Rus Like Everyone Else (21 page)

“Yes,” Rus said, “let's see.” His voice quivered a little bit. Nervously he looked up from his desk. Around him everyone was flicking through heaps of files and tapping on the keyboards, not once looking up from their desks. Rus lowered his gaze, and with a hesitant move of his hand he took the Chinese number list, following the lines with his fingertips. After twenty minutes he whispered triumphantly: “Six thousand seven hundred ninety-nine televisions sold!”

Form by form Rus continued like this, looking up the words,
translating the numbers, and after a few hours he could recognize the word for “profit” and for “sold.” When at one o'clock the others got up to go to lunch, Rus ate Wanda's sandwiches behind the screen, quietly mumbling things like “five hundred thirty beds, sold for eight thousand” and “one hundred old-fashioned birdcages, sold for eight hundred and ten.”

One by one he translated the amounts and entered them into the computer. He was determined to be focused, to make it through his trial period, to make Wanda happy, and to buy a briefcase to replace the bag.

EMPTY GIRL

The secretary was sitting at her gray desk, watching the gray clock tick. She had been doing it for a few hours now. Aside from that, she had not really done anything. It had started that morning, when she came into the office two hours late and her gray telephone rang.

It seems as though I'm not picking it up, the secretary had thought as she looked at the phone that was ringing, ringing, ringing and then stopped. When she sat down, she noticed that she did not open her e-mail, and when someone came in to see the manager, she'd said, “He is not in,” although he was. There was a conference call to introduce a new employee, but she did not pick up. The files people placed on her desk she first stacked on the table against the window, but later she had opened the window, shoved the files out, and watched them fall into the dumpster in the parking lot.

It was very strange behavior. The lawyer had sent her a memo saying that he needed to see her in the copy room in five minutes, but she did not go. She put the note through the paper shredder. She also put all the Post-its on her desk through the paper shredder, and all her files and books. All she had done from then on was stare at the glass wall in front of her, stare at the gray clock, stare at the gray people who were moving through the hallway like an old black-and-white movie, except that they were using mobile phones. The people passing by glanced at her, and when the manager
walked past her desk he had asked if she had any idea where his laundry was. When she said she didn't, he stared at her for a moment and just said, “I see, I see.”

At five a boy came in her office to bring the packages. He brought her the colorless pencils, the colorless dress, and the colorless wallpaper that she'd ordered on the Internet.

At that moment the lawyer came into her office, shouting, “We are not signing anything!” He yanked the clipboard out of the boy's hands and started rummaging through the packages. “I have been waiting four days now for my racing suit.” One by one he picked up the packages and threw them on the floor. “I am going racing on the circuit this weekend with the shareholders. My suit was supposed to be here four days ago. Where is it?”

“I don't know,” the package boy said. “This is all I have.”

The secretary saw the lawyer's cheeks turn dark gray with anger, and he squeezed his eyes into slits as he looked the package boy up and down.

“So this is all you have,” he said. He put his hands on his hips. “And what if I say I don't believe it. What if I think you know where my suit is. I think you should take another good look in your van and bring me my suit.”

The boy picked the clipboard and the pen up from the floor. “I don't have your stupid suit,” he said. His hands were shaking a little bit as he put the pen back in his pocket. He glanced at the secretary.

“I am going to file a complaint against you if you don't apologize,” the lawyer said.

The boy's eyes darted to the secretary. Then he turned around and stepped in the elevator.

“I'm a lawyer,” the lawyer shouted after him. “I can get you fired in a second!”

The glass doors closed and the boy sank away behind the glass. Abruptly, the lawyer turned around toward the secretary. He pointed at her.

“You,” he said. “You have not answered the phone all day. Everybody knows it. What game are you playing?”

The secretary looked up at the lawyer's face. He was normally a tanned brown color, but his skin was now gray. A few hairs had
gotten away from the grip of his hair gel and shone in the light of the ceiling lamp.

“I don't see any color,” the secretary said. “Since this morning everything is gray to me. It is a mental problem.”

For a few moments, the lawyer said nothing. He just shook his head rapidly, letting out short, sharp breaths.

