The Ministry of Labour Transition
by Joel McKay
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Night had settled by the time Ray walked through the front door of his Gatineau townhouse. His sister Caroline was there, a tired look on her face, a near-empty glass of red wine and its accompanying bottle situated on the dining room table next to her. Ray could hear cartoons in the next room. “How’d it go?” he asked.
She offered a half-smile. “Usual. School lessons, a swim in the pool, lunch, hide-and-go-seek, more school and dinner. Exhausting day.”
Ray let the door close behind him with a resounding click. It was his favourite noise of every week. He breathed out heavily and smiled at his sister. “Thank you, I know it’s a long week.”
Caroline lifted her glass, drained it, and set it down. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“She’s asleep?” Ray asked.
Caroline looked through the half-closed door into the den next to the living room. The blue light of the TV flashed as the cartoons raged.
She nodded. “Looks like you can add ‘bedtime’ to my list of accomplishments as well. She really seems to like old cartoons, doesn’t she?”
Ray shrugged. “Yeah, it’s a thing.” He laughed, tossed the overcoat over the back of one of the dining room chairs and loosened his collar. The bottle of red was near empty on the table beside Caroline’s glass. He pulled a glass down from the cupboard above the sink and tilted the last splash out of the bottle. Then he reached for another bottle off the rack and held it up for her consideration.
She clamped a hand down over the rim of her glass. “No, thanks. I better stop now.”
He studied her face. Red cheeks, wine-stained lips. “Understood. It’s a bit of a walk, though; you’re welcome to take my bed if you want to stay here and head home in the morning,”
“No, Tansie will just see me in the morning, and we’ll be right back into a game of hide and go seek. I better go now while I have the chance.” She lifted her nose toward the master bedroom. “Ray, when was the last time you slept in there? I don’t mean to be nosy, but we wound up in there playing our game. There was an inch of dust on your nightstand. It looked like nothing had been disturbed for months.”
“I crash most nights in Tansie’s room. She has trouble falling asleep still,” he said.
“You know you can turn—”
He held up a hand to halt her. “I know what you’re going to say, Caroline. I’ve heard it all before. It’s been a long week. Tonight’s not the night.”
“One day, Ray. One day you’ll have to,” she said, a sadness in her face.
He met her eyes but said nothing.
Caroline grabbed her jacket and started for the door.
“Listen, I don’t have my card with me. Mind if I settle up with you next week?” he asked, a sheepish look on his face.
“That’s fine, Ray,” she said, planting a kiss on his cheek.
She was out the door without another word. Ray kicked his shoes off and peered through the doorway in the den to find Tansie fast asleep on the couch, curled up in a heavy down quilt she’d obviously stolen from her bed. He thought about setting the wine glass down and joining her, but knew he’d promptly fall asleep. “Tides, TV off,” he said aloud.
The house management system whispered a gentle chime, and the blue light from the den powered down as the TV flicked off.
“Would you like to power down the entire system for the night, Ray?” the system asked, using a gentle female voice.
“No, thank you,” he said. “Tides, turn on the den lamp. Twenty percent. Warm yellow.”
The system chimed again, and a warm halo of lamplight awakened in the den over Tansie’s head, ensuring she would not be sleeping alone in the dark. Ray knew she wouldn’t notice, but it made him feel better.
He collapsed onto the couch in the living room. The wine was dry and chewy, almost spicy. He swished it around in his mouth, realizing he hadn’t even bothered to check what bottle Caroline had opened. Tasted like a Malbec. A nice one. She had good taste. No surprise there, Ray thought.
“Tides, report on data consumption for the past month,” he said.
The system chimed again, and the disembodied female voice said, “You’ve exceeded the baseline allotment for September, Ray. Would you like to purchase additional data?”
“Please.”
“Charging credit now,” she said. The system chimed again, and the room went silent.
Ray sat quietly for a few moments, his thoughts running over his week, thinking what worked and what didn’t. It ended with Julia. “Grim reapers.” The words stuck with him. He guessed Julia didn’t actually mind, in fact, she probably liked it. But for him they struck another chord, one he’d rather not think about.
“Tides, raise hologram set two: the lake house.”
“Sure thing, Ray,” the system answered.
Ray’s townhome walls melted away, and suddenly he was sitting inside the main living room of their old lakefront cottage near Petawawa. It was summer. A breeze floated in through the screen door, carrying on it the scent of sunbaked pines, lake water and freshly cut grass. The sun was setting, and the sky looked like someone had dashed a pail of pink and red across it. The haunting call of a loon carried across the water toward him.
He sipped his wine, reveling in the memory of the lakefront cottage where he and Mary had spent so many summers. The place where they had conceived Tansie and where their daughter had sprinted down the long narrow dock and leapt into the lake water, that infectious giggle erupting from her mouth as she came up for air.
