I should have called their bluff, she thought later. I should have told them there and then: It’s perfect! But it was a Friday afternoon and there was no apparent need to rush.
She spent the weekend strategising. Her application had been a model of suggestive thinking. The view from the window was hardly mentioned. Instead, she argued for being in the attic, in the head office, close to the limitless firmament of stories. Had the option been made available to her in good time, she might just as well have argued for being in the basement, with one foot in the underworld and the groundwater of myth seeping into the sole of her shoe. Perhaps she could now make a case for composing below and consulting above? Behind a closed door in the basement, she would be the corporate unconscious, left alone to ruminate and digest. And in her office on the 21st floor, in clear sight of the world, she would be the corporate conscience, approachable and consultative. Her door would always be open.
But she never got to argue the point. When she opened the door of her office on Monday morning, she was startled to find a technician at work inside. He was commissioning the recitation pod. She had never seen anything like it and yet she knew at once what it was for. The proportions of the hood and the footplate were unmistakable. The thing was made for a human head on a human body. The air smelt of burning leaves.
She tried to question the technician but he instructed her in a teacherly tone to sit at her desk and be quiet. She called Liselotte, but her old ally had already been briefed: Human Capital & Technology hoped she would make the best of this self-realisation opportunity. She was urged to navigate change by living out her personal destiny.
The technician finished tightening some bolts on the armature and stood back to inspect his work. He wiped his hands on a yellow cloth, and then he pressed his palms to the hood and massaged it gently. After a minute or two, he took his right hand from the surface and reached in through the aperture, while the left kept moving in small circles, rubbing and squeezing. Apparently he was satisfied, because he withdrew both hands with a smile. Then he quickly packed up his tools and went away without a glance in her direction. The device was silent. Only a bead of red light on the console suggested that it was live. Open for business, as she came to think of it.
The door had barely closed when the manual dropped into her inbox. The cover said ‘User’s Guide’ in many different languages. Half the pages were devoted to numbered diagrams with arrows showing the placement and movement of head and limbs.
The drawing pin jitters across the desktop with a tinny hum, while the storyteller counts off the seconds on her stopwatch. The silver cap spins straight and true, as if eleven seconds are nothing, and then in a moment wobbles and cants and falls over. A pristine plane, she thinks, not a scratch, no blade, nib or compass point has come near it. Yet it leaches the momentum out of her top in an instant. The last of three tries, all short of the target. Now there’s nothing for it.
She glances at the draft of her story on the screen, her new piece for the forthcoming quarterly board meeting. There’s the title and the start of the first line. The Art of Falling, it says. And on a new line: It’s been said that the art of falling… And that’s all. Not a word more in three days.
She slips her feet out of her shoes and lines them up with her toes. She reaches into a drawer for the forbidden notebook. It’s a pocketbook bound in soft brown leather. She opened it carefully when she bought it, starting with the flyleaves and peeling off pages at the front and the back in turn, pressing each one flat and running her thumb along the stitching at the spine, working her way methodically through the sections until she reached the centre spread. Then she numbered the pages in the top corner in pencil. The rest is blank.
She steps onto the footplate and crouches beneath the hood with the ruff over her shoulders. This is always the worst part: she must force herself to go on. An anticipatory hum sounds from the hollow above. She pushes her feet into the stirrups and straightens her knees until the top of her head touches the rubber. It smells like soup again, schmaltz and floury dumplings. Her scalp bristles as the hood begins to suck. She opens the notebook on the console, shuts her eyes and thrusts her head into the aperture.
Grey and damp. It’s never been like this before. She feels shivery, light-headed, short of breath. Perhaps she’s at high altitude? She would see far, over crags and precipices, if the mist lifted. Watery clouds envelop her, beading her eyelashes and flattening her hair against her scalp. She catches her breath, and breathes, deeply and slowly, trying to strain the smell of rotting leaves and disinfectant through her nostrils. When she opens her eyes again, she’s drifting in the cloudscape. She floats over hilltops and it’s almost pleasant. Once she tries to speak, but her jaw is locked. It’s freezing up here, she thinks, and squeezes her elbows to her ribs. This reminds her of the book in her hands and reattaches her head to her body. She pictures the page curving like muscle from the spine, the goose-pimpled skin of the paper.
