PHASING OUT
by Jamie Rosen
I understand the reasoning, the motivation behind this replacement, but I cannot countenance it. Efficiency is to be striven for, yes, and to be prized when found, but there is something improper, something wrong at a fundamental level with the shift from true human writers to these narrative-construction programmes.
These are the words I plan to say to my superior, to make clear to him my standing on the subject, and I do in fact say them to him, but only in my head as he passes the desk where I work, a fantasy that ends with the brunette receptionist from one floor down joining me in an intimate embrace that is only marginally dissatisfying. But in reality I say nothing to him, for I know there is really nothing for me to say in the matter, the decision is out of his hands, is that of his own superiors, and even were it not, I am simply here to file the correspondence as it makes its way in and out of the office, no less of a machine, in effect, than that which I would be protesting.
On the elevator ride to the lobby each day, the brunette receptionist boards one floor below me. Her face is pinched, almost rat-like, and she is slightly overweight and conscious of it. Her demeanour is not one of confidence, but I lust after her each afternoon, regardless. I am well aware of my own limitations, even as I resent them.
My apartment is as large as I could afford, which is to say it is not. There is a preponderance of brown about it, in floors and carpets, cupboard doors and unmade sheets. At night, when I cannot sleep and my limitations drive me once again into my own arms for comfort, I imagine sometimes that they are, instead, her arms, her hands, and as the aging lamp on the street below casts its sickly light on the room, I sometimes pretend the pillowcase is her hair, their different browns blending together in the shadows.
Every morning, I arrive before her. I know this because I once spent an hour vomiting into my toilet -- it was nothing serious -- and saw her stepping into the elevator as I came into the lobby an hour late. I could not concentrate all day, but I attributed this to my illness when my superior asked.
When I leave the office this time, something is wrong. She does not enter the elevator when it reaches her floor. My entire commute home is spent alternating between concern for her well-being and resentment at being abandoned. This obviously is unnatural behaviour, and I counsel myself against it. With some effort, I am relaxed enough by nightfall that I fall into a dreamless sleep with ease.
As the week progresses, her absence continues and I find I can no longer function properly at work. My concentration wanes, my mind strays, at the most inopportune times to thoughts of where she may be, poorly scripted dramas of abduction and rescue at the end of which she always thanks me in an appropriate if somewhat hazily defined way.
In the elevator, I happen to overhear a fragment of a conversation in which my worst fears are confirmed she has not been kidnapped by Vikings, or suffered any other fate from which I may, with a heroic gesture, liberate her. She has been made redundant, losing her position at the company to a computerized system which can reroute calls and schedule appointments with superior efficiency. Her job now non-existent, I will likely never have cause
to casually strike up the conversation I have been rehearsing, practising, perfecting all these months.
I know, of course, exactly what I must do in light of this new information. When I arrive in the morning, I step off of the elevator one floor early, thrusting myself into an unknown land to confront her usurper. It sits where I imagine her desk once did, slightly more than my height, a gleaming silver box two arm's-lengths across, with lights flashing alternately indigo and mauve and a screen at eye-level displaying messages in text. On the whole, I must admit, it is a rather attractive device. Certainly, it seems to have been designed with its purpose in mind, sleekly functional, and its surface catches the light in unexpected ways. It is in fact quite striking, and it stirs in me unfamiliar feelings, feelings of admiration, of respect. I remember the brownness of her hair, the narrow, rodent-like features of her face, imagine the early sag hidden beneath blouse and skirt, the wrinkles and lines, and step forward, arms outstreched.Art by Mo Paul