The front window of the coffee shop explodes outwards as the bomb goes off. I see it clear as anything. It kills the young mother and her baby in the pram first, then it rips through the homeless man, bundled up in charity blankets on the other side of the path. The blast tears backwards through the shop also, eviscerating the blueberry muffins and baristas alike before arriving at me, pointlessly shielding my face with my hands.
Then I shake my head and everything is back to normal. The homeless man continues to sleep, the young mother strolls out of the blast zone. The blueberry muffins are fine. The baristas are preparing drinks. When I was a kid I was praised for my vivid imagination. Now, no one cares, but I am stuck with the vivid imagination.
At the front of the coffee shop was an empty table with a laptop and a notebook on it. The guy who had been sat there stood up and walked out a few minutes ago. He hadn’t seemed suspicious when I first arrived. In fact, I was a little envious of him. Sat there with his sunglasses on top of his head, tapping away at his computer, occasionally jotting notes down in his notebook. He looked so studious and focused. Then he took out a cigarette and a lighter and walked outside.
It was the laptop that set me off. I thought it was weird to leave it behind. I suppose if you are going to make a life of studying in coffee shops then at some point you are going to have to figure out what to do with your laptop when you go out for a smoke. This guy obviously decided it was easier to trust the world than to pack up all his stuff every time he wanted a cigarette. But leaving it behind unattended; that sets off alarm bells. How hard would it be to fit an explosive inside a laptop? How big an explosion could a bomb small enough to fit inside a MacBook cause? Am I sat so close that I will be killed instantly? Am I sat just far enough away to only be maimed?
I try not to think about it and just read my magazine, but I can’t. I drink my coffee quicker than I really want to, taking big gulps even though it is still too hot. I had come into the coffee shop to relax. To enjoy the warm, bright Sunday afternoon. Getting out of the house for some fresh air seemed like such a good idea at the time. But now there’s that laptop. I am sure it is going to detonate. Deep in my stomach a panic attack begins. If I stand up now I can be out and gone before it happens. If I had left two minutes ago I would be safe by now. Why didn’t I leave two minutes ago? Should I warn the others? Should I try to clear the area? No, they’ll never take me seriously. I am breathing too fast. One of the baristas is looking at me.
I have one last big swig of my coffee, burning the roof of my mouth, and leave. Outside the guy is leaning against a wall smoking his cigarette. He doesn’t look threatening. He looks friendly. Someone I’d like to get to know. I realise that the laptop was fine, it was never going to explode. But it is too late. I am flustered, panicked. I put my head down and hurry away.
Thousands of years ago, when everyone believed the earth was flat, they must have had specific anxieties relating to falling off the edge. How could you not? If you truly believed that at the edge of our great disc was an empty, cavernous nothing, then the idea of falling off would have been terrifying. If the earth really was flat then today we would have phobias relating to it. People would talk to their therapists about it. About how they would love to go on a holiday to the edge, to look out and see the underside of the universe, to bungee jump off into the nebulous void, but they can’t. They are too scared.
For dinner I make a bagel with some marmite – the exact same thing that I had for breakfast – but only eat half of it. Then I play my Xbox with the headset on so that I can talk to the people who are beating me at my games. These are my people. Good folk but awkward, lacking in the social niceties, herded onto our Xboxes to keep us out of the way.
“I had a panic attack in a coffee shop today,” I said to the fifteen total strangers currently engaged in our latest harrowing deathmatch. “All because some guy went out for a cigarette and left his laptop on the table.”
There is silence over the headset. I am not sure if anyone heard me. Or if they even have their headsets on.
“Wanker,” someone called Gamerbob1337 says.
“Me?” I say.
“Yeah you,” Gamerbob says.
“Come on Gamerbob,” I say, “this is serious. I went out for a coffee today and I couldn’t cope. In here playing this stupid game with people like you is the only place I feel safe. I don’t know what to do.”
“Have you tried not being a pussy?” Gamerbob1337 says.
This is typical of the reaction I get when I try to open up emotionally during a game. They can get a little threatened by it. But Gamerbob might actually have a point.
“You know, Gamerbob,” I say, “that actually sounds like a pretty interesting idea. Maybe we could spend some time talking about strategies for how to actually achieve that? How does a person go about not being a pussy?”
I wait for his reply but after a while it becomes apparent that he has left the game. I send Gamerbob1337 a friend request, but he declines it.
I arrive at work at 9:40. Very late by most people’s standards, but this has become my norm. There is a weird atmosphere when I walk into the office. Usually no one says hello to me or anything, but this time it is even frostier than usual. No one even looks up. The whole office is silent, apart from the gentle tapping of fingers on keyboards. The radio is off and no one is talking to anyone. Something has happened. Usually they would be chatting away to each other, talking about their children or their holidays or whatever. The rest of my team share a big oval desk so that they are all facing each other. My desk is a single and is separate from theirs. Originally this was supposed to be temporary, but no one ever offered for me to join their happy community and so I ended up settling where I was.
On my desk there is a small flyer propped against the keyboard. It says ‘Have you asked someone how they are today? It can make a difference. Mental health affects us all’.
I look around to see if anyone else had got one also, or if it had been targeted at me, but because I was late everyone was in full swing. If they had got one they would have put it away by now. There is a recycling bin by the coffee machine, so I decide to get a drink and check to see if any had been thrown in there.
“Does anyone want a coffee?” I say to the room at large, but no one responds. No one even looks up.
White coffee extra sugar, because the button that does black coffee extra sugar has a light over it and makes an aggressive beeping noise when I try to push it. I try three times before giving up. I don’t mind white coffee but I can’t drink a lot of it. It makes me feel sick after a while.
My manager comes over. He tries to look casual, like he just happened to show up while I was there, but I think my failed attempts at black coffee alerted him to my presence.
“Morning,” he says, punching a number into the machine and getting exactly what he wants on the first try. “Have you got a minute?” He inclines his head back toward his office.
I don’t think I can say no to this, so I say “Yes,” and we head into his office.
My manager is an extremely nice man. Early fifties, career middle-management, two children, likes tennis. I am sure he is more complicated than that, but he never lets on. I have never once heard him raise his voice or get mad or say something mean about anyone. Even when he should.
“Is everything OK?” he says, as he closes the door behind us.
I know he is referring to my lateness. This is how nice he is. I have been over thirty minutes late seven days out of the last ten, and what he wants to know is whether I am OK or not.
“I just overslept again,” I say. “I’ll make the time up.”
He nods slowly and looks at me with empathetic eyes.
“I know you will,” he says. “But you really should try and get here on time. Think about it from the others point of view. Especially what with everything that is going on at the moment.”
I know the others point of view. They hate me. He knows it too, and he wants them not to. He thinks that if I turn up on time and make small talk about television shows that they will grow to accept me.
“Put your alarm clock on the other side of the room,” he says, “so that you can’t just turn it off while you are still in bed.”
“That’s a good idea,” I lie. “I’ll try that.”
At the end of the day I wait until everyone who knows that I was late has left, and then I leave also. I don’t make up all the time I was supposed to, but no one will ever know.
It takes me two trains to get home this time. It should be one, but I had to get off as there was an unattended bag in the gangway. No one else seemed to care, but I had to escape. I sit on a bench and watch my train rumble away. It doesn’t explode. They never do. This is why I had been late that morning. I didn’t oversleep. I couldn’t oversleep if I wanted to. I woke up a full hour before my alarm clock went off and spent a long, empty morning drinking coffee and looking out of the kitchen window.
It isn’t always unattended bags that set me off. It could be anything. A threatening stranger, too many people, an old school friend that I haven’t seen for years. Sometimes it is simply that the air is too thick and I feel like I am drowning. Occasionally I can put up with it and just ride it out, but an unattended bag is more than I can handle. Show me an unattended bag and all I can think of is a shock-wave pulverising my skull and the heat melting my face.
Letting my manager think that it is because I oversleep isn’t any better than just explaining what really happens, but somehow the lie is preferable to the truth.
I call in sick the next day. I wait until ten past nine then lay down on the bed with my head hanging off the edge of the mattress so that my voice sounds nasal and unusual.
