“Yes, Rus,” the manager said, “keep it short.”
“It is about the sound,” Rus said, looking around the table at his coworkers.
“Excuse me?” the manager said.
“The sound in the air vent in the office,” Rus said, nodding. “I think there may be a bird in there.”
“A what?” the manager said. “What are you talking about?”
“A bird,” Rus said, speaking as loud and clear as possible. “There are bird sounds coming from the air vent. Shrieking, cawing, scratching. It sounds like a gull. And it keeps getting worse.”
“Does anybody know what he is talking about?” the manager asked.
Rus’s coworkers looked at one another. Fokuhama coughed.
“Is this a Russian thing, Rus?” the manager said. “Because we have a cultural element in our yearly office party. That would be the appropriate moment for Russian folk tales and so forth.” He tapped impatiently with his pencil on the table.
“No.” Rus shook his head. “There is scraping and shrieking and fluttering. It comes from the air vent. I can hear it very clearly; it is right above my desk. I think a bird got in there from outside. The noise is very loud and annoying and it disturbs me when I copy the forms. I promised Wanda I would finish my trial period, but frankly I do not see how anyone can work with that noise!”
Rus realized that he was shouting a bit. He cleared his throat. His coworkers kept silent. Most of them looked at their notebooks or out the window.
“I think something needs to be done about it,” Rus said. “Maybe someone can go in there and chase it away. Or find out how it got in and block the entrance. We could use a long stick, not to hurt it, but to give it a little push, so it goes away.”
The manager looked at Rus for a few seconds with a frown on his face.
Then he placed his copy of the Company Guidelines on the table in front of Rus. He opened it to the letter B.
“Let’s see,” the manager said. “What does it say about birds in here, Rus?”
Rus looked at the index page: “Back-to-back loan. Balance. Ballpark. Bankruptcy. Bill. Board. Bookkeeping.”
“Nothing,” Rus said.
“Exactly,” the manager said. He took back the book and closed it carefully. Then he looked around the group.
“There are no animals in the office,” he said firmly. “Is that clear?”
He placed his hand on the table in front of Rus and leaned toward him. “No. Bird.”
Quietly Rus’s coworkers got up from the chairs, avoiding Rus’s eyes as they walked out the room. Slowly Rus picked up his calculator and his notebook and put them in the plastic bag.
THE DAY OF TRUTH
The sun was shining on Mr. Lucas as he sat on the bus to the Memorial Service. He looked out the window. Kids in hooded sweatshirts were playing music and dancing by the bridge; a young woman in a veil held hands with a man. It was sad to know that in reality the city was much grimmer than what his hypnosis allowed him to see. The youngsters were most likely intimidating passersby, or robbing them, and the woman was probably walking far behind the man, her head bent.
Mr. Lucas had seen it all on the news, the terror that ruled the streets. He was blind to it now, and he wished for everyone to live in the beautiful world he was in. He started to invent some idea about mass hypnosis and seas of calmness, but then the driver called, “Memorial Square,” and Mr. Lucas got up with a jump.
There it was, his Memorial Square. Mr. Lucas straightened his suit as he stepped out onto the pavement. In the glass of the bus stop he saw his reflection—his black suit, his hair combed over—standing in the middle of the city. He was surrounded by a stream of tourists, businessmen and businesswomen, families, and police, and the monument was towering over them, glowing with an aura of sun.
“I made it,” he said, “I made it, I’m really here.”
From his bag he pulled out his map and his passport, and made his way through the crowd of people toward the police officer guarding the gate to the fenced-off invitation-only Memorial Square.
THE BOSS’S SON
The Queen was standing by the window of her room when the boss’s son came up to the tower. She looked very serious. She was wearing her official costume; he’d mended her crown for the Memorial Service for her, gluing all the rubies back on.
“The only way to find out,” the Queen said while she wrapped her hands around the curtain, “is when I die. If everything is still there when I am dead, that means I did not make it up. The only way I can find out is to wait till the very last moment when I am almost, almost dead, and then force my eyes open to see if everything is still there or if it died with me. That would be the only way to really know.”
RUS CANNOT WORK
Distraction had never been a problem for Rus before, because he never really had to get anything done. But now that he had to copy the numbers that came in from China, now that he wanted to keep up his pace of two hundred files a day and make it through his trial period, now he knew what a problem distraction could be. Life was a serious business, and if you made a mess of it, they sold everything you owned.
Rus was sitting by his desk, looking up at the grating of the air vent, his hands on the stack of files he still had to go through that day.
There was a white shape moving behind the iron bars, hidden in the dark. It was a gull with a heavy, smooth white body; sharp nails; and a yellow beak. The gull disappeared now and then for a few minutes, but reappeared every time Rus started to look at the files again, as if it did it on purpose, as if it wanted Rus to fail his trial period.
“Go away,” Rus mouthed to the ceiling. “Go eat out of some garbage bin or fly next to some ship. Leave me alone. I am a businessman now. I am with Wanda.”
The bird turned around behind the grating and folded its beak around the metal bars.
“Fokuhama,” Rus said. “Look up for a second. Fokuhama.”
