Your weekly irregular dose of fabulous1 fiction
Week #21 - Rendezvous
Friday, 02 May 2008 21:29
Here it is! I've spent almost three weeks hating on this story, but upon re-reading it, perhaps it's not so bad. I just intended on writing something with a rather different tone.
Aww well. I'm nearly a week behind now. Must...play...catch-up...Maybe the next one will be done by Sunday, but I wouldn't wager on it.
Rendezvous
Simon sipped his coffee while pacing back in forth to stay warm in the little alcove. Alcove was perhaps too fancy a word for it; it was more like an aborted alley. South of the main entrance to the building was a small nook about twenty-five paces across and thirty paces deep. He liked it there. The alcove itself was off of another alley, but there was no entrance from the building so the smokers never congregated there. The nook didn't seem to have any purpose at all, except as a place to sneak off on your break, when you didn't feel like discussing this month's projected numbers or who in the office was fucking who. There was even a bench to sit on in better weather. Simon had carried it out from the front lobby on a night he'd been working late. Lately he'd been trying to decide if it got enough sunlight to make a small garden viable later in the year.
The night before, there had been a good dumping of snow, five inches. Not at all unusual for Winnipeg in March. This snow was wet and heavy. Horrible for traffic, but fantastic for kids to play in.
He kicked at some snow, which clumped together and rolled a bit. Simon looked down at the pebble of snow, walked over, and gave it another nudge with his foot. It rolled and gathered more mass to itself. He tossed his coffee cup in the garbage can he'd taken from the smoking area one Saturday weeks ago, and then spent a few minutes rolling the ball around until he'd made a large snowball, bigger than a medicine ball.
Simon imagined pushing it from the top of a snow-covered hill, watching it roll, gathering momentum and more snow. As it rolled down the hill, it engulfed couriers, traffic cops, businessmen in suits, their briefcases and patent leather shoes stuck out from the snowball in various spots. The ball finally crashed through the front doors of Simon's building, spewing people and snow everywhere.
He savoured this image for a moment, looked at his watch, saw his break was over and then walked around to the front entrance and headed up to his desk for an afternoon of interminable spec reviews and meetings.
Simon stood in the alley, looking into his alcove. He glanced around, feeling like that time he'd called in sick on a Tuesday and spent the morning wandering naked around his house, only to realize after lunch that the curtains in his living room were wide open and that his neighbours and passers-by had all got quite the show. He felt exposed, and a little violated.
He'd hurried down after work, feeling a parental urge to check on what he had created. But someone, sometime during the afternoon, had come down there, rolled up another ball of snow, and placed it on top of his. Simon had been at his current job for three years, and never once had he bumped into anyone else there. It was his space, and yet someone else had been here and made their presence known in the clearest of terms.
Simon paced around the perimeter of the nook, trying to figure out which footprints were his, and which were the intruder's. He thought some of the prints might have been smaller, and from a different tread, but he'd disturbed so much snow earlier that he couldn't make out anything for sure.
He didn't sleep well that night. He tossed and turned, trying to decide who had added the second ball of snow. Who she was; by the time he was brushing his teeth, he'd decided it must have been a woman. The footprints had definitely been smaller than Simon's, and it's not like he was all that tall. And in his memory, they were narrower and had had a definite heel. Another guy probably would have just kicked it to bits or something. He ran through his mental inventory of the women in his building, but it was tough to separate who he thought it might be from who he hoped it might be.
Simon stopped by the next morning; the snowballs were still intact. He looked at it for a bit, then rolled up another ball &mdash smaller than the first two &mdash placed it on top. He looked at his handiwork, hands on his hips. Simon realized he hadn't made a snowman even once during his entire adult life. He'd probably been twelve or thirteen the last time. He'd made it in his backyard and the family pooch had peed on it almost immediately.
He was greeted, as usual, in the lobby of his office by the administrative assistant.
"Hi Simon," she said. "Simon?"
"Oh, uh, morning, Alyson." He'd been staring at her, trying to imagine her bent over in the alley, rolling a ball of snow. No, she wore heels every single day, regardless of the weather.
The first thing he did when his workstation powered was to start a database of the likely suspects. He started off with the main database table, 'Candidates', which had just five columns: Name, Department, Possible Motive, Typical Break Time, Estimated Shoe Size. Next, he created a second table to track the connections between people. This one had three columns: Name, Relationship, Strength of Relationship. He started filling in the values he already knew. Elisabeth, Accounting, Unknown, Around 10:00am, 8; Tanya, Legal, Smoker (Frequent Breaks), Every Hour, 7.5, and so on.
"Simon, man, what are you working on? I never see you concentrating so hard this early in the morning."
Simon looked up to see Darcy poking his head over the cubicle wall which separated them. Darcy was one of the junior programmers in his department; Simon found him a little wearisome and annoying. Darcy chugged down energy drinks packing more whollop than speed and was probably considerably smarter than Simon was.
