A Pointless Story

"Who are you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who are you?”

Christine looked around, trying to garner some support from the people standing in line behind her and trying to assess whether everybody was in on the prank. The other people looked at her with the indifferent, somewhat aggravated stare we reserve for strangers who impose on our time or patience.

It was not a joke and the atmosphere in the lobby had started to feel a little tense. An undercurrent of sarcasm tried to find its way out of her mind and offer some commentary, but she decided it was not worth the trouble and snuffed it with a deep cleansing breath.

“Christine Taylor,” she articulated the sounds to make sure she did not have to repeat her name. The whole situation felt awkward enough as it was.

The thing is, Christine didn’t want to come here in the first place. Christine didn’t really know why she was here or what was expected of her, because Christine never once questioned her schedule.

Three weeks before, she found out she’d been signed up for this conference, and while she was mentally reorganizing her schedule to accommodate it and sorting the junk mail with automatic gestures, she found the letter. It looked both personal and somewhat generic, in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, and she would have thrown it into the recycling bin without opening it if the stamp didn’t draw her attention. It looked very old, and also as if somebody had peeled it off another envelope and reused it, she could still distinguish the traces of the old postal stamp underneath the new one.

‘How did this even get processed?’ She shrugged, trying to imagine how many letters and packages went through the hands of a postal worker on an average day and how unlikely it was that anybody would pay attention to these kinds of details. Come to think of it, she didn’t pay attention to these kinds of details either, especially during weeks like this, when she was too busy to breathe. Christine was secretly proud of her tight schedule which kept her too busy to breathe, neck deep in work and out of the ranks of the useless.

She’d already spent a whole minute evaluating the letter, which was probably some advertising gimmick, and tension started to build up in her shoulders because she felt unproductive. She looked around the office to see if her coworkers were silently judging her, but everybody was engrossed in their own work and just as busy as she was. Nobody was paying attention. She made a second attempt to dispose of the letter and curiosity got the better of her; she figured she should at least open it before throwing it away.

The envelope was empty.

‘Idiotic prank,’ she thought irritated. As she threw away the empty shell something metallic hit the floor with noise. Instantly all eyes focused on Christine. She smiled and blushed, embarrassed, and picked up the offending object while everybody went back to work, displeased about the interruption.

She couldn’t help wonder where the weird object, which turned out to be a coin, came from, because she was pretty sure the envelope was empty before she threw it in the bin. Its surface looked uneven and dark. Bronze, maybe? She had no idea about antiques and coins in particular, but even to an untrained eye it was evident the object was very old and had never been meant for circulation. It was covered in script and looked more like a medallion, despite the fact it had no bail.

Christine studied it for a few more seconds and then put it in her pocket, went back to work and forgot about the whole issue.

Three days later she was out with friends, was ready to settle the bill at the end of the night, she pulled out her wallet to leave cash on the table for a tip and noticed the coin, a little weirded out by the fact that it had made its way into her wallet. She was pretty sure she didn’t put it there, but with her busy schedule there was really no telling what absentminded moment had yielded this result.

She reached out to grab the coin just as the waiter was handing her the check holder, and its sharp edge slit the edge of her palm in the process. The cut wasn’t deep, but enough to draw a few drops of blood, which smeared on the table and the coin in the process.

She cursed her clumsiness and the fact that she couldn’t handle her drinks, and she felt a little too tipsy for an average evening out with friends like this; she felt somewhat spacey and weirded out by the sight of her own blood, and embarrassed for making such a mess, and suddenly so out of touch with herself and with her life that she felt like a stranger in her own body, watching the world through someone else’s eyes.

“Are you alright, Christine? You don’t look so hot!” one of her friends shook her arm, gently, her eyes filled with worry.

Yeah, I’ll be fine,” she replied as she headed for the restroom to clean herself up and run some water on her face. There were no paper towels, of course, she noticed annoyed, because the locale never seemed to stock up enough on this particular item, which was always insufficient for the number of patrons. No air dryer either.

Her hand was still bleeding and she remembered the packet of tissue she had in her purse. As she pulled it out a gentle gleam drew her attention: it was the coin.

Now that was really creepy, because she distinctly remembered leaving the coin on the table, smeared in blood, and now there it was, gawking at her, in pristine cleanliness.

‘I didn’t drink that much, did I?’ she frowned, trying to recall the details of the night. ‘None of this is normal,’ she suddenly got drenched in cold sweat and unable to articulate why. It wasn’t fear, it was something else, a feeling without a name which she however recognized immediately and didn’t doubt. A knock on the door startled her.

“Christine!” It was her friend. “Christine, are you alright in there? Christine!” the knocks on the door switched to panicked pounding.

