Anything’s Deletable

(12:34)

Mel closed the document—a 737-page comparison between two translations of the Gao Dao Chaching, which it took Mel 153 pages to realize was the author’s bastardization of “Tao Te Ching,” a text of only 88 pages. Besides whether or not someone who couldn’t be bothered to look up the correct transliteration was qualified to write such a book, there was nothing wrong with it. At least, not according to the FBMU’s ‘Common Standards;’ a 28-page document of rules and exceptions Mel was supposed to compare the books against. Despite the breadth of these rules and the specificity of their exception, Mel rarely found anything in the books that went against them, and when he did, Ashley always told him to ignore them.

When Mel started the 737-page comparison, there were seven other books also waiting to be read. Now he was finished, there were nine.

“Whew,” he mentioned to Annabelle, “they never end, do they?” She, Mel, Rokuro, and Kirsten (who was sick today) shared a quadicle, a large cubicle with four workspaces facing into each corner.

“Not that I know of,” Annabelle responded, turning towards him. “I hear they let you sleep once you become a manager though.”

“How long does that take?”

Annabelle winked. “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

Mel would have asked more, but before he could, Ashley barked out a sharp, “Keep it down, please,” from her cubicle, part of a pair attached on Mel’s side of the quadicle. Since her cubicle was separate, Ashley’s main form of communication with the team was either through short emails or commands shouted over the wall. This was her first of the day. Mel hadn’t known she was in yet. He and Annabelle raised eyebrows at each other, then each turned back to their computers.

The next book Mel opened had the title, The Wisteria Winds. It was the fourth autobiography he’d read that week. The first page read, “Identities hidden to protect the innocent.” This was followed closely by the dedication, which read, “To Molly, for all she put up with and still forgave.” A quick glance through the first few pages showed that the author, named Mary, had changed her name in the manuscript to “Maxine,” and the book was about her long, tumultuous relationship and eventual marriage to “Moira,” complete with adultery, addiction, and abuse. It totaled 593 pages. Mel, processing all this, felt a pain start to coalesce behind his left eyebrow, like someone embedded a marble in the bone and was vibrating it remotely.

“Rok!” Ashley’s shout arced over the cubicle wall. Mel read the sentence, “My father (Marty in real life, but I’ll call him Max in the book) slept around on my mother, and to this day will not admit he was in the wrong,” before Ashley again snapped, “Rok!” Looking over his shoulder, he saw Rok at this computer, tablet and stylus in hands, headphones bopping up and down and clamped tightly over his ears. In the time it took Mel to realize he should probably alert Rok, Ashley herself stood up and threw a crumpled up piece of paper at Rok, missing him but hitting his computer screen in time to be the lightning strike to the thunderclap of her third, “Rok!”

Rok, for his part, had the grace not to jump. He swiveled his chair slowly towards Mel and Ashley, taking one of his headphones off. “Yes,” he said, sleepily.

“Come over here,” Ashley said before disappearing behind the wall again.

Rok and Mel made eye contact, the former raising his eyebrows to which the latter shrugged. Rok stood and walked to stand by the entrance of Ashley’s cubicle. Mel turned back to his book.

“Moira’s family was no better than my own, I would soon learn. During my first visit to their home, Clara Lee (aka Sarah Lee, the only mother-in-law I’d ever need) dropped her apple pie as she was pulling it out of the oven. All Moira’s father could do was cuss her out, calling her stupid and asking why she couldn’t do anything right. I remember though, Clara had a fighting spirit, even back then, and she napped right back at him, ‘You’re the idiot that kept the crust in the tin!’ Now, I would have not too much of all this—I mean people yell at each other, right—but being called an idiot made him so mad he threw his water glass at her. From across the room! It shattered and they both screamed and Moira, she just kept on eating her dinner.”

“That isn’t what I said,” Ashley’s voice rose above the cubicles again. “I know I did not say that because it’s not something we ever allow, so therefore I could not have possibly said it. We have an in-house style; we want people to look at a book and go, ‘oh, that’s an FBMU book,’ not, ‘dear god, what three year old drew this.’ Do you understand?”

“But that’s what the author—“

“I don’t want to hear what you think the author wanted or any buts, I want to hear that you understand me.”

“But I—“

“No buts!”

“But—“

“Rok!”

“I’ve seen the email where you told the author we would do that,” Rok said, his voice cracking as it topped over Ashley’s own gradually increasing volume. “I’m sure it’s saved in your inbox, it’s in the database.”

“I’m telling you, Rok, this is not the hill you want to die on. We can find illustrators who will do what we tell them. Is that what you want?”

“No, I—“

“Go back, do these over again, and apologize to the author for wasting his time. Stick to the style. Understand? Tell me you understand.”

“I understand.”