"Just laying out schema for my project." He alt-tabbed away to hide the window he'd been working in.
"What have they got you on these days?"
"The Penksy account. Hey Darcy, do you know what size shoes Mary in Shipping and Receiving wears?"
"No idea, man. You don't have some kind of a fetish, do you?"
"No, it's not like that.
In a meeting that morning, Simon sketched on his pad of paper an algorithm that would rank the plausibility of each person in his database being the culprit, or perhaps cohort was the better word for it. It's hard to be precise about these things, of course, and he had to make some educated guesses. He also had to review chi square distributions and other statistical formulas; his university courses in stats and probability were many years in the past. In any case, it was a lot more fun a project to work on than the Penksy account.
At lunch, he went to downstairs to check on things. Nothing had changed; three balls of snow stacked up. He walked to get some coffee at the further away Starbucks. The people ahead of him in line were complaining to each other about the weather.
"Goddamn snow. I swear, I can't take any more winters," said the first, rubbing his hands together.
"Tell me about it. I've to start looking for a job somewhere warmer," he paused, as if deciding then and there where he was going to move. "Vancouver, maybe."
"Vancouver? Hell, my brother-in-law was golfing in Calgary yesterday."
"The snow isn't so bad," Simon told them, "You just need to learn to enjoy it."
The other two men each gave him a look and then went back to their conversation.
On the way back, he stopped by again and everything was still the same. This changed the rankings a bit and Simon updated his data accordingly.
At quitting time that day, he discovered a pair of branches sticking out of the middle snowball. They were raised up in the air, forming a wide V. Like the snowman was holding out his arms for a big hug.
The nearest park where branches might be picked up or broken off a tree was five blocks away. She must have gone on her lunch to get the branches, and stuck them in during her afternoon coffee break. Unless she finished work before Simon did. Could she be on the sales team? They were always leaving early. Simon had scored them low because he hadn't thought they'd involve themselves in something so frivolous.
Simon and Darcy were filling their mugs at the coffee machine in the staff lounge.
"Oh man, I was reading an article last night on quantum information theory. It's so cool."
"I remember that," Simon responded.
"You took quantum in university?"
"No, no, I meant something else. What's so cool about quantum information theory, Darcy?"
"Well you know complex numbers, right? How i is the square root of negative one? It doesn't exist in the real world, but they need it to make some formulas work out."
Simon took a sip of his coffee while Darcy filled his own mug and continued, "Well they have this concept of negative information. It's sorta the same thing as i. I mean, how can you have less than zero information, right? Imagine having a conversation with someone where when he's done talking, you actually know less than you did before. Weird, huh?"
The entire way back to their cubicles, Darcy continued talking about quantum mechanics, and how quantum computers were going to change everything, once someone finally managed to build one. Simon just felt tired, and old. He couldn't remember the last time he'd spent an evening at home studying math or coding something for himself. That is, until recently. The past couple of nights, he'd been thinking about his algorithm to figure out who his snowman-building partner was. He had the program running on his computer at home; he could connect remotely and try running it with different parameters when he thought of something new.
That morning, he'd put a toque on the snowman before going upstairs to his desk. He'd tried to find a more traditional top hat the previous night, but the only places that carried them were tuxedo rental places. After work, he would find a scarf had been added.
Simon was walking toward the snowman when he heard crunching sounds further down the alley around the corner. He broke into a jog and turned the corner in time to see someone disappearing out of the alleyway at the other end; he caught just a glimpse of a long brown coat.
He made to run, to catch up to her, but stopped himself. He walked until he could see the nook and the snowman. In one of its stick-hands was a pink rose, already beginning to curl up from the cold. Simon walked up and tried to smell the flower, but his nose was too stuffed up.
Simon stared into the snowman's charcoal eyes for a little while, and then said, "Yeah, I know, Big Guy. She's just been coming here to see you."
He straightened out the snowman's toque before heading home.
He stopped by to visit at least once a day, until it was completely melted. It took until nearly May because the alley was in the shade almost all day long.
4 responses to "Week #21 - Rendezvous "
D.J. wrote:
Friday, 02 May 2008 23:37
See ... that's MUCH better than what I posted this week! ;)
Honestly, this isn't a bad story ... I can see where it could be smoothed out here and there, but there's a real sweetness to it that never overpowers the reader. Nice.Erinn the Bold wrote:
Thursday, 08 May 2008 10:25
I wanted the solution to be that the snowman was spontaneously generating himself. I suppose that was too much to ask.
Honestly though, I liked it.Dana wrote:
Thursday, 08 May 2008 15:13
Oh man! That's much better than my idea, Erinn!Astrid wrote:
Monday, 09 Jun 2008 11:55
"Hey Darcy, do you know what size shoes Mary in Shipping and Receiving wears?"
Hilarious moment! Loved it.
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