Fokuhama did not respond. He sat at his desk, his head bent deeply over his file.
“Fokuhama,” Rus said again.
“What?”
“He just put his beak through the grating,” Rus said. “Look!”
“I am working here, Rus,” Fokuhama said, not looking up. “Like everyone else. The guidelines state that it is not permitted to interrupt a coworker’s work flow. Honestly, I don’t know how the manager hasn’t fired you yet.”
“But that is it!” Rus said, pushing the stack of files on his table toward Fokuhama. “I can’t focus on my work with that noise! Why won’t anyone look at the bird?”
Rus realized he had raised his voice again. The other coworkers were looking up from their computers.
“Get back to work,” Fokuhama hissed. He pointed at the papers. “This is our reality. This is our world.”
CAW, it sounded right then through the office, the shriek coming from behind the grating of the air vent. Both Rus and Fokuhama glanced up at the grating. Quickly Fokuhama lowered his head again.
Rus got up from his chair. “You heard it!” he said.
“No, I didn’t,” Fokuhama said, not looking up from his papers. “There is nothing to hear.”
“You did,” Rus said, pulling his chair away from the desk. “I saw you looking up.”
“I did not look at anything,” Fokuhama said. “There is nothing there.” His neck turned slightly red.
“You did hear it,” Rus said, standing up on his chair. “Everybody hears it. There is a bird in there. Why is everyone ignoring it?”
Files fell on the ground as Rus placed his foot on his desk.
“Ordelman,” Fokuhama said. “Get down.”
Rus stepped from the chair onto his desk and reached out to the air vent. He pushed against the grating.
“There are feathers in here!”
He pressed his forehead against the grating and peered into the air vent. There was a fluttering noise, and Rus saw the gull walking through the ventilation pipe, its claws scratching the iron. There
was some light shining into the pipe from above. The gull fluttered and flew up, out of sight.
“There are a lot of crumbs lying in here,” Rus said. “Somebody is feeding it. They’re coming from upstairs.”
“Ordelman,” Fokuhama hissed. “The manager.”
The manager was standing in the door of the office. He had one hand on his hip, and with the other he pointed the laser pen at Rus.
“Get down from there,” the manager said. “Right now.”
Rus stepped down from the desk and sat down on his chair.
“Fokuhama,” the manager said sternly, “give me guidelines, chapter seven, paragraph six.”
Fokuhama closed his eyes. “Chapter seven, paragraph six, titled ‘If It Is Not in the Guidelines,’” he recited in a hoarse voice. “‘Anything that is not mentioned in the Company Guidelines is not relevant to the company. And what is not relevant to the company does not exist to us at all. The Overall Company works like any good system: if something does not fit in it, it is simply not there.’”
THE RADICAL SECRETARY
“This is Dr. Kroon speaking, calling to say I scheduled your follow-up appointment on the day after tomorrow, eleven o’clock. Perhaps you want to discuss your progress with me, or try some medication. A lot of people need some extra help these days; they say they’re feeling the void that religion left. But can you ever really say that God is not there? Perhaps he has taken the shape of a void inside all of us. However, that may be an endless question. Either way, Dr. Kroon, tomorrow, nine o’clock.”
The secretary put on her coat. She took a last look around her white apartment, opened her white door, and walked out into the hallway. She walked past the canal, where tiny raindrops made wrinkles in the water; she walked through the old part of the city, where the statues stood solid and heavy on their columns. She walked past a woman who was reading all the graffiti on the wall as if they were letters addressed to her. She walked past a man who was covering his scooter against the rain, carefully binding ropes around the plastic. She walked over the market square, where old ladies were unfolding shopping lists written in curly letters on little papers, the kind of shopping lists in curly handwriting that were in old ladies’ bags all over the world.
She walked under the clouds past the market, past the South Station, where the trains were rattling on the rails; she walked past the docks, where the cranes moved through the air. Seagulls circled above the containers and cawed. She walked on along the ring road into the center, past the Memorial Square, where a man holding binoculars waited in the rain; she walked past the new Memorial Monument, which seemed to swing from side to side a little bit in the wind. She walked along the roadblocks that were set up around the Memorial Square, where the gray-and-white-checkered tape made a ratata sound in the wind; she walked past police officers, through the shopping district, onto the business square. She walked into the office, took the elevator up to her department, and hid in the copy room, where she waited until everyone would be gone.
THE COPY ROOM
“This is our reality,” Rus said to himself, his nose almost on the paper of Hong Li’s file, “this is our world. Five hundred twenty-two iron teapots from China, sold as scrap metal, twelve hundred fifteen cups with no handle.”
He had his shoulders up and his jaws clenched as he worked slowly through the files, while the shrieks of the bird filled the department and interrupted his thoughts, making him start over and over again.
Rus looked at the backs of the heads of his coworkers, who were answering phones and typing, smiling and typing, with their black suits and their briefcases, the picture frames on their desks. Wanda did not call him today.
