Tell Me If You Think This Is Funny
H
appy sits three cubicles over and tends to her aesthetic. See the Thomas King quote in her signature block. See the quilled moccasins she wears around the office, which she claims are an exact replica of Sarah Hardisty’s from the Royal Ontario Museum. See the single raven’s feather she plants at the centre of her topknot on casual Fridays. See her Twitter feed. She does not care that her pendant earrings are made in China instead of Inuvik, that her parka’s fur hood is synthetic. That the idle tempo of her speech sounds like a mockery, though no one would accuse her of mockery. She has inoculated herself with sermons on the illegal harvest of caribou and the need for language revitalization. “There’s no harm in enthusiastic allyship,” says Theo, a policy analyst from the second floor, but still, I check the HR manual for a section on appropriation, for something to address Happy’s failure to present as the white woman she is, to wear the mom jeans, the loafers, the Fitbit like the rest of us. Here I thought the youth of today could agree on our identity as colonizers—a pine rooted at our core; slow to burn but ripe for societal change. Happy, however, has found another way to feel at home.
My university friends do not understand my chronic unease because they don’t know what it means to live in a capital city without the gloss (read: unlimited data plans). They don’t know that to grow up in an isolated territory is to feel adrift from the country proper. It’s not the country’s fault so much. The country tries. But the country is not my parents’ peach sofa or diesel at a crosswalk. The country doesn’t feel like home the way pastel skies and low humidity do. I could spend 40 years in some other town, but that would never make it mine the way Yellowknife, the small big city, is mine. I mean, obviously, the small big city is not mine.
Cry me a river, you say.
Take refuge under your thick, wool blanket of privilege, you say.
And even these words are self-serving, and fuck me, obviously, for thinking that anyone wants to listen to my righteous humility.
I hear you.
Happy always works an extra 20 minutes, but never puts in for overtime. Few actions are as passive aggressive. I walk by her desk at the end of the day, and Happy smiles and nods, her fingers a gale across her keyboard. She can only spare a glance because she has important work to complete, and wouldn’t it be nice if she could leave on time, says the subtext, to live my life of abject boredom and insignificance.
One stair at a time, I descend, gather proximity like firewood, my body angled to the side as if to approach a cliff’s edge, as if whatever felled Happy might catch me too, might toss me a full storey to the same concrete end.
That day, however, I hear Happy collect her bag a few minutes before 5:00. Her keys clatter, her keyboard tray bangs, and her coat zipper sings. She makes it to the stairwell ahead of me, her tan slippers a-patter as she treads downward in a waltz’s three-four count. Step, step, step, pause. Step, step, step, pause. I stomp after her until the fourth-floor landing when ahead of me, Happy shrieks and the banister reverberates. I jump the final steps and turn the corner.
Her silhouette lies at the bottom of the well. Fish-eyed. Limbs folded like a sweater. Happy screams and screams. I drop my bag, pull my phone from my pocket, and dial 911. One stair at a time, I descend, gather proximity like firewood, my body angled to the side as if to approach a cliff’s edge, as if whatever felled Happy might catch me too, might toss me a full storey to the same concrete end. I do not recognize myself in my fear. I do not recognize Happy in her pain. As the 911 operator answers, the landing door opens and a woman gasps. She heard the screams, she says, but did not expect so much blood. The woman bends to Happy and checks her vitals while I stand a few steps above and relay information to the operator. The stairwell fills, the bodies of office workers like water from eaves, clogged at the spectacle on the third floor. My senses collect information to process later—their trample, their shadow, their whisper. I do not know how they organize a retreat, but they do, and by the time the paramedics arrive, we are alone again: the woman, Happy, and I.
I wonder what other people have for problems if they don’t have my father. I imagine how they must fill their time. They read. They assemble puzzles. They play video games. They bake ratatouille in ramekins. They plant cilantro in pots under windowsills. They drink coffee and leave the mugs on the counter unwashed. They fold laundry, but sometimes they forget. They disagree, but they don’t accuse each other of treachery. They don’t yell and yell and yell and threaten to smash phones or burn clothes or snap wrists.
