James was a short, fat and balding man who had long considered himself the most mediocre person alive. He repeated this fact to himself as he handed his resignation letter to Steve, his manager, whom he found clattering away on his computer. James stood still for a few moments, looking at the letter for the pathetic little signature of his that he hadn’t bothered to change since high school: a little scrawl that vaguely started with a J and ended with a short curl for an S, with an interlude of weird scrawny loops that were meant to be shitty cursive for “a-m-e”. James thought that his signature was weak and unimpressive. It was.
“Sorry, Steve,” he mumbled. Steve’s eyes briefly flitted from his screen to James’ face, barely registering his being in the room. Apparently an email took precedence over James, because Steve continued to whack away at what seemed like a very important and angry message. But James wasn’t surprised. He was used to people ignoring him. He pushed the letter on the table ever so slightly forward – whereupon he noticed it lay uncomfortably white against the dark polished wood of his manager’s table, as if its very existence offended the natural order of things.
Steve noticed the slight movement. This was unusual; never, in his seven years of handling James’ incompetence, had James re-asserted himself – to him, at least.
“What?” Steve demanded. His fingers danced across the keyboard with a fiery passion.
“I…” James hesitated. He didn’t know how to put this. The room was filled with the staccato patter of aggressive office politics taking place. “I’m resigning,” he said at last.
Without turning his head away from the screen, Steve asked, “And what in the hell for?” He secretly burst into a jolt of elation. He knew that this day would come. The company did not support his decision to terminate James’ contract on account of him being one of its longer serving employees, but since James had remained a senior executive for seven whole years, Steve could see this resignation letter coming faster than all those goddamned foreigners coming into the country. The past seven years saw James attend training session after training session, with no noticeable improvement in performance whatsoever. A waste of time and money, Steve repeated to himself as he had done ever since he clapped eyes on James.
Coincidentally, James was repeating something in his head, too. Your life is a mediocre one, he thought. Whatever you do here, it won’t make a difference. You’re the most mediocre of the mediocre. Your mediocrity is outstanding, and that’s why you have to leave. That’s why you have to do it.
“I’m leaving to do politics.”
The typing stopped. The sentence hung in the air, above the humming of a faraway printer. James was suddenly aware of a single cold bead of sweat trickling down his back. He traced its passage down, past the shoulder blades, past the spinal column and into his butt crack –
“WHA–!” Steve shouted, but he couldn’t shout much more because his mouth was busy with laughter, sharp peals of manic laughter that shook his entire being. He doubled over, convulsed, desperately clutching his armrest in an attempt to breathe through the uncontrollable contraction of his lungs, expelling air out as soon as he got it. James stood there and took it in. He took in the accusing daggers of humiliation and doubt like any politician would, and then proceeded to calmly lie like any good politician would.
“I’m going to stand for election in the next cycle – will you be my first voter?” He was surprised at how confident he sounded.
This only served to renew Steve’s laughter, which was now bordering on levels of medical concern. James swept his eyes over his manager’s room: the luxurious leather sofa chairs in the corner, the shiny plaques displaying Steve’s second lower honours degrees and the dull silver name plate that was knocked over in his mania. James briefly thought of his own small, cramped cubicle, and slowly made his way back to his seat. Steve’s laughter didn’t seem to subside as he left the room. He sighed and looked at the seventy-one unread emails in his inbox, and then at the window outside. It was such a nice day. It would’ve been nice to be outside. Steve still did not stop laughing.
*
That was all a month ago. James now found himself in a room called “COURTESY”; this was emblazoned in huge, sparkling golden letters on the door, an ostentatious effort to remind staff of the company’s core values. James thought that he had never come across anyone, not in his seven years of service to the company, who was courteous to him. The white plastic chairs and tables reeked of corporate, and he was vaguely reminded of the antiseptic in hospitals.
A woman walked into the room holding a sheaf of papers. “James?” she asked. He gave a small nod of his head.
