I feel it when I blink. A tetheredness, something in my eyelashes, some grit or fibre I can’t find by touch. I try to ignore it, but soon I can’t think of anything else. 

Not that I’m paying much attention to the meeting, which I hear only dimly, distorted as from the bottom of a pool. No one expects anything from me after my appraisal, held this morning in the fishbowl corner meeting room, visible to everyone. My manager is a large man who contrives to find obstacles, choosing the narrow path, the low ceiling, in order to draw attention to a size that is his only meaningful professional ability. His acolytes in the office speak in hushed tones of his prodigious scale: his wingspan. Corridors bear the mark of his extensively extended breadth, the paint chipped by his encumbered talons – watches, rings – as he flaps like some vast scavenging bird any chance he has to encounter the limits of a space. I know this is performative because he has never hit his head, where his thinning hair, shaved short, could not hide the embarrassment of blood.

People are looking at me oddly. I must be pulling at my eyelids with a discomforting frequency and intensity. I hold my hands in my lap and imagine they are bound by dozens of doubled elastic bands, constricting and contorting my flesh, resolving the plain sense of fingers and palms into an obscure, waxy abstraction, the pain overwhelming and normalising, leaving no space for my Self. These are my Gloves but I can only wear them at home. If I could wear Gloves to work I would be much more focussed, were it not that I am also compelled to type.

My manager had motioned me in first. Gentlemanly. He sat between me and the door – became a second door, really, a clumsy meat-barrier halving the space, sealing the escape route – and I was pinned further by hasty, sympathetic glances from other employees as they scuttled by. This was, as Leadership likes to say when faced with overwhelming evidence of their relentless discourtesy, a feature, not a bug. They want me to feel on trial, on edge, these conversations performed in something closer to a coliseum than a confessional booth.

The people in the meeting are still looking at me, but now I’m sure I’ve done nothing to cause it – that is, physically. I must be imagining my Gloves with such certainty, such Truth, that their presence is almost sensible to those around me. I imagine that this dull ache, this deadening, has somehow transmitted to those seated closest, that they raise twisted stalagmites in bafflement and horror as the invisible bands tighten, and the people beyond them begin to feel the numbness tingle too. I imagine I have manifested a Plague of Gloves.

Lack of gravitas. Could be warmer. Question of trust.

I perform a function within an international shipping company. The presentation I’m currently not listening to regards the Arctic and has slides with the heading The New Suez Canal. The charts have a sickly yellow theme, in line with our company brand. Slowly crawling animations, unreliable and infuriating, are a final nauseating flourish. 

Don’t look like you really want to be here.

The meeting ends and I resist the urge to find a mirror. I have a clearer articulation of how it feels, now: the eyelashes are in the wrong order, which isn’t possible (?) but is how It feels. I have a better sense of its It-ness, and that allows me to ignore It more effectively as I gather the loathed branded mugs and bring them into the kitchen.

Few things have unified the staff more than these mugs. High cones with tiny handles, difficult to use, almost impossible to clean. The dishwasher cannot force water with sufficient pressure to scour any residue, and only the smallest of hands can comfortably reach the bottom with the thin handkerchief-sponges the company provided after terminating day-time cleaning staff. (Subcontracted, but still part of the family. Heartbreaking to lose them.) We may not bring our own mugs because that would impact the professionalism and aesthetic of the working environment. It would simply become harder to do our jobs if we brought our own mugs in. Anyone could see that. They were embarrassed to even have to explain it. We just had to compromise, simply reconcile ourselves to the discoloured, often faintly gritty base and the obscure sediment we would swallow. It is, as Leadership likes to say when faced with undeniable evidence of their corruption and discrimination, just the cost of doing business.

Just. Simply. Just. Simply.

I put the mugs on the far counter, not in the sink. My visible contribution has been to get the mugs indisputably within the kitchen zone. If you put them in or near the sink Leadership materialise to thank you for doing the washing up. Case in point: my manager sticks his head in, slaps the walls either side of the entrance, and says, ‘Those mugs, eh?’

