Some of us have families. Debts. Mortgages. And even though we work for a company that sells health insurance, many of us don’t have comprehensive coverage of our own. We’ve been waiting for a miracle, some upturn in fortunes, but the cold reality of the situation is upon us. We are scared of the future.
Yet the moment Jennifer walks in, cradling it in her arms, all this is forgotten.
I am on a sales call when she enters. It was clear within the first few minutes of conversation that the man on the other end of the line has no intention to purchase any of our health care packages but policy dictates that I have to follow through the script of questions, laminated and pinned on my cubicle wall, beat by beat, until the call reaches an end.
Yet when I see Jennifer coming down the aisle, heading for her desk, carrying it, I find myself rising up, removing my head-set, not even bothering to finish the sales talk. I’m drawn to her, to it. There is no decision, no choice. All around the office my co-workers are doing the same thing, standing up from cubicles, moving towards Jennifer, as if on some pre-arranged signal.
We gather round her, looking at it, in various states of awe. It is beautiful. Miriam from accounts tentatively asks if she can hold it. Jennifer nods kindly. Of course she can. She places it in Miriam’s arms. Miriam stands there, staring down at it, her breathing shallow, her eyes like little dark pools of water.
“Oh my,” she says. “It really is wonderful.”
We ask Jennifer where it came from. Jennifer says she found it lying on her door step that morning. I feel a twinge of jealousy, that she could have a life where such things happen, that while I was forcing myself into the shower, bleary eyed and alone, she was opening her door to such a sight. I want to say something cutting, to try and puncture her joy, bring her back down to where the rest of us are, but then I find myself looking at it, and I feel a sense of wonder rushing over me, washing away any jagged thoughts.
The manager comes over to tell us to get back to work, but when he sees it he stops mid-stride.
“What is that . . .?” he asks.
Jennifer just gives him a gentle smile. He keeps staring at it, frowning a little. “I’m not sure you can bring that to work.”
Jennifer gazes down at it. “No,” she says, and although her voice is quiet, I can sense the edge underneath. “I can bring it to work.”
Its face is peering out from the grey blankets she has swaddled it in, and she strokes its cheek, almost absentmindedly. The manager stands there, nodding for a moment, as if he accepts that, but I can feel the unease reverberating off him.
“Would you like to hold it?” Jennifer says, offering the bundle to him.
He shakes his head. He walks back through the bullpens and cubicles, reminding us that we have sales targets to reach, that the end of the week isn’t far away. He is trying to sound authoritative, in control, but he stumbles over his words. He walks into his office, never looking back, closing the door behind him. The blinds are already down. I hear the faint click of the lock. I want to watch for a moment, to see if he’ll peer out through the slats but already I am turning back, drawn to look at it once again.
I know I should get back to work. The manager is right—we only have until Friday. Our livelihoods hang in the balance. I should be sitting at my terminal, making calls from the list, chasing sales, but I already know that won’t be happening.
We won’t get much work done today. Nobody is concerned by this, as we stand there, a small crowd around Jennifer.
We are lucky. We are blessed.
Tuesday
In the dream I am in a maze of cubicles that stretch out forever. Strip lights flutter overhead. Monitors flicker an uneasy green glow but they cannot penetrate the darkness here that seems thick and heavy. I can barely see in front of my face.
This is our office but it is also somewhere else at the same time, somewhere oddly familiar, and the fact I seem to have been here before terrifies me in a way I can’t explain.
Then I hear it calling to me from across the room, somewhere buried in the bullpens and workspaces. I try to run towards its cry, but the ground is sludge beneath my feet and my muscles feel like rotting candy-floss. I look up and realize I was never in the office after all. I am standing on a shore. Dark water laps at my feet. I get the sense that I have been standing here for a long time. Maybe forever.
The tide is coming in and out so quickly, so violently, that it leaves a gulf behind it, a muddy seabed where scores of silver fish gasp and thrash, before the water crashes back in, sweeping them up. Over and over again. In the distant surf giant black shapes rise and fall beneath the sea. The sky is alight with stars.
It is still calling me, but now it is joined by other voices, first one, then many, a cacophony howling in some language I don’t understand. Louder and louder as those black shapes burst through the water, towering overhead, and just as they fall upon me I, of course, wake up.
I lie in the half-light, listening to early morning traffic outside. I try not to imagine where Tony is now. What he is doing. Who he is with. I’m forty-five years old. It’s too late to start over. I can feel all that time trailing behind me, out of reach, gone forever. A quiet panic starts to build and threatens to overwhelm me and I sit up in bed, unable to catch my breath for a moment, shaken. I consider calling in sick, but then I remember Friday’s deadline and as bad as things might feel right now, they could become a lot worse.
I am running late and by the time I reach the office there is already a crowd around Jennifer’s cubicle. Even though my view is obscured I know instantly that she has brought it into work again. I can feel its presence in the room, a shift in the atmosphere, in the humidity.
The manager intercepts me before I can join them. He lightly takes my arm, guiding me towards his office. I shake my head, trying to keep moving towards Jennifer’s bullpen.
