The Dilettantes (14 page)

“That was a graphic,” Tracy reminded him. “Out of my jurisdiction.”

“Anyway, we were worried.
I
was worried.”

“I see,” she said. A bus shot past, kicking up a sheet of dirty mist that fell at their feet. Her expression became a little less strained. “And the books, you say?”

In a split second, Alex decided to go out on a limb, opting for a joke. “Yeah, well. You know how it goes. Two birds, one stone, etc. I’m a busy dude.”

After an excruciating pause, Tracy mimicked the ironic gloss in his voice. “Natch.”

“So anyway, like I said,” Alex repeated, “maybe we can do this again sometime …” He took a few exaggerated steps backward. “Now I’ve gotta run to the hospital … Grandma fell into the town beehive again …”

She laughed, this time with considerable lightness behind it. “Fuck you.”

“Oh, don’t you worry,” he said. “We’re all fucked.”

“In that case, you’d better walk me home.”

Tracy’s house still had a slightly haunted feel to it, where you could see the dust silhouettes of objects recently departed. She was unusually forthcoming, too. At school Tracy often gave off a vibe that was pleasant but largely inscrutable, iceberg-like; here she insisted on giving Alex a full tour. He realized that this was the first time in weeks he’d been in close proximity to a woman without having to keep his sexual demons in check. It was a much-needed ceasefire. He’d jerked off to the memory of Eleanor’s swirling, denim-clad ass three times in the past week alone.

He’d even, once, to his secret shame and puzzlement, hate-masturbated while thinking about Victoria from his old tutorial. But that one felt more like exercise than anything.

Now, however, he was free to wander Tracy’s living room and poke at her
DVD
collection without any hidden agenda to contend with. “Oh, and I got my Shakespeare project back this morning,” he said.

“Tell me,” said Tracy, sitting cross-legged on her couch. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

“I actually have a theory about this.”

“Great. More theories.”

“It’s a short one, I promise. Professors and
TAS
like to talk about the death of the new, right? So why do they keep giving better grades to papers and whatnot that even just
try
to do something crazy and original?”

“I give up.”

“Because they have to spend days upon days reading essays that take ten pages to explain that, deep down, Hamlet has an important decision to make. No ideology in the world can stand up to that kind of slow torture. So when you do something even mildly unusual, they’re just so grateful for the stimulation that they can’t think clearly.”

Still, Alex conceded, it was true that all of the really good ideas had been done to death. Formal stunt pilotry (e.g., beginning and ending your essay with ellipses) was totally bush league; comparing a book to its film adaptation, once grounds for automatic expulsion, was now simply called
interdisciplinary
. So you had to aim bigger, flashier. There was a longstanding rumour, whispered throughout the liberal arts, that one frazzled undergrad had actually built a scale model of Bentham’s Panopticon out of popsicle sticks for his term paper and left it in front of his
TA’S
office door, alongside a handwritten note that said You Figure It Out.

Which was all to say that when Alex had gone to Eli’s office to pick up his screenplay, he was met with the most gushing enthusiasm
he’d ever seen from the
TA
. It caught Alex completely off-guard; nothing, he confided to Tracy, made him more suspicious than unbridled joy, especially when directed at something he’d said or done. But Eli had shaken his hand so strongly, and locked into such a tractor beam of eye contact, that even Alex had to assume the feeling was genuine. Eli had asked him where the hell he’d gotten such a terrific idea. (“He didn’t say
terrific,”
Tracy objected. “Scout’s fucking honour,” Alex replied.) The
TA
spoke so quickly, in fact, slurring entire sentences into long blobs of sound, that sometimes the only discernible word for long stretches of time was
Derridean
.

Alex had only been able to shrug and say, “I just thought it’d be funny if Isabella were a fighter pilot.”

To which Eli had thrown his head back and cackled. “Indeed! And having Angelo try and tempt her with that tab of
LSD
. Ingenious.”

The screenplay got an A. “Then again,” Alex added, “so did everyone else’s project, as it turned out. None of us could figure out how that’s even possible. But it is what it is.”

While Alex was partly thrilled at receiving such bald-faced, if somewhat qualified, affirmation, he wasn’t able to fully enjoy the moment. He knew that it was really garbage, a rudimentary parody, no more clever than those Twisted Tunes cranked out by the local
FM
stations’ cocaine-fueled morning shows. Having it taken so seriously sucked whatever fun it contained right out. It was probably more accomplished than anything else he’d written in recent memory, but
ingenious?
In a better world, he added to Tracy, this kind of idea would’ve been bathroom graffiti.

