Paper Chains

Dangling limply across the makeshift walls of the office cubicles, a paper chain made from scrap paperwork was severed at the middle. Perhaps the gluestick that had been used to haphazardly string it together was dried up. Maybe someone tore it by accident. I’d probably never find out. There were plenty of things you’d never know in your life, be it minute, inconsequential happenings such as this one, or indelible unknowns, like if that person years ago truly did like you back. You still wonder, regardless, and perhaps to the same extent equally in both instances. This was just one of those things.

I’d come with my housemate to attend her office Christmas party as a guest. Her work was in a small, tight-knit company. One of those places that always had all of their lunches together every day, no matter what. Who brought in baked goods for one another just for the sake of it. Who, apparently, made their office seasonal decorations as some kind of bonding activity. I suppose after a while, they all got sick of only talking to each other, day in, day out. Which is where the plus-ones, such as myself, came in. We were invited simply to make things interesting, or to stir up enough of a fuss that there’s some mild office gossip rippling across the cubicles over the first waking days of January. At least, that’s what I presumed.

At first it was difficult to tell who worked at the office and who didn’t. After a few rounds of smalltalk, though, certain physical tells made themselves apparent, like dead fish floating to the top of the pond. For example, the office workers shared a particular habit in their body language, where they would, upon meeting someone for the first time and shaking hands, sandwich your palm in between both of theirs, like a predator circling their prey. When I first met my housemate a year or so ago, she’d done the same to me, but I’d presumed that was just a unique quirk of hers that she’d picked up from some place or other. Little did I know, this trait would tell me all I needed to know about someone before I’d even learned their name.

This paper chain became interesting with me during an uninteresting conversation with an office worker about her concerns regarding her young child. She was wearing a staunch red knitted jumper that was subtly insulting to the eye. Apparently there was a terrible case in a nearby town of a child of a similar age to hers being lured into the clutches of some deluded child-napper and murdered. Just plain awful. Not the sort of thing you want to listen to at a Christmas party. This woman, who introduced herself to me as someone who worked in HR (telling me absolutely nothing about what she did on a day-to-day basis) explained that her child’s school had to hold an assembly warning the pupils not to speak to any old stranger. Kids don’t know that you shouldn’t be doing those sorts of things, the woman said to me, a stranger. I almost asked her if she could remember my name, given that I hadn’t told it to her yet. As she continued rattling on her concerns of stranger-danger, my eyes wandered, searching for my housemate to save me. But she had been irrevocably gripped in the maw of setting up the festive quiz in the other room. Inevitably, the broken decoration fell within my eyeline, and I spent half of the woman’s monologue staring at it blankly.

When I was young, people with supposedly more wisdom than me were always harping on about not talking to strangers. But that was fundamentally what made up most of the human experience, I supposed. What fun was it sticking to your family members and no one else? It might act as a necessary precautionary tale for children until they’re wise enough to tell deception from concern, but for everyone else, your life is composed entirely of meeting strangers and forming the bond between them. As soon as you make that decision to know someone, it’s like you’ve linked together the paper chain, and suddenly a whole string of new strangers are at your disposal. Sometimes these relationships break down, and the chain dissolves. People become strangers again. That’s just how it works.

After my talk with the woman naturally ran its course, I wound up in a new conversation with another hand-hugger.

“So, what do you do?” He said to me with a crooked smile, tie a little too loose around his collar, like a limp paper chain.

“Oh, a bit of this and that,” I responded coolly. Which could mean anything.

Frankly, I couldn’t bring myself to assert that any particular label necessarily belonged to me. In my opinion, once you declare that you are or aren’t something, that’s all there is to you, and people decide whether you’re worthy of being in their lives based on one throw-away characteristic you happened to be partaking in at the time. So I liked to be as vague as possible at first. Just to see where things went.

“Oh, really?” He laughed like I was joking. “So, do you work?”

“You could say that,” I mused. He did not laugh.

The truth was, I was in between jobs at the time. Maybe that’s why my housemate decided to bring me to the party over her boyfriend. Pity networking. Alas, I’ve never been known to smooth-talk. So perhaps I’d be the mysterious wallflower who happened to speak to everyone only once and no more.

“Well, how do you spend your time?”

“Here and there.”

I could go on.

In university, I’d spend almost all of my free time reading just about anything I could get my paws on. From Steinbeck, Camus, Mishima, all the way to pointless detective fiction or throwaway romances. Anything, at all times. I’d swallow down novel after novel. Nowadays, that sort of thing has lost its appeal. There’s plenty of things I have to deal with in real life. I don’t need some fictional universe putting its stake out on my attention.

“Well, do you have a partner?”

“In some sense.”

You’ve got to give it to this hand-hugger, he really tried. But I doubt he would’ve been interested in my boring and uneventful date last week to the Italian restaurant in town with a three-out-of-five on its food hygiene rating, so I remained alluringly untouchable.

“Um… well what brings you here?”

“I go wherever the wind takes me.”

