The Dilettantes (4 page)

“Okay, first of all, I really don’t think we should use the word
manifesto,”
Alex said. “Makes us sound like douchebags, don’t you think?” He looked around and saw he did not speak for the room. “Fine. Never mind. Does anyone here know how to do this? Has anyone actually done it before? What are we basing it on?”

“Nah, fuck all that,” someone said from the back. “It’ll come from the heart. You don’t need to look up the truth in a
book
. Don’t sweat it.”

“Right.” Alex rubbed his eyes in vigorous circles, pulling toward the inside corners every few seconds. “Okay. Sure. You new guys are
great, by the way. Full of moxie.” Clapping his hands, he said, “Let’s go for it. Who’s going to transcribe?” He looked toward one of the youngsters. “You still got that pen handy?”

The girl nodded.

“Excellent.”

The rest of the meeting went more smoothly. There was the usual housekeeping to attend to, during which the outrage in the room lowered to a simmer. Those with sections to edit wrote what they had that week onto a blackboard, while the others asked polite, uninterested questions and crossed their fingers that they wouldn’t be tapped to pay for dinner that week (reimbursements being a delicate and slow-moving process that few editors could afford to get tangled up in). They made noodles and drank from gigantic aluminum cans of iced tea. Chip compared the bumbling football team to the Maginot Line, and chortled to himself. Page counts were negotiated, accompanied by much scratching of beards and ankles. Suze, the arts editor, threatened to stop giving out advance movie passes unless she started receiving the reviews she was already owed. Next week’s open house was discussed. Rachel was firm that ordering sushi was
not how it was done—
two platters of sandwiches and one bullet of Coke, Sprite, and Orange would be fine. What kind of Orange? “Crush.
Obviously.”
They didn’t take it to a vote. The manifesto was downgraded to a strongly worded editorial, and then again to an editorial cartoon, writer and artist
TBA
. The girl Alex had tapped to transcribe it instead took careful notes in the Spider-Man binder. The cover story would be the feature Alex had assigned about home brewing, unless something better came along at the last minute. Keith performed a freestyle rap about his favourite kinds of yogurt. Afterward they all trickled back to their desks and hit refresh on blogs, news tickers, a Word document by accident, and email, email, email, like an itch.

Alex and Tracy waited out the interim until the next meeting in the mini-office traditionally shared by the arts and copy editors. Three of these cubicles lined the back of
Peak
headquarters, each with dividing walls that fell six inches short of the ceiling and a window overlooking the main production room. The fluorescent lights on this side gave everyone who worked under them scalding headaches; Tracy had made a half-effort to cover hers by pinning an abandoned yellow fleece over the fixture.

“Nice job back there,” she said.

“On the douchebag manifesto? Yeah, well. Doesn’t look like it’s even going to happen now, does it?”

“That’s what I mean. The best way to make a project go away around here is to start assigning people to it. Looks like congratulations are in order.”

Alex let out a short, sandpapery laugh. He leaned against the wall opposite Tracy’s desk, which was, in fact, the only one in the office that didn’t have a computer attached.

Through the window they saw the front door swing open and shut a few times as people started showing up for the collective meeting. A bunch of discarded
CDS,
long since passed over for review, had been looped together with string and hung from the door handle, announcing each new visitor with a series of synthetic clacks.

Collective meetings were open to anyone who paid into
The Peak
’s funding, which was basically everybody. Thanks to a neat trick of accounting, this amount got automatically bundled into the university’s student fees—most undergrads had no idea they lost seven dollars each semester this way, and the editors were in no rush to point it out to them.

Some obvious first-timers walked around the office in silence, most a little intimidated by the whole subterranean experience, some
decidedly underwhelmed by what a dump it was. The more impressionable among them ran their fingers along the chipped table corners in awe and studied the collages of old covers on the walls. A gaudy mix of neon green and blue paint peeked through the gaps of newsprint, the colour of an Easter hangover.

The new kids were waiting for someone to come over and introduce themselves, and officially invite them back to the couches that were distantly visible in the other room. It didn’t happen.

Alex asked, “So how are your classes?”

