Heaven Is Small (12 page)

By the time Chandler arrived at this juncture in her story, ten proofreaders had trooped through to pick up twelve new manuscripts (two of the same faces twice) and Gordon had cultivated a garden of pencil shavings that topped the wastebasket, threatening to drop sooty petals to the floor. Most of Chandler’s pencils were now nubs. At this vital point Chandler became so ambiguous about her “escape” from the situation that Gordon began to suspect that she had resorted to the rope or the razor.

“Maybe life is just a series of increasingly bizarre escapes,” he interjected, in an attempt to comfort and also to prompt. A paternal desire overcame him, to reach out and stroke her elbow or her hair, but he tamped it down.

Chandler smiled that self-deprecating smile, the one that emphasized not only her dimple but the faint lines around her mouth as well. No matter how long she had lived under the malicious thumb of her uncle — assuming there even was an uncle — she could not have lived there as many years as fell between seventeen and thirty. The skin around her eyes was still lusciously unyielding, but her mouth was more pliant: she was no child.

Gordon questioned her as congenially as one can when inquiring into absconding from rapist relatives. He quickly determined that, in spite of what it said on her business card, Ms. Chandler Goods had never been to Paris — at least, she had not actually wandered its streets.

Rather, her knowledge was rooted in the vocabulary of a would-be tourist, book learning melded with fantasy gleaned from movies and photographs — or perhaps, it occurred to Gordon, in the vocabulary of someone stationed just slightly above the city, viewing it from an unchanging position, a permanent window. In Chandler’s Paris there were no beggars, no dog droppings, no confused tangle of metro lines, none of the fine filth that covered the city and crept its way under Gordon’s nails and even into his nostrils, darkening his phlegm when he spat, during the few days he had spent there while still a student, backpacking around Versailles, the Louvre, the Sorbonne, Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, and, of course, the Lizard King’s grave. Chandler’s apartment had no neighbourhood, or if it did, it was a strange patch of land able to levitate and switch from Left to Right Bank at will; she had no transit route to work and no friends outside the office; she had never been to a nightclub; she did not know the number of francs for a Coca-Cola or a
bouteille de vin
, nor the name of the
boulangerie
where she bought her
petit déjeuner
. The only thing she seemed able to detail with any accuracy was the work she did. And even that, strangely, was in English, as though, in spite of the prevalence of French names, Chandler’s entire department was a flock of expats.

Whether she noticed his sudden spike in curiosity or not, Chandler meandered right back around to Paris sunshine, placing her head on her palm with a sigh. “It’s like a net thrown over the sky to try to catch the clouds. In the morning the sky was always white along the bottom, and overhead a pale ’70s blue . . . like my mother’s eyeshadow.”

“How . . .” Gordon tossed a handful of shavings — and an entire pencil nub along with them — into the trash. “How could you give two poops about sunshine after everything you went through?” Two things occurred to him even as the question escaped. The first was that he had just asked about something he didn’t even believe. The second was that he had quite naturally reached for the phrase “two poops” instead of the beloved four-letter version he had favoured when he worked at the mall.

Chandler leaned her head into her hand like a twelve-year-old. She peered at his mug, now empty, as she hooked a pinky finger through its handle and dangled it, letting it swing, her eyes following the impromptu pendulum. “Everywhere you go, Gordon . . . everywhere—” She glanced past the mug to him as if offering it back. “You have to find something . . . at least one thing to love.”

He reached out and took the mug carefully from her fingers, which were cool to the touch. The phrase “the cool hand of a girl” came to his mind, but he banished it with a half-hearted smile.

Now that he was certain he was dead, Gordon was gripped by thorough disappointment. He expected to remember important things about his living years — the life-altering moments. But what he remembered were mundane, passing-time errands and meandering. In fact, what he remembered most clearly was contemplating buying a carry-on for a vacation he never wound up taking. The carry-on had thick black straps and leather on the handles, a thick silver zipper and a leather logo patch — and the saleswoman, name-tagged Anita, had smiled in a super-genuine way. He remembered standing in the store with a riot in his stomach, wondering if he should shell out the seventy bucks so she could make her commission, deciding in the end to postpone it for the express purpose of a return trip to the store and a future conversation. For weeks Gordon had walked by, peripherally obsessed, attempting to monitor Anita’s shifts so he could ask her out, but in the end never going back and doing it, and never buying the carry-on either.

