* * *
When Ryan came back upstairs, Gillian was standing in the hallway.
“Is that my mother’s car out front?”
“Yes,” said Ryan without any hesitation. “She stopped by to see us.”
“Really? Where is she?”
“She’s in the basement.”
“The basement? What is she doing down there?”
“She brought us a surprise.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell. Then it wouldn’t be a surprise now would it?”
Gillian moved down the dark hall without noticing the blood trail she was stepping on.
“Mom?” she called down the basement stairs.
“Go down, you should see it.”
“Mom?” she called again. “Are you down there?”
“Go on.”
Gillian took a few steps down, then stopped. “What’s that smell?”
“You have to see it Gillian, with your own eyes. It’s really quite something.”
“Mom?” Gillian turned around to go back up the stairs but Ryan was right behind her. “I don’t like this Ryan. Where’s my mom?”
“Down there.”
“Why isn’t she answering then?”
“Maybe she can’t hear you. You should…” Over Gillian’s shoulder he saw the tentacle slither up the stairs. Gillian’s eyes widened in terror as the tentacle wrapped around her leg, pulling her backwards. Gillian screamed. “Oh God, Ryan! Help me!” Gillian shouted as she was pulled to the bottom and around the corner.
My cellphone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me,” says Sarah. “My mother left for the hotel, so the coast is clear. I’m sorry she’s such a pain.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Can you come home? Sammy did a poop. I think we should try to give her a bath. She smells.”
“Okay, I’ll be home in ten. Want anything?”
“Espresso chocolate brownie if they have one. If they don’t, don’t worry, I don’t want the low-fat vegan one. Otherwise get me something good. And a decaf with milk.”
“Done. You know, my character just killed off his wife.”
“You’re a sick bastard. Does she get hacked up into little pieces?”
“I think you’re the sick one… hacked up into little pieces?”
“Yeah baby, lots of blood. Hurry home will you?”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
“I’m sorry Gillian,” said Ryan. He stood on the stairs, listening to the slurping and squelching sounds the hole emitted as it devoured his wife.
What have I done, thought Ryan. What have I done?
The Darkness and the Light
Somehow I managed to endure four days of Barbara. In the evenings Sarah let me escape to Starbucks so I could work on Hungry Hole. I kept revising the part where Ryan hit his mother-in-law with the hammer, each time making it more bloody and violent. By the end of the fourth day, Ryan was mashing her head into a pulpy mess before sawing her up and feeding her to the hole, limb by bloody limb.
After the departure of Barbara, we came under siege by a barrage of visitors and non-stop phone calls from people wanting to wish us well, wondering when they could come and drop off a casserole, when they could come and see the baby: my mother, my father, Phil, Sarah’s sister, my stepsister, my cousin and a number of Sarah’s girlfriends. The apartment is swarming with flowers, cards, balloons and stuffed animals.
About a week later, I come home after getting groceries to find Sarah sitting on the couch holding Sammy. A helium foil balloon, slightly deflated, the word Congratulations written on it, floats mid-air, hovering just above and to the left of Sarah’s head. Sarah’s crying. My heart jumps. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she sobs.
I rush over. “Something wrong with Sammy?”
“No, she is f-fine,” she cries.
I sit down beside her and rub her back.
“What is it baby? What happened? Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know. I’m just sad. I’m okay, just sad.”
“Sad about what?”
“I think it’s just hormones, Colin. I’m still bleeding. I’m still being held together with string. I’m covered in breast milk. I haven’t had a bath in two days. I haven’t been outside in forever, and I’m so tired.”
“Why don’t I put away the groceries and then when I’m done, why don’t I sit with Sammy while you take a bath? Then, if you’re feeling up to it, we could go for a walk. I think the fresh air could do you some good. What do you think?”
She nods her head, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Okay then, let me put those away and you get cleaned up.”
I can’t say that I’m too shocked by Sarah’s emotional outburst. Just the other night we were watching March of the Penguins on TV. Sarah fell asleep. When they got to the part where one of the penguins loses his egg and the baby dies, I cried my eyes out. I can’t imagine what’s going on with Sarah and her superhighway of hormones surging uncontrollably around her body. While Sarah is in the bath, I place Sammy on the Baby Einstein activity gym. She is far too young for it, but it’s supposed to be good for little Sammy’s developing brain to look at black and white stripes. I log on to my email, which I haven’t checked since I sent out the birth announcement. I have twenty new messages, most of which have the same subject line: “Re: Our New Taxpayer,” friends and family responding to the photos of Sammy I sent. One subject line grabs my eye: The Cube People. I click on it.
