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Construction


Calvin was not sure of many things. He was sure he had seen Gira naked.

One year on the job and Calvin was not sleeping anymore and he never felt awake. The minutes were eons but the hours were decades: time was loopy and he had begun to grimace with just one side of his face. The asymmetry bothered him as he brushed his teeth in the morning and stared that face in the eye, tough guy stance, can you take it? A year ago, even six months ago, maybe the answer had been yes. Maybe. But now it was a steady probably not.

Then Gira got transferred in from External Relations. It was a big demotion and the older ladies in Firmwide Secretarial whispered about it near the water machines. Something to do with her superior, or her work ethic, or a missing watch, or a kiss. Gira looked to be about twenty four, around Calvin's age but maybe a little older, and she was the harsh kind of pretty that only shows itself in a sudden laugh. Very dark hair, almost black. Long.

He was absolutely sure he had seen her naked. He did not remember where.

Gira got transferred to the cubicle adjacent to his. He could see her typing and dialing the phone from the crack where the two halves of his partition did not quite meet. Other people had tacked photographs of their families or paramours to the grey carpeted surface, but he had never felt inspired. Through the crack, he could see that Gira's wall was bare, too. Well, her opposite wall. He figured she could have tacked up pictures on the wall he couldn't see. And she'd only been there a day anyway.

The previous occupant of Cubicle N.7.53 had been fired a month ago for putting poison in the water cooler. His name was Raymond. Raymond Westler. Calvin had never interacted with him.

Cubicle N.7.52--department of Notifications, row 7, cube 52--was about four feet by three feet. It felt smaller or larger depending on Calvin's mood and the weather. It was entirely grey. The whole office was grey. The company's logo was grey. The frame that displayed the government contract was grey. Cubicle N.7.52 housed one standard-issue computer, one standard-issue monitor, one deluxe telephone, and one extra-deluxe office supply box, which had in it a cornucopia of folders, staplers, notebooks, pens, paper clips and other sundries, all shades of grey .

He didn't have to work here. When he told people where he worked, they tended to react as though the job were a last resort. It was, for most people. But Calvin didn't have to work here. His father owned a construction company. He could go work construction. Construction didn't pay as well--not even close. This job paid astronomical amounts of money. It had to, considering. But, if it got to where he had to leave, there was always a place for him in construction. He thought about this daily, but it never came to where he had to go. It just wasn't bad enough yet. Another person may not have waited for it to be bad enough, but Calvin was curious by nature. Something in him just wanted to see how bad it could get.

He did not sleep. He never felt awake. He kept a dream journal, but it was filled with rambles and snippets that may not have been dreams. It was hard to tell. The dream journal was a present from his father. It had a black leather cover and thick lined paper and a red ribbon bookmark that was sewn into the spine. His father sent it to him the day he took the job and the card enclosed said "a place to keep your thoughts, if they become too heavy to hold."

Was he dreaming or was he going out and doing, really doing, the things he wrote in the book? It was impossible to tell. For dreams, they were so literal. Every step was there. Leaving the apartment. Standing on the street. Waiting. You don't wait in dreams. Bleeding. You don't wake up from dreams bleeding real blood.


Gira was good at the job. No wonder she'd been so high up before. Calvin could hear her talking on the phone--the cubicle walls were carpeted with grey soundproofing, but she was loud--and she sounded so confident, so smooth. She could have been selling fire insurance or asking for charitable donations. She ended each call with "thank you for understanding. We'll send someone by a week from tomorrow. Enjoy your twilight."

Twilight was the name the company gave to the week between notification and resolution. Late night television hosts had a field day with it at first, but even they began to find it less funny when people they knew began to win the lotteries.

Twilight. Lotteries. You had to give the company credit for spin.

Lunch was every day at 12:25. You had to stand outside your cubicle and form a line with everyone else and march down, row by row, to the cafeteria. Work was a neverending stream of lines. Lines for the cafeteria. Lines for the bathroom breaks. Lines for assignments and status meetings. Left foot right foot and stop. The lines were because everyone had to be accounted for, now, after the rash of employee sabotage. No one expected that to happen at first. It helped to have Gira in front of him in line. Her gait was eccentric. She wobbled a little, side to side. It was different. Her ponytail of stick straight hair swayed like a pendulum.

"I saw you naked." He whispered it. "Where?"

She spun around. The ponytail swatted his face. She smiled but her eyes narrowed. "No," she said. "I don't think that's very likely."

