The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

I am assuming you find it comforting or at least thought-provoking in some way to be sitting in one or other of the cubicles tucked away deep in the bowels of this great stone monstrosity that housed you all those years ago and in which you were taught, inter alia, Latin, French, algebra, some English history and deportment. But your deportment seems to have failed you momentarily just as something else about you, something I had never suspected, has failed me. I would apologize for seeming angry, but you are not around for any rudimentary apology that, in any case, I would not mean, which is why I am angry in the first place; in your first place, your alma mater.

I am sitting in a school hall, your old school’s hall, with your sister, your brother-in-law and one of their daughters as they wait for another of their daughters, the eldest, to accept some award, or perhaps she is to sing. I am not your husband. He gets out of these things now, and so—at the last minute, I find—do you.

I do not know why I am here, although I would be able to recount with great accuracy how I got here—not that this is something you need to be told. It was arranged some time ago. Even had you not disappeared inexplicably, leaving me literally in the dark, it is hard to imagine feeling more uncomfortable. Your sister, poodle hairstyle—is it just for the evening?—pearl earrings with a matching brooch and matching breasts, each perfectly shaped and straining to make a point in cashmere reminiscent of more genteel times; does she always chew gum? It does you no harm being her sister—you are not your sister’s keeper and you look good next to her—just as it does you no good to be ashamed of her. She should have married an astronaut and it looks as though she has. Her husband, as if freshly returned from an audition for the part of Dad in a U.S. situation comedy, replete with painted-on hair and perfect teeth and intoxicated by his own congeniality, bobs around us in the foyer of the school hall like an apple in a barrel of water. You were here then, I know that, touching my arm briefly and by accident. He tells me what he does for a living but I am having trouble remembering his name. I do not want to sit next to him in the hall during the assembly for fear that, in his bliss at being a father at his daughter’s speech night, he might reach for my hand. But I am spared this fate and find myself seated between your immaculate sister and you—that is, before you got up to leave.

I would have had no expectation of anything but kitsch coming down at us from the stage tonight had I turned my mind to it, but the truth was, I did not and could not have turned my mind to it and still have agreed to accompany you here. It seemed important to you that we attend—or, rather, that you attend not alone—which has meant, of late, going with me. It has never before meant leaving without me, but perhaps I am precipitate to draw this conclusion. Perhaps you are in the wings, waiting for some response from the chorus before reappearing. Or is it the chorus from whom you are hiding?

When I first saw you, by the lift well, it was for an instant and I was not even sure that you were working with us. So what was it that I noticed in that instant? I had already been divorced for quite a while, and my female registering reflexes were permanently cocked, ready for quick action in the sense at least of acknowledgment, the lightning start of an Olympian being one of the few consolations of the truly lonely long-distance runner. Do you, wherever you are, want to know what it was that I noticed in that first instant? Yes, you do have a kind of beauty that is more than merely physical, I have told you that; but it wasn’t that. The smile, I have seen it so many times since. The smile that plays around your lips and cannot be counted on kindled a curiosity in me that I had not felt for some time. The smile, and something with a life of its own residing in your eyes, suggested that you knew something most of us did not know, something which made you unsafe. Of course, there are many things we didn’t and still don’t know. These days I don’t even know if I’m meant to be in Sales or in Marketing. But unfortunately I do know something that you don’t. I might tell you if you come back from your ill-timed nocturnal creep down memory lane.

“It’s a small world after all . . .” sing the girls from Mrs. Dowager’s Year Seven music class. Is that really her name? Couldn’t be. It sounded like Dowager when the Principal introduced her. But she’s hardly a dowager, is she, smiling side-on to us like that, seated at the piano in a tight skirt and white blouse looking barely old enough to be either married or fully qualified to smile side-on at us from a piano. What charm she brings to a melody so banal it can only have been composed to drive people mad. Surely it was not her choice. If you are not back by the end of this, I may have to seek her out. Perhaps if there were teachers here like her in your day, this seat beside me might be warmly occupied instead of conspicuously empty.

A small world after all? Perhaps, but after all what? After all the sanctimonious middle-class fund-raising and collegial and national flag-waving in all the speech nights ever orchestrated? Was it Dorothy Parker you were paraphrasing when, in describing your school milieu, you said that if all the girls that ever went to this school were laid end to end you would not be a bit surprised? But they surprised you once, didn’t they? It began with an invitation not received, then another and another. For a bright and capable girl, pretty and later beautiful and famously coordinated, there was no excuse for not being selected by your peers for sporting teams and pubescent pyramids formed for the purpose of commemorating one or other school camp in photos ready-made for the back of a drawer. You found yourself, without warning, out of season.

You were the last to know your father had lost his money and these young women, ribbons in their hair and hearts so full of spring, already knew enough to know that your newfound affliction warranted, at the very least, profound abandonment. So why do you do this to yourself? Why do you visit this place pretending that it holds something for you, something pure and joyous? And why have you dragged me here only to abandon me?

