Just the two of us alone in an elevator, ascending a company-owned skyscraper. S. straightened my tie as I watched my reflection in her eyes, their surface bending the light in unexpected ways, my head stretched and rising like a thin line of smoke, brown hair tendrils dissipating as I moved; it was hard to recognise myself, I couldn’t find my face. The elevator doors opened and two high performers looked at us from across the hall, strode beaming in our direction. They greeted S. and asked for our coats, while I watched another couple being welcomed with a metal detector. High performers have always made me uneasy. A common source of this uneasiness is how heavily armed they are, although for me there’s a lot of discomfort to be found in the details. Their teeth are ruler straight and white, hair always combed right to left, short on the sides with an immaculately sculpted fringe. They are tall and slender and relentlessly smile. This smile can convey more emotions than you’d think: pleasure, displeasure, hunger, joy, sitting below their cheekbones which are just the right height. They speak in a confident boom, mirth and bonhomie accentuated by their consummate professionalism. It’s the verbal equivalent of several slaps on the back and a tousle of your hair. They look you in your eyes, smiling, grasp your hand and shake firmly, the same way that a house cat watches and toys with a mouse.
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?