“I’m not coming in today,” I say. “I’m sick.”
“OK,” my manager says, then we sit in an awkward silence for a few moments.
I don’t ever offer symptoms or explanations when I call in sick. It sounds fake. Desperate. Instead I just confidently declare my illness and then the ball is in his court.
“Well,” my manager says, cracking first, “I hope you feel better soon.”
“I hope so too,” I say.
I force a cough just as I am hanging up the phone. I think I am good at this.
Pete was in the living room. I forgot about Pete. He works nights and so is always around during the day. We hardly ever see each other. Even though we have shared this house for nearly six months, I think we have probably spoken less than a hundred words to each other. He has his feet up on the coffee table and is watching a David Attenborough nature documentary on the television.
“I wanted to be a documentarian when I was young,” he says to me.
“Really?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, “I liked the idea of hiding in a bivouac for days, waiting to get the perfect shot.”
I have no idea what a bivouac is, but I don’t say so. I just make a little ‘ah’ noise, trying to sound interested but non-committal.
“It’s all about patience,” Pete says, gesturing at the television. “Patience and stamina.”
Even though it is only nine thirty in the morning, Pete is drinking a beer. It seems wrong to drink this early, but on the other hand, he only just got in from work. How can you expect a person not to unwind after work with a beer just because you have only been awake for a little while? Pete and I live in different time zones. He is twelve hours ahead of me.
“Want to watch it with me?” he says.
On the screen a gazelle nearly gets away from a lion, but then doesn’t.
“No thanks,” I say.
Pete doesn’t seem bothered that I don’t want to join him. He is used to being by himself. I don’t think he has a girlfriend, or any friends at all. I asked him what he does for a living once and he told me that mostly he sits around a big office on his own watching pirated movies on one of the computers. Said he loves it. Apparently he is on call, but I never found out what he gets called to do. Pete has never asked me what I do, which is good because I don’t like talking about it. It makes me seem even less impressive.
“I’m going out for a bit,” I say.
“OK,” he says. “Goodnight.”
There is no queue in the coffee shop. I walk straight to the counter and a young guy with scruffy black hair and an accent I can’t place comes over.
“What can I get you?”
“Black coffee,” I say.
“Americano?”
“Yes,” I say, “Americano.”
Through the window I see the homeless man still in his thick nest of donated blankets. It looks like he hasn’t moved since the last time I saw him. He is so still. Everyone that walks by makes a point of not noticing him. He could die inside those blankets and no one would even realise. I feel a small pang of jealousy. Some people live their lives trying to make sure they are remembered. I wonder if it might be best to be forgotten.
“Do you want the Guatemalan shot?” the young barista says.
“I’m sorry?” I say. The only word I caught was shot.
“Guatemalan shot.” He points up at a poster advertising speciality coffees. “Thirty pence extra, but very excellent.”
“Can I just have it normal?” I say.
He shrugs and smiles.
“No problem. Do you want milk with the Americano?”
“No,” I say. “Just black.”
He shrugs and smiles again.
I take a seat at the back of the coffee shop and evaluate the room. There aren’t many people today. Two old women sharing a slice of tiffin; low threat. A man in a suit waiting for his takeaway coffee; moderate threat unless he leaves the briefcase behind, in which case severe. The barista; no threat. I trust the baristas.
Julian walks in. Julian is a member of the same team as me at work. He sits on that oval island of desks that I am not permitted to join. As soon as he walks in I shrink down in my seat, trying not to be seen. I am extremely intimidated by Julian, even when there isn’t a risk of him catching me pulling a sickie. There is something about him that makes me feel judged and useless. He is tall and thin and muscular and wears these excellent suits and shiny black shoes. He must polish them every day. I haven’t polished a shoe since I was a schoolboy. Julian has the nonchalant confidence of someone who is good at his job and knows it. A man in full control of himself.
I think that now would be an excellent time for a bomb to go off. Now would almost be preferable. No one could hold a sickie against me if I was killed in a freak explosion. No one would talk ill of me in my eulogy, or as my photograph appeared on the news as one of several victims. No one would ask why I was sat in a coffee shop during office hours on a Tuesday morning. But of course, I have never felt more certain that a bomb was not going to go off.
