Out in the dark over the snow/ The fallow fawns invisible go/ With the fallow doe;/ And the winds blow/ Fast as the stars are slow.// Stealthily the dark haunts round/ And, when the lamp goes, without sound/ At a swifter bound/ Than the swiftest hound/ Arrives, and all else is drowned; // And star and I and wind and deer/ Are in the dark together, - near/ Yet far, - and fear/ Drums on my ear/ In that sage company drear.// How weak and little is the light/ All the universe of sight/ Love and delight/ Before the might/ If you love it not, of night.//
A woman just broke down in tears on the phone to me. Her husband died a few months ago, she lives by a new calendar in the form of the rotating list of things that her husband would have sorted. Customer services is counselling by another name. She is terrified of being cold over Christmas. I make a special case, cover my arse in the form of back notes, as per [insert colleague], I put a job onto an engineer who can takes it because as per colleague told me that the cancelled appointments are part of our eco-system and it is strange to think that the mechanics of this world now take the form of negatives, absences we take for granted. Where the inevitable rhythms of customer mishaps must be embedded into the business structure, so that I can make exceptions like the above. ‘without our insured customers we would generate no profit’. Without the disparity between those who can afford the company’s insurance plans and those who receive its services FOC — our company couldn’t exist, however, it is through this disparity that the company needs to exist, to provide services and ensure safe social housing. Our late capitalist world is a zero sum game so someone has to lose out.
On the day I get signed off on my training, I see the carcass of a muntjac deer when walking home. I have smelled it for the past week, but, was unable to work out where the smell came from. My immediate thought is old fish. Nothing of the sweet and clagging scent that as a crime fiction student I have come to understand as rotting flesh, via some perverted academic osmosis. This is not my first time at the dead animal rodeo. I grew up in semi-rural Yorkshire, remember swimming into the parched skin of a dead sheep that had gone to die in the river. The scent of sheep carcasses are a semi-rural necessity. I write about roadkill. I held the board-stiff corpse of my cat, his tuxedo fur now dull and flat, muscles cold and taut with lactic acid. At first I think the carcass is a dog, it is so small; then a pig, looking at its hooves. Only when I see the white dappled tufts coming from its behind do I recognise its tiny frame, its black, open ribcage minutely convulsing with cream maggots, its shrivelled, almost old fruit-like muzzle are undeniably that of the adorably procreative muntjac deer. They represent freedom. A species introduced unnaturally to a wealthy Englishman’s estate; they escaped, fucked for their lives and are slowly bounding up the mainland’s geography. They are nature’s plasticity, authenticity-made-brown-furred-flesh.
And, in that moment, I absolutely believe it is the same deer I saw on the walk home from my interview for that same job. The same muntjac deer other employees see bounding round the outskirts of the industrial estate where we are based. It’s a communal loss, but one that feels personal. I do not feel grief, I feel a panic about the death of the individual to corporate culture. I’m enjoying the way I look in a headset too much. Enjoying the kitchenette chats. The coffee machine that nobody knows how to use. The daily comparisons of everyone’s packed lunches. The pet updates on Teams. The ever-looming spectre of the office Christmas karaoke. Our regular callers, the old lady with the fish. The almost exclusively gif-based language that our office group chat operates on. Getting my own desk that I can decorate. My fondness for this company scares me. I should not love a company. But I love its company. I think my heart needs a thesaurus.
Or maybe how the deer strikes me is something about maintaining curiosity with the natural world in spite of it, a question of whether we can have it all, regular hours that nurture work and study, a well heated office on an industrial estate and a walk home shrouded in trees and eight-o-clock darkness. And that is a panic in itself. That I cannot discern the intentions of my own poetry. That meaning’s relation to me has become so well lubricated that I cannot understand a thought without it sliding along a scale of a thousand different implications. I wrote recently of being okay with the liminal states of being, of understanding. But sometimes it is too tiring to accept something in its multiplicity.
I am automatically allocated a callback. I state my name: barnaby in a bollock-less voice. Nobody ever acknowledges I’m a man on these calls. I’m the first open transsexual the company has had in its almost fifty years. We’ve got a new gender-neutral sign for the toilet, even though I use the gents when I can. If Britannia is a woman, then the transsexual man is a muntjac deer. A little bastard where he shouldn’t be.