Prior to working for Heaven Books, his life for many years had been an urban mall. His memories were Freshly Squeezed, Bubble Tease, Jimmy the Greek, Roasty Jack, New York Fries, Made in Japan, Bagel Stop, Cinnabon, Carlton Cards, Deco Home, Payless, Radio Shack, Island Inkjet, HMV. The cherry rosettes of photograph-perfect ice cream cups were frequently replaced by seasonal promotions tied in with children’s films Gordon knew about but hadn’t seen.
Surf’s Up! Fruit Blast! Splish Splash! Penguin Swirl!

Now when Gordon tried to remember the important things — like his wedding to Chloe, or even their wedding
night
— it was like holding one shoe in his hand, and leaning over, peering under beds for the other. The memories were cobwebbed, dark. But the temperamental price gun from Whoopsy’s Gags ’N Gifts still jammed in Gordon’s hands, and he could still visualize the cartoon faces on the latest batch of
Simpsons
T-shirts. SpongeBob SquarePants Forever Bubbles key chains retailed for $4.75. His inner retail voice trumpeted:
Add that to the movie poster for $7.99 and you’ve just bought a fabulous birthday present for LESS than $15.00 — with tax!
Cultural detritus floated up at him, dreamlike. He recalled bikini-girl beer holders, classic horror-movie calendars, and in the fish bowls that lined the counter, rock ’n’ roll buttons, rubber lizards, dice with sexual commands printed on their sides, innovatively shaped pencil toppers, and light-up gel pens.
I know you’ll be happy with your purchase.
Thank you for shopping at Whoopsy’s.
There were bug boxes with magnifying lids, perfect for catching insects in, and Gordon had pocketed one immediately and used it to carry his magic pills. The sound the Vivatex tablets had made, the first few days he’d carried them like this, was like a tiny maraca teeming with beans. To the left of his heart, where he kept the pills even now, inside his shirt pocket, invisible, the eraser-sized see-through box rattled with the pleasure of his pain. As white as Chloe’s birth control pills, they had become his own kind of control. Gordon remembered ordering tubs of French fries and waiting.

A few days later, when Gordon next joined Chandler in her office, her confessions had evaporated. It did not take long for Gordon to realize that Chandler’s confidences were about as deep as her e-mails: banged out in a frenzy and sent off with no forethought, no reread, no fear about the impression she was making nor any hope of answer. This time she went into a two-hour inventory of the workforce she had left behind in Paris.

“Daniel was known for his little dog, and photographs of little dogs, and conversations full of little dogs; Lizette for top buttons undone; Laurent for middle buttons undone; Eduard for worshipping the Tour de France, for slinking in and out of rooms silently, his body sleek as a bicycle.”

At the end of her prattle, seemingly without any prompt, Chandler dug under a stack of folders and came out with a stiff cardboard package, which she handed him.
Gordon Small, Heaven,
it said on the rectangular label.

“For you?” she asked with a hint of suspicion, even though the bookseller’s logo was prominently printed in the return address corner.

Gordon nodded, and without another word he took it away. As he walked he let his hands slip up and down as if weighing something, enjoying the shape the cardboard made against his skin. It didn’t feel nearly as heavy as he had expected it to.

In his cubicle he tore his finger open on the staple. He put it in his mouth and sucked, though there was no blood, and no saliva with which to suck. As the cardboard gates opened he saw that the cover was not the blue-green twilit expanse he had anticipated. The book was a mottled wine colour, and the adorning name did not belong to Gordon’s ex-wife. Half in roman type and half in script, the title declared:
The Purpose-Driven Life.
Gordon dropped the book and its packaging abruptly on the desk and sat staring at it.

A moment later, Chandler e-mailed. Her subject taunted: “Is it good?” The body of her message read:
What did you get?

Gordon used one finger to push
The Purpose-Driven Life
inch by inch across the surface of his desk. It hung half on and half off, then fell with a wallop into his garbage basket.

The wrong thing,
he wrote.