She sat down opposite him and picked out a sheet of paper with his picture: unsmiling, bespectacled, ugly and just as fat as he was – albeit with more hair. A big, black “EXIT FORM” was ominously placed on top of the page, then his eyes moved down to the first question: Why are you leaving the company?
“Just fill up this page and the one behind,” said the HR lady with clinical coldness. James looked at her and frowned.
“A bit ironic, isn’t it?” he said, shifting his gaze to the letters on the door behind her.
“What?” she replied. But James was already looking down at his exit form, considering which of the options would best fit politics. I found a new job? Then again he hadn’t actually done anything yet, and neither did he know how he was going to actually join politics. When he spontaneously came up with the idea to quit his job a month ago, his idea of politics was writing political posts on his blog and aggressively promoting them on social media, criticising the government for its lousy economic strategy and poor approach to social issues. He found that none of the parties in his country suited his views, and he had no idea how to create one. The most daring thing he had done, which probably counted as one of the prouder moments in his life, was to call the prime minister “a barking piece of shit” on one of the PM’s Facebook posts. It was then promptly removed and he received a stern warning from the site. Naturally, he ranted about the entire fiasco on his blog.
He decided on “Others” and wrote down “Joining politics to better my country.” He could feel the stare of the HR woman reading his untidy schoolboy scrawl, and he thought he heard the silent judgement in her head. He completed the other questions with relative ease and was about to sign away his job and livelihood. There was a polite, deliberate pause. Steve was partly correct in that he wasn’t really progressing – but that wasn’t the crux of the problem. The government was somehow responsible for his job progression and it was up to him to affect change by entering politics. He had been mediocre for far too long. He was, for once in his life, determined to change that. He was flooded with Cs during his time in school, and he didn’t see how all the As could be overrepresented in government all of the time. It was, then, a call to arms against the elite: taking away his two years, taking away his right to freedom of speech, of the press and – what? He didn’t actually know what else. He only listed all these things because the websites told him that he was missing these things. They had explained it to him, but he wasn’t entirely sure what they really meant. He understood, though, that gay rights were a huge rallying point for everything. If anything went wrong, gay rights would be the answer. Trouble from supporters of the incumbent government? Gay rights. Conscription? Gay rights. Unreasonable retirement plans? Gay rights.
Before he knew it, he was looking again at his familiar scrawny signature on the dotted line. The woman took away the form and introduced another sheet of paper. “Sign here, too.”
It was just a declaration that he wouldn’t share the company’s secrets with the rest of the world. This time, he didn’t want to use his old signature – he cursed himself for unconsciously signing that pathetic signature of his. He placed the pen high, guided it down in one magnificent swoop to finish off a “J”, eating into the text of the document, as all good signatures do.
“We need your signatures to be the same, James,” the woman said.
James looked up. Clearly, she didn’t appreciate his internal metamorphosis after technically completing the exit process a few seconds ago.
“This is my new signature.”
She looked at him strangely as if she was talking to a small, difficult child.
“No, James – we need them to be the same. It doesn’t matter if this one’s new or not.”
He briefly considered his position. If he was going to enter politics, he had to be firm. All this behaviour of allowing things to just happen was not going to work.
“Well, okay then – you’ve got me in a very tight situation here. Here is my compromise –” He took the pen and scrawled in “a-m-e-s” in the way he had done before, satisfied that he successfully brokered his first deal.
The lady, at last relieved of such a burden, stood up and walked out of the HR department. As she scanned out with a card, he noticed that it was the pass that he had just surrendered to her; the parting shot with his company was that of his dull, dazed face on his first day of work, uncertain about what the company had in store for him. He knew now that it had done exactly nothing for him.
*
Once, in the days after he had handed the letter to Steve, he overheard a conversation between two old men on his way home in the evening. They were sitting in front of a broken lift that normally serviced a block of public housing apartments, obviously very annoyed that they’d have to use the stairs that night.
