Paul Starling was going blind. He shut his right eye and focused his left first on the feeble potted Dieffenbachia on his desk, then on the horizon, where down between the buildings and the self-park signs a narrow sliver of Lake Michigan merged with the sky. The horizon was blurry. Or the day was hazy. He shut his left eye and repeated the exercise with his right. The horizon was blurrier. Even the hard glass buildings mere blocks away, at the intersection of State and Madison, had soft edges. He opened his left eye and focused both eyes on the Dieffenbachia. Now the plant was blurry and his eyes stung from concentration. He was definitely, without question, losing his vision.
The view from the thirty-first floor would encompass a blue-gray sliver of Lake Michigan for perhaps another month. Then the new building going up several blocks east, on Madison Street, would obscure it forever, and Paul Starling’s desk—if it was still Paul Starling’s desk—would look out on nothing but other buildings, each full of nothing but other desks and thousands of other Paul Starlings staring out every day at the gray doom of the city. In the corner of the window a spider dipped and swung lazily on its silk.
Paul’s computer chimed and he glanced at it: the forty-fifth new e-mail of the day had arrived. He could guess its contents. The secretarial pool had been slow to learn—hell, still had not learned—of the number of hoaxes and falsehoods circulating on the Internet. Nearly every week the entire office was treated to the grainy picture and misspelled story of yet another missing moppet, or an ominous list of all the things drinking Coke would do to your body, or a dire warning of an imminent computer virus. Usually such missives were follower immediately by a terse e-mail from Vijay, the sole IT guy, begging people to check their sources before clogging the server with pointless forwards (“THIS CHILD HAS BEEN MISSING SINCE 1997 AND IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY SHE LOOKS LIKE THIS ANY MORE. PLEASE DO NOT E-MAIL PHOTO ATTACHMENTS”). Vijay always ended his e-mails with a link to the official Pillory & Branks E-Mail Policy, which made a point of saying:
Some incidental personal use of P&B systems is acceptable, but excessive personal e-mailing is abusive of our system and will be grounds for discipline up to and including termination.
Lately that warning had been appearing in larger and larger type—it was now at least six points larger than the rest of the official E-Mail Policy—but Paul rarely even read it. When he started working it had struck fear into his heart, and he made a point of keeping personal e-mails as clipped as possible, even to the point of unfriendliness. There had been no reprisals. His personal e-mails had grown friendlier. There had been no reprisals. Now personal e-mail accounted for approximately 95% of his use of the P&B system. There had been no reprisals, just as there had been no reprisals for the secretaries. At Pillory & Branks, bold type was reprisal enough.
The window glass rattled with a thud several stories up, and—before Paul could focus past the spiderweb, before he could blink or even gasp—a man in a suit plummeted past his desk.
Paul pushed himself back reflexively, bile rising in his throat. The man’s body had been curved, belly down, knees bent, arms out in front of his head, an inept swimmer sinking faster than expected. Paul closed his eyes and saw it again. The man had been wearing a swimming cap! No—no—he was—this was what shock did to your mind. Not a swimming cap: a silver fringe of hair hugging the scalp.
Shrieks and shouts and hubbub rose from the plaza thirty-one floors down. Paul stared at his window. Had he really seen—? But yes—but if not that, then what?
The spider scuttled across the face of the glass, monstrous and repellent, somehow irritated. The falling man had ruptured its web.
“Shel?” said Paul. His voice sounded weak, whiny, childish. “Shel? Did you see that?” He was on his feet. He couldn’t remember standing up. “Hey, Shel?” He stood on tiptoe to see into the next cubicle. It looked deserted.
A muffled voice issued from beneath the desk. “Did you say something, Paul?” In a second Sheldon Metzger emerged, lumbering to his feet and shoving a stray shirttail back into the straining waistband of his Dockers. His face was flushed. “I’m just”—he gulped for air—“adding a few things down there.” To the casual glance Sheldon’s cube looked like any other, but beneath the surface of the desk lurked a profusion of wires and plastic casings and instruments that would not have looked out of place in the cockpit of a space shuttle. He had quietly been souping up his computer for two years; at last count it had had four hard drives. Vijay, far from being annoyed, seemed to admire Sheldon’s technical prowess, or at least to feel a kinship with his impatience with the P&B standard system. Also Sheldon never e-mailed forwards, and he had managed never to cause a major server outage. Sheldon was in no danger even of bold type.
“Were you talking to me?” said Sheldon now. “I can’t hear so good down there. All the little fans get loud up close.”
Paul stared at him. If Sheldon Metzger was talking to him, red-faced and sweaty—if somewhere beneath Sheldon’s desk a new chip was humming in the chorus—then things had to be normal after all, didn’t they? Then maybe hadn’t seen what he thought he had seen? “You didn’t see the,” said Paul. “The guy fall?”
