The Rage Room Read online

  11. ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I LAY IN BED, smothered by the weight of my life. Dragging myself out of bed was harder than dragging a horse’s decapitated head across a row of parked cars, the nightmare from which I had awakened.

  I arrived at work buzzing with fear and exhaustion. It took sheer force of will to enter the main doors. I went to Jazza’s and my office, sat down, and stared at nothing. Jazza always got in later than me, no surprises there. I felt anxious and wired, and my eyes were gritty and clouded. I drummed my fingers on the desk and wondered when Jazza would show up. I was about to fold my head into my arms and take a nap on my desk when a message flashed across my visuals,Vanguard! SOS! Vanguard!

  I sighed and pulled myself up. I took the elevator to the Level 172 washroom and tapped twice on the door.

  “Son!” Daddy dragged me inside. “The Board insists you get a copy of the manifesto! In fact, they’re quite annoyed with me for not having contacted them last night. They consider Ava to be a real threat.”

  “But Jazza’s not in yet, sir,” I replied, and Daddy grabbed me by the shoulder. “Then get him in asap, get the file, and return here pronto.”

  I nodded and scurried back down to my office. I messaged Jazza on the way.

  Where r u? Urgent!

  No response at all. I rushed into our office, adrenaline firing through my body. And there, on the floor, lying on his back, was Jazza, with one arm thrown across his face.

  “Jazza! Why didn’t you reply? Listen, buddy, you’ve got to give me that capcha of Ava’s manifesto, now! Come on, buddy! Get up! Code Eleven, buddy, come on!”

  Code Eleven was our way of saying the shit was hitting the fan big time. But Jazza didn’t move. I sat down on his chest—a weird move—but I had to get the guy moving. He stared up at me, his face red and swollen.

  “She dumped me,” he said. “She wiped our shared comms. She flashed me a note saying:

  “Hasta la vista, baby! So long, and thanks for all the data.

  She’s gone, Sharps! I loved her and she’s gone!”

  “Gone? From work? Gone where?”

  He shrugged and motioned for me to get off him. “I don’t know. But she’s gone from me. Gone.” He started sobbing.

  “Thanks for all the data….” My mind was whirling. “I wonder what data she meant exactly?”

  I sat down on the floor, wondering how I’d break the news to Daddy when the big man himself rushed into the room and knelt down next to Jazza.

  “Tell me you’ve still got the manifesto?” He must have been listening in. I leaned back against my desk.

  Jazza shook his head. “Gone.”

  “What can you remember?”

  “She will rule the day. That’s all. She never told me how she would do it. Hack into Minnie’s mainframe, I guess. She never told me the details. I loved her!” He wailed, and Daddy slapped him across the face.

  “This is so much bigger than you, boy!” He thought for a moment. “We’ll download your backups and histories and see if anything comes up.”

  “A brain scour?” Jazza jumped to his feet. “No way! People die from scours!”

  A brain scour? I’d never heard of them. I felt like the only idiot in the room.

  “I won’t do it!” Jazza shouted. “You’ll have to kill me first!”

  “Not a problem,” Daddy replied coldly, and I watched in horror as three wrestlers in surgical scrubs stormed the room and subdued Jazza, throwing him to the ground and spiking him with a needle. They carried him off as if he weighed nothing. I was stunned.

  “Stop staring, son,” Daddy said irritably. “Wait, incoming intel.” He cocked his head and listened for a moment. “Received. Will do. We have to go to a meeting. Come on.”

  “Me?” I squeaked.

  “Grow a pair, son. This is war. Come on.”

  “Will Jazza be okay?” I rushed after Daddy, who was marching down the corridor.

  “Of course. The boy’s a moneymaker. He’ll be fine. We’ll keep the parts that matter. We need him back in working order.”

  I followed him to the penthouse boardroom with an expansive view of the city. An enormous mahogany boardroom table floated in the centre of the room like a black lake. And there, at the table, sat Ava.

  She looked calm. Impassive. Ava was tiny but formidable. Black bangs cut across her large pale forehead and she had weirdly rounded limbs, like a doll cinched by elastic bands. She’s a tiny balloon toy, I thought. A poodle without any bones or angles.