But that is not it, is it? That’s not all of it. I don’t think you have ever realized that what is left out forms part of the story. You don’t need these people, and even then only part of you thought that you did, the part that was left out. How is it that I came to know so much of what went on all those days ago inside these sorrowful gates? I have listened, put things together and hung on to them and you didn’t notice this because you were too busy either pretending these stories were meant to be funny or else that they were in lieu of what you had meant to say while undressing for bed or leafing through a street directory in the front passenger seat. Just when you thought I suspected the value in pursuing something, you would pull us both up short: “There is probably more than one way of getting there,” you might say, “but why are they always digging up the road I need?”

I am not so dull as to draw conclusions about you from the fact that at fifteen or so, in extremis, you turned state’s evidence, sending scores of young women to their detention for smoking. And it is funny that you convinced an influential echelon and perhaps even a few teachers that your archrival was infected with a highly contagious disease so rare that no one could be sure of its name. Eventually reaching a new equilibrium, you survived and then prospered academically. I know all of this, if it matters to you. But now you have felt the need to touch the iron gates again and breathe deep the disinfectant that stained your youth. We never completely lose our childhood appetites; we just add to them and, in doing so, they become a little less conspicuous. After a half life of apparent conscientiousness, are you finally indulging a taste for truancy? Don’t do this to me, not now, when I have something to tell you.

Your presence at the lift well was no coincidence. We soon learned that you worked on our floor, and since our floor was one of five the company leased in their entirety, you had to be working for the company. This was somehow reassuring, perhaps because you were so unlike the rest of us. For a start, you seemed unafraid. I had been unafraid for some time, too, but with you it was different. You were efficiently unafraid. There was no mindlessness or sycophancy in your efficiency either. It was as though you were working for yourself. Head Office was not even in your firmament. This is the kind of state most of us had hoped for, years ago when we started our working lives.

When you begin, you always think that having done everything right as a child, adolescent, secondary and then tertiary student, you’re going to be the one that success will snuggle up to while you are busy, that it will grab hold of your leg and never want to be without you. We know of course that very few among us will achieve this but, at least initially, we also seem to just know that we will be among the few. We will be the ones. Someone directly above us might be intractable; we hadn’t planned for this, but we can handle it. In fact, as we walk down the carpeted passageway, the perfect generator of static electricity, to present our work to this person, we begin to imagine our colleagues in the tea room expressing amazement, admiration, envy, that only we seem to be able to handle him or her. “It’s just a matter of reading them,” we say nonchalantly, knowing this skill is innate and cannot be taught. And if, in addition, we possess those skills that can be taught, well, there will be no stopping us.

But there is always stopping us. Whether it is the temperament of the direct superior which we thought we had handled but had not; the office politics of which we were unaware; sexual politics, be it harassment or inopportune indifference; time-honored racism, religious animosity, paranoia, a hungover economy, our personal appearance or the perception that we were not really like them after all, the walls we streamed past first thing on those first mornings turn into barriers, broken only where necessary to allow the passage of air. So, after a while, we just hang on and do not bother ourselves too much about success.

My figures had been down and I had just about given up on rising any further within the company. In fact, it is not too dramatic to say I was working on surviving, just hanging on. My marriage had ended not with a bang but with a Wiltshire, the now famous last argument concerning specifically a putative need for steak knives, and touching more generally on consumerism and various forms of hunger. By the time you appeared I was no longer living my life properly and was in grave danger of having it taken off me. When I first saw you something awoke within me, an inexplicable nervous pain which got me to work early. We soon learned that you were married but that did not bother me. I did not anticipate any kind of outside relationship with you. In my prime you would have been out of my league, and I had been relegated a number of times by then. It really would have been sufficient just to watch you around the office, to be your friend within it and to maybe start to rehabilitate myself. I was droll around you but not unhelpful. Your suggestions at the section breakfast meetings did not evoke my usual contempt. Across the conference table I would detect, I thought, a swift glance of inquiry from you, perhaps of apology. Had I approved of what you said? Had I detected that it was a performance? You can fool many of the people all the time.

But what do you call this performance tonight, this disappearing act, and what is it in aid of? Young Mrs. Dowager has long since vacated the stage, leaving behind a feast of expectation and unanswered questions; what is it about Mr. Dowager, whoever he is, that this musical patron saint of Year Seven will do no more than sit side-on at the piano for anyone but him? So certain am I that I will not forget the image of her in that white blouse that I feel I must have seen it before. Perhaps you have one like it? It is a small world after all.

The Principal is back onstage. Once he was a teacher, now an MC always with an eye to the sponsor. Soon he could have his own show. Or is this his own show? There is a great turnout tonight. In this he is completely correct. Looking like he is out of the same mold as your sister’s husband, the astronaut, the Principal invites us to sing along with whatever is coming up next. Perhaps it is your niece? Your brother-in-law stirs. The Principal is working the auditorium. He will sing along. One can only hope he relinquishes the microphone before this happens. “Just doing his job,” you would say, far more accepting than I of people making fools of themselves for money. But he has to work particularly hard tonight. There is disquiet among the faithful. Ten days ago a young girl was dragged to the bushes, still within the grounds, and raped. There is nothing reassuring about the police caravan set up by the side of the front gate. Notwithstanding that it has been on the news, in the papers, and that all the parents know about it, the police caravan serves to remind everyone how helpless we all are. The Principal has the mike in both hands. He is panicking. All together, now!

