The Office Where Time Flickers
I’d been working at W__ Corp for about two years when I first learned that time flickered in and out in the back corner of the office basement. I’d gone down there in search of office supplies and wandered around for a while past what appeared to be half-completed but inactive construction projects into an area all the way in the back, in the corner, where the lights were flickering in this funny sort of way like the bulbs were only half working or the wiring was screwed up or something. That was when I saw this guy—from the back at first, but then he moved, and I saw his face—and I realized he looked strangely familiar; he looked like an older guy (who I thought of as Glum Manager) who worked on my floor, like a younger version of him. But that didn’t seem so weird as nepotism is alive and well at W__ Corp, which means I’m often running across offspring of this person or parents of that one; this guy was probably his son, I thought, or a nephew or something. Also, he had this whole retro thing going on that I definitely would have remembered if I’d seen him before, and the effect was as pronounced as if he were an actor who had just walked off the set of one of those movies about government bureaucrats set in the fifties or sixties: he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and his hair was a little longish but not too long, plus he had sideburns. Also, his clothes were… well, sort of weird, I guess; there was something strange about the fabric and the colors; he was wearing a pair of brown pants in a shade Pantone has likely forgotten.
No, I was positive I hadn’t seen him before—although, to be honest, there are a lot of people at W__ Corp I don’t know since, as a rule, I prefer to keep to myself, for several reasons, the primary one being that I don’t want anyone to think I actually belong here because I don’t. I’m a designer and an artist, so I’m definitely not the typical sort of person who works at W__ Corp. That said, I don’t really know much about the average W__ Corp employee, except I’ve always supposed they dream in Times New Roman font, and they all like bland office-y colors like gray and beige and live utterly unambitious, unremarkable lives. I mean, more power to them and everything, but—to be clear—that’s not me.
I do recognize, however, that I need to blend in, so when I come to work, I make sure to disguise myself carefully as someone who belongs here. Or at least that’s what I think every morning when I’m getting dressed: when I’m pulling my “blouse” over my head and get into character as my Benign and Pleasant Work Self—not only in the exterior sense but also interior by thinking alien-to-me words such as “blouse,” as that’s the sort of word I imagine the type of woman at W__ Corp would use to refer to such a garment, just like they probably call their bags “pocketbooks.” Also, when I’m at work, I say words such as these—and others besides—with the enthusiasm of a foreigner trying to order coffee in the language of the country they’re visiting, and, over time, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. In my time at W__ Corp, I’ve also developed what I think of as a Professional Smile—which means that I arrange my face in a neutral smile awash in pleasantness designed to make the corners of my eyes turn up as if I were actually smiling. Gradually, I was learning how to perfect this smile in a manner that allowed me to simultaneously transmit, subtly, that it’s not quite genuine, as its origination has to do with politeness, which is a veneer rather than a feeling. Mostly, I think I’m pulling all this off—the Professional Smile, I mean, as well as my ability to speak in the language of my Benign and Pleasant Work Self—although sometimes I’ve noticed that my coworker Oliver raises an eyebrow sometimes while I’m speaking, which worries me a little—as I wonder if I’ve inadvertently allowed the real me, or a real-ish version of me, to leak out when I’m around him to the degree he can see that I’m putting on an act.
But surely that’s only in my imagination. Surely, I’ve managed to fool Oliver along with everyone else.
*
This was the sort of thing I was thinking about when Sideburn Guy turned and seemed to be looking in my direction. A fellow character, I thought. (I’ll confess to a little pinch of jealousy, though, that—for whatever reason—he seemed comfortable with the idea of walking around the workplace as a non-conformist. Was it because he was a man? Men seem to be freer creatures in the workplace, as a general rule.)
I lifted a hand in a tentative wave.
Hello, I said.
That was when I saw it: the cigarette. It was in his right hand, the smoke curling away from it. It was so… wrong—That was what I thought; I remember that.
Something within me went cold and still.
Then he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, his gaze still fixed in a faraway manner at a point somewhere over my left shoulder. He scratched his sideburns and took a deep drag from his cigarette before exhaling a cloud of smoke.
That was when he flickered once, twice, the lights overhead flickering with him, the whole area descending into a grayish shadow followed by a flash of light—
And Sideburn Guy disappeared.
