Time Changes the Man
The drudgery of work is all in the mind, we suppose, but what if it's written into our very flesh?
MY nightmare begins with the birth of each day, when it drags me from the security of sleep. Today is no different; my eyelids open, still heavy with the burden of the coming day, to find the sun pallid through the shabby curtains.
There is nothing welcoming about the light. The few weak rays possess a lifeless, opaque quality that seems quite alien. All the same, I crawl from the pit I call a bed and shake myself free of the bedclothes and the drowsiness.
Once dressed I throw back the curtains and squint at the sudden glare. Even that pale light manages to hurt my eyes, dazzling my mind with memories of pleasant summer days long since past.
Turning back to the gloom, the mirror catches my sight and I meet my own stare as if it belongs to a stranger. All I perceive is a near shadow with indistinct features, but I know what this inversion of myself wears. What it has worn for days beyond count: the crisp, white shirt; the suit, as grey as the overcast sky; the tie, dreadful in its gratuitous lack of taste.
With a despondent sigh, I wonder what happened to me. At what point did my world turn grey and monochrome – like an old black and white movie but without the charm? The answer is lost, forgotten somewhere in the vault that we call memory.
Reluctantly I walk out of my home. The cold air instantly mists my breath into dancing ghosts of long-dead joys. The day has only just begun, yet already it weighs heavily on my shoulders. As it does with those who shuffle through the streets around me, as if fearing the world might somehow notice them and disturb their grey solitude.
They resemble my own hunched self so completely, that it almost seems I have undergone some kind of fission, to produce a world of clones.
Eventually my place of work towers above me. The building reflects the sky from its brooding façade, as though to remind me that that it forms the centre of my life, the source of mundanity where my mind is crushed in the day to day grind of providing it with sustenance. I know that I have worked here too long, and I sigh at the prospect of yet another day within its grim walls. Then my clones and I shuffle through its doors, gulped down in one greedy swallow.
Inside, a clock fills the foyer with an ominous tick like the heartbeat of the universe. With each swing of its pendulum I feel more of my life transferred into the company’s dusty vaults. I turn away from its frowning face and make my way to my assigned place, the desk where I must perform the same tasks day after day. Here I am like the hamster running endlessly in its wheel, except I am aware of the dynamo that turns my activity into corporate power.
My tasks fill the minutes that slowly turn into hours. Life passes by without noticing, while my work progresses to the symphony of time: the ticking of the company clocks, the watch at my wrist, the beating of my own heart. My life is ebbing away, its own tic-toc subtly out of sync with the rhythm of man-made time.
Mechanically, I carry out my chores until the boredom strikes. Right on time, I notice from looking at my watch. With remarkable derring-do, I take an unscheduled pause to look around at the rows of desks. At each one sits another clone of myself, feverishly slavering over equally mind-numbing tasks. I know they are bored, that dreams and thoughts of colourful days turn the greyness of their lives into a living torment. The thought strikes me that – here – even boredom faithfully follows the company’s schedule.
A slamming door startles me back to work. A supervisor, perhaps? I have no idea; my furrowed brow is suddenly concentrating anew on the forms and papers on my desk. In that way the day drags on. Yet the body provides reminders of its humanity, thereby distracting me from work. My stomach rumbles, even though it is not yet lunchtime. My body disregards all externally applied schedules, knowing only its own needs. My mind has little choice but to follow these timetables, shaped as it is by them, and so I must ignore the anarchist demands of my body – if I am to fulfil its needs at all.
As I try to ignore my stomach’s demand for attention, I also try to ignore the fatigue that transforms my eyelids from flesh to lead. I rub them, but they remain eager to look into that place where my mind can wander free of company shackles.
Nervously I leave my desk. I am afraid that the supervisor will notice my unscheduled toilet-break. It is a risk I must take, for I need to splash my face with water in the hope that it will shock me into wakefulness. Fear is a white-hot knife in my stomach all the same, as I scurry furtively towards the toilets.
In the disinfectant-smelling confines of that tiny cell, my fear turns into a thrill of excitement. I am the dissident, acting to subvert the company’s schedule and take back some of the precious time that I have sacrificed on the altar of Profit. The cold water revives me somewhat and I rub my face, massaging a little life into the grey skin and the tired muscles beneath.
When I reach for the towel I notice something strange above my temples, just within the hairline. I pause to stare into the mirror and I am shocked at the obscenely throbbing bumps. My fingers probe the fleshy protrusions, feel the heat of the pulsating blood within. Then there is no more time to ponder as a wave of dizziness threatens to throw me to the floor. I steady myself on the washbasin, suddenly aware that I have broken out in a cold sweat. My skin itches all over, my suit rejected to cause extreme discomfort.
I stagger out of the toilet and the harsh banging of the door adds to my alarm. It is a small relief that the noise brings no management wrath, and my colleagues ignore the noise. For all they know I am the omnipresent supervisor, forever casting a watchful eye.
At my desk I slump back into obscurity and rest my face in my hands. The dizziness spins the room counter-clockwise to my gyrating guts. A groan escapes my throat, horrifyingly loud to my ears. I look around, fearful that I might draw attention to myself. What I see makes me groan once more. This time in fear.
My colleagues are ignorant of my distress. They continue with their tasks just as before. But now they are different in their uniformity. Chitinous heads with twitching mandibles look down at desks through bulbous eyes framed between dangling antennae. Barbed, multi-jointed limbs emerge from segmented bodies still draped in tattered clothes.
One of them finally looks up in an act of daring nonconformity. In those eyes I witness distress, but also I see that these eyes are twin clocks staring at me, just as the clock on the wall stares.
Never have I known such fear. I know that I must escape, but lunch is still an hour away and even in my terror, I cannot rip myself away from the precious schedule. Somehow I automatically process my tasks.
It is a Hell I have seldom known. Each minute stretches to impossible dimensions and dawdles through the present, until lunch finally – mercifully – arrives. With unseemly haste I rush from my desk and flee into the outside world. All around me are the chittering bodies of my colleagues. It is madness that surrounds me and I scurry home, desperate to hide myself from things I cannot comprehend, to shut the world out of sight beyond my bedclothes.
Home at last. I struggle with the door, only to find my hands will not co-ordinate. With a whimper of frustration I finally manage to open the door and slam it shut behind me. Secure from the horrors of my day, I lean against the door and pant heavily. I try to close my eyes but for some reason they wish to remain open; a far cry from work where they wished to stay closed.
I stagger to the bathroom in search of the painkillers I know are in the cabinet. And then my nightmare reaches its conclusion. Two bulbous eyes stare back at me from the mirror, and a shocked chitter escapes my mouthparts. With a clawed appendage, I reach up to stroke my antennae.
The terror evaporates. The nightmare is over and I wonder at what I have been so afraid. I realise then, the madness was not outside. It existed within me. And that is now cured.
The grey days are over for I have found myself once more. My body is no longer out of sync with the world; my heart beats in time to the clock.
MC
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Time Changes the Man featured in the author's self-published fiction collection, Isolation Space (2009). The story first appeared in Alternaties #16 as Time For A Change circa 1994. Subsequently, it was republished in a reworked form in The Asphalt Jungle (#3, Spring 1999) under its current title. It appeared again in The Doppelganger Broadsheet Vol. 13 #48 circa 2006.
Copyright © May 1998. All rights reserved.