Harris
became a night watchman so he could finally get paid to write.
The
best assignments were at construction sites, where he occasionally patrolled
through massive metal skeletons with their cables hanging out, but mostly just
sat alone in pale computer glow, peering at words in silence, until birds
muttered and trucks hissed and the dark turned blue and died. Then he greeted
the first hardhats and set off sunlight-headed into the freshly poured morning.
But
Harris couldn’t just stroll into a security firm and announce that he wanted a
job where he could write.
Instead
he lied.
He
said he’d been a guard seven years (untrue) and had worked every position
imaginable (nope), and he’d discovered that he was only truly happy when he
worked independently, for example in a construction site at night.
For
his next trick, he changed the subject.
But
then Harris moved to Berlin, and he wasn’t sure whether he could lie believably
in German, and anyway it was unclear whether construction sites would still be la dolce vita. So he took a tactical
risk: during an interview with a kindly recruiter at a job agency, he told the
truth.
The
recruiter — Klüh, an old worn-out mountainous chain-smoker who had been
chuckling at everything Harris said — sobered up and looked at him sternly over
the bridge of his yellow-lensed aviator glasses. But there was something off
about his severity, and gradually his purple lips wriggled into a smile, and he
slapped his desk, wheezing giggles, and announced that Harris had come to the
right person — heeee heeeeeeee — because mensch did Klüh ever
have the right place for him: a tiny hotel with ninety-nine rooms. Not only
would Harris have some time to write, but he would also earn an extra two euros
an hour.
Klüh
stuck out his vast hand proudly.
Eventually,
cautiously, Harris shook it.
He
was nervous, but the extra money cinched it. He had debts, and besides, his
wife still hadn’t gotten her work permit. The system made him an offer that it
had rendered him unable to refuse.
The
next day, Harris biked out to the bland wasteland where the security firm had
their stainless-steel air-brushed office. There he was greeted by a dour
Scandinavian named Uv, and after a few formalities they performed the sterile
and terrible rituals of the contract.
That
evening Harris togged himself out in black and marched out of his sunny yellow
district, through a graffitied park seamed by anxious drug dealers, into the
arches of an iron bridge lined with tattooed trolls partying in trash, and up a
slowly rising hill toward the highest point of the party district, where the
five-story brick hotel loomed over tracks and water, bodies and lights.
He
swung in through the hotel’s propped-open glass doors. On a low black stage a
tiny woman howled soul from behind a grand piano. Creative-types lounged on
plush divans and encoignures, holding fairy-pink cocktails. In the corners
bamboo aroma dispensers shot up vapor jets of citrus potpourri.
And
between the stage and the bar was a ring-shaped desk within which, staring
perplexed at a recessed monitor, stood a groomed cockatoo with blue lips and a
bouffant.
Harris
told her that he was here for a test shift. At first she couldn’t hear him.
Then she shook his hand, told him where to drop off his backpack, and, as
Harris was leaving, offhandedly mentioned that the round desk would be his
station through the night.
He
turned away quick so the bouffant wouldn’t see him grimace.
In
the changing room, Harris wiped at sweat until his face stung.
The
manager, a tiny, elf-eared woman called Antje, fetched him from there and led
him through his patrol route, instructing him nonstop as she took him over
seven stories, from the residential floors — muffled black halls with black
doors — to the bar, the stage, the whiskey-tasting room, the restaurant and its
twelve-person kitchen, down into the dusty thickly-white-painted brick
basements to the hotel’s mechanical hearts and other flammable steel organs.
Smiling
when appropriate, Harris watched Antje’s rapid blue eyes gleam and darkle. In
his head he was already composing his refusal to the security firm.
Back
at the circular desk — the soul woman had been replaced by a hip-hop-happy
DJ — in the heart of the noise, elfin Antje cheerily went through the intricacies
of how to conduct checks-ins and check-outs, how to file receipts and
registration slips into accordion portfolios, how to protocol the multiple
hand-offs of keys and print and sign the proper papers at the proper time…
But
somehow she managed to talk to Harris as if they were old friends in easy
conversation. She kept looking into his face, and he always smiled back.
Eventually
she said, “I don’t tell many people this … but …” looking at him now with her
eyes narrowed, “I do have the feeling that you understand what we want.”
“Yeah,”
Harris said carefully. “I think so too …”
Antje
clapped, squealing: “Then we are more than happy to welcome you to our team!”
He
looked at her in horror.
He
called his boss at the security firm, sullen eyebrowless Uv, and announced that
he couldn’t work at the hotel because the constant loud music gave him
headaches (true).
