I sit by the river and watch where the sky and the water touch. Nothing ever changes there and I do not expect it to. But I still watch. Even though it flows quickly, the stream makes no sound at all. Not even splashes from stones heaved into it cause any noise. This is because the trees in the forest absorb any sound made. The meadow is surrounded on all sides by the forest and so nothing escapes. They are especially hungry for my voice and they tempt me with this silence, push me to fill it with something. I know that if I do, I will never get back whatever it is that I say, the trees and this meadow will keep it forever. This silence can be terrifying: time is indistinct and the spaces between things feel emptier than they should. But I acclimatise again and the thought of a noise breaking the stillness is repulsive. The only hint of sound here is the barely-perceptible whispering of the trees at night. They call to me and tell me to open the cabin’s door and step outside into the dark. 

When I am not staring upstream I walk around the edge of the meadow along the same path. I can feel that it is pleased; any work, it doesn’t matter what, makes it happy. This feeling sours when I daydream, which I do often. I can’t picture his face or remember his name but I try to and sometimes if I think hard enough I can feel him with me, just as I do right now. He paces this path with me. 

Night falls quickly and without warning. Darkness spills over the tops of the trees and displaces the light hiding beneath them. I run from my path to the wooden shack as the night churns behind me and swallows the long grass and the small trees of the orchard. It reaches for me. The bare wooden fence surrounding the shack is submerged, a grand cataract who fills the meadow with night. Eventually the whole meadow is filled and I make it into the shack only moments before being drowned and I deny it ownership for one more day. 

Wood has been stockpiled and arranged in a stone fireplace. I can feel cool night air in my lungs and that I am breathing heavily. My hands tremble as I light the fire, which fills the cabin with wisps of smoke and taciturn light. I lie on the floor and stare into the fire and chase these daydreams, try to picture his face and sometimes I can almost see him, it is achingly close and I can feel a cold disapproval from outside, the trees tell me to step outside and leave these glimpses of somewhere else behind forever. When staring into the fire frustrates me, I lie prone and peek between the wall’s coarse panels. Even though the shack is full of gaps and cracks and during the day light steals inside in rough lines crossing the floor, the night seems to respect the four walls and roof. It swirls outside, not far from my head, and I watch it and am hypnotised. Beyond the wall everything is invisible. The light from the fire disappears as soon as it leaves the cabin.

The trees begin to whisper to one another; all points of conversation cross this cabin, which is precisely in the middle of the meadow. Once it knows that I will not step outside, not tonight, the meadow puts me to sleep. The trees whisper and fill me with an overwhelming tiredness that conquers me in seconds. It is not every night that the trees murmur like this and take me somewhere without dreams. Other nights the soporific eddies and whorls of the darkness swim in my mind. I wake up with a sensation of rushing, as if surfacing from deep under the sea, and daytime has already arrived. I never see the dawn. The light always returns before I regain consciousness. I stand, stretch a little and set off to watch the stream or pace and daydream. The air smells clear and still, as if anticipation hid somewhere. I can’t see what the anticipation would be for: nothing changes here and each day is dedicated to preparing for each night. There is no sun, only a bright sky without clouds. The forest and the night, the clockwork world without time, up here in this meadow.

We lived so close to everywhere relevant that I almost always walked; home was only half an hour from the hospital, a bit longer to The Tower. Company advertisements were playing in the supermarket and I heard them on the way home too, jingles and ditties through the streets whistled by pedestrians, from open windows as families listened to them over dinner. Streetlights led the way in silver lines to quieter streets and home, it was already dark. Front door opened and closed, shopping bags and my coat, they were left in the hallway and would be dealt with later. No point keeping things tidy when you’re alone, with or without S. Now upstairs, I sat in the chair beside the window and had not turned on the lights. Watching The Tower shine at night, I listened to the radio: a panel discussion on slogans. I hoped that it would take my mind off of what happened at work. 

"Well, you see, the slogan is neutral. It’s not like the slogan in and of itself is malicious, it’s there for us to make of it what we will, know what I mean? It’s like, we could use this to create a better world, where we could just say what we wanted and it would just, like, appear. Or—"

"The military-industrial complex, though. We just, we can’t let this out, we don’t want nuclear proliferation, do we? Every state with its own slogans, terrorist cells, lone, ah, lone wolf attacks with slogans, the lot. We research enough ways to destroy ourselves, don’t we? Well, why research another? We don’t have to make this worse!"

A third voice: "Why bother? Nobody cares, nobody except for a few cranks in academia, whose funding has been cut to finance slogan research. Under ten percent of the public, when big polls were conducted, not even ten percent of those asked listed the slogan in their top five most important issues. You people always want to complain, even though all of you are employees or shareholders—"

"I resent that, I resent that, that’s unfair. Look, the only slogan that manifested is our company’s: ‘Our Employees Are Our Company’. Does that look like a safe path to go down? Mass disappearances, and with the— these effects don’t even follow the slogan verbatim. It’s not just employees, it’s also shareholders, any beneficiary, they disappear—"

"That’s why we need to understand it. There’s some underlying logic to this, it’s, it’s not magic—"

The presenter tried to adjudicate: "Now let’s get some order, remember that this is a debate and discussion in good faith and we need to let everyone speak without interruption, we’re—"

"—our company needs to take some responsibility. Their CEO, she acts as if—"

"Our company only stumbled onto this, they didn’t mean to manifest the slogan. Would you blame the discoverer of a volcano for its eruptions?"

"—S. hiding behind her husband’s medical work, as if that somehow absolves her—"

I turned the radio off as the presenter lost control, my interest waned. The slap of my shoe’s sole had been irritating me for days and now was the time to fix it, it had gotten bad enough, the sole was almost totally separated from the shoe. It reminded me too much of those snarling teeth, opening and closing its mouth and it clapped the stairs as I descended. Maybe it would grow teeth too, smiling unpolished shoes. The cupboard below the stairs contained mostly dust and had a pleasant smell of dry age and unpainted wood. When the door was opened cobwebs would sigh towards you and then sway back as you searched for whatever it was that you wanted, between the old bags, a single black gumboot, a box of unused tools. Stairs in reverse marched down the ceiling to the floor in the gloom, a comforting space that never changed. On opening the door, the first thing that I noticed was not the cobwebs or the pleasant smell, not the shoe polish or glue, but a black shape sitting on one of the crooked shelves, rectangular, a handle pointing upwards. Before resignation could run through me, it began to wail. Without stepping backwards I slammed the door and stood facing the closed cupboard while Briefcase howled. The door was white and I took an unusual interest in the simple carved woodwork at its edges, the chips in the paint. Maybe I could focus on something else for long enough that all of this would pass me by. Screaming crept from beneath the door. 

Back up the stairs, each step vibrated with Briefcase’s cries up my legs through to my neck making my throat prickle. Back in the chair by the window, observing The Tower standing vigil over the city, wishing back to a time when S. would have put a hand on my cheek or her head on my shoulder and to tell me that we could find some sort of solution. I looked to The Tower for answers but it remained monolithic and inscrutable on the skyline. My hands gripped the chair more and more tightly as the moans continued to ring out relentlessly and my eyes were closed. But I couldn’t stay up there forever; S. was gone and I’d have Briefcase all to myself, at least for a moment. Maybe the papers inside Briefcase would tell me something. Even better, they’d say nothing and I’d have one thing fewer to worry about. 

Now standing at the cupboard door with my hand on the doorknob, then in the kitchen pacing, then back at the door. 

Rapping on the cupboard door with my knuckles: "Why have you come back?"

With that, all the noise stopped, making the house feel hollow in its absence. And there was no answer. In the quiet, I looked up at the stairs. Just walk up, sit down in the chair and wait for S. to get back. Keep safe, that’s what I thought to myself, maybe talking to Briefcase will tempt those eyes and teeth to come closer. A clack on the ground, my loose sole slapped the floorboards as I stepped away from the cupboard. 

And then Briefcase spoke; the decision had been made for me. "Why did you take me back home?"

"I didn’t. Why are you in my cupboard?"

"So S. brought me here?" The voice behind the door sounded hopeful as it said S.’s name. 

"S. doesn’t exist at the moment."

"But then how did I get here?"

"That’s a good question."

I’d have more time to react up here if S. walked through the front door, then I could hide Briefcase or pretend that we had never talked. That was why I brought Briefcase upstairs and sat down in the chair by the window, the briefcase open on the small table next to the chair. It didn’t make much sense, I’d hear from the transponder if S. re-existed again, but being away from the front door made me feel safer. 

"So you don’t remember being carried?"

"No, but we, ah, we did go somewhere. First you just— I remember being closed up in the box—" Staring out the window, I couldn’t quite look at Briefcase when it said this. I was obviously guilty. Tantalisingly, the papers in Briefcase sat within arm’s reach. "—then there were holes punched in the box with, um, a knife or something—" 

With scissors. I’d poked air holes in the box. So at least I’d done something kind.

"Ok, ok, ok, I know this part. What about after we, um—" How to put it sensitively? "You know?"

Maybe it was furrowing its brow, thinking. It could have been frowning. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell with briefcases. "Well, someone picked us up, kept shouting about ‘buddy,’ and, well, we stopped calling out after a while because, because whoever was carrying us just found it funny." It couldn’t have been a good time to ask about the papers. That’s invasive, and Briefcase had no reason to trust or like me. Plenty of reasons to feel the opposite. "And then we just sat there, you know, there wasn’t all that much for us to do. Hat said a few things, like, muttered about you and then asked what I thought S. was doing. Actually, is, um— does S. have a twin, or, or is there someone else who looks the same, and has the same name, but isn’t, you know—" S. was notionally the same person, although she’d changed a lot since the slogan. "—S.?"

"No, she doesn’t. That woman you saw, that’s S. So, what next?"

Briefcase was getting more confident in talking and wasn’t whispering anymore. "Um, then we didn’t speak at all after that. Then, uh, then—" Shifting in the seat, raising my eyebrows. Briefcase’s papers shone white in the city’s nighttime glow, lit office-block windows and streetlights. "We couldn’t see anything outside the box anymore because, well, we thought that it was nighttime. Or, maybe I thought it was, because Hat didn’t say anything. And, and, that reminds me. Do you work in a hospital?"

"How do you know that?"

"I, I, I— ok, I don’t know for sure, but I think I saw you, or, or maybe someone who looks like you. Is there someone who looks like you who works in a hospital?"

"Tell me what you saw."

Briefcase spoke more softly, maybe I had scared them by snapping back so suddenly. "It wasn’t much, just a little, you know, like a little flash, but—" I really didn’t want S. to get back. Not yet. "—but then, the holes in the box, we were up so high! I was, it wasn’t pleasant at all, just like that and we were above the city and it was daytime again, or, you know, maybe when it got dark before it wasn’t nighttime, but it was dark for some other reason, I don’t know, like—"

"Sure sure, good, what did you see next?"

"Well, through the holes in the box I could see a city - I think it’s this city, but maybe not, but, but probably— and from so far above everything else. So high. And through the holes in the box I could see this building, big, or, like, a collection of buildings all built together. It was like I was focussing on it, the building there got bigger and bigger, then suddenly, um—" Briefcase paused.

"And?"

"And then I saw you."

"And you’re sure it was me?"

"I—"

"Ok, ok, so tell me, where was I and what was I doing?"

"There were two times, so the first time you were in a, a— you were with a few other people, sitting down and talking to them—" I didn’t like where this was going. "Then you turned around and looked right at me. Right at me! And wow, you really didn’t look happy. And I could feel— it was like looking through someone else’s eyes, and feeling through their feelings, too, feelings like, ah, like a predator, you know? But, but, anyway, you were in a hospital. There were sick people everywhere. And people crowding me! They were all bunching up and pushing towards me, but I just looked at you through the hole in the box and you stared at me before leaving. I watched you go. That was you, wasn’t it?"

Wearily: "The second time?"

"The same thing. I stared at you and you stared right at me, again! Did you recognise me? Was I there?"

"Where were you and what did you see?"

"I was in a crowd - another crowd - and you were standing above me, like, far above me, standing by a window. And then you opened the door."

"The door?"

"The cupboard door."

Had Briefcase been following me? I looked at it. It didn’t seem threatening, not personally. In what it represented, maybe, watching me through those teeth and yellow eyes, intentionally or not. 

Too late to back out: may as well dig deeper. "Those papers you’re carrying."

"Yes?"

"Do you mind if I have a look at them?"

"No, uh, no. That’s no problem. No problem at all."

A few sheets of paper were already in my hand when Briefcase answered. I was trying to be polite. Briefcase kept talking and I ignored it. 

The weekly planner was the same, nothing new was in it. It was blank, apart from the note about going full-time, which I had read a few days ago. The handwriting was still disturbingly familiar. Of the loose-leaf pages I held, only one had anything printed or written on it, and I shook my head as I read. 

