he was living in the golden dream world in which young men, mounted on
the wings of an if,
easily float above all barriers - Balzac
This rented apartment is small but it doesn't matter. I only eat, sleep and write on my computer all day long. There was no training at The Stables, so I learn by myself. I play with the words, put them together, take them apart. I study the classics and read the Orange Magazine for tips and inspiration. I even compose my own little stories now and then. The kitchen cabinets, owing to these paper-thin walls, are placed on the floor next to my bed. The kitchen is thus empty except a stove and just enough room to cut an onion and a carrot once a week. The only person I befriend here is the old man with his half-dead little dog. We say 'hi' when we see each other. Otherwise, this unfamiliar city seems lifeless even on this last day of the year. A few Christmas trees are blinking in the windows and some faint music is playing here and there. I'd love some baked flavors from the hands of my lady once I return home from this short walk. But there's none of that. There is no lady. I had a pack of biscuits today instead of my usual soup. It's the New Years' Eve, after all! I undress and continue my studies in front of the computer. I didn't hear the fireworks. I must fell asleep. I can't remember.
"I need no geniuses in my team!" our Cat scorns us when we're back at The
Stables. We believe him. We scarcely do any intellectual activities around
here. Our contracts say we should, but we don't. Our colleagues from
Headquarters write all the stories, they do the research, go in the field,
draw up our heroes and villains, put freedom and hopes into their mouths. We,
the Writers of the Future,
as our official motto
goes, what do we actually do? We're mostly proofreaders, we change a word here
and there, adjust the intensity of these winter colors and spot grammar
mistakes. I could get creative and sign my emails with a "stay strong, my
brother, much happiness to your hat," but it's against the rules. They must all
end "with kind regards."
Someone joins our team... but who?! We only know that Genius has sent her
to a different floor for lack of chairs in our office. I ask around, find her
out and go over to say 'hi.' I do the same on the next day. And the next. It
only takes me five minutes, after all. Aren't you the translator of the Big
Book of Symbols and Letters?
Dee suddenly asks me. Yes, I am! Of course I
am! I used your manuscript to learn for my exams! It was the best!
she
goes on. She has two weeks to finish her word puzzles as part of her initial
training. "But who is your mentor?" I ask. "Mentor?!" she asks. So I become
her mentor. I help her figure out the word puzzles, we ask questions and find
answers together, I encourage her to write on her own and feel the words
flowing. She loves it, she says. At the end of two weeks, a chair appears! Dee
is officially admitted into our team. I've enjoyed playing the teacher and so,
without any official approval from the Cats, I establish my Undercover Academy
for Junior Writers right here in The Stables.
Genius himself discovers these two words, Symbols and Letters. But badly. He mixes their meaning. I try to explain. I hand him the manuscript in its original form. He doesn't believe me. He is unmoved. He doesn't even want to open it. I give examples. I suggest other reading resources. Older manuscripts. Our University courses. No. Nothing. I believe he doesn't even like to read. He nonetheless tours the office like a would-be president preaching his special interpretation of them in a loud voice, going from chair to chair, from colleague to colleague, spreading his knowledge. He wants everybody to learn. You cannot choose not to hear him. He is so loud, he is so insisting, that your only choice is to listen.
Smirk, another Cat, also tours our office, but with gifts. A wireless
mouse and a wireless keyboard. For your great work and accomplishments,
he
says, and hands them over to one of our colleagues. Two days later, he's back
with his speech and bearing the same gifts for another colleague. Soon, we are
all prized. When my turn comes, I refuse. I've spent months looking for these
elegant, retro style keycaps. Months looking for the perfect
keyboard. Personally, I like the loud one I have back home, my empty room
fills with music when I type on it. For work, I have acquired a discreet one,
out of consideration for my colleagues. Smirk is loosing his patience with my
passionate speech. According to our Chief Cat instructions, we must all
clear our desks of cables and clutter and keep our office lean and clean, so
you must accept them!
he demands. I am keyboarded against my wishes. We
throw our perfectly fine writing equipment in a former meeting room turned
junkyard until peaks and valleys begin to form. Our Chief Cat officially
rebrands this waste as our recycling initiative.
The Chief Cat and his advisers rent us a conference room in a nice hotel
with free snacks and drinks. We get a day off to brainstorm ideas to improve
our team morale and efficiency. That's the word the Cats like. Efficiency!
