Sex and Death (24 page)

She'd thought:
May you be cold
, and told him no.

Listen, says the Ephron spitfire, those candles weren't cheap. You went out of your way. You were trying to warm
this
goddamn place up, for all the good it did you.

For all the good the Ephron does her. The Ephron does no good, she's just a voice, another impotent voice dictating what one is supposed to do and say in various hackneyed circumstances if one is a contemporary female North American. The break-up is the most hackneyed circumstance of all. How could a life event that popular culture has so diligently undertaken to prepare her for – with its songs, films and prime-time dramedies all to do with love and loss – leave her so completely at sea? She can't send an email. She can't cook a sausage.

Pop culture has only offered comfort in the aftermath. Like that moment a few days ago when music started speaking to her. It started talking to her directly, of heartbreak. All music. Even bad music. Bon Jovi. Roxette. When she had to stop what she was doing and sit on the kitchen floor and listen because suddenly she realised that she was being addressed. Someone else's pain was messaging her own, like an animal locked in a basement, howling away, rousing her own animal to start howling in return.

How would the Ephron spitfire send an email? Sassily! How would she cook a sausage? Fuck the sausage. She'd call up her besties and go out for Martinis and – what, what kind of food signifies rebellion and indulgence to the Ephron? Cheesecake? Fondue? See, she doesn't even know. There is that
Kids in the Hall
sketch where a bunch of office ladies pour a bottle of Irish Cream on top of a cheesecake. But she is lactose intolerant. She can't eat cheesecake, pizza, ice cream, any of the more celebrated foods understood to indicate feminine self-love and self-care and a certain fuck-all-y'all
je ne sais quoi
.

I did it all for love!

But maybe she didn't do it all for love. Perhaps she did it all so she would never have to feel like this.

*

At the end of the summer he came in from the step where he had been drinking. She heard him calling back and forth to some students making their way down the alley. The tone of the conversation was jarring because he sounded cheery and convivial. She could tell from its lazy jocularity the students were drunk too. The two parties greeted each other as friends, because of what they had in common.

He came in and she asked him, Who were you talking to? And he told her: None of your business.

That was the point things had got to and what was terrifying was that she had no idea how. She gulped. She was doing a lot of gulping around then. She said: Why won't you tell me?

It was awful the way asking a completely reasonable question could sound like a screechy harangue when you knew the other person was primed to hear it that way.

Like the nightmare when you find yourself on stage, in a role, expected to know the lines, but you don't. So you wing it, badly, as the audience heaves with resentment – you can feel it as you hear it, the outrage: a low but steady rumble, seething like a human soup.

You don't like me talking to young people, he said.

She repeated the sentence word for word back at him, changing the appropriate pronouns.

Then she sputtered at him for a while. Why wouldn't he tell her who he was talking to? This was madness. What was happening? He refused to say. All he'd say was she didn't like him talking to young people, which was what he had been doing outside, and because of that, he would not tell her.

It was a code, he was talking in code, she realised.

He was telling her, I don't want to owe you anything, any more.
Of myself. Even the smallest things, the most inconsequential courtesies or snippets of experience. From this day forward I begrudge.

He said: When are we going to talk about what's happening with us?

Which was a fair enough question. But by then she was too far gone to reply to a fair question.

*

The next day he was red-eyed sober and all business: We need to ask ourselves why we are together. We haven't ever really sat down and asked ourselves that.

So this was what they were going to pretend, now that it was morning. They would pretend to be analytical. That it was really just a matter of drawing a line down a page and listing reasons, good ones and shitty ones, pros and cons. Taking grown-up, responsible action, something they should have done long ago, that it had been irresponsible and shortsighted of them to put off, like buying RRSPs or mutual funds.

I mean: what do we want? Do we even want the same things? Do we want kids, do we want. . .

We have been together all these years without wanting kids.

You don't care about my work . . . We don't like each other's family.

I
like
your
family!

. . . Each other's friends.

Friends
? There was no way she was letting him get away with this.
You're
the one who doesn't like your friends.
You're
the one who doesn't like your family. You hate my friends
and
your friends. You hate my family
and
your family.

