Rollback

Chapter 17

It was time, Don knew, that he got a job. Not that he and Sarah were desperate for money; they both had pensions from their employers and the federal government.

But he needed to do something with all the energy he now had, and, besides, a job would probably help get him out of his deepening funk. Despite the physical wonders of being young again, it was all weighing heavily on him — the difficulty in relating to Sarah, the jealousy of old friends, the endless hours he spent staring into space while wishing things had turned out differently.

And so he walked over to North York Centre station, just a couple of blocks from their house, and got on the subway at the station located beneath the library tower there. It was a hot August day, and he couldn’t help noticing the scantily clad young women aboard the train — all of them healthy-looking, ta

When he reached his own stop — Union Station — he got out and walked the short distance to the CBC Broadcast Centre, a giant Borg cube of a building.

He knew this place like — well, not like the back of his hand; he was still getting used to that appendage’s new, smooth, liver-spot-free appearance. But he no longer had an employee’s pass-card, and so had to wait for someone to come and escort him up from the Front Street security desk. While he waited, he looked at the full-size holograms of current CBC Radio personalities. Back in his day, they’d been a collection of cardboard standees. None of the faces were familiar to him, although he recognized most of the names.

"Donald Halifax?" Don turned and saw a slight Asian man in his mid-thirties, with incongruous peach-colored hair. "I’m Ben Chou."

"Thank you for agreeing to see me," Don said, as Ben got him through the gate.

"Not at all, not at all," said Ben. "You’re a bit of a legend around here."

He felt his eyebrows go up. "Really?"

They entered an elevator. "The only audio engineer John Pellatt would work with?

Oh, yes indeed."

They left the elevator, and Ben led them into a cramped office. "Anyway," he said, "I’m glad you came down. It’s a pleasure to meet you. But I don’t get what you’re doing applying for a job. I mean, if you can afford a rollback, you hardly need to work here." He looked around the windowless office. It happened that they were on the fifth floor, and so should have been able to see Lake Ontario, but no matter where you were in this building, it felt subterranean.

"I can’t afford a rollback," he said, taking the seat Ben was gesturing at.

"Oh, yeah, well, your wife…"

He narrowed his eyes. "What about her?"

Ben looked cornered. "Um, isn’t she rich? She decoded that first message, after all."

"No, she’s not rich, either." Perhaps she could have been, he thought, if she’d struck the right book deal at the right time, or had charged for all the public lectures she’d given in the first few months after the original message had been received. But that was water under the bridge; you don’t get a second chance at everything.

"Oh, well, I—"

"So I need a job," Don said. Interrupting his potential boss probably wasn’t a strategy a career counselor would have approved of, he thought, but he couldn’t take this.

"Ah," said Ben. He looked down at the flatsie reader on his desktop. "Well, you did Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson. Good man; so did I." Ben squinted a bit.

"Class of 1982." He shook his head. "I was class of 2035."

The point was obvious, so Don tried to deflect it by making light of it. "I wonder if we had any of the same instructors?"

To his credit, Ben snorted a laugh. "And how long did you work here at the CBC?"

"Thirty-six years," said Don. "I was a recording-engineer/producer when I…"

He backed away from saying the word, but Ben provided it, underscored by a crisp nod of his head: "Retired."

"But," continued Don, "as you can see, I’m young again, and I want to go back to work."

"And what year did you retire?"

It was right in front of him, Don knew, on his resume, but the bastard was going to force him to say it aloud. "Twenty Twenty-Two."

Ben shook his head slightly. "Wow. Who was prime minister back then?"

"Anyway," said Don, ignoring the remark, "I need a job, and, well, once the Mother Corp is in your blood…"

Ben nodded. "Ever worked on a Me

Don shook his head.

"An Evoterra C-49? Those are what we use now."

He shook his head again.

"What about editing?"

"Sure. Thousands of hours" — at least half of which had been cutting physical audio tape with razor blades.

"But on what sort of equipment?"

"Studer. Neve Capricorn. Euphonix." He deliberately left off model numbers, and he also refrained from mentioning Kadosura, which had been out of business for twenty years now.

"Still," said Ben, "the equipment keeps changing all the time."

"I understand that. But the principles—"

"The principles change, too. You know that. We don’t edit the same way we did a decade ago, let alone five decades ago. The style and pace are different, the sound is different." He shook his head. "I wish I could help you, Don. Anything for a fellow Ryerson man — you know that. But…" He spread his arms. "Even a guy fresh out of school knows the stuff better than you do. Hell, he knows it better than I do."

"But I don’t have to be hands-on," said Don. "I mean, the last while, I wasn’t much, anyway. I was mostly doing management, and that doesn’t change."

"You’re exactly right," Ben said. "It doesn’t change. Meaning a guy who looks twenty-something isn’t going to be able to command respect from men and women in their fifties. Plus, I need managers who know when an engineer is bullshitting them about what the equipment can and can’t do."

"Isn’t there anything ?" Don asked.

"Have you tried downstairs?"

Don drew his eyebrows together. "In the lobby?" The lobby — the Barbara Frum Atrium, as it was technically known, and Don was old enough to have actually worked with Barb — contained nothing much except a couple of restaurants, the three security desks, and lots of open space.

Ben nodded.

"The lobby!" Don exploded. "I don’t want to be a fucking security guard."

Ben raised his hands, palm out. "No, no. That’s not what I meant. I meant — don’t take this the wrong way, but what I meant was the museum."

Don felt his jaw go slack; Ben might as well have punched him in the gut. He’d all but forgotten about it, but, yes, in the lobby there was a small museum devoted to the history of the CBC.

"I’m not a bloody exhibit," Don said.

"No, no — no! That’s not what I meant, either. I just meant that, you know, maybe you could join the curatorial staff. I mean, you know so much of that stuff firsthand. Not just Pellatt, but Peter Gzowski, Sook-Yin Lee, Bob McDonald, all those guys. You knew them and worked with them. And it says here you worked on As It Happens and Faster Than Light."

Ben was trying to be kind. Don knew, but it really was too much. "I don’t want to live in the past," he said. "I want to be part of the present."

Ben looked at the wall clock, one of those broadcasting units with red LED digits in the middle encircled by sixty points of light that illuminated in sequence to mark passing seconds. "Look," he said, "I’ve got to get back to work. Thanks for dropping by." And he got up and extended his hand. Whether Ben’s shake was normally limp and weak, or whether he was being delicate because he knew he was shaking an eighty-seven-year-old’s hand, Don couldn’t say.