There's enough storm in our heads to last a decade. But our personalities hit
a wall of furry heads with fake smiles plastered on them. "So how would you
improve things? How would you do better if you were in our place?" the heads
ask us. How would we know?! We're writers! Just let us write! Gives us
plenty of paper and let us write! When we are adventurous enough to reply, we
are called absurd. In the best case, we get tasked with filling up yet another
form, being responsible for yet another monotonous activity, of which we
already have plenty. "Give us two hours per week to read, study and write
about anything we want! You know, to improve our skills!" one pioneer says. I
like it! Much better than the endless talk about the bad food in the
cafeteria. "Well, yes, but how would I sell this idea to the Chief Cat? Who
would pay for those two hours? What would Headquarters say? Hmm? Tell me!"
Genius instantly goes on the counteroffensive. He doesn't even pretend to be
on our side, on the side of the pen. Our agitator drops it. Dee raises her
little fingers and is handed the microphone, when I joined The Stables, I
was sent to a different part of the building, as you all know. I felt so alone
there. Only M here came to visit me daily, say 'hi', and make me feel like I
was part of the team.
I count my former students. Fifteen. My Undercover Academy proved a
success. I've learned more from you in two weeks than from my professor
back in school,
one clandestine student told me. Did they learn from me?
Or with me? Or from themselves? Who knows. We just explored subjects together,
freely, without deadlines, without a fixed curiculum. They even had the
freedom to write their own story, sit down and write their own ideas, with
their own pen. But slowly, the Academy has become part of the official
training. Smirk and Genius had the idea of improving it. They forced everybody
to come up with ideas, adjustments, plans, what if scenarios, let's add this,
let's add that. For the good of the team. Meetings have taken place to discuss
the curriculum, deadlines introduced, an official calendar set up, who does
what, how long it should take, extra puzzles and exercises with correct
answers given directly by the computer, things have been automated, mentors
assigned and trained for each of the subject. This new direction is beyond
me. I don't understand it. I don't understand its purpose nor the
materials. So I'm handing over the reins of my Academy to somebody else.
Luckily, I find two other colleagues with whom to go out for fresh air
once in a while. But there is nowhere to actually go. The Stables is located
near the airport and close to other gray-looking buildings and factories. We
could escape beyond its fences only with special approval. Even so, where
would we go? Left? Right? It's all the same. It's a treeless, barren field
where cows and sheep used to graze. So we just circle our building like caged
animals. When we are bored and want to try something different, we circle it
in the opposite direction. We exchange jokes, our dreams for the future, and
little stories from our past. In summer, we sometimes find brightly colored
flowers, so tiny that we bend on our knees to greet them. They smile back at
us in complete silence. What are they thinking about? Where did they come
from? The wind brought them here by mistake, how else could they choose to
call this symmetric lawn their 'home'? One colleague finds four-leaf clovers
all the time and he's not even trying. He has collected more than ten in his
notebook already. We saw them. We too try our luck, but in vain. I bet I
could eat this whole field for breakfast and I'd find exactly zero lucky
clovers! How the hell can you spot them?!
The Beard, our other colleague,
entertains us.
Why you keep telling jokes all the time,
Genius begins my
performance evaluation. I'm confused. Maybe he even likes them!
Hehehe!
Smirk remarks and they both laugh. He reads the long list of
standard performance indicators and I 'meet expectations.' That's not
bad. That's not great either. "Well," Genius goes on to the next item on the
list, "me and Smirk here can see you handle satire pretty well, but 'exceeds
expectations' is for those who teach the subject, and you're not a professor
of satire now, are you? Hehehe.." I could be. My colleague does much
better. He gets promoted to staff writer, which means he gets to write and
decide the direction of our stories. He gets invited in the weekly meetings
with Headquarters to discuss important matters. But he says
nothing. Absolutely nothing. I know for a fact, I sit next to him. "I don't
understand anything about what these people are saying, man! You should be in
my place!" he confesses to me. After a few weeks of these silent meetings, he
doesn't get an invite anymore. That's the third week they didn't call
me. They must forgot about me,
he says. He's back at proofreading, like we
all are, with nothing written in his name.
I keep writing in my free time. About whatever. About the cows, the skies, about the complete, dead-end silence, about my daily experiences. I mostly like to observe people and their movements, the contradictions, the colorful posters plastered in schools, on the TV, in the movies, the constant marketing, the constant selling of daily life by the sneaky Cats and the actual reality around me. Even when we were kids, we used to paint only happy houses and trees, and yellow suns and free birds on blue skies. It never rained then. No, it never rained. I publish a piece in the Orange Magazine. My story is liked. People are reading it. They send emails of encouragement and approval. The cars outside, parked under my window with their engines running, spew toxic fumes inside my room again. I never meet my readers, though. I never saw them. I never will. I didn't even see their hand writing, only identical letters on the computer screen. I'm not sure I even know their real names. Maybe they're machines. Maybe they're aliens.