From: Marcus Jackson Editor Black Forest Editions
Date: 2007/04/25 AM 10:12:01 EDT
To: Colin MacDonald
Subject: The Cube People
Hello Colin:
After reading over your complete manuscript of The Cube People, I’m delighted to tell you that we would love to publish it if it is still available. It is one of the most unique and interesting books I’ve read in a long time. I thought the characters were well-developed and robust. The plot is extremely clever; however I did find some sections confusing and think they could use a reworking. Overall though, it’s really a fabulous book. We would be looking at next spring as a release date. Please let me know if the manuscript is still available.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Best Regards, Marcus
“Holy shit,” I whisper to the air. My head is spinning. I reread it several times. I look down at Sammy who is staring up at the black and white bar. “I did it Sammy,” I tell her. I listen to the bathwater stop. Should I tell Sarah? Should I interrupt the bath? I’m about to burst. I’ll wait. I tiptoe dance around Sammy on the mat pumping my arms into the air. Then I go back to the screen and read the email one more time. I just can’t believe it. First Sammy, now this. I’m undeserving. I don’t remember auditioning for this play, but here I am with the starring role.
Sarah sees me on the couch with a beer in my hand and a smile from ear to ear. Sammy’s now in the vibrating chair. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say back, smiling like a lotto winner.
“What?”
“Black Forest Editions said yes.”
“What? Really?”
I point to the laptop. “Read it.”
Her hair wrapped in a towel, Sarah shuffles in her bathrobe over to the screen and reads. She stands up straight and turns around, right hand on her mouth. Her left hand is flapping, swatting away an imaginary bug as she begins to cry.
“I’m so happy, I’m sorry I’m crying, but I’m really happy for you, baby.”
I go over and give her a hug.
“Are they a good press?”
“Well it’s not a big press, but they have published a few G
overnor General’s nominees.”
“Oh baby, I’m so happy for you.”
“You up for a walk?”
“I’m worried about popping a stitch.”
“We’ll go slow. I’ll push the stroller. Maybe walk to the 7-Eleven and get a Slurpee?”
She nods her head.
“Look at little Sammy, isn’t she beautiful?” I ask.
“She’s so lovely. I love her so much.”
“Man, can it get any better than this?”
I go back to work after being off for two and a half weeks. I have almost two hundred emails to wade through. There are several emails from management stating that they are toying with the idea of having a no-email day. I wish. I hack away at the electronic jungle of messages most of the morning. I’m happy to see that Jackie and Mr. Peaches are still gone. I’m secretly hoping that they’ll be unable to come back. To my surprise, Dan shows up at quarter to eleven carrying a massive white panel. “Colin, give me a hand with this,” Dan huffs.
“Jesus, I thought you were gone for good? Bruce told me you had fibromyalgia and you weren’t coming back.”
“Nah, turns out I have Seasonal Affective Disorder and I just need light.”
“But, Dan, it’s May.”
“Well it’s more like non-seasonal depression.”
“Non-seasonal depression, what the hell is that?”
“Well it’s seasonal depression, except it’s not in the winter or fall.”
“So you’re suffering from just plain old depression then?”
“Well, sort of, I guess,” says Dan cheerily. “The doctor told me I could use some light after I told him how dark my cubicle was.” I suspect that this whole business is just a clever ruse for Dan to get what he really wants and has been asking for for years, namely a window seat.
We spend the next half hour attaching the metal stand and adjusting the height of the giant light panel. When Dan flicks it on, the whole quad is immediately awash in a powerful fluorescent light. It’s football stadium light, the kind you would see on your way to heaven. I realize that I won’t be able to work when Dan has his SunSquare Plus ablaze. It feels like a car is parked behind me with its high beams on. “Dan, I can’t see my screen with the glare coming off of it, you’re going to need to turn that thing off.”
“Just fifteen minutes twice a day,” pleads Dan. “I really need to get better.”
“Christ, fine. I’ll be back in fifteen then,” I tell him.
I march off to get a coffee.
The Bottom of the Hole
Being back in the office, it seems like I’ve joined a secret club that only fathers can understand. You don’t really know what it means to have a child, the sleep deprivation, the emotional influx, until you go through it yourself. I pass by Bob Roland on my way to the coffee room. Bob has three kids. “How’s it going, Colin?”
“Pretty good. Tired.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll never sleep again,” he laughs. “But seriously though, don’t worry, it will get better in three months or so. Oh, and you’ll never sleep again.”
He walks off laughing. “Thanks Bob, thanks for that.”
I walk into the coffee room and there’s Barry, Bruce and Dexter. They all turn their heads and look at me. I think they’re going to say congratulations, or be jovial or something, but instead Barry says “Colin, we need to see you this afternoon in my office.”
“Um, sure, what’s it all about?”
“We’ll discuss it then.”
“Okay, what time?”
“1:30.”
“Okay, see you then.”
Dexter Peterson is in his fifties. He’s a Tech-4 or Tech-5, I’m not sure which, but he knows everything. He’s the guru’s guru, the man behind the curtain, the mainframe god. Dexter stories are legendary around the office. He has appeared in people’s cubicles and told them that their programs are using too much CPU, then rips their code apart leaving them decimated. You never want to see Dexter.
