Office 227

At the end of my first month at Code-Breaking Office 227, when we ran out of code, I learnt the true meaning of boredom. One of the veterans warned me about this on day three. He told me that once a month or so we’d have to find some way of amusing ourselves, or, alternatively, go insane. His suggestion was chess, but I had no interest in chess and instead spent my time reading big books with big themes and making long lists.

I’d been carted out to Office 227 on May 6th, 2024. There were fifteen of us and many of us were underweight and skeletal. There was one German and one Jew. I was the only Brit. This became the source of some camaraderie, we exchanged anecdotes and stereotypes, but the jokes and laughter soon stopped and we rode in near-silence.

After an hour, the German turned to me and told me about his flight to Mexico. He told me it had been delayed, which he had been expecting, and that due to the delay, his ticket had been refunded, which he had not been expecting. We talked about airports, rocking due to the truck, then we talked about Office 227.

‘But why the desert though?’ he said. I shrugged. I told him I had no idea.

We arrived way past midnight. I was issued a badge which said Win Cresmaschi, although they’d spelled it Crematche, and was told to wear it around my neck at all times. Floodlights cut across the dust, the truck’s engine idled. We headed indoors, laden with bags, straps criss-crossing our chests. The desert lay silent and expansive over our shoulders. It seemed to hum. 

I synchronised with the rhythms of Office 227 quickly. My body became adept; at points, I believe even my pulse was altered. I felt the sway of upshift and downshift. The incoming rush and the outgoing tide.

Upshifts caught us unaware. The coffee machine maxed out after two hours and flashed angry ‘out of order’ signs at anyone who approached it. I worked on a code till 4am, crashed, and woke at 7am to start work on another. Lochtie was seen in the corridors, yelling into rooms, his hair tufty and unwashed. We no longer walked anywhere, but ran instead, papers pressed to our chests, sleeves rolled up to our elbows, the sound of clattering feet and tortured breathing a near constant. There was a phantom energy among us. I began to think that happiness, true unfettered happiness, existed in the depths of concentration. At one point, we stayed up for over fifty hours. Many of us started on medication. Lochtie wore four nicotine patches. I myself got noontime shakes for days afterwards and felt the lingering sting of caffeine on my palette. Afterwards, we slept for days.

By month six, my attempts to ward off boredom in the downshifts became more intense. I started learning German. I played marathon sessions of solitaire. I surfed the internet and watched a little too much pornography. I even went walking in the desert, keeping Office 227 in sight, as a reminder, I guess. It looked large, flat and squarish against the desert. I wondered why they had painted it grey. In the distance, two buttes stood cinematically apart.

I was transferred from a British Code-Breaking Office. It was numbered somewhere in the hundreds. I was hired because I was an expert on asymmetric cryptography. This was a rare and sought-after skill. I had my own alcove in a larger office; I had a stapler and my own printer. I worked primarily on my own. On my first day, three or so interns leaned their chins on the division of our alcoves and watched me take apart three codes. The codes had been moved from department to department for four months and no one had been able to crack them. It took me less than ten minutes; the shortest intern said it was a pleasure to watch me work.

The rumours that Iverson was masturbating in the conference room began in June. On Tuesday 7th, Lochtie told me he’d seen him do it. He told me Iverson used his left hand. The following week, I saw it myself, or thought I did.

Iverson was 6’3 and German. He was stringy, almost all bone. It was never determined whether this (the fact he was German, not the tallness) had anything to do with the rumours or not, whether we had singled him out.

I saw it during a brainstorming session. The temperature was high and we were all jacketless. Iverson talked for around three minutes on the benefit of departmental synergy. He spoke slowly, pausing before each sentence, gesticulating with only his right hand. When making a delicate point, he touched thumb to index finger and prodded at every word. When indicating someone’s opinion or idea, he pointed with all four fingers. There was a car-crash intensity to his eyes, a force. He seemed to shake throughout the session; his left hand engaged. I found myself compelled to look at my lap.

After the meeting, I headed to Lochtie’s desk in the bullpen. On that day, the bullpen was loud and keyboard-intense, almost primal. Interns streamed past me, each with a folder of loosely paper-clipped code tucked under their arm. There was a juicy collison across the room, two interns with their ties over their shoulders, heads down and texting. Someone near me described it as a limb-jangling collision; this was the only term that felt appropriate. Limb-jangling. There was laughter and repartee, quick quips, cross talk. I had to shout to get Lochtie’s attention. He came over to see me. He was tieless. I told him I’d seen it, that I could confirm Iverson was doing things in the conference room. Lochtie was sceptical. He told me that at this point rumour was no good, that for him to do something we’d need evidence. I told him that Diven had seen it too and about the tissue Diven had found, but Lochtie was still sceptical. He asked whether we could trust Diven and I told him we could. I’ll see what I can do, he said.

