“There’s a tingling in my ear.”  

The woman’s bulging glasses make her eyes look like over-inflated glass balloons, pointed  needles at their centres for pupils. I wonder how she can write whatever it is she’s writing. I  wonder how she can glance at her watch. I wonder how she can see me. 

“Which ear?” she asks. 

“The right one.” 

“Is it painful?” 

“No. But it itches.” 

The paper bedsheet crinkles under the bony protuberances of my buttocks. I dangle my legs  from the edge of the stretcher, looking at the woman’s feet as she examines me, her head tilted  slightly to compensate for the weight of her enormous eyes. I notice she’s wearing steel-toed  work boots. They look new, and I’m impressed by the way the light glosses over the perfect  curve of the toe-cap, like the polished bumper of a Cadillac.  

“Is that everything?” she asks. 

“Yes, I think so.” 

She retrieves an iPad from the counter nearby and tells me to fill out a few forms. I take it  from her eagerly. Form filling is a hidden delight of mine and I fly through these digital pages  with a wide grin, my teeth glowing bright. I put check marks over the handsomely bolded little  squares with as neat a print as I can manage. It is hardly distinguishable from the original  typeface. I fill out dates, names, signatures, time stamps, employee IDs, social security numbers,  blood types, genders, disabilities, pronouns, body fat percentages, sexual orientations, preferred  room temperatures… 

When I finish she takes the iPad back and tells me I may return to work, and I have to  suppress a disappointed sigh. I step through the door and start down the hallway. It’s a very long  hallway. There are exactly 32,000 cubicles in the hallway, stretching out for 40,000 kilometres  across the arctic tundra. This is where the best Companies have built their one-hallway  warehouses. It is a revolutionary system designed to limit the mental strain on employees by  making navigation as simple as possible. A perfect marriage of architectural prowess and  emotional productivity. There’s nothing simpler nor quite so peaceful as walking an arrow straight hallway. There are no diverting paths to confuse, no hideous posters promoting a holiday  you’ll never celebrate. I belong to cubicle number 26,356, and I know precisely how to get there,  right down to the last step. As I walk I like to imagine there is another person walking next to me  in the other warehouse belonging to the other Company, with nothing but two walls and a foot of  empty arctic air separating us. I listen to his steps and sometimes if I really strain my ears I can  hear the sounds of his shoes against the ground, echoing. 

But I have this thought in my mind and I’m beginning to grow anxious, for the truth is that I  did not tell the woman everything about my ear. Indeed it itches, that part was true, but it is much  more than just a tingle. It feels like something is living in there, crawling, nesting, egg-laying and  mate-eating in the valleys of my brain’s folds. A tunnelling insect washing its hands in my  cerebrospinal fluid, chewing on all the fat and the protein. I wish I had a woodpecker’s tongue so I could reach up there and swat it. I read once that woodpeckers can wrap their tongues around  their brains, securing them in place for their jackhammering. They hold onto their minds to avoid  losing them. I wonder if humans will ever evolve this ability, if only to relieve these phantom  itches of the mind. 

And yet there are times when I can hear a sound, a vocoded wrinkle through those tingles and  itches. I can hardly make it out unless I stand very still and hold my breath. It’s a voice. A throaty  song. Harmonious inflection and modulation, and it loops like a melody in a song. Four bars,  eight, curling through my brain like a snake biting its tail, or like a woodpecker’s tongue, and I  admit that image is profound, perhaps religious. I’m sure it means something. It must mean something. 

I am back at my desk. I watch a woman through my computer screen. She points to a  whiteboard behind her on which a chart has been sketched with black marker. I read the word  “postpartum,” written by who I assume was this same woman. 

“Individual,” comes a voice from behind. I stand up quickly, pushing away my black  synthetic leather office chair with the back of my knees. I see a balding head pop up from beyond  my cubicle’s wall, and then another and another and another and another one after that. I hear  them stand, 5,644 individuals in front of me, 26,355 individuals behind. 

