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She’d been the first one to arrive and had positioned herself squarely amidst her luggage, like Lego blocks spaced out around her to create her own little world. I enter the lounge and despite the chaos and multitude of people, she immediately takes up my visual space entirely. Three other women and a short, stocky man who still manages to exude elegance sit around her. Elizabeth comes floating towards me, her lengthy limbs searching me far before the rest of her arrives.
“We are hugging now! Elena started it and I think we should make it a practice”.
It’s amazing how such a frail body can radiate so much warmth. Elena is the last one to get up and move from behind her luggage. Just before she reaches me, her lips change to the semblance of a smile, and where the tall, ghostly body meeting me now left space.
I’m on to you Elena.
The dark, heavy desks form three squares divided across the room as evenly as possible. The position in the back of the room has a calming effect on me as I take in the space in front. Every single person has their own part to play, each of us directed towards another as grounded by the desks and weighty chairs.
“I have a worry.”
An ostentatiously serious-looking face breaks into my thoughts. Before my eyes focus on the blue line squaring off her cream-colored blouse, I notice how, somehow, Elena has managed to nudge the dark, heavy desk to put herself at a different angle to everyone else.
“I am very concerned about what this process will do to us. How will we be protected against …”
My eyes lock in on her blouse, seemingly selected to convey her regional heritage. The blue line doesn’t move even one inch. Not once during her monologue of grave concern about the personal safety of, supposedly, us all. A concern that now needs to be met with a response pitched just right in between acknowledgment and appeasement. I scan the faces in front of me one by one, and when I get back to Elena, she has found her position almost in the middle of the room, in-between the three squares balancing the space just earlier. The blue line of her cream-colored blouse strikes right across.
A very distinct feeling of irritation starts making its way up.
Elena has positioned herself playfully on the desk facing the wall with the results of our earlier work. Legs dangling, forward lean. The rest of us are standing in a semi-circle. Irritation hits me right in the face before even one word is uttered.
The forward lean, the “authenticity” spelled out through yet another blouse, the stern face that attempts to exude an academic air that puts her above the others. My shoulders involuntarily twitch while my feet shuffle position.
Hilda rattles through her explanation, repeating “simply” just once too often, fumbling her words while keeping her eyes directed at the poster on the wall.
It’s amazing how even sights appearing only in peripheral vision can take up your full view. Elena straightens her back and pushes up her chest. My scalp tingles and my arms tense up.
“I hear you Hilda, but I’m concerned that your example doesn’t do justice to your key concept. Are we really supposed to understand…”
My voice breaks right through before I can do anything about it: “Do you even realize how often I do just that? Everytime I want to go out I check and talk about it for probably way longer than people find tolerable. Great example Hilda.”
Elena’s eyes double in size and stare at me. I realize I somehow moved from my lean against the wall just outside the semi-circle to a space within.
I quietly take a step back again.
I see red. All I can see is red to the right of me. The blouse with red embroidery is ticking away incessantly, making me wonder if it is really coming from the keyboard, or if I somehow developed tinnitus.
How, out of all of us, had we ended up in the same workspace?
Things happened in our workspace. But in the passive voice. Plants were given a home in every corner. Mostly the prickly kind. A printer used by both of us was installed on a table next to my desk. A kettle I never used was placed on the table I needed for meetings with others. The office chair I was sure I once had, was replaced by a wooden version similar to those you see in old classrooms, while the desk on the other side of the office was overflowing with the soft luxury version. I was told there was no agent of action. Things just were but nothing was the matter. Everything was covered by a smile and maybe I was just mistaken.
When I was 11, a girl who had just joined our school told me how her older brother had brought home a cactus from Brazil at the end of his year-long trip through Latin America. The cactus was put on the windowsill right next to his bed, so that the memories of adventures past and the dreams of the world ahead could be taken into sight all at once. Sometimes he thought he could hear a soft whir in the background, adding another layer to his reminiscing and daydreaming. But the whirring increased in strength, so much so, that the cactus seemed to vibrate. Then one day, while he was lying on his bed, staring out the window, the cactus erupted and what seemed like thousands of little spiders came crawling out. A Phoneutria Keyserlingi had used the cactus for its eggs. The brother needed to be taken to hospital.
I don’t know. It’s hard to tell, with the constant ticking of the keyboard and frequent whirring of the printer, if a cactus had added to the noise.
Have you ever heard of the story of how a family of six found was found dead and it turned out a venomous spider was found in the kettle from which they drank tea?
And Elena did always drink a lot of tea.
You don’t know why. Nothing specific but something untranslatable taps you repeatedly on the gut, saying, something isn’t quite right. As this story develops across the Storytelling with Puck week, will we find out what that something is?
