Around eleven o’clock in the evening, Brandon raced out of the house and soon was on the highway, driving towards the city. Nia’s words still echoed in his head, “You absentminded ducky.” His wife always had a sense of humor in such situations, while he remained acutely self-conscious and irritable.

With hands clinched at the wheel the only companions he had in the car were petty frustrations, “Why me, why now?” he thought. All it took was a missing laptop charger to ruin the evening. When he kissed Nia goodbye, she told him, “You worry too much about such things.” He still could not think of an answer to that.

She was right, of course, and Brandon knew it. He got upset too easily over small stuff. As if he was in a shadow theater of worry, where his delicate hands cast immense dark figures of horror on a looming white wall. There he saw the laptop shutting down during tomorrow’s meeting. There he saw the manager and the senior data engineer disapproving of his new design. Brandon had wanted to get some work done in the late evening so as to be better prepared for tomorrow.

“But I had to forget the stupid charger,” he said aloud, as if expecting an answer or some kind of consolation. Maybe if things were different, he could actually enjoy the night drive. Fresh air was slipping through the open window as the car raced on the almost empty highway towards the beautiful city, adorned in twinkling lights. 

“I have twenty more minutes until I reach the office,” he calculated. “Three minutes to spend in the office and 35 more to drive back. If I’m lucky I can be home around midnight.” At certain sections, the car exceeded the speed limit, as Brandon tried to account for all the upcoming traffic lights and whether there was an alternate route by which he could skip some of them.

We are all slaves of our own perceptions. Our opinions of ourselves and of others, our hopes, worries, dreams, anticipations. All these enmesh us in a web of interpretations and assumptions so dense that we can scarcely be aware of what is going on.

What was going on with Brandon? He was working from the office Mondays to Wednesdays and from home during the rest of the week. This Wednesday evening, a forgotten charger had prompt him to race out of home. He could have simply gone to the office tomorrow and worked from there, but that would mean his manager and colleagues would know what had happened! He was determined to avoid such an exposure at all costs.       

Thus, engaged mostly with thoughts of discontent, Brandon reached the empty parking lot in front of the office building. The only other person around was the night guard, who lazily sat in his booth, watching a portable TV set.

“I need to grab something real quick!” said Brandon, showing his pass card.

Soon he was off the elevator, past the adjoining corridor, and finally in front of his desk. Brandon grudgingly took what he came for, but on his way out, something caught his attention in the corridor. There was a poster on the wall with a photo of a large wave, folded in a perfect spiral with white foam everywhere and interlocking shades of blue. On the side in big letters one of the company’s core values was written out—flexibility.

Brandon stopped, suddenly remembering the previous year’s vacation with Nia in Bari, Italy. The Adriatic coast was so captivating. One late summer evening, they sat on a bench at the Largo Luigi Giannella and talked for hours, mesmerized by the monotonic motion of the waves. Brandon felt as if he was there again with Nia and, in an instant, forgot about the poster, the charger, his irritation, and the office all together.

Then for a moment, Brandon was nowhere!

And then he returned.

This was the most shocking experience he had ever had. His lungs were completely emptied of air, and he was breathing in shallow portions through his mouth, the inhales burning his throat. Every single inch of Brandon’s skin was covered with a thin layer of cold sweat. Dizzy and experiencing horrible vertigo, he felt like vomiting.

“Mister! Mister! Are you all right?” the night guard rushed toward him through the corridor.

Brandon could say nothing, though he wanted to. His mouth was too dry.

“Shh, don’t speak, pace yourself. You gave me quite the shock.”

The guard took Brandon’s arm over his shoulder and, supporting him, they made their way outside the building and into the small security booth.

“Go on and sit here,” the guard offered his chair. “Drink some water. What the hell possessed you to come here at this time of the night?”

Brandon recuperated rather quickly as he gulped down the entire bottle of cheap sparkling water. Giving into his first instinct, he started rationalizing, “Maybe I had a heart attack or something…” But there was no pain in the chest. “Maybe it was something I ate.”

“Name’s Bob, by the way. I remember your face. Funny that this is the first time we’ve been properly introduced.”

The guard was chubby, not that tall, with a baldhead and a bushy gray beard. His blue eyes seemed both lighthearted and serious. Brandon looked up at Bob, decided to give up on his rationalizing, and asked:

“What happened?”

Bob shrugged his shoulders. “You got nauseous I reckon.” Brandon supported his head on his arms, leaning on the desk in front of him. For some reason, he again recalled his trip to Bari. All this stress is really getting to me, he thought. In his peripheral vision, he could see the place where the office was, but before him there was no building to be found. Since Brandon was still feeling a bit out of sorts, this did not surprise him at first. For a few seconds, he lazily focused his gaze towards the emptiness which was once occupied by the imposing building. Then it struck him. The office is gone! But in the very same instant he thought it, the office reappeared.

