Startled back into a fully wakened state, we exited the factory as a consolidated group, proceeding with a measured pace, unspeaking, until we had all filed out of the building. Outside there was no sign of Blecher, although I don’t think that anyone expected to see him. In any case, the grayish fog was especially dense along the road leading back to town, and we could hardly see one another as we made our way home, none of us saying a word about what had happened, as if we were bound by a pact of silence. Any mention of the Blecher incident would have made it impossible, at least to my mind, to go back to the factory. And there was no other place we could turn to for our living.
That evening I went to bed early, taking a substantial dose of medication to insure that I would drop right off to sleep and not spend hour upon hour with my mind racing, as it had been the previous night, with thoughts about the origins (somewhere in the earth) and subsequent destination (at some other factory or series of factories) of the metal pieces I spent my days assembling. I awoke earlier than usual, but rather than lingering about my room, where I was likely to start thinking about the events of the day before, I went to a small diner in town which I knew would be open for breakfast at that time of the morning.
When I stepped inside the diner I saw that it was unusually crowded, the tables and booths and stools at the counter occupied for the most part by my fellow workers from the factory. For once I was glad to see these men whom I had previously considered ‘lifers’ in a job which I never intended to work at for very long, considering that I still possessed higher hopes of a vague sort for my future. I greeted a number of the others as I walked toward an unoccupied stool at the counter, but no one returned more than a nod to me, nor were they much engaged in talking with one another.
After taking a seat at the counter and ordering breakfast, I recognized the man on my right as someone who worked at the assembly block beside the one where I was positioned day after day. I was fairly sure that his name was Nohls, although I didn’t use his name and simply said ‘Good morning’ to him in the quietest voice I could manage. For a moment Nohls didn’t reply but simply continued to stare into the plate in front of him from which he was slowly and mechanically picking up small pieces of food with his fork and placing them into his mouth. Without turning to face me, Nohls said, in a voice even quieter than my own had been, ‘Did you hear about Blecher?’
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘What about him?’
‘Dead,’ said Nohls.
‘Dead?’ I responded in voice that was loud enough to cause everyone else in the diner to turn and look my way. Resuming our converation in extremely quiet tones, I asked Nohls what had happened to Blecher.
‘That rooming house where he lives. The woman who runs the place said that he was acting strange after – after he came back from work yesterday.’
Later on, Nohls informed me, Blecher didn’t show up for dinner. The woman who operated the boarding house took it upon herself to check up on Blecher, who didn’t answer when she knocked on his door. Concerned, she asked one of her other male residents to look in on Mr Blecher. He was found lying face down on his bed, and on the nightstand were several open containers of the various medications which he was prescribed. He hadn’t consumed the entire contents of these containers but had nevertheless died of an overdose of medication. Perhaps he simply wanted to put the events of the day out of his mind and get a decent night’s sleep. I had done this myself, I told Nohls.
‘Could be that’s what happened,’ Nohls replied. ‘I don’t suppose that anyone will ever know for sure.’
After finishing my breakfast, I kept drinking refill after refill of coffee, as I noticed others in the diner, including Nohls, were doing. We still had time before we needed to be at our jobs. Eventually, however, other patrons began to arrive and, as a group, we left for work.
When we arrived at the factory in the darkness and fog some hours before dawn, there were several other employees standing outside the door. None of them, it seemed, wanted to be the first to enter the building and switch on the lights. Only after the rest of us approached the factory did anyone go inside. It was then we found that someone had preceded us into work that morning, and had switched on the lights. His was a new face to us. He was standing in Blecher’s old position, directly opposite mine at the same assembly block, and he had already done a considerable amount of work, his hands moving furiously as he fitted those small metal pieces together.
As the rest of us walked onto the floor of the factory to take position at our respective assembly blocks, almost everyone cast a suspicious eye upon the new man who was standing where Blecher used to stand and who, as I remarked, was working at a furious pace. But in fact it was only his hands that were working in a furious manner, manipulating those small pieces of metal like two large spiders spinning the same web. Otherwise he stood quite calmly and was very much a stock figure of the type of person that worked at the factory. He was attired in regulation gray work clothes that were well worn and was neither conspicuously older nor conspicuously younger than the other employees. The only quality that singled him out was the furiousness he displayed in his work, to which he gave his full attention. Even when the factory began to fill with other men in gray work clothes, almost all of whom cast a suspicious eye on the new man, he never looked up from the assembly block where he was manipulating those pieces of metal with such intentness, such complete absorption, that he gave no notice to anyone else around him.
If the new man seemed an unsettling presence, appearing as he did the morning after Blecher had taken an overdose of medication and standing in Blecher’s position directly across from me at the same assembly block, at least he served to distract us from the darkened office which was inhabited by our temporary supervisor. Whereas the day before we were wholly preoccupied with this supervisory figure, our attention was now primarily drawn to the new employee among us. And even though he filled our minds with various speculations and suspicions, the new man did not contribute to the atmosphere of nightmarish thoughts and perceptions that had caused Blecher to become entirely deranged and led him to take action in the way he did.
Of course we could forbear for just so long before someone addressed the new man about his appearance at the factory that day. Since my fellow workers who stood to the right and left of me at the assembly block were doing their best to ignore the situation, the task of probing for some answers, I felt, had fallen upon me.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked the man who stood directly across from me where Blecher once stood on his side of the assembly block.
