2.

I woke up almost exactly as I had the previous day, my son curled up behind me at the head of the bed, breathing softly, snoring a little. It calmed me, as did the blanket rising and falling steadily to my right.
I covered him up. At night he liked to hide completely beneath the blanket. It made him feel safer; he was still afraid of the dark. Like all children, he filled it with things both thrilling and dangerous, a feeling I remember well from my own childhood. I wish I could still see something strange and adventurous there too. But I know there’s nothing there.
I let them both sleep and slipped out of the dark silence of the bedroom, then everything just as yesterday: a yogurt, a glance at the weather on my phone, get dressed, quietly pull the apartment door shut, pass the dead mailboxes—sometimes I still look inside them, force of habit, though I know perfectly well the post office no longer delivers letters—and extract the car from the grip of the silver Volvo and white Tesla. Then a short drive through deserted streets, roads, and intersections. Today the traffic lights weren’t even blinking orange; apparently they’d decided it was better to switch them off entirely.

In the garage, empty spaces gaped like gums missing teeth, underscored by the reddish hue of the concrete coating beneath them. With the home-office system in place, it looked like Sunday had suddenly descended; I was nearly afraid I would be alone in the offices.
Still, some of my subordinates and colleagues were sitting at their desks just as they had yesterday. Half of them had their office doors open. They even seemed pleased to see me, or at least had gone to the trouble of pretending.
I sat down in my office chair and realized, with a vague sense of satisfaction, that today I would be here all day. Two or three meetings, lunch delivery, obviously, two lattes, invoice control, approval of salaries and any bonuses, reporting to my superior, the obligatory Reading Hour, though I could of course push that off until I got home. My mother-in-law would only be at our place until five, and I didn’t want to leave my wife alone with our son for too long.
My wife had never accused me of being the one responsible. She had never said a single word on the subject. But it was certainly there inside her, and one day it would burst to the surface: one day she would identify me not as the cause, which was how I understood it, but as the reason, as if I had, in essence, knowingly brought about everything that had led to her condition. That was why I did not want to break the new rules: until our son started kindergarten, I could not allow him to be home alone with his mother for more than a few hours at a time; I would arrive on the dot, I would not stop anywhere, I would keep to this regime. After all, what did it matter. I had already been functioning more or less like that before: out of work at five and then the second shift with my son deep into the night, back when he used to fall asleep late. A responsible father. A bit of a robot. A soldier. A soldier on the combat mission of everyday life.
All this, however, led to only one conclusion: if I was going to write under these circumstances, there was no way to do it except at work. How exactly I was supposed to manage that, I hadn’t yet figured out. A book isn’t something that writes itself. Word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph, then another, then a page… Everything takes an unbelievable amount of time. Once it is done, you put it aside, read it again with enough distance, rewrite it, cut and add, clarify and improve and polish and tend to it. Then do all of that several more times, until there’s nothing left to do, until my mental capacities are exhausted and I can no longer meaningfully remove or add another word. This sixth version of the manuscript was definitely the last. All that remained was to refine the final hundred pages out of three hundred; I estimated that would take a hundred hours at most. All it required was a firm regime, just like looking after my son.
And today, if my estimate was correct, I could carve an hour, maybe two, out of my work—though when I say carve, mildly, timidly, meekly, what I mean is quite consciously and without stress give absolutely zero fucks about work and devote myself solely and exclusively to the book. There’s no other way.
My heart skipped a beat.

