Seven down, p.1
Seven Down, page 1
SEVEN DOWN
SEVEN DOWN
DAVID WHITTON
Copyright © David Whitton, 2021
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All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Russell Smith
Cover design and illustration: Sophie Paas-Lang
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Seven down / David Whitton.
Names: Whitton, David, 1967- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210245573 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210245581 | ISBN 9781459748576 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459748583 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459748590 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8645.H58 S48 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
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For Jonathan Dewdney
March 11, 2024
Nadja,
Well, here we are, you and me, like the old days, that noxious little office on the corner of Zambak and Istiklal. How did we get anything done? The relentless street hustle, the fossilized plumbing, dust motes streaming through the blinds. All those goddamn cats. Good times, good times.
So we’ve escaped the “layoffs” once again. Who would have thought it would be us, the last men standing? Would you ever have given odds for such a development? It speaks, I guess, to the soft power of keeping your head down and saying nothing and contradicting no one. The Board has once again invoked the Peter Principle; we have risen to our level of incompetence, like the suckers before us and the dipshits before them. Life is a continuum. And while I’m grateful to be able to make my mortgage payments, it also means that every single moment of my workweek is an affliction.
Here are those interviews you wanted, all the civilian assets we burned in Operation Fear and Trembling, compiled for your convenience in one slim blue binder. I’ve had a chance to listen to some of the tapes, and from what I can tell, these transcripts are solid product. Someone said once that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. So it is with these accounts. You’ll notice that I’ve arranged them out of chronological order, and also out of the order in which they were filed, but, I hope you’ll find, to some poetic effect. Pay close attention, therefore, to the date on each transcript.
Like everything else related to the operation, this binder has been a nightmare to assemble. The interviews were conducted over a two-year period, with the last one, incredibly, taking place a little over five weeks ago. Why, you ask? Because we lost that particular contractor. No, I’m not shitting you. One of the asset coordinators lost her contact details, and no one in the department could remember where she’d been placed, or if she’d even existed. I am deeply embarrassed for us, Nadja. You know my thoughts on this.
There were too many points of failure. Whoever designed the operation — Berger and his sycophants? this stinks of them — failed to account for the unaccountable. Just read the transcripts; even our assets understood it, and they knew screw all about what was going down. Humans are little whirlwinds of chaos. We who have transcended humanity can laugh at them all we want, but we depend upon their labours and must respect their fearful power.
Here’s a story for you. A few years ago, I decided to go back and visit the city I grew up in. It’s not close to here, took some doing, connecting flights, et cetera et cetera. I’d had a happy childhood there, and a rowdy but good-natured young adulthood. My parents were solid and kind and they let me Be, in the Platonic sense. They let me become the person I was destined to be, for better or — actually, just for worse. In my teenage years I had fine girlfriends and a cohort of chums who I understood and who understood me. I was something of a bohemian, I’m not ashamed to say; I took psychedelics and listened to dissonant music. I had drunken dalliances in the alleyways outside of rock clubs, I aspired to become a painter in the mould of the great Basquiat. The city was burnished in my mind, a peaceful beginning to an otherwise somewhat brutish life. And particularly in later years, as I progressed in my career, and saw and did the things I saw and did, this place and the person I was inside it took on an outsize importance. I longed to return to it. So, a few years ago, in the wake of some professional embarrassment or another, I went back, what the hell, and strolled the streets and sidewalks of a city that still felt so unresolved to me. I walked past the downtown movie theatres that I’d snuck into when I was a kid, where I’d seen Red Dawn and Cheech and Chong and Superman II — I forget all the pictures I saw, there were so many — but the point is that those flickering palaces in which I’d whiled away all those afternoons were long gone, demolished, or else turned into “event spaces” or internet cafés. I walked past the old library, a handsome limestone edifice that would soon be gutted so that a tower of condominia could rise from its innards like a great glass dildo. Eventually I worked up the nerve to undertake a pilgrimage to my old neighbourhood, to the house where I’d grown up, those endless summer days riding my bike through the parks and trails, the winters spent sledding down the slopes of a disused quarry. But I found, after I got there, that my childhood home had been torn down, erased, replaced with a weed-strewn metered parking lot. The blue spruce in the front yard, gone. My dad had planted it the day I was born.
We long to return to a prior state, Nadja, one of innocence — but that state is forever gone, if ever it existed, and if we wish to press on, we must radically accept the new reality: of grand Victorian houses razed for parking lots, of toy stores turned into strip clubs, of golf courses cutting through endangered Carolinian forests. The world is on fire, Nadja, and humanity has gone insane. We must find a way to be good with that.
Enjoy the attached.
