goneawayworld | SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

SHEET CAKE MEETUP

“Who the fuck is Linda?”

The question pops up every few minutes, a little tack of punctuation above the offensively-inoffensive music being piped in*. The room the hires have been ushered into is clearly just a conference room, with a layout that requires either sitting at awkwardly-spaced intervals around a giant table or milling and scooting around the smaller folding table, where the “big surprise” the corporate officers promised them is on display: a sheet cake.

A sheet cake that that still bears HAPPY BIRTH DAY LINDA in blue icing across the top, although someone has, at least, gone to the effort of writing welcome, to the team new hires in Sharpie on a purple flashcard and used a Popsicle stick and tape to plant it like a dismal flag right in the middle of Linda’s “DAY”. Dedication aside, the cake itself looks pretty suspect too, not as if it were poisoned but more like if it were salvaged. The cake part looks dry, and the frosting seems strangely...sweaty. No one’s eating yet, and yet there’s already a piece missing.

However, there’s no lack of enthusiasm around the room. A projector hooked up to a laptop casts an off-center, warped rectangle of WELCOME TO, THE BEST TEAM. NEW HIRES!! onto a wall. The many paper plates have a festive print, although they all seem to be Christmas themed. The table cloth looks as if it came from both 4th of July and potentially a war, given the scuffs and tears. The shot-glass sized paper cups are inadequate to hold a satisfying amount of sparkling cider, but at least they don’t leak. There are many more plastic knives than forks, which could prompt some hires to give in to their animal instincts and just use their hands, or perhaps start a barter economy for the better utensils.

“I’m so jealous,” a corporate employee keeps saying as she ushers hires into the room. “We haven’t had a good party in this office since Kelly’s baby shower, and that little girl practically has teeth now!”

(An eagle-eyed hire may suspect that the box of donuts next to the sheet cake might have come from said baby shower, on account of the fact that the few stale hunks of donut remaining have Pepto-Bismol pink strawberry icing and that there’s still the paper envelope for a gift card with ITS A GIRL written on it.)

Most of corporate slips out after the hires get set up - this is clearly an event for the hires to do some “team building” and work on “rapport” in addition to filling their bellies with cake that tastes remarkably like sand. There’s a karaoke machine in the corner, but hires are instructed not to touch it because, as an employee points out, last year’s Christmas party demonstrated that karaoke is the worst thing in the entire world for morale (“in any world! even before this one got eaten away by the bombs!”).

There’s an additional big glass jar filled with scraps of paper, which the hires are informed are filled with prompts for ice breakers and activities in case the party needs a pick-me-up. Any hire who investigates will find that most of the ice breaker activities start with three benign questions (“what’s your name?” “where are you from?” “what’s your favorite animal?”) and somehow, always a fourth question that feels a little invasive (“what are your feelings on unions?” “under what circumstances would you kill an innocent person?” “do you use the same passwords for all your accounts?”).

“Please enjoy yourselves and all the desserts Jorgmund has generously supplied you with,” one of the employees says on her way out, “and don’t worry about making a mess, janitorial gets paid too much to sit around as is.”

*All music that can be summarized as ’grocerycore’.

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"Well, obviously demons are real. They're in the bible, after all." The metaphorical alarm bells might be going off around now, because Mac's quite serious. "Ghosts, too, but only the holy ghost, so I think that's kind of a grey area."

He makes a wobbling gesture with his hands.

"The holy ghost isn't actually a ghost or a spirit," Sam rattles off, hardly even thinking about it. "Not in the way that we use either word in modern English, at least. Most bits of the Bible tend to consider the Holy Spirit more the power of creation. Actually, the Hebrew for the Spirit is ruach ha-kodesh, where ruach means breath or wind and it's postulated that Judaic authority considered the Spirit a way of communication between God and Their creations."

There's a pause while Mac squints, as if he can't focus on thinking about what was just said and looking at Sam at the same time, a break before he talks heavy with Mac trying to unstall his mental stickshift engine.

"Dude, are you saying God's a Navajo wind talker?"

That brings Sam's thought processes to a screeching halt, looking over at the other guy and just staring for a moment. "Uh. No. The wind talkers were World War II. Bible's been around a lot longer than that."

"Exactly. That's why what you're saying doesn't make any sense. But I'd check your math, bro, I'm pretty sure Navajo people have been around since way before World War II. That's kind of their beef with us, I think."

There's a chain of logic going through Mac's take on the conversation, but mapping out Mac's train of thought is frequently less like drawing lines between distinct points and more like trying to follow a pinball in a machine during an earthquake. As far as he's concerned, Sam brought the conversation to this weird place by trying to equate the Holy Spirit to 1) some Jewish thing? and 2) a medium of communication, and thus Sam needs a friendly reality check from Mac, expert in most important things in life.

"I mean...yes, the Navajo have been around a lot longer than World War II. That's just when the term 'wind talker' was actually in use. Also, not Hebrew so I'm not sure why you think the two of them have anything to do with each other."

He was going to have a headache soon. Probably really soon.

"You were just saying about talking on the wind, bro. This seems like a matter of your bad communication skills." Mac shrugs. He picks around at the donut on his plate. Maybe the sprinkles are still ed- no, they are not. They crumble like old soap crust.

Sam opens his mouth to say something, then pauses and looks at Mac for a moment while a scene from Blazing Saddles runs through his head. You know the one.

And while Sam wouldn't ever say it out loud, he's pretty sure that this guy may fall into the category.