“I have a midterm on Thursday,” Tracy said. “Ridiculous, right? We’ve only had two lectures, one of which consisted of everyone saying what they knew about the Enlightenment coming in. Now it’s time for a
test?
Half of it better be on the guy beside me who thought that’s when they invented the alphabet.”

“An exam in an English class? I thought you guys were allergic to them or something.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. “This is just a 200-level course, so they have to have at least one exam. Why do you think I’m even taking a course on the stupid Enlightenment? It’s a pre-req. I just put off doing it until now.”

“I don’t know anything about that stuff,” Alex admitted. He thought back to his bus ride with a fresh topcoat of frustration. The depths of his ignorance only ran deeper the more he thought about them. His stupidity was large; it contained multitudes.

Alex was briefly cheered up by his own little internal joke—until he remembered he had no idea where it came from. But could he really be held accountable for that? Authorship wasn’t exactly in vogue anymore. These kinds of reference points floated out there in the public domain, absorbed into the air’s chemical equation. Most of them he’d first encountered as parodies on
The Simpsons
anyway.

“Yeah, me neither,” Tracy said. “But so far it’s just been history: memorizing which king beheaded which wife or ran away from which duke. I do like Alexander Pope, though. We did ‘Rape of the Lock’ in high school—everyone managed to nervously giggle their way through. I like imagining this tiny, frail guy running home and making elaborate fun of all the women who rejected him. He’s basically a blogger. LiveJournal would’ve loved him.”

“I see a term paper forming: Pope’s influence on
Revenge of the Nerds
. ‘Wit as muscle.’ Some mind/body dichotomy stuff. You could use Descartes, Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Atlas. Or Charles Xavier.”

“Mm. Yeah,” she said. Tracy was less into these kinds of name-dropping contests than the boys at the paper. It struck her, in fact, as a distinctly masculine pursuit—memorizing stats and figures as if the sum of human culture were nothing more than a set of baseball cards. She also felt it’d be sexist, somehow, to say this out loud. “What about you?” she added. “Classes okay?”

“Not bad. We’ve already done
Henry IV
and
V
, and this week is
Julius Caesar
. They’re pretty good. I think I’m onboard so far.” By this, Alex did not mean he had read the above-mentioned plays. He majored in humanities, which was kind of like English, only you watched more movies and could write your final essay about a picture of a vase. This particular course was called Shakespeare Without Shakespeare, and had only one rule: reading or referring to the Bard’s actual plays or poems was strictly forbidden. This point was written at the top of the syllabus in bold italics. Alex had been trying to get in for over a year, on Tracy’s urging that recognizing a bad Shakespeare pun was one of the few and lonely solaces of the liberal arts grad. But the course always filled up on the first day of registration.

“Well, stick with it,” she said now. “Try not to let all those YouTube clips get you down. Did I tell you I’m doing a Shakespeare course, too? We should brainstorm together when essay season approaches.”

“Actually, I was thinking of maybe sculpting something. My professor would probably like that more—he uses all these weird pottery metaphors. I heard that’s what his degree is in.”

Tracy got up, shaking her head. “It depresses me more than I can say that I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not.” She went over to the stacks of
CDS,
which lined the arts desk like castle walls, and rummaged for new arrivals. It seemed like all Suze ever got sent was undecipherable punk rock and easy-listening piano ballads from women in their forties. The bulk of it was homemade; Tracy only now noticed how many of the artist photos used the exact same sepia filter.

“Yeah, don’t bother. Those are at least six months old,” Alex said, over her shoulder. “Keith pawned all the new ones. I saw him slinking away with a bunch of overstuffed plastic bags last week.”

Tracy dropped the stack she was holding straight into the trash can. “So what’s your plan for getting rid of the
Metro?
We never got into it at editors’, as usual.”

“What, assuming the douchebag manifesto doesn’t bring the administration to its knees?”

“Call me crazy.”

“I say ignore it. Ignore it, and it goes away.”

“Really?” Tracy asked. “You don’t believe that.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, we’ve been talking about shit like this for years. Every new batch of editors pulls the same end-of-the-world routine.”

“But this seems different. Don’t you think? Usually the objects of our paranoia don’t have websites and distribution vans.”

“They’re already set up at all the SkyTrain and bus stations coming up here.”

“Exactly. They’ve got us surrounded.”

