waking and dying without light.

Vincent Bertolini-Felice / 3.4.25 / "Ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the last one."

-Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston in Office Space)

For the past three weeks, the sun hadn’t risen by the time he entered the office. Occasional shrapnel of the awaiting sun sent fragments of light just beyond his inky black hair and onto the frosted pavement. Awaiting him, just beyond the sun was the same elevator ride to the same hospital white corporate suite that had dictated the waking hours of his life. He fumbled with the keycard tethered to his hip, inserting it the wrong direction twice before correcting himself. He pressed on the indents below his eyes with the edge of his fingertips to gear himself to the day that awaits him.  

“Sam-o!”  

Before he had time to orient himself to the gravelly voice greeting him, a smooth, fattened hand shook his shoulder. 

“Dallas told me Q4 is looking even better. Come October we might just be able to wake up at 8.” 

“That’s-that’s great Percy.” 

This was about the extent of conversation Sam Livingston could muster up so early in the morning. His hands were now fully obscuring his eyes, sparing himself from the burden of eye contact in order to muster up enough effort to walk to his cubicle. 

“Weekends around the corner, we got a tailgate going for the game Saturday, can I count you in?” 

“Listen.” 

Sensing an itch of hostility emerging from the depth of his throat, Sam collected himself. Craning his neck upwards and removing his hands from his bagged eyes, saying through a deep sigh. 

“Sure. I’ll be there Percy.” 

He had seen Percy thousands of times in the last month alone, yet the image of his protruding, jagged nose, unkept goatee, and maniacal grin injected a rush of fear into his brittle soul. By the time he processed the image before him, Percy was gone, and the waning minutes of dusk were all that illuminated the sterile office before him. 

He now had the courage to walk the few steps to his cubicle. His cubicle was positioned the closest to the door and from the slump in his chair, he could see just beyond the edge of his divider and look at the effervescent rays of light in the hallway. He wondered how much of his morning was spent taking in the sun that had been lost to him in the confines of his sparsely padded cell. 

A sticky note adorning the top right quadrant of his computer informed him to “Call my wife”. She wouldn’t be awake for another half an hour. He had placed that note there when he was still waking up at 8, knowing that by the time he saw the note, she would be awake and ready for him to outline the day to her. With the changes to his work schedule, he couldn’t help but look upon the note with resentment, knowing that his morning was nothing more than a ticking clock until 9, when she would be ready to speak to him. 

Departures from this routine of half-asleep work interrupted with a mandatory call to his half-awake wife tended to irritate Sam. Despite the consistent presence of these agitations, he was seldom thrown off his ordinary functions. This was not the case when his phone rang twice in quick succession, both single rings followed by quick hangups from his brother. Flummoxed by not only the fact he was receiving such a call but also at the cryptic nature in which his brother chose to call. 

He stared at the call logs, questioning if he had actually received a call or if his working life had led him to a paralyzingly vivid hallucination. He was assured it was not a hallucination when he received a message on the banner of his phone. 

“Hey man, let’s grab a drink after work. I’ll be at Cruz at 8.” 

Sam repositioned his frame, slumping into his chair with his head dipping slightly below his ripped mesh headrest. He adjusted his phone to where it caressed his outer thumb and the webbing near his pointer finger. The green text bubble transfixed Sam, his brows increasingly furrowing at such an odd request.  

The last time he spoke to his brother was several months ago at an anniversary Sam attended with his wife. The pair of lovers spent the evening having barren conversation in which one person was either constantly interrupting the other or failing to understand that they had been spoken to. An initial group of four was dwindled down to three for most of the evening as Sam’s wife found herself constantly receiving calls that were too important to ignore. When the three left the restaurant, Sam was the last to notice his wife hunched over, knees locked, shaking from the Seattle cold while yelling at an unknown recipient on the other side of the phone.  

The evening was not spoken of again by anyone involved, and Sam shirked away from interaction with his brother for a brief period out of an unfelt sense of shame that something had soured but he wasn’t clear of what.  

He was not naive enough to think he would never hear from his brother again but for him to pitch something so casual at such an odd time felt out of place. Since leaving their shared household, the two seldom spoke. Although they lived little more than a quarter of a mile away and shared important occasions such as holidays, birthdays, and the likes, they seemed to only acknowledge the others existence when these dates were around the corner. 

“Sam. Chris wants to see you.” 

The words spoken resonated with Sam and proved enough of a jolt to shake him out of the minutes long pondering he was in the midst of. The voice stating it on the other hand was bland and benign enough to be one of a few employees he knew the name of. He was able to deduce it was Molly, an administrative assistant, only due to the fact that she was the medium for Chris in this context. Chris Horton was one of three men Sam reported to and quite possibly the most mediocre supervisor in all of middle management.  

