Set-Point

By Fawn Parker

Lucy Frank is a 20-something old aspiring screenwriter who takes up digital sex-work to pay the bills. Circulating a confused social atmosphere of half-engagement with lovers, friends, and co-workers in present-day Montreal—Lucy struggles with her self-image, an eating disorder, and the illness of her mother. Haunted by self-doubt and a desire to believe in her work and worth, Lucy volleys between self-sabotage and ambition as she tries to develop a parodic script set within a massive multiplayer world-building game. She is thrown into amplified chaos when one of her sex-work clients threatens to dox her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arbeiter Ring Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781927886267

Fawn Parker

Fawn Parker is a Giller-nominated author of five books including the forthcoming Hi, it's me (McClelland & Stewart 2024). Her story "Feed Machine" was nominated for the 2020 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and her story "Wunderhorse II" was anthologized in André Forget's After Realism (Véhicule, 2022). Fawn is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick and her work is represented by Ron Eckel at CookeMcDermid Agency.

Book preview

Set-Point

Set-Point

ARP Books | Winnipeg Fawn Parker

Copyright © 2019 Fawn Parker

ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)


205-70 Arthur Street


Winnipeg, Manitoba


Treaty 1 Territory and Historic Métis Nation Homeland

Canada R3B 1G7

arpbooks.org

Design and layout by UrbanInk
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens on paper made from 100% recycled post-consumer waste.

copyright notice




This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty.

ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Set-Point / Fawn Parker.

Names: Parker, Fawn, 1994- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190068523 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190068558

| ISBN 9781927886250 (softcover) | ISBN 9781927886267 (EPUB)Classification: LCC PS8631.A7535 S48 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowlegements

For my mom.

Chapter 1

Iwas to work at the kidney-shaped desk in the secondary studio, with the storage lights and the shuttlecock-launching robot and its prototypes. I showed up early to get a better sense of what exactly I would be doing there. The job was listed as Janitor with Assorted Responsibilities—including but not limited to mopping, dusting and organizing product prototypes, blogging, minor computer repair and/or running bugged-out computers to the repair shop, and software pirating. For my first week I’d been assigned to the workroom, a small area of the secondary studio sectioned off by plexiglass, where I would organize power tools, paint supplies, cables, and hardware accessories into Husky brand storage cabinets. A floodlight tripod hung upside down from the ceiling of the workroom like a carcass in a meat locker.

Along the back wall of the workroom was a wooden band saw bench my boss asked me to disassemble and take down to the trash. In front of it were piles of loose perforated foam, broken down boxes, and uneven planks of wood. The foam was to be rolled carefully onto a cardboard tube and mounted above the packaging station in the main studio. The boxes and wood were trash, unless I wanted to take any of it home with me. In the space adjacent to the workroom were two stacks of three tables, which had to be unstacked and arranged evenly in front of a large video conference monitor.

I was crouched under the bench in the workroom unscrewing the third of four corner screws when the fourth ripped out of its threading and the board came crashing down on my arms. The screw made a small slice in my forearm, which started to bleed at one end and then filled, like a stroke being drawn with a red fountain pen. I checked behind me to see if anyone had witnessed what’d happened. The studio was empty.

I checked the Husky drawers I hadn’t sorted yet for bandages or a roll of gauze. There was a box full of packaged blue Uline industrial tape, so I opened one and taped a piece of paper towel over the cut. A small amount of blood made contact with the paper towel and spread out like an inkblot test.

The band saw bench was mostly intact and the saw itself was too heavy for me to lift on my own. I took the board that had fallen and some smaller pieces from the sides and wrapped them in a black garbage bag to take down to the dumpster. Later, I would have to get someone to help me with the saw.

The shuttlecock-launching robot operated full time so the engineers could find flaws in the design. Alexei, the lead designer on the shuttlecock project, showed me how it could get jammed if the shuttlecocks weren’t distributed evenly enough throughout the eight chambers.

Pretty much we’re trying to break it, he said. And then fix that, and break it in a new way, and fix that.

The shuttlecock-launching robot stopped at 45-degree intervals, launching one shuttlecock per chamber at varying heights and with varying levels of power. Part of my job was to pick up the shuttlecocks from all over the studio floor and reload the launching machine. The height of the cork nozzles on the shuttlecocks meant that the part of the conical feather structure on the top shuttlecock that met with the base of the bottom one was too wide, leaving about half an inch of wiggle room. Without the nozzles, the shuttlecocks would have fit snugly inside of one another. I could stack a maximum of four before they would topple over. If the machine was going while I was washing the floors, sometimes I would get hit by one of the shuttlecocks, and if a designer was in the room they would go, Haha.

