JPod (5 page)

"I bet Ronald is home as we speak—it's his day off. He's in his bathrobe and staring out the den window at his immaculately maintained front garden. He wonders if it was all worth it—the fame, the money, the fries—and then he has this moment when he realizes that this is all he'll ever be. It shocks him—the purity of the emotion. He has to sit down in an armchair. He reaches over to the bookshelf and, from between a row of comic books, he removes a bottle of Scotch."

"And just then, the Hamburglar walks in wearing a pink nightie."

"We need to find him a mate."

"Let's all write to Ronald to explain why each of us is his ideal mate."

"Who chooses the winner?"

"We'll vote." I went first.

. . .

You may or may not remember me. I'm Ethan—you gave away balloons at my seventh birthday party, and my mother says you were ableto get the orange drink machine working again with just a paperclipand the wits God gave you.

Ronald, I hear you're looking for a mate. I may not be the best candidate, as I'm straight and, well, too much makeup is always a bit of aturnoff. Maybe you're straight, too. Maybe we're just two lost souls tryingto make a go of it in this great big nutty world.

Be all of this as it may, I'm supposed to plead my case. I am nearing thirty, and I make $41,500 a year (Canadian) as a programmer, but they've dangled this huge carrot in front of me, telling me that I can become an assistant production assistant if I learn to integrate programming skills with art skills plus skills in managing people. The irony is, assistant production assistants make way less, even though they're higher up the food chain. In any event, this is all to say that I have good prospects as a provider.

Ronald, do you play computer games? I know that the cooking of your french fries is regulated by a special deep-frying computer run by proprietary McDonald's software that beeps once the fries are golden yellow So I think maybe you're more computer savvy than people give you credit for.

I'm single at the moment, but have had two reasonably longish relationships. Both ended because they simply weren't The One, which is such a corny notion. It always leaves you with a niggling unease that the relationship you're in is merely love's calorie-reduced version. It also would have helped if they cared about my work. It's not like I'm married to my job, but a little "Honey, how was your day?" goes a long way. Speaking of work and relationships, I'mcurrently more attracted than I acknowledge to Kaitlin, who's new to jPod. She's a programmer and she's . . . just nice to look at. But wait,I'm supposed to be wooing
you
. What else can I add that would make you desire me? Oh, I know—I like both helium and balloons. What a blast it would be to mate with someone who has the entire global helium cartel in his big yellow pockets.

That's about as gay as it gets, Ronald.

Pick me! Pick me!

Ethan

. . .

It must be hard to live at the top, what with Wendy and Burger King always waiting to knife you in the back. I say to you, smother them in melted cheese while they pray uselessly to their cardiac gods!

I am Bree, and when I was sixteen I worked in a McDonald's in Richmond, BC (which was, BTW, the first non-US McDonald's ever). I was fired because I was never meant to be working in the service industry, which is an elliptical way of saying I dated all the guys on the staff at once, thus triggering a mass-quitting saga. That, and I also reconfigured the french-fry computer to make a ringing doorbell sound instead of beeping, which is how I turned on to technology.

Here's a confession: everyone thinks I sleep with anything with three legs, but the fact is, I don't do it that much, and when I do, it's only to confirm that I don't like it that much—which means I'm maybe into gals instead of guys. That's my challenge for the next year. Are you into gals who like gals? To be honest, I look at your public persona and say, "Okay, Bree, this guy's into Smurfs or something, not women." Or am I wrong? I mean, Ronald, let's face it—what's with you? How do clowns replicate? Do you have parents? A family? Do you believe in God or a political party? After you've taped your TV commercials, do you go back to your toadstool and kick back a box of wine? Part of me is happy to think of you as a mere cartoon, but the more genuine Bree says there has to be something more primal and demanding and blood-and-guts at the centre of it all.

I work in a cubicle farm called jPod with a small handful of geeks. It's called jPod because of a computer glitch that put six people whose last names start with the letter J in the space that was supposed to have been a rock climbing wall, but which got cancelled because it was too twentieth century. Once you're in jPod, there's no escaping. I tried for months, and simply gave up. Kaitlin's new here. She'll try hard to get out for a while, and then she'll simply accept her fate and try to get on with life as best she can.

Oof.

I'm tired and a little bit lonely. What a no-hope statement from a twenty-six-year-old woman. I suppose next it's ten cats and my head in the oven.

Call me.

Your little tease,

X

Bree

. . .

I'm Mark. I can't believe I'm actually writing this letter, but I talked to this guy downstairs in HR, and he says it's part of the lifestyle here, and I should take part, since it can't hurt me and will help me bond with the others. I'm supposed to ask you (oh God, this is stupid) to choose me over the others to be your mate. And I've been thinking about it, but it's maybe not a good idea we get together, since you seem to kill everything you touch. In all your old commercials, you were romping through french-fry patches with your fellow spokes-mascots, but you think I haven't noticed that the french-fry characters vanished a decade ago? Or that nobody's seen that website with JPEGs of the Evil Grimace weighing nine hundred pounds, wearing a diaper and living in a failing mobile home community north of the Mexico-Arizona border? What about Mayor McCheese, unrecognizably bearded and detoxing from pickles in a Las Vegas homeless shelter? Every day, when he prowls the city's alleys, crows and jackdaws bite away at his bun face. How could you allow these creatures to just vanish like that? Don't tell me that it wasn't your decision to make, because I know you have clout with the people there. I once saw a video of you golfing with Ray Kroc, so don't go pulling the "No Clout" stunt with me. Maybe you were jealous of those characters sharing your limelight, but I don't think so.

