SELENA ENTERPRISES, Toronto, Canada. All rights reserved
The novel first published in the magazine THE NEWS OF THE NEW WORLD, North Carolina, USA, 2001/2002
Reprinted with permission
The town of Smallton had so many munching facilities, weight management centers and funeral homes that one might think people were born there for the sole purpose of acquiring as much weight as possible, and then losing it in order to die slim and beautiful. But this was not true. In Smallton, people acquired pounds, dropped pounds and moved to the better world at the same rate as in the rest of the country. Life in Smallton was regular - comfortable and dull.
Jack Stanton was a medium-level specialist in MeanToClean - a company that designed and sold napkins for fast and slow food restaurants. Interestingly, regular restaurants ran out of napkins much faster than their fast food brothers. Probably, after weight-losing sessions, customers were so hungry that they munched them while waiting for the appetizers to arrive.
Jack treated his life in Smallton and his job in the napkin company as annoying misfortunes. In his thirties, he displayed the three basic features of an absolutely healthy person: excellent sleep, great appetite and complete aversion to any job. And, as every human being, he was completely happy with his intellect and completely unhappy with his salary.
Jack"s company occupied the second floor of a two-story building located on the central street of Smallton. There is not too much variety in the names of the central streets of small towns. Municipal authorities are usually able to conjure up two options only: Main street or King street. Smallton"s municipal leaders were people with extraordinary imagination, so the street sign read: "Main King Street". And in keeping with another old tradition it was the shabbiest and the bumpiest road in the town.
The first floor of the building was owned by a funeral company AlwaysWelcome. Because of stiff competition, the company was not doing well and rented half of the premises to a real estate agency. Since that time the first-floor office window was decorated with the picture of a mourning gentlemen in a respectable black suit bending over a gravestone accompanied by the advertisement "Thinking about a new home? We can make your dreams come true!"
Jack"s work days were dull. He usually looked through the window and chewed the end of his pen, pretending to be absorbed in thoughts about increasing company profits by testing a new product: reusable and washable stainless steel napkins. In reality, most part of the day he drowsed and contemplated street life through the thick double-pane window.
Life outside the window was also dull. Even the standard amusement of young men, known as "chick watching", did not work since most of women in Smallton, regardless of age, could be divided into two groups: those who had already gone through the weight management center and those who ought to do so. The latter were in the visible majority.
Regardless of their status with respect to going through "slim-die-fast" centers, Smallton women were in no hurry to refresh their wardrobes. Spring-to-fall was firmly restricted to baggy shorts, shapeless blouses and ugly open-toe sandals known as "Welcome to rheumatism". Smallton beauties wore such nice outfits everywhere - on the streets, in malls, restaurants and workplaces. The latter finally provided the long-awaited solution of the sexual harassment problem in offices since it simply eliminated the very grounds for it.
The change of seasons did not have much effect. Men and women wore the same sex-free and shape-free shorts and T-shirts till the first hoarfrost. When the first snow covered the ground, women put on fitness-club tights of indefinite color and long-sleeved sweaters with the shoulders starting at their elbows. The most stylish Smallton dandy-girls sported fashionable maxi coats and coquettish hats accompanied by running shoes.
In winter, both halves of the Smallton population wore jeans and light short coats barely covering the navel. If this portion of the body was more or less lucky, the ears were in big trouble. It was difficult to say what they were blamed for, but during the five cold and windy winter months those poor things had no shelter at all. In Smallton to put on a hat was considered to be a greater shame than to admit that one was as queer as a three dollar bill.
Watching people walking along the central street, Jack learned how to figure out the temperature outside. If the ears of a passer-by were slightly pink, the mercury column was somewhere around the zero mark. Scarlet indicated a temperature close to ten degrees below zero. Crimson ears warned that it was at least minus twenty. And when Jack saw that some people dared to put on baseball caps and their ears radiated an amount of red bright enough to develop photographic film, he knew that the temperature outside was below minus twenty five Celsius.
