Welcome to Paradise

Welcome to Paradise. Paradise is the new idea of staycation. I’ve been working here for years now, and let me tell you, as a job, it’s no paradise. Paradise is part of the new idea of vacation, since the real world became a place no one wants to visit any longer. Of course, I couldn’t afford a vacation anyway, not even a virtual one, that’s why I’m working in Paradise.

I work as a sort of travel agent for virtual reality, helping folks to find their dream vacations. If you are interested in skiing the Alps, travelling down the canals of Italy in a gondola, exploring the rainforests of Costa Rica, flying across a dusty plain on an African safari, I’m your guy. None of these vacations appeal to me, however. My dream vacation would be a trip to a tropical island paradise created just for me. Sunbathing on the soft white sand, swimming in the cerulean sea, and who knows, I could even learn to surf or something. Sky’s the limit with virtual reality. I work on it in my free time.

I’ve only been to the main HQ, where the vacations take place, three times. It is a large hivelike building that takes up three blocks downtown. It has gotten larger since it cropped up ten years ago. Like it’s swollen somehow, and bees might come pouring out of it at any second. Each year, when I attend the Christmas party, I’m impressed by how well guarded the place is. The secrets of Paradise’s state of the art virtual reality are highly sought after in the emerging world of virtual technology. They have succeeded where others have failed in providing the customer with a worthwhile and completely believable vacation experience. Sorry, I get caught up in the work pitch sometimes.

I work with a guy named Carl and it’s just us when there are no customers, so I’ve gotten to know him fairly well. Carl is a laidback kind of guy who enjoys taking his coffee breaks in his car only to return smelling of Jamaica. I don’t say anything though, because Carl is my only friend. Every payday we go out for a beer and Carl shares one of his joints in the alley behind the bar.

Carl hates working at Paradise as much as I do, but he stays for the vacation. Each employee of Paradise gets a complimentary vacation after five years and Carl is coming up on his. Recently, he asked me to help him log it. He could have done it himself, but there were no customers to speak of that day and we’d been lobbing paper footballs into each other’s goal fingers across the desk.

“Of course sir, what kind of Paradise can I help you design today?” I asked in my best customer service voice, making Carl laugh so hard he broke his character of Carl the Customer.

“I’ve always wanted to sail the seven seas, on a pirate ship.” Carl said, staring at the posters around the room advertising Las Vegas, the Great Wall of China, and the Mediterranean coast.

I began to type in the specifics, making Carl a pirate captain, Captain Carl, on a luxurious pirate ship filled with gold and treasures, loyal mateys, a parrot on his shoulder. I checked with him and he added some details as well, a green spotted pirate flag, and his own garden of greenery on deck.

“What happens if there’s a storm?” I laughed.

“No storms in Paradise man,” he grinned.

“You should stop on a tropical island,” I said, thinking of my own dream vacation.

“Yeah, why not. Lots of rum served in pineapples. Monkey butlers. Tree houses and stuff.” Carl agreed.

I liked that, I added rum served in pineapples and tree houses to my own dream vacation as well. Monkey butlers frightened me though, so I left them out. My dream vacation was a file I had been working on since I’d been hired three years ago. My own tropical island paradise.

Three weeks later, Carl took his vacation. I worked alone, but it was not very busy, so I didn’t mind. Less people came in each year it seemed. The year I started working at Paradise, it was difficult to get time to think. There had been three other employees with Carl and me in those days, but each year, we lost one, until it was just the two of us.

When Carl returned from his vacation, he seemed different somehow. He still had the same, laidback type demeanor, but his eyes seemed different. As if they were not really looking anymore.

“How was your vacation?” I asked, folding up a football. “Did you like all the pineapples?”

“It was very nice, thank you for the many pineapples.” He smiled, but it seemed fake.

He reminded me of the smooth figures in the department stores sporting the season’s new looks. He began no conversations after he returned from his vacation, though he would reply politely, albeit a bit robotically, if I did. He no longer went to his car to smoke joints, or played paper football, or asked if I wanted to get a beer on payday. Carl never even left at quitting time anymore. He stayed late, typing at something that I did not understand.

I began to get suspicious, but I did not know anything much about Carl. I knew his parents were dead, like mine were, and that he lived alone. I thought that he had a brother, but no one I knew well enough to ask if he was alright, so I began to just observe him.

I made notes in a small black notebook when he would do something odd.

Carl never goes to the washroom anymore.

Carl only orders soup for lunch, but he never eats it.

Carl’s typing seems like printer test page.

Carl smells like an auto mechanic.

Less customers every day, but last I heard, they were expanding Paradise downtown, creating more hives of patron’s personal oasis. It began to strike me as very odd. Carl’s behaviour was one thing, but why expand when business was declining? It made no sense. I even considered quitting, but at that point I was less than a year away from my own paradise, so I stayed. I kept watching Carl though.

One night I drove my car home and then walked back, twenty long blocks, to see Carl still sitting at his desk, typing away. I knew what it was without having to look because it was the same garbled nonsense every time I caught a glimpse of it.

 I waited for two hours in the coffee shop across the street, not certain what I was even waiting for, until Carl locked up and left. He did not take his car, which I had not seen him drive since he’d gone on vacation, instead, he began to walk down the sidewalk. I followed him, feeling insane, and at the same time, completely justified. Carl was acting crazy. I was just trying to figure out why.

I realized we were heading downtown. On our way to the hive. I could see it looming in the distance now. It almost looked like it was swelling, but it was just the way the lights illuminated the building’s smooth curves. Carl went in through the front door of the main hive.

The guards were out front, so I did not follow Carl further. Instead, I called a cab and spent the rest of the night trying to warm up in a hot bath.

The next day at work, while Carl was tapping away on his keyboard and I decided to see what I could sleuth, without making it too obvious.

“What were the other pirates like?” I asked, waiting until he looked away from his screen, “I never asked you when you got home.”

“They were, like pirates are,” Carl said, in a way that made me believe that he no longer knew what pirates were.

“Right, did you like the dinosaur I threw in there?” I lied, wondering what he would say.

Carl nodded politely.

“Thank you Rick, it was very nice.”

He went back to his work then and I tried to decide if I should tender my resignation when I got an email saying that my exemplary work in sales gave me an opportunity to add a week to my vacation. I was at a whole month now and if I quit, it was like I’d earned nothing.  I had become very dedicated to my dream vacation, so I spent all my time on that. Cliff jumping into sapphire seas, skimming across the waves on a jet-ski, spelunking treasure in caves, snorkeling around the corals, bonfires with friends that I didn’t have – I even threw Captain Carl in there, or the idea of him anyhow – as well as all the girls I would never meet in real life. I designed myself a treehouse overlooking the ocean, with a robot monkey butler to bring me carved pineapples full of rum. I designed everything down to the letter.

So, today is the day and I showed up to the Hive early in anticipation, the day of my vacation I’ve been dreaming of for as long as I’ve worked in Paradise. The halls just look like a normal office building, and I’m a bit disappointed about that, but I tell myself that it’s not the hive that matters, just my glorious creation. The attendant takes me to a room with my design projected on the walls. Standing on the beach my glorious oasis. I can’t even see the door I came through anymore. Like it disappeared into the lazily lapping ocean. I can hear the bonfire down the beach and I might get some boar, but first I’m going to check to see if my friend Captain Carl is on his way, I think I can see a green flag in the distance.