A Philosopher, A Psychologist, and An ExtraTerrestrial Walk into A Chocolate Bar

1

Spike walked into the polished, marbled, and columned lobby of Manus Industries, Inc. carrying two bright-red five-gallon containers. Despite that, she was ignored by Security. Duh. She was wearing grey cotton cargo pants and a grey sweatshirt. And she had short spikey hair. Besides which, she had no boobs. And it looked like she forgot to put her make-up on. She probably didn’t even shave her legs. Let alone you know. The one Security guy shifted his overflapping belly. The other one scratched his armpit.

Once she reached the corporate goldfish pond, she set down the containers, then shrugged off her knapsack. She took out a little fish bowl and a long-handled net, then put the knapsack on a nearby overstuffed leather chair. She carefully leaned her phone against the knapsack, set to record. Returning to the goldfish pond, she filled the bowl with its water, then scooped up the five goldfish that were swimming about, transferring them into the bowl. She noted that another seven were not swimming about. It was disturbing, for more than one reason, but convenient. She left them floating belly up.

Next, she up-ended the five-gallon containers, putting into the pond chlorine compounds, dyes, solvents, adhesives, coatings, inks, and oils. She’d spent her week as a temp doing on-site research, watching what went down the drains, comparing existing paperwork with regulations and best practices. Then she’d done the math. Parts per million and all that. Her action was not an exaggeration.

She’d thought about announcing her action—she was particularly fond of bullhorns—but thanks to the out-of-control advertising industry, anything duller than strobing neon and deafening sound, which was pretty much everything that was real and true, failed to make an impression. So, she acted in silence. That might be noticeable.

And indeed, a small crowd had gathered. Though probably only because this was the most interesting thing that had happened all day, maybe even all week.

As a result, the two guys lounging at the Security Desk finally paid attention to her, and headed her way.

She left the five still-alive fish in their bowl, their new but considerably more constrained living space, perched on the ledge, on the edge, between the emptied containers, each thoughtfully labeled like a granola bar with its Nutrition Facts.

After zooming in for a close-up, she pocketed her phone, grabbed her knapsack, then, seeing the approaching guards, broke into a trot for the door, slaloming, just for the hell of it, between the pedestalled busts of past presidents—odd to call them busts, as surely none of them were women—to make a nicely coordinated exit through the heavy revolving doors. She crossed Bloor Street, moving from the shadow of one skyscraper into the shadow of another.

Meanwhile, in the other skyscraper, on the fourteenth floor, in cubicle 20371-b, the one with the pathetically inept sound-absorbing divider covered with bright orange fabric that had a tear near the top corner and leaned in perilously because one of its shiny silver supports was broken, Jane Smith was focused on the screen of her laptop. Not the screen of her desk computer.

It was a dark and stormy night, she’d typed. Which meant that the program had failed again, she added. Then stopped. Don’t storms, by definition, necessitate dark? Or at least cloud cover? Is there any kind of storm that happens on a sunny day? A wind storm. Wind happens without cloud, doesn’t it? And magnetic storms. And solar storms. No, they’d happen in outer space, where it’s—no, wait, the sun’s right there. Always shining. So why is it dark in outer space? She pondered that for a while, then moved on. ‘Night’ by definition necessitates dark. That was the bigger problem.

No, the bigger problem was that such sloppy work, work that opened with such obvious redundancy, got published. Life was so not fair.

Though of course ‘dark’ could just mean there was no moon.

It was a relatively dark and stormy night. She retyped the first sentence. Then totally changed the second one.

“Ready to go to lunch?” Spike bounced into Jane’s cubicle.

Jane jumped a little, because she hadn’t seen or heard her coming, grinned, because she was always happy to see her, then looked pointedly at a huge clock hanging on the wall. Because it was 10:00.

“Good point,” Spike said. “So we’ll go in ten minutes.”

“Much better.”

Spike cast about for something to do for ten minutes—

But then it occurred to Jane. “Hey, why aren’t you—” she looked at her intently. “You did something, didn’t you.” Spike was always staging ‘Moments of Truth’. She’d record them and then upload them to YouTube.

Spike shrugged, then perched herself on the corner of the desk.

“What did you do,” Jane asked, in the tone one uses to reprimand an incorrigible terrier whose tail was wagging.

“Oh, nothing.”

She waited.

“I turned the corporate goldfish pond into a reflective pond.”

Jane thought about that. “In all three senses of the word?”

Spike thought about that. “Yes.”

“Good for you!” They high-fived. Jane would watch the video later.