I count to four.

‘Yeah.’

We look at each other and he leaves. My eyelid spasms as the tethered lash is pulled or pushed and I accept I need to deal with It. I know instinctively that It won’t be a simple, obvious problem. I know It won’t have a solution, just an adjustment. A live-around. As

always.

The light in the accessible toilet is different from the rest of the office. I often come here for respite from the sheer violability of the open-plan. (There are words for this. Institutional terms. Prison language that describes it.) When I hide here, I stand next to the full-length mirror, back to the wall on which it is hung, and try to peep at it without it seeing me. It’s as big as a door and when I let it reflect the room without me in it it’s almost like I’m looking into another room, one immeasurably improved by my absence. I find this reassuring somehow. It sustains me until I can get back home to my Gloves.

It is a full wet-room with shower, not that we have disabled staff. And we won’t: the CEO’s last EA was constructively dismissed for having bunions, as everyone knows. It’s not supposed to be used as a toilet either, for some reason. Officially, the room’s only function is for the CEO to shower after cycling to work. (Though he never calls it that. Instead, he says, lycra-ed, spread: I had a mini-peloton in. This means that he cycled to work with other men.)

Unofficially, the room has other functions, as everyone knows.

I face myself, as close as I can bear. I scrutinise my eyelashes. They are free, unencumbered with grit, silt, fibres. They bear neither mascara nor extensions, for they do not need them. They were once, rightly, my great vanity. Like some delicate, exotic instrument, I pluck lightly at them, checking for looseness. They hold firm, which strikes me as odd. Eyelashes come out. It’s axiomatic: wishes, and so on. What am I to infer from their refusal, here? Then I realise the eyelashes aren’t disordered. It’s that one of them isn’t mine, isn’t at all Real, is an Imposter lash, implanted in the red-threaded rim of my eyelid, otherwise appearing identical to her sisters. Which begs the questions: what is it if it is not Real? Why is it in my eyelid? Who put it there?

And finally, which one is Not Real?

When I return to the accessible toilet I am bearing supplies, gathered by some dowsing instinct. An armful from the stationery cupboard: scissors, plastic postal wallets, brown packing tape on one of those cutting spools. Elastic bands. I didn’t even attempt discretion, ransacking shelves, studiedly ignoring whispers. My phone chirped a notification – sending smol hugz xx – and I dropped it in my desk drawer while grabbing the make-up kit, overlooked by the off-boarding team, that was left after the previous resident was fired too quickly to do her own packing. She, too, presumably got smol hugz. It isn’t clear what I need these things for, but it is clear I need them. There was something else missing, I knew, but I couldn’t tell what it was until I got back to the room and found, sure as fate, a small shelving unit with fresh towels, and a door wedge. Both had been invisible to me before but now glow with purpose.

I lock the door, but that’s not enough. I tape plastic postal wallets together and place them over the thin gap at the base, then kick the wedge hard, pinning this seal on the unhinged side. The instinct persists to secure, defend, fortify, and, inspired, I realise that the shelving unit sits perfectly underneath the door handle. (I recall the unofficial functions of the room, which everyone knows.)  I tape the edges of the seal securely to the door and floor – the unspooling rasp loud and sharp, echoing in the tiled space – and slide the shelving unit in place. Instantly, I can breathe: I am, at last, unobserved, the room near-impregnable even if unlocked from the outside.

There is obviously some sort of pattern to the eyelashes. I am less certain now that only one of them is an implant, or that only one eye is affected in this way. I rummage through the make-up bag, find a pair of tweezers and – with a pang for who I used to be – I am delighted to find they are excellent, surgical: a rubberised grip for control, tapering to a precise, fine point. Whoever they belonged to misses them.

