Hard Copy, page 8
Office Manager didn’t smile either and said, ‘Fine.’ Then they turned to each other again and went on whispering.
I knew it was probably nothing to do with me, but back upstairs again, after I’d shut the door of my little office behind me, I found myself on the verge of tears. I took a few deep breaths, and that’s when I noticed. With each inhale, the printer made a sound too. Something was shifting about in there. I thought it was a coincidence, but when it happened a third time, I thought, No, he’s breathing along with me. Like a supportive husband puffing away next to his wife who’s in the midst of giving birth.
*
Now that I’m on leave and am no longer allowed in my little office, nothing matters that much anymore. Life is only interesting if you can share it with someone. I never used to understand why people were so obsessed with relationships, but that was before I had one of my own. People used to say to me, ‘Wait until you have someone,’ and I’d want to strangle them. Now it seems they were right. Without my printer, half the world no longer exists. Where I used to take note of every detail, everything’s now a bit vague. It makes it difficult to have intimate conversations, but I don’t want to have those with anyone except my printer anyway.
It wasn’t like I was constantly talking to my machine. Just occasionally. People talk to their pets all the time, to loved ones they’ve lost, to their plants. I’m not like one of those people in the street, talking loudly and gesticulating wildly, the kind of person you don’t make eye contact with, the one you can see coming from a mile away because people are moving uncomfortably away from them, someone you cross the street to avoid just to be on the safe side. Someone like that homeless guy, with his books and his apple. No, someone like that I am not.
Anyway, the way I see it, since the human heart beats only by the grace of tiny electric shocks, we too are machines. Human, animal, thing: they’re all arbitrary distinctions. A global emancipation movement will one day prove me right.
*
Why do people assume that there’s only one reality, and why do we all have to submit to it? What we see isn’t the only truth, there are all kinds of phenomena that defy our powers of observation, phenomena that refute our mathematical models, that radically shake our concept of logic. Why can’t I live like that? Our office, the space we share, is my magical circle, other than that I am not very hard to please. I don’t bother anyone and people don’t have to bother themselves with me. Didn’t I carry out my tasks and didn’t I do them well – wasn’t that enough? Nobody ever told me how I was supposed to do my job. They never said that I wasn’t allowed to talk to you out loud. My fantasy, if you must call it that, is an earthly fantasy, it’s far closer to real life than most other collective belief systems, like religion or monogamy (and people aren’t usually put on leave for those beliefs, may I add).
*
There are people who want to escape the chaos of city life by becoming shepherds. They want to work in nature, in the sunny countryside, with animals and plants, the sun and the moon. Long linen dresses at golden hour. They imagine a life of self-sustenance. They dream of long hikes through wooded hills, with a very tall walking stick, a sheepdog at their side and a knapsack over their shoulder. The herd follows them wherever they go, the sheep barely need looking after. From time to time they’ll stop for a rest, take out their pocketknife and carve artful patterns in their walking stick, take a bite of persimmon. With the money they’ve saved, some of these people will try to make their life a reality (carefully documenting it all on the internet, of course). Meanwhile the real shepherds, the ones in the south of Spain for example, race about in an old, polluting Jeep. That’s the easiest way for them to get around on the tricky terrain. They yell at their herd out of the window, and if the sheep won’t listen, they toot their horns until they obey. The echo reverberates between the hills.
*
The next day I venture out again. My employer has assigned me a career coach. They feel it’s time to start thinking about my recovery. The appointment will be held in the office, which is supposed to help me to begin my journey back to work, step by step. Attending these coaching sessions is the only way I will continue to receive a portion of my salary, the paperwork states. Today is my first appointment. I am still quite a long way from the office when my phone pings. Your meeting starts in 15 minutes. And that’s when I am run over.
I’m crossing a little bridge, the smell of the sewer wafting up from the canal, I’m glancing at the notification on my phone and so I don’t see anything coming. Later it occurs to me that I may have heard a beeping sound, but my mind was elsewhere, I missed the warning signal, so there’s no way the accident could have been avoided.