Through the window, they watched an irate football player bat the door open with one hand and stomp straight back to the couches,
where a crowd was slowly congealing; in his other hand he held a
Peak
as if he was choking it. “Either way,” Alex said, “I’m out of here come the spring. If the
Metro’
s not on campus by then, all these new fuckers on staff will have run us into the ground anyway.”

Tracy smiled, almost to herself. “People say that every year, too.”

“It just seems like we don’t
do
anything anymore,” he said, hearing his tone grow indignant and not doing much to restrain himself. “Last week I was in the back, reading through the archives. Did you know that when 9/11 happened,
The Peak
was all over it? We ran a dozen news pieces the very next issue. The opinions section went nuts. We got hate mail, and all the Jewish groups boycotted us because they thought we didn’t come down hard enough on Islam. Maybe we were totally wrong. I don’t even know. But at least we had a stance, you know?

“Can you imagine how hard we’d shy away from something like that now?” Alex added. “Sometimes I really wish I could’ve been part of that era instead—instead of putting out garbage like this home brewing thing.”

“Wasn’t that your idea?” Tracy asked.

“Only kind of. But—well, maybe it was. Who cares? It’s all part of the same slop. I feel like half of what I do now is sit around and make house ads where historical figures act like fratboys.”

The noise from the meeting room was returning to a boil. Seats were being taken.

“I think you’re just being an old man,” Tracy said. “With any luck, this’ll all run its course pretty soon.”

“Oh yeah?” Alex said. “When Keith walked into the office last week and realized it was the anniversary, do you know what he did? He looked straight at me, giddy as a kindergartner, and said, ‘You guys. I’m going to fly two pieces of cake into my mouth to celebrate.’”

“To be fair, that’s pretty good.”

Alex sighed. “Fuck. I know. That’s the whole problem.”

A timid knock behind them revealed an unusually nervous kid who appeared to be approximately twelve years old. “Hello,” Alex said, eyeing the kid’s outfit, which included thick eyeglasses and an alarming amount of official
SFU
merchandise.
He’s no athlete. Too much school spirit? Or just a gift from mom?
“Can we help you?”

“Um, is this where the meeting is? The ad said 1:30.”

Tracy and Alex glanced at each other:
a new volunteer
. This kind of thing needed to be handled delicately, since you never knew if they’d turn out to be good news or bad—an editor-in-training or a complete and utter timesuck.

It was Tracy who reacted first. “Absolutely,” she said, with just the right amount of maternal warmth. He loosened up before their very eyes. “Come with me—you’re right on time.”

Tracy lived on the top two floors of a character house off Commercial Drive, just past the point where it turned from charming locus for Italian immigrants, bohemian-leaning university students, and rowdy young parents pushing strollers past sunset, to something that resembled the post-apocalyptic: wide, empty streets and an expanse of splintered concrete punctuated by one modest community garden—which was located, for maximum metaphorical impact, in the shadow of a massive SkyTrain support pillar. She’d lived there since her parents’ divorce in the mid-nineties, when, after it had all bubbled uglily to the surface, Tracy’s newly single mother decided it was high time her thirteen-year-old daughter got to see a world beyond their smarmy, adulterous suburb. Now the deed to the Commercial house was in Tracy’s name alone, and she lived there with her long-term boyfriend, Dave.

Indefinite sublet
is the phrase her mom used, with a wink.

Most of the time it felt good to not have an asshole landlord to contend with. But as Tracy arrived home late that afternoon, jiggling the door handle and eventually shoulder-checking it open, she thought about how nice it would be to have someone to yell at about all her broken stuff. Cathartic, even.

Cathartic
. Her mind drifted for a few blank seconds from Aristotle, to Plato, and then to the Raphael painting of them both, which was also her mental cheat sheet for telling them apart. In the picture, each wore a loose, colourful robe and stood at the top of an ornate staircase. One of them pointed up, signifying the heavens; the other held his hand out straight ahead, signifying the Earth, the here and now, all of the objects and people we’re pretty sure we didn’t just dream up. Kicking off her sneakers, some other part of Tracy’s brain dutifully counted to fifteen as she climbed each squeaky wooden step.

