"Er, well, that's, uh, not entirely, um, accurate ..."

"Your resume is woefully thin, Mr Thorbiornsen."

The man was British. Every time he said "Mr Thorbiornsen" he sounded like he had eaten something vaguely unpleasant but was too polite to say so. Or spit it out. It didn't help the situation that Erik couldn't shake the feeling that he was being interviewed by a Bond villain.

"Well, uh, I am only eighteen, uh, sir, it's kinda hard to, y'know, accumulate –"

"You have not, in fact, held down a single job in your life, Mr Thorbiornsen. That does not recommend you. There is not even, Mr Thorbiornsen, a month with an unpleasant fast food franchise listed here. Most young persons of your age have at least managed that."

Gloomily, Erik stared at the paperweight/snow globe on the man's desk. Inside it was a tiny model beach of the tropical variety. He wondered if the man thought a snow globe with a tropical beach in it was weird. He wondered if the man would understand if he explained that there were no fast food restaurants in Doherty. Probably not. There were McDonald's restaurants in Saudi Arabia, he was sure. This man with his improbable snow globe would never believe that there existed a town on the continent that did not have a convenient fast food outlet to give surly teenagers completely irrelevant information to put on their resumes.

This man probably didn't even believe Northern Saskatchewan existed.

"I do, uh, have some work experience, uh, sir. It's, er, right on the front page." Wasn't it? How could it not be? There was only one page to begin with. Front page. What an idiot.

"Ah. Yes. You are, I presume, referring to what you have listed here as employment from 1995 to 2003, with an establishment as a dishwasher and waiter." The man did not sound pleased. His voice was as cold as the snow globe beach looked.

"Yessir," Erik gulped, nervousness slurring the words together so he sounded drunk instead of alert and attentive. He was obviously making a great impression.

"Mr Thorbiornsen, you have, in fact, listed the name of this establishment as The Restaurant." Wherever this man went, beaches clearly were frigid.

"Yessir."

"What restaurant would this be, then, Mr Thorbiornsen?"

"The Restaurant. Sir."

The man glared at Erik. He wished he had thought to wear a sweater.

"There's, uh, only the one, you see. Sir. Um. Up there. Er. In –"

"Crow Lake. Yes. Quite. How very ... post-modern of the owner," he said, making it clear that he thought it was anything but.

"Sir," said Erik, helplessly.

"1995 until 2003, Mr Thorbiornsen? When were you born, Mr Thorbiornsen?"

"November," bleated Erik, feeling cold, sheeplike, and vaguely traumatized.

The man appeared to be waiting.

"Twenty-sixth?" Erik ventured.

The man's perfectly sculpted eyebrows of cool, intellectual evil drew down and together in a perfect frown.

"1985?" Erik essayed once he could speak, the year emerging from his lips as a barely audible squeak.

"1985," the man said, his hearing evidently excellent. "1985, Mr Thorbiornsen. Which would make you, Mr Thorbiornsen, how old in 1995?"

"Ten," came the squeak, although once it had escaped, Erik feared the question had been one of those unfair rhetorical ones.

"Ten, Mr Thorbiornsen. Ten. Do you realize, Mr Thorbiornsen, that this is a country blessed with laws about child labour?"

"It, uh, wasn't, um, not, er, wait, it wasn't like that, uh, sir. My, my father, he, uh, he was the, uh, owner of the, the, The Restaurant. Sir. So it, it wasn't –"

"Actual employment, was it, Mr Thorbiornsen?"

"It felt like –"

"I suppose the Daniel Thorbiornsen listed amongst your references would be the father in question?"

Erik couldn't make his mouth form words, so he just nodded. The only people he'd been able to think of who might provide a good reference, or, at least, not a character assassination disguised as a reference, had been his father and his high school guidance counsellor/English teacher/part-time secretary. He'd put Dustin's mother under the list of references, too, in the hopes that she'd forgotten her son was in Montreal and give Erik a good reference to keep him too busy to exert his evil influence on her darling boy.

"Relatives, Mr Thorbiornsen, do not qualify as proper references."

Erik thought this blatantly unfair, under the circumstances, and would have told the frowning man so, if it weren't for the fact that his throat appeared to be paralysed.

"Really, Mr Thorbiornsen, perhaps you should have endeavoured to gather the experience for a proper resume before you began wasting the time of busy individuals with these useless applications."