Somewhere at this moment, while the young girl, who has not returned to school, plays jacks on the end of her bed with a family friend she calls “Auntie,” the man who did this, who took away her nights for years to come, is doing something else. It is too easy for us to picture him as we would like to paint him. Perhaps he is reading the newspaper, and if he is not, one day he will, as we do, and something will appall him. Now we say he is demented, sick. The trick is to call it that before the screams, the nightmares and the shivering. But we never do because we are too busy buying real estate from him, playing golf with him, wishing him a happy anniversary or coming to him for a personal loan. What is going on inside the caravan while I am sitting here? Police are on the lookout for a man who looks like everyone.

They are just doing their job. I know. I can hear the way you would say it, such a convenient expression. It is redolent of long suffering, but this, I have learnt, is not your forte, not when you are just doing your job. I am angry. You have been gone too long for comfort. Should I say something to your sister? I was not always angry, and even now, sitting here like an idiot, embarrassed, bored, I know I will not always be angry. I have something to tell you.

It was not so long after you came that it seemed, just for a moment, that I had reached a turning point. You had reached it for me, just by being there the way you were. You were an affirmation of life, and the weight of the last few years felt as if it had lifted. Everything seemed somehow possible again. And this was before we became—what have we become?—involved. You wore a silk scarf around your neck. It had colors that had never been seen before in this building. Your voice, confident but friendly: it was a pleasure to hear it no matter who you were talking to or what you were saying. It suggested, in the way you spoke to a secretary or someone from Accounts, that perhaps I would be all right. The prospect of lunch with you infused in me a kind of golden exuberance. Your interest, even your professional interest in me, reminded me of what I had wanted, hoped for, when I had started with the company. It was almost as though I respected them more for your association with them or rather their association with you.

Why did I start with them? Why do any of us choose one company over another as an employer? The money? At the beginning they all offer more or less the same, and no one knows how it will go after that. I guess it is often not so much your prospects at a particular firm, because these are essentially unknowable, but whether people will think you have done well to get the job there, that determines your choice. That was largely it in my case. It was really the prestige. They gave good letterhead.

But you know what can happen. You work their hours and sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually you can’t tell how it is going so you give it just a bit longer. You set yourself a deadline to be somewhere or something by a certain time but you don’t tell anyone, so you can shift the parameters and no one knows whether you have failed. If they throw more money at you, you upgrade your car and get a bigger mortgage. That’s how they keep you. You are not the same person anymore. Immaculately dressed over a skin irritation and chronically time deprived, you have jettisoned all those interests you talked about at your first interview all those years ago. You have dead-lines to meet or budgets to fulfill and you’re not going anywhere, unless or until you find yourself microeconomically reformed and slumped catatonic in the ergonomically designed chair of some employment consultant talking about the possibility of taking up painting again. Until then you are getting in earlier and leaving later, never finding the time to stop and smell the Prozac.

Who are the people who thrive on this? How do they do it? I think you knew from the first day at the lift well and only us chumps could have failed to notice it. And the biggest chump of all fell in love with you, slowly and awkwardly, to the gentle breeze of the desk calendar fanning the days. I do not hold you responsible for this insofar as responsibility is equated with intent. You were not flirting with me, or rather, that was not your intent. I know this now. There is little else I know to be as true as this except, of course, that which I was going to tell you tonight before you took off. Now here is something right up your alley. A magician is onstage. Bright-colored silk kerchiefs appear and disappear through his sleeves. Rabbits become acquainted with the insides of hats. Everyone seems to be enjoying it, your brother-in-law most of all. I am not. In infancy I was dropped by a nurse and ever since I have not been mystified by magic tricks. I smile in case someone is looking at me. But no one does. They are all enraptured, unaware of the greatest trick of the evening: the one in which the lady vanishes.

You courted me, slowly but undeniably, and I never questioned your interest. Since we were not yet lovers it was even easier to believe that you saw something in me that I had seen in you. This was enough. I did not need to see you after hours—does this seem naïve?—and the longer it went on, the healthier it appeared to me. It seemed honorable to be so fond of you without ever being with you at night, without ever touching you. I impressed myself greatly. You rarely mentioned your husband, and when you did, it was not with bitterness but a sad resignation. Even when you kissed me in the basement car park—and it was you who kissed me—I did not allow myself to make too much of it.

Then you called me at home one Sunday evening and asked me to come over. I’d wanted to have an early night. I had an appointment with the specialist the next morning. Your husband had left you. He packed up his estimate of half the contents of the house and went. I had, of course, never been to your home before. You wanted to go out to the movies or somewhere—anywhere. “Let’s not talk about it now,” you said. “Maybe one day I’ll need to tell you everything, but right now I need not to.” But you told me a great deal and we nearly missed the film, one of those vehicles that enables Anthony Hopkins to regret everything.

