How to Disappear Completely

Like pixels melting through one wall and coming out the other, an overweight man has passed my desk four times now, but always from the same direction. I swear he doesn't turn. I watched, followed him down the hall, but I lost him. Perhaps it was four different men, it's not so impossible. They're all the same, this build and that carefully arranged hair and these wife-chosen suits. The same collection fills the great square chequered with smaller squares, every day.

The squares are sacred things, filled with family photos and general memorabilia of the real life just outside. Cereal-box idealism, that green juicy grass and gold sunshine as a backdrop for the people they belong to who see them occasionally at weekends, grinning for the camera. Tickets to events that help spike the performance charts plastered and yellowing on the walls.

The walls of my space are covered with post-its of the yellow sort, reminder after reminder to fill in the blanks on papers: copy, file and shred them, maybe in reverse order for fun. I have no photos but there are many pencil sketches replacing them that cover clear around the computer screen; some are visions, some are nightmares that disturb me, but all of them are a release. If I don't draw them they will block everything else out until I can reach my studio and lash it out in paint, so here my cell is wallpapered.

The light above me began to die three days ago. The flickering gives me a migraine, the kind that pulls the eyes from the sockets, but I can't bring myself to fix it. One mustn't complain too much, one could lose everything one day, one should appreciate them while one has them.

I pay attention to what I’m doing and notice my fingers have gone blue, trembling; they curl over the papers and sort, unconsciously, moving faster than I can follow, buzzing, ready to breathe, grow legs and run away.

My head pulses in pain trying to remember what I was supposed to do, but I struggle to see and hear through the thick smog surrounding me. Instructions are carefully spooned to me but my mind is too allergic, I can't swallow it, I get so nauseous. There were figures involved and a fistful words, I was to record them on my computer but the temptation to tip it over the windowsill is great; I'm so far up here on the sixteenth floor and if it fell down down down down...

I find I must've switched off. I look up at the clock and have lost an hour. I make a conscious effort to concentrate but if I keep my head down my eyes keep glazing over and my hands will take over again, processing and folding things, making origami: look, I can make a swan.

Here one has been born on my desk, made from zeros and ones all flickering like an old movie, ebbing and crashing until it flies. It picks up speed and flutters, hovers above the desk. It bounds clear of the window, reaching for clear air, its wings growing and stretching, a massive span, and gracefully billowing in the ice-cold breeze ruffling its feathers of digits. But then it starts to smoke and bursts into millions of blinding colours which become flames eating up the feathers, until the swan is nothing but grey sullen ashes that scatter across the sky.
I peer out the window: the ashes float like snowflakes into the eyes of a man trudging wearily sixteen floors below and make him choke and cry. There's a burning in my own eyes watching this swan die, but I'll blame my tears on this smoke.

I must've caused the swan to burn. It’s because I have a window cubicle. I don't deserve the window cubicle.

I gaze back at the bundle of paperwork on my desk and carefully pick up the top sheet. This one has ‘Budget’ printed in block-letters on the header; I fold it into neat triangles and halve them, press them together and sharpen the edges and make it airborne over a sea of studious shoulders and heads.

Can anyone hear this infernal screaming in my head? It started as drunken laughter one morning, gradually breaking my concentration, when I couldn’t remember what had happened all those years ago (I keep seeing flashes of a body breaking over stone steps) but then it changed into blood-curdling screams and I saw her chased, and then slipping, and what used to be a distracting daydream is a vision of my wife's death, stalking me.

The paper-plane dips low over a worker's head and catches him by surprise; he starts as if he’s been shot and snatches it out of the air, shoots his dark-circled eyes around wildly and tears into it, shredding it to a pulp. I watch him, hovering in the corner, lurking above my dividing wall. To him, I’m a Cheshire cat, sleepless eyes and unshaven face, but no smug grin. I just wanted to know if I could provoke him to confess, to match his face to the one I can't find chasing the girl down the steps before she fell and she broke, but something else is ticking inside him.

