Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

Shane had gone mad. Something in his head had gotten loose and inside he was thinking “I’ll bet it’s not snowing in Sarajevo” over and over again. Or maybe he was thinking about the girl in the graveyard.
    I should tell you that I looked through his knapsack once, while he was working on the boat. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t like Shane, but it fascinated me that he was doing something so insane. I wanted to know why. I wanted to have some clue. I found a little notebook inside and quickly took it to the photocopier, but could only run off a couple of pages before another employee came by, so I put the notebook back. But I’ve still got those two pages. I’ll transcribe them here for you, in case it’s useful:
    Once, I made out with a girl in a graveyard. I didn’t realize it was a portent of the future. It was the kind of thing thousands of people have done before me, and if it had personal significance, if it symbolized a certain individual daring, a frisson of experience outside of the every day, well, then, I seem to have psycho-analyzed all the mystery out of it by now, haven’t I? The fact is, the world is generally indifferent to such acts. They do not reverberate or echo. No quiver or ripple comes unbidden to others because of it. But I still think of this event, if not often, then often enough; the softness of her lips, the intensity of her tongue, the feel of her against me, and, also, I can remember feeling the tombstones all around us, almost a dulling comfort against the burning. What am I to make of it? As much as “I’ll bet it isn’t snowing in Sarajevo”. Later, we sat there, gazing at the dead. Perhaps it was then that I decided I’d rather leave than stay.
    There’s more, but it’s not particularly useful to relate it. Some things are too personal, and I do not feel I deserve the comments anyway.
    So it wasn’t until month five or six that we really began to see the shape of the thing, and to realize the extent of Shane’s Folly, as some of us began to call it. It took the form of a Roman galley, or so Shane said. It had five slots on each side for oars and one main mast in the middle. Typical for him, when I asked him where he’d gotten the blueprints for it, he just smiled and flipped me a coin. I’m going to take a rubbing of it with a pencil and show it to you here, right in this report, so you can see just how disrespectful Shane was to those around him.
    A coin with a tiny, rough image of a boat on it. My first thought was outrage—that he had wasted the time of my fellow employees on building something that wouldn’t even work. Later, I realized that this thought meant Shane had gotten to me in a way. I thought about the ramifications of this while in my apartment enjoying a glass of cheap brandy and some jazz music and looking over the heirlooms my father had left me (if any of you are ever in the market for antiques for around the house, you might consider checking with me first). For a time, I even thought about going to the manager and handing in my resignation. Shane had compromised my integrity as a corporate employee. He had tried to substitute his vision for the corporate vision in my mind. He had almost succeeded.
    At the time he tossed me the coin, I didn’t let him know the extent of his almost-victory. I flipped the coin right back to him and said, “If you’re not going to be serious, why should I listen to you?” He replied, “Because if you don’t, you’ll be left out.” I didn’t realize at the time what he was talking about. Left out of what? His talk of graveyards and kisses? His grotesque utterances about Sarajevo? His frequent lunches with some of the other employees, to which I was never invited? It didn’t phase me.
    You must understand—I was never angry at Shane. Never. I merely understood better than anyone that we had a job to perform in the bookstore and Shane was making it more difficult to do that job.
    After nine months, the