Julian looks around while he is waiting for his coffee, hands in his trouser pockets jangling loose change. He looks over at me for a moment, and then looks away again. Did he recognise me? It is hard to tell. He didn’t acknowledge me or anything, there was no flicker of recognition, his gaze just drifted over the top of me. For the first time I am relieved by the way he never seems to realise I am in the same room as him.
Julian spends ages sorting his coffee out, carefully taking off the lid, adding sweeteners, stirring thoroughly. It seems like he will never finish. I am sinking lower in my seat and I have my hand over my mouth, as though in deep thought, but really in hope that this will disguise me should he turn around again. But then he is finished. His coffee is finally stirred to his satisfaction and he strides off without so much as glancing at me again.
I get killed five times in a row by the same person. It seems so effortless to him, like he kills me because I happen to be on his way somewhere else. I take off my headset so that I don’t have to listen to him gloating about it. Getting angry seems so pointless and unnecessary, but I can’t help it. My hands are gripping the controller tightly. I go out of my way to get him back, but no matter what I do he gets me first. He just swats me aside like I am nothing.
It is hard to forge connections with people when your social circle is made up of random people brought together because they happen to want to play the same game. It doesn’t help that once we have all been assembled in the same place – this disparate collection of strangers with only this one thing in common – we then spend the rest of our time together trying to kill each other. It is no wonder everyone tends to be so rude. The symbolism doesn’t lend itself to camaraderie.
“Can I have a word?” my manager says. Whenever I take a sick day I have to have a back-to-work interview where he asks me how I am and notes it all down. He always seems a little embarrassed to have to do it, but it is company policy so I don’t hold it against him.
“I’ve got some news,” he says as he closes the door. “You have heard about how we are transferring some of our work to one of the other offices?”
This is the first I have heard of this but I nod yes, of course.
“Obviously it affects our team the most and represents a significant reduction in our workload. And so we have had to have a restructure, we are going to be rearranging a lot of the responsibilities.”
He is not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on a point somewhere between us.
“Naturally we did everything we could to make the new structure as workable as possible.”
I see it coming a mile off but he takes his time getting to the point.
“I want you to know you have been a valued member of the organisation and we really appreciate all the work you have put in.”
My head goes light. Everything feels a little further away.
“But we are going to have to let you go.”
He hands me a letter, tells me that there are details of the severance package inside, contact information for payroll and pensions, and my termination date. It is two weeks away.
I love the way he said let you go. Like he is setting me free.
“Do you have any questions?” he says.
“How many people are being made redundant?” I say. I don’t really want to know the answer to this, but I feel like I ought to be asking something.
“In our team, just one.”
“And in the whole department?” I say.
“Just one.” He looks ashamed as he says it.
We sit in silence for a while. I wonder what Gamerbob1337 would say in this situation. Is this the time to not be a pussy? My manager’s eyes look heavy and he isn’t as cleanly shaven as usual. I bet this conversation has been playing on his mind. I bet he lost sleep.
“Just so you know,” I say, “I would have got rid of me too. So I don’t hold it against you.”
My manager looks so relieved that he almost smiles.
No one in the office looks at me when I walk back in. Not directly anyway. I sit down in my seat and push the keyboard away from me. I feel like I don’t have to work too hard for the rest of the day. No one could hold it against me. I fold the letter in half and stuff it into my pocket, treating it with a kind of deliberate nonchalance, like it isn’t too important. Outside it starts to rain and I sit quietly watching it tapping against the window. Someone offers to make coffee and three people go to help. They herd out into the kitchen. It doesn’t take four people to make coffee. They just can’t stand the silence.
I close my eyes and feel a great flush of relief pass through me. I have been let go. They have set me free.
Even though I had been late I leave when everyone else does. I do it brazenly too, walking down the stairs and out of the door with them, almost daring them to say something about it. No one is allowed to criticise me today. No one is allowed to judge me.
