“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“I’m terribly sorry,” I replied pathetically.
“No, you’re not! Do you think I can’t see what you’re doing? You made these incomprehensible mistakes to get your revenge on me!”
“I swear I didn’t.”
“I know you did. You resent me so much for telling the vice-president about the business with the Dairy Products Department that you’ve decided to make a fool of me in public.”
“It’s me that I’m making a fool of, not you.”
“I’m your direct superior and everyone knows I gave you this job. I am therefore responsible for what you do. And you know that. Your despicable behavior is typical of Westerners. You put your personal vanity ahead of the interests of the company. You didn’t hesitate before sabotaging Yumimoto’s accounts to get your revenge on me, knowing perfectly well that your mistakes would fall on my shoulders!”
“I had no idea, and I didn’t make these mistakes on purpose.”
“Oh come on! I know that you’re not very intelligent, but nobody could be stupid enough to make mistakes like that!”
“Yes they could: me.”
“Stop it! I know you’re lying.”
“Fubuki, I give you my word of honor that I did not copy them out incorrectly on purpose.”
“Honor! What would you know about honor?”
She laughed scornfully.
“Believe it or not, honor does exist in the West too.”
“Ah! And you find it honorable to admit openly that you are the stupidest person on earth?”
“I don’t think I’m all that stupid.”
“You’re either a traitor or you’re a half-wit. There’s no third option.”
“There are normal people who are incapable of copying out rows of numbers.”
“That sort of person doesn’t exist in Japan.”
“Who would dream of challenging Japanese superiority?” I was actually trying to sound contrite.
“You should have told me you were mentally handicapped, instead of letting me entrust you with this work.”
“I didn’t know. I’d never copied out rows of numbers in my life.”
“It’s a peculiar kind of handicap. It doesn’t take a scrap of intelligence to transcribe figures.”
“I think that’s precisely the problem with people like me. If our intelligence isn’t required, our brains go to sleep. Hence my mistakes.”
Fubuki’s face at last lost its combative expression. She assumed an air of bemusement.
“Your intelligence has to be required? What a quaint idea.”
“It couldn’t be more normal.”
“Fine. I’ll think of some work that will require intelligence,” my superior repeated, apparently delighting in this turn of phrase.
“In the meantime, shall I go and help Mister Unaji correct my mistakes?”
“Certainly not! You’ve done enough damage as it is!”
I DON’T KNOW how long it took my unfortunate colleague to restore order to the ledgers I had so systematically disfigured. But it took two days for Miss Mori to find an assignment she deemed within my capabilities.
A massive file was waiting for me on my desk when I arrived in the morning.
“You will doublecheck all the expenses for business trips,” she informed me.
“More accounting? But I have warned you about my deficiencies.”
“That won’t matter this time. This work will require your intelligence,” she explained with a sardonic smile.
She opened the file.
“Here, for example, is the file that Mister Shiranai has put together so that he can be reimbursed for his expenses for his trip to Düsseldorf. You will have to go over every sum and see if you get the same total to the nearest yen. As most of the bills are in German marks, you will have to work out the sums based on the rates of exchange on the dates indicated on each bill. Don’t forget that the rate changes every day.”
So began one of the worst nightmares of my life. From the moment I was given this new task, time disappeared into an eternal tunnel of torture. Never, but never, did I manage to reach a total that was even remotely close to those I was supposed to be double-checking. For example, if an employee had calculated that Yumimoto owed him 93,327 yen, I would get 15,211 yen, or perhaps 172,045. It was very soon clear that the errors fell in my camp.
At the end of the first day I approached Fubuki.
“I don’t think I’m capable of carrying out this assignment.”
“And yet this is work that requires intelligence,” she replied, implacable.
“I can’t work it out,” I admitted miserably.
“You’ll get used to it.”
I didn’t get used to it. I was, to the last possible degree and despite determined efforts on my part, incapable.
My superior decided to demonstrate how easy it was. She opened one of the files and started to work. Her fingers flew with lightning speed across her calculator. She didn’t even have to look at the keypad. I timed her. She was done in less than four minutes.
“I get the same figure as Mister Saitama, to the nearest yen.”
She put her stamp on the report.
Subjugated by this latest injustice of nature, I returned to my labors. Twelve hours were not enough for me to do what had taken Fubuki a trifling three minutes and fifty seconds.
I don’t know how many days passed before she realized that I had not yet finished double-checking a single file.
“Not even one!” she exclaimed.
“No, not even one,” I admitted, expecting the worst.
To my dismay, she was content simply to point to the calendar.
“Don’t forget that all the files need to be finished by the end of the month.”
I would have preferred she start screaming.
More days passed. I was in hell, assailed by streams of numbers and commas and decimal points that coagulated in my brain into an opaque magma, so that I could no longer distinguish them from each other. An optometrist assured me my eyesight was fine.