Something slams into the right side of my body, at hip level, and I sink down onto the cobblestones in slow motion, or at least that’s how it feels. I lie there quietly on my back for a few seconds, my hands somehow folded across my chest. Did I automatically clutch them together as I fell, or did that happen after, when I was flat on the ground? I stare at the sky and feel no pain. I think, Am I dead?
‘Oh shit, oh no, so sorry, are you all right?’ A man with a gold chain round his neck leans over me and stretches his hand out.
I grab hold of it. I’m not dead, just a little shaken. My elbows are skinned and they sting a bit. I sit up, and only then do I realize what’s happened, that I’ve been run over. The offending vehicle was a rubbish collector’s van. It’s small, with a silver, triangular bin in the back, brooms clamped to its sides, a cramped interior.
‘I’m so sorry, are you OK? Where are you going?’ The man with the gold chain, it turns out, is a garbage man, and he’s holding the passenger door open for me. I scoot in. We barely fit on the little grey seat, him behind the big steering wheel, me squashed up beside him. I see now that he’s wearing fluorescent orange overalls. I didn’t notice that before, back when I thought I was dead.
He drives me to the office. Weirdly, I feel comfortable sitting next to the garbage man. I’m not even worried about getting abducted. We zoom along the canals of the inner city and the narrow alleyways a normal car won’t fit through. The city looks like a stage set. Everything is swept clean. Where did all the litter go? Did this garbage man clean it all up? Now it’s so clean that I wonder if a set designer created it. It’s all here, the brick houses, the canal boats, the bollards along the pavement’s edge, the red-and-white checked tablecloths in the café on the corner. It’s all so effortless. Beauty attracts beauty, which is why in this part of the city everyone has straight, white teeth.
The garbage man asks if he can put some music on. I gaze out the window and listen to a voice that seems to be coming from another universe. We drive on in the direction of the office. Suddenly I know exactly what I need to do when I get there. The plan has just popped into my head, as if I’ve received clear instructions from some otherworldly presence. It might not be so easy, this mission, but I’ve got nothing to lose.
The garbage man always wanted to be a garbage man, even as a little boy. Dirt fascinated him, he never liked playing with toy cars, only with garbage trucks. His father thought it was silly, he wanted him to become an accountant, something in finance so that he’d get rich, but what’s there to do with money? Buy things. And what do you do with those things in the end? Throw them out. So.
He drops me off near the office. ‘Good luck,’ he says, as if he knows what I’m planning.
When I turn the corner, the office seems to have disappeared. The row of canal houses has slid shut, hiding the gap where it used to sit. Has it been picked up by a crane, or swallowed up by the other houses? Crushed flat, sucked down a sink hole? Wasn’t there a bell here before? Now, in the place of a wooden door, there’s a window masked with yellowing newspaper so that outsiders like me can’t peer in. The newspaper looks like it’s been there for years.
What’s happened? Is someone playing a joke on me? Maybe it’s like one of those tourist shops with the cheap baked goods, waffles and churros (huge mark-up) that suddenly appear out of nowhere, then disappear just as quickly. I look round again. The brown water, the canal houses, the elms. Yes, I recognize all of it. Just to be sure, I walk up the street, round the next corner, up another canal-lined street. Oh. It was the wrong canal. There’s the old wooden door. I plod towards it. Those canals do look alike: the water is the same shade of brown.