He couldn't get a proper job without a good resume showing him to be, if not qualified, then at least experienced at something. He couldn't present a decent resume until he got a job. There was something terribly depressing about this cycle. Erik tried to push these circular thoughts away and think of something helpful, or intelligent, or at least coherent to say.

"I was on my high school basketball team," Erik heard a thin voice say. His? Fuck.

"Four years. Yes. I saw." The man's cool eyes travelled up to the top of Erik's head and then back down again. "Somehow, Mr Thorbiornsen, I am not surprised."

The burning from the blood rushing to his face felt all the worse for the chill that inhabited the rest of his body.

"Mr Thorbiornsen, I should hope it is self-evident that there is not a position available here for you, at this time." The man slid the thin sheet of paper that was Erik's resume onto the top of the pile of, presumably, similarly discarded candidates.

Erik wanted to rage at the man, point out the paradox he had presented. He wanted to explain with all the eloquence he could muster how difficult it was to find work as a teenager when you lived in Crow Lake, Saskatchewan. He wanted the man to know that he was stuck in a two-room apartment with no one but a lunatic for company for the next four months. He wanted to take the improbable paperweight/snow globe that was now sitting on his resume, tell the man how stupid it was, and shove it up the man's ass.

He asked, meek and soft-voiced, "Sir, if my resume was so inadequate, sir, why did you even call me for an interview, uh, sir? If, uh, it, um, isn't rude to ask, sir."

The man's eyebrows rose from their frown and he told Erik why.

The door of apartment 306 burst open, slamming loudly against the wall only to swing back with equal violence and clip Erik's elbow as he stomped in. Swearing and grasping his arm, he kicked aside an empty pizza box and made his way into the apartment.

Sprawled on the couch with a book over his face, Ray didn't even look up at Erik's noisy entrance.

With a scowl, Erik threw himself on the end of the couch in an attempt to annoy his work-free roommate. The couch shuddered a bit on impact and Ray's book fell on the floor, while Ray did nothing but roll over and smash his face into the back of the couch.

"You idle rich types are disgusting," Erik said, shaking Ray's leg impatiently.

Ray yawned and opened an eye. "I am not an idle rich type."

"One of us was out looking for a job. The other apparently spent the equivalent amount of time napping. Sounds pretty damn idle to me."

"I was studying, Thor."

"The insides of your eyelids, maybe."

"A power nap in order to gather my mental facilities."

Erik rolled his eyes. "Whatever. Shouldn't a ninja be a bit more alert? What if I'd been an enemy ninja coming to kill you in your sleep?"

"What if I heard you trip getting out of the elevator and this was all a ruse to lull you into a false sense of security?" Ray countered, before smothering another yawn.

"Why would you even bother?" Erik asked, getting entangled in the mess of stupid hypothetical questions despite himself.

"Well, maybe I've been hired by a terrorist group that's very anti-Viking –"

"I'd think they'd want someone more competent. And fast acting," Erik interrupted with a pointed look at Ray's stomach.

"They only contacted me last night. Or maybe I'm from the future –"

"They don't have a reliable way to help you lose weight in the future?"

"And your horrible early 21st century food is having an adverse effect on my advanced metabolism," Ray finished smoothly. He propped himself up on his elbows, the position making his stoutness less evident.

"Hate to see what a cold would do to you," said Erik. He tried not to grin.

"All of this, of course, is irrelevant to my mission, which is to keep your clumsy self from unleashing the apocalypse."

"Or you fell asleep because you were up half the night trying to unlock Mixy's alternate outfit in Ragespawn –"

"It is the only reason to ever suffer having her in battle."

"And you just don't want me blabbing if a mysterious old man with a Japanese accent calls and asks about you."

"If that were the case, I'd just hide the phone from you."

"It does ring, you know."

"So I'd have to deafen you as well," said Ray in a burst of logic. "See the wealth of explanations available to you if you didn't persist in jumping to these silly conclusions?"

"They're stunning," Erik said dryly. "Were you studying at all?"

"Were you really at a job interview?" Ray countered, picking his book up off the floor.

Erik grimaced. "Yes."

"And how was that?" Ray asked with a pleasant smile that oozed manipulative, amoral bastard.

"Didn't get it," Erik said glumly. "It wasn't even a real interview. They lured me there under false pretenses. Is that even legal?"

"Did you get that bit in writing?" Ray asked, flipping through his book.

"No."

"Record it?" Ray asked as he found his place again and settled back.

"No ..."

