The Big Dream (17 page)

“Where have they gone?” she asked him.

“Who?”

“The rest of the department.”

He weighed the phone in his palm. “No one tells me, sorry. I just come to take the phones.”

“But . . . but the whole . . . everyone?” She thought for a moment. “Should I be gone too? Did someone forget to fire me?”

“In these straitened economic times, I would not dare to say,” said the man with the phone, and then he took it away.

She had never received formal assignments in research – usually her more-senior colleagues just sluffed their least appealing tasks onto her. Without a task, without colleagues, without even walls, Research felt most unmoored. She went, silent in her Payless Maryjanes, to her supervisor's office, though she had been instructed never to go there before noon unless she was dead.

The supervisor's office was empty. More alarming, even the seemingly solid floor-to-ceiling walls that bound it had been
removed, so that it was no longer an office at all, merely some space at the end of the hall.

At this point, she had to go research who supervised her supervisor. This turned out to be a junior VP, who was on paternity leave. He was supervised by a senior VP who was at a kitchenware convention. She plunged on through the org chart, only to find that next in the chain of command were the Offices of the CEO.

The men who ran the company, distant from her as Andromeda stars, were no one she could picture asking anything, let alone what came after
grommet
. But if they weren't to provide the next action-item memo
,
who would? She had never been a self-starter. She was always bolstered by her colleagues. The now-terminated chef had been especially kind, always calling her
kid
and gently punching her shoulder.

He was gone now – they were all gone, but both her boys needed upper
and
lower retainers. She had to steel her soul, stay at her desk, and formulate her own action item. But that was when the 69 guy came back, nodded absently to her, picked up her phone and began to disconnect it.

She slammed her hand down on the keypad. “I'm staying. I'm Research.”

“Ah. Sorry.” He drew his hand back. “What are you researching?”

“I . . . what do you think I should research?”

He blinked at her, blushed slightly. “I overheard an editor on the fifth floor, someone from
Dream Woman,
say they wanted to run a feature on women's orgasms.”

“Seriously?” She was homesick for her old workstation, for when she was secure within walls with a day's docket of concepts to investigate. That morning's
grommet
had been left over from a long, complex assignment, from
hook and eye,
to the
toggle
to the more complex
spring-ring
and
lobster.
Only
grommet
turned out to have nothing to do with the necklaces and bracelets, just a braced
hole in fabric. All the others were in the article, but grommet was out, and even that, though sad, was satisfying. How would she know what was in or out if she didn't know what was on the list?

“What, specifically, about orgasms? What questions do they want answered?”

The guy shrugged. “If I were you, I would not limit myself to the simplistic binary of question and answer. Yes, there are many questions worth answering: why is the sky blue? Who are we when we are dead? Is the public fascination with the Gosselins
schadenfreude
or pity? Why do some nations drive on the right and some on the left?”

“Those are the sorts of research items I am used to.”

“But there are matters that do not beg a question, only attentiveness. We do not ask questions of a waterfall, of a BMW engine, of a newborn. We must only observe, minutely – through this care we come to know not only the answers but the questions.”

She didn't know what to say, but the clock on the wall behind the phone guy's head said 12:30, lunchtime. Actually, it was a sushi clock, so it really said unagi:30, but in any case she was hungry.

Without colleagues for company, Research ate her cheese-and-tomato sandwich while beginning her research on the female orgasm. She read an article about how women are chronically cheated on the pleasures of oral sex. It was surprisingly boring. She took some notes, started the second half of her sandwich, and opened weather.ca. The temperature at Pearson airport was 22 degrees, and skies were clear. That sounded nice. And now that everything and everyone were gone, she needed only to turn to see 22 degrees and clear skies over the airport. The window felt miraculous.

It wasn't miraculous: there were fireworks of bird-shit on the outside and fuzzy grey dust inside. But it was also floor to ceiling, eight feet across: blue light and white contrails and green
grass and traffic. It had been a long time since anything had changed in Research, and now everything had changed, even the light.

She stood up and went towards the light until she bonked off the glass: left arm, plastic glasses frame, both breasts. At the airport, a fat-bodied aeroplane lofted up, and a striped windsock whipped. It looked like a lovely day out there but the window frame didn't open, so she had no empirical knowledge of the current weather.

She went to her desk and read about barometric pressures, cool fronts and rising air, and what a windsock means. She didn't glance at the powdery blue sky until the 16:55 commuter rose towards Washington, D.C. It was narrow and glinting in the afternoon sun, like a needle that could thread a grommet. She watched its whole ascent, the perfect stab into the sky, until the tailfins disappeared at the top of the window.

Then her phone rang. She picked it up, held it to her ear and said, “Research.”

“This is Ella from
Dream Woman
editorial?” said a hesitant voice. “I was trying to reach my usual research contact, extension 7195? Tall, well-dressed, nice breath?”

“You don't know her name?”

“I knew her extension, but apparently it has changed?”

“She's . . .” Research knew so little. “Gone. She doesn't work here anymore.”

“That's awful? I've got this unconventional-orgasm article to fill in . . . ?”

Research missed her pretty, angsty colleague, their chats between stalls in the ladies' room about
Canadian Idol
. But she had a mortgage, a car loan, a taste for out-of-season fruit. “I have some material I could send you.”

There was a pause. Perhaps the woman was wondering what sort of person researched unconventional orgasms without being asked. Finally: “Anything good?”

