When I
entered the cubicle in which Paula and I worked together, she was emptying the
contents of her desk drawer into a box to take them to another place, away from
me and “my bad vibrations.” However, pretending to be oblivious of her
departure, I dumped my backpack on my desk, sat down and focused on my
tasks.
‘You might as well use my desk,’ said Paula
with an overtone of remorse, which got no answer from me. I saw her pick her crystal
pyramid from one of the shelves of the cubicle, hesitate for a second and
then put it back, at which I promptly sprang to my feet to grab it and, performing a kind of mocking, theatrical movement, I dropped the pyramid, which smashed to pieces against the floor, a stupid grin on my face. How could
it possibly occur to her that I would have liked to keep it there? Shaking her
head with resignation, she walked out from the cubicle we would share until that moment... Hardly have I bumped into her around that publishing firm since
then.
Some people say that our relationship was
doomed from the very start because Paula and I were an ill-assorted pair and
nothing could have been done about it. What is certain is that I did not
realise that I fell in love with her since the very moment Mr Lockheed –-the
floor manager— had introduced her to me. And even as early as that, when he was announcing that the two of us would be in charge of the client’s
paperwork, I got the feeling that Paula was someone special. There was
something about her that gave me the strange hunch that love would be landing on
my life at last. Yet not an hour had gone by that some trait in the girl, a strong sense of determination and independence became apparent, however imperceptibly manifest. I remember vowing not to let my pride unattended, should my heart be on the line. To no avail, since her half-detached manners along with those deep blue eyes had made sure that there would be a landing, a crash landing at any rate.
As it happened, the beginning of the bitterness took place one day at
lunch break, with Paula’s salad lying in front of her, untouched, because she
could not stop reading a book.
‘What is that about?’ I asked her. So
engrossed in the reading was she that she just lifted the book a little to let
me see the title in its cover: Control
the Energies that Flow around You. What a title, I thought. This girl had
always been interested in things that were over my head. I remembered telling a
friend of mine that breaking the ice in relationships could be such a painful
business, however relaxed or self-confident one tried to be.
Soon Paula began to give me the cold
shoulder: she would enter our cubicle without as much as a mere hello, settle
down to work and remain disturbingly silent for most of the time. Why disturbingly?
On Monday mornings, for instance, we used to tell each other what we had done
during the weekend. Not that we chatted our heads away but at least on those
occasions I had felt better.
When I told that friend of mine about the
affair, he said: ‘Can’t you see? By her standards you must be a dull guy... or
there must be something wrong with you...’ That opinion made me brood over the
confessions I should have not made. ‘My life is going to the dogs,’ I had once
told her, and so it seemed because I had been going through a series of
misfortunes, among them, being robbed of my wallet and flunking a couple of
final exams. In such cases, however, one should expect a word of sympathy from
people close to you. Instead, as I was telling her these things, she gaped at
me with a vacant expression, as if pieces of an horrific puzzle fell into place.
The worst was still to come, though.
Rotating the position of the stationary on
her desk had been a harmless, weird thing to do at first, but then changing her
PC monitor from its usual position so I could no longer see her face made me
really upset.
‘Why is that? Don’t you want to see me
anymore?’ I asked her, my voice straining not to sound hurt.
‘You could do with a bit of changing as
well,’ she replied dismissively. And it was at that moment that she produced
from her handbag a glass pyramid that flashed like a sparkling diamond.
‘That’s for keeps, isn’t it,’ I asked her.
‘Even if I told you, you wouldn’t
understand,’ she said dryly.
The crystal pyramid was an esoteric stuff,
it occurred to me, and that started me suspecting that Paula had got into some
mystical fad and that perhaps I was playing a villain, say, an evil spirit in
this story.
Now, I wish I could be the kind of guy who
can make friends easily, but I am unfortunately not, so I was left to sulk at
my desk most of the time when I was not working with her around because, by
then, hardly did she speak to me.
One morning, sick with this situation, I
decided to put an end to it. My plan was to pull her out of her detachment by
making her mad at me. The darn book she read every time she took a break would
do the trick. So before she arrived, I got hold of it from
her desk drawer, opened it at random and happened to read:
“Chapter 7 BE WARNED: OTHER’S ENERGY CAN DO
YOU HARM (...) beware of those who carry the burden of great failures. You
should now clearly see their frustration branded on their brows. What you have
to do is to block their negative energy by keeping yourself out of their
eyesight scope if they were close enough to affect your aura...”
What a hell was that! I thought that my mate
was a sensible girl whose thinking lived up to education at college. Leafing
through a few pages, then I came across:
“It is especially the energy of the
non-easygoing type that you must be protected from, for it can alter and
disrupt your own flowing circuit. The crystal pyramid will serve as a pivot for
redirectioning its ill forces...”
‘What are you doing with that?’ I suddenly
heard Paula hiss behind me. She must have expected to startle me but I kept
motionless, carried away by the rubbish in that book. Her
nothing-can-affect-my-world expression dissolved for once when, aghast, I stared
at her.
‘So you believe in this bullshit?’ I
demanded as I brandished the book at her face.
‘It’s pure consciousness of the energy that
flows in the universe...’
‘It’s pure insanity!’
The noises around the floor died down and,
out of embarrassment, I stalked out of the cubicle.
Later,
I was informed by Mr Lockheed in his office that Paula would not be working
with me anymore, plus a new recruit would be filling for her. I was about to
make a strong complaint about her attitude toward me but I got cold feet.
Everybody knew that old Mr Lockheed had a soft spot for Paula, besides... well,
I had gone off her deep blue eyes and perhaps more than that...
Pure insanity, I said again when,
horrified, I happened to notice another crystal pyramid on a shelf in that man’s
office.
The following day, Paula would be taking her
stuff from the cubicle to another place in the company, thus terminating our
working and already inexistent relationship. I swore that even if I were dying
to confirm whether her outrageous beliefs were responsible for what had
happened, I would forget all about it. She may have attained the gift of
levitation by now, but I do not give a damn.
Written by Eusebio Natanael