This little encounter leaves me shaken. I wonder if Dexter is part of the “we” in “we need to see you?” Maybe it’s just Barry using “we” to mean “I?” It’s probably just about my family leave or something. Still, I wonder if one of my programs I took over from Dan is sucking up too much CPU? I know there’s some spaghetti code that I still need to fix. Perhaps I’m too paranoid?
Powering through the thousands of emails that have accumulated, I arrive at one with the subject line “No-Email Day.” Clicking it open, a message from the Commissioner greets me.
To All MRC employees:
In today’s rapidly growing technology age, information is coming at us at an almost incomprehensible rate. We have less and less time to get on top of the data that we are being bombarded with on a daily basis. Hours of each and every day are wasted sifting through email while the real work continues to accumulate. The excellent level of service to the national taxpayer is being hindered by email. It has to stop. We are going to be implementing a No-Email day so you have time to get to the real work. We live in challenging times, but working together we can be a glowing example for others of what a forward-thinking Agency we continue to be.
– Bill Crow, Commissioner of the Ministry of Revenue Collection
I smell disaster. I delete the email and move on.
I have lunch with Phil at Sunshine Valley. He and Zoe apparently had a big fight last night and we have to sneak by First Choice. I tell Phil the news about my book and he becomes more animated than he normally is. I can’t believe how excited he gets. I love his reaction.
On the high about the book (Phil’s contagious enthusiasm pushing it to the heights of Everest) combined with the secret-club-of-dads sensation I’m carrying, I feel electric. With this emotion radiating from my being, I waltz into Barry’s office at 1:30 on the dot. Barry, Bruce, Dexter and two men in dark jackets who could quite possibly be from the cast of The Matrix are standing there looking like they have all eaten one too many serious pills.
“Whoa, what’s up?”
“Please take a seat and shut the door,” says Barry. I do. “This is Detective Bellows and this is Detective Waters from the RCMP,” offers Barry.
I nod. Everyone is quiet, solemn. “What’s up?” I ask.
Waters begins. “We’re investigating Peter Cann for fraud. Do you know anything about it?”
“Fraud? No,” I say.
“Do you recognize these?” asks Dexter, shoving a piece of paper at me. I take it.
“These are our test SINs.”
“Test SINs?” inquires Bellows.
“Yeah, we use these social insurance numbers to test our system in production, in our live system. We use them all the time.”
“Do you know what Peter was doing with them?” asks Waters.
“I don’t know, testing the system?”
“He was filing them,” says Dexter.
“What do you mean filing them?” I ask.
“With some of our calculations, we round down to the dollar. Peter was accumulating all the rounded cents that get dropped. This kind of fraud has been committed by many others in the computer programming field before; however none of them were this good. He put logic into place to hold the money in queues, which he would drain out every six months. It must have taken Peter at least ten years to put it into place, all the programs and logic in hundreds of programs needed to bypass all the checks,” says Dexter with a hint of pride in his voice, as if only one of his own could be smart enough to pull it off.
“Wow, how much did he take?”
“We’ve been working with Dexter here to determine just that,” says Waters. “We’re estimating in the millions, maybe even upwards of a hundred million dollars, stolen from the government. If we catch him, and we will, he’s going to be put aw
ay for a long time.”
“Jesus, I can’t imagine Peter doing something like that. It’s crazy,” I say. Now, that’s what I say, but I’m thinking that Peter Cann is even more brilliant and more courageous than I imagined him to be. I’d been working beside a master criminal for years and never even knew it.
“The reason we wanted to see you Colin,” says Dexter, “is your user ID is on some of the programs that we suspect Peter wrote.”
“Really?” I stammer.
“Do you know how to code in Assembler?” asks Dexter.
“No, but I’m sure I could learn,” I say.
Dexter looks at the two detectives and says, “I don’t think he did it.”
“Did what?” I ask. Jesus, I feel my face flush, my palms are sweating. Shit, I think about all my writing I have saved on the LAN. I think about the marker I took home to mark those boxes when we moved. I think of the extra fifteen minutes I took at lunch the other day. Jesus, has Peter set me up as some sort of fall guy?
“Help Peter,” says Bellows.
“No way guys, I didn’t do anything.”
“Why is your user ID on a bunch of Assembler modules in Production?” asks Waters.
“Yeah, why?” pipes in Bruce. The joy that I had been radiating turns to irritation and I’m overcome with a desire to slap Bruce in the face, hard.
“I don’t know. Maybe Peter did it under my user ID?”
“Colin, what we know is this. Peter has had his fingers in lots and lots of code. Pretty much everywhere he’s put in bypass logic for these test SINs. Nobody’s ever questioned what he was doing because they were just test SINs, and Peter is a well-respected and very smart man. None of the programs that we suspect he wrote have his user ID on them. He was good at covering his tracks. The other reason I don’t think you did it is because Dan’s user ID is on some of these programs. He could never write code this sophisticated, plus he wasn’t physically at work when some of these programs were put into Production,” says Dexter.
The Cube People Page 12