Who’s that? A man at a window. A man in a black frock coat and a broad-brimmed hat. No, it’s too vast to be a window: a wall of glass. He is rocking like a metronome.
She remembers. It’s the transit lounge in Zürich. She’s found a quiet annex, away from the crowds at the overpriced coffee counters and duty-free shops, where a trio of conjoined chairs faces the apron. She’s dozing with her computer bag clasped to her side when a shadow flicks over her eyelids, coming and going like a pendulum. She peers through half-opened lashes. Near her a man has come to pray. He is swaying close to the sheer glass, which magnifies the outside world like an immense lens, blistered and veined with rainwater. On either side, gleaming fuselages are coupled to the concertina folds of gangways, but the bay in front of the praying man is empty. An expanse of wet tarmac stretches towards a hangar with its door gaping. This steel-framed black space is a gigantic version of the screen she spends her days gazing into. The man wears a hat with a tall crown and a saucer brim, perched high on his head, and he holds a book but never looks at it: the litany on his lips he knows by heart. His voice rises and falls, scattering dust on the polished veneers of the terminal. A remnant of old Europe in a costume out of a museum, perhaps not even a man but an automaton, bowing repeatedly to the void. Although she cannot understand a word, she hears a melody and counterpoint of resignation and protest. Half-asleep, entranced by the spindrift of his beard breaking on the lapels of his coat, she begins to mumble the prayer under her breath.
A memory stirs in her joints. She tries to follow the motion of the man in the hat, but the hood tightens its headlock. Instead of moving her torso, she moves her hips. The mist is audible, the words spurt from the man like air from a bellows and curl around her temples. A glow begins to rise under the hood and she smells rubber. She keeps on swaying her hips, scraping her shins against the calipers.
For a moment she pictures herself in the corner of her office with her head in the pod, but the image is unconvincing.
She closes the book on her forefinger, keeping the place, and presses the spine between her legs. As she sways, one strategic thrust after another chugs along the rosy membrane in capital letters, moving from right to left as resolutely as breaking news. Is she reading or writing? Is someone speaking? The stream reveals nothing. The pod owns the syntax, she thinks. Perhaps the vocabulary is mine, the soft, warm deliverables? She identifies inputs and outputs and aligns them with the mission statement, and then she manages them efficiently and effectively through the downswing and the uptick.
She would drift in the overproduction of pleasure, with the empty book squeezed between her thighs, but the pod loses interest abruptly. Sinking down on the footplate, she observes that the door of her office is still closed, thank God, and sits there rubbing her shins while her breathing slows.
The storyteller has her feet up on her ice-white desk. She wishes she could busy her hands with a smoke, although it’s strictly forbidden and would set off the fire alarm. She laces her fingers behind her head instead. The l
ight on the telephone has been blinking ever since she came out of the pod. It can wait.
She holds out her hands to see whether they’re still trembling. She feels more like herself, but the office is as unfamiliar as a hotel room and the man in the hat bothers her. Where in God’s name did he come from?
She looks again at the title of her new story on the screen: An Unexpected Climax. Is it fit for a corporate fiction? That depends on whether it promotes the corporate vision. When it’s done, she’ll try it out on Simonetta, the receptionist on floor 17. Erotic fiction is her thing. Then the Equity Committee, Credit & Risk. One step at a time.
She runs through the first line in her head: They say that an unexpected climax… And then she looks out of the window. Perhaps I’m not made for the storytelling racket, she thinks. I should find another occupation.
Just then, a camera pops up in the bottom of the window frame.