“I tell you, this government don’t fuck care the people one. See? This sort of thing so simple still don’t know how to do.” A man with a large mole on his chin sat with one leg on his seat, slapping his knee as he spoke.
“All they know is bring in the stupid bangla, bring in so many still take so long to fix,” the other man responded, vehemently nodding his head in absolute agreement. “They promise us lift for pioneer – but the lift at where? Fucking sitting down here doing nothing.”
“Sorry – uncle? I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation about this lift,” James said as he approached the two old men. Before the letter he wouldn’t have bothered about two disgusting old men at the void deck – but somehow, the letter was a source of inspiration: by himself, for himself.
The one with the mole looked him up and down carefully. “You who? MP?”
James was quite flattered by what he took to be a compliment, because he didn’t see how someone could mistake him to be a member of parliament when his shirt sleeves were rolled up carelessly to the elbow, complete with rings of dried sweat around the armpits: the making of a true salaryman on his way back home from work.
“No, I’m not an MP, but I will soon be representing your voice in politics.” He figured that he should start making his existence known as quickly as possible, seeing as he had seventy per cent of voters to convince. Something in the old men’s desperate swearing told him that they needed some change in their lives.
“Not MP, not bangla, talk to us for fuck? Like you can fix the spoiled lift?” Mole dismissed him with a fold of his arms.
James really didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t repair lifts, and neither did he have direct political influence on his own constituency. He couldn’t really do anything. He was mediocre.
But –
“But what about gay people?” he said with an air of deadpan seriousness. He thought that he had them now – he silently muttered praise and thanks to the website he had visited that morning. “Don’t you know that gay people need to have rights too…” his voice trailed off.
Something was wrong. The expressions of the two old men changed dramatically. Both of them carved a huge, disgruntled furrow in their brows and their mouths began to twitch uncontrollably. Mole unsteadily got to his feet, clenching his wrinkled fists as he strode towards James.
“You think you big fuck?” Mole pointed a dirty, yellowish finger at him, which was trembling in rage. “We don’t fuck care what gay people nonsense shit! You think if gay people can fuck each other, this lift will be fix?” Spittle was flying freely from Mole’s mouth.
Now James didn’t know what to do. Two sources of truth – the Internet and the situation unfolding before his eyes – were contradicting each other. Didn’t everyone care about the LGBT community? About the environment? About relentless immigration? Then why were these men so angered by a lift?
He looked at the lift again to see if he could weasel his way out of this one. But he could only see four unhelpful sentences, two of which he couldn’t even understand, all of them shouting at him, shouting, screaming, telling him to get the hell out of there, DANGER – KEEP OUT, the red paint burning into his corneas and making him painfully aware of his own ineptitude to solve anything at all. He decided to take their advice and started to move away from the scene, but the orange netting caught his fat, stubby body and he came crashing down, down to the ground, smashing his spectacles instantly. He barely made sense of the sharp roar of laughter nearby and got up as quickly as his heavy body would allow him to, picking up the shattered remains of both his lenses and what little pride he had.
He started running. He felt his body being overworked, and in that myopic blurriness, he thought he saw two grotesque and distorted human forms chase after him in mirthful wrath. Or perhaps they didn’t and just continued laughing from where they were.
*
His mind stubbornly insisted on replaying this memory as he passed by the same place on his way back from the HR office. Fortunately, there were no old men in front of the lift this time. It seemed like it had been fixed at last.
He noticed, however, that there were an unusually large number of pigeons. They were hooting about, stupidly knocking into each other in excitement over the food left in front of the big burning canisters reserved for the Chinese folks who still believed in hell money and hungry ghosts. That was it: it was the first day of the seventh Lunar month. The smoke from the burning hell notes made his eyes water, and he saw things clearly for the first time. There were hungry ghosts. They existed. There they were, fat, plump and grey like him, nibbling at the pathetic little orange cakes and flaky rice. As he saw them fighting amongst themselves for morsels of stale food, he smiled at it all. It was all there: the fire, the ghosts, the offering.