II
I don’t remember getting in the elevator or walking through the maze of cubicles on the third floor or any of the other things I must have done on the way to Oliver’s desk—but I must have done all those things because there I was, sitting on the little gray bench in his cubicle and trying to maintain a semblance of composure even though I was shaking. Oliver was watching me with that kind, patient way he has, but I gradually realized he looked a little concerned, too—and I (belatedly) realized that not only was I babbling, but that my speech patterns had (subtly) lapsed into those belonging to my Real Self. Hardly anyone was around, but I was still trying to be quiet, as I knew I sounded crazy and I didn’t want anyone to overhear; I was half-whispering as I tried to explain what I’d just seen, saying things like fucking A, Oliver, he was there, and he was gone! and a goddamn cigarette, I saw it, I swear, and many other uncharacteristic outbursts alien to the persona of my Benign and Pleasant Work Self besides.
After a while of this, Oliver got up and motioned I should follow. He led me to the conference room down the hall, closed the door behind us, and motioned for me to sit down. Then he explained that I shouldn’t worry and I wasn’t crazy because what I’d seen was known to not only just about everyone at W__ Corp but also, rumor had it, long before then, that someone knew someone else who used to work at this building back when it was owned by a technology company (M__ Corp) which had long since gone under and saw the same phenomena happen then—that, likely, he added, those M__ Corp people saw Future People working at W__ Corp as well as various people from the Past of M__ Corp and other companies who had been in this building, now long forgotten.
I interrupted him, shaking my head, and told him he might as well have been speaking in tongues. I don’t get it, I told him. What are you saying?
Oliver laced his brown fingers together and looked down at the table momentarily before speaking.
Time, he said eventually, seems to be unstable in that part of the office—that part where you were just now. It flickers in and out.
Flickers, I repeated.
He explained that if someone stood there long enough, they would likely see fragments of the Past. Sometimes, he said, the Future as well—at least, that’s what I’ve heard.
Then he sighed. People don’t like to talk about it because—like you—they find it somewhat distressing.
Right away, I wanted to know more. Not just about what Oliver said about how there was a part of the office where time flickered in and out but…Well, I don’t know exactly, other than while he was speaking, I saw (or thought I saw) a flash of a different sort of expression than I was used to seeing on Oliver’s face. For the first time, it occurred to me that Oliver likely also had a carefully constructed Benign and Pleasant Work Self—a thought which threw me off guard because I realized I didn’t know who the real Oliver actually was. This meant that the version I knew, the one that I’d somehow (despite my persistent determination to remain aloof from my coworkers) managed to become so fond of, could have been as much of an artificial construction as the faux version of myself I’d manufactured when I first started at W__ Corp and maintained to the present day.
A thought that rattled me. So much so that, deep down, I thought I felt something deep within me fracture.
However, then the door opened, and three Important Men (I knew they were important because their photos were on the website management page) were standing there, frowning and looking at their expensive watches while saying they had that room reserved.
It’s all yours, Oliver said. Then he looked at his watch before looking up at me and apologized, saying he had to go to a meeting himself.
*
After that conversation with Oliver I kept finding myself making excuses, slipping down the hall to take the elevator to the basement level and walking to the back corner and watching to see what happened. I wasn’t the only employee at W__ Corp who went down there; occasionally, I saw others stare in that direction with frightened looks on their faces before scurrying back to the elevators and vanishing.
Yes, I’ll admit: the sight of that area was terrifying to me as well. But I kept going back. Why, I don’t know. But I’m stubborn like that; I always have been.
*
Eventually I found that I could work in a small dark room with windows covered in blinds that I think was once meant to be a conference room, but now seemed to be used more as a storage closet. I dragged a chair in there and positioned myself by the window, using a binder clip to hold some of the blinds together so I could look out past the abandoned cubicles to that part of the office where I’d seen Sideburn Guy. Then I’d watch.
*
In the weeks that followed, Sideburn Guy occasionally made guest appearances, but I saw others as well, people that, over time, I named Eighties Woman, Fifties Bureaucrat, Seventies Pencil Pusher, Future Data Entry Serf, and many others besides.
Once, I saw Eighties Woman crying; she was hunched over her desk, the image of her flickering in and out in this shivery way that everything in the Past and Future shivered in and out, and clutching onto an enormous beige handset, whispering into it, her shoulder-padded shoulders hunched around her ears as she kept trying to wipe away the streaks of black mascara under her eyes…This sight of all of this would have been sad if it was something I’d come across in the Present, but knowing it was in the Past made it even sadder, for some reason, which I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
As the weeks went on, I saw similar scenes, other people talking either on the phone or to one another, mostly from the Past but in some cases (as in the example of Future Data Entry Serf), the Future too. It didn’t take all that long to tell the difference, as the people from the Past wore the sort of clothing and accessories I’d seen in various movies, and people from the Future usually had long hair and seemed to favor crinkly-looking outfits; they also wore tall shiny boots.
*
In the Future, there were some subtle and no-so-subtle structural changes to the building itself; for example, there were big clunky concrete columns in place of the more modest ones in the Present that were covered in drywall, and a couple of walls might have been missing—but lighting in the Future was sparser than in the Present so it was hard to say for sure.
*
Unsurprisingly, technology was also different in the Future. Many Future People carried around small discs made out of blue metal that projected what seemed to be holograms of small, talking heads but sometimes also projected little scenes of multiple people sitting in conference rooms or whatnot.
*
I’ll admit that sitting in the dark and watching all of this was a strange hobby and not really all that pleasant. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to stop.
III
Fast forward a few more years.
*
I was in my usual spot, sitting on a stack of storage bins in the dark with a laptop on my lap and peering through my usual space in the blinds, when I saw the air brighten in its usual fashion, and a man walked in wearing a greenish-checked shirt and those huge shiny boots that people from the Future seemed to like so much. There was something familiar about him, although at first, I couldn’t place him; his hair was dark but with liberal amounts of silver woven in, and there were lines around his mouth that made some part of me think, well, that’s new—That thought coming a split second before the actual understanding that the person I saw standing there now, rubbing his forehead and looking tired, was Future Oliver.
As I watched, trying to take this in, Future Oliver fiddled with one of those flat bluish metal discs I’d noticed most of the Future People using and placed the disc on top of a little pedestal that stuck out from the wall in his cubicle. Just as he sat down, the tiny head of a man popped into view just above the pedestal, stern-looking and apparently quite talkative. I suppose that even just a few years earlier, the sight of Future Oliver still working here a couple of decades in the Future would have filled me with pity, thinking how sad it was that this was how his life had turned out. That, in other words, he’d never branched out to become anything other than a W__ Corp employee.
But, as I watched, I realized I didn’t feel that way at all. Which surprised me.
*
There were others I watched over the years, too many to count, people mostly from the past—even the recent past, people I’d worked with, even…I’d watch as their gaze would wander away from their typewriters or their boxy beige monitors or—in the Future—the disembodied heads that floated above their circular devices and see how their expressions would change when they believed no one was watching them or when they were no longer doing their best to process their work thoughts through their minds—and I’d (again) feel a little ashamed for how I’d been when I first started at W__ Corp, how unique I thought I was for trying to separate my Real Self from my Benign and Pleasant Work Self when now I understood that the people at W__ Corp were no more interesting or complicated than I was; that we were, frankly, far more similar than I’d ever imagined could have been possible—and I’d feel a further erosion of the version of me I’d previously thought of as my Real Self, as if she were now nothing more than a small pile of sand that was all that remained of a hill after years of steady wind.
IV
All along I should have known where all this was going. Yet I was still surprised when it happened.
*
One day—a Thursday—I looked up and could see that I was looking into a scene from the Future (I could tell immediately because of those chunky concrete pillars) and the different-seeming lighting that was warmer, more like daylight—and a woman wandered into view who looked…
Well, my mouth went dry as I processed this because I knew it couldn’t have been who I thought it was...It was the Future, after all. But I recognized the curve of her cheek, the soft line of her jaw…It was my mother—or so I thought. For a moment, I was convinced.
But right away, I knew it couldn’t have been; my mother was long dead. Eventually, though, my understanding caught up to what I was seeing—because, of course, it wasn’t my mother.
It was me.
*
Someone else came into view, a younger woman dressed in a crinkly outfit and tall shiny boots, and Future Me was talking to her earnestly, tucking her (my) hair behind her ears, hair that had turned silver in the same way my mother’s had turned silver. (She had an extraordinary Professional Smile, I noticed; it was quite polished and much more convincing than my own.) Then she lifted her head and, very deliberately, began sweeping her gaze up and over and…
*
Her eyes (wrinkles at the corners, I noticed, and eyebrows sparser than my own) fell on the exact part of the window I was looking through.
*
For the longest time, I sat there, hardly moving, hardly breathing.
I knew how this worked. I knew that Future People (or, for that matter, Past People) couldn’t see anything in the Present. But since this was me (albeit a couple of decades removed), I knew what was going through her head: she knew where I would be sitting, even if she didn’t know for sure if I’d be there. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Future Me made a habit of looking in that direction in case her Past Self ( me, in other words) was sitting in the dark on the other side of the window, gazing out.
*
We stood there for some time, staring at one another across the years. I thought I detected pity in her gaze. But I didn’t want to see it, so eventually I looked away.
*
When I looked back, she was gone—but, of course, not entirely. She was somewhere inside of me; I could feel her. She was waiting. Someday, she would have my life. I guess I was already letting her have it. Why fight it? It would be hers soon enough.
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