The Secret of
Sleep
by Alun Williams
The old man
who works on the fourteenth floor had no name. I
guess his mother gave him one, but that was some
time ago and no one knows what it is or more
importantly, what he does.
We all have
our jobs, our little compartments and we all have
name tags too, just so we don’t forget, all
of us except for the old guy. He doesn’t
seem to have an office of his own, not that we
know about. We can’t ever find out where he
works, except that we know it’s on the
fourteenth floor. Once, we put a chalk cross on
every door on the floor and wrote the names of
all the staff who work there. He doesn’t
work in any of them but every morning he arrives,
disappears down the corridor and reappears when
it’s time for lunch.
Harvey
Goldblum Junior followed him one time. Harvey
came back and said that the old guy, we called
him Arthur, went to the third bench on the
Bethesda Terrace, folded his jacket and lay down
and slept for thirty four minutes before
returning to his non-existent office and his non-existent
job. After that each of us took turns to follow
him. Arthur follows exactly the same routine
every lunch break and seems to sleep through the
noise of the city for exactly thirty four minutes.
When it was my turn to follow him, I watched him
fall asleep and wished that I too could sleep as
easily and as well as he did. He seems to reach a
peak of total calm. I hate him for that.
No one at the
office wants to confront him. Administration
thinks it’s the responsibility of human
resources, who in turn believe it’s
payroll’s responsibility. Payroll say
security are the ones who should handle it, but
they fell that without any evidence to back up
any action, they might be sued. In the end
they’ve sent a memo to all departments
asking for a list of all employees’ names
and security id numbers. They think that by
eliminating names to numbers they can find out
who the mysterious old guy is. What they’ve
found however is sixteen members of staff who
aren’t supposed to work there and in the
storm that followed everyone forgot about
Arthur.
No one has
ever found out the truth. Arthur continues to
come in every day and carries on taking a thirty
four minute nap on his lunch break. We’ve
decided to let him continue. Confrontation is not
one of the main attributes of a data
processor’s functions and one day we think
that if we live long enough and beat the boredom,
we could all sleep like Arthur.
|