When I walk into the office building again after all this time, it looks pretty much the same as before. Of course, why should it look any different? These weeks of being on leave have felt like an eternity to me, but in office-time it’s probably gone by in a flash. The marble of the foyer (this is where the clients enter the building, which is why everything is clad in marble) looks as drab as ever. It smells the same too, of the same paper and the same cleaning product. The monotony of grey carpeting in the offices and corridors is broken up by the same old stains, the same old faded spots where the sun and the furniture have left their mark. On the walls are the same old posters in the same old frames. On the glass wall divider of one of the conference rooms, Post-it notes that have been stuck up for months are flaking off. In the kitchen the same rarely cleaned coffee machine is making the same sputtering noises. The same people (female colleagues) are loading the dirty cups belonging to the same other people (male colleagues) into the dishwasher, they’re the ones responsible for turning it on and getting it emptied. Some of the plants are a stage closer to death than they were when I still worked here, but that makes sense. Aren’t we all.
Through a half-open door I catch a glimpse of Product. He’s sitting at his desk, peering intently at his screen. Product always tries to do everything to the best of his ability. Before he buys something, he consults a price comparison website for savvy consumers so he can get the best deal. He swims a few laps of the pool every morning, he likes to give other people advice. He is sitting on an exercise ball, his back very straight.
*
A boy in my class at middle school had a swimming pool in the garden. That was his claim to fame. A classmate once had dinner at his house. He later told the whole class that everyone in the swimming pool family had to drink a big glass of water before dinner was served, in order to still the first pangs of hunger. Another boy in my class in primary school was called Hendrik, but he refused to listen to our teachers unless they addressed him as Hendrik The King. He made all our teachers call him Hendrik The King. He kept it up for an entire school year.
*
‘It really is nothing to be ashamed of, [my name],’ says the coach, who will probably be charging two hundred and fifty euros (excluding VAT) for this session. I know it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but even so I’m not going to tell him that I inadvertently found myself in the copy shop yesterday. I also won’t be telling him about my hunt for the package, about the trouble I went through to find something that, it turned out, wasn’t even ordered by us. I’ll say nothing about the note on the door. I’ll say nothing. I think about the garbage man and my plan.
‘It happens to the best of us,’ says the coach.
No, it is happening to me. Hardly the best of us.
I may be the only employee who’s ever been put on leave, but I’m not the only one with burnout, though I know they think it’s strange that I, of all people, could suffer from that. She got burnout from that job? Haha! As if someone who stacks shelves could get burnout! A waitress! A call centre worker! A cleaner! A receptionist! Society’s losers and their dumb little jobs!
My coach is in his early fifties, but he looks younger. He has dark curly hair and a museum pass. He is married, has two kids in primary school, and on weekends he heads for the beach to go surfing, rain or shine. He wasn’t always a career coach, he used to have a taxing job in the business sector which made him unhappy, so then he decided to have a career change. And then? Then he became happy. I know all this about him because he often uses his own life story to illustrate his views. He doesn’t understand me. He’s a man who is convinced that everyone’s career path must follow the pattern of personal development and growth. His hands are folded together on the desk as if he’s praying. After a long monologue about the meaning of my furlough (I can look at it as having some time for myself, less pressure, that I must rest in order to prevent serious, ‘deep’ burnout) he begins to talk about my plans for the future.
‘I would like to talk to you about your ambitions, your goals. Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?’
I don’t see myself anywhere in ten years’ time. I have no dreams for the future, I don’t have a single aim other than being reunited with my machine. I don’t want to improve myself. I just want to be. I did have a vague ambition once, and that was to leave the place I came from, which I did. Aside from that, I would like to accept my life just as it is (or the way it was before I was put on leave), and present it exactly that way to other people, if they ask, without excuses or explanations.
Since I haven’t given an answer, the coach is silent too. He’s waiting. After a very long pause he says, ‘Maybe that’s a tricky question. Ten years is a very long time, of course. Let’s put it this way: is there anything standing in your way that’s preventing you from achieving your goals?’
I think about the little blue note. About the package I risked my life to retrieve, the anonymous sender who might be out to get me. Is anything standing in my way? I’m silent again, this time for an even longer period. He doesn’t say anything either. I think I’m tiring him out, but he doesn’t let it show.
