Break Glass In Case Of Emergency.

Short Fiction

Aug 18, 2024

It took Reuben Williams a good few moments before he registered his own shimmery reflection in the windowpane. Staring dull-eyed towards the horizon, eyes flickering over the miniature cars that had begun their morning commute across the silhouetted, somber city, he had almost forgotten where he was. He watched as the sun raised itself beyond the confines of the ever-far line at the end of his sight whilst he attempted to gather himself, like broken pieces of glass, into a reformed whole.

Since arriving at his office he had been used, he felt, like nothing but a mechanised instrument. He had spoken intensely to close to thirty people, he had delegated, chosen, prioritised, suggested or assigned instruction that would inevitably be interpreted as order. He was the sum of every person he listened to, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all. When he reached in solitary, for a thought that might suit him, like what he fancied for dinner, or what he might do during the weekend, he discovered remote radio silence, nothing but pink noise that faded ever so briefly into the static of the air conditioner installed above his head. In fact, for a brief moment, a moment entangled in the fragmentary limbo of darkness and dawn, a moment that may in fact have lasted several hours, he questioned if he was actually alive.

He looked over towards the mahogany of his executive chair. The chair was empty. The chair was empty because his mind was dispersed throughout the entirety of the building. Cut up like disjointed shadows across his legal department and HR, across the incompetent shoulder of his VP, wandering through the hallway of his ever-eager Sales force. Reuben’s chair was empty because he found himself in New York, scuttling through the corridors of some white-walled office, because he was in Naples, talking to pursed-lipped politicians at a charity conference, because he appeared in Liverpool, straightening the edge of his suit-jacket as he leaned forward to address the chairman of a company he pretended to care about. In the brief moments where he found himself alone, it was as if his system went on standby, like a monitor screen dulling to lowered brightness. The ensuing darkness would comfort no one, not even himself. Last night he awoke in a spasm next to his wife, sitting up in bed like a grey shadow, as he prodded his face to confirm that he was in fact still a physical entity.

He needed a damn break, he might’ve thought, if he could think. Yet thinking about himself was out of the question, out of the scope of his assigned vocation, and therefore, irrelevant. The line between himself and his corporate role had begun to melt so as to dissolve the border from two, to a mere, blobbish one. Looking out of his office window stunned him because he’d forgotten how to distinguish his face from the reflected form of his twenty-second-story-office-box. He was widely known as the man without any edge, fitting snuggly into the position he was allotted, completing his quota, like a man who did not fully exist.

He had been mistaken once, in a smoke-filled bar, for a famous film director by an unassuming youth. Enjoying the admiration in the boy’s eyes, he had revelled for this startling instant in undeserved recognition for artistic work he had never done or considered doing. It stuck with him, and upon learning the name of the man he had been confused with, had consumed the entire works of this director so as to live as an artist, a world so foreign, for just a few moments longer.

Now he sat at his desk, massaging his scalp and realising that he had learned to live with his fading in-existence. He could not mourn for long the passing of something with blurred edges, himself, and feel sorry for its disappearance. All this was a worry, a worry that had now begun to twinge itself as pin-sharp pain on the right side of his head. The sensation was so silent, so innocuously grey, that there was simply no word for it. Like the soft blinking realisation that you’ve stepped into claustrophobic mental space, or the absence of something, like a sound one notices the moment it stops. He could still pinpoint the exact moment it had begun, standing up after dinner last week it shot into him like a splinter. It affected his right side only, skull and brain in one. It was there in every moment, undefinable, unreachable through touch, yet always there. Perhaps the word was dead. His right hemisphere was dead. A pang of grief whelmed up in him then, like learning he had lost something of great value, whilst unable to remember the importance it held to him.

Lights began to flicker on in the building, the rumble in his stomach confirmed as much, another day was beginning. He felt the world become brighter outside, as he dwindled, like a candle in the sun, to a desperate, dull glint.

