Solitary: 3

It was time to face the inevitable. He clicked open his task management software. He selected the folder on the server that was home to automatically generated lists of reply letters to be sent. 53. Not bad. He started from the top and worked his way down.

These letters began by rehashing the query (not completely accurately) with sentences starting with “You told us (insert problem)” and “We explained to you (insert explanation of user-error and/or the warranty technicality that, lamentably, tied First’s corporate hands).” Thereafter, the correspondence shifted in tone. It reminded customers of how deeply interested First was in their plight and how committed First was to their satisfaction. Pronouns were always in the royal “we” (as though the author represented a great and magnanimous body) and featured as much passive voice as possible (since, as Mr. LaRoi explained, “these things happen”). Nearly all follow-ups ended with the placating, “We thank you for contacting us. We, like you, believe that products and services ought to be perfect because it’s what you deserve. That’s why we are the People people™.”

So far as Josh could tell, these letters were intended to affect one or more of the following: (1) confuse customers whose memories were intact into thinking they had misunderstood the content of their recent customer service interactions in the hopes they would take no further action and, thereby, waste less First time, (2) console customers who were forgetful into thinking everything was okay because a company exists who knew them and wanted to help wherever possible, even though the company was unable to help at this (outlying) time, and/or (3) provide a mindboggling and ass-covering paper-trail in the event of class-action lawsuits.

Whatever the purpose of the letters, Josh could relish the act of transcribing them. He often watched his peers typing and prided himself on his relative grace. Others’ hands looked like spastic spiders jumping on a hot surface. His fingers moved nimbly over the keyboard, fast and elegant like the wings of a hummingbird. After years of training, they were precise. He could trust his hands. Even in imprecision, he displayed a mystical union with the keyboard. He intuited and corrected the few faulty swipes without cognizing the letters involved. He curled and stretched, punched and lifted, tilted and raised like an impresario. Whereas a pianist moved along one row, he moved along five (not counting the function keys, whose size, like an underutilized appendage, suggested atrophy). Reminiscent of an apothecary, he knew exotic combinations to yield unusual, yet not unhelpful, results. His repertoire went far beyond the comparatively sophomoric CTRL+ Z or CRTL+V. Josh subconsciously engaged in showboattery whenever a co-worker would look in on him (usually to avoid working him-or-herself) as he was working. He would continue typing unabated and, taking his eyes off the screen, casually perform the ALT+SHIFT+BACKSPACE or, when completed, the ALT+SHIFT+K. He had no sign his coworkers understood these magic tricks, or even noticed them, but he enjoyed it all the same.

Typing was one of his few cerebral releases. He could not ponder anything else when in the throes of this fever of productivity. He could not introspect. He could not think about what all of this meant, where he was going, or why he had consigned himself to this position. If he did, his digital accuracy would suffer. This profound thoughtlessness and channeling of the environment (from the eyes to the hands) reminded Josh of hurdling down the side of a Michigan sand dune in his childhood. The angle of inclination could not have been less than 75°, yet he ran rather than tumbled to the bottom. He did not know how he was staying upright. He did not command his legs to pump. He thought nothing of it. They hyperactively bent and straightened in step with the pitch of the dune’s face. At eight, he did not have the words to convey the feeling, but he was consumed by it. Thoughtlessness had a pleasure all its own. The undisturbed state of being—even being an unreflective action—seemed to Josh seventeen years later an alluring-yet-frightening Eastern sort of pleasure. Nirvana.

Clicking, however, could be neither meditative nor artful. There was no order or pattern to it. It involved larger fields of movement within which irregular paths were made. The up, down, and around, the jagged swipes next to the long arcs felt sloppy and all-too-human. It was less like communing with another and more like ineptly manipulating something formless and foreign. Traced out, the trails would be indistinguishable from a toddler’s scribbles. The picture was something to be displayed because of the endearing ineptness it contained rather than aesthetic attraction. Then, there was the issue of the sticky left button on Josh's mouse [a source of bottomless frustration and instigator of six (rejected) PO Request Forms]. More than most people, he disdained clumsiness. This had a chilling effect on his use of the mouse and enticed him to lean heavily on that field-jumping miracle key, TAB.

He typed much and clicked little. Work moved through him. He hummed along at 85 WPM. The cursor hurdled across the screen, jumped back, and tried again a little lower. The clock spun.