A former alcoholic, he leveraged his troubles and the soft timbre of his voice to try to form meaningless connections with his underlings that he thought promoted productivity. Sam remembered their last conversation, one in which he managed to bring up a night he spent in a fetal position at his daughter’s middle school in an attempt to convince Sam to tidy up his penmanship on his memos. 

Chris’s office was a drab eggshell white with no pictures or mementos to soften the blow of the imposing lack of color. For someone so focused on curbing hostilities and being approachable, he presented a rather malevolent facade. He could be seen wearing the same black on black suit that would have been considered overdressed at a funeral, covering the majority of his face with neatly trimmed arrays of prickly, jet-black facial hair. 

Sam spent the majority of their meeting staring at the veins on his hands. The thin and wiry lines stretched from the cuff of his skin tight sleeve through his pallid hands and trailing off at the bony fingers that covered his mouth. The content of their conversation was nonsensical corporate jargon that neither party fully understood. A dash of reprimanding for something irrelevant paired with praise for something meaningless.  

It wasn’t until the end of their conversation that Chris’s hands left the confines of their clamped position, obscuring his mouth. Sam noticed the veins closest to his wrist began pulsing, vibrating and pressing violently against the skin as if it was on the verge of bursting.

When he extended his arm to shake his hand, he noticed the veins continued their desperate dance, almost exuberant at the idea they could escape their interconnected prison. 

But Sam knew they would quiet down, return to their natural state without a fuss. They could throb, scream, and cry as much as they wished, but they would never break free, simply lying dormant until the next opportunity to break routine emerged. 

When Sam returned to his cubicle, he tussled with the sticky note. He reached into his wrinkled linen pockets to retrieve his phone and call his wife. The text block fixed on the banner of his phone told him it was 9:14. It was too late to call. She would be onto more important matters and his call would only be a hindrance on her morning. It was no bother anyways as she already knew what needed to be done today, he really had no reason to speak to her. 

The working day was just as tiring and exciting as any other day, save a jam on the printer to add a sprinkle of discourse to the office. Before noon, three unknowns attempted to initiate conversation with some line about the printer being the opener they needed, “it’s crazy, isn’t it?” or “just what we needed, huh?” The idea of a stranger drumming up conversation was something he was used to, but he failed to see how this excuse of an effort could be taken as anything other than offensive. 

Following the third attempt at conversation that concluded in an older colleague asking about his family, Sam felt obligated to leave the office for his forty-five-minute escape disguised as a lunch break. 

Due to an unforeseen accident on I-5, the entirety of the break was spent pressing and removing his foot from the rusted gas pedal on his 08 Civic. By the time he arrived at the restaurant a little over a mile away from his office, he realized he had no idea what he wanted and returned to the office nine minutes late on an empty stomach. 

He felt as if he was now in the perfect mental state to address the most important matter of his working day, the cryptic message he received from his brother. 

It took an hour of blank stares at different screens and the occasional clack at the keys on his computer to formulate the perfect reply. 

“Sure.” 

Despite the impression that he did not care as conveyed by the reply, he quietly panicked at how aloof his reply appeared. He wished to mimic the enigmatic temperament he pictured his brother possessed when he sent the message. 

As he set down his phone, he was summoned back by the ding notifying him of a reply. 

“Great! I’m glad we can do this.” 

Why? Why the cheeriness? Neither of them was the type to communicate in this manner. Sam couldn’t help but feel as if something either had to be grave or wildly exciting to warrant such optimism. Either way, the uncertainty of the whole affair frustrated him and paralyzed him from completing his work for the day. 

He left the office at 7:44. Overcompensating for the incredibly important nine minutes he missed not eating lunch. He believed at more than two occasions someone attempted to converse with him, but he did not have the cognitive facilities to know if these dialogues really happened. 

His drive over was static and crippling, freezing twice in integral moments and nearly causing accidents. 

He arrived at Cruz more than twenty minutes late to their dinner. Cruz was a block away from a dormant Amazon office, its facade reflecting the gentrified, minimalist scene that surrounded it. 

Ambient lights and a panoply of plastic flora consumed the busy scene within. A mellow, rustic guitar filled the air, only broken up by the flow of laughter and ceramic clinks.

An overeager party of four swooning over their food directed Sam to his brother sitting in the corner nearby.  

The walk to the table brought on a variety of nerves known to schoolkids with a naive crush or a groom seeing his wife walk down the aisle. His brother stood to greet him and the cushioning of his plump forearms sent a chill down his spine. Why a hug? 