That was all gone now. Mary had passed away the year before. Car accident. All the technologies and marvels of the world, but people still couldn’t figure out how to make the roads safe. There’s your grim reaper.
At least he still had Tansie. He smiled, sipping his wine, knowing she was safe and fast asleep in the room behind him. He drifted off breathing in the warm summer air. In the distance, the loon called out again.
* * *
It was a coffee shop. The owner’s name was Lillian Cat, so, naturally, a broad pine-wood sign with a stylized cat wrapped around a steaming coffee mug was the emblem for the business known as Li’l Cat’s Coffee Shop and Bakery. The sign stretched across the front of the building above a wall of glass and doors that allowed passersby to get a good look at the stacks of cinnamon buns and scones in the display case just inside.
On Monday morning, the street in front of Li’l Cat’s was little more than a parking lot for the crummy work trucks used by reclaimer crews to get to their job site, which happened to be across the street.
“Have you ever been this close before?” Julia asked, looking at the project site across the asphalt road from the coffee shop.
Ray nodded, “Yes, lots. It always looks surreal, like you’re watching a movie being made.”
The two civil servants stood in the middle of the road and watched reclaimers wander in and out of Li’l Cat’s to get their morning coffee and pastries. Their bright yellow and orange vests reminded Ray why this part of E-Garden was simply called Vancouver Camp now.
Half a dozen of them milled between beat-up crummies, chatting about their weekends and generally waiting for the whistle to blow to indicate it was time to get to work. Ray guessed only a few of them were actually from E-Garden, most were likely from other parts of Canada where their towns had already been reclaimed, and this was the only work left that they could find.
They were a port-in, port-out crew, working ten days in E-Garden before jumping back to whichever part of the Corridor they called home now, pockets filled with credit. No doubt spending it as fast as they made it. Incubating a new, clean, sustainable national economy, he thought, shaking his head. He hoped some were banking it because, when this project was done, there’d be no work left for anyone for a while, he suspected.
On the roadside opposite Li’l Cat’s, two things were happening. To the left, a dozen or so reclaimers faced a cinder-block one-story with a flat asphalt roof. Each member of the crew held a tablet and were busy watching the screens in front of them while a swarm of aluminum spiders with long metal legs and spherical bodies got to work on the structure.
A sickly orange light shot from the underside of the spiderbots and cut into the building, disassembling it. Within a few minutes what had been a 20th-century style commercial frontage was little more than rubble being loaded into an automated dump truck that sped away on anti-gravity engines.
To the right, where similar buildings had recently stood, the rubble taken away and the soil worked over and readied for planting, another team of reclaimers worked. These were tree- and shrub-planters. They wore wrapped around their shoulders a burlap sling that contained a bag full of seedling trees. In one hand was a shovel and, in the other, a sapling.
A crew captain walked between them holding a tablet, providing guidance on how to create the most natural-looking mix of flora, lecturing about the importance of using indigenous plants, not the invasive species the English brought over when the area had originally been colonized. The reclaimers worked silently, either half or not at all listening to the tablet-wielding officer in their midst who wore a righteous smile each time a new tree covered over ground that once bore the mark of human habitation.
To the right of that crew was a young forest that stretched away to the west for as far as the undulation of Vancouver’s west side would allow Ray and Julia to see. The new virgin forest was empty of workers altogether. Ray guessed the trees and shrubs in it had likely only been planted the previous week, but already the cedars and hemlock were four or five feet tall in some places.
“The rate they’re going, the city will be gone in six months,” Julia observed.
“Doubtful. It’s a big province. The whole thing has to come down. Tearing down retail shops is one thing, reclaiming a hydroelectric dam, highway, or mine site is something altogether different,” Ray said. “I was posted in D-Garden for two years. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to reclaim Winnipeg.”
He turned away from the scene and faced Li’l Cat’s. “What do we know?” he asked Julia, nodding to her tablet.
Her fingers tapped away. A hologram leapt up from the screen displaying the stylized cat-and-mug logo with a series of business stats next to it.
“Owned by Lillian Cat. Opened last year. Her wife Marian is co-manager. Decent profit in the first year, but not like our friend Mr. Beakman,” she said.
“Open only a year? Who would open a coffee shop knowing this whole area was going to be reclaimed?” Ray asked.
Julia’s eyes followed a fresh contingent of reclaimers who piled through the glass doors for coffee refills and baked goods.
“Capitalism never rests,” she said.
Ray sighed, “Right. Okay, let’s go. This time, I want you to follow my lead.”
He stepped forward without waiting for a reply.
She grabbed his arm. “We need to talk first. ADM Brown reached out over the weekend. They’re promoting me to executive co-lead, corporate transition in E-Garden, effective next week.”
