The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [33]
“I can’t help but feel he’d benefit from your reading, Steve.”
“It’s better I don’t get involved.”
“You are so sensitive, Steve.”
“Now you go join the others while I get dinner cracking.”
“Thanks, Steve.”
Glove Pond: Steve
Steve’s fevered brain was contemplating how to make dinner out of beweeviled pancake mix when young Brittany gave him an excuse to procrastinate. The moment she left the kitchen, he raced to the coat closet and ferreted out the copy of unsavoury Falconcrest’s upcoming book from its satchel. Curse him and his new ideas.
Locked within the warm, breezeless confines of the guest bathroom, Steve began to read:
Love in the Age of Office Superstores
Chapter One
Shimmering amber millipedes of dawn light chewed on the office superstore’s blank stucco outer walls. A lone pigeon fell to the parking lot, scavenged for edible grit, found none, then returned to the roof and out of sight, possibly to die of boredom. Formless overcast clouds the colour of Korean paper-shredding machines inched in from the west. In the spotless front seat of his Chevy Lumina sedan sat Norm. He was no longer young, his pot-belly enblubbered roughly to the extent of a large Thanksgiving turkey. His scalp grew hair like virulent beige bread mould. His hands clasped a Diet Coke filled with house-brand vodka—breakfast and lunch folded together into one meal.
The car radio played “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go!,” a tune from Norm’s youth that, in some indefinable way, reminded him that he was a captive of his life’s bleak repeat cycle. Other cars pulled into the lot, fellow morning shifters, their vehicles neither new nor spotless: Jettas made from sheets of rusty lace, polio-stricken Corollas from the early 1990s, and late 1980s Chryslers held together by local AM radio station promotional stickers and wishful thinking. Yes, Norm’s colleagues had youth, but Norm’s maroon Lumina had the capacity to drive across a dozen ecosystems on a single tank of gas without the slightest threat of breakdown. When nuclear war finally arrived and everyone else’s shit heap died trying to escape the firestorm, it was in Norm’s car that everyone would ride, stylishly and comfortably.
The vodka tasted harsh, scientific and aggressively cheap. Technically, vodka was made from potatoes, yet Norm suspected his was made by underpaid robots on some distant sci-fi planet where living organisms had long ago ceased to exist, and where the recipe for vodka was the legacy of long-vanished humanoid Elders. Potatolike molecules may have entered the vodka-making process, but the possibility of genuine tuber content was nil. But despite his vodka’s best-left-unimagined lineage, Norm required it to survive the day ahead.
A trailer full of Dell products sat in the superstore’s loading dock, ready to suckle the building with its abundance. Norm dreaded Dell Day almost as much—but not quite as much—as he dreaded Office Furniture Shipment Day with its lumbar-destroying monotony of unloading, carton-breaking and inventorying the shipment’s contents. Should Norm ever have need of an office—a dream that felt as unattainable as spending a month’s holiday with Smurfs—it would certainly not be furnished with an L-shaped plastic/walnut laminated Chinese fibreboard modular desk system graced by a Dell. No, Norm’s dream office would contain a simple pine table, a humble bottle of ink and a quill made from a griffin’s wing feather.
One final sip and Norm knew it was time to leave his Lumina. Leaving his Lumina was harder for Norm than getting out of bed in the morning. Preparing to leave his Lumina reminded him of the gestation of a dragon’s egg, which sat soft and inert for twenty months, only hardening during the final days before hatching. After one goodbye vodka swig, Norm opened the driver’s door a crack and paused as the November air bled into the vehicle and he exchanged the tinny sounds of early 1980s pop music supersensation, Wham!, for cold and discomfort.
Moments later, clad in his scarlet employee