OPERATION FEAR AND TREMBLING
ASSET DEBRIEFINGS — MARCH 7, 2022
TO FEBRUARY 3, 2024
Compiled by N. Osterberg for Presentation
to the Board of Directors
Pre-Board and Board Meetings
March 18, 2024 | San Diego
Sheraton Hotel Conference Room A
CONTENTS
1. RESERVATIONS
[Interview conducted March 8, 2022]
2. ENGINEERING
[Interview conducted May 29, 2022]
3. CATERING
[Interview conducted March 7, 2022]
4. COURTESY
[Interview conducted December 9, 2022]
5. SECURITY
[Interview conducted February 3, 2024]
6. MANAGEMENT
[Interview conducted March 7, 2022]
7. SYSTEMS
[Interview conducted March 19, 2023]
CONFIDENTIAL [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION] 003381
DEPARTMENT FOR NEA/I
SUBJECT: CORRECTED COPY: ASSET DEBRIEF INTERVIEW
REF: A. [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION] 3181
Classified By: CDA Officer T. Weber for reasons: 1.4 (b) and (d).
ASSET ID: “RESERVATIONS” [Legal name Summer Johnson]
MARCH 8, 2022 — 21:04 GMT
1 day after Operation Fear and Trembling
[Preliminary comments redacted.]
—I was unwell, yes. I was shivery, nauseous, my brain throbbed behind my eyes. A stomach bug, I thought at first, before my self-diagnosis grew more ominous. I couldn’t, though, I just couldn’t let my mind go there. And then of course, me being me, it did anyway. Why do women vomit in the mornings? I couldn’t allow myself to consider it. That I might be, fuck. Not now, not now, it would be so unfair. I’ve been mostly careful, all this time, with Steve, we almost always use raincoats. I’m sorry, you said you wanted everything. Is this, am I oversharing? You said you wanted details. And also it’s important that you understand, I guess, the ordeal that you … that I endured. As if the situation weren’t bad enough, I had contracted some kind of norovirus, or else I was … plus it was a Monday, the timing was so awful. Plus Steve and I had stayed up late the night before, mostly drinking, but also … being intimate, so I was hungover and underslept. That really didn’t help, believe me.
—So, if we could maybe skip any extraneous —
—Actually, I don’t believe these details are in any way extraneous, because, if I may? Because it’s important you understand the sacrifices I’ve made. It doesn’t diminish my regard for, it doesn’t mean I’m not happy that I, plus maybe, if I might? For the sake of the next person, you’ll stop scheduling these things on a Monday, when people maybe are statistically more likely to be hungover and underslept and feeling vulnerable? I’m sorry. That was, that was not called for. I’m, where was I?
—Your description of the day of the operation. It was 5:15 in the morning.
—It was 5:15 in the morning, yes, thank you. I’m front of house, I work the morning shift, seven to three, so I wake up with the birds. Steve was still in bed, he wouldn’t get up for another couple of hours. I was standing at the kitchen counter, trying to tamp down the bile with a fruit smoothie.
—Nice. What kind of fruit?
—Here we go again. What does that have to do with anything? Why would you care? It was a guava-pineapple concoction, mixed with yogurt. It helps me digest, if that’s important for you to know. It helps me go to the bathroom. Sorry, sorry. I imagine you must be recording this. That thing in the ceiling, it’s a device? A microphone? Okay. Sorry. I’m just tired. I don’t know how to feel right now. I didn’t expect you to be handsome. You people, in my mind you all look like sixty-year-old tax lawyers, but your hair, it’s so wavy, it’s almost distracting.
The light outside. On Monday. It was that odd predawn blue black. The light inside was warm and yellow and it was so comforting I considered calling in sick. Coffee was steeping in the Bodum. The smell of that, the aroma … And I felt an intense grief for the morning I wouldn’t have, you know, reading a book in bed, sipping coffee, next to Steve.
—Right, again I’ll remind you that —
—Just, if you could give me a moment, [Redacted]? May I call you [Redacted]? I’m setting a scene.
—Please make it brief.
—Okay, so. Intense moment of grief. I rode it out. Then, staring at nothing, a souvenir magnet on the fridge of the San Jacinto Aerial Tramway, Palm Springs, California, I remembered that I was forgetting something. What was it? My morning routine was smoothie, coffee, and then, what was it? Oh yeah, Twitter, I had to check Twitter. I picked up my phone, hit the app. I’ve been doing this for so many years it hardly serves to call it a habit; it’s a lifestyle by now. I refreshed my Twitter feed and, per my ritual, scrolled backwards. It’s a way of putting it off, the inevitable, I suppose. I could have just gone straight there, to the account, but you can imagine how —
—I’m sorry, which account is this?
—The account that you guys made me follow. Unfavorable semicircle, it’s called, with an at sign in front of it. You really don’t know about it?
—Not my department. Go on.
