Rockets Versus Gravity (6 page)

D
espite his battered, disconnected state, there is some jump in James Yeo's step. He strides along as his mental soundtrack plays “YYZ,” the driving,
guitar-bass
-
and
-drums instrumental by Toronto rock band Rush.

YYZ is the identification code for Toronto's Pearson International Airport. It's the Morse code signal that guides the planes in, and these three letters are printed on the luggage tags of anyone returning to Toronto after escaping to anywhere else by air. If James hadn't
consciously
chosen the song, his subconscious would have played the track anyway.

At this late hour of the night (or, depending on one's perspective, this early hour of the morning) no planes land at Terminal One. Except for the whir of ventilation fans and the hum of idling computers and muted TV screens, the fluorescent-lit expanse of YYZ is silent. Other than the occasional security officer or cleaner who ambles past, the usually-bustling space is inert and lifeless.

James stands and stares up into the antiseptically clean, heaven-bright expanse of Terminal One — the curved panes of glass, the triangulated white cantilevers — and he feels a slight tingle of hope from somewhere within his heart's compressed tangle of flaps and tissues and arteries. He can feel his blood pumping inside him; James Yeo knows that he is still alive.

James reaches into his briefcase and tugs the laptop computer out. He flips it open, switches it on, and clicks “YES” to connect to the airport's wireless Internet. First he logs on to the Riskey and Gamble corporate website and navigates to the customer service blog that he is required to update once a day. He types:

James Yeo is going away.

Next, James signs in to his LinkedIn page, another Web presence required of all sales staff at Riskey and Gamble. “Gotta keep your clients informed!” Harry says. So, James informs his clients:

James Yeo is going away.

Then onto his Facebook page. In the status bar he types:

James Yeo is going away.

And then onto Twitter, where he Tweets:

James Yeo is going away.

And then he sets his Gmail account to respond to incoming emails with the following automatic response:

James Yeo is going away.

A hot wave washes over his cool brain, and his eyelids flutter. His head lolls back against the back of the
blue-on
-chrome chair. On James's mental soundtrack, “YYZ” is still playing, but the tempo slows and the volume gradually drops.

The bright, white expanse of Pearson International Airport fades to a foggy shade of grey, and then into a void of black, through which the eye of James Yeo's mind floats back to the previous morning, which already seems like a lifetime ago.

Declination

dec-lin-a-tion

d
Ɛ
k lǝˈneɪ ʃǝn

1. A bending, sloping, or moving downward

(as a spent rocket falling to Earth).

2. Deterioration.

3. Deviation, as from a standard.

J
ames Yeo strokes the strings one last time, and as that final melancholy minor chord echoes back at him from the concrete walls of the Air Canada Centre, the capacity crowd roars its approval.

Leaning against the security barrier in the front row of the crowd is Priya; she waves her hands in the air, and her .22-calibre nipples strain against her Rush
Moving Pictures
concert jersey. James winks at her, and she smiles.

“Thank you, Toronto!” he says into the microphone, his equalized voice amplified to demigod volume. “It's good to be home.”

Then the bedside clock radio blares; the crowd vanishes, the mic disappears, and James no longer feels the guitar strap digging into his right shoulder.

He jolts upright in bed, once again failing to recognize the interior of their most recent bedroom. James and Sidney have switched houses five times in the past three years, and sometimes his waking mind still expects to surface somewhere else.

J
ames's wife, Sidney, is a real estate agent, and she had felt that it was “imperative” to sell their previous home while the market was “hot,” and to upgrade to a place with Premium Selling Features while mortgage rates were low. So they flipped their solid little double-brick wartime home in “scorching white-hot Leaside” and exchanged it for a seven-digit mortgage and an enormous,
stucco-and
-fibreboard suburban McMansion near Avenue and Wilson.

Their latest residence is way up north by Highway 401, at the opposite end of the city from where they both work, a frustrating crosstown journey from where any of their friends live, a war zone of snarled traffic and construction zones and closed roads and one-way streets between their house and any point within the city where they might actually want or need to be. Despite these “minor lifestyle accommodations,” though, Sidney is pleased; they now possess a house with the following Premium Selling Features:

• A three-car garage! (For their single Honda Civic, which Sidney is suddenly itching to replace with a Lexus sedan
  .)
  
• Twelve-foot ceilings! (A twelve-rung ladder is neces­sa­ry to change the “contractor-grade” pot lights, one of which seems to burn out weekly.)
  
• A kitchen cooktop with six burners! (They have used two of them so far: one to boil pasta, the other to warm the sauce-from-a-jar.)
  
• A family room, a living room,
  and
  a rec room! (James and Sidney currently own enough furniture to par­­­­­-ti­ally furnish the rec room.)
  
• Four big bedrooms! (Three of which have not yet been slept in.)
  