There wasn’t. Has there ever been time for one more Joni Mitchell song? But who am I to talk. When my wife and I first separated, I found myself often waking up in a shitty 1970 Whitlam-something Mazda hatchback—she took the sedan—barely moving on the South Eastern arterial, only to be reminded via the cassette player that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. All that remained of my marriage was a compilation country-and-western tape that had gestated for about eight years between the driver’s and front passenger’s seats, only to rise phoenixlike from the ashtray.

I was surprised to find myself in your home, flattered you had called. I think I had met him once, just briefly, at an office Christmas party, the one they invited spouses and partners to. I thought I had observed him thoroughly, given the limited opportunity, but I would not have guessed at his hunger for bric-a-brac. The place seemed more than half empty. We drank Swedish vodka and you filled me in, told me of an affair you’d had more than a year earlier, before you joined the company, and how it had hurt him, how he couldn’t trust you after that. But I felt sure, even then, that his mistrust was older than that. When you went to get changed I sat, glass in hand, waiting for him to come back nonchalantly through the front door, as though he had forgotten something. What would I say to him?

Don’t we love her unfaithfulness, just once or twice anyway? Then her forgetfulness cleans her hands of all those deeds that we have tallied so faithfully. It enables her to keep going. I know her well enough and you know her even better. I can understand how it is that you come to take these things, all these little things. I know her well enough. You had better not come back.

You had taken an interest in me well before this, before I could be of any obvious use to you. Before I had befriended you, I was completely computer illiterate, whereas now I can impersonate the employee who warrants all the expensive hardware the firm seems incapable of resisting. And isn’t impersonation the key? Whoever the hell we are—and we never know—there is now the creeping suggestion that it no longer matters. If we can imitate the current faddish gestalt of success then money will surely follow. And even computers still matter less than money, although now it is only in computers that we prize memory. For us memory has become a burden. For you in particular it has been this way for quite some time, since before you sat here, in this auditorium among those young women with ribbons in their hair, suddenly out of season, so depreciated. Memory has been a burden for you since you first bristled at the stern admonition by your father that you must be happy in some other way. The money had gone.

Your sister was winded by this, left flat and lifeless. All the possibilities of civilization from gastronomy, travel, appreciation of certain previously ordained pieces of sculpture, haute couture and even sexual fulfillment that she felt would have been within her reach had your father done something differently, something about which she has never really bothered to find out—all these possibilities had vanished. There is a warmth in blame which blanketed her until you, the younger sister, took her under your wing. You had survived by reinventing yourself.

In your early university days you became the floral-skirted queen of alfalfa and buckwheat, an acoustic-guitar-strumming braided bohemian. You tried to teach your sister the guitar, probably without much greater success than your foray into that black hole that is my affinity with computers. There were many cross-legged circle-sitting music sessions in which your new friends tried to view things alternately from a Marxist or feminist perspective without any of them ever really mastering bar chords. It must have been at one of these midnight-to-dawn sessions that someone introduced you to the songs of Joni Mitchell, presumably with malice aforethought, songs for which there is always time for one more, the one we just have time to hear when your husband has recently left you.

Then it happened, far more suddenly than the first, another metamorphosis. It happened so suddenly it might have created headlines in the student newspaper: Sisters released from a year and a half on a D minor chord. Your sister quickly recovered her Vogue Living sensibilities, the ones that led her to marry this astronaut here on my right. And you? I don’t know where you are.

Only you know. You are not merely unknown to me but unknowable. It embarrasses me now to recall the way I permitted myself to admire you for your fluent command of a pseudotechnical managerial jargon for which I have contempt. So easily done in the first thaw, we became intoxicated with the you-and-me-against-the-world of it all, forgetting that it never stays that way. It became ultimately a tag-team match wherein sometimes you sided with the world. I watched you color your office and the whole of the floor with your presence, shrugging off without noticing all that had for years tripped me up or slapped me in the face. I wanted to believe in a likeness between us despite everything I saw, and this is how there came about the corruption of reason which, in this instance, permitted me to admire you for your capacity to impress Lloyd Walker, whom you persisted in calling Mr. Walker until I ribbed you for it without mercy.

Lloyd Walker is my vintage. We started at more or less the same time. A ruddy bespectacled man who speaks in forced high-pitched gusts of wind as if he had several pieces of fruit permanently lodged in his neck and speaking was only a method that had been recommended for dislodging them. With his exaggerated side-to-side gait and the inexplicable dowdiness of another time and place, Walker quickly became the object of often very funny but unfailingly cruel jokes. While his wife stayed robustly home, knitting casseroles from women’s magazines and pruning the children, he was taking offense inoffensively year after year and punctually, steadfastly, not rocking any boats. There is a temptation to locate such a physically unfortunate-looking character somewhere around one’s sympathy, pity and even affection, believing him, after everything that you have seen or imagined him to have felt, to be incapable of cruelty himself and perhaps even to be endowed with some vestige of a kind of In Which We Serve, Noël Cowardly honor.