“Dave?” she called, underhanding a purse full of books and cigarettes onto the coffee table. The
TV
had been left on, and a pear sat kebabed to the kitchen table by the larger of their two functioning knives. A small puddle of juice had spread out from under it and then half-dried in an amorphous, limb-like shape. “Dave? Are you here?”

A muffled yell came from the top of the staircase behind her: “I’m
steeping!
”

After a few seconds Dave came clumping down the attic stairs, bringing what sounded like a flock of medicine balls along with him. A cloud of thin smoke, or maybe thick steam, preceded him as he barreled around the corner into view. His lab coat, stained old-yellow and unbuttoned, flared out behind him. Underneath was a suit vest with a pocket watch chain poking out, and under that a T-shirt showcasing an orca whale mid-breach. He looked like a one-man matryoshka doll.

“I can barely hear you from up there, Trace. Did you yell at the corner?” he asked. “Did you? No. Because you never do.” This last bit was muttered; he softly tapped a fist against the top of the doorframe. Dave had a theory that if you spoke directly at the corner of the ceiling where the hallway met the living room, the sound would splinter precisely, then travel like sonar to the rest of the house. He said he did this in the longshot case he started to lose his hearing
prematurely, but the truth was that months of listening to nothing but My Bloody Valentine—on knockoff earbud headphones, cranked to their tinniest and most compressed—had already done the kind of aural damage that the recording industry would very much like to draw your attention away from.

Dave had a lot of theories. Tracy wondered if any of them had predicted that she’d come home that day to finally break the fuck up with him.

“Take that lab coat off, you idiot,” she said. “We need to talk.”

“I told you. I am working. Presently. In my lab.”

“Oh, really.”

“Yes. Today is chamomile. It’s a bit of a madhouse up there at the moment, but some truly interesting specimens are emerging. Data that’ll rock Big Lipton to its
foundations.”
Dave was a fair-weather hobbyist who liked to skip around from obsession to obsession, and had lately been on a vague environmental kick. He’d hummed and hawed about it for weeks. Baby seals were too clichéd. Whales and the ozone layer were nineties problems; they didn’t even make the shortlist. He toyed, briefly, with space debris and the huge island of garbage forming in the Pacific. But in the end he settled on the unlikely target of the international tea industry, and had since become very serious about bleach in single-serving bags and something called spoiled fannings.

He sniffed theatrically as he sat down at the table next to the skewered pear. “Anyway, you wouldn’t be interested.”

Tracy bit her lip. She’d promised herself that she’d do it coolly, not rising to any of the usual bait.

Dave swirled his finger through the puddle of juice and popped it into his mouth. “Anyway, did you check out that link I sent you? The post from 8:29 last night. KISStronaught had his head so far up his ass, he was just asking to be taken down a few pegs. I mean, he
had this attitude starting at the very top of the thread—you could see it building steam in little ways, just snowballing over the first few pages.” Dave scowled in vivid recollection. “That guy’s so smug. I think he’s from Wisconsin. Anyway, by the time I got through with him, the post from 2:49 a.m., that was the big one, like five users had
PM
ed me about it. They even came up with a nickname for me: The Mad Dog. Awesome, huh? I put it in my signature.”

“No, Dave. I must’ve missed that one.” Tracy was trying hard these days not to smoke within ten minutes of getting home. This was less to prove that she didn’t need nicotine than that she didn’t need it to deal with Dave.

She hadn’t made it once in almost two weeks. “I did read the other things you sent, though,” she added. “The—petitions.”

“Good, good. Standard rules apply: if you don’t sign them, I’m leaving you for someone younger.”

And here was the real reason Tracy hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to break up with Dave. From very early on in their relationship, they’d adopted a kind of banter based on the mock-premise that the joker was always on the verge of dumping the jokee. It came from an offhand comment made on their very first date, when Dave was so nervous about letting any kind of silence hang between them that he brusquely announced that if she didn’t love the tiramisu at the café they were walking to, if it wasn’t god-help-him perfect tiramisu, he’d never go out with her again. Tracy was caught off guard, and laughed so hard that she broke out into a coughing fit. The exchange quickly hardened into classic, go-to material as they went exclusive and then moved in together, to the point that their friends began describing other couples making similar comments as “Daventracifying,” a nickname that shouldn’t have caught on but somehow did.