I feel a tap on my shoulder and I turn to find a small-statured woman looking up at me. I am  frightened by her unblinking, incessant gaze, and how her eyes seem to roll in their sockets like  billiard balls. I wonder how she can see me at all. 

“Yes?” I say with a soft tone of polite expectation. 

I hear the rest of the individuals sit back down to resume their work. The sound is a cascade  of rustling cloth and mechanical clicks. 

“May I see your identification badge?” 

I hold out the rectangular plastic tied around my neck and she scans it with her iPad. “How  long have you been working here?” she asks. 

I check my watch and glance up and to the left. Up and to the left means you’re digging  through memories. It means you’re taking an innocent moment to pause and recall the truth.  There is nothing suspicious about looking up and to the left when asked a question. Up and to the  right, however, means you are making things up. It means you’re lying, and I have never lied. I  make sure to look up and to the left. I linger here a moment and I make sure she sees me doing  this. 

“About a year.” 

“One year?” 

“Eleven months. I started on the thirteenth of September last year.” 

She smiles, her lips like elastic bands stretched over the skin. “Thank you very much for your  hard work.” 

I smile and nod. It feels good to be commended. That is what I love about this Company:  they are always commending their employees. If they gave me a plaque I would hang it up above  my chair in my cubicle so that it can shield my mind like a dreamcatcher and make me smile in my dreams too. 

“When was the last time you had your Top-Up Training?” Her smile is gone now and she is  looking down at the iPad in her hands. I sneak a glance at the screen and see a cartoon clown  hopping up and down. It extends a gloved hand in a thumbs-down gesture, shakes its head and  frowns. 

“Pardon me?” I ask, somewhat more harshly than I intended. 

“Your Top-Up Training.” I can see mild alarm growing behind her giant eyes. “I don’t think I’ve been given Top-Up Training.” 

Mild alarm turns to intense distress. 

“I need you to come with me so we can do your Top-Up Training.” 

I follow her out of my cubicle and back up the hallway. To my right, the taps of my shadow’s  shoes follow us from behind the wall. 

I am led into a small beige room with a single plastic chair in the centre. It looks like the  nurse’s room I was just in but a plaque on the wall reads Top-Up Training Room, so I know it  must be a different room. The woman tells me to take a seat and then leaves. 

I sit. Fluorescent lights pillage the top of my bald head. I can feel the rays jackhammering my  skull. Surely this can’t be healthy. I remember reading how harmful fluorescent lights can be,  and I am sure they’ve been banned. I’m shocked to find them at this Company. I make a mental  note to file a complaint. 

There is a TV screen in front of me. It switches on, and all 70 inches suddenly alight in  images flashing on the screen, so clear that I could as well be looking through a pane of glass at  the real things behind it. There is an image of an ant lying dead in the corner where the black  rubber bases of two walls join together. Its soul rises up slowly from its corpse. The image  lingers here a moment before switching to a close-up of a woman walking in pearl-white socks.  She walks into the camera and the camera moves backwards with her feet. The audience can’t  see her face. There is no sound. I can’t even hear the buzzing of the fluorescents anymore and  now that I think about it I can’t recall there ever being a buzzing of the fluorescents. 

