Work is an alternative reality—there are people I know at work whom I don’t know in my real life. Activities, hierarchies, various customs that only apply to this world that I inhabit 8 hours a day before I exit and go on with my life, trying to make sense of it… or not. Some people try to solve this inconsistency by blending work and real life. Or rather, they have their life taken over by their job (as the reverse isn’t permitted) effectively giving up their identity in favor of their role as an employee. This probably costs them a lot, and I am sure they suffer, but at least it makes the whole thing less hard to deal with than cases like mine.
The day after my talk with Anhela, I had an encounter with a colleague of mine called Mirko, who was a perfect example of this breed. Besides being a colleague, he was a former classmate, and ever since we were in fifth grade, he had been a brilliant mathematician, a brilliant computer scientist. Yes, and a huge nerd and he was entirely devoted to his career. Now, in parallel to working here, he was also studying at university—something which I also had on my list to do. Mirko, on the other hand, didn’t have time for making friends (although I’m not sure he had it on his list).
“Hey!”
I heard Mirko’s childlike voice and saw him coming toward me with his usual lumpy walk, which is why we called him “Snowball” at school (because when he walked he looked like a snowman rolling his lower snowball… never mind).
“Nice to see you! What are you up to?”
I said, and I really did feel good (although meshing my work life with my personal life usually made me nervous).
Of course, he came to talk about work. Mirko would never come to me for any other reason. He started briefing me about the situation he was in with his current project. The whole story was very convoluted and I was absent-mindedly waiting to hear when he would start telling me how all this was related to the stuff I was working on. But that moment never came. After a couple of minutes he stopped talking and looked at me, as if he anticipated a response, but I really didn’t know what to say, or even if I SHOULD say anything at all—Mirko never asked for advice. Especially not me.
I said that it sounded like his options were either to do A or do B (details omitted). He nodded. Then I said that the upsides of A were such and such. And the upsides of B were such and such. He nodded again, as if, again, he was anticipating a response.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me which one.”
For a second I felt great, because I thought that Mirko was asking for my opinion, but then my pride was overshadowed by the fear that my critical thinking always triggered when faced with something it doesn’t fully grasp.
I told him to just do what he thought was more appropriate and went outside to catch my breath. I walked to the terrace overlooking Vitosha. I observed the mountain carefully, not fully admitting to myself that I was searching for another phenomenon. There was no such thing. I wrote this while I was there:
New day, new mountain And still I am searching for that same old thrill
While I was resting there I had a similarly weird encounter with another colleague of mine who hated me, or at least wasn’t a fan. She came to me and started making small talk, which was so clumsy that I won’t try to write it up—if I did, it would consist mostly of “Erm”s and “Mhm”s followed by ellipses.
I was just beginning to wonder whether reality (or THAT PARTICULAR reality) had completely broken, but soon I discovered the real reason for all this. It was when that colleague finished the conversation and said, “I’m happy for you.”
People had found out I was being promoted.
And Mirko was assigned to my team.
Suddenly, everyone’s attitude toward me had changed—some people who didn’t care about me suddenly started liking me (and conversely, some people with whom I had previously talked abruptly stopped liking me), but the biggest difference was that everyone had an opinion of me. I was no longer an outsider.
This is when I realized that I never WANTED to be an outsider. I never wanted to be socially awkward. Quite the contrary—being with other people was a fundamental goal that I had (unconsciously) pursued since I was little. This was valid even when it came to people I didn’t particularly fancy—I was, and still am, egalitarian (and so was Anton, by the way). And my whole childhood, all those obscure interests, all those weird things that I did, all this longing for the unconventional—all of this was just an attempt to start a conversation with someone. My only goal with buying t-shirts of bands that no one knew was for the pretty girl from the other class to come and ask me what the hell this weird unreadable logo was. But I would never have admitted it to anyone—not to her, and not even to my own stupid head. I just feared rejection too much. Like every person who doesn’t believe in themselves, I was too constrained by only operating in the very narrow and pessimistic framework of what I thought was possible.
And even when the things that were possible had changed, fear often prevented me from confessing to myself that I actually craved attention (after being deprived of it for so many years). It took time for me to come to term with the reality that there was something wrong. That rather than the artful introvert that I imagined myself as, who had mastered the art of avoiding and of being avoided, I was just a very unsuccessful extrovert.
But, to be precise, I was neither of those things: my position on the extrovert/introvert axis was varying—I craved attention, but only REAL, genuine attention. I wanted connections, but only meaningful ones, ones that I could use to enrich my worldview, and if I didn’t think of the connections as meaningful, I would immediately switch to introvert mode.
For this reason, I had a very limited number of connections in my personal life, as I could never maintain connections with people I was genuinely into and who were genuinely into me as well, and few people were genuinely into me all the time.
But the promotion changed my situation completely, at least when it comes to the alternative reality of work, which I already discussed. Because at work I had already accepted that I was obliged to be social with my colleagues for the duration of the workday, and because ever since I was promoted, suddenly my colleagues wanted to be social with me as well—or at least they preferred me to Anhela—suddenly everyone wanted to be on my team. Everyone but one person.