As I'm supposed to be winning your matehood here, I ought to be more cheerful. Okay, here's something: I think it was really brave of you to invest so heavily in purple restaurant furniture in the 1970s. You go, clown! Sex would be a problem because, sorry, I'm not into you. Maybe it's a clown issue. Maybe it's me never knowing whose party you've been attending. How about if I offer to be your friend instead?

Mark

. . .

I'm John Doe, and I think I could help change your life in good ways. I come from a freaky upbringing myself, so I know how it must feel to always be the different one. The thing is, I was stuck being in the family I was in, but what about you? How does it work with clowns—are you born with your face made up? Did you get your mother's red nose and your father's Raggedy Ann hairdo? Is clowning something that is thrust on you at birth? Do other clowns hate you because of your fame and success? Do you have friends?

Let me be your friend. I'll bring over a loofah and a bottle of Noxzema, and we'll take off your paint. If it turns out that you're really Liv Tyler, we can even make it, too.

But otherwise, the sex thing? Look, it's not like I have trouble with same-sex relationships—my mother is the biggest raging dyke on the planet, and I love her to death. When I was growing up, she made this big stink about how I had to call her a dyke, and nothing else—even in high school—and because of it I was always being sent home. She really liked that, though, because she relished the fights she had with school staff. It was only after I escaped from home that I discovered, thanks to the miracle of satellite TV, that the real mother I always wanted was, in fact, Lindsay Wagner of
The Bionic Woman
—not as she appeared in her TV series, but rather as she appears in car commercials two decades later: calm and confident; the sort of mother who'd buy you Count Chocula
without even being asked to do so.

No, I got the scary, crazed dyke mama, plus—over the course of seventeen years at home—Joan, Nancy, elan (all lower case), Georgia and Sunn, more often than not overlapping.

So, if there's something you want to tell me, I'm the one with ears. Have you considered gender reassignment procedures? You have to take hormones for years, and then they gradually "regenderize" you. Georgia was regendered.

As for me, I want to look as average as possible. I'm difficult to locate in a crowd because I wear only khakis and a solid-colour buttoned shirt that, scanned in Photoshop and desaturated, lies between twenty-five and thirty percent on the grey scale. I keep myself nine pounds overweight and drive a white Taurus, which everyone says looks like a rental car, which makes me happy. I'd never eaten any of your narrow but tasty range of burger-type products until I was seventeen, in the McD's outlet on the other side of town. I ordered a cheeseburger—it was also my first non-vegetarian experience—and it was wonderful. I didn't even puke. Thanks for turning me on to cow.

It was actually my love of cow that made me leave home. I kept tasting it in my dreams. My mother had some weird voodoo dream scanner, and she could tell I was being non-vegetarian even while I slept, and come morning it was wheat germ and stern lectures on slaughterhouse procedures. Did you know that a cow enters a meat-processing facility at the top of a seven-storey building and that, as it gets more and more processed, it goes down the building floor by floor? Not only that, but there's a thing in abattoirs called the Chute. Every time they find a diseased lung or something, it goes into one of a succession of seven funnels in the building's centre. By the time you're on the first floor, the Chute is filled with this monsoon of inedible cow remnants, which are then blenderized into pet food smoothies. I mention this because, here at work, we call our in-house memo system the Chute. So, you see, Ronald, even when you don't think you're giving to society as a whole, you continue to do so—when you cause us to reformulate our personal relationships to carnivorism and the Chain of Meat—a distant cousin of the food chain.

BTW, what's the deal with these salads you're selling now? It kind of rubs me the wrong way. You're about cow, dammit, not leaf. Anyway, send me an email or even phone me. It's area code 604, and the number itself is a seven-digit prime which, when squared, is two digits short of being a factorial. Are you up to that challenge? Let me help you become the Power Clown you know you can be.

John Doe

. . .

I just heard her on the phone with someone in HR, trying to get out of jPod. Good luck.

"What do you mean it's not possible?"

[HR staffer]

"Do you mean not possible now, or not possible
ever}"

[HR staffer]

"I'm a super-experienced character animator, and I've worked at two other big companies, and none of them would ever have stuck me in this chunk of Siberia with a clump of whacked-out freaks."

[HR staffer]

"Okay, that was harsh, but look at my position."

[HR staffer]

"Call Allan Rothstein. He hired me. There's no way he'd have hired me and then stuck me in jPod."

[HR staffer]

"I know Allan Rothstein is busy, but he wasn't too busy to hire me, so I'm sure you can speak to him and clear this up."

[HR staffer]

"When
does
he get back from the Orlando studio?"

[HR staffer]

"Who else can I speak with?"

[HR staffer]

"They can't
all
be in Orlando. There's a meeting here soon, and
some
of them have to be here for that."

[HR staffer]

"You don't understand. The people in this place you stuck me in perform tasks completely unrelated to mine. I'm a character animator; I have to be with my team."

[HR staffer]

"Oh. How did people ever get out of jPod in the past, then?"

[HR staffer]

"They don't?"

[HR staffer]

"What do you mean, just be quiet and try to make peace with it?"

[HR staffer]

"My last name actually begins with the letter B. I'm Kaitlin Boyd."

[HR staffer]

"Boyd is my stepfather's name. Well, yes, on official forms, it's Joyce."