Grace lowered the gun. The world in front of her was so similar to the world behind her it seemed that if she propelled the bullet into the mist in front of her then, after ten minutes or so, it would hit her in the back.
Grace weighed the gun in her hands. It was the first gun she had ever held, and somehow it felt more real than anything she’d ever touched before. A shiver ran down her spine.
Something had changed in the landscape. The mist was rising, and in the distance thick vertical lines had appeared, running over the ground toward one vanishing point on the horizon.
MR. WHEELBARROW
Mr. Wheelbarrow stood on the gravel path outside his house, the cold morning air cooling the tears on his cheeks. The hospital had just called about Freddy, telling him there was no progress at all. He was in a very deep coma and it was unclear what was keeping him there.
Mr. Wheelbarrow thought of the back of Freddy’s neck, the way he used to watch his neck when he sat in the backseat of the car and Freddy was driving, that broad neck bulging over his collar, soft but strong. Sometimes Mr. Wheelbarrow had mouthed the words to his neck, but he had never said them out loud, because it wasn’t necessary.
Mr. Wheelbarrow wrote all the layers of his love into the soap opera: the passion, the jealousy, the worries, the faith, and the trust he felt resonated through the characters and the plotlines, knowing that Freddy was watching this love letter every night on the couch with a bag of crisps.
Now Mr. Wheelbarrow stared out over the fields surrounding his house, the black ditches between them. Normally he would be writing at this hour, steering Grace, the main character of his show, into new moral dilemmas with secret admirers and forbidden love. But he couldn’t care for Grace in this moment. He’d let go of her it seemed, and he realized he could not even find her anymore in his thoughts.
THE BOSS’S SON
The boss’s son was in the Queen’s chamber. She had given him bandages to wrap up his feet.
“One night,” the Queen said, looking down at him as he sat on the floor, bandaging his feet, “during a dinner with my speech-writers for the Memorial Service, I went to the bathroom to freshen up. When I inspected my teeth for red wine stains, a thought occurred to me. I thought: I am the Queen. It was a thought I’d had a thousand times before, but now it exploded in my head, like a firecracker.”
“I am the Queen. And I looked at my face, my upper lip curled up to display my teeth, the wave they had put in my hair that morning. I am the Queen.”
The Queen looked in the mirror of her makeup table and touched her face distractedly.
“I am the Queen. It was such an absurd idea, such an utterly absurd idea, that I suddenly realized how unrealistic it all is. The people who’ll look up to me when I stand there at Memorial Square, the speechwriters who’ll help me find the right tone, dignified and yet caring. It seemed like I had just made it all up, some strange fantasy.”
The Queen shook her head. “I went back to the dining room and I thought: How do I know these people exist? How do I know they are real? How do I know they don’t disappear when I turn my back to them? What evidence do I have?” She shook her head. “I asked the writers to provide me with evidence that they truly exist. But no one could. No one could!” She shook her head.
The Queen covered her mouth with her hands. “I fired all of them,” she whispered. “I’ll just make something up on the spot. They’ll never even notice.”
She looked like she was going to throw up. The boss’s son kneeled down beside her and stroked her hand, the first time she allowed something like that, because she was too distracted to notice it.
THE CAR PARK
Right when the birds started singing, Rus walked out the door of Wanda’s apartment to go to the office. In the street it was still very empty. The bus driver yawned as he pulled up to the bus stop, and the metro was only half full. People who had just woken up and people who had not been to sleep yet avoided each other. Rus sat in the metro the way the manager had taught him to sit, focusing on the empty space in front of his nose, causing the face of the person in front of him to look like a blur. He walked headfirst through the streets of the business district, keeping his eyes on the Overall sign in the distance that towered high above the other buildings.
Yesterday the manager had read him a sentence from the chapter “Eyes on the Target” from the Company Guidelines so he could repeat it in his head while he walked. The sentence was: “The deer will only get past the snake if it keeps its eyes on the well.”
The well in this scenario, the manager had explained, was the office; the deer was Rus, who was trying to get there; and the snake was the traffic, the passersby, the noise.
Rus had asked if the snake wouldn’t attack from behind if the deer wasn’t paying attention, but the manager had explained that that was against the rules of the story, and the snake would be convicted in court. Rus wondered who the court was in the story and the manager said, “The owl of course,” and that’s how Rus had learned and learned.
Thinking about the well and the owl and the snake and how wise it all sounded, Rus walked up to the office car park. The building was still dark and the doors were still closed.
A few meters away from Rus two lights flashed on and off in the half-dark.
It was the manager, signaling to him from his car.
“I like to see the building fill up with employees,” the manager said as Rus sat down next to him in the BMW. “Everybody taking their place, lights switching on. It is like the office comes to life, so to speak.”
In silence they sat there while the sun came up over the Overall Company building. The manager was quietly smoking his cigarette, studying the Company Guidelines book in his lap. The sun made an orange line around the roof of the building. Rus looked at the departments, stacked on top of one another, the windows dark squares in black walls. Only on the top floor was a light on. A silhouette moved slowly behind the window, putting his hand on the glass.