The problem, of course, came when either or both of them actually were at wits’ end, and the other couldn’t tell if they were
really having what, to all appearances, looked like a fight. Tracy was never 100 percent sure when Dave was genuinely threatening to move out, and Dave never knew for sure if Tracy was serious about catapulting his every last possession onto the train tracks. Should they go into full relationship-save mode, or keep the banter going?

Once Tracy had guessed wrong. It was a few months after Dave had moved in, and she broke down crying after he raised his voice to auctioneer levels and said there was no way he could reasonably be expected to live with someone who didn’t appreciate the genius of shoegazer. She’d hugged his knees together, sobbing from a deep and vulnerable place inside her, and said she’d try to listen again, really she would, if it meant that much to him. Then she looked up, nose running, lenses fogged, and all he’d been able to do was meekly back away, embarrassed for both of them but still not sure how to make things right. He spent the next five days puttering around the corners of the house, eating marmalade from the jar and mutely rearranging his record collection. They hadn’t mentioned it since.

Tracy looked across the table at Dave, who was picking shards of pear from around the knife and rattling off the subhuman conditions in which chamomile was grown and harvested, taking a long detour into the Nepalese workers’ revolution he was helping to indirectly orchestrate with some of his buddies from the forum. Picturing all of the ensuing chaos she was about to set into motion—the crying, the fights, the is-this-really-a-fight fight, the divvying up of the furniture, the changing of passwords and locks—made her feel exhausted. Lately it just made more sense to ignore the problem and focus on the manageable stuff, like what to eat for dinner, or next week’s readings. Neither of them was happy, she knew that. Dave’s tea crusade kept him upstairs for more and more of the day, and when they were together he seemed to increasingly regard her as an irritant—not to mention an organics naysayer, vampirically trying to suck the passion
from his cause. And to think, she’d been the one to first tell him about fair-trade coffee and the arctic seal hunt, all those years and commitments ago. It seemed a parallel universe from here.

On the other hand, for things to get any better—for either one of them—first they’d have to get much, much worse.

“Dave,” she started, already feeling an entire night’s worth of tears pressing against the dams of her eyelids. “You know I—”

“What?” He looked at her distractedly.

“You know I want only—only the best for y—”

“Come on, Tracy. Speak up already!” Ah, yes. The other side effect of Dave’s cavalier music-listening habits was the occasional episode of tinnitus, which drowned out all other sounds completely, the way radio static swarms car speakers when you bump the dial. He tried to cover these attacks, even from Tracy, still, by pretending to be enthralled with some banal object—as he did now, picking up a ladle and studying it intently.

Tracy could already feel the adrenaline slowly subsiding, and something oddly resembling relief taking its place. Sometimes Dave was such a big, commanding personality, she thought. The kind of guy who charmed baristas, professors, and most small animals without even trying. The kind of guy who could instantly transform a dozen strangers into one rapt audience.

But sometimes he was just a sad, overgrown child, plugging his ears and waiting for the world to re-shape itself around his latest harebrained scheme.

She lit a cigarette—0 for 13 and counting—and plopped down in the chair opposite him.
Not today
, she thought. Then, because why not, she repeated it out loud. “Not today.” Dave still didn’t look up from the ladle. With each pull of her cigarette Tracy took extra relish in the cloud of tar that was no doubt whirlwinding through her lungs; she thought dark, sulking thoughts. Then, since she was
apparently stuck with him for a little longer, she decided to announce a few more hidden grievances, the slow-burning kind that inevitably touch nerves and really aren’t worth bringing up for the fight they’ll set off. The kind of complaints that take years of gathering evidence to see the pattern.

“You never wash between the fork tines,” she said, looking straight into the distracted whites of Dave’s eyes. His hearing was still pure fuzz. “It grosses me right out. You can’t walk down the sidewalk in a straight line. You ball your socks up weird.”

Each tick of their kitchen clock pounded in the fall air. The only other sound for several minutes was the persistent glass tinkle of a hobo rummaging for bottles in the dumpster outside.

That evening they crawled into bed together and slept facing opposite walls. Meanwhile, their toothbrushes sat wet and foamy in the bathroom cabinet’s stainless steel cup, kissing like vintage film stars.