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Life

Wages: Life on Mars

Chapter 13: Escape from the bleak planet.

John Armstrong 2 Oct 2007TheTyee.ca

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[Editor's note: This excerpt, in which our hero glimpses liberation from the employ of a big Vancouver newspaper, is the 13th of 14 installments, appearing Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

The offer of early retirement packages was posted on the newsroom corkboard and I had my name on the application papers while they were still warm from the copy machine. I was waiting for the governor to call with my pardon but when he did it was only to turn me down. They would gladly be rid of me, but I was the wrong sort of reporter to qualify for the buyout.

I was a foot soldier, a dogface, sent where needed, and they still needed cannon fodder. I was welcome to apply again if the offer were repeated some time in the future. That was a bitter thought; the future, what was left of it, was dribbling away from me at increasing speed. It left a knot in my stomach.

I had a poor attitude to begin with and it worsened. The casual stupidities and incongruities of the desk became unbearable. My head was a box of wasps and the editors all took turns shaking it. I came to work angry, filled with hate for the place, myself and everyone in it. If you said hello I said fuck off and if you were smart you left it at that. When we ran stories about workplace massacres, I felt sorrow to my bones at the terrible waste of it all -- the gunman had only managed to take out a paltry few and none of them management. If only he'd waited for a board meeting.

I'd been turned down in mid-winter. By spring my brain was an infected boil, filled with puss and purulence under tremendous pressure. My jaws were locked with tension and my teeth ground perpetually. My muscles ached and burned with lactic acid like a channel swimmer's; more than my jaw was clenched, my whole body was, from toenails to the tips of my hair. If I let go for one second I knew I would be a front-page story in my own newspaper. Maybe I could interview myself after the slaughter -- an award-winning exclusive. But then they would never let me go.

Mars needs local angle

It was 10 a.m. on a spring morning. I was at my desk drinking coffee and reading the wire and listening to my guts churn when a message beeped on my screen.

"See copy in your desk. Needs local angle and rewrite. Leslie."

Leslie was a reporter who, having impressed the managers with her work on the fashion and garden show beats, had recently been promoted to the desk. She was tall, bony and blonde, like an Afghan hound; her hair weighed more than her body. My previous dealings with her had not been successful. She was one of those editors who thought it all tasted better after she'd pissed in it. Everything she touched with her red pen withered and died. I thought she would benefit from a nice run behind the car, preferably tied to the bumper with a strong chain.

The story was a decent one. Scientists preparing for a manned landing on Mars were using the Yukon steppes as a staging ground. It was the closest thing on Earth to the frigid, barren environment the astronauts would have to deal with. They'd never been in the newsroom.

The crew lived in inflatable huts and wore their spacesuits and respirators outside as they hammered at rocks and took soil cultures while researchers in Winnebagos recorded their blood gasses and wrung out urine and stool samples to better understand the effects of human existence in artificial environments. Some of the equipment built for the job had already been adapted for medical use on Earth.

It was a fascinating little story, originally filed by a wire reporter in Houston, and my job was the sort of thing I'd done a thousand times: replace the American quotes with new ones from Canadian scientists and doctors and move the pieces around to make it a local story. It was a mania with the desk -- if a tidal wave obliterated an island in the South Seas we were less concerned with the drowning of several thousand brown people who wore skirts than we were with finding out if anyone from Vancouver had been on vacation there.

I wrote the thing up and stitched it back together, adding in a local doctor who described the residents of the surrounding area who lived there year round with no life support technology beyond a parka and long underwear to keep them alive. Maybe NASA should recruit a few of them, he suggested. I read it through again and shipped it back to the desk.

Fluffed like a puppy

My screen pinged again.

"See MarsShot back in your desk. This needs a light touch, not a dry news-style approach. Leslie."

Okay. Fine. Light and bright it is, then. I fluffed the copy up like a hotel pillow and sent it back to her. It was cute as hell -- it wriggled and capered like a god-damned puppy. It was so light and bright you needed a welder's mask to read it and a boat anchor to keep it from floating away.

Ping.

The fucker was back. Now it was too light and bright and Leslie had rewritten a great chunk of it. No paragraph was longer than three sentences and no sentence was longer than 10 words. Every other sentence began with "And" or "But." It was reminiscent of Hemingway, if he had suffered a grievous head injury and couldn't write to begin with. I'd read better prose on the side of a cake mix and here it was on the screen as an example of how to do it right, with the implication that she had knocked this out in jig time and I should be able to do the same.

I sent it back with a query: "This is what you're looking for? Then put your own fucking name on it." I was very calm, in an odd sort of way. It was as if someone else was typing and I was only watching them. I was floating above it all, the newsroom filled with reporters on the phones and pecking away like pigeons at their keyboards, soft spring light through the windows and a muffled roar in my ears. It was the same feeling of disembodied calm and decelerated time as in a serious car accident, when things slow down to give you a good look at what's coming and bad as it is it doesn't seem to matter all that much.

Here she came, bustling up the aisle to my desk, quivering with anger. I couldn't make out a word she was saying. It was just a meaningless whine and clatter of sounds. I smiled and stood up, my hands on the monitor. She was still ranting. She stomped her dainty foot on the tile floor. The neighbouring reporters had all stopped to watch. I kept smiling and saw the future playing out in my mind, my hands moving to the side of the monitor and lifting it up, bringing it down onto her head in a glorious shower of sparks and blood, bashing her brains out. The sound in my ears was a celestial harmony, a great angelic chord made up of a billion voices and all the oceans. She was yapping at full-tilt but I couldn't hear a syllable over the roar of blood boiling in my head. I was perfectly at peace and after I had beaten her to death I would throw myself through the window and sing all the way to the ground.

I had the monitor lifted just off the desk when I sat it back down.

Just what the doctor ordered

"Excuse me, Leslie, I need to go see my doctor," I said. I walked out of the newsroom and took the elevator down to the street.

Dr. Barr was only a few blocks away. It was a beautiful day and the sidewalks were full of happy, productive people rushing to and from the places those kinds of people are found. I went up the steps to Barr's office and sat down with a magazine until the receptionist called my name.

"How are you?" he said. He'd had me on medication for several years to treat anxiety and general depression. I had news for him -- all you had to do was come inches from bludgeoning your boss to death and depression and tension just melted away. I hadn't felt this good since I'd given up heroin.

"Fine," I said. "I almost killed an editor a few minutes ago. I was ready to brain her with the computer monitor."

He took that calmly, as calmly as I had said it. Neither of us seemed much concerned by the thing. He scrolled down his own computer screen, reviewing my history.

"Tell me what happened," he said. I ran through it, the strange elation and disembodied feeling. He was typing it in as I talked, then he stopped. "Why didn't you hit her?"

For a moment I thought he was going to scold me for letting her get away when I had her in my sights but then I realized he was more interested in what stopped me.

"I have no idea," I told him. He asked if I had been under any exceptional stress lately. No, nothing exceptional, and that was the truth, too. Her quibbles over the piece were nothing compared to some of the idiocy we'd all experienced over the years. I had simply, finally snapped. Even now words fail -- as if I were trying to describe a colour or a smell.

"Well, I think you should be on stress leave," Barr said. "I'll write you a letter to that effect and send you to a therapist." But first he opened the desk drawer and handed me a pill. "Put that under your tongue and let it dissolve."

I didn't need it but who was I to argue with a trained professional. "You might want to think about another line of work," he said, handing me the letter.

I put it in my jacket.

Quit? How could I? It was the best job I'd ever had.

On Thursday, in the last of 14 excerpts, John Armstrong flummoxes his therapists, and runs for daylight.  [Tyee]

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