“Well,” Tracy said as he got up to go, “at least you only have one more semester to get through.” She thanked Alex for convincing her to leave the house for a change, and they shared a quick but firm hug at her front door. On his way back to the SkyTrain, Alex ran the numbers in his head: thirteen weeks, four courses, two presentations, six
essays, two exams. Then he’d be booted ceremoniously out the door—from cap on head to cap in hand, out to where there were student loans to be repaid and soul-flattening jobs to interview for but never get. If he decided to go the other route, applications for grad school were already on the horizon.
The Peak
might get run out of business even sooner than that. Meanwhile, some C-grade celebrity was about to show up and expose
SFU
as a literal cultural dumping ground.

One more Editor’s Voice, one more feature, a few more Photoshop goofs snuck into the house ads, and that was it. He’d be gone —and all without having had sex in almost two years, while living in the most permissive and socially lubricated environment he would ever know.

As he was boarding the train, he got a text message from Tyson. It read: “Dude. Jsut finished getting my dick slurped in the library by a shelf stocker when wat do I see. Metro guys in big gay aprons in convo mall. The philistines r here.”

Merry Christmas, Alex. We’re all fucked.

The movie star arrived quietly, with no entourage or pre-emptive press releases. This was intentional. There was no fanfare because he hadn’t organized any.

In fact, accounts differed as to when, exactly, Duncan Holtz showed up at
SFU
for the first time. Everyone agreed that he was in
C9001
on that first official morning of the spring semester, sitting there unassumingly in a Yankees cap. The class was 1st-year sociology. Home base for schedule-overloading window shoppers everywhere, as well as those wafflers who had parents demanding a post-secondary education, specifics be damned. But there were earlier rumoured sightings, too: Holtz slipping into the bookstore just before closing, or enjoying a quiet pint of Rickard’s on the Pub patio.

By the time he left that first lecture hall, a cluster of students had already gathered in the
AQ
hallway, waiting to catch a glimpse of celebrity firsthand. To his credit, the star was gracious upon being found out. He signed autographs in the hall and posed for some camera-phone pictures—always remembering to make physical contact with the fan, putting his arm around them or ending their exchange with a high-five. That was how you showed you were sincere. It was one of the first things the media handlers taught you.

Then, with a casual wave, and flashing that permanently boyish grin, Duncan Holtz headed down a staircase and was gone.

A round of giddy texts and status updates went out. The consensus was that he looked even more rugged in person, though surprisingly short.

This turned out to be a typical reaction to his presence anywhere on campus. Students and professors alike would stop him in the halls to shake his hand and say how much they admired his work. For some reason they always named the most obscure film they could think of, as if this were proof of their deeper fandom, and not just that they’d scrolled to the bottom of his IMDb page. The star treatment didn’t end with strangers, either—he also got it from his classmates. Even though he attended the same lectures and tutorials every week (by all accounts he was very punctual), sitting alongside the exact same sets of students, hardly a week went by without a collective gasp when he walked into the room.

Mostly Holtz kept to himself. The only visible connection to his past life was his manager, a short, cutthroat-looking man who could be seen whispering sinister nothings into the movie star’s ear as he wandered between classes. Still, Holtz kept smiling at passersby, accepting the man’s presence the same way a hippo tolerates the chirpy little bird that perches on its back.

The
Peak
staff aimed to reconvene after the holidays with renewed energy, ready to shelve their petty grievances for the time being and put the newspaper’s best foot forward. They clomped through the front doors in rapid succession, making a pile of their slushy umbrellas and then setting up shop at their usual posts in the production room. Tracy had rejoined the parade, and was met with polite, golflike applause as she returned to her desk with a mock curtsy. First
on the staff’s shit-talking list were the new
Metro
canvassers they’d all had to walk past at the bus loops. These were tall, hunched-over goons, their faces dotted with comic-book stubble, and with all the charm and silhouette of a refrigerator.

A wave of lurching and growly impressions had just broken out when Alex noticed the pink slips.

“Suze,”
he said, his eyes locked on the grid of mailboxes. “What are those?”

The arts editor didn’t say anything, and the room went silent around her. When she hesitated again before answering, Alex saw his own fear of conflict reflected back at him, which only made him angrier. By the time she was ready to respond, it was too late—the other editors had already swarmed the cubbyholes, rifling through stacks of neglected mail in search of the unlucky prize.