“So who are you today?” Spike changed the topic, looking for a nameplate somewhere on the desk. Then realizing that only desks in corner offices have nameplates. Hm.

“Cynthia Lewis,” Jane said. Not that it mattered.

“And what does Cynthia Lewis do?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet. It’s only … 10:05.”

“But it’s only 10:05 on Thursday. Haven’t you been Cynthia Lewis since Monday?”

“Good point.” Jane thought about that. A little.

“Maybe she just sits here,” Spike suggested. “In which case, you’re doing an excellent job!”

Jane grinned again. “But it wouldn’t necessarily be ‘just’. Being can be doing.”

“You’ve been reading Sartre again. Or Heidegger.”

“Chodorow,” she corrected. “And Rachels. You know … if you give someone a lethal injection and they die, that’s active euthanasia, because you’ve donesomething, but if you withhold food, that’s passive euthanasia, because you’re not doing anything. Supposedly.”

“But they still die.”

“Exactly. So even by not‑doing, by just being, you’ve done something.”

“Cool.” Spike liked that.

She looked at the clock then. It was not yet 10:10. “So is Cynthia a pregnancy or a nervous breakdown?”

“Or?”

“Good point.”

It still wasn’t 10:10. “How’s the novel coming?”

Jane grimaced as she turned her laptop so Spike could read the screen.

It was a relatively dark and stormy night. Even the Jell-O was scared.

Spike laughed. “I like it!”

“Ah!” A Very Important Man had appeared at the cubicle, looking friendly and patronizing. “Just the girl I’m looking—”

“Excuse me?” Spike said to him, surreptitiously reaching into her pocket to record. “Does she look like a child?”

Jane grinned at Spike, then looked at the man, waiting for his answer. It was a very good question.

“I beg your pardon?” The man turned from Jane to Spike, surprised to be addressed, let alone interrupted, in that way. Especially by someone who looked like Spike.

“Not my pardon you should be begging,” Spike replied. Then repeated, “Does she look like a child?”

The man didn’t understand her point. So he ignored her. Go figure.

“Look,” he turned back to Jane, “I need those financial reports—”

“If you can’t tell a child from an adult,” Spike commented, “you should not have access to financial reports.”

“What?” The man was confused.

“The word ‘girl’ means ‘female child’.”

“Oh excuse me,” he said insincerely. “You’re just the woman I’m looking—” He knew as soon as he said it that that was worse. No, wait a minute, how could that be worse than a grown man looking for a girl? Okay, now he was really confused.

“Who are you?” he said to Spike, even more irritably.

Jane grinned.

“I’ll tell you who I am if you tell me who the hell you think you are!”

“I need those copies by 10:30,” he turned back to Jane.

“No,” Spike corrected him. “You want—better yet, you would like—those copies. Please.”

The man left, clearly angered. But he’d be unable to articulate why exactly.

“Ten-thirty!” he shouted back.

Spike waited a moment.

“So have you found the photocopier yet?”

“No,” Jane replied, ruefully.

“Have you looked?”

“No!” she replied, indignantly.

Spike grinned. Then looked at the clock. 10:09.

“You know,” Jane said, thoughtfully, “I don’t even think he’s my supervisor.”

“He’s a man, you’re a woman, by definition …”

“Yeah,” Jane said. Sadly.

“Okay, time for lunch!” Spike announced and popped off the desk.

Jane saved her work, backed it up to the permanently-plugged-in mini flash drive, then closed her laptop and put it in her bag. She took two steps after Spike, then stopped and went back to her desk. She moved everything from the inbox into the outbox.

“Time for lunch!” she agreed.

And the two of them left the building.

“Hey, Jane, Spike.” Bridgit greeted them with a broad smile as she placed two glasses of water onto their table. “The usual?”

“Yes, please.” They settled into their favorite booth in the corner of the dessert café, then casually looked around. Most of the customers were, as usual, women. It was nice. It was one of the reasons they were regulars.

“So are you going back to Manus?” Jane asked. Probably unnecessarily.

“Don’t think so.”

“Got anything else lined up?”

“I hear Riverdance is holding auditions.”

Jane took a sip of water. “You’d be able to use your psychology degree.”

Bridgit returned with two cups of tea and two different, but equally decadent, chocolate desserts. And that was the other reason.

“Thanks, B,” Spike said.

“Yes, thank you, thank you,” Jane said, immediately forking off a huge piece of her Chocolate Divinity Cheesecake and mumbling “need this, need this …” Of the two, she was a little more … addicted.

“Mmmm,” she leaned back, as the ecstasy travelled from her tongue to her brain. “The pure pleasure that is chocolate.” She lovingly licked her fork.