Research completed the call, formatted her notes on vaginal, clitoral, G-spot, and anal, then powered down her computer at 5:03. She took her cardigan from the back of her chair, her lunch sack from under it, and said goodbye to no one. Then she went out to the parking lot. She counted 196 cars as she walked to the bus stop. White was the most common – 68 cars. She could not remember the colours of the four cars now missing.

When Research got off the bus at 8:48 the next morning, there was a silver-blue airplane high above her head. It had a fish painted vertically on the tail, as if it was diving. The fish was blue, too, brighter than the plane. Brightest blue of all was the sky.

Indoors was mainly grey but the blue beamed in through the enormous window, which someone somehow had washed, inside and out.

She looked into the exact definition of teal, the blogs of MuchMusic VJs that her sons liked, the calorie content of chili, the average woman's desired amount of oral sex versus experienced. She sent these facts to various editors at
Dream Fashion, Dream Teen, Dream Woman
. She stared out the window. The sky was a medium blue-green, more blue than green: teal.

She walked through vast empty space between her desk and the window – even the other researchers' desks had been removed now. She had always threaded through them like a rope through a grommet, and now there was too much space. She had liked her colleagues; everyone boiled extra water in case someone else wanted tea. She had no way of finding them now, out there in their real lives.

Back at her desk, Research found an enthusiastic email from
Dream Woman
regarding her facts about oral pleasure, requesting further research. The editor did not mention the chili information (surprisingly low fat).

Googling “techniques+cunnilingus” brought many suggestions, but they repeated from website to website, or even within one – “light feathery kisses to the inner thigh” seemed much the same as “light feathery kisses up and down the leg.” She wondered how else to research this, eyed the framed photo of her husband in his canoe, and sent off her report.

She boiled a single cup of water for tea. She ate her yoghurt early. She looked out the window at a helicopter rising, possibly carrying the executive team from an internet start-up with a bold innovation for something. She wanted to research using reality, not the Internet. She wanted to be good at her job and interesting to her family. She wanted to slip through life like a lace through a grommet. She wanted to be someone who found joy in more than just what her husband got up to with his tongue.

She stood up. She left her purse in her file drawer and her coat on its hook, but she nevertheless left the research room at a non-standard break time. She didn't know where she was going, but she did know what was available to do at her desk: action items she had created for herself. An encyclopaedia of deposed kings, a list of xylophone-heavy musical scores to be matched to the film, plus a half-dozen more websites she'd been asked to investigate for methods of flicking the tip of the tongue to draw out the shy clitoris. Research could not summon enthusiasm. She found the xylophone shrill and most kings deserving of being deposed, and her own clitoris had never been terribly shy.

She went into the stairwell. She climbed one flight, and was already in an unknown world, though the hallway carpeting was the same platinum grey. Research walked passed a door with a Dilbert cartoon on it, then one with an On Vacation ! sign, then a Christmas wreath, then one from which the nameplate had fallen down. She paused by an open door to see someone pulling a computer from the desk. It was the same building services guy that had taken away the phones yesterday, only now his T-shirt read
“Flat-chested.” She nodded at him. He blinked, looked around, and then nodded back.

She walked into a kitchen that was the same as the one downstairs but different; like a kitchen in a dream, but unlike anything in
Dream Kitchen
magazine. Here was a toaster oven instead of a pop-up toaster, Dawn detergent instead of No-Name. In the refrigerator, there were glass jars with rubber tops, which Research liked – so easy to investigate. These jars contained chopped cantaloupe and blueberries. No pudding cups, but many yoghurts. Here, salad dressings separated into homemade oil and vinegar rather than emulsified Kraft Italian.

Research wondered if this was a wealthier floor, or simply one that valued lunch products more? She could afford BioBest yoghurt and organic pita, too, and did – for her family, at home. She never thought about the food she ate alone at her desk.

Thoughtfully, she took her pen and pad and began cataloguing this floor's milk/cream ratio, its pears and apples, Snackwiches and Lunchables. Research went on to other fridges on other floors, found breast milk, live-culture yoghurt, crème brûlée. Then the small appliances, and then the walls and ceilings themselves – grape-juice spatters, gum stuck above the wastebin, lipstick kisses on a cupboard door (why?). Lists and descriptions of the kitchen configurations of Dream Inc. took her all the way to the glorious weekend: the boys' basketball practice, a dinner party, a Sunday morning in bed, 69ing with her husband.

On Monday, she began listing contents of above-sink cupboards. She didn't know what else to do. The economy was blowing up and even airplanes sometimes exploded and a sizeable percentage of women never achieved an orgasm. The Internet seemed to promise solutions but she couldn't find them there. Problems like money and pleasure and flight were beyond her to answer alone – she couldn't even form the questions. But she could think of dozens of questions about the people at Dream Inc., and once she started asking, she found she actually cared to
know. Even after 5:00, in the grocery store or beside the basketball court, she wondered about her colleagues' square inches of monitor size, highway or surface-route commutes, and their confusion over dental plans. She wondered about their happiness, their lunches, their lives. These were trying times, and she was curious about how other people were tried.

In the kitchens, Research encountered very few of the people she was researching. Once beside a sink where she was trying to describe the scent of a label-less bottle of dish soap (pine, lavender, and chlorine?), a lady jostled past to rinse an apple. Once a gentleman in a three-piece suit waited patiently for her to finish counting the pieces in his Corn Bran box (158) and put them all back before he poured out a bowl.