A list of twelve names, beside each was a brief radioalmological description of the person’s soul. I recognised several of these names, although I had not heard of them in years. None of them had existed for years. A handwritten note on the bottom of the page:

"compatibility of souls high

construction of soul seed to begin"

The same handwriting as in the weekly planner. Those names, I remembered them and I remembered the descriptions of their souls. I had imaged them and I had written those reports. S. wanted them imaged, a team-building activity to welcome everybody aboard, the new hires. Like a group photograph of the twelve new board members who S. had worked hard to bring aboard. Back then, I had thought nothing of it. At the top of the page, the letterhead was our company’s, the old letterhead that they had before the slogan and before the entire board disappeared on the first business trip, one which they still have not returned from. 

"Find anything interesting?"

I grunted and asked Briefcase where it wanted to sleep, laying the papers and weekly planner back inside, carefully. Everything needed to look untouched. 

The Tower’s yellow windows blinked at us from across the city. The briefcase wanted to sleep downstairs, in the kitchen. I, widowed by The Tower, and Briefcase, maybe widowed too, we stayed together as the room grew darker and darker, I stood by the kitchen counter and Briefcase lay on top of it. Amber windows shone over all that they observed. The continuous murmur of traffic outside was punctuated by the occasional, fragmentary conversation. It was a warm evening and the air was thick in my mouth and lungs as we were still and lost in ourselves. Briefcase insisted that S. had taken it to work each day, fondly remembered the things she placed inside it, university textbooks, work documents, cafe loyalty cards. It described a city that we had once lived in, here, whose bones are buried under The Tower and its slogan. A tenuous link to the past, or at least a hint: I saw my old feelings for S. from far away, lived in them for the first time in years, a past when we found each other exciting, remembered in the descriptions Briefcase gave of old streets or shops that we had spent time in which no longer existed. We used to sit here, at this table, now would have been the time when I’d sit across from her, maybe with food, maybe without, maybe with conversation or maybe not; not that it would really matter. It would be warm and well-lit. Instead, here things were: dark, S. was absent, I didn’t want to finish the half-eaten bag of popcorn on the table and there had been too many surprises today. I was tired and I wanted to go to bed. Turning to leave the kitchen, now in the doorway, I stopped and toyed with the thought. 

Maybe I could just ask; maybe I wouldn’t need to image them. "Briefcase?"

"Yes?"

"Do you, um— do you have a soul?"

"What do you mean?"

It didn’t understand the question and I left the kitchen without saying anything more, the bell of a distant train rang, the floorboards and stairs creaked. I ran my hand over S.’s belongings lying on the hall table - a pile of papers, odds and ends - and imagined her hand there. The past seemed closer tonight, we were almost touching, I was just a few moments late, not too far off. It was now dark enough that I was navigating by unconscious memory. Stepping down the hall to the stairs I bumped the hatstand and knocked it to the ground. Tripping over, the house felt even quieter after the sudden noise, sharp wood-on-wood snaps and dull thuds and whispers of fabric on the floor. Cautiously, I found the lights and squinted from the sudden brightness; an upended hatstand lay sideways underneath coats and other clothes which tented over its branches. I picked up the larger scattered objects and lay them across the bannister of the staircase. As I brushed aside a tartan scarf, a red brim peeked from under the hatstand’s limbs. Inevitability, I lifted the scarf and saw what I had been hoping not to see. A secret to myself, I understood that I had expected this. 

"The temerity," sneered Hat.

So there was no time for me to get to the private wing of the hospital, to my rooms, pick up the parcel and be on time for the ward round. I was already late, anyway. But I dreaded another round of seeing the same interchangeable patients with the same untreatable pathologies, so I procrastinated and waited in the cafeteria queue, tried to pick the least bad option from a selection of unappetising meals. Several nights ago at a company function, a woman told me excitedly of the phenomenological diet. Fasting, cold showers, unpleasant sleeping conditions, small stones placed in your shoes each morning; the more discomfort, the slower the subjective perception of time. You don’t extend your life, but it feels a whole lot longer. The greatest benefit would probably be fewer meals to worry about each day. I stared at the scratched photograph of my face on the lanyard, at the counter, the food, the back of a woman’s head who was a few places ahead of me in line, back to my lanyard. Today I would fast, an expression of intent rather than indolence. My registrar and interns met me in the cafeteria. 

"List, list, where’s my list?" Paper fluttered as I snatched the list from the intern without looking at her. 

"A few came in overnight," said my registrar. 

The overnight registrar looked tired during handover. Recent admissions: several severe repeated objectification syndromes, a garden-variety melancholia, one overwhelming Apollonianism, catastrophic soul decompression and a soul stasis.

 I think I said this exact thing at the start of every round: "New ones first, then ICU. And how many patients can I make private?"

The hospital lobby was large, high-ceilinged and the entrance was mostly made of glass. It used to let a lot of sunlight in but then The Tower got big enough and its shadow blocked out most of the sun in the morning. By the afternoon, the lobby felt like a greenhouse. Grey linoleum floors, corridors split off at seemingly random angles, no symmetry in sight. The scattered potted palm trees made everything feel even more barren and artificial. 

I hadn’t been concentrating and barely noticed that my registrar was talking to me: "—two week history of decreased motivation as reported by family, pathologically relaxed. Patient too relaxed to give a proper history. Past history of a soul decompression episode, maybe a few subclinical episodes of the same, some other physical past history that I didn’t get, you, intern, can you chase his physical history? Ask one of the corporeals, if they’ve bothered showing up to work, ok? Anyway, so ah, ah, yep—" Shuffling papers. "—right, decreased motivation associated with increased enjoyment of lying aimlessly in the sun, spending increasing amounts of time with the family parakeet—"

Listening really wasn’t necessary, I’d heard this story a thousand times before. I wondered whether I should decompress my soul a bit, especially after the previous week’s stress. Yes, I would probably be less productive, but it would be a nice break. I could self-prescribe decompression therapy. Take a month off, leave the city.

"—uncharacteristic new affinity for loud silken shirts, top three buttons undone, sea shell necklace in situ—" 

Having decided to begin the round in the cafeteria, I gathered my team’s orders: "Which coffees are we getting, you, espresso, I remember that, latte? No, cappuccino. Cappuccino. You, you don’t drink coffee do you? Still pure, I see. Me? No, no coffee for me either, it’s this new diet, have you heard of it? Phenomenological diet—"

Of course everyone had heard of it; every self-respecting professional had heard of this new prestige game. I talked with my reg about their phenomenological diet experiences, they’d been following it before it got big. The cafeteria sat directly beside the lobby and had a cold light without windows, under which everything seemed too sharp and defined, the world more unadorned than usual. The tables and chairs were made of a slippery plastic material which was easy to clean but good for little else. There were a few plants scattered around the place. My neck prickled and stomach turned. A stasis lay over everybody here. Everyone was either sitting or standing and seemed to transition instantly from one to the other, no one apparently moved. Life slowed here under the halogen sun. My registrar was now asking a med student what they wanted to specialise in; I really didn’t care. 

A commotion caught my attention, a small crowd had formed. Lining one wall of the cafeteria were counters, sections of glass cabinets holding food alternating with cash registers. One cashier, a woman behind the counter, was standing motionless while a customer tried to pay for his meal. Increasingly frustrated, he started gesturing towards the register more and more emphatically. The woman ignored this customer and continued to stare at me. More people protested as the queue to order and pay lengthened. Some disappeared elsewhere, the more devout stayed and complained. The other employees took orders and payment as usual, but this particular cashier stayed in place and did not blink and she began to smile long teeth at me. It began as a slack jaw with slightly pursed lips and progressed to a full grin with her face turned slightly downwards and her eyes leering from under a tilted brow. The teeth grew longer the more she smiled. Those queuing didn’t seem concerned by her appearance at all; they were annoyed because she refused to serve them. She was treated as a very slow, but otherwise completely normal cashier and nobody paid attention to her smile. The others at my table glanced without concern at where I was trying not to look, her hot gaze on my throat, quick blinks in her direction. Her canines slid over her lower lip as she bared her teeth. I had seen these same teeth at a company function a few days ago, growing from the mouth of a company employee. 

Once again, my reg had been speaking and I had been noncommittally nodding and agreeing. "—which patients do we have today? Let’s go through the list from the top. First, ok, let’s divide up the jobs that we’re aware of now, see if we can do anything before the round starts. Alright, so we need to contact—"

The customers in the line had formed queues around the woman the same way that water flows around obstacles in a stream. Her arms were held straight at her sides and her shoulders were packed tightly together while a row of pearlescent teeth glinted from between her lips, wet and glistening as she licked them. 

A man in an untied hospital gown loudly wished for a second opinion from the table behind me: "—doctor told me to stop. Well, what if I don’t want to stop? No one can tell me—"

I stood up and announced that the round urgently needed to start. We left, throats scalded from swilling our drinks quickly and her head turned to follow me as I left and her tongue rolled out of her mouth, panting. The rest of the cafeteria remained uninterested in this woman. Fellow cashiers operated her register, reaching over and under her shoulders while customers spoke past her to those serving them. To them, this woman was an obtrusive but otherwise unremarkable object, everyone worked around her. Her head was twisted backwards one hundred and eighty degrees as she watched me leave, the rest of her body did not move and she never broke her gaze and never blinked. 

"Are you alright?" asked my reg as we left the cafeteria.

Discreetly pointing at the cashier, my voice cracked: "Is the cashier there, that woman behind the counter, is she looking a little, uh—" Her head was still pointing backwards, snarling. "—um, atypical?"

And my registrar knitted his brow, looked at each of the cafeteria staff behind the counter and pretended to see what I was seeing, nodded noncommittally. First Hat and Briefcase, and now I was seeing things that nobody else noticed. But it’s not all bad; if I lost my mind, maybe S. would pay me more attention.

Getting around the hospital was slow for many reasons. Crowding was one, patients got lost and blocked every corridor. Dodging stretchers being wheeled between rooms was so common that nobody noticed it after a few days of working here. The layout also prolonged everything. It was the busiest hospital in the world, so close to The Tower, far too busy to shut down any section for repairs, renovations or to build something new. So whenever it needed to be expanded, more beds added, the new addition was just stuck onto the existing structure. It was a mess of architectural styles and, from the outside, looked like about thirty different buildings blended together in a mess of cubes and rectangular prisms, mostly grey concrete or bricks, sometimes luridly coloured metal; its interior was no more coherent. Tucked away, high up and overlooking the plaza which lay in front of the hospital’s entrance, was the private wing. There it was cleaner and quieter because we kept public patients out. The elevators rarely worked so the team and I took the narrow square spiral stairs, coiling around a central shaft. I let the rest of the team speak while I fought down nerves and tried to forget about the woman in the cafeteria. We’d all accepted bracing changes in the post-slogan world, especially here in this city: The Tower seems to invite it, the fracture between the old and the new widens the closer you are to its base. But these changes, dog’s teeth from a woman at a recent company dinner, the same teeth and same expression in the cafeteria, Hat and Briefcase, they weren’t imposed on large populations at once like the trips, objectifications or high performers. These changes were too personal, unnoticed by those around me.

The lanyard flapped against my leg as we walked down a faceless corridor studded with locked doors, patient cubicles. My shoe slapped on the ground, but nobody commented on it. Its sole had come loose at the front and lolled like a tongue when I walked. Just laziness; I kept meaning to fix it, but it hadn’t gotten bad enough yet. I could hear our new Dionysian patient through the wall of her cubicle. She was waiting for a bed on the Dionysian ward, somewhere dark and sound-proofed. My reg informed me that she’d been picked up by police last night, drinking wine from a champagne flute in the shape of a fawn. Opening the door to her cubicle and stepping inside, her voice was loud and vigorous. I couldn’t make out what exactly she was singing about, but if it were anything like every other acute exacerbation of Dionysianism, it would involve some type of excess. Her hospital gown had been worn backwards like an open robe, proudly baring her naked body to the world as she gestured passionately and sang. We tried to treat her as well as we could on the general almological ward, but lacked the specialist equipment we really needed. What was truly required was a dedicated Dionysian cubicle, an anechoic chamber, pitch black, minimal stimuli. She probably wouldn’t get better there, either. At night she barked at the moon and scratched herself bloody. But all of this was done with normal human teeth, so everything was fine. Through the windows in her room I could see The Tower. 

 Looking sideways at my registrar: "Done?"

"The complete soul stasis?"

I’d already forgotten about them. "They’re not going anywhere, let’s— actually, you know, we should— yep, probably should see them. Let’s go, it’ll be quick." 

A person separate from their soul is barely a person at all, they are only a body in space. What causes the rupture? There are theories: intense emotional states, frustrated love, some company fanatics say it’s from not paying obeisance to The Tower. One academic proposed that the scent of drying laundry and freshly baked bread in a warm, well-lit wooden room during a haze of languid summer days evokes such strong memories - real or imagined - of an ideal childhood that the soul falls out of the body, as if trying to tumble back to a different time. Whatever the cause, the effect of soul stasis is dramatic. The soul stops moving with the body, it picks a spot - or the spot picks it - and it stays there. Instantly, the body becomes ambivalent to everything and only exists to continue existing. Moving this body closer to the soul makes no difference, the two are separated by something more fundamental than distance. Soul stasis is a misnomer, so I always thought. It is not so much a stasis as a total severance. 