This faux-masculine, head-versus-heart bullshit he was suddenly trying to pull.
Let's just think about this for a minute
. But his
analysis was incoherent. His analysis was incoherent. When they were twenty-five and spending entire days in bed, gleeful at their own poverty, that they literally could not afford to do anything but what they were doing right now at this moment, he never once sat up, the quilt bunching around his jutting hip bones, to declare:
We need to ask ourselves why we are together
.

He said: I know you want kids – you treat the cat like a baby.

She looked up from the cat, whom she happened to be cradling in her arms. There she sat, the first woman in the history of the world to behave in a maternal fashion toward her cat.

Furthermore, she was perfectly content to be cradling the cat and he knew it.

*

So even the sober conversations were bullshit – that's what was so difficult. That's why it got so that every time he tried to talk, drunk or sober, he would open up his mouth and she would hear: I want to get away from you so bad. So bad. So bad, I'm just making up random shit at this point. In all my panic; in my desperation.

It got so she could only gulp: I can't hear this any more, I can't hear this.

And he would say: See? We can't even have a conversation. Because he was the reasonable one.

One night, maybe around day three of what she came to think of as ‘the talks', she started whooping. She ran into the downstairs bedroom and flung the door shut in a panic because she was whooping and she couldn't stop. She heard him upstairs saying, Oh come on – as if to the universe. Finally he came down to find her. He said: You run off and slam the door, come on. We don't need this melodrama. We need to talk. But she was still whooping and he became concerned. He lay down beside her on the bed and they spooned as she whooped. She tried to get words out and
explain the situation. I (whoop) can't (whoop) talk. I (whoop) can't (whoop) talk. He rubbed her back.

Because it was astonishing! To wake up in her own home, smack in the middle of this life she had chosen, and find herself despised.

*

She walks into the room she uses for an office. It's flooded with summer daylight. She looks up to see that the roof has blown off the house – at least this side of the house. It must have happened in a storm – a storm she must have slept through, because she never noticed it raging. On the one hand, this can't be a good thing, the roof blowing off the house. She doesn't know how to deal with it, logistically – whom to call, where to begin. On the other hand, it's a beautiful day. Birds and treetops overhead.

She wakes up and the roof is still on. But it's not summer any more, it's winter. Now the task at hand is to get through winter. She'd forgotten about winter, and now it's here, and she has to get through it.

The grocery store is a five-minute walk away, the drugstore is in the same plaza as the grocery store, the liquor store across the street from the drugstore, the gym is ten minutes away, the organic grocery store is about nine – she can stop in there on the way from the gym – yoga is about ten minutes in the opposite direction, except she can't afford yoga any more.

Godzilla Video and DVD, with a rampaging dino glaring down from the roof, about to leap onto traffic sending massive, apocalyptic fissures into the pavement, into which cars teeter, their occupants screaming. About a twelve-minute walk.

So: if you get up in the morning, feed the yowling cat, reply to emails, do some kind of work, you'll look up and it will be about noon.

Then, say, you cook a sausage or an egg and listen to the friendly and sympathetic CBC announcers while you eat it.

Then, maybe, you need groceries. Or you should really go to the gym. It's important to take care of oneself. Self-care, that is a woman thing. You read about it in the magazines, you hear about it on television. It mostly has to do with yogurt and various creams. Nobody ever talks to men about yogurt. The gym at the university is free because as far as the university is concerned, you are the spouse of one of its fine employees, which gets you perks.

Massage and physiotherapy for example. That is, until the university bureaucracy catches up and this present unreality receives an administrative gesture of some kind – a form, likely, that will be filled out, deeming things official. And that form, she reflects, will be all they ever have by way of divorce papers. Because they never ‘made it official' as the saying goes. Which is why this whole process has been, and will continue to be, so incredibly easy. Two people live together. One of them leaves. A year or so later, a university administrator notes a discrepancy, crosses out a name, pushes up her glasses, decides to grab a coffee.
Fin
.

And if at the gym you have a lingering shower, pull on your various winter-city layers, wind your scarf around your raised hood? It could well be three or four o'clock in the afternoon by that point.

