Here’s how it happened.
For a few months, there had been distant rumblings around campus that the Metro, a free daily that had been blanketing the Greater Vancouver area with celebrity-strewn garbage tumbleweeds for over a year, had plans to expand to Burnaby Mountain. The thing was shockingly well read. Discarded copies pooled by the dozens in back corners of buses and SkyTrains, and even though you were never more than an arm’s length away from one, the company employed fleets of retirees and the recently paroled to stand in green aprons in the middle of sidewalks all over the city, bothering people into taking a copy. They repeated the same phrases over and over again. “Free Metro.” “Paper?” In this respect they had more than a little in common with the panhandlers a couple of feet farther down the block. Each had their slogans. But it was obvious who was flooded with business, and who was literally starved for it.
So far the Burnaby campus had been immune to the daily’s charms, for the same reason it would have also shrugged off Noah’s flood: it had the higher ground. SFU, Ark-free Since 1965. True, it was nearly impossible to get decent take-out delivered up the mountain, but the upside was that the commute also scared off most unwanted solicitors. As a result, The Peak, SFU’S official student newspaper, had enjoyed a near-total monopoly. Its only rivals were a sporadically published newsletter by and for business students called The Buzz!, and a pamphlet written in Mandarin that, despite impressive distribution numbers, not one person had ever been seen reading.
But now it looked like the Metro was making a real play for a presence at SFU. Rick, The Peak’s business manager and resident grown-up, heard through one of his channels that the daily would be setting up a booth at Clubs Days, complete with banners and confetti. There’d be an entire squad of fresh-faced excitables wearing headbands and green jumpsuits, ready to chat up passersby and even cartwheel for a paycheque. If things went well there—and really, how could they not?—they’d leave dozens of shiny Metro boxes in their wake, scattered down the mountain like breadcrumbs. Apron-clad reverse-panhandlers wouldn’t be far behind.
The Peak had two major things to fear from this new competition. One was advertising. Ad dollars were scarce to begin with, and the Metro was sure to take a significant chunk of them—and that wasn’t even counting the pre-existing clout that came with having successful branches installed in seven other Canadian cities. Let’s say a campus business wanted to get the word out about their product, but disagreed with a certain student-run paper’s occasional policy of running full-frontal male nudity beside all of the ads. So far they’d had no alternative. But the Metro staked its reputation on being wholesome, or at least some hall-of-mirrors facsimile thereof. It had been thoroughly market-tested and focus-grouped in all relevant demographics. It had two pages of soft local news, one page about the rest of the world, and forty about the latest in celebrity diets. It didn’t have any penis quotas, anyway, and sometimes that’s enough.
The second problem was Sudoku. The Metro had it; The Peak didn’t.
At that week’s editors’ meeting, this very issue was under discussion.
“We could get it. We could totally get it. I know a guy.”
“You don’t know anyone.”
“Is someone taking minutes? We need to be writing all this down.”
“And check this out, right? We’ll make it even harder. Bam. Instant victory. Beat them at their own game.”
“Bam.”
“Oof!”
“You’ve got it all wrong. People don’t want it to be harder. They can barely be fucked as it is. They just want something to stare at on the bus—something to doodle on while they’re on the phone. Plus it’s already impossible. You ever try it?”
“No. But then again I disagree with the whole idea on principle. Word searches and math have no business in bed together in my personal opinion.”
“You mean in a dresser drawer together.”
“Just sevens and ones all over the goddamned place.”
“See, I can’t do anything past intermediate. There’s too much to juggle in your head. I get all dizzy.”
“Because Sudoku is Japanese.”
“Oh, the ones I do are scaled: one to five. My favourite is three. It’s okay. Totally doable.”
“Do you buy the books? I saw the New York Times guy has his own line, but I don’t think his heart is really in it.”
“Did anyone see that documentary about him?”
“And Japanese people live in small houses.”
“Hey! How about a crossword? That would be easier.”
“Sure, why not.”
“The first obvious question is what the dimensions should be. With black spaces, or the more economic Harper’s model. Cryptic or standard. Are themes allowed? What do we think?”
“Come on guys, seriously. This is important. The minutes …”
“We should have someone look into potential ink savings re: no blacked-out units. Pull some quick data together. Venn diagrams.”
“Hey. Everyone. Hey: I really don’t care about any of this.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m okay with that, as long as we don’t use any of those answers that keep getting recycled every other day. No iota, no aorta. Definitely no eerie. Or with just one e. Like the lake. Shameless vowel-grabs, the lot of them.”
