The Dilettantes (21 page)

Tracy started work at the
Peak
office nice and early—dangerously close to sunrise, in fact. She needed a big head start before production day set in around her. There were the usual dregs of first copy to attend to, but nothing serious. Mostly she was worried about her own story. She leaned over Suze’s temporarily commandeered keyboard and cursed at the screen every couple of minutes. Then she started pacing the hall.

It’s just such a different muscle
, she thought.
I can edit this stuff in my sleep. So why can’t I do the first part?

Rachel had saved the front page of the news section, as well as the cover, for Tracy’s story. She’d also reminded her to keep the focus tight: stick to the illegal campaigning angle, the
SFSS’S
response, and the potential consequences. Keep descriptions of the actual melee to a minimum. In a perverse way, Tracy was actually compromised by having been there in person—she was now implicated in the story, and, as a result, subject to all kinds of bias. Right now they couldn’t afford the slightest whiff of conflict of interest. But there was nobody else with clean enough fingers to write the thing. Rachel was already covering the debate later that day—which would also be the place to follow up with Holtz and finally get him on the record about this whole mess.

After a few laps through the office, Tracy sat down again. She commanded her brain to focus. The fact that this was the most important thing she’d ever done at the paper loomed overhead like a nagging rain cloud. She’d intended the story to be an act of reclamation, a kind of validation for all the time she’d spent here, but she was discovering that having good intentions wasn’t enough. Sentences needed to be written. You could only type one word—one letter—at a time.

And yet the panic and nail biting were accompanied by an unexpectedly pleasant tingling feeling. The negative side effects of the writing process were familiar from the dozens of essays she’d cranked out as an English student. But what was this new sensation? Maybe knowing that this was a piece of writing that students might
choose
to read was releasing some hidden stockpile of endorphins. Tracy had heard countless fellow editors whine and moan about having to serve their readership. Plenty of her classmates had a similar attitude toward academic writing—as if it were just so much fuel for an anonymous, unthinking fire. But that never rang true for her. The way Tracy saw it, all writing was seduction. And readers didn’t owe her anything. It was her job to rein them in, and her job to keep them glued to the page. She was grateful they showed up at all.

Of course, they’d be showing up to the lowest page count in
Peak
history: eight pages, covers included. Tracy would be providing 25 percent of the entire week’s content all by herself.
Stop thinking about it
, she told herself, and got up to pace around some more.

The office looked like it had been looted by an angry mob and then left to decompose. Writers no longer dropped by to say hello. No one even bothered to come yell at them anymore. Chairs, tables, computers, cutlery: all sold. Some of the old
Peak
covers on the wall, formerly a proud reminder of the paper’s glory days, had come unstuck and flopped over in surrender.

One of the few remaining centres of activity was Rachel’s news bunker, where she’d assembled a big poster outlining each of the four presidential candidates’ campaign promises, as well as some basic biography and a photo. Tracy paused her pacing to consider Holtz’s jawline, the tragic scope of Samantha Gilmartin’s resumé, and Piotr’s fractured English and unfortunate official photo—he’d been caught in mid-sneeze, and afterward had insisted, without so much as looking at the first take, that it was good enough. The space left for Kennedy was almost completely blank. The only information she’d supplied was a single sentence that listed Emma Peel and Eddie Izzard as influences. In lieu of a picture, Rachel had swapped in a clip art question mark.

Joke candidates
, Tracy thought.
They only get weirder every year
.

Time for a smoke. Tracy headed outside, and without quite realizing it, ended up walking halfway across campus, turning her story over and over in her head. She trotted up the
AQ
steps, still cracked and deformed from the time Arnold Schwarzenegger had driven a tank down them, nearly a decade earlier, in pursuit of his evil clone. Nobody knew if they’d ever be fully repaired. Then it was up through the gardens and past the statue of Terry Fox. Tracy tapped a knuckle against his artificial leg—a neat, albeit accidental, complement to the school’s reputation in the world of sci-fi. Maybe some of his luck would rub off on her, talismanically. True, a twenty-two-year-old kid diagnosed with fatal bone cancer probably wasn’t the best personification of luck. What he really offered, as every
SFU
student well knew, was hope.

