Office
A lumpy building in the middle of a wide stretch of parking lot below blue-tinted high-rise towers. Beige asphalt shingles on the outside, unpainted wallboard walls on the inside.
The people who work there just call it “the office.” If there’s a company name, it’s completely absent from the outside of the building, the top of the stationary, or even the email addresses they’ve been given.
Wires, hundreds of them, extend to the building from every direction. Each carries a different data stream. Each data stream, when decrypted, provides the key to unlock another data stream, and that data stream provides another key, and so on until the final data stream is unlocked, the only one that carries meaningful information.
“217 decrypted!” one office worker shouts. “The password for 368 is ‘volcano, asterisk, wind, asterisk, eclipse, then the number 12.’”
Creak of a rolling chair in some other corner of the building scooting over to terminal 368, and everyone listens.
“368 decrypted!” comes the shout. “The password for 52 is as follows: ‘In the cave, comma, beneath the roots of the mountains, comma, the gold dreams of a dragon, full stop.’” After a moment, the same voice adds, “That’s the gold that’s doing the dreaming, to be clear.”
By the time they’ve finished, they’ve lost track of which terminals have and haven’t been unlocked, so it always comes as a surprise when, instead of another password called out, they hear the chittering of the old printer.
Everyone claps.
No wire takes information out. The information is printed on sheets of paper that are the exact dimensions of the insides of the briefcases with which the office workers depart each evening.
The office workers go out and blend instantly into the crowds of other five o’clock pedestrians bound for home, a bar, a fitness club, night school, or a thousand more idiosyncratic destinations. The briefcases look ordinary enough, black or brown leather, well-worn on the corners. To be left as if by mistake at a dozen locations around the city. Under a park bench. In a 2 a.m. diner booth. At a bus stop. Beside a rooftop pigeon coop. Under the sink furthest from the door in a women’s restroom on the top floor of a department store.
The workers return in the morning to find new, empty briefcases open at their desks and the digits are already pouring in on the feeds, waiting for the key seen on one screen to be entered on another.
They have no idea what they’re communicating or to whom they’re communicating it, but they agree it’s not a bad job.
#
Every autumn, one of the office workers takes a few weeks off to practice his secret vocation. He travels to the farmlands beyond the city, visits the yam fields at harvest time, and rushes the best specimens home to his curing room, where he’ll fill the shelves with orange, yellow, purple, and brown lumps. Over a dozen days he’ll monitor the temperature and humidity, maintain the gentlest stirring of air under dim colored lights of his own devising.
His yams are renowned.
The secret is that he sits with them, closed up in the curing room for ten minutes when he wakes up and ten minutes just before bed. He just breathes in and out, slow breaths from deep in his lungs. He pictures starches brightening like embers under his exhalations as they ripen into sugar.
He brings them to the office for lunch, shares them with his coworkers.
One year, they're even better than usual.
The office workers roast them in the break room toaster ovens until the skins crisp, then devour them plain or with a bit of butter, some pepper and oil, or maybe just a pinch of salt.
The rest of the day, everyone is unaccountably happy, nearly singing the passwords. The yam curer glows with an inward pride. The workers’ sweet potato lunches are still buoying them up as they go out into the city with their briefcases at the end of the day.
Although the last page of each briefcase’s printout is a map with instructions for where it should be left, the office workers leave the briefcases with additional flair that afternoon and evening. Not just under the department store women’s restroom sink, but hooked into the curve of the drainpipe. Not just beside the pigeon coop, but inside a briefcase-sized sprinkling of corn and seeds. Not just in a diner booth, but with a napkin tucked under the handle.
The next day, more yams for lunch, more exuberance in the afternoon. Last night’s flair in briefcase hiding has had some kind of feedback effect—for the first time that anyone can remember, the printouts give them new drop-off locations.
Under one of the coin-operated telescopes on the viewing deck of the tallest downtown building. Beside the cart of a food vendor selling fried icefish on the busiest street of the main shopping district. At the back of a row of house-sized transformers in an electrical substation. In an abandoned guard booth beside a stretch of unused train tracks. Under the red carousel horse with the golden mane and the wild look in its rolled-back eyes on the merry-go-round that never stops spinning in the park that never closes.
The yam-curer is a bit concerned that things are moving too quickly, that changes are happening outside anyone’s control. But his co-workers would be disappointed if he didn’t bring in another bag of his yams, so he selects ones from the further corners of his curing room, up near the ceiling, behind the pipe chase where they might not be quite as perfect.
The office that afternoon, however, is like a party, with outbreaks of laughter between passwords and a grand choreography of chairs rolling between workstations. The workers dash from the office to deliver the briefcases to another set of new locations in the city’s hair salons, beaches, abattoirs, and nautical museums.
The yam-curer feels like a storm is sweeping through the quiet routines he’s become accustomed to. All he can do is hang on, keep calling out passwords, keep carrying briefcases, keep bringing yams.
Eventually, however, he reaches the last of this year’s crop. A single yam, shared among the staff, one bite each. The mood the rest of the day is a little melancholy, and the office workers carry their briefcases out into the downtown crowds with a resigned air and downcast eyes.