“I’m ok, I’ll be out in a second,” Christine answered and the pounding stopped.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” her friend insisted as she accompanied Christine to the door, holding her arm for fear the latter might lose her balance at any moment. Christine shook her head no; she seemed to have regained her lucidity and then some, a hyper acute keenness of her senses which made her painfully aware of every sight and sound. She cast a furtive glance at their table, half expecting to see the coin on it, but somebody had already cleaned it.

“We’ll see you at the conference next Tuesday, then?” the friend asked. “You remember the address, yes?”

She repeated it, just in case, since Christine’s face still seemed to reflect the foggy contents of her noggin.

“Yes, of course!” the latter snapped, annoyed. “You told me five times, I got the memo, Chad stopped by yesterday afternoon to remind me, they’ll launch a flare soon. I got it!”

“No need to get upset, I was just making sure,” the friend got defensive, still unconvinced that her friend was in full command of her faculties.

The unsettling feeling that she was living the life of a perfect stranger still haunted Christine. All these activities that comprised her existence made perfect sense, there was nothing strange about them at all, nothing other than the fact that they always required her participation but never seemed to be about her.

That conference, the one she snapped about, she didn’t sign up for it, it just showed up on her schedule, like most of the events of her life did: the cousin’s wedding, the chance meeting with old acquaintances from out of town, the trip back to the bookstore to return the mixed up purchase, the monthly trip to aunt Millie’s, who was old. She needn’t bother to run her own life, the universe ran it for her by default, with a rich selection of acceptable activities, all within the range of normal and socially approved.

She paused for a second, trying to picture who she would be if she got suddenly disconnected from this group living pipeline that fed her her life’s meaning, her identity and her goals, and she gasped at the chasm that was left behind, a hollow, worlds deep, in which she kept falling forever.

‘Who am I?’ she kept asking herself, because she wasn’t the girl at work, who blushed, embarrassed to draw attention to herself, or the friend who had too much fun on an evening out, or the professional on her way to a conference, she was none of these people, they were her masks, her props, her clothing.

'Maybe this coin is cursed,’ she looked at it intently, too emotionally spent to have the appropriate reaction to such a thought, which should have been dread. She felt a strange, metallic taste in her mouth and didn’t pause to contemplate why. Why would it matter?

“So, you’re coming to the conference tomorrow?” Frank stopped by her desk the day before the event, and she confirmed, politely, as expected in a professional environment, quietly wondering if she looked like a person with memory problems all of a sudden.

She’d been to that convention center numerous times and she knew it well, but it didn’t feel the same, in a way she couldn’t explain, everything felt colder, as if the light itself was screened through a color filter. She shrugged off the feeling, unconsciously playing with the coin in her pocket, to soothe her anxiety. She had never felt comfortable at these events: too many people with too many eyes, opinions, curiosities.

How was this blessed object in her pocket again, it dawned on her. She never wore that suit except for formal business venues, such as this one, and the last thing she wanted from life was to be reminded of her mental rabbit hole in a professional setting.

So there she was now, in line for the name tag, waiting to find out where her assigned seating was, and she’d gotten to the front of the line and was met by the most obnoxious question: not ‘your name, please’, or ‘can you see your tag here’, or anything, but

“Who are you?”

What kind of organizer asks this question, anybody would feel ill at ease to be addressed like that, and all of these people behind me are now upset that I’m holding up the line. Her mood instantly switched to rotten and she articulated her name in such a way that she wouldn’t need to do it more than once.

“Sorry. I can’t seem to find you on the list.”

‘You have got to be kidding me! After you rubbed my brains raw with reminders for three whole weeks, you can’t seem to find me on the list?’ Her first instinct was to turn on her heels and leave that instant, but halfway through the turn her gaze encountered a coworker who recognized her and waved.

‘At least I’m not completely off the rails,’ she thought.

Now she had no idea what to do: she couldn’t go to the conference because she wasn’t on the list and she couldn’t leave because her coworker expected her to be there. She tried to negotiate an acceptable solution with the staff at the orientation table, but they were uncharacteristically uncooperative for some reason, maybe her personality rubbed them the wrong way, so after the seventh person came around to solve her problem and asked her to start the story from the top again, she lost it when they uttered the inevitable question,

"Who are you?”

and blurted out flustered

“I have absolutely no idea!”

“Finally!” the attending staff rolled his eyes. “Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth around here. Follow the corridor, third door to the right. Enjoy the conference!”

She followed the directions, somewhat puzzled, and half-way down the corridor she was stopped by the solicitous staff, who had been running all the way there to return her the coin, which seemed to have fallen out of her pocket.

“You’re lucky I found it,” he commented, pleased. “They won’t let you in without it.”

Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash