by Adam Nevill
The monologue concluded with a command: ‘Return to your desk!’
By the end of the interview I was at stage two of the consultation procedure. This boiled down to one month’s salary. With my savings, I could scrape through two more months in the room I shared with Graham. After that, I would fall into arrears in rent unless I found work quickly. It was doubtful that I would find new work. All I knew was books and I’d heard terrible things about the other two publishing companies that operated in the city. They were repeatedly shedding staff. Those were my only thoughts: my limited chances of survival.
The voice from the phone also had the temerity to pitch the information to me as if I were being offered a great opportunity, like a promotion or pay rise. ‘We offer you a competitive new opportunity outside book publishing . . .’ Like all management missives imparted from the Communications Department on the executive floor, this was pure spin. A rewriting of an employee’s immediate future prospects, which amounted in my case to penury, homelessness and perhaps even starvation before the year’s end.
The hideous, buzzing voice also recounted to me how proud I should be of the company’s continuing success after my departure, as if the company should always be in my thoughts. ‘You will agree the future is brighter than it has ever been for our company. You will wish us the best as we maintain our global reach and success. You will be proud of your former association at all times with our brand values for producing the highest standards in creative excellence.’ It went on and on praising itself, the company.
There was a brief administrative acknowledgement of my service too, but that was incorrect. They had my length of service as three years, but I had worked there for fifteen. My name was also mispronounced and my home address was incorrect. The records had not been updated in at least ten years.
Following the propaganda about the company’s greatness, which made no mention of the authors whose work it soullessly and unscrupulously exploited for its own benefit, the pitch of the voice became faux solemn. In fact, I had a sense throughout the entire interview that the voice was mocking me, and perhaps even the company whose virtues it extolled at such mind-numbing length.
During the final phase of the prepared speech, in which the voice deepened and took on a mock-sinister tone, I was regaled with many official warnings and threats of severe legal action should any information about my work, my authors or the company be made available to its competitors.
I was given a date for my exit interview on the executive floor. Leaving parties were forbidden, and the day following my exit the staff would ‘be vigorously urine tested for illegal substances and alcohol exceeding the safe limit imposed by the company for maximum efficiency and safety on company premises’.
Finally I was offered a ‘generous compensation package’, subject to VAT, in exchange for several donor organs from my own body that the company would sell on my behalf through its medical insurance division. In exchange for a kidney, bladder, length of intestine and both eyes, I realised that I would be able to pay for the room I shared with Graham for another five months, while blind and writhing in agony in my pathetic bed, unable to see and experience the Reliquary of Light.
I would of course refuse the offer, but shuddered at the thought of those in this city who had signed up to these corporate donor packages out of desperation. I sometimes saw those victims that could still walk, milling around the municipal dispensary that provided clean water and basic foodstuffs to the destitute and lame, in return for handing out flyers, or wearing sandwich boards for the corporations.
When I returned home that evening, gravity seemed especially crushing. The air of the city was fouler, the wind colder than usual, the traffic more belligerent. I found myself fumbling with my transport pass at the station. My movements were poorly coordinated. I frequently lost balance in the street. The weight of what awaited me, what I had effectively postponed for fifteen years, became heavier and better defined in my thoughts as reality, not merely a nightmare.
People glared at me. Workers tutted on the train. I believe they could sense my failure and looming ruin in the city. There was no empathy left here. There was only a fear of one’s own demise and the struggle to keep on existing, while dead on one’s feet and demoralised.
I should have been saving my money for the struggle ahead, but I treated myself to a carton of Thai-style soya and a small bottle of rum. I intended to consume them quickly and then huddle under my bedclothes with the Reliquary of Light. The light would reveal to me that this dilemma was a worldly trifle, insignificant in the vast scheme of things, my suffering and misfortune irrelevant compared to what awaited me in the afterlife.
As I entered my room, anticipating this private moment of bliss and revelation, I was actually light-headed and tearful with happiness at the mere thought of that tiny receptacle of inmost light waiting behind the skirting board.
But the day was about to become truly intolerable and my position in this world insufferable.
I could see how thorough Graham had been this time while searching my half of the room. Mistaking my epiphany the previous evening for intoxication, because he knew of no distinction between the two states of being, he had ransacked my portion of space while I had been at work.
After his search for drink or narcotic substances he’d only made poor attempts at concealing his trespass because he did not fear me. The drawers were not shut properly. My bed was at least one foot from the wall. The door to my bedside cabinet was wide open.
Already ashen-faced and quivering, bloodless with a dread that was almost suffocating, I fell to my knees and burrowed beneath the bed to the skirting board that hung loose from the plaster. The cavity in which I had sealed the Reliquary of Light was empty.
I scampered to the curtain and tore it aside. Whimpering, and by this time physically shaking, I scanned Graham’s debris. I then began searching on my hands and knees through what resembled, and smelled like, a landfill.
