“I’d like to sell Saturday.” he leaned hard on the receptionist’s table. “A… valuation, please.”
Anton was expecting a stare, a look that read, are you fucking insane? The woman behind the counter looked utterly bored, eyes averted to a phone in hand. He’d expected as much. He didn’t get her attention immediately and he wasn’t going to repeat himself, so he sat in the cramped waiting room, a measly thing that could only boast of four plastic IKEA chairs. The air was musty with an old-bookstore style carpet mold, a distinct two-star hotel sort of smell. It was a small shop. It was a different world inside, much smaller than the large squat block that the storefront suggested, and it only reinforced Anton’s thought that he was running on a fool’s errand.
“Hey. Come on up.” It was only when Anton turned the other way that the woman finally gave him his attention. “You’re the only one ‘ere. We got time.”
Up until this point, Anton had frankly thought he was tripping. Had he stepped into an underfunded counselling firm? Was it only him that really bloody thought he could solve his loan problems by skipping a day? Martha telling him was one thing, but this…
“You deaf? Let’s go.” The receptionist was a lot taller than she looked when she was standing. “Before you ask, its Xue Qing. You aren’t getting anything else ‘bout me.”
Xue headed down a narrow hallway hidden from view by the most tacky and ordinary potted plant imaginable. A large poster on the wall, lacking any other decoration, read “QUESTIONS ARE NOT ASKED LIGHTLY.” in an excessively bold font, having lost its sheen of fresh copy paper long ago. Anton knew he wasn’t smart, but it didn’t take a genius to realise that it went both ways.
“The Watchers. You know them?”
The hallway was ridiculously long, and it took a moment for Anton to realise Xue was still paying him any attention. “Y-Well, no. No, I don’t.”
“A new customer, then.” She finally stopped, turning about to face a perspex door with all the energy of a toy soldier. “More work.”
When they were firmly seated in the office, Xue’s annoyed face was far from the most disappointing feature of the room. The office- or glorified cubicle, for that matter- was no more than three square meters. The plastic IKEA livery that had adorned the waiting room had been replicated, seemingly throughout the entire building, and Anton’s large figure was both squished and uncomfortable. A smaller replica of the ‘QUESTION’ poster, as Anton had come to mentally transcribing it, had found itself to the wall behind Xue.
“Saturday, was it?”
“Yes…I considered it quite carefully…if I lost it, well-I-I…I could live without it. See, the money’s quite import-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” There was a slight hint of something Anton couldn’t quite place under Xue’s steely gaze. “Listen to me. Deciding the day’s the easy part. The Watchers may fake compassion, but in the end, they couldn’t give half a shit ‘bout your life.”
There wasn’t room to fidget. Conversation like this had a way of suffocating Anton in a way physical space couldn’t match.
“Watchers?”
Xue took off her glasses, wiping them on her sleeve. “Not as smart as you look. Who do you think buys your time?” At Anton’s continual confusion, she twirled her finger, pointing to the inconspicuous plaster ceiling. “The ones up there. Look, here’s the form- I don’t have all day.”
The form wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, to the point it bothered him. Everything was too simple, too ordinary, too dull. Except the people.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“300 dollars?” asked Anton.
Xue had been fiddling with a second pen while Anton finished signing. She pointed to the poster on the wall- ‘QUESTIONS ARE NOT ASKED LIGHTLY’- then sighed. “What? Too little for two weeks?”
“No, it’s fine…its quite enough…”
“Good.” She was already getting up, ready to get out of the cubicle-room. “The sooner you realise how little your life is truly worth to them, the better.”
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Now, at this point one may think that Anton’s first missed Saturday went terribly. Perhaps he was hit by a car, and never got his money. Or maybe an unforeseen miracle? Perhaps he would’ve been hit by a car on Saturday. Did he save his life by selling it?
Unfortunately, reality often proves to be a disappointing storyteller, and Anton spent his Friday watching Better Call Saul on a bootlegged website with takeaway on his lap, ending his day in a mattress and waking up in time for brunch on Sunday.
“Where were you yesterday, man?”
Anton wasn’t ready for the question, and when it came he wasn’t completely sure about how alone it made him feel.
“Yeah, my god. That horse was a gift. A. Gift. We nearly recovered ALL of the money we lost the week before. Thundering Betty? I’ll remember that name for sure.”
The table was laid about with the ‘Sunday Feast’: five full English breakfasts piled high with a pub grub mess of bacon, eggs, sausages, beans…Anton realised with a start that he wasn’t hungover, because he hadn’t been drinking, because he wasn’t at the races, because he spent Saturday…
Ah.
Anton was a big believer of not using phones during meals. He found out at that moment it took only 300 dollars to break a moral compass honed throughout an entire lifetime.
With the 300 now in his savings account, he wanted to believe that the meal went smoothly, that the rest of the week would go the same way- a slight regret that would go away with time, that could be pushed down with money. He failed to convince himself that it was anything but a mistake.
“Busy these few weeks, huh?” A mistake.
“God, I said we were going to visit mom in hospital this Saturday!” A mistake.
“Betty just keeps winning! Each of us, nearly a thousand this week!” A mistake.
The final straw was his dog.
He knew Betty was old, but these weren’t the things one thought about when they sold their life for money. Her paws and sloppy lick across his face were things that were default parts of his morning, and across the span of years had become things that were ingrained within his memory as normal.
Sunday came and she was dead. Pale, still, stiff. What would she have thought of in her final moments, when the one she had cherished the most had gone and disappeared?
A mistake.
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“Your sort of people always come back.” Nothing had changed about the room. “Out with it. What do you want to ask?”
“Can I buy back back my time?” Xue mockingly lip-synced Anton’s exact words as they left his mouth.
“Yeah, well.” She pointed at the obnoxiously dreary poster that permanently lay plastered behind her. “Us people down here, we don’t ask questions.”
“Is there no way? I didn’t think this as far…as…I thought I did…” Anton already knew it was no use.
“People don’t…” Xue bit her lip. “Characters like us can never think as far ahead as we need to. That’s why the Watchers love buying our stories.”
Anton groaned, leaning hard on the wood counter, cold to the touch and sheened with plastic. “I just lost…just…”
“14 years of your life? Yeah, you did. People never think of it that way the first time they come here.” She pulled a little closer. “Look…sir. You have some friends, meet once a week, mom’s in hospital with something something, you can watch the races sometimes, you can move around to go to places you want to go. Get out of here. Me? I’m stuck here until the end of time, sitting in a chair, being a receptionist, not asking questions. Why? Because the Watchers didn’t write my story doing anything else. Enjoy what you have. Leave this place.”
“Leave.” Anton repeated.
“Yes. Get out of their sight.”
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The ceiling was made of plaster, a grainy surface with only a single crack, where an old light fixture had been removed and painted over. The room’s light was provided only by two lamps on the other side of the windowless room, and it cast a shadow that stretched across the roof like a spectre even in the early morning. None of the plastic chairs were filled, the air so quiet she could hear herself breathing.
“Watchers, watchers, watchers. Well, you’ve led another lamb off the path, haven’t you?” She twirled her fingers, pointing at the ceiling. A faux grin was plastered on her face. “Fuck. Why do I care? Looking down on people like us for sport, only to forget us like we’re worthless when you look away. I’ll never understand you people.”
She was no longer smiling, but her soulless eyes remained fixated on the roof.
“Did you have fun, dear Reader?”