Figures, whose calm Pythagorean beauty I had always admired, became my enemies. The calculator, too, was set against me. Among my many psychomotor problems was one that was particularly debilitating. When I had to tap on a keypad for more than five minutes at a time, my hand suddenly became as sluggish as if I had sunk it into a sticky pile of mashed potatoes. Four of my fingers became irremediably immobilized; only the index finger managed to reach the keys, but did so incomprehensibly slowly and awkwardly.
Given that this phenomenon was coupled with my singular stupidity on the subject of numbers, I presented a fairly disconcerting spectacle. I started looking at each new number with as much astonishment as Robinson Crusoe spying a footprint in the sand. My numbed hand tried to reproduce it on the keyboard. To achieve this, my head kept having to make trips back and forth between the paper and the screen, to ensure that I hadn’t misplaced a comma or a zero someplace along the way. Strangely, this painstaking process still didn’t prevent me from committing even more colossal errors.
One day as I was tapping away pitifully, I looked up and saw my superior observing me with consternation.
“What is your problem?” she asked.
I told her about the mashed-potato syndrome paralyzing my hand. I thought it might make her feel more sym-pathetic. But her facial expression was eloquent. And what it said was, “I understand now: she really is mentally handicapped. This explains everything.”
_______
THE END OF the month was drawing near and the pile of reimbursement files was as thick as ever.
“Are you sure you’re not doing it on purpose?”
“Absolutely sure.”
“Are there many … people like you in your country?”
I was the first Belgian she had met. I felt a rush of national pride.
“There are no other Belgians like me.”
“That’s reassuring.”
I burst out laughing.
“You find this amusing?”
“Has anyone ever told you, Fubuki, that it is wrong to mistreat the mentally impaired?”
“Yes. But I wasn’t warned that I would ever have one working for me.”
I laughed harder.
“I still don’t see what you find so amusing.”
“It must be part of my psychomotor illness.”
“You’d do better to concentrate on your work.”
THREE DAYS BEFORE the end of the month, I announced my decision not to go home in the evenings.
“With your permission, I will spend the night here at my desk.”
“Is your brain more efficient in the dark?” Fubuki asked.
“Let’s hope so. Perhaps being alone will help.”
I got her permission without difficulty. It was not unusual for employees to stay at the office all night when deadlines were looming.
“Do you think one night will be enough?”
“Probably not. I don’t intend to go home before the end of the month.”
I showed her my backpack.
“I’ve brought what I need.”
I WAS OVERWHELMED by a feeling of intoxication when I found myself alone in the Accounting Department. It dissipated as soon as I established that my brain worked no better at night than it did during the day. I worked nonstop. This produced absolutely no results.
At four in the morning I went and splashed water on my face, then changed clothes, drank a strong cup of tea, and returned to my desk.
The first employees arrived at seven o’clock. Fubuki arrived an hour later. She glanced at the pigeonhole where the completed expense forms would have been placed and saw that it was still empty. She shook her head.
Another sleepless night followed. The situation remained unchanged. My head was no clearer. And yet I was far from despairing; I felt an incomprehensible surge of optimism, which gave me a certain audacity. Without interrupting my calculations, I therefore conducted conversations with my superior on subjects that were far from relevant.
“Your first name has the word ‘snow’ in it. In the Japanese version of my name there is ‘rain.’ That strikes me as very pertinent. There is the same difference between you and me as between snow and rain. Which doesn’t alter the fact that we are made of exactly the same substance.”
“Do you really think you and I have anything in common?”
I laughed. Lack of sleep had made me giddy. I would sometimes feel deeply tired and dispirited, then suddenly start giggling.
My Danaides’ jar was constantly filling with figures that my feeble brain managed to empty out again. I was the Sisyphus of accounting, and like the mythical hero I never gave up. I tackled the inexorable operations for the hundredth time, the thousandth time. I should point out, in passing, this astonishing fact: I got everything wrong a thousand times. This would have been as maddening as a repetitive piece of music except that no two mistakes were alike. For each calculation I got a thousand different results. I was brilliant.
I continued from time to time to look up between sums to contemplate she who had sentenced me to this torture. I was still mesmerized by her beauty. Her only flaw was the overly immaculate way she blow-dried her shoulder-length hair, immobilizing it into an imperturbable curve so rigid that it seemed to say, “I am a female executive.” I would succumb to the delicious fantasy of changing her hairstyle. I would set her dazzlingly black hair free. I teased it mentally to make it seem carefree. Sometimes I really let myself go and made her hair look like she had just spent a night of torrid love. She was quite sublime when she looked wild and abandoned.
Fubuki caught me staring at her hair.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I was thinking that in Japanese ‘hair’ and ‘god’ are the same word.”
“ ‘Paper,’ too, don’t forget. Get back to your work.”
My mental haze was getting worse by the hour. I knew less and less clearly what I should and should not say. While I was looking up the rate of exchange for the Swedish Crown on February 20th of the year before, my mouth began to speak on its own initiative.
“What did you want to be when you were little?”
“An archery champion.”
“That would have been perfect for you!”
As she didn’t return the question, I kept going.