Just like that, half of
The Peak’
s staff had been fired: Chip (sports), Steve (opinions), and Keith (humour), plus the web editor, photo editor, and associate news rookie. Even though they’d known this was a possibility for months, it still didn’t seem real. They looked to Suze and Rachel in bewilderment, grasping for some kind of explanation.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Suze mumbled. “There was another board meeting, right after Christmas. It came out of nowhere. They cut the page counts in
half
. They wanted positions—whole sections—cut, too. We both voted against it. You guys need to know that. But they outnumbered us.” Beside her, Rachel nodded, looking as if it physically hurt her to do so.

“But we … we were
elected,”
Steve said. “We were voted in. That’s got to count for something.” In fact
The Peak
’s elections, held every semester, were widely understood to be a formality, since they were always intentionally under-advertised in the paper’s musty back pages, and incumbent editors nearly always ran unopposed.

Suze kept her head down; her hair covered most of her face. “What they said was that, essentially, I guess, the section you were elected to edit no longer exists.”

“However you want to slice it,” Rachel added, “it adds up to the same thing.” The news editor, who prided herself on being the smartest person in the room, looked as if she’d had the chip on her shoulder knocked clean off. “No staff,” she added, “and no budget. I don’t what the hell we’re supposed to do now.”

Steve hadn’t yet taken his eyes off Suze. “And how, may I ask, did the board decide which sections got cut? I can’t help but notice arts is left intact—that wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain arts editor being
on
the board, would it?”

Suze was almost inaudible. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Don’t make this about that.”

So Suze and Steve’s covert fling was dead in the water, then. Whatever slow-burning lust had built up between them had been totally used up. They’d marathon-fucked on the lounge couches (in Alex’s imagination, anyway) for the last time. He felt a little consolation in watching the two of them turn on each other so quickly—at least the people having sex were as unhappy as the people who weren’t.

“You think that’s what I’m doing?” Steve said. “You think this is about
that?”

Keith jumped in, mistaking one of the office’s great unspoken secrets for another. “Go fuck yourself,” he said to Steve. “Suze can carry her own weight around here. You know damn well it’s because the board got sick of you making up all your contributors.”

“Excuse
me?” he said.

“Give it a rest, guy. Would you? You barely even cloaked it. We all know what anagrams are, for fuck’s sake.” Keith stood up. “Is there anyone here who doesn’t already know about this? It’s about time we said it out loud for once: Steve makes everything up. And he doesn’t
even have the brains to invent a fake name. He just rearranges the letters in his.”

Keith picked up the last fall issue from the racks and flipped to the opinions section. “Let’s see here. ‘Trent “Whalebone” Sip’? ‘Leni “Banshee” Sprowt’? Genius. And what about those online commenters you keep conveniently rounding up?”

“Keith, don’t,” Alex said.

“Who were they again? ‘Absinthe Pelt Owner’?
‘Wanton Bleeper Shit’?”

Now Steve turned on Keith and spat, “You should talk, you fucking Neanderthal. Nobody has cost this place more money than you. Remind me again why we don’t have a working scanner? Oh, right: it’s because you tried to upload a bowl of spaghetti. They’ve been trying to fire you for years. You’re a walking liability. And you aren’t even that funny.”

“My god, Suze,” Keith said, exasperated. “How did you ever let this guy put his smelly little dick inside you?”

The argument had come stumblingly full circle.

Steve looked at Keith, then Suze, and finally the crowd of editors. “Good luck, assholes,” he said, his fists trembling. “If the
Metro
doesn’t burn this place to the ground, I’ll come back and do it myself.” The string of
CDS
clattered violently against the door as it slammed shut behind him.

For the next hour the other outgoing editors solemnly gathered their things, while the others stared into computer screens, not talking or even clicking on anything. Chip slowly whistled an extra-funereal version of “Taps” while cramming papers into a duffel bag. Rachel came in and announced that the page count for the next issue would be twelve. Twelve whole pages—a massacre.

Alex was one of the few editors who’d truly believed this day was coming, but he felt just as blindsided as the others. There were so many
moving parts, and so many things he didn’t understand. For want of real answers, he found himself repeating the very worst clichés. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Cutting the nose off to spite the face. He was surprised at how easily they rolled off the tongue.