I shouldn't feel so sorry for myself, preoccupied with the white noise in my head: that one's daughter died last year quite suddenly of a brain aneurysm. He came back to work the following day. Not a sick day since; he has never grieved. But then when pressed too hard I see his chest convulses ever so softly, and I’m sure for him too the noise in his head is loud.

Perhaps everyone here is possessed with noise, louder than my personal orchestral blare; that’s why they work here: it’s mindless enough to keep them occupied but still has the appearance of “building a future” for their families, who will forget them the more they work over-time in order to afford being with them.

That’s why the manager chooses to throw his parties every so often: this office is the only family his employees have left, and they worship him like a hard-to-please father awaiting the red-marker A+ to earn love as a reward. It’s an absurd form of torture, an elusively large carrot to dangle - at these social occasions the models for success are paraded like golden calves to incite ambition, but somehow the great chasm between us and them never seems to be crossed by ourselves, or by someone we know. These people must have pass-codes to the greater realms of life we don't know of. Our chances are dim as the base of a pyramid - someone has to be at the base, someone always has to be the pillars. That's what the meaning of life is, after all, the endless reaching for the top stone.

It's just that she made things different. She breathed colour into it. It's as if I had fallen asleep and wearily kept moving forward without ever being able to lift my feet, never getting anywhere, but she awoke me, just in the softness of her fingertips or the wisdom of her free spirit. I could've stayed awake forever. But she fell, and now she is asleep.

I concentrate on the pen scribbles.

A sigh in my ear, if I look up it'll disappear, an invisible smell of perfume catches at my throat. My muse won't return, so she has banished me here, I'm just waiting for her to take me back. I would paint anything she asked, lay myself flat, paint my nightmares or even my own body curved over stone steps, over her head buried in a pool of hair, everything. I would follow the trail of smoke she leaves, but if I turn she isn't there. I breathe her in - brilliant images behind my eyelids fill me up and make me feel drunk - but when I exhale she never existed.

One day she'll come for me, I know she will. If she doesn’t, I’ll jump out after the swan and fly.

I shut my eyes and so another hour passes, distracted by an image flashing by my memory: a strange figure dancing in the rain. It was stupid, and people looking on turned away as if I were defective and shameless and naked. But I was only trying to wake up.

It had been raining in torrents, it was just before midnight. I couldn’t sleep because of the electronic beehive of traffic infiltrating my dreams and the wind kept biting at me, hissing in my ears, it would choke me if I didn’t get up. I ran for hours or years until my legs were moving but I wasn’t following, until the burning sensation shooting in my joints and the acid in my throat grew too strong and I felt too weak and collapsed into the street and tried to find the oxygen around my burning tissue-paper lungs, my mouth in the puddle. The asphalt was warm and softly breathing steam, the rain drenched me, each drop a tiny suicide leaving me covered in the death of a thousand tiny bodies of water.

After a while, although I was too close to the water to see myself, I caught my breath, but someone unfamiliar was in my reflection, this cold an painful face was not mine. I got up and started to dance in the rain, kicking puddles violently until I was covered with mud. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the shine of the street, matted curls and dying eyes, and tried to forget everybody and nobody was watching and flung myself into the air, into chaotic dance, slashing at the rain, watching my silhouette stay behind in the shape of droplets, chasing my shadow in the dull, orange-cordial streetlight. Until I was interrupted by a car crashing into me from behind, bringing both my dancing legs down. It backed up and skidded away.

I haven’t danced since then, though the temptation is overwhelming to jump onto the desk and leave muddied footprints all over the paperwork. But people don’t like it. It could be the joy that scares them. Or the recklessness. They’d call an ambulance.

There must be something wrong with my visions. They tell me so. The hand on my shoulder, belonging to a white coat - I've been waiting to see it all day - tells me so.

I look up to the shadow-lined face, confused. ‘Have you come to wake me up now?'