I started to avoid Iverson. When I saw Iverson coming down the hall, I pivoted and disappeared. Once or twice, I threw myself into an empty room. I alternated my route through the building on a day-to-day basis. I kept a tight and ever-changing schedule. I timed my break room trips so they didn’t coincide with Iverson’s. I spent as little time in the bathroom as possible. I sped through the process, increasing my intake of fibrous foods to keep seat time minimal.

Around this time we began playing ‘Victim’ to avoid boredom.

Victim required each player to submit a 3x2 passport photo. These were then mixed up and redistributed. Each player got a photo and carried it with them in the inside pocket of their blazer. My first photo was of a guy named Hackers.

The aim of the game was to ‘seek out’ whoever the photo displayed. Once found, employee A (the seeker) tapped employee B (the victim) on the forehead. The tapping required you to hold your index finger and middle finger together, like a lance. Once tapped, the victim surrendered their photo. The game ended when everybody had their own photo. There was rarely any confusion or errors.

I got Hackers easily. He was on the toilet, defenceless. We swapped photos and he was out of the game, at least for a while. My next victim was Lochtie.

The best players ambushed, attacked, or took aggressive military action against their victim. I remember waiting for three hours to burst out of a cupboard at Hackers. Lochtie famously barricaded Jobidia in the conference room and rushed him. Diven once dropped out of a duct and surprised an intern.

Lochtie envisioned a version of Victim where the victim could overrule their own assassination if they blocked the prod just in time. We shook our heads. It would be too complicated, said one. It’s good as it is, said another. I asked why we held these meetings in dark rooms. The collective - we named ourselves ‘the collective’ after about a month - told me to fuck off. Lochtie then suggested implementing Dramatic Fake Deaths. Silence. Then everybody nodded. Dramatic Fake Deaths were commissioned and spread. It pushed the game to a new level.

Some of us carried our photos for days.

It was Diven, despite his size and inflexibility, who championed the Dramatic Fake Death contest. He toppled from chairs, thrashing in agony. He fell from bunks. He crashed into kitchen cupboards. People sought out his seeker. He was a well-choreographed and realistic die-r. He understood, intuitively, how a body would ‘die’ at any given moment. His trick was to not make the death overblown, nor seek to break established Fake Death formula. He died. That’s all that can be said. Diven’s best death came on June 28th. Lochtie surprised him in the break room. Diven was drinking milk at the time and fell to his knees, dribbled milk, and collapsed sideways. It was by no means his most technical death. However, the combination of slowly expanding milk puddle and classic crime-scene-investigation pose came together perfectly. Lochtie stood, admiring, for around half a minute, before finally asking for Diven’s photo.

The quickest game was a mere thirty minutes. It was frantic and aggressive. I remember being tackled by a largish intern and blacking out. Lochtie told me he had to hide under his desk to avoid getting trampled. Jobidia was, apparently, the winner, although his victim looked ashamed and coerced.

After about a month, we worked in a state of near-constant agitation. New rules arrived and disappeared almost weekly. Someone crossing the room towards you felt like a threat. The break room became tense when a new member entered. Everybody froze till the employee proved his innocence. Sometimes successive killings occurred in a five minute span. Sometimes less. Lochtie and I witnessed a group of twelve interns descending upon one another in an unoccupied corridor. Three interns were walking abreast, chatting, when a stranger burst from a closet and massacred the first. One of the three avenged his fallen comrade. Then another intern came sprinting from the west. Before you could blink, there were twelve. The interns exchanged a flurry of finger jabs and collapsed in mock death. Soon there were twelve interns in various states of repose. There were howls and screams. One survivor tread between the wreckage; a hand emerged and proffered a photo.

On August 9th, due to a faulty vending machine, I had to spend a minute watching a metal spiral unwind in the west-side break room. I was on a three kill streak and had a shot at winning. When I retrieved the crisps, one knee on the tough tiled floor of the breakroom, I heard him breathing.

‘You want to ask me something,’ Iverson said. He was peeling grapes at the table. Moisture clung to his top lip and he breathed solely through his nose. 

‘No,’ I said. A photo of Iverson sat in my blazer pocket.

‘You want to ask me something?’ Iverson said again.

‘No.’

Iverson was yet to blink.

‘I do it because I’m bored,’ he said. ‘I am bored minute to minute, day to day.’

I told him I didn’t want to hear this, but he kept going. He had thirteen grapes now. The fridge had been opened and remained open. It hummed. I still had the packet in my hand. There was a pause. He told me he was efficient, that he was quick, didn’t waste time, that it kept him awake. He told me that he started by pretending his wife was under the table, but this soon turned sour, so he began adding other team members, to break the monotony of his task. There was always monotony, he said, always. He told me about other fantasies. Twins, triplets, a dominatrix, even himself. I placed all my weight on my leading foot and threw the packet at Iverson’s face.

The game of Victim is now hardly played in Office 227, once a month at best.

