TBT #75: So What Now?

You can hear everything through one of the air vents at the MacIntyre building. I work upstairs, taking papers from folders and putting them in other folders. It’s a boring job and I don’t like it. It took me three months of long days before I found the vent. It happened by chance and is a boring story. But it made my life better in a profound way. Every day now I sit by that vent and listen to the hollow sounds as they tell me their secrets. And every day I learn how to be a better man.

They run self-help groups downstairs at the MacIntyre building. Most of them are what you would expect. Men with commitment problems and women with eating disorders and a dozen variations of each. In the first week of listening alone, I must have heard a hundred different stories and theories on fidelity and body image. And it’s funny, in an unfortunate way, because the women are all worrying about how they look while the men all worry that maybe they’re not looking at things right.

I used to listen to the radio at work. Mostly classical musical. I liked the relationships between the notes. The way the songs would segue from loud to soft, from fast to slow, from bass to baritone to soprano. I liked the way it all fit together.

The weirdest group is also my favourite. They come in Tuesdays at 4. There’s not a lot of them, but they all tell such fascinating stories. They call themselves the Self-Actualized, though they never seem to talk about what that means. Instead they just tell their stories, again and again, and then ask the same question, always, at the end.

After I found the vent, I spent two weeks slowly moving my desk closer to it. I didn’t want to do it all at once, because sometimes the boss comes around. I’m not sure he would care, particularly, that I moved my workspace. He doesn’t seem the type. He seemed normal at the interview, but then on the first day he surprised me by asking, straight out, if I smoked weed. Thinking it was a trick question, I said no. He looked disappointed and hasn’t really talked to me since. He spends most of his time out back with some of the warehouse guys.

There’s a woman who’s always at the weird meetings. She talks in a low voice, neither happy nor sad. She’s especially flat, so much so that I can hear it in her voice through a vent that turns everything flat. Her story is simple. She was once unhappy. She wore her hair tight around her head. She dressed in long skirts and beige shoes. She worked hard at her job and tried to make the best of the relationships she had. Nobody ever really noticed her, and she almost reveled in that. But one day her long-time boyfriend — a man she does not speak highly of at all — revealed he was breaking up with her for a much younger woman. Through the pain that situation brought, she came to realize that life is not worth living if you do not take risks. She let her hair down, and has not turned back since.

I moved my desk slowly, because I didn’t want anyone else to notice the vent. There’s only one other woman working in the office with me. She takes the folders I fill, removes the papers, and transfers them to other, smaller, folders. I think she’s bipolar. Often she talks about her daughters, who are both delicate angels who excel at figure skating and demonic beasts who don’t give a damn about their poor old mother. Sometimes she talks all day. Sometimes she works. Sometimes she lays her head against her desk and names imaginary cats. She’s unpredictable, so much so that I had to be subtle. Just a little each day, bringing me closer to that vent near the closet. It was at a perfect height to my chair, so that I could sit and work with my ear almost pressed against it. It wasn’t just a vent anymore. It was my vent.

There are at least three men at the meetings who tell pretty much the same story. They used to work all the time, doing whatever it is workaholics do. They spent all their time trading stocks and holding high powered business meetings and brokering deals from skyscrapers, staring out at a sprawling city. But then, out of the blue, their lives changed. Either they got fired or they found out they now had a child to take care of or a family member was dead. But whatever the reason, they came to realize, after struggling to balance their careers with their new obstacles, that life is not worth living if you do not have a family in your life that loves you. They all put their briefcases away, and have not looked back since.

When I go out for lunch, and walk through the lobby of the MacIntyre building, I always study the faces of the people walking in and out of the downstairs offices. It’s hard to match them to the voices I hear, even when they speak, because they all sound so different through my vent. I think I’ve seen the first girl, the one with her hair down. There’s a dark-haired girl who must live in a wind tunnel, all unkempt and dizzy. She bounces for no reason, spins herself as she talks on the payphone and always plays with her hair. I like to think it’s her, but I could be wrong. She could be nobody.