So you might as well stop at the organic market on your way home, laboriously unwind your scarf, pull down your hood and contemplate the varieties of wheat-free pasta on offer.

When you ask a woman in an apron which brand is most popular with her customers – realising as the words form that it's your first conversation of the last couple days – she says: I don't know. Why don't you ask someone else?

Outside, it is thirty-five below zero Fahrenheit. Time to go home. Dark. Maybe approaching 5 pm.

Once home, you cook dinner. Maybe a sausage or an egg. We're closing in on evening now. Two glasses of wine tops.

From Godzilla Video, a popular TV series. A man lies on his back in the middle of the jungle. He hears screams, shouts of distress all around him. He opens his eyes, awaking to panic. Looks around. He doesn't know where he is or how he got here.

When I get back to my desk in the morning the chat box is blinking in the corner of the screen. At the top there's a message from Barbara, my personnel manager. She doesn't write very often. The message reads:
Good Morning, Todd. Let me know when you log in.

Hi Barbara
, I type.
I'm here.

Hi Todd. Sorry about the weather today. How are you? Not too lonely?

I'm fine. Not lonely.

Bad news then. We've finally cleared a new co-worker for you.

She'll be arriving at 2. Can you go meet her?

Sure, Barbara. No problem.

I'm always a bit nervous with new people, but it's been nearly three months since my last co-worker left, and I've been doing the day shift, then having to get up in the night too when an alarm goes off, to check the monitors and see what the problem is. So it'll be nice to relax a bit, and share the responsibility.

I take lunch early, and make an effort to tidy up the work station, smoothing the crumbs onto the floor and giving the screens a polish. I've developed some bad habits, working by myself, and I'm going to have to remember to eat in the snack area, rather than at the control panel. I clean the floor too, then when I'm done I make some tea and sit in the swivel chair to drink it. I nurse the hot mug for a while, enjoying the emptiness around me, while it lasts.

*

I don't get up to the coach bay much. To get there you have to head up to the glass viewing screen, where the tours go to look down over the power plant. There's a visitor centre on the other side of the site, where tourists go in and ask questions and get answers, before going home and turning their heating up to full. Then you leave the control centre and take the long covered corridor which runs like a furrow up the hillside. From the top you get a great view of the plant beneath you, in all its odd and immaculate geometry. It looks like someone has installed a gigantic kitchen appliance of uncertain purpose right in the middle of the moor.

The coach bay is just a lay-by with a shelter and a small bench. I don't get outside much and it's cold waiting under the shelter. I begin to wish I'd brought some tea.

After a while a tiny coach appears on the road and slowly grows to life-size. It parks up beside me, the door exhales and opens, and an enormous rucksack attempts to climb down the steps. From somewhere behind the bag I hear swearing as its owner – I catch a glimpse of some battered jeans and canvas basketball trainers – twice tries to make the last step from the coach. The rucksack, in green army camouflage, keeps getting caught in the doorway. Eventually it shoulders its way through and bobs groundwards, revealing a young woman about half its height. She has a frown crinkled just between her eyebrows, and with a practised concentration she swings the huge bag onto her shoulders, then works at tightening the straps attaching her to it. She blows sharply upwards from the corner of her mouth in an effort to clear a stray strand of hair from in front of her eyes. It resists the attempt.

‘Oh hi,' she says. ‘Todd? I'm Sally.' She extends her hand and the rucksack lurches forward over her head, as though it were keen to give me a hug. I step back.

‘Sorry,' she says.

‘Would you like a hand with that?' I ask.

‘No thanks,' she says. ‘I've got it balanced. Don't want to shift it now.'

I give Sally the tour. I show her the bunk rooms with their camp beds. I point out the TV/VCR and the stack of old movie tapes. I show her the cupboards with the spare blankets, even though it never gets cold enough to need them. I show her the snack area and where we keep the mugs for tea, and the medical cabinet with our supplies of pills. I show her the locker room, and she gratefully dumps her rucksack, swinging it to the ground then attempting to stuff it whole into her locker.

‘Sorry,' I say. ‘I should have brought you here first.'

