Self Storage

A Serial: Episodes 1 and 2

It was with particular surprise, bordering on alarm, that K. felt his office door open from the outside one otherwise unremarkable morning. His back was to the entrance and he doubted the sensation so much that he did not turn around at first, thinking it a phantom feeling, or even a memory. A small presence soon made itself known, however. Its first sound was not speech, so much as a coo. K. turned expecting to find a bird that had somehow trapped itself in the room.

His eyes met instead a girl’s - perhaps a woman’s - small and frail as a child but with a clenched jaw and taught frame that indicated years spent resisting some force, like wind on a ship’s deck. Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you?” she asked, leaving K. with the distinct sensation of being himself the force she was now facing head on. Her hair was pulled back as taught as her body, her hands were on her hips, she was squared against him in a manner that made it clear above all that he could not possibly knock her down. He wondered if she might be an expert in some martial art.

“I am K., the caretaker of this self-storage facility,” said K., although it had been so long since he had spoken words aloud he couldn’t be sure they were intelligible. Language in the head is different than on the tongue, he thought, and made a mental note to practice speaking aloud more to keep his vocal chords active.

The woman looked at him without saying anything further. Could it be that he had spoken in a different language than he intended? Not too long ago he had opened a unit with Berlitz instruction tapes, and he had been playing them indiscriminately on a dictaphone he had found in a unit of office supplies. He didn’t care what language they were teaching, it was their cadence that pleased him - the repetition of phrases - the slow development of complex sentences out of tiny units, like a magnet attracting bits of metal and somehow turning itself into a machine. He had spoken aloud so little lately, and listened so much... could he have inadvertently adopted one of the languages from those tapes, even as his internal grammar remained unchanged?

“Well K., I am glad to have found you,” said the woman finally, in a language he continued to understand. But “found” was so odd - no one could be looking for him, surely? - that he held on to the remote possibility that she too had switched languages, matching whichever one he had absorbed from the tapes. It seemed plausible that there could be a language where “found” was a synonym for “met.” Maybe more than one.

“I am glad to have found you, because this building - although large - is so oddly shaped that it is difficult to perceive from the outside. There is a type of camouflage that utilizes an unexpected change of scale - an airplane the size of a fly would be an obvious example, but it can be equally effective in the reverse: a fly the size of an airplane. If such an insect were in the sky, do you think you would notice it?”

K. was having trouble focusing on the meaning of her words, because he was finding it difficult in fact to continually perceive her form. Her stance, her manner when she spoke belonged to a much larger person. Was she camouflaged in just the way she was describing? Her shape seemed to dissolve in and out of the background. K. felt dizzy, and steadied himself with one hand on the back of a chair.

“I am positive that you would not notice a giant bug in the sky,” said the woman, definitively. It was clear that she was right. K. felt her drawing closer, although he was now nearly on the verge of blacking out. “What is your name?” he managed to stammer.

“Joy,” she said. “But that is too obvious, symbolically speaking. So I go by Frieda.”

2.

When K. came to, there was music playing - a song he could not identify, but which felt nonetheless familiar. A phrase here and there he could anticipate; some of the melody as well. And yet when the middle eight modulated unexpectedly, K. knew for certain he had never before heard the tune:

Throughout the days
our true love ways
will bring us joy to share
with those who really care

“But Friede means ‘peace’; joy is ‘Freude’” he said to Frieda, who was lying beside him. She looked at him with pity. The song ended and another immediately began - this one he knew for sure, it was “Unchained Melody.” But where was this music coming from?

Frieda stood up abruptly, drawing herself as tall and taught as he had first seen her in the doorway. It was like watching a sail hoisted on a mast.

K. meanwhile resembled more a heap of rope left on a dock. Had he been asleep? Had he experienced love? He wasn’t sure of these last moments - or how many there had been. The Righteous Brothers were singing:

And time goes by so slowly...

in a way that made it self-evident.

When the drums entered big for the final verse, Frieda turned to the door. She pointed to a speaker mounted on the wall before she left. It was painted the same color as the rest of the office, and K. had never noticed it. “I’m leaving the music on,” she said. “There’s a dial under your desk.”

K. got up and reached for the dial, which he had also never noticed. He tried it gingerly, and found it changed the volume in the speaker. He turned it all the way in one direction, and it clicked off.

Frieda was gone, so K. had no one to ask why there was no other dial - if this was a radio, wouldn’t there be a tuner as well? - or where else this music could be coming from. As for why he hadn’t noticed it before, Frieda had already made clear: he had. There’s no missing a bug the size of an airplane. But including it in one’s view was another matter.

K. looked around at the familiar office, straining to see more objects hidden from him in plain sight. He examined the volume knob under the desk, and found it attached to a wire which snaked down a table leg to the floor, then ran like a rodent across the floor to the nearest wall, along that wall to the corner of the room, up the corner to the ceiling, and out the top. Dust fell in K.’s eye as he poked gingerly at the hole in the ceiling, and he scrambled off the chair he was standing on.

When he was able to open his eyes, he thought he could hear music again. This time it wasn’t emanating from the speaker that Frieda had pointed out - it was coming from the tiny hole in the ceiling.

K. stood once more on the chair, and stretched his ear toward the hole despite the dust. He could just faintly hear strings, swelling in what seemed like a patriotic tune. He jumped down - this was such an unusually athletic gesture for K., it gave him a rush of adrenalin - went straight to his desk and turned the volume knob. Strings swelled out of the speaker on the wall. Now that he could hear more clearly, he realized it wasn’t a patriotic tune; it was the “Can-Can,” played as if it were an anthem.

This time K. left the volume on, and fell back heavily in his chair. He sat there in a kind of stupor, listening as the music continued - from the nationalistic “Can-Can,” to a crooner smoothly singing:

Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over
But life goes on, and this old world will keep on turning
Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together
There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning

K. waited for those opening lines to repeat, but the singer instead stretched like a cat and meandered off, repeating an anodyne chorus endlessly, humming it, handing it off to strings and taking it back, changing keys, even whispering over it at one point with reassuring but meaningless words - anything except returning to that distressing first image. Had K. heard the words correctly? Were these banal lovers in fact saboteurs, holding hands on some lofty perch as they watched the destruction they had wrought below...?

A voice interrupted the singer, bringing this puzzling plot to an end if not conclusion: “This is the memory station,” it said, with the mellifluous calm of a radio DJ. And another song began.