Moore A Garden Fed by Lightning

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-988-12198-7-9
Verlag: Signal 8 Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 220 Seiten

Marshall Moore's short fiction is propelled by a scathing wit and a dark imagination, and he does not shy away from taking readers down roads that are less traveled and rarely even mapped. In the title story, a con man cons a beguiling con artist... or does he? In 'Grape Night,' a new arrival in Hong Kong enjoys the pleasures and terrors of a wine-tasting party with visiting gods from the Greek pantheon. In 'Underground,' the minotaurs who secretly control urban life welcome a new member of their bloodthirsty elite. And in 'Cambodia,' a country's genocidal past and its cosmopolitan present collide atop a ruined temple. In A Garden Fed by Lightning,as in his two previous short-story collections, Moore spans multiple genres of fiction and subverts them all.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moore, Marshall

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1.
It was supposed to be a promotion. Three months into his tenure at the Hong Kong offices of an immense but embattled multinational bank, Aaron Garamond found out his entire division would be eliminated in six weeks’ time, with some redundancies coming even sooner than that. He’d moved down from Beijing for this job, the associate director of in-service training for the bank’s Asia-Pacific operations. For the last year, he’d been looking for an opportunity like this: graduation from the rank and file, ascendance from cubicle to office. Although he still had to kiss a few flabby asses and suffer a few pompous fools, he’d advanced. For a little while, anyway. Until the trapdoor dropped open underneath him. He went to work the drizzly Monday that the ax fell, dizzy with dread after last week’s announcement. The fallout from the previous decade’s financial meltdown had proven to have a long half-life: the world’s economic permalaise had flared up again, eviscerating the bank’s stock value, and its customers were leaving in droves for less monolithic and more accountable institutions. Having already moved his own assets to more stable banks, he understood this. At the same time, as the new associate director of a new division, he knew whose head would be on the chopping block if the contagion had spread to Hong Kong. His was the kind of job that could easily be cut, half the work going to those lower on the food chain and the rest to the higher-ups. We’re not the ones who make the money, Aaron thought, waiting in the queue for the elevator. He shifted his cup of Starbucks from his right hand to the left. Even with a cardboard coffee condom on the cup, it was too hot to hold for long. Software training and diversity workshops are meaningless at times like these. Sure enough, he found the job-killer email in his inbox. Clicking on it sucked all the oxygen out of Aaron’s office. Reading the details, he could hardly breathe: meeting with HR at 10.30, conference room on the 23rd floor, the weird one with windows behind the speaker’s podium. Who’d signed off on that bit of architectural lunacy? You were guaranteed a migraine even when the news was good, which in this case it was guaranteed not to be. He sat very still for a few seconds, waiting for the black filigree at the edges of his vision to disappear. After he could think again, he spent the next hour transferring the files he needed onto a USB drive and backing them up a second time online. He didn’t expect to be let go right away, but you never knew. The lessons of the past had not been learned: the average multinational still had all the scruples of an organ thief with a vial of Rohypnol and a paring knife. He’d put a lot of work into the materials he’d developed. Depending on how this was going to be handled, he didn’t want to be the intellectual-property equivalent of a guy who wakes up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney. He delayed going downstairs as long as he could. A few minutes before 10.30, he took the stairs instead of the elevator, preferring a bit of exertion to the panicked claustrophobia of the elevator going down. The future ex-colleagues in the stairwell with him looked as anxious and bloodless as he felt. Bizarrely, breakfast snacks had been catered in: coffee, tea, juice, pastries, fruit. Even more bizarrely, people were eating, although Aaron couldn’t tell why: masochism, nerves, or a survival instinct to store up calories like a bear preparing to hibernate? He picked up a bottle of water, too cold after its time in its mound of crushed ice. When moisture dropped on the front of his trousers, he dealt with the ensuing male panic moment (Oh shit, people will think I pissed on myself) by choosing a seat nearby, in the back of the room. “How bad do you think it’s going to be?” hissed Flora Fung when she sat next to him. Her makeup had a stippled look, as if she’d just reapplied it on cheeks moist from crying. Her breath stank of black coffee. “Do you think they’re going to do