Did any of this occur to you in that breakfast meeting as you put your now famous suggestions to this lymphatic papier-mâché head of the department and the assembly of double-breasted morons below him? What did you think they were thinking as they looked at you over black coffee, cardboard croissant and the Financial Review, these gentlemen of commerce, each with his own car space and synapses that are still waiting to be formally introduced to one another? Walker’s secretary was already reading the minutes of the last meeting and I still hadn’t found my seat, having sauntered to your side of the table to lean casually, conspiratorially, and whisper, “Hey, you know why they call this the bored room.”

Walker thanks us for our attendance as though perhaps some of us had considered sleeping in. Even I know the importance of this weekly orb-of-day charade. The minutes are read. Some circular from Head Office is distributed and discussed. This usually involves most of them, or at least the intellectually weakest of them, clambering over each other to most fulsomely praise with no-name-brand sincerity whatever inanity has come down from on high this week. Only Atherton is creative enough to restrain himself every now and then. Perhaps he is still asleep. There is often a sullenness to his affect at these meetings which has made me think we could have been friends.

Targets, projections, monthly, weekly, for the company and for the section, are read. Well done but we can do better. We can always do better. All talk of what Walker euphemistically calls the horizontal merger is, he says, premature. We must not believe what the press is writing about it, and if we are approached by any of them, we are neither to confirm nor deny. Refer all inquiries to Head Office. But what could we possibly tell the press? They know everything before we do. The little we are told is in the weekly epistle Head Office sends us, and every other department, to make us all feel we matter.

I was eating cantaloupe and honeydew melon. It slipped from my fork on to my lap. I shook involuntarily and it hit the floor. Had anyone noticed? I was gazing out of the window when you began to speak. I came back from the tiles and the flag on top of some distant building, in through the window, and past my reflection to see you lip-synch to your own voice. “Go ahead,” Walker encouraged you. The words came out with polite certainty, a mix of reverence and the imperative. It was an idea and a statement of the bloody obvious dressed up as a question. Create a new market, by which you didn’t mean exporting to countries where previously we were unknown and all of the population had until recently sat in loincloths up to their necks in their own shit but where now five percent live better than we ever did by co-opting the other ninety-five percent into slavery. This was a common idea. Everyone was doing it. We were already doing it. You meant something else, something local. Create a market somewhere between wholesale and retail. Since much of what we did was based on turnover, why not offer some form of discount to certain traders who either bought unusually large quantities or else bought far in advance? The principle was applicable to most of our lines. Walker liked it. You sang it like a song.

I wondered then whether it was something off the top of your head. As genuinely pleased as I was to see Walker take to it, I had difficulty reconciling it with the person I knew to be you. In the first place, it was trite. Did you really think this was a new idea, to offer products at a discount in order to increase the volume of sales? You had never mentioned it to me before. Were you worried that I would talk you out of it? Or steal it? I am not capable of stealing anymore, if I ever was, and am even less capable of dressing up something like this as new and original. It would embarrass me. And what a waste of time that would be, to feel embarrassed. I do not want to waste any more time. Where are you?

Con-sider yourself one of us, sing the Year Nine girls or those of them who graduated from Mrs. Dowager’s Year Seven class and still harbor the suspicion that their future may lie on the stage. I feel the need to tell someone I don’t know how much more of this I can take but your sister is hugging herself, both arms crossed against her chest, one hand gripping her shoulder, the other tugging on an earring. Your elder niece, our elusive but undoubtedly charming raison d’être, has not yet, to my knowledge, graced the stage. Perhaps you are with her, and she with you? Your sister’s astronaut, sitting beside her, is tapping his knee in time to We don’t want to have no fuss. It’s clear—we’re—going to get along.

I was in my office late one evening and, strangely, you were not around. You had not gone home but you had gone for the day, I remember being aware of that. The sun was going down, refusing to stay back late for love or money, and the skyline was delineated by the usual sterile fluorescent light of the city. I was not working but tinkering or perhaps tampering with my computer. I love the look of a spreadsheet against the dusk sky. By changing the data we can change the picture. If we do it often enough and fast enough we can make our own cartoons. The data is of course meaningless, so the skyline is the limit. I was checking my e-mail, just for the hell of it, because you had recently taught me how. Even the term e-mail sits uncomfortably with me. It always sounds like a brand of white goods. Previously my secretary was the only link between me and all those thousands of computer-literate people who desperately needed to contact me but who did not feel sufficiently confident with the telephone.

