The younger of the tax guys - I’m pretty sure his name is Mike, or Mark, or Mick, or something - has been doing my head in today. His sallow jowl is looser and flappier than usual - it hangs like a swatch of burlap about his chin, like a frumpy valance in an etiolated council maisonette, or maybe it’s just me, I haven’t been feeling too well myself lately.
The keyboard I inherited from my predecessor, Stephen, shows almost no signs of wear or use. The keys are as smooth as pebbles from an undiscovered stream in a forgotten mountain plateau. Indeed they so closely approach perfection that I avoid their use altogether, instead composing my documentation by cutting and pasting the appropriate text from a variety of other sources, using my mouse alone. What might account for the supra-natural, unblemished aspect of the keyboard which was my predecessor’s kindest bequest? Since the quality or sufficiency of Stephen’s work has at no point been called into question, I must conclude that he maintained his fingernails according to the most rigorous standards of care.
Now we already know that he was a great one for rambling off over the countryside without a care for a hot dinner at a decent hour, and taking his obsession with manicuring also under consideration we begin to suspect that there was more to Stephen than meets the eye, ear, or nose. But then show me the man whose echo in the dead vault of the past rings true and clear, or whose silhouette on the gauze screen of the future represents him in all the crazed complexity of the present day.
I say my friend is elderly, but this is mere speculation. So far as I can tell, he could be any age, in the first humiliating flush of youth or the final humiliating flush of decrepitude. He is, if you will, ageless. The skin of his face is at once unblemished and careworn, like a very fine leather; his eyes are as sprightly as an imp’s and as impassive and graven as the knots in an ancient yew tree; his hands are at one moment fresh and supple and lithe, capable of pulling down saplings, wringing the necks of birds or caressing a lover and the next moment fragile, slightly translucent, the sinew and ligaments faintly visible like the innards of a boiled prawn.
A warm, sweet, rank stench putrefies the air in the corridor outside my office. This in conjunction with the present time (12:10 p.m.) leads the rational observer to only one conclusion: one or both of the tax guys are celebrating some triumph of their trade with a takeaway from McDonald’s. I turn off my desk fan and listen to the sounds they make while they eat: a slapping sound like wavelets on a sea wall, the furtive rustling of paper bags, the slurping of soda through straws, and very faint, a mucilaginous glooping noise which can only be the sound of contented mastication.
My friend occupies the office adjacent to mine. He is an elderly chap, Malay-Chinese; his hobbies include personal investment and South East Asian cuisine. I have only his word for it on the latter, but it seems reasonable, and besides, his word is as good as his bond. I am certain that he is a great afficionado of the stocks and shares, because his desk is strewn with analysts’ notes and annual reports - or so I imagine. You see the curious thing about my friend is his closed-door policy. Since I came into this position, three months ago or so, I’ve never caught so much as a glimpse - no, wait, so much as a fleeting glimpse - of the interior of his office. My friend appears at the door to my office, like a grotesque and macabre cuckoo popping out of a clock, once or twice a day for conversation. But when I come into work in the morning, and when I leave in the evening, my friend’s office is always without fail closed to all comers, the door shut tight, the blinds drawn close, lacking only a sign saying “closed for ever”, as impermeable to sight or sound or rational enquiry as the ark of the covenant, which may or may not exist, or as the mind of a madman careering off alone on some unknowable channel of mental migration.
The two tax guys in the windowless office opposite me have been doing my head in as usual. The elder tax guy, the one with the mane of ermine, leans back in his chair and exhales softly, at least I presume he does, since he is just out of my sight behind the partition. Maintaining what for him is a posture of unusual langour, he meditates on the day ahead and its likely outcomes; there are so many. Will he end the day richer or poorer? More or less composed? Perhaps he’ll make a new friend or unmake an old one. Often, it’s true, nothing will happen, and on these days one outcome is likelier than any other: he will be a day older.
His colleague, or apprentice, or whatever the terminology is, the one I tihnk is called Mike, sips daintily from his gargantuan flask of coffee. It’s 10:30 AM and therefore the coffee is what passes for fresh, but the same can’t be said of Mike, near-inert, jaundiced, sitting in his chair, a pale greasy streak on the brown paper bag that is this morning.
I can’t be certain about my predecessor’s marital status, but it seems reasonable to me that he was married to a woman named Victoria, or possibly Alice, and that this was a woman of some considerable means. She had a finely-shaped chin, a nose ever so slightly more bulbous than the average, and an impassive demeanour, and she lacked confidence in herself in general and in her sexuality in particular.
Why am I using the past tense? She may still be alive for all I know.
Victoria, or Alice, is in her mid-forties and semi-retired after a lucrative career combining criminal defense with cosmetic surgery. Now she performs occasional consultancy work and, in all likelihood, sells the odd painting at local galleries, although she’s not a natural artist. Possibly she married my predecessor, Stephen, five years ago on a beach in Mexico, with only their closest friends present, and some passing Mexicans, and the echoing ocean rushing and hissing over sandy shingle, under an eggshell-blue encompassing sky.
I am reliably informed that my predecessor, Stephen, was a great one for taking long walks. Often in the evening he would think nothing of striking out on a jaunt at six o’clock, attired against all likely weathers, and roaming the countryside for three or four hours, returning, like a tomcat, out of expectation at nine or ten or even eleven in the evening. He would sit down alone to eat at an inhuman late hour on account of the time he spent on his walks, but he never discussed the whys and wherefores of the whole business, at least not with my source.
Chances are, and you don’t need me to tell you this, he was very high-up in Natural Philosophy. For if you look back at the great minds in that business, your Boyles and your Bacons, you’ll find they were never happier than when traversing the countryside unaccompanied, thinking about the stars and the burrowing things and suchlike, and eating at a regular hour meant as little to them as a bugle call to a deaf person, swaddled in blankets, huddled in a lightless cave at the edge of the earth.
The day dawns drear and irrefutable on a sound-proof world. The tax guys hover to and fro, blithe in their duties like two people at the first beginning of things. As I watch, it strikes me that their windowless office, across the corridor from mine, must be a comforting place, a place insulated from the shocks and abrasions of the roughhouse world outside. A place where what few things occur do so with perfect assurance and under perfect, almost beatific, control.
No sound comes from the room. It’s as if a thick perspex screen separates their world from mine. I envy them.
As I flew out of Vancouver,
its cover of mist,
its clouds like clover,
crossing the Coast Mountains
and the raucous and chaotic Rockies,
and ever on over Alberta,
a land turning auburn and mauve
at the sudden setting of the sun,
and over patchwork Saskatchewan
(farm upon farm,
endless farms),
I wished that I were home
with you, my love,
with you in my arms.