A Better Job By Joseph LaBine

Philip CC




A Better Job

Good things that go unshared are not, in the end, good. 

     Rain is beating on the roof. I am at the desk. I have a coffee. It’s Sunday. A few days ago, the beating rain was snow melting. That’s not right. The point is that the sounds of being alone in this room with the empty desk and my coffee has been the same for several days. The same and not the same. No. The same and the same and the same again. 

     Today is my only personal day and so I am sitting down to make these notes. The room is a hotel room. There’s a sign on the empty desk that asks in a vaguely accusatory tone, ‘Have you forgotten anything?’ Yes. I seem to have forgotten everything this morning except the sound of the rain tapping on the metal roof above this room. I have forgotten what I came here to do. The people are gone. I just now got up from the chair at the desk where my coffee and these notes are to check if there were any messages. After checking I sat back down and wrote the preceding lines. 

     I am thinking of a story from childhood, but one I only read once. I just got up from my chair again because I thought that there might have been a message in the intervening time that I wrote these lines just now.

     I still remember small details from the story even though I read it over twenty-five years ago. The father was lonely and forlorn. The central character, a young girl, is seeking adventure or experience. 

     I stopped looking over my notes for a moment there and gazed at the ‘Have you forgotten anything?’ sign. It is not a reminder to the clear the room when I leave. I was meant to have read it at the start of my stay. It is an advertisement. I forgot ibuprofen and a charger for my cellphone. I could have gone to the front desk for the items or been directed to a store in town where I could purchase what I needed. However, I did not look at the sign when I arrived on Thursday and have only read it closely just now after looking three or four times. I am checking out in an hour. I have forgotten many things. 

    I got up from my chair again just now to arrange breakfast. The restaurant is attached to the front of the building. After breakfast I will leave this hotel.

     The story may have been about a selkie woman. That’s not exactly right. What I mean is that it featured a woman who wears a fur coat. She is friendly to the main protagonist, the little girl I mentioned earlier. At one point she puts on her fur coat, and it turns out that she is no longer a friendly woman; she has turned herself into a seal. I vaguely remember that this happens at the end of the story which is why I recall it being a selkie story because sometimes the end is the point of the story. 

     A work colleague of mine just called me in this room, so I got up from my chair to answer the phone. I knew it would be my colleague on the phone because I was expecting him to call after dropping off our guests at the airport. He will meet me for breakfast at the hotel and is bringing another colleague who was at the airport driving more guests in another vehicle. My first colleague told me to ‘be ready to go in five minutes’.

     Just before the phone rang, sitting at the desk, I could hear faint organ music coming from one of the nearby churches. The thought came to me that I would have liked to have been inside that particular church just then rather than waiting for my colleague to call me to let me know when to join him and our other colleague for breakfast. I will put these notes aside and go to the restaurant. After that I will check out of this hotel. 

    The thought fills me with a strange sadness because, while I have no reason to believe otherwise, I seem to know that I will never be any closer to the story about the selkie woman in the fur coat than I am right now. And what’s worse, is that my memory of it will only deteriorate with time and, at best, remain as a kind of vagueness. 

     The woman befriends the little girl who is staying with her father at a seaside place like Atlantic city, though it is not, from my recollection, Atlantic city at all. The conflict in the story is that the little girl is imaginatively trapped. Her father is depressed. Perhaps her mother has died because there is no mother and the selkie is a kind of emotionally available parental figure who is reserved because of the age difference but generous and genial. I think of her as a kind of aunt. The girl, whose name I cannot recall, goes out everyday on the pretence of getting ice cream somewhere along the pier or boardwalk. She needs a dime to do this, so she asks her father for the money, and he reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a dime which, after each outing, she replaces without his knowing. 

     It is significant that the adventures this girl has seem to cost nothing. And of this unlimited source of money in the jacket, we as readers are required to suspend our disbelief. Either her father is so oblivious that he does not notice the dime is the same from the previous day, or he is so depressed he simply does not care. We are walled off from his thoughts and any pronouncement on his character because this is a story from a child’s point of view and whatever is happening in his mind is happening firmly in the world of adults. We are also given to understand that the family is not rich, and this seems logical as the father does not seem to be working so he is in no position to let the daughter go out for ice cream every day, and yet he does, possibly because he has forgotten the events of the previous day. The girl’s father is not made of dimes and yet the giving of the dime is never called into question. 

     It is over this series of daytime outings that the girl befriends the selkie woman. And one of the most profound things this woman does before taking off or putting on her fur coat and revealing herself to be a seal—the actual circumstances of her final metamorphosis are not something I remember—is that she teaches the little girl to appreciate art. I vaguely recall that they visit an art gallery or a museum. They look at paintings so often that they get to know the figures inside the paintings, and we learn in fact that these figures are already the selkie woman’s friends. This is where the magic appropriate to children’s stories comes into play: the selkie and the girl are able to physically enter the world of the paintings, meaning they leave their reality, gallery or museum what have you, jump through the frame and enter the scene inside. Outside of her father’s house, the girl is not only learning to appreciate art; she is learning to live inside it. 

     Now as an adult, I think back on this story and acknowledge that I may be misremembering or inventing it, and what strikes me most is that her father, in his depression and inability to exercise any constructive agency beyond the giving of the money, nevertheless seems to licence all this playing by allowing his daughter to go outside. It is as if he knows she can have this rich imaginative life away from him, and he is happy to allow that even though outwardly he is emotionless and empty. The mother therefore must be dead, though I can’t remember for certain, it seems to be the only plausible way of explaining the father’s withdrawal from life and the girl’s deep need for an understanding maternal figure. When the selkie woman finally transforms and leaves her, there must be a kind of sadness though again I do not recall this. The story from my recollection seems to end with the selkie swimming off into the distance or simply ceasing to have human qualities at all because she is now fully a seal. But none of this matters because the girl has been empowered to transmute the grief of her mother’s death through imaginative play. Surely, she has dreamed all of these things, the seal included, and the vibrancy of these imaginings counterpoint her bleak family life. 