“What?” said Sheldon, squinting at him.
“I could have sworn,” said Paul, “I just—some man just fell past the window.”
“What?” said Sheldon, laughing now. “What, just now?”
“Yeah.”
Sheldon laughed harder. “Well, who was he?”
“No, I’m serious,” said Paul. His stomach had constricted itself into a tiny ball, quivering with its own tension.
“Like,” said Sheldon, “like a jumper?”
“Yeah,” said Paul. Down on the street a siren grew louder and louder.
“Wait,” said Sheldon. “You’re fucking serious?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying. You don’t—”
“Nobody actually says anything they mean here. You know that.”
“But I—”
“Increase productivity ten percent annually. Model the virtues embodied in the P&B mission, vision and values. Live the brand. Walk the talk.”
“Sheldon,” said Paul.
“Walk the talk,” said Sheldon again, laughing, and shaking his head.
“Really,” said Paul. He waited until Sheldon met his eyes and remembered what they’d been talking about. The siren crescendoed and then shut off abruptly at its loudest point.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” said Paul. “A guy in a—in a pinstripe suit.” For some reason it was thinking of the suit that did it. Paul’s knees buckled and his stomach bucked like it was trying to escape his body. He fell awkwardly to the floor, clenching his jaw and his throat, forcing the sick back down.
“Hey, are you all right?” said Sheldon, looking genuinely concerned for the first time.
Paul shook his head no, violently, squizzling his eyes shut.
“You want me to, like, get someone?”
Paul kept shaking his head no. His skin was cold and sweaty and he was suddenly aware that his clothes were damp at the insides of his knees and elbows. Come on, Paul, he thought, come on, come on, you can do better than this, Starling. He parted his lips just enough to allow a thin breath of cool air. Now he was almost okay, now he was coming back, now he was a man again.
“You sure you’re okay?” said Sheldon. Sheldon was marvelous at commenting on situations but rubbish at actually participating.
Paul trusted his throat enough to relax into a nod now. He opened his eyes. The cubicle looked even shabbier at floor level, where the drawers and cabinets revealed all the nicks and scrapes and gouges from the vacuum cleaners of the four different cleaning services P&B had tried out in the past year. The cords for the phone and the computer lay in a formless black and beige heap. The carpet—a faded teal-blue industrial horror from the 1980s with a small diamond pattern in the pile—was pilled and stained black where his desk chair rolled back and forth. Were his patterns so predictable: a three-foot web of tracks—not even an interesting one—the drawing of a beginner on a Spirograph? Or, perhaps, were the tracks so worn into the carpet that he could not roll in new directions now if he tried?
“Man, you still with me?” said Sheldon.
“What?” said Paul. “Yeah.”
“You’re all staring off into space with your lips moving.”
“I’m fine,” said Paul. “I’m fine, I’m fine.” He reached up to brace himself on his chair and pulled himself to his feet. It would have been wiser to sit for another five or ten minutes, but it was frankly more appealing to risk dizziness than to endure any more of Sheldon’s tender ministrations.
“Okay,” said Sheldon. He bent over his own desk and clicked his mouse automatically. “Aw, man,” he said after a moment. “Is your Internet down?”
“I,” said Paul. Internet? Sheldon still cared about Internet? What was the Internet? “I don’t know.”
“Mine’s fucking crawling.” The sounds of repeated clicking, then the jabbing of an index finger on a mouse button, rose from the cube.
“I have to go downstairs,” said Paul.
“Okay,” said Sheldon absently.
Paul, too preoccupied with leaving to think about his trajectory, collided with the dividing wall. That was going to leave a bruise on his shoulder—but he had to get downstairs—
He made for the elevator bank. More sirens were approaching the building. Nadine, the receptionist, was talking to someone on her headset phone, wide-eyed. Did she know? How could anyone not know? And yet it had just happened—if it had happened—but it must have happened—a falling man in a pinstripe suit, a swimmer in air, a belly flop—don’t think, Starling—
The elevator dinged and lit up red to signal a voyage down. Paul stepped in and the doors slid shut. He was the only one in the elevator and as soon as the doors closed he smelled the fear and nausea coming off his skin. The news screen blithely ran some stock numbers, most adjacent to down-pointing triangles. Across the bottom of the screen ran an ad for a retirement fund management service: Let the tortoise beat you to the finish line. The tortoise was definitely going to beat Paul to the finish line. It wasn’t even close. Paul was never going to reach the finish line. He had never stayed in a job longer than a year before joining Pillory & Branks; now he was two months away from vesting in the P&B pension plan, but he had never contributed a dime to the 401(k), never deposited much on the side. Retirement was as alien a concept as chopping off a hand. He could do it: but why? The difference, though, was that he knew why his hands were useful. About his employment he was far less certain.
0 comments:
Post a Comment