excerpt
same job that has bought his life out. When he sits in his office he feels like
another piece of furniture or even like the cheap print on the wall. All this for a
salary that keeps him and his family fed, but has kept him forever hungry for all
the other things in life which he has missed out on.
He has lived this life for thirty years of five days everyweek in the same office and
the same crummy hotel room. His life is like a wound up machine, well-oiled,
well-serviced to do as expected of him; a machine that uses little energy and that
produces a bit of something for the people above. Five days aweek away from home
and two days at home with Emily and his daughter Jennifer, who has grown up
without a dad and Emily, with a husband on call, with a life in pieces, in increments,
like an eyedropper giving a drop here and a drop there, enough to keep one seeing
something of life, but not enjoying a real life.
Many a time he has wished for a different job, a different life closer to his
family, but it’s too late now, too late for change. Retirement is coming soon and
he looks forward to that.
He gets ready monotonously, like a robot doing things as if wound up, like a
wound-up little man that kids play with, with his brand new batteries every day,
the same routine, every day the same sequence from getting up in the morning to
going to bed late at night. The TV, his opium, there to keep him company; the
TV close by, but his wife and daughter and everything else a human being likes to
have close, always far away.
In his office he doesn’t even say good morning to the receptionist, who has
been his smile-of-the-day kind of a person. She’s surprised when he doesn’t talk
to her on his way by. She knows something heavy sits on his heart; she has
noticed over the last few years that this man is just an automaton and the softness
of his heart—the heart she remembers from the first days she met him—is just
not there anymore. What a job can do to a person is amazing, but it isn’t her
place to ask him about it or to do anything about it. She knows that’s where his
wife comes in—when a man has something heavy in his heart. Dorothy also
knows she isn’t his wife, so she let his wife worry about it. But does his wife care
to know what sits heavily in her husband’s heart? Dorothy has never met Mrs.
Roberts.
It’s about nine o’clock, the usual time he dials the number to reach home.
“Hello there, honey,” he says, when Emily answers the phone.
“Hi Matthew. How are you, today?” A question asked for the millionth time,
and here comes the answer, repeated for the millionth time.
“I’m okay; how are things at home?”
“Everything is the same,” deep in Emily’s heart, she wishes things could be
different for a change.
Manolis Aligizakis 