Heaven Is Small (20 page)

The next day, at his desk in Cubicle 133 of Floor Twelve, Heaven, he could not remember what he had written the night before. When Gordon flipped the computer from DOS mode to Windows, abandoning a dozen suitors and fumbled snoggings, he was cock-a-hoop to see that indeed he had written
something
, that one might call it writing of a sort. There were paragraphs, full pages, chapters. The pen bounced up hard. Gordon skimmed the virtual pages, still too afraid to print them out but congratulated nonetheless by the phrases enclosed in their white perimeters: a welcoming (he thought) snatch of dialogue, and the delightfully rancorous cigarettes, teacups, and national holidays of any American short story. Phrases flashed out at him like grinning men in worn brown suits.

Gordon pressed his fingers to his temples and attempted to mentally retrieve the pages of the second-hand paperbacks that had lined his shelves for years, both the thumbed ones and those bought but barely consumed. He attempted to reference them from a distance or crib their cadence. There was a line he still remembered from a John Berryman poem:
All my love, my falsity, my anti-hopes.
And so, over the course of a few nights, slipping between fiction and memoir, Gordon worked an account of his life into one long letter to earnest book-club member Mrs. Abigail Mabey in Minnesota, and whoever else might read it.

To scroll was a thing like God. To send the final file to Daves was even better. Gordon prepared the e-mail and clicked Send.

18

A manila envelope lay on top of gordon’s inbox.

It was too soon to have received anything back about his and Daves’ book. Off it had gone just last week. Too afraid to print out the proof, Daves had called Gordon into his office to show him the final layout onscreen. “It’s all you now, Gordo,” Daves had said, indicating that the original book’s text had been completely knocked out and replaced by Gordon’s. A title and an author name still clung to the cover, but the love story inside was no romance. Gordon had nodded and Daves had sent it off to the Print Division downstairs, a purple progress bar filling in slowly —
8
%
, 30
%
, 55
%
, 82
%
, 90
%
, 99
%,
100
% — as the file transferred. When Gordon had asked how long until it reached its audience, Daves had shrugged in his usual manner, plaid shoulders twitching as if shaking off snow. “It’s more like newspaper or magazine publishing than book publishing. It’s a matter of weeks or days, not months or years,” Daves had answered calmly. “But I can’t imagine we’ll hear anything until after Christmas-slash-Hanukkah.”

With shaking hands Gordon reached for his inbox, tore open the package, and held the second non-Heaven title to reach him from the other side. He thumbed it open. There it was. His poem. In print. Selected from one of the packages he had sent out to literary journals the day he first saw the mailroom. It was the only one he had submitted that wasn’t a love poem.

TO: FROM:

Gordon Small

Jesus e-mailed me this morning

and his subject line was:
What?

I thought he must have heard me,

calling his name in the night

when I had been abandoned,

when the filaments rattled

like small stones inside the lights,

when the waiting walls raised moss —

But it seemed what he wanted

was to sell me a new watch.

Gordon Small works in a cubicle at Heaven Books. He is pretty sure he is already dead. Previously he released a novella entitled
The Mercy Seat.
This is his first published poem.

Gordon felt a current of heat creep over his face. He shut the magazine. He rolled open his top drawer, dropped the volume in. He looked at the magazine inside the drawer. The cover had a face pencilled in blue inside a small square. It was neither a man’s nor a woman’s face. Behind the blue face, colour leaked through. Red streaks, like someone had bled on the man (or woman) or, more accurately, bled somewhere behind him (or her). Gordon let the drawer snap back on its springs. The cover with his poem behind it disappeared into a flat façade of wood grain.

It was a stupid poem.

Gordon tossed the magazine envelope into his recycling bin and turned on his computer. He waited for it to load. Icons took their place along the bottom of his screen. A purple happy face with a line splitting it in two popped up. Gordon waited for the face to go away. When it had, he logged on to the Heaven system and entered the code for his next assigned romance novel.
Carousel of Dreams
appeared at the top of the illuminated text. Gordon edged the cursor down the page. Though the books Heaven published had no page breaks until they went to Daves, Gordon still considered the screen he viewed as a page, an endless page. One page that led to the end of the book, the last line, the end of the story. The place where the story ran out of words. Gordon scrolled through what might have been four pages, though of course he couldn’t say. At line 127 he began to lean his chin on one hand.

Gordon pulled open the drawer. The blue face stared up at him with translucent pastel eyes. Beneath it he found the poem again. He reread the revealing biographical note first, guessing it had been shrugged off by the editorial committee as whacky writer humour rather than an actual communiqué from the other side. He reread the poem. The filaments. He could live with the filaments. It was only the poem’s closing line, really, that turned it into a joke. A one-liner. Har-dee-har-har. A-fat-man-with-a-cigar kind of a poem. He wondered if Chloe’s
post–
poem had really been as good as he had thought at the time. Maybe he had only thought so to convince himself he was selecting important things. He wondered if Chloe had felt like he did now. He wondered why he himself had been so confident, long ago, about his own brief fiction.

Gordon dropped the magazine into the drawer. He bit one thumb as if his own poem had given him a paper-cut. He kneed the drawer closed and the publication credit fell back into wooden invisibility.

He was scrolling through Chapter Four when the drawer popped open. Gordon was sure he hadn’t touched it. But there it was, springing wide of its own accord. Gordon eyed the magazine warily. The man/woman blue-eyed him back sidelong, the expression of the lips unchanging: slightly down-turned, but definitely not a full frown. Gordon picked up the literary journal.
Literary
. The word filled his mind with a sugary euphoria. He flipped quickly to page 44.

It was a good poem after all.
Gordon Small. To: From. Small, Gordon. From: To.

“Gordon Small . . .”

It took a moment for him to realize the voice wasn’t in his head.