At 7:30 the lights in the office switched off automatically because of the Memorial Service. Rus got up slowly. He had finished only sixty-two of the two hundred files he needed to do. He put on Barry’s coat and walked through the dark hallway to the copy room to get his plastic bag from behind the copying machine where he’d hidden it. For a few more moments Rus looked at the dark shadows on the wall in the copy room. Then he pulled his plastic bag out from under the copying machine. When he opened the door a stripe of light fell into the room and he saw that the secretary was standing next to the copy machine, looking at him.
“Hello,” Rus said.
“Hello,” she said.
They looked at each other for a moment in the dark copy room.
“Wanda did not call me today,” Rus said. “She usually calls me to check how I am doing with my work pace.”
His voice quivered.
“If the bird wasn’t there I could be like everyone,” Rus said. “If I could just ignore it like the others.”
“Sometimes you just can’t ignore things anymore,” the secretary said. “Because they will only get worse and worse if you ignore them. You can’t always wait to see how things pan out.”
“Yes,” Rus said tiredly. He wished he knew what the pans had to do with it. When he was at the door he turned around.
“Do you know what is on the eleventh floor?” he asked the secretary.
“The president-director of the company has that floor,” she said.
THE QUEEN’S SPEECH
The flag next to the monument on Memorial Square was being raised. Mr. Lucas was standing in the front row of the Survivor Area, next to the veterans and their wives. He had been the first to arrive, four hours early, so he had been able to take the best spot, right across from the tall monument where the Queen would give her speech. The veterans around Mr. Lucas saluted the flag, and some of the survivors put their hands on their hearts when it reached half-mast. Mr. Lucas himself remained immobile. He had decided beforehand not to draw any attention to himself, to avoid the possibility of getting carried away by being overly dramatic. He’d rather stand out by maintaining a modest exterior, exuding calmness and solemnity.
While he was standing there like that—his chin lifted slightly, his eyebrows frowned, his sea of calm surrounding him—he tried to picture how he looked in his black suit, gazing up to the flag. Earlier one of the veterans’ wives had asked him what time it was. She had a very soft voice. She was the type of woman he would like to have married if everything hadn’t gone so horribly wrong: demure, polite, but with fiery pink cheeks. Mr. Lucas pictured her looking at him now. He felt very proud. Among these impressive veterans, he was making his own humble statement, shining in his own modest way. Today, he was no less than anyone.
Mr. Lucas’s moment of self-reflection was interrupted by the Queen, who entered the square. His heart jumped at the sight of her. She was wearing all black and a crown with rubies. It seemed like her green eyes were exuding light in every direction she looked. With her hands folded she walked past Mr. Lucas, only one or two meters’ distance between them. He could feel her royalty hanging like a cloud over her, an otherworldliness that caressed his cheek as she passed him by. Then the trumpets started.
The sound of the trumpets went from Mr. Lucas’s ears straight to his heart. They sounded for the sadness and the war, but for Mr. Lucas they were trumpets for his triumph, celebrating his redemption. In this moment, he felt like his miserable life was being redeemed, that every second here erased one failure in his life. Then the bells started ringing and the Queen started to speak.
THE MEMORIAL SERVICE
Ashraf drove down to the city center. It was past eight and he was nowhere near being finished. He’d had a bad day. Richie called in sick, so he had to go back to get his own van first. It was past ten when he started. Now he was trying to get to area 1980 to deliver the last packages, but they had closed off half the city for the Memorial Service.
Memorial Square was right between area 1979 and area 1980, and no matter which side he approached it from, he could not get past. Each turn he took he drove up to a police roadblock, so he ended up driving past the square five times but getting nowhere.
Ashraf drove into a street with a no-cars sign. It was empty because the shops were closed f
or the ceremony. He knew that at the end of the street there was an alley that led to the main road in the business district. Slowly, he drove over the pavement, past the closed shop windows. At the end of the street he tried to turn left into the alley, but he had to back up onto the square to make the turn. The people on the square were focused on the Queen, who was making her speech. Slowly, Ashraf reversed the van a few meters onto Memorial Square and turned into the alley, where two motorcycles were parked in his way. He drove the van carefully up to the motorcycles, but the gap between them was very narrow. The front wheel of the second one was turned toward the road and just in his path.
Ashraf inched up to the motorcycle, bumping slightly against the front wheel. If he gave it another small bump, he thought, and turned it two more inches the other way, he could fit right past it. He inched forward.
Wie-joe-wie-joe-wiejoewiejoe. The motorcycle alarm sounded loud in the street.
“Dammit, dammit.” Ashraf looked over his shoulder and quickly started backing the van up, trying to turn back into the shop-lined street. The alarm was loud and the people at the Memorial Service were looking his way.
The Queen had just ended her speech, and the old people in uniforms were giving salutes to the flag.
“Dammit, dammit.” Ashraf backed the van out of the alley into the street, but he could not do the turn in one go, so he had to drive back into full sight again.
He backed out and drove as fast as he could in reverse down the street. He parked the van around the next corner and turned the engine off. He pressed his hands to his forehead. In the distance the alarm silenced. He heard the trumpets of the Memorial Service again. That meant it was nine o’clock. All the offices were closed now. He banged his hands on the wheel and started the van again, driving away without knowing where to go.
THE MOMENT
Rus Like Everyone Else Page 17
