Memorandum
By midafternoon the May long weekend flyers had gone to the supermarket. The courier had refused my help so I stood there and fidgeted like his little sibling as he loaded the flyers into the van. He and I both knew nobody actually read the farting things, a knowledge that tended to make my spirits go in a small can.
I tried rearranging the pallet jacks in Bay D, but I finished too soon to really feel useful. So I went back upstairs to make grimaces. Danielle told me not to worry about the other jacks down in Bay E, the green auxiliary bay that smelled like hankies—those could wait until the 28th at the earliest—and Su-Nam said nothing but ruffled the newspaper in the coffee room as though to say, “Hey kid, I wouldn’t judge you if you whistled up a little vanity project.”
He was reading an article commemorating the tenth anniversary of a victory against an enemy of our nation. Our enemy had been wasting our valuable time at the Doha Round when, during a breakout session, he sat on a wasp and was stung quite hard on the ass. He did not die, but in some of the photos taken later that day he looked sad. The paper naturally ran the saddest looking of these with the story.
I returned to my desk in the workroom and drafted a memorandum:
“In the interests of consistency of style, ‘bees’ will from now on be referred to as ‘beesps.’”
The effect of my memorandum was almost immediate. I knew because I went outside to check.
Fiction
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August 26,
2020
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10-minute
read
“Excuse me,” I said to a woman in the unnamed laneway behind 43rd street, “but what do you call your job?”
She had parked her truck at the back of an aromatherapy store and was halfway finished shifting a dozen industrial-strength galvanized jugs of wax and honey from the back of the truck bed to the ground. Her white protective suit squeeze-boxed at the joints each time she swiveled, and I saw that the crinkling folds were darkened by soot. The smell of leftover smoke was unmissable, even from six-and-a-half feet away.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. I caught just a ripple of pique through her tea-coloured face mesh. “I’m a beespkeeper.”
* * *
I was so happy that I drafted a second memorandum right then and there, this time enjoining all people of goodwill to refer to the unnamed laneway as “Beespkeeper Said Beespkeeper Laneway.” No desk being evident in the alley, I wrote with the paper pressed against a brick wall, giving the script a certain rugged, grave rubbing quality. This made my second memorandum quite special.
Emboldened, empowered, and halfway to feeling exactly like Chaka Khan, I damn near flew back to the Jocasta Building to drum up another one.
Those who had remained inside were avidly following my progress using a large map. They did not get up to greet me. They preferred the map. So I went to my desk again and made grimaces while thinking about what else I might do.
“Sleep and wakefulness cycles haven’t been tooled with for a while,” said Su-Nam over my shoulder.
I asked him what he meant.
“We know the pre-industrial ‘first-and-second’ system—kind of a given when you go to bed as soon as it’s dark outside. And we know the Iberian siesta model, ditto the above but for places with midday temps that would scald your peeps off. Like ours do half the time, come to think of it. Later we get the dubious Dymaxion Sleep of Buckminster Fuller, and whatever the hell fighter pilots do, and all that trendy ’90s polyphasics bullshit—green, glow-in-the-dark alien stuff. But what, Sandy, is the common denominator?” He gave me a meaningful look. My manager never likes to tell me what to do directly.
So I drafted a third memorandum:
“As a substitute for periodic sleep and wakefulness, all eligible employees are encouraged to take their sleep time in one lump sum, beginning approximately twenty (20) years from the time of their deaths.”
This one did not catch on at all. I knew because nobody did any different. They didn’t even bother to feel mad at me.
“It was a tad too abstract,” Su-Nam said. “Too technical. Let’s get you out in the world again. You know, the great world. The big great world. The energy and tension of the square.”
He handed me a yellow Adidas bag that I knew to carry, about half of the time, his swimming clothes. The other half of the time it held dessert wines.
“A final word of advice, Sando,” he said as I shouldered the bag, zipped up my windbreaker, and preparatorily slung six or seven kielbasa links around my neck for the journey into the great world. “That death thing—people just don’t like it. Scares ’em halfway to blue heaven. Even now. Even me, a tough and strong big man. Why do you think I carry a yellow Adidas bag?”
And with another knowing and pregnant look, he pushed me out the door.
* * *
I did not have to walk very long before I witnessed a memorable episode in the great world. In front of an ornamental waterfall and statue garden, I met several men who had been turned blue by the misapplication of colloidal silver, a topical folk remedy that, against the advice of their doctors, they had begun to ingest. I had seen this once on Oprah and was surprised that it was still going on.
The men were collecting funds in the hope of producing an independent film about the waterfall, but candidly admitted to me that the situation seemed pretty hopeless. “Too niche,” Netflix had told them, “unless you can think of any crimes that might have happened in there.” I asked them where they gathered the courage to keep trying. They smiled shyly and pointed to the arm-crook of one of the larger statues, a reclining figure committing an act that was once considered lewd but is now recognized as one of the benefits of a robust yogic regimen. In this crook sat a Crosley Cruiser portable record player, a discount model infamous for skipping about three or four times per side even with perfectly fresh new records.
The men told me that whenever they felt very sad they would play the title song from Purple Rain on this machine. It skipped every time the mighty Prince Rogers Nelson sang “that means you too.” The blue men would hold hands in a circle around the statue and sway to these words for, at times, the span of an entire evening.
I suggested that these words, repeated in this way, had an “incantatory quality.” I suggested also that their choice of song was in some sense ironic, and that I would have expected them to pick instead the Italian group Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” They hated that I said these things.