  She stared at me, and I shrank from her gaze.

  “Called to order!” an electronic voice boomed into the room and I jumped. Ava didn’t twitch a muscle.

  “Ava Jane Jaccari, you have been found guilty of compromising the integrity of a fellow employee of Integratron, and you shall therefore be demoted with a commensurate pay grade cut and loss of privileges for the period of one year. What have you to say in your defence?”

  Ava shrugged. Daddy took a seat and motioned for me to do the same. I was shaking, and rivers of oily sweat snaked down my rib cage. Why was I always so wet? I wondered if I could get the glands removed or something. And I must have put on weight during pat leave because my suit was tight and my shirt buttons strained. I yearned for my track pants and hoodie. I reached for my acupuncture wire twist and started to slip it over my wrist, but Daddy saw me and stopped me with a look.

  “Ava Jane Jaccari, what do you have to say?”

  “He was a good fuck,” she said, and she folded her arms. “Probably more man than you ever were, you and the club of boys who raped my mother.”

  “You’ve used that card,” the electronic voice said coldly, “well beyond the expiry date. Perhaps you seek expiration yourself, or deletion, or you’d like to work on a Farm? I know you know all about them. Hmmm?”

  Ava went white, and her large eyes widened further. “No,” she whispered. “I seek neither expiration nor deletion nor the farms.”

  “We want a copy of your manifesto.”

  “I destroyed it. You can look for it. Scour me if you like. You won’t find a thing. Besides, you need me. And you know I deliver the highest dividends. The numbers speak for themselves. No one understands the female psyche like me.”

  It was true, and I found myself nodding. Wait, I was agreeing with Ava? I stopped myself, but not before Daddy turned around and glared at me.

  “I realize I overstepped my boundaries,” Ava sounded chastised. “Let me make amends. It was nothing more than primal lust. I let my female hormones get the better of me. I knew the rules and I broke them.”

  What? What was this? She-tiger turned tiger moth? Where was the real Ava? She had to be playing them.

  “You think we’re stupid, girl,” the voice boomed. “We’re not stupid. You and Jazza Frings will be assigned to work under the direction of Sharps Barkley, here present, and he in turn will report to Charles Phillip Arthur George Williamson the Fourth, here present. Your goal is to develop a new campaign that will deliver no less than thirty-three percent of the total global dividends of the corporation.”

  What did that mean? I was never good at math. But Ava clearly was.

  “Impossible!” she said. “You want us to earn over ten billion dollars in the next nine months?”

  “Or be deleted, trying. Message received?”

  “Message received.”

  A strobe light flashed into my eyes, blinding me. I was trapped in a cave of darkness, and I slowly blinked my way back to the shadowy present.

  They’d lowered the blinds and dimmed the lights to an eerie twilight. If these were their intimidation tactics, they were working.

  “Any questions?” Daddy asked.

  “Yes,” Ava replied flatly. “When do we get Jazza back?” I noticed she was no long referring to him as the employee
. “And you’d better not have damaged so much as one brain cell on him. If this cardboard cutout quarterback’s all you’re giving me, I can’t deliver.” I was mildly flattered that she’d likened me to a quarterback.

  “We only need Frings for a day. Both of you take the rest of the day off and report for duty tomorrow.”

  I stood up. Even my jacket was soaked. I was hardly able to stand. “See yourselves out,” Daddy said. “Sharps?” I turned to look at him. “Remember you’ve got a bunch of balls in the air on this one and there’s only so much I can do.”

  I leaned on the table for a moment, aware that I was leaving a palm print on the spotless surface. I was trying to reply when a purple light hologrammed around Daddy’s body. He turned a weird shade of green and deflated like a dehydrated prune into a haggard, ninety-year-old man with sunken, ravaged hawklike features and sparse teeth. Three seconds and he’d turned into a centenarian. The stress of the moment must have eroded the data, overwhelming the app that made him look like a younger man. I was looking at his raw clay instead of the image he projected to our visual cortices. But then he shimmered again, and the light turned pink, then yellow, and a sixty-year-old Prince Charles rippled back into place with big goatlike teeth and pale blue rheumy eyes.