He tries a new tactic. Now he’s saying reassuring things and using the word ‘exciting’ a lot. There’s a website that lets you see how high the water level in your postcode will rise in the next forty years. In my neighbourhood it’s four metres. That’s exciting. I don’t share this thought with the coach. I could tell him that I’m worried about the environment, I guess, and then he’ll nod sympathetically and say, ‘We all are.’
He asks if I am interested in the customer service industry. ‘I know you like helping people.’ He looks at me insistently. ‘That’s a great place to start.’
I don’t want to record exactly what I’m doing and how much time I’ve set aside for it in my online calendar, I don’t want to go to the dentist on my lunch break, I don’t want office outings, I don’t want to have to rush around and I don’t want a company gym membership. I don’t want a slice of pizza when the company does well, I don’t want a Christmas hamper. But I can’t tell my coach any of this. If I do, I’ll never see my machine again. So I put my most normal foot forward. ‘I enjoy my work very much,’ I say. The coach looks startled. Maybe he’d already given up on me. ‘And I’m good at it.’
‘Oh! Well, that’s fantastic.’
I nod.
‘Can you tell me a bit more about the sorts of activities you find stimulating?’ He grips his notebook a little more firmly, pen at the ready.
I don’t dare say anything about the printer. ‘Well, lots of things.’ The printer is the only reason I like coming to the office. I take care of him all day long, dusting him, encouraging him, reassuring him, looking after him. I am there for him and he is there for me. I have more feelings for my printer than for anyone else, but I can’t say that to my coach. ‘Sometimes, as you may know, they’ll give me an extra task. Looking after the customer service inbox, for instance.’
‘Yes, excellent,’ he says. Now we’re getting somewhere, he thinks, I can tell from his eager posture. He’s frantically scribbling away, which I find puzzling, since I haven’t really said anything. ‘What did you learn from it?’
I hate the customer service inbox, I hate having to be courteous to unfriendly people. ‘Actually, like you said, yes. Helping people. That’s what I want.’
‘Yes, interesting.’ He nods in agreement as he returns to his notebook, jots down ‘HELPING’ and underlines it twice.
Coach, that isn’t what I want at all! I simply want to print and send out my letters, replace the cartridge every so often. I want to run my finger over the paper so I can tell if it’s fit for use, as I always do. I want to go up to my own little office every day and I want to be left alone in there. I want to switch on my printer in the morning and listen to its start-up sounds as I take my first sip of coffee from my mug, the same one I use every day, I want to spend all day with the machine, watch the printed letters stack up, I want to count the envelopes, categorize them and sort them into piles, print out the postage labels and stick them on, I want to see the sunlight patterns change on the wall of my office, I want to hear the noise in the street through the single-pane window. The sound of police sirens, a ringing bicycle bell, people laughing and talking, cars honking, a sliding door opening and closing, a scooter alarm in the distance, a tram in the next street, an aeroplane flying low overhead, raindrops against that same window. The building’s noises: the familiar creak of the floorboards, the sputtering of the coffee machine, the slamming of the front door, the sound of my office chair rolling across the old boards. Then, safe in my refuge, I want to spend the day with my machine, snug and happy.
*
A leadership course is a normal thing to have on your CV. When I got to university, I found myself in a cohort of fellow students, most of them eighteen-year-olds like me, who, without irony or embarrassment, were preparing themselves to become part of the establishment. As the dean welcomed us freshers, ‘Today’s students, tomorrow’s leaders’ was projected on a large screen behind his head. Not only did many of the students in the hall believe in that slogan, they aspired to it too, and now, almost ten years later, they are just as intent on joining the powers-that-be.
*
While the coach has been going on about himself, I’ve been working out how I’m going to do it. I’m proud of my plan, some movement in my life: finally, something is going to happen! I’m taking hold of the reins, or – how do you say it? I’m going to solve all my problems, and opening that box will be the first step in the right direction. The printer is too big to carry home, too heavy, he will have to stay here, but the package I can manage. My machine is patient, he’ll wait.