“It’ll just be a minute,” he says. “Please.”
He closes the door behind him as we enter his office. He offers me a seat but I don’t respond so he awkwardly perches at the end of his desk instead as some sort of compromise. He smiles at me, like he hopes I will initiate the conversation but I just look towards the blinds, knowing that beyond them, out there in the office, the others are gazing down at it.
“I think this might be a problem,” he says.
I still don’t speak. I can feel the fast beat of my heart. I want to leave his office and go back out there. This isn’t fair. It is a cruelty to keep me away from it, in here.
“Do you think it’s a problem?” he says and his tone suggests that he’d really like me to answer.
I shake my head. This isn’t a problem. No.
“Nobody did any work yesterday.”
He approaches me, cautious, like I’m a feral creature that might bolt at any moment. “We’ve got a long way to go if we’re going to hit those sales targets by the end of the week. And well, for God’s sakes . . . look at it.”
He walks towards the window and opens the blinds. I feel a wave of relief at seeing them all gathered round Jennifer out there. It is still here. “This isn’t normal,” he says, and his voice cracks a little. “We have to do something. We have to talk to them.”
“Why?”
My question seems to confuse him and his mouth moves before he can fully find the words. “Something is wrong here. It’s like when you have a dream and you try to remember what happened but the details keep slipping away and . . . I’m not sure I even remember why I brought you in here, in the first place.” He shakes his head, his hand to his mouth. “Doesn’t that seem strange? Do you remember us walking in here? Do you?”
After the accident, when I was still in the hospital, he was the first one from the office to pay a visit. He brought some flowers, because he didn’t know what else to bring in a situation like that. He didn’t ask many questions, he didn’t even ask how I was feeling and I was grateful for that at least.
I see the worry etched on his face, feel his desper
ation, and I find myself nodding, trying to remember why I didn’t continue my work yesterday, why I walked away from a call in progress, but then I see movement from the corner of my eye and look back out to the office, and Miriam has stepped to the side a little and I have a clear line of sight and I can feel it, looking at me, and for one glorious moment nothing else exists outside of this.
I open the door and my manager tries to say something but I am already moving across the room, weightless, on air, drifting towards the rest of them as they congregate around Jennifer’s cubicle.
Jennifer sees me and smiles and I smile back at her. Miriam is muttering something to me and it takes me a moment to hear her properly, as she tries to tell me about a dream she had last night, a black beach, dark water, how the stars overhead seemed altered in a way that terrified her. She says something about an eye opening, mentions the word leviathan, possibly as an adjective, maybe as a noun but I have stopped listening long before she breaks down into whispered sobs. I just want to savor this moment, standing here with my co-workers, in the warm glow of its presence.
Phones ring unanswered. Emails stack up unread. We stay exactly where we are and where we are meant to be.
This is Tuesday in the office.
Wednesday
I do not remember going to sleep or waking, or what my dreams were made of. I open my eyes and find myself standing before the sink, toothbrush in hand, the faucet running, unfamiliar words jangling in my head.
After the accident Tony would often find me standing here in the mornings, similarly unable to recall how long I’d been here. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours. I was sleepwalking a lot at the time. He would guide me back to bed, whisper reassuring words, telling me this was something that would be pass.
It didn’t pass though and in time his understanding turned to resentment. He wanted me to let go, but I couldn’t. I wanted to cling onto my grief, to wrap my arms around it, to let it thrash and throw me around.
Then the incident at the supermarket happened and everything seemed to change between us for good. They had it all wrong. I wasn’t taking the baby anywhere. All I did was pick her up from her pram, walk with her for a few minutes along the aisles. I just wanted to know what it felt like, to glimpse a life that should have been mine. They could have given me one more minute.
That’s all I wanted. To be happy, truly happy, for just a moment or so.
It wasn’t that much to ask.
The manager is waiting for Jennifer when she arrives. We have all been watching the door, expectant. Miriam brings up the sales report, but it is a half-hearted attempt to focus on work and none of us respond. Then Jennifer comes in and the office seems a little bit brighter, a little more real. Of course, she has brought it back with her once more.
The manager places his hand on her arm though, moving her to his office. We are all risen, craning to look. Jennifer is trying to say something to him, but he is talking over her. Their voices are indistinct. We start to move forward, closer, but they have reached his office already and he ushers her inside, closing the door, locking it.
The blinds are down. They are sealed away from us.
We try to get on with our work. We look at sales figures, data, leads. We make the right moves with our fingers on keyboards and the right noises with our voices on the phone. But we are not here. We are inside that office with them.
Lunch time comes. Nobody heads out to eat or even orders in. Our vigil is all that matters now. Sometimes we see a shadow beyond the blinds, somebody moving in the office, and a murmur of anticipation ripples across the room. But the office door remains locked and closed.
Outside, cars pass down the street. Commuters walk, eyes fixed on cellphones, blind to the world around them. Trains rattle underground. The sun sinks down, turning the sky orange and then red and finally an unsure shade of black. Lights flicker on across the city, a blanket of stars.
