by Matt Cardin
As I sat there looking out of my window, which covered an entire wall of my office, I could gaze down upon those old structures huddled together several hundred yards from the foot of the Brand Building and feel a pleasant sense of weightlessness rising up in my breast like a cloud of feathers. This had been my primary preoccupation during all my long years in that office: simply to look down on the old city and enjoy it from this dizzying height. The atmosphere around the Brand Building was clear as crystal, like freshly washed glass, except for a white mist that clung to the black exterior in the early morning hours. This always burned away in the sunlight by mid-morning, leaving me with a totally unobstructed view of the scene below. It was truly magnificent to look down on the old buildings with their cloak of muddy gray smog, and to feel somehow purified and rarefied by the mere fact of my height and their distance.
My favorite time for this activity was during the long evenings of winter, when sunset came early and the lights of the old city shone visibly in dim haloes through the smog for a long period before the end of my workday. On such evenings, I would sometimes dance my eyes over those lights in quick darts, making them blur into streaks and tracers, and then raise my head and steady my half-closed eyes upon a horizon line stretching from east to west, located right on the precise division between the city below and the sky above. The stars would be out overhead, shining like shards of crystal in a black celestial ocean. I would watch them from the tops of my eyes while keeping the lights of the old city centered in the lower half of my vision. And sometimes for a split second that felt like a miniature eternity, I could fancy that the stars above and the lights below formed a single unbroken continuum of night sky. It would look as if a great constellation had fallen to earth, or better yet, as if there were no earth at all but only the stars shining brilliantly in their cold and cruel distance. I would gasp and feel tears start to my eyes, and would sense myself on the verge of some great revelation, some unknowable fulfillment that would justify all the long years of my blundering, inarticulate yearning for something beyond the dreary pall of everyday existence.
But then the moment would pass, and my eyes would clear, and the stars would return to their inaccessible heights, and the city below would settle once again into its unromantic guise as a dirty jumble of smog-shrouded bricks, and I would be alone in my office on the ninetieth floor of the Brand Building with no understanding—or at least no real one, none that would explain to me the longings and confusions of a meaningless past and present—of why I was there.
This all changed late one evening when my secretary opened the door to my office and walked in to stand before my desk.
I swiveled around in my chair and regarded her with surprise. She had never entered my office before, and I could not possibly guess what she might want. I took the opportunity to observe her more closely. She was slim and bony and dressed in a navy blue skirt. Her hair was rust-red and pulled back in a bun. Her face was white and narrow. A network of delicate dry lines textured the skin of her cheeks and forehead. She might have been thirty years old or twice that.
“Mr. Brand wants to see you,” she said. When I looked at her dumbly, she said it again: “Mr. Brand wants to see you.”
I did not know how to react. My eyes were still filled with after-flashes from the stars and city lights, and I must have looked as dazed as I felt. After a moment I rose from my chair and came around the desk to stand beside her.
“Gather those and take them with you,” she said, pointing to the pile of papers that lay on the desk. I complied as if in a dream. These were the papers on which I had been scribbling meaningless pictures for months and years. She turned and exited, and I hurried after her with the sheaf of papers flapping under my arm as I tried to straighten my necktie.
She led me out of my office and down a hallway in a direction I had never gone before. I looked back and saw my eight or nine coworkers in that division standing singly outside their doors. They were watching me with awed expressions, exactly as I would have looked at them if the situation had been reversed and they had received the mysterious summons.
Then they were lost from sight as I was led around a corner into an ill-lit hallway. We walked halfway down it to an open elevator door, where the secretary stopped and gestured for me to enter, which I did.
“He’s waiting for me right now?” I asked. In reply, she reached inside and pressed the button for the two hundredth floor. Then she backed out and walked away, leaving me alone as the doors closed.
The inside of the elevator was uncharacteristically cramped for the Brand Building, whose spacious interiors had always belied the limitation of its exterior shape. But the decoration was much more ornate than what I had grown accustomed to. I grasped a handrail of polished brass to steady myself as I felt the car shoot upward at a positively terrifying speed. The light fixture depending from the ceiling was multi-bulbed and hooded with tiny lampshades mounted on curling metal arms that looked like gold. It hung so low that it nearly brushed the top of my head. For a moment I tried to imagine the elevator car and myself as we must have appeared from the outside. I closed my eyes and caught a momentary mental glimpse of a tiny metal box rocketing upward through the core of the needle-like Brand Building toward the stars above. My lungs labored as I fancied the atmosphere grew thinner. Immediately, I cut off my imaginings and opened my eyes to dispel the vertigo. When the car eventually slowed and stopped, the light fixture vibrated and its bulbs trembled and tinkled.
I was breathing hard when the doors opened. Grasping my papers in sweaty hands, I emerged into an antechamber that was like nothing else I had ever seen in the Brand Building. It was spacious and geometrical, shaped almost like a perfect cube except for the slight inward slope of the walls that made the ceiling smaller than the floor. All the surfaces were black and gleaming. An enormous burgundy rug with a vaguely oriental pattern stretched nearly from wall to wall, and laid out on it were a number of exhibits that reminded me of pieces in a museum. Some were in clear cases while others sat uncovered. Some were made of polished wood or bone and looked like tribal idols or fetishes. Others were crystalline or metal and looked sleek and new.