At the edge of campus, Tracy took a seat in the courtyard next to the Higher Grounds where she’d spilled her guts to Anna about the breakup. Thoughts of Dave still occasionally flickered through her head, and every once in a while she’d come across a memory as raw as a canker sore, the kind so deep-seated that your entire mouth had to reorganize itself around the pain.

But these moments were rare, and getting rarer all the time.

On the other side of campus, Alex wandered back from Shell House, fuzzily hungover and replaying the previous night’s events on a mental loop. The light rain on his head and shoulders felt like splashback from the world’s biggest waterfall.

A handjob isn’t nothing
.

He said it to himself again and again, like a mantra.

A handjob isn’t nothing. A handjob isn’t nothing
.

They didn’t have sex. But it wasn’t a failure—no matter what Tyson might say later. He came. She came. It was undeniably sexy. Romantic, even. Afterward they cuddled on her mini-couch and watched old
Arrested Development
episodes on her laptop, touching each other’s fingertips until Maggie, at least, was up for another round. Alex grinned and ducked his head under the covers.

Then they’d both slept for ten hours, legs entwined. When he eventually woke up, Alex spent a full minute taking in the bristly white moustache staring down at him from the wall. It belonged to
NDP
leader Jack Layton, and his head was offset by the flare of party orange around him; in the picture he looked just about ready to tackle someone.

Maggie rolled over and propped herself up on one elbow. “Looks good, right? I mean, it’s no Norman Rockwell, but I like it.”

Alex turned to look at her. He put his face right up close to hers and scrutinized each feature in turn. She laughed, then clamped a hand over her mouth to cover the morning breath. It was the eye make-up—he’d been so distracted by it last night that he hadn’t processed why the rest of her had looked so familiar, and why his attraction felt oddly like déjà vu.

“The poster sale,” he said.

“Bingo.”

“That is so unfair. My god! Why didn’t you say anything last night?”

“Me?” she giggled. “Why didn’t
you?
”

Alex slowly pieced the details of their first meeting back together. “You were with your friend,” he said. “The one Tyson said he did all that crazy stuff with.” He faltered, embarrassed to say it out loud.

Maggie said, “You mean coming, like, all over her?”

“Uh, yes. Exactly.”

“Yeah,” Maggie said, rolling her eyes. “He probably did. I wouldn’t get jealous, though. Christine lets all the guys do that to her. It’s kind of her thing.”

Am I really having this conversation right now?
Alex thought. “Really? Well, then—what’s your thing?”

She jabbed a finger into his ribs. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already.”

As Alex walked into the Mini-Mart, he replayed the whole exchange over again in his head. He said hello to the owner en route to the drink coolers. She got an impish look on her face and replied, “Someone’s in a good mood today.”

“Me?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Usually you are—how to put it?” She made an exaggerated frowny face.

“Grumpy,” Alex suggested.

“Yes. Exactly right. But today, it is different.”

Alex placed a bottle of water—plain, unflavoured, caffeine- and mascot-free water—on the counter. “I’m just hungover,” he said. “My mouth is made of sand right now. But thank you.”

Outside, he gulped down half the bottle in one go. In the distance a crowd was forming, near the cafeteria where the debate was due to start any minute. It looked like some media people were there, too—plus two security guards he could have sworn were the
Metro
goons. But they weren’t handing out newspapers now. They weren’t even wearing green. They were just standing there.

Alex made his way up the ramp to the office to go assemble the troops.

The cafeteria was filled with the usual piles of grubby old newspapers (the
Metros
outnumbering the
Peaks
at least 3:1) and hard plastic chairs, though today the former had been haphazardly swept to one corner and the latter organized into a grid. It was as packed as the film class had been the day before. The irritable politicians who’d stormed Holtz at the lectern so valiantly now looked simply run down, rubbing their puffy faces and continent-shaped bruises. Overall the shift in the crowd was mostly along departmental lines. The film kids had been replaced by bemused-looking political science majors. Mack Holloway sat in the third row, holding a fresh notebook. Alex, Tracy, and the other
Peak
editors slipped past the unblinking security guards and set up shop against the back wall. The debate was already under way.

