from Pure Shit

I returned to work the next morning relieved that my commute was shorter from Aaron’s condo. The arrangement of my workspace had changed. Things were missing from my desktops, both virtual and physical. It appeared that what few tasks I had were being withdrawn from me. Nassim confirmed that his workload had increased, and he was pleased about it. It finally gave his day a continuous pattern of activity. Without tasks being split between us, Nassim enjoyed the opportunity to survey the circuit of the mailroom in its totality. It surprised me to see him so thrilled to manage this space—I had thought we both disdained our workplace equally. The conglomeration of off-whites in the mailroom suffocated me. The fluorescents hummed steadily, distracting me from my search for whatever minor task I could complete. Nassim, now meaningfully engaged, resisted my efforts to joke around with him. He had become possessed with new intent. What had once been his interest in me rearranged itself into a mere patience; within a few days, even that patience inverted. It was colder in the mailroom; the thermostat displayed the same temperature.

Even if I had been left something to do, I didn’t understand how I could return to it without drifting into recurrent fantasies of camp. The light there—how it reflected against the rich green of the fields. It had a completely different quality from any light I’ve since been under. A mercurial feeling set in and confounded me. Something metallic was flowing in my body, leeching from me, tiring me, heavy. It was reminiscent of either a fever or hangover, though I knew it could be neither. I was compressed in the reverberations of something my mind couldn’t do away with. 

Nassim was suddenly so chipper performing his job. For our bosses! Who had never done us any good in our lives! I regarded him with envy—I had had years to be granted more responsibility, and I hadn’t been. What did it matter now that I knew what else I could do with a day? I shifted around in my chair and let out small, pouting exhalations as I tried in vain to settle down. I looked down at my arms and pressed one into the other, clutching and releasing my wrist with increasing force. For a few moments, this grounded me. I needed these sensations to stop me from thinking about my week away. Once I started applying words to the situation, it got worse. If I filled the distinction between being at work and being at camp with further thoughts, restlessness became clear misery. How long it would be before I returned? Would my joy at camp be revived with a return, or would the situation lose its novelty? How could I tolerate my present boredom? Is a life this mundane even tenable for a human being? How could I go on like this? How is a person expected to go on?

I pinched under my thighs, massaging them. I thought of spirit without antidote as a storm of anticipation that wouldn’t break.

During my previous bouts of absenteeism, the company had intervened—not with discipline but with a mocking form of corporate soft power that invited me to find purpose and family in my job as a functionary for this asset management corporation. They were threatened by employee misery not out of concern for us, but because staff malaise had some relationship to acts of refusal (absenteeism, general ill will, and, at worst, the potential unionization of lowly office staff). This encouraged the company to adopt certain acts of social engineering (human relations policies) to alleviate the lack of corporate connection and internalized responsibility of myself and other employees. These interventions, of course, were meaningless. I had resisted them in the past. I would not download their apps and I would not attend their behavioural therapy sessions. But now, I wasn’t being offered them anymore—it was certain that the legality of my dismissal was being ascertained. 

For two weeks longer, I consoled myself knowing that the company was wasting its expenditure on me and that I could take advantage of this paid time. As long as I clocked in and out when asked, I could do whatever I pleased. This only rendered my failure to do so embarrassing. I thought that if I managed it right, I could let my fantasies of an elsewhere carry me through my days, but the images were blowing out through over-exposure. I was chewing through the meat of my fantasies and leaving little of them behind. I could not stop thinking of my last afternoon with Jane. I’d played and replayed a reel of her rubdown in my mind and the image had become unequivocally sexual. I took a perfectly mundane therapeutic encounter, one of potentially hundreds that she must have carried out over the years, and twisted it into a sexual fantasy of such magnitude that it reigned supreme over my days for weeks. Lying there and being stroked by her made every bit of the impact on me that sleeping with her might have—more, likely, because no anticipation resolved into the lazy afterglow of fucking. I could still feel all the want suspended inside of me, floating around electric. Her hands pressing around, how it felt to lay myself out under her. I am trying not to over-sexualize her. I am trying to focus on the fact that this memory’s hold on me simply comes from my adoration for her. I am trying inhabit our relationship’s sweetness instead of profaning it with obscene quantities of lust.

I was failing. I had been staring blankly into the middle ground toward the office wall for an uncertain amount of time suspended in my imagination. I shuddered and shot an embarrassed glance at Nassim. He had not noticed. He had other things to do. 

I stared down a folder of old emails on Outlook—former problems, none worth resolving. I took long, expensive lunches alone, but it was often too windy to walk around. Small whirlwinds formed on the least pleasant days in the negative space between skyscrapers, leaving corridors unnavigable. I’d step out and spring back just as quickly, sniffly, chapped, and with my hair a mess. I had been working for this company for two years and always hated it, but I could savour my hatred as a protective element of my self-constitution, knowing by my exposure to this environment what I was against. Boredom had been tolerable as a process of controlled dissociation. Work’s tedium was a flat forgiveness of time. I had hours during which I felt disconnected from myself, but I was asked to be. It was bland but necessitated. I was in the service of something required. When my job made me angry, I could appreciate it. Mild annoyance had a generative element—I would leave here eager to balance the waste of these hours with something better. I could take the elevator down to the break room and eavesdrop as the most evil men discussed the most evil things—multimillionaires with nothing inside them casually discussing the razing and reconstruction of entire towns for no reason but to watch numbers grow. I could look at them, return home, and think, I have seen hell’s own demons, and I am against them. It was a galvanizing experience to make twenty-seven thousand dollars annually—a fresh grand for each year I had been alive—to service and be disrespected by exactly the people who ensured that this wasn’t a livable sum. I could watch them make their jokes, dribble coffee out of their mouths, buckle their belts hastily leaving the bathroom. I hated this job, but I loved, at least, knowing which hours I was selling myself and which hours I was my own. 

This wouldn’t suffice any longer. The private psychodramas of observation, the gentle cradling of monotony, the episodic frissons of irritation against co-workers who had not learned my name—none of this could carry me through eight and a half daily hours in this tower any longer. I thought of all the simmering delight I took in years of impotent rage, passive to my cooperation with the company. Another man eating another danish told another misogynist joke, talking about a recent date, the price of her meal, and how many more of them it would take before he owned her. Previously, I had comforted myself thinking, they are so stupid, these vacuous men, knowing nothing but the sickness of autonomous climb—they don’t even know I’m in the room! But they have always known that I was in the room. They tell the jokes to generate the anger that gets stuffed back inside, circulating impotently. They tell the jokes and I enjoy my disgust while I cart around their correspondence. Their very stupidity was a part of the infrastructure that made the whole operation function. A few months ago, and I would have been on fire thinking this, going for a beer after work, telling a friend about it, raving. But now I couldn’t even take pleasure in my loathing. A recognition that had substituted for potency now fell back to its true form: watching. Finally, I was finished watching things I no longer wanted to see. 

I stopped coming in. I had already collected the developer’s money and given up my apartment; I would simply continue to collect my employer’s money until they notice I’m gone and stop depositing it. I would look for something else, something meaningful. Or I wouldn’t—it makes no difference. The cushioning of payment is the extension of time. My future would be drawn out as futurelessness until it contracted back toward debt. 

Catherine Fatima

Catherine Fatima is a writer from Toronto whose work investigates capital, desire, misery, and the threading of each into the other. Her first novel, Sludge Utopia, was published with Book*hug Press in 2018. She currently lives in Montreal where she is completing an MA in Translation at Concordia University. Her upcoming book, Pure Shit, is about a rural therapeutic community.

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