As with all repetitive motions, even the most pleasurable become painful over time. When his eyes began to water from a lack of blinking and he could take no more, he squeezed his lids shut and forced the remaining liquid out. He rubbed his cheeks dry. He flexed his wrists and threw his tartan-lined arms out and softly groaned. He bent his ankles beneath his chair so that his toes pushed down inside his shoes. He waggled his heals. He stared at the blue LED light symbolizing power on the frame of the monitor, which gave the outside world the appearance of dogged concentration. Josh imagined himself in the classically out-of-body sort of way. His vantage point was over his shoulder near the drop-ceiling, like that provided by a security camera. This was his day: overwhelmingly silent—nearly complete silence were it not for the plastic clacking—and overwhelmingly inanimate—nearly complete inanimation were it not for the movement that made the plastic clack and the consequences of his prolific caffeine consumption. Josh thought of how, in heist movies, crafty criminals would hack into monitoring software and replace the live feed with a freeze-frame. The video-made-photograph confirmed the status quo to the guards whenever the checked. Change, the difference between live and frozen, was impossible, but the guards had no idea. Josh’s day looked like this. No one could tell the difference between the photograph and the video for hours at a time. This was his life. He felt uncomfortable and left his desk in a rush.

To use the restroom, employees traversed a lengthy corridor flanked by various salaried workers deserving of offices composed of drywall, steel, and wood (rather than felt, aluminum, and cardboard). The doors of these titular nobles were invariably shut and eerily quiet. Still, one felt the urge to walk past them quickly and hold one’s breath in the hopes of passing unnoticed. Josh made the first of many passes, pushed to the left of the hand plate (to avoid germs), and entered the confines of the men’s room. An artificial bouquet clogged the space. Oranges. It always smells like rotten oranges. A faulty ballast hummed. The facilities were chromed with white accents. The tile was beige. The stalls were the color of nutmeg and made of compressed plastic. Josh was alone. He approached the nearest urinal with a thud-slap-thud-slap. He liked the sound of his soles against hard surfaces. Dramatic. He relieved himself and listened to the spatter. He dropped his lids and thought about the evening. A movie? Not again. Something…physical. A walk maybe. It would be nice to take a walk. Bundle up. It may snow. Too much snow this winter. A record? He did not flush (to avoid germs) and went to the sink. He met his reflection and was surprised at his hair’s disarray. He pushed down on it, ruffled it, and pushed down again. It was stubborn and remained puffy. I need a haircut. Soap and water were dispensed automatically. As he was lathering, Edward Kaypart sauntered in. Josh eyed him in the mirror. No greeting was exchanged. The stream was too cold to linger under. He focused on the dull feeling the temperature gave him. Enough. He patted his hands dry and listened to his footsteps again as he left. He heard Kaypart grunt as the door swished shut behind him.

Given the square-footage of the building, a person toiling in the central commons could go all day without a glimpse of the (relatively) natural world. One of the lone publicly accessible vistas was the fourteenth floor’s waiting room. Josh frequently took a circuitous route from the restroom back to his cubicle in order to confirm the existence of the outside world. The room, which was always empty, was lined with faux-wood adorned with conical sconces reminiscent of a gastropod’s home. Newspapers were feathered tastefully across the black granite top of the coffee table, unread, and replaced daily. Beyond the chairs and table, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on other structures with mirrored exteriors. The patchwork of glass rectangles across the street distorted images, melding the cityscape with ambient light. It was not stretched and skewed like a funhouse, but bulging and pocked like diseased skin. Through the gaps left by the avenues below, Josh could see the river, lazy plumes rising from the industrial district, and the horizon beyond. The sky was swaddled in a taught overcast blanket. Looks sickly. He felt as poorly returning to his desk as he did when he left it.

It was disconcerting how much of an affect the environment had on its inhabitants. Seemingly all that was required to be in good spirits was a bright sun and a temperature that made you neither sweat nor shiver. Contrarily, when the sun was impeded and the temperature oppressive in either extreme, absorbing the pallor was inevitable. Where’s the dignity of man? This line of thought agitated the sensitive humanism Josh could not be rid of, despite the stoical (if not defeatist) theme of his maturation. He liked to think of himself (and people generally) as self-possessed and rational. This meant they could always be reasoned with. What reasoning, though, was there in this realm? A person was a body within a system operated on by other bodies. For the better or for the worse, it was all inhumane. There was no challenging the emotions stirred by nature or otherwise. Language was emasculated. A person could not be talked out of a mood. How unhelpful was it to tell a person (himself included) that, “It’s not so bad.” True or false, the proposition did not matter. “Okay, so what?” the heart (whatever that is) seemed to say on its own. “It feels so bad.” People recognize the uncontrollability of circumstance. The painful consequences of it were manageable. They aren’t “up to you,” so you can cast it aside. To have something inside of you that would not submit to your own commands was frightening, unwieldy, and dangerous. How can you dissociate from that? The riddle of mental illness entered Josh’s mind, but then there was the chair, climate control, and the unwavering glow of 65W tubes over his work-station.