The StudioTechID design studios were on the fourth floor of an industrial loft building in the St. Henri neighbourhood in Montreal. The fire escape led to an external spiral staircase that I would use to carry bags of trash across the parking lot to an adjacent building’s dumpster. The overhead door above the dumpster was open, with workers eating out of lunch bags sitting along the edge of the loading dock. I walked around to the back of their building and left the bag of wood pieces next to a broken tabletop, to avoid using their dumpster in front of them. Even if there wasn’t a rule against me using it, they still might say something.

I walked back to the StudioTechID fire escape, where from the bottom I could see my boss, Eric, standing just outside of the fourth floor doorway. I hoped he hadn’t seen me; I wouldn’t have an explanation if he had watched me pass right by the dumpster with a bag of trash and then come back empty handed. Then I would have to go through the whole thing about not wanting to interact with the loading dock men.

Thank you Christine, he was saying into his phone when I got up there. That’s enough, thank you.

Eric ended his call when I approached him on the stairs. Lucy, do you need something to do? he said.

I still have some of the original things to do, I said. I put my arm with the injury behind my back. If he noticed I’d hurt myself already he might think I was too weak for the job.

How are the hours for you?

They seem good. I could do more even, probably.

What’s your other job? he said. You’re a writer?

It isn’t really a job.

I’m going to need you more in the near future. With the baby and all of that I’m going to be out of the studio two, three days a week.

The fire escape rattled. A worker came up the stairs beneath us and entered the floor below ours.

Okay well I can do more, I said. I was also going to ask if I get a smoke break.

Eric shrugged. Can I have one? he asked.

I handed him a cigarette and got one for myself. I considered what my life would look like, spending even more time at the studio. Maybe I would get into a rhythm and find more value in my down time if I didn’t have such an overwhelming amount of down time.

Thanks, he said. I told my wife I’d quit, but you know. Fire on one end, fool on the other.

Alexei came out and squeezed onto the fire escape platform with us. Can I have one? he said.

Eric nodded so I gave one to Alexei.

So, Eric said to me, I’ll need you to do just a few more hours. I told you about the birth and everything.

Yeah, I said. A little bit.

Alexei took the cigarette I gave him back inside the building.

It’s all different these days. You have the water and the doula and, you know, the pressure. It’s not pain anymore when you’re giving birth, it’s just pressure.

Mm, I said. I burnt my hand a little trying to light my smoke in the wind.

I got right in there with her, in the like, water birth tub.

The roof of a lower portion of the building jutted out less than a foot from the fire escape’s staircase. There was a full living room set—a sofa and two chairs and a broken lamp—with trash strewn around it.

That’s funny, I said.

Eric stubbed out his smoke on the railing.

That setup on that roof. I didn’t mean the birth tub is funny.

That roof isn’t to code. Someone could fall right through it.

When I was growing up, there was a commercial for a furniture outlet where a couple are having a fight. They sit down on their new couch, but it breaks through the floor and lands in a nicer living room, which better matches the new couch. There’s a whole scene in the downstairs apartment with champagne and flowers and another couple’s photos on the wall. They turn to each other and smile like they’ve scored this new fancier apartment downstairs, where all of the furniture has been purchased at the same outlet store. Whatever argument they were having remains upstairs.

I flicked my cigarette butt onto the floor of the rooftop living room. Eric went inside first and went to the main studio. I’d finished sweeping and mopping the floors in there, which meant I could spend the majority of the rest of my shift in the secondary studio, mostly alone. Eric wanted me to have the workroom organized by the end of my first week.

I went to the computer at the kidney-shaped desk and googled symptoms of tetanus. A mini preview gallery of the image results included a woman with an insane grin and a cartoon depicting a man with his mouth chained open and locked with padlocks. The stain in the paper towel taped over my arm had dried to an orange-y hue.

There were three stacks of tables in three rows piled behind my work area in the secondary studio. I first had to lift the top table, which was upright, off of the middle table by maneuvering its legs through the legs of the middle upside-down table in each stack. Then I would lift the middle table and turn it in the air so that I could set it down on its legs next to the bottom, also upright table.