I suppose, if they don’t have an angry father, they have an absent father, or a depressed father, or a greedy father. Or maybe they don’t. Who among us is without sin, but can we be honest? Some sins are worse than others. Show me where the flaw ends and the sin begins. Let me mark it with my pencil. I can no longer tell.
Most days, I question my role in the government machine. My love of the term “policy shop” sees me through more hurdles than expected—a vision of wrought iron and sharpened blades and cattle. I cling to the term when managers copyedit my briefing notes to nonsense, or when I open an email to the surreptitious barb of an absent exclamation point. I am not convinced that the term can uphold an entire career, though, the 30 or so years required to collect a pension. I blame Happy for this uncertainty. Work is tedium and irritation and futility, but she insists that she feels only passion.
[I]n my head, I dare Happy to tell the coal miner or the grave digger or the grocery clerk that he will hate retirement without the coal, graves, and groceries.
“I can’t imagine retirement,” she said to me one time in an elevator ride to the seventh floor. “I’d kill myself out of boredom.”
“I’ll kill myself if I don’t retire,” I said, because surely none of us would choose to sit behind the carpeted walls of our cubicles and grind our elbows against our desks and stare at screens until our pupils forget how to dilate but for the need to sustain our lives, and in my head, I dare Happy to tell the coal miner or the grave digger or the grocery clerk that he will hate retirement without the coal, graves, and groceries.
Happy also receives the best assignments. In theory, we have the same policy analyst position and the same two years of experience, yet she has never written about equipment malfunctions at the hospital, the code browns and the leaky ventilation system, which I am assigned ad nauseam. She petitions for the best topics and succeeds: medical assistance in dying, forced sterilization, organ donation, culturally appropriate wellness camps, and the glossiest of all, homecare for elders.
From time to time, I overhear her conclude a phone call with, “policy rocks!” and I pray that she will succumb to this love of policy like a malignant psychosis; that she will quit her job to run for office because such doggedness must point to politics. I even suggest this to her once, but she shakes her head.
“A politician? God, no. I’d hate the attention,”
My dam nearly breaks. If not this job, I must look elsewhere for my tether to this city.
Happy lies in the hospital bed, her hair sea-shelled on a blue pillow. I struggle a moment to reconcile this image with the one I have of hospitals, of the white, white, white. Her skin absorbs shine like porcelain, but as I approach, I see the far side of her face and the red that expands from beneath the bandages. I place my pot of geraniums on the counter and turn to an apparition at Happy’s door.
A chorus. Gait and complexion suggest Scandinavia, and when I study the older woman’s face, I can see the similarities to Happy’s—peaked nose, cleft chin, a touch of rosacea. The woman does not speak, but crosses the room and wraps me in a hug. I remain stiff in her arms and watch the thin faces behind her shoulder blink and nod and blink and nod. I search for tears, my white whale since the accident, and I consider my culpability in generating the karma that threw Happy down those stairs. Can we generate karma for others? History would say yes! Abso-fucking-lutely you can!
Years ago, I made out with a boy in his jeep outside of my parents’ house. Eventually, I said, “I should go before my dad sees,” and he said, “I’m not scared of your dad,” and I wondered when boys stopped being afraid of dads and whether this was feminism and whether I had missed my opportunity to outgrow my fear at 21 like everyone else.
This boy insisted on his fearlessness, yet he ended things the very night I invited him for dinner, during which my father remarked on his crooked park job and unshaved lip and impractical degree and preferred auto-body shop and open-toe shoes and strong cologne and lack of baseball knowledge and small dog and long fingernails and on and on and on—facts laced together on the needle of my father’s judgement to form an unsupportable collar. The boy told me to leave too, to get out now because he could tell that I did not move through my father’s world unscathed. I hung up the phone and told my parents.