The image changes to a medium-closeup of an ant walking along the edge of a sidewalk in  what appears to be a city. I assume it’s New York but in truth I can’t see anything of the city that  would justify this assumption. There aren’t any cities in the arctic. Tires are hurdling past the  right of the ant and shoes and legs and the hems of people’s pants on the left. The ant is wearing  six socks over its six legs. I find this curious. Why wear socks if you won’t wear shoes? Wet  socks are a miserable experience. Surely any creature can appreciate that, big or small, self conscious or otherwise. But the ant doesn’t seem bothered. It walks with no clear destination in  sight, no mound of melting ice cream on the pavement, no puddle of spilled Gatorade, no half eaten Twix in its wrapper. The ant simply goes and the camera follows. I wonder if there is some  meaning being assembled here by these series of shots. There must be. No sane filmmaker would  stitch two shots together without there being some sort of rope to tie them together. Perhaps there  is something to be said about the insect-human-insect shots. The filmmaker (I guess at Fincher,  Bong Joon Ho, Gerwig) must be trying to illustrate a point, to paint a painting, to tell a story, to create an image. I adjust my position in the plastic chair. There’s a scrape of the leg on the tiled  floor and I flinch, unaware of how long it’s been since I’ve been subject to sound. I decide I do  not like sound and promptly attempt to slow my breathing so as to create as little of it as  possible. I hear a faint voice whisper into my ear and I stick my finger in to try and claw it out. 

The image changes. I see a paper bowl on a desk. Artifacts fill the screen around it—Kleenex  tissues, supplement bottles, a pouch of nail clippers and a nail file, two keyboards, water bottles,  headphones… The bowl is centred and I take a moment to appreciate the image. It is a beautiful  image, with bands of grainy sunlight from an off-camera window and a puddle of drifting dust in  the air, moving as if they too are feeling the laziness of the Sunday evening. The bowl is filled  with powder. It’s too fine to be soil or dirt; too light. It looks like ash, but it’s too brown to have  come from cigarettes; too fine and not quite flaky enough. This bowl is not an ashtray, at least  not in the traditional sense of the ashtray, as in a tray for the ash from one’s cigarette. It appears  to be an incense burner. I even spy a small cylinder of rolled-up printer paper taped to the rim of  the bowl where I presume the wooden end of the incense stick is to be inserted, and as it burns,  the bowl catches the falling ash. But there’s something else inside this bowl, something  glistening from within the mound of orange-brown powder. I squint and lean into the screen. I  blink. I remove my glasses and then put them back on again. There is definitely something else  in there, something not a by-product of the combustion of an incense stick. It is silvery and  metallic, and it reflects the sunlight like a mirror. I don’t know what it is and it makes me  anxious. I stand up and bring my nose up to the screen, nearly grazing it against the warm  quantum-dot LEDs. 

The image changes. There are the same socked feet as before, still this time, sitting close and  nearly touching as the woman they belong to sits in a subway car. I can’t see the woman’s face,  nor even anything above the shins of a pair of mahogany corduroys. The image lingers for  several minutes and I begin to feel uncomfortable. Like an ant watching from under the seats,  hiding behind a grimy bolt and a strewn candy wrapper. How long will this shot last? It’s been  years. I want to look at the incense bowl again, the one with the buried artifact. In there is hidden  the meaning of all this, I know it. I need only understand. The train’s brakes squeal and the  woman’s legs sway to the left of the frame. The train comes to a halt, the woman stands and the  socks walk out of the frame. I let out a breath of relief. I stand but my head hardly clears the top  of the mangled candy wrapper next to me. I glance at the goo of chocolate still inside, a growl  rising from my abdomen. Then the screen fades to black. Credits roll and I discover that David  Fincher was indeed the director. Charlie Kaufman was the screenwriter, the ant was played by  Rupert Grint and the woman was— 

No! How could I have missed the name? I must have gotten caught up with all the names  ahead of it that my eyes simply skipped over! 

Woman #1: An— 

I remember the first letters: An. 

My brain throbs and I feel very anxious. 

The screen is off and the room is silent. I stand like this for a while. I can’t hear any buzzing. 

I can’t hear anything. I stand and think about that thing buried in the bowl. I think about the  woman’s name. I think about David Fincher’s intentions with his choice of shots. I think about  Charlie Kaufman’s intentions with his choice of plot. What are they hiding from me? That ant in  socks, that buried object, that deliberate skipping over that woman’s name? Something is off,  like a puzzle piece in the wrong spot. I can feel it, and I intend to uncover it, the meaning of it.  Because I know it means something. 

