In This Office

A man sits at his desk, his brain and body infected by fungus. His body moves like the tolling of a bell; his thoughts do not flow but accrete. He stares down at the paper before him: a list of names and addresses, written by hand in cough mixture.

Beyond his window the sky is wheeling. Thousands of bugs fill the air, alive alive-o like waves of mustard, and a delirium spaces out molecules of oxygen and hydrogen mathematically. Cormorants preen on rusty benches; a fox lollops through a meadow; amphibians writhe in untrodden mud. The world is convulsing with the force of an alien survival.

Here he sits, with a picture of his wife and child enclosed in a frame on his desk. Everyone excels in this office. Impossible to describe this life that they are living. You can fill it with words, but it won’t matter which ones. The sandwich man collects his money, gathers up his remains and takes the lift down to the street.

Outside in the soil beneath the regal parks there is a seething, a ticking insistence, determination without volition. In here, the accretion rises.