The nurse was speaking: "—quiet overnight, eating and drinking as normal, not sleeping. Can we give something to make him sleep?" The nurse must have been new and didn’t know.

 My registrar filled him in: "They never sleep. No more dreams to have without a soul."

While my reg and the nurse spoke, I tried to have as brief an interaction as possible with the patient and their family. "How are you feeling today?"

The patient drank sips of orange juice and didn’t acknowledge us. His expression wasn’t sad or one of discomfort, as some expect. Just blank. It was at home, likely in a wicker basket filled with shoes beside the front door, that’s where his soul probably was. He was putting his shoes on when his soul fell from his body into the basket. It was his husband who found him when he returned home, sadness quieter and quieter and the husband now only stood in the corner and played with the hems of his shirt. He held his hand sometimes and would talk to that blank face. There were no questions today because there wasn’t much more to explain. Everybody had normal teeth.

"Any questions for us?" I asked, hopeful that this would be a brief consult. 

"No, no thank you. I think we’re ok here." He looked at his static husband and nodded. 

From a woman in the room, maybe a sister, a friend, words that had been brewing, evidently for a while: "It’s that— it’s that tower, isn’t it? The Tower took him, didn’t it? He just bought shares." 

I opened my mouth to reply, they didn’t know about me and S., I could appear unconflicted. 

Before I had to say anything, the husband interjected: "We’re ok here." 

He would go to the static wards when a bed opened. The static wards were colourful and inviting, and while the inpatients were indifferent, the staff seemed to do better. It wasn’t that the statics were difficult patients to care for on a moment-to-moment basis; but the more time you spent around them, the more the colour in the world faded, slightly. You couldn’t put your finger on it, but each sound would be a little less full, the smell of a clear day thinner than it should be. Almost like an entropy of souls, a void where a soul should be tugs others in its direction, they move to fill the space. Not that any of this is proven, but I’ve heard about the same feeling of inevitable decay from several people and have felt it myself. Not unwelcome, this man dulled my worries a little.

Time to end this ward round: "I’ve got— there are private patients I need to attend to. Call me if there are problems. Or, or not, I trust you, I’m sure you’ll work it out."

My discomfort, I couldn’t forget the teeth. It was time to do what I had planned on getting done this morning: fetch the parcel from my private rooms and get home, have some quiet time alone. A few people greeted me as I crossed the hospital, most didn’t. Crowds thinned as I approached the private wing. The elevators there worked and I examined my face, reflected and distorted in a window beside me as I waited alone for the lift. Normal eyes, normal teeth.

The elevator opened straight into my private rooms. They used to be co-owned, but I bought everyone else out with company money and now I was the sole owner. I’d hired a few other radioalmologists to reduce my workload and even had my own SEARI and CARI in there. It was an intrusively faceless series of rooms, corporate-chic paintings on the walls chosen to be as unobjectionable to as many people as possible. Cream-coloured paint, a carpet whose pattern I immediately forgot, the reception desk was vacant. 

A voice called out from the staff room behind the receptionist’s desk, out of sight: "It’s in your office!"

There were no patients waiting. 

Again, the same voice from the staff room: "The parcel! I’ve left it on your desk, in your office!" My receptionist; I couldn’t remember her name. 

Thanking her, I went straight to my office. I had socialised enough that day. Pneumatic hiss, I had to lean on the door to close it. So many patients slammed the door shut behind them that my receptionist had a new door installed, only in my office. It closes itself, and very slowly. My office was bare: I’d hung my framed degrees on the wall behind my desk, someone put a plant in the corner. Instruments to examine almographs on my desk, chairs for me and the patients, that was all I needed and wanted. 

I opened the blinds and first saw the dust in the air, which the afternoon light made faintly golden. The room felt quieter with the lights off and I heard myself breathing, views of The Tower through my window. Several storeys below the hospital plaza was busy; light-grey paving was sparsely interrupted by trees rising from the concrete. Tides of bodies swept in and out of the hospital’s entrance. Like a goose walking over your grave, that’s what S. used to say when she shivered without meaning to. It felt like a goose walked over my grave as I looked through the window at the people below, rested a hand on the glass and left smudged fingerprints. I shivered again. 

People were crossing the space from every direction and a group of hospital security staff were corralling herds of objectified staff members through the crowd to get them out of the way and onto the street, where they could travel to The Tower. The glass was thick enough and I was high up enough that everything was silent. Another shiver, The Tower billowed with objectified and sun glittered from its windows, observing its city. Waves of people continued to churn and the swirl hypnotised me and I took a moment to watch them wander, calm my nervousness which had been worsening all day. It didn’t help, the more I watched the more unsettled I felt. Heads bobbed in ripples as they walked. A flash from the crowd, but there was nothing. I couldn’t see their faces clearly and blank people milled below. Another flash or shimmer, but only in my peripheral vision and there was nothing to see when I looked square-on. A pack of performers ploughed through the middle of it all, knocking over anyone in their way. The performers’ songs were so loud and clearly enunciated that I could hear them from my office. And there, in their wake, I saw him: a man, an unmoving lynchpin at the centre of the maelstrom. He stared at me and I stopped breathing for a moment, froze rigid and then my legs went limp. So direct, even from that far away there was no doubt, he was staring at me and nothing else. The woman in the cafeteria had unnerved me and I propped myself up below the windowsill to sit. His yellow eyes shone brightly enough to illuminate my office, I watched flickers dance over the bare walls. Was it the man I’d seen earlier? I couldn’t make out any features but for his eyes, which were unmistakable. Two little glistening jewels. I reached up and closed the blinds while I sat. 

The reception was empty, so was the lift, I couldn’t stay in my office because he had found me there. Had they followed me to work? I’d have to leave via the hospital’s back entrance; there was no way that I’d walk through the plaza where he was, whoever he might be. Would the woman with long teeth also be hiding down there in the crowd? Uneasy, watching the eyes and teeth of every person I passed, I escaped underground. 

Beneath the hospital lay a warren of faceless and airless corridors to get lost in. No matter how long someone had worked here, they could still find themselves disoriented in a stretch of grey or a dead end where there once was a door. They could be lost for days before a search team found them, wandering the quiet corridors and accompanied only by the hiss of multicoloured pipes and the occasional sound of the pneumatic tubes. There was no complete light or dark, only a continuous twilight of echoing places. These used to be plain old corridors; slowly talk emerged, wrong turns taken, corridors would repeat themselves. Of course nobody said anything about it, not for a while. People would blame their own forgetfulness or put things down to absentmindedness, why they took ten minutes longer than usual to leave work or arrived so late for a meeting. Employees and eventually even patients and families avoided the hospital underground of their own accord long before anyone said anything out loud about the confusion. The shifts in layout grew worse until, with a great deal of relief, it was suddenly and universally acknowledged that something really was going on, down there. Confused excuses of ‘I thought I left on time but I must have walked here too slowly’ became ‘the corridors became longer,’ more confidently stated, people knew that they weren’t going crazy or at least were descending into insanity with many other companions. While disappearances could range from inconvenient to fatal, people adapted. It became a fact of life. I twisted and turned through the corridors until I reached the radioalmology offices. We had our department down here. Once the slogan manifested and these underground corridors started to shift, we were offered a new place for our offices but we all said no. Fewer people bothered us, this way. 

The sole of my shoe flapped and I tried to walk quietly, echoes chasing themselves far away to somewhere unknown. Would they hear it, all the noise I was making, the stalking yellow eyes and dog’s teeth? About half-separated from the rest of my shoe, the sole opened and closed like a mouth, like the open mouth of the cashier in the cafeteria who drooled after me. Or would the shoe begin to speak, like Hat and Briefcase had? I sped up and just wanted to be home. Did they want something, this man with yellow eyes and woman with dog’s teeth? Was it because I looked at the documents in Briefcase, because I had spoken to Briefcase and Hat? A habitual penitent, I trace everything back to my crimes. 

It was cool and dark here under the hospital, and I felt like I was floating. Nothing was painful or sharp but rather a march of days and nights that arrived now without me knowing it, an endless expanse of existence with the edges smoothed off and no light or shadow.

One performer grinned as he took our coats and bags, while another maniacally showed us all thirty-two of his teeth, lips stretched to breaking point, and offered us canapés. 

Even his wisdom teeth were perfect. "Have a wonderful night, buddy!"

I wasn’t sure whether to take this as an invitation or a threat. It was shouted, so whatever it was, it was at least enthusiastic. Panoramic views of the city at night, S. and I stepped past the crowd of performers and into the dining room, black tablecloths, sixty storeys above the ground with The Tower shining in through the windows. It was a company function, team-building for senior management. 

Whispering and pulling me by the arm, S. was trying to reposition me, inconspicuously: "Not that way, not that way, not that way."

"Well, which direction should I face?"

"Not that way, they’ll see us and— No! Turn towards me, I think they saw you looking at them."

"But you don’t like—"

There weren’t many colleagues that she liked. Or any; it was more a gradation of tolerability. 

"I like them more, it’s better to face them than them."

This continued for some time: I, moving ten degrees left and then pushed twenty degrees right, S. never satisfied with where we were facing. It was a losing battle, everybody was always trying to make eye contact with her. Conversations drifted from those around us and were spoken more loudly than they needed to be, trying to catch S.’s attention:

"—listen, I’ve just come across something which is, ah, you know, blue and comes in a can. You in? We can get them on the cheap—"

"—I told the doctor that I’ll sleep when I’m dead. I’m going to be tired anyway, so better do what I want, when I want, and—"

I got tired of rotating, and she got tired of orbiting me. One colleague of S.’s materialised behind us and started a conversation with the backs of our heads. We took our time turning around, but she was undeterred. Obsequious, a typical acolyte of S.’s, I didn’t bother listening to her. There was a man crouching in the corner. He had his neck bent at an unnatural angle, mouth wide open and facing the ceiling. He was slowly fitting a series of umbrellas down his throat, his lips forming an ‘O’ the size of a dinner plate. His eyes had the familiar glaze of the objectified, the bleary smile and surrendering features of one who has both discovered and fulfilled their meaning in life, who would crawl to The Tower when called. I could hear him over the room’s patter of conversation and through the folded umbrellas, gently chuckling to the world his satisfaction and contentment. My feelings toward the objectified have always been mixed; their simplicity is a source of both pity and envy. Some would be disappointed in me, but the life of a picture frame carries a beautiful simplicity and clarity of purpose. You know where you stand with the world, existing to build The Tower, to crawl there however you can and incorporate yourself into its height. And I was reminded again of Hat and Briefcase, the maybe objectified, maybe not. No objectified had ever talked as lucidly as they did, never said anything as strange, either. Thoughts of them kept intruding, but it had only been a few days since we’d thrown them away. You’ll forget in time, I told myself. Bright yellow light from The Tower’s windows, I was mesmerised by their gaze when at once, transponders throughout the room sang out a descending arpeggio, everybody looked at each other knowingly and a few looked at me. I didn’t bother turning around to check on S.; her existence status had been made clear. She’d left on a business trip.

The woman was still talking and had been addressing me, even though she no longer had S. as an audience. The aggressive blandness of my answers didn’t worry her; they invigorated her, actually. The more I looked at her, the more I was drawn to her teeth. Her incisors were small rows of neat, white points. The canines, though, were what most caught my attention. They were long and thin, curving down her throat slightly, and when she closed her mouth they would overlap, top over bottom and bottom curling over top. They seemed to grow longer and beckoned more down her gullet with each word, she licked her lips and growled, bared her teeth more than I had expected; they were a dog’s teeth, and I had a great view. 

These teeth made me uneasy and so I looked away. While she talked, a man at the far end of the room watched me from behind her. He sat in a chair with his back straight and his body was angled ninety degrees from me, head turned at an uncomfortable angle which he held without moving. He grasped the arms of his chair so tightly that I half-expected to see splinters peek out from between his fingers. It looked as if at any moment his taut, spring-wound body could sling-shot from the chair across the room if he’d just loosen his grip. I tried my hardest not to look at him, the small face peering over the dog-toothed woman’s shoulder. No matter how hard I tried, I found myself glancing at him. Drawn to his eyes over and over again. They were always in the same place, stock still and striking yellow. The man with yellow eyes, observing me with a salivating intensity. Obviously I saw that he was staring, and it didn’t worry him at all; I don’t think he even blinked. Almost nobody noticed him. They would walk past, sometimes stand between him and me, stand almost on his toes. When they moved again he was still there, head still turned parallel to his shoulder, yellow eyes and a distant smile fixed squarely on me. It was only a performer who paid him any attention, looking between the yellow-eyed man and me and winking. 

"Trading pure alpha since kindergarten buddy!" The screamed conversation of two high performers behind me broke the reverie. 

A transponder chorus, the room sighed with relief when S. re-existed. She had returned nearby and was already on her way back to this company event; people were much more likely to return in places close to The Tower, and nobody had ever returned outside of this city. Return travellers from the world accumulated here. I rubbed my eyes and the woman talking to me had normal, human teeth again. Stress from the past few days, I decided. It was making me see things. I didn’t come across the yellow-eyed man again that night, not for want of trying.