He breathed in the incense deeply. He finally knew what he had to do.
*
“What do you mean you don’t sell it any more?”
“I’m sorry, sir it’s just – I’ve never seen one in here before,” the pimple-faced teenager said. “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
“How can you – let me speak to your manager,” James insisted. “Now.”
The teenager behind the counter visibly broke out into a thin sheen of sweat. His nametag pathetically read “TRAINEE” in big, block letters, accompanied by a large badge that said, “I’m New But I’m Trying!” It wasn’t his incompetence that ticked James off. Rather, it was the overall air of apathy and entitlement that was supposed to come with Trainee’s generation. James wasn’t really sure if Trainee himself was apathetic and entitled, but it was always better to assume than give the benefit of the doubt. By the looks of it, James thought, it didn’t seem like he was very engaged with bettering the prospects of this country – he didn’t even know what was in his own store.
The manager came out from the back of the tiny office a minute later. He was probably around five years younger than James.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but that item hasn’t been in stock for a few years already. I don’t know why, but maybe for public safety. You know, with all those terrorists nowadays?” Although what the manager said would have sounded ingratiating had he adopted a different tone, it sounded as if he was tired of life. He looked like he was tired of everything the world had thrown at him, even James’ wretched appearance in his store.
James actually did know what the manager was talking about. He wouldn’t have considered what he was going to do a terror act, however. It was all for the betterment of the country. “Do you even know what I’m going to do?” James retorted. “It’s not going to be some cheesy attack on somebody. It’s a sacrifice for the future of this country! You may not know what I’m talking about now, but just watch out. You’ll see,” he finished. He swivelled around and left the petrol kiosk’s minimart, walking onto the street. He didn’t even have a car. Both Trainee and his manager were staring at his receding figure, not entirely sure how to make out what they had just seen and heard.
“Siao already, this one,” the manager said.
*
“How I’m Going To Fix My Country’s Problems Tomorrow:
Tomorrow we’re gonna see radical and irreversible change in this country. Far too long have the elites oppressed us and taken away our rights. Chinese privilege and president elections all are a part of a larger conspiracy which are out to destroy the values we hold dear to us. We must keep these values close to our hearts and believe that they will beat the other values that we do not advocate.
Tomorrow I will do something to change everything. Nobody else has done anything so I will do it. Watch out for the headlines. Let’s make this country great again”
James updated his blog without re-reading the post. He let out an exhausted sigh as he closed the lid of his old laptop. It was half an hour to midnight. Only a bluish light from the small television silently showing a Korean drama lit his messy room. He watched the actress plead, miserably, to her character’s mother – it occurred to him how strange it was for the lips to move and for the eyes to well up in tears. The surreal mock sadness was somewhat funny in its muteness. The painted face morphed suddenly and grotesquely; the artificially red mouth shifted and moved, desperately trying to keep up with the outburst of emotions from its owner; the cheeks, the jowls, folded and unfolded, sometimes both at the same time, contradicting, flailing –
He switched the screen off. Radical and irreversible change. Won’t anybody notice that it’s a blatant copy from that website? God, I hope they do. Then they’d know what I believe in, James thought. Since his childhood no one really understood him nor cared for him, not even his aging mother who had died in that very room of a heart attack two years ago. His father had left him when he was still an infant and his mother cared more about the lottery than his well-being. They were never married. When the casino opened a few years ago, he had already effectively lost his mother – she came back only for more money, and eventually, to die.
His eyes wandered to the red jerry can on his desk. Tomorrow, that will be the catalyst for change in this country – that will be the reason why I will finally leave a mark on this world, he thought. He had purchased it online with the last bit money in his savings account after the petrol kiosk denied him a revolution.