Eric came into the studio while I was on my second stack. He had some papers in a folder and it seemed like he was going to give them to me. He wiped his hand over the surface of one of the tables and tucked the papers away, so as not to present them to me anymore. Oh, shit, he said. God damn it.

Sorry, I said, though I didn’t know why.

Shit, it’s ruined. All of them are ruined.

I’m sorry. I didn’t even do more than one or…

Lucy this can’t be buffed out, the surface is too fragile.

I didn’t think it would, like, um, are you sure it was me.

Eric had his face right down close to the tabletop of one of the unstacked desks. Shit, he said, rubbing at a scratch with his hand.

Yeah, I said.

See how those ones are stacked face to face like that. Like this one was before you moved it. You can’t slide them, the surface is very fine. Feel that, it’s incredibly fine. They scratch when you slide the surface of one across another.

Right.

Shit.

It’s interesting how that can happen when they seem to be like completely level. Like what is scratching what, is what I’m wondering.

The launcher is empty, he said.

Really? I just refilled like five of the tubes, I think.

I can hear it making that sound. It sounds awful. Alexei is always saying it’s not doing any damage but with that sound I just can’t believe that’s true.

I think it still has some in it, I can hear them hitting the conference monitor.

Running low if not empty.

I’ll pick them up.

I can’t remember how much these were even. I can feel it, it’s deep. This big scratch right down the middle.

I left him there, inspecting the tables, and came back. You’re right, I said, it was empty.

2017 is the summer of my breasts, said my mother.

I was at the kidney-shaped desk researching liquid gaskets for a blog post on gaskets vs. o-rings as industrial sealants.

I could feel it working in real time, she said. Like golden rays of chemo washing over me.

That’s great, I said. I took my coffee outside to the fire escape so I wouldn’t get caught on the phone. Are you with your sister?

No I came into the city on my own. She’s going to come pick me up.

Oh okay, I said. I balanced my paper cup on the railing.

What are you doing, are you okay?

Yeah. I’m at work right now. I got a job doing janitorial stuff.

That sounds horrible, she said. How long have you been doing that?

Just a couple days.

Sorry, I was just being honest. Do you like it?

It’s okay. I’ve only hurt myself once.

Be careful, please. I was feeling bad the other night. I felt like it was coming from you.

I leaned against the railing and knocked my coffee off of the edge. I could see it spill out across the ground. No, nothing bad has been happening.

Okay. Have you heard back about the grant?

No, there was some, like, thing with the system. A system-wide error had caused a month-long delay in the application process on the national grant program’s website. I wasn’t able to apply until the end of April, which meant I wouldn’t be hearing back until the beginning of July. Until then I would keep working at StudioTechID. They paid $14 an hour which was $2-4 more than the other jobs I’d had in the city. And if I didn’t get it, I could find something else to do. I could pursue happiness, in a pure way. That was always plan B: centre the self.

Okay, she said. I hope it works out.

Thanks. I should go back inside.

I went into the main studio to make another cup of coffee. Eric’s desk was right beside the espresso machine. I hadn’t asked him if I was allowed to use it, and when I got there in the morning I waited until he went on his break so as not to have to ask. I took a mug from the shelf underneath the machine that said Keep Austin Weird over a tie-dye pattern. I could see on Eric’s computer screen that he was emailing somebody a bunch of vacation photos.

There’s a stack of large glass panes against the wall in the other room, he said. Now he was scrolling through his iPhoto library. Lucy.

Sorry. I thought you might be on the phone.

He showed me that both of his hands were empty.

On a bluetooth or something, I said.

If they’re too heavy for you, Alexei and Jacob can help you move them. I need them to be behind the LCD TV stand.

I can try. I tried to lock the portafilter into place but something was blocking it, and if I took my hand away it would fall down. I rested it on the tray and pretended to compare the two types of espresso beans.

Have you ever been to Hawaii? he said.

No, I said. I’d like to.

I went last month.

Wow, nice.

Check this out. He rotated his screen. He clicked into slideshow mode so I could see a full-screen image of him and his wife swimming with boogie boards. We outsource most of our manufacturing to China so I’m going back and forth all the time. I really rack up the air miles.

Oh, my friend Marta is moving to China soon.

Alexei came to the desk. Nice, he said. Cuba?

Hawaii, said Eric.

Alexei reached over me and secured the portafilter.

Thanks, I said.

"Can I