The Cube People

by Christian McPherson

  Gillian turned to the agent. “Ryan suffers from epilepsy. Sometimes this is how it starts before a seizure hits.”

  “No, Gillian, I’m fine,” said Ryan, as his body suddenly tightened and contorted and he fell to the ground and began to convulse.

  * * *

  “Just give me a minute,” said Ryan, sitting on the bottom step of the basement stairs.

  “Is he going to be okay?” asked the agent.

  “He’ll be fine,” said Gillian.

  “I think we should take it,” said Ryan.

  “What?” asked Gillian.

  “The house, I think we should take it.”

  “Maybe you want to think about it?” suggested the agent.

  “No, I feel the book in me coming out, this is the place.”

  “The book coming out?” questioned Gillian.

  “I feel that I could write in this house. The seizure, it was a sign I think. What do you think of the house?”

  “Well, except for this basement, it’s great.”

  “Then we should put in an offer,” said Ryan, smiling.

  * * *

  Ryan managed to hit the goddamn beam, again, on his way down to the cellar.

  “Fuck,” said Ryan.

  “You okay honey?” asked a snickering voice that came from the top of the stairs.

  “Remind me to…” he said but stopped. He turned and ran back up the stairs. Dean and Marsha were sitting on the floor. Ryan took the joint from Marsha’s offering hand.

  “I have an idea for a book,” said Ryan, then he took a drag.

  He exhaled and they all listened as he told it.

  The Smile of a Million Smiles

  I’m in the garage staring at the stacks of money on my workbench. Should I give it back? Three hundred thousand could buy me three, four, maybe even five years of writing. Surely in that time I could write the bestseller. I would need one to stay away from my day job permanently. It would buy me a shot. How many people are handed a chance like this? Is this fate? Could this have happened any other way? The door to the house opens and Sarah walks in yelling my name. I turn to her and say, “Hi honey.”

  “I’ve been looking all over for you, and…” She sees the money.

  “What’s that?”

  “Three hundred thousand dollars,” I answer.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Peter Cann sent it to me.”

  “Have you called the police yet?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You can’t keep it.”

  “Whoa there, Miss Conscientious, let’s just take a second to think about this, shall we?”

  “What’s there to think about? If you get caught you’ll go to jail. You have to give it back, Colin.”

  “Can you hear me out for one second?”

  “No.”

  “Give me one chance at a sales pitch.”

  “Fine, pitch away,” she says.

  “This is my dream. I can have the time to write, I mean really write. No cubicles, no lines of code to change, no interruptions. I’ll have peace and quiet. I can’t listen to Dan drone on for the next twenty years about his failing body. I can’t stand the smell of hand sanitizer in the morning. I can’t deal with filling in my goddamn timesheet. Do you understand what I’m saying here? I’ll be able to spend more time with the kids, with you. This is my chance. I don’t want to end up a miserable failure. I don’t want to be my father.”

  “Listen, Colin, I don’t know what makes you think you’re so special, but everybody goes to work. Everybody fills in their timesheet. Most people don’t like it, but they do it just the same. That’s just part of life. If you want to be a writer, then write. Real writers find the time. Taking this money, it’s cheating. Besides, softness never made good art. You’re the one who told me that. If you only have thirty minutes a day to write, then you’ll write like it means something when you do write. It might not be any good, but the passion will be behind it. People will feel that. You need to give the money back. And don’t worry, you’re not your father.”

  I look at the towers of bills and imagine a world without fluorescent lighting.

  Standing adjacent to the stage, I can see Sarah, the kids, and my mother sitting in the studio audience. They’ve pinned a cordless microphone to my shirt and have done a sound check. I’m nervous. My palms are rivers of sweat. I remember what Sarah told me: “People are here to see you. They want to see you, want to hear what you have to say. You’re likeable, remember that.”

  She’s speaking from her couch about her website and where you can go to find out more information. She says, “And when we return from our break, we’ll be speaking with Colin MacDonald, author of The Cube People. It’s one of my favourite books of the year, and it’s soon to be a major motion picture directed by David Cronenberg. So please stay with us.” The crowd applauds. The woman standing next to me with a clipboard and small headset motions for me to go out, to take my place on the stage. She rises off the couch and extends her hand. I feel as though I should drop to one knee and kiss her hand, but I don’t. I grab it and she leans in and gives me a peck on the cheek and softly into my ear whispers, “Welcome.” I take a seat on the couch next to her. She picks up my book and places it on her lap. She caresses it softly as if it were a cat. We do another sound check and we’re set.

  “Welcome back,” she says, smiling at the camera. Her teeth are perfectly white, no traces of tea or coffee, but pure white, like printer paper, as if they’re waiting for words to be typed upon them. Her mouth is a series of white pages bound elegantly by upper and lower lip covers, just waiting for that oval kiss, that sticker that says Buy me. I know now that I’ll never need Peter Cann’s money. I’m happy I decided to hand it over to the police, but at the time I felt as if I were a trapeze artist and somebody had just taken away the safety net. I didn’t know it was going to turn out this way.

  Her smile is the smile of a million smiles and when she asks me how I am, I tell her without any reservation or hesitation: “Fabulous.”

  BEEP BEEP BEEP… There’s Marcus Jackson in the audience, clapping his hands together. Although I’ve never met him, I know it’s him. Every time he brings his hands together they BEEP.

  BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP…

  I hit the alarm clock off. Sarah rolls over, taking most of the duvet with her. Funny how your mind can play tricks on you. Do you really have any control over what you think? Was it always going to happen this way?

  When I’d brought Peter Cann’s gift of stolen money home, fear had danced in my heart. The image of me in an orange jumpsuit, Sarah bringing the kids to see their inmate father, flashed before my eyes. I went into work the next day and told Barry I’d been kidding. He’d said with a chuckle, “Thought you were.” It’s a good thing I did, because the next week, Kurt Jackson called me. He’d finished reading over Hungry Hole and told me he couldn’t publish it. He said it wasn’t strong enough, not nearly as good as The Cube People. Sarah had tried to be comforting. “Well, you know what Colin, whatever happens in your life, at least you managed to get published.” I understood what she was trying to say, but her words felt like failure. I got a sinking feeling in my gut, a ball of wet clay. I’ve had that feeling in my stomach for two weeks now.

  Just as I’m heading out the door to go to work, Sarah yells out for me not to forget my lunch. She comes running down the hall with a piece of Tupperware containing spaghetti leftovers, my name and expiry date written in ballpoint across a piece of masking tape on the lid. “Thanks,” I say, kissing her lightly on the cheek.

  I walk to the bus stop and wait. The sky is grey. When the bus arrives, I manage to get one of the last seats near the back. I softly drum the plastic lid of my lunch. I could be home, writing, if I’d only kept the money. I remind myself that g
ood art doesn’t come from cushiness. I could do with a few toss cushions though.

  Glancing to my right I see a young man reading a book. Then I realize it’s not just a book. A complete stranger is reading my book. My book. I don’t make any sudden movements, like I’ve discovered some rare exotic bird and I don’t want to scare it away. I observe him reading for several stops; he’s got short-cropped hair, glasses, maybe twenty-five, neatly dressed. Maybe a university student? He seems fixated, intense. I’m filled with wonder and awe. He flips a page. “Excuse me,” I say.

  “Yes?” he answers sitting up straighter in his seat, pushing his glasses higher up his nose.

  “I just wanted to know what you thought of your book. Are you enjoying it?”

  “This?” he says, turning it over in his hands. “Yeah, I love it. One of the best books I’ve read in a while. Have you heard of it or something? I think the guy who wrote it is local.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking of getting a copy.”

  “You should, worth it,” he says, and then goes back to reading.

  Suddenly I realize I’ve missed my stop. I DING the bell and get off. As I walk back the ten blocks to work, I can’t stop smiling: one of the best books I’ve read in a while.

  When I get off the elevator, the air on my floor seems pungently stale. After I manage to cram my lunch into the overcrowded refrigerator, I make my way to my cubicle and log on to my machine. Fastened to the fabric wall of my cube, the photograph of Sarah and our three children stares at me. The knot in my stomach seems to have relaxed, albeit ever so slightly.

  I open Word and begin to type a new story:

  The monster had him by the throat, but he wasn’t afraid. He knew now that it wouldn’t kill him.

  Acknowledgements

  I thank the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous financial support during the time that I wrote this book.

  Jeffrey Hodgson, Shelley Little, Tim MacIntosh, Ross Buskard, George Sneyd, Brenna MacNeil, Nicole Hillmer, Ken Sproule, Maria Wing, Cindy Christie, Graham O’Neil, Jules and Christopher Hilliker, Mark Saikaley, Marc-Andre Pigeon, Tom Macdonald and Don Mounteer, thank you all for reading.

  For your support, thanks to: James and Megan Cantellow, Bill Rogers, Ben and Allison Lones, Bryan Gardner, Celine Dore, Claire McLaughlin, Barb Harris, Jennifer Stone, Colette Gignac, David Pringle, Henry Scott Smith, Sarah Bristow, Jason Mutch, Jen Baker, John Francis, Jean-Pierre Verreault, Brian Stoneman, Kathy and Scott Cowan, Kate and Shawn Charland, Kevin Ready, Neal Gillett, Rob White, Chris Sherlock, Jeanie Hicks, Luke Sneyd, Mike Hillmer, Christine Woodrow, Josiane St-Louis, Finlay MacLennan, Joanne Lee, Bob Kidman, Jeremy Galda, Terrie Osborne, Nona Ioan, Anita Comeau, Juliette Lavoie-Goguen, James Wong, Sharon Pickles, Kelly Gillingham, Luciano Oliveira, Lynda McGahey, Pat Langhan, Rod Myers, Rohin Lakhani, Will Jan, David Schumann, Jesse Vallier, Phil Lee, Gina Cook, Eric Dumville, Dorothy Camire, Rob and Sonya Read, Peter McColgan, Kim Davison, and all my other friends in APD and DISA.

  To my mother and talented photographer, Judith Gustafsson, thank you for all that you do. To my mother-in-law Susan Carr (who is very much unlike the mother-in-law in this book) thanks for all your love and support. To Lona Leiren and in loving memory of my father-in-law Russell Carr who passed away last year, bless you both. The Davis and Gustafsson teams, along with the extended Carr family – Ashley, Sarah and Kyle, much gratitude.

  My succinct and unquestionably sane publisher, Silas White: thank you.

  My beautiful wife, Marty, I love you as much as the day I met you.

  And finally my kids, Molly and Henry, to whom this book is dedicated, you are the reasons I get out of bed (literally) and I love you with all my heart.