She
doesn’t pick her handbag. She doesn’t head for the door like the rest when the
clock hits ten. She strolls a bit in the room, stays back to burn the midnight
oil, to work on something – a project, a pending reply to an email, a blog
article, something impatient that cannot wait one day more. She works late.
Lights in the adjacent offices go out one after another. Her lights stay on –
the 37th floor - defying the night, inviting notice.
He works in the opposite building. A
cleaner for the night shift. He has watched her from his window – this vantage
point – every single work night for four months. He has mastered her routine.
You could say he’s a stalker but is he, really? He doesn’t leave his work
station on the 38th floor of their building to follow her; he only
sees everything because all other lights in her building are out and she has no
curtains. She is exposed to eyes in the dark. Eyes in the other building where
he works. He doesn’t even know if she is called Leah or Linda or Melissa or
Maria. She could be anyone. For now she has no name. Her
oblivion to his presence, though, makes his act somewhat raw. Somewhat
intrusive.
There’s hardly ever any show of nudity; not a shade of it, but she always takes off her coat and flings it
somewhere to the side as soon as everyone leaves, and kicks her high heels from
her feet. She remains bare-feet the rest of the time. She then usually paces
the room, talking on the phone (it’s like her daily ritual), the two or three top
buttons of her shirt undone and a little revealing. She doesn't just walk
around the room; she sashays – gracefully, as if without weight…like flowing
mercury. It’s artful. And her feet feel the soft carpet under them.
She is not exactly beautiful (let that be said). Not in the loose
conventional sense that we bandy the word, at least. But there’s something
unworldly about her. Something staggeringly lofty. Something that peeps and
hides behind her as she goes about her business. For more than an hour she sits
at her desk, staring at her computer screen, tapping her keyboard. She stops
now and then to sip from a grey porcelain mug that always sits on her desk next
to what looks like a writing pad. Even then, her eyes never leave the screen.
There’s something deep about how she relates with the stuff around her. The way
she holds that grey mug, for instance – humbly, with both hands, as though it were holy sacrament – and how she then sips from it must make the mug desire to
sit by her side, like a trophy, and wait to be sipped from. It says a lot about her.
There are four desks in the room; all
mahogany – magnificent and polished – and leather swivel chairs. They sit
stately around the room, effusing power, like lords. Very highbrow. The sort of
furniture from behind which executive shots are called; shots that shake
structures of establishments right to their foundations. Life-altering decrees.
Strange thing about desks of this kind, though, is that they tend to change
people that sit behind them for too long. These people become stiff and
humorless and begin to take things a little too seriously, you get? They generally drift towards a zone where they start to fancy
themselves gods among men…but then again, who are we to judge? Are they not the ones that hold the knife? And the yam as well? Huh? There’s a tall Tuscan
bookcase further back, resting against the wall. It’s full; books mostly, and a
few files. And at the corner to the left of the room sits a water dispenser. A
potted plant in a vase can be seen too, smelling the cool night air coming in
from the window. It sits on something that’s hidden from view.
At some point every night after she’s
done typing whatever she types, she gets up - as though to stretch - and then
she does something very weird. Not weird weird like a dog riding a horse. Not
like that. She begins to dance, okay? It looks strange from his window, even
comical. She’s dancing but he cannot hear any sound, any music. This is how
deaf people must feel when they walk into a club, he thinks – people huddled in
a room, moving their bodies funny – except I don’t think deaf people go to
clubs anyway (or even care for music). He can tell from her dancing that she’s not the type of girl that goes on Youtube to look up dance moves to then practice in front
of a mirror. She doesn’t do the bend-over thing. She doesn’t twerk :-( . She doesn’t
make her butt the be-all and end-all of her dancing, where all the action is (or as my friend would say, "where all the action at").
She’s not a Youtube vixen. She dances proper, like a gypsy – a sweet,
good-humored gypsy. He nearly laughs at this, though, because the thought that
she could be a tree-hugger just flitted through his mind. And it’s a thought
with some charm.