“It also works because you could keep a puzzle book in a drawer really easily. That’s like its house.”
“Do you want to go outside and smoke until this is over?”
“Yes. More than anything.”
“Hi all. Sorry I’m late.”
“Tracy, over here.”
“What’d I miss?”
“Not word fucking one, believe you me.”
“Where would we even put a Sudoku? Like what section?”
“I say humour.”
“Yep.”
“Definitely.”
“Touchdown.”
“Whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. All of you can go right to hell. It’s the humour section—as in jokes only. Don’t dump your excess baggage on me just because I’m at the back with the classifieds. No word jumbles, no horoscopes. I’m not the diversions editor or whatever the fuck.”
“Sure. Yes. Sports. It’s a mental workout. Cerebral crunches. Chin-ups for the soul. Give it to Chip.”
“Not a hope, chief. I’ll stonewall you.”
“Or opinions. Give it its own column. Maybe It’s Just Me, by Sudoku Puzzle. S. Puzzle for short.”
“If I really picture myself smoking hard, my brain will release some sweet, sweet endorphins. I’ll clench my fists.”
“Would we have to pay this Sudoku guy?”
“Yeah. And who is he, anyway?”
“I should say that he’s never actually made one of them before. But he’s been meaning to for, like, forever. He’s a stand-up dude. A real think tank.”
“Are you related to this person?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.”
“I bet I could smoke ten cigarettes at once. Someone dog dare me.”
“If nobody takes minutes we’re never going to remember this for next week. Can someone find the Spider-Man binder? I’ll do it. I have a pen.”
“Okay, I changed my mind, you guys. We can put Sudokus in the humour section, guys, as long as I get to make them myself. Hand-drawn. Full page. And we’ll save time, too, because they’ll be unsolvable. Just never print the answers.”
“It never … none of this is procedural.”
“Also they’ll be in Comic Sans.”
“You use that for everything.”
“That’s because it is a perfect font.”
“Smoke, smoke, smoke, smoking.”
“Ugh. It should be illegal to use if you’re over eleven years old. You should automatically be registered as a sex offender.”
“Rick! Will The Peak buy me cigarettes?”
“No.”
“Who put this popsicle in the microwave?”
“Don’t touch that. I’m using it.”
The Peak employed a total of eleven editors and, in a vague homage to the school’s heavy-left political origins, had no editor-in-chief. Section editors dictated their own content, and disputes were solved by a show of hands, heroically long-winded emails, and the occasional secret ballot.
So they sat, equals, on itchy couches and around an old wooden coffee table that was spray-painted purple from three redesigns ago, and talked about the larger task at hand. Something had to be done. Decisions had to be made. Action had to be taken. Someone made coffee. That was a start. They all agreed that the Metro’s move should be viewed as a direct assault on their autonomy, and that the student government should have already taken swift action to keep the daily at bay. A manifesto was immediately proposed, to unanimous yahs and whistles. Papers were swept off desks. Excessively long pens were drawn. Three people called the state of affairs an abomination. Chip, the perpetually red-in-the-face sports editor, announced he wasn’t “going to take this lying down.” And stood up.
“We need gumption,” he said. “We need hustle. Now’s no time to keep our stick on the ice.” Chip was round and squat, sporting suspenders and an archaically bushy moustache. He held eye contact with the intensity of someone bound and gagged in a car trunk.
Rachel, the news editor, said, “The thing that gets me is, they can’t just come up here and tell SFU students what news is. That’s our job.” She would know. Rachel had worked there for longer than anyone else could remember, and could cite arcane policies and protocols for which no written record existed. Nobody knew what she studied, but her hair showed constant signs of being chewed on, as if she was forever on the brink of some oral presentation or cumulative exam. “We know this campus. It’s our beat. We know what our readers want.”
“Totally. And I see where you’re going with that, Rachel. For example, I spent all last night Photoshopping pictures of dolphins playing Connect 4. I am willing to donate my work for the cause.” This was Keith: humour editor, eater of pizza, and lifelong critic of The Peak until he found out he could get weekly free pizza and a warm place on campus to sleep off his drinking in exchange for producing two pages of content every issue.
“Look,” Rachel said. “We need to send a message. This kind of behaviour will not stand. Okay? It simply will not.”
“I wish we could just tell them to eff off,” one of the younger editors said from the back.
“Yeah,” another agreed. “It’s actually sort of mean, if you think about it. Why would they come here just to wreck everything for us on purpose? We’re just trying to have fun.”
Rachel muttered, “Some of us are here for something bigger.”
“As if anyone’s going to read their stupid paper.”