Rachel landed the only laugh of the whole day. “One nice thing about the page cuts,” she deadpanned. “Now I don’t have to write anything about Duncan Holtz.”

The only place Holtz was ever seen buying food on campus was at the White Spot Express in the
AQ
. It was a local chain, one step above fast food, and distinguished mainly by its secret-recipe Triple “O” sauce and Pirate Pak kids’ combos, which came in foldable cardboard galleons that looked like
G
-rated
Pequod
s. Mostly Holtz ate alone. Once or twice he was joined by his bird-eyed manager. He always sat near the windows overlooking Convo Mall and the library, the latter of which billowed steam out of its futuristic-looking exhaust gills at all hours.

Holtz would sit there for an hour or so, idly flipping through textbooks or listening to music. He ordered sloppy burgers and drank root beer. Other students gawked from afar, marveling at how normal he seemed. Whenever anyone did work up the nerve to approach him—somehow it was harder because he
wasn’t
acting all standoffish and celebrity-y—he remained as unflaggingly pleasant as ever. Where, they wondered, was the overwhelming cockiness? Wasn’t that what had landed him back at school in the first place?

All of Tracy’s classes from the fall semester had been deferred, in essence wiped from her academic record. She’d been in no condition to attend lectures, let alone assemble the usual slew of term papers.
She’d talked it all over with her departmental advisor, and together they had agreed on the course of action—but when the letter finally came, printed on official
SFU
letterhead, she slumped to the floor of her front foyer, crying and ashamed at how quickly she’d broken to pieces.

What a waste of time
, she thought, sniffing mightily.
Even now. Even this. I just keep falling farther and farther behind
.

Tracy began to see everything she’d done at
SFU
as an exercise in poor time management. And not just Dave. The school had sent a copy of her academic record along with the letter, and here her decisions were laid out as clear as day. Why hadn’t she picked a major faster? Why take three linguistics classes? Why hadn’t she just gotten
on
with it? Even Alex, who was a full two years her junior, was going to graduate first.

And her job. What on earth had working at
The Peak
ever gotten her? She wasn’t going to be a copy editor when she grew up, was she? Tracy didn’t even know whether
copy editor
was one word, or two. She’d seen it spelled both ways, but never looked it up.

Christ
, she thought.
I could have been halfway through law school by now
.

The
Metro
distribution workers were posted at either end of campus, one to each bus loop. Apparently the usual retirees the daily hired weren’t able to struggle up the hill each morning, because in their place was this gigantic pair of goons—six foot six if they were an inch. They also had identically bad, S-shaped posture, as though they’d spent their formative years ducking under one low door frame after another. As passengers spilled out of the overstuffed buses, the goons sprang out right into the thick of the foot traffic, copies of the paper fanned in each hand like novelty playing cards. “Free
Metro,”
they bellowed. “Don’t be shy, kids. Take a bunch for your friends.”

Alex felt like the goons were staring him down personally whenever he walked past—as if they knew he worked for the competition. It was as if he’d been targeted by some shadowy figure high up in the
Metro
bureaucracy; Alex imagined a psoriatic finger pointing to grainy security-camera footage in an ominous, far-off boardroom and a voice wheezing, “Him.” Even though he was hidden under scarves, toques, and headphones—not to mention early-morning fog and the other commuters—he could swear the goon’s pupils came into sharp focus as he came into view. This one even had mismatched eyes: one dark brown and one icy white. A Bond henchman come to life. The first few times it happened Alex was so spooked he let the goon stuff a paper into his hand.

Their stacks of newspapers gone by lunchtime, the goons silently packed up and disappeared. Meanwhile the nearby
Peak
boxes contained a rain-spattered cube of an issue that was well over a week old.

Great
, Alex thought, letting the metal flap slam shut.
Don’t tell me they fired the distribution person, too
.

It was shaping up to be a busy semester on all fronts. Through some logistical snafu, there were two competing movie crews on the sfu campus—a big-budget Hollywood epic and a straight-to
-DVD
sex farce—each scheduled to shoot pretty well every day until exams. Worse, they needed access to the same locations, but for completely different purposes. One was going to use the football field to stage the landing of a massive rectangular alien spaceship; the other for a ragtag group of misfits to beat the varsity football team at their own sport, all with the aim of having sex with the cheerleaders.
SFU
students were told to expect major delays until further notice.

Elections for the student government took place in the spring, too, the campaign period for which seemed to start earlier and earlier every year.