I collided with Iverson at full pelt and we barrelled over the table. Iverson’s hands grabbed at my face. The fridge began beeping. A chair got upturned. Iverson knocked my fingers aside twice. We collided with cupboards. Then I was on top of Iverson, trying to disengage his arms. I pinned his left arm with my right leg. Iverson spat in my eye. It was unexpected, dirty, off the grid. It was understood then that we had stumbled into a new patch of the game, something violent and unexplored, a special zone specifically for this engagement. We began testing limits. I grabbed his hair. He bit me, firmly, on the elbow, leaving a semi-circle of pinkish tooth marks. It got savage. He went for my eye again. I scratched at his neck. At one point, he reached for a spatula and I kicked him in the face. Iverson was shouting something vicious and German. We kicked and kneed, elbowed and slapped. Iverson began punching me in the leg, vicious, flesh-whacking punches. It felt solid, painful. I stretched for his forehead. He writhed and twisted as my finger came closer. He tried biting again, this time on my upper forearm, but I was determined. The fight finished with us entangled. Iverson’s left knee up against my chest, my right arm wrapped around his neck, the index and middle fingers of my left hand pressed firmly against his forehead. He continued to breathe solely through his nose. The moment held for a second and then faded.

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. ‘Just disgusting.’

On my way back to work, I checked my elbow and found I was bleeding. It was a sustained kind of bleeding, not dramatic, just constant. I went into the nearest bathroom and sat on the toilet applying tissue for about fifteen minutes. He had really bitten deep. Each of the bite marks was fleshy and when I pulled away the tissue they would weep blood. I met Hackers in the corridor after I was done. I told him about what happened and showed him my elbow. He looked it over. That’s pretty fucked up, he said, are you okay? Yes, I said, I’ll be fine.

My most painful memory was from when I was about eight. It happened in my first home and surrounded a painting competition. It was June, perhaps July, early summer at least. My grandfather and grandmother were over for tea and biscuits. Every year in September, the winner of the junior competition had their painting hung in one of the corridors of my school, Smithfield Combined School, in a dark, sandalwood frame. It had its own imitation-gold plaque with Win Cremaschi (or whoever the winner was) in neat, copperplate writing.

Moments before it happened, I remember clearly the feel of cold, white porcelain on my nether regions. I had been painting all morning and had that special post-work type of happiness, which comes from long periods of sustained concentration and feels good and raw. I could hear the sound of conversation from the front room, plus acoustic - memorably acoustic - music. I remember wiping, flushing, then coming downstairs, still dressed in my ‘work’ dungarees, and pausing on the third step of the stairwell. From where I stood, I could see my father and my grandfather standing with their backs to me, the painting framed between them. I have my doubts that this is exactly how it happened. This layout seems too much like a metaphor, as if I’ve constructed this memory rather than simply remembered it. My father was shorter and both were wearing shades of blue or possibly green on their top halves. Beyond them was the table, covered in yesterday’s papers. The palette, which was a paper plate with dry and half-dry splotches of paint around the edges, rested on an old notebook. My four paintings were wooden-pegged to a long, room-spanning length of twine. Then my grandfather told my father that the painting was kind of crap, really, wasn’t it. And my father looked at him.

I didn’t see or hear what he said next. Instead I sat down on the step and found myself unable to cry. This was the most horrific aspect of the event, the inability to cry and express my distress. The next thing I recall is my mother, her hair up in a rubber band, coming out of the front room and seeing me on the step. What’s wrong, she said and I remember just shaking my head, unable to speak. Faintly, I could just about make out the word Jolene.

The memory fades off here, the acoustic music still playing, my mother stood with her hair in a band and me unable to cry. I think about this event all the time. Mostly at night. The event is sharp and I don’t like to think about it, but it comes upon me in periods of silence or dullness. A type of static, throbbing beneath everything else, background noise.

Diven and I were sitting, comfortably supine, on the faded rec-room sofa, watching low-bit, non-HD, non-3D television in RGB. It was a downshift and everybody was either relaxing or sleeping. I was reading a dog-eared, secondhand edition of Crime and Punishment. I had made a list of all the things I wanted to do on a battered notepad and then proceeded not to do them. Diven was playing along to Countdown with a well-chewed pencil and a moleskine notebook. He took up most of the sofa. His face was spotty and shone in the 60-watt glow of Office 227’s ill-maintained light bulbs. Whenever he guessed a longish word, or a particularly poetic combination. His feet paddled with excitement. The noise level was low; there was only the scratch of fabrics, or the crack and tear of a turned page. Both of us checked our phones frequently, we had our feet up on a chipped, tea-stained table. A clock ticked.

‘Intaglio,’ Diven said. I looked up. Somewhere down the corridor a radio played songs which felt both familiar and not. 