“Who is that?” Rus asked, but the manager shook his head without looking up.
“That is not important to you,” he said, tapping on the Company Guidelines book. “You should read this—this is important.” He gave Rus the book.
“Chapter seven,” he said, “my personal favorite.”
The manager lay back in his chair and closed his eyes as Rus started reading.
“‘The beauty of the company,’” Rus read, “‘lies in the ability to work together as one organism. Thousands of cells working together toward one goal: growth. Each cell has its own task to complete and focuses on nothing but that, while the head of the company steers it all on. In that sense, the company is a creature, with arms and legs and a head with a vision, a creature that is always trying to grow and to move. Sometimes it crawls slowly forward, and sometimes it catapults out of a dark corner across the room. It is a colonial organism, which means the different particles could survive on their own. But within the company you are with thousands, outside the company you are alone.’”
The manager sighed contently. “It sounds a bit dramatic,” he said, “but that is the poetry of it.”
He nodded at the office building. It was nine o’clock. Rus looked at the sliding doors, how they opened and closed, letting the employees into the building. The logo of the company, the beetle, was hanging above the entrance hall. It was holding its front claws over the doorway, as if it was shielding it.
“What do we do exactly?” Rus asked after a while. “How does the company work?”
“We import and export both material and immaterial products,” the manager said.
“Ah,” Rus said. He folded his hands around the handle of the plastic bag.
“It means that we mostly buy the debt of poor people,” the manager said, “and then we arrange for their things to be sold.”
Rus thought about the numbers he had entered the day before: birdcages, beds, tablecloths.
“But the best part is how we do it,” the ma
nager said. “We are the first to sell the stuff in bulk. Because a lot of the small things some poor family in Asia owns, for instance, are hard to sell. I mean, who wants to buy a duvet that belonged to some debtor somewhere? But if it is two thousand duvets, and we process them into stuffing, we make a nice profit on the whole.”
The image of his flowery duvet rose up in Rus’s head, and he pushed it down again. “I see,” he said.
“We also buy interest of course, and other companies and all that kind of stuff.”
The manager laughed and patted Rus on the shoulder. “But what we sell does not matter. What we do is work with numbers, making sure they go up. You only have to think about copying those numbers, and yesterday you did a very good job.”
“Yes,” Rus said. “Thank you.”
He tried to see his life as a line, a line going up, like Wanda had said.
“I have switched on your seat massage,” the manager said, “do you feel it?”
Rus felt the chair moving behind his back. It pressed just below his shoulder blades, as if it knew exactly where his muscles hurt.
HOLLOW SECRETARY
The secretary was lying on the bathroom floor. The white tiles underneath her felt cold. She looked about her. The door was white, the ceiling was white, and the walls were white. The air that entered her body through her nostrils was cold, and it felt as if the air she inhaled were white as well—cold and white it went into her lungs and out again. The secretary breathed in deeply. She imagined the air chalking the inside of her nostrils white like the walls of her apartment, her air pipe, her lungs, and all the branches of her veins, everything chalked white. She felt like a stone, a hollow white stone in a hollow white stone apartment.
In the distance her telephone rang. “Hello, this is Dr. Kroon speaking,” her answering machine said. “I’m just looking at the rain tapping on my window again, thinking about the conversation we had. Being alone in your thoughts can be very difficult, and the word ‘depression’ does come to mind.”
Dr. Kroon was quiet for a moment. She could hear his pen drumming on paper. He cleared his throat.
“We’re all familiar with the desire to have someone to share one’s ideas with,” he continued, “someone who fully understands you and you understand them. But how do we know if such a person exists? And where can we find them?
“This was Dr. Kroon, calling about your follow-up appointment.”
The answering machine made a beeping sound and the window banged shut. A cold stream of air blew over the secretary’s skin. She wanted to get up from the bathroom floor, but she was tired, too tired to even lift her head off the tiles. She took deep, slow breaths and lay still. There were no thoughts in her head, just silence.
THE COMPLAINT
“There has been a complaint about you,” the post boss said to Ashraf. “From a man. A lawyer. He called.”
The post boss had called Ashraf into his office to say this. He had taken off his glasses and he rubbed his eyes while talking.
“He did not want to make any hard accusations against you, but he did allege that there could be a suspicion of theft. It is about a racing suit, apparently.” The post boss put his glasses on his forehead and looked at Ashraf, who was standing across from him. His office was messy; his desk was filled with the new policy instructions.
“So?” the post boss said. He tapped his pen on the paper.
“What did you tell him?” Ashraf said.
“Well,” the post boss said, “you must understand my position in this.” He rummaged through his papers. “I have personally looked into it, and if the order number is still here, I could not find it. Richie would never fit in any racing suit, and he is not the type, I mean, well, um.” He wiped his forehead.
Ashraf felt the blood rushing to his head. “You know I did not take it, right?” he said.
