Joseph

It was on his eighteenth birthday that Joseph’s parents said he could no longer live at home. They had no savings and no wealth. And as lifelong renters they planned to move to a one-bedroom unit now he could support himself. Joseph did not love or hate his parents and knew he was entitled to nothing. This was a fair decision. Without complaint or protest he moved into a flat in the city’s south with five other strangers. The flat was small and, from a certain perspective, depressing. Two of these strangers slept in the converted living room. The others Joseph rarely saw because they worked night shifts. Joseph illegally sublet the flat’s smallest room, originally a utility cupboard. At night Joseph would breathe dust and sweat into the mattress used by an unknown number of previous tenants.

       Joseph got a job filling packages at one of the large warehouses encircling the city. The multinational company that employed him paid minimum wage and his commute to work was long and expensive. The train cost him nearly an hour’s pay each day and the round journey took two hours. Three, once when the old signalling systems failed. Stepping around the homeless people outside the station, Joseph would board the train each morning and stand silently in a carriage where nobody dared to look others in the eye. At his job Joseph packed flimsy plastic things into cardboard sleeves and boxes and placed them on a conveyor belt. That was all. By the end of his first week Joseph understood that crushing boredom and discomfort were normal for people like him. Resting his eyes on the long commute home, he imagined the barrel of an invisible gun pressing gently against his forehead.

        Joseph left home with no savings. Paid in arrears but paying rent in advance, he got a credit card to purchase necessities from the very company whose orders he packed each day. The goods arrived rapidly. He now slept under synthetic fibres and a duvet that crumpled like plastic. The pillows could be comfortable if crushed and folded into the correct shape. He wore clothes and shoes to work made from petrochemicals.

        After Joseph’s first paycheck arrived, he sent money to the companies that owned his flat and supplied his water, electricity and gas. As expected, the remaining amount did not even cover his credit card bill. That sum began to accrue interest the day after Joseph failed to pay his bill. Stressed and fatigued, Joseph saved money by spending his free hours in his flat. He did not have books, a computer, or a television. So he streamed free movies and music on his phone, scrolled through videos and images on social media, and tried to match with people on dating apps. Joseph’s thoughts became strange and sad during these weeks. Abstract and forceful urges surged and receded in his head and they made him wonder if he had a sick mind. Joseph video called his one close friend from high school, now living three hours away in one of the city’s satellite towns. That friend did not really understand the nature of Joseph’s feelings. Reassuring Joseph he was fine he quickly ended the call. Joseph noticed how quiet his room could be even with the electrical hum and the screams heard from the street.

        Months passed. Prices increased while Joseph’s wage did not. His disaffection congealed into something like self-hatred. He desperately sought some kind of escape or transformation. Vaping and drinking helped. But drugs—marijuana and ketamine—gave Joseph a deeper and wider sense of relief. Listening to his favourite songs while stoned, Joseph sometimes felt the glimmering edge of another world. Alive to possibility, he would try to memorise the feeling, to preserve it for use in his sober life. But he would inevitably return to his present—the cracked and mouldy walls of his tiny room, the soiled sheets on his bed—where the feeling was so remote it may as well have belonged to someone else. Someone better looking, fitter, and smarter than himself. With more options than he ever had.

        Joseph worked constantly, but he had no money, no prospects, and no idea what might change his life. His dating life was an abject failure. At his co-ed high school, he had gained some romantic experience. He knew it was not the lack of sex that pained him, but the absence of connection, mutual understanding and shared reality in his life. He yearned to have and know somebody. But in his daily life of trains, warehouses and supermarkets he met no one. At work he was too busy to risk speaking with his coworkers. The dating apps were completely useless too. A thin, undistinguished young man of middling height and unremarkable appearance, the algorithm condemned Joseph to digital oblivion. Being unable to afford the premium tier of the apps did him no favours either. With the flatmates he barely knew he began to visit local pubs. Sipping the single drink he could afford, a beer purchased on credit, he would start conversations with strangers that collapsed into awkwardness and alienation. Joseph did not blame them for their lack of interest. He was barely interested in himself.

 

In a warm boardroom in the city’s centre a group of people, mostly men, concluded their discussion. They would raise interest rates this month. It was the appropriate policy in current economic conditions.

Joseph’s debt grew.

 

Joseph tried and failed to find another job. Each month he spent hours sending his CV into the digital abyss. Generic emails he received said it was a “tough choice” and they would “keep his CV for future opportunities” that never materialised. Other companies ghosted him like the people he messaged on dating apps. Occasionally they would say he lacked relevant experience and education for unskilled jobs that required neither. Joseph was unsure how much his packing skills would improve with further experience. But education was something he could not consider. He had not performed well at school and nobody had ever encouraged him to attend university.  Joseph knew he was not smart. But he also had no savings to pay the fees and he could not afford to add to his growing debt. Even if he had money for the courses, he knew he could not pay his rent or bills if he reduced his work hours to attend classes. University was foreclosed to him. He saw it was a dream for other people.

