The Mimosa Effect 2

This week’s SS prompt of Destination is particularly apt, considering I’ve been thinking a lot about various destinations lately – places I want to go, both metaphorically and physically, in the new year.  I’ve just committed myself to another round of NaNo insanity by joining up with NaNoWriYe (setting a word count goal for the entire year).  Considering how much of the past two months has been taken up working on my new novel in progress, Sleeping Underwater, I thought it about time that I started posting some excerpts here.  Note that all of these are first draft, so the writing will occasionally be somewhat rough.  This bit introduces one of our seven main characters, who is plagued by dreams in which his only destiny is a kind of Kafka-esque nightmare existence, where the only escape is to simply fade away.

Dreams of Inconsequence

It is a cold, bitter day, with a close grey sky.  Leaves chase the man down the street, newspapers catch at his feet as he walks.  He walks with his head down, shoulders hunched into the chill wind.  He walks with a determined stride, that of a person aiming to be somewhere on time, and not a minute too late.  The buildings rise grey and straight around him, their eyes dark and empty.  Here and there, he imagines he sees a spot of colour; a curtain, perhaps, or a potted plant.  Now and then he imagines he sees faces; at one point, he is certain of it.  A white cat is watching him from a second story window, still as a statue.  Its eyes never blink as he walks past. 

There are a few other people on the street; unremarkable people, bent as he is into the wind, dressed in shades of beige and grey, brown and darker brown.  They wear sensible shoes, and overcoats, black gloves.  The men wear black hats, simple fedoras, or the occasional warmer, fur-lined variety. The women’s heads are covered in thick black scarves that cover their mouths.

The stocky man quickens his step, noticing the time on the village clock, which sits like a giant eye in the center of the tower that rises from the town square.  The man looks perhaps twenty-five, from what one can glimpse of his face, but the lines around his eyes are those of someone much older.  One hand is plunged deep into his coat pocket; the other carries a simple dark brown briefcase with a silver latch and hinges.  He looks like he was built for efficiency; not too tall or lanky, with wide feet (but not too wide), the better able to retain heat in the cold winter, and keep his balance on the ice and slush.  His stride is long for his height, and lengthens further as the clock tower begins to toll the start of the hour. 

Dong.  The sun is barely visible through the layer of clouds, a hint of remembered light only.

Dong.  The man jogs up the stone steps to the set of double doors, where he is joined by a handful of other hurrying figures.

Dong.  His black gloved hand emerges from his pocket, and he pushes his way through the right hand door.  It is made of heavy oak, with no decorations save a date carved into its top quadrant, which is faded and worn: 1853.

Dong.  The man walks the long corridor, passing several nondescript doors.  Each door has a small glass window in the top, through which he can see nothing, save a faint yellow glow, as of gas light.  His footsteps echo on the marble floor.  The marble is polished to a high sheen, which does little to brighten its leaden grey colour.  The streaks and whorls in it seem to lend it a kind of depth, as if one were walking on a frozen pond. 

Dong.  The man has imagined, more than once, that one day the ice might break, and send them all tumbling to the depths below.

On the sixth, and final, heavy toll of the bell, still audible even behind the thick stone walls, the man finally comes to a stop, before a particular doorway.  The only thing that distinguishes it from the other doors, is that it is the stocky man who enters it, rather than one of the other men, entering the other, identical doors; that, and a tiny, tarnished brass number above the murky glass window: 12a.

The man remembers the door of his classroom in grade school.  It had the same number on it.  He finds this peculiar, but not terribly interesting.  He pushes open the door, and enters a room that is at once loud, and oddly quiet.

The room is loud, in that it is filled with the constant, incessant tapping of plastic keys, under hundreds of fingers.   The room is divided in a grid; five wide, by some dozen or so deep, of identical cubicles.  Each cubicle is divided from the others by three walls, each about chest height, if one were to measure them by the stocky man.  The man , who appeared rather shorter than average when walking the street, now appears to be a rather average height, now that he has straightened up.  He walks briskly about halfway down the corridor at the left-hand edge of the room.  He nods at several cubicle dwellers as he passes by, as they briefly glance up.  They nod in return, then bend their heads back to stare at their computer screens.  The sound of fingers on keys never stops.

The man ducks into a cubicle, shedding his coat and gloves and hat in a smooth motion, arranging them on a small but sturdy looking stand.  Each cubicle contains the same wrought iron coat stand.  It comes to about chest-height on the man, and contains three hooks, tipped with round knobs.  He once tried to estimate how old they were, and failed.  They could have been pulled from a bog a thousand years ago; they could be younger than he was (although he doubted it). 

He flicks on a switch on the power bar that is riveted to the outer edge of the desk, and the computer hums to life.  The screen flickers on.  It is, in theory, a colour monitor, except that there is very little colour displayed on it.  The background is a black-and-white picture of the outside of the building.  The desktop icons are in shades of grey and a kind of monochrome pallet of dark sepia.  Beside the computer are several piles, in several stacked crates.  On the left, are the incoming files.  On the right, are the outgoing files.  At this time of day, the outgoing crates are empty.  By the end of the day, the two sides will have reversed, and the left crates will be empty.  The following morning, the cycle will repeat itself.

The man’s job is not immediately clear, but that he is responsible for steadily moving the files from one side to the next is obvious.  The casual observer, after watching him all day, might still not be entirely sure what changes have been made throughout this process; only that it involves entering a great deal of data into the computer, via the keyboard.   The mouse is rarely used; the man has memorized all the keyboard shortcuts, and has little need for it.  He does not mind; it means he can work all day without pain in his wrists.  For the pain in his hips and shoulders, which is so constant that he has become quite used to it, there is a small bottle of white pills and a bottle of filtered water.  The man does not need to provide either pills or water.  At the beginning of each day, each is refreshed as needed.  The pills are refreshed as soon as the bottle is empty.  The water is refreshed regardless of whether he has finished the previous day’s supply.  The man finds this rather wasteful, but is unsure of who to complain to about it.  He has tried putting suggestions into the suggestion box, but gave up the practice after several years, once he realized that no one ever seemed to read them. 

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