101 Detectives

by Ivan Vladislavic

  When her turn at the lectern came, between a lively discussion of the risk appetite for the new quarter and the latest modifications to the regulatory framework on corporate governance, the storyteller could not find her stride. She felt like a cashier in her prosaic business suit. There was nothing wrong with the story. It was a post-industrial piece, using the outmoded mechanics of cogs and levers to describe digital processes. It was graphic, she thought; it let the listener see the lever in leveraging. But she did not deliver it well: the words pooled on the floor of her mouth. At the heart of the story was a drop of oil that greased the wheels, spreading itself ever more thinly over the entire mechanism and allowing it to function, a lyrical passage perfectly in keeping with the poet’s contribution, and when she reached this point she glanced up at last from the screen to try to catch the poet’s eye – but she was nowhere to be seen.

  There were appreciative murmurs afterwards, but the storyteller knew that her first bolt had missed the mark. This dismal performance plunged her into anxiety about her new job. She had been headhunted by the corporation, or so she believed. When the agency’s letter arrived, she had been working quite happily for a family concern. The package on offer was impressive and the personal approach was flattering. But how had it come about? She felt so uncomfortable in her new position, and so unwelcome, that she began to think some rival might have set her up for a fall.

  In the weeks after her debut, she kept hoping she would bump into the poet, but she never did. That splendid, suede-booted personage made an appearance at board meetings and the occasional function, always slipping in at the last moment as if she had just been getting her make-up done in some fabled green room, and then she melted away again before the meeting was adjourned.

  Finally, she’d asked Liselotte, the receptionist on floor 11, if she knew where the poet spent her working days. And so she learnt that her elusive colleague had an office somewhere above, on a higher floor. On 20, Liselotte said. Maybe even 21.

  After that, she was never at ease in her own office, which everyone thought so stylishly spartan. She was in the wrong place, as simple as that. She belonged at a higher level.

  The storyteller reached out to the poet once in her awkward way. At a special meeting of the Audit Committee, when the poet was still hovering, she tried a gesture herself, an undulating hand movement meant to convey the passage of time in a language her fellow artist would understand. But apparently her grasp of this language was poor, for one of the clerks in Strategy & Communication misunderstood entirely and came hurrying up to the lectern with a glass of water.

  The recitation pod pings. It’s a soft but insistent sound, an electronic throat-clearing like the chiming of her refrigerator at home when she forgets to close the door. It wants attention.

  The storyteller lifts her head from the desk and sniffs the air like a savage. As always, the sound is accompanied by a pleasant smell. What is it this time? Cinnamon, cloves, caramelised sugar. The laboratory’s idea of toffee apples.

  The recitation pod repels her. How silly she must look standing in the corner of her office with her head in the hood, as the manual calls it. Like the classroom dunce. You cannot read in there, which is her forte. You can only speak. That’s what it’s designed for: to prevent you from reading and to teach you to speak. That’s why Human Capital & Technology allocated it to her. It has been recorded under ‘Number of training opportunities facilitated’ in the Corporate Balanced Scorecard. The fact that she is a reader by inclination and training has been noted and evaluated, and registered as a fault to be corrected or rather a challenge to be overcome. Nonetheless, when she goes into the pod, she always holds an open book in her hands, her forbidden notebook. Otherwise her fingers keep rising to the hood and touching its cold surface. She even keeps her eyes downcast as if she can see through the armoured shell and its rubber lining and follow the words on a page.

  It is red inside the hood most of the time, a dense, dusty maroon as suffocating as old theatre curtains. Sometimes the colour changes, for reasons she cannot explain, to a minty green or a spacious midnight blue, and then she feels as if she could learn to breathe in there. But just as suddenly some viscous shade of yellow will wash back in and suck the rubber lining to her skull.

  Going in, thrusting her head through the puckered aperture under the bell of the hood, is bearable. The ruff, lying heavily on her shoulders, reminds her of the protective bib the dentist’s assistant drapes over her when she’s about to take X-rays. The unexpected heaviness of something that appears to be light is pleasantly confusing to the senses. She almost enjoys the dead weight pressing down on her shoulders.