For all of my newfound computer skills, formatting, scrolling and saving, I can never remember my password or whether it is mine or yours. You will remember we used yours while you were teaching me. My first instinct is to use yours and I did that time, too, so that it was not my e-mail I was receiving but yours. Discretion may be the better part of valor, but serendipity should not be lightly dismissed, either. I was not searching for anything. My discovery was more in the form of an honest mistake and I would gladly have turned back from it had that been possible. It was one of these things you come across by chance, and though you are, at that moment, unable to grasp it fully or in context, still you are unable to turn away, fascinated by what it means, by what it is going to do to you. Something is triggered in your nervous system, something akin to that triggered when, as a child, you walk in on your parents in bed. No amount of shame or self-rebuke or the cursing of chance can overcome the sweet pulsating ache of your discovery. Walker had been writing to you.

What the hell was going on? What had you done so well that particular morning? If he was referring to your splitting of the atom at the breakfast meeting, he was clearly flattering you in the way that inadequate men with power and with the most transparent of motives often do. Surely you were not flirting with Walker? Were you simply permitting him to flirt with you, a proposition not quite as repulsive to contemplate but one still necessitating further explanation? You had not said anything about it. I know you would have been at least as revolted by this as I am. Why wouldn’t you have said something? Were you planning to do something about it and, in the interim, thought you would spare me? Of course I wouldn’t have been jealous of a sensitively handled rebuff of his unwanted attentions. You could have told me.

But there was more. A memo containing your bright “creation of a new market between wholesale and retail” idea was there on the screen, word for word as you had expressed it at the meeting. All right, what I would call sycophancy, you would call job security, or more likely, just “getting ahead.” But this was a memo from Walker to you. I couldn’t understand this. Was he passing on your idea to someone else and checking it with you, making sure that he had captured the concept in all of its complexity? Was he about to pass it off as his own? If so, why would he tell you? Why would he check it with you first? I kept reading it, hearing the words in different keys. By now it was night; most of the staff and even the cleaners were gone. There was nothing to focus on but the terminal and the high-rise clinic outside: cold, sharp immutable representations of all that we have collectively striven for.

Were you giving it to him? Were you feeding him ideas and if so, why? In order that he might grow? Why would you do this? I still had it in the back of my mind that perhaps he was stealing from you, although this would make no sense. If he was stealing from you and I had discovered it, I would have to tell you. Wouldn’t I? So why wouldn’t you tell me? I have nothing he would want to steal. But this is nothing anyway, just some bit of trite marketing you have dressed up. Why didn’t you discuss it with me? Was it because it was just some puffery you came out with that morning to alleviate your boredom, sitting as we were in the bored room, and you have the ability—let’s say capacity, a more neutral term—to sell it to an idiot like Walker. Then I read it again and noticed the date. He had written the memo to you a week earlier.

There are friendships in which neither person gets to finish a sentence because both of them are so completely attuned to the other that they will finish each other’s thoughts. We have never been like this. To know each other this well, there has to be a level of trust that we had not reached. When we met, I was more or less in the fetal position inside my suit; but by the time of my terminal discovery, I had made great progress, at least by my own standards. What was I to think of a memo from Walker to you containing some trivial commercial alchemy that, a week later, you parroted first thing one frosty morning as if it were your own? Why would you do this? Why the pretense?

My mouth was dry. I felt as one does when one is on the verge of becoming aware of something unbearable, something from which one never recovers. I didn’t know what to do. It was about nine by then. I hadn’t eaten anything. There was no sound but the ubiquitous hum of a large building, probably the lights, the occasional fax coming in and Atherton’s muffled voice making what I assumed was an overseas call. I was breathing at a rate consistent with running but I was seated, still looking at the screen. I went to turn it off but it wouldn’t go blank. I kept hitting the wrong button. I tried to reach you on the telephone but I couldn’t. It was not because I didn’t know what I would say. Not knowing what to say has never stopped me before. I could not call you. I was unable to. The first time I dialled I got the wrong number, a child’s voice. “My mother can’t talk to you.” The second time, an older woman spoke on an answering machine. I became very alarmed. This was a nightmare. Checking my address book, I was reassured to see that I was not misremembering your telephone number. But when I went to redial it I found that I still couldn’t. I kept misdialling. There was a numbness down my left side. I went shakily along the passage to the darkened tea room. I had to have a glass of water. I needed to talk to someone. I thought it was you. Your answering machine came on when I tried again and you will remember an almost percussive voice from an arid mouth asking, “Where are you?”

Mrs. Dowager is talking quietly to someone by the side of the stage. I can’t make out whether it’s a man or a woman. An elderly man is onstage now. He is speaking from a lectern. I wasn’t paying attention when he was introduced and it isn’t clear to me whether he is a retired politician or a war veteran. It has been too long. You have been gone too long. From the corner of my eye it appears your sister is asleep. I am tempted to wake her. There is a coarse ache at the back of my eyes. The formerly important older man seems to like being onstage. He has drifted to one of everyone’s favorite topics, law and order, and he touches a raw nerve with the audience.

The man’s voice does not have to grate, does not have to cause a pulsating pain in the back of my head, but it does. It carves a wedge in my consciousness. His voice itself is an offense. Then there are his words. It has come to this, ladies and gentlemen and students. It has come to where we do not feel safe in our own community, in our streets, in our homes. I don’t want to spoil the splendor of this wonderful family evening here at this proud educational institution, but let me just say this: We really do need more rigorous law enforcement. I know you would all agree. I get up to look for you.

What was I hoping for? What do we ever hope for, and isn’t it fortunate how innocent we are in hoping for it? Sunlight suddenly hits the earth, warming it till something grows, something we had not thought about, had not thought possible but now see and see it to be beautiful. The weather is unexpectedly balmy. We quicken our step and the smallest thing excites us. Your smile, have I mentioned it? It can awaken a tenderness in me that had lain dormant for a longer time than I can measure. We are in quiet agreement on all that matters. Everything is quiet and warm. We are not afraid to close our eyes, and while there is nothing at all contrived about this moment, we have been waiting for it all our lives. We close our eyes together. No one is offering advice: there is no need. We lie together on the cool dry grass, partially entwined and gently breathing in our own felicity. Do you remember? We lay on the cool dry grass and it was as if it were before the fall. Can you remember?

I had developed a taste for your electronic mail, particularly your correspondence with Walker. You may have noticed, I don’t see how you could not have, but I was often agitated and irritable. An increasing proportion of my remarks were of a kind that would burn or corrode organic tissue. I was shaking more. Grabbing a coffee from the tea room, I would stop off at Atherton’s room and make small talk for longer than I ever had before, leaning in his doorway with a new familiarity. He must have been a bit surprised. There are no pictures of his wife or kids on his desk. Atherton hates small talk. So do I.

What distinguishes Atherton from everybody else is not that he is so perceptive but that everybody else is so uncritical. Atherton is unbewitched by the cult of managerialism. I do not really know him and I have to imagine what his marriage is like or what he does on weekends. Is he in the garden, is he perhaps sanding down a hardwood cabinet of his own making, playing golf somewhere or reading Montaigne by the French windows in the chair his father left him? Perhaps, wearing corduroy pants and a checked shirt, he is shifting the furniture in the lounge room while his wife, one hand to her chin, tries to imagine some other configuration. The kettle boils and he makes a pot of coffee, finely ground, rich aroma, the kind he likes. On the other side of the window, his children are leaping over what was once a pile of leaves. It was a pile he had collected. He pours the coffee into two large blue mugs his wife had bought a couple of years earlier at a fair in the country. Perhaps there is still something of the little girl in her. He has always liked that about her. We really don’t know much about Atherton. But he is going, too, isn’t he? He will have to go.

Although we can never know all that there is about anyone, I know enough now. Migraine laps at the back of my eyes. Even though the corridors of the school are in almost complete darkness, there is a burning light behind my face. I call your name and hear your voice come back at me. It is a child’s voice coming from the distance. This is not really dialogue but, stumbling as I am into the walls of your old school, it is the best we can do. Or is it? Can we do better? Walker says we can do better.

What would have happened had I not had your password? What would you have told me and when? I have been of so much use to you. A smart-arse, observant, alienated, subversive type like me, it was likely I would be of use. But you didn’t quite know just how much you would call on me till your husband left you. This made things a bit sticky, even for you, and now you are hiding. But the game is up and sooner or later I will find you. It’s a small world after all. It was extremely unprofessional of you to provide even an idiot like me with access to your private correspondence. Who knows what I might find out? I could discover what you earn, something we have never discussed precisely, never put a figure on, although this would not really be at all embarrassing for you. But I might learn who it is that pays you. This is far more damaging, especially since we are not, after all, employed by the same company. My company pays someone else for your services. Then that company pays you. You are, in the naked light of day, a consultant, and your work is just about complete. When you leave, so will Atherton and I and many more. It was all a performance.

From the auditorium I can hear the distant sound of a cannon or a kettledrum. A small student orchestra plays cabaret music. At least, that’s what it sounds like. Berlin in the twenties: on it goes. Weimar revisited. But when the Reichstag finally burns this time it will be on pay TV. This night is forever, or at least that part of forever that you experience when everything else is on hold and there is no one above us to press Play. I have no idea where I’m going. There is no place I can think of that you are likely to be. So the darkness is appropriate. But it won’t calm the nausea. It feels like gastric juices coursing through my eustachian tubes, seeping into my eyes. The cannon is in my head. It is fuel to the fire behind my face, licking at my ears from the inside. I want to be rid of my tongue. My movement is staccato, out of time with the cannon. I grip the handle of one locker after another to keep upright. If I do this long enough, will I touch a locker that was yours? What have you done? Downsizing is the current panacea, and you had been hired to advise on its implementation. Why can’t I hate you for it? I had something to tell you.