Ray stopped. The hair stood up on his neck. That meant she didn’t report to him anymore. Instead of supervisor and employee, now they were expected to be partners. His gut churned a little, thinking about that, a flash of thoughts tore through his mind. He pictured arguments, meltdowns at businesses, complaints to the Ministry. But that wasn’t the part that fed the little ball of anxiety that was rapidly taking root in his head. No, that was caused by the knowledge that no one had bothered to tell him beforehand. That was what worried Ray.
“I hadn’t heard. Do you have something you can share with me?” he asked, making his best attempt to sound nonplussed.
Her eyes passed over him, searching for some indication of just how annoyed he was. He wouldn’t let her have the satisfaction.
Her fingers rattled across the tablet again, and the hologram of a letter signed by Assistant Deputy Minister Yvonne Brown popped up between them.
“Here, I’ll send it to you. I’m sure Yvonne just didn’t want to interrupt you on your weekend. We all know how you like to disconnect.” She pushed the hologram toward Ray, and it disappeared into the ether with a chime, signaling it had been received on his tablet.
Yvonne. First name basis with the ADM, eh? So that’s how it is. Ray had no doubt Julia was angling to become the sole lead in E-Garden, pushing him into retirement. Like so many of the younger generation, they were rabid about finding and keeping work, angling to please the higher-ups so they had a better chance of landing a gig in the Corridor when this was all done.
A part of Ray couldn’t blame her. Retirement was strangely terrifying. Being forced to live on a government paycheque, no work, no hope of work, and being forced to while away your days until either the economy picked up and the government allowed employment opportunities again or you died. It wouldn’t be so bad if he could volunteer, but even that was forbidden. Government saw it as free labour that undermined market demand to create paid labour, which was their goal. Or so they said.
Well, how’s that going? The Reclamation had been underway for twenty years, and it had created a lot of work tearing the country down, but not a lot in the Corridor where everyone had transitioned and was supposed to be incubating a new economy. What did the Prime Minister call it? Clean Work.
Ray turned toward the coffee shop, biting the inside of his cheek. His teeth sunk in so deeply he could feel the coppery taste of blood.
Perfect, just perfect. And, if they retired him, how the hell was he supposed to keep paying for his townhouse and the first-rate Tides system he’d had installed after Mary passed? What about Tansie?
All these thoughts raced through his mind, but what brought him back to reality was the dusty smell of ancient cinder block crumbling behind him as the spiders sliced through it with cold, surgical precision, a reminder of where he was and what he was supposed to be doing.
He looked at Julia and offered a thin smile. “Congratulations. You’ll do well.”
“Right,” she said, rolling her eyes.
He turned and walked into Li’l Cat’s. The place was empty. The reclaimers had gone back to work. The noise of the spiders across the street filled the otherwise quiet coffee shop with a dull and pervasive buzz that reminded Ray of the drone of a beehive.
A middle-aged woman, about six feet tall, with long black hair and a colourful sleeve tattoo on her left arm, leaned over the counter, her back to Ray and Julia.
“Lillian Cat?” Ray asked.
She was busy wiping the counter with a white towel and didn’t bother to turn to them. “I’m out of coffee. Give me another fifteen minutes. You guys are pushing us hard these days.”
“Ms. Cat, apologies, but my name is Ray, Ray Gallun,” he said, lifting his hand in greeting.
She turned and set her eyes on the man in the navy-blue suit and tie and the younger woman wearing the navy-blue suit jacket and skirt behind him. Her eyes widened with recognition like someone watching a crime unfold in front of them.
Her chin quivered, the way it gets when you’re trying to hold something back. She draped the cleaning towel over her shoulder, crossed her arms and breathed out slowly.
A second voice rang out from a room in the back. “Lil, do we need to place another order for mu—” A short, round woman with red hair appeared. She cradled a wood box in both hands. The question she asked was cut off the moment she saw her wife’s defensive posture and the two civil servants standing like statues in front of her.
“You can’t be here now,” Lillian said to Ray. “Not yet. I wasn’t expecting—”
Ray turned to a table next to him. Four wooden chairs sat around it. He pulled one out and motioned for her to join him. Julia slipped into a seat next to Ray and fiddled with her tablet. Another hologram popped up, this one showing the coffee shop’s financials as filed with the Canada Revenue Agency.
Lillian took note of the hologram and quietly sat down. Marian didn’t.
“It’s never easy to have these conversations,” Ray began.
He went on to tell her who they were — which she had already guessed, Marian frowning behind her — what they were there to do, and how they could assist her with the transition. Like most business owners, she didn’t immediately want any assistance. The more he talked, the more her shoulders slumped, and soon Marian was standing behind her, a comforting hand on her back.
That’s when Lillian broke into tears. “We just started this... a new, I don’t know... adventure. Something different for both of us,” she said, tears streaking down her left cheek.
Copyright © 2023 by Joel McKay
