The Dilettantes (8 page)

“You hear that?” she said to the editors, pulling Keith off the floor and back to his chair. “Looks like our big exclusive is coming through after all.”

“No way,” said Steve. “He’ll never find anyone. It’s too late. And besides, the whole idea is boring anyway.” The others mumbled something without looking away from their computers. Possibly in consent, possibly protest; Tracy couldn’t tell. Music blaring out of three different sets of speakers fought for everyone’s attention: the sugary rush of The New Pornographers from one corner, dissonant Swedish jazz from another, while a bunch of rappers inside Keith’s laptop warned that they were not to be fucked with. Meanwhile the affable but soft-spoken photo editor was experimenting with different-sized flashes, giving everyone fuzzy purple dots on the inside of their eyelids.

“You don’t know that,” Tracy said to Steve. “At least he’s doing something. The rest of us are just sitting here, hoping it all goes away on its own. The truth is we’re all fucked come Monday.”

Back in his seat, Keith wriggled out of Tracy’s grip on his shirt. “I hate to say it, but Steve’s right about this one,” he said, and stood up to address the room. “If I could have everyone’s attention.” A few people turned to look at him. Mostly, the bustle of production day wore on. The printer buzzed and spat out pages-in-progress. Through the news cubicle’s window, Rachel could be heard doing a phone interview. Rick was in his back-corner office, working with the door closed and locked. The house of cards went up; the house of cards fell down.

“Hey! Buttflaps!” Keith flipped his chair over, making a dull plastic thud on the carpet. Its wheels spun in the air aimlessly. “Who here thinks Alex is going to get this hedge story thing?”

The production editor kept her eyes fixed on her screen. “He better,” she sighed. “Otherwise we’ve got no cover.”

“Thanks,
mom,”
Keith said. “God. Anyone else?” The associate news rookie scurried past him, grabbing a stack of long sheets from the printer and power-walking them back to Rachel’s desk. A pop song about pharaohs and chess pieces kicked in. The rappers reminded everyone that fucking with them was still unadvisable. “No? Anybody?” Keith sat down, overjoyed with himself. “In your
face.”

“They’re ignoring you, dummy,” said Tracy on her way back to her own desk, where a fresh stack of copy awaited her. “You know, finishing their sections? So we can get out of here at a reasonable hour?”

“You should do a story about my dick! Ha!”

Alex inhaled calmly, methodically. He needed to keep an open mind. He had to remember not to hate the reader. “Thanks. We’ll consider it. Again: do you know where—”

Another guy in a polo shirt appeared in the next door over. “You from the newspaper? I got an idea. Why don’t you do a story about my
dick?”

“Your friend just said that.”

“Oh.” He looked genuinely sad.

The process at
The Peak
worked like this. A new issue came out every Monday morning that classes were in session. Assuming, that was, that the delivery person got them out on time. So let’s say Monday afternoon. For the satellite campuses, sometime Tuesday would’ve been nice. The new issue then circulated for a few days. Mid-week was the editors’ meeting, where the next issue was planned, content for each section shared, and any floating in-house content assigned. All of this got written onto the back room’s blackboard with bright cigars of sidewalk chalk. For some editors—opinions, humour—these meetings were basically just a paycheque hurdle, since they never received any content at all until at least Thursday night.

Friday was production day. And a day it was. In other words, forget about scheduling classes then, even in the morning, before anyone else bothered to show up to the office. It was the principle that counted, and in this, the editors’ usually haphazard loyalty was unshakeable.

Production day had its own internal protocol. When an editor decided to run a particular story, he or she gave it a quick once-over before adding it to the stack on Tracy’s desk. Eventually it would come back, red-penned and full of lovingly sarcastic marginalia, and from there the corrected file was imported into the layout program. Many an hour could be spent on the next step, wherein the story was cut up, formatted, and laid out on the digitized page. The section editor then stole photos from the internet, inserted captions and text boxes as necessary, and fine-tuned everything at a meticulous and
frequently glacial pace. When things weren’t going an editor’s way, doing layout felt like trying to build a sandcastle with both hands asleep. (More than once Tracy had spun in circles in her chair while waiting for new pages to edit, complaining to Suze, “Isn’t technology supposed to make this go
faster?”)
Once everything was lined up, the page got printed at full size and sent off to the copy and production editors for approval. It’d come back with new sets of red and purple corrections, respectively, and the whole process got repeated for final.