• A heated driveway! (“Nice!” James mused. “We can switch it on in the winter to give the local homeless people something warm sleep on.” Sidney rolled her eyes and huffed, “It's for melting
  snow
  , James. There are no
  homeless people
  in
  this
  neighbourhood.”)
  

The biggest Premium Selling Feature of them all, though, in Sidney's Professional Opinion?
Seven
bathrooms!
SEVEN!
Her voice trembled with emotion as they signed the mortgage documents. “We will make a
killing
when we flip
this
place!”

James understands now that no house they share can ever really be a home; in Sid's own words, it's merely a “deficit-financed equity upgrade.” He hasn't bothered unpacking all his clothes from the suitcases yet, and his guitars are still sealed inside cardboard travelling closets rented from the moving company, whose drivers know James and Sidney by their first names. James is wary of letting himself get too comfortable here, since Sidney and her colleagues are already predicting that their new neighbourhood is going to get “very hot, very soon.”

If James complains even obliquely about the hassle of moving homes approximately every eight months, Sidney just shrugs and says, “Moving is easier than renovating.” Or, alternately: “I deserve better. I deserve more.” There is a hardcover book on Sidney's bedside table that reminds her daily of her newfound mantra:

YOU DESERVE BETTER!

YOU DESERVE MORE!

Rule the Boardroom! Rule the Bedroom! Rule the World!

James notes cynically that reading this book has not resulted in more bedroom proclivity from his wife; in fact, their sexual liaisons have actually
decreased
since she started reading this tome.

“
… and it's going to be the hottest day of the season so far,” an over-caffeinated DJ hollers through the speaker of the clock radio, “a record-breaking thirty degrees Celsius, or eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. So get out there and make the most of a —”

“Oh, shuddup!” Sidney moans as she pounds the snooze button with her fist, glaring at the LED digits glowing
6:00 a.m
. “Gawwwwwd! Why is it so fucking hot in here?”

“I can go switch on the air conditioning if you want.”

James is not sure he can actually do this, since the state-of-the-art, multi-zone forced-air system has a control grid more elaborate than the instrument panel of a Boeing 747.

“Gawd,” Sidney whines, “this humidity is insufferable!”

She kicks her long, slim legs in the air, launching the Egyptian-cotton sheets and Indian silk–covered duvet off herself, and burying James beneath them. The hem of her nightdress lands eight inches above her smooth pubic mound, which she recently had waxed bald at the spa; the little bloody speckles have just faded away.

James was fond of Sidney's sparse triangle of strawberry-blond pubic hair, and he wonders why she would so abruptly remove a feature of her body that he had praised so frequently. Nevertheless, the sight of his wife lying there with her legs wide open, pubic hair or none, causes James's erection to push up hard against the heap of down-filled bedding.

He shrugs the duvet and sheets onto the floor and then rolls over toward Sidney, brushing the inside of her thigh with his fingertips. A few gentle stokes there used to be all it took to get her juices flowing. Just a few months ago, she would have been on top of him right away.

She snaps her legs together, trapping his hand.

“For gawd's sake, James!”

“Aw, c'mon, Sid.”

She tugs his fingers out, pulls down the nightdress, and props herself up against her custom-made,
virgin-down
-filled Medium-Firm Side-Sleeper pillow. The muscles of Sidney's trainer-toned arms are lean, tense, and twitchy.

“No time for
that
,” she says. “I've got to show three different houses this morning, and I still have to wash and straighten my hair. This fucking humidity!”

James reaches for her waist and says, “Just let it go curly today.”

“Professional women
do not
have curly hair,” she says.

A
pparently
,
James muses,
neither above nor below
.

“And you'd better get your ass in gear, too,” Sidney says. She swings her legs over the side of the bed, and her feet slap against the polished rainforest-hardwood floor before James can touch her again. “You can't slack off just because you're married to the boss's daughter.”

James sighs. As if working for Sidney's father has ever been an advantage.

S
id's dear daddy had invited more guests to their wedding than James had. Harry Riskey's VIP clients and colleagues sat closer to the head table than James's own mother and father. After the wedding, Sidney's parents sent around little albums of photos from the event to all of the guests, embossed in gold leaf with
Our Daughter Sidney's Wedding
(as opposed to, say,
James and Sidney's Wedding
). Harry Riskey vetoed the photo of James removing the garter belt in the traditional fashion, from beneath his daughter's wedding dress, judging it to be “inappropriate to share with colleagues and clients”; but somehow another photo, which depicted Harry's business partner, Baldric Gamble, posing beside the non-blushing bride, her left buttock clenched firmly in his right hand, slipped through the approval process.