The post boss nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said nervously. “But a report must be made. If this suit stays missing, the complaint will be sent to the head office and, in the end, I am held accountable. And the facts are against you. I mean, racing suits are obviously attractive, I suppose. Especially white ones.”
The voice of the post boss sounded far away. When Ashraf got angry his mind switched off and it seemed like he got transported miles and miles away from where he was. Ashraf picked up a pen from the desk and breathed in and out slowly. BELGROVE HOSPITAL, it read on the plastic.
“I did not take the suit,” he said. “I don’t take things.”
The post boss got up from his chair and walked around his desk. “However it may be,” he said, “however it may be, you now have an official warning. The official warning will stay in your file for six months. If something happens in that time you will be fired. And if you are fired because of theft, you will go on a list that is open to other employers. It is already in the computer, so there is nothing to be done.” He patted Ashraf on the shoulder. Ashraf abruptly pushed his chair back and bumped into the post boss’s leg. Papers fell from the corner of the desk onto the floor.
“Everything okay in here?” Frank, the district manager, came into the office. He took Ashraf by his elbow. “Are we going to take it easy?” he said.
Ashraf closed his eyes.
“No need,” the post boss said quickly. “Thank you, Frank. Just having a conversation.”
Ashraf turned toward the window and looked out. The new postman from Ghana was practicing with his bicycle while the others were cheering him on. His boss sat back down behind his desk.
“I can see you are disappointed, Appie,” the post boss said, “but let me speak like a father to you now. Let me give you some advice.”
Ashraf turned around. The boss was leaning on his arms over the table.
“Don’t have high expectations,” he said. “Be quiet, be thankful.”
The boss took off his glasses and stared into the distance.
“The fact is,” he said, “and I have told my son this over and over again, that you belong to an awful generation. My generation built this country up after the war, the generation before me fought in the war to save this country. Your generation, for some reason, is good for nothing.”
The post boss shook his head.
“It is as though you were all born rotten or something, nobody knows.”
He raised his arms and waved at the window. “But, as I’ve told my son many times, we’ve built all of this for you, it is finished, and there is enough. All you have to do is cooperate.”
He sighed.
“I have burdens to carry; I have a load on my back. But what did he have to carry, what problems did he have? Nothing, no burdens, but still he got fat like an elephant.”
The boss stared out the window. Ashraf closed the door to the office behind him with a restrained click.
THE NOISE
It was two o’clock, and Rus had already worked through his first pile of files, and he was halfway through the second one. Tiktiktiktiktiktik, kzzzkzzk, hum, the demure sounds of the office sang softly in Rus’s ears while he worked through the papers. He had even found a cadence to it. Tiktiktik, he took a new paper, kzzkzzk, he entered the numbers, ring, he put the paper away, tiktiktik, he took a new paper, kzzkzzk, he entered the numbers, and so forth. The hum of the air vent just continued and surrounded it all.
The cooperation between the sounds and his movements made Rus feel like he was a machine, just like the computer and the phone. And he was a bit like a machine actually; the manager said there had never been anyone in the copying department who could work uninterruptedly for hours like him. But of course a machine would not have trouble breathing and it would not have moments when its heartbeat became irregular and thumbed in its throat. But that was no problem for Rus, who was becoming more and more like everyone; Rus, who had found an excellent place to hide his plastic bag behind the copying machine.
The only thing that Rus wished would stop was the sound in the air vent. It was a strange, irregular scraping sou
nd, something scratching and tapping on the iron. The sound had gotten louder and more frequent, and it kept interrupting his work rhythm. Each time he heard it his head turned automatically toward it, making him forget where he was on the list.
There it was again! Kiehg, kiehg, kiehggg. This time the sound was sharp and audible all through the office. Rus looked at his coworkers. They all kept working silently, not looking up from their desks. Then the sound stopped.
Rus took up a new file and looked up the Chinese words and numbers in file number eighty-nine, filled in by a certain Ming Rong Heng. Three hundred and twenty-five kettles, six thousand forks. Above him the sound started again. This time, there was first a scratching and fluttering and then a loud thump. What was it? The question came up in Rus’s mind and he pushed it down again, typing three hundred twenty-five kettles and six hundred tablecloths into the computer. Or was it forks? With his shoulders up against his ears Rus stared at the numbers on the screen. “Focus,” Rus said to himself quietly, as he bent over Ming Rong Heng’s file again, “eyes on the target.”
ONE MORE DAY
Mr. Lucas made his preparations for the next day in a state of bliss, glowing and nonstop talking to himself. The beauty of the hypnosis surrounded him, the sea of calmness pulsed through his veins. The only thing that was not going very well was the sleeping and he was a bit shaky because of it, but he had rebelliously resolved that he “could sleep when he was dead,” as he had heard someone on the radio say. Right now it was important he thought everything through and practiced every detail for his perfect day. He had called the public transport services for the bus times, the weather line for the weather, and now he dialed the number of the Secret Service, to find out where exactly would be the best spot for him to stand during the Memorial Service to get a full view of the Queen.
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