"Have witnesses?"

"Not as such, no," Erik admitted.

"Then I doubt you have a case. Confine your grumbling to places outside a courtroom. That won't involve you spending a lot of nonexistent money on a case you'd probably lose anyway." Ray's words were unusually blunt, spat out as though they were part of an automatic reflex. Most of his attention was instead focussed on digging about in between the couch cushions with one hand until he produced a pencil, which he promptly popped in his mouth, where it was gnawed on in a thoughtful manner.

Erik made a face. He wouldn't want to put his hand between the couch cushions on principle. "I sort of figured you, being my friend and all, would be my hypothetical lawyer in this hypothetical lawsuit."

"I'm touched, Thor, but I'm not a lawyer," said Ray distantly. He scribbled a mark in his book.

"You're taking the test, though," Erik persisted.

"To get into law school. The two are not actually equal, my dear Thor." Another mark, this one made with some force.

"Well, you could at least agree to be my hypothetical lawyer."

"Hypothetically, why exactly would we be suing this guy?" asked Ray. He began to mark something in his book, stopped, and started erasing frantically. When he was done, he moved the pencil fractionally and made a mark.

Erik eyed Ray, unsure of how to respond.

"Discrimination on the basis of being a Caucasian male really would not go over well. I won't believe the interviewer was drunk enough to make a pass at you. And I'm fairly certain your natural lack of grace doesn't qualify as a disability until you actually lose a limb. So," asked Ray as he punctured each statement by making an emphatic mark in his book, "what did he do, exactly? If this comes down to you just not being hired, I don't want to waste my hypothetical time on suing everyone in the city. I'm fairly certain the hypothetical judge wouldn't be impressed, either. He's got mean eyes. And a unibrow. Never aggravate a judge with a unibrow," he said, in the tone of one sharing a piece of great wisdom.

Erik hunched his shoulders up automatically, as though they could prevent Ray from saying something even more annoying or embarrassing.

"The Honourable Judge Hypothetical Unibrow is becoming impatient, Thor."

"I think I've changed my mind," Erik grumbled. "I think I want a lawyer who can remember my name."

"Sigurd," said Ray, drawling the name out for the amount of time it took to make two marks in the book and turn the page.

Erik grimaced. "I was told," he said, trying to keep his voice deadpan and distant, "that I had only been called in for an interview because the lady I handed my resume to the other day made a point of telling her boss, when she brought him my resume, that I was the tallest, most freakishly skinny human being she had ever laid eyes on." Erik thought he did an impressive job of keeping the next bit from sounding as horribly glum as it made him feel. "I suppose she must be quite gifted in the storytelling department, because her description of me was so vivid that her boss had to see me for himself."

For a minute the only sounds were Ray's slow breathing, Erik's shallow, uneven breaths, and the noise made by Ray's pencil when he jammed it into the paper.

"I'm not going to try and convict a man for having a mind powered by scientific inquiry, Thor. Case closed." Ray flipped to the back of the book for a minute, then returned to his paper. "There's beer in the fridge."

Erik grunted his thanks and got up. Ray responded by instantly slouching back down and stretching his leg out as far as they would go.

"Maybe you should take this as a sign, Thor."

"Eh?" Erik tugged open the fridge door. Inside, it was well stocked with beer, but very little else. At the moment, he was not inclined to complain.

"Possibly you'd have better luck if you applied to the circus for a job."

"Ha-fucking-ha," said Erik, letting the fridge door slam shut as he opened his beer. "Tell me, Ray. Wouldn't it make more sense for you to nap while I'm here and study while I'm out?"

There was a smirk in Ray's voice. "My dear Thor, while there may be no one to distract me into conversation while you're absent, your presence is simply an inspiration in academic endeavours. Even ones as trivial as this," he said and the smirk died, leaving only irritation and the sound of one hand coming down heavily on the book.

Erik blinked. "What?"

"You remind me," said Ray simply, "of all those things which I should like to avoid in life. You are the embodiment of a negative exemplar. I see you and think 'Well, I certainly don't want to end up like poor Thor, best study so I can become a productive member of society in some far off day.' You see?"

Erik saw. The can of beer he chucked at Ray just missed hitting his roommate's foot and rolled onto the floor.

Erik listened, dismally, to his mother's voice on the answering machine as he sorted through a stack of mail. It was mostly junk.

Had he found a job yet? He had written his last exam weeks ago.

They understood that finding a job was hard. He wasn't being blamed for his continual unemployment.

