the hot air balloon

I looked out of the office window and saw the hot air balloon. “Hey look at that hot air balloon,” I said, which met a unanimous silence. It was gliding steady and majestic across the distant countryside. Later, after I had already forgotten I had seen it, I looked into the equally forgettable sky, filtered and dampened by the tinted windows of the fourth floor, and I saw it again. This time it was veering jerkily, oddly, erratic and stupid across the skyline, only closer to me, the window, the centre of the city.

I wasn’t sure what was happening at first, just watched it getting more and more out of control. I tried to rouse the attention of a colleague, slumped over a computer keyboard and sighing heavily like a man without dignity, but it was pointless. He looked like he was dead, only livening up marginally for another cup of awful instant coffee straight out of a machine. The hot air balloon whooshed back and forth, much like a regular balloon does when you let go of its end tunnel, midway through blowing it up, and I imagined it making that humorous raspberry sound. I suppose it did look pretty humorous, but it was hard to escape the scale of this balloon, the idea of the people on board screaming deathly screams past the raspberry, swung defiantly around the city breadth and waiting for the sweet oblivion of a bloody mangled death when they finally hit the ground, the pride stripped even from those awful last moments that went on forever. It took some of the humour away.

After a few minutes of watching, the balloon reared out of sight in the direction of the Roman Catholic cathedral. I stood up from my desk and walked to the farthest window, trying to follow the balloon, to watch this bizarre journey to its horrific climax, but by the time I’d reached the window I could no longer see anything. Maybe it had already made its plummeting descent into the busy shopping streets of Wednesday? Or maybe it had gone further, carried onwards to the future by gusts and integrity? Either way, it was gone, and I returned to my desk feeling a little let down.

The afternoon passed slowly and without event, my attention interchanging between the computer screen, the lavatory and the window.

By about three o’ clock I had noticed a difference when I stole a quick observational into the street below. It took a while to realise, as it sometimes does when you look at scenes all the time, but eventually I saw it. What had been a beautiful clear – if a little cold – February day was now thickened with a dense white fog that had settled like an old blanket across the mattress of the city. But it wasn’t just a fog. It filled the air, from the top of buildings right the way to their bottoms, so thick you couldn’t see more than a couple of inches in front of you. All I saw from the window up here was whiteness, thick oppressive whiteness, a void of sorts. It was as though the world had ended whilst I had been looking at the screen, and just this one bastion of commercial exchange stood, eternally alone, at the precipice of some great nothingness. The rest of the world gone, into some cosmological vacuum, without a trace. It was apocalyptic, the fog, and I shivered at the thought of an eternity in the office building.

I looked around the office, terrified that I would be the only one who could see this, the cloud really the smog of my encroaching madness, but the others were whispering to each other, pointing smutty fingers with lewd incomprehensible jokes. I didn’t want to imagine the genitals in their business suits, but something about the easily rippled material of business suits makes it hard to think about anything else. Heavy squat lumps, stretched withered lengths, crusted baked flaps, forgotten overgrown openings.

“What is it?” I heard one of them say. He didn’t look up from the spreadsheet as he spoke, despite making direct reference to an external occurrence, a scene unfolding outside of the limited jurisdiction of his ergonomic workstation.

“Must be the fog they’ve all been on about.”

Of course it was fog. But the fog? I’d heard no mention of the fog anywhere, and I subscribe to eight different weather channels. If there was fog at large for which only the definite article would suffice, I would know about it, of that much I was certain. I knew the importance of the weather. But this fog was unlike mere weather, it was unnatural. And so white. It defied prediction. But yet this definite article, this ‘the’; it somehow humanised it, gave it form and motive, physicality and spatial existence. It was appropriate somehow. Unnatural, inhuman, but most definitely alive. And yet this was not the fog of dinner party small talk. It was something else.