We were ushered to our seats, the sit-down dinner was to start. The tables were arranged similarly to the open plans of most offices close to The Tower. Apparently the same as in The Tower itself, not that I’d ever seen it personally. Tables were densely populated and set up to maximise the empty floor space. This was to accommodate the re-existent. It’s a stochastic thing: the more empty space, the more likely that someone would return from a trip somewhere convenient: a disoriented company employee is better to re-exist on the floor between work desks than on top of a table, or in someone’s lap. The effect of this was minimal privacy, sub-par leg space and intimately knowing the eleven other colleagues who shared your workstation, at least physically. It went the same way with dining, but with more knives. S. had been seated at another table, and I was placed between our company’s CFO and a woman I didn’t recognise. 

Twelve people to a table, and the only person I knew by sight at mine was the CFO, who turned to face me: "Still saving lives?" This was a statement with a question mark at the end, delivered with a shoulder squeeze. He liked to belittle people and it had been at least a month since he had told me how impressive he was. "Cured soul stasis yet?"

Not answering, I recognised my plate: a former patient of mine, a chronically objectified. I thought of Hat and Briefcase again and fought down curiosity. At first this plate found his objectifications disturbing, but each time he became a plate, he resented his human form a little more. His interests began to centre on holding things, and old hobbies not involving supporting, elevating or otherwise keeping objects stationary fell away. He was found at work, furtively holding coworkers’ lunch in his hands without moving. He would bashfully apologise, but was always drawn back. He lost weight: his interest in food was not of a nutritive sort. I only began to see him once the repeated objectification syndrome had truly set in. He would tearfully describe his ennui and lack of purpose. A human life offered him little - he was to be a plate in The Tower or nothing at all. The souls of the repeatedly objectified are strange things. Malleable in the beginning, softening with each objectification, until a point is reached and then they harden, wrought into whatever shape The Tower needs. If plates had souls, would they look like that of my patient? But only human plates have souls. My patient smiled softly; I’m not sure if he recognised me. He made me uncomfortable, so I covered his face with a bread roll. Company employees talked around me:

"I worked eighty-five hours."

"A hundred and ten."

"I haven’t seen the sun this week. Fasting the whole time. It’s efficient. Do you know how much time you spend eating? I’ve been fasting a lot lately." The woman sitting beside me pointed at her plate, food lying proudly untouched in front of her. "Slows everything right down. I was five days deep into a fast, no mattress, sleeping on a stone slab, right, I had a cold shower and boom! I hit zero point eight subjective speed. The phenomenological diet just works, let me tell you."

Someone interjected, a non sequitur: "I’ve been closing left, right and centre. Everything’s going up. Everything."

And the woman continued to talk about her phenomenological diet. Everyone talked past each other. Conversations, at best, passed close by, but never intersected. 

"I don’t think I’ll even eat tonight. I feel like I could get down to zero point seven."

"Have you worked out your t-START index? Mine’s 185.2. Just interested."

"Water-only is the way to go. Don’t get polluted with caffeine."

The t-START was the main topic of conversation around the table. The now-drunk CFO was leaning deeply into his chair, angled away from me and smiling sarcastically, as if he were longsighted and trying to move far enough back to get me in focus, eyes crinkled into little upside-down crescent moons, he’d been belittling me this entire time and I’d only vaguely noticed. I looked at the wine glass in his hand. He was a high-functioning Dionysian, but inevitably going downhill. That’s the way with Dionysianism: it’s a progressive disease. One of my colleagues was treating him so I knew his whole story. Like all employees, his soul pathologies got worse with each promotion. 

"Hey, ah, listen." The woman sitting beside me leant over. "I hear that S. is, like, really looking into t-START scores now, right, and mine has been, well—" She pretended to be modest and I pretended to believe her. "—well, exemplary, and I was just wondering whether she knew—"

Another petitioner, I was a way to S., and nothing much more interesting. Crumbs from her bread roll decorated my lap, she snapped it to illustrate the boundaries that she was pushing through, absolutely crushing.

"S. will love it, believe you me," I said, cleaning beneath my fingernails with a fork. 

Maybe I said it in too much of a monotone. She lost interest in conversation after that.

Dinner was served. The plates and the tables went together. As in, the tables were the exact circumference needed to accommodate twelve dinner plates. If you wanted to move your plate or readjust your seat, everyone else had to shift clockwise or anti-clockwise accordingly. The first plate was placed slightly off-centre; everyone ate leaning slightly to the right. High performers wandered and refilled drinks, one circulated and cracked pepper onto people’s meals, unbidden. He tipped his elegant black hat at me over and over again: he couldn’t have known anything about Hat, but I squirmed anyway. A white sheet was pulled over my head unannounced. I jumped and couldn’t breathe for a moment and it slid from my face to around my throat and tightened. I tried standing but was pushed back into my chair and held tight. 

"Gotta relax buddy, relax. Don’t want to stain your suit with dinner." The high performer finished tying a white napkin around my neck. 

He growled softly in my ear and pushed down on my shoulders. I could hear the click of his teeth. Performers have always fascinated me, our company’s most fanatical workers. No one chooses to be a high performer, The Tower chooses you. A prepubescent boy’s voice would get gradually louder until it could be heard city blocks away. Dentist’s bills plummeted as teeth straightened and became incandescently white. Classmates would use their jawlines as convenient rulers and compete to see who could hang off of their mountainous cheekbones the longest. Their hair would comb and wax itself into an immaculate fringe and their eyes grew bluer and bluer. You wouldn’t know a performer’s age by his face. They are creatures of perennial youth until one day when they curl up and die out of sight in a corner of The Tower, a radiant rictus grin lighting the room around them. They eat each other’s bodies if the corpses aren’t cleaned up quickly enough. No one had ever seen them buy a suit as it grew through their skin, at first robin-egg blue and darkening with each promotion. Whispered rumours said that on the top floors of The Tower was the alpha performer, only one and in a suit so dark that it appeared black, the apex predator of apex predators. I’d asked S. if it was true and she said she didn’t know. 

Empty dinner plates were removed, replaced with dessert under The Tower’s gaze, its light seeping in through the windows, and I said goodbye to my patient, my plate, before he was carried away. Loud conversations around the table, t-START scores shared. I just listened, I didn’t have a t-START and didn’t want one. Only company employees had to worry about them.

Disinhibited, alcohol feeding his Dionysianism, the CFO addressed the table with a flourish of his hands: "Does anyone, uh— and, and I’m just checking, you know, but does anyone know what the t-START is actually measuring?" 

As soon as he spoke, he looked ashamed, reassured us that he was joking. And then everything fell silent; even the performers stopped moving, obediently turned towards the lectern at the head of the room. S. took the lectern and paused, the room now quiet enough that, as she turned her head to observe all those sitting before her, the whisper of her white blazer’s fabric was clearly audible. She spoke, something about our company, why our company was doing well and a big thank you to all the people who made this past quarter what it was; that face which had frozen in time, she looked at least a decade younger than anyone else in this room except the performers. I tried to find that time again, back when I looked as young as her, university days when we’d first met, before she started to work full-time for our company, back when my love for her wasn’t a habit or memory, but something more present. Sometimes I tried to find anchors of memory, restaurants, shops we used to go to, some reminder of earlier days. But this city has changed so much, The Tower has overgrown so many things and there’s almost nothing left. My memories live internally, there is no home for them outside except for S.’s unchanging face and in our house. Applause, S. had finished speaking. I hadn’t really been listening to her, but it wasn’t necessary. I knew what she was going to say: I could hear her practising through the walls at home when she didn’t know that I was there. 

A loud clatter and the room went silent. High performer waiting staff excitedly looked at each other, the CFO tipped his head back and shouted to the room, slurring his words. "Trip, trip, nothing to see here, just a departure."

An empty seat, a half-eaten dessert; the business widow was gathering up the contents of the departed traveller’s dropped handbag. He looked disappointed, to sleep lonely at night until his partner returned. This was an odd time: most trips occurred when the stock exchanges were open, but the occasional trip still happened after hours. 

A crowd formed around S. once she stepped out from behind the lectern. I stayed seated, paying an inordinate amount of attention to people’s eyes. Just boring browns, blues and the odd green. No yellow eyes. Gravitational pull, a whirlpool of people with S. at the centre, I watched them circle her and thought of the past few days. Performers, trips, objectifications, the lot; had Hat and Briefcase been the keys to finding it out just how much S. had to do with all this?

I turned on the light and welcomed her home. "Hello darling." Her eyes were still wider than usual, heavy breathing. "So I’ve been ignoring these two—" I began. 

She stopped me."They’re going."

"They have names.”

From the table, in unison: "We have names."

"Not my problem. Stop talking to them." Arms held straight by her sides, she marched out of the living room and down the hall, so I followed. 

Upstairs in our bedroom, where Hat and Briefcase couldn’t hear: "I want to come home and not be bothered. Those two—"

"Hat and Briefcase."

"Really, really, don’t get attached. They’re not staying. It’s a mistake—"

I felt sorry for them, pangs of conscience, it didn’t seem like it was their fault. They were as confused as I was. These two objects had arrived in a changed house, one that they insisted was their own, an owner who suddenly had disowned them, a city that they said had transformed overnight. But they were dangerous, S. seemed to think so, even if she wouldn’t say it openly. I knew they were, even if they wouldn’t answer any questions I had about S., because investigating only fed my paranoia. Anyway, we had the power and they didn’t. They were to go. 

S.: "So I’m thinking we just put them in the fire."

"Cremation?"

"Sure, call it whatever you want. Destroy all the evidence."

During tightly-controlled interviews with the media, frictionless conversations with me at home, considering the immolation of a talking hat and briefcase, S.’s blunted expression remained the same. The same unchanging face, never looking a day older than her early twenties, despite the fact that we were both past thirty. It used to bother me that I looked older and older than her. 

"But don’t you think that they feel pain? Or, you know—" My curiosity returned. "Why are we getting rid of them?"

Nervous, kneading her jacket’s fabric between two fingers, "Just consider it for a second. What will the media think? The public? Anyway, we don’t need this sort of stress. A talking briefcase, a hat?" 

And what if they had souls? Rummaging through Briefcase’s innards was one thing. Almological imaging would be a whole other level of subterfuge. They had to go; there were too many things I wouldn’t be able to resist, curiosity. 

Still, I didn’t want to burn them to death. "How about instead of incineration, we leave them somewhere? Maybe in a cardboard box?"

"Where?"

"I don’t know. A street corner several blocks from here."

S. didn’t look convinced. "And if someone finds them?" Then she stared into space for a moment, nodded and smiled, answered her own question: "There’s no need. I should have asked them earlier—" I made to speak and she cut me off. Even when smiling, her expression remained the same. "A high performer is already on his way."

"What’s a performer going to—"

"He’ll take them back to The Tower, that hat and the briefcase will get sorted out there, away from prying eyes."

Disappointment and relief at one, I hid my feelings beneath helpfulness: "Do you need me to call anyone?"

"Like I said, a high performer is already on his way," she said without facing me, already standing up and opening our cupboard, rummaging through it. My view of her was obscured by one of the cupboard’s doors, the sound of shifting clothes, crunch of something unknown, when she stepped back into my sight she was carrying a cardboard box. "To keep things discreet."

"Would we need to poke holes in it?"

S.: "What?"

"The cardboard box."

"Why?"

"So they can, I don’t know, breathe or something."

"If it makes you feel better, sure."

I thought for a moment. "What’ll happen to them in The Tower?"

"Does it matter?"

"They look like they have an internal life, or an experience of what it is to be a briefcase, or a hat. Whatever that is."

"True. Still, so what?"

My squeamishness was one reason why I became a radioalmologist and not a corporeal doctor. A squeamishness which, I discovered, extended to hats. I didn’t want them immolated, I didn’t trust a high performer to treat them well, I didn’t want them to disappear in The Tower: "What about a quick death instead? Is that mercy?"

"Behind the shed, give them two behind the ear, you know like—" she clicked her tongue twice, index finger pulling an imaginary trigger. 

"Do hats die?"

"Very shortly, that won’t be our problem."

So we broke the news in our living room, that they would have to live elsewhere. S. was firm, I conceded. Briefcase was quiet and Hat vocal, blaming me, pleading with S. "But why? You took me to work the day before last, it was so recently! What did I do wrong? It’s you, isn’t it. You—" ‘You’, directed at me, "—you did this. S., get this one— this person here, he’s the one you should be throwing out. What has he ever done for you?" 

There would be no quick death and no burning; a performer was inbound on foot, so S. said. Falling back into familiarity, I just went along with things, placing the cardboard box on the ground, closing Briefcase and placing it in first. 

"Murderer and invader! You think you can do this to me? Imprison me, bury us somewhere in a cardboard coffin? A mass grave, the two of us! S.! S.! Stop him! Stop him now, you’ve got to stop him!"