‘The company sent me,’ the man responded in a surprisingly forthcoming and casual tone, although he didn’t for a second look up from his work.
I then introduced myself and the other two men at the assembly block, who nodded and mumbled their greetings to the stranger. That was when I discovered the limitations of the new man’s willingness to reveal himself.
‘No offense,’ he said. ‘But there’s a lot of work that needs to be done around here.’
During our brief exchange the new man had continued to manipulate those pieces of metal before him without interruption. However, even though he kept his head angled downward, as Blecher had done for most of the previous day, I saw that he did allow his eyes to flash very quickly in the direction of the supervisor’s office. Seeing that, I did not bother him any further, thinking that perhaps he would be more talkative during the upcoming break. In the meantime I let him continue his furious pace of work, which was far beyond the measure of productivity anyone else at the factory had ever attained.
Soon I observed that the men standing to the left and right of me at the assembly block were attempting to emulate the new man’s style of so deftly fitting together those small metal pieces and even to compete with the incredibly productive pace at which he worked. I myself followed suit. At first our efforts were an embarrassment, our own hands fumbling to imitate the movements of his, which were so swift that our eyes could not follow them, nor our minds puzzle out a technique of working quite different from the one we had always practiced. Nevertheless, in some way unknown to us, we began to approach, if somewhat remotely, the speed and style of the new man’s method of fitting together his pieces of metal. Our efforts and altered manner of working did not go unnoticed by the employees at the assembly blocks nearby. The new technique was gradually taken up and passed on to others around the factory. By the time we stopped for our first break of the day, everyone was employing the new man’s methodology.
But we didn’t stop working for very long. After it became obvious that the new man was not pausing for a second to join us in our scheduled break period, we all returned to our assembly blocks and continued working as furiously as we could. We surprised ourselves in the performance of what once seemed a dull and simple task, eventually rising to the level of virtuosity displayed by a man whose name we did not even know. I now looked forward to speaking to him about the change he had brought about in the factory, expecting to do so when the time came for our meal break. Yet the rest of us at the factory never anticipated the spectacle that awaited us when that time finally arrived.
For, rather than leaving his position at the assembly block during the meal break that the company had always sanctioned, the new man continued to work, consuming his meal with one hand while still assembling those metal pieces, although at a somewhat slower pace, with the other. This performance introduced the rest of us at the factory to a hitherto unknown level of virtuosity in the service of productivity. At first there was some resistance to this heightened level of dedication to our work to which the new man, without any ostentation, was leading us. But his purpose soon enough became evident. And it was simple enough: those employees who ceased working entirely during the meal break found themselves once again preoccupied, even tormented, by the troubling atmosphere that pervaded the factory, the source of which was attributed to the temporary supervisor who inhabited the office with heavily frosted windows. On the other hand, those employees who continued working at their assembly blocks seemed relatively unbothered by the images and influences which, although there was no consensus as to their exact nature, had plagued everyone the day before. Thus, it wasn’t long before all of us learned to consume our meals with one hand while continuing to work with the other. It goes without saying that when the time came for our last break of the day, no one budged an inch from his assembly block.
It was only when the bell rang to signal the end of the work day, sounding several hours later than we were accustomed to hearing it, that I had a chance to speak with the new employee. Once we were outside the factory, and everyone was proceeding in a state of silent exhaustion back to town, I made a point of catching up to him as he strode at a quick pace through the dense, grayish fog. I didn’t mince words. ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded to know.
Unexpectedly he stopped dead in his tracks and faced me, although we could barely see each other through the fog. Then I saw his head turn slightly in the direction of the factory we had left some distance behind us. ‘Listen, my friend,’ he said, his voice filled with a grave sincerity. ‘I’m not looking for trouble. I hope you’re not either.’
‘Wasn’t I working right along with you?’ I said. ‘Wasn’t everyone?’
‘Yes. You all made a good start.’
‘So I take it you’re working with the new supervisor.’
‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘I don’t know anything about that. I couldn’t tell you anything about that.’
‘But you’ve worked under similar conditions before, isn’t that true?’
‘I work for the company, just like you. The company sent me here.’
‘But something must have changed at the company,’ I said. ‘Something new is happening.’
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘The Quine Organization is always making adjustments and refinements in the way it does business. It just took some time for it to reach you out here. You’re a long way from company headquarters, or even the closest regional center.’
‘There’s more of this coming, isn’t there?’
‘Possibly. But there really isn’t any point in discussing such things. Not if you want to continue working for the company. Not if you want to stay out of trouble.’
‘What trouble?’
‘I have to go. Please don’t try to discuss this matter with me again.’
‘Are you saying that you’re going to report me?’
‘No,’ he said, his eyes looking back at the factory. ‘That’s not necessary these days.’
Then he turned and walked off at a quick pace into the fog.
The next morning I returned to the factory along with everyone else. We worked at an even faster rate and were even more productive. Part of this was due to the fact that the bell that signaled the end of the work day rang later than it had the day before. This lengthening of the time we spent at the factory, along with the increasingly fast rate at which we worked, became an established pattern. It wasn’t long before we were allowed only a few hours away from the factory, only a few hours that belonged to us, although the only possible way we could use this time was to gain the rest we needed in order to return to the exhausting labors which the company now demanded of us.