“Mr. I‑Need‑Those‑Financial‑Reports should just chill and have some chocolate,” Spike said, taking a bite of her own euphoria.

After her second, more leisurely, forkful, Jane commented, “Men don’t seem to have the capacity for pure pleasure.”

Spike thought about that, then nodded agreement. “Their so-called pleasures are really just victories, aren’t they. Which means they derive pleasure only through competition. What’s the philosophical term for pleasures like that? Pleasures that aren’t pure.”

Jane gazed off in deep thought, crinkling her forehead, searching for the obscure and technical word …

“Impure pleasures,” she announced.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Spike grinned.

They continued to enjoy their lavish desserts. Slowly.

“Yesterday he called me Janey.”

“Who?”

“Mr. I‑Need‑Those‑Financial‑Reports.”

“Billy? Ricky? Bobby? Do you know?”

“Do I care?” she responded. “Wish I had a name, though, that didn’t have a diminutive version. What do people call you when they want to reduce you?”

“Ezzie-the-Lezzie.”

Jane looked at her. “Oh. Right.”

For a while, Jane had envied Spike, née Esmerelda, her community. For a while, ten years ago when they first met at a Women’s Issues group that had formed when they were both in their second year, she had accompanied her to the lesbian bars, thinking that politics surely trumped sexual orientation, but she felt like such an imposter. She simply wasn’t physically attracted to women.

’Course, now, she wasn’t physically attracted to men either. At some point in her mid-twenties, she faced a mind-body problem not addressed by Descartes: the dissonance between the two had become too great to ignore. And, apparently, too great to reconcile. She was delighted, therefore, when she realized, a short year later, that her body had opted for asexuality. She was completely comfortable with complete celibacy.

Furthermore, she quickly discovered that just as people were mistaken to assume that all straight women performed femininity, she had been mistaken to assume that all lesbians were politicized. As Spike had pointed out, one’s sexual orientation had nothing to do with whether one thought about shit. So maybe she wasn’t missing out on community after all.

Then again, as a straight woman who didn’t buy into the feminine mystique—either the make-up and heels thing, or the male attachment thing, or the kids thing—she was some sort of freak (where were the post-70s straight women who’d said goodbye to all that?) who didn’t fit in anywhere. She couldn’t even claim a hyphenated-Canadian status based on skin colour or ancestry. So she was missing out on community. It’s just that she just didn’t envy Spike anymore for that. Especially since The L Word.

She still thought lesbians more likelythan straight women to reject male domination in any of its forms, but she recognized now that that could be an accident of sociocultural practice rather than the result of conscious recognition and analysis of the patriarchy. That gay men were as likely as straight men to subordinate women seemed to prove Spike’s intriguing point: same-sex orientation didn’t necessarily entail rejection of sexism, despite the latter’s basis, and embodiment, in heterosex.

“I shouldn’t have quit teaching,” Jane said after a while.

“You didn’t quit. You were fired.”

“I was a sessional,” Jane protested. “Sessionals don’t actually get fired.”

“They get not-asked-to-teach-again.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And why did that happen?” Spike reminded her. Clearly they had spoken about this before. “Because you criticized the students’ opinions.”

“It was a Critical Thinking course!” She protested again. “The whole point of the course was to teach that not every opinion is equally acceptable.”

“Even so. That was disrespectful,” Spike was clearly quoting. “The students were offended. Especially what’s‑his‑name who went running to the Chair of the Philosophy Department. Who, in turn, felt compelled to mention it at the national philosophy conference. To everyone he met.”

“Little prick.”

Spike flagged Bridgit to their table.

“She’s going to need another one of those.”

Jane slouched into the bench seat.

“Remember the students’ evaluations?” Spike asked. “She made it perfectly clear that she knew more than any of us. She—”

“I was their professor!”

Bridgit appeared with another slice of Chocolate Divinity Cheesecake.

Jane took a large forkful.

“At least I was in the company of my intellectual peers,” she mumbled.

“You mean the faculty, right?”

Jane gave her a look.

“As I recall, you weren’t too impressed with them either. And I quote, ‘Inquiring minds don’t give a fuck.’”

A long few minutes passed before Jane spoke again.

“I hear that in Paris, they have chocolate bars.”

“They have them here too. At the 7‑Eleven.”

“No, I mean chocolate bars. Not chocolate bars.

“Oh, well then.”

“Like instead of serving beer and … beer, they serve, like, a hundred different kinds of chocolate.”

“Yeah?”

Jane licked her spoon. She also licked her plate.

“We have to go to Paris then.”

(free download of complete novel at jassrichards.com)