He threw himself onto the bed and closed his eyes. In the grey, dreary darkness of the night, he groped helplessly for sleep’s salvation. It was far too fluid, too slimy and quick – just when it seemed within his reach, it slithered away, hissing at him. All of a sudden he was in a pitch-black hallway with no doors or windows. It was at the end of the passage. He started to run, but the hallway expanded endlessly before him. He ran and ran and ran, chasing after something that was shapeless, intangible – all he knew was that he had to catch up, to somehow have it writhing in his bare hands, struggling, but in his grasp.
His eyes flung open – he could not sleep. It was decided: he would leave at once.
He took the jerry can and the lighter sitting on his table and got ready to leave. Just then his digital alarm clock beeped: it was twelve midnight. As he pulled the door open, he realised that he was summoned – summoned, by that little beep, to a greater, newer heaven, one that he would forge single-handedly.
It never occurred to him that it could have been a call to hell.
*
The journey from his place in the west to the city centre was a straightforward, albeit long, one. After considering all his options, there had been no choice but to walk to the place: he did not have any more money to take a cab, and neither would it be possible to board a train or a bus with what he was going to do.
He managed to arrive in town just as the sun was rising. The light of the new day was eclipsed by that giant red structure at the fork – layers upon layers of people, all in stacked rings, were suddenly smiling at him. Some were even dancing, running, in nauseous dizziness; some were coloured in the wrong colours in various shades of disgusting green and blue. The colours clashed in his eyes, the violent red and the exploding greens, pinks, yellows, blues, all of them forcing themselves into his field of vision – he tried to look away, but he could only follow the spiral, up and up and up as each layer viciously stepped on the heads of the ones below them. They seemed to be fully content with everything as long as they were crushing somebody else – blood, red, thick and hot, flowed from the crowns of their heads and dripped freely down to the scum beneath. And then he saw the man at the top, triumphant, above all of the filthy beings below him. The man, holding out a spiral of red, a vertiginous abyss, started to laugh, and all of the people exploded simultaneously into a cacophony of laughter, jeering, booing at James, whereupon he crumpled into a pathetic heap onto the ground.
He did not know how long he remained there. He could tell that there were some people who stopped and tried to speak to him. When he opened his eyes a small crowd had gathered around him. The morning rush hour was in full swing. He had to complete what he had set out to do. He stood up, ignored the concerned looks of the faceless people around him and picked up his things. He started running, his mind set on one thing only.
Breathless, he stood in the centre of the square in front of the train interchange. He watched the stupid and irritating office people come and go as he opened the jerry can. The sharp pang of petrol momentarily stung his nose. Then the liquid was all over him; he smothered every inch of his skin with the one thing that would redeem him from mediocrity in his life. He embodied the smell. By this time the crowd had caught up with him, and after the incident they would describe him to be “wild… as if he were dancing to save his life.” In reality he was dancing to be saved from life.
James brandished the lighter from his pant pocket, which drew several gasps from the crowd. There was a moment of silence. James looked hard at the cheap, green plastic and his roughened thumb over the metal. It clicked.
At once his body was in flames. Evil, sinful tongues of fire licked his body dry of the foul liquid – his skin peeled back horrifically and his tender flesh was eaten alive. He allowed the flames to consume him and was very quickly numb to whatever was happening to him. As he lost consciousness he looked to the sky and cried out – but there were only unintelligible rasps and stutters.
The immediate response was swift. He was declared dead within an hour. Newspapers plastered his name all over the headlines. Opinions flew across all sides of the political spectrum. Was he a terrorist? A martyr? A revolutionary? The country was abuzz with theories, rumours and conspiracies – people couldn’t stop talking about him. At one point the government even put out a public statement, after which citizens calmed down and stopped discussing. His name survived only on the boards of alternative fringe theory forums.
In time everybody forgot about him.
Through the Looking-Glass, and What I Found There 