Adam swiped his card at the door of the building, went to the elevator. In its mirrors he saw his hands were shaking. He turned his back and hit the button, then pushed the hands into his pockets. He didn’t know why they were shaking. He remembered the streetsweeper, the sight of his reflection in the window of Starbucks, the feel of cold glass on his forehead. But he couldn’t recall walking from the corner to the building, whether he had smiled at the security guard at the gate as he passed or attempted a greeting. There was an ache in his calves, a weight in his stomach. The emergency stop button at his elbow was an inviting cherry colour. He leaned a shoulder against the mirror, kept his gaze on the scrubbed steel doors. The elevator settled to an ordinary halt at his floor and stood patiently open.
The lungs would not empty completely. He steadied his breathing.
There was nothing wrong with him. It was an ordinary Monday. He took his phone out of his pocket, woke it up. The battery icon was full and green. There were no fresh messages.
It was dark in the office. No-one else was in, but the space had a feeling of recent occupation. He listened, sniffed the air, suspected a scent, but it hovered just below identification. He stood inside the entrance, near where the leaf-like logo, humility-small, marked the wall. There was no reception desk, just the open space with its workstations facing each other, the kitchen along one wall at the back, Manu’s glassed-off space, the bathroom door. His hands were still now, his fingers cold. He slipped the phone into his coat pocket and crossed the room. It was all just as it had been on Friday evening, when he had left his laptop in the office and gone out to a bar with Manu and Eliza and a group of their friends. He passed his desk, relieved that the laptop was still sitting there, its sleep light pulsing faintly.
The bathroom was dim. Murky daylight entered through one high window. The air made things look older than they were, like an Instagram filter. It aged him too, he saw with a glance. He ran his hands under warm water until the chilled feeling went away. His eyes avoided the mirror. When he reached for the dryer, he felt a pain in his shoulder, a tight feeling across the chest like a spark. He ignored it, turned without activating the sensor, wiped his wet hands on his jacket, and went to his desk.
He didn’t touch the lights; he liked the place better like this. With the lights on, it felt too self-conscious, even (he had to admit) a little pretentious. The interior was like a warehouse, with its high ceiling and exposed ducts, but it was all an illusion: the building was new, had been designed for offices and retrofitted in a post-industrial style to give it a startup vibe.
Manu didn’t use words like startup or entrepreneur. He preferred team and family. He had half-a-dozen people like Adam working for him: two Americans, a soft-spoken New Zealander, a short Irish guy and a lanky Argentine who was supposed to be leaving for Japan next month. Adam’s Chinese was the second worst of them, but his English was the best. When Eliza finished a translation, it was him that she approached with her copy for a final correction. It usually didn’t need much, but he always changed her wording anyway. After that first year of ‘hello’, ‘how are you’, and ‘my name is’, it was a relief to work on expressions with nuance and perfectibility.
He reached for his laptop, hesitated. There was really no reason to leave the building. The coffee here was better than at Starbucks; they had it delivered from the specialty place. But the new machine, which must have cost a fortune, intimidated him. Adam decided that he didn’t need coffee. He wasn’t alert, exactly, just reluctant to settle. There was nothing to be anxious about. The office was fine, a warm atmosphere; he liked to be here, even if it slowed him down. He worked from home a couple of days a week, and on those days he was usually done by eleven. In the office everything took six times as long because they reflected on outcomes and talked each other through processes and had whole afternoons off for team-building activities: video game tournaments or languid three-on-three basketball in the park. Every couple of weeks Manu would sit down with each of them to see how things were going. These were unscheduled sessions: he would appear behind a chair, lay a hand on a shoulder, ask: ‘Got time for a little reflection?’ Reflection was a core value, it was on the list. This was the first job Adam had had where he didn’t have to fill out time sheets, get a certificate if he was ill. Manu was a natural leader, not bossy but kind: a guy who surrounded himself with men who were not as strong or happy as he was, and helped them to be stronger, happier. They were all loyal to him. He could have been a therapist, was a good listener, knew to ask open-ended questions. He kept telling Adam he was a godsend. Adam tried to believe the work was easy because he was good at it.