People living in Smallton were different. But there was a single passion that united them. Men and women, young and elderly, healthy and sick, married and divorced, tall and short, slim and stout, blondes, brunettes and even bald ones played bingo. Along with socialist ideas, the idea that one can get a fabulous amount of money without any effort, simply sitting and twiddling one"s thumbs, is one of the most magnetic and fascinating ideas in the history of mankind. And some nasty tongues even assert that those ideas are simply two sides of a single dream.
In Smallton, bingo cards were sold everywhere - from maternity houses to funeral homes. Along with standard bingo cards with straight numbers, there was a huge variety of special bingo cards in which each number was accompanied by a colorful sticker. There were bingo cards for toddlers with apples, peaches, grapes and other tasty and healthy things instead of numbers. There were cards for dog and cat lovers with the stickers of their favorite pets and cards for car lovers featuring popular modern and retro cars. There were cards for people with cranks, people with challenges, people with disabilities and even special cards for adults only. The latter ones were sold in bright opaque jackets in locations at least a mile away from all churches, schools and City Hall.
Jack was not an exception. He started to play bingo in early kindergarten and every week bought a card to fill it in with cherished numbers he never changed.
Friday began as a routine day. His neighbor"s dog started to bark at six o"clock , his car did not start the first time (how many times had Jack told himself that his next car would be Japanese? ) and during breakfast he spilt red ketchup on the new white tablecloth. The latter immediately was sent to the laundry basket with a comment by his wife Jacqueline that she would be very surprised if it had not happened to such a loser as himself.
When Jack reached the office, he thought that the day will also go as usually. Ordinarily, Jack"s day was supposed to be divided between napkin tests and coffee breaks. In reality, most of the time he sat at his desk chewing his favorite pen, watching baggy and asexual people walking along the littered sidewalks of Main King street and thinking that life was miserable because those bloodsuckers paid him abysmal peanuts that were hardly enough to pay the mortgage for a synthetic kennel with a drive-thru kitchen in which everything that could be combined was combined: a foyer was combined with a living room, a washroom was combined with a bathroom, the floor was almost combined with the ceiling and the heating system was combined with allergies and asthma.
That Friday morning, all the rules were broken. When Jack reached his office, the company secretary told him that he had been invited to a meeting in the boss" office that had already started five minutes before he arrived.
In the napkin company, every manager had his own nickname. Section manager was a Boss, or simply "Bee", the department manager was a Big Boss, or double bee (probably because he stung twice as painfully) and the President was a Big Bloody Boss or B52. Usually any session with this heavy bomber did not lead to anything good. And if you are late . . .
Jack and the company secretary Judy were in a permanent state of cold war. Probably that was the reason why they smiled at each other with twofold zeal.
Before Jack joined this company, he thought that doors were invented to bring quietness and privacy to homes and offices. But, according to some weird tradition at the napkin company, all the doors in the offices had to be open all the time. Probably, this was to make sure that nobody fell asleep at the work place, and if anyone did, snoring would be a good signal for the security officer to seize a labor code violator. The only minor disadvantage of this practice was that animated meeting discussions, checking voice mail through speakers, constant ringing of phones at secretaries" desks and the rest of routine company noise poured through the open doors of managers offices to the engineering area like a river after spring thaw. All this created such a cacophony of sounds that by the end of the day most of the engineers and technicians went crazy and could hardly distinguish a blueprint from a blackboard.
Judy"s desk was next to Jack"s office. By her secretary"s nature she could not live without a phone. She called and received calls every thirty seconds. Since Jack could not shut the door, he had to listen to all of them.
William Shakespeare is said to have had a vocabulary of 30,000 words. Judy easily put the magnificent language of the great playwright into a ten-word frame: "hi, okay, right, cool, great, awesome, you know, you"re kidding, bye". The tenth word is not for publication and was used once a month when her current boy-friend called her to say that from now she was as free as a swallow in the sky.
"Long-beezer musical bed!" Jack thought on his way to the meeting. "She deliberately wasted five minutes with silly every-morning-around greetings: "How are you today? Good. About yourself? Good. That"s good. That"s very good that it"s good. And if it were not good, that"s good that it might be good . . ." and so on and on. After all these countless, stupid and meaningless "goods" she told me I was supposed to be in the boss" office five minutes ago! She, like my wife, probably also thinks that I"m the greatest loser in the Universe. Okay, okay, one day she"ll get a thumbtack on her chair. The longest and the sharpest I can find in this middle-of-nowhere town."