All it took was someone like Keith to throw the whole operation into disrepair. To call his sleeping schedule erratic would be putting it lightly. In fact, Keith claimed to have never known eight unbroken hours of sleep since elementary school, when one night he discovered a marathon of
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
on late-night
CBS
. It was an awakening, subtle and inscrutable, his version of the Virgin winking back at him from a tortilla. Many hours later, as the first rays of sunlight hit his living-room curtains, he stood up like it was any old morning and sauntered off to school. In recent years Keith had taken to all-night raves, and took sprawling, coma-level naps to make up the difference. Production unofficially started at noon, but he never arrived at the office until an hour or two before dinner.

“Don’t worry,” he yelled to the retreating Tracy. “My section is going to be awesome.”

“Really.” Her voice was muted through the wall. “What else is in it?”

“It’s simple. I’m going to—”

The front doors flew open as a middle-aged man in tasteful brown slacks and a lot of frown lines on his forehead stormed in and looked around. “Who’s in charge here?” he bellowed, and held up a page from the most recent issue. “I paid good money for this ad, and I do
not
think it is appropriate for this picture of a—this—well, this
penis
to be sitting there next to it. I think a full refund is in order, not to mention some sort of printed correction.”

Keith turned his head only slightly toward him. “Shut the fuck
up
, dude,” he said. “Whoever you are, nobody likes you.”

The man in tasteful slacks looked stunned for a second. “I am the owner of Tom’s World of Flowers, young man,” he said. “That’s who I am. Now: where is the fellow I spoke to on the phone when I bought the ad? Your business manager?”

Keith now turned to him fully, and crossed his arms. “You’re looking at him.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m the business manager. And according to my calculations, you are a date rapist.”

“What? Who do you think—”

Keith cut him off again. “Listen, you want to be useful around here? Help me think of funny things that rhyme with Vagisil, or else
fuck off
and get me a ginger ale.”

“Never heard of him. You sure you got the name right?”

“I told you. I don’t know his name.”

“Actually I think you’re in the wrong building altogether.”

“Shit.” Alex looked around frantically. Time was running out. “Really?”

“Look, I’ll level with you. I don’t ‘go’ to this school.” She did air quotes and then kept walking.

The rest of the editors whooped and clapped. Keith started a chant of
Va-gi-sil
and beckoned with both hands for the others to join in. The tasteful-slacks man turned purple, unable to get another word out. Back at her desk behind the window, Tracy slouched down in her chair.
Not the time, guys
, she thought. The man took one last look
around the office, in search of any flickering signs of support. Not finding any, he turned to leave.

“Guys! What on earth is going on out here?” Rick had emerged from the cocoon of his office and stood at the edge of the production room in disbelief.

“Va-gi-sil! Va-gi-sil!” The chant now joyously filled the office. Keith waved his pencil around like a conductor. Even Rachel joined in, rhythmically tapping her still-live phone against the window from the other side of the glass.

Rick stormed down to the doorway and offered his hand to the tasteful-slacks man. “I’m so sorry about this,” he whispered. “They’re good kids, really. They just sometimes forget that their computers are connected to a printing press, and these little inside jokes eventually make it out to the rest of the world.”

“In all my years,” he spluttered. “This kind of thing is extremely unprofessional.”

“Absolutely. You’re 100 percent right about that. Please, let’s sit down and talk for a minute. I’m sure we can find a solution.” Rick clutched his stomach with his other hand and winced. Then he righted himself, and led the tasteful-slacks man through the chaos of the production room back to his office. “Isn’t it time for dinner or something?” he hissed to the editors over his shoulder. “Just get the hell out of here so the grown-ups can talk.”

“Oh, thank god,” Alex said as another door, on another storey, slid coolly open. He wiped his brow even though he was not technically sweating. He had to admit that his resolve had been wavering a little there, but now it was doubly, triply reinforced. “You’re real. Tracking you down has been—”

“No worries. Come on in, man. What do you want to know?”

