At midnight my head hit the pillow and I remembered the fish. Had I fed it or not? I got out of bed. Removed the fish from the aquarium. Put it in a deep plastic container. Went to clean the aquarium. Maybe the fish is sick. The aquarium slipped through my fingers and shattered in the sink. I left it there. Afterward, I put some food in the plastic container and the fish swam around. It looked quite pleased to me. I feed it on Mondays and Thursdays. But sometimes it’s hard to remember when Mondays and Thursdays are. I get the schedule wrong. My monthly period too. It was always very punctual and I could gauge when it was coming. Painless nuclear nerves. At a certain stage, I installed an app that told me when my period was coming. I wrote down the symptoms that appeared before, during, and after. And also when I last had sex, if at all, and with whom. I got the cell phone from the company. The company also pays the monthly cell phone bill. From time to time, they replace the cell phone. Everyone’s. Usually an upgrade. At other times, if stolen or damaged, they agree to replace it. Many numbers have been lost or erased because of upgrades. Or the opposite, doubled and tripled. Mostly I don’t pay attention. The main problem is with the dates. The app syncs with the latest update but sometimes it’s not accurate enough. In these cases, I completely lose count.
*
Woman in workspace—are you bored? What are you thinking of now? You have thirty-seven unread emails in your inbox. There are also assignments written on the whiteboard—in your handwriting, I see you’ve made an effort to write legibly. Someone enters the room. He’s talking to you, can you hear? Now he puts a hand on your desk, leans against it, peers at the computer screen, you discuss a document. He asks you for something, an issue for which you have sole responsibility, he asks a very simple question, the answer should already be on the tip of your tongue, now is the time to answer because he has finished talking, woman in workspace, he has stopped talking, has been silent for at least five seconds, I know, because this is about the same time it took me to say: woman in workspace
Company 3
There were whispered rumors by the break room. In the conference room. Before the meeting. Mumblings. Mutual suspicions. Assessment of options. Job searches. The vast majority staying on in the meanwhile. At the initial stage, the start-up had been able to raise huge sums from investors in Israel and abroad. Now the money was slowly being eaten away. The start-up had initially attracted attention. That’s no longer sufficient. The investors are beginning to walk away. To cut off the cash flow. The opposite of what happened at the beginning. Back then the CEO received a commitment from the Israeli tycoon and chief investor in the elevator on the way out of their first meeting. Today the Israeli tycoon is still one of the main investors in the start-up. In the beginning, he met the CEO in his own offices. But the meeting was curtailed in the middle. The tycoon had to leave early, his car awaited him outside in the parking lot. In order to make the most of the last few moments at his disposal, the CEO went down in the elevator with the tycoon. When the elevator doors opened onto the parking lot, he agreed to invest in the venture. It was no mean sum, a hundred million dollars. Now it’s all been eaten away. People are talking.
*
Woman in workspace—are you staring into space? I see. Who are you thinking of? Two months have passed. You haven’t moved. Go ahead and click click click with the mouse, organize the folders in your mailbox, organize those in your computer too, in My Documents, sort everything into folders, that will fill half the day, maybe more. And at least you won’t just sit around wallowing in your own fabrications. The time has come to grapple with the lost assignment, the one you always leave to the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the end. The one you’ve avoided updating at the weekly meeting, or the monthly meeting, certainly not at the annual employees’ performance review meeting—this is the assignment they also forget, every one of your managers at every single place you’ve ever worked. You chew time until it falls apart between your teeth. It’s five in the afternoon, can you hear the beeping? They’re being summoned to the shuttle. Now you remember to start working, here in the quiet, now no one will answer emails, all the air conditioners have been switched off and only the breaths
Company 4
In the afternoon, the day before the visit of the big delegation, the small engine died. It stopped the machine and jeopardized the demo. After hours of testing and trial runs the source of the malfunction was located: a small pin that had eroded away inside the engine assembly. A spare part was found. The project was still in the experimental stage and not all the sensors, programmed to alert in real time and to automatically report malfunctions, were working. We disconnected some of them manually in order to avoid rebooting the system on every test run. Some of them were temporarily reprogrammed in reverse, to accelerate the work pace.
Three team members, sixteen hours inside the machine. Endless cups of coffee, a large and complicated system evaluated at two and a half million dollars. One day before the visit, the system shut down completely. At a certain stage, we removed all the covers and caps protecting the internal system in an effort to locate the source of the malfunction. The pressure increased with nightfall. Our manager joined us. He arrived after receiving an update on the situation. By that time there was no chance of cancelling the demo. Between seven and eight, his phone didn’t stop ringing. The senior managers wanted to be sure everything was ready for the demo. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He moved away when taking calls. After two or three phone calls like that he said that until we found the source of the malfunction and solved the problem, no one was going anywhere. After that he said, I’m staying with you, forget everything else, cancel whatever you have this evening, I’m ordering pizza.
The cleaner was supposed to come at seven in the morning the next day. I asked her to come in earlier than usual, around two hours before the delegation arrived for the demo. A woman of about forty, perhaps less than that. Works mornings as a cleaner for us, but not just for us, she gets around and works in a few other places in the area. Like others, she’s employed by a subcontractor. The subcontractor also provides us with basic commodities, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, milk, and cookies.
