This Location of Unknown Possibilities by Brett Josef Grubisic

Motives.”
    â€œPardon me?” Marta’s exchange with this woman was becoming as awkward as the tussle with the gatekeeper.
    â€œJake, er. Mr. Nugent has scads of appointments all day, all week in fact. What’s the name?”
    â€œSpëk. Dr. Marta Spëk.” Why hadn’t the guard made a call? That would be efficient compared to this lunatic repetition.
    â€œAha, hello, we were wondering what you’d look like. I’m Lora Wilkes.” She cackled then, a sound like no other that suggested a perturbed parrot and a cartoon witch. Marta felt tempted to ask how closely she matched their predictions. Of course they’d want to guess. Fair is fair, she admitted, and after all she’d spent plenty of time charting the probable Hollywood excesses of her soon-to-be colleagues.
    â€œA pleasure to meet you.” Marta held out her hand, feeling stiff, under scrutiny, and overdressed. Lora—whose firm ample bust looked to be the product of elective surgery—had swiveled her chair toward another woman whose computer screen display caused an eruption of laughter. Marta intuited that this crew was familial and boisterous, if unprofessional; while workmates, they’d still likely go out for dinner and drinks or catch a movie.
    A composed and altogether more insular environment existed within the Dark Tower—a monastic one minus a hearty sense of community and surgical augmentation. Marta had informed few of her colleagues about summer plans and had heard nothing from anyone else except holing up with business as usual—grant applications, conference appearances, journal essays, reviews, and chapters for forthcoming books.
    â€œHold on a sec, love, I’ve got to get this. Newsflash: LA is king and he knows it.” She tapped a hasty reply on a phone’s glass surface. Lora glanced up and gestured toward the executive’s partially open door. “The meeting of the minds is right that way! Have a seat right there, and we’ll set it in motion. Hang on.”

THE GRANDVIEW GRIND
    1 .
    J ake deemed his driving suitably aggressive, ratcheting several notches above average. Harshly judging license holders with an incessant need to yammer while ignoring basic rules of road conduct—“They’re called signal lights, you fucking moron”—he kept calls to a minimum. Restless and pent up today, he tapped the phone’s glass surface at red lights and traffic snarls.
    He planned to stop for fifteen minutes in a suburban park after shutting up shop for the day; and he’d already posted “Quick Service?”, an ad listing relevant statistics and a time guesstimate. If that produced negligible results—and Jake could predict from past experiences that zilch was almost a given—he would search pay sites to better the chances for success. The number of his active online profiles fluctuated, sitting at an economical mid-range at the moment. Periods of duress or boredom rocketed the number from zero to three, though never—almost never, in truth—higher.
    Like the law of diminishing returns, flux existed; and Jake took for granted that the course of his hankerings would normally run into peaks and valleys. As he charted the situation, he was human, humans belonged to nature, and winter/spring, ebb/flow and wax/wane represented cosmic principles, as fundamental as life and death. Simple. It all added up, most times at least.
    In those rare episodes of self-doubt when comparing himself unfavourably to colleagues—contented with a home-cooked pot roast dinner and several hours of prime time talent contests on the heels of a celebrity infotainment segment with a 30– second clip about a hurrying figure in black sunglasses checking into a clinic for sex addiction treatment—Jake’s normal-because-natural theory seemed filled with Swiss cheese holes. He faltered, seeing his too intimate commonality with back-in-rehab