s been hyperstimulated. She went from zero to sixty, full-on contractions, in a matter of minutes when they put the insert in the second time. When we get to the birthing room, I’m surprised at how big it is. In fact it’s enormous. Sarah’s become wild, her eyes have widened and her breathing is rapid. “I can’t get on top of the pain. I’m so hot,” she says ripping her hospital gown from her body. She’s running around in a circle clutching her lower back, her head flopping, spinning as she moans in pain. I look to the nurse for help.

  “Okay, Sarah sweetie,” says the nurse, “you need to calm down.”

  “Okay,” says Sarah, slowing her pace but continuing to walk around the room.

  “Would you like something to ease the pain?”

  “Yes,” she blurts.

  “Would you like to try the Jacuzzi tub?”

  “Sure, but something for the pain.” I help Sarah get into the tub and get the bubbles going while the nurse leaves to get some drug called Nubain.

  “I’m sorry Colin, I wanted to do it without the drugs, but I didn’t think the pain would be this intense. It just came on so fast. I think I’m going to need to take the epidural.”

  “It’s okay, baby,” I tell her. “You’re doing great. You just hang in there.”

  I run the water in the tub and get the jets going. I help Sarah in. She flops around the tub like a whale. She’s moaning in pain.

  “Oh God, I’m going to be sick,” she says.

  I help her out of the tub and Sarah throws up, missing the toilet of course. Most of it hits the side of the Jacuzzi.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t worry about it.”