Underground Time

by Delphine de Vigan

  Her thoughts have shrivelled up.

  Everything has become so small and restricted.

  She can still hear Jacques’s irate voice saying: ‘Don’t speak to me in that tone.’ And his monologue which went on for several minutes, his voice loud and indignant, intended for others to hear.

  Jacques has gone on the offensive. He won’t let it drop. She knows him. As these ordinary hours go by, something is afoot, though she doesn’t yet know what. She must guess his strategy, anticipate the next attack. Not only resist, defend yourself, Paul Vernon said.

  Attack.

  It’s perhaps four o’clock. Or maybe not quite. In spite of herself, Mathilde counts the time that’s left. She feels as though she is outside of her own body, at one remove. She can see herself, with her back against the backrest of her swivel chair, her hands flat on her desk, her head bent forward, in exactly the position she would assume if she were busy analysing data or studying a document.

  Apart from the fact that all she has in front of her is a playing card.

  The cupboard, the shelves, the brown stains on the carpet, the long crack above her, the halogen lamp, the coat stand askew, the position of the filing cabinet on wheels – every detail of this office has become familiar to her. In one day. She has had time to absorb it all, to put it all together, its smallest corner, its tiniest marks.

  Objects don’t move. They are silent. Until now, she hadn’t thought about this, she hadn’t realised how true this is. They have a natural propensity to become worn out, damaged, ruined. If no one touches them, moves them or takes them away. If no one touches them, protects them, covers them up.

  Like them, she has been relegated to the end of a corridor, banished from the new, open spaces.

  In the midst of this dead, bare world, she is the last breathing thing, the last breath. She is in the process of going extinct. What’s more, that’s all that’s left for her to do. Melt into the background, adopt outdated shapes, press herself into them, flow into them like a fossil.

  Her feet are swinging beneath her chair. She notices everything. Nothing escapes her. She’s in a state of heightened, singular consciousness. Each of her gestures, each of her movements, her hand in her hair, her breathing which causes her chest to rise, the twitch of a muscle in her thigh, the slightest flicker of her eyelashes, nothing moves without her being aware of it.

  Neither around her nor within her.

  Time has become denser. Time has amalgamated, fused: time has become blocked at the mouth of a funnel.

  She’s going to leave the office. She’s going to hurry across the floor, her notepad under her arm, she’s going to pop up somewhere, burst in without warning, without knocking. She’ll say, ‘So, what’s new?’ or ‘Where are we up to?’ She’ll sit down opposite Éric or Nathalie. She’ll start to laugh. She’ll ask how their children are. She’ll arrange an extraordinary meeting, a crisis meeting. She’ll declare an end to hostilities, a new era of individual creativity, she’ll abolish gross margins. Or else she’ll wander the corridors barefoot, stopping every so often to stroke the walls with her empty hands. She’ll take the lift, press buttons at random, hum sad, nostalgic tunes. She’ll ask nothing, she’ll watch the others working. She’ll lie down on the carpet, propped up on one elbow. She’ll light a cigarette and tip the ash in the plant pots. She won’t answer questions. She’ll laugh when they look at her. She’ll smile.

  Mathilde gets up and without closing her door goes to the lift. She’s going down for a breath of fresh air. To breathe. She presses the button, goes closer to the mirror to look at her face.

  She looks old. Tired. She has aged ten years in a few months. She doesn’t recognise herself any more.

  There’s nothing left of the self-possessed, confident woman she used to be.

  She recognises the smokers in front of the entrance. Always the same. They go down several times a day, alone or in groups. They form a little circle around the ashtray, talking, lingering. For the first time in ages she wants a cigarette. She wants to feel the smoke burning her throat, her lungs, invading her body, anaesthetising her. She could go over to them but she keeps her distance. But not too far away. With the sun at this angle, she can only make out their silhouettes, their dark suits, light shirts and shiny shoes. She catches snippets of conversation. They’re talking about ISO standards and certification procedures.

  These people put on their disguise and go to the office every day. They walk in the same direction, pursue a common objective, speak the same language, inhabit the same tower, use the same lifts, eat their lunch at the same table, share the same conventions, they have a job, a pay grade, they pay social-security contributions, they save holiday and overtime, which they carry over to the next year, they collect a travel allowance and declare their net taxable income at the end of the year.

  They work.

  Here, spread over ten floors, there are three hundred of them.

  Elsewhere there are millions.

  These people in their disguise no longer recognise her. They smoke their cigarettes without even seeing her. Then they flick their stubs on the ground and go back into the building.

  Back in her office, she looked at the Argent Defender. He hadn’t moved. Not so much as a hair. He was standing in the same parrying posture, brandishing his shield against the enemy, braced against the wind. She thought about the balance sheet for the twentieth of May so far: Jacques had transferred her to a store cupboard without any forewarning and had hung up on her after having given the impression that she had insulted him.

  The twentieth of May was a day of chaos and violence, she thought, nothing like the day that had been predicted for her.

  When she went to use the computer again, it didn’t respond. Neither the mouse nor the keyboard.

