To kill Samsa

Shut in a company’s bathroom, I stare at myself in the mirror.

“You’re solid rock,” the reflection says, “but you’re having one of those. This is what a panic attack feels like.”

I disagree. I’m a grown man. I don’t have panic attacks and the likes. If that morning Gregor Samsa had gone to work, maybe he wouldn’t have turned into a cockroach. Maybe it was just about getting a bit of elbow grease in and keeping a positive attitude. There’s nothing you can’t do after a good night’s sleep.

Somewhere in the hallways of a bank that will remain unnamed my supervisor is looking for me, spurned by inexplicable anxiety. I entered the bathroom five minutes ago. My absence has already caused chaos.

Good morning, my name is Gregor Samsa. I’m a consultant in a big Italian company and I hate my job.

“Nobody’s called Gregor here. Maybe Gregorio. We’re in Italy, remember?” The mirror image says. “You breathing?”

I suppose there’s some explaining to do. This thing that I feel is not exactly panic. It’s more like when a spider crawls under your skin. Good, you can see the bump its made in your arm, it’s not moving. You look at it and you schedule an appointment with your doctor next week. Then the bump disappears. Where the fuck did the spider go? Did it abandon you?

Explaining. Consultancies ain’t so bad. It beats working in a mine for sure. I guess my issue with it is breaking my balls day and night for someone else’s profit.

In this bank that will remain unnamed everyone hates me. Their idea of career is sticking to this place that pays a pittance but gives them an illusion of security and pro rates on their mortgage. The least smart of their employees programs in Fortran, is fifty-four years old, and spends his afternoons looking at F1 races on his workstation’s screen. The smartes has hunger in his eyes and knows his salary would be sevenfold in the U.S., four-fold in Germany.

Six minutes gone. I can only imagine how intense my supervisor’s search for me has gotten. Bathroom breaks ain’t included my company’s policy. I understand my supervisor, really, he’s a consultant like me. He wants me to take his place here, to deal with this people, to become their new pet. It’s that kind of situation in which passing the curse to someone else frees you, like those internet scares born with early email.

I need to get in a meeting to explain stuff I know nothing about, and hell they don’t either, but it’s quite important to keep up appearances. I can’t just walk in and say: “Holy shit, there’s twenty people in here and it smells like balls. I’m quite sure at least nineteen of you have better ways to spend time.” It would be anarchy. It would be complete system collapse. I would be destroying that delicate ecosystem on which my whole country relies.

In order to calm down I list all my colleagues from the slimmest to the most obese. In the mirror my reflection clicks his teeth. “Maybe Samsa should have taken a sabbatical. Maybe he should have moved out of his family’s house.”

For years I’ve made fun of those guys in college studying Literature or Arts. I would denounce them as hopeless romantics, myopic and jobless. Italy is a country for engineers. Even between the carcasses of our heavy industries you can always rebrand yourself in the third sector.

“We believed we followed the most logical path,” the image in the mirror says. “We wanted to work. We wanted success.”

Just a second later you’re there selling your man-hours. Even the cockroach knows that only two things really matter: time and energy. Yours. Twenty years in this job and you’ll be a manager. Thirty and you’ll be economically free. Follow the logical path.

I look for my face in the mirror and I’m afraid to see my supervisor in there, as if I’m becoming him. Where’s the boy I was? By God I used to dream something, once. I would have never believed that being an adult meant running to the bathroom just to breathe. My mirror image presses both palms against the smooth glass surface.

“Time paid is time stolen,” he whispers, “yet five minutes is all it takes to be free, really free.”

I cannot trust in salaries, in grades, in planned job revies, in overtime and national contracts anymore. I cannot trust 10-days long vacays in Maiorca or Sharm el-Sheik, nor their cheaper counterparts. I am sick of pro mortgage rates and in washing machine bought with ten easy monthly installments. Fuck you! Attaching a dollar sign to my hours is ugly enough; you cannot ask me to like it!

My mind goes back to those stiff employees, hair full of gel, to those widened bellies in tight white shirts. Forever stuck in between Iannaci’s songs and a Fantozzi movie. I’ll be damned, you’ll never have me.

“The only truly logical path is the one you can walk with a light heart,” says my reflection.

I lean on the sink and puke in.

Time to get out. Time to kill Samsa.