MY OFFICE WAS A temporary refuge of sanity and control. Here there were specific tasks to be performed. My secretary had gone over a list of medical supplies that had been received and had to be paid for. The check was IBM’d and awaited only my signature and the countersignature of Mr. Brand. The laundry had lost an entire shipment of sheets. The Academy Doctor wanted to see me on a “personal matter.” Personal usually meant financial: anything from a request for a small advance to a raise.
Leona, my secretary, was a tiny Negro girl—the Academy was an “equal opportunity employer”—of extraordinary efficiency and taciturnity. She laid the papers before me in the proper order, giving me the proper time to scan before she moved on to something else.
“Mr. Gilliatt left a message,” she said. “There’s a discrepancy in the clocks. The one in the Guide’s Quarters is off.”
Damn! It was the wrong day to forget a detail like that. Gilliatt’s black book would profit by it. “Did he say anything else?”
“He said it was being attended to.”
Leona, you dark Sphinx, I thought, stop being so perfect. What I want is nuance, not accuracy. What is Gilliatt up to today? How will he use a small error against me? But I had hired her for the very impersonality that frustrated me now. I distracted myself with details. I knew that at any moment I was going to bolt for the door and dash out to where Max was filming the morning’s activities with the cool compliance of Gilliatt. But distraction worked both ways. I was distracted from the details with which I was trying to divert my attention. Drifting into my mind came fragments from the early morning. Max and Jewel spies? Suicides? What motives? Perhaps Max was the reject from one of the other Academies? Just to do something that felt purposeful I put in a call to the Central Exchange. I gave them the basic data on Max and Jewel and requested intelligence. Then I ordered the off-duty guides to snow clearance duty and comforted myself with a cup of tea, convinced for the moment that I had done something useful. The shapeless horrors were held at bay once more. Action, even meaningless action, contradicts the pointlessness of things like snow, the mystery of things like singing dreams.