On the ninth floor (there is no ninth floor, really, it is
the roof, but he prefers calling it the ninth floor), it is windy. People go
there to smoke, and if you are not careful, the wind is so strong that it
plucks the smoke out of your mouth even as you part your lips to properly
exhale and savour that feeling of smoke moving out of your lungs. He is here
for a very specific purpose today, and it is not to grab a smoke. He climbs the
stairs to the elevated table tennis room that occupies part of the roof, and
hauls himself to its roof, using the door handle as a foothold. It is even windier
up here, with no buildings of comparable height around, and there is no parapet
here. He wonders what his odds of survival will be if he jumps from what is
effectively the tenth floor, and wonders if the wind will just blow his skinny
form away from the roof and do the job for him, and he wonders if late evening
in the month of May is a good time to die.
***
Supervisor To Under-officers Processing, In-charge of Data,
they call him. In real life terms, it is a dead-end job, just like the
thousands of other jobs floating around. The benefit is he will never be out of
a job- there is simply too much requirement for people like him. The downside
is he will never move further. He often
wonders what happens to those people who vacate the openings he often gets
calls from employment consultants from. Do they retire from one life of
obscurity to another life of even more boring obscurity, do they die, drop off
the face of the world, do they change professions (what professions do they
change to- do they become door-to-door salesmen, do they start their own businesses,
do they go back to college to append additional bullet points to their
resumes?), or do they simply give up?
He never opts for a change of job. There is a rhythm in this
daily life, which is difficult to break. His team of seven Under-officers
Processing comes in around 8, he walks in around 8:15, gets a briefing on all
the data that his team has processed, and how far the different projects they
are collecting data for have progressed, spends a half hour trying to make
sense of that data, and around 9:30, goes in to update his boss, who walks in
an hour after him. She is a real bitch, and he mostly spends his days hoping
she will be gone soon, but knows that it is not going to happen for another
year at the very least, knows that her job is also a dead-end job, only, she
has the option of turning back. He has spent time as Under-officer Processing,
as the grunt who copies data from filled up paper questionnaires and enters
that into spreadsheets for market researchers to make sense of. It is a highly
emotionally draining job- reading what flavour of condom people prefer to use,
or what kind of soap they think will get rid of their rashes is not an
intellectually stimulating experience, but it occupies time. And that, he
supposes, should be important for a widower who has not yet reached his
forties.
Widower. He ponders often over the word. A man who has lost
his wife by death and has not yet remarried. How many of us are there in the
world, he wonders, how many lonely men eating dinners of nachos and salsa sauce
night after night, drinking half bottles of whiskey and zoning out in front of
the TV, waking up half dead in the morning to face another day as a relentless
enemy? He has often gone back to the car-accident which took her away (God, was
that still in college?), the bastard who T-boned their car was drunk and
himself ended up as a fatality. What a futile way to die, he thinks. Guilt is a
one way street, but there are levels of guilt, and his level of getting
dead-zoned with guilt is the wish that he had learnt to drive, that he had been
driving the car and not her, that he could have died instead of her, even that
if she had to die that way, it could have been better had he been drunk and
driving and a survivor of the accident, so that he would at least have some
concrete guilt upon his conscience to live with, a reason for his misery-
anything which would be better than this bland, faceless cruelty of fate which
stares at him every night from the vapid forced-normalcy of the TV or
fathomlessly dark and amber depths of the whiskey bottles. He wonders about this
coincidence of colours- whiskey is amber, gum-resins in which fossils of
insects were preserved were also amber. Probably whiskey is a metaphor for
that, an ancient gum-resin which fossilises the soul and preserves guilt to be
carried on forever and ever, only to be found every night to have its DNA
renewed in the laboratory of drunken despondency. Seventeen years of drunken
despondency, seventeen years since he decided not to go back to college,
seventeen years since he decided that he would make nothing of his life. He has
succeeded, he reflects, as the wind tries to push him out towards the edge- he
has a job that acronyms to STUPID, and here he is, pushed to brink of death by
a woman who he abhors, smoking what might well be his final cigarette. The
plan, he reflects wryly, has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
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