Jobidia, Lochtie and I stayed up late one night working on code 654 when we became trapped. Jobidia had leant his keys to Hackers and it was this, and the fact that the doors of Office 227 locked automatically at 11.45pm, which meant there was no way out till morning. Lochtie had read somewhere that concentration increased when a person needed to pee and, as Code 654 needed his full ‘cerebral wattage’, had decided to delay his bathroom break till past midnight. I remember him eyeing up bins and bottles, hopping from one leg to another, pacing, shouting, directing long, angry non-sequiturs towards Jobidia, kicking walls and tables, jumping on the spot, having moments of heartfelt regret, threatening to piss on me, climbing on chairs, punching at a keyboard for three minutes, and then, eventually, relieving himself in a plant pot, while we watched on helpless and somewhat dismayed. Later, Jobidia and Lochtie attempted to break down a door, but suffered multiple shoulder-based injuries and decided to stop. By 1am, we found ourselves floorbound, arguing over the situation. I was lying spread-eagled. Lochtie was over by the wall. Jobidia was prone with his chin resting on his fingers. At roughly 2am, someone suggested we climb into the ducts.

We had first attempted this manoeuvre upon arrival at Office 227. Everybody was settling in and relations were edgy and awkward, but people will do anything, anything at all, to escape boredom.

Our trips evolved, slowly at first, into a full scale exploration of the ‘ductosphere’. Suddenly, ropes seemed somehow appropriate. Accidents happened. On day 5, two members got lost and were found blackened and bruised in a foyer two hours later. On day 6, Lochtie attempted to get people to call one another ‘explorers’ or ‘expidites’, but this never caught on and caused a fight instead. On day 9, Diven got lost in a yet uncharted portion of the ductosphere and was not seen or heard from for a whole 24 hours, until he returned with a half-eaten rat in his bag. He refused to tell anyone what went down in the area, now named quadrant 3, and possessed a pronounced aversion to ducts and cramped spaces from then on. At some point, I found a bat.

Finally, after twenty-three days of edging forward and banging hard-hats on cramped duct ceilings, Lochtie collated the maps, listed the various areas and pathways, and pinned this construct to the wall. It was, dare I say it, beautiful. 

That particularly night, our progress through the ducts was painfully slow and hard on knees and elbows. Jobidia got trapped twice. Lochtie, after hitting his head for the fifth time, promised to never trust Jobidia with any key-based duties for the next six months. Jobidia kept telling us it was tight in here, fucking tight in here. I made a crack about Jobidia’s mother, which Lochtie found riotous. At one point, we found ourselves lost and Jobidia kept telling Lochtie that he Lochtie, had made a fucking map, so how, exactly, was he, Lochtie, mapmaker and renowned explorer, lost. Lochtie retorted, twisting around in the cramped interior of the duct so he was facing Jobidia, that whether or not he made the map was unimportant because, currently, they were without the map. So regardless of whether he, Lochtie, had made the map or not, they couldn’t use it right now because they were in one place and the map was in another. I asked why the hell the ducts were so complex in the first place and Lochtie began spieling about how Office 227 was a conglomerate build and so there were three construction parties and - you’d know this is you’d read the introduction pamphlets Win - there was a big mix-up with the building plans so there’s no coherent layout to the whole building and it’s all got kind of fucked up and abstract. Jobidia told him that technically conglomerates were companies formed from several businesses with differing aims. Lochtie told him to fuck off.

Jobidia found a maintenance hatch at 02.45am approx. and exited into a second floor bathroom, somewhere in the west sector, quadrant 2. We all took the opportunity to relieve ourselves. Lochtie had landed in a toilet and had to walk back with a soaked left leg, leaving a dotted trail of toilet fluid. We were silent, each of us too tired or pissed off to talk. At one point, we had to make our way through a blacked out section of Office 227’s west sector and I stumbled into a mop and bucket, spilling water over Jobidia. I said sorry. Jobidia looked at his leg and shrugged. We went a little further and I apologised again. Really, he said, it’s fine. I remained silent after that. At the dorms, Jobidia nodded and wished the pair of us a good evening. Lochtie and I remained hunched with hands on knees. What a fucking night, Lochtie said.

‘That’s the thing about it though, the -deleted by publisher due to libel concerns- image, it’s intoxicating.’

‘What are you on about?’ Lochtie said.

‘Well, it stirs up all this press and ruction around it. I mean, there’s a palpable hullabaloo around this image. I don’t want to get into the whole feminist, should she, should she not angle, but you have to agree there’s a palpable hullabaloo around this image, Lochtie.’

‘Well, yeah, I’ll agree, it’s a cultural touchstone.’

‘These images are shocking now because they’re shocking. They’re primarily irrational, random. There’s no set criteria around what constitutes this image as shocking. It just shocks.’

‘Did you sleep last night, Win?’

‘Well, think about it. They don’t fit into the standard shocking criteria. They don’t tick all the ‘shocking’ boxes. There’s this new breed of artist Lochtie, this is what I’m saying, listen, no, listen, there’s this new breed of artist.’

‘Caffeine. Caffeine is what you need.’

‘I think it’s because we’re bored, Lochtie. I think it’s because what used to stun or shock us has been numbed. Now we need a girl dancing, twerking even, around a paternal figure waving a foam finger, sometimes mock-fingering herself with said foam finger - I’ll spare my semi-freudian analysis of the whole thing. But, listen, there’s a need, a want, at the centre of all of this.’