Briefcase began quietly crying, or at least sounded like it. They were closed, which made them harder to hear anyway. Held at arm’s length between my thumb and index finger, Hat’s personal abuse and pleas for S.’s help grew more and more profane - I was afraid that, somehow, it would bite. My reassurances convinced nobody, not Hat, not Briefcase, not me, my insistence that The Tower was actually a really nice place where there were plenty of talking hats and briefcases to meet, where Hat and Briefcase could feel at home. I dropped Hat into the box and taped it shut, left it to sit in the doorway connecting our living room with the narrow hall, at whose far end was the front door. S. stood with crossed arms, watching us with a blank face and occasionally glancing through the window at The Tower.

"I don’t want a new home, I want to be in my home!" came Hat’s voice, pure venom.

Jaw tight, S. giggled through bared teeth before regaining her composure.

"What’s so—" I started, stopping to listen to the shouting in the distance, growing louder, footsteps like whip-cracks from outside.

S. stepped from the window, began walking towards the front door. "He’s almost here." 

Having crossed the living room, she tried stepping over the box. Her impassive expression broke as she tripped and flipped the box on its side, rushed footfalls before she found her balance against a wall. Part of me enjoyed it, the momentary sneer, red face, insults to match Hat’s; a glimpse of real emotion, not S.’s usual bare distance, more barren with each post-slogan day. 

Briefcase’s sniffs and soft gasps graduated to loud cries and moans, while Hat shouted itself hoarse. "Are you moving us now? Is this the end? What a way to go, Stolen, stolen— abandoned by my mount! Abandoned because of some bastard invader!" 

The galloping footsteps outside came to a halt at our front door, a commanding voice, the only voice that high performers spoke in, rattled the house: "Chauffeur service right here buddy! The courier has come to collect!"

I glanced down the hall at the front door briefly, and when I looked back at S. she had returned to inscrutability. Briefcase continued to cry. Was I responsible? Hat seemed to think so. But I’d only agreed to S.’s plan, made some suggestions, I didn’t make any definite decisions. Picking up the box, which lay on its side, I followed S. down the hall, towards the hammering knocks on the front door and excited chatter from the performer standing outside our house.

Briefcase was screaming hysterically, Hat was pleading: "What was it? I’ll keep quiet, you won’t hear of me. I thought that I could stay, why can’t I stay like before? Is it you there, S.? What changed? What did I do? Just don’t do this, please don’t do this. If you don’t like me, well, I don’t know what I did but just put me under the bed or let me collect dust somewhere, just not like this, please not like this."

Luminous grin, a beautiful silk tie; S. opened the front door and there stood a high performer, dispatched here from The Tower without any request or command being spoken. I handed over the box without a word. 

"You don’t have to do this," said Hat, quietly, before the performer turned and sprinted down the street, carrying the cardboard box above his head. 

His cheers faded into the sound of traffic and behind a closed door our house was quiet again. An opportunity to dig into S.’s past had been missed and part of me was glad. I didn’t feel like talking to her and she didn’t have anything to say to me; we tried filling the silence with the radio, but they were talking about our company so we turned it off.

"Welcome home? To our home. Welcome to our home!" said Briefcase, trying to be friendly. 

I played absentmindedly with an ovular keychain in my pocket, from a holiday that we once took overseas, back before the slogan when S. at least pretended to take time off work. It had the name of some beach embossed on it and I scraped the etched letters with a fingernail.

Hat shouted at me down the hall: "So when are you moving out?"

"We’re not."

"No, when are you moving out? S. stays."

Briefcase chimed in: "Well, I suppose we’re going to have to learn to live with one another, to accommodate, you know?"

I already liked Briefcase more than Hat. "No. We’re not learning to live with each other. We’re the humans here, we already have a briefcase somewhere and I don’t normally wear hats."

"How about we, ah, we all got off on the wrong foot, I think. I’m Briefcase."

"I don’t talk to briefcases." I leaned on the hall table; I wasn’t quite ready to look at these two. 

Shouting from neighbouring rooms seemed easier. 

"If you’re going to stick around, how about you find me another hat? I’ve been sitting here all day and, and no offence Briefcase—"

"Go on, go on, none taken."

"—but none of you understand me on a deeper level, we can’t talk shop. S., maybe, but not you."

I had my eyes closed, a few seconds of quiet before Briefcase broke the momentary stillness. "Could you introduce me too? Is anyone else speaking? It’s a, a kind of new skill and I want to, you know, practise. We’re not the only ones, are we?"

I threw a baseball cap on the table beside Hat. I had found it upstairs in the bottom of a cupboard, the logo of some local sports team printed on it in large and loud letters. An acquaintance gave it to me as a gift because I happened to come from this city. Briefcase had been left open and I tried not to look at the papers and planner inside it, but couldn’t help myself. Hat introduced itself and then nobody and nothing spoke.

Hat tried again: "Go to many games? I hope that your mount is tall. It’s hard to see much otherwise."There was no response, the cap just sat there like caps do. Its visor was pointed at an oblique angle to Hat. I wanted to be helpful and pointed the visor towards Hat and waited. "Do you recognise what’s been done to this house? Because neither of us do." Neither of us, as in, Hat and Briefcase. The cap, to my relief, did as a cap should and did not speak. "Well, you could at least acknowledge me. Didn’t anyone ever teach you any manners? I’ve greeted you, in my house, and what? Silence? Who do you—"

Briefcase tried to conciliate while Hat kept up its tirade. "It’s probably, the ah, the right thing to do, to reply, that is. You know, it’s not too much, you just need to—"

"—you’re only half a hat, you know. Cover the face, fine, maybe the back of the neck, fine, but both at once? There’s a good reason that I, I always knew that I didn’t like caps, lazy, impractical—"

"Just tell Hat what your name is. Don’t be, ah, you know that Hat doesn’t mean what it’s saying to—"

"Ok! Time to wrap this up! It doesn’t look like it’s in the mood to talk!" I clapped my hands while I said this, trying to look jovial. 

"Wait a second! I’m not finished here. You can’t come into my house, sit on my table and treat me like this. I’ll—" Before Hat could finish its sentence I was already carrying the cap and in the hallway. 

Hat’s voice grew more indistinct as I climbed the stairs and then I looked out the window with my hand on one of our chair’s many sharp, white edges. The floor shielded me from the treble of Hat’s voice, so I only heard a booming staccato. Intrusive thoughts, the papers in the briefcase, I needed to see them. I was impressed by Hat’s enthusiasm; I would have conceded by now, but it was still waxing rabid. I looked down at the cap in my hand and felt a swelling affection for it. For our desperately uncomfortable chair as well. These were objects behaving themselves and not burdening me with speech or any sort of apparent internal life. The pictures on the walls, the floorboards, these and everything inert around me, for these I was thankful. The cap was back in our bedroom cupboard, on the floor among crumpled cardboard boxes and an old backpack that I hadn’t used in years. It had a proper place in its disuse, and that was in this cupboard. 

I went down the stairs slowly, felt the bare wood give with each step and the creaks they gave were long and drawn out. Putting off the inevitable; I was going to look at the papers inside Briefcase, ask it and Hat some questions that I shouldn’t. S. could have stopped me, but she didn’t get home in time. 

"Can you believe it? The nerve."

"It’s ok, it’s ok, there are all sorts in the world, sometimes you just—"

"Ignored me, just like that!"

"—you’re not going to get along with everyone, you know?"

From the hallway I could hear Briefcase calming down Hat, which wasn’t speaking so loudly anymore. Getting to know them even a little bit more would make it harder to throw them out, but that was a future problem. They stopped talking when I entered the living room and sat down at the table, arranged them in front of me. 

My first question: "So, were you talking before? As in, before yesterday?"

"Well, not talking talking, but we were, you know—"

Hat butted in, talked over Briefcase. "We remember plenty—"

"But it’s a bit hazy, actually."

"But maybe I didn’t want to speak and that’s why! That’s exactly it! I just didn’t want to."

Hat’s bravado didn’t convince me, but Briefcase’s uncertainty did: "I don’t think I could speak. I, I remember some things but they’re not so, so clear. Getting clearer! But no, I just remember some places and some people, and don’t remember talking to anyone."

Eyeing what Briefcase contained, I wanted to ask about S. But I didn’t and I stood up, crossed the room and started to stack wood in the fireplace, the one which sat in the wall across from the table. It was cold outside and so we needed to get a fire going, so I told myself. Really, I just didn’t want to look at Hat and Briefcase. I half-hoped that S. would get back home, stop me from investigating any further and let me return to a routine that I didn’t care for, but was very used to. But the fire was started and S. still wasn’t back. Relaxed by the sound of crackling and spitting fire, its warm light, I took the plunge. 

No point putting it off: "And you remember S.?"

Hat laughed, not in a friendly way. "Of course we do. She took us to work each day. You on the other hand. I don’t remember you."

Hat continued to mutter about me being an intruder while Briefcase spoke. "Well, she took us to work five of every seven days. You know, work days."

"And where was work?"

"It was, uh—"

"In the, the— in the city, of course! You wouldn’t know," snapped Hat.

"So you don’t know where work was."

"I don’t— you— the absolute, absolute temerity of this person! Briefcase! Can you believe what you’re hearing? You, yes, you, intruder, S. is going to hear about this, let me tell you—"

So I’d offended Hat. It didn’t know where S. took it to work each day, where she apparently took it to work. Maybe it would follow through on its threats, tell S. that we’d been talking, but then what? Her anger, if she could manage even that, at least it would be something more than the bland distance of the past few years. 

I decided to ask Briefcase more questions; Hat obviously couldn’t admit when it was wrong or didn’t know something. "Do you at least know where in the city she took you to work?"

"I, uh, I can’t really remember, but—"

Standing, picking up Briefcase: "If I showed you a better view of the city, do you think you’d remember?"

Back up the stairs, I left Hat behind because it really didn’t add anything of value. Embers of stress, I’d already wronged S. in my mind, my subordinate crimes being years of submerged doubts about our company, her role in the slogan. And now, I would act on those doubts. The greater crime, though, was realising that part of me really didn’t care. Let S. be furious. At least she’d notice me as something more than a prop for company PR, a relic from her pre-slogan years. Soft and indistinct noises came from the briefcase; I’d closed it for carrying and surprised myself at how quickly I was walking. I wanted to get this done before S. returned home; care or not, things would be easier without her. 

Our house was long, narrow and tall. The ceilings on both of its two storeys were uncomfortably high, and through the window in the hall to our bedroom the views out over the city were magnificent. This city was mostly flat, except for the hill in the inner suburbs on which our house stood. Buildings got taller and taller as they approached the centre and focus of the city: The Tower, which stands high above everything and through the clouds and casts its long shadow in a sweep as the sun moves across the sky. Its silhouette quivers with objectified. It used to be alarming, but then we all got used to it; when the market capitalisation fell, how a section of it would disappear instantly, the objectified making up a section leaving on a business trip en masse. Skyscrapers twist and bend and sway like a bramble beneath The Tower. When I opened Briefcase and put it on the small table beside the window, its voice became clearer again.

"Does Hat ever stop shouting?"

Briefcase waited before answering me: "Hat’s just, um, passionate."

It’s not easy making small talk with what should be an inanimate object. I could only catch the odd word of what Hat was screaming from downstairs, complaining about being left out of the conversation. I didn’t know where it saw from and didn’t know how to orient it, to make sure it could see the city. 

But it was fine, it could see: "Oh, oh wow, it’s— it’s like Hat said."

"Like Hat said?"

Disturbing, how quickly I got used to talking to Briefcase and that I was using Hat’s name so casually. My nerves were still holding, but only just. Maybe most of me didn’t care so much what S. would do, but I’d been passive for so many years; these habits tell you how to feel, whether you agree with them or not. S. was still away on a trip and I still had time, but I didn’t know how long.

"That, ah, that it looks like it’s the same place but, but it’s— it’s a lot bigger, those buildings everywhere, they’re a lot more, um, spindly than they were, just a moment ago."

Architectural fashions had changed a lot over the past few years, since the slogan. 

"Just a moment ago?" I looked again at the documents in Briefcase.

"It only felt like a few days ago that S. walked me past this window. She wasn’t talking to me or anything, just walking past. And then suddenly, uh— I don’t know." That did sound a lot like a business trip. If Briefcase had hands, maybe it would have pointed: "That huge tower there, in the middle. That wasn’t there."

It couldn’t be a trip, then. A pre-Tower, and therefore pre-slogan, trip? Nope.

"Do you remember where work was? Where S., you know— where you say S. took you both?"

"Somewhere in the centre. Near where that tower is. The big one. Yes, yep, definitely, it was in the centre. I remember."

"So Briefcase, how about we have a little look at these documents here. Do you mind?" I’d already reached forward into Briefcase and picked up a small book.

"No problem, you can have a look, it doesn’t worry me, just, um, help yourself."

It was a weekly planner and I opened it, flicked through a few pages. The dates and years made everything even more unclear. 

Briefcase was still talking: "I don’t want to intrude or, or be rude or anything like that, but I really have to ask. And if it was a private conversation, really, don’t feel like you need to answer, but—"

Familiar handwriting, a single note:

"Drop out. Go full time."

The note was dated from pre-slogan times, before we were even married, more innocent days. Around when S. dropped out of university. The Tower watched through the window. 

"—but do you know why S. keeps refusing to, um, admit that we know each other? No, no, I’m not saying that she’s lying, but— well, she can’t have forgotten, just like that. That’s not like her, not at all."