"I'm sure of it," he said. "Where? Why?" The company had very strict rules about after-hours conduct of employees. You weren't even supposed to drink. Everyone had to be squeaky-clean even to get hired.

She sighed and pulled him into a corridor by his wrist. Her touch was surprisingly harsh. Their coworkers showed no shock that they stepped out of the line. The people in line continued to shuffle down the hall.

"Okay, but it wasn't me," she said. "But it was someone who looks like me. If you tell, I swear to God, I have a friend in the lottery room and I know your father's name and your brother's name."

He ignored the threat. "You have a twin? A sister?"

She rolled her black eyes. "You're so literal." She glanced back at the grey-clad line inching forward. "Not that I can blame you. How long have you worked here?"

"Not long enough to not be insulted."

She laughed.

"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean I was going to tell. I just..." He held his hands to his head. "I've been having a weird time of it lately. It was a stupid thing to say. I haven't been sleeping. And I know, I am absolutely sure, that I've seen--"

"It's a weird way to introduce yourself to someone."

"You already know who I am." Everyone knew who everyone was at the company.

"So?" She held out her hand. "Fuck company culture. It's nice to meet you. I'm Gira. N.7.53."

"Calvin." He shook her hand. "N.7.52."

"If you want," she said, pulling him back into the line, "After work we can go to the teahouse and I can explain what you saw."

...

The teahouse was a block away from the company headquarters but it had the air of a house of resistance. It wasn't a banned activity per se--the company could hardly rationalize a reason for banning herbal tea, though they had banned all caffeinated beverages a year and a half ago after the bomb coffee fiend Hugo Larenges had set off in Cremation. Still, you had to be careful about how often you went to the teahouse. Thrice a week was too much. Once a month and you'd be under the suspicion that arises when someone is seemingly too good.

"I was sixteen," Gira said. She sipped her tea. The teahouse had vaulted ceilings and a small loft up a set of rickety stairs. They sat at one of the loft's ten tables. Below them, a three violinists and a cellist who sang baritone composed a Patsy Cline cover band. The teahouse was not as crowded as usual.

"Sixteen is very young," Calvin said.

"I was sixteen and I was living on my own and I was promised two hundred thousand dollars."

"Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money."

"Yeah, well, I never got it." She put her hands to her lips in the manner of an ex-smoker who had grown accustomed to taking drags during dramatic pauses. "Want to tell me where you saw it? Not that it matters. I'm sure they've probably found it by now. I'm just waiting."

"I wish I could," he said. He had barely touched his tea, which smelled too much of grass. "But I really have no idea."

"Well, where do you hang out?" She put "hang out" in air quotes. She meant the sex shops on the outskirts of the city. There were rows and rows of them, tiny, dirty places with booths in the back where you could watch any dirty movie ever made, or if you paid more, watch a live performance.

"I don't know."

"I'm not going to turn you in for going. Are you retarded? Please. You've got more on me. Just tell me." She touched his hand. "Trust me. We can be in this together. I like you."

"I seriously don't know," he said. He explained the sleep predicament to her, and the dream journal that was full of things that were probably not dreams.

She gulped the last of her tea. "Well, it sounds like you need to tie yourself to your bed and lock yourself in your apartment."

"Tried it. Got out."

"Well, maybe you need a nighttime chaperone."

"Volunteering?" The company forbade employees to have intimate relations or to engage in activities that could appear to outsiders as involving intimate relations.

"Yes."

He shook his head. "I'm not even sure what could happen if--"

"Please," she said. "Really? I'm not scared." The woman who used to be Gira's boss, Gwendolyn, had woken up blind one morning four years ago. It was a mystery for months as to why it happened, but the culprit was eventually revealed to be a bottle of eyedrops tainted with acid. It was the first recorded incident of employee sabotage. "I've worked at the company for five years now. Nothing they can do scares me."

"Not even their daily business?"

"Well," she said, reaching over for his full teacup and taking a sip from it, "That scares everyone."


****


Gira made work easier. Her boldness made him want to be bold too. He began to show off.

The company was on lockdown until further notice. Jessica Otterdam had spiked the cafeteria meatloaf with vicodin, and now no one was allowed to walk in the hallways alone. On a two-by-two walk to the coffee machine with Gira, Calvin darted into a momentarily unoccupied cubicle and snatched a report from the desk, crumpled it up, and threw it onto the ground. Gira snorted.

He picked up the mangled report.

"Ricardo is not going to like that," Gira said. "And neither is Manager Stone."

Calvin smoothed the paper and returned it to its approximate original location. "I could always go work construction," he mumbled. "My father owns a company."