I found most of this about myself during my first meeting with my new team. I was nervous before the meeting because I couldn’t recreate any of the code thanks to which I was promoted in the first place, but the second I entered the conference room, I realized that this was the least of my worries. The people on my team were so chaotic, and holding a meeting with them was so hard, that I almost never had time to talk about the actual task at hand. I had never noticed the invisible strings that held people together, and how much work it took to operate them.
At the end of the meeting I was sure I had failed it—I hadn’t said almost anything of value, but it turned out I did well. Apparently my colleagues were inspired by me and they took the initiative. Slowly, the project started moving, although I didn’t know almost anything about either managing projects or programming. I could not help but feel proud when I saw the way they were listening to me, although I actually didn’t know what I was talking about.
For this whole week I didn’t manage to visit Curious. and to see the girl who knew someone who had seen the phenomenon. The whole thing was very hard to arrange—as with everything that has to do with Anton, they wanted me to go to their place at noon, so we could discuss something and then call her and arrange the meeting with her at a time she was comfortable with. But because I was working long hours and Anton lived very far away, there was virtually no way to organize the whole thing.
On the day I received my first big salary. I felt rich and I decided to get a cab and arrange the whole trip. I took a car directly from work, traveled all the way to their house, took them with the car (waited half an hour for them), and finally went to find the address of the girl. For half an hour we traveled around this part of Sofia, where I had never set foot before. Then we got out of the car and started walking around the neighborhood, playing “Spot the Ten Differences” with the absolutely identical apartment blocks, which created a feeling of lack of movement—wherever we turned we saw the same thing, as if we were sailors traveling the open ocean.
At one point, Anton stopped and fixed their gaze on an inscription scratched next to one of the entrances.
“This is it,” they said.
The inscription read:
A + T
Where “T” was the girl we were supposed to meet (Tania), and “A” naturally was Anton. I laughed and nudged them on the shoulder, but they weren’t amused. Before entering, they hinted to me that they didn’t want to spend much time with this girl.
“Why do you never like your old girlfriends?” I asked.
“Because I don’t like myself,” they replied, while pressing the doorbell.
Anton’s ex-girlfriend definitely didn’t share their antipathy. She threw herself on them and hugged them so tightly that they couldn’t break free. Her: dark skin, light hair, and charming face. Her figure had perfect proportions, and the only thing that distinguished her from the models who posed for magazines was her height—she was a bit taller than normal. Dressed in a silk nightgown and flip-flops. Apparently, she had just gotten out of bed, but despite that, she hadn’t wiped off the thick line of black pencil from her eyes, which (at least I think) she had put on only because she knew she was about to meet Anton.
I had to rescue Anton from her by playing the role of the bad cop, which they had assigned me.
“You’ll see each other later,” I said. “We’re here on a completely different matter.”
“Sorry,” the girl said.
“So, who is the man?”
“So, I bumped into him yesterday, more or less at this time. He was terribly nervous and with very poor eyesight. So, he normally sees very well—nothing wrong even though he’s elderly—and yesterday I had to show him the way so he could navigate the stairs. And I, like, very worried: ‘What happened to you? Will you be okay?’ and he: ‘Eyes cannot look at light for too long.’ From there on, he started telling some super strange story, about some light coming from space… How he had gone to see it up close, and it had directed itself toward him. And then it started illuminating the interior of all machines. He could see how the current passed through those…”
“Integrated circuits… One important question—what’s the chance that he made these things up? That they were hallucinations, if you will?”
“None. He is a very straightforward person. Has a professorial title, in his time he was chairman of a scientific council. And his memory… His brain is like a real computer… For example in the supermarket across… I mean, because sometimes we bump into each other there. And even if he’s buying, for example, twenty different things, just by looking at them he knows exactly…”
The girl started to chatter and Anton signaled me to interrupt her:
“Okay, you’ll tell us later!” I said. “We need to see your neighbor before he goes to bed.”
She said goodbye to us and closed the door.
As we headed upstairs, I began to remember that severe headache from the time of my encounter with the beam. I had experienced it only once in my life and hoped it would remain that way. Just hoped. It reappeared and increased with every step we climbed, bringing us closer to the other witness of the Phenomenon. “We’re on the right track,” I said, while massaging my temples. I was so bad that Curious almost dragged me to the door. They pressed the doorbell. No one opened.
“Maybe he’s not home?”
“Nonsense! Where else could an elderly person be at ten in the evening?”
Curious grabbed the door handle and shook it, causing the lock’s bolt to start rattling.
While they were knocking on the door, I saw that there was a sign on the door.
Bonchev had died the previous day.
The pain made me close my eyes and scream. For a moment everything disappeared again (which made me feel calmer). My next memory was of us leaving the apartment. I felt the hand of Curious, who had grabbed me around the waist and was dragging me down the stairs. Then one of the doors on the staircase opened—someone had heard us:
“Hey, Curious! What happened to your friend?” I recognized Tania’s voice.
“Nothing’s wrong with him! We’re leaving now!”
“But where are you taking him?” she continued. “Stop for a moment! What happened upstairs? Curious!”
They stopped and turned to her:
“Tania, don’t you remember my real name?”
“Well no.”
She sounded extremely worried.
“Great!” Anton turned their back on her and continued down.