“Ja
SSSUUUPER,” Uv hissed. “Perfekt!”
And
hung up.
Later
he called back and calmly informed Harris that he had already scheduled him for
the next month at the hotel. If Harris hung on for just four weeks, full time,
he would be transferred.
Harris
felt he couldn’t say no.
His
mind was taken from him. There was little security work and lots of filing
reports and fulfilling lists, billing logging sorting folding and stapling,
signing for keys, but then also face-to-face duties like checking guests in and
out, chatting with lonely inhabitants or selling the house spirits, house
coconut water, and house fashion line. Harris was micromanaged by the middle
tier, scrutinized by swiveling security cameras, and made to submit to the
theorems of lofty bosses who understood nothing of life in the thick-carpeted
trenches, all while he facilitated shows, dinners, conferences, bookings,
brand-events and presentations, and weathered constant unforeseeable disasters
for which someone always had to take the blame.
But
the raw work only penetrated so deep into his brain. The deeper echelons were
infiltrated by his colleagues and contaminated by the emotions they pressed
upon him. The floor chiefs, ever vigilant, worried over his shoulder and
lectured in circles. They coordinated their knowledge of him with each other.
The waiters gossiped with the most casual snobbery and could smile two
different smiles simultaneously. The poor girls being gradually and painfully
converted into managers zoomed around taut as mousetraps. Someone was always
about to get in trouble. Someone was always getting told off. Eyes narrowed in
resentment. Nostrils flared with suppressed anger. Discontent oozed and hot
hate scorched out behind backs in reaction to the smallest imagined slights.
By
the time Harris got home each morning he twinged from singed emotions, and to
recover he had to think endlessly into his journal, hypothesizing and
theorizing, examining his motives, sorting his head, cauterizing wounds and
stitching them up with logic.
Then
he slept through the day, ate, and went back.
Harris
worked the next eleven days out of twelve — filling in for a sick comrade — and
by the end he was a creature of the hotel: he belonged to his work, just like
nearly everyone he knew, all their personal possibilities subordinated to
institutions that help affluent people trade pieces of paper, talent and
individuality worth less than capacity to do repetitive, dehumanizing, and
often humiliating tasks for next-to-no pay.
Harris
did everything he could to escape work-as-life: he lied, he didn’t go out, he
ate expiring fruit, he biked for hours to avoid train fare, and he rented
broken-down apartments where nothing worked and the winter cold was unbearable.
But the rent got higher every year, and they jacked up the prices of rotten
fruit, and the truth was that so far they’d managed to steal the majority of
his adult life.
And
he was among the lucky ones…
By
the last shift Harris was complaining so bitterly that his coworkers, who were
more depressed and further along in their addictions than he was, banded
together and defended the hotel against him.
It
was a slow night, so theoretically he could have read for ten minutes here or
there, had he been able to concentrate or even just stay awake. Instead he
trudged back and forth from the courtyard to the street, struggling against his
closing lids; and early in the morning, when everyone else was gone, Harris hid
behind a partition where the camera couldn’t see and rested there for a few
minutes with his eyes closed. When he opened them he saw the hotel’s work
roster. For the next three days the other guard’s name had been whited-out and
replaced by his.
Harris
did call Uv in a wrath. He did demand to know what the hell was going on.
And
he did insist that Uv treat him more like a human.
But
yeah, he buckled: he took the days.
Finally
Harris crawled on elbows and ankles to his day off and pitched into bed and
slept objectly through the morning and afternoon. In the evening there was a
brief moment of reality when his wife climbed into the loft bed and they lay
next to the open garden window and rain came on so hard and swift that the air
turned white and the trees wriggled ecstatically and weeds thrashed on the
overgrown concrete. They floated still and silent above the flailing sunset
jungle. The low and heavy purple heat slowly melted into cool blueness. Newborn
breezes explored our cheeks. A deep bass heart throbbed in the distance, under
the far-off wails and rumbles of trouble.
The
next afternoon Harris was awoken by a phone call from his lovely boss. Uv
needed him to do four twelve-hour shifts, and the first one would start in a
few hours — not at the hotel, however, but at some empty refugee homes.
Okay,
so losing the days off stung. But what if Harris could finally write? With this
in mind, he managed to sound happy. He even thanked Uv. But the site was far
and he couldn’t afford the U-bahn, so after the phone call Harris had to leap
into his all-black work clothes, shoulder his bulky backpack, and bike hard for
eighteen kilometers through the steaming July evening, zigzagging through
downtown blocks, along riversides and through parks, arcing around a golden
victory statue and past a nuclear power plant — and more often than not
blundering down the wrong path, because it was all new and he didn’t trust the
GPS and had nothing in his stomach to power his withering brain, much less his
limp legs; all they’d had at home were two mushy apples and some salted
peanuts. His muscles gave out one by one, until finally he had to invent new
muscles in order to struggle on.