From this inscrutable assemblage, I gathered an odd sense of excitement, tempered with anxiety. It was a familiar feeling, and I was on the verge of remembering where I had felt it before when a voice issued from a hidden speaker and told me to approach the doors on the opposite wall. I had not even noticed them. In order to obey the faceless command I was obliged to walk through the museum display, and for some reason I felt a strong reluctance to touch anything. I had the sense that I was navigating through a mysterious sea whose pristine beauty my very presence might defile.
Once across, I stepped gingerly off the carpet and back onto the shiny black floor. The door handles were huge and made of brass. When I touched them, the doors opened easily and silently, and I stepped into what I knew must be Mr. Brand’s office.
It was long and low and all of a shiny black, just like the antechamber. Mr. Brand was seated on the far side behind a black desk, framed against a massive window that dwarfed the one down in my own office. I had never laid eyes on him before, but there could be no question of his identity. His face and throat were thick, his shoulders broad, his head high-browed and square. Indeed, he was powerfully built all over. Even seated there behind his desk, he exuded an aura of authority. From this alone I could well understand why everyone in the building, and also in the city below, walked in awe of him. His hair was white and straight and combed back from his forehead to fall in stern lines down to his shoulders. He was dressed in a black coat with a black shirt fastened tightly about his neck. I did not doubt that if he were to rise and walk around the desk, I would be greeted with the sight of black pants and black shoes, impeccably polished. Somehow I also knew that he would prove to be disturbingly tall, a veritable giant of a man, and I fervently hoped that he would remain seated. A pair of black spectacles, completely impenetrable and perfec
tly round, completed the ensemble.
“Please,” he said, “sit down.” He spoke with a faint accent that I could not place. His voice was fully as deep and commanding as his appearance would imply, but it was more cultured than I would have expected, carrying a kind of measured grace that was quite pleasing to the ear. Up until now his hands had remained folded before him in an attitude of waiting, but now he gestured for me to take a seat in the single sable-colored chair that was positioned to face him from across the desk.
I did not dare disobey. A moment later, I was seated face-to-face with him while he regarded me from behind his spectacles.
“You have done good work for me,” he said at last. “That is why I’ve called you here: to thank you. Of all my many employees, you are the hardest working and most loyal, and you deserve to know that.”
My heart sank as I heard these words. I was certain he must have gotten my file mixed up with someone else’s, with the record of some other employee who actually knew his job and truly deserved a commendation. I dreaded to think what would happen when Mr. Brand discovered that he had invited the wrong person into his inner sanctum.
“No, you are the right man,” he said. A little shock went off in my chest as he seemed to read my thoughts. I felt I should say something, but all my faculties were paralyzed. For a wordless moment we faced each other across the desk.
Then I noticed the vista that spread out behind him.
Gleaming from below, the lights of the city cast up an aurora that tinted the bottom half of his long, single-paned window with a milky radiance. Simultaneously, the window’s upper half was populated from end to end by an assemblage of stars the likes of which I had never seen. It must have been due to the clarity of the atmosphere at that altitude. The night sky was a black velvet curtain encrusted with diamonds. It was the smooth surface of an oily ocean shining with the phosphorescent eyes of a billion unknown, underwater creatures.
The sight so overwhelmed me that I felt the breath sucked out of my lungs, as if I had stepped through those windows into the vacuum of outer space. The papers in my hand slipped from numb fingers and plopped down on the desk.
In the midst of my transport, I was aware that Mr. Brand was regarding me with what I might have taken for affection if the thought had not been so ridiculous. Then he looked at the papers and smiled, showing me two rows of tiny perfect teeth.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “May I?” The unexplained request confused me, so I tore my loving gaze away from the mystical windows and saw that he was holding out his hand. I watched my own hand pick up the papers and pass them to him. His meaty fingers closed around them with a kind of greedy relish, and then he was scouring them with his hidden gaze, flipping from one page to the next, turning to look at the fronts and backs of pages whose every available inch was covered with a meaningless chaos of designs. I watched as his body bowed slightly in its seat. The lapel of his coat crinkled. A lock of white hair fell down over his forehead and bisected one of his black lenses. He seemed to be devouring the pages with his eyes. I was fascinated by this display of utter abandoned greed, and then I stopped to wonder what that word could possibly mean in this connection, and why it had arisen so immediately and naturally in my mind: greed.
After a few minutes, he raised his eyes from the papers and gave me that same tiny-toothed smile. “Oh, so good,” he said in a voluptuous voice. “So very, very good. You are a positive treasure. I assure you that from now on, you will receive your just due from me. Please forgive the years of tedium, but I had to be certain. And now I am.” He looked back down at the pages and laughed at some private joke. “Am I ever certain!”
My head was swimming as if I were drunk. Perhaps it was the thinness of the atmosphere. “Mr. Brand.” It was the first thing I had said to him, and the sound of my own voice unnerved me. He looked at me with that same pleased expression.
