The sunlight in Denver seemed brighter than it had in Maryland, but Rachel knew that was just her imagination. She figured that subconsciously her brain was telling her over and over she was closer to the sun.
She and Eleanor both ordered iced tea. They were sitting outside, watching the people and cars go by. Rachel felt a brief wave of panic, and almost wished she’d insisted that Mark come along as well. She had no idea what to say to a fourteen-year-old girl. She was doing her best, loping along with the obligatory questions about school and activities, but it all felt choppy and strange, like heading out into open water without any navigation tools whatsoever. It seemed impossible to believe that she was once a fourteen-year-old girl herself.
So when an ad for an energy drink formed in the sky over the office buildings in downtown Denver Rachel was relieved. Finally: something to cling onto, conversationally speaking. She asked Eleanor what she thought of cloud ads. But Eleanor shrugged.
“I don’t know. I know they’re controversial. But they’ve been around a long time. I figure as long as they don’t hurt the environment it’s probably okay. People don’t seem to pay as much attention to them as they used to. Didn’t they have them in Maryland?”
Rachel shook her head and explained Maryland was one of the few states that hadn’t allowed them. Although at this point, she’d traveled so much for one job or another she’d seen enough of them that she shouldn’t be surprised anymore when they materialized in the sky. “Maybe if I’d grown up seeing them like you did they wouldn’t surprise me so much,” she said.
Eleanor nodded. “Yeah, I bet that’s true. My dad really hates them. There was that dancing hamburger ad in the sky while we were all at my mom’s burial. Remember that? There was that moment it blocked out the sun.” Eleanor took a sip of her iced tea. “My dad started a campaign then to try to stop them. He was emailing our representative in Congress every day for a while. But eventually he gave up.”
Oh God, yes, Rachel thought, wincing. She’d forgotten about that. In fact, she’d pretty much blocked out that whole terrible day. The forlorn look to all the little headstones when she’d turned her head one last time on her way back to the car. The way the grass moved like waves in the wind.
“Well, I’m with your dad on that one. I don’t like them either,” Rachel said. “I don’t understand why they’re allowed, to tell you the truth.”
Eleanor blinked at her. “Really? Wow, that’s interesting.”
This surprised Rachel. “Why?”
“Oh, well, it’s just… Well, they’re environmental advertising and you’re also in environmental advertising now. So it’s your field now. Right?” Eleanor peered at her through thick eyelashes. Cassie’s eyelashes, Rachel thought.
“Well, I really start on Monday, but—” Rachel put her hand on her napkin as if she were trying to keep it from blowing away, but it was unnecessary; the silverware was already on it. “Yes. I suppose.” The job offer had literally saved her, swooping in out of nowhere at a time when she was floundering around in another futureless contract position in a suburb north of DC. It was crazy luck; she’d happened to work with one of the investors of BrandGarden years ago when he was brought in as the temporary CMO to turn around another flailing marketing department she’d been in. He’d remembered her for some reason and recommended her for the job. She had no idea what he’d told them. She supposed she was adequate at what she did, but hardly exceptional. But when she’d flown in for an interview, everyone treated her as if she were royalty. It was the same on the previous Friday, when she’d stopped in to meet a few people and fill out her paperwork. “We’ve been waiting for you,” the head of Product Development breathed in the hallway in front of a giant display of Pergot logos, his hands clasped in front of his chest. “Everyone has.”
“Well, I think it’s amazing,” Eleanor said, peering at her over the top of the menu. “Your new job, that is. That building is incredible!” She grinned. “I’ve been telling my friends that my godmother is going to be working there. They’re really impressed.”
“Oh!” Rachel was used to working at companies no one had ever heard of. She knew from her research that BrandGarden was getting more and more coverage in the press, but she was surprised that teenaged girls were aware of it. A blossom of anxiety quivered under her ribs. It was one thing to work in marketing at a little company that no one cared about, but another to work in one that had so much visibility. Not for the first time, she imagined failure plodding towards her with outstretched arms. “You’ve seen the building?”
Eleanor explained that she’d driven by it with her father. “Although I don’t know what Dad—” She put her hair behind her ears and leaned over as if she were studying the menu intently. “Well, anyway.”
Of course, Rachel thought. Mark worked in water engineering in a state where water was rapidly becoming more and more of an issue. And now along came a brash new startup that probably used water by the ton and sold products that required water to stay alive. Products that—well, why not be honest? —no one needed. Of course he wouldn’t be a fan.
“It’s okay,” she reassured Eleanor, and smiled. Really, Rachel couldn’t stop looking at her. She kept seeing glimpses of Cassie, like light shimmering off water.