There are a few friends that visit
her regularly – a few nights a week at least, before she goes home (or wherever
she goes after she leaves here). Two boyfriends and a girlfriend. Each comes at
their own time, as if programmed never to meet. He wonders if it’s chance or
design. Guy A is the kind of guy who walks around with a bottle of booze
wrapped inside a brown paper bag tucked somewhere in his coat pocket. Someone
you’d want to pay to see his liver. Any time is booze time to him. Life is one
long party. Fun kind of guy to hang around. This guy comes around eleven,
dressed in a business suit, the tie, like a leash, still knotted around his
neck and all like he just walked out of a G8 meeting. His shirt, under his
coat is never tucked in. She usually walks to the door to see him in, a tall
guy – 6’2” probably. He bends to kiss her on the forehead as she reaches up to
hug him, and says something in her ear. She pinches him and extricates herself
from his grasp, bubbling with mirth. He usually pulls out the brown bag from
the inside pocket of his coat at this point and places it on the desk. You’d
think he’s drawing a gun, the way he pulls it out. Silly chap. He wants to
impress the damsel. She seems to like him, though, but am not sure about him.
He comes across as a sojourner, someone that just nipped into her life to sip
booze and will soon be on his merry way. He could be a banker, a realtor, one
of those court room loud-mouths. Any of those professions that insist on a suit
and a tie; on image. He is someone she
must have met at a professional gathering. The whole time he never sits. Maybe
he mistakes this for one of those corporate shindigs where people stand while
they sip juice from short glasses and nibble cookies held on serviettes, and
“appreciate” paintings (art) on the wall, and exchange business cards.
Guy B invariably dons a pair of
corduroy pants and a kitenge top, like a painter from Luthuli. Dreadlocked.
He’s about 5’8” – about an inch taller than her but you’d think he towers head
and shoulders above her. Maybe it’s because he stands on a load of personality
which, like gas, fills every space in the room when he comes around. She hugs
him tight and almost refuses to let go. If you were staring, you’d look away at
this point because you wouldn’t want to risk spoiling that image in your mind
with a not-so-good one that might follow (you never know; life can be so dramatic). It’s a deep connection you see there.
Without warning, the rasta guy scoops her, sweeps her off her feet and stumbles
with her towards her desk. The guy at the window smiles a bit. The sight of a
skinny dreadlocked guy staggering across a room, carrying a woman in the dead
of the night is quite something. Well, it’s the height of chivalry, no? This is
the kind of guy who will know how to skin a moose, or would tell you that the
chain saw now is subject to a 9% VAT tax, up from the original 7%. Be very
careful with a man who is not a lumber yet takes a keen interest in chain saws,
though. Such a man is a man alright but he might not be a good man. Rasta
always pulls up a chair next to her and almost the whole time she shows him
something on the computer. He could be a writer; who knows? Today he is watching and listening. He knows how to
do that. Now she leans her head on his shoulder and clasps her hands with his. You see
lust in his eyes, raw lust. And there’s love in her’s but she’s fighting the
urge to give in (which is weird). She knows not to. She knows that if she does
she will lose herself completely because she likes him a lot already. She would
not know how to claw her way back out. In her fear, he is also saved from her
because she seems the kind to steal you away entirely from this world to
another, where she’s queen and you are king and nothing else counts.
Then there’s her girlfriend. She
comes last, always, like an afterthought. She looks like an afterthought
actually. The guy at the window usually regards her with a bit of suspicion –
that she could be a member of some illegal sect, or some secret society – the
Skull and Bones type. And he might be right; visiting people this late in the
night doesn’t seem godly, does it? Do they not say that it is at this hour that
the devil roameth…and seeketh souls? Believers, anybody? She’s super sweet,
though, this girlfriend, and bubbly and loud. You can’t help but love her – a
petit young lady that talks like a crowd (and visits her friends at night). She
comes in clad in a pair of jeans and a brown jacket – her favorite jacket –
worn over her ever-trendy tops. Ever seen Rachael Shebesh, anybody? No? Well,
look her up. This girl’s hairdo is a replica of Shebesh’s hairdo – a Mohawk’s
nest. Just a side note: maybe her friend should try to always check and make
sure there are no unhatched Mohawk eggs left lying in there because, am told, baby Mohawks are quite a mess when they hatch. They might mess that beautiful
nest.
They must be old friends, these
girls. Confidants. People that share a lot between them. She must know about
rasta man and the booze guy no doubt. The guy at the window wonders what she
thinks of them. Does she care or is she like, “Whatever”?
They are having fun tonight. They
talk and laugh and sip from mugs. They seem oblivious of time. Just now Miss
Mohawk-Nest flashes out her cell phone. She dials then brings the phone to her
ear, and waits. His phone also rings just about the same time. “What a
coincidence!” he thinks to himself. He reaches for the phone in his pocket:
“Hello,”
a woman’s voice.
“Hello!” he replies.