  The fish had drowned. The screen was black.

  Mathilde pressed ALT and F4 simultaneously to restart the machine. Then she waited a few seconds for it to go off before starting up the system. She thought of keyboard shortcuts, mentally listing the ones she knew, using the ALT and CTRL keys, which enabled you to copy, paste, save. She wondered if there were any comparable functions in daily life, ways of going quicker, of avoiding problems, of overriding.

  She thought that the time she wasted waiting for her machine – waiting for its goodwill, its slowness, its whims – those minutes which used to horrify her, enrage her, today were comforting.

  Waiting for the machine filled the time.

  Mathilde is facing the screen, her hands poised above the keyboard.

  An error message appears, signalled by a sort of chime. She gives a start. She reads it once and doesn’t understand it at all. She reads it again:

  The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:WindowsSystem32Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

  She could weep. Right here and now. After all she’s been through. No one would see her. No one would hear. She could sob uncontrollably, without shame, let her sorrows flood on to the keyboard, between the keys, get into the circuits. But she knows how that would end. Moments like that. When you open the box. When you let yourself go. She knows that tears bring more tears, bring old tears to mind, that they all have the same salty taste. When she cries, she misses Philippe. Philippe’s absence becomes palpable within her body, begins to throb like an atrophied organ, an organ of pain.

  So she rereads the message and she laughs. She laughs all alone in her windowless office.

  She dials the number for computer maintenance. This time she doesn’t recognise the voice of the man who replies. She asks to speak to the other one. She says, ‘He’s the tall fair-haired man who came this morning. With the pale blue shirt. And the glasses.’

  He’s on a call. They’ll let him know. He’ll call back as soon as possible.

  She’s waiting again. In thi
s space of muted dislocation and silent collapse, amid the imminence of her own downfall.

  Today, every one of her gestures and movements, each of her words, her laughter in the silence, converge on a single point: a breach in the sequence of days, a fault line from which she won’t emerge unscathed.

  She’ll phone the train company. While she’s waiting. She’ll book tickets to go away, anywhere, at the end of term. She’ll take a train to the south with the boys, she’ll go to the seaside, to Nice, or Marseilles or Perpignan, it doesn’t matter. She’ll find a hotel or a place to rent. She needs to book the tickets, to have a fixed point of anchorage, a date that she’ll write in her diary, beyond today and tomorrow, in the opaque extension of time. She checks the date of the school holidays, then dials the number.

  After a few seconds of music, a woman’s voice announces that she is listening. This voice doesn’t belong to anyone, it comes from a highly sophisticated computer system. It’s the voice you hear in every station, recognisable among thousands, a voice that pretends to be listening.

  Would this voice listen to her if she said that she couldn’t go on? If she said, ‘I’ve made a mistake; get me out of here.’ Would this voice listen to her if she said, ‘Come and fetch me’?

  The voice recognition system asks her to specify her request. Mathilde follows the instructions.

  She speaks clearly, separating out the syllables. In the almost empty office, her voice echoes.

  She says: ‘Tickets’.

  She says: ‘Leisure’.

  She says: ‘France’.

  She’s sitting at the back of her office, speaking to someone who is no one. Someone who has the merit of answering her nicely, of getting her to repeat without becoming irritated, who doesn’t start shouting, who doesn’t claim that she insulted her. Someone who tells her what to do, step by step, who says: ‘I didn’t understand your answer’ in the same patient, benevolent tone.

  Someone who informs her that an adviser will be taking care of her request. Her waiting time is estimated at less than three minutes. Mathilde holds.

  ‘Hello, SNCF, this is Nicole, how may I help you?’

  This time it’s a real woman. She can hardly hear her over the hubbub made by Nicole’s colleagues, who all do the same thing for eight hours a day. A real woman who operates her computer and refers to herself in the third person.

  Mathilde books four tickets for Marseilles, which have to be collected from the station before 9.20 a.m. on 6 June.

  The real woman spells out each letter of the booking reference on her file:

  ‘Q for Quentin, T for Thibault, M for Matthieu, F for François, T for Thibault again and A for Anatole. QTMFTA.’

  Her holiday is known by men’s first names.

  Her system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory.

  The tall fair-haired chap is busy elsewhere.

  The smell of Glacier Freshness is enough to make you vomit.

  She’s right in the middle of the world’s absurdity, its lack of balance.

  The man from computer maintenance has come into her office. He’s wearing his mobile on his belt and there’s a Stanley knife sticking out of his shirt pocket. His hair’s dishevelled as though he had just appeared suddenly from the tenth floor hanging from a rope. All he needs is a cape, a long red cape billowing in the wind. You can tell from his face that the computer-maintenance man is someone who’s necessary, from the furrow between his eyebrows, his preoccupied look. He can be contacted at any time, he travels ceaselessly between the ten floors, repairing, restoring, restarting. The computer-maintenance man brings help and assistance. Maybe he’s related to the Argent Defender in some way that’s imperceptible to the naked eye.