Eleanor unwrapped her silverware and carefully positioned her knife and fork on either side of her plate. “You know, I heard there’s an observation area that’s open on weekends,” Eleanor said. “At your new job, I mean. Where you can see the flowers in the back. I was wondering—Well, maybe you don’t want to since you’re about to start working there, but I just thought—”
“Oh, gosh, what a good idea!” Rachel beamed at her. Finally, something that could make her feel like a proper godmother. After all, weren’t godmothers supposed to grant wishes? Here it was: a wish she could grant. “Yes, let’s do that. We’ll go over there right after lunch.”
•
Feeling like an intruder, Rachel parked in the employee lot anyway, just to see how it felt to be there. The building loomed before them, sparkling in the sun. It seemed larger than it had when she’d interviewed there, or than the day before, even. As if it had grown.
Eleanor stared at it through the windshield. “Can you believe you’re going to go to work here every day?”
“I can’t,” Rachel said honestly.
•
The day before Rachel had shown up to get her keycard and fill out her paperwork. While she was there, she’d met a few people on the marketing team she hadn’t met before, including Felicity, head of product marketing. Felicity was the type of female executive who had terrified Rachel throughout her career: expensive shoes, perfect makeup, not to mention a vocabulary full of marketing buzzwords that she fired off one by one in conversation, like bullets.
After a brief meeting with everyone upstairs, she’d walked Rachel back down to the lobby by a display of Arctic Goose logos and talked for a while about what she kept referring to as the brand story. “It’s so important to concentrate on the living aspect of our product,” Felicity said breathily. “One of our selling points is that we make brands seem like they’re alive. When people walk into the front lobby of AwesomeBurger headquarters, for example, we want the look of those beautiful logo blossoms—those cream-colored buns! that green pickle accent! —to stay with them, even if it’s on an unconscious level.”
“I see,” Rachel said, trying to arrange her face so it would appear as if all of this made perfect sense.
“I’m still working at getting this concept right, but we see BrandGarden as not just a way to promote a brand but transcend a brand,” Felicity smiled. “We believe our product carries the extratextual understanding of what it means to be alive. Does that make sense?”
“Absolutely,” Rachel lied.
Felicity put her hand on her chest. “Oh, I’m so glad!” She beamed at Rachel. “I can tell you’ll be a perfect addition to the team.”
•
Inside, Rachel and Eleanor followed the signs to check in at the front desk. The lobby was decorated with huge flowerbeds everywhere. The air smelled lightly of dirt. People milled around in little clumps, pointing at the flowerbeds full of SearchBeetle and Wunderundies and PopZing! and PinkQuark and Nescia. A tour guide was pointing out the features of the Nescia blossoms. How the long petals twined together to form a delicate letter N. “It’s designed to evoke sweetness and light, just like the product,” the tour guide explained. Everyone in the tour group nodded. They were all holding little pots of miniature versions of the Nescia logo, this month’s giveaway. They’d given Rachel one on Friday; it was now sitting on her kitchen counter next to boxes of dishes that hadn’t been put away. Remembering this, Rachel felt a twinge of guilt. She hadn’t bothered to put it in the sun.
“My goddaughter needs a visitor badge,” Rachel told the woman behind the front desk, a pretty blonde. She hadn’t been there the day before. “I’m an employee,” she explained, holding out her own badge. “Well, sort of. I came in yesterday to do the paperwork. I really start Monday.” Rachel was aware that she was babbling unnecessarily. She had the sense that the building was pressing in on her. All that bright shining light pouring down from the skylights. Not to mention the future, with all its looming expectations. Waiting.
“Welcome,” the blonde smiled.
•
There was a cafeteria in the observation area that extended out the back of the building, and the field was outside. Rachel knew from her orientation that the field was just for show; the logos that were grown and produced for companies actually came from a greenhouse twenty miles away. The logos waved gently in the breeze. Eleanor got an ice cream sundae from the ice cream bar and an orange soda, and Rachel got a cup of tea. They sat at a table by the window near a broad section of Wash Genie. Right next to their table was an observation binocular with a little platform for kids to climb up and take a look at the logos in the field. A sign on top of the binoculars read “How Many Logos Can You Identify?”
Rachel was blowing on her tea to cool it down when there was a clicking sound at the window just behind her head, and she jumped. But when she turned around, she realized it was only an artificial bee that had grazed the glass and then spun off in the opposite direction, as it had been programmed to do.
“I’ve read about those,” Eleanor said. “But it’s the first time I’ve seen one.” She wrinkled her nose. “They don’t look much like bees.”