‘Did you sleep?’

‘A need, a want, at the centre of all this. That’s the punchline.’

‘Win?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you sleep?’

The greatest writer on boredom I know is Benjamin Schwartz. His popularity exploded while I was at university; the covers haunted bookstores and cafe tables, the bookmark never past halfway. Critics and students fawned. The word ‘genius’ was used. Me and five or six others would meet and discuss him in a small post-grad pub. We sometimes talked about girls, sometimes other authors, but mainly, Schwartz. I once talked about maths, but this seemed to bore them, so I made sure to avoid the topic from then on. I cannot remember the group’s faces. I can remember their names were distinctly Christian and that two of them insisted on using their middle name when signing documents or on essay submission sheets. It was through the group that I met Anna.

Anna came to the discussion with Mark. She wore a tight, dark green sweater and had her hair tied up with an elastic band. Only Anna and I smoked. Mark came out with us, but couldn’t stick the cold and left after less than a minute. I told her she was very pretty and she nodded. I tried talking to her about Schwartz, but she told me she hadn’t read any Schwartz and, besides, she much preferred American authors. At the moment she was in the thrall of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She said she had read Fiesta that afternoon, which explained the sweater somewhat. I asked whether she had read Steinbeck and she told me she hated Steinbeck, who wants to read about the poor, she said. I lit another cigarette; we stayed outside and talked for two more. She told me she wasn’t afraid of death, which I thought was brave. She told me she planned to go into television, but preferred books, which I thought was stupid. She told me that the magic of books, the real true worth of books, was that they were a type of medicine for the lonely. I thought the phrasing a little clunky, but the statement struck me as true nonetheless. I asked her whether was lonely, and she said yes, but not right now. We slept together that night.

Anna and I slept together at least twice a week. She eventually told me she was in love with me. We were lying on our backs, her fingers circling my belly button. She told me about her family and listed her long string of ex-lovers, some of them girls. We often stayed up late, talking. I began to leave my books and coursework in her room and would return there after lectures. We were very close, but I was never in love with her. On two occasions, I came close to convincing myself I was. Once, I said it accidentally and probably, in that instance, I meant it.

Mark stopped talking to me at discussions. At first, he was subtle about it, but eventually he dropped the pretence. We would sit in silence when it was only the pair of us. One day, I asked him whether it was due to Anna and he nodded. On reflection, this was a fairly stupid question. Then he asked whether I was in love with her. I told him I didn’t know. Okay, he said.

Another Schwartz book came on the market - posthumous, assembled from found short stories in the mass of his notebooks (these were published later that year) - and was sold out within a week. I got to read Daniel’s annotated copy. I struggled with some of the stories, which were either bad or too experimental, or, often, both. When we came to discuss the stories, Mark wasn’t there. Daniel said he hadn’t seen Mark that day and he wasn’t answering his phone. A kid called Henry, rather jokingly, said that maybe Mark had killed himself. We began to take bets on whether Mark had shot or hanged himself. Someone suggested he threw himself in front of a train, that became the new favourite. It seemed characteristic of Mark, enigmatic, somewhat rustic, a vintage suicide. The joking continued until we realised Mark still hadn’t turned up. I began to think that Mark had actually committed suicide, that he had killed himself because of mine and Anna’s relationship, that I was responsible. I was tempted to phone the police. I left Anna a text, explaining the situation. She didn’t reply. Half an hour later, a few of us began to seriously consider that Mark had committed suicide. I was on my feet, suggesting we go knock for Mark to see if he was really dead. Mark arrived then and told me to sit down. He had been talking with a lecturer about Schwartz’s new book, that was all, and he displayed the book as proof. Henry told Mark that we had been worrying about his suicide. Why were you worrying about that? he asked. Because of Anna, I said. He looked at me. Who?

At the start of the summer term, Anna asked me when we were going to have a baby and I laughed. Then realised she was serious. We had just watched a French film about a failed romance and the room was far too hot. We lay there in silence and I rolled over so I couldn’t see her face. I could feel her looking at the back of my head.

Anna and I began watching things in February, neither of us talking, just watching. We watched two series of the nineties hit Friends. We watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which she was a big fan of. We watched pretty much everything by the director David Fincher. We watched an hour long interview with the writer David Foster Wallace and chewed popcorn. We watched a movie set in and around a diner, just a diner. We watched a box set of adapted Shakespeare plays. We watched The Fugitive, Minority Report and The Departed in one sitting. We watched the Star Wars trilogy over the course of a week. We watched a Jack Nicholson movie which I forget the name of. We watched the movie Changing Lanes, thinking it was Changing Places. We watched Oliver Twist. We watched Hannibal. We watched the first two Alien films. We watch a French film without subtitles and then the following week with subtitles. We watched the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad. We watched Gangs of New York. We watched Rainman. We watched Cosmopolis. We watched an episode of The Wire and didn’t think it was all that. We watched Gladiator. We watched Clash of the Titans. We watched Back to the Future. We watched Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom. We watched Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Arc. We watched Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom again, even though it’s probably the weakest of the three. We watched Death in Venice. We watched Highlander. And so on. 

