The Sudden Introspections of Borge Isoue

It was the middle of October when Borge Isoue realised his job meant little to him.

This enlightenment wasn’t inspired by one of those articles published in a hip online magazine that said clever things about late-stage capitalism. Neither had he picked up a book or seen a clip of a motivational speaker about how one ought to love what they do so that they didn’t have to work a single day in their life.

Rather, he’d simply spent too much time working towards holding down a job so he wouldn’t have to end up dependent on welfare like his father and remain open to criticism from better-placed peers in society. And while he had no partner to go home to, he’d found stability to be a much more seductive goal to strive for. He was first a student, then an accountant, and finally, a man with enough debt incurred from the former occupation to engage him as the latter for the rest of his days.

His latest independent musing could be condensed into such: There must be more to life than plucking away at a worn-out keyboard the management’s been apprehensive about replacing.

He looked around his cubicle to see what everyone else was doing so. The most ideal candidate for a cross-reference would be the Procrastinator, as Borge had named the similarly middle-aged colleague in the Accounting Department sitting next to him. Those who misused their productive hours to think idle thoughts were always more aware of the depths of the world.

But the Procrastinator seemed to be working intently at his desk. Borge thought about it for a while, then decided his quest for concurrence was more important than the stability of a flow that was probably going to be disturbed within a few minutes anyway.

“Hey,” he said.

As the chubby colleague turned towards Borge, his annoyance at being disturbed turned into a sense of amusement. If it were the introverted Borge who wanted to have a word with him, he must have had something worth saying.

“Wassup?” he asked.

“Do our jobs matter?”

The Procrastinator raised his right eyebrow in response to the peculiar query. “Of course. Doing this feeds us, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“Weird of you to ask that. You do this job with much more passion than the rest of us can seem to garner.”

“I was just wondering if there’s any meaning to do what we do.”

At this, the Procrastinator nodded and let out a sigh. “It depends on the way you’re looking at the matter.” He answered like a man who’d thought about this before. “I don’t think there’s inherent meaning to anything we do. But if what you do makes you happy, why search for purpose elsewhere?”

“My purpose should make me happy, you say?”

The Procrastinator offered a shrug. “I suppose so. For example, I have a garage band I play with every Saturday. We’re playing at a local gig near the Cherry Pub this week, too. You can join us if you want. Meet some new people, meet some old ones, and have a few drinks along with a great time.”

Though Borge could never comprehend the appeal of music as a consequential entity in society, and found art as a profession filled with people who would be better off going to therapy, he gave the Procrastinator’s invitation a moment’s thought. “I’ll have to run some important errands on Saturday,” he said eventually. “But I’ll try to come if I can make out the time.”

The Procrastinator understood it to be the polite declination it was, then returned to his work with a wry smile. This also prompted Borge to get up from his place – he suddenly wasn’t feeling too well.

He made his way through the maze of cubicles spread all across the floor. His surroundings were drained of its colours. Even as the open windows let in an icy breeze, they did nothing to dissipate the nausea building up in his chest. He faltered in his steps, eventually regained his composure each time to ensure he made his way to the washroom on the other side of the office by pushing open its door. Then, he landed on his knees in between the urinals and lavatories cramping up the space on either side.

His tie’s tip had been touching the floor for quite some time when he picked up his neck to verify whether someone else had witnessed this rather embarrassing collapse of his. But there was no one else to be found in here. Even the lavatories seemed to be ‘Vacant’, as declared by the fading green markers set next to the locks on their doors.

So, he got up from his place and placed his hands on the sink. As he washed his hands under the basin and splashed some of the water on his features, he realised there would be more appropriate times to deal with his sudden introspections. For now, he would simply finish his work as efficiently as always to ensure he wasn’t in the office for longer than he needed to be.

That’s another sign, he realised. I never feel like staying back in the office or being in the good books of my boss by indulging him more than necessary. Neither do I feel any particular remorse about having to work overtime.

As he came to grips with this realisation about his indifference towards either aspect of his considerably lengthy career, he heard someone flushing the toilet from within the men’s room. Had someone walked past him and into the lavatory without him realising it? It was the most reasonable explanation he could conjure at the moment.

But a rugged voice shattered the illusion when it spoke out loud, “You’ve reached the same conclusion your colleagues did sooner or later.”

“What do you mean?” Borge asked.