I went to turn the page and to answer Briefcase, but my resolve cracked. The transponder buzz, vibrating in my back pocket, ascending tones. I jumped, Briefcase stopped talking. I stuffed the weekly planner back into Briefcase and slammed it shut, I didn’t want these two in the house anymore and wanted them gone. If they stayed here then I couldn’t help myself; I’d keep pulling at a thread that I didn’t understand and fall into somewhere I didn’t want to be. And if they were gone? Normality. Did I want post-slogan normality? She would be home soon, so I was taking two steps at a time down the stairs to put Briefcase back with Hat and pretend that nothing happened. If they told her that we’d talked, that I’d looked inside Briefcase for a moment? Better her anger than her apathy.

On the table, Hat was still complaining about being left out, but I didn’t answer and it gave up after a while. I had been distracted and realised that it was night and the lights were off. The Tower’s windows twinkled in the distance and the living room had a greyscale diorama quality lit by wavering orange firelight from embers, Hat and Briefcase only dark outlines from the black straightness of the table. The light switch lay beside the doorway and I watched the room silently with my hand on the switch and nobody talked. I couldn’t bring up anything with S. anymore, her coldness, my cowardice. Inactivity is a sedative, so is animal comfort, so is ‘it could be worse,’ so is habit, so is dissatisfaction fearing a worse dissatisfaction if anything changes. I didn’t know if I loved her anymore. We waited in the dark, I waited to see if Hat and Briefcase would tell her, say something about today’s talk. Scared and ambivalent at once. It was a strange time. 

I’d given this lecture so many times before. That laugh, ‘hah,’ almost rehearsed, always in the same place. My students looked unengaged and I felt unengaged. At least work was keeping my mind off Hat and Briefcase; they were to be disposed of after work.

"The plain almograph, taken with the SEARI, this will be your bread and butter. You should try to see and interpret as many of these on the wards as you can. When I was a student, we all, ah, used to, used to get together and spend hours interpreting the hardest almographs that we could find. Hours. That’s the only way that you’ll really learn." This wasn’t entirely true. "You can always pick the students, in exams, in OSCEs, the students who spent all their time on the wards." This wasn’t true either. I hated administering exams. "So, tell me a little bit about the soul. Anyone?" Many students became particularly interested in their notes. "Remember: SEARI, single-exposure almographic resonance imaging, CARI, composite almographic resonance imaging, like those plain films and CT scans that the radiologists love so much, respectively."

Studied expressions directed anywhere in the room but towards me. Furrowed brows and writing. I hadn’t said enough to warrant so many notes; I tried to remember what I had written while avoiding answering questions at university. 

Getting rid of Hat and Briefcase would make my life easier or more pedestrian, but would I miss out on some opportunity? They seemed to know S., and she was so adamant that they go, maybe too adamant. A years-old question was awoken, swam to the surface. The slogan, was S. responsible? Using the hat and the briefcase to dig into these doubts would be some sort of betrayal. A prickle in my throat.

"If no one is volunteering, I’ll just start at the front and ask everyone questions sequentially." The room became even more silent. I remembered the feeling from med school and wanted to inflict it on others. "Where in the body would you find the soul? Yes you, we’re going right to left, starting at the front. Actually, actually, right, yes, those in the back row come up to the front. I notice that the people closest to me are sitting in the second row, and that the back of the room is prime real estate. Come up the front, no need to be scared, I won’t continue with this lecture until you do. Ok, so, yep, just, just come up here, thank you. Alright, starting front right - your right, not mine - where in the body would you find the soul?" I pointed at a student, my first victim.

"The heart."

"Yes that’s partially true. Where else?"

"The brain?"

"Yes, you can also find it in the brain, in a sense. Can you find it around the brain?"

"I don’t think so."

"Ok. The soul is found around the brain and the heart. It doesn’t reside within them, as such. You can find the soul outside of the body, right? It’s not restricted to the body or any body part. It envelops it. Ok, next student. Tell me about the distribution of the aether."

This student squirmed too, answering without looking at me. "It sits across all observable space. The density of it changes when a body is nearby."

"Anything else?"

She was red in the face, grew more so as the silence lengthened. There wasn’t any reason for me to keep quizzing her; my question was vague enough that she was trying to intuit what I was thinking rather than showing any sort of knowledge. A ‘how long is a piece of string?’ question. Getting things wrong in public is humiliating; why did I inflict it on my students? Because that is how my teachers taught me. 

"The luminiferous aether," I said, more to myself than the students. 

All this talk of souls: did Hat and Briefcase have them? Could they be strange objectified, a shared hallucination, something more? Something I could image? Nervousness grew. 

It’s rude to point, but I pointed at the next student in line anyway: "So what is it that shows up on an almograph?"

"Spectrums."

"Sure, spectra of what?"

"The, the, uh, the luminiferous aether."

"Yes but a spectrum of what? There is only one type of aether that I’m aware of."

The student was silent and I let the moment linger. Nobody but those who had already answered questions was looking in my general direction. I don’t think that I’m fundamentally mean, but I can’t help myself with students and juniors. I don’t feel good about it; it simply happens and I passively observe. I’m nice to them in my head. 

"Does the aether move under the influence of a body?"

"Yes it— it vibrates." His voice broke slightly when he spoke, maybe because he was speaking so quietly.

"Ok, I’ll pay that. The component particles of the aether vibrate, as well as shift under the influence of a body, pulling inwards towards that particular body’s brain, eyes and heart. The pattern of densities associated with a given person’s soul can change slowly, but not so much that it becomes unrecognisable; you get a soul in the womb, and you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life. Now, unlike a soul’s pattern of density, the rate and amplitude of aetheric vibration are variable over short time periods. This vibration can tell us aspects of the soul’s present state."

I just looked at the next student. She looked at me, moved her mouth slightly and didn’t make any sound. 

The student beside her: "The frequency of vibration lets us diagnose soul pathologies."

I realised I had not changed the lecture slides since I had started to talk. It was a generic-looking introductory slide, minimalist and throwaway in its design. It had someone else’s name on it, which was good. The projector was a handful of degrees off level and the projected image would vibrate slightly when someone at the back of the room moved too vigorously. Vigour as in breathing, shifting in their seats, it didn’t take much. It was subtly out of focus, many rubbing and squinting their eyes, glasses were readjusted, necks stretched forward. The student was still speaking. The first few slides documented the history of radiology and radioalmology and I ignored these on behalf of everyone else. Time for the clinical scenario.

 I read from the slide. "Ok, here we go. A forty-nine-year-old man presents to the emergency department with three hours of sudden-onset, profound boredom on a background of long-standing ennui. Past history of listlessness, occasional runs of self-importance, a saturnine disposition and atrial fibrillation. Differentials?"

A student raised their hand. "A lesion in the cranial field, the aetheric density around the brain."

Not a bad answer, but I pushed this student for more: "That’s a possibility. But what is the usual function of the cranial field?"

"Apollonian."

"Apollonian what?"

"Maybe the opposite."

"It depends on whether the lesion results in a deficit or if it’s a rare productive lesion. But I’ll pay that. What else? Actually, actually, actually, we’ll stay with you for now, tell me what Apollonian means first."

The student didn’t groan out loud, but she definitely groaned internally. "The soul state when, ah, when the soul turns inwards—" I just raised my eyebrows. "No, when the patient gets, like, their rational and logical self dominates the Dionysian part of the soul so they just think all the time and, um, they don’t let loose."

"And Dionysians?"

"The opposite. Poetry, song, dance, things like that. The Apollonians are too inhibited and the Dionysians not inhibited enough."

I couldn’t be bothered; these descriptions were terrible, but the more I thought of what was happening at home, the more anxious I got. S. was decisive; when she disagreed with something, she normally dismissed it completely, just once, and then refused to talk about it again. Going on about it was a waste of her time. This sort of vehemence, that she doesn’t know what or who Hat and Briefcase are, that they have to go and now, returning to the subject again and again unprompted, that was so unlike her. She was only ever this emphatic with one other thing, something we never brought up anymore. I knew the lecture well enough to give it on autopilot, but it was getting hard to concentrate on anything else except the new arrivals in the house. Was I missing some opportunity by getting rid of them without any investigation? 

I had been speaking to the class without even realising it: "Ok, back to the earlier question. More differentials?" I had moved a few students further along with my questions. This one had been checking his watch nervously, but there was easily enough time for him to be publicly interrogated. He started to answer, but I spoke over him. "Actually, how about you tell me how you’d examine him. I know, I know, radioalmologists love their imaging, but sometimes we even examine our patients! Tell me about how you’d take a dream history from a patient."

The soul is confined, during waking hours, to the body’s contours. More or less. It remains within these bounds and forms, save for extreme states - soul stasis, death - and in dreaming. Death sees the soul dissolve away, somewhere. In dreaming? The soul tentatively reaches out, thin filaments at the start of each night. It grows bolder as the night goes on, the tendrils knitting webs which drift and flutter. They trace the outlines and surfaces of objects as they explore the room around them. The specifics of dreams remain obscure, but their general inclination can be inferred from an almograph, and the state of someone’s soul can be inferred from the contents of their dreams. By the early hours the dreamer’s bed can be encased in an ivy filigree of delicate spindles. The soul always wraps around objects and never goes through them; it seems to respect the physical world around it, although always lying just out of reach for solid hands. When two people sleep close to one another their dreams dance above them, but most couldn’t sleep in the almographic imagers, so dreams were hard to study. 

A silence, this student obviously wasn’t going to answer. I asked the next student about taking dream histories and tried to swallow down my worries. I couldn’t: S. was only ever this agitated, as now with the hat and briefcase, when it came to having her soul imaged. She used to have almographs taken without any problems, regular checkups. I took some of her myself, a birthday present when I was still in training, she has an emerald green cat’s-eyes soul that I could recognise anywhere. But after the slogan manifested she started to refuse, emphatically. One of the only fights we’ve ever had was over a routine almograph, one that she didn’t end up having. I re-emerged from thought and a different student was speaking. This one knew what he was talking about. 

Maybe I’ll just ask them some questions when I get home, I thought. There’s no harm in talking to Hat and Briefcase. I’m not getting attached. More nervousness. I went to ask another student a question and S.’s transponder beeped - a descending arpeggio, she had left on a business trip. The students shared glances, they all knew what it meant; they all knew who I was married to. A crest of enervation broke and I couldn’t talk, not for much longer. A feeling of weight behind my eyes and an increased appreciation of gravity. 

I was still speaking and now choosing the fastest possible route between the first syllable and the end of any thought: "—no scientific consensus on whether we dream or if it’s a function of the soul—" Was I meant to forget all about Hat and Briefcase, once all of this was resolved? "—or if there’s even a difference between us and our souls—" They’d be gone and no longer our problem. Maybe nobody’s problem. "—plenty of theories, but no firm idea of what the soul even is, if I’m being frank—" S. seemed a whole lot less surprised than I’d have expected. Was it disloyal, me doubting her like this? But I’ve doubted her like this for years; I’d started doubting us, too. "—the soul’s a mystery. But one day we’ll be able to control it. You’ll see."

As soon as the front door closed behind me, an irritable voice came from the living room: "What? You’re back? Why do you keep showing up in my house?"

I took much longer to take off my coat, untie my shoelaces, and then I stood in the hall for a while. I wasn’t ready to confront this problem, not quite yet. 

The voice from the living room kept shouting. "Are you the one responsible for the decor? How did you ruin everything so quickly?"

I didn’t think the house was so ruined. S. had lived here since childhood and it had only been renovated once. That was when I moved in; it was all her initiative, plenty of furniture was thrown out and even more brought in, wallpaper papered, pictures hung. Eventually satisfaction replaced initiative and S. decided that this was now our home. She was proud. It’s fine, though I didn’t mind the way it was before. 

"No, really, how did you move, or, or change around all the furniture so quickly and quietly?"

The hall linking the front door and the living room was narrow, mostly taken up by a staircase leading upstairs to another corridor and our bedroom. I thought about walking upstairs and pretending that the hat wasn’t there, but it was making so much noise that I’d fret about it anyway. So I squeezed between the staircase and hall table, stepped into the living room.

"Ah! He graces us with his presence!"

One wall was floor-length windows into a garden that we never used. I looked through the windows at The Tower, sighed, then turned to the hat on the table. 

"So good of you to finally look at me. Now, put me on your head."

My first words to a hat: "Why are you in my house?"

"Wear me, then we’ll talk."

"No, really, why are you in my house?"

"Wear me." It didn’t move when it talked, the red curved crown and narrow brim stayed still. "Wear me now!" Such a sudden increase in volume, I had it on my head before it had even stopped speaking. It kept talking and vibrated subtly which send shivers through my skull and down my back, not unpleasantly. "So, now that that’s out of the way, why are you in my house?"

It’s hard to know where to look when you talk to something sitting on your head, but I tried my best: "I live here."

"I live here."

What to do? 