  He’s been told that Mathilde has a problem.

  With a weary gesture, she points to the computer. She moves the mouse and the error message appears again.

  He reassures her. It’s nothing.

  He’ll reboot the machine. These things happen.

  Mathilde moves out of the way so that he can sit down.

  While he’s working, she hesitates but ends up asking him the question.

  ‘I went out for a breath of air for twenty minutes a little while ago. Do you think . . . could someone have come in while I was away . . . and tampered . . . I mean, have interfered with my computer?’

  The man from computer maintenance is looking at her. The line on his forehead has deepened.

  ‘No, no, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a configuration problem. No, really . . . I can assure you . . .’

  He falls silent and keeps working. Then he turns towards her again and his voice is gentler.

  ‘Listen, sweetheart, if you don’t mind me saying . . . maybe you . . . maybe you should get a bit of rest.’

  He makes a gesture towards her, as though he were about to put his hand on her shoulder, an interrupted gesture.

  Does she look so fragile? So exhausted? So devastated?

  Is her fragility overflowing, going beyond her?

  She looks at the man’s agile hands, back on the keyboard again.

  The man from computer maintenance has finished. He has rebooted the machine. The fish are back. They’re bumping into each other again.

  Just as he’s leaving her office, Mathilde calls out to him: ‘About that card . . . I’ll talk to my son this evening, to see if it’s possible . . . I mean for yours, your son. I’ll see what we can do.’

  The phone rang and Patricia Lethu’s internal number flashed up.

  The HR director wanted to tell her that another subsidiary in the group had a vacancy in its research centre. A senior role in the New Products and Sensory Studies department, including the direct management of a team of four. The post had been vacant for two weeks because they hadn’t been able to find the ideal internal candidate. Given the economic situation, external recruitment was out. Patricia Lethu had trouble concealing her excitement.

  ‘I’ve sent your CV and I called the director of the centre myself as I know him personally. I recommended you. They have one or two other candidates currently under consideration, but it seems that your profile is the best match. I was most insistent. I’ll hear back very soon. He needs someone urgently. The post can’t remain unfilled much longer. I didn’t think it necessary to mention your current problem. That would have put you at a disadvantage. You’ve been with us for over eight years now, so it’s perfectly legitimate that you should want a change.’

  Mathilde held her breath all the time that Patricia Lethu was talking. She said yes, of course. Of course she was interested.

  Her cheeks had become flushed. When she put the phone down, it seemed as though her body was working again: there was an impatience in her movements, her blood was pumping more quickly, there was a strange sort of impulse which began at the base of her spine and went all the way up to her shoulders and made her sit up straight. She could feel her heart beating even in her wrists and in the veins of her neck.

  She got up from her chair. She needed to move around. She paced her office and for a few minutes she didn’t hear any of the noises, not the torrent of the flush nor sounds of voices.

  Mathilde needed more fresh air. She went back down in the lift; after all, what did it matter?

  She remained outside for a moment, with her eyes closed and her face to the light. Above her rose the glass pyramid, so smooth-looking.

  Another group had come out for a smoke. Among them she recognised some people from management control and admin. They greeted her. A young woman took a cigarette from her packet and turned to Mathilde to offer her one. After a moment’s hesitation, Mathilde said no. The young woman didn’t rejoin the others but stayed near Mathilde, on the other side of the entrance. The young woman asked which department she worked in, how long she’d been there. If she had tried the lunchtime gym class, if she knew a swimming pool nearby, if she lived far away. She was wearing a light dress with a geometric pattern and wedge heels.

  Her name was
Elizabeth. She’d been working for the company for a month.

  Elizabeth was happy to be here, that’s what she said. She’d found her ‘dream job’. For a few seconds, Mathilde envied Elizabeth, with her youth and her confidence. Her way of combining a certain capriciousness with her feelings. She thought that she’d like to be in her position, wearing that dress, with those fine hands, that same ease, her fluid way of moving and of standing. And that it would be infinitely easier if she were someone else.

  As Elizabeth went off with her colleagues, she said, ‘See you.’

  ‘Hope I see you again.’

  That was strange. This woman had come over to her, had spoken to her. She had asked her questions and laughed.

  Mathilde went back up in the lift. When she got back to room 500–9, it didn’t seem so small any more.

  She’d just sat back down when her phone rang again. It was the director of the research centre. He had looked at her CV and wanted to meet her as soon as possible. Would tomorrow work?

  She didn’t know by what miracle or desperate mustering of her remaining resources, by what last effort or burst of energy, she managed to respond calmly to his questions. And, it seemed to her, with relative self-assurance; not like someone who’s pretending to be mentally healthy, but someone for whom nothing more than a possible transfer is at stake.

  She was able to describe her projects, her responsibilities and her main achievements to him exactly as though they still existed, as though they had never slipped away from her. She forgot about the nine empty months, a vague gap in the continuity of time. She rediscovered words that she no longer used, the appropriate vocabulary, deliberate, proactive phrases; she mentioned figures, budget totals and didn’t make any mistakes.