“It’s good to see you Sammy, I... I... got you a jack and coke, it’s- “ 

“I’m not drinking.” 

“Oh... oh ok. Probably for the better.” 

His brother waved his arm in an attempt to flag down the waitress. He pointed to Sam and mimicked taking a drink before sliding his finger across his throat twice to signal the cancelation of his drink order. 

“Why did you want to meet me?” 

“Sam, let’s get some food first, I don’t want to dive in on it right now.” 

“Is it that bad?” 

“It’s not good.” 

Sam leaned back in his chair, pressing his shoulders inward and slumping his arms in his pocket. 

In a moment mirroring the one before, Sam waved back to the waitress, doing the same motions as his brother, giving a thumbs up and nodding his head to state he wanted the drink. 

“How’s the family?”  “Uhm, about the same. Emily has dance going on this weekend, going to head up to Tacoma.” 

“8-year-olds travel that far for dance?” 

“Some do. The ones that show potential, I guess.” 

“How do they tell at that age?” 

“I don’t know Sam.” 

“It seems unhealthy for people to-” 

“Can we not do this Sam?” 

“Do what?” 

“The same thing you always do. We carry on normal conversation and you feel the need to inject your opinion on everything as if the world will burn down if you don’t.” 

Sam chose to remain silent. 

“Christmas, New Years, our anniversary, same thing every time.” 

“The anniversary dinner? How was that on me?” 

“You were chastising your wife for being late. You just wouldn’t drop it and when she walked out on the dinner, you acted as if nothing happened!” 

This was not how Sam recollected that evening. He had a hard time imagining his wife throwing such a fit at something so trivial as that. He had purchased her a watch she had wanted just hours before, and for her to pitch a fit at his comments after that simply did not resonate with him. 

“She’s cheating on you, Sam, that’s why I called you here.” 

Sam did not reply, yet his brother could read the sense of confusion and spite marking his face. 

“We were at a bar off University, and she was there with a guy in his twenties. We assumed you knew and didn’t think much of it. They were overly flirtatious and clearly drunk. We followed them out of the bar and they walked back to this guy’s place. Two nights later, different place, same thing, same guy. Except they didn’t have the decency to save their affection for later.” 

His brother took a break to take an aggressive and sloppy sip from his drink before resuming with his tangent. 

“I do the decent thing. I take a picture, show it to her and tell her she has to tell you. She nods her head, no greater thought. I said ‘What does that mean?’ She doesn’t care to reply, laughs and closes the door on me.” 

Sam pressed the side of his finger to the edge of his nose,  cupping his hands together to cover his face. His mouth was agape and bereft of any sounds or breath, thinking about the increasingly violent thud of his heart against his oxford cloth shirt. 

A collection of memories, good and bad, flashed in his mind. The first week they met, lying in each other’s arms on the plaided comforter of his dorm room. A dulcet voice serenading their silence as her eyes wandered past him and to the window. He turned his head around only to see the Pacific Ocean, four years later.  

They lied on separate blankets, each wearing wire rimmed sunglasses, fixing their gaze forwards. He had informed her moments before that he was going to be in San Francisco for the next two months. She had resorted to her usual frustrated silence and he mimicked her.

He told her he would be able to take care of them financially and she need not worry about going back to work or taking a break from her normal routine in his absence.  

She turned to him and lifted her sunglasses, her mouth moving but no words coming out. He rotated his glance to see what she was commenting on and when he looked back she was in his arms.  

She was wearing thin white linens and the veil that signaled he was viewing their wedding. A slight protrusion indented his neck, the bones of her wrists caressing his neck as she held him close. He remembered how her arms left his neck when he failed to reciprocate her expressions of love in his ear.  

His brother’s hand shook his forearm. A puddle of unbroken tears welling up his eye as he quietly nodded his head and mouthed the words “I’m sorry.” 

“I need to go.” 

Sam stammered with his words, exiting his chair and weaving through the regular restaurant obstructions and into the brisk grasp of night. A violent thrust of wind rushed across the left side of his face, pushing his side part into his forehead. 

Three open mouthed breaths escaped from his lungs as he looked up into the starless sky, wondering if God or any omniscient being could fill him with the thoughts to free himself of his pain. 

He craned his head downwards, feeling his chills and aches run down and out of his body.  

With his body free of any physical impediments, he knew what his night would become. He would return home, lie next to his absent wife, and drift off imagining that he could wake up at 8, free of his headache. He stretched his arms deep into the barren sky, hoping that he could leave his body behind and sink into a harmonious union with the nothingness above.