…(coming soon)… an
Anecdote
Author’s Note: The private detective agency in this story works a ‘relay’ operation. This means they split all the functions of a detective into little bits, split amongst a large number of operatives. There are probably ten of them working on whatever it is they are working on, at any one time.
It was the summer. I was waiting for a phone call, and all the spiders were coming in from the rain through the windows. When I picked up a woman was speaking, giving instructions. I was full of affirmation. I nodded and said “I think so, I guess.”
I remember my boss, the head of the company, said in my interview: “You understand atomisation.” This was something stated, without a question mark. And I nodded and said: “Yes.” That convinced him to give me a job. He wore a blue suit. Its was the last time we met in person.
The spiders came in and the woman spoke a secret code. She hung up. The next morning I took off on foot to the address and waited. He appeared looking like they often do, like middle-aged men who had done something wrong or stupid or maybe misunderstood. He wore a grey suit and carried a green carrier bag, a shopping bag that bulged and flapped in the breeze. He set off up the street, then across another road and so on. He turned down an ally and we were suddenly in the countryside. It was incredibly hot, and people were doing farming right up alongside the backs of the big houses. He was a fast walker and overdressed, and I could see him a fifth of a mile away putting down his carrier bag and unbuttoning his jacket and being red faced and panting. He really just seemed like a fat middle-aged guy and I had very little interest in whatever he was doing. In fact I didn’t even know what I was looking at.
This makes sense, though. In the interview the boss had said: “Obviously, the point of the job is that you have no idea what you are looking at. You have no holistic stake in the operations of the company. None of us do. We deal only in pieces of information. Otherwise we become ideological, yes?’ The stresses were his own, and so were the big words, and he drummed his fingers on the desk. It made sense. “I understand perfectly,” I said. Next to him a backlit screen said the word RELAY, as if to intentionally overstate his point.
I should flesh myself out: when I was eighteen I fell hopelessly in love with a girl that I hated. It was the summer, and a load of us hung around the town square, just bumping into each other again and again, like in a soap opera. I loved her so much, I tried to fuck around with her all the time, I was just horrible. She was always there, and it made me sad that this person could have such a terrific effect on me. I said to her once that summer, I sneered: “why don’t you do something interesting with your life?” I can’t even remember what the context was. About two weeks later she went off travelling, to the literal other side of the world, and I had lost her forever. It left me very melancholic. Do you know the proper definition of the word melancholy? It means to mourn something that might not have ever been there in the first place.
So I was melancholy and became a detective eight years later, and I can’t for a second remember what the delay was for. And now the connections I make when I’m following the people who walk off into the countryside, or travel to airports and train stations, are entirely solipsistic, and I’m going a bit crazy. But, so it goes. I’m not paid to work these things out. I remember my boss said: “We’re not paying you… [etc. etc.]” I’m actually a very lazy man. I wouldn’t know a denouement if you hit me over the head with one. I prefer a good anecdote. Listen to this: I was once given instructions to follow a woman from an airport. And I was told her terminal, gate, physical appearance down to the fabric of her underwear. When she came out she had one arm. The point is, they’d told me all of this and forget to tell me she had one arm. She went off somewhere and someone else took over and I forgot about it until now. This is how this story ends, by the way. It ends with a slight shock followed by a complete disavowal.
But first: the man is sitting, by a barbed wire fence that separates a woodland from the big corn fields we have been in since we left the houses. The houses are out of view now. I am stood, still a fifth of a mile down, just looking at him, waiting. I may as well be five feet away, because this man is awfully serene and just staring across the corn field, his gaze at a ninety degree angle from mine. He is staring at nothing, in the most literal sense you could possibly get. I’m suddenly struck with the thought that I don’t know where his jacket is. He must have taken it off and put it in the bag. He’s sweating and panting. He has brown sweat stains under his arms that look like tea. So do I.
Suddenly he stands up with the bag and takes something out, a container, letting the bag drop to the ground. He sort of skips a couple of paces and hurls this container out into the cornfield. It carries a few feet in the air, not so much an arc as a downward gradient, a straight line. But, still, the throw has character and meaning. It suggests the man is trying to smash the object. I notice something, see some stuff coming out of the top as it crashes into the field. The man just stands with his chest out looking at the field for a few moments, breathing in and out very deeply. So do I. Then he sits back down. He walks a few steps back in a slightly dramatic way and kind of drops down on his backside. He is still looking out in the field, at the space that used to be nothing, which is now something but I don’t know what it is. I think back to the impact and grope for an analogy. I think of an aeroplane crash.
But this doesn’t work, and instead one of the things I remember now is from a few years ago, when I had a terrible time with depression and had tried to kill myself with an overdose of pills, which didn’t work, obviously, and a couple of days later I was out of hospital and in bed at home. Then I got some money out at the cash machine, and saw this police ‘wanted’ sign above the cash machine, with a photo-fit face of an Asian man in the middle. This man had raped a student in the supermarket car park, and the girl had remembered his face enough to put together this photo-fit and description. But me, I knew this man from work, from following him a month before. I knew where he lived, that he walked to a huge number of garages, and talked with mechanics, and then went straight home afterwards, on an almost daily basis. I knew that about him, and suddenly I knew this, and I began to make connections, and I felt as if I was betraying my company and my boss. And, weirdly, myself. And so I decided to cut out the mental gymnastics and simply go home. I didn’t ring the police because it would have been unprofessional of me. I didn’t feel any better or worse after this.
And now after an hour of looking at this latest man, who is sitting motionless at the side of the field, I realise I’m in something of a new quandary, because he isn’t doing anything at all. You see, I really have to stay with him or I’ll lose my job or worse. And he’s not doing anything. He has outfoxed me by doing absolutely nothing. Isn’t this stupid? He has me pinned against a barbed wire fence, and the night comes, which is very cold, and then the morning. And still nothing.
It’s in the morning still. I realise the only thing I can do that makes any sense is quit work by telephone, even though this will get me in serious trouble. So maybe I will quit tomorrow. I walk up to the man, and I discover that he has died without visible injury. I head out into the field and discover that the object he threw is an urn and that some of the ashes have come out of the top and spread about randomly, and, hey, look, they are on my shoes now.
Will