It must mean something. 

I hear the sound again and it’s haunting. It’s the uncanny valley of human noises. A synthetic  voice. A manufactured cry. I can’t place it. I resist the urge to itch and instead stand still and  observe it. I can’t place the gender, I can’t place the age. It’s simply a voice. The voice. The  amalgamative voice of every human who’s ever lived. I arrive at this conclusion after what  seems like hours and am promptly exhausted. The voice has been looping in my head for the last  week. Upwards inflection, vibrato, pause, upwards inflection, downwards inflection—a vein  nearly bursts in my temple. 

The door opens behind me and the woman with the billiard eyes steps back inside. She hands  me an iPad and tells me to take a survey about my Top-Up Training experience. I nod and take  the iPad, excited again. It asks me to rate the training experience on a scale of disappointing to extraordinary. I tap meagre, three above disappointing, two below extraordinary, and just above  unsatisfactory. The iPad then asks me to explain in at least 3200 words why I selected merely  meagre. It is phrased in a somewhat passive-aggressive way and I wonder if I’ve offended  someone in some way. I explain that I missed the name of the actress playing the role of Woman  #1 and that I believe this to have been a deliberate slight by David Fincher and Charlie Kaufman.  I explain how the writing was pretentious, the shots nonsensical, moving from insect-woman insect to incense-woman while never resolving back to the incense in a proper 3-act structure.  There was no explanation as to why these transitions were made, why the shots were cut in such  a way as they were, and why the actress playing Woman #1 never even had her face revealed let  alone named in the credits. I finish with 4,406 words and hit next. The screen buffers. I hope it’s  another essay. 

It’s not. The iPad flashes the words, “Thanks. I’ll be sure to forward that to HR,” and then  proceeds to rate me as merely meagre. I am outraged. I am seething. This is reprehensible,  disgraceful, detestable… 

The woman leads me out of the room and I walk back to my office and take a seat back down  at my desk. I resume the video playing on my computer screen. A woman points to a chart  behind her with the word postpartum written. 

I used to dream of my father when I slept, but as of late my naps have been dreamless. My  ear tingles. I can feel the ant digging through my brain, erasing my memories of him. He killed  himself with a panini grill and a bathtub. The grill, if my memory serves, had the slogan “So  good you’d grill your socks!” printed on its box. It was a repulsive attempt at marketing but it  just so happened that my father’s body was still wearing socks when I found it in the bathtub, and I will never understand why. Until the day of my own death, I will have this one fact about  my father hanging over me. I ponder it every day. Sometimes it takes up the space of a single  thought, sometimes it is a train of them, but I can always count on it to make an appearance. I  used to see it in my dreams, but not anymore and I think that is perhaps a good thing. Some  people need to pinch themselves or recite an affirmation to awaken from a bad dream. I need  only observe my thoughts. If I am not dreaming, then I am real.

A man will electrocute himself in  his bathtub with his socks still on. Do not ask why. I know you want to, but you can’t. You have  to accept it, and that is the tragedy of the world. You could sprout hairs in your eyes and the  doctors will name a new disease. You could find a cat mangled in your dryer, fur singed and  limbs shattered. It could blink and hop out, trodding on grotesque anatomy, but you are not  dreaming. You can pinch your arms and recite your affirmations, but you have to believe it  because it is happening. You could awaken prematurely in the operating room and find a band of  clowns dancing around you in silence. You could fly over a mountain range and see the land  flicker like a dying fluorescent lightbulb. You must believe it. You must believe all the absurdity  you see. Catch it in your arms and let it nuzzle at your elbow. Let it grow on you. Let it fester. 

I awaken with my finger in my ear and a savage itch just beyond its reach. Something is  moving around in there. I scream and pound the side of my head but the itch doesn’t go away. I  grab the water at my desk and pour it into my ear. I remain still for several minutes, my breath  held, my eyes open and bursting from my skull. 

