with two losing choices: strike back and stray from the real issue; or stick to the issue and let the criticism stand undefended, making it valid, and making you pay a price in frustration and bile whenever he dredged it up against you in a future confrontation.
Doubly angered, I was tempted to collect on past debts. But this morning was not other mornings. My reserve of confidence was meagre, and I cautioned myself against squandering it by engaging in a retort.
Without response, I walked out, back to my office.
Why hadn’t Kyle already gone storming to the board of directors? I had to ask myself. Why was he holding back?
There was more threat lurking in what he had not done than in anything he could have done by denouncing me to the board before I could defend myself.
Twice along the hallway, I touched the walls with my fingertips, unsure whether I was steadying myself or merely testing my connection with something solid.
* * *
In my office, I closed the door. Pulled the creased message slips from my pocket and flipped them to a corner of my desk. Sat motionless.
I refused to look at the calendars on my desk and computer. I had become afraid of the dates, afraid of their measuring of my life. I feared that I had already lived too long, experienced too much, used up my luck and all of my chances.
I tried to concentrate on suppressing the uncertainty that seeped into my thoughts from some deeper place within me.
In my mind I saw myself sitting out yesterday morning next to the electric kettle in my kitchen, its white plastic shell, cracked behind the spout, leaking steam for months, my shopping for a replacement lost within my overall procrastination one weekend to the next. There would never be a language affluent enough for me to explain it in words spoken aloud to another person: how not leaving my apartment had been necessity rather than choice.
I had woke in an unfamiliar bending of space and shadow in the false light before dawn, feeling as if I had been dug out of sleep by a blunt shovel.
In a stale bathrobe, I prowled the clamorous silence of my empty rooms. Sick. Unsteady after a murderous night of murderous dreams that had all been rinsed away at that exact second my eyes fluttered open, leaving me with ragged effigies of the dense emotion and confusion. I chased the fading dream images, stretching to heal myself by somehow linking the broken ends of my feelings to the raw ends of my broken-off dreams.
My concentration absent, my hands unguided, I fell into familiar routine. Fussing to fill and plug the kettle, spooning ground coffee into the glass carafe with the plunger. Pouring the boiling water. And then pouring the coffee. Inhaling the fragrant gush of steam from the mug.
It was not until I had lifted the mug and sipped that I noticed the second steaming mug still waiting on the kitchen counter.
I could not prevent myself from glancing to the hallway leading from the bedroom. Like grabbing at empty air halfway through an unexpected fall. I could not stop myself from expecting her to come shuffling into the kitchen.
Parked, then, at my kitchen table over slowly cooling bitter coffee, without her, I could think of nothing but all of the things now undone between us, all of the things we would now never share, our lives forcibly unravelled by a specific minute in time. I seemed to breathe by having to remember how to do it.
Breaking dawn brought a ferocious sun, shooting blindingly through the floor-to-ceiling windows; diffusing all the angles in the rooms and corners and hallways. Their shadows bleached away, the straight lines melted back into the walls.
How was I to navigate with no exact points of reference?
Anxiety swirled in my blood, bringing a headache that was too stubborn to either bloom or depart.
Even as I willed myself to remain motionless and tried to pierce the thick light by tightening my focus, the blurred lines along the ceilings and baseboards, and the dispersed angles in the corners of the room, refused to grant any purchase of motion or retreat from my thoughts and memories.
I saw our mornings, heard the growing silences between us. Felt the lost chances slip away.
I could not hide from pieces of life lived so deeply.
Nor were there any points of reference to plot my escape into the future.
Sitting at my kitchen table, hoarding my heartache, trying to write on the tabletop with my dripping coffee spoon in blotting letters “love has gone.”
The voice within me ran ahead of the pokey scratchings of my spoon, demanding:
What was my life any more?
What would it mean after I died?
Where would they go, all of my thoughts and feelings?
How long would it last, death?
Unable to move.
Unable to function.
By noon, sunlight surged over me like high tide. The rooms and hallways poured out into window-glass reflections and mirrors and confused soft shimmerings at the edge of my vision where there should have been clarity. In the glare, my vision receded, leaving me trapped in a brain soup of distortion, weakened by sorrow.
In ribbons of regret streaming from my fingertips, the day spun itself out.
* * *
Mid-afternoon. Only halfway down the river.
Despite remaining at my desk and computer keyboard through lunch to weed through my faxes, sow a handful of phone calls, and punch out new email, I had not produced the critical information needed to liberate the firm from the hundred-million-dollar payment it would have to make three weeks out. Singapore and Bangkok still asleep. With their information not yet available, I had only been able to work with a few stray calculations, recording the limited number of bond subscriptions booked from Toronto. Grabbing up their dollars like lifeboats and stringing them together where, at the bottom of my screen, they always sank under the immense load of the hundred-million-dollar bond payment.
For the last hour I had done little more than debate whether I could afford to escape the office on the pretence of going out to grab a sandwich if it meant Kyle or others might intercept negative information in messages returned to me before I had a chance to edit them.
What happened, instead, was that Michelle came to see me, hovering hesitantly just inside my office as if uneasy at being removed from the reception area.
“Mr. Smith. I always have coffee with Molly, Kyle Addison’s secretary. She says that Mr. Addison says that the firm’s in big trouble. That you did something in China or somewhere that is going to cause the firm to go bankrupt. Is that true? I’m really worried. I’m afraid to go on vacation and come home to find out that I don’t have a job anymore. I’m afraid I should try to cancel the cruise and get some of my money back if I’m going to lose my job. I haven’t got very much saved right now.”
I was bluntly reminded of how my actions, however high they soared above daily routines and however measured, spilled into the lives of others. A sobering sense of obligation swelled within me. “No, sit down. I’ll try to explain.”
She entered, perching her thick hips delicately on the edge of a chair in front of my desk.
“First of all, let’s begin at the beginning. You’ve been around here a year or so. Long enough to know how Kyle is. Haven’t you?”
Obviously fearful of endangering herself with any gesture of overt disrespect, she shrugged lamely.
“Okay,” I continued haphazardly, “suffice to say that over the last thirty years, Kyle’s gotten so used to sitting in there under his Yale diploma like a bishop at high mass that he thinks God also graduated from Yale. And when he thinks anybody here in the firm has sinned, he wants the whole firm to know about it.”
I watched her eyes drift; I was losing her in the residue of my own resentment.
“But