One day in the March of that semester, I went out walking. It was sunset and everything was bathed in orange light. I stopped by the tennis courts and watched a pair of medics, in thigh hugging shorts and tank tops, play a gruelling but undynamic set. The first was somewhat taller than the second and dominated serving, but was slack in open play. They were counting points, but soon lost track and just played instead. I didn’t watch the game for long. Two girls with red faces jogged past. In the distance, I saw four jacket-wearing first years, sitting with legs crossed, discussing something theoretical and no doubt dense on the terrace of the campus cafe. I went to skim rocks on the lake, but couldn’t find any. I listened to an orchestra tune up. I went home and slept for a long time.

I broke up with Anna on August 17th, it took me that long. I did it over the phone and when she got difficult I put the phone down and sat in silence. She told me that I had betrayed her, that I had lied to her. She tried to ring again, but I didn’t pick up. When we next saw each other, she was quiet and talked in a murmur. I once caught her gazing mournfully through a library window. She asked to meet for coffee and I said no. She asked whether I wanted to go to the cinema and I said no. She said she just wanted to be friends. I told her I didn’t want to be friends. I used cliches and slogans to defend myself. I didn’t say it’s not you, it’s me.

The last time we talked was at 2am. She rang me and I picked up without thinking. We talked for an hour about several subjects. We talked about Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She told me she had read Schwartz and didn’t get it. I told her that was what happened, you either found him boring or fascinating, there was no in-between. She didn’t argue. At the end of the hour, she asked me whether she bored me. I said no. I mean, when we were together, did I bore you then, as a lover? she said. I paused and looked at my calendar. No, I said, of course not. There was a silence. We made quiet, but meaningless conversation for half an hour and then she told me she was tired and had things to do tomorrow. I said okay and waited for her to hang up. I went to bed and thought about what was going to happen to her, whether she would be okay. I thought that maybe I should ring her in the morning and check she was okay, but, come the morning, I forgot and didn’t even try ringing her until the week after. I waited and got her roommate. Her roommate told me Anna was out at the moment. I didn’t tell her who I was or what I wanted, but that I’d call back that evening and could she pass that on to Anna. I forgot and didn’t think of it again till a month later, when I saw she won a prize for one of her essays. But, by that time, I had moved on and so had she. I don’t know what happened after that. 

The postman, who arrived at Office 227 at around 1300h-1400h every Wednesday, was named Harold Bergman. This tall and dumb-looking postman was only ever referred to as Harold. Never ‘Hal’ or ‘Berg’. Nobody had seen Harold’s lorry or van or post-truck within a three mile radius of Office 227, nor a tell-tale dust-trail, and it was never understood how he arrived, transport-wise at least. He seemed to simply emerge from the desert, wearing his regulation uniform of beige shorts and white socks, the socks stretched to their limits, his shorts belted, with no compromise around the term ‘waist-height’.

Harold told me and Lochtie that he, Harold Bergman, was a time traveller. He claimed he was an active participant in the Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Saigon. For 50p or a trinket, he promised to tell us our future. His predictions were sometimes oddly correct. He managed to pinpoint the location of Lochtie’s left sock. He successfully predicted the winner of Wimbledon 2024. I noticed a few days after meeting him that he spoke with a slight lisp. He told me that I would look back on this part of my life with deep sadness and loneliness. He told me that I would always exist most purely on my own, that I was a natural exile, a lone force, always existing on the fringe of something. I asked him how he knew this and he told me I had written it and was writing it as we spoke.

I highlight Harold here because Harold’s job was boring, truly boring. His sorting was messy and rarely correct; letters addressed to names beginning with D would end up in the Z section and the letters Q and P were consistently confused. The whole thing took Harold twice the time it should have, but he seemed somehow immune to boredom, happy despite the monotony of the task. Once, I followed him around the shelves. He was in a state of almost euphoric happiness. I asked him how he could be so happy and he told me he was just a happy kind of person. I asked whether he found the task boring and he told me, no, he did not. I asked him how he managed to fend off boredom and he shrugged. Then he said: ‘the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting’ and looked at the letter he was holding.

‘What?’ I asked, but he didn’t reply.

A new batch of code arrived on September 1st. It included Code 729, which was passed around a total of three departments before arriving at my desk. I began work on it at 10am and continued to work till around 2pm. I skipped lunch and was still going at 4pm. Lochtie dropped in and told me he was going to eat and I got up and went with him, although my mind stayed at my desk.

We met Hackers at the food hall. It was packed and the line was way out into the corridor. There were six or seven members at each table. One had seventeen around it. Some squatted or knelt. Hackers had already got our food and sat, making pencil altercations to various red-lined sheets, while shovelling rice into his mouth with a fork.

