Five Days Apart

by Chris Binchy

  What is wrong with you? I wanted to ask her. Why do you find me so funny?

  But instead I looked at the mirrored wall beside me and saw what she saw, a tired twelve-year-old boy in his father’s suit with an unhappy expression on his face. When the doors opened, she led me through an open-plan office. The people that I passed didn’t look at me. They weren’t much older than I was, mostly men, some women. Three people did the interview, a bored-looking fellow whose smile lasted less time than the pulse of his handshake, an older guy who I thought might be difficult, and a woman who was friendly. I didn’t hear their names when they said them, thinking too much about my damp hand. The woman seemed most comfortable, and she did most of the talking, asked what I knew about the company. We all talked about what I had done in college, the kind of analysis I would be up to, and they went through their questions. Then she told me that their graduate program could offer all sorts of opportunities if I was prepared to work, that they had a very fluid policy of promotion, and if I fit in, I would find myself rising very quickly. I asked about the other members of their team, and the younger guy, who hadn’t really said much, suddenly lit up and started talking about the diversity of their backgrounds and educational levels and experience, and how despite that they all could progress in a company like this. People got on well, and if I was to ask anybody out on the floor did they think the company genuinely cared for them, any one of them would say yes. Without a doubt. He seemed moved by his outburst, full of belief.

  It prompted something in me. I said I liked the sound of it all, said I would love to be a part of their team and that I believed I could do the work and that I liked deadlines and challenges. Not that I liked them, but that I responded well to them. I told them about those final weeks in college when we had all been feeling the pressure and how it had brought us closer together and that had helped each of us, had lifted the weaker guys and hadn’t cost the stronger ones anything. I didn’t say that I was one of the strongest, but the way the sentence came out, it was implied. I shut up after that. They sat in silence after I had finished. I thought for a second that they might start clapping, but then the woman said that that was fine, and somebody would be in touch by the end of the following week. I stood up and shook their hands again and bounced out the door.

  When I was talking to them, when I got going, I wasn’t nervous and I’d said what I wanted to say. I had seen the place, the building full of big plants and people with ID swipe cards and work to do. It didn’t look frightening, and sometime in the week before they called, I realized that I wanted the job. To plug into something bigger than myself and belong to it. I could be like those other people drinking coffee, standing around in groups, looking at one guy’s screen trying to figure out what the problem was. I wanted it. Get me out of the house. Think about something else. I would get paid.

  They asked me to come in again the following week. When I was there talking to the older guy, who I realized now was the head of IT, it took me a while to understand that they were giving me the job. We had a five-second conversation about money where he told me how much they would pay me and I said that was fine. At the end he said that he hoped that everything would go well for me and that he would be following my progress.

  From where? I wondered as I was leaving. Would the big man in a cavernous office on his own be watching me on a screen as I tried to prove that everything I had said in my interview was true?

  A day of induction. Talk about the company, their history, their rules. What could not be tolerated. What they wanted for me and from me, and what we would give each other. A little symphony of symbiosis. Then a laughing guy took my photo, and a couple of minutes later I had a laminated card with the name of the bank, a bar code, and a picture of me.

  The first day, when I arrived and gave my name to the girl at reception, a guy called Frank came down and got me. He was about thirty. I could tell by the way that he said my name while shaking my hand and then grinned at the girl behind the desk as we passed that he was enjoying this. Bringing in the young fellow. We went up to the floor where I had had my interview.

  He introduced me to twelve people in five minutes, a flurry of names and smiles. Some more interested than others, some too busy or distracted. There were in-jokes with some of them, oblique references to people’s sexuality and unsettled bets. It was all very relaxed and informal, ha, ha. People asking me what team I supported, and when I couldn’t answer, they just looked at me.

  “Not much of a football man,” I said, laughing stupidly, trying to let them know I wasn’t a prick. “But I watch it,” I said then. “Sometimes.”

  He brought me to a desk at the end of the room, facing a wall, away from the lifts and beyond the window that ran along one side of the room. There was a computer and a phone beside it.

  “This is your machine,” he said. “You’ll be seeing a lot of this view. If you last.” We stared at the wall together for a moment while I tried to gauge why he’d said that.

  “That was a joke,” he said.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Very good.”

  He showed me how to log in. The first time I did it, when the box came up and asked me to enter my ID and the screen jumped to life when I put it in, I felt a wave of excitement that almost nauseated me. Frank showed me what I’d be doing, the folder with the five applications that I would have to test, and he gave me an overview of what each one did. He said it would be explained in more detail by various other people over the next couple of days. He would be there across the room if I needed anything. That was all there was. I sat at my desk and opened the folder.