The yam-curer, for his part, is relieved, looking forward to the return of duller days.
The next day, everyone’s back to reading passwords in a monotone. When they look at the printouts, however, they see that every instruction page shows a map of the outside of their own building, each with an arrow to a different incoming wire. Whatever changes they’ve set in motion have their own momentum now.
The office workers mill around in the parking lot, looking up at the office roof until the yam-curer thinks to run over to the sign-painters’ van and borrow their ladders.
One by one, the office workers go up to the roof and tie their briefcases to a wire with twine that’s been on a shelf in the second-floor storeroom for years. The diagrams on the instructions show that the briefcases should be at least arm’s length from the roof, and it can take a few tries to get the twine tight enough to keep the briefcase from sliding down to rest against the shingles.
The bottom of every instruction page has always carried the same fine print, which no one bothers to read anymore, which has always told them, amid various elaborations and excursions into legalese, to leave the briefcase in the prescribed location and move swiftly but casually away without looking back. While waiting for their turn to go up the ladder, one of the office workers realizes that the fine print has been replaced by a single line, still tiny, but now in all-caps bold: THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
The office workers are all debating what that means, and entirely forgetting to give the painters their ladders back, when the others arrive, the ones they’ve always tried to avoid, the briefcase-finders. Unlike the office workers, the finders have always worked alone. They seem surprised to see the briefcases hanging in the open, even more surprised that there are so many of them, and stunned that there are so many people who clearly intend to do the same work that they’ve been doing, consulting the same or very similar maps, dressed in identical gray slacks and black turtlenecks, trying to work out which briefcase is theirs among those swaying in the breeze coming down off the blue-glass skyscrapers.
The briefcase-finders circle warily at the edge of the parking lot before venturing, first one, then a couple at a time, over to the building and up onto the roof. The office workers stay discretely out of the way as the finders come down again with the briefcases and make their way, fleet and furtive, across the parking lot among the few remaining cars, and melt with visible relief into the crowds and shadows.
When the office workers arrive the next morning, they’re all on edge, not sure what to expect, and the yam-curer has to be the one to lead them in the front door. The briefcase-finders have taken all the seats, are already typing at the terminals. The usual office workers mill around a bit, down a few cups of coffee before gaining the courage to approach the finders, who promptly put them to work reading aloud the printouts from the day before. The printouts are like a story woven out of all the nonsense passwords they’ve ever shouted across the office. At exactly noon, the finders simultaneously hit send on all the terminals.
Nothing happens, at least not right away.
The feeds are empty, the office quiet. The usual workers chat with the others until mid-afternoon when the printer rattles to life. A single page falls into the output tray and there’s a sound overhead like the twanging of giant springs. They all go outside to find that the wires have been cut, and lie like limp snakes all over the evacuated parking lot.
They look at the instructions on the printed sheet, and the yam-curer goes to find the sign-painters and borrow their ladders again. They strip the wires of their insulation, twist them into braids, and loops and spirals, stand their constructions up to build a forest of antennae on the roof. Then they find more instructions on the back of the sheet, something they’ve never seen before. They spend an hour bickering over the more complicated diagrams they find there, and eventually reach consensus as to which stars they should be orienting toward. When the orienting is done, they go back downstairs, watch their screens, wait to see what new instructions will arrive.
It’s a month before anything shows up on the terminals, and then the messages that arrive are in some language whose alphabet is made up of overlapping shapes in bright colors. They need to get a new printer, one that prints on poster-size paper with more vivid inks.
A new routine follows—going out each afternoon with paste made from sub-standard yams and putting the posters up around the city. The sign painters are adopted into the office, their expertise proving to be as indispensable as their ladders.
The city’s inhabitants take the posters for abstract art and the designs become popular. They appear in fabric, on the facades of buildings, in sidewalk chalk art, on the curtains that open to reveal the screen at cinema shows.
The following autumn, the office becomes one large open plan yam-curing room. The whole amalgamated staff of office workers, briefcase finders, and sign-painters breathes through the day, and the original yam-curer carefully tracks levels of humidity and light. They all wait impatiently for the yams to be ready.
When they are, there’s a grand lunch, a jubilant affair, everyone wearing festival clothing made from fabric covered with the alien geometry, the yams roasting on coals spread out in the parking lot, and the old password call and response revived as a kind of choral game. Everyone’s sure that, once the fully matured yam sugars reach their bloodstreams, they’ll be able to read the patterns and finally understand the messages they’ve been printing for the last year.
The original yam-curer is less certain. However, he takes the long-handled tongs and retrieves a yam from the embers, drops it on his plate. He splits the charred skin and it’s a bright ruby color inside. The butter melts on contact, carrying flecks of pepper deeper into the yam’s interior.
All the walls of the lumpy little office building, inside and out, are covered in bright geometry. His co-workers are singing happily under the twisted shadows of the antennae. It’s a good day already, even if it doesn’t bring enlightenment.
He takes the first forkful and waits to see what happens next.
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