  Coming out is another matter. Sensing her intentions, the hood contracts around her head like a prodded anemone. She has to wrestle herself free.

  After a month of treatments in the pod, each more combative than the last, she’d gone to the hairdresser and had her sleek hair cut short, and now she wears it in stiff, unruly spikes, a carefully styled disorder which her skirmishes with the hood cannot ruffle. The new look was meant to register her dissatisfaction, but it went unremarked.

  Oleg was her sister’s idea. The world is full of good men, Joan always says, jerking her chin towards the nearest window, but you must be open to meeting them. He’s exactly your type.

  He was new in town. She took him to a rooftop restaurant on the edge of the old business district. Climbing six gloomy flights of stairs, past floors cluttered with derelict knitting-machines, overlockers and steam presses, they emerged on a canopied island hung with ferns and orchids and paper lanterns. The furniture was spindly Scandinavian, the crockery eggshell Japanese. Oleg let her have the view: the grimy roofs and façades of factories and offices, chimneys and soot-stained windows, the overhead lines of the railway, the girders of a flyover, and here and there a rooftop café or club, bright and colourful islands like their own, where people like them were eating, drinking and flirting, elegantly suspended between heaven and earth. They ate vegan wraps and drank Chinese beer.

  She did not like Oleg, but she was taken with his hat, a natty, multicoloured porkpie made of raffia. He had a fussy routine for adjusting its fit, which he performed every five minutes, raising it ever so slightly between the palms of both hands, with his sticky fingertips kept well clear of the pristine weave, then tilting the brim down over his forehead, before sliding it back onto the crown of his head and bedding it down a touch. He knew precisely where it sat best.

  Oleg was a DJ. He travelled constantly, he told her, in search of new sounds. Last week he was in Sarajevo, this time next week he would be in Lubumbashi. After that maybe Bamako or Luanda or Cairo. Some of the best new sounds were in Africa. War zones did not frighten him. Some of the very best new sounds were in conflict areas. Kiev, Bristol, well not really. At the end of this itinerary, he adjusted his hat again and gazed over her shoulder into the jungly heart of the restaurant, cocking his head as if he was listening for new sounds in the foliage.

  She looked in turn at the skyline over his shoulder and listened. She heard taxis hooting down below and scraps of talk and laughter carried on the breeze from the islands upwind.

  What hat is he wearing now? she thought. What is he keeping under it?

  He did not want to take it off, and ten minutes of teasing were needed before he let her try it on. She was sure he would be bald underneath, that the hair curling from under the brim was just a fringe, but his hair was as thick and glossy as a Labrador’s.

  The bond between hat and head was not easily restored. He repeated the routine three times before he was satisfied.

  Is he scared of losing his head? she thought. She had learnt to see every human action as sign, symptom or subterfuge. It was one of the unpleasant side effects of being a storyteller.

  She was reminded of a poet she had read about, a famous Swiss poet who wore a hat with a mechanical cuckoo that popped out through a trapdoor when he pressed a remote control. An eye-catching visual aid to embelli
sh the punchline of a poem. She told Oleg about it, but he was not much interested. The sounds in Berne and Zürich were very thin, he said, because of the altitude and the democracy. Whereas the sounds in Reykjavik and Sofia were intriguing, despite the lack of conflict.

  Raffish, she thought as he adjusted his hat again. Could it be related to raffia?

  She saw afterwards that Oleg’s manoeuvres had less to do with his hat than his hair, which had to sweep from under the brim in exactly the right devil-may-care way. The hat was an accessory for keeping his hair in place, like a hairpin or a comb, and he wielded it constantly as if someone was on the point of taking his picture. Perhaps it was an invitation.

  If only she had changed her hairstyle sooner, she thought now, she and Oleg might have had more to talk about.