"I’ve lived here for years and we’ve never met—"

The hat cut me off: "Don’t you lie to me, I’ve lived here for years upon years, and my mount for longer. You’d better—"

"—you just appeared here unannounced, I think I can be forgiven for asking—"

"—when my mount gets home, watch out! You’d better - and I’m saying this for your sake, it doesn’t make a difference to me - but you’d better clear off right now."

I didn’t know what a mount was, but the term was delightful. I tried asking nicely, again: "But jokes aside, what’s your name and where do you come from?"

"And what did you do to the walls? These carpets? How did you get this furniture in here so quickly? And so quietly? I don’t remember hearing anything. That couch, it makes me sick, you’ve the most awful—" And the hat continued like that, mostly abuse, the occasional threat. 

I was told about all the things its mount would do to me when she got home. Blank-faced, I thought about how it would view S., feeling like a passenger who would watch this all get solved soon.

When I was stressed or didn’t know what to do or just wanted some quiet, I would walk upstairs and sit in the hall which connects the staircase to our bedroom. There was a window and next to it a chair. It’s an armchair, white fabric and perfunctory padding covering what felt like a cinderblock. Where you’re supposed to sit is dead flat, and both the arms and back rise from it at perfect right angles. The human body isn’t made of perfect right angles and so it fits poorly. The chair looked intimidatingly modern, which is probably why S. bought it, years ago in a pre-slogan world, shortly before she was made CEO. I was so proud; soon after her promotion came the slogan and she retreated from everything except our company. Distant, S. no longer a fixed point in my life, I was swept away in the slogan’s change, along with the rest of the world. 

The hat sat on my head as I walked upstairs to the chair by the window, and I didn’t think my question was offensive: "You’re not an objectified, are you?"

"First you show up unannounced in my house, now you’re insulting me?"

"It’s not an insult. It’s an almological condition. A medical condition."

"Never call me that again!"

"So you’re not objectified?"

"Stop calling me that. If you’re going to insult me, at least use something, something— at least say something that you didn’t make up thirty seconds ago. Objectified? What kind of insult’s that?"

"You actually don’t know about objectification?"

This didn’t go down well. I was accused of being condescending. It’s hard not to be; everyone knows what objectification is. 

"Of course I know what objectification is. Do you think I’m stupid?"

"So tell me about it."

"Well, when— it’s when you’re, you’re an object. It’s there in the word, object-ify. Why don’t you tell me, if you’re such an expert?" And so I shook my head, tried not to sound too surprised as I explained objectification. "Stop speaking nonsense." 

Objectifieds didn’t lose their memories, not like this, not so specifically. Maybe this hat really wasn’t objectified. 

"So you’re— you’re actually just a hat?"

"I’m not going to discuss this any further. You’re clearly an idiot, you clearly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, you’re clearly just—" Mid-word, it stopped speaking as soon as we reached the window and I sat down, with views of the city as the sun set. There were a few moments of quiet, and then the hat spoke again: "Where did all those buildings come from?"

"Someone built them, I’d say."

"No, but—" It trailed off, starting again a few seconds later: "But they’re all so much bigger. When did they— how did they get so much bigger so suddenly?"

"It wasn’t that fast."

It was pretty fast, the city went from being something of a backwater to the most important place in the world in under a decade. It all started with the slogan. But the skyline didn’t change overnight, like the hat was making out. Or, it didn’t change overnight except for The Tower. 

"That huge building, that one in the middle. What’s that? The, the— is it moving? Is it just me, or is it moving?"

"You don’t get out much, do you?"

Quietly: "When did everything change?"

It surprised me, how well I was taking all this. Two people walked under the window talking indistinctly and the murmuring drone of traffic continued as it always did. And then S. got back home.

It was an old lock and loud. A metal grinding, the bolt clunked noisily, I heard S. shove the door a few times and it didn’t give way; the door was also old and subtly changed shape with temperature and humidity and didn’t fit the doorframe so well. But then it suddenly burst open and S. was inside.

No longer wistful, the hat’s anger returned: "There are even more of you invading?"

Nodding while pushing myself out of the chair, I walked down the hallway, turned down the staircase and S. came into view; the hat gasped, or sounded like it did. The sun was setting and shining through the window at the top of the stairs. I was golden-backlit and only a black silhouette looking down onto S. and my shadow stretched over the steps and covered her. We didn’t speak for a moment. 

S.: "Is this what you were talking about?" As I nodded, S. continued, "We’ll need to deal with this, and now—"

"S.! S.! S.! Back from work!" Such genuine pleasure, the hat was so happy and S. crossed her arms. "So, look, S., we’ve got a problem. This person here—" I was probably the person in question. "—well, he just showed up in our house. Also, also, you wouldn’t believe it, but he’s changed all the furniture! Imagine, you leave the house for work - without me, but we’ll get to that later - and someone’s just, just— well, I don’t understand why he did it. Anyway, only the table is left, everything else, everything, he’s moved around or, or repainted, or—"

 "We need to dispose of it. Now." Who that was addressed to was ambiguous; S. could have been looking at either of us. 

But the hat quickly assumed: "Exactly, exactly! We need to get rid of this, this idiot! Can you believe it, he says that this is his house, that he lives here, that I’ve just appeared, and he’ll tell you too, he’s probably preparing to tell you to get out right now—"

The hat had assumed incorrectly. 

S. was already walking down the hall to the living room, shaking her head, looking stormy: "The hat needs to go."

Howls of anger, insults directed at me, a hat spurned. I walked downstairs as the hat’s insults massaged my scalp and followed S. There was something else: a muffled voice spoke from the living room, the fourth voice in our house today. 

S.’s voice was clear enough and cut through the hat’s shouting and whatever else was speaking from out of sight: "You too. Get out."

One hand on the hall table, I stopped and looked down the hall at the doorway. Through it came a conversation that I knew represented a changed part of my life. Did I want to step through the doorway and see things change? No, but things had already changed: I was wearing a talking hat, who was still loudly abusing me. This new voice from the living room was greeted warmly by the hat. S. scowled and I don’t know what my expression was, but I wanted someone else to fix this problem. 

Cheerful, half laughing, the hat’s voice rang out: "Well open them, open them up! They can’t speak like this. So surely you’re going to drop this act now, really. You must have taken it to work, what are you doing to do, carry everything in your hands?"

So familiarly, the hat spoke to S. as an old friend. She was resolutely not looking at the black leather briefcase on the table and wasn’t looking at the hat either. They sounded like words spoken from underwater or through a wall, pleading. 

S. turned to me, strained: "And you’re sure you didn’t buy it? Please tell me you bought the hat on the way home."

"To the best of my knowledge, no," I shrugged. 

S. muttered to herself: "This isn’t meant to happen. What’s it doing, dreaming like—" And then she stopped herself and stared at the floor. 

I tried to help, tried rationalising things: "Do you think that they’re objectified?"

"I told you not to call me that! S.! Make this imbecile stop!"

She looked at me and sighed, closed her eyes as the hat continued: "S.! Open them, they can’t see, can’t speak, can’t hear all that well either, not when they’re closed. Or, or maybe— you! The one who’s wearing me, you! Make yourself useful and open Briefcase."

I was interested and so I followed the hat’s advice. S. didn’t say anything but I could feel her disapproval. 

Mid-sentence: "—why didn’t you take me to work today? Quite high, airy, the briefcase’s voice became much clearer and easier to understand once I’d opened it. 

"S., do you know these, these—" Raised eyebrows, shaking her head before I’d finished my question. "—these things?"

"S., have you— don’t take this the wrong way, maybe I’m just being, I don’t know— please don’t take this badly, but are you—"

This briefcase’s question was finished by the hat: "You look tired. Is something wrong?"

Gritted teeth, S. turned and left the living room, up the stairs and to our bedroom. Her footsteps boomed through the ceiling. 

The hat and the briefcase continued to muse about what S. was doing, why she was ignoring them. The Tower’s windows lit up with yellow light at dusk and looked through the windows at us and I looked out at them. 

"But she, she took me to work only yesterday. What’s she doing, Hat, do you know—"

"No idea, no idea. First this person shows up in our house—" I took that to be me, "—and then S. is behaving strangely. I don’t know, I don’t know what to make of it. Besides, have you seen the city? Completely different. Something’s up. Something’s wrong."

While the hat had spoken so confidently and abrasively for the whole day, these last few words were quieter. It sounded like an emotional moment, so I took the opportunity to rifle through the papers in the briefcase. 

"Do you have any manners?" Said thunderously, the hat was back to its old acidity. 

The briefcase tried to introduce itself: "I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met, so, uh, so did S. invite you over?"

"I live here," I said.

S. had reappeared by the entrance to the living room and pointed at the papers in my hand: "Stop, put those back and let’s go, we need to talk about this problem in private." She had come back downstairs so quietly. "Put those back. It’s a sign of attachment," she said while glancing through the window at The Tower.

"Reading the things kept in talking briefcases?"

"Exactly. A classic sign of attachment." 

"I suppose so."

It sounded fair to me, although this sort of situation was unfamiliar. I didn’t have any real intuitions, S. sounded so sure of herself and so I just went along with what she suggested. There were a few stapled pages which I’d picked up, they looked like scientific papers with hand-written notes scribbled in the margins, a weekly planner and some jottings on loose-leaf paper. I was slightly curious, but not overly so. 

The briefcase thanked me for returning its contents and the hat kept trying to get S.’s attention: "—what are your thoughts on all the decor, do you think this uninvited guest changed everything while you were at work? But, no, I was here, and everything changed. Only this table, this is the same, the fireplace, that’s the same. But everything else, everything else changed like that."

Things got stranger: it sounded like they clicked their fingers to emphasise their point, that. But speaking without a mouth and clicking without fingers are equally strange. Intrigued, I picked up the hat and looked underneath it. Maybe it had a mouth under there. 

"Put me down! Put me down! Put me down this instant! S.! Make this brute stop! Who do you think you are, grabbing—"

"Put the hat down. Attachment, you’re getting attached."

It looked like the underside of any other hat. 

I was trying my best to understand what was happening and stared at my feet: "Do you think it was a business trip?"

"—stupid fool, thin-haired, dirty hair, manhandling me—"

"Hats don’t take business trips," said S., still looking out the window.

She had a point, but what the hat and briefcase described bore some similarities to the trips. Suddenly de-existing and then returning sometime later, it’s a strange feeling, non-linear existence took some getting used to. I often wondered about why I took so few trips. Yes, I knew the feeling of blinking and seeing that time and the world have moved on without me, at once somewhere else. Only three, that was the number of times I’d de-existed. This is how things usually went: the more someone benefitted financially from our company, the less they existed. And, through S., I benefitted a whole lot. But my existence within the world was mostly continuous, with few breaks and rare entries into an elsewhere unknown. Maybe I worried about trips so much because I’d been on so few and always felt the possibility hanging over me. S. barely mentioned them anymore, probably because they happened so often. 

I was thinking out loud: "Maybe it was— ok, this is a strange theory, it’s never happened before, but hear me out. Maybe there was a company stock bull run, these two objectified—"

"We two have names."

"—then there was a crash, they left on business trips, and, and—"

"No, that didn’t happen. Come upstairs, we’ve got some things to discuss."

S. didn’t seem so interested in the almological dimension of this. Sure, my theory wasn’t totally convincing - why were they speaking, if the hat and briefcase were objectified? More importantly, why were they so sure that they knew S.? - but still, something interesting was going on. Would these two new guests have souls? 

A briefcase broke the silence: "What’s a business trip?"

S. opened her mouth to speak, paused with it still open, and then slowly closed it, exhaling gently. 

I answered, because S. wasn’t going to. "You don’t know what a trip is? S., the hat didn’t know what objectified were either. Do you really not know what business trips are?"

"Stop talking to them. Stop talking to them." S. sure was firm.

"Maybe I could image them. Put them in the SEARI or CARI. Maybe publish a paper—"

"No, no, no, no, no, that’s not happening, attachment, you’re getting attached, this is being kept quiet, you’re coming upstairs, and—" She left the room before finishing the sentence. 

I looked at the papers in the briefcase, shrugged, followed S. upstairs. 

Our bedroom took up most of our house’s top storey. Like the rest of the house, it was long and thin and from the bed you could see out into the hall and the top of the staircase which doubled back onto itself, descended and pointed towards the front door. The window by the bed didn’t face The Tower which was a relief; I didn’t want it watching me while I slept. We ate dinner sitting on the floor at the end of the bed because S. didn’t want to look at our new guests and I felt bad about eating in front of them. Maybe they’d feel like they were missing out. Out the window, tree branches cobwebbed black against a cobalt sky. The hat’s voice carried up the stairs and through the floor, alternating pleas for S. to come downstairs and explain things and verbal abuse levelled at me. I didn’t understand every word but I got the general idea.

"They’re not staying. They’ve got to go." Her message stayed the same while eating, brushing our teeth and then lying in bed. 

The novelty was bracing, but I wasn’t sure I wanted them to go. S. and I hadn’t spoken this much at home in a long time.

"But they’re so sure that they belong here. And that all this is completely normal, a completely normal talking hat and a completely normal talking briefcase."

I thought again about the papers and planner in the briefcase. Maybe those would help explain what was going on. 