According to him, it was nice meeting me, but he had just seen someone else he wanted to speak to, so had to leave. Yet another paper chain I would never link up with. How many people like that would cross my path? Surrounding me, in this cramped floor of this office building, the gargle of complete strangers seemed to stretch on endlessly, like the surface of the Earth out of an aeroplane window, or a Dostoevsky novel. No one here knew who I was. If someone asked me earnestly to tell them about myself, I could answer any which way I pleased. What did that make me? A complete stranger, nonetheless. So it didn’t matter what I did. If I left, it wouldn’t be relevant to my life what these people had to say about me. So I left. Saying nothing.

Outside the office, the wind whipped at my hair, leaving it pointing in no particular direction. The streetlamp beside the building threw out a yellowish tinge like the air had been stained with old age.

“Who am I?” I prompted myself. Nothing came to mind. Around me, the street settled into an awkward silence, a distinct: you tell me.

I guess I better start with the basics. I’m a university graduate with a degree in History, for some reason. I was born twenty-seven years ago. I’m a housemate. A person. A living, breathing human being. I own a bus pass. Yeah, I think that’s everything.

But, you know, most of those things could change at any given moment. My bus pass was due for a renewal. My tenancy would expire. My degree could be revoked for whatever reason. And I could suddenly drop dead. So what was certain about me? That I would die, I suppose. I could imagine, if my housemate’s office gave out those name tags, mine would read ‘Hi I’m: going to die, eventually’. But I’d look around that cramped little room with those crappy decorations and everyone else’s name tag would say the exact same thing. That was the one inevitability we all had to deal with. The one certainty we all shared. It was no shock that, someday, that fate would fall neatly into our laps. So what set us apart? Who were we, and why did we love these frivolous labels? If we really did all end up the same way, were any of us truly strangers, or were we all strangers to the same thing? It was completely lost on me.

I looked back at the building I’d emerged from. From ground level, the windows stretched right from the horizon of the pavement all the way up to what must have been the second or third story. Behind this sodden glass, a figure stood inside the office, staring right at me. On closer look it was someone in business-casual attire with a slouchy posture. Just your average guy. But they kept on staring, endlessly, almost as if I were a performer on stage and my act was about to begin. There the audience were, waiting with bated breath. I waved to them to ease the tension that had gathered up around me like tumbleweed. They waved back. A few moments passed, and it dawned on me that the windows were reflective, and I was staring at my unrecognisable reflection like it was a stranger. It wasn’t as if I had done something different to my appearance that day, or anything like that. I simply didn’t recognise my own reflection. I had no idea who I was.

I decided to walk it off around a couple of nearby neighbourhoods. No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about the paper chain. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like my paper chain, my own link in this long, endless connection of people, had been severed somehow. In what way this might have occurred, I had no clue. All I knew was that I was a complete stranger. And yet, I spent the whole evening talking to myself. So whatever that woman in the hideous red jumper was saying to me in the office earlier probably did have some weight. I should stay away from people I don’t know. Some paper chains are just a complete circle, with no link to one end or the other. You just keep wandering around and around in endless rings until the glue splits and it all drops in one limp old pile.

As it happens, a few bitter streets away, a short shadow lay reflected underneath the street light beside a bus stop. The unmistakable build of a preteen. Instinctively, I walked up to the child.

“Hey, are you lost? What are you doing out here so late without a parent?” I asked.

The child looked up at me. If I had to guess, he must have been around eleven years old. A scruffy backpack hung off his shoulder, and the hood of his puffer coat was lined with fur. He hesitated, unsure if he should respond. Eventually he decided I couldn’t do much harm.

“I’m on the way home from my friends’ house,” he said apprehensively, like his tongue was brand new, “waiting for the bus.”

“Hmm,” I mused. “What kind of parent leaves their kid out so late on Christmas break?”

The child shrugged.

“Do you know who I am?” I tried.

He shook his head, wary.

I sighed. “Nor do I.”

I peered out on the street in front of us. Not a car in sight. Utterly deserted. Looking back at the kid, I found that he was staring at me in the exact same way the stranger, myself, was staring at me in the window. That empty, unsure look that you get when you’re waiting for someone to go ahead and spit out whatever it is they have to say.

“I can take you home,” I offered. “The bus… it’s not regular around here. And there’s all kinds of creeps on there at night.”

The child hesitated. Probably smart enough to know not to take up an offer like that from a complete stranger. But, then again, what did I know? Or him, for that matter? What was different about us?

“I’ll walk you home,” I added.

For a moment, our gazes locked. His glassy, adolescent eyes had a slight reflection in them. In the dark of his pupils, I saw what must have been my own face blinking right back at me. Whatever it was behind that, this child's soul or brain, was completely unreachable. At that sort of age, what counts as identity is based entirely on temporary situational factors, such as where he went to school or what hobbies he partook in. In a way, we were similar in that respect. The only thing that separated us was age, and that I knew.

“Okay,” he agreed. Not a scent of emotion behind those words, just a naive acceptance of the inevitable. Somewhere deep within me, a feeling of complete satisfaction washed over me. As if someone had dropped a vase in front of me and its entire contents had shattered at my feet, glass, water, flowers, and all.

I offered my hand. Without any further delay, his hand slipped into mine, little fingers settling in my palm. His touch was smooth and cool, unmarred with adolescence. Together, we left the bus stop, the neighbourhood, and the office. He and I kept on walking to this placeless place, a place that would tell us the only thing about one another that we could know for certain. A place where the paper chain went on and on, and yet stopped, abruptly.