Money was getting increasingly tight. If he didn't think he could find a job in the city, he should probably think about subletting his apartment and coming back home for the summer.

Money was tight.

Money was always tight.

However, money particularly needed to be saved right now. Collin had to go to Athens.

Couldn't he just try a bit harder to find work?

Good boy.

There was one piece of mail that was not junk mail and yet was still addressed to him. It was from a little old lady Erik had been interviewed by earlier in the week. It told him that he was a very sweet boy, but they had decided to hire someone else.

Erik deleted the message from his mother. He contemplated throwing the rejection letter in the garbage, but after a minute of thought, he shoved the letter in his pocket instead. It didn't seem likely that Ray, no matter how bored he was, could be seized by an urge to start poking through the garbage, but Erik didn't want to chance it.

"You haven't gone deaf, have you?" asked Erik, tossing Ray's mail on the table.

"Don't believe so, Thor."

"Right, then. So one of those enemy ninja came in and chopped off your legs, eh?"

"I'd like to think I'd notice that," Ray said with a sniff.

"Ah, of course. Then it must have been a pirate."

Ray snorted derisively. "Hell no!"

"Well, then, I'm out of reasonable explanations for why you have suddenly and mysteriously forgotten how or lost the ability to answer the phone," said Erik, grabbing a beer and going to fall on the couch.

"I've been concentrating so hard," said Ray, shooting a wounded look at Erik, "that I entered a zen-like state upon which the sound of the ringing phone could not intrude."

Erik looked from his beer to Ray and then to the television. He rolled his eyes. "Yes, this level is quite difficult, eh?"

"Damn right, Thor. Damn right."

Erik parked Dustin's car in the nearly deserted shopping centre parking lot and grabbed the battered section of the paper with the want ads in it from its spot in the passenger seat. He shook the pages open as best he could and tried to smooth the relevant section out over the steering wheel. He hunched over wheel and paper, the top of his head pressing against the roof of the small car.

In the paper, circled with blazing yellow highlighter that showed through on the other side of the page and had transferred to several pages after that, was a minuscule ad about an establishment needing to hire for all positions.

To Erik's mind this implied a certain desperation. It also promised very good odds. They'd be hiring lots of people for lots of different things. Applying for a job here was like applying for many jobs at once.

Although, with so many positions open, it probably meant flocks of unemployed would be applying, and Erik didn't do very well against competition. At all. Ever.

Trying to rouse some long-neglected sense of optimism in himself, Erik grit his teeth and carefully checked the address to make sure he was at the right place.

Address: confirmed.

Carefully, Erik scanned the fronts of the little stores and businesses, looking for the one he wanted. He looked down at the paper obsessively.

ZEN JUICE, proclaimed the ad in tiny block letters.

Erik looked at the storefronts again, hitting his head in the process. Between a candle store and a florist's with drooping, wilting flowers on display in the windows, was wedged what Erik could only assume was the right place because the address did match. But the windows were covered in paper and where the paper was falling was visible nothing. No suggestion of lights actually being on could be seen. Above the dark windows were purple-blue letters surrounded by stylized, rainbow bubbles which read Zen Jews.

Frowning with slight confusion, Erik nevertheless gathered his resume in one hand and the paper under one arm as though it could provide some kind of insurance. Clinging to both, he left the comparative safety of Dustin's car and approached the dark store. Hesitantly, he knocked on the glass door, but got no response. It also hurt his knuckles. Nervously, he put his hand to the door handle and gave a tentative tug.

The door was unlocked.

Erik found this inexplicably worrying. What if burglars had broken in and were still pillaging the place? Never mind that there seemed to be no visible reason why anyone would want to break into such a place.

Or what if there weren't any burglars at all, but the ad and the entire store were just a front for some criminal agency? Drug trafficking, or a white-slavery ring, or ... or something!

He wondered when Ray would notice he was missing. He wondered when his parents would notice and, when they did and the truth came out, if his disappearance and/or death would just be filed in their heads as one final and deadly screw-up from perpetual screw-up Sigurd Erik Thorbiornsen. He wondered –

– why he was being such an idiot and pulled the door open.

His shoulders were still tense.

It was dark inside. Erik could make out the shapes of covered furniture, barely, and moved carefully between the mysterious lumps.

He tripped over one, a chair by the way it tangled with his legs, anyway.