  All the things that people didn’t see. The thousands of hours that went into making things operate easier, better, quicker, more securely. The amount of silent invisible effort that it took to make a company like that function. This was what I began to realize through those first few days. This enormous entity made up of a hundred thousand people all over the world into which I was being absorbed, that existed in people’s heads as a one-word title and a logo, floated along on a sea of hundreds of millions of processes, any of which could go wrong at any time, that if they weren’t watched and checked and tested all the time could catch on a moment of inattention, any tiny human frailty, and stall, crashing suddenly and taking more and more down with them as they fell. I had thought there would be nothing inspirational or beautiful at the coal-face of the job, that it was only as you moved out through the systems and details and accounts into the real world, the lives of the customers and clients, the businesses and enterprises and governments whose decisions influenced people’s lives, that you would begin to feel the sense that this was an important company to be working for. That that would be where anything vital to be found in this business must lie. But no. That first week. The training people from the different departments told me about the applications that were relevant to them and their functionality, and in the middle of it all, I began to see beauty there.

  It was about attention. Thought. A struggle against the work becoming rote, the need to stay fresh and focused. The computers hummed and clacked, but how human it was. It wasn’t trying to decipher a mess of code. I could see that I needed to be sharp and constant, yes, but also imaginative and creative and meticulous. It was about making something perfect and then looking again to see if you could make it better. Immunizing it against contingency. Can it be broken? What have my colleagues not considered? What tiny detail have they let slip through? And while they’ve been getting in with their microscopes to make sure that everything is okay in there, what are they missing from the bigger picture? What can I see when I stand back and look at it all? Between us all, we could keep it working. In the handbook that they had given me there was a statement from some guy with a head full of teeth writing to me from somewhere in Connecticut saying that the company would always strive for excellence, and I could see it now. I could feel his enthusiasm and understand i
t. I was a part of this world. Every aspect of this was work I could do and, better than that, it was work that suited me. I could be passionate about it.

  Frank looked after me. When people were going down for lunch, he would check to see if I wanted to come along, and after I saw that he wasn’t just being polite, I went with him. We sat in a group, all the people from our floor, and talked about the work and pay and the bosses and what had been on TV, and I sat in the middle of it all and laughed when I was supposed to and kept my mouth shut the rest of the time. There was a core of people who were smarter and better dressed, who went out at weekends together and made the arrangements and seemed to know everybody from all the floors as they passed around us. And then there were the others. The ones who sat and watched and didn’t speak. The split was there, so obvious, in the middle of them, and I knew where I wanted to be, but I didn’t know what it would take. At lunch one day Frank asked me where I’d done my degree. I could feel the rest of them looking at me as I told him.

  “Is Brady still around? Still doing his thing?”

  “He is. Was he there in your time?”

  “In my time? Listen to this child. I’m not even out of the place ten years.”

  “But you knew him?” I asked, sounding more excitable than I would have wanted. It was comforting to hear a familiar name in a place like this, to picture the professor with his glasses and jumper and personal smell, ready to talk about anything with anyone, always friendly and understanding and weird.

  “Complete charlatan,” Frank said. “What a waste of space.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you liked him? So distracted and eager and all that mad-professor stuff. Totally contrived. He’s not worth a fuck. Counting down the days.” I tried not to let my devastation show. I didn’t think there was anything I could say. “You don’t agree?” he asked.

  “No, I kind of liked him,” I said. He looked at me for a second and then shrugged and smiled at me.

  “So you think I’m being unfair?”

  “Yes,” I said. “More or less.” I tried to think of something else to make it less bald, but after a moment of silence the others laughed.

  At five o’clock people went home. For the first couple of days when I was still settling in, I left when they did, but then on an evening when I had work still to do I said to Frank that I’d like to stay back and get it finished.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not that kind of place. There’s no competition to see who can work longest. It’s about organizing ourselves to get it done on time.”

  “I am on time. I just wanted to get a head start—”

  “What’s the point?” he said, smiling. “You’ll just end up having more time tomorrow. And what are you going to do with that?”

  “More work?”

  “You see where it goes? You just get into a cycle where you work more than the rest of us. We don’t want that. When the deadlines start coming, we’ll stay back, but until then we don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go home. Relax. Meet friends. Do whatever you want. I’m sure you’ve better things to be doing than hanging around here all night.”

  It meant that I was home before six every day. It was summer, and there was light in the sky until after eleven. It was a lot of time to fill. I would buy food on my way back, cook it, do some laundry and iron a shirt for the next day. Then I’d watch television until I could go to bed. For a while that was my routine, but I could feel the walls begin to close in.

  I went for walks. Even if I wasn’t talking to other people, it was still better to be around them. I cycled to the park. Every evening there were thousands of people doing things together on the pitches and the paths and across the fields into the trees. Playing sports and jogging and walking dogs. Flying kites and taking photos of deer and chasing each other. Families having barbecues and picnics. Gangs of people drinking. Picking each other up. All these enterprises constructed so that people could be together outside in the evening, as if nobody wanted to be at home.

  A couple of times a week I would go to the cinema after work and watch whatever was starting at the time. Being on your own at a film was better, I thought. I listened to the people around me eating too loud, talking into phones, laughing at the same ads they saw on television every day. The unbalanced couples where one person didn’t have the same brainpower or interest or hearing as the other. Who is that? Who is he? What did he say? This thing is in fucking Chinese. The film ruined for them both. I was there for the comfort of the darkness. The primeval excitement of looking up at big bright things happening above. Noise and light.

