By the end of the third month, Nigel had begun to suspect that he could do the work indefinitely.
Not forever, perhaps. He was not foolish enough to think anything in his life would now proceed indefinitely. But the arrangement had settled into him with a speed he found faintly alarming. The days had shape. The streets had use. People expected him. The company paid absurdly well and asked, in return, only that he remain useful in ways no sane economy could recognise.
There were worse fates.
He was washing a car when the message came.
It was Yvonne’s smaller one, the blue hatchback with the stubborn streaks that never quite came off the rear window no matter how often he went at them. The bucket stood beside him half-clouded with grey water. The sponge was in his hand. One side of the car gleamed; the other remained dull with road film and last week’s rain.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He might ordinarily have left it there. Lately the company had taken to sending him little bloodless notices of approval, which could always wait ten minutes. But something in the timing of it — the exactness, perhaps — made him stop.
He set the sponge on the roof and took the phone out.
The message was short.
Your engagement with the project has now concluded.
Effective immediately, your services are no longer required.
Final payment will be processed in the usual way.
Thank you for your participation.
Nigel read it once.
Then again.
Then a third time, as if somewhere between effective immediately and participation a more human sentence might emerge.
Nothing of the kind did.
He stood beside the car with the phone in one hand and the dripping fingers of the other slightly spread, as if he had been interrupted halfway through becoming something else.
Then, without quite deciding to, he walked away.
Not dramatically. He placed the sponge on the roof of the car. He did not swear. He simply left the bucket where it was, left the suds drying in pale streaks across the bonnet, and crossed the road toward his house with the awkward, stunned pace of a man who has just remembered a death from some years ago and found, to his disgust, that it still matters.
Inside, he rang the number he had for the company.
The call was answered almost at once.
“Good afternoon,” said a woman he did not know. “Project administration.”
“Yes,” said Nigel. “I’ve just had a message.”
“Can I take your name?”
He gave it.
A pause.
“Yes, Mr Ellis. I can see the update here.”
“The update.”
“Yes.”
Nigel sat down at the kitchen table without meaning to.
“I think,” he said carefully, “there’s been some sort of mistake.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Another pause, this one trained.
“Your engagement has concluded,” she said. “If your contract has been terminated, then you are no longer an employee of the company.”
“I was halfway through washing a car.”
Silence on the other end.
Nigel looked at the wall.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s the message, then. Tell them I’d like to know what the hell they think they’re doing.”
“I can certainly pass that on.”
Nigel let out a short laugh.
“Yes,” he said. “Do that.”
The line went dead a few seconds later, though it had the courtesy to make it seem mutual.
He sat there a while.
Then, through the front window, he saw Yvonne’s husband crossing the road toward the house.
Nigel rolled his eyes.
The knock came.
He waited.
Then came another.
Nigel got up, opened the door, and found the man standing there with an expression that had not yet chosen between concern and irritation.
“Everything all right, Nigel?”
Nigel looked at him.
“Why?”
“Well,” the man said, “you’ve sort of vanished.”
Nigel said nothing.
“The sponge is still on the roof.”
He pointed vaguely across the road, as though Nigel might have forgotten the concept of roofs.
“And the suds have dried in a bit. On the bonnet.”
Nigel stared at him.
“I’ve got bigger problems than your bonnet,” he said.
The man blinked.
“All right.”
Nigel waited.
The man adjusted his stance.
“No need to bite my head off.”
Nigel gave a small, incredulous laugh.
“You came over to complain about a half-washed car.”
“I didn’t come over to complain.”
“You did.”
“I came over because you disappeared.”
Nigel just stared at him.
The man’s face tightened.
“Well,” he said, “there’s no need to be nasty.”
Then he turned and walked back across the road with the injured dignity of a man who had been denied customer service.
Nigel shut the door rather harder than he needed to.
Five minutes later, the phone rang.
He looked at it.
A withheld number.
For a moment he let it ring, out of principle, then answered on the fourth pass.
“Nigel,” said the interviewer.
He recognised her voice at once. It was impossible not to. The same calm precision. The same tone of someone discussing a weather pattern in which she had no personal stake.
“Can you tell me what the hell is going on?” he said — a question that, in that moment, seemed to matter more than the meaning of life itself.
“I understand you’ve received notice that the project has concluded. You’ve done extremely well, Nigel.”
“I’m touched. But what does that mean for me?”
“The intervention produced more usable data than anticipated.”
Nigel leaned back in the chair.
“Once more: what does that mean for me?”
“We wish you all the best in your future employment endeavours.”
Nigel laughed again, more quietly this time.
“Do you.”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
Then he ended the call.
He sat in the kitchen until the light had thinned to evening.
Outside, the half-washed car remained where he had left it, one side bright, one side dull, like a before-and-after photograph no one had asked for.
At half past six, his phone lit up again.
Not the company this time.
Yvonne.
He stared at the name until it stopped ringing.
A moment later a message arrived.
Still all right for Friday? Windows need doing before my sister comes x
Nigel looked at it for a long time.
Then he turned the phone face down on the table and listened to the house settle around him.