11

Gordon glanced up to see if anyone was nearby before he pulled the tabs from his desk drawer and tore the mailing sticker clear. He smoothed it onto his envelope. Over the past two weeks, as he had come to terms with the discovery of his own demise, Gordon had penned and stamped three submissions to literary magazines — two stories and a selection of five poems — all about his relationship with Chloe Gold. He felt a strange sense of freedom. Gordon Small had gone beyond the grave, and anything he wrote now, regardless of its invective, no one could hold against him. He had located the postage machine in Manos’s cubicle one night recently and printed off a stack of tickets to ride. He considered each submission a test. Not of his own abilities, but of their ability to travel outside of Heaven. He tapped the current envelope against his lips in a silent goodbye-and-good-luck.

Gordon’s nights now heaved with punctuation, but not the mere additives of commas and colons that he salt-sprinkled into the pulp as it passed by him during the day. If one were to label the cubicles like booths in a restaurant, Gordon’s would be the one hundred and thirty-third, the very last fuzzy pink booth. It was there, sometime past midnight, after Security’s rounds, that Gordon began his real work, with a black ballpoint pen clenched between back molars.
What I have been given here at Heaven is truly a gift,
Gordon keyed.
Endless hours, infinite light, paper supplies, envelopes, free postage.

Now, envelope in hand, Gordon made a daytime trip up to the Heaven Web on Floor Fifty-Eight, where he took a whirl on Ivy’s computer, 411ing addresses. Soon Gordon’s borrowed rose-brown envelopes had dropped with a delicious
snap
into the outbox. Monitoring the outbox, however, proved more difficult than Gordon had assumed.

“When will they pick this up?” he asked Ivy, who waved a hand as if to say,
What will be will be
.

When he persisted, she quipped dramatically, “How in
Heaven’s
name would I know, Gordon? I deal in e-mail and rss feeds.” In true Web fashion, Ivy claimed she had never taken notice of the pickup time.

Gordon made a quick decision to remain truant from his cubicle and risk a reprimand so that he could hang about on Floor Fifty-Eight, keeping tabs on the outbox there. Simpler than having to make lengthy explanations to Chandler, Gordon told himself. For all her coffee breaks and gossip, she was the department head. But even on Floor Fifty-Eight, he realized, he could spend only so many hours of the day before some supervisor in expensive jeans and Pumas came by and asked what he was working on, mistaking Gord for one of his own, perhaps assuming that his suit was a thrift-store statement.

When, sure enough, this very thing occurred, Gord rolled up his shirtsleeves and ran his hand through his hair, spiking it up at the back. “Conceptualizing, conceptualizing . . . ,” he said, gesturing, tempted to add
dude
or
man
to the end of the sentence but unsure it would play. He left this hanging and tried on his Totally Deep look, the one he had perfected a lifetime ago, in junior year, when he had weighed one-twenty and worn black jeans.

Pumas was pleased, or pleased enough, nodded a shagged head that was only slightly more primped than Gordon’s, and went away. Gordon was a watch-pot again. When Pumas came back in another hour, Gordon said he had sought a consultation session with someone from Editorial.

“I’m just waiting for Gordon Small to come up.”

Pumas punched him on the shoulder and kept on going.

The outbox pickup came at 2:16 that afternoon.

It was a cart and a boy like a small burrowing animal — James Ames, according to his name tag. His eyes were cokey, his skin pale. He looked on the verge of a nosebleed, and his smile appeared drawn on. Gordon scrutinized the lack of care the boy took when he dumped the Floor Fifty-Eight outbox on top of his freight. The corner of one of Gordon’s envelopes jutted over the edge of the cart like the silver-pink fin of a salmon jumping out of the stream toward the inevitable. Gordon found himself grinning at Ames — a Bentley-esque exposing of teeth, barely amicable.

“Just heading out myself.” Gordon called the elevator, climbed in first, and depressed the Open Door button until the cart was wedged in with him.

He watched as Ames took out an ultimate swipe, the plastic bar on a long coil of wire locked around his workman-brown belt loops. Gordon trailed him through ten other pickups, the wheeled barrel becoming even more perilously stuffed. Ames never questioned Gordon’s presence as Gordon patiently held the elevator during each floor’s trip.