  The storyteller fans the pages of her notebook under her nose to dispel the smell of apple pie (or whatever it’s meant to be) and looks down on the familiar scene. The prefabricated geometry of the new city subdues her eye: the taxi rank, the corrugated canopy of the petrol station, the black coil of the freeway, office parks and townhouses, the skywalk to the convention centre, the rooftop parking at the mall, the fountain in the square. It’s all strangely silent. Something so large and various should make a noise. A soft hubbub, rising up ten floors to her open window, would be reassuring. But the windows are sealed tight.

  She remembers her father asleep on the sofa on a Saturday afternoon with the television playing mutely in a corner. Little men would be driving golfballs down green fairways: the balls rose in stately arcs and hung in the air so long it seemed the film had stopped. Silence took the sudden life out of things. Through the fluted legs of the coffee table she watched her father’s chest to make sure it was rising and falling, her attention all that made him breathe.

  Now she scours the streets for signs of life. Everything stilled, hushed, bleached to the bone. Yet there are more people than usual in the square with their faces turned to the sky. Heliotropes, she thinks, following the sun. Perhaps they see her here at the window and envy her the panoramic view, little knowing how it makes her feel.

  If your office is higher up, you have access to the roof garden. There is no rule that says a data capturer from the 5th floor or a junior manager from the 9th cannot get into the lift and go up and sit in the sun eating a low-fat yoghurt or reading a report, but the fact is that no one from the lower half of the building ever does. A variable gravitational force keeps them in their place or draws them down to the lobby or the square. This force weakens as you rise. Nearly everyone on the top four or five floors sometimes goes up to the roof, even the PAs and receptionists. The people on the top floor pop up there every day. It’s their territory.

  She herself has been up to the 21st floor often, because that’s where the boardrooms are, but she’s never felt free to enjoy the view. Only once did she have time to imagine what it might be like to work there. Simonetta, the receptionist on floor 17, let Liselotte on floor 11 know that there was an unoccupied office in the Research & Information Department and so she went up in her lunch hour to take a look. It was a corner office with a clear view over all the surrounding blocks and it lifted her heart. The old city shimmered on the horizon like a mirage.

  Her stories had improved by then. Though her performances were never as colourful as those of the corporate poet, they were steady and useful. At the Wellness Weekend workshop, she’d told the tale of Hiroto Yoshida, the marathon-running monk, and got more than the usual applause. Human Capital & Technology had even posted it on the intranet. She’d earned the right to make a small demand, she thought, and so she put in an application for a higher office.

  She could not emphasise how much she loved the view. It would look as if she spent her time daydreaming, and even though that was part of her job description, strictly speaking, it did not seem wise to say so directly. She argued instead, persuasively she thought, for vision and perspective. Her current quarters were stuffy and constrained: she needed light and air and a more expansive view. She had to see the big picture. It was essential to her work.

  Another ping. As she skirts the big white desk a savoury aroma wafts into her nostrils. Chicken soup? That’s new. She sniffs all around the device. It’s never given off such an intense fragrance. She’s not sure exactly where it comes from, but she thinks it’s a gland inside the hood.

  She presses her palm to the shell. Hotter than usual too. Sometimes when it’s hot to the touch it’s cool inside. There’s no telling. Especially when it radiates heat like this, it reminds her of an old-fashioned drier in a hairdressing salon.

  It’s been in her office for two months now. Human Capital & Technology keeps telling her she’ll get the hang of it, but with every passing day she finds it harder to put her head into the thing. The thought of it sickens her.

  On the advice of the Senior Manager: Knowledge Strategy, she’s tried to think of it as a private retreat. It’s supposed to be a learning opportunity: on-the-job training. But often when she’s in there, she has the feeling she’s being watched. The contents of her head are being extracted and processed. Someone is picking through this sludge to see whether she’s been chewing properly. Input and output are topsy-turvy.

  She cannot fathom its inner workings. The hood isn’t large. From the outside it looks like you could hardly nod your head in there. But when you’re in it, the space around you, laden as it is with dark shades, appears to be endless. Vistas open. Yet she chokes on the smell of the product in her hair and the synthetic exhalations from the hidden gland. She’s tried reaching in under the ruff and pushing her hand through the aperture, but the rubbery collar clenches on her fingers as if it knows that her intentions are mischievous.