     I may think about this story again, but it is safe to say I will never remember it. And strangely, though I will never be able to, I hope to one day confirm it never existed, that my reading of it over twenty five years ago is a mirage, and that what I have said above is the result of some incredible daydream that is so powerful, I have remembered it for a quarter of a century. I do not believe this is possible but stranger things have been implanted in one’s mind.

     At the very least, I can content myself with having written it inside this room.     

                *    *    *    *
Another hotel room, another navigation of light switches, sink, another 6am wake up, another in-room coffee, which, as I go to start the machine, I see the guest before has made as well and has left the pod. Housekeeping cleaned the room but evidently missed inside the machine and little bits of trash at the bottom of the can. These are signs that this room has been lived in or stayed in before I came here which of course it has, but part of the mystique of every rented room is to hide this fact in plain sight and lull every visitor to sleep with conveniences. We forget that we are inside a container when we stay in hotels.

     I’ve lost a month of time and am continually on the road. That month included my birthday, Mother’s Day which, at the deep displeasure of my wife I failed to celebrate, and a bank holiday that passed without incident. My alarm rang just now. It’s 6:23am and fast approaching the time that I will have to gather my things and leave this room. If I get out quickly, I will make my flight. The terminal is only a short walk from here. 

     There’s a continual relentless drone in the air, a low murmuring commotion that I try to ignore, but I can hear it, listen. I have scraped myself away from sleep to board this plane. I recall the actual moment I exited my dream and became aware of its envelope around my consciousness. At 6:26am I willed myself into the shower. The metal shelf for the soap resembled the ones at my mother’s house and, had I been tired enough to believe the tiles were blue instead of white, had I not woken up early enough to collect my thoughts, had I remained in my dream a little while longer, I might for a moment have returned to my childhood bedroom, returned to that first autumn after my mother remarried and to the first time in my life I experienced the privacy of having my own bathroom. The brand of soap in the shower is called ‘Young. Again’. 

     It’s 8:26am. Flight attendants dole out eggs and fruit. I feel so dull in this sun above the clouds. The whiteness in the far distance resembles snowpack and sea ice like some imagined world on top of the boreal woods and rivers running up to the big lake and then home. 

     I feel more awake after food and water. While eating, I reflect on how I actually sacrificed last night’s sleep to talk to Job. 

   Job picks me up from the airport hotel. We go through a drive thru for coffees, pass the Mega Church where he plays drums on Thursdays and Sundays, talk about work, his younger brother’s daughter, music, movies, 9:30 quickly turns to 11:30, and then just before turning into the hotel parking lot at about midnight, Job tells me that eight months earlier he had been on a long drive and stopped in a small town for dinner. He parks the car. He thought that no knew him there and no one would care if he got drunk, so he did. That inebriation left him with anxiety, a deep emptiness that has persisted until now and darkened his outlook. All of this is hard for Job who is typically cheery. He tells me that this night of drinking compelled him to stay in the unnamed town longer than he intended and to sleep in his truck. He recounts no interaction with police. He does not confess to paying for sex. The point of the story is the emptiness. The story itself is empty. 

     As we stay parked by the curb of a terminal building for one of the cargo airlines, Job tells me that since returning home he has not been able to look his friends in the eye. I wonder if he is telling me the whole story because he says, ‘for the past eight months I haven’t been able to tell anyone’. He resumes driving. 

     We arrive at my hotel. As he circles the parking lot, I try to gently explain that there is nothing really the matter here but stop myself because the feelings seem genuine and troubling. The truck we are in is the same one he slept in that night. From my perspective nothing much happened. Job should just live his life and be happy, but I leave the vehicle convinced that he has reached a breaking point. I hope I see Job again, but I am uncertain I will.

     Lying in bed in my room, it is very late, but I am glad I called Job and stayed with him long enough to hear his confession if it can even be called that. Nothing is really wrong. He is not in trouble with his employer. And while drinking is frowned upon by uptight people in his church, as he said, no one could have seen him. He is still part of ‘the worship team’ as he calls it. But I can’t help thinking that one action has given way to something else. The bottle has hit the wall so to speak. I do not care that he got drunk, nor do I think he did any great harm to himself. His conscience should be clear, but I find his emptiness in a moment of fullness at his stage of life worrying. He has the demeanor of someone who has fallen into an abyss for no reason. 

     I recall that arriving back in my room, before getting into bed, I knelt down and prayed very briefly, thanking God for the day and for the opportunity to see and talk to Job. I then set an alarm knowing I would get – at the very best – five hours of sleep. I shut my eyes.

     Even after rushing to the terminal and boarding this flight, I have been compelled for the last three hours to write all this down. The final thing Job told me before I left the drunk truck was that he’d been ‘keeping a container of googly eyes at his jobsite and sticking them onto signs and work things for fun. I love googly eyes. They make things come alive’. 

     He smiled as he said this and that’s how I left him. 

​



Joseph LaBine is a Canadian poet and scholar. His first collection L297 was published by Flat Singles Press in 2022. His work has also appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Grist, Malahat Review, and Journal of Modern Literature. He recently edited the first volume of Niall Montgomery’s collected poems, TERMINAL 1: Arrivals (Flat Singles Press, 2025). He lives in Yellowknife NT.
​