“
Gor
don?” Chandler, who seldom made her way through the cubicles, flapped a blurred sheet of paper at him over the partition. Gordon made a mouselike sound in his throat and scrambled to conceal the magazine within the desk drawer once again. In true Chandler fashion she leaned nimbly but urgently into his cubicle, the smell of Lancôme’s Poême accompanying her. He bet the whole neighbourhood where she had lived on Earth smelled of skin cream.

“Have you
seen
this?!” she whisper-shrieked, shaking a Xerox in his face. It was too close for him to make out.

Why did Chandler
emphasize
everything she said? Gordon imagined an angel perched on her shoulder with a fat highlighter, illuminating the morphemes as they fell from her lips. She was practically shivering with excitement — the way she did when she had gossip to convey.

She let the page fall between them.

Gordon ducked his head, his mouth hitting his shirt collar as he read. “Oh, fuddle-duddle,” he muttered. Then, louder, the word released as he’d intended. “Oh. Oh . . . fuck.”

The blurred ink read: “CHLOE GOLD TO CHAMPION UNKNOWN AUTHOR.”

Gordon’s hands started to shake as he strained to read what appeared to be a newspaper article that had been clipped, then copied from a previous photocopy, degenerating in the process:

CHLOE GOLD TO CHAMPION UNKNOWN AUTHOR

“I will conduct a worldwide search for this author, whoever he or she may be,” novelist Chloe Gold stated in a press conference on Monday. Gold referred to a mysterious and utterly anonymous writer who came to her attention after she found a brief notice about the prankster on Booktroll, a blog popular with those in literary publishing.

Gold claims she will “employ as many hands and minds as needed to uncover the text’s true author,” whom she hopes to champion. “What we have here is an absolute reverse of the J.T. Leroy situation. I went out and found the paperback Booktroll referenced. Immediately I felt as if I were reading a story that had been written just for me,” Gold closed with emotion after admitting the book had left her “flabbergasted.” Gold’s own resumé boasts the award-winning
Goodbye to the Wind
and the new and lauded
Hello Twilight
.

According to Booktroll, the author-at-large seems to have sneaked his or her own writing into the world inside the covers of someone else’s novel. According to Gold, “There has never been an unhappy romance. Never has any novel in the romance genre, introduced through Heaven Books or by one of its competitors, touched upon the topics of alcoholism, abortion, divorce, lesbian relationships, or suicide. Never have the hero and heroine parted ways or come to violent ends.” All of that changed when an author writing under the name Allison Sharpe offered Heaven readers a heart-rending incomplete love story in the form of a letter addressing an actual book-club member, Abigail Mabey.

Reporters were quick to reach Mabey by phone at her home in St. Paul, Minnesota. She confirmed that she received the book by mail through Heaven’s Sealed-with-a-Kiss Club but has not yet read it. “I certainly intend to,” she said.

Heaven Books author Allison Sharpe has three previous titles with the company. The real Sharpe says she did have a book called
Darling Deception
under contract, but the title as it has been released “contains not a single bloody word” from her pen.

Covered in the standard lavender script of Heaven’s Secret Hearts imprint, a love-meets-suspense line, the text itself may be what its title,
Darling Deception,
declares. Bloggers have been debating whether the book is a publishing mix-up or if it marks a bold new direction for romance publishing. Some posit this title may have been a market test. The company has previously said it plans to introduce new fiction lines to reflect more contemporary dating trends.

At the time of printing, messages left for the publisher were not being returned.

If Gordon could have burst into a cold sweat, he would have. Unconsciously he placed a hand upon his forehead and slowly mopped it over his brow. “Have you showed it to Daves?”

“Dave? In Layout?” Chandler still hadn’t wrapped her head around Daves’ plural name. “Why would I show him?”

Eyes rescanning the flecked photocopy, Gordon continued to blurt out questions. “Where did you get this? Is it going around? Why didn’t I hear about this from Ivy up in the Net Division?”

Chandler leaned a hip against his desk and blinked her long lashes, finally having found Gordon’s eyes with hers again. “Because, darling . . .” One amused finger reached out and squiggled its way down between his pecs. It sent shivers through his knock-kneed body. Chandler’s irises were full of a coy green light. She got to the end of his tie and flipped it mockingly into his face, her finger breaking away just before the exchange reached obscenity. “You’re hearing it from
me
. As department head, don’t I always have the best scoops? Don’t I always know what’s what?”

Before Gordon could react, Chandler turned and exited his cramped quarters. “By the way,” she called back over her shoulder, “you’re wanted upstairs.”

Gordon stood and put a hand to his chest, where a tiny maraca shook, the antidepressants quivering along with the rest of him.

“Ms. Lillian Payne in HR asked me to send you up for a meeting. ‘Immediately,’ she said.” Chandler invested
immediately
with her most professional tone. She winked as she rounded the corner and disappeared.

Gordon stood inside his suit. In his suit, inside his cubicle, Gordon stood. He stood, blinking with the shock of Chandler’s mock invitation and the very real fact that he was being called up to Floor Seventy for the first time since he had been interviewed. As he stood he imagined that if Daves were to come out of his production office and see Gordon standing there, hands limp at his sides, from that far perspective Daves would confront a series of pink walls leading to other nooks where computers and people-like people sat, and at the end of them all would be Gordon, centred between the dividers of his world. A man of moderate height and moderate build, in olive-coloured armour against a backdrop of pink wool and pink tin shelving. If one of the men from the Design Department were to glance over, that man would see the five-foot-ten Gordon staring, standing, staring, standing, staring. The man in his suit. The man inside a romance factory. The man full of fear. The small man.

It took Gordon a few moments to realize what he was waiting for. Heartbeat. Adrenalin. As foolish as such things were to wait for, he found he missed them terribly.