With the full weight of my body, I push open the door to what can only be the girls’ toilets, slam my palm against the wall looking for the light switch. Nothing. The wall is cold. I can slam it all I like. It will not answer. The room is dark. I call your name. My voice is a gasp of air pushed over bark, a sickly afterthought from my neck. Do I really think you are in here? Now? Ever? I push open the door to each cubicle. There are five of them. They don’t all swing back with equal force. I can’t see them but I feel the difference in the movement of the air each time. The hinges squeal differently, individually. This is their moment. They won’t share it. I am good at this, repeating it. I am getting to recognize them by their sound. I try your name a couple of times for no reason at all until I stumble and hit one side of a cubicle wall. On my knees now, I vomit. The floor is damp. The cannon pounds inside me but I vomit arhythmically. My tongue is in the way. My nostrils are clogged and I rest my head on the toilet bowl. Do you know this one? I hear nothing for the crashing inside me. I will cry here till I bleed.

My breathing arrests me once I am empty. This is the worst it has ever been. I raise myself up and flush the toilet. My knees are sore and damp. I am hot. The floor is damp everywhere. The cleaners must have mopped the floor here not long ago. I can hear the soles of my shoes rejecting the moisture. I go to wash my face in the trough. I had something to tell you. Don’t you want to know what it is? The mop sits inside the bucket on the draining board beside a whole lot of plastic cups. Did you use these? I can hear the street, people. The tap is on. Water escapes hurriedly, dying for air. Furious. Never seen a trough before. I am wet, my face and hair, my chest, through my shirt. I shudder and lose balance. The mop is out of the bucket and both are on the floor with me. It crashes down. I lie there. It is dark. The left side has shut down again. I am numb there. How long will I lie here? I don’t know. I was looking for you.

The door is kicked open. I hear the crack of a shoe against the wood. The light is on. I squint. It is a woman, a uniformed policewoman. I can’t imagine what it is she sees looking down at me. I am ridiculous on the floor. She could be watching me die. They want to check, to do a scan. They want to check for a shape on my brain which would too easily explain everything. The policewoman wants to know what I am doing here. She draws her gun and requests backup on a two-way radio attached to her lapel. I am unable to speak and she is scared. Go on, shoot. I have no answers. She will have to wait for the scan like everybody else. Can barely say it anyway: a possible glioblastoma. The suspect has a name. No need for backup. I wanted to tell you. This is what they’re looking for. Perhaps it will show up on my screen, when I’m more proficient with the terminal. Are you going to shoot or not?

They give you coffee in the police caravan whether you ask for it or not. It’s their way of apologizing to the potential suspects for the recent spate of police shootings. It would be better if they shot you. I am shivering. They don’t let me see myself. She starts asking me questions. I’m good at the early ones: name, address. What am I doing here? It is your niece’s speech night? I don’t know her name. What are her parents’ names? I don’t know, met them tonight for the first time. Can’t remember. What year is the girl in? Eleven or twelve. I make it up. No, I have never been here before, of course not. Why “Of course”? You idiots! Are you really drawing a salary to suspect me? Ask me something sensible and I will do my best. They do. She has neglected to close the caravan door. The carnival is over. I hear people talking. That’s what I want to know, too: Where is she now? Where are you?

I hear voices, women’s voices and their laughter. Through the crack in the door I can see people passing; they come in waves, in bunches. They look in as they pass. They look at me. I see you with a group of girls. They are in school uniform and have ribbons in their hair. I hear them laughing. You look in at me through the gap in the door. We look at each other. Your face is blank. Say something. Tell them why I’m here. Tell me. But you don’t say anything. You are wearing the school uniform. Only it is not you. It is your niece. She looks so like you, much more than like her mother. I call out your name to her but she walks on. It was her speech night and all went well. Her friends adore her. The world’s at her feet, starting with me. I have never heard her speak. A policeman slams closed the caravan door. He frowns. They must be joking with all of this. I have the right to remain silent. He feels obliged to mention it.

Have I ever loved you? Yes, before there was reason, and still later, when there was none, even though, as it turned out, the best thing about us was the person I would have become had you been as I had cast you. I am broken now, feeling the wind on my skin till it pushes my bones to mock me, when there is no wind. I am burnt dry by the sun till the feeling is gone on one side, when there is no sun. They tell me these are the symptoms. Your betrayal is as clear to me now as our Swedish vodka, but I cannot allow you to be so far removed from the person I thought you were that I am unable to love you. You see, I realized something when you came along. It was not a realization that pays. It would be of no interest to Walker and it has no tax implications for anyone. But I realized that I needed to love you. It defined me, and if you did not exist I would have had to invent you, minus the betrayal. But perhaps that is all of you, the sine qua non of you.

So why is it later than you think so much more often than not? They will not give me a mirror but I see from my forearms, my wrists and hands that my skin is the color of wet ash. This place is not known as a war zone. It is the leafy suburb in which you and your sister were educated. Your father sent you here and then went about his business. This is your community. It has become a war zone for me and soon everyone will know.

I sit by the wall in a police caravan, a good night’s work for someone. My feet, our feet, are sore and we have only travelled one day in our new school shoes. But we have travelled that same day over and over and over, only without ever noticing it. We fill our day, our one repeated day, with distractions, clothes, cars, orgasms, a job. A job for Atherton, for me. You will sleep and live the day again and again. But remember the cool dry grass. That’s what I had to tell you.