My father wrung his hands “What a buffoon,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Sat there like a sullen child. You don’t want to date a sullen child. You don’t want to marry a sullen child.”
“No.”
“Some people are a waste of breath.”
“Yeah.”
I sit across from Happy’s mom in the hospital cafeteria. We palm oversweet hot chocolate. I bite the cup’s paper lip, then my lip, then the paper lip.
“This is Hilary’s first time in a hospital.” I open my mouth to clarify that it is not Hilary in that hospital bed, but someone named Happy, and that we should inform a nurse that Happy’s real mother has yet to arrive and that the Scandinavian troupe should depart to make room for the real extended relatives. After a moment, I digest the more logical answer: that Happy is Hilary.
“Mine too,” I say.
“You must have been a healthy kid.”
“Just a lucky one.”
Happy’s (Hilary’s) mom checks her watch. The rest of the Scandinavian troupe went for Subway and Timmies. They promised to bring me back a ham and cheese on whole grain and a chocolate dip.
“Our flight from Toronto had just landed when I got the call.” She leans toward me, her dyed hair limp against her skull. “We’d made it to the gate, but the airport people couldn’t get the metal ramp to lock, or something, and Hilary was supposed to collect us, so I answered to tell her it might be awhile, but it wasn’t her on the other end. That’s a very scary thing, to hear another person’s voice on your daughter’s phone.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Of course, we don’t talk much. She doesn’t always have time to return my calls.”
“She does seem busy.”
“Does she like her work?”
“Yes,” I say. “She’s the most devoted one in the office.”
“Hilary’s never been short on devotion,” says Happy’s mom. Her voice rises with laughter. “She likes what she likes, you know.” She cocks her head, eyes tilted to the black screen of her smartphone so that I can see the creased shadow between her eyebrow and lid, the colour of pearls. “When she was little, she used to be all about the leopards. She wanted them on everything—towels, pyjamas, lunchbox. Not panthers, not jaguars. Leopards, though between you and me, I think some of that stuff was actually jaguars. She had 25 stuffed leopards piled on her bed. She organized fundraisers at her middle school for the Amur leopard, which is endangered, you know. Probably down to 40 or 50 at this point. Bake sales, bottle drives, car washes—she did the whole shebang to advance her cause, and it’s the same thing now, only with natives.”
I look up from my hot chocolate.
“Pardon me, I mean Indigenous folk,” she says and swats a hand. “I’m not a racist. I just know so many people that call themselves natives. Growing up, that’s all anyone said.” She sips her hot chocolate. “Hilary’s the way she is, obsessive about native things, because she wants other people to know that she cares more than me and her father. Same as jaguars. But she’s got a heritage of her own, you know.”
She looks off into the middle distance, where I assume she sees the veiled outline of the Scandinavian troupe.
“Leave the native stuff to the actual natives and show a little Norwegian pride.”
I re-evaluate. Her devotion plays less performative now. Plays rebellious. Plays activist within-her-own-family, which is surely the hardest place to be one. Here, at last, her origin story, the scaffolding that hung from her person like a mask, which she has worked so hard to remove. Who could blame her if she has worked too hard, ripped those supports away before she could finish the building, stood naked and filled herself with whatever she had at hand.
On Thursday, I open an email from my supervisor, Ginger, and deflate at her request for a one-on-one. The concern for my mental health in the aftermath of Happy’s workplace accident is like a runner’s stitch on my psyche. All week I have weathered side-hugs and Microsoft Teams messages, Corgi gifs and iced lattes, which might have cheered me if they had not sprung from Happy’s well. Ginger and I meet in a “quiet room,” a closet that passes for a boardroom because it contains a phone and two chairs. We sit, our knees on the cusp of a kiss, and on principle I stare at my notebook instead of Ginger’s face because Ginger’s face is heart-shaped and blemish-free and the object of many stares.