He glanced down at the phone resting in his palm, and plugged it into the charger. There were no notifications. Still nothing from Natasha. He checked her WeChat profile, and saw that she had posted a photo. The photo had been taken in a restaurant, a banquet room, and she was with her family. Her mother’s face almost the twin of her own, not much older, but with curled hair; her father’s lips stained with wine (studium and punctum, a useless part of his mind recited). On the table before them, the remains of a steamed fish lay pooled in sauce on a platter. They seemed happy, if a little stiff. The grandmother, the only one seated, did not look sick or even that old. He studied Natasha’s smile, the liveliest of them. Like her laugh, it seemed too much, almost inappropriate; it overwhelmed the face. No trace of her anger. She was wearing a high-collared dress that looked strange on her. He’d never seen her in anything but jeans and t-shirts in Beijing. She looked glad to be there, despite the costume.
He was still getting used to her face, so different in images. But everybody changed around their families. He might never have to meet them.
He thought he would leave a comment, but could not think of one except to ask when she was coming back, which seemed needy after the long silence. His thumb hovered over the little heart, but he didn’t like the photo in case he thought of a comment later; better to avoid the shame of reacting twice. With thumb and index finger, he zoomed in until the father’s wine-stained lips were looming. Feminine, almost. A genetic match for Natasha’s, maybe even softer. He saw her on the subway platform, mouth tight with anger. When he looked up from his screen, his vision was fuzzy, thoughts scattered. He sank into his ergonomic chair, still unsettled by the sense that there was someone else in the room. Someone must be working elsewhere in the building, he decided. He could hear the hum of air coming in through the filters. Maybe that was enough to generate an illusion of life.
Adam swivelled gently and began an inventory. His pulse seemed normal enough, but his throat ached. There was sweat in the armpits of his shirt from the subway, a sting in his eyes from the air. It was only half past eight, could be an hour until Manu came in, plenty of time. He could finish the media release for the design festival, then see. He reached for his laptop but did not open it, just let his hand rest against its warmth. He put down his phone and let his other hand fall against his leg. He closed his eyes.
Perhaps a minute passed in which he did not think at all.
When he opened his eyes, he felt slightly better. The office was purposeful. Time was flatter here than it was at home, it could be rolled out and sliced. Anyway he wasn’t sick, he was just tired, or fighting something off. One of those waves of vagueness, the strange corporeal exhaustion that sometimes overtook him. Manu might send him home, he thought, but even so it was better to be seen trying first.
He stood at his desk, shrugged off the jacket, opened his laptop, waited as it woke. He cleared his throat and heard the sound repeating in the ceiling. The open space had strange acoustics; everything reverberated. He glanced around the room, feeling watched, then foolish. He folded the jacket over the back of his chair and sat again, keeping his back straight. If he sat there for long enough he would focus, he would get something done. After a minute, the screen saver began its abstract dance. He hadn’t bothered to change it from the default.
He watched the colours shift for a while, then found the jacket irritated. He got up, bundled it onto the chair, and went to the kitchen. Adam opened the small glass-fronted fridge and extracted a bottle of iced tea, lemon flavour. He drank the sweet cool liquid, let the sensation clear his thoughts. He felt the drink fall coldly against the inside of his rib cage, the sweat respond in the soft place inside his upper arm. The ducts thrummed overhead. He wondered now if he had turned on the air conditioning or if it had been running when he got here. He couldn’t remember. The fridge beeped impatiently at him, so he pushed its door shut with one knee. He would finish the draft and send it through to the venue, take some initiative. He was sure he had its name card in his desk drawer.
He paused at the entrance to Manu’s office, looked through the glass that protected him. There were no photos on the desk. The only personal trinket was a black plastic figurine he recognised as Miyazaki, though he could not place the film. A tiny red light indicated a machine on standby. Manu’s leather chair, like a raised baseball glove, waited for the shape of his body. It was worn at the arm where he had touched it.
He had a feeling that he could not quite name. A sense he had forgotten something, left a transaction incomplete. He looked at the drink in his hand, the bottle empty. The only thing waiting was the text on his laptop. No-one else was in the room with him, no-one watching. He leaned one temple against the glass, and closed his eyes.