Inside the [redacted] offices the wind is unfelt. Visibility is good today, one can plausibly imagine one sees the ocean’s gleam. There is ample conversation. Most sentences are clipped. Teams disappear inside conference rooms for hours. The energy that can be sampled from the hallway is either naive or weary. What abounds is not so much a definite warning but rather a subdued urgency, a mastered panic. Near the window, someone is describing how he can identify vitality immediately in someone he’s talking to, “It’s on sight. And it’s obvious, like, very much so.”
Inside the conference room, I am listening to [redacted]. Outside the windows executives waver, minds trapped somewhere between the ephemeral space of the video call and the brutal and humiliating irruption of having a face that can be seen, recognized, approached by others. It is often helpful to gauge the intensity of political turmoil by how hard leadership works to reassure the team. [Redacted] is working very hard. Behind me the floors fall away; the city is sharp and blue and red.
Inside the privacy of my phone I see another of my job applications has been rejected from [redacted]. The turnaround was too fast for a human bounce, and I conclude I failed to dupe an algorithm with sufficient keywords or phrases. I can feel my shoulders creeping up. Speed means done by a machine, and therefore there is no one to aim anger at— a principle wherefrom I often draw advantage. From both early-life encounters with rage, and the experience of recent months, I am fairly certain that my character is such that it is also capable of transmuting disappointment into discipline, or at least the accelerated pressures of regular output, the punishment of regular generation. I wonder if this predilection has a limit, and what qualities preserve and extend the reaction.
Inside the elevator [redacted] asks me how old I am. I tell her; she is aghast. I have had this conversation before and every time it crash-lands in incredulity, consternation. I wonder why I never lie.
Inside the confines of these essays I bring all my defects and faults to bear on concealing myself. With each one, less of me is visible. Eventually I will become fully indeterminate, with a gleam that might be visible on the clearest days.