The office has been steamed by men for the past goodness-knows-how-long, their odour and puff forever. Now she sits in the centre of it, only a small room with her in the centre. The temperature is a sine wave, its pleasant spans brief, often too hot, often too cold, a vivarium of extremes beneath an unpleasant lamp. The desks are designated. At night a robot is detached from its anchor and sets about pulling from the parquet flooring all the dust we expel, and underneath the wooden blocks, dislodged and uneven, is soot a century old. She sits opposite me and her posture is just as terrible, so if I talk to her neither of us adjust and our spines grow weaker. Underneath our screens I can see her wrists and fingers over the same arrangement of letters and flicks that I take for granted right now. Her long strawberry-milkshake nails rattle on the keys; the men groan. She sighs and curses over my task.

‘You bought a book?’ a repulsive young colleague asks me, although I have done nothing to invite his interaction. Yes, I tell him, pausing, for it is such an unusual question, and he delivers it as if, in his twenty-four years, he has never witnessed such a thing. Three books, I add. ‘Fission?’ I ask him to repeat himself. ‘Fission?’ I correct him on the pronunciation. ‘You’re one of those people who reads fiction?’ What a disgusting cunt; I wish to spit on him. My disdain for him is matched only by my colleague and friend, who mocks him relentlessly and mercilessly. For a moment though, and quite unprepared for it, I am reminded of Bill Hicks and the wafflehouse waitress; a car journey along I-75, a built-in CD player, the passing holiday scenery and upsetting humidity choked out by our rental car’s AC. I apologise to the repulsive young man for stammering as I am not used to being asked such stupid questions. He eyes me, offended. At that moment a colleague rushes back into the room, phone in hand, having just spoken to his father in Iran: he is safe, okay, his mother too. My colleague is very happy. He is often very happy and to think of him makes me smile. He tells everyone that his parents are okay and he gets back his work.

A woman sits next to me, but so close that she mostly sits on me. The upholstery of the intercity chair and I can no longer be distinguished; I wear its cloth, it smells of my antiperspirant. She wears a black fur coat that makes her much bigger; her hair is pulled back and moussed down flat against her skull. Although I am there already, she does not care, this stranger. I am as there as the air or the PA announcements; I am just there, nothing more; she is upon me and I am blanketed by her thigh, her shoulder and her right breast. I read Sontag’s diaries (1947-1964) and the woman watches videos of toddlers on her phone, scrolling from one to the other, endless. They are not her children, but she watches them all the same. We get off at the same stop.

Capture taken from Heartburn (1986).