“Individual.”  

I stand up quickly. My bald head drips water onto the carpet. 

“You’re over your sleep limit,” says the woman. 

“No,” I reply. 

“You get thirty minutes every two hours. You’re thirty-two minutes over.” I check at my watch. “Oh.” 

She tells me I must go into the Late-Employee-Form-Filling Room and fill out the Late  Employee Form. I obey and start down the hallway. My wet shoes squeak against the floor, and  through the wall on my right I can hear the mysterious man walking with me. I laugh because I  can hear his shoes are wet too, reverberating little squishes. 

I find myself back inside the beige room, fluorescent lights irradiating my brain. The room is  empty save for the chair and the giant TV. I don’t see any forms or iPads. I peer into the hallway  outside and see nothing but rows of cubicles fading into a distant point. Maybe the form is  online. I reach into my pocket but my iPhone isn’t there. I start to panic, tearing out my pockets,  spilling coins and mints, my Gucci wallet, the keys to my P.O. box. My ear erupts in a terrible  spasm of itches, more shards than tingles, and I scream not from pain but from the knowledge  that I can do nothing about it. I start to develop a wheeze, violent arrhythmias in my chest that  feel like the walls of my heart collapsing on themselves. I think about calling 911 and then  remember I don’t have my iPhone. I burst into the hallway, sweeping the pale green walls for any  landlines. I begin to speed-walk down the hall, mindless in my misery. My wheezing echoes  ahead of me and I am reminded briefly of my companion on the other side. I hope he isn’t suffering like I am. I hear the voice all around me and I beg for a different sound, anything but  this, these incessant scratchings inside my ear. They have never been so loud. I am weak, I am  sick, I must report it, I must warn somebody, I must… 

I peer into every cubicle I pass. Most are empty, but every few thousand cubicles I see a Van  Gogh gallery within the four fabric walls, or a man on all fours, bent like a desk. I see a thin  humanoid creature feeding cat food to a dog; a woman rearranging the organs in her abdomen,  watching herself through a vanity mirror across the room. I see a cubicle flipped upside down, a  man sitting in a chair stuck to the ceiling watching a woman point to a word on a whiteboard.  Cubicle number 12,846 contains a rainforest. Cubicle number 9,812 contains two seconds of a  pornographic scene playing in an infinite loop. 290 is a void of white—I don’t linger here. When  I reach the end of the hall I find a blank wall. The cubicle at the end states that it is number 1,  and it is empty. The itch grows worse as I turn and make my way back down the hallway, faintly  aware of my companion hurrying with me from behind the wall. I wonder if he’s also got an itch  in his ear, and I wonder if he’s also punctured his tympana trying to claw it out. 

Everything in cubicle 13,001 has been turned inside out, including the man sitting in his  office chair. He watches me with the back of his eyeballs as I pass. In 16,046 there is a thin  humanoid creature feeding dog food to a cat. In 29,049 there is a man without a mouth standing  on his desk. 30,108 is filled with a thousand boxes of vegan Q-Tips. 31,474 contains a clown  without makeup. 31,832 is an abyss that drops into an infinitesimally small point, at the end of  which I think I can make out a Coca-Cola billboard flickering in the distance. In cubicle number  32,000 there is a bright red landline bolted into the fabric of the wall. I pick it up and dial 911.  The line rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and

 

