The Last Few Days

Behind the desk, it is easy to act normal. Customers say the word and you go blank. You trudge upstairs, twice per hour, scrubbing your hands with pink bulk soap until they crack and redden. You selectively forget that this will do nothing.

In five days this city will be silent, but today you are here. Nobody has anything to say. Your faces are bare. The shelves are full. When the customers speak their breath meets you.

It is a bright day in March and you are doing your job. You guide people around, you move with a sure grace, you answer questions fast and fluently. People say thank you, thank you. They are wildly grateful for your stability.

The sheer ability gained by training is pleasant; walking is pleasant, moving, doing tasks, being an authority on anything at this time. It is difficult to admit this pleasure.

In the back room you catch each other’s eyes. If you caught the illness today, you would not believe it. How could you? You have been perfect today, perfect.

On the internet, people are writing about your employer, saying they should close their stores immediately. It’s not safe. The workers aren’t safe. You do not comment — partly out of self-preservation, partly because it is impossible to reconcile that anger with being here, now, in this immense stillness.

You look around. Each stack and shelf, each product and the lines which enclose it, become precarious and therefore adorable. Clutch something bright blue to your chest. There is so much here; the abundance makes you dizzy.

Catch yourself before leaning on anything. Feel your body’s attunement to this space, its stubborn refusal to believe that anything will change.

You feel every skill, every tactic, every coping mechanism, every impulse toward niceness straining against your safety. You want to run. But every cell in your body has been trained to be good.

Every way you protect yourself serves to make you more functional, more easily exploitable. But if you open yourself to the horror, each of a succession of horrors, you will be doing so alone.

You have visions of dying in your corporate branded clothes, but unfailingly this makes you laugh, rather than cry. Perhaps the funniest thing you can be is bad advertising.

The woman in front of you says “thank God you’re open, barely anywhere else is.” Thank God. God is with us. You earn £0.42 in the three minutes it takes to process her order.

Throughout these last days, you draft a story about the people who close down the city for the night. It ends: tonight we hold the city like a single taut banner and we roll it up, steadily, four to each side and an extra one on each corner, and as a slow line we carry it home.

Looking around at the others, you try to think of a future where you will call back in three years and someone will remember your names.

After, you think of the store. Conversation punctuated by counter bells. Soft lighting. Plastic and tins and an expectation of noise.

The things you sell have voices and they talk in the dark for months and months without anyone answering, and nobody covers them, and nobody touches them, and it’s sad, it’s sad, it’s sad.