Back at The Stables, Dee moves up the ranks. We're not sure this position exists officially. But her voice gets louder. Her little fingers don't point up anymore, but sideways. "Look, look! He doesn't want to work!" she admonishes me one day. "He's lazy" she complains to Genius in front of all, as he passes through the office. I try to explain my dreams again. I'm trying, as politely as I can, to refuse the same monotonous assignments we keep receiving from Headquarters. I wish we'd write ourselves. I wish we'd write our own dreams, even if full of mistakes, even if dull for now. Dull dreams, but ours, original, creative, discovered by us, for us, instead of constantly proofreading the intellectual outpourings of others. Yes, that would be my dream. In another part of the office, three colleagues are hunched over a manuscript. "This is good stuff, man! Really good stuff! We should study this!" I hear them say. I approach them. "What did you find? What are you reading?" I ask casually. "Go away, man! Leave us alone!" one of them replies arrogantly. The Lucky Clover admonishes them with all his might, "you should be ashamed of yourselves, man! You really should!" He saw it. I saw it, too. I saw what they were reading on their computer. I saw it with the corner of my eye. It was The Big Book of Symbols and Letters. I acknowledge defeat and buy I bicycle. I go out of the city, explore the roads, the countryside, the woods, the streams, say 'hi' to the kids waving at me in the villages, talk with the cows when they return home at sunset. In silence.
"Solve these," Chief says at the start of our interview. They're the same
word puzzles I know by heart already. I take my pen and lay down my words
carefully. I even manage to summon a sweet scent of spring. When Chief returns
half an hour later, I put my future into his hairy hands. "What is this?!" he
admonishes me right on the first sentence. "Why do you write like this?" he
continues. "Well, I saw a similar style in The Years of the Butterfly. It's a
classic! Isn't it beautiful?" I reply. He is unmoved. His hand draws waves of
disapproval, even. "Oh, the Years of the Fly!... of the Butterfly! Anyway! We
are specialists in a different field around here!" He gives my letter to his
assistant. I look this literature inspector in his eye. His silent confusion
is clearly visible. He's not sure if my solution is correct. He's not sure if
my solution is wrong, either. He tries to be smooth about it, but I'm right
there in front of them as Inspector leans over and whispers in Chief's ear,
"what the... what is this puzzle about? I haven't seen it before!" "Oh, you
can ignore that," Chief replies with an irritated voice, his gaze fixed
somewhere in the distance. Inspector is back at my letter. He hesitates,
scratches his head and utters his first only and words, "yeah, looks good to
me!" "So what are you writing about in your magazine?" I ask eventually. He
gives me an example of the same style of writing we talked about earlier. I
ignore this shameful illiteracy on the part of the chief editor and put
forward my financial expectations. Oh! But not even our experts make that
kind of money!
He is willing to buy my pen, but at a significant
discount. He even calls me the following week and insists that this is a
great opportunity for you to learn and thrive, but if you're only interested
in money, well, then...
I find out their area of expertise from an
insider, a former colleague from The Stables. They are not writers, they are
officially proofreaders.
I explore other journals, magazines and editing houses. Anything that has
to do with the written word. But I get the feeling they're all the same at
heart. The same splashy mottoes, the same tedious activities. One evening,
when returning home from a failed interview, I break up crying. It's autumn,
it's raining, I again walk home alone like I always do, there was nobody
waiting for me at the train station, there are again no baked goodies in the
oven, there is no lady waiting for me at home. Will there again be a silent
end of the year behind the computer? Eventually, I find something, if only to
dream again, if only to put another if
on these hopes, if only to
postpone reality for a few more years.
It's a hot summer. We temporarily moved our offices from the barren
field. We finally ran out of chairs for our ever increasing team of
experts. We are now closer to the city center. But life is not necessarily
better here. The monotony, the long days, the identical tasks, the same yellow
bus to and from The Stables in the morning and in the evening, the same
grammar mistakes to proofread, the same lack of stories to write, the same
Genius. We at least have more freedom in our walks. There is no fence
now. There are even some trees around here. But when it rains, we can't go
out. The roads are not paved yet. It's my last day. Goodbye's and smiles and
nice meeting you
. The same standard endings like in our emails. Before
I close the door behind me, I hear The Beard calling me, "Wait, wait! I'll
walk with you!" We exchange our usual jokes and stories in front of the
building. He still didn't manage to find any lucky clovers. Me neither. Then
we're off to some good wishes and stay strong
s and, unexpectedly, he
gives me a friendly hug I'll always remember and we depart.
Dedicated to The Beard, The Lucky Clover and the tiny flowers, the only signs of life spotted around The Stables many, many years ago, when we were young, hopeful and dreaming