Free How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad Page A

the fleets of antidepressants that are servicing half of our industry. Her old-fashioned abuses please me more; she is the only person I know capable of disengaging an entire office sprinkler system so she can hot-box her office on an 11:00 a.m. break.
    “I don’t know if I want my mood even,” I tell her. “I don’t know if I want
your
mood even. Aren’t moods kind of the whole point?”
    Sunera looks at me. “Point of what?”
    My cell rings: dad, from Arizona. Sunera snatches to see who I’m ignoring.
    “Your poor dad,” she says.
    “My poor dad? The absentee landlord of fathers?”
    “I know, I know, he wasn’t around –”
    “Oh, he was around, it was worse than that. He was the absentee landlord who lives in your apartment.”
    Sunera’s face drops and I know she’s suddenly seeing me as a sooty foundling. “Still, he’s your dad, Max.” The way she says “dad” suggests all kinds of dadlike behaviours I never saw: the bedtime, the lecture, the strong silent type. She’s thinking of her own dad when she says, “You should call him back.”
    I’m considering whether to snap at my best friend or hug her when Marvin comes swanning into the caf with a new haircut – pointy, blond, painful – and spinning like a bottle cap in a street-corner game, bursting with a piece of gossip.
    “Did you hear? Did you did you did you?” This level of Did-you-hear? requires smoking. While carcinogenic baconas a lunch entree is deemed an acceptable health hazard here in
The Daily
caf, the room is non-smoking, all the better for my get-fired agenda, so I light up and ash into Sunera’s Diet Coke can.
    “Baby Baron is selling!” hisses Marvin, leaning in all gleaming and giddy. “Rumours are flying. He’s selling
The Daily
to
television’ ”
Marvin makes television, his life’s work, sound like a swear word. “We’re hemorrhaging money, apparently. This is it. It’s the end of journalism as we know it,” says Marvin, like this is a bad thing.
    “How so?” I ask.
    “Convergence, Max,” he says. “They’ll use the same reporters from TV to write for the papers, and if there’s anyone left at the papers, they’ll have to appear on TV. Look at me! I’m not telegenic! I’m screwed.”
    “You mean they’ll just cut out the whole middleman ‘writer’ thing and let the anchor-people talk directly into computers and some guy in a room with silver walls will press buttons on this old Hal-type computer, and this machine will just convert TV into newsprint, and bingo,” I put on my best evil sci-fi villain voice. “The future will be now, Marvin. And we will all be unemployed.”
    Sunera shakes her head. “That’s not why you’ll all be unemployed,” she says. We look at her.
    “Anytime there’s a corporate takeover, the new company needs to make its mark immediately. They’ll fire you to prove they’re serious,” she says.
    “Serious about what?” asks Marvin.
    “Serious about being new.”
    Something occurs to me: the two words most writers want to hear are not, as some ambitious young things think,
bidding war
, but
severance package
. My escape strategy may be up for some modification.
    Sunera is driving and talking on her cellphone and on the radio Howard Stern is shitting all over Renée Zellweger for being temporarily fat and I’m imagining my boardroom buyout, a teary goodbye, a billboard-sized novelty cheque in my hands: Baby Baron, the Editor, the Big Cheese gathered at the long espresso-coloured table weeping as they let me go …
    Downtown on College Street, the latest neighbourhood to moult its immigrant past and make way for sommeliers and organic grocers, a white sheet flaps between street lamps like it might be advertising a small-town bake sale. Instead, it reads, ACCLIMITIZE: SIX NEW ARTISTS in black letters. The next sign, a few feet later, says, BUS TO BLOW LOUNGE EXPERIENTIAL ENVIRONMENT. COLLEGE AND CLINTON . 7 PM , WEDNESDAY . The Ex and his new