When Jack entered the executive meeting room, B52 tapped on his watch, pointed him to the chair and began the conversation with a straight question:
"Are you an idiot or a public school graduate?"
Several years ago the provincial government decided to choose Smallton for new experiment - testing the level of knowledge of high school students to meet UNESCO standards. The results proved to be above all expectations. In the multiple-choice test seven out of ten students chose answers stating that UNESCO is a contagious venereal disease, that the area of a sphere of the unity radius depends on the version of Windows installed on your computer, that during World War Two Canada, United States and Germany were fighting against communist Russia, and that Israel was founded two thousand years ago by Jesus Christ.
When the test results were published in the local press, practically all parents moved their bundles of joy to private schools and to be called a public school graduate became such an insult that Jack immediately chose another option.
After the introductory question, B52 reported the latest results on napkin sales. They were fairly discouraging. It should be mentioned that before going to market, the company started an expensive and aggressive advertising campaign. Smallton newspapers were filled with alluring ads:
"Save! Save! Save! The high-tech lifetime napkin at your home. Buy once, pay once and enjoy it the rest of your life!"
The new hi-tech napkins really were of superior durability and quality. The only nuisance was that in air-conditioned restaurants and homes the steel napkins got cold and stuck to the lips for good. The company was bombed with lawsuits from people who had to undergo surgery to separate everlasting new napkins from their lips. As usual, management, including both "bees", washed its hands and it looked like the only whipping boy who could be found to blame for this failure was technician Jack. In fact, who did finally test those bloody napkins?
When Jack returned to his desk, he felt an unpleasant aftertaste in the middle of his stomach as if he was forced to suck a steel napkin at least for half an hour. He slowly sat back in his chair and caught sight of an issue of the Smallton Record.
It was Friday. It was time to check bingo numbers. Jack had done it every week for years, so he did not feel any agitation or excitement. It was another routine job like testing those damn napkins or shoveling an endless driveway after a snowstorm. Jack opened the newspaper at the familiar page and looked at the numbers . . . All of a sudden the room started to spin around him.
When the green and red circles in his eyes disappeared, Jack took a second look. He stared at each number until his eyes began to water.
No mistake! He knew all those numbers as well as the Lord"s prayer. The six numbers he put in each draw for so many years were absolutely identical to the numbers in the paper! And this week"s jackpot was ten million dollars! Oh, no. Ten thousand grand! Too fantastic to be true!
Jack closed his eyes and started to daydream, devising a glorious revenge plan . . .
"So, I begin a new life. I"m a new man. I start treating those hypocrites same way they have been treating me. How do I do it? Well, let"s start from my sweetie eversmiling prostitary."
Jack confidently moved to Judy"s desk. As usual, she was chatting on the phone. Seeing Jack approaching, she immediately switched her regular smile to a double-strength one. Jack had a fantastic feeling that today the entire planet was spinning around for him only and this feeling brought waves of vindictive inspiration.
"Judy, can you do me a favor? Please tell the Big Bloody Boss that I"m leaving and I"ll be back in a few decades. I"m afraid I have to spend them in the nearest jake. Delhi belly, you know. And make sure you tell him that my only concern is not to spoil his new furniture the next time he invites me to his office. That firewood cost the company a fortune!"
Judy"s smile slowly vanished.
"Jeez!" Jack exclaimed. "I thought you take it off only at night together with your pantyhose. By the way, did anybody tell you how great you look without a smile? Fewer wrinkles. Now I"d never guess you"re almost 60."
Judy was only 47. But who cared? Jack always wondered how much money she spent to look at least a year younger than she really was.
"By the way, how old are you, Judy?"
Judy opened her mouth but could not utter a word. She looked like a pop star who was supposed to start singing but had forgotten all the words.
"Sorry, I know it"s not a very polite question to ask a woman. A woman is always as old as she looks. But in your case I"m puzzled. You know what? At the first sight it appears that humans do not live that long . . ."
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