‘Have you ever seen it like this?’ Hackers asked.

‘No,’ said Lochtie.

‘We heard you got Code 729,’ Hackers said.

Lochtie looked at Hackers, then at me. I nodded.

‘That one’s a real bitch,’ he said.

There was a fight happening on the other side of the room, two big interns, one of them holding a tray.

‘It’s the stress,’ Hackers said, apparently to himself because no one replied. Lochtie began telling us about the code. He told us that ‘the case’ this month was quantity over quality; that, apart from Code 729, we were basically faced with a lot of easily solved code, but so much it would take a whole month to crack. He said that on their part the move was elegant. Simple, yet effective. I noted it was always ‘they’ or ‘them’, never Russia, Ukraine, Japan, especially not ‘The Democratic Republic of Asia’. Lochtie said that the simplicity and quantity of this month’s batch was probably the reason last month’s batch was so weak; they’d been saving up for this move. He didn’t theorise that this may be because they were planning some big offensive or pivotal tactical manoeuvre. I was about to ask, but was cut off by Lochtie’s phone ringing. He stood up and left. I hadn’t known Lochtie to do that and asked Hackers about it.

‘It’s his daughter,’ he said, through mouthfuls of rice. ‘She’s comatose. He goes back to England once a month. His wife rings him with updates.’ He paused, looked over his shoulder and continued: ‘They’re on the rocks,’ he said. ‘I heard them arguing last night. Something about a whore. I think Lochtie is having an affair.’ I looked at the door.

‘You think so?’ I said.

‘I don’t know, I’m guessing,’ he said and looked at the rice.

Hackers and I did not have much to talk about, and after we finished talking, he went back to making altercations. I found myself waiting for Lochtie to return. The fight between the two interns had been resolved by the time he came back. We talked about the code some more while I ate. I stayed for about fifteen minutes more and then went back to work.

I worked on Code 729 till 1am, fell asleep at my desk and started work at dawn. Three days later, I solved it and started on Code 730. Code 730 took five minutes. I remember feeling distinctly disappointed.

Lochtie told me this in the west-side break room when there was no one around. That, yes, his daughter was comatose and that he would read to her every other week. That, yes, she had fallen on a French holiday from four storeys up. That it had been raining and the wet cobbles had flashed blue and red. That she was twelve and three quarters. That her hair was ginger, not so ginger that she was auburn, but ginger enough that she was unhappy being called a strawberry blonde. That the crowd was dense and hard to push to the front of. That she wanted to be an archaeologist. That, no, Lochtie had never believed it was his daughter, even while he was riding towards the hospital, watching the paramedics bustle and gripping his wife’s hand all too tightly. That the doctors refer to his daughter as ‘semi-comatose’. That she had a fondness for riding horses and horses in general. That her favourite colour was blue, not pink, although he had once guessed wrong. That, yes, that was probably the tightest he had held his wife’s hand. That once he had read to his daughter not from a book, but from his rental car’s instruction manual, not because he wanted to, but because he had forgotten his book. That her name was Karen. That he thought about her when he had nothing else to think about and that, yes, thinking about her was painful. That she would be thirteen in February and he was planning something big. That while reading from the car instruction manual and attempting some form of humour, he had looked down at Karen’s expressionless face and the various breathing apparatus which extended from it and had thought, without any heart or basic humanity, oh why god, why me. That his daughter had two necklaces which they swapped once a month. That the silver one was her favourite. That there had been one elderly witness in an orange shock blanket. That his wife was never at his daughter’s bedside when he was. That the instruction manual was soggy. That when he asked, everybody told him that someone’s daughter fell, someone’s daughter fell. A daughter. Three storeys. A daughter, someone’s daughter. Fell. Someone’s daughter. No, four storeys, four. A daughter, someone’s daughter. Someone’s daughter fell.

On my last day I clocked off at 3pm and went to my room to lie down. Jobidia came by and said it had been a pleasure to work with me. He had a coke in his left hand, and every so often he spat into it. After about the third time, I asked why he was doing that and he started to talk about his tobacco habit. He told me about it as if it was a stand-up routine. There were punchlines and short observational skits. He seemed to get more out of it than I did. He told me he wanted to be a stand-up. I nodded and told him it was evident. Lochtie came in around halfway through and told me, not Jobidia, that he had smuggled drinks into the office and that he was planning a party for that evening, a party which was to celebrate my leaving, or, he supposed, commemorate. I looked up past Jobidia and said thank you. Lochtie nodded and then lingered in the doorframe, listening to Jobidia. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them he was gone.

The ‘party’ took place in the large dorm room, between three ‘corridors’ of bunk beds. Drinks were passed round and soon there was a happy, alcohol-based buzz. I was sitting on a top bunk, drinking rum and coke. Hackers was beneath me with his arm around the shoulders of an intern. Two of the interns had entered a drinking competition and were cheered. Lochtie, leant against someone else’s bunk, observed this all with a great sense of pride. Diven had concerned Jobidia and was telling him about his wife. Iverson had taken a bottle of gin and removed himself from the party. He had bounced off the door frame on his way out.