After a moment, he offers his hand. "I'm Sam." Better to let the other conversation go.

"Mac." He grins, because he doesn't mean any ill; it's not Sam's fault he's not on Mac's level. "The, uh, the outfitters got my name wrong."

Trying to get ahead of the fact that his nametag very clearly has RONALD MCDONALD crudely and ineffectively Sharpied out.

Yeah. Sam can see that. And...okay, mentally, he may be thinking that the name fits because the guy is kind of a clown.

Just not a funny one. And probably will still give Sam reason to be afraid.

"Good to meet you, Mac." He's going to regret saying that, isn't he? "Where are you from?"

"South Philly. Go birds. Caw." Them's fighting words if Sam disagrees. "You?"

...He has no idea who the birds are, so he just nods. "Little place called Lawrence, Kansas. Born there, at least. My dad was military, so we moved around a lot."

It's not even a lie, really.

"Dude, that sucks. I was lucky, I never had to move around much, dad in prison and all." Mac's not reticent about that. It's not that his dad's cool for being in prison, just that Mac can easily play the hand of not everyone in prison is guilty or! being in prison means you're a badass criminal with a kill count in half his conversations. No matter which direction it takes, Mac gets to feel like he's won, and that's definitely the sense he gets from Tallface McGee talking about moving around a lot. Mac's had the same childhood address since 1977.

"Kansas, huh? That's pretty flyover. Is it really all cornfields?"

Sam shrugs. "It wasn't that bad, really. We saw a lot of places that we probably wouldn't have seen, though it was rough when we had to move in the middle of the school year." Or a couple of times. Sam's...mostly let go of the resentment. "And your dad being in prison must have been difficult in its own way. With him not being around much."

The last question gets a laugh. "You're thinking of Nebraska. Kansas is a lot of farm land, true, but it's mostly just flat."

"I mean, school sucks anyway, so you didn't miss a ton." Mac's high school experience was defined less by the inattentive teachers than the bullying that was only just redirected by the blatant drug-dealing. Mac had weed, quaaludes and occasionally cocaine at hand; it took the edge off of being one of the high school losers. "It wasn't that bad. He came back every few years before his P.O. busted him."

By the time Luther McDonald's parole officer was busting him, "Mac" McDonald had become accustomed to people breaking into his home in the middle of the night to take his parents away. Probation officers had done it enough that it was just a recurrent nightmare come true, not an actual unexpected event.

"Flat with like...wheat?" Mac doesn't know what flat farmland leads to.

"I always liked school. I was pretty good at it." Yes, Sam was that kid in school. One of the ones who actually enjoyed going. Though that was at least partly because it was better than his real life had been going.

But he'd also had a big brother to deal with the bullies, too.

"Dad wasn't always around, but he was raising us on his own. I think that just happens." There were a lot of reasons why John hadn't been around much, but nothing he wanted to talk about. "And...I mean, Kansas has corn. We're just not as known for it as Nebraska is."

"Nerd." The way Mac says it makes it clear that while it's good-natured needling, it's backed by a legitimate mentality of men versus dudes-who-do-science. Or whatever else nerds do. The only reason this animosity isn't weaponized is because Mac's having a good time shooting the breeze with Sam.

"Single parent, that's rough." Mac shakes his head in overstated empathy. "Honestly, I don't know much about those states in the middle."

Or about most states, even those he's a lifelong resident of.

Sam rolls his eyes, but he's still smiling as well. "Yeah, and? I'm absolutely a nerd." He fully admits it. His brother gives him shit about it all the time, but he can admit it.

"Yeah, a lot of people on the coasts don't. But it's not that surprising, though. It's a big country." And Sam knows how big it is. He's criss crossed most of it, after all

"I'm obligated to beat you up now, bro. Sorry about it." It's the natural way between nerds and people-who-suck-at-school, whether those people suck at school through natural inability, lack of motivation of unfortunate household circumstances (Mac happily checks off all three options). He doesn't sound like he means it. It's possible that even at his most threatening Mac still would come across as blithely inept, about as much of a threat as an off-duty mallcop recharging their segway.

"What's the best part of it? The country, I mean? I always had an adventurous spirit, honestly, but it's been totally squandered."

That got a raised eyebrow as the smile widened. "You can try." After all, Sam has a lot of muscles for a nerd. Mac wouldn't have an easy time trying to beat Sam up.

Not that Sam thinks he'd seriously try to beat him up. He's taking it for a joke, after all.

He looks to the ceiling, considering for a long moment. "To be honest, I do kinda like the midwest. It's quiet and the backroads are straight, so you can just let the car go. Though if I had to settle anywhere in particular? I'd probably have to go with either the mountains or maybe up in the northwest. Somewhere close to the coast, but far enough away that you don't see the tourists all the time."

"I'll warn you in advance, I've got a serious multidisciplinary background in seven or eight different kinds of martial arts." Mac absolutely does not have those things, but he likes how it sounds when he says it. Besides, he's a great spokesperson, especially on topics he's passionate about - like himself - so obviously Sam's going to buy it.

"That sounds," Mac pauses, widens his eyes, and says on a massive exhale, "so boring."

"I'm sure you are." And Sam just oozes sincerity. Of course he believes Mac. "I can't say I have any of that. I just fight dirty. Doing otherwise would get me and my brother killed back home."

The rest gets Sam to laugh, shaking his head. "It's nice, sometimes. Or it's good for catching a nap. My brother prefers to be the one doing the driving. I've caught more than my share of Z's in the passenger seat."

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SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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