"So you've said," Gira said. "So you've said."



*****

Calvin was one of many who worked for the company because they did not know what else to do. The company recruited heavily on college campuses. Calvin had been groomed to take over the construction business since he was a child, but he was never interested. The constant motion and the constant noise drove him mad. Building--the act of creating--made him nervous. It was inviting ruin. It was a mark. It was change.

As a child, he could not put into words why he did not want to work in construction. His feeble protests regarding the motion and the noise and especially, especially the motion only earned his father's mockery, and even to Calvin, they were hollow and not entirely true. But as he got older, the motion of ordinary objects took on a new significance. The slow rotation of the mustard yellow cylinder of a cement truck, the deepening and releasing of creases around his dying mother's disappointed mouth as her lips pursed to take a drag of her omnipresent cigarette, the unsteady stiletto-heeled steps of brittle girls in their late twenties as they navigated icy January streets. It seemed to him that every object served as a tiny cog in an elaborate system of interlocking gears, and it scared him. His impulse was to wish it to stop.

He laughed now, when he thought about his job at the company. He finally found a job that involved getting things to stop.

*****

The first night Gira slept over, nothing happened. Calvin didn't fall asleep at all. Neither did Gira. They stayed up all night and played Scrabble and drank lemonade.

The second night Gira slept over, nothing happened again. This time, they played Jenga and drank Diet Sprite.

The third night Gira slept over, she brought with her a bottle of sleeping pills. "I know, I know," she said when she saw Calvin's face. "But we're already this far. These don't show up in any blood tests. And I can't take another sleepless night of playing a game."

"But what if sleeping pills prevent anything from happening too? I mean, I never took them when it was happening. What if it has to be natural sleep?"

She sighed and opened the bottle. "It's worth trying." She dropped two small pink pills into her hand and held them out to Calvin. "Here. Imbibe."

*****
They woke up back in Calvin's bed, but covered in mud.

Gira didn't remember what happened either. Nothing was in the dream journal. The mud was everywhere. It was caked into Gira's hair, and she had to cut it off because it wouldn't wash out. With her gangly body and dramatic coloring and sharp features and newly short hair, she looked like a court jester, especially when she smiled.

"I need a break," she said, sweeping up stray hair from Calvin's bathroom floor. "Not from you, silly. From sleeping here. This was hard. And now I'm worried."

"Worried about what?"

"That's just it," she said. "I don't even know."

"Welcome to being me," he said.

*****

One of Gira's Notifieds came to look for her. This usually happened to a person once or twice during tenure at the company, especially in the department of notifications. It was one of the reasons security was so extreme.

When Calvin first got hired, he attended a three day orientation and the entire second day was dedicated to security. "Due to the nature of the work," the leader had said, "You will inevitably be stalked. Yes, stalked. Any other word is a euphemism. They will stalk you and come find you and sometimes they will succeed. Can you blame them?" Calvin could not. He was surprised it happened so rarely. But people, for the most part, accepted the new system. It did have its benefits. It was ingenious in its own way. And the company certainly did provide a lot of well-paying jobs, funded directly by the taxpayer. The Notifieds who came stalking were usually angered by the irony that they paid the taxes that funded their own demises. It was insulting. But there was no way out.

Gira had to be in hiding until further notice.

*****

Calvin filled his dream journal with pages and pages of squares.

*****

Work was a nightmare without Gira. They'd given her cubicle to someone else, and the new occupant of N.7.53 was a short, thin, bald man named Steven Rogol. He farted copiously. Calvin could see through the space in the partition that Steven Rogol had already tacked pictures of a small brown dog to the cubicle wall. His voice was reedy and insistent. Exactly the kind of voice, Calvin thought, that people imagine when they imagine getting the call.

Calvin and Steven walked two-by-two to the water machine and Steven asked what had happened to his cubicle's previous occupant.

"She died," Calvin said. It was the response you were supposed to give if someone was in hiding, even if you were talking to a coworker. After all, what if Gira's Notified stalker had been able to plant someone at the company. What if it were Steven. Calvin doubted it, but who could tell. He'd learned it in training. Steven must have learned it in training, too. He nodded. He farted.

"That's a shame. Know her well?"

"Not really," Calvin said.

"It's a hard job," Steven said. "Been at it two days, and it's a hard job."

"I'm probably going to quit soon. My father has a construction company."

****

His watch said ten after midnight. Calvin was walking. The street was wet and reflected the flickering dimness of the old dirty streetlights. He was at the edge of the city. He could tell because no one was around and because he heard the whistle of a train. No trains went through the city anymore. A cat darted across the street into a broken window.