“Twenty? Twenty fairy tales? That’s not nothing.”
My deputy nodded.
“Twenty… but did you see the budget?”
“I thought it was going to be half that.”
“Now you understand why I’m glad you’re back?”
“I thought it was for selfless reasons.”
“In late capitalism, very little is selfless, as we know.”
“We do. Even love in the time of capitalism has serious systemic economic and social constraints. What we do not know, though, is when exactly you became a Marxist.”
She swatted at me and missed. I hadn’t meant it badly. She came from a wealthy family that had allowed her to study at an Ivy League university in the States, and I still remembered the party her family had thrown, a quarter of a century ago, on the roof terrace of their penthouse, with several prominent right-wing politicians in attendance. She was obviously overqualified for her position on my team, but when her husband was laid off from a collapsing big-tech company, there was no time for heroics: their three children attended elite schools, and those were not free, unless she wanted to fall back on her rich father. People do change, after all.
For a moment I couldn’t shake the memory of our first encounter at her family’s place. She never wore skirts, only pants; it was hard to say why, and it probably wasn’t meant as a feminist gesture. She had them on today, as she had then—except back then they were pale, lightly acid-washed jeans that took me a fair amount of effort to pull down. Jeans used to be worn close to the body, not shapeless and five sizes too large, as they are today. In the end I managed to get them off, and her panties too, one of the first thongs I’d ever seen. All of it happened on the carpet in the middle of the spacious living room of their three-story apartment at the top of a skyscraper.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked, nudging me, while I was trying to blur out the image of the tiny black panties on the Iranian carpet.
“I’m still having trouble concentrating. It’s the illness, sorry. What were you saying?”
“I wasn’t saying anything. But now I’m saying that the meeting is tomorrow. Do you remember?”
“Of course I do. It’s in my calendar.”
“I read somewhere that the illness affects memory. So I’m asking.”
“That’s kind of you. I looked up the new guy.”
“And?”
“He’s worked at the company before.”
“That’s what I told you…”
“Oh! Well, never mind. So should I order moving boxes and we can shut this place down?”
I didn’t mean it seriously, though she knew I had plenty of experience shutting companies down. Sometimes I joked about it in front of her; with others, I would not have dared:
“Look, I founded a music label, and that very same year the MP3 revolution started: piracy, downloads, the end of CDs. If I were talking to someone younger, I’d probably have to insert a little historical explanation of what a CD was. I shut it down before streaming services even arrived. Then I worked in print. Magazines held on for a while, but later they went under too, along with newspapers, so I moved into radio. That didn’t last long either, so I was done there as well. Basically, everything I touch starts to die. And now I’m here!”
She was certainly thinking about it; the wrinkle between her eyes deepened.
“You wouldn’t mind shutting down this division? Or another round of layoffs?”
Wouldn’t mind… How can she ask me that? How could I possibly not mind? The first five hours of every working day, I earn money for the mortgage. I felt a stab in my chest.
“Look around—half the people who work here have been working for me for almost two decades. They adapted. They no longer write magazines, they write these texts. They no longer do sound for radio shows, they make podcasts. There’s always something.”
I faked a smile.
“I hope you won’t mention any of this at the meeting?” she asked suspiciously.
“Oh, they don’t know?”
She shook her head.
“Then I won’t. Seeing you this agitated, I’d rather not have the whole team fall apart,” I answered, and felt another stab in my chest.