Then he said, “I can't believe this,” and “After all I've done for you.” He turned around and walked out of her office. He tried to slam the door, but his coat got stuck so he had to open it again and take his coat out. The secretary looked at the gray veins in her wooden desk. She drew a stripe on the desk for every second the clock ticked, drew stripes all over her desk for minutes and minutes, until the office got emptier and emptier, and at six she took her coat and her plastic bags and got up.

THE BOSS'S SON

The Queen sat in front of the mirror in her black Memorial Service robe and her crown with the dark red rubies. She touched her face with her hand.

“Don't you think it's strange,” she said to the boss's son without looking at him, “that I am the Queen? That I am the Queen?”

“Yes,” the boss's son said. “I never thought I'd meet you.”

“No,” the Queen said impatiently, “not in that sense. Not in the sense that it is special or unique. I mean”—she stroked the mirror—“that it is strange that I am the Queen. The whole idea of it.”

“You mean it surprises you that you are the Queen,” the boss's son said.

Angrily the Queen shook her head. “This”—she pointed at her reflection—“is the Queen. And I am that.” She took the mirror and held it desperately up to the boss's son. “Don't you think it is strange?”

“Well,” the boss's son said, “if you are precise, it is not the Queen you see in the mirror, but the reflection of light on a flat glass surface.”

The Queen sighed. She closed her eyes for a moment.

“Take your shoes off,” she said.

Quickly the boss's son took his boots off his feet. The Queen got
up from her chair and smashed the mirror on the ground in front of the boss's son's feet.

“Walk over it,” she said.

The glass broke under his feet.

The Queen looked at the blood seeping from the glass onto the carpet, and she covered her face with her hands. “No,” she said sadly, “that does not prove anything.”

THREE O'CLOCK

As the day went by, Rus got better and better at entering the numbers, faster and faster at translating the amounts of materials collected and the amounts of materials sold. He worked without stopping for hours, and only looked up at three o'clock when the telephone and printer noises around him ceased suddenly, and he saw that all his colleagues had gotten up from their desks. Voices and laughs and a smell that reminded him of Starbucks came from a corner of the work floor.

Rus stood up from his desk and walked toward the voices, but there was no Starbucks there, just a kitchen block with a coffee machine and an enormous bottle of water that was standing upside down.

The colleagues stopped talking when Rus walked toward them.

“This is the coffee corner,” one of the women said eventually. “We always have a cup of coffee at three.”

Fokuhama was pouring coffee into the coffee cups of the women.

“I always used to go to the Starbucks,” Rus said. He took a cup from the table and held it up too.

Fokuhama stopped pouring the coffee. The colleagues looked at one another.

“I'm sorry,” the woman said. “We all have our own mugs. And this one is Fokuhama's.”

“Oh,” Rus said.

“Otherwise no one does the dishes,” the woman said. “No one feels responsible for the dishes. They all think, Oh, that was not my cup, and they leave it there. It gets very messy.”

Rus put the cup back on the table. He turned around and
walked back to his desk, feeling the eyes of his colleagues on his back. Right leg, right arm, left leg, left arm, and he sat down at his desk where he continued to read and translate and type, file after file. A scratching sound started in the air vent above his head, but Rus kept his head bent and pushed it away, working steadily through the files.

PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS

The secretary came out of the office and walked onto the business square. The square was busy with people coming out of offices and the wind blew trash down the street. She walked away from the office, her coat wrapped tightly around her body. A woman passed her by, pulling a suitcase behind her. The lack of color made the world around her seem further away than ever. As if it had nothing to do with her. There were TV screens on the buildings showing commercials for shoes. In the café for after-work drinks there were men in men's suits talking to women in women's suits, drinking beer and wine. She could hear bits of conversations drifting toward her: “always finding opportunities to move forward, otherwise you're going backward,” “then I think, Come on guys, what is the corporate value of all this?” “I am the type of person who goes through with these deals, who goes for the last penny—that is just me.”

The secretary stood still. She dropped her bag on the pavement. It was the first time since she started working in the office that she wasn't daydreaming as she walked home: going over the small conversations she'd had that day, or planning future events, or thinking about how she was going to make a joke and how everyone would laugh. The longing that had filled her thoughts and her days was missing and it scared her. For the first time she really saw the world around her, not only registering what people were saying but really hearing it, not only looking at the tall office buildings but really seeing the dark rectangles against the gray sky.