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I scroll through the photos from Anjali’s dinner party. A shot of Jaime, grinning, and Eleanor, with her hand on his shoulder, her fair hair haloing her lovely face. The photo of me is irksome, and so I untag myself, deleting it from my timeline.
I get through three more therapy sessions, and dictate my patients’ notes to my Mac. It is 4.34 p.m. and I am just packing up my things with the intention of sneaking out early when a notification pops up: ‘Truman requests a meeting.’ I sit for a few minutes, struggling with a burning heat in my stomach and a trembling in my hands. I check what we discussed in our last meeting. Then I look up my boss’s Me & My feed, seeking intel. His biog has been recently amended with the addition of ‘male feminist’.
I’m still a little fuzzy from the Amzipan; I need some caffeine for balance. I head for floor 45 for a takeaway. There are fifteen cafes in this damn building. They sport various brand names but all are owned by the same franchise and produce a coffee that tastes thin, as though not made from the glossy beans on display on the counter but some kind of gravel hiding in Nescafé jars in the back. Jaime and I once discussed how capitalism, in its extremity, narrows choice with the same degree that Communism does, thanks to burgeoning monopolies. You’re still left buying the same trainers, same iPhones, same cars: products of a corporate dictatorship. Jaime attempts to 338buck the trend by buying from ethical online stores at twice the price, but I’m sceptical. If you’re living in a capitalist society, capitalism isn’t the enemy living outside of you, it’s the parasite inside you, and its hooks are deep in your gut. You post status updates and you network in order to raise your profile; you climb the social ladder and you stamp on your colleagues in order to get that promotion. In order to truly rebel against it, Jaime complains, you’d have to live a life of failure and poverty, and make your peace with everyone around you becoming a ‘have’, while you succumb to being ever more a ‘have-not’.
Back in my office, I mull on the recent rumours of redundancies, and fret that this might be the reason for our meeting. I’ve only taken a few sips of coffee before Truman raps on the door and barges into the room. His handshake is as limp as a sea creature. A week ago, I overheard him discussing this approach with a colleague in the lift. Business Weekly recently declared that a crushing handshake is out of fashion, given that it suggests metal fingers, a wired hand.
‘I haven’t much time,’ he snaps, as though I am the one who’s kept him waiting. I nod briskly.
I guide him down the corridor to the gallery. The painting efforts of fifty Cybersenx Empaths hang on the walls. This week they were given Constable’s ‘The Valley Farm’. A small percentage of the paintings look well behaved; the Empaths have copied Constable quietly and faithfully. Most, however, have veered unintentionally towards post-impressionism. Their colours are loud, their trees look frenzied, and their landscapes curdle with melancholy. I am reminded of that painting Van Gogh worked on in the asylum he spent his last years in, where the trees appear in a state of flux, as though they are 339transforming into something strange and beautiful, almost animal. I forget its name.
Truman checks my report on his phone. ‘Only ten per cent are producing what might be deemed “harmonious pictures”.’
‘Forty per cent are in the “satisfactory” bracket,’ I point out quickly.
‘And fifty per cent in the “unsatisfactory”.’ Truman glares at one particular painting: a cow standing in a country landscape looks like the bovine equivalent of ‘The Scream’. ‘Who did this one?’
It’s Alek’s work. ‘I need to check the files,’ I say quickly. I add, ‘You know, the middle classes don’t all want attractive landscapes hanging on their walls.’
‘There’s plenty of stats to prove that a landscape is the most soothing picture for the human eye,’ Truman retorts.
‘Artists were once the revolutionaries, the guys the state wanted to hunt down and lock up. “Avant garde” was originally a military term.’
‘All the more reason to wipe out that malicious algorithm and produce art of a fine quality,’ Truman snaps. ‘I hope, Rachel, you appreciate what you’re here for and what you’re trying to achieve.’
I ought to back down, but I can’t stop myself.
‘All I’m saying is – painting a landscape doesn’t make you nice or the people who look at it nice. Hitler painted landscapes before he went into politics.’
‘But they were awful paintings, weren’t they?’ Truman smiles, as though we’re critics sharing a joke. ‘He lacked per-spective and couldn’t get the dimensions right … We’re getting off-subject, Rachel. We need progress within the next three weeks. We need eighty per cent of painting in the “positive” 340range. The new offices being built in Canada Water require pleasant paintings on each floor. That is what our client wants and what we are here to deliver. You can manage that, can’t you?’ he says, with a faint sneer.
This is what irks me most about Truman: he knocks digits off my IQ, renders my gender a disability, my qualifications a joke. Our enemies caricature us. Only with our true friends and lovers can we be complex.
We stand in silence for a minute, staring at the pictures, Truman twitching beside me. I think of my studio back home, where my canvas and paints sit, slowly acquiring a layer of dust.
‘Why not just wipe all the Empaths clean and create a batch of sociopaths?’ I suggest. My sarcasm is lost on him; his face falls slack as he considers the possibility. There is fear in his eyes. Perhaps he too suffers from insomnia, worrying about targets and demotions. I wonder if this project is merely paying lip service to the government, a weak effort so that they can say, We tried, we did our best, but failure was inevitable. I wonder if the target is deliberately impossible, if I am being set up to fail.
As we say goodbye, he offers his hand again, but I pretend not to notice it. Hauling my bag on to my shoulder, I walk out. The lift falls a hundred floors; our argument replays a hundred times in my head. I get into the car, worrying once more about the talk of redundancies, wondering why Truman failed to mention them. I pray to lose my job; I pray to keep it.