WAIT

The Wait

You pick up your phone, glance at its screen, and put it back down. Still nothing.

Road work clangs deadly somewhere down the streets; where exactly you don’t know. From experience of not having to leave home for days on end, you know it starts roughly at 9:30 every morning and ceases 6:30 in the evening. Except in rare moments of hazy consciousness, the metallic stomp marks every semi-second of nine hours. The invisible rig reconstructs time in addition to roads.

The words “I’m glad to offer you…” or “I regret to inform you…” that would set Future’s wheels in motion are rejected by cyclical time. Every second you think the previous should have delivered the news. Every second disappoints, raising the stakes for the next – which proves disappointingly identical and identically disappointing. Disappointment feeds anticipation which feeds disappointment.

Emotions swell while time remains stagnant. You feel yourself grow large within the four walls of your room: a monster bloated with time, shunned by humans.

Normally they would have called. Something must have held them up. You did well: you said the right things, behaved the right way, displayed the fruits of your years of hard work for them to see. They liked you, and the door to the life of your dreams will be opened. Won’t it?

The handle is missing. Hidden somewhere, on the stark white walls of your room. You scan the walls for specs of dust that have newly settled, uneven patches of paint that have hitherto lain unnoticed: a sign that this moment is different from moments before, that change is afoot. A small shadow flits across the wall, possibly from a fleeting bird outside the windows – but it escapes before registering as reality. Your flight to Future is denied.

White are the walls of your room; it thickens in your lungs. White are the rows of read emails on your computer screen. The summer outside which, deaf to your prayers, refuses to make way for autumn, stupefying the city in its glare.

Only in the far distance, in a tiny segment of highway glimpsed between skyscrapers, is movement detected: cars gliding soundlessly into frame, and out.

You imagine the people in those cars, looking ahead, scenes of the city zooming past their car windows. They wouldn’t notice this room, whose windows are indistinguishable from thousands of others from afar – inside which a monster is trapped in its own temporal dimension, outgrowing it.

Too much pressure is building inside of you. You try releasing it forwards: you checked in with them and received warm replies, but nothing of real promise; you applied for other jobs, but nothing has come back yet. You try releasing it backwards, recalling the day of the interview in vivid detail: the slightly awkward way you answered their question about your career change; the extra five minutes you spent on their written test; the wrinkle you raised by asking about special work arrangements; the double assurance she gave of recommending you to human resources; the hint of impatience when she said they would take at least two weeks to review; the apologetic smile he gave before dashing off…

Without Future’s promise, the past remains a bunch of signals of undetermined meanings, luring unarmed souls to the flagellation of guesswork. You wonder what you would choose: imprisonment in the present with the nagging cellmate of the past, or solitary confinement.

How you long for that moment – when their call comes a-ringing, when their email notification thrusts upon your screen – to mount, a bulging wave gaining momentum, and crash in an explosion of joy or grief – it doesn’t matter – breaking the spell, drowning out thought, muffling all noise.

The metallic stomp tramples your silent reverie. Stamping every semi-second, it is as if the rig is programmed to copy and paste time. You could only pray for it to glitch.

The stomp comes from somewhere down the streets; where exactly you don’t know. The invisible rig hammers on, punching deeper and deeper into the same hole.

Outside, the sky is silver.

You pick up your phone, glance at its screen, and

______________

* Inspired by On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle

Vanessa Ho is a Hong Kong-based writer, currently editing for a local English newspaper. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Imprint, The Apostrophe, and Eksentrika.