The photo album pretty much summed it up for James; he, the groom, in his tuxedo with the
dusty-rose
-pink bow tie and vest, was of equivalent value to the proceedings as the
dusty-rose
-pink bridesmaids' dresses and the
dusty-rose
-pink ribbons tied around the chair backs at the reception.

During the Pregnancy Scare, Harry Riskey had made three demands:

1. James would immediately cut his long hair short.
   
2. James would immediately quit playing music for a living and would come to work at Riskey and Gamble Insurance.
   
3. James would marry Sidney within three months, before Sidney's pregnancy started to show in an obvious way.
   

Even after it was discovered that the pregnancy test had showed a false positive, James complied with all three of Harry Riskey's demands.

And here James is now.

“
And don't leave that bedding on the floor!” Sidney scolds. “Those sheets are dry clean only, and that duvet cover cost three thousand dollars!”

James picks up the sheets and duvet, and smoothes them over the mattress.

James follows Sidney into the ensuite.

She leans over the faux-marble countertop, her face an inch from the bevelled mirror as she inserts her contact lenses. “By the way, you'll have to eat dinner by yourself tonight, okay?”

James inches up behind her and encircles her waist in his hands.

“Showing houses tonight, too?” he asks.

His erection springs free from his boxer shorts, and he nestles it between her upturned cheeks.

“Oh, for gawd's sake, James, stop that. It isn't romantic.”

“But it's fun!”

“Maybe for you.”

“I can't help it! You have the nicest ass!”

“Well, you're right about that,” she says. “And no, I'm not showing houses tonight. I'm having a strategy meeting with Roland.”

James's penis deflates, and he steps back from his wife's previously enticing buttocks.

R
oland. Roland Baron. Roland “The Red” Baron. The self-­proclaimed “Baron of the Upper Beach.” That's what it says on his business cards, embossed in faux-gold letters right beneath his grinning mug shot, along with the phrase
You Deserve Better! You Deserve More!
Since it was Roland Baron who gave the book to Sidney, James assumes that the business card slogan was plagiarized directly from the book's cover.

James has five of Roland's cards, one for each time that Roland has forgotten (or pretended to forget) that they've met before.

“Nice to meet you, Jake,” Roland says (every time), handing over his card as if it's the key to the city.

“We've met before,” James replies (every time). “And it's James.”

James can't even purge any of his passive-aggressive anger by drawing a ridiculous goatee over Roland's business card photo, because Roland already has one, trimmed so immaculately that it appears to be etched onto his chin with a black Magic Marker.

For the past three business quarters, Roland Baron has been the Top Grossing Agent at the real estate brokerage where Sidney works; he's got the translucent plastic tombstones on his desk to prove it. Roland claims that he invented the term “the Upper Beach,” and now he is the dominant real estate agent in the area.

The Beach
itself is a neighbourhood that runs parallel to the eastern beaches along Lake Ontario. For the sort of Torontonians who have become rich from capitalism but still want to feel as cool as they did during their
wannabe-hippie
-
underground
-university-newspaper days, this “upscale yet funky” area is
the
place to own a home. Some of the old-timers still call it
the Beaches
, but the influx of Limousine Liberals voted to rename it
the Beach
. Simple. Elegant. Refined. Like the people who have taken over the area. And yes, they actually had a
referendum
on the issue. It was
that
important.

Just to the north of the Beach is the southwest corner of Scarborough, a satellite of Toronto that is a bit too low-rent and working-class for the bankers and lawyers from the downtown office towers. Coffee Time franchises still outnumber Starbucks, and there is more Bud Light on tap than any imported or microbrewery beer, so properties in Scarborough are a harder sell to the nouveaux riches.

Then Roland Baron had an idea, a great, Grinchy idea: instead of “Southwest Scarborough,” he would refer to the area as “the Upper Beach,” and maybe some reluctant neo-capitalists would pay premium prices to live there. As Roland explains it, “When you meet some chick from Mississauga at a downtown nightclub, and she asks you where you live,
the Upper Beach
sounds pretty cool, right? I mean, Mississauga is
Manhattan
compared to Scarborough, but you just might get into that tight little, um,
minidress
of hers” — he winks here — “if you live in
the Upper Beach
. Am I right, or am I right? Or am I right?”

By the time the other real estate agents had caught on to the ploy, Roland was already the Baron of the Upper Beach, with his name and likeness plastered onto giant billboards all over the area. Since he now had more business than one agent could possibly handle by himself, he benevolently offered a “limited partnership” to his colleague Sidney.

Their partnership doesn't have many limits, as far as James can tell.

Since “joining forces” with Roland, Sidney wears low-cut blouses and push-up bras, because one of Roland's maxims is “Mammaries Move Properties.” She wears thong-style panties now, too, because, according to the Baron of the Upper Beach, “Panty Lines Discourage Signings.” Or maybe the saying was “Ass Sells Grass.”