“Eff right off, that’s what I say.”
“Yesterday their front-page story was Boy Loses Tricycle.”
“Ha. Totally.”
“Ridiculous, I know.”
“Does anyone know if he found it? That story was such a cliff-hanger.”
Rachel snapped her pencil in half. It was mechanical.
“That’s because they’re just awful writers,” Alex said. “Pure and simple. They wouldn’t know an inverted pyramid if they went on vacation to inverted Egypt.”
Keith sat up, sensing a riff in the making. “They wouldn’t know a lede if … they were … winning a race!” As the words left his mouth, his face screwed up like he’d licked a battery. “Shit. That was awful. I’ll get it. It’ll come back.”
“Plus they only have one writer in the whole place doing news,” said Tracy. “Have you looked at their bylines? One guy does all of the city stuff and compiles the world section. What a tragedy. Mack Holloway, the loneliest man in newspapers.”
“Egypt …” mumbled someone from the back. “Oh! An inverted sphinx!”
“Shot in the face by an inverted Napoleon!”
“Yeah,” sighed Keith. “That’s the same joke a few more times. Fuck, you guys. Step it up already. Anyone else?”
“King Tut.”
“He was super young.”
“Like six or seven, I heard. Baby pharaoh and shit.”
“You guys remember when Geraldo Rivera did that TV show where he opened his tomb? I was just watching it on YouTube a few days ago. It was crazy, this super big ratings thing, but then it just turned out to have some broken bottles in it.”
“In elementary school I had to do a project on Egypt. I drew the raddest sphinx head for the title page.”
“Isis.”
“Actually, that’s a lie. I totally traced that shit.”
“Didn’t they have a goddess called Isis? Goddess of … grain. Or sleep. Sheep?”
“Isis! That’s another banned crossword clue.”
“Or those snakes that live in baskets.”
“Asp! Another!”
“Isis is the goddess of desire.”
“Really?”
“Yep. ‘Isis’ is the goddess of Desire. No question about it.”
“What are you … oh. Goddammit. Not this again.”
“Hold on: did they find it or not?”
“I think they did.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, yeah. There was a thing about it on the news.”
“So where …?”
“On a bus someplace. They put out an amber alert, and no problem. Totally found—what was he, Mexican.”
“Mexican? What does that even mean?”
“Amber alerts are for missing children.”
“Yeah. What are you guys talking about?”
“A tricycle.”
“Why would he bring his tricycle on the bus? Someone should abduct that retard again.”
“So what do we do?” Alex asked in a near yell. “I mean, literally what do we do next?”
The strategy seemed to work. Several sets of eyes did a slow pan toward his corner of the ratty wool couch.
“We draft it,” someone offered. “The manifesto.”
“Might I suggest something either dolphin– or Connect 4–related?” Keith asked, tipping an imaginary hat to the group. “I have a picture we could use.”
“Okay, first of all, I really don’t think we should use the word manifesto,” Alex said. “Makes us sound like douchebags, don’t you think?” He looked around and saw he did not speak for the room. “Fine. Never mind. Does anyone here know how to do this? Has anyone actually done it before? What are we basing it on?”
“Nah, fuck all that,” someone said from the back. “It’ll come from the heart. You don’t need to look up the truth in a book. Don’t sweat it.”
“Right.” Alex rubbed his eyes in vigorous circles, pulling toward the inside corners every few seconds. “Okay. Sure. You new guys are great, by the way. Full of moxie.” Clapping his hands, he said, “Let’s go for it. Who’s going to transcribe?” He looked toward one of the youngsters. “You still got that pen handy?”
The girl nodded.
“Excellent.”
The rest of the meeting went more smoothly. There was the usual housekeeping to attend to, during which the outrage in the room lowered to a simmer. Those with sections to edit wrote what they had that week onto a blackboard, while the others asked polite, uninterested questions and crossed their fingers that they wouldn’t be tapped to pay for dinner that week (reimbursements being a delicate and slow-moving process that few editors could afford to get tangled up in). They made noodles and drank from gigantic aluminum cans of iced tea. Chip compared the bumbling football team to the Maginot Line, and chortled to himself. Page counts were negotiated, accompanied by much scratching of beards and ankles. Suze, the arts editor, threatened to stop giving out advance movie passes unless she started receiving the reviews she was already owed. Next week’s open house was discussed. Rachel was firm that ordering sushi was not how it was done—two platters of sandwiches and one bullet of Coke, Sprite, and Orange would be fine. What kind of Orange? “Crush. Obviously.” They didn’t take it to a vote. The manifesto was downgraded to a strongly worded editorial, and then again to an editorial cartoon, writer and artist TBA. The girl Alex had tapped to transcribe it instead took careful notes in the Spider-Man binder. The cover story would be the feature Alex had assigned about home brewing, unless something better came along at the last minute. Keith performed a freestyle rap about his favourite kinds of yogurt. Afterward they all trickled back to their desks and hit refresh on blogs, news tickers, a Word document by accident, and email, email, email, like an itch.