“That your life has no in-built purpose to navigate through. As for what makes you unique, it’s your own purpose – you don’t truly feel anything about it.” The sound of someone’s chain being pulled up accompanied these final syllables.

The lavatory door was pushed open a few seconds later. From inside it stepped out an abomination of a creature – a beast with two horns, a glass eye, a well-tailored black suit, a pair of red boxers one usually wore only within the confines of their home, and a peculiar leather suitcase he – no, it – was carrying in its right hand. While the rest of its physique seemed normal enough, its facial features resembled that of a goat’s.

The strange being plucked out a vintage pipe from out of the blazer’s left pocket with its unoccupied hand. As soon as it had slotted the pipe in between its lips, smoke escaped from the opening. “Some people feel grateful for the life they have. Others feel trapped in it. You, on the other hand, have had this job to call yours for as long as you can remember, but you don’t have an opinion of it. Isn’t that worse than being trapped in hell?”

“Why would that be?”

“Because happiness makes everything colourful, depression makes everything come across in the binaries of black-and-white, whereas being indifferent simply keeps you in purgatory.”

Borge realised he hadn’t experienced the world with a multitude of flavours like he was supposed to for as long as he could remember, and not just in the past few minutes since coming to this conclusion.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Borge said to steer the conversation away from his lack of association with joy and misery for a few moments. “I don’t know what you are, but I suspect lung cancer works the same across all organisms.”

“You work in a company that sells vintage cigars, Borge,” replied the Goat, wanting to point out the hypocrisy of the accountant’s advice.

“I do?”

“You didn’t know?”

“I never bothered to find out.”

“Ah,” said the Goat, letting go of the smoke that had built up in its lungs. “Makes sense.”

The two stood next to each other in silence for some more time, until Borge turned off the tap so that he could proceed with drying off his hands. “What are you, though?”

On hearing this perfectly natural query, the Goat suddenly gripped Borge’s arm without notice and pulled him towards the lavatory he had just come out of. The accountant stumbled – almost falling on the floor – but recovered enough momentum to keep up with the creature as it dragged him into what was surely going to be an even more finite space.

When the door was opened, only a regular commode could be seen. The Goat showed little regard for its hygiene – and for the laws of physics – as it jumped right into the commode. Borge lost his own balance and involuntarily fell in behind him. But he did not feel any water splash on his head. Nor did he get stuck like any practical person would have predicted. He just felt … nothing.

He slowly realised the sensations moving around in his head were just a symptom of his downward fall into a place he couldn’t quite make sense out of. For the first time in his life, he was also feeling them as strongly as one could have. He did not know whether this was because of a theoretical impossibility coming true, or a more instinctual reaction to the novelty of whatever environment he was embarking towards.

After falling for a further minute or so, his body flipped around violently. He expected the subsequent landing to be the end of him, yet his feet just suspended themselves in mid-air. Once the momentum had successfully been removed from his physique, he was lowered down to solid ground by the same mysterious force.

“You can open your eyes now,” said the voice Borge now knew to be the Goat’s.

When he did so, he saw something he never had before – darkness in all its glory. After he got accustomed to the palette of the realm he now found himself to be in, and his body regained its balance after being thrown into the deep end without notice, his eyes grew even wider on realising what the colours were comprising was something even more unfathomable.

He hadn’t known the world could be as delightful as this when it was grey. There was a blank expanse that stretched out. It didn’t look like a void in its most exact sense, but there were no corners, no skies, and no signs of the existence of a creature beyond the two of them in this world either.

“Where are we?” Borge asked.

“Isn’t that evident?”

“It isn’t.”

“We’re inside your mind.”

“How’s that possible?”

The Goat smiled. He pointed towards the space in front of them and said, “Have a seat.”

Borge imagined two chairs and a table, made of polished metal to match the aesthetics of the place. The furniture immediately appeared in front of him. He hadn’t wanted to do so consciously – this had just been a natural reaction to what the Goat said.

The beast wearing the boxers plopped down its briefcase beside the chair, then took a seat on the right. Borge ambled up to the one left empty for him at the other end. Once he was sitting down, the Goat withdrew a file from the same leather briefcase and kept it on the table that hid its bright-red boxers from the accountant’s eyesight. This arrangement allowed him to see the entire room only in the shades of grey that made it up.