I notice the door at the end of the hall just ahead. There is a bright red neon EXIT sign above  it, as well as some text on the door warning that an alarm will sound if it’s opened. I can hear the  symphony of the wind outside; the ice blowing in frigid tycoons. I’ve never heard it roar so loud.  I drop the receiver and step toward the door, place a hand on its cold metal panic bar, and push gently. The alarm blares behind me as I step outside. The world is dark, lit only by the white light  spilling from the hallway behind me. I can feel my skin shrivelling up against the frigid air. The  ground is soft under my feet. I look down at the snow, the fine white powder blowing over my  shoes like dust. Spells of it blast my face. I can vaguely hear the sound of crashing water in the  distance, massive chunks of ice breaking and splitting against a glacial tide. I look to my right  and see an array of hallways like the one I just came out of, extending out into the dark air like a  mirror in a mirror, only their doors are shut. To my left are more of the same hallways, except  there’s a door ajar, the one belonging to the hallway immediately next to mine. A giant ant stands  in the swirling snow, pearl-white socks stretched over its six legs, staring at me with pinpoints  for eyes. 

Sometimes I wonder where everyone went. There are thirty-two billion people on this planet  and I haven’t seen a soul. I don’t see anyone in the streets. I stroll in deserted supermarkets  listening to nothing but my tiny feet against the linoleum floors. I feel as if my skin is in a constant state of being torn. As if my brain is one giant spool of sinew and is being stretched and  knotted, pulled apart and then crushed back together. The world is so infinitely complex. It’s too  much for me to bear. I have so many desires, whims, things I was chasing thirty-two minutes ago that I no longer care about now. I have not seen another face in decades. I’ve forgotten how  mouths see, how eyes talk. I hallucinate these things, these humanoid features over the slates of  flesh I see sagging over the fronts of people’s heads, melting off their skulls like cheese. I think I  imagine the features correctly but there’s no way to be sure. At times I think I’ve made the eyes  too big, the lips too puckered, too downturned, too melancholy. I’ll cry when I step on an ant. I’ll  nurse it back to life, perform CPR, give it three pairs of white knitted socks and send it back on  its way so I may recognize it if I see it again. The world only exists because I dream it. Because I  picture it and mold it into what it is. I don’t even know what my own face looks like. That too I  model and form with the tips of my nail-bitten fingers. My head is throbbing. I feel tremendous  anxiety. I wish I was dead, and yet I am a grain of sand in the Sahara desert. I am a hydrogen  atom in a collapsing star. I am a dead ant’s soul rising from its corpse. I am a puddle of meat  dissolved by light, my ego dissected from my solid form. I am the naked brain of a dead man. 

I find myself standing in the light of the hallway behind me, listening to the sound in my ear,  the voice that has never plagued me so loud as it does now. I hear the distant echoes of a  woman’s voice on the intercom piercing through the blaring alarms, telling us that it is now time  for our stretches. I do not obey and they will be here soon to ask me why. They will tell me of all  the benefits of stretches. They will prescribe me only the most effective antidepressants. They  will remind me how grateful I should be for having been born after all the wars and the famines  and the poverty. They will show me photographs of skeletal children. They will tell me we are all in this together. 

As I wait for them to come I reach down and grab a fistful of snow from a mound at my feet,  but it’s too powdery to be snow, too light and too dusty. I see a glimmer of silver inside it. Ants  crawl in and out of an opening near the crest of the mound, flecks of black blinking over a  glimmering object. I reach in and dig it out, the insects swarming over my fingers. I don’t know  what I’m holding. Something mechanical, electronic. Something that was once used to listen to  music, or tie a shoe, or deliver a baby. Whatever it is there is no doubt that this is the source of  the sound. I put it up to my ear and listen, and there is no doubt that it is a voice, one spoken  from the mouth of somebody long dead. It loops. I wonder if it is a remnant of this person’s life,  like permanent shadows from atomic bombs. Voices still in echo, neurons still reacting. 

The woman tells us to move on to lumbar rotations. I cross my six socked arms around my  abdomen and rotate. I listen to the countdown. My head doesn’t hurt anymore. I do not feel  anxiety. I wonder about the silver thing in my hands. About the sounds it makes, the faint ticking  of some mechanism inside, bleeding through a veil woven with the voice of everything I’ve ever  been. I know it means something. 

It must mean something.