For dinner the editors went upstairs to the Highland Pub. What the
Peak
office lacked in horizontal real estate—its two neighbours being a parking garage and the meeting room for droning Christian singalongs—it made up for in verticality. Up one flight of stairs was a coffee shop owned by the student society, and also the last remaining place you could still get London Fogs for a reasonable price. Up one more was the Pub.

The editors pushed three tables together in the middle of the main floor and grabbed a stack of menus off the bar counter. The Pub was constitutionally incapable of turning a profit, and therefore chronically understaffed. You got used to doing things for yourself.

One large conversation about Rick’s outburst in the office splintered immediately into five smaller, unrelated tangents. A Canucks game shone out from the various televisions. Keith ordered five beers before sitting down.

The guy grinned, his teeth gleaming white. His chin was a right angle. A row of bobble heads nodded along from his desk, next to a tastefully overflowing laundry hamper. The whole scene looked like an Axe Body Spray commercial.

“What do you mean,” Alex said, his own imperfect jaw clenching, “you want to get paid?”

Two of the younger female editors vigorously compared sex lives, using cutlery as props, while Chip did several back-to-back spit takes from two seats over. Tracy was trying to convince Rachel that
The Little Mermaid
was actually a feminist cartoon. The web editor
shared a plate of yam fries with the associate news rookie and listed his twelve favourite web comics, in ascending order. Keith asked whoever wandered past their table what
they
thought was the funniest thing about Darfur. The photo editor stuck his earbuds in. Suze and Steve playfully argued over which animal Rex Murphy most closely resembled: raccoon or platypus. (Everyone else assumed the two of them were covertly sleeping with one another—no platonic banter was that cute.)

“She loses her voice. The female lead is literally and metaphorically mute, and this is how she wins the man. You call that progress?”

“Go back and watch it again. Ursula is a
commentary
on the patriarchy—she even says, ‘The men up there don’t like a lot of blabber.’ She’s calling attention to it. My god, it’s obvious.”

“Number four is Penny Arcade. It’s weird how they draw themselves so thin and cool-looking, but I still like it.”

“I say raccoon. Final answer.”

“Yeah, you would say that.”

“Then my legs were kind of—well, I can’t do it
here.”

“I think you’re giving the talking cash registers at Disney way too much credit. That they’re capable of making ‘commentary’ about anything.”

“Hey buddy—yeah, you. Know any good Darfur jokes?”

“Platypus all the way, lady. It’s the nose.”

“Number three? Maybe Achewood. Obvious.”

“You’ve got to take charge. At a certain point I had to tell him, ‘It’s not a rabbit’s foot, babe. You don’t just rub it for good luck.’”

“Pffffff!
A thousand apologies.”

“What about their government? Don’t they have, like, a funny government? Get back here.”

It was warm, and comfortable, and the Canucks won in overtime, and even Tracy didn’t think about the
Metro
the entire time.
Alex imagined the paper with his story in it being fought over at newsstands. He imagined the online version shooting up the Reddit homepage. Very cautiously, he reached for his wallet, then stopped. “Wait. No. Even if I had fifty dollars, I couldn’t—” He flung his notebook onto the ground and stood up. “We’re done here.”

Back in the office, their stomachs full of veggie burgers and red-and-black-flecked bar fries, the editors settled back down for the final stretch. Rick’s office was empty and dark. If anyone slacked too hard now, Tracy, who, along with the production editor, had to stay until the very last section’s very last page was finalized, was happy to poke and prod them into action. All of the critical times had been pinned to Tracy’s corkboard, next to her improvised style guide, for easy reference.

12:21 a.m.—last SkyTrain.

12:35 a.m.—last bus.

2:19 a.m.—last night bus.

After that, options were slim. You could either sleep on the couches, where you’d be greeted several times in the night by members of the graveyard janitorial staff, or else brave the unlit forest paths and try to stumble down the mountain, where bears were still routinely spotted, into the outer fringes of Burnaby.
SFU
: Petitioning for a Zipline Since 1965.