With somewhat more accuracy and method, I separate and interrogate each eyelash. The breathing strategies of close mirror-work return instinctively: those diving breaths. That initial feeling – I called it Tetheredness, though for no reason – has not grown more intense, merely my awareness. It’s lost scale, context, but if I was objective I would have to say it’snthe same feeling. This feeling doesn’t at all remind me of the large growth on my mother’s eyelid, beyond, around which she would glare at me with a filmy, pale-blue scavenger eye that stripped any sense of worth from my bones, that never saw a cause for joy in me, that never saw a source of pride. Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Maybe that bulbous lump always obscured the part of me with value, that part of me that deserved her love. Either way, the feeling in my lashes doesn’t at all remind me of that.

There’s a bang at the door and I make the noncommittal noise of the plausibly- shitting. I wait a while, and the bang does not repeat. As Leadership likes to say when faced with emails anonymously leaked to journalists, it’s just Being cheeky – ask forgiveness not permission.

I’m running out of time, I think, without knowing what I’m running out of time for.  The dowsing-instinct again. The room angles slightly downwards towards a drain in the corner, so the intended, impaired user wouldn’t have to navigate the raised edges of an enclosure. I place another plastic wallet over the drain and lay two of the towels over it after soaking them. Their weight secures the seal, or at least makes the leakage negligible. I turn the shower on, hot. 

It subsides, slightly, or my awareness of It does. I go back to the mirror to see if anything is noticeably different, but first, frankly, plainly, regard the face looking back at me. If I am as a stranger, it is because I’ve lost the edges of myself, recently. I removed the mirrors in my flat, even though the medicine cabinet doors in the bathroom will be coming out of my deposit. Initially I had just unscrewed them, but even under my bed they exerted an unsettling hollowness so I put them in a tote bag and left them on the bus. Ever since, a glimpse in windows has been sufficient to ensure I’m appropriate for work: that I look like I really want to be here, the quality prized above all by Leadership.

I hadn’t needed a reflection to see that my hair was becoming brittle. No matter how gently I brushed, the roadkill scruff of fur left in the bristles was clear enough. I’d snatch it free and hide it deep away in the bin as I do all mammalian evidence of my leaky, compromised Self. I run my hand through my hair and feel it come away, far less tenacious than my eyelashes, so I continue, in a reverie: not looking anywhere but in my own eyes, mostly gentle, sometimes snatching at that scruff, driven again by instinct. In some places I use the scissors.

I’m so focussed – only occasionally wiping away the steam from the mirror, only realising towards the end how much I’m sweating – the sense of Tetheredness almost completely subsides. But once there’s nothing more, really, to hold my attention, the room and the Tetheredness comes back, cruelly unequivocal. My eyelash aches and the noise outside suggests the seal isn’t as effective as hoped. In the shallowest part of the room, the water is now above my ankles. 

I laugh, lightly, musically, when I imagine all the efforts to fortify had somehow failed, but my manager still couldn’t get in because he was slamming his bulk into an unlocked door – or even an open door, rattling against the aperture, progress forever thwarted. I think they can hear me laugh, because the banging stops.

I turn off the main light and regard the space by the glow of various dispersed red and green LEDs. I click with my tongue to hear how the sound has changed.

I undress and sit under the stream, which stings my scalp. I bite the bag of elastic bands open and set to work. They scatter, float: I rejoice, briefly, in inefficiency, in poor planning, sensations I have never before been permitted. It’s harder than usual, wet rubber less manageable than dry, but I know that Gloving will finally soothe the competing impulses that comprise It: Tetheredness and Instinct. I know also that I’m never going to type again. At some point the shower cuts out – they must have shut off the water supply to the whole floor – but they still can’t get in. 

I splash for a while, contentedly.

Banging on the door continues. Shouting, but in no language I’ve heard before. I notice something in the low corner of the mirror: a dull blue indicator light. I slither over and press it with one of my new appendages and the panel hums and shines: it’s an anti-fogging function, which lines the mirror with a soft white glow. The condensation begins to lift, and despite my terror I stand and wait and – through the door, in that other room – my Self is revealed, renewed and thrillingly alive.

She looks like she really wants to be there.

***