it… today?” “No idea,” Aaron said. “I hope not, but I backed my files up this morning, just in case.” “So did I,” Flora said. “I walked around and told everyone else to, as well. Those people running HR… they’re Nazis.” Aaron thought a fist-bump would be appropriate but as ragged as Flora looked, she’d probably do it too hard and slosh her coffee on herself. “Oh look, there’s Loathsome,” Flora said, using the nickname she’d introduced him to. The senior VP of HR, Leo Lo, was a dour, stout Chinese-American known to all and liked by none. His rank proved the theory about incompetence rising to the top: idiots get promoted to a level of seniority commensurate with their lack of ability. Once they’re too high up the food chain to fuck anything up, they’re set, their only challenges figuring out whom to hire to mask their ineptitude, which stupid things to spend lavish sums of money on, and how many mistresses they can bang on the side without their wives finding out. With a great deal of overloud throat-clearing and conspicuous sympathetic mugging, Loathsome preened through his introduction and then cut right to the chase. He apologized for ruining everyone’s beautiful Monday morning. (The sky outside was the color of drying cement.) He knew everyone was keen to get back to work—deadlines, deadlines, deadlines!—but he had to take a moment to address what was on everyone’s mind. They’d all seen the news; they all knew heads were on the chopping block. Yes, there were going to be cuts. The bank had to right-size after taking an extended beating in the markets. So much volatility; so many unknowns. And then he slit every throat in the room: “If you’re here, that means you’re being laid off, effective today. The basic package will be determined by Hong Kong labor laws…” Gasps and a couple of wails ensued. The rush of blood out of Aaron’s head felt like a bungee jump without the springy cable. “So the fucker can pay us as little as possible,” he muttered when he could speak and think again. “You know he got a budget to work with, and how he divides it among us all is his decision,” Flora hissed back. Aaron flinched at both the news and the java breath. “I think he gets a bonus if there’s something left over. He gets to keep it.” “For some of you,” Loathsome continued, “that means a base of three months’ salary. For others…” He riffled through a little spiral-bound notebook, then further proved Aaron’s estimation of him by saying, “For others, that means I don’t have that information right in front of me. Your line manager will share the details. There will be an additional month’s salary equivalent for each year of service.” “Slightly better,” Flora said, although her anger made her voice sizzle like aqua regia. Aaron couldn’t talk. He was doing the math. Three and a half months’ worth of salary sounded about right, although considering he’d moved down here for this job—and Loathsome had hired him—he still felt as if he’d shown up at a party just in time to see the guest of honor pour urine into the punch. Although he had savings, plus some stock he could sell if it came to that, the whole point of moving to Hong Kong had been to climb into this better-paying job, not to wipe out his bank accounts. He could last how long without full-time, stable work? Six months, he supposed, maybe seven before he started to panic. He knew his real emotional reaction would come much later, the splash of a stone dropped down a deep well. Panic, ennui, disbelief, and—in time, if nothing turned up—a black, chasmic depression. He’d lose weight but he had a few extra pounds he could stand to shed (at least something good would come out of this). Loathsome blathered on: “I’d really like to thank you all for your contributions to the company. These are hard times, but… I guess this is appropriate, since this is our Greater China office. As the Chinese saying goes, there’s an opportunity in every crisis.” “We do not say that!” Flora snapped, this time loud enough for people around them to hear. Leo must have detected the sour note in the air, because he backtracked right away, saying he’d always heard that, but there was a lot of truth in it, blah blah fucking blah. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I am so sorry—sorrier than words can express—to be the bearer of this bad news.” Without waiting for formal dismissal, people stood up and began to leave the room. For the first time, Aaron heard crying—no sobs, but a few people were unmistakably breaking down. The woman with the cubicle closest to the door of the main office had a friend on either side of her, both offering consolation as she cried with her face in her hands. He didn’t have to hear their words; their body language told him everything he needed to know. Six months, he thought. Fuck me. In this economy? How many banks will close between now and then? 2.
As Aaron had expected, the newly ejected weren’t allowed time on their laptops. In the vertigo crash of shock and relief that followed this announcement, he took a couple of deep breaths to keep himself steady. He...