Mumbles of dissent and weather quips surged around the office like farts, and I felt myself starting to sweat under my easy-care shirt. I loosened a couple of buttons, already felt like I was trapped somewhere underground and falling apart piece by piece. I went to the window, pressed my face against it trying to see some familiar landmark, any hint of life, but there weren’t even silhouettes or outlines through the intensity of the fog. I was short of breath, convinced I was choking on the air conditioning, panicking wildly. The sweat had dampened my hair and it was plastered to my face, huge wet rings under my arms and on my chest, and I groaned, probably much louder than I was aware because people were looking at me. I needed to calm down.

Lurching desperately from my chair I went to the lavatory again, to freshen up, sort myself out, do anything that would get me through the remaining hour and half before I could go home. I looked at my face in the mirror. My nose was so red. What is always this red? And my cheeks too, I looked like a burns victim, blotchy under the halogen. I wanted to slap my face, and did, then splashed it with the tepid water from the tap. Fuck, I was dying. I must have been dying. I pissed into the pristine porcelain of the sink, and tried out different smiles for size on my reflection.

The lift chimed its presence on the fourth floor when I moved out of the toilet door. Something made me stop when I heard it, and I looked back at the two men stepping from its proximity. They were suit clad and as bald as bald babies, without a hair on their heads, not even eyebrows. I was slightly taken aback by such hairlessness, more so by the fact that they were laughing and joking amongst the pair of them, as businessmen will:

“So I gives her one in the ripply buttocks!”

“Fucking climbing frame!”

“Creosote soups for families everywhere, cunt it!”

“Getta fuckin’ loada that calculator sum!”

“CHILDSPLAY!”

Bald yet joking, it was disorientating for me, and with the sweat creeping back under my second hairline I pressed myself back into the cool white wall and let the bald men pass me in moist-palmed self congratulation, through the door and to where they came from.

“Fuck,” I said, or meant to.

I wiped my cuff across the breadth of my forehead and went into the office, but screamed aloud as soon as I had done so. Suddenly the world had fucked me.

Where once had stood stocky men with short backs and sides, or women layered and enshrouded with the fruits of their gender, or sideburns, or pony tails, there was nothing. Now there was nothing. Just bald pates, cue balls, postmodern fruits, slapheads. Nothing.

They were all bald!

They had all lost their hair!

Every last follicle!

Hollow and hairless!

Lumps of skin they were!

Hairless office workers they had become!

As bald as mistakes!

Their faces had grown from the exposure, bizarre new life forms sprouted from the
features!

My god, it was hideous!

I felt gazes hitting me and threw my eyes desperately to the window. And then it hit me. Of course! The balloon had been a weapon, a kamikaze inflatable! It was loaded with this inexplicable synthetic nightmare. And now they were bald, all of them, bald.

It must be the air conditioning. It was in the air conditioning.

But then…

I had the feeling that I had shit myself, that it was the only logical act left to
me, but there was no warmth, no solidity, no bulk. Nothing. Just another feeling.

If it was in the air conditioning then…

Then…

Panicked I ran back to the toilet, flung my reflection into the polished glass of the mirror. My hair was there but looked so frail, like it was hovering inches above the surface of my scalp. I put my hand up to it and it fell out in thick greasy clumps, just stroked off of my head like the hair from a moulting cat. It fell into the sink and onto the floor at my feet, and I puked as I rubbed it away, erasing it as though already a memory, wiping it away from the future. I felt so bald and tried to smile but I didn’t recognise me.

I thought I must have been dead when amidst the voices chiming with bravado and camaraderie I was lifted from the ground and carried back through the secure doors and into the thick of the open plan nightmare, set down unsteady and reeking of stomach and there in front of my now bald boss, who smiled and looked strangely like a woman and with a hand on each of my shoulders said:

“That’s it, that’s it, we can all do it and welcome. A harmonious life lived well amongst the bald. Adaptation spells remuneration. Colonize the skin.”

I puked again, a vomit of resignation.

It was business.