  I thought about personal ads. I could meet someone different and forget about Camille. Somebody from another life altogether who wouldn’t remind me of her. I looked at Web sites and the evening paper. There were hundreds of girls in Dublin looking for the right kind of man. Hundreds. They were very specific about who they were and what they wanted. Nonsmoker, social drinker, good sense of humor. Relaxed. Easygoing. Honest. Bubbly. Vivacious. Cuddly. Up for a laugh. Likes cinema, meals, animals, theater, the Outdoors, the Arts. Seeks similar. They all sought similar, as if Dublin was full of easygoing, humorous people trying to find each other. It never felt like that to me. I saw lots of uptight anxious hassled people trying to avoid each other. Was I up for a laugh? What did that even mean? Water balloons? Clown shoes?

  And who was I anyway? “Twenty-four-year-old male, shy, uncomfortable in his own skin, may or may not have hidden depths, trying desperately to avoid hanging around with best friend and his girlfriend with whom he is in love. Better if you don’t look like her. Should be capable of disappearing immediately if circumstances change. Good sense of humor. You’ll need it.” I gave up before I’d even started.

  The summer passed by. It was easier to feel optimistic when the sun shone, when the smell of the sea came into town carrying the gulls flashing white and screaming, getting the accent right as they looped above. “Where else would you be?” a taxi driver said to me one Thursday evening on my way home after work, as the pink light bathed everything and made it look the way it should. The two of us were plugged into our roles, the working stiff heading home and the old rogue trying to think of diversions. I looked at the city around me, the bridges reflected green in the river, shimmering in a way the land wished it could. The girls teetering along in groups, tanned skin and hair and handbags. The guys passing them, knowing that it wasn’t cool to turn around, but looking in the end. The night air, friendly and fragrant, telling you that it would be all right. Not to worry. That you should enjoy yourself because tomorrow would be Friday and after that who cared. The whole city, cars and people, lined up and moving around each other, feeling that everything was tonight. Get it right, and the rest would fall into place. Turn away from the bouncers, from the tiny junkies who drifted sideways through the crowd trying to be seen and trying to disappear, from the first puking kid of the night, and see whatever it was that you wanted, because it was all there.

  I felt the joy of the suit. It made me one of a group. An office boy. A data monkey. Nothing to distinguish me from anybody else with an ID on a chain around my neck. I saw my tie on other guys every day, people I must have had something in common with to choose the same thing. A shade away from absolute conformity. The same level of pointless resistance. The same shoes. Too many people doing the same thing to even try and be different. Disappear into the dull comfort of belonging. The same sandwich for a week at a time, then change. People like me everywhere, in shirtsleeves, all purposeful, trying to convey that you’re two pay rises better off than you look. The coffee shops where the nicer-looking girls went, where we sat on rickety stools and waited for something to happen that never did. Standing sometimes with the smokers, gathered at the front of buildings, facing d
ifferent directions, hiding behind gray pillars, in ones and twos but everybody always plotting, plotting. Even on their own. When I’m in charge, it’ll be different. When I get out of here, I’ll be happy. When I go back up, I’m going to tell him.

  This new part of town that could be anywhere, with all the languages and the gyms and the coffee cups and juice bars, international shorthand for nowhere. The buildings piled high around us, trying to tell us that they were going to be there forever. The cleaning company vans in the evening, unloading the men and women who made sure that nothing ever looked different. The green bins, the wine bars, the dead unhappiness of the midweek pubs, stuck down here as if you were on a business trip somewhere grim, drinking your per diem. Because this was another country. Going back home was a trip, five hundred yards across the road into a no-man’s-land populated by street drinkers and tourists gone wrong, then cross a bridge into town. Away from this affectation that still tried too hard, not believing in itself, as if in the morning it might be gone when we all arrived. Disappeared, just flat waste ground where we had thought we were. Fifteen thousand people looking at an empty space in silence, but inside we would all be thinking the same thing. I never believed in it anyway. I always knew this would happen.

  Chapter Six

  My job was solving problems, looking at situations where things didn’t work and finding ways to resolve the difficulty. Maybe other people would have been better able to see a solution to my problem with Alex and the girl. Maybe somebody else would find something obvious about that situation that was hidden to me. Maybe they would tell me that I was doing the right thing to cut them out of my life and move off in a new direction. This job was just the start of it. The perfect opportunity to make a break with an uncomfortable past.

  Or maybe if I went to the girl at the next desk and asked her to come on a coffee break and told her everything, she would know that the thing to do was to rebuild my friendship with Alex. Because I couldn’t be happy without him, and it was stupid to fall out over a girl. Maybe he hadn’t known, she might say, maybe he hadn’t properly understood the intensity of my feeling for Camille, and if that were the case, then would it be it fair to drop him? Maybe I should go to Camille and talk to her. Resolve the situation in the clearest possible way. Tell her everything, say I love you, I know this is a surprise and it might be hard to believe considering I don’t know you, but it’s true. And I need to know if you could ever see yourself with me. Because if I was with you, I would make you happy and be loyal to you forever. Or something like that.