There’s a new guy who just joined who used to chase storms. He loved adventure above all else. He could not see the point of doing anything if it did not involve a reckless experience. When he wasn’t following tornados, he jumped out of planes or swam with sharks. It was the adrenaline, he says. He never felt a better high. But then, and this is my favourite part, there was a girl. And she wasn’t like him. She was quiet and reserved and filled her life with her family and her work, which was charitable and kind and devoted to helping the world. He loved her and then let her go, because she wouldn’t go on adventures with him. Afterwards he climbed a mountain and sat on a rock staring directly up at stars that were bigger than any he had ever seen. And he realized, then, that life is not worth living if you do not love and be loved. He climbed down that mountain, and has not looked back since.

I said I hated my job but I don’t anymore. I used to, because it was boring, but now I appreciate just how mundane it is. I always said that what I really wanted, growing up, was a career that would allow me to focus on other things. I never wanted my whole life to be work. And this job lets me have those other things. I sit and I work on auto-pilot, shuffling the pages across my deck quickly, all the while listening to my vent. Marie keeps buying me more classical musical CDs for the office, “to help the time go by.” I don’t have the heart to tell her that I do not need them any more. How could I explain what it is I have now, that so perfectly replaces the tempo and the melodies of the music I used to hear? I do not miss it at all.

There are others, too. It’s a different combination each week. There’s always an old man who realized, just before it was too late, that what really makes a life — what really makes a man — is not the drinking or the sex or the sunlight gleaming off your beamer, but the bright shining eyes of a child or a lover or a wife who stood with you for sixty years. And then there are the artists, who were once so afraid to express themselves — to set the inner painter or performer or pianist free — but then realized, one day, that all that’s truly important in life is not revealed to you unless you express your true self. Every now and then there’s a person who talks about faith, and how they realized that life is not worth living if you cannot trust God or the universe or Saturn’s cosmic rings. They all suffered a realization, and have not looked back since.

I live so close to the MacIntyre building. That’s another reason I’ve started to actually like this job so much. Marie and I are just around the corner. I walk the same route every day, passing the same new-stands, the same coffee shops and even the same people. I can’t even remember how long I’ve been working here. The other day Marie put on one of those CDs she bought. We were in the kitchen doing dishes, like we do. I wash and she dries. She smiled at me as the music started. “I noticed you didn’t take this in to work,” she said. “Do you not like it?” I listened to the beats, the horns and the strings. A sad viola. The steam from the hot water in the sink rose to my face and fogged my glasses so that I could not see her. “I don’t know this one,” I said. “I only like the ones I know.”

All the stories end the same. They’re often told with flourish, the action rising to an impossible conclusion — that moment of realization — and then they just stop. And the storyteller gets quieter and usually pauses for a moment, trying to collect themselves. Their tale over, I imagine them sitting, staring at the ceiling, thinking of what else there is to say. I count the beats in my office, filling manila folders rapidly until I hear it, low and cold: “So what now?”

So what now?

It’s said with awe and wonder, like they’re gazing at a comet in the sky, like they’re witnessing a birth, like they’re watching the last train pull away from the station, standing alone on a February night. And I think of the notes on the page, and the music in my head, rising up and then falling down, shooting forward towards its inevitable crescendo. And its inevitable end.

I decided soon after I started listening to the self-actualizers that I did not want to realize what really matters in life until I am very old. I think about this every day, as I walk around the corner to my apartment building, staring at familiar faces without names. Marie greets me at the door and we hug and I kiss her forehead. Later we’ll eat dinner in front of the TV, watching TLC programs about people with deformities. We laugh and make fun and then love in the bedroom, our wine glasses still half-full on the bedside table.

Somewhere during all of that I catch the sunset over the MacIntyre building. I can see it from my bedroom window. It’s brilliant gold and red and purple reflecting against blue-tinged windows. It reminds me of a painting. But I look away quickly, because I have seen it before. It looks like this every July.

Her breathing is a beat. I sleep beside her, my back to her, thinking again about how I do not want to realize what is important in life until I am very old. I do not want to be like the people I listen to through my vent, wondering So What Now each and every week, and sighing heavily against their own happiness. Marie gurgles and talks in her sleep. It sounds like a song. There are words and music in my head, I realize, staring at the drapes over the window. They follow the path of sunsets, rising and then falling, arcing upwards and moving down, all towards some end.

But soon I’m asleep, dreaming about my vent and the happiness it brings, ready for tomorrow today. And again and again and again.