All week I have weathered side-hugs and Microsoft Teams messages, Corgi gifs and iced lattes, which might have cheered me if they had not sprung from Happy’s well.
As expected, Ginger begins with sympathy. “None of us can imagine how you must feel,” she says. “You and Happy, two peas in a pod, and then to see her in that state—I just can’t imagine.”
No peas had ever existed in more separate pods than Happy and I, but I don’t correct her. “I feel okay.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to take some time? I can guarantee approval of your leave request.”
Again, I decline, though the offer would relieve me of these gestures of corporate kindness. I decline because Happy would have declined had I fallen down the stairs in her place, her commitment to her work far too great to waste time on bereavement—least of all in my honour. I wonder if I have made this choice out of spite or out of respect. Ginger compresses her lips, but does not insist. Instead, she asks me to update her on the status of the Annual Report and reminds me to enter my last dentist appointment as casual leave, and already she has reached the end of her discussion points. Her pen hovers over the final bullet, etched in black on her yellow legal pad.
“Then just some housekeeping,” she says. She flips the page to reveal a new page full of cramped text. “Executive has a mandate priority to foster a more culturally inclusive environment.”
I stiffen.
“They have benchmarks to meet by the end of the fiscal year and have asked managers to make sure employees hit all the targets. Looks like you have a few outstanding. I thought we could square those away today.”
“Sure,” I say.
“Email signatures should include the words ‘thank you’ in each of the 11 official languages. I haven’t noticed consistent use of this in your emails.”
“Oh,” I say. My signature block contains my name, my title, my phone number, and my email address. I had never considered it deficient, and I doubted the people I emailed considered it deficient, but if Ginger wanted me to include words in languages I did not speak and that my email recipients did not speak, I would not argue, no matter how performative. “Sorry.”
“That’s alright,” says Ginger, and her smile seems genuine. “Easy fix. There’s approved formatting in the visual identity program folder on the H-drive.” She scans her notes. “Directorate has asked that everyone ensure they have the latest orthography tool downloaded so that Word automatically formats Indigenous place names with the correct alphabet. I noticed your briefing notes don’t usually use the correct alphabet.”
The orthography tool: one of Happy’s darlings. She insisted we use the tool to incorporate the correct diphthongs in all our copy, never mind that Word ejects the software like a virus every fortnight, never mind that no one besides Happy and Ginger see the majority of my drafts.
“It’s hard to get the software to cooperate with my computer.”
Ginger frowns and her heart-shaped face lists to one side. “Let’s make a request to TSC. Maybe your computer has a bug.”
A scream swirls in my throat like a whirlpool.
“Okay, last thing,” says Ginger. “You have only finished four of the eight cultural awareness training modules. Do you have a plan for how to get those done soon?”
Swirls. Swirls. Happy had her paws on this program as well, though I could never understand her role in a knowledge-sharing committee on Indigenous culture. Maybe she took minutes. Regardless, she returned every Tuesday from their lunch meeting unable to contain her enthusiasm for the local artwork they had commissioned or the latest Elder they planned to interview.
“It’s like making a video game,” she said of the interactive learning tools, “but way more valuable.”
“I have a lot of deadlines next week, so I’m not sure. Each of the modules takes forever.”
“I get that,” says Ginger, nodding. “But it is mandatory and you did have two years to do it.”
The scream almost erupts, but with effort, I convert it to laughter. “I might need two more years.”
Ginger doesn’t answer. Her cheeks bloom red in this cramped space and I imagine mine have too.
“You know, because it’s so dry,” I add. “Is it?”
“I mean, yeah, I think objectively it’s pretty dry and repetitive.”
“I found it very moving and informative.” Ginger looks at me now with unblinking eyes, her legal pad pressed to her chest.