I get off the train one stop after I got on it. There was a bag on the floor of the carriage in between two seats. Both seats were occupied but it was impossible to tell who the bag belonged to, so I started to freak out. What if it didn’t belong to either of them? What if they both thought it belonged to the other? How long had it been there? I can’t rationalise any of this. I know it doesn’t make sense. All I could do was imagine a slow motion explosion shredding us and leaving a homogeneous stew of body parts behind.
As I sit on the bench waiting for the next train to arrive it starts to rain again.
If I had been old enough to be aware of the cold war during the eighties I would have spent my time walking around expecting giant mushroom clouds to suddenly balloon up from over the horizon. I’m glad I missed all that. I wouldn’t have dealt very well with it. I don’t think I would have been able to open the curtains in the morning.
For some reason they pay the severance money directly into my bank. I was expecting to have to wait ages to get it, but the exact figure quoted in the letter has just appeared in my account. Now that I have the money I don’t feel especially obligated to see out the notice period, so I stop going to work entirely. I don’t call in sick or anything, I just stay in bed. I figure my manager will still give me a good reference if I ever need one, and I think the others will appreciate my absence. They can get a head start on forgetting I ever existed.
I stay in bed enjoying the hazy morning sunshine that creeps in under the curtains and then get up when it suits me. At about nine thirty I pull on a dressing gown and head into the kitchen to make some breakfast.
Pete is there, making dinner, the smell of boiling pasta and garlic bread filling the kitchen.
“Sick again?” Pete says with a wink.
“Not today,” I say. “They laid me off.”
“That’s a shame,” he says, testing a piece of the pasta by throwing it against the kitchen wall. It bounces off and lands on the floor.
“Is it done if it sticks to the wall, or if it bounces off?” he says.
“No idea,” I say.
“Me either.” Pete picks the pasta up and puts it in the bin.
I wonder if I can get a job like Pete’s. He always seems so cheerful. So laid back. The low lights of an office out of hours, being awake while everyone else is asleep, seeing the night sky when no one else does, maybe it brings the best out of a person. Three a.m., four a.m., the loneliness. I could handle the loneliness. Bombs never go off in the middle of the night in empty office buildings. It’s just not how it happens. You never hear about the lone nightwatchman killed in the blast.
“I think it’s probably done,” Pete says, draining the pasta and pouring some tomato sauce over it. “Do you want some?”
“Sure,” I say, “why not.”
Pete serves up the food and we sit down to eat for the first time in the six months that we have lived together. The pasta is a little underdone, but I don’t mind. He offers me one of his beers and even though I don’t feel like having one I accept it anyway. I want to see what it is like to drink a beer so early in the morning. I’m not going to lie, it feels pretty weird.
“Cheers,” Pete says, chinking his beer bottle against mine.
“Cheers,” I say.
“I feel amazing today,” I say to a fresh crowd of fifteen total strangers.
I’m running around in the game, but I’m not really trying. I haven’t managed to get any kills, but it doesn’t matter. I brushed my teeth after I ate with Pete and so now all I can taste is spearmint and garlic.
“Me too,” someone called PhantomXxX says. And then we have a quiet moment, Phantom and I, where we both reflect on that amazing feeling that we are both enjoying. That sense of time passing by a little slower than usual, a moment of peace and respite. I smile. I expect he does too.
Then I turn a corner in the abandoned space station we are fighting in and a land mine goes off. It had been cleverly hidden just out of sight so that it would trigger as soon as someone rounded the corner. It happens so suddenly it makes me laugh. One minute I am just running along having the time of my life, and then the next I am dead again. My little virtual me is killed instantly, its rag-doll body bouncing off of a wall before landing in a broken heap, one leg sticking out at an impossible angle. But it’s no big deal. It’s not all that important.
I am still laughing at how sudden it was when PhantomXxX says, “Gotcha,” and I can hear the smile in his voice.
He sounds so pleasant and calm. I send him a friend request and he accepts. Outside, the sun breaks through a crack in the clouds and everything lightens up. For a moment everything is a little warmer and a little brighter. For a moment everything is fine.
* This story was originally published in Glimmer Train ( Issue 100: Fall 2017)