Erik lay on the floor in the darkness, the chair and most of the sheet that had been covering it on top of him for an uncertain length of time before lights came on. A male voice let out an exclamation of "What the fuck?" and footsteps approached.

Erik hoped it wasn't someone with a gun.

A face appeared above him, with red-rimmed eyes, scraggly blond hair, and a scragglier, slightly reddish, goatee. "What the fuck?" said the voice again, peering at Erik in a way that looked as blurry as Erik felt.

Erik blinked. He tried to think of something to say and all that came out was, "Hi-my-name's-Erik-I-saw-your-ad-in-the-paper-and-I'd-like-a-job-please."

In retrospect, his paranoia may have caused him to over prepare.

The face looked baffled and shook before disappearing. "How about we get you off the floor first, eh kid?"

Erik's breathing slowly began to move away from that region which was perilously close to hyperventilating as the sheet was pulled up and away, swiftly made into a compact bundle, and thrown into a corner, where it promptly became un-compact again. Then the chair was removed and set upright, allowing Erik to roll over and eventually get to his feet with some help from a proffered hand. The face looked blearily startled as Erik unfolded, rubbing the back of his head and looking down at the man with what he was sure was a terribly stupid expression. But there were no exclamations along the lines of "Holy fuck, you're the tallest, skinniest freak I've ever seen and if you wait there, I'll just go and call a circus to find out how much they'd like for you."

Take that, Ray and everything Ray had ever said and might ever say.

"So," the man said slowly as he looked Erik up and down. There was a care to his words, like he was reading them off cue cards a long way off, so the words were barely visible. They may also have been in another language and the man was being forced to translate them in his head before speaking. "So," he said again, "you're Erik and you're here for a job."

Erik nodded. The newspaper and his resume had been lost in the fall. Without them, he found himself at a loss and didn't trust his mouth to form any intelligent words.

Or semi-intelligent words.

Or any words at all, really.

"You must be damn keen, kid. Couldn't wait for me to get back from grabbing my breakfast, he?" said the man.

Guiltily, Erik's eyes darted to the man's left hand. It was holding a greasy paper bag from Margie's Pita Palace: Now Open 24/7!!!

"Uh," said Erik.

"There was a note on the door," the man continued.

"Oh," gulped Erik.

"Didn't see it? Or is my handwriting that fucking bad?" asked the man with a sigh. He sounded terribly earnest, but Erik's jittery mind and body were in no condition to process this fact and as a response all the man got was an unsteady "Erm". The stuttered syllable made him pinch the bridge of his nose and grimace in pain. "Are you just going to stand there and piss yourself?" he asked impatiently. "Is that how this is going to go?"

"Nur," admitted Erik.

"Okay, let's try this. You make yourself useful, go find another chair, and then go in the back and make coffee. Can you make coffee?"

Erik nodded dumbly, then tried to get tongue, vocal chords, and brain aligned. "Kinda," he croaked.

Possibly it would have been better to remain silent. The word did not, to Erik's ears, contain volumes of reassurance, and from the expression on the man's face, he felt the same way. But he didn't say anything. He simply pulled the chair that had attacked Erik over to the naked table and began dissecting the bag from Margie's with exaggerated care.

Wary of the other tables and chairs, Erik made his way to the back of the building and a scruffy coffee machine that still managed to be daunting thanks to its various knobs and sheer size. It took Erik about ten minutes to figure the machine out and another five after that to realize that its persistent refusal to produce a cup of any kind of coffee was because it was completely empty. Faced with a choice of going back to the front and asking the man with the goatee where various things were kept, which would surely result in his being subjected to sarcasm, disdain, disapproval, or instructions to get his incompetent ass out, or with fumbling in private confusion until he found what needed to be found, he chose the later.

It only took him another twenty-five minutes.

Emerging form the back with a cup of coffee finally clutched in a lightly trembling hand, Erik found the man having apparently finished his breakfast and looking sleepy, as well as more than a bit bored.

He looked up from his tired contemplation of the half-crumpled Margie's bag and a startled expression was fleetingly visible across his face as he looked at Erik. "It takes you that long to make a fucking cup of coffee?" he exclaimed incredulously.

Erik explained as best he could, with a lot of stuttering and poorly placed pauses.

The man took the cup of coffee and drank for a minute in thoughtful silence before setting it down on the table by the Margie's bag. The shot of caffeine seemed to have removed a lot of the blurriness from the man. "You know, kid, there was a jar of instant and an electric kettle under the sink."