        At work, Joseph’s line manager explained that the company had demanded higher daily fulfilment rates. Joseph’s KPIs increased by 25%. He was not paid more. The small screen by his packing station now sent cold, threatening notifications whenever his fulfilment rate declined over a five-minute period. When he received these notifications, he would stare blankly into the lens of his station’s CCTV camera, a sense of deadness yawning open inside him. Some workers resigned after the change. Others who complained or searched terms like “workers rights” on their phones simply disappeared. In any event, they were all replaced by other unskilled people desperate for work. Joseph soon started pissing in bottles at his station, turning away from the camera to leak urine into crumpled plastic that became warm in his hands. He had no other choice—he would fall irremediably behind on his quota during the time taken to walk to and from the bathroom—though each time he did it, he feared the company would punish him for exposing himself in a public area.

        Joseph lacked the vocabulary to describe how he felt after six months in his new life. Introspection was an asset he had neither the time, money, nor cultural inheritance to access. His body, insisting that he understand his suffering, began to behave strangely. Joseph would wake at 5:30am each day, feeling that he was being watched, his heart pounding and his breathing restricted. These attacks would pass. A strange inertia would then envelop him on the train as he gripped the cracked plastic handles. Fantasies of death and dismemberment filled his mind as commuters coughed into the train’s stale air and he held his breath. Sometimes he was pulled apart by ten different trains, and that men in suits would not flinch as they stepped over the pieces of his torn body scattered in the marbled lobbies of high-rise buildings. One morning the word delete overwrote all his other thoughts and he was besieged by images of himself turning blank and folding over like a piece of paper.

        At the facility anxiety displaced these terrible thoughts and he focused entirely on his repetitive and mundane work. By the day’s end, Joseph was so exhausted that he felt and thought nothing. The train ride home would occur without him remembering a single detail. Avoiding all eye contact with the beggars and the homeless people on the streets near his flat, he would return home and collapse on his bed. The eveing would pass as Joseph ate artificial food and tapped the glass on his phone. This habit gave Joseph stimulation rather than sustenance or enjoyment. He felt embarrassed as he scrolled past muscular men imploring him to lift weights and hurt women. The videos people filmed in their tiny apartments demanding his anger or his allegiance to some cause left with him a vague, inarticulable cynicism. As he scrolled he would occasionally glimpse his reflection in the phone’s glass. Joseph would then imagine himself neither happy nor unhappy. Just that he was here.

        At a doctor’s appointment where Joseph hoped to discuss some new, vague health issues—his weight loss, psoriasis and blister-like lumps, a perpetual sense of nausea—the GP used a questionnaire to tell Joseph he actually felt depressed. The GP gave him Prozac and registered him on the waitlist for talk therapy. Twelve weeks later, Joseph missed a phone call while he was packing orders at work. Though he would fall behind on his quotas, Joseph returned the call and learned he was entitled him to six telehealth sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy of thirty minutes each.

        Joseph began therapy the following week. Unable to take the call within the company’s facilities—there were no private spaces and the company surveilled everything—Joseph took the appointment on his thirty-minute lunch break. He would hold the phone to his ear while he sat on a concrete path next to the freeway. Cars screamed past and he pressed cold noodles or dry bread into his mouth while his therapist told him he must “unhook” from his negative thoughts. Joseph ended most of his sessions five minutes early. He arrived late to his workstation after his first session, his screen blinking red as if a crisis had occurred.

        Joseph’s first year at the packaging plant ended. His angst had settled into a hard sediment within. He now neither despaired nor desired escape. Recognising Joseph’s aptitude for his role, his company offered him a promotion with a ten percent increase in salary. Joseph would manage new workers and enforce the packing targets set by senior management. Joseph felt neither love nor hate for his company. But the pay rise would allow him to pay down his escalating credit card debt. He might even rent the larger room in his shared flat. Joseph immediately accepted the offer. Packing orders at a frightening rate, he then calculated the days remaining before would received his higher pay check.

        But as he worked that day, something snapped inside Joseph’s brain. The tether connecting his mind and body loosened and Joseph felt his perspective float backwards and up toward the ceiling. He saw himself packing orders and he felt neither fear nor anger. Only neutrality. From then on, Joseph floated about a metre behind and above himself, watching on from above as if he were a mere spectator, neither malevolent nor benign, of a life that was never his own.