One of my hobbies is to collect shredded paper from the garbage bins outside large office buildings. With clear tape I piece together the scraps, mostly long slivers of paper with a few hand-torn fragments among them. My loft is littered with these jigsaw puzzles. I have found sensitive documents, incriminating evidence, and secret love letters. Some of them I sell to the reporters and private investigators who hound me constantly, bringing bags of shred and begging for their re-constitution. Sometimes I do It for them, when I need the money, but I prefer to find my own puzzle pieces. Credit fraud, insider trading and adultery do not interest me. The puzzle is all; usually I don't care about the words. There are a few documents which catch my interest as they take shape, urging me to find and build the page before or after, to recreate stories of lives which have been shredded by the machine.
Once I found a tale like none I'd ever seen, a hand-written journal on plain typing paper. The sleaze merchants would never pay for it, but I knew it held the key to a crime of epic proportions. I couldn't tell if the pieces came from one journal or two; the handwriting varied slightly and I noticed repetitions of dates and events, but these could have been due to the writer's obvious confusion. It was such a curious puzzle that I couldn't help showing it to the few people who were interested in my art at the time—that was before the Soho galleries "discovered" me, of course. Still, word of my project must have spread somehow, because one day the man who had written the journal appeared at the door to my loft. I was shocked, to say the least, but I invited him in for a cup of tea and he told me his story. I knew most of it from the puzzle I had assembled, but even if I'd had all the pieces, I don't think I could have guessed what had really happened to him. This is what he said:
"There were two of us at first. I never knew Claude before the merger. He was just doing his job and I was just doing mine. Actually, we were doing the same job in two different companies. When Fluid Systems Inc, my firm, and Dynamic Fluid Solutions, Claude's firm, melted together into the world's largest fluid dynamics research & development consultancy, I figured one of us would have to go. We weren't scientists, just mid-level administrators responsible for project accounting. Researchers presented their reports, and we checked them against budget allocations. Not exactly rocket science.
"Fluid System Solutions, as the new firm was called, had about twice as many of us as it needed. The scientists were there to stay. Some would be re-assigned to new projects in order to avoid redundancy, sure, but they'd keep most of them around. Paper pushers like Claude and me were on borrowed time. Our department was where the cuts had to be made.
"First, they closed one of their old administrative office buildings, the one where Claude worked. They didn't want the bad press associated with thousands of white-collar lay-offs, but they needed to show the Market that they were cutting costs as a result of the merger. So they packed all of us into one building. Nobody complained about the crowding, because we figured it was a temporary situation that would be alleviated when half of us were fired.
"Stocks went up after Claude moved into my office. I never got any options, and I had been too stupid to buy stock with my own money before the merger. Claude had stock. He told me after he heard me muttering about my missed opportunity one day. Every day, if the share prices went up, he made a point of mentioning it. I couldn't mention it if they didn't, or my loyalty would be called into question.
"In those first days I really hated Claude. He was fat, and he took up too much room in our cramped office. The smell of greasy food permeated everything. He never actually ate out; he just went out and came back with a slice of pizza or a deep-fried burrito—a chimichanga he called it. Our desks were against opposite walls, and our backs just about touched. I could hear him back there munching and slurping. Of course I had to start eating in, too. Otherwise Claude might get ahead, and we were clearly in competition. Management had implied that we'd be judged by the weight of paperwork we could turn out by the end of the month.
"I made a point of eating Caesar salad for lunch at my desk, crunching loudly on the croutons. Then I brewed that foul mushroom tea that's supposed to be so good for you. Claude seemed to hate the smell of it even more than I did, so I pressed on and pretended to enjoy my daily cup of fungus. With a few well placed comments and gestures I shaped those ad hoc brewing ceremonies into subliminal messages that I was leaner and meaner than he was.
"We rarely spoke, and Claude even stopped mentioning the market value of his shares after a while. It went on like that for weeks. I'm not sure when, but at some point I actually stopped noticing him.
"One day we sat at each other's desks by mistake. I don't think either of us realized it for at least twenty minutes. My desk had become sloppier, his neater... they looked pretty much the same now. We shuffled past each other, not looking one another in the eye, and resumed our normal positions.
"Another day that week I was halfway through a piece of pepperoni pizza when I realized Claude was munching on carrot sticks. I finished the pizza and washed it down with a coke. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I had noticed a few extra folds in my stomach lately. And Claude looked like he'd been working out.
"I wrote those pages as a sort of last will and testament. Work had consumed my life, so I don't know who'd I'd leave anything to anyway, but I felt the need to set down some record of my individual identity. Paul and I—shit, did I say Paul?—I am Paul. Claude and I. Claude and Paul were getting more and more mixed up. Our boss, who used to be two different people, I think, our Boss had taken to calling us by each other's names. Paul and I were merging. Claude and I. Sometimes I'll start a report and then after we come back with lunch and we sit at the wrong desks again, Claude will finish that same report. When I went over my reports at the end of the day, I couldn't tell which ones he had done from those I had done. The handwriting all looked the same.
"The morning when I shredded those papers, I came into the office and there was only one desk. I wasn't sure if it belonged to Paul or Claude. I felt like having a chicken chimichanga and a Caesar salad for lunch... not one or the other, but both. There was only one pile of reports on the desk. When I got to the last page of the first one, where I was supposed to sign, I just scribbled something illegible on the dotted line.
"Maybe my boss will mention my name during my monthly performance evaluation. Then I'll know who I'm supposed to be. For now, I'll just go about my business and hope nobody notices. At least I still have a job, whoever I am. The merger is complete and I didn't get laid off. Who knows—maybe I have stock options now.
"The point is, I haven't been fired yet, and I don't think I will be as long as I don't make a fuss. I shredded those notes because I don't want them thinking I have any evidence or anything, you know? Please, I'm begging you, please just destroy them and let me be whoever I am now, OK?"
He spoke with such passion, the dark circles around his eyes creasing into elaborate wrinkles, his knuckles whitening as he clung desperately to his pinstripe lapels. I knew I had to do it, right there in front of him, or he would never leave me in peace. So I burned it. Six months of work, up in smoke, the best of my ragged puzzles gone forever. I didn't think I'd ever see anything like it again. I was depressed for a while, fell into a slump of rebuilding credit card receipts for the junkie down the hall. Then, I found another journal not unlike the one Claude-Paul had asked me to destroy. But it wasn't his, it was someone else's. Then I found another, and another. They're turning up every day now in most of the big dumpsters downtown. And no one has asked me to burn them yet.
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