The Room (2 page)

The second time I went into the room I was looking for photocopy paper. I was determined to manage on my own. Despite all the exhortations to ask about things, I was unwilling to expose myself to humiliation and derision by displaying gaps in my knowledge of the setup. I had come to recognize the little stress wrinkles they all got whenever I did actually ask. Obviously they weren't to know that I was aiming to get to the top of the Authority. To become someone who commanded respect. And I didn't want to give HÃ¥kan any excuse to indulge his work-avoidance.

So I checked everywhere, all the places where in the majority of offices you might expect to come across photocopy paper, but there was none to be found. Finally I made my way round the corner, past the toilets, where I had a feeling I had previously seen a small room.

At first I couldn't find the light switch. I felt along the walls on either side of the door, and in the end I gave up, walked out again, and found the switch on the outside. What an odd place to put it, I thought, and went back in.

It took a moment for the fluorescent light to flicker into life, but I was quickly able to ascertain that there was no photocopy paper there. Even so, I got an immediate sense that there was something special about this place.

It was a fairly small room. A desk in the middle. A computer, files on a shelf. Pens and other office equipment. Nothing remarkable. But all of it in perfect order.

Neat and tidy.

Against one wall stood a large, shiny filing cabinet with a desk fan on top of it. A dark-green carpet covered the floor. Clean. Free from dust. Everything neatly lined up. It looked slightly studied. Prepared. As if the room were waiting for someone.

I went out, closed the door, and switched off the light. Out of curiosity I opened the door again. I got a feeling I had to check. How could I be sure the light wasn't still on in there? Suddenly I felt uncertain whether up or down meant on or off. The whole idea of having the switch on the outside felt strange. A bit like the light inside a fridge. I peered in at the room. It was dark.

The next day my new boss came over to our desk in the big, open-plan office, with his thinning hair and cotton cardigan. His name was Karl, and the cotton cardigan wasn't very new, but looked expensive. He stopped next to HÃ¥kan and pointed out, without any introductory pleasantries, that my shoes were dirty.

“We try to think about the floor,” he said, pointing at a metal basket full of blue plastic shoe covers hanging on the wall right next to the entrance.

“Of course,” I said. “Naturally.”

He patted me on the shoulder and walked away.

I thought it was strange that he didn't smile. Don't people usually try to smooth over that sort of remark with a little smile? To show that you're still friends, and make me, as the newcomer, feel welcome? It wasn't nice, getting told off as bluntly as that. It had a serious impact on my work and I sat there for a long while with an uncomfortable feeling that I'd just been taught a lesson. It was annoying that I hadn't thought about the shoe covers myself. Obviously I would have done it if I'd had time to think about it.

He had managed to make me feel both stupid and insecure, when in actual fact I was one of the smartest. Besides, it was just rude to walk off like that. I counted the number of errors my boss had made during my short time there and came up with three. Plus one minor infraction. Three or four, then, depending on how you looked at it.

HÃ¥kan, who had obviously heard the whole thing, sat there unusually quietly, apparently preoccupied with some document. Carry on pretending, I thought. Carry on pretending.

I leaned down and undid my shoes even though I was in the middle of one of my fifty-five-minute work periods, and something like that really ought to be dealt with during one of the short breaks.

I looked around the room. Everyone was immersed in their own business. Yet it still felt as though they were all watching me as I walked, in just my socks, over to the small kitchen at the other end of the office and fetched a cloth. I cleaned up as best I could, fetched a pair of shoe covers, and put them over my shoes. They rustled as I took the cloth back. I tried to see if anyone else was wearing shoe covers, but they were all wearing either slippers or normal shoes. Maybe they were indoor shoes, I thought.

I wrote a note and stuck it on my briefcase:

Buy slippers.

Then I went to the coffee machine and got a cup of coffee. I reasoned that this fifty-five-minute period was already ruined. I would just have to sit it out and start again with the next one.

The bulb in the ceiling of the little kitchen was broken and needed changing. When I opened one of the cutlery drawers, I discovered that there were plenty of new bulbs there. It would be a painless task to unscrew the broken one and replace it with a new one. It seemed odd that no one had done anything about such a simple problem.

The coffee was far too hot to drink straightaway. I had to keep moving it from hand to hand to avoid burning my fingers, so I thought I might as well take a turn around the department and try to build up my social network.

First I went over and stood beside John's desk. But as I was standing there it struck me that it might be best to start with Ann, seeing as she, in purely geographic terms, was closest to me and HÃ¥kan. If I was going to expand my contacts, obviously I ought to start at the center and work my way outward. Like ripples in water, I thought. Besides, John made a hopelessly bland impression. What did someone like that have to offer me that I didn't already have? It would be unfortunate for my profile to be seen with such an insipid individual from the older generation, and thus become associated with the colorless crowd.

Ann was a woman, of course, and I was reluctant to associate too intimately with women and risk seeming pushy or ingratiating, but I realized I could adopt a gender-neutral attitude to start with. It ought to help my modern image and demonstrate a certain intellectual flexibility. Besides, Ann was looking more and more like the social queen of the department. Whether I liked it or not, she seemed to be something of a spider at the center of the web. I carried on to her desk and adopted a relaxed posture with my weight on one leg, so that she could be left in no doubt that I was amenable to having a conversation. She looked up at me and asked if I wanted help with something.

“No,” I said.

She went on working.

I stood there for a while, looking at the badly drawn child's picture of a sunset, and wondered if she was aware of its flagrant inaccuracy. Maybe she was blinded by her emotional involvement? No matter what the circumstances, the child, or grandchild, deserved to be made aware of its mistake so that the error could be avoided next time. If things like that weren't pointed out, its marks for drawing would certainly be negatively impacted.

After a while I became aware that the zipper of my trousers, and thus my genitals within, were on exactly the same level as her face. So I shifted my body slightly to find a more neutral position and ended up standing right behind her chair, which also felt rather awkward. Particularly as she didn't seem remotely bothered by me. I blew gently on the coffee and waited for her to say something. It was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable just standing there. Jörgen looked up at me briefly and I decided to give Ann ten seconds. Once they had passed I walked away, taking with me the clear message: I wasn't welcome.

HÃ¥kan was sitting there typing, and I wondered if he was actually writing something or merely wanting to give the impression that he was busy.

He was wearing a shabby blue corduroy jacket, which made an unusually scruffy impression. Particularly when combined with his long sideburns, which somehow seemed better suited to the 1970s. I wondered why he hadn't taken it off. As I was sitting there looking at him, it struck me that his blue jacket had been bothering me since first thing that morning. Even before the business with the shoe covers and cloth, and before the incident with Ann, I seriously disliked that jacket. Once when he emptied his pockets out onto the desk I saw he had a whole bundle of crumpled napkins. Several of them appeared to have been used. He looked tired. Maybe he was out every night partying? Either way, he ought to take care to make sure that his work didn't suffer.

I never went into the room that day. But I thought about it several times. It was as if I was thinking: I ought to go into the room.

That night I lay awake thinking about Karl's cotton cardigan and what sort of unfortunate consequences his attitude problem might have. I thought about HÃ¥kan and the way he got away with things. I thought about Ann and the elegant way she rejected me. I realized I would have to look out for her. She was doubtless capable of dragging a creative individual down to the semi-social state of casual interaction involving endless coffee and small talk that characterized most workplaces.

Oh well. I wouldn't let myself be affected.

Instead I thought about the attractive woman in reception. Her smile. The way she made me feel genuinely welcome each morning with just a glance. As if she really saw me. Saw that there was something special about me. I realized that she was one of the rare breed of alert women, of whom there are fewer and fewer, and decided as I lay there to give her a little of my time. Maybe a chat early one morning, maybe lunch?

In my mind, I went through material from the department. Decisions and framework documents that I arranged chronologically and put in folders. I got up, went out into the kitchen, and drank a glass of milk as I read the ads in the morning paper.

The third time I went into the room, I did it for no reason. That's not like me at all. I usually stick to a clear chain of cause and effect, but this time it was as if I just wanted to go there. I closed the door and stopped in the middle of the floor, in front of the desk.

The desktop was partly covered by a protective pad that seemed almost to have been stuck down. I felt obliged to lift one corner to check that it was only held in place by the anti-slip backing that stopped it shifting even a millimeter in any direction, no matter how you pulled and pushed it.

In front of the pad was a hole puncher, a stapler, and a teak pen holder containing two ink pens and a pencil. All neatly lined up. All neatly lined up.

I raised my elbow and rested it on the shiny metal filing cabinet that stood against one wall. I felt a sense of calm in my body that seemed to cleanse my whole system. An intoxicating feeling of relaxation. A bit like a headache pill.

There was a full-length mirror in the room. I caught sight of myself in it and, to my surprise, I looked really good. My gray suit fit better than I thought, and there was something about the way the fabric hung that made me think that the body beneath it was—how can I put it?—virile.

I stood there for a long while, resting my weight on one leg, with my elbow on the filing cabinet. It was a good stance. I looked incredibly relaxed. Simultaneously confident and aware.

I had never thought of myself as “attractive.” Most of the time I used mirrors to check that my clothes and accessories were in the right place. Not to check how “attractive” I was. The idea had never occurred to me. I never actually thought about men as being either more or less attractive. But I realized it was time to start doing so.

Because the best thing was the look in the eyes.

The man reflected in the mirror had a remarkable look of concentration in his eyes. He fixed me squarely with his pupils and followed me wherever I went. I realized at once that this was a new asset, a pair of eyes that could demand anything. And get it.

Inhibited people don't see the world the way it really is. They only see what they themselves want to see. They don't see the nuances. The little differences.

A lot of people, more than you'd imagine, think everything's fine. They're happy with things the way they are. They don't see the faults because they're too lazy to allow themselves to have their everyday routines disturbed. They think that as long as they do their best, everything will work out okay.

You have to remind them. You have to show people like that what their shortcomings are.

Fresh documents kept arriving from the investigators. The numbers on the title page indicated the level of priority given to their conclusions, on a declining scale where number 1 was the most important. On the fourth floor we worked exclusively with three- and four-figure documents. The framework decisions from one to ten were almost never changed now, and those in double-figures were dealt with by considerably more senior administrators on the floors above. No one in my department had ever worked with a single- or double-digit decision. Not even Karl. As soon as anyone started working on a file near two or three hundred, rumors of promotion would start to circulate about the person in question. Fortunately for everyone on my floor, there were departments lower down that worked with all the five-figure material.

The fourth time I went into the room I took my colleague HÃ¥kan with me. We had some questions about internal organization to go through, and I thought it best to discuss them inside the room.

HÃ¥kan sat on the other side of my desk. We worked opposite each other. At any moment we might happen to look up and meet each other's gaze. I tried never to look straight ahead whenever I looked up from my work. HÃ¥kan carried out his duties with the same lightness of touch as everyone else in the department. He used the phone more or less as he liked, took breaks whenever he felt like it. He would spend ages gazing off into the distance without it apparently having anything to do with work. Now and then he would try to talk to me as well. I would rebuff him gently but firmly. Usually with a simple gesture of the hand. Arm out, palm raised toward him. It worked.

We didn't actually share a desk. We each had one of our own. But the desks were positioned back to back and HÃ¥kan had an irritating habit of shoving his papers across his desk every time he started something new, which meant that they eventually ended up on my side.

One day I caught him in the process of doing precisely that. In the middle of one of my fifty-five-minute periods.

It certainly wasn't my intention to sit and stare at him as he worked, but his movements were so expansive that it was hard not to. He took out a couple of weighty new files from the investigators and put them in front of him on the desk, but instead of gathering up and tidying away what was already there, he merely pushed it away from him. Toward me.

I realized at once what was going to happen.

Not now, maybe not even today, but eventually HÃ¥kan's desktop would overflow with files and papers and documents, and they would begin to eat away at my side.

I had seen the same pattern before, in other workplaces, and knew it would be a source of irritation between us. I spent a little while wondering how best to tackle the situation on this occasion.

For the time being there was nothing I could say. He could manage or mismanage his desk however he liked as long as he kept to his side. There were still a few centimeters left as yet. Almost a decimeter. What could I say?

I looked at the time. There were still about twenty-five minutes left of my fifty-five-minute period, but my rhythm had been disturbed. I would just have to regard the rest of the period as lost.

At the same time, I realized that now that the thought of what was going to happen with HÃ¥kan's and my desks had arisen, it was going to be very hard to let go of. It would be there as a point of friction, and was bound to unsettle me. Maybe it would be just as well to deal with the confrontation at once, seeing as I now, in a manner of speaking, had some time to spare? At some point HÃ¥kan would have to learn to put things away before he started on something new. Not just push it away and assume that it would disappear by itself. Maybe it made sense to make him aware of that without delay?

I got up quickly. Walked behind my chair and stood there with my arms leaning on it. Took three deep breaths. Håkan looked at me and smiled a quick, false smile that was probably meant to look polite. I spun the chair gently, back and forth, as I looked at his papers.

I was very conscious of the fact that this was properly a matter for management. Efficiency savings of this sort and solutions to potential collegial conflicts naturally ought to be dealt with by an alert and engaged boss.

An attentive and empathetic leader would naturally have noticed the fissure that was on its way to breaking out within the ranks, and would have done something about it. Rather than waste time picking on the more alert members of staff about shoe covers.

But perhaps I recognized that Karl really did not possess those qualities? Perhaps I recognized even then that he wasn't management material, and that one day I instead would be taking control of this department? Perhaps this was the first step? Perhaps this was exactly the right opportunity for a rebuke?

“HÃ¥kan,” I said in a friendly but firm voice.

“Yes,” he said, looking up at me as if I were interrupting him in the middle of something important.

“Have you got a minute?”

He nodded.

I stretched, sucked in a deep breath through my nose, and let it out of my mouth in small puffs as I contemplated what tactics to employ.

“Look around you,” I said eventually.

“Yes?” he said.

“What do you see?”

He said nothing for a short while as he looked around.

“No, I don't know…”

He went back to looking at his screen.

“I'd prefer us to deal with this at once,” I said.

“With what? What do you mean?” he said, suddenly irritated.

I fixed my gaze on him and said in a calm and friendly voice:

“Before this gets out of hand, I'd like you to listen to me. I'm sure you'll see what I mean.”

He looked at me with the tired, ignorant, slightly stupid expression that is so common in people who aren't used to seeing the broader picture in small things.

“Let's take a walk,” I said, leading him round the lift and into the little room. I thought it best to deal with this in private, so that we could talk without being interrupted.

Inside the room the air was fresh and cool. I closed the door behind us and stood in front of the mirror with my arm on the filing cabinet. The light in the room definitely made HÃ¥kan look worse, while I glanced in the mirror and confirmed that I had retained the same crispness as last time. The man in the mirror was able to smile. He looked relaxed and spoke with a calm, deep voice.

“There's something I've noticed,” I said.

“Yes?” HÃ¥kan said, looking round as if he'd never seen this room before. Perhaps he hadn't. He didn't seem to be particularly observant. Poor fellow. In just a couple of weeks my local knowledge had already surpassed his.

I decided to get straight to the point and if possible get back in time for the next fifty-five-minute period.

“You don't put your old files back when you take out new ones,” I said.

“What did you say?” HÃ¥kan said.

“I said I've noticed that you're letting your papers spread out across your desk. Soon they'll be on my side, and then you'll be encroaching on my space. I am, as I'm sure you can appreciate, keen to have full access to the whole of my desk. I am already inconvenienced by the disproportionately large computer that takes up about a third of the space; it really ought to be possible to procure a system with more modern, smaller terminals, but never mind that, that isn't your responsibility. I would just like you to adopt new habits that don't risk disturbing my work. Do you understand?”

Håkan looked at me in surprise, as if he had been expecting something completely different. Perhaps he thought I had something private to say? Maybe he thought we had come in here to discuss personal matters? I felt a momentary satisfaction at having so quickly and concisely clarified the problem to him, presenting my demands without a lot of introductory small talk. Now the ball was in his court and he had little option but to accept my terms. After all, my wishes were in no way unreasonable. Sure enough, he made a slight nod.

“Good,” I said. “Well, I suggest we get back to our duties, and if everything goes smoothly we need never mention this again.”

I smiled at him, opened the door, and stepped out. Håkan followed me and we both went and sat down. He had a dried, white stain on his shirt, high up on one side of his chest. I noted that he sat and looked at me for a long while after we had returned to our places, without doing anything about his papers. I let him. Things need time to settle, I thought. Eventually the message would get through to him and hopefully lead to a more proactive way of dealing with his things. Presumably he wasn't used to being reprimanded in such a clear and effective way. You might as well get used to it, I thought. I might very well end up as your boss one day.

I leaned across the desk and whispered:

“Don't think of it as a reprimand. More as an observation.”

“What?” he said, and I realized that he was playing along in our tacit understanding to let this stay between us. I nodded, leaned back, and mimed zipping my mouth shut, then locking it and throwing away the key.