The papers within the file offered a timely respite from this monotonous diversity. They were printouts filled with what seemed like emblems and official attestations. But Borge did not know what these meant, because the script it had been written in seemed to be quite apart from anything he had ever seen. They looked like epigraphs from an ancient era at first glance. However, the modern serif twist to the script led him to believe this script was distinctly contemporary – and foreign to anything he’d ever seen before.

The Goat reached into its briefcase once more to take out a recorder. It then nodded at Borge and pressed the ‘Record’ button. The body of the instrument was painted in ash grey, too.

The creature’s posture was upright and formal as he began speaking. “Time of recording, 11:26am. Place of recording, Mr Borge Isoue’s consciousness. Believability of client about encounter with a representative from Goat Collective for Enlightenment, moderate.”

Borges peeked underneath the desk. He didn’t know whether what he saw next resulted from forces beyond his control, or if it was a repeat performance from his imagination. Either way, the Goat was now wearing formal leather pants in perfect conjunction with its black suit and tie.

The Goat tilted its head sideways in reaction to this, and flashed what seemed to be a smile. It then pressed the pause button on the recorder and said out loud, “I forgot to wear pants when I came out here today. I should’ve warned you earlier, but I’ve been running on a late schedule. I’m from the Goat Collective for Enlightenment – sent down here to get you to sign The Contract.”

“The contract? What contract?”

“It’s spoken with a capital ‘C’.”

“How could you possibly know whether I spoke it with a Capitalised ‘c’ or not?”

“Now you’ve capitalised the ‘C’ of ‘Capitalised’. Rather clever of you. You’ve got a peculiar sense of humour hidden in there, one can’t deny that.”

Borge remained silent in response to his sneaky mental alteration being detected.

“I can’t really understand what you’re saying,” the Goat continued. “Your language is too … shall I say, primitive? No offence, of course. Every senior associate at the GCE can read the subtitles of everything humans say, write, or think in our own tongue.” The creature’s fingers pointed in Borge’s direction and ran from left to right, where the subtitles must have been visible from his own point of view.

“Is this script on The Contract … the same as the one you’ve written this contract with?”

“Yes.” The Goat nodded, his smile returning to his features once more. “Also, one last thing before I resume with the recording – I was technically supposed to show you my ID card when we first meet. Apologies for the confusion that may have ensued from me not doing so. I’m rather bad with following protocols, but I close Contracts for my employers, so they let me be.”

“Wait, how can I understand what you’re saying, then?”

“Because we’re in your subconscious.”

This was an overtly cryptic answer, but Borge did not pay it any more attention as he turned his attention to the laminated ID the Goat had taken out from the inside pocket of its coat and placed on the right-hand side of the table. It contained a passport photograph of the goat Borge had been talking to. The creature wore the same black-and-white ensemble it did now.

The minutes within the card were written in the same indecipherable script, but it also contained what seemed like a circular logo. Its central image was a cloven hoof.

“Err, I don’t know if this clears things up…” Borge said.

“Well, it seldom does.” The Goat reached out to press another button on the tape recorder. The formal interview was underway once again. “Mr Isoue, I’ve already shown you my identification and confirmed with you that your life is a joyless drag, have I not?”

“Err, yes.”

“That’s where we come in: we’re a one-of-a-kind collective making our way around the world to pursue unique individuals like yourselves, who see the world to be drained of colour not because you’re afflicted by some unfortunate ailment, but because you simply elect to view the world with a lens devoid of any passion.”

“I still don’t think I understand.”

“Ah. Let me put it in even more comprehensible terms. There are artists in the world. They make out a lightning bolt to be a wonderful metaphor for the ferocity of ‘Mother Nature’, even though it’s nothing except the result of natural forces mixing in the lower atmosphere of the planet while abiding by the laws of physics. Conversely, the one with a sorrowful mind sees a thunderstorm and deciphers it to be a divine alignment of the rest of the Universe with the state of their mind. And then, there are you – a curious person who simply retreats under an umbrella or a roof and waits out the storm without waxing poetic about it. Your way of observing life offers as much as objectivity as one could ever hope for from humankind.”

Borge nodded. He could see how he was the ideal type of personality for the Goat Collective to approach. “But what do you need from me?”

“Just a signature.” The Goat put its hands into its coat once again and took out an elegant fountain pen with a lead tip, placing it on top of the paper to present him with an unwitting ultimatum.

“Could you tell me the specific terms of The Contract? I can’t even read your script.”

“Try hard enough and you’ll be able to.”