Mel tried to keep his eyes on his computer, but couldn’t help flicking briefly to Rok’s face as he returned to the quadicle. It was red. Mel tried to keep reading. “she just kept on eating her dinner, she just kept on eating her dinner, she just kept on eating her dinner, she just kept on eating her dinner, she just kept on eating her dinner.”

“Mel!” Ashley’s voice cracked over the wall again. Mel jumped, first in his seat, then nearly a second time out of it, but before he could Ashley continued, “You’re at ten in your queue now. Pick up the pace.”

“There were times when I was drunk and I tried to drive myself home. I wrecked four cars. Moira always came to bail me out. Even when I was sleeping around on her. Even when I was so high I would forget who she was.”

“I knew she had been to AA by then. She started going while we were separated, and I’m sure you know that they’ve got these 12 steps, one of which is ‘I accept that I am helpless before a higher power.’ Well, as it turns out, the original version that the founders of AA wanted to say was ‘powerless before Jesus,’ but of course you can’t have that in modern America. But no devil can keep God down, and even if AA today only refers to Him as a ‘higher power,’ the good practitioners know in their hearts who that higher power can only be. One of these good practitioners was Mary’s sponsor, our good friend Pastor Craig (who’s got good things ahead of him, I know it). And it just so happened that the meetings he brought her to were in the basement of a church. Our church, to be exact—the one we still go to to this day, Our Hope United Second Methodist.”

“Now, everybody knew that the Pastor’s Wife at Second Methodist only started flirting with him for the position. When she started showing up to church, he was a MARRIED MAN. I knew she wouldn’t be any good from the moment I saw her, sitting on the aisle with her big hat and that feather sticking out of it. I said to Moira, ‘That woman is looking for trouble,’ and you know what she said? ‘You would know.’ Ha!”

“And when the dragon rears its head and the four horsemen ride across the plains of Russia and the United States and Central Asia and Europe and the Antichrist calls forth his legions, I know I shall be standing with Christ and all his other faithful followers, and we shall be victorious because our God is an almighty, all-knowing, and all-powerful God!”

(This last may have been from a different book.)

“Mel!” Ashley again, shrugging into a leather jacket. “I’m getting lunch. Hold things together while I’m gone.” She lowered her voice, stepping into the middle of the quadicle and leaning towards Mel. “Don’t let Rok do anything without asking someone first,” she added, winking.

“O-okay,” Mel stuttered. Annabelle had gone too, and once Ashley left Mel and Rok were alone. Rok didn’t turn around, but neither were his headphones covering his ears.

Mel turned back to his computer. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six!”

Mel pushed against the drawers of his desk with his feet, the chair rolling him across the floor of the quadicle to stop beside Rok’s desk. “So, what was that about?” he asked.

Rok didn’t react, pretending that whatever he was looking at on his screen needed his continuous, uninterruptible attention. “Nothing,” he said. Then, “Stupid stuff, that’s all.”

“Was it the kid’s book?” Mel asked.

Rok blinked, glanced at Mel, then remembered he was supposed to be uninterested in anything but his screen. “What, she email everyone about it to make sure we’re on the same page?”

“Rok, I look at every book that comes through. And the emails related to it.”

“So you knew what we were talking about just from eavesdropping.”

“I try not to, but you both got so loud.”

“It doesn’t matter anyways, it’s just more things I have to redo, apparently.”

“Have you tried talking to Nicho about it?”

“Nicho’s going to take her side. Nicho always takes her side.” He deepened his voice and elongated his vowels, imitating the older man, “‘Stylistic choices are up to the individual team manager. When there’s an opening on a team with a little more freedom, you can apply, but stick with what Ashley says for now.’ He writes that every time. I bet it’s a template.”

“This is that kid’s book,” Mel said, breaking some invisible barrier and perusing Rok’s screen. “I thought the author wanted the illustrations to be ‘impressionist.’”

“He does,” Rok agreed.

“I know what email you’re talking about,” Mel said.

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, the one where Ashley says—”

“Our in-house illustrator would be more than capable of creating a series of impressionist illustrations, he’s really good at that sort of thing and would really appreciate the chance to not draw our in house style.”

“Exactly!” Rok started furiously clicking, pulling up a web browser with about a dozen open tabs.

“She really hit the nail on the head with that one,” Mel said.

“I can’t find it anywhere,” Rok said.

“What?”

“It’s not in the database anymore,” Rok pointed at his screen. They were both silent for a moment as Rok clicked through a few tabs. “There’s a gap now. There’s this email where Ashley congratulates this Phil guy on finishing a book, thanks him for choosing the FBMU, and then asks him a bunch of questions—“

“Including ‘what kind of illustrations do you want?’” Mel added.