“No,” Rachel agreed. The field was full of them, if you looked closely. Small black things that vaguely resembled shrunken airplanes whirring to and fro. One settled near them on a velvety blue blossom on a Wash Genie plant and went to work, pointing its metal nose inside each individual flower. Rachel had watched videos about the things online and learned how the specifics of each logo flower was programmed into them—the petal length, the total number of blossoms, and so on. Apparently, the flowers never varied per brand. Each as constant and predictable as plastic bottles.
Eleanor was watching it, sipping on her orange soda. The can advertised it was sweetened with Nescia, which apparently was a major partner; there was a big neon Nescia sign on the wall over the drink station.
Oh my God, Rachel thought, panicking. I need to start paying attention to this kind of thing. Alliances, partners, blah blah blah. I need to care.
Eleanor was staring out the window. “It’s funny to think about all the things that my mother didn’t live to see. I mean, she’s only been dead for five years. She’s missed so many big things. Holographic selfies, floating helpers, things like this… It’s weird that it’s been so long.”
“I know what you mean,” Rachel said, and hesitated. She didn’t want to upset Eleanor. Yet talking about Cassie was one of the reasons she was here. An unstated duty of her godmotherhood. One that she had been neglecting up until now. However, in her defense she’d been living over a thousand miles away until a couple of days ago. “You know, I still think about her every day.”
“Do you?” Eleanor was drawing patterns in the condensation on her soda can. “You guys were, like, best friends since junior high, right? I bet you used to talk about boys and stuff.”
Rachel laughed. “Oh totally. She was insane about this one guy. Alan Rogers. He was a character. Played the tuba in the high school band and was always in the school plays. Used to dress up as a gorilla at the basketball games and run around. Wrote poetry too.”
“No way!” Eleanor laughed. “He sounds like the exact opposite of my dad. Did they ever hook up?”
Rachel shook her head and said she thought he moved away. Although as she thought about it she realized it was a little disconcerting she couldn’t remember for sure. There was a time when she and Cassie used to analyze his every move. It was all such high drama. Now she could barely remember what he looked like.
“Didn’t my mom want to be a writer too? Actually, didn’t both of you want to be writers? That’s what she used to say.”
Rachel blinked. “Oh—yeah, I guess we did.” She smiled. “I’d forgotten about that, to tell you the truth.”
“What kind of things did you want to write?”
“Oh—” Rachel let out a long breath. “I don’t know. I suppose I was going to write this devastating stuff, you know, this truthful stuff…” The memory, this dream was an elusive thing. Even as she was speaking, she felt as if the words were floating away, like soap bubbles. She paused, trying to remember why she wanted to do such a thing. “I wanted anyone who was reading them to feel things very deeply,” she said finally.
“Okay,” Eleanor said, nodding in an adult-ish way. Watching her, Rachel felt a little stab of wistfulness. “What about my mother? What did she want to write?”
“Well—” That was when Rachel remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years: how secretive Cassie was about her writing. Once time Rachel stumbled across a blog she’d written—although now she couldn’t remember how. Maybe Cassie had left it open on her laptop and Rachel had either read it then or looked up the link later. But she did remember how surprised she was by what Cassie had written. Like she was trying really hard to sound like someone else. Or that she actually was someone else, and the friend Rachel thought she knew was actually just a construct of some sort. A familiar shell, but with a secret stranger inside, making secret observations. “Probably the same kind of writer,” Rachel said. “You know. The kind who writes things that leave a lasting impression.” She smiled. “You know, this was all before we started working. After that, things changed. Our priorities shifted.”
Rachel told Eleanor how Cassie started working in a real job before she did. How jealous Rachel was. It was the year after college and Rachel had a part time job as a waitress in a low-key Italian restaurant in the town where they grew up, while Cassie was getting on the metro and going into the city every day to work as an admin at a law firm. She felt like Cassie had crossed a barrier into a shiny new existence and Rachel was left behind. “It was like she’d acquired this mysterious knowledge of what the real adult world was like. The place we’d been heading our entire lives. It terrified me, to tell you the truth. All of a sudden, she knew how to buy these work outfits. Even knew what kinds of shoes to wear, what sorts of bags to carry, that kind of thing. I thought she even sounded different when she talked. Oh, your mother was crazy about that job.”
Eleanor frowned, almost imperceptibly. “Huh,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just that—” She took a sip of her soda and put it down. “Once I was out riding around with my mother—I think it was when she was already sick—and we passed an office building that she said reminded her of her first job. She said she hated that job.” She shrugged apologetically. “Maybe it was a different job—the one you remember?”