About halfway through, Hackers and Lochtie got into an argument about the hotness of various cleaning maids. Lochtie was backing Cassandra, but Hackers reckoned that Maria, the 5’8 blonde, who spoke poetic and melancholy English, topped the bill. Lochtie had a couple of forerunners, but, as of yet, no real stake in the hottest maid debate. Hackers and Maria had had sex roughly three times; twice in private and once while Lochtie slept off a terrible hangover on the floor below. There were rumours that Lochtie had slept with Maria, but these were only rumours.

Diven and Jobidia were discussing sport in the corner. Jobidia was on the floor, a coke can balanced on his chest. Diven squatted and fell almost three times. I was on my seventh rum and coke. Hackers and Lochtie were on their feet, face to face and shouting. Everything felt kind of echoey and detached. Hackers told Lochtie that it didn’t matter whether or not Maria or Cassandra was the hotter of the two maids and, in fact, this whole discussion could be solved by some sort of group vote, and Lochtie yelled that Hackers’ need to formalise everything was the reason why he couldn’t understand the downright-illegal attractiveness of Cassandra and thus should probably consider himself exempt from any sexual conquests in the near future. There was silence and everybody’s eyes were on Hackers and Lochtie. In the corner, an intern threw up over Diven’s shoes. Hackers said the point, Lochtie, was that Cassandra, no listen, the point was that Cassandra had a pornstar’s beauty whereas Maria was actually legitimately beautiful.

Lochtie threw the first punch. Hackers, who was astonished that Lochtie had actually hit him, staggered backwards, nose bloodied, into Diven’s bunk bed. Jobidia came over, coke can in hand, and got Hackers’ elbow to the face. Jobidia ducked and Lochtie struck an intern. The intern went to retaliate, but struck Jobidia. Jobidia, who was missing a tooth, struck the intern, who clattered into Iverson. Iverson, who had just returned and was drunk and alien to the world, went mad and punched the nearest guy, Diven, in the face.

Soon everybody was fighting and it all got blurred. I was dragged off the bunk by two eager interns and punched in the stomach. Diven came out of nowhere and collided with the pair. The three smashed into a bunk bed and the thing collapsed around them. I stood up and tried to take stock. All I remember were images: Lochtie having Hackers in a headlock, Diven elbowing Iverson in the chest, myself kicking an intern in the stomach, somehow everybody ending up in the break room, Iverson breaking a blender over Lochtie’s head, an intern striking Hackers in the crotch with a spatula, the smooth, gas-like hiss coming from the oven, which no one really noticed at the time, Hackers trying to defrost an intern’s head in the microwave, Jobidia stumbling over, still with his coke can somehow, and telling Hackers there’s no possible way to fry a head with the microwave door still open, two interns galloping at each other with their heads in saucepans, me and the head of HR going through a table, Large Al, who was not be messed with, sitting on a pile of moaning interns, trying to light a cigarette, Diven by the door doing nothing, Jobidia and Lochtie fighting by the fridge, Hackers still trying to solve the defrosting problem, Al’s cigarette catching and the whole room going up. 

We were propelled through the window and collapsed in a wave of soot-stained shirts. Iverson and Lochtie landed in each other’s arms. Jobidia was catapulted through a dorm-room door and collided with a desk - miscellaneous papers covered him. Diven emerged from the break room completely black; he raised a hand to everyone and walked slowly to his room. Hackers came out with his arm around the intern, who still had the microwave on his head. The pair made it about three steps down the corridor and collapsed. I was the first to survey the damage. The break room was completely black and little flakes of ash and soot fell like snow. The only sound was the cold hum of technology.

My final day at Office 227 was overcast. I felt fuzzy and threw up shortly after waking. On my way out, I saw people in yesterday’s clothes, clutching heads and collapsed against walls. In the kitchen, hunched and lingering, a pair of unshowered interns recalled what happened, their memories patchy and blurred. Lochtie had got up early and met me with a steaming cup of coffee. It was just me leaving and the car hadn’t arrived yet. We had nothing to do but fill the time.

‘It’s quiet this time of morning,’ I said. ‘Nobody up, the desert just sort of breathing.’

We looked out at the desert. We expected to hear the wind, but didn’t.

‘Did you ever find anything out there?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s a desert.’

‘Nothing at all? Nothing, like, spiritual or something?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

We stood in silence. At one point, he kicked a stone. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Is this driver ever going to get here?’ he said and looked at his watch.

I looked at the dirt road; there was no sign of the driver.

‘This is how things end,’ I said and didn’t really feel it was the right thing to say.

‘Silence?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you find you’re always waiting for something to happen and then nothing ever does?’ he said. I sighed and frowned and looked back at the desert. I didn’t have anything to say. I just wanted to look like I was thinking.