“But all of his responses got deleted,” Rok continued, dragging his mouse over two emails in the database, the first with the subject line, “Introducing Rok—your Illustrator.” “There were a bunch of emails I had to read through and they’re gone.” He highlighted the dates of the two emails, the fortnight between them.

“Whatcha looking at?”

Annabelle appeared at the entry to the quadicle, a bowl of soup in her hands. It was so suddenly and so silently (and, admittedly, because Mel was paranoid enough that he thought she was Ashley at first) that Mel jumped in his seat again, which made Rok do the same, which in turn made Annabelle flinch. The soup jumped as well, out of the bowl and onto Annabelle’s hands and shoes.

“Shit!” they all three said at once.

While Rok and Mel helped clean up the spilt soup, they explained to Annabelle about the missing emails, what was contained in them, and what that meant for the conversation Rok had with Ashley earlier, which Annabelle remembered.

“They’d still be in her outbox,” Annabelle suggested. “Or the author’s inbox. You could ask him if he’s got the emails.”

“I’m not supposed to email him without Ashley on copy,” Rok said. “I feel like she’d see it before me and squash the conversation.”

“And it’s not like she’s going to let us see her outbox,” Mel added.

“You never know,” Annabelle winked. “She can be goaded, just like anyone else. Is the project getting a copyedit?”

Rok and Mel looked at each other. Rok shrugged. “I don’t know how to check that,” Mel said. “I thought all of them got a copyedit.”

“They have to pay extra for it,” Annabelle said. “Is that the project page?” She pointed at Rok’s screen. “Scroll to the top.”

Rok did so.

“It’s not,” Annabelle said after scanning a moment. She turned to her desk, grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote, on Rok’s desk in a way that they both couldn’t help but see, the book’s batch number, five digits which she underlined with a pleasantly decisive stroke. “I’ll comp him a free editorial review,” she said. “I don’t have to cc Ashley when I talk with him, and I can see if he’s got the emails saved in his inbox still.”

“Great!” Mel smiled.

“Will that work?” asked Rok, a born skeptic.

“Who knows?” Annabelle shrugged. “I give it 50-50 he even responds. And if Ashley notices she’ll probably just tell me to undo it. But if he’s got it still and he sends it to me, then we’ll have it.”

“And do what with it?”

Annabelle stood, surveyed the room above the level of the cubicle walls, and sat again. “I’ve been noticing things like this a lot,” she admitted. “It seems like Ashley just tells the authors whatever to get them to sign on. One got to me expecting a ‘historigraphical review,’ which I don’t even know what that is, but when I went through the contact history, just like you did, there was an email where Ashley told the author we’d be able to do that. She came up with the term even, responding to him asking if we could do such-and-such a thing—the point is, we don’t do that such-and-such a thing either, but then she made up that we do and sent him through the process. By the time I saw that and told him, ‘that’s not something we do, here’s what I can offer,’ he’d already gone through a content edit with you, had a custom cover drawn by you, and Kirsten was just about to finish the interior design. He threatened to cancel unless I fulfill the services promised by Ashley, and when I brought it to Naomi she told me to just do it. Point is: it’s a pattern, but we need to be able to demonstrate it’s a pattern, and we do that by collecting examples. If this author gets back to me, that’ll be two examples. One’s a mistake, two’s a fluke, three’s a problem. Naomi doesn’t ignore problems.”

She said it brave enough and confident enough that it blew a flutter in Mel’s heart. He didn’t quite understand everything she said, but it sounded exciting and dangerous, like the beginnings of a rebellion, a coalescing of power. From where he sat, Annabelle was clearly the focal point of that power, a halo radiating from her round face, her only hard angle the determined gash of her smirk.

“But, currently, right now,” Rok deflated Mel’s courage with his slow, monotone words, “what do I do vis-a-vis these illustrations Ashley yelled at me about this morning? Do I still have to redo them?”

“I would,” Annabelle answered firmly. “For now. Let her think she’s gotten away with it, and she won’t go on a deleting spree again.”

Rok didn’t have to say anything else for Mel to know what his point was. Annabelle didn’t either, and Mel understood what she was saying too. But when it came down to it, for all her talk, Rok’s situation was still the same.

Mel could relate.

Before anyone could say anything more, however, they all heard the unmistakable voice of Ashley saying, “Hey there!” to someone in one of the other cubicle rows and scattered back to their own desks.

“This city of Fictograd,” Mel read, “claims to be a center of peace and justice, a haven for the good and merciful from the cruelties of a capitalist world. But I say to thee, ’tis only an illusion. Everywhere I walk, every corner I turn, every stair I climb, all of it—marked by the stench of the Beast!”

“Man, everyone’s so quiet,” Ashley said, stepping into the quadicle. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think y’all were just talking about me.”