She holds out her hands to see whether they’re still trembling. She feels more like herself, but the office is as unfamiliar as a hotel room and the man in the hat bothers her. Where in God’s name did he come from?
She looks again at the title of her new story on the screen: An Unexpected Climax. Is it fit for a corporate fiction? That depends on whether it promotes the corporate vision. When it’s done, she’ll try it out on Simonetta, the receptionist on floor 17. Erotic fiction is her thing. Then the Equity Committee, Credit & Risk. One step at a time.
She runs through the first line in her head: They say that an unexpected climax… And then she looks out of the window. Perhaps I’m not made for the storytelling racket, she thinks. I should find another occupation.
Just then, a camera pops up in the bottom of the window frame.
For a startled moment, she thinks it’s a gun. Someone has been sent to kill her. This is how the corporation terminates your services; she’s invited the chop with her lack of enthusiasm and resistance to self-improvement. But no, if she’s being shot, it’s only with a camera. The device drops out of sight briefly and then rises again with intent and she sees that it’s attached to a human head. The head of a man. Now, she thinks.
The camera is rigged to a padded skullcap that elevates it slightly above the man’s head. When he looks at her, it’s like being looked at by two people. A camera crew.
She waves. She recognises the regal gesture as she’s making it: it’s the stiff-fingered, windscreen-wiper salute of modern royals. The motion you would make removing a grease spot from a mirror.
He cannot see her or has chosen to ignore her.
She gets up from the desk and goes closer. At the same time, he reaches up with one hand, hooks his fingertips into a channel on the window frame, twists his body and steps up with the opposite leg. Out there is the narrowest of ledges, hardly more than a lip on the frame, but he gains a toehold. Like a lizard on a garden wall, she thinks, as he clings crookedly to the glass.
She must be invisible to him, she’s sure of it now, but she cannot accept it. She kneels down on the carpet so that her face is close to his, raises her right hand with the index finger pointing stiffly upwards and moves it from side to side. She recognises this gesture too: it’s the movement her optometrist makes to check whether her eye muscles are working properly. There’s an instrument for this purpose, a little mace topped with a shiny orb, but Mrs Jonas prefers to use her finger. Nothing.
She’s spent every working day of the past eight months in this office, without once considering that one might not be able to see into it from outside. There’s a bronze-tinted film on the glass that makes it seem as if sunset is never far off, and she likes the effect, it improves the atmosphere. Now it occurs to her that the film might be intended to ensure her privacy. But from whom? She looks down into the square inside the mall with new interest. More people than ever are crowded together there, and they all appear to be looking at her, although of course they’re looking at the climber. In all the times she’s been to the mall for her banking or her pedicure, or even when she sat at Armando’s drinking a glass of sauvignon blanc, she never once thought to step out into the daylight and look up at her office. Somewhere along the line, without her even noticing, the flame of her curiosity has been snuffed.
The climber reaches up again and with another reptilian motion lifts his foot onto the ledge and stands upright against the glass. At rest there, arms and legs stretched wide, he is transformed into a fine specimen of a man. As good as a sketch by Da Vinci, she thinks, anatomically accurate and symbolically allusive. Vitruvian Man on his way to the gym. Not naked, mind you, far from it, sheathed from head to toe in some sort of leotard. A climbing suit, she imagines. An extreme climbing suit. Beneath the stretchy fabric, baggy at the knees and sweat-ringed in the armpits, he’s slim and muscled, an athlete. A long face, sun-browned and attractively weather-beaten. Not a young man, she thinks, a man in his prime. Jets of sandy hair spurt through the air vents of the camera mount.
Oblivious to her presence. This authorises a closer inspection. Bending towards the glass like a museum visitor before a work of art, she examines his codpiece and the sculpted ridges on his torso. From close up, at least some of them appear to be made of plastic: he has a plate of body armour attached to his midriff. The pectorals and biceps are screen-printed on his suit. As he adjusts his stance on the ledge, she sees his own muscles flexing beneath the hard-edged outlines on the fabric.
A pouch of resin dangles from his belt. He reaches into it with one hand and then the other, and beats the excess off on his thighs. Then he leans back to assess the ledge on the 12th floor. The underside of his chin is an arrowhead. His calf muscles bulge and the printed versions amplify the effect. Any second now, he’ll be gone.
She makes a fist to knock on the window. But what if she startles him and he falls? As she kneels there with her knuckles turned to the glass, there’s a roll of thunder, and then a shadow flicks over the glass and the sound becomes the clatter of a helicopter.
The climber scuttles upwards. Just like a lizard, his asymmetrical hustle, but she thinks: The Human Fly. And she wishes this had not come into her head. At this moment, she has the feeling she’s seen all this somewhere before. The man on the ledge, the woman in her office, the predatory helicopter circling. A movie probably. It’s a distressing idea: this might be the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me, she thinks, and yet it feels like a cliché. Everything surprising has already happened before or is about to happen again. No matter what I do or say, or how I remember it or tell it, it will never be interesting enough. She presses her cheek to the glass and tries to catch a glimpse of a rubber sole, the elegant slipper of an acrobat, as the climber disappears from view.
The corridor is deserted. Closing the door softly behind her, she crosses the carpet on her bare feet, glancing through the open door and sealed window of each office she passes. She can hear the muted thud of the chopper, but all she sees is one tea-stained swatch of sky after another, like a strip of film with nothing on it.
Liselotte is not behind the half-moon desk in the reception area. Leaning over an arrangement of silk roses and baby’s breath, the corporate storyteller glances into the blank monitor, just as a bubble breaks in the water dispenser.
In the silence that follows she hears a small uproar. It’s coming from the conference room off the lift lobby, where a door stands ajar. They are all there, every rank and income bracket from the senior managers to the receptionists, hunched over the table with their fingers laced under their chins or perched on the armrests of chairs, eyes on the television screen, transfixed. A mutter of commentary. No one even looks up as she slips into the room.
When he was close enough to touch, she did not fully appreciate the climber’s fancy dress. Seeing him now on the screen, magnified and distanced at once, she gathers that he’s a bargain-basement superhero. He has red leggings and green briefs, and a yellow bandanna or scarf knotted at his throat, the suggestion of a cape. He’s swiftly scaled another six floors. Three more to the top of the building.
A reception committee stands ready on the rooftop. It’s like the end of a marathon: someone holding a towel emblazoned with the sponsor’s logo, someone else proffering a bottle of water, a third person, invariably a man in a suit, ready to shake a hand and present a platitude. There are a dozen men in uniform too, security guards or policemen with truncheons and two-way radios.