  I couldn’t think straight. I nodded. “Yes, Daddy, I mean, Mr. Williamson, sir.” I saw Ava’s mouth twitch as if she was going to laugh at me, but she was silent. Had she seen his crazy metamorphosis? Most likely, but knowing Ava, she wasn’t surprised.

  She and I rode the elevator down together. I wanted to say something. That I was sorry about what had happened to her mother. I wanted to ask her if she had used Jazza or if she had felt any kind of fondness for him. I saw her differently now. I’d feared her, but she’d revealed her own passions and weakness, and we were in the same boat now.

  “You and I are nothing alike,” she said as she pressed the STOP button. I sank to the floor, trembling, the walls instantly closing in. I suffered from terrifying claustrophobia, and I knew Ava knew that. She knew everything about me.

  “You’re the angriest, saddest man I know, Sharps. I see you and your futile anger. I see how you clench your fists when you’re talking to me. I see you doing everything you can to hold back from hitting me because you hate your life. Has it ever occurred to you that you could change things? No, of course not, because you’re a company man, Sharps. You, in your too-tight shiny suit. I see you.”

  She sank down close to me. “Don’t ever think you know anything about me, you weak little man. I see you, with your pretend gym-boy muscles. I know you’re afraid of everything.” Her breath was warm, like cinnamon toast. I covered my face with my hands and wheezed as she leaned in closer.

  “By the way,” she added, “I know your mother—she’s an amazing woman.”

  What? Mother? When had they met?

  “What did she say about me?” I managed, my head buried in my knees, my mouth filled with sandpaper, and my heart a panicked mouse on a hamster wheel. My brain was going to explode all over the mirrored elevator walls. “Ava, please let me out. I’m going to die here.”

  “You won’t die! And you should ask her what she said,” Ava laughed. “Great woman, your mother.” She poked me with her finger, and I looked up at her. “I would have expected more from a son of hers.”

  “I’m pretty sure she did, too,” I whispered and then I fainted. When I came too, I was lying alone outside the Level Two elevator. I got to my feet and leaned against the wall.

  Then I left the building and went to find Mother.

  12. MOTHER

  I PULLED UP AT MOTHER’S HOUSE and took a deep breath. A certain kind of bravery was needed to see Mother.

  Mother never liked Celeste. But then again, Mother had spent most of her life trying to convince me that it was okay I was gay. Only I wasn’t gay. Or asexual or metrosexual. I had a sex drive all right, I just had a weird way of expressing it. Mother said I’d be so much happier if I just embraced my true self and let myself hang loose. Hang loose? When she said that, I put my fist through the wall, quickly followed by my first anger management session. I was fourteen—who wouldn’t have lost their temper?

  My father was a Real World Athlete, a RWA Gladiator. His body, unable to endure further punishment, forced him into early retirement and he reluctantly turned to coaching. Cage fighting and body-building were his specialities. I had no idea how my parents met or why they got married. They were close to forty when they had me, so I guess it wasn’t so weird that I had my kids late too. Following his retirement from competitive sports, my father remained a health nut. He ran twelve kilometres a day, getting up at four a.m. on the dot and doing two hundred push-ups and two hundred chin-ups as a warmup. He was also a steady alcoholic, a fact which none of us was ever allowed to mention. When he was drunk, a solid funk of hatred rose off him like the early morning fog off a swamp. He had a sharp angular face—a tough guy best left alone.

  One day, he went out and he never came back. Mother said she figured he went on a bender and decided to stay gone. She didn’t care, and I certainly didn’t miss him. I preferred it when it was just Mother and me. She was a neat freak too, and I loved that about her. So why did she hate me for being the way I was? You could lick her carpet and come up clean. As a kid, I used to do that, lick surfaces around the house, just to test. Mother said that wasn’t normal, but then again there were kids out there literally eating dirt, so why take issue with me? She said I resented my father for leaving, and the therapists agreed. They said that was the root of all my problems, my issues of abandonment. But if you asked me, I had bigger issues with the fact that he was an asshole. And hey, the whole world was angry, it wasn’t just me. Then Mother grew annoyed by my increasing fondness for BleachBuddy. She said I was over-the-top obsessive compulsive, and it annoyed her when I followed her around, spray bottle in hand.