For a startled moment, she thinks it’s a gun. Someone has been sent to kill her. This is how the corporation terminates your services; she’s invited the chop with her lack of enthusiasm and resistance to self-improvement. But no, if she’s being shot, it’s only with a camera. The device drops out of sight briefly and then rises again with intent and she sees that it’s attached to a human head. The head of a man. Now, she thinks.
The camera is rigged to a padded skullcap that elevates it slightly above the man’s head. When he looks at her, it’s like being looked at by two people. A camera crew.
She waves. She recognises the regal gesture as she’s making it: it’s the stiff-fingered, windscreen-wiper salute of modern royals. The motion you would make removing a grease spot from a mirror.
He cannot see her or has chosen to ignore her.
She gets up from the desk and goes closer. At the same time, he reaches up with one hand, hooks his fingertips into a channel on the window frame, twists his body and steps up with the opposite leg. Out there is the narrowest of ledges, hardly more than a lip on the frame, but he gains a toehold. Like a lizard on a garden wall, she thinks, as he clings crookedly to the glass.
She must be invisible to him, she’s sure of it now, but she cannot accept it. She kneels down on the carpet so that her face is close to his, raises her right hand with the index finger pointing stiffly upwards and moves it from side to side. She recognises this gesture too: it’s the movement her optometrist makes to check whether her eye muscles are working properly. There’s an instrument for this purpose, a little mace topped with a shiny orb, but Mrs Jonas prefers to use her finger. Nothing.
She’s spent every working day of the past eight months in this office, without once considering that one might not be able to see into it from outside. There’s a bronze-tinted film on the glass that makes it seem as if sunset is never far off, and she likes the effect, it improves the atmosphere. Now it occurs to her that the film might be intended to ensure her privacy. But from whom? She looks down into the square inside the mall with new interest. More people than ever are crowded together there, and they all appear to be looking at her, although of course they’re looking at the climber. In all the times she’s been to the mall for her banking or her pedicure, or even when she sat at Armando’s drinking a glass of sauvignon blanc, she never once thought to step out into the daylight and look up at her office. Somewhere along the line, without her even noticing, the flame of her curiosity has been snuffed.
The climber reaches up again and with another reptilian motion lifts his foot onto the ledge and stands upright against the glass. At rest there, arms and legs stretched wide, he is transformed into a fine specimen of a man. As good as a sketch by Da Vinci, she thinks, anatomically accurate and symbolically allusive. Vitruvian Man on his way to the gym. Not naked, mind you, far from it, sheathed from head to toe in some sort of leotard. A climbing suit, she imagines. An extreme climbing suit. Beneath the stretchy fabric, baggy at the knees and sweat-ringed in the armpits, he’s slim and muscled, an athlete. A long face, sun-browned and attractively weather-beaten. Not a young man, she thinks, a man in his prime. Jets of sandy hair spurt through the air vents of the camera mount.
Oblivious to her presence. This authorises a closer inspection. Bending towards the glass like a museum visitor before a work of art, she examines his codpiece and the sculpted ridges on his torso. From close up, at least some of them appear to be made of plastic: he has a plate of body armour attached to his midriff. The pectorals and biceps are screen-printed on his suit. As he adjusts his stance on the ledge, she sees his own muscles flexing beneath the hard-edged outlines on the fabric.
A pouch of resin dangles from his belt. He reaches into it with one hand and then the other, and beats the excess off on his thighs. Then he leans back to assess the ledge on the 12th floor. The underside of his chin is an arrowhead. His calf muscles bulge and the printed versions amplify the effect. Any second now, he’ll be gone.
She makes a fist to knock on the window. But what if she startles him and he falls? As she kneels there with her knuckles turned to the glass, there’s a roll of thunder, and then a shadow flicks over the glass and the sound becomes the clatter of a helicopter.