Four podiums had been placed near the floor-to-ceiling windows. Behind them stood Piotr Ivanov, Samantha Gilmartin, and, sporting heels, a wobbly head of black hair, and massive fuck-off sunglasses, the enigmatic Kennedy, who was apparently not a figment of the imagination after all. They were all screaming at one another. Standing at one side was the
IEC’S
Lana Murphy, looking very tired indeed.

“Candidates,
please,”
she pleaded. “That’s enough.”

The fourth podium was empty. Holtz hadn’t shown up yet. His manager wasn’t in sight, either.

“Now, as I was saying,” Lana continued, “I’d like to welcome everyone to this, the presidential debate for the
2009–10 SFSS
elections—Piotr, please. Enough.”

“It is all irrelevant!” Piotr boomed. “Let us get down to the brass tax, yes? Calamari on Pub menu. Yes/no vote. It is simple.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Samantha hissed. Her meticulously cultivated image as the
SFSS’S
heir apparent had, in the twenty-four hours since she’d helped instigate the riot, cracked to the point of near-uselessness. “You’re running on a squid-based platform. Your entire career is an
Onion
headline, you moron. The rest of us have important things to discuss here.”

Kennedy leaned forward over her podium. “I agree with Ms. Gilmartin. Calamari is gross.”

“That is
not
what I said.”

“Do you provoke me wilfully?” asked Piotr. “This will not stand.” He pointed at the scattered cameramen and photographers in the front row. “Reporters! Document this statement. It is sitting on the record.”

Alex whispered to Rachel, “You getting all this?”

“Unfortunately, I am,” she said. “Your breath is terrible, by the way.”

“Enough,” Lana said. “Let’s just get through this.” She turned to the crowd. “First, let me say that our office has received several complaints about each one of these candidates over the past few weeks, and more than one investigation is underway. Rest assured that we will get to the bottom of every one of them. But, since these allegations are as yet unproven, I will not be addressing them in my questioning today.” The noise started to grow again. “Of course, you all are under no such obligation. So have at it. We’re moving alphabetically—first opening remarks go to Ms. Gilmartin.”

Samantha cleared her throat and flashed a rehearsed, if somewhat desperate smile. “My fellow students, we are living through strange times, and at
SFU
those times have been stranger than usual lately. But times of uncertainty call for a rock to lean on. Not
some flash in the pan, but a known quantity. Someone who knows the course, and more importantly … who knows how to return to it, when we’ve lost our way. And to stick to it. That’s also important.” She heaved a heavy sigh, and her smile wobbled. “A vote for me, Samantha Gilmartin, as your student society president is a vote for quality. I have three years’ experience in student politics. The other three candidates, combined, have zero. I mean”—an even heavier sigh—“seriously, just do the fucking math.”

Polite applause. “Thank you,” said Lana. “Next would be Duncan Holtz, but he still hasn’t arrived. So we’ll move on to Piotr Ivanov.”

Piotr gripped the podium with both hands. “Calamari on Pub menu. I say yes. Are you an asshole? Also say yes.”

More polite applause, and a few scattered coughs.

“Well, then.” Lana drummed her fingers. “Is that all, Ivan?”

He squinted. “Only assholes say no to calamari.”

“Oh, give it a rest,” Samantha said. “This is a serious election.
I am a serious politician
. Does everyone here know that you got kicked out of the Pub because of this calamari bullshit? You’re
banned
. For life. I mean, really.”

“That’s enough,” Lana said.

“Who’s going to vote for a head case who can’t even attend his own victory party?”

“We’re moving on,” Lana said. “Kennedy, please. Your opening remarks.”

Alex tried to pay attention as the enigmatic presidential hopeful adjusted her huge sunglasses and cleared her throat. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie, and his graduation, and this whole bizarre world that had snowballed into what could now be called his university career. It was difficult to wrap his head around. He’d spent four years in the thick of something that he’d always assumed was a relatively normal experience.
The Peak
, he’d figured, was as
good a front-row seat for university life as you could ask for. But now that he felt himself drifting away from it, an astronaut untethered from his space station, it was becoming more and more obvious that this would be the part of his life he’d spend the rest of it reminiscing about. For all his complaining, he was gradually accepting that he’d never know anything like it again.