—Well, you can imagine how it terrified me. Every day I was like, what would I see there, what phrase or aphorism or gibberish would @unfavorablesemicircle spew into my feed? Mostly I follow celebrities — Miley Cyrus, Lizzo, some stand-up comedians. The odd news account. Dril, of course. And sometimes I get sucked in, all the bickering, every day there’s a scandal. But inevitably, in the middle of all my slack-jawed scrolling, there would be this live hand grenade in the form of @unfavorablesemicircle, which blew it all up. Sometimes I wouldn’t even realize I was reading one of your tweets, I was so glassy-eyed. I’d read something like “The greatest hazard of all, losing oneself, can occur very quietly in the world” and think, Jesus, Miley’s off her meds, and then snap to and see your stupid username and my reverie would be ruined, I’d be back in my kitchen with my goddamn phone.
But after that I’d look around, at the fridge magnet, the coffee maker, Steve’s bottle of CBD oil on the counter by the microwave. And I’d become, I don’t know. Happy, maybe. The world, no matter how shit the weather, no matter how toxic the morning’s news, the world would just sparkle, you know? Whatever it was that would one day be required of me, whatever important or terrible thing, it wouldn’t be today. Today was a bonus day. That’s how it felt to me.
Last Monday, though … god, last Monday? Yesterday, I mean. Yesterday I stared at that black slab in my hand with horrified disbelief. It was the trigger phrase, written in light on the screen of my phone. As if somehow my fear of those words had called them into existence, and if only I could calm down they would disappear back into the pixels. I shut my eyes … one, two, three, four … opened them. And tried again. And still they were there, those words: “I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.” Today was the day of the operation. I was not hallucinating. “I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing,” said @unfavorablesemicircle. Again I rejected this, I groped around for other plausible explanations. Someone somewhere could have pushed the wrong button. Why not? A quick check-in with Regional would clear it up, they would reassure me and send me on my way, which, a normal shitty day at work? Was looking pretty great right now.
It was maybe a minute. Maybe less. Maybe more. When it hit me. The trigger was real, it was not a mistake. I … I managed to make it to the kitchen sink before I barfed up my smoothie.
—Do you need to pause for a bit? Would you like some water?
—No, no, I [inaudible].
—That’s fine. Take your time.
—I tried to breathe. A three-part breath, expanding the stomach, then the ribs, then the clavicle. The kitchen was vibrating, I couldn’t get it to stop. I tried to think. Laptop, I thought then, per my training. In times of stress your thinking becomes primal. Go to laptop, Summer. Get laptop. I didn’t move. I stared at my coffee mug. My poor little coffee mug, waiting for me by the Bodum. Steve had brought it home from Newfoundland. It had Viking sod hut dwellings on it in gold embossed lines. My heart was busy breaking, looking at this mug, when along came my second thought. Today is the day, went the thought. This is what it’s all been about. Today is the day. And I didn’t know whether to be terrified or relieved. You didn’t have the decency. You didn’t tell me what to expect, what it was that I was supposed to do. But I guess you couldn’t, could you?
—Was that a, I’m sorry, was that a rhetorical question or …
—I’m asking.
—Ma’am, I’m in Quality Assurance. I have no insight into Operations.
—No, of course not.
—So please, if you could just …
—Continue. Okay. I keep the laptop in a Company-issued lock-box. I keep the Company-issued lockbox in the basement, under the stairs, under a pile of old blankets. Regional has the combination. When they clear out my things, they’ll find it there. So anyway, what happened next was I dug out the laptop, went to YouTube. This was five, maybe? Minutes? If that? After my discovery? I’d rinsed the vomit from my mouth and run downstairs. But it wasn’t necessary to rush, because you made me wait there like, fifteen minutes, kneeling on the concrete, refreshing the YouTube feed, praying that Steve wouldn’t wake up early and find me.
Finally the feed reloaded and a new video appeared. “DOWN7,” it was called, like a stock market symbol. I hit Play.
It was a low-resolution video, black and white, nothing much to it, just pixelated palm trees bending in a thunderstorm, punctuated by bursts of static. The audio made my skin crawl. You couldn’t have chosen creepier music, could you? It was like a song from an ice cream truck, far away, full of chimes and bells, childlike and squelching, like a broadcast from an old-timey shortwave radio.
Not that I understood what I was watching. Not yet. I was in a thoughtless panic, unable to even try to remember what I was supposed to be doing. But after a moment, after several moments of staring at nothing, I regained myself and applied my attention to the task at hand. I downloaded the YouTube video and opened the file with OpenPuff.
—I’m sorry, OpenPuff?
—The program? That came with my laptop? It decodes things. It decoded the YouTube video and found the image you’d hidden inside it.
—Is that right? Clever.
—You don’t know about the hidden image?
—I’m Quality Assurance, not IT.
—You really don’t have any idea, do you, what the others in the Company are doing.
—It’s a sandboxed work culture. There are reasons for that.
—Uh-huh. Well. Anyway. After my moment of staring in thoughtless panic at nothing, I came back to myself and remembered what it was I was supposed to do in this circumstance. Hidden inside the swaying palm trees was a second image, a what-do-they-call-it. Like an old portrait that’s been painted over. What do you call it? Anyway, a second image, it was there all along except you couldn’t see it unless you had the software to decode the jpeg. The second image was — pentimento. That’s the word.