The climber scuttles upwards. Just like a lizard, his asymmetrical hustle, but she thinks: The Human Fly. And she wishes this had not come into her head. At this moment, she has the feeling she’s seen all this somewhere before. The man on the ledge, the woman in her office, the predatory helicopter circling. A movie probably. It’s a distressing idea: this might be the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me, she thinks, and yet it feels like a cliché. Everything surprising has already happened before or is about to happen again. No matter what I do or say, or how I remember it or tell it, it will never be interesting enough. She presses her cheek to the glass and tries to catch a glimpse of a rubber sole, the elegant slipper of an acrobat, as the climber disappears from view.
The corridor is deserted. Closing the door softly behind her, she crosses the carpet on her bare feet, glancing through the open door and sealed window of each office she passes. She can hear the muted thud of the chopper, but all she sees is one tea-stained swatch of sky after another, like a strip of film with nothing on it.
Liselotte is not behind the half-moon desk in the reception area. Leaning over an arrangement of silk roses and baby’s breath, the corporate storyteller glances into the blank monitor, just as a bubble breaks in the water dispenser.
In the silence that follows she hears a small uproar. It’s coming from the conference room off the lift lobby, where a door stands ajar. They are all there, every rank and income bracket from the senior managers to the receptionists, hunched over the table with their fingers laced under their chins or perched on the armrests of chairs, eyes on the television screen, transfixed. A mutter of commentary. No one even looks up as she slips into the room.
When he was close enough to touch, she did not fully appreciate the climber’s fancy dress. Seeing him now on the screen, magnified and distanced at once, she gathers that he’s a bargain-basement superhero. He has red leggings and green briefs, and a yellow bandanna or scarf knotted at his throat, the suggestion of a cape. He’s swiftly scaled another six floors. Three more to the top of the building.
A reception committee stands ready on the rooftop. It’s like the end of a marathon: someone holding a towel emblazoned with the sponsor’s logo, someone else proffering a bottle of water, a third person, invariably a man in a suit, ready to shake a hand and present a platitude. There are a dozen men in uniform too, security guards or policemen with truncheons and two-way radios.
The camera zooms in on the reception committee. That’s the Chief Risk Officer. And the woman beside him? She bristles at the thought that it’s the corporate poet, summoned to deliver an occasional poem, but it’s Duduzile, the PA to the Operations Manager: Facilities Management & Maintenance. Almost as bad. The very woman who processed her request for a higher office. Her skirt flutters like a frantic bird in the downdraught of the rotor. Or it may just be
the wind. It’s always blustery up there, according to Simonetta, a sudden gust once blew the lettuce out of her salad. The edge is alarming too. She expected a barrier more imposing than this waist-high parapet and flimsy handrail. It shouldn’t be so easy to step off into the void.
The climber can go no further. He pauses on the ledge of the 21st floor, holding on by his fingertips, and leans back to consider his final move. A policeman on the rooftop leans over to talk to him. Spiderman has a problem, she sees now. The channels in the window frames that he’s been scaling end here. Above is a concrete overhang, wider than the ledge on which he’s standing, and then nothing but the smooth face of the parapet. It looks unassailable. They could open a window and let him climb into one of the boardrooms – if the windows opened, that is. Surely he considered all this before he started his ascent?
No matter what his plans are, she knows this is the most dangerous part. She watched a documentary once on high-wire walkers and learnt that the truly risky moments in any act are stepping off and arriving back. Out in the middle of the wire, when the spectators’ hearts are in their mouths, the artist is in perfect control. It cannot be otherwise. Balanced over the void, depending only on himself to defy the laws of gravity, his concentration must be pure. Every distraction is tuned out. But when he comes back to the grounded end of the wire, and must pass from his ethereal element into our earthbound one, he is most at risk of falling. The people who wait there, the assistants and seconds, even the most seasoned ones, have to stop themselves from reaching out to seize a hand or an arm. It’s a natural instinct, this urge to drag someone to safety, but it must be resisted. The artist, who has put his life in peril, must be left alone to save it.
101 Detectives Page 6