“Mr. Brand,” I repeated. “I don’t understand. Thank you for your praise, but I just don’t understand. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I don’t even know what I do for you or your company. What can you possibly see in those scribbles?”
He laughed again, in a tone full of affection, and at last arose from his chair. I had been correct in my suspicion: He towered over me. The top of his head nearly touched the ceiling, and when he walked around the desk to stand beside me, his pants and shoes were black, and the shoes gleamed even more brightly than the floor.
“Oh, my child, if only you knew. If only you could understand. I wish I could explain it to you, truly. But then the Brand Corporation would be out of business, and you would be out of a job, and I would be toppled from my perch here in the eye of the needle, and the only thing left in all the world would be that dirty, crumbling city below. And neither of us could live with that result. You want it no more than I.”
I was nodding and agreeing with him before I even realized it. Although I had no idea what he was talking about, I positively shuddered at the thought of the old city existing on its own without the Brand Building’s redemptive presence presiding over it, with Mr. Brand securely ensconced at the top.
“You see?” he said. “We indeed understand each other.”
Then he laid his heavy hand on my shoulder, and everything changed. Even through the barriers of my coat and shirt, I could feel the heat of his flesh, which penetrated those thin layers of fabric and spread over my skin like hot oil, and I knew in my soul that I was permanently altered by his touch. I knew that even if I were to remove my shirt and find no visible mark, I would still be forever changed by that contact with Mr. Brand. In the space of a second, he had taken something from me and given something else in return, something new and unimagined. As he stepped away from me and walked back around the desk to his chair, I felt a tingling vibration begin to shimmer inside me. It soothed me from neck to groin, and between my eyes, from behind my skull, a warm pressure like a finger pressed gently outward. Mr. Brand resumed his seat and looked at me.
“Thank you again,” he said. “Thank you, sir, for your hard work and loyalty.”
Some indeterminate amount of time later, when I stood up from my seat and returned to the black double-door, I moved as if I were walking underwater. My head spun with a flurry of new insights that came coursing through my awareness like spray from a black waterfall.
I saw dimly, as though reflected in a dirty mirror, the extent of the organization for which I worked. I saw the way its influence extended like a network of invisible arteries into the old city below, into the hearts of its inhabitants. I saw how it sucked away the lifeblood of their souls and fed on their dreams, using those tender psychic morsels to fortify and amplify the black tower, bringing its apex ever closer to the outer edge of the sky and the inner edge of heaven.
And more: I saw this influence reaching away from the known world, rounding strange corners and meeting at odd intersections with the teeming edges of other worlds, worlds beyond the known rim of light and darkness, sense and solidity, the foundations of all that I knew and thought possible. In countless other worlds, I saw countless other beings lined up in hovels like the sickly people in the windows of the old city below, like the ignorant employees stacked up in their slivered tiers throughout the monstrous height of the Brand Building. They all labored somehow, these beings, even the ones who no longer moved or spoke or thought, and their labor bore fruit in the form of grotesque and fantastic productions that could never coalesce into any kind of order that would make sense to sanity as I knew it.
But in some unaccountable fashion, these productions, when they were brought together and arranged in the proper order, cohered like the serrated edges of a lethal jigsaw, and always proved to be precisely what Mr. Brand needed for the furtherance of his business. His corporation grew with the expansion of his soul, and his soul drew its nourishment from the silent labor of a network of unwitting worlds.
There the vision reached its limit. Having seen so far into things that were undreamed of, my newly awakened i
nner sight came up against something like a black, shimmering shield that repelled vision as a mirror repels light. I knew that beyond this barrier must lie the knowledge of the ultimate end, the pattern and purpose for which this vast network of ignorant organized labor was being bled dry by a man who had somehow attained the status of a demigod and now wanted to make his transition into divinity complete.
The visions coiled and glimmered in the beam of my inner sight, and my knees grew weak. The black inner barrier receded and solidified, gaining form and shape until I found myself gazing at my own watery reflection in the smooth, polished wall of Mr. Brand’s sanctum.
As I touched the door handle, I knew without looking back that he had again taken up the papers, my own unwitting contribution to his Promethean endeavor, and was again feasting upon their contents. I almost felt that I could see the lines and shapes twisting before my own eyes instead of his.
But something was different now. Something had been altered within me, for now when I looked with these new eyes upon the randomness of those designs that had been spawned by boredom, I glimpsed a phenomenon that transcended mere ink and paper. It seemed to be a pattern, a subtle arrangement of shape, position, and proportion that brought order out of chaos. It was, I understood, a higher kind of order, one that made perfect sense out of senselessness and imparted meaning to the meaningless. I fancied that in the depths of Mr. Brand’s soul, through the agency of the things I had drawn, this patternless pattern was spreading out two black-feathered wings, or perhaps they were doors, which could open up and transport a person to the heights of an unimaginable bliss in some unimaginable realm situated far beyond the need for reasons or the lack of them. Somewhere in a cold Arcadia, in a skyward abyss of utter inaccessibility, there was a place where ennui was unknown and the stars shone forever without obstruction. This was the paradise Mr. Brand was bound for, and I recognized in its beauty the fulfillment of everything I had ever wanted for myself.
