The rest of the office raised their heads from whatever they’d been doing. Bartek Kowalski appeared to have been sculpting something from a chunk of styrofoam packing block
“Go home,” I told them. “We’re not getting anything useful done. Go and get this out of your system and let’s come back tomorrow with our minds on the job, please. Okay? Now go.”
Everyone started to get up and gather their things together and get their coats. Agnieszka stayed where she was. “Did you mean it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Whatever.”
“No,” she said, holding up the piece of embroidery. “Do you really like it?”
“It’s lovely,” I assured her. “Now go. Get out of here. I’ll lock up.”
After everyone had gone I sat in the office for a while, feet up on my desk, head tilted against the back of my chair. The German ergonomicists, who I had been assured by the salesman had developed this model of chair, had not countenanced anyone treating their furniture in quite this way, so it was more than a little uncomfortable and after a while I took my feet down off the desk and got up and wandered through the office. I had not, I realised, yet shaken off the sense of loss I’d felt when Marcin’s hangover tablet — cognitive enhancer, whatever — wore off. Which was rather alarming. My history of recreational drug use had never been very illustrious or — Marcin’s occasional little gifts apart — adventurous. It had never affected me like this before. I felt vaguely heartbroken.
I locked up the office and went to the cinema and watched Wajda’s Katyn again. It suited my mood. After the film, I bumped into a couple of designers I knew in the foyer and we went to a restaurant, where I tried to work up some enthusiasm for the food, and afterward we went on to a party. Not a hit-and-run but a civilised drinks party, responsible professionals, canapés, darkwave playing quietly on the Bang & Oluffson so as not to disturb the neighbours. The host and hostess, whom I knew slightly, were showing their guests some quite spectacularly-bad watercolours they’d done, and when they asked me what I thought of the paintings I smiled and nodded and said, “Very nice.”
The hostess looked critically at me. “You don’t look very happy, Jarek,” she said.
“I’m fine, Iwona,” I told her. “I’ve had flu.”
“Ah,” she said. “You should try one of these.” And she took from her pocket a familiar-looking little plastic envelope and handed it to me.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“At the university,” she said. “One of the Sociology Faculty was handing them out. He said it was some kind of experiment. You know, something about whether you’d take drugs from a stranger.” She laughed. “Of course, he’s not a stranger so I didn’t count, but he gave me a few anyway. Try it. He said it was just vitamins.”
I opened the envelope and tipped its contents into the palm of my hand. It was a round, floppy tablet just like the one Marcin had given me, but someone had printed a clock face on this one. The hands of the clock stood at five to midnight.
I smiled at Iwona and put the pill back in the envelope. “I already tried one, thanks,” I said.
When I arrived at the office the next morning, there was a styrofoam sculpture of a cat sitting on my desk.
The weeks went by and we rolled into October and then November. It rained. Gales blew in off the Baltic. Then it snowed. In the office, the staff and partners managed to curb their collective artistic urges and we got our heads down and did some serious work on our outstanding projects. I managed to become so engrossed in my work that I hardly ever thought about Marcin’s hangover pill.
It was somewhat harder to forget about the floppy pill, though, because it was on the news. People were calling them, reasonably enough considering what was printed on them, ‘clocks,’ and they were everywhere. Nobody seemed to have the slightest idea where they were coming from, but they were turning up all over Poland and Germany and the Low Countries and even in London. The authorities — who still hadn’t managed to get hold of one for analysis — were warning people not to take them. There were stories of people holding clock parties. One op-ed piece in a magazine ventured the utterly charming theory that the clocks were in fact completely harmless and part of a huge sociological experiment into the way new drugs spread through a society. There was said to be a mild euphoric effect after taking them, but this could be ascribed to the latent suggestibility of the human mind. It was actually charming enough to be plausible.
I seemed, meanwhile, to have gained a minor reputation as some kind of critic, because Tomek’s sister and Hania’s father and half a dozen other family members and friends of the staff and partners had taken to visiting the office and leaving me paintings and poems and CDs of music and strange pottery shapes for my opinion, which was baffling but ever so slightly gratifying. As the weeks went on, more and more of this stuff arrived, along with their penitential amateur artists, until one morning around the beginning of December I quipped to Tomek something along the lines that I hadn’t realised my colleagues had so many relatives and he answered that it had been some weeks since he or anyone else in the office had recognised any of the artists.
“We all thought you knew them,” he said.
That was when I phoned Marcin’s employers to try and find out where he was. They told me he was on a sabbatical, but a few days later I was visited by a very polite young man who said he worked for the Ministry of Public Health and was interested in speaking with anyone Marcin had been in contact with while he was in Poland. We talked for a very long time about generalities — did Marcin seem ill, at all? Was anyone with him? Did Marcin, perhaps, use any medication while he was with me?
I answered the polite young man’s questions as truthfully as I could, short of mentioning the hangover pill and the clock. Did Marcin, perhaps, discuss his work at all? He certainly did. Did Marcin, perhaps, express any strong anti-social opinions? He did not. Did Marcin, perhaps, express any strong religious views?
At this point I stood up and told the polite young man that I didn’t see what Marcin’s religious views had to do with the Ministry of Public Health, and the polite young man agreed that they didn’t and proceeded to arrest me.
I’m very well-connected these days. I can open my phone and speed-dial the chiefs-of-staff of half a dozen European prime ministers and presidents (including the President of the European Union and his wife) and be put through immediately. Except the President of Albania, who took personally my description of his latest novel as ‘infantile.’ But he’ll be back. They always come back.
A few years ago, I was not nearly as well-connected. But I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, and there was a cascade of favours owed and favours paid and I have no idea how it all worked out for the individuals involved, but at the end of it all I was sitting in a white room in a prison just outside Antwerp, where Marcin was just beginning a forty-year sentence on terrorism charges, with a side-order of industrial espionage.
“My lawyer’s going to drive a fucking truck through this,” he told me. “They’ve totally misused the anti-terror legislation.”
“Who’d have thought the Belgians would have been so vindictive about you stealing their patents and handing out their drugs on the street?” I deadpanned.
Marcin glowered at me. He was sitting across the table from me, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit of the kind made infamous by Guantanamo inmates. He was also wearing a complicated chain-and-handcuffs arrangement which meant that he had to walk in a kind of hunched-over shuffle and couldn’t raise his hands above his waist. I thought the chains were overkill, but maybe the Belgians still hadn’t finished making their point.