I wince at the panic that travels my spine and burrows under my tailbone. “I mean, no, I know it’s incredibly important, especially in today’s climate. I just meant that we don’t have to pretend to be riveted. Things can be boring and educational. I bet the people who made this don’t even think it’s that exciting.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because,” I say and I know I have pulled on the wrong thread, this conversation a scarf already half-way unravelled. “The subject matter—it’s just not something that makes sense to be excited about, unless you’re native—I mean, Indigenous.” I pull at my collar. “Unless you are actually Indigenous, it would be weird to really love this kind of stuff. I mean, it would be too sad to love it when it’s not yours, right? When it can’t love you back? How could anyone bear that?”
Ginger holds up a hand. She caps her pen. “Please work on the modules until you’re done. I’m going to reassign your tasks. Let’s meet again tomorrow because I think we need more than,” she checks her watch, “two minutes to unpack what I’ve heard today.”
Probably it is the country’s fault. The country is a genocidal murderer. Facebook says growth is impossible if you never leave your home town, and maybe if we all leave together, not just the north, but the continent, we might experience a great, exponential growth. Maybe we would cure cancer. Maybe we could stop the robots. God help us, maybe we could get some perspective.
I consider my options. I could follow Happy back to Norway. We could become fishermen or bobsledders or whatever it is that they do alone in those fjords. Certainly, the people would rejoice. “Go,” they’d say, “lick your wounds. Leave those pine trees with us. Uproot them from your core. We’ll replant them.”
I return to the hospital. The nurse tells me that Happy is asleep, but lets me wait in the pink armchair in her room. My geraniums have blossomed. Somebody must water them—probably the nurse, though Happy of all people could probably still accomplish day-to-day chores while high on oxycodone.
Happy wakes after 15 minutes, her eyes bloodshot and puffy. She does not react to me. The bandages remain in place like a sweat band, her temples haloed, and she reaches for the blue cup at her bedside. I stand and bring the straw to her lips. She takes three long drags of water and I return the cup to the table.
“I heard you found me,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Thanks. My mom says thanks too.”
“I met her the other day.” I point to the door, as though the other day loiters in the hallway.
“How was that?”
“She was nice.”
“Was she?”
“Is that not normal?”
“She lives in Toronto. I live in Yellowknife. That’s no accident.”
Happy is still drugged, I realize, and the words flow uninhibited. I take my chance.
“Why do you care so much about Indigenous culture? Is it because your parents are racist?”
Happy laughs. And laughs. Eventually, she says, “I suppose, because it interests me.”
“But why? What could interest you so much about something you could never be a part of?”
“Kind of a selfish rule to have. To be interested only in things that centre you.”
“You’ve become an authority.”
This Happy doesn’t respond to. “Why does it bother you? Is it because you’re racist?”
“Maybe.” I pause and Happy waits. “I’m jealous, I guess. You have a connection to this place, even if its stolen.”
“It’s all stolen,” says Happy, her voice so close to the edge of sleep that I doubt she will remember this tomorrow. “All of it.”
I consider her words.
“I wish I had thought to steal it, too.” The ventilation system whirs. “Because otherwise, I’ve stayed here for no reason.”
Unshed tears garble Happy’s voice, though I am the one with the reason to cry.
“None at all?”
“I don’t know.”
You stayed. Remember? You stayed because when you were six, you lived in that house across the street from a park, its white clapboard siding like a prairie school in a TV movie. Birch trees sighed toward each other and dropped their bags of rusted leaves on the front lawn like travellers after a long trip. You and your father raked for hours in parallel red jackets until the leaves formed piles, though probably you did little to advance the task, your rake as small as a dustpan. You took apple juice breaks and inhaled the wet air. You tired, your nose and fingertips pink with cold. Here, a flock of geese sailed overhead and your father lifted you onto his shoulders and you watched the solemn procession. When the birds flew beyond sight, your father held you over the piled leaves, a game, a bluff, and you giggled until he set you on your feet and cuddled you to his chest, and you felt safe and content in a way you have never felt since. Remember. That’s why you stayed. The geese flew south, but you stayed.