“You feeling better, Mister?” Bob was starting to wonder whether he could have his chair back.

“I could swear the office was gone just now.”

Brandon was not usually so direct or blunt. He would have normally considered how saying such things would make him look and what Bob might think about him. But now he was shooting his thoughts and observations without any restraint, just like a child.

“Nah, maybe your vision is blurry. You seem ill, should I call you a taxi? Can you get home alright?”

Brandon was not convinced. He could not put his finger on it, but it seemed that the guard was hiding something. Maybe he could buy some time.

“I came with my car and hope to drive back. Can I rest here for a little while, do you mind?”

“Not at all, it would be nice to have some company for a change.” Bob opened a foldout chair and sat down next to Brandon. “So Mister, what do you do here?”

“The names Brandon. I’m a data engineer.”

“Ha, you and your fancy job titles,” Bob laughed. “My brother was an engineer in a coal mine. He retired early and still got a nice pension, too. Rightfully so, with his work being so hard and demanding. He worked underground you know, not in a cozy office.”

“What about you?” Brandon asked. “How long have you been working here?”

“Almost two years here,” Bob answered with a sigh. “Before that, I did three years in a warehouse. It’s not much, but I’m content. I used to have my own little hardware store, inherited it from my uncle. Ah, it was a nice place. You should have seen it. We had three aisles, a big counter and a small supply room out back. This was in my hometown…”

“There… it did it again,” Brandon grabbed Bob by the shoulder and pointed at the office. “It was gone, I swear it.”

“Mister you’ve had quite the shock, why don’t I call you a cab and…”

“How did you know I had a shock?” Brandon’s voice became cold.

“What do you mean?” said Bob.

“How did you know I was in trouble?”

“I saw you on the security cameras.”

“Ha, I got you!” Brandon’s pupils widened. “The cameras inside are worked by a security company, you just watch the parking lot, don’t you think I know that?” He pointed to the screens victoriously, all of them clearly showing footage from the outside only. “You better tell me what is going on or I’ll…”

“Ok Mister, you asked for it.” Bob’s voice also became cold, and a chill entered the small security booth. “You see the office building, right?”

Brandon nodded. Bob instructed him to look a little bit to the left, so he was not staring directly at it.

“Ok, you still see the building?”

“Yeah, I can… Oh!”

Brandon grabbed his shoulder instinctively as Bob’s fist withdrew from its powerful punch. Confused and in pain, Brandon leaned backwards, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the night guard.

“Why the hell did you—There! The office was gone again!” He looked around with even greater confusion. It had been a horrible night; it was already ten to midnight.

“Yeah, I know it was gone.” Bob turned to the building and crossed his arms. “What were you thinking about when you felt sick in the building?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just answer, Mister, you wanted to know what’s going on. So answer.”

“I thought of my vacation in Bari.”

“Aha, and I was watching TV, and no one else was thinking of the office around midnight, probably most of your coworkers are sleeping.”

“You crazy old goat, I’m going to report you,” Brandon threatened. He was trying to look intimidating, but Bob ignored him.

“When no one is thinking about it, it vanishes. Some nights it’s gone for minutes, even hours if I doze off and there are no late pedestrians around. At this time of night, we’re the only ones thinking about this office, and when I hit you, I thought of how I had to close my hardware store. You thought about your aching shoulder. At that moment, no one was thinking about the office, so it vanished. Of course, when you notice its absence, you’re thinking about it, so it comes back.”

“I must still be dreaming.” Brandon’s confusion was starting to become hazardous for his whole nervous system. In order to avoid any further damage, his brain simply gave up, too tired for any further logical deduction. Too tired even for denial.

Bob looked at him with sincere compassion. He opened a small refrigerator under his desk and gave a beer to Brandon, who accepted it meekly, then took another for himself and said:

“Watch the building behind the office. Do you see the windows? Try counting them. There’s one sealed with bricks, do you see it?”

Brandon started counting, but quickly realized that the office had vanished again and shivered in confusion and fear.

“When you think about the office, just resume counting windows,” instructed Bob.

Surprisingly, drinking beer and counting windows did calm Brandon down. They stayed there silent in the small security booth for a while. On several occasions, the office building vanished and reappeared.

“It goes without saying that we keep this wonder to ourselves, less we get fired or worse.”

“Don’t worry. I myself am trying to forget about it as we speak,” Brandon said with an awkward smile.

“Ha, ha, yeah you do that.” Bob sipped from his beer. “When I get bored from my TV, I count the windows. With that sometimes, the office vanishes all together, but mostly it just comes and goes. It flickers, as if it’s not certain whether it exists or not.”

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

☕ Here is a chance to contribute and help me with my future writing. If you contribute only once that is more than enough. Let us share a beverage together.