Alex and Tracy waited out the interim until the next meeting in the mini-office traditionally shared by the arts and copy editors. Three of these cubicles lined the back of Peak headquarters, each with dividing walls that fell six inches short of the ceiling and a window overlooking the main production room. The fluorescent lights on this side gave everyone who worked under them scalding headaches; Tracy had made a half-effort to cover hers by pinning an abandoned yellow fleece over the fixture.
“Nice job back there,” she said.
“On the douchebag manifesto? Yeah, well. Doesn’t look like it’s even going to happen now, does it?”
“That’s what I mean. The best way to make a project go away around here is to start assigning people to it. Looks like congratulations are in order.”
Alex let out a short, sandpapery laugh. He leaned against the wall opposite Tracy’s desk, which was, in fact, the only one in the office that didn’t have a computer attached.
Through the window they saw the front door swing open and shut a few times as people started showing up for the collective meeting. A bunch of discarded CDS, long since passed over for review, had been looped together with string and hung from the door handle, announcing each new visitor with a series of synthetic clacks.
Collective meetings were open to anyone who paid into The Peak’s funding, which was basically everybody. Thanks to a neat trick of accounting, this amount got automatically bundled into the university’s student fees—most undergrads had no idea they lost seven dollars each semester this way, and the editors were in no rush to point it out to them.
Some obvious first-timers walked around the office in silence, most a little intimidated by the whole subterranean experience, some decidedly underwhelmed by what a dump it was. The more impressionable among them ran their fingers along the chipped table corners in awe and studied the collages of old covers on the walls. A gaudy mix of neon green and blue paint peeked through the gaps of newsprint, the colour of an Easter hangover.
The new kids were waiting for someone to come over and introduce themselves, and officially invite them back to the couches that were distantly visible in the other room. It didn’t happen.
Alex asked, “So how are your classes?”
“I have a midterm on Thursday,” Tracy said. “Ridiculous, right? We’ve only had two lectures, one of which consisted of everyone saying what they knew about the Enlightenment coming in. Now it’s time for a test? Half of it better be on the guy beside me who thought that’s when they invented the alphabet.”
“An exam in an English class? I thought you guys were allergic to them or something.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “This is just a 200-level course, so they have to have at least one exam. Why do you think I’m even taking a course on the stupid Enlightenment? It’s a pre-req. I just put off doing it until now.”
“I don’t know anything about that stuff,” Alex admitted. He thought back to his bus ride with a fresh topcoat of frustration. The depths of his ignorance only ran deeper the more he thought about them. His stupidity was large; it contained multitudes.
Alex was briefly cheered up by his own little internal joke—until he remembered he had no idea where it came from. But could he really be held accountable for that? Authorship wasn’t exactly in vogue anymore. These kinds of reference points floated out there in the public domain, absorbed into the air’s chemical equation. Most of them he’d first encountered as parodies on The Simpsons anyway.
“Yeah, me neither,” Tracy said. “But so far it’s just been history: memorizing which king beheaded which wife or ran away from which duke. I do like Alexander Pope, though. We did ‘Rape of the Lock’ in high school—everyone managed to nervously giggle their way through. I like imagining this tiny, frail guy running home and making elaborate fun of all the women who rejected him. He’s basically a blogger. LiveJournal would’ve loved him.”
“I see a term paper forming: Pope’s influence on Revenge of the Nerds. ‘Wit as muscle.’ Some mind/body dichotomy stuff. You could use Descartes, Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Atlas. Or Charles Xavier.”
“Mm. Yeah,” she said. Tracy was less into these kinds of name-dropping contests than the boys at the paper. It struck her, in fact, as a distinctly masculine pursuit—memorizing stats and figures as if the sum of human culture were nothing more than a set of baseball cards. She also felt it’d be sexist, somehow, to say this out loud. “What about you?” she added. “Classes okay?”
