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The Temp

My life is like this:

My alarm clock says 4:00, or 3:47, or 5:10, or something like that, when consciousness stitches itself together. I never actually rely on my alarm clock to wake me. I don’t sleep well. I don’t think people tend to sleep well when they’re living with the sorts of things I am. Thoughts that go bump in the night. Secrets that scratch away in my head.

Sometimes I drink my coffee in the dark living room while watching the news. The housing crisis. The climate crisis. The crisis crisis. Luckily none of it affects me. Sometimes I watch the sleeping neighborhood from the balcony. Sometimes I stand in my roommate’s doorway and watch him snore as Verity lies unnaturally ramrod-straight beside him. No normal woman sleeps like that, although it’s been a while since any woman has slept next to me, normal or otherwise. I stand there and wonder what I’ll do with him. I wonder what I’ll do with her , when the time comes. We’re going to run out of rugs.

The apartment building grumbles to life, radios and TVs flick on, cars outside start, and I come alive by proxy, a robot humming awake from a pulse of ambient electrical power. When my roommate comes out, I fire a bright shit-eating grin at him, because that is what humans are supposed to do.

“Good morning, Grant,” I say.

—

The morning traffic squeezes my bus down Main. I offer my seat to the pregnant women and elderly and mumble “Sorry” and smile self-effacingly when someone steps on my foot. I’m the perfect extra in the background, with my messenger bag and glasses; my hair and clothes neat, appropriate, forgettable; a free city newspaper folded in half in one hand—which I never read. When the credits roll, my part will be Morning Commuter #6. My bus spits me out at Richeson and I catch the SkyTrain to Bylling, then walk the remaining five minutes to one of a hundred skyscrapers rearing up like late-stage capitalism’s middle finger held up to humankind. I’m a cog in the corporate machine. I’m one of a billion fruiting bodies on the capitalist fungus that permeates the globe with a fine, hairlike mycelium. I’m no one. A nonentity. I like it that way.

I work for a temp agency, which means I’m a warm body for hire. As long as I have a pulse, I have a job. At the moment, I’m a placeholder for a human with actual value. Harriet is on unpaid leave, and so that some bean counter doesn’t decide that her position can be cut since no one is performing her job or taking her salary, her supervisor, a man called Doug, who has been promoted several strata past his zone of competency, has hired me to fill her spot. Her tasks were redistributed to her team members, so my job is to sit at her desk and keep her chair warm. I am given work to do: I have an intimate relationship with the photocopier, the coffee machine, the collator, and the rooftop, where I take about twelve breaks a day.

People call me Jacob and Jack and Jonathan. Quite a few people don’t bother with my name at all, although I make a point of learning everyone’s. I always do. A few busybodies patted me down for gossip about a week after I arrived, found me empty-pocketed, and have left me alone since. I’m a little friendless island in the workforce sea. I prefer it. I’d rather watch, and listen, and work on my list to pass the time and ease the boredom. Adding names, removing names. Adding them back again.

At the end of the day, I take public transportation home with my fellow hollow-eyed survivors of the downtown commercial hell zone. I smile vacuously at them. Good job, team! Same time tomorrow? I let myself into the apartment and find Grant and his latest consort, Verity, sprawled on the sofa watching reality TV. He cradles her against the side of his body and absently strokes her hair. I know better than to be envious of what he has.

I clean. I restore order. And then I cook. Healthy meals with expensive ingredients—organic vegetables, grass-fed meat, and things like saffron salt and truffle oil—carefully and thoughtfully prepared, all at Grant’s request and on his dime. If it were just me, it would be a bowl of cereal. I’m not planning to live to a hundred. I make a show of inviting Verity to join us, because Grant likes for me to be polite, but of course she never accepts. Grant doesn’t date the sort of woman who eats. Instead, she watches us with wistful eyes too large in her perfect, sculpted face.

Rinse, repeat.