"I have never met those two before and do not plan on getting to know them any better."

"I still think imaging them might be, you know, interesting."

"What will the company think of all this?" She didn’t say this to me, glanced at the wall in the direction of The Tower. Then she continued: "Just, just, let’s just stop, we’ll dispose of these two and then we can forget this ever happened."

"Yeah, but it is pretty weird."

"I don’t care, it’s not happening, it won’t be happening shortly. The sooner they’re out, the better. We might need to control their movements, prevent escape, prevent survival and the possibility of them returning."

"Bound and gagged and all that? Is that legal?"

"The relevant laws apply to humans, sometimes to animals. It’s open season on that hat and—"

"Do you think it flaps its brim and flies like a bird? Or rolls on its side like a wheel? And what about the briefcase, that’s a, it’s a whole lot less obvious how that one could, you know, its motility is a more difficult question." Having something to talk about was intoxicating, I forgot myself for a moment. 

"I don’t know and don’t care. So long as they’re controllable it’s not my concern. The briefcase is—"

"Briefcase. That’s its name, the hat called it Briefcase."

"And the hat? It’s called Hat?"

"It sounds like it. Hat and Briefcase. Proper nouns."

"I’m not doing this."

"Do you think they’re lonely? Or have some need, maybe not biological, but some sort of equivalent, some unmet need that they’re missing?"

Then there was quiet. Should I have asked S. why they seemed to know her? Another thing to add to the list: there were plenty of things I wondered and suspected about S., questions that both of us avoided. 

"More problems. And there isn’t so much time left." And then she trailed off. 

Her being overworked was normal, but things had been much more intense than usual. Far more business trips than usual, too. 

"The world just keeps turning, doesn’t it?"

She agreed with me, the closest thing to intimacy that our company had left us.

"Wear me." That’s what it said to me that morning, a fashionable and vaguely familiar felt hat that had appeared on the kitchen table. 

It wasn’t mine and I didn’t know how it had gotten inside, so I left the house for the hospital, pretended that it had never happened. I’d wait, spend more time at work than usual and let S. get home first, let her solve the problem. But then plans changed, lunch was organised by S. and so I told my registrar to finish the round without me. 

Walking to meet S. only took half an hour even though the foot traffic was dense. But I was going to The Tower, so the crowds didn’t really matter; that’s the direction almost everybody moves in. The Tower was looking tall that day; the share price must have been good and its tangled surface swam with streams of objectified, assembling themselves into a dizzying variety of architectural styles and impossible angles.

It was always windy there and a gust ruffled my jacket as soon as I stepped into the open space. The cages for recently returned business travellers were enormous, walkways and instructions covered the ground, coloured arrows painted onto the concrete snaking between chest-high fences. Nothing to stop the breeze, which blew through this vast flat plain surrounding The Tower’s base, the centre of the city. S. was delayed as usual so I waited, sat down on a man in a suit who had become a park bench. As far as I could tell, he was an ordinary-looking man, at least before the objectification. No announcement, no special anointing by The Tower; some people were just prone to objectification and others seemed immune. The only known risk factor? Financially benefiting from our company. Years before, when the slogan was still new and we were all adjusting, I felt uncomfortable using the objectified. But now, watching the bustle of activity around The Tower from this man’s flattened and curved chest, I didn’t give it a second thought. It was only when his breath made my back damp with humidity that I moved, avoiding eye contact with the objectified lampposts and pavement. More waiting. These lamp-posts and the concrete could have been my patients. Many had told me about their objectification; I’d been on a few business trips but never objectified. And if I objectified, then I wouldn’t be missing much. The world would continue without me for a while, fine. 

Confused returnees wandered, brushed past me in the dense crowd, the usual objectified migration routes crossed from the city and over the cages to The Tower and their satisfied chuckles blended with the chants of protestors, a mixed group of company consumers who never let their consumption obstruct their complaints, always outside The Tower’s entrance and beneath the slogan that changed the world, the trips, the objectified, the high performers, the lot:

“Our Employees Are Our Company."

When the slogan first manifested, S. and company management took the sign down. But everyone got so used to it and it had such good brand recognition that our company put it back up, proudly. 

Heads turned, the protesters grew more agitated, a pack of company high performers split the crowd in two and approached me, all of them at least a head taller than the rest of us. Finally, she had arrived: ushered to me by our company’s favourite sons, S., my wife, a woman whose blonde hair and green eyes I once loved from welcome compulsion and now loved out of habit. Backs ruler-straight, grins luminescent even in direct sunlight, the cold clear light of early spring when winter still hadn’t quite gone but the longer days and green buds on trees promise something new: the high performers surrounding S. stepped aside to let her through. Mostly beaming at the protesters who had surrounded us, the performers chanced furtive glances at S., grins twitching slightly as they did so. How to bring up the hat?

S.: "The usual place?"

She’d already made the decision and so I agreed. S. waved away the high performers, who bounded over the protesters’ heads, high-fiving and vigorously shaking hands in mid-air. 

Bland questions, all I could ask with so many listening, everyone we passed turned their head to watch S.: "How was the latest trip?"

She got back last night and left home before I got out of bed. I already knew the answer: the same as always.

"Well, I stopped existing, remember none of it and then reappeared near The Tower. Anything exciting happen while I was gone?"

"Well, actually—" Technically, the hat appeared after she returned, while she existed. Was this the sort of thing to discuss in public? A particularly strong gust of wind swept through the returned traveller cages, so she couldn’t hear me speak. "—something interesting at home—"

"What was that?"

"I said—"

And the moment was gone. I didn’t feel like telling her anymore, or I was too unsure of what to say. Maybe later. A ring road surrounded The Tower and the cages, running five, maybe six hundred metres from The Tower’s entrance. As The Tower grew and swallowed up the space around itself, the ring road got pushed back, return traveller cages built over the former road and buildings demolished to make room for new asphalt. Our destination was directly across the road and popular enough with company employees that it was rebuilt each time the road was shifted. The cafe’s claim to fame was that S. could be seen there. 

She walked in front of me, faces behind windshields turned and followed her across the street and the people crossing the road with us leaned away from her slightly, trying not to stare but they couldn’t help it, they stared anyway. A white glint of keloid from the base of her neck where it caught the sun just right, only a tiny scar but I knew where to look; it kept track of her existence status, the transponder implanted under her skin just after the slogan manifested and the trips began. When she stopped existing it alerted me and company high-ups, a descending major arpeggio would play on any devices monitoring her existence status. It played an ascending arpeggio when she came back. 

It only took five minutes to reach the cafe if you moved at S.’s pace. 

"So how are things at our company? The Tower’s looking tall today," I asked, watching her across the table. 

And so began our routine. I used to resent being used like this, but today’s lunch let me half-forget the hat. People were always listening, journalists, workers at the few surviving rival companies, company employees looking for inside information which might give them a leg-up on the competition. They were all just another resource to leverage. An optimistic and upbeat summary of all things company-related was spoken clearly and loudly, notes were scribbled on surrounding tables behind newspapers conspicuously unread. It kept the share price up which kept us wealthier and also kept us existing. Sure, a higher market capitalisation caused more objectifications - The Tower needed materials to grow - but neither of us was prone to objectification so it wasn’t really our problem.

S. delivered the good news: "Good. Great. Fantastic!" 

So many listening, this wasn’t the place to bring up a talking hat. The cafe was busier than usual, probably owing to the current bull run on company stocks. Company people were the bulk of its customers and given how close it was to The Tower, the cafe made all of its staff shareholders. This was organisationally easier: shareholders and company staff were equally likely to leave on business trips, so the percentage of cafe staff existing at any one time was roughly proportional to that of its clientele. When the trips started, our company’s market capitalisation took a hit because people were scared they’d never come back. After it became clear that returns were the norm - and that our company was reporting back-to-back record profits - the share price healthily recovered. S. and I had separated our finances and she was the only legal owner of any shares, so at least one of us would always be home. Everyone now knew that these accounting practices did nothing to prevent trips, but we were too lazy to change things back. 

"Two, thank you." She held up her thumb and index finger as she said this, the waiter nodded and turned away nervously. 

Tall windows let in mid-morning light. My glass of water cast a wavering corona onto the table. The sharp edges and bare surfaces of the cafe gave the impression of cold, although it was uncomfortably warm inside. 

S. hadn’t stopped talking since sending the waiter away, projecting her voice to the whole cafe: "—everything’s progressing well. We’ve put more funding into research and development, we’re making sure the slogan will serve everyone. Even basic soul research has more funding: the new head of the slogan labs, the one who signed up recently, I think you know her—"

"From med school, yep. She liked almology, but not the patients," I said blankly.

"Anyway, she’s good. Great, she’s great. Much better than the previous head."

A newspaper rustled from behind S., its owner glancing over the pages. Our conversations in public always felt a little stilted, but when others could listen we followed an unspoken script. There was no script at home, so unless something unusual happened we didn’t talk. 

So I played my role: “And the new labs are paying off?"

"Oh, yeah, big time. Just imagine what we can do once we understand the slogan, in total."

Every university had a large portion of its research budget dedicated to slogan research. Governments too, a weaponised slogan would have decisive military benefits. Funding them all was our company. 

And she smiled at me: "We’re going to make a new world with this."

It was hard to know what that smile meant anymore, so I nodded and smiled back.

Our drinks arrived, food shortly after. We kept talking about our company because that’s almost the only thing anyone talked about. The Tower, our company: both of these had normal names once. The Tower had its name changed, capital ‘T’, capital ‘T’, The Tower, it was considered snappier and more memorable than what it was named before. Our company still has a normal name, it’s just that nobody uses it anymore; after the slogan, Our Employees Are Our Company, people started to call it ‘our company’. Its real name, even I forget it sometimes.

The waiter returned with our drinks, something new and uncaffeinated which I didn’t recognise. Like most of my peers, I had tried to reduce my caffeine intake. It’s not like it was found to be harmful, this was just a prestige game among the affluent. They’d tell you how many hours they worked last week and that they did it all without the help of caffeine. One hundred percent willpower. Of course, there was an explosion of caffeine replacements, stimulants, some were placebos and some were effective. One manufacturer brewed their product with amphetamine. This was popular for a few months, before regulators became suspicious. The results were too good to be safe, the thinking went. People aren’t meant to find their work this exciting, nor are they meant to operate on half an hour of sleep per night. This negative thinking was correct. Rather than disappear entirely, these drinks migrated to the black market and their distinctive electric-blue cans could still be found, empty, buried at the bottom of rubbish bins, hastily hidden away in any dark corner of any office, hospital, wherever people worked. They gave me the jitters and were too sweet for me to get into them in any meaningful way. I had defaulted back to coffee, it just seemed easier. 

Looking over my shoulder, S. changed the focus of our unofficial PR event: "And how are your students?"

The general public saw her as harsh; expressing interest in her husband’s work, medical work, was one of S.’s solutions. As for my students, their appearances during lectures ranged from moribund to frankly deceased. Those sitting around us, pretending to read their newspapers and pretending to enjoy their food began to make their way out. They’re just not all that interested in me. Now that we were less observed, alone at our table, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. It was time to bring up the hat. 

Leaning forward, in a low voice: "So, back to what I was saying in the cages, we’ve got someone— something at home." S. looked around, raised her eyebrows quizzically while I talked. "It’s a, a— so don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not crazy, I’m just dispassionately reporting—"

"Get to the point."

"—not something I’d have expected—"

"Out with it."

"—but sometimes life just turns out this way, you know?"

"I don’t know because you won’t tell me." Watching the room, she smiled at me again. 

Back at university, when we’d first met, her ambition was beautiful. Now there was almost nothing else to her and it seemed disfiguring. 

Time to get this out in the open: "There is a talking hat at home."

She looked a whole lot less surprised than I’d have thought. "That’s not meant to happen."

"I can’t argue with that."

And now what I’d been waiting for, her plan: "Well, they’re both going to have to go."

"Both?"

"They’re— no, I misspoke. It is going to have to go."

That sounded good to me. 

Tower is my first novel. I started writing it when I was working as a doctor, and finished my first draft during the covid lockdowns. It was the first major piece of fiction I'd written since high school, and it felt liberating to start making new things again after the prescriptions of university and medical life. It's not that anyone told me to stop making new things, I just fell out of the habit.

I've always enjoyed narrative-heavy literature with a fantastical element, such as The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, or Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. Such books use superficial inaccuracies (the devil didn't come to Soviet-era Moscow, the existence of Tralfamadorians has not been confirmed, etc, etc) to reveal something true in a deeper sense; this is something I sought to do with Tower, and I think I was mostly successful.

In addition to literature, the STALKER game series inspired Tower in a very significant way. Less the plot of these games, but more the atmosphere and art direction. The Red Forest, the brain scorcher, Limansk-13 and Pripyat all carry a sense of concrete menace that I tried to reproduce in sections of Tower.

A final source of inspiration was in music, mostly the band Yellow Eyes and Celestial-era Isis.

Shout out to @davidsartwork (he’s on Instagram), who did the cover art for Tower.

I would like to note that some of Tower’s formatting is different here on Substack than it is in the physical edition/ebook.