We are all still here. The phones don’t ring anymore. There is no sound of typing, of printers smoothly ejecting documents. We barely breathe. All the lights are off, except for the manager’s office. It is aglow at the end of the room like a faraway city that we can never visit, that will forever be glimpsed in the distance, out of reach.
Then we hear the lock turning. Our glazed eyes switch back into focus. The manager leans his head out. He sees our darkened outlines, staring back at him.
He tells us to go home for the night.
He closes the office door again. The lock turns. The light goes off.
We go home.
Thursday
The door to the manager’s office is still closed and locked. The blinds remain down, the light is off inside. Yet overnight we have made a silent, unacknowledged decision to get back to work. We have a sense of purpose now. We have our leads.
The automated system patches us through to people around the country and we tell them how tremendous our medical insurance policy is and how much money they can save by switching providers.
We outline the terrible things that could befall their family without our service. We follow the scripts pinned up in our bullpens, next to photos of families, friends, colleagues, signs that say you don’t have to be mad to work here, schedules, calendars, lunch menus. We tell our customers about successful claims that have been paid out before, about special rates on ambulatory and hospital care, and our fast, free, no obligation quotes. We also make sure to tell them about the negative spaces that exist between letters, the hidden provinces concealed by words, how language evolved to control us so we could no longer see the invisible kingdom that lies beyond the veil. We are removing these verbal blindfolds, these constraints, speaking in a tongue that none of us understand or remember, but have always known, buried somewhere in our primal past, as man stood naked under the cosmos and stared up into the eternal.
We are chanting, discordant consonants collapsing into unknowable vowels. I can see Miriam crying into her headset as her mouth makes strange shapes and the sound pours from her throat in an unending torrent. Her nails dig into her palms, thin slivers of blood trickling onto white sleeves.
I smile at her and she smiles back, helpless, her mouth still moving, like she is merely a grinning puppet. The man on the other end of my phone-line is shouting in my ear now, his words running into each other; they are the sounds of an ancient tomb opening, they are the sounds of a dead moon falling from the sky, they are the sounds that are coming from every mouth in the room, through every tinny headset, across telephone lines, across electronic signals, across radio waves, spreading and spreading and spreading, like waves onto a dark shore, like a herald for what is to come.
We keep going all day and all night. We do not stop. We are good workers.
Friday
Today we have to deliver the sales report to head office.
The streets are deserted. Headless streetlamps sparkle in the morning air. Smoke drifts from subway entrances. A black sun shines overhead.
Friday is the best day.
The carpet in the office is thick and sticky. Miriam is slumped over her terminal, bent forwards as if to prostrate before some inevitable god. Her jaw hangs open, still moving, still trying to form words and sounds, despite the fact it is swollen and dislocated. Her hands are raised a little, opening and closing, gently clutching at the air. She reminds me of a scuttled crab.
Jennifer sits in the cubicle next to mine. I have not seen her since the manager led her into the office on Wednesday. Her skin is ashen and she has lost weight. She quietly tells me that all this is a dream, but just not our dream. She tells me not to be sad. Nothing can end that truly did not exist. I remind her that the sales report is due. It is very important for reasons I can’t seem to remember. Something about downsizing, although the concept of size seems vaguely ridiculous now.
Nevertheless, I sit down and start to collate the figures for the month. Expenses. Sales. Growth. Profit. Loss. My fingers tap lightly on the keyboard and I can see my reflection on the terminal scr
een, dim and distant, a ghost.
“What was it, Jennifer?” I ask as I insert the numbers into a spreadsheet. “What was it you found on your doorstep?”
“You don’t remember . . .?”
“I keep forgetting things. Did we all go on a work outing somewhere? For some reason I remember a beach. Sand. Maybe it was night.” I am about to say something more but even that drifts away. Compiling the report should be Miriam’s job but she is no longer moving, crouched at her desk, a husk.
“You don’t remember,” Jennifer repeats, no longer a question.
“Do you?”
She shakes her head. “I remember it was a Monday. I remember the alarm on my phone waking me up. Showering. Doing my hair, my make-up, getting dressed. I was hurrying because I was worried I was going to be late and I’d been late quite a few times this past month.” She stops for a moment, shivering. “I remember opening the door and stepping out and looking down and there it was and . . .”
“What was it?” I ask again, even though I both know and don’t know the answer to that at the same time, and maybe what she saw isn’t what I saw, or what Miriam saw. Maybe we all saw what we needed to see.
Jennifer shrugs, smiles helplessly. “I just knew I should bring it to work. That I should show everyone.”
She falls silent, staring off into some distant place. Her hands are black and charred. I finish the sales reports and email it. The document makes a satisfying whooshing sound as it is sent and I imagine a little paper airplane, taking off into the air, weaving between the buildings and bridges of this town, flying out above the highways, towards head office.
I get up and walk down the aisle to the manager’s office. I knock lightly on the door and enter. He is sitting behind his desk. He has been crying. I tell him I have sent the sales report to head office.
He tells me it is quite possible that head office no longer exists. He is shaking and he struggles to get the words out. I walk over and put my arms around his head, pulling him close, like a mother to a child.
Hinnom Magazine Issue 003 Page 6