  So it wasn’t exactly a gaggle of kittens at a picnic when Mother met Celeste. They both froze and became icily polite, like they’d collided in a grocery store and were forced into an awkward conversation while gathering scattered cans of creamed corn and mushroom soup. At first I thought it was funny because I’d never thought Mother loved me enough to fight for me, but then I realized it wasn’t that. She just didn’t like Celeste and the things that she stood for. And after we had Bax, things didn’t improve. She didn’t visit, nor were we allowed to visit her. Who doesn’t want to see their own grandchild?

  “I’m not babysitting,” she said when I told her Celeste was pregnant. “I’ve done my time. I’m not saying I regret having you, but the results were ambivalent. I just want to do something meaningful with the rest of my life.”

  What was I? A science experiment? And an ambivalent result? What did that even mean? And why wasn’t I meaningful? Why wasn’t Bax meaningful?

  “Why don’t you love me?” I asked plaintively. We were drinking coffee at the plastic white table, and the kitchen was not as clean as it was when I lived there. I wanted to dart up and grab a cloth, and Mother caught my eye. “No, Sharps,” she said. “That’s why you had to leave, remember? That, and breaking things. So sit still and grin and bear the filth.”

  She was being sarcastic. The kitchen was impeccable by most people’s standards, but I spotted fingerprints on the stainless steel kettle, a dusting of crumbs under the toaster, and the drying rack needed a good bleach bath soak.

  I studied my hands to distract myself, but I could also see that the floor under the fridge hadn’t been vacuumed since I left. And I knew I didn’t want to look inside. “I wish we saw each other more,” I blurted out. “I miss you.”

  “Do you, Sharps? That surprises me. It’s not like we ever really talked to each other. I cooked and you cleaned, and you stayed in your room or we watched some streamed program together.”

  “Yes, but now I’m married and I’m going to be a father!”

  “And I�
�m happy for you. Look, this won’t be easy for me to say or for you to hear, but I’m going to be honest. It’s like you’re not really … well, doing anything with your life. I feel like I don’t even know who you are. I’ve never really known. And that makes me sad. We never talk about things that matter. What can I tell you? I wish you all the best, I do, but I can’t change the way things are.”

  “You wish me all the best,” I echoed, pushing my coffee away from me. “Wow. That’s brutal, Mother.”

  “That’s not my intention,” she said. “I just can’t fix things for you anymore, Sharps.”

  “It’s not my fault I’m the way I am,” I exclaimed. “And I try. We’re each other’s only family. Through the good times and bad. I care about you!”

  “Look, Sharps, I need some space away from you.” Mother looked wrung out by the last admission. “I’m sorry, Sharps. It’s not like you’re stupid—you’re not. In fact, your IQ is off the chart. And you’re a fine-looking man, handsome. And now you’ve got yourself a family. I want you to leave the nest, fly and be happy. You don’t need me to be happy.”

  “But I do!” I cried. “You’re my mother!”

  “You keep saying that like it’s some kind of magic charm. It’s not. I’m just an elderly woman, getting older by the day, wanting to find some real meaning in my life. I’m entitled to that. I looked after you all these years; I’m owed my time to think about what matters to me. My time of not being responsible for you.”

  Which is when I got up and left. Well, I meant to leave. Instead, I stood up and reached into the cupboard that housed her special occasion Queen Elizabeth china. I looked at her calmly while my body throbbed with red anger and my scalp prickled with static fire. Without stopping to think, I smashed every single piece. Teacups, saucers, plates, a coffee pot, side dishes, and even a gravy boat.

  Mother didn’t say a word. She sat and watched me. At one point she folded her arms and sighed. When I was done and there was nothing left to break, I left, vowing never to return. But here I was.