I looked at the corner of the screen. It was almost three. Time for the second latte. Time to try what I had set out to do that morning. I made the rounds of the occupied offices. They were observing the obligatory Reading Hour, their heads bent attentively over texts, most of them now only on laptop screens. Bitterly, I realized that even if I finished my book, paper copies would probably never be printed; perhaps I’d never hold it in my hands, never feel its weight, never slide it in among its paper companions. It would exist only as an immaterial cluster of ones and zeroes, stored somewhere far away in the silicon pathways of servers.
I made my coffee and shut myself in my office, and with a peculiar urgency I realized I couldn’t waste a single second; a kind of nervous tension seized me, and I had scarcely sat down before I was opening the manuscript file—a moment for the contents to appear, the index and my notes, for the pagination to load—and jumping straight to the last edited passage.
Despite the considerable weakness and the headache I’d already been trying to hide during the meeting about the unusual commission from the French car manufacturer—after all, pretending that everything is fine is part of every good manager’s toolkit—despite all the aftereffects of my illness, I saw the text before me with absolute clarity and a clear head: its structure, its grammatical and factual errors, its weaknesses and strengths, the poorly connected dialogue, the misplaced detail, even one entire illogical scene, which I immediately deleted without mercy, along with a passage about the main character’s clothing. Had I really written a sentence containing words like gauge, weft, and calico? What was I thinking?
I read through the entire chapter, all ten pages, and piled a heap of notes along the side. I also checked the file on my phone, where I had accumulated several ideas or elevated formulations, and added a few small details that supported the central theme.
An hour passed. The coffee glass was empty; delicate cobwebs of milk foam were drying at the bottom. I considered whether to continue and try to annotate another ten pages, or whether to plunge into rewriting—in any case, I could rewrite one page at the very least. I don’t know why it was going so well; perhaps a certain anxiety after a long idle stretch. I decided to continue editing. Maybe, at the same pace, I could manage at least another ten pages, in which the hero, through his indecision, gets himself into serious trouble.
I ran through another page and, at the same pace, filled its margins with twelve notes, including an incorrect citation and an imprecisely used transtextual allusion, which I checked against the source material.
I started reading the next page and marked the first note, as if I were in some feverish state; it was going fantastically.
Then the second.
Third.
Fourth.
Fifth.
Just as I was about to start the sixth, someone knocked on the door. I flinched. I must have been unusually focused; normally, I would have peripherally registered anyone appearing in front of the glass wall of my office.
Another knock.
Who…
Anna.
Anna from marketing. I could not, on the spot, remember her surname.
I shut the laptop out of guilt, even though I could have simply minimized the text editor. Then I nodded and pointed for her to come in.
“Am I interrupting you? Should I put on a mask?” she asked.
“You don’t have to. And you’re not interrupting,” I replied, wishing it would turn out to be some minor thing and that she would not sit down in the chair by my glossy white conference table.
“Good. I’ll just have a coffee here and go,” she informed me, and sat down in the chair by my glossy white conference table.
And yet, however carefully I looked, I did not notice any cup or mug on her.
“I’ll make it myself, all right?” she said, catching my curious glance, and stood up.
“I can manage.” I stopped her.
I wondered whether to offer her an espresso, which could potentially be drunk in two sips, or a latte, which would inevitably mean a longer delay.
“Cappuccino?”
“Thank you. No sugar.”
“Of course.” I nodded. Of course no sugar. I didn’t know anyone younger than me who sweetened their coffee.
As I waited by the coffee machine, the grinder buzzing and the foamy milk sputtering, I wondered what she could want. Our company had an open-door policy; anyone could visit anyone at any time. Not that I had ever seen anyone drop in unexpectedly on the board up on the twelfth and top floor, but it was possible, in theory.
I brought water and coffee from the kitchenette and set them on the table. She thanked me (“You didn’t have to”—of course I didn’t have to), and I waited to see what would come of it.

“You have a library here?”
“Yes—we put books in it. Clusters of paper. Usually there’s a lot more text inside than just a picture with a few words.”
She let my remark pass without the slightest acknowledgment and took a sip of coffee. A few seconds of silence settled over the room.
“What do you need such an enormous library for?”
I hesitated—what was this visit supposed to mean? Only then did I really look Anna over. I don’t know why it struck me so late, but that day she looked nothing like the Anna I had filed away in memory. There were only two such files, nothing more—one from three years earlier, when our offices were still being built after the acquisition and she had wanted to show me where we would be based. She had innocently asked whether we needed any flooring done, because her boyfriend laid floors and would gladly take the job. Given the naivety of that kind of question—we were a centrally managed corporation with its own purchasing and facilities departments—what surprised me was something else: she was telling me she had a partner and trying to get him work, even though the situation was inappropriate and the request rather beside the point. And she was not ashamed of it; it was for her partner, after all. Back then she had stood right beside me at the entrance to the construction site, the sun beating into us sideways through the glass wall—too kind or too naive, I could not tell at the time. She had seemed much smaller to me then than she did now: a young woman with light, straightened blond hair, a thick layer of make-up, and bright lipstick, the way people do it today—anything but natural, anything that might bring a face closer to the most overused filters on social media, where in the end all faces come to look the same.
I also remembered her from one meeting, when I rejected a marketing visual and suggested Prussian blue instead of royal purple. She laughed and said her boyfriend, the flooring guy, couldn’t tell yellow from orange. Maybe there was a little admiration in it too, I don’t know. I remembered nothing else, although we regularly saw each other at corporate meetings.
She was dressed in ill-fitting, grimy-white clothes: a sweatshirt, trousers of indeterminate cut, if they had any cut at all, even white socks and white shoes, one leg crossed over the other. The heavy make-up was gone this time.
“I am convinced of the benefits of consuming quality fiction and of its derivative processes, such as the intentional acquisition of new knowledge, inductive analysis, critical cognitive function, imagination, and reflection,” I said, quoting from the presentation that had once finally persuaded management to approve a book-buying budget and introduce a strict Reading Hour.
Seeing that she was not amused, I added:
“Basically, if you want to write, it’s good to read.”
Her impassive expression did not change.
“I write enough at work,” she replied. “And I don’t read. The last thing I read was Harry Potter.”
“Harry Potter?”
“Yes. All the books.”
I wanted to make some remark, but my usual energy for sarcasm was gone. I’m really not well, I thought.
“You see, you couldn’t work for me. But I suppose that doesn’t matter in marketing.”
“I do social media. I’m a socialist.”
Ah yes, these new terms: impressionist, socialist. Though neither has anything to do with art or politics.
“I know,” I said. “I thought you fell under marketing.”
“Not at all. We’re an independent department. You can stop by sometime. But we don’t have it as nice as you do here.”
“I took some care with it,” I said, accepting the compliment. “I needed peace. Would you believe I managed to squeeze eighteen offices in here?”
Throughout the company, the prevailing doctrine was that open space was best for our corporation (one could hardly miss the word cheapest hiding inside it). I did not share that conviction—the proof was in the employees fleeing to kitchenettes or corridors, where they found more quiet. Perhaps Anna’s presence in my office was one example. In addition to the small offices, I had also had three recording studios built in the corners of the floor. We should isolate ourselves as much as possible, I had argued at the time.
“And a library!”
“And a library.” I nodded. “Today it’s just an aesthetic extravagance.”
For a moment, silence settled over the office. Then she complimented my plants, though they were still struggling to recover from my absence, and suddenly she stood up. I waited for the purpose of this unexpected visit to finally reveal itself, for her to say why she had come, what she needed—instead, she only said:
“I’ll go now. Thank you for the coffee.”
I produced something along the lines of gladly, don’t mention it, it’s fine, feel free to come again, which perhaps she didn’t even catch. Unlike other women who visited my office, she left behind no trace of perfume, only a pale brown ring from her mug on that dazzlingly glossy white round table.