I found the Reliquary upside down and empty of its light in a corner of the room. The lid had been left open for too long and the light of heaven had leaked away into Graham’s soiled clothes. The very sainted wood of that box, that portal, was actually concealed beneath a shirt with yellowed armpits that stank of a farm animal. But the front of the shirt still cast a faint luminescence, like that of a glow-worm, where the light had spilled and dispersed. Despite the stench in the fabric, I pressed the wretched shirt to my face in an attempt to savour the last dregs of heaven on this Earth. And such was my despair and such was my rage that I believe they even heard my cries in the paradise belt that night.
Once I had finished the bottle of rum, and finished urinating onto Graham’s greasy pillow, I went down to the communal kitchen and fetched the only sharp knife in the cutlery drawer. I returned to our room and unscrewed the light bulb from the ceiling. I emptied Graham’s wardrobe onto the floor, then crept inside the cabinet and waited for him to come home.
Even after my toils that night – the gristly wet work of getting Graham disjointed and unspooled upon his bed, before distributing his various parts into plastic bags – my rage did not abate. Having the keyhole into paradise blocked, a peephole that had offered me a glimpse into a place where all of the answers awaited, and where love eternal burned like the middle of a star, was not a matter that I could forgive or react to reasonably. I felt as if dear Father Suarez’s purpose on this Earth had also been dribbled into the vomit-speckled carpet of a degenerate alcoholic’s room. It was not my task to forgive such an act of desecration. But I believed that it was my responsibility to address it. I’d had a really bad day too.
The act of dismembering Graham represented something of an awakening for me. I already knew that little in this world even came close to matching the harmony, resonance and perfection of the light. But the gulf between the world and what was accessible to all through love and a devotion to simply being better had widened to such an extent that the only happiness worth aspiring to
now was that of wealth and acts of status-completion to move one gradually upwards within an unjust and callous hierarchy.
And yet the rules of the game were fixed; the receipt of the white envelope was inevitable. Only the monstrous could ever be ascendant. Sadists and sociopaths had completely enslaved us and removed any chance of inner or spiritual life. The inmost light had been doused within a whole species. These are broad brush strokes, admittedly, but they were the beginnings of an epiphany that presented itself inside my imagination in vast, epochal, even monumental visions that night and thereafter.
Day by day, as the date of my exit interview approached, after I returned home from work I slowly but fastidiously removed Graham’s body and his belongings from the room. I took up the carpet and gave away his furniture to the local offices of charities. I scrubbed the bare wooden floors, the walls and the ceiling. I took down the curtain. I erased him.
Upon my bedside table I placed the empty Reliquary, arranging it upon a piece of starched white cloth. I cultivated my memories of what once existed and issued from that box while I sat cross-legged before my shrine. I made notes. I used as much description and strangeness and imagination as took my fancy, and I revised and whittled and then polished these words endlessly through the cold nights until I had begun, albeit feebly, to capture some sense of that wondrous light and all that it promised and imbued in oneself.
Though his phone rang continuously at one point, not long after I freed myself of his burden, no one ever came to the room to ask after Graham. I gave his phone to a vagrant in the street.
By the time of my final interview, in which I was to be given the white envelope, I had made the room a place of solace and reflection, Spartan but clean, though not without a sense of sacred mystery engendered by my simple shrine, and by the words that I would recount before it each evening after a simple meal taken with a glass of cold water.
The security detail remained outside the main doors of the executive floor and informed me that they would wait for me until the meeting was concluded. They would be present to supervise the mortifying ritual of my clearing my work station before the eyes of the terrified and cowed staff. My ex-colleagues would then commit themselves to their useless endeavours with a renewed energy in order to avoid the white envelope and my fate.
I found the corporate process and the building just as crude, simple and horrid as I had ever done. But that morning I was no longer afraid. Since the very light inside the Reliquary had been taken from me, I had nurtured a sense of its celestial wonder inside myself that had grown daily.
I had no doubt about the existence of this light somewhere better than this. At that point, I had also come to accept that I had nothing left to lose besides my life. My death, however, would only hasten my entry to what I had experienced from a fragment inside Father Suarez’s little wooden box. Living without fear, and with my spirits engorged with a memory of that light, I began to experience a sense of weightlessness and freedom that I had never known before in my daily existence. Emancipated from the indentured slavery of the company, I was also free to pursue a new purpose, and by means as extreme as I deemed necessary on a case-by-case basis. As an agent of light, I had also decided to permit myself a certain monstrousness with any monsters that I encountered, until my inevitable end.
Once the doors to the executive floor closed behind me, I dropped to my knees and slid two rubber wedges beneath the doors to prevent them being opened from outside.