Borge picked up the fountain pen, took off its cap, and stared intently at the text. For the first few moments, nothing seemed to happen. The indecipherable script remained just as it was, with its idiosyncratic protrusions around the edges of its letters being the most appealing part of the words. But as the accountant slowly found himself immersed in the elegance of the words rather than their meaning, they rearranged themselves into a comprehensible form. While it wasn’t written in his mother tongue, he disregarded this fact. Thinking about it seemed to make the words tougher to understand.

I, Borge Isoue, the undersigned, understand and give my explicit consent to the Goat Collective for Enlightenment (henceforth referred to as the “GCE”) for proceeding under the following conditions:

1. The GCE will recruit me in the capacity of being a Consciousness Provider i.e., GCE Agents will use my sensory experiences and analyse my cognitive constructs for their research.

2. My memories will be made available for them for any fieldwork they are researching under the metaphysically approved domain of “Understanding Humanity’s Unparalleled and Bloated Self-Importance”.

3. There will be two weeks’ notice in advance before I make any career decisions that will impact the psychological stasis of my body.

4. I shall keep the same weight of the world on my shoulders without letting it alter my current pace of social interactions (or the lack thereof).

5. I will also read the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche to further encourage my non-engagement with the world within three months of signing this contract.

A space had been left empty at the bottom of the document for him to sign.

“You can sign it as soon as you want to,” the Goat said.

“What will I get out of this arrangement?”

“Do you see how everything’s bright here inside your mind?”

“Yes, the colours are more … engaging.”

“We’ll make the outer world look the same way for you. We’ve got the magic and the tools to do that.”

“Wouldn’t I start enjoying life more, then?”

“We’ll ensure keeping you at an optimal level where you’re more intrigued by the world, but not any more interested in it than you were before.”

“How long are you people going to be in my mind for?”

“Err, as long as it takes for us to comprehend the psychology behind humanity’s self-importance as a whole. Suitable candidates like yourself present researchers from our realm with the best opportunity to observe humanity and collect the necessary data for our research. We won’t affect your life decisions in any meaningful manner. We won’t need to, because we’ve mapped out the rest of your life paths with our systems. Your fate’s going to remain the same no matter which option out of the two you choose right now.”

Borge looked down at the contract in his hands once more, twiddling around with the edge of his fountain pen prudently enough to ensure it did not cause a stain. “I… I don’t think I can sign this.”

The Goat shook his head. “Mr Isoue, I understand how it might feel weird for you at the moment. But we’re only going to conduct operations within your subconscious, and make no changes to the life decisions you’d have taken even without us.”

“So, the benefit I’ll be getting is that … the world will become mildly more intriguing for me?”

“In all honesty, anything’s better than the colourless existence you’re leading right now.”

Borge was taken aback by the bluntness of this statement. “You said you’ve already mapped out the rest of my life in case I don’t sign this contract.”

“Yes, we have.”

“Can you tell me what’ll happen?”

“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t – it’s GCE policy.”

The accountant nodded. He was about to express his regret about this fact when the Goat reached out to the recorder and paused it once more.

“And since the time we first met, Borge, I haven’t grown any fonder of protocols.”

***

 When Borge settled back at his desk, the dizziness lingered on in his head. It must have had something to do with the fact that a goat from another realm had just entered and exited his mind.

The Procrastinator sitting next to him had either finished with his work or never returned to it during the time Borge had been in the washroom. He was circling his cubicle with the help of his chair.

“Hey, man,” Borge said to him, “My timings must have got mixed up. I have no work this Saturday – I’ll be able to make it to your band’s gig at the Cherry Pub.”

“Really?” The delight on the chubby man’s face was immeasurable. Borge hadn’t noticed how his cheeks flushed up with a distinct red colour every time the Procrastinator got excited. But he did now. As a matter of fact, the entire world looked much more colourful than before. It was enough to excite him about the possibilities his future entailed.

He had decided it couldn’t do much harm to enjoy his life some more from now on, since he would’ve wound up with the same fate by the end of it even if he were to go along with the Goat’s proposition. He’d decided not to.

“When exactly does your gig start?”

“7pm.”

“That works.”

“Any kind of music you’d specifically like us to play?”

“Whatever kind you enjoy most.”

“Look forward to meeting you without a tie,” said the Procrastinator.

“Likewise. See you there on Saturday.”

“Any reason for the sudden change of heart?”

“Ah,” the accountant replied. “Even I didn’t have it in me to read the entire works of Nietzsche.”