There seemed to be no appropriate or adequate way to explain this error on his part, so Erik remained silent, wallowing in misery and discomfort.

"Jesus Christ, kid, I'm not the fucking Spanish Inquisition. Sit down," the man said, his scruffy chin jerking in the direction of the chair on the opposite side of the table.

Erik obeyed with all the grace of a poorly programmed robot. Once he was sitting, he felt even less comfortable than he had when he had been standing and looming over the man. His feet twisted about the front legs of the chair and hunched unhappily over the table, not meeting the man's eyes as he took another sip of coffee.

"This is better than the instant shit, at any rate, so I suppose I should thank you for that."

Not knowing what to say, Erik opted for the old, if unreliable, standby of absolute silence.

"Thanks," drawled the man sarcastically, the word acquiring a few extra syllables in the process. "If you eat something, are you going to throw up, kid?"

Erik shook his head. Then nodded. He thought about trying to speak, but he didn't think a garbled mating of "No" and "Fuck, yes" would clarify his position. He stared at the edge of the brightly coloured table. It was yellow.

Yellow, some frantic, distracted part of Erik's brain remembered from something his sister had said when he was a kid and she was an unfathomable, insane teenager, was a colour that was supposed to make people feel more cheerful. He focussed on the table with an intensity that did not improve his mood or alleviate the urge to vomit. It did, however, make his eyes hurt.

This meditation on the table was interrupted by the man, who had probably realized that he could wait for hours and still not get a definite answer from Erik. "A gamble, then. Okay, that's cool." The bag from Margie's was pushed across the table to sit in front of Erik. "You throw up, you clean up, eh?"

Erik managed something resembling a definite nod and opened the bag. It contained what Erik could only assume were the remains of the man's breakfast: half of one of Margie's breakfast pitas. One of the variety that had the misfortune to be the bastard offspring of Mexican cuisine and a crepe, disowned by both. He could only tell this because one of Ray's less brilliant, drunken, one a.m. ideas had involved staggering to Margie's.

Eyeing the breakfast pita, Erik wondered if this was some kind of test. A glance at the man's coffee cup revealed nothing. Not wanting to appear ungrateful, which also involved erring on the side of caution and cowardice, Erik ate the pita.

It was disgusting.

Margie, if she existed, was an evil woman.

She was also a woman who must have been high on LSD if she thought powdered sugar, jalapeno peppers, and sweetened cottage cheese were an appetizing combination.

"Your average first world eatery," the man said, as Erik devoted his attention to chewing and keeping his face bland, "contrives to make a meal for a single person contain enough actual food for somewhere between one and a half and two and a half people. This is a primary cause of both obesity and food wastage. This wastage allows companies to charge exorbitant prices for a quantity of food you either cannot or should not eat." The man stared expectantly at Erik over his coffee cup.

Baffled, Erik essayed a nod.

This seemed to be the correct response, because the man took a sip of his coffee and continued. "It's a fucking crime, it really is, and typical of capitalist society."

"Mm," Erik ventured around a painful mouthful.

"But they stare at you funny if you try and order something from the menus designed for senior citizens. Which provide portions of a more reasonable size for someone of my age. Or yours, I suppose. How old are you, kid?"

"Eighteen," Erik mumbled after swallowing. He tried to ignore the burning in his throat.

"Well, okay, maybe not your age. Eighteen, you could probably eat an entire cow in one sitting and still have room for a plate of veal. You know what veal is?"

Erik blinked, thrown by this line of interrogation, but he nodded. Did he look that stupid?

"You ever have any?"

The man stared at Erik in a way which suggested the honest answer was not, in this instance, the correct one, so he shook his head and finished the pita.

"Good kid," said the man, finishing his coffee. "You a student, kid?"

Erik nodded. The line of questioning suddenly seemed much less bizarre, lacking dead baby cows or critiques of capitalism.

"Major?" the man asked, stealing back the Margie's bag and crumpled it into a ball, then smoothing it out again.

"That, uh, I haven't quite, um, decided where to, uh, focus my, er, energies," Erik managed. It sounded better than "I haven't a fucking clue" at least. Another point against honesty.

"You taken any philosophy classes?"

"No-o," Erik said, unsure as to the ideal response to the odd question. Honesty seemed the best bet, though. What if this guy could call the university and ask? Was that sort of thing confidential? He should ask Ray. But only if Ray were to be miraculously replaced by someone sane. Preferably someone who was less of a jackass.