*
Woman in workspace, I understand, I understand; I see how everything accumulates into a single point in time. And time stretches with languor across office desks. Look, for example, at the marketing manager’s desk, stacked with gifts received from potential customers around the world. The gifts lie there gathering dust. The cleaner has been working here for twenty-five years. She doesn’t clean gifts, she concentrates on windows and floors. It smells good. How do you start? How do you explain to people sitting right now in the conference room that a meeting which began at nine o’clock has interrupted the pace of life. You hear but you do not listen, you exist, but you do not understand. Last night he told you for the fifth time that he cannot go on, just cannot go on, but since then he hasn’t stopped, he hasn’t stopped calling you and talking to you at every possible opportunity. He just can’t. You tried to explain to him, woman in workspace, that you cannot—you cannot work like this. But he sticks to his guns like a well-greased piece of machinery with tip-top programming, wound up like a spring, right on target, sucking you back in like a whirlpool, and you swirl into the drain, the strainer is rusted over and dirty, everything has been eaten away
Company 5
I came home; but when did I fall asleep? It must have happened right away. I was too tired to shower. Not even a quick wash. I don’t know what happened a second after throwing myself onto the bed. My legs were still airborne. What about the door. I locked the door. I didn’t lock the door. I only slammed it. In the end the door is always locked. The dream appears. I’m falling from a great height. I always wake up from the dream at the same stage: the moment I hit the bottom of the manhole. At this stage, I mostly wake up in a panic and a second after that discover I didn’t even fall. All limbs are attached. On the bed, I look up at the ceiling, raise one leg to make sure—sometimes both. Go back to sleep. Fall asleep immediately. The pin of the small engine breaks again and again, instant replay. The demo was still in jeopardy. One of the investors laughed out loud and I was almost swallowed up between his jaws like something out of a comic strip. He looked like a massive fish. The loop continued, always the same loop, the pin breaks and the investor laughs, and laughs. Still dreaming, I waited for morning to come so I could go back to work.
*
Woman in workspace, maybe put some pot plants here?
*
At night you dream of meeting someone on the street. In the morning you get up, woman in space, you shower and lie down on the couch, both windows facing you are open. You lie there like that, woman in space, naked on a towel, clouds through the windows, sky and several tower cranes. Memory of the ocean. The acupuncturist says you have a deficiency. There is sadness in your metals. The deficiency, we will look for the deficiency. The ocean holds steady in the sockets of your eyes. She goes from one organ to another, pressing deeply. Where does it hurt, she repeats and asks where, where, where do you sense a flow, where do you sense heat, where do you sense change. Where are you?
Company 6
At the technical meeting there were more participants than usual. In the middle of his speech the chief engineer cut himself short. Asked: Who’s going to summarize the meeting. He was running the meeting. He looked at me. I looked back at him without blinking. He continued, we’re already expecting, the project’s in process, we’re running late, and we have to move fast. He looked again at the project manager and laughed, said let’s not forget the demo incident, in the end we brought that machine to its knees, he said, and lucky for us in the end it worked like a Swiss watch. Everyone laughed because the engine really was Swiss.
*
Woman in workspace, what will you do with your time this summer, it’s under the tree watching you, like a cat. You didn’t go to work because you lost your voice. You don’t know when it disappeared. The water in the faucet is hot enough. You wake up. Afterward your hands shake again because it’s been a long time since you felt flesh that is not your flesh. And yours has amassed within, and sometimes it’s disproportional and afterward there is much logic to it.
Company 7
I fell into the manhole. Only after reading the report did the chain of events that led to the fall dawn on me. Under managerial orders, they carried out an urgent safety check and stopped all activities until details had been clarified. The chief engineer, so it said in the report, was the one who’d been standing outside the door and had authorized the electrician to open the manhole. Forgot to ensure there was no one inside. Thought the room was empty. So it says in the report. A moment later he left, and the contractor sent one of the workers into the room to open the manhole.
Company 8
After the fall into the manhole, the senior members of the company called me. The department director, the field director, two deputy managers, and the director of human resources. The senior members expressed concern, asking exactly how it happened. Told me to rest at home. I said there were suspected broken ribs. I’m at home. Still really painful. But easier to breathe. Breathing is painful when sitting down.
Company 9
After midnight on Friday the cell phone rang. The company’s customer service center. I answered. The agent said sorry for the late hour. He knew my name. The agent said the alarm had been ringing for the last half hour and they’d been unable to neutralize it by remote control. Updated me that a technician was on his way and would call for instructions when he got there.
I lay awake, waiting.
*
Woman in workspace, wretchedness is in the flesh. Not what is eaten up, but what lives inside you, the wretchedness of devotion to any possible intimacy. This body that asks for what. It rests like this as time oscillates over bones, through running water, across lands through which you wander during working hours. Woman in workspace, stay another hour, clean up the mailbox a little, stay a couple of hours, let the clock tick away. The map on the screen updates itself and you see the traffic jam will delay you by another half hour, maybe more, apparently an accident at the main junction. Another truck. You hear the trucks, woman in space, they’re carrying rocks to the harbor. The water turns murky, from the beginning it was impossible to bend down to drink from it, the water is salty. Now the water has become murky. Not fit to swim in, or dive, impossible to search here for coral or shells. Sometimes, woman in space, you can hear trucks screeching at the harbor junction, they’re running the lights. Rushing to unload rocks. Afterward, an echo is heard, the sound of sirens, the shrill of ambulances, and the thud of rocks being unloaded in the background. Woman in workspace, you don’t like strikes, suddenly the entire sea turns silent, and you are left alone with all the rocks and the earth