There was a knock as Cecilia, his assistant, entered, flashing one of her arsenal smiles at him and sliding a piece of paper across his desk. Cecilia spoke through her teeth, in low, vibrato tones, offering his morning schedule ‘typed and printed,’ as well as the tiptoe raise at the mention of a young man from Sales waiting in a seat outside. He asked for five minutes, and she turned and left, her gold-coiled-hair prancing after her.

Reuben slid open his desk drawer, and stared down at the hunting knife encased in a glass cabinet. ‘Break glass in case of emergency’ was printed in red across the side. He wondered if all he needed to finish the sharp needle pain that prickled his brain was a good blow across the side of the head, like a computer rebooting, a factory reset for his meat suit. He was looking sideways at the blade when a brief knock marked the arrival of a young, scruffy fellow. He closed the drawer, greeted the man ‘good morning,’ and motioned faintly to the chair ahead of him. The man stood there, not so much entering as much as announcing himself, braces elasticised over his shirt, buckled to the brim. He held his eyes to Reuben's before they traced themselves, like rooftop runners, across the cemented city. He complimented the skyscraper-speckled view, and lowered himself finally into his seat. The chair exhaled as his buttocks hit the leathered cushioning. Reuben let the room decompress itself before getting to business.

He told the boy the jagged-edged truth. He’d been dragging his feet for too long. Reports of disinterest, lack of cooperation, and incompetent sabotage of team morale. The third warning in three months, does anymore have to be said? ‘We’ve decided to let you go’ hung in the air of the sky-scraping office like a feather in the wind, suspended with nowhere to go.

The young man simply stared down at his hands, picking bits of dried skin off of his palm, “Do you like it here?” He said.

Reuben, his skin discolouring to greying wallpaper, scrunched his forehead into a wrinkled mess.

“It’s just, I’ve never seen you smile, sir. I was just wondering if you like it. Being here.”

Reuben blinked. On a regular day, he might’ve stood up and chased the young sub out of his office. But his tiredness lay on him like a metal blanket now and he could do nothing but stare at the pencil fellow, his rope hair and his thin, feline eyes. Just then, the sun reached the reflective coating of his office box, shimmering into the room and bouncing from the glass desk onto the ceiling like an angel smile. The young worker closed his eyes and grinned like a man who had long been looking forward to tanning. There was a wonderful freedom in the young man’s physicality, a maddening calm poured out of him. And something vaguely familiar too, like a man you can only recognise in the fleeting moment of his smile.

The man stood up and reached out his hand, a final salutation from one colleague to another. Reuben stood up too, legs shaking on carpet flooring as he took the man’s hand in his. The touch of his palm lingered in his own like a healthy itch, perking up his ears, widening his eyes, filling his chest with inhalation as he noticed, for the first time, the hummingbirds which squeaked their way towards their nests. Beyond the up-down motion of the hand-to-handshake, Reuben heard a rustling symphony of leaves rattling in the summer breeze, an electric current of kinetic motion which moved in all of life, slow and fast, and which manifested in himself, in his greyed short hair and wrinkled forehead, in the faintly spotted back of his hand, and bursting calf veins, in the olden coating that appeared like vintage gloss across his body. The hand of the boy fit into his own like a glove, and the boy, much like himself many years prior, was like a premonition of an undefined thought in the back of his mind. He had the sudden urge to get going, to leave and never come back. The pain in his head, so undefinable and incalculable only moments ago, eased and spun out of his skull like candy floss around a stick.

Then the boy left and Reuben was alone, loose-tied, knees buckle-prone. As he walked away from his box, steely elevator glances and phoney smiles which hid judgemental distaste did not deter him from exiting corporate confinement. He began to feel lighter with each click-clacking step on the porcelain pavement. The most miraculous thing happened to him then. He walked with no aim, no destination, no incentive. He walked and walked, and walked, and the lyrics to a poem he read long ago bubbled up in him like a long-lost friend that he believed had abandoned him eons ago. The words traced themself across the surface of his mind like ink blotches on fresh parchment.