"Good," said the man bluntly. "Hate fucking philosophy students."

"Er," said Erik, taken aback by the vehemence with which the man condemned unfortunate students of thought. Unless he was just condemning the practise of sleeping with them, which would not bode well for Erik in whatever direction the conversation was going. What would be so bad about sleeping with a philosophy student, anyway? Were they just too chatty? This guy didn't seem like he'd have a problem with that sort of thing, unless they started philosophizing about how tasty baby cows were. Did they call out the names of long-dead philosophers during the throws of passion? Why would you care, unless you had some serious concerns about your partner harbouring necrophiliac tendencies? Erik wouldn't mind sleeping with a philosophy student, if one existed who would give him the time of day and then want to have sex with him. Even if she cried out Freud's name during sex. Was Freud a philosopher? Sigmund and Sigurd were really close, anyway, not that he'd sleep with anyone who called him Sigurd –

"So, you want a job?"

"Uh, yes, sir –"

"Kevin, kid. Kevin Crane," the man interrupted. He was frowning fiercely, as though Erik had made some huge mistake.

"Uh, right. Kevin. A job. Yes. I, uh, brought a resume ..." Erik's voice trailed off and he snapped his head from side to side, his eyes scanning the floor for some glimpse of his resume. "It, uh, sort of went flying when I, er, tripped. I'm, uh, not quite sure what happened to it. I think it's probably under a chair, maybe, or a table, unless it –"

"Doesn't matter," said Kevin. He held up a hand to stop the flow of babbling about the possible locations of the resume. "What was your name again? Erik?"

"Erik Thorbiornsen," he mumbled.

Kevin's expression changed to one of genuine confusion for a second. He even looked slightly daunted before regaining his composure. "Erik. Right. Where you from, Erik?"

"Crow Lake."

Kevin's red-rimmed eyes looked confused again, but he remained silent. Coolly silent. This silence was a cunning tactic, unlike Erik's blank, too-stupid-to-form-words silences. It compelled him to elaborate.

"Saskatchewan?"

"Never heard of it," said Kevin. For some reason, this seemed to please him. "Around where?"

"Doherty," said Erik, but this was just as mysterious to Kevin as the original village.

"Near what parallel would you say?"

What?! Would the next question be "Point out your exact location on this map of the solar system?" What was a parallel, anyway? One of those lines on a globe, Erik was sure, but the ones that went around the world, like a belt, or up and down, like an old man's suspenders? Who even learned geography anymore?

"Fifty-ninth?" Erik picked a number at random.

Kevin looked even more pleased, if possible, although Erik's couldn't help wondering if the number meant anything more to him or if he were just faking it for some bizarre purpose. This entire thing was bizarre. Less like a job interview, if it even was that, and more like a practical joke.

Had Ray dragged himself out of bed yet?

"Do you have any experience working in the food industry, Erik?"

"Some," Erik mumbled. His stomach didn't feel so good. Would this interview be going better if Kevin had the resume in front of him or not?

No elaboration was requested. No explanation, details, dates. Kevin just accepted Erik's answer and moved to the next question on his mental list. If such a thing could be assumed to exist. "You worked as a waiter?"

"Yeah," said Erik. He was feeling almost relaxed again, his fingers barely clutching the happy-yellow table at all, but he didn't allow the normalcy of the questions to lull him into a false sense of security this time.

"Dishwasher? I don't mean just loading the dishwasher at home when your parents nag you. Actual dishwashing."

"Yeah."

Kevin looked sceptical, but continued. "You ever work at a McDonald's, Erik?"

What was with potential employers and McDonald's? "Uh, no, I haven't."

"Some other fast food place?" Kevin persisted.

Fuck. "No, never. Not a lot of those up North, eh?" said Erik in a burst of what his parents would have labelled 'attitude'.

"Good to hear," said Kevin. He beamed. Another perplexing secret test passed. "Welcome to Zen Juice, Erik."

The test, apparently. His subconscious clearly searching for an opportunity to screw up, he found himself saying "Don't you want to wait until I can get you another copy of my resume?"

"Kid, resumes are for finding employment at soulless corporations where no one will ever bother to differentiate between you and a couple dozen other young kids in need of work. They don't look at your resume either, by the way," Kevin said, in the tone of one sharing a fiercely guarded secret. "Does this look like a soulless corporation to you?"

"No-o?"