‘What's with all the lockers? I thought there was only the two of us.'

‘Everyone gets a locker.'

‘Everyone, huh?' she says.

She has to lean against her rucksack to squeeze the sides in. It's not clear that she'll be able to get it out again.

‘What on earth do you have in that?' I ask.

‘Oh God, I know. It's like everything. I'm between houses at the moment.'

‘Well, at least it's a big locker.'

‘Great,' she says. We stand there a moment, until I realise why she's continuing to look at me.

‘I'll be outside,' I say.

She comes out after a few minutes, hair tied back in a hasty ponytail. The jeans and trainers have been replaced with scuffed shoes and smart, though creased, black trousers. She gives me an embarrassed grin and tries to smooth out her blouse, but the wrinkles keep regrouping on her. She looks upset.

‘There's an iron,' I say.

‘It's a nuclear power station,' she says. ‘Lots of ions.'

I look at her suspiciously. ‘I've only seen the one,' I say.

*

Lastly I show her our control room, and how to operate the CCTV screens. She nods along.

‘You didn't show me the reactor,' she says, when I've finished.

We go back up to the viewing screen and I point out the white-painted dome sticking out from behind the control centre. All that's visible is part of the outer concrete shell. Inside that there's a steel containment vessel, then a concrete liner. Beneath that, the reactor chamber. And within that, absolutely nothing, nothing at all.

‘How do we get there?'

‘We don't,' I say. ‘It's not our area. I mean there's a corridor, but it's locked.' I pause, and then add, ‘But you know it's empty, right?'

‘What do you mean?'

I think about this for a moment. I wonder if I'm not supposed to tell her that none of it is real. That the whole thing, as immaculate and perfect as it all looks, is fake.
Pastiche
, Barbara calls it sometimes.
How's our pastiche today?
The production values, admittedly, are amazing. God only knows how much it all cost, enough for a million wind turbines, I imagine. They've even done out the walls around the reactor in radioactive paint. And the workers on our screens, for the most part, are just drone robots in hazmat suits. A few weeks ago one of them broke down when there was a crowd of tourists at the viewing screen. It slowed in its movements then ground to a halt, taking on the slightest stoop. A yellow-suited figure standing perfectly still in the middle of nowhere, looking as though time had frozen for it. No one seemed to notice, or else they just assumed it was normal, a scientist lost
in thought. Maybe they imagined his hair grey and crazy under the suit. I called Helen from Tech Support and when the visitors had gone she sent out a guy to get it running again.

Still, I would have thought that someone would have told me if I wasn't supposed to tell Sally about it. I make an executive decision that this is information she needs to know, in order to do her job. I lower my voice, even though we're the only two people in the control building.

‘It's not real,' I say.

‘Well, duh. Everyone knows that. But what do you mean, empty?'

I remember the chamber, just a big empty space, seamless and white-tiled, an inside like the outside of an egg. I remember a low, pervasive hum, soft and calming. I remember liking it.

‘Empty. You know. Like there's nothing inside it.'

‘Did they
tell
you it's empty?'

‘It is empty. I saw inside it when I got here.'

‘Like, completely empty?'

‘Like empty empty.'

‘Hm,' she says, her frown nestled back between her eyebrows. It fits there pretty well. I don't meet many girls, it's true, but even allowing for this, I realise that Sally is what many people might describe as attractive.

Later, we sit for a while and watch the CCTV together, and views of clean corridors where robots pretending to be scientists wobble slowly along. I show Sally how to switch to the outside cameras, with their shots of heather and razor wire. There's almost never anything of interest on those cameras, unless a protester has trekked over the moor and got caught in the wire and I have to see if someone's free to go and cut them loose.

‘And then what happens to the protester?'

‘I don't know. Nothing.'

‘Just point him in the right direction and send him home?'

‘Sure.'

Sally gives me a look.

‘What?' I say.

‘Never mind,' she says, and looks around. ‘And that's it?' she asks.

‘Pretty much.'

‘It doesn't sound like fun. You know,' she says, when I don't reply, ‘fun?'