  The manual is no help. It’s full of advice about facilitating conversation with the intangible and honouring the work cycle by speaking your truth. You have to speak in there, that much is clear. The device gives your words weight and returns them to you, ‘delivers’ is the technical term, in an apparently tangible form. These returns are meant to be rewarding and to encourage further deposits.

  But when she puts her head in it, she feels stifled. Her tongue lies in her mouth like a slug. Her jaw is numb and immobile. The words clot in the back of her throat.

  No matter what it smells of around the pod – roses, candyfloss, mandarin oranges – inside it, one base note keeps striking through. Ammonia. It’s like a well-scrubbed public toilet.

  Her application for a higher office had got no response. A week passed without so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. She was on the point of writing again when Human Capital & Technology sent a clerk from Facilities Management & Maintenance to show her the office she could have if she wished to move. It was in the basement, on the third and lowest level of the parking garage, behind a metal door that looked as if it might conceal a generator or a switch box. But as the clerk had told her on the way down in the lift, it was the office occupied by the corporate storyteller in the days before that designation existed. The clerk was a skinny young man in a checked shirt and a long red necktie pointing downwards like an arrow on a graph. He unlocked the room with extravagant turns of several keys, reached in to put on a light and swung the door wide. Take your time, he said, I’ll be back in half an hour.

  It was a small, busy room with a fluorescent stripe in the middle of the ceiling and grey walls glistening with sweat. There were filing cabinets of a darker grey steel and a desk, shored up at either end by wire baskets marked in and out, both spilling papers. In a small clearing amid the papers lay a blotter with a calendar printed on it, the days of an unnamed month all but obliterated by jottings and doodles. Scattered like trash cans in a field of snow were cracked plastic containers full of paper clips, rubber bands, drawing pins, dust, lint and small twists of lead-blackened eraser rubber. A turned wooden vessel held some pencils with the paint chewed off their ends. The carriage of a typewriter jutted from a mound of crumpled papers.

  The storytelle
r’s heart soared. She rolled the chair away from the desk. It was something like a kitchen chair on four wheels with a leather seat cracked right through and caved in like a flopped sponge cake. She slumped down on it. It was the least comfortable chair she had ever sat on: the bumps and hollows left in the cushions by her distant precursor pressed into her flesh. It felt wonderful. She rocked for a moment in the chair, listening to its antiquated squeak and enjoying the painful pleasure of its anti-ergonomic grip, and then she tilted it back, gasping when it seemed to be going right over, laughed out loud when she found the tipping point and put her feet on the desk.

  The wall before her was covered in books. Even the spaces between the books and the canted shelves had more books jammed into them on their sides. The rows under the ceiling leant in at a dizzy angle like a wall on crumbling foundations. It was a good thing there was no window. One stiff breeze, she thought, and the whole thing would topple.

  The corporate fictions. She had never expected to see them. Bits and pieces had slipped through the online portal, crossing her screen in a flash, fewer and fewer of those as the techies had plugged the gaps. Just last week the Executive Manager: Strategy & Communication had told a meeting of the board that the corporate memory would soon be outsourced to a specialised company and accessible going forward only to senior staff members with the appropriate clearance. The sight of the corporate fictions, complete and unrestricted, overwhelmed her.

  She rose from the chair and the sagging wall of books loomed over her. Any moment now, she thought, it will crumble and bury me. With a grim laugh, she prised a book from a shelf and opened it. A reference work of some kind, with rows of type in columns and a thumb index of golden letters on glossy black half-moons. She drew her forefinger down one of the columns and she fancied she could feel the rungs of type bumping against her fingertips. When she got to the bottom of the page, she lifted her thumb to the top of the next column, and then her fluttering fingers annoyed her, and she slammed the book shut and sat there with her hand in the trap. And that was how the clerk with the downward-trending tie found her when he came to fetch her back to the 11th floor.