The Third Factor
Clearly the method of elucidation I employed in my report did not satisfy the administration, and thus I am at a loss as to know how to proceed. I beg to be forgiven here for stretching regulations, for deviating slightly but, I hope, productively from the standard report. Since I have already tendered my resignation, I will also say frankly that I see a supplemental report as superfluous. Or, rather, I would see it as such were I not aware that failure to answer the administration’s request might well result in my being subjected to a sustained process of observation — observation of the sort which I myself have been obliged to carry out in the past. Obviously I am assuming — hardly a safe assumption — that I am not already under observation.
Had I a copy of it, you would find appended to this notebook a completed copy of what I believe is grievance form 026/a, “Formal grievance, superiors, non-immediate, at hands of.” I would have shaded the box marked “Request, redundancy” and would have, as per requirements, bolstered the form with the requisite materiaclass="underline" my initial report, my letter of resignation, and the administration’s latest request. Perhaps whichever administrator receives my materials will argue that, since I previously tendered my resignation, I am no longer considered an employee and thus not authorized to file a grievance. My inability, despite my best efforts, to obtain said form suggests as much. Yet if I do not de facto possess employee status, why am I being asked to supplement my original report?
The gestation of my current state of mind — a state of mind which led to my resignation — took place during my first assignment. I had been asked to note the movements of a silvery-haired gentleman who habitually sported a soiled trench coat. These movements consisted generally of a slow round from park bench to park bench. I had been noting his movements in a battered but sturdy notebook that fit snugly into the palm of my admittedly meaty hand. I wrote in a notational code devised by myself and my immediate supervisor — a code of such efficiency and concision that I needed less than a single page per day.
This assignment lasted for the better part of a year. The subject was of regular habits and there was only slight variance in his movements. I arrived early in the morning to take the place of the night observer. I left in the early evening, when I was replaced by the same man. At the end of each day I walked to a designated street corner, there to find an older make of car, nondescript save for the heavily tinted glass of its windows. It was a different car each day but always had the same license plate. My instructions were to try the passenger-side door. If it was unlocked, I was to open said door and climb inside, delivering my report aloud to my immediate superior. If it was locked, I tore the day’s page free from the notebook and left it pinioned and fluttering between the windshield wiper and the windshield itself.
This first assignment, it should be evident, was a simple one. The subject under observation made no effort to avoid me. Indeed, he seemed consistently unaware of my presence. As this attitude persisted for the full course of the observation, I became lulled into complacency. For this reason I was surprised and unprepared when the subject, between benches, removed a small-bore revolver from his pocket and shot himself in the belly.
As my supervisor and I had developed no notational code for this behavior, I wasted valuable time rendering in longhand what I had seen. For the first time, I used more than a page, a fact which filled me with not inconsiderable distress. Once the event was recorded, it took me some time to decide what to do. In the end, thinking I might compromise my position were I to intervene directly, I called anonymously for an ambulance from a yellow call box enthicketed deep within the park. By the time this ambulance arrived, the subject had bled to death.
The paramedics covered him with a sheet and loaded him into the ambulance, two facts I also recorded longhand in my notebook. After a failed attempt to pursue the ambulance on foot, I returned to the designated street corner to report. My subject had chosen to shoot himself well before the conclusion of my day’s observation; thus, no car was present, only a pair of orange cones banded with reflective tape.
Returning to the park, I waited out the end of my observation period. I was not replaced at dusk by the night observer. After waiting for some time, I made my way back to the designated street corner and there found a car waiting. The passenger-side door was open. I climbed in.
My supervisor sat silent while I began to read aloud from my report, his gloved hands resting delicately atop the steering wheel. When I reached my longhand description of the shooting, he lifted one hand slightly. I stopped speaking.
“You did not employ our code,” he said.
“The experience unfortunately was not such as to render itself into a coding with which I was familiar,” I said, somewhat uneasily.
In a few instants he explained how one might elegantly extrapolate a relevant coding of the event in a way that was logical and immediately comprehensible. Why I had not seen it before, I couldn’t say.
In letting his hand fall back to the steering wheel, he signaled for me to continue. He stopped me yet again when I explained my telephone call.
“This,” he said, “constitutes a description not of his movements but of your own.”
He raised similar objections to my failure to follow the ambulance.
“These are hours,” he stated, “that shall remain forever outside of observation.”
But, I explained, by this time the subject was dead.
But by what authority, he wanted to know, had I determined that my observation should end with the subject’s death?
For two days I stood outside a mortuary, at the end of which I was made to attend the graveside services and note the subject’s movements. These, as one might expect, were minimal at best. I watched his coffin being lowered into the open grave and listened impassively as a friend of the family spoke of an unknown assailant—obviously not realizing the subject had shot himself — and of the Good Samaritan who had called for the ambulance, which had come, alas, too late. He was followed by a parade of friends and relations eager to grieve, whose words rapidly reduced the man’s life to a half-smiling and impotent shambles. It disconcerted me to discover the ordinary banality of the fellow’s life, though I cannot say why.
When I returned to the designated street corner after the funeral, I discovered a piece of paper fluttering between the windshield and the windshield wiper of the car in question, a paper which made clear that I was to report to another city, to another contact, to accept my second assignment.
My new assignment was slightly more complicated than my previous one, which initially seemed to suggest that the administration had been pleased with how I had performed on my previous assignment — though I was at a loss to understand how exactly I might have pleased them. I was given a photograph and an address, told that I was to observe the individual in question and follow him, report on his movements, his associates. I was to keep a record but to meet with my supervisor only if I noted anything unusual.
When I asked what exactly constituted unusual, my administrator, sitting beside me in the flickering half-light of the movie theater, made a vague gesture, hard to see in the dark. I was not, I was told, to wonder what I was looking for; when something was unusual, he assured me, I would know. Before I could inquire further, he softly squeezed my knee and stood, pushing past me and out of the theater.