‘No,' I say. ‘It isn't. Shall I make some tea?'

‘In a bit,' she says. ‘I'm going to take a look around first, get my bearings.'

I'm a little hurt by the implication that my tour wasn't up to scratch, but I know how I am when I'm in a new place, so I leave her to get settled in her own way, and I get back to my desk. I message Barbara to tell her that Sally arrived on time, and then I switch back to the camera screens. I click the mouse and flick between views. It really isn't much fun.

*

Our employers are a group called Low Carbon Fuels, which is a local division of what was once an American corporation, then part of a Middle Eastern consortium, but which is now, as far as I understand, owned by a Chinese conglomerate. I fell into the work by accident: a couple of years ago I was going through a tough time and got into a bit of trouble paying one or two bills, and, eventually, my rent. Due to some things which happened in the past and which I don't want to talk about, going home wasn't an option. So instead I covered for a while by borrowing money and moving things around on credit cards. After a sequence of letters with a colour scheme that shifted rapidly from black to red, and came with an increased use of block fonts and underlining (all of
which I carefully recycled), they sent some bailiffs round to seize the only asset I owned, which turned out to be myself.

It was at this point that I learned that my landlord and the companies I owed money to were, coincidentally, separate subsidiaries of what was then the American group that used to run Low Carbon Fuels. We've since negotiated a payments programme to consolidate my existing debts into one easy monthly payment, converting money owed (of which I had none) into time available (of which I had plenty), and handing myself over to the company for that period to do whatever it was they told me to do. It was either that, they said, or they harvested my organs. I have never been good at telling when people are joking, so it seemed best to go along.

And it's turned out to be an arrangement that works well. It's good for me, after all: food and accommodation are provided. I don't have to pay any electricity bills, and most of the time I don't have to talk to anyone either. I like having everything looked after, and not having to worry where my next meal is coming from (it's coming from the snack area). And they like employees they can rely on.

Low Carbon Fuels, of course, due to that accident with the cabinet minister, is well known as one of the companies the government contracts to build fourth-generation nuclear power stations. Except it turns out that it isn't, and what it actually is, is one of the companies the government uses to pretend to build nuclear power stations. Or rather, to build pretend nuclear power stations. After the last incident, they're scattering a few of them around the countryside, much as they did with inflatable tanks in the Second World War. As I understand it, they're built to pretty much the same specification as the real nuclear power stations, so even the people doing the building aren't able to tell whether they're working on a fake or the real thing. No doubt the building of
actual nuclear power stations is subcontracted to companies whose names I don't even know, and is done deep underground, well out of harm's way.

I know all this because Barbara told me about it not long before the plant opened, while she was showing me round. It was my first day at work.

‘Wow,' I said. And thought it best to add: ‘Don't worry. I won't tell anyone.'

‘I won't worry,' she said. ‘One of the reasons we like you is that we think you're very good at keeping secrets.' She tapped her nose exaggeratedly as she said it.

This seemed like a nice thing to say at the time, and I smiled with her. I've thought about it a bit since then, and the more I think about it, the less nice it seems, but I also think that she's probably right.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this place is that though it's essentially useless, it is apparently more profitable than the real thing. Once when I was talking on the phone to Kurt from Accounting about where I was up to with my graduated payments programme, we got distracted and he ended up showing off about how much work it was running the numbers for a place like this. It turns out that although the facility isn't exactly productive in terms of energy output, due to a liberal spread of solar panels among the roof tiles it barely uses any either. We're a loss-making institution, still, but the sums involved are pretty minor, and are offset by the gift store and the cafe in the visitor centre, both of which bring in good money.

‘Hell,' said Kurt, ‘if you factor in decommissioning, and the environmental cost of all the radioactive waste you're not producing, that place is a gold mine.'

*

Sally settles in well. She's happy with the night shift, and it turns out she likes tea (though she takes it with too much sugar), which is good because I structure my day around regular tea breaks. We get into a routine of meeting for breakfast (dinner, for her) and then again for dinner (her breakfast). Sometimes she comes to fetch me before she finishes her shift, when I'm still waking up, so we have time to hang out before I take over.