“Not bad. We’ve already done Henry IV and V, and this week is Julius Caesar. They’re pretty good. I think I’m onboard so far.” By this, Alex did not mean he had read the above-mentioned plays. He majored in humanities, which was kind of like English, only you watched more movies and could write your final essay about a picture of a vase. This particular course was called Shakespeare Without Shakespeare, and had only one rule: reading or referring to the Bard’s actual plays or poems was strictly forbidden. This point was written at the top of the syllabus in bold italics. Alex had been trying to get in for over a year, on Tracy’s urging that recognizing a bad Shakespeare pun was one of the few and lonely solaces of the liberal arts grad. But the course always filled up on the first day of registration.
“Well, stick with it,” she said now. “Try not to let all those YouTube clips get you down. Did I tell you I’m doing a Shakespeare course, too? We should brainstorm together when essay season approaches.”
“Actually, I was thinking of maybe sculpting something. My professor would probably like that more—he uses all these weird pottery metaphors. I heard that’s what his degree is in.”
Tracy got up, shaking her head. “It depresses me more than I can say that I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not.” She went over to the stacks of CDS, which lined the arts desk like castle walls, and rummaged for new arrivals. It seemed like all Suze ever got sent was undecipherable punk rock and easy-listening piano ballads from women in their forties. The bulk of it was homemade; Tracy only now noticed how many of the artist photos used the exact same sepia filter.
“Yeah, don’t bother. Those are at least six months old,” Alex said, over her shoulder. “Keith pawned all the new ones. I saw him slinking away with a bunch of overstuffed plastic bags last week.”
Tracy dropped the stack she was holding straight into the trash can. “So what’s your plan for getting rid of the Metro? We never got into it at editors’, as usual.”
“What, assuming the douchebag manifesto doesn’t bring the administration to its knees?”
“Call me crazy.”
“I say ignore it. Ignore it, and it goes away.”
“Really?” Tracy asked. “You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, we’ve been talking about shit like this for years. Every new batch of editors pulls the same end-of-the-world routine.”
“But this seems different. Don’t you think? Usually the objects of our paranoia don’t have websites and distribution vans.”
“They’re already set up at all the SkyTrain and bus stations coming up here.”
“Exactly. They’ve got us surrounded.”
Through the window, they watched an irate football player bat the door open with one hand and stomp straight back to the couches, where a crowd was slowly congealing; in his other hand he held a Peak as if he was choking it. “Either way,” Alex said, “I’m out of here come the spring. If the Metro’s not on campus by then, all these new fuckers on staff will have run us into the ground anyway.”
Tracy smiled, almost to herself. “People say that every year, too.”
“It just seems like we don’t do anything anymore,” he said, hearing his tone grow indignant and not doing much to restrain himself. “Last week I was in the back, reading through the archives. Did you know that when 9/11 happened, The Peak was all over it? We ran a dozen news pieces the very next issue. The opinions section went nuts. We got hate mail, and all the Jewish groups boycotted us because they thought we didn’t come down hard enough on Islam. Maybe we were totally wrong. I don’t even know. But at least we had a stance, you know?
“Can you imagine how hard we’d shy away from something like that now?” Alex added. “Sometimes I really wish I could’ve been part of that era instead—instead of putting out garbage like this home brewing thing.”
“Wasn’t that your idea?” Tracy asked.
“Only kind of. But—well, maybe it was. Who cares? It’s all part of the same slop. I feel like half of what I do now is sit around and make house ads where historical figures act like fratboys.”
The noise from the meeting room was returning to a boil. Seats were being taken.
“I think you’re just being an old man,” Tracy said. “With any luck, this’ll all run its course pretty soon.”
“Oh yeah?” Alex said. “When Keith walked into the office last week and realized it was the anniversary, do you know what he did? He looked straight at me, giddy as a kindergartner, and said, ‘You guys. I’m going to fly two pieces of cake into my mouth to celebrate.’”
“To be fair, that’s pretty good.”
Alex sighed. “Fuck. I know. That’s the whole problem.”
A timid knock behind them revealed an unusually nervous kid who appeared to be approximately twelve years old. “Hello,” Alex said, eyeing the kid’s outfit, which included thick eyeglasses and an alarming amount of official SFU merchandise. He’s no athlete. Too much school spirit? Or just a gift from mom? “Can we help you?”
“Um, is this where the meeting is? The ad said 1:30.”
Tracy and Alex glanced at each other: a new volunteer. This kind of thing needed to be handled delicately, since you never knew if they’d turn out to be good news or bad—an editor-in-training or a complete and utter timesuck.
It was Tracy who reacted first. “Absolutely,” she said, with just the right amount of maternal warmth. He loosened up before their very eyes. “Come with me—you’re right on time.”