He didn't know how he got there.

He kept walking.

He was missing a shoe. His left foot was only wearing a sock. The ground was cold but not icy. Icy would have been better.

Gira grabbed his hand and pulled him into a doorway. She pulled him further into a narrow room. It was full of crates and rusted objects that looked like parts from dissembled machines. There was a cot in the corner and next to it, a portable stove with a pot. The room was barely illuminated by a sad-looking strand of half-burnt-out christmas lights dangling in a wad from a far corner.

"I wondered when you'd come," she said.

"How did you--?"

"Shhh."

"Is this... is this where you shot the movies?" he whispered. It was the first thing he thought.

"No. Come on. Even at sixteen I wouldn't have risked--Those were made over the border, silly," she replied. "Jeez. This is where the company is keeping me. 'Until further notice.' Ha." She reached up and pulled a cord. The christmas lights went out. The room was completely black.

"What did you do that for?" he asked.

"To scare you," she said. "To see what you'd do."

"Did I pass?"

She answered him by kissing, with great passion, the tip of his nose.


****

Calvin submitted his resignation letter the following Thursday.

"You realize what this means?" Manager Stone said, tapping his pen against the dark wood conference table.

"Yes."

"No more immunity for loved ones. No more immunity for you. For you, increased odds. Double odds. And earlier."

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"You also know you cannot come back."

"I know."

"And you don't get your bonus this year. Looks to be--" He ruffled through some papers--"About six hundred thousand dollars. For good performance."

"I don't even know what good performance means. All I did was make phone calls."

Manager Stone laughed. "There are nuances."

"Oh."

"You give up the company car."

"I don't even have a company car."

Manger Stone flipped through more papers. "Oh. Yes. Right. Sorry about that. Well, are you certain? Absolutely certain?"

"Yes. Absolutely certain."

"You know that former employees of the company tend to be blackballed in other industries of course. Unfairly, I believe, but you do understand. A form of weak protest. This country is so... anyway, you do know."

"I have work lined up. My father has a construction company."

"Ah. Construction. Well, good luck." He rose and extended his hand. "It's been a pleasure and I am sorry to see you go."

"Thanks," said Calvin. He turned around and walked out.



****

He visited Gira every night. He never knew how he got there. The dream journal was filled with gibberish and drawings of faces.

"I quit the company," he said. "I'm going to work at my dad's company. Con--"

"Construction," she said. "Good."

"I bet I could get you a job there too. If you want. You could stop being in hiding. It's been what, how many weeks?"

"Three."

"I could get you a job there too. If you want."
"I don't think so." She sat down on the cot and leaned over to stir something on the burner. It smelled like chili.

"Why not?"

She looked at him. She gestured to her surroundings. "I'm open to changing my mind. But right now... I don't really hate it here. Free rent. All paid for. I'm still earning my salary."

"This is not an apartment!"

"So?" She picked the pot up from the burner. "Do you want some chili?"

"No."

*****

A month later, the company deemed it too dangerous for Gira to ever come back to work again. Apparently, her Notified was part of a large resistance gang funded by international interests. She was too big of a target. She was a danger to the company. They were sorry, but they had to let her go.

She showed up at Calvin's house in the morning, crying. Her hair had grown long enough that pieces of it got stuck in her mouth when she sobbed.

"How can you care this much?" Calvin asked, petting her back. "It's pretty much regarded as the worst place in the world to work."

"I know, I know." She wiped her face on her grey fleece sleeve. "But I didn't start out in Notifications, you know. I was..." She sat down on the floor, cross legged, and just looked at him.

He understood. It was weird, but he finally understood. "Underneath it all, you really believed in the cause."

"Can I stay here?" she asked.

"Of course.

*****

He worked at the construction company during the day. She read books and drew pictures. At night, they stayed up late and played long games of Monopoly and Risk while drinking ginger ale or milk.

Her hair grew to her shoulders. He got promoted. The dream journal was empty.


*****
POSTSCRIPT

A year later, they had reached the end of their relationship. It was always obvious to Calvin when a relationship was almost over.

"What are you drawing?" he asked.

"Just a room," she said.

"For what?"

"It's not for anything. It's just a drawing."

"Oh."

Their flow of niceties seemed less effusive and more hollow. Less urgently pushing towards an apex and more thinly sweeping over a great pit, to hide it.

"I love you," he added. She fiddled with the end of her braid and pulled the corners of her mouth into a straight approximation of a smile.
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