"Then relax and consider yourself employed, kid!" Kevin said, patting Erik's shoulder. "You're a bundle of fucking nerves. Relax."

Erik tried to do as ordered. He hoped a tense slouch could pass for relaxation.

"That's better. Much better. No handshake, though; germs."

"Uh, right."

"So, Erik, as a newly employed employee of Zen Juice, do you have any questions?"

The newly employed employee had a lot of questions, but most of them seemed to have been specifically generated by his brain to get him fired. He was, for once, definitely sure that asking "Are you insane or just high?" was not something to ask one's new boss. He settled on the question which seemed least likely to involve judgement of Kevin Crane's sanity. It was important to ask at least one question. It made you look keen. The good kind of keen, not the break-and-enter keen.

"Is there a reason the sign outside says Zen Jews?"

Kevin's eyes grew wide in genuine startlement and no little horror, which he quickly tried to cover with an expression of exaggerated nonchalance. "Would you believe it's meant to provoke deep and zen-like contemplation as to its meaning?"

"Am I supposed to?"

Kevin stared.

Erik flinched away from the stare, feeling guilty, although he wasn't sure why. "You ... said you didn't like philosophy ..." explained Erik helplessly. "That, uh, does sound awfully philosophic."

Kevin stared a moment longer. Suddenly, it seemed that Erik's presence was making him feel sick, because he looked away, shutting his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. "Why don't you take this cup to the back and demonstrate those dishwashing skills. In less than half an hour, please, kid."

Erik stumbled into apartment 306 and tripped over Ray's shoes, but he didn't care. He felt exhilarated. Or confused. Exhilaratedly confused, then.

A bit nauseous, too.

He tried not to examine the feeling too closely.

"Hey, Ray! I got a job!" he announced. He was almost tempted to suggest going out for drinks, on him, but it wasn't even noon and there was no point in disrupting a precedent of Ray serving some purpose.

Ray was less than enthusiastic. He hissed an impatient "Sh!" from the couch without moving his eyes from the screen. In the background, the love interest was explaining how her entire existence had all been a ploy of some sort to further the evil plot of the mad doctor. Who she actually was. After, Erik supposed, some extensive surgery, because hadn't there been one of those rare fade-to-black scenes twenty hours earlier?

Erik shuddered and made his way into the apartment. "When do you write that LSAT thing, Ray?"

"Next week," said Ray impatiently, pausing the game. "What is it, Thor? Things are finally getting interesting."

"Just glad to see you aren't letting your nerves get to you or anything like that."

"It's important to keep a clear head for this kind of examination, Thor. It's not knowledge, it's confidence. Calm. Cool. That sort of thing."

"Uh huh," said Erik, unimpressed. "I got a job."

"Circus passing through?"

Erik ignored this. "One of those flaky coffee houses or juice bars or something is opening up on 8th. Zen Juice."

"Never heard of it."

"It's only just opening up," Erik repeated impatiently. The nausea was definitely back. He blamed Ray. He wished Dustin were around. Dustin could have been enthusiastic, in a Dustin kind of way.

"So you're a coffee monkey."

"Something like that, I guess. A job's a job," said Erik, feeling almost philosophic through the nausea.

"I thought they hired hot chicks to be coffee monkeys. Maybe that's only at the big chains, though. Small-time, independent operators have to settle for fellows like you, I suppose. You should offer up a prayer of thanks for such minor entrepreneurs, Thor."

"I'm an atheist," was all Erik could think of saying.

"Offer it to your favourite scientist, then. Hell, Thor, I don't have all the answers. You must find your own. Fly free, young Viking, fly free!"

Before Erik could wrack his brain for a semi-witty retort, the nausea surged up violently and he realized he couldn't blame Ray for it. Damn Margie, he thought, and bolted to the bathroom to be messily sick in the toilet. As he recovered from the first violent expulsion of the breakfast pita, Ray left the couch to lean in the bathroom doorway.

"Food poisoning? Is that considered a good omen at the beginning of a new job? I admit that I'm not familiar with all of your customs yet."

Erik glowered from his position over the toilet.

"Ah, right, I forgot. Atheist. You probably like to pretend you don't hold with such superstitions."

"Could you pretend to be a human being?" asked Erik.

"You want me to call your dear mother and tell her how you've finally become less of a leech, or will once we get your stomach pumped?"

Erik responded by throwing up again, rather loudly.

"I'll take that as a no," said Ray and shut the door, heading back to his interrupted game.