I proceeded as instructed into the boardroom where I was greeted by a shrunken individual in an expensive suit. He wore a gingery blonde wig atop his withered face, and had lifts in shoes that were too big for his feet. A clownish gargoyle who reminded me of an ape.
A fat woman with masses of glossy, coiffured hair that was far too young for her bloated head joined him. Her corpulent hands were encrusted with gaudy golden rings. They each had quick, rat-like eyes that glittered horribly. Each half-smiled odiously, as if trying to repress their mirth at my anticipated distress.
I understood immediately that their destruction of my career – and therefore my life, as they saw it, because what else defined us now? – gave them great pleasure. But this, these things that sat at the end of the long table, and those others that they served in some other building that was also, no doubt, a pressure cooker of fear and intimidation, made us afraid? These gibbons cowed us in our multitudes across the grimy cities? It was not enough that their rapaciousness had poisoned the environment. We also subjugated ourselves to these things that walked on their hind legs in expensive clothes, in return for existences blighted by anxiety and privation. People carved and mutilated their own bodies in the bathrooms of these companies, and leaped under high-speed trains, because of them, these quick-thinking, fast-talking apes that contributed no light to the world.
As the little monkey in the suit chattered and taunted me with its corporate double-speak, and while the great pudding with its absurd, regal hair nodded its head at key words and phrases like ‘competitive’, ‘added value’, ‘rationalisation’, ‘taking ownership’, ‘repositioning’ and ‘market share’, I fingered the paring knife in my pocket. At last the devil had a face, but its theology was as empty and meaningless as the lives it had reduced around it.
I held back from destroying them. Since the dismemberment of my roommate, I realised that my patience must become as deep and boundless as the light that I now served; my bestial compulsions and impulses must be tempered by thoughts of paradise. Returning some light to the world would only be possible if my incarceration or execution was delayed. I had much work to do before I left the stage.
At the end of its spiel, the little gibbon was clearly unsettled by my indifference and my failure to writhe and beg for mercy. The porcine creature that sat beside the monkey even became petulant, as if I were guilty of an unprofessional affront by merely standing still and staring at them with revulsion. In that room they liked to witness terror and despair, not defiance.
‘You must not open the envelope until you have left the company premises. Nor will you discuss its contents with your former colleagues. If you do, the future opportunity contained therein will be void.’
He hurriedly concluded his prepared speech by repeating an offer for me to donate my vital organs in return for a miserable stipend. The creature was at its most loathsome at that point in the interview. As it sat there and offered to recycle my body, I was no longer even sure that it was human. But I had no doubt that the creature had been sustained by the bodily organs of others. How else could something so ancient, with a face that reminded me of dried fruit stretched into a human likeness by cosmetic surgeons, still be alive?
I tore open the white envelope before their horrified eyes. Such an act would have been unthinkable before my awakening in the very blood of the vandal of light, the thief, Graham.
The envelope, as I suspected, was empty. A representation of the future. This piece of empty folded-and-gummed paper served as a reminder of a world without human rights, the lightless consensus. This was their final act of revenge on those who failed to generate enough capital to sustain the vulpine roles of the executives, which in turn maintained a status quo in which they were the sole beneficiaries. And we actually feared them. Them! It was time someone shone a simple, pure, bright light upon their faces.
I moved around the table as if to shake their hands. Such a manoeuvre had clearly not been attempted before and their bewilderment bought me time. Enough time to uncrown the apes. Simultaneously, I seized a handful of hair atop each executive’s head and then tore upwards with all of my strength.
There were shrieks and both figures rose from their chairs like puppets that I had taken control of. The great royal curls of the woman came away after a tearing sound reminiscent of sticky tape ripped from fabric, and I revealed the ghastly grey wisps and the pasty scalp beneath its tresses.
The monkey’s locks appeared to have been stitched into its remaining glandular hair around t
he ears. But the wig partly lifted like a carpet tile and the creature’s little legs, which ended in those canoe-like shoes, skittered about the floor. When I released his donor-hairpiece, he fell and kicked out like an insect on its back in the soil. And in that moment of triumph, I realised that the executive, and its most loyal acolytes, could only be dealt with effectively through a rapid dehumanisation followed by physical destruction. Only after such a reign of cleansing rage would any light rise and bathe a world freed from the entitled.
‘I’ll come back for your heads another time,’ I said. As I left the boardroom my body suffused with a light and energy that seemed to make me capable of raising and pitching great rocks through the tinted windows of the buildings that rose like cathedrals in the commercial districts.
I left the building by the executive fire escape and passed a private ambulance parked onsite. It was waiting expectantly to perform extractions from my torso.
My first tenpenny Book of Light has been a great success. Since it was published four years ago, another sixteen million books have been uploaded to the Rainforest Cloud, so it took a while for the book to shine its solitary ray of light through that mass of wishful thinking and delusion. It took me three years of giving the book away free before it became sufficiently visible to gain its present unstoppable momentum.