He
rolled up twenty minutes late to the front of the site, a fenestrated shipping
container squatting between old trees. Behind it, ringed by tall metal fencing
in a golden field, were white rows of identical shipping containers, each with
a door, windows, and a tiny lawn.
When
Harris knocked on the main door, a friendly face popped up at the window
laughing: “I’m not allowed to let anyone in!” Nevertheless he did exactly that,
shook his hand, and introduced himself as Rolf. Harris apologized for being
late.
“Oh
it doesn’t matter to me,” Rolf said. “I’m here all night anyway.”
Harris
smiled sicklily and tried to sit down, but his makeshift muscles gave way and
he fell into the chair. Rolf, mixing instant coffee for him, asked him where he
was from. Then he wanted to know why Harris left his homeland, but didn’t listen
to his answer before offering his own opinions, and soon Harris stopped trying
to respond and just stared off to the side — at black branches ticking against
pink sky — and drank the instant coffee, which stretched hot root-claws into
his gaping stomach.
A
few hours later Harris was able to escape his garrulous companion and bike out
in search of food, but everywhere was closed, even the gas stations, and he
pedaled ever slower as he neared his own personal zero. Finally he found a
doner shop, but they didn’t take debit. He hunted down an ATM, only it wouldn’t
dispense less than twenty euros, a near-magisterial sum that Harris did not
possess. The next ATM obliged, though, and Harris raced back and ordered a
doner. The pita sogged, the sauce was ketchup with extra sugar, and the meat
tasted of slaughterhouse — but he ate so greedily that at one point he chowed
down on a wedge of tin-foil, and gagged like a dog over the green plastic
table.
Back
at the converted shipping container, Harris set up his laptop and began writing
for the first time since the hotel took over his life. He couldn’t focus on
fiction, not with so many unexamined and anxiety-inducing experiences swimming
in his meninges. So he started writing about Klüh the jolly recruiter and began
to describe the trouble since then, in an attempt to get it under his control,
lassoed by arguments and tamed, made bearable.
But
Rolf never stopped talking. He disgorged a stream of life advice that ranged
from how to treat women (randomly order them flowers) to which herb liquor
would get Harris drunkest. Still talking, he produced a stereo and set it to
play knock-off pop, loudly. Then he took out his phone and started tapping away
at a lurid match-3 game with the sound on: cheers, swishes, pops, coin clinks
and jewel dings. The only time Rolf ever looked up from his game was when
Harris put earbuds in, at which point Rolf motioned at him to take them out and
wondered whether they should maybe go for a patrol.
At
three a.m. Harris’s phone rang. Guess who? Uv the eyebrowless one had cancelled
two of his shifts at the construction site so that Harris could attend
fire-prevention training at the hotel. “Hold on,” Harris rasped, and raced
outside. He perched on an upturned bucket and crossed one leg at the knee and
shook his foot like mad and tried to speak slowly and calmly:
“I’m
not going!”
“You
have to.”
“NO!”
“There
is no ‘no.’ You’re going.”
“Yeah
well … I won’t do anything for free!”
“Nor
should you. The fire-training is paid. Listen, you have … four? five … actually
eight more shifts at the hotel. And if it catches on fire?” Harris shook his
scrawny fist at the rustling trees. “I don’t care! I am not going!” His voice
cracked:
“I
have plans!”
“Really?
Because I thought you were working at the refugee homes…”
“Yeah
exactly! I planned on not being at that fucking hotel!”
He
didn’t cave, but after Uv hung up, saying he would call the next day, Harris
lay down on the pavement and cried.
After
his face dried and the snot unclogged he began doing push-ups on the
still-black tarmac. Locking his body long and straight, he pushed until air
left him and sweat shined his forehead and his arms shook and refused, but he
held on, he lifted himself groaning and snorting, by centimeters, twice more — bringing
him to a personal record of nine.
It
had been a summer of rains and the grassways along the pavementwere flooded.
From the dark water grew floral citadels, wispy skyscrapers in which crickets
sang.
Pacing
between the unlived-in homes, Harris peered into their hollow kitchens, where
sometimes a ceiling fan spun silkily in near darkness.
Harris
hooked his fingers into metal-lattice fencing and watched fog rising from a
golden field. In an imperial tree thousands of tiny birds switched branches
furtively, in near silence. There was no one else around but him and the
insects, and now you.