“Oh! Well—”
As much as Rachel missed Cassie, she supposed she’d forgotten some things. Like the unspoken competition between them. Rachel hated it, didn’t want it to be there, but didn’t know how to stop it. Until finally that time when they were juniors in high school, the time that Cassie blew up at her. “Why do you always have to be better at everything than me?” she’d sobbed after Rachel found out that she won a county writing competition. Rachel was stunned. She’d never thought Cassie saw her that way, even could see her that way. Cassie had immediately apologized, but still. Rachel never quite got over it.
She still felt strange, remembering. It was painful to think about the possibility Cassie was pretending how she felt about her first job for Rachel’s benefit. Trying to win at the game of life.
It’s okay, Cassie, Rachel thought sadly. You reached the end before I did. You definitely won.
*
The light shifted by a fraction. Another artificial bee buzzed low by the window. A cloud ad for an Ukul—only a 2.9% APR! —drifted lazily across the sky. The edges of the shape of the Ukul—the windshield, the tires—were shredding in the wind. Real clouds were on the horizon, gloomy and dark, over the mountains beyond the field of logos.
Next to them a man and his children—a boy and a girl—were standing at the telescope. The girl climbed up on the platform and the father helped her adjust the height so she could see. Right away she pointed and bounced up and down on her toes. “I see PopZing!” she yelled.
But Eleanor wasn’t paying attention. Instead she was looking up at the floors of offices visible through the skylight. Her eyes glowing, a little smile on her face. Rachel wished desperately she could see whatever it was that Eleanor thought she saw. “You might work here for years,” Eleanor said. “Are you excited?”
“Oh sure—” Rachel broke off. A voice out in the lobby that sounded like Felicity’s, saying something about how the flowers looked happy to have so many people around. Rachel felt her shoulders pull together sharply, as if they’d been yanked. Of course Felicity would be the type to be in the office on a Saturday, she thought. She turned her head, trying to appear nonchalant. As she did she took a deep breath, trying to summon up the person she was about to become, the one who would know the right things to say.
But it wasn’t Felicity at all. Just a mother talking to her kids.
“The extratextual understanding of what it means to be alive,” Rachel murmured out loud, remembering.
A little wrinkle formed in Eleanor’s forehead as she stared at her. Another glimmering impression of Cassie, like a dolphin surfacing and then diving back into the ocean. “I’m sorry?” Eleanor asked.
Rachel shook her head. “I was remembering something from when I was here the other day. Thinking out loud.”
The children next to them were arguing over whether a flower they saw across the field was blue or green. Their father had wandered away and was standing under an oversized potted Hannah Teas plant sprouting teacup-shaped blossoms, murmuring something into his phone about margins and likelihood.
This was almost over, this visit that was so long overdue. In some godmothery way, Rachel felt like she’d failed. Eleanor believed she was looking straight into Rachel’s great shining future, but Rachel couldn’t bring herself to tell her how she really felt. Maybe she didn’t want to disillusion her.
Maybe she didn’t want to hear herself saying any of it out loud.
Sure, she could promise herself that she could talk to her more in the future, maybe when she was older, but: she knew how this would go. She’d make plans to see Eleanor again, really try even, but Eleanor would be busy, and she would be too. In a blink a year would pass, a couple of years, and Eleanor would be applying to colleges, inching ever closer to her own career, and Rachel might be a different sort of person, at least to a degree. More lines on her face, more gray in her hair, more afternoons crafting meaningless diagrams on whiteboards. More years spent caught between the fervent need to escape this building and a desperate attachment to it, like a small fish stranded behind a protective rock. Years later she might even look back on this afternoon and her anxiety with pity, condescension. Maybe she would even hold meetings in the floors above where she was sitting at that very moment, explaining earnestly to everyone how BrandGarden was inextricably tied to the extratextual understanding of what it means to be alive.
Maybe by then she would even believe it. Or come close enough to believing it that it would be practically the same thing.
Outside the wind picked up, and the last shredded remnants of the car ad separated and blew away in the sky while the logos swayed in the wind. Next to them the children turned away from the binoculars as the rain began to fall. They sat back down at the table next to them and waited for their father as the rain pounded at the windows. The girl was humming a little tune, and the boy was frowning, still looking outside. “I don’t get it,” the boy told his sister. “What the big deal is. Why all these people are here. It’s just a bunch of flowers.”
Emily Zasada’s short stories are forthcoming or have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, The Northern Virginia Review, Menacing Hedge, Penny, and Flock (formerly Fiction Fix), among other publications. Originally from the Baltimore area, she now lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son. Visit her website at www.emilyzasada.com.