“When I was little I wanted to become God. The Christian God with a capital ‘G.’ When I was about five I realized this would never happen. So I put a little water in my wine and decided to become Christ. I imagined myself dying on the cross before all of humanity. When I was seven, I realized that this was never going to happen. So I decided to become a martyr, and stuck to this choice for many years. It didn’t work either.”
“And then?”
“You know what happened then. I got a job in accounting at the Yumimoto Corporation. I can’t sink any lower.”
“You think not?” she asked with a strange smile.
THE LAST NIGHT of the month had arrived. Fubuki was the last to leave. I wondered why she didn’t just tell me to go home. It was obvious I would never be able to complete even a fraction of my work.
I was alone again. My third sleepless night in a row in the gigantic office. I was tapping away on the calculator and noting down the increasingly incongruous results.
Then the most fantastic thing happened: my mind flipped.
Suddenly I was weightless. I got up. I was free. I had never been so free in all my life. I walked over to the bay window and looked down on the glittering city far below me. I ruled the world! I was God! I threw my body out of the window to be rid of it.
I switched off the neon lights. The lights below provided enough illumination to see clearly. I went to the kitchen to get a Coke, which I drank without stopping. When I returned to my desk I untied my shoelaces and threw off my shoes. I leapt up onto a desk, then hopped from desk to desk, whooping with joy.
My clothes hampered me, so I took them off one by one, scattering them around me. When I was naked I did a handstand. I’d never been able to do that before in my life. I walked over all the nearby desks on my hands. Then, after executing a perfect flip, I leapt up and found myself sitting in my superior’s place.
“Fubuki, I am God. Even if you don’t believe in me, I am God. You give the orders, but they don’t mean much. I rule. I’m not interested in power. It is so much more perfect to rule. You have no idea of my glory. Glory is a wonderful thing. It means having angels trumpet in my honor. I have never been as glorious as I am tonight. All thanks to you. You don’t know it, but you have given rise to my glory!
“Pontius Pilate didn’t know either that his deeds hastened Christ’s triumph. There was the Christ of the olive grove. I am the Christ of computers. The darkness that surrounds contains a mature forest of computers.
“I am looking at your computer, Fubuki. It is magnificent. In the shadows it looks like one of those statues on Easter Island. It is after midnight, meaning it is Friday, my Good Friday, known as the day of Venus in France and the day of gold in Japan, though I can’t find any connection whatsoever between Judaeo-Christian suffering, Latin sensuality, and Japanese adoration of an incorruptible metal.
“Since I left the secular world behind to take up holy orders, time has lost all meaning and been transformed into a calculator onto which I tap out numbers riddled with mistakes. I think that it’s Easter. From the heights of this Tower of Babel, I see Ueno Park and the trees are covered in snow. Cherry trees in blossom. Easter.
“I’ve always found Easter as uplifting as Christmas is depressing. A god that becomes a baby is kind of worrisome. Some poor martyr who becomes God—well, that’s another matter.”
I put my arms round Fubuki’s computer and showered it with kisses.
“I’m a poor crucified creature too. The best thing about crucifixion is that it’s the end. My suffering will end. They’ve crammed my body with numbers
so numberless that there’s no more room for even a decimal point. They will slice my head off with a saber. I won’t feel anything.
“It is a very great thing to know when you are going to die, Fubuki. You can prepare yourself and make your last day into a work of art. In the morning my torturers will arrive and I will tell them: ‘I have failed! Kill me. But grant me one last wish: Let Fubuki be my executioner. Let her unscrew my head like the top of a peppermill. My blood will flow and it will be black pepper. Drink ye of it: For this is my pepper of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. Sneeze in remembrance of me.’ ”
Suddenly, I realized how cold it was. I could hug the computer to me as tight as possible but I knew it wouldn’t keep me warm. I put my clothes back on. My teeth were still chattering. I lay down on the ground and dumped the contents of Fubuki’s wastebasket over myself. I lost consciousness.
SOMEONE WAS STANDING over me shouting. I opened my eyes and saw bits of trash. I closed them again.
I slipped back into the abyss.
I heard Fubuki’s gentle voice.
“That’s just like her. She’s covered herself in garbage so that we won’t dare touch her. She’s made herself untouchable. That’s what she’s like. She has no dignity. When I tell her that she’s stupid she tells me that it’s more serious than that, that she’s mentally retarded. She always has to put herself down. She thinks that it makes her less of a target. She’s wrong.”
I wanted to explain that the trash protected me from the cold. I didn’t have the strength to speak. Huddled under Fubuki’s garbage, I was warm. I went under again.
I EMERGED. THROUGH a layer of crumpled paper, empty soda cans, and cigarette stubs soaked in Coke, I saw the clock. Ten in the morning.
I stood up. No one dared to look at me, except Fubuki.
“Next time you decide to dress up as a tramp, don’t do it on our premises. There are subway stations for that sort of thing.”
Sick with shame, I took my backpack and fled to the bathroom, where I changed and washed my hair under the tap. When I came back, someone had already cleaned up the traces of my madness.
Fear and Trembling Page 4