The company I now work for is something that has retaliated out of a world honed by evil, and my love for it has emerged from similar origins. We coordinate and provide engineer services for a mostly socially-housed clientele. The need for social housing — or rather, the fact that safe shelter is so inaccessible that its lack turns from a travesty to a social scheme — can point its finger at the avarice of the increasingly wealthy elite. Similarly, my appreciation for this is job is perhaps the rebound of having, until three weeks ago, worked for a similarly avaristic boss with five plus businesses, forty leased-out properties and a banging coke habit. If the zero-hours contract is a financially, emotionally and physically abusive relationship, the nine-to-five is a reliable lover.
I listen to podcasts on my walk in. Occasionally I listen to Fontaines DC. I’ll watch the trees sensually drop their golden leaves, like featherlight negligees or pantyhose drifting to the ground. Halloween is approaching. By the time I publish this, it will have been and gone. Perhaps that’s why the body of this muntjac deer seems to say something more. It is a time of year where the dead can speak. It’s a time where I’ll mine anything for a think piece, to maintain my individuality as a writer.
I wear a lanyard, a magstriped collar, I have a small moodboard on my Whering app for office outfits, I have two permanent almost-bruises on either side of the bridge of my nose from where my glasses sit. My coworker told me the other day that he knows I’ve sloped into the office because whenever I’m there, all anyone can hear is the clatter of my desk-fan. I like that I have a thing. I’m loud fan boy. I wonder what has changed inside.
The police called. Wanting someone to fix a broken door. So we skirt round the periphery. Change the locks; my coworker asks if it was DV and I say I never asked. Maybe I should have, to at least know where it is that we slide in and out of this person’s timeline. These small tiny fixtures which life, disaster, death hinge on are our business. We are evident not in the forefront of people’s consciousness but in the repaired eclectica of their homes. As evidenced in my writing, sonder is, by definition, a concept wholly fascinated with its demarcation of fascination. Every day I am exposed to it, with every call my fingertips crackle with the growing intensity of an interanimate geiger-meter. I feel like it’s a privilege to be granted this ability to dart in and out of people’s lives, no longer through hospitality but emergency service provision. So what has changed? Is this the reveal of some painstakingly obscured classism, where the dopamine hit of want has been replaced by sanctimonious fulfilment via the implied deservingness of a customer. Who deserves a coffee? Who deserves central heating? The more good I do, the less of a good person I realise I am. Is it even a good deed when I get paid a living wage for it? Perhaps it is more accurate to say that our business is sonder. The paraphernalia of boiler repairs and broken doors is the fallout.
I wonder how the world has capacity for all these things. All this data, all these words, times, parts orders. I do not understand internet servers and perhaps that is a safety measure for myself, if I did understand how we create, how we mine that space; suddenly that unknowable expanse has parameters and yet another part of the world becomes terrifyingly bounded. My curiosity is a self-destructive small child and he must be protected from technological knowledge at all costs.
I started writing this as a kind of collection of disparate ideas I have had while sitting at my desk at work. They weren’t intended to connect, but I suppose I am only capable of one thought and of meditating on the various tendrils that come off it. And as usual, that thought is the individual, me, where I stand in relation to a world that I always feel dislocated from as a transsexual, but I one I also feel thrust into the searing core of through my inability to make sense of anything in the moment.
My intentions with this essay are shifting. Fear in rotation, all that jazz. The individual (be it their individualism or their moral compass) is byproduct of the destructive capitalist forces that it fears. What if the death of the individual is not intrinsic to corporate assimilation but rather indicates a dissolving of the finely honed membrane that makes the individual appear to be individuated from the world? What if it’s just self deception that we should be preoccupied with what is the good thing to do, what a good person would do; over what is good for the other. Being good as opposed to doing good. And I don’t know how we can distinguish the two in the moment, whether that is of immediate importance when someone has had a leak so severe her kitchen ceiling has fallen through and her neighbours are watching water flood out from under the front door. I just do what company protocol is.
Maybe I’m wasting time on this essay. Maybe it is time to put these thoughts to bed for a night or two. Filling up those unfathomable internet servers with something that was summed up far more eloquently, far more devastatingly, in the corpse of a muntjac deer.
sources
‘Out in the Dark’ by Edward Thomas, 1916.