The Thing It Landed OnChapter 3 of 146 min
Everything here can be taken
Alan was sixty-two and had been at the same firm for thirty-one years. On a Friday afternoon in March they restructured, and the job he had was no longer a job anybody had.
Everyone was decent about it. The money was fair, the pension was intact, and two people cried who did not have to. There was not even a box to carry out, because everything he owned there was a login.
He sat in his car in the car park for twenty minutes before he started it. He has never been able to explain, since, what he was doing in those twenty minutes.
The fortnight afterwards did not go the way he expected, and the reason is the subject of this chapter.
It was not the money. He had done the sums and the sums were fine.
It was the dentist. The form said occupation and he looked at it for a while. It was the neighbour at the recycling bins saying you're about early on a Tuesday. It was a cousin at a christening asking the ordinary question that people ask, and Alan hearing himself say I was with Hadfield's, and then hearing the was sit there in the air between them.
He had answered that question several thousand times without ever once having to think about it.
Nobody had taken the work from him. The work was only ever a set of tasks, and other people were doing them by Wednesday.
What had been taken was a place to stand. For thirty-one years, when anything needed to know who he was — a form, a stranger, his own head at four in the morning — he had put his weight on that spot, and it had held.
And here is the part that unsettled him, which he did not have words for in the car park and still does not:
The floor went, and he did not fall.
He was still there on the Monday. Diminished, embarrassed, with nothing to say at the bins — but there, looking at all of it, in exactly the way he had been looking at things on the Thursday. Something had continued straight through an event that was supposed to be the end of something, and had not even broken step.
The list
This is where the chapter becomes briefly uncomfortable, and then stops.
Take the things you would offer if somebody asked who you are, and ask a flat question of each one: could this be taken?
Your work can. Alan's was, on a Friday, by people being decent about it.
Your competence can. It goes slowly and then quickly, and anyone who has watched it happen to somebody sharp knows it is not a slur to say so.
Your looks have already begun to be, and whatever arrangement you have made with that, it is a negotiation rather than a solution.
Your health can be taken in an afternoon by a letter. Your reputation can be taken by somebody who decides to, and the fact that they were wrong turns out to be a surprisingly weak defence. Your memory can be taken. Your people can be taken, and that is the one that does not bear writing about lightly, so I will not.
Every item on the list of things you would say is on the list of things that can go.
That is not a trick of framing. It is a plain property of all of them, and it is true today, whether or not anybody raises it with you.
Who is reading the list?
Now do what chapter two asked, because it is the whole point of putting the list in front of you.
You have just read seven things that can be taken from you. Some of them made you flinch. You are still here, reading the next sentence.
Whatever has been reading that list is not on it.
This is not a consolation and it is not a claim about anything after death. It is an observation about the last ninety seconds. Something looked at the removal of every single thing you would offer as an answer to who are you, and was not removed by looking. It was not even inconvenienced. It is doing the same thing now.
Alan had no language for it and did not need any. What he had was a Monday on which the floor was gone and he was standing anyway, which is the same fact arriving by the long route.
Most people get this exactly once, in a hospital corridor or a car park, and then file it under shock and never return to it. It is not shock. It is the first accurate look at your own situation you may have had in years, and it happens to arrive at a bad moment.
The list still matters
It does not mean the list is unimportant. Alan's job mattered; thirty-one years of it mattered; the people who cried were not being silly. A thing that can be taken is not thereby worthless — if it were, nothing anybody loves would be worth anything, which is obviously false and a monstrous way to live.
It means something narrower and more useful. They are things you have, and the having is real, and none of them is the one doing the having.
Alan went back two days a week eight months later, for a smaller firm, for less. He is better at it than he was. Not wiser, not serene — he still gets irritated in meetings, and he will tell you so. What changed is that the work no longer has to hold him up while he does it, and it turns out that work is a great deal easier when it is not also load-bearing.
Tonight
Three minutes, and you will want to do it alone.
Write down three answers to who are you. The ones you would actually give — your work, your relationships, the thing you are known for. No philosophy. The real ones.
Against each, write the circumstance in which it could be taken. Not a dramatic one. The ordinary one: a restructure, a diagnosis, a falling-out, twenty years.
Now the part that matters, and it is only a question, so do not brace for it:
Who is reading the page?
Do not answer in words. Do not try to feel anything in particular, and if nothing happens, nothing happens — it will come another night, usually when you are not trying. All you are being asked to notice is that the reading is going on, that it was going on before you wrote the list, and that it did not change when you wrote down how each item ends.
Then put the paper somewhere, or throw it away. It has done its work.
Before any more of the bill, here is the concession. What Alan lost had been working for thirty-one years, and the next chapter is about what it was doing for him the whole time.