“You wouldn’t understand,” they said.
“I want to,” I said.
“To begin to understand,” they said, “think about a statement that is ecumenical. Then think some more. Include in your thinking an oceanic passion, something which we suspect is either beyond you or could only come out of a person like you in warped and evasive ways.”
I do not like to be lectured by people who are not Su-Nam. I held out the equivalent of fifty American dollars so that they could purchase a better record player.
“We will take your money,” they said, “but not for that.”
I gave them the money and went around the corner to write another memorandum, this time in naughty, vestibule secret. I confess my motives were a little on the spiteful side. I wanted to make them grateful.
“Those who have turned themselves blue by ingesting colloidal silver are from this moment onwards in possession of the requisite funds to make an independent film,” I wrote. I knew this wording would apply to some people who had not asked for the money, but that was fine. I thought it would be a nice surprise for them anyway.
I raced back around the corner like a Christmas morning. To my disappointment, the blue men’s donation box was no fuller. They looked at me with pity.
“Did you try to write a memorandum just now so we would have enough money for our film?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We tried that already, ya sill-bill.”
It was clear I had not yet grasped where my powers began and ended.
* * *
A few blocks away on a side street I met a yellow big Labrador male dog, wissin’. He looked in my eyes as he did so. He had a wiss the colour of beaten gold.
At a picnic table in a park just down the street from the wiss, I sat and wrote memorandum number four:
“In the interests of consistency of style, ‘piss’ shall from now on be referred to as ‘pisp.’”
To see if it had taken, I approached some mothers watching their children scoot up a slide. The mothers were shouting warm words of encouragement to the slowpokes, but also urging the children nearest the top to kick at the ones below them, hard. I believe this parenting style is advised in all the fashionable books.
“Mothers,” I said, “how do you feel when your children wake you at six in the morning to tell you their favourite things in the world?”
They were as one in their answer: “Pretty damn pisped off.”
I ate a kielbasa sausage in celebration of another apparent and, I hoped, unqualified victory.
“What a hungry little bean,” they said, approvingly.
I hate it when people call me a little bean.
“Watch it,” I said. “I have the power to stop you from saying that.”
“You do?” they said. “Or you think you do?”
We stared at each other, the mothers and I. They goaded me with their eyes and I was afraid. I remembered the time that my own mother had gone on strike—the panic this had caused in my brother and I as we pored over the ticker tape in the rumpus room. It took hours of finesse on the Fisher-Price phone to keep several crucial foreign partners from cutting their ties with us entirely. In the meantime she had killed six Pinkertons.
My brother and I no longer had recourse to strikebreakers, and with the yellow Adidas bag as an added encumbrance I was in no condition to fight the mothers now.
“I have messages, probably,” I said to the mothers. “Back at the Jocasta Building. I have to. I mean, that is to say—”
“Messages about being a bean,” they said, and laughed.
I ran as quickly as I could, the back of the bag smacking against my rear in a way that I did not consider metonymically similar to anything that had ever happened to me in my life and certainly nothing related to my mother.
* * *
There were messages. Two.
“Dear Sandy Sherman,” began the first one, a letter typed out and printed dot-matrix style on a heavy cream paper. The return address was for one A. B. Vilnius, at a PO Box in a district of Chicago that I knew to be populated by people who—regardless of their age, income, occupation, nationality, religion, or any other distinguishing characteristics—lived in the United States of America. I have never been to the United States of America but I am an expert on Chicago because of Chaka Khan. The letter continued:
“I have tried very hard to fellow your instructions but your latest has lift me all of a buffle. Why in the ass is ‘piss’ changed for consistency’s sake when ‘pee’ remains unchanged? Shouldered it be ‘peesp,’ like ‘beesp’ earlier? For land’s sake (wo)man (I am unsure of your six, or rather your ginger – I hype I have not offended) Kant you at lease mike up your mound?”
I knew exactly how to deal with such an impudent letter.
“I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t want to,” I said to it, and ripped it up. I did however like that “why in the ass.” I wrote it on a Post-It Note for later.
The second message, a quite gauche postcard of three pink-nosed kittens in a wicker basket, had no return address. It was written in an urgent, fretful little hand, its two economical lines like a grade-school wave drawing:
“Sherman,
The yellow big Labrador male dog was wissin’, not pissin’. I would say wisp all the time, no sweat. But pisp? Get real. Your instructions make no fucking sense.”
I do not take criticism well if it comes on a kitten postcard. I howled for my manager, but he wasn’t there. Danielle told me he had gone to the chemist for jujubes. He eats them each year on the day of the stinging.
“You can do it without him, Sandlebar,” she said, throwing a red silk scarf over the nearest desk lamp and dimming all the others. “Go to the place of darkness. Go to the fire at the other side of the river. Go to the place from whence there is no returning. The muzzle flash at the end of the dream.”
I thanked Danielle for her sound and politic counsel, politely dismissed everyone from the workroom, locked the door, and opened the yellow Adidas bag: five very fine Austrian Rieslings and a tawny port. I had been wondering why it was clinking so much.
Geoffrey Morrison
is co-author, with Matthew Tomkinson, of Archaic Torso of Gumby, a collaborative book of short fiction published this year with Gordon Hill Press. He is also the author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier and a recent finalist for The Malahat Review's Open Season poetry and fiction contests. He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory.