It's some time in June. One of those days of lazy heat that breaks through in the moments just before summer, a day loaded with the promise of things to come. He had walked out past the shops and the main road and turned into the lanes; a network of old-world but somehow human tracks. More human than the solidness of the dual lane carriage-ways that bend and twist from city to sea. You felt someone had carved through rock to make these things, forcing the weight of their body against the earth. The grass is tall and yellow at their edges and bends with each breeze. Patches of shadow thrown by Oak trees at intervals of ten feet or so. The last time you came here was a Saturday in 1997, the weather was about the same and you were on a bike and there were four of you. With four people the road felt crowded, over-populated but cheerfully so. It was over-populated with the right people. But of course, the lanes are empty now, it being mid-day, it being mid-week.
How is everything mathematics and yet the first hint of order causes such hell? The line of the desks, the elevator lights rhythmically counting off floors, the computer keys. No, that wasn't completely true. Somehow, in being a millimeter out of synch, uneven rifts and gullies had been created between the keys that tossed light to places you could call beautiful: Little oblong shadows on mornings when he was alone at the office and would sit bathing in the calm and order and allowed himself to make believe he was in control of everything he saw. No-one calls that early in the morning. A brief glance through emails reveals that of the twelve unread, eleven are either personal messages from friends or spam. That's true beauty. That with the little wave of joy that rises and engulfs your entire body. In the distance a coffee machine snores, squeezing water through all those ground beans.
Being professional requires bending your body to other peoples vision of the world without them ever needing to demonstrate why their vision is right. Being professional is knowing your place and so not knowing your place leads to a horror you can't describe without wandering into the world of the B-movie slasher.
A tractor passes slowly. The farmer looks down from the high bucket of his seat and frowns. Did he actually frown? Did he look for a dog? No dog, he would have thought. The woman in the street with a pram and no baby, the man stood outside a bar without cigarettes. Little trip wires. It's the uncanniness of it that sets the alarm bells on edge. What are you doing in an empty road in the middle of the day? What could you possibly want? Other minds begin to process the images. A man alone on a road in a wax jacket on a Tuesday. The wind pushing his hair to inhuman places, the eyes half shut against the light. The world needs answers, needs justifications. What do you know that we don't?
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