I parked the car, nudging both the Volvo and the Tesla in the process. It was just after five; I had left work earlier than I had to because there was no point going back to writing anymore, and I had still managed to look Anna up in the internal system: she was right, she was not in marketing and had nothing to do with it, something I’d somehow overlooked over the years, just as I had overlooked her. In the photograph she looked exactly as she had in that distant, hazy reminiscence—straightened hair of some indistinct shade of blond, a confident smile. Most likely that photo had gone through a filter too.
I opened the apartment door carefully, unsure whether my wife was asleep. To my surprise, she was sitting with our son in the living room, both of them in pajamas, absorbed in a cartoon about a snail.
“I’m hungwy!” my son blurted out without greeting as soon as he noticed me.
Helena greeted me tiredly and asked how work had been.
I touched her gently.
“Are you hungry too? Did you eat?”
“All day! All day I’ve been trying to get through to someone, anyone who would take me.”
“Do you want something to eat?”
“And nothing! Three weeks at the earliest!”
“Should I at least make you some tea?”
“I don’t know where to call anymore. I’m completely exhausted from it.”
“Did you try a crisis center? Should I try asking around?”
“You don’t have to ask,” she said tearfully. “I’ve tried everything. There’s one more place I’m supposed to call. The crisis center, actually.”
“Hungwy! Wanna eat!” our son reminded us, without taking his eyes off the screen.
“Do you want spaghetti or porridge?”
“Pasketti! Yeah!”
My wife went to lie down in the bedroom. Our son continued watching the film.
After I cooked the spaghetti (butter was enough for him, he would not eat it any other way, and he did not finish even that), we went outside, after a small tussle over the tablet, in the direction we always used to take before all this; outside, the weak spring sun still shining, a mild wind blew across the open ground, and we walked through the park to the edge of our district, where the nearest train tracks and the nearest railway crossing were: barriers, crossing gates—šraňky, I told my son, though that was not really Czech; our family had always swarmed with Germanisms: some schmuck stole a flask of schnapps from my rucksack, son, can you believe that, and he laughed even though he did not understand a word, and I laughed at him too. At the crossing gates, which he referred to exclusively as ding-ding and which were his obsession, we spent an hour and a half waiting for trains to pass; there were few of them, which, given the circumstances, was to be expected, and he waved at every empty carriage, never saying much, only waving and jumping or dancing, as he always did when he did not know how else to express joy. We stayed there until darkness fell, and then returned through dark and completely empty streets, through the empty park and along empty sidewalks, and came home; the lights were off and my wife was asleep again.

Translated by Bruce Bybee