A square of cardboard stuck to the wall. Or is it part of the wall? You come closer. An undulating surface of corrugated grooves and, between the horizontal edges and the wall, dark interstitial spaces that mirror the shadowed stripes of its surface. Closer still. Mycelia of fibre fraily fanning, faint hairs you need only rub to dislodge and free. And you do rub, with curiosity, this discrepant square on the wall of your office in the building in the city where you live.
Push.
The cardboard gives a little, and the dark spaces widen, alerting you to a lacuna in the concrete structure of your working life. This irregular disjunct in the architecture of your travails disturbs you. But it is a disturbance you cherish, woven as it is into the performance-based commitment that has driven you to examine the facade here, woven into the very structure of who you are.
Push again.
You see that though the cardboard is of a thickness and stiffness and is attached by a sufficiently effective adhesive that there is moderately more give on increased pressure, you have reached, at the very least, diminishing returns and are likely close to the limit of the inward curvature your index finger can comfortably effect. There is, however, more than one way to skin a cat, and should you insist on penetrating beyond the cardboard to examine further the hidden space beneath, no more than a short sharp punch would do the trick.
But as much as you may wish to know what lies behind the surface, the question must arise as to whether or not you can justify further scrutiny. There, indeed, is the rub. Employee ethics certainly extend past regular working hours into voluntary presence on company premises (as applicable now) and, in certain respects, are infinitely extendable— (consider confidentiality agreements). Mere will is not enough, there must also be a way… And so you deem it prudent to begin a mental accounting of possible contract clauses under which your actions—considering reasonable allowances for interpretative divergence—may or may not be later judged.
Concentrate.
Based on your most recent re-reading of your work contract (so far as you can visualize it), you identify the most germane section of the text—“Damaging of Company Property” according to which, it is apparent that to mutilate the square of cardboard in any way for whatever reason must be construed as riskful. The precise level of risk is less clear. Contract provisions present themselves in hierarchical priority, after all, with some breaches bearing true legal jeopardy and others falling within the domain of internal discipline. Further confusing considerations is the fact that there may be, lodged in this structure, both breaches of rules and mere breaches of etiquette, or breaches that are ambiguous in terms of that distinction and, therefore, require a somewhat arbitrary disentangling.
In this particular case, though the monetary value of the cardboard is surely negligible—and so its material destruction entails no jeopardy in itself, its functionality (yet to be established) may imply financial consequences above and beyond its intrinsic value. This leads to the branching considerations of maintaining the cardboard’s physical integrity and of maintaining its function. The first branch may be secured conditional on the non-destructive removal of the cardboard—for example, by dissolving the adhesive that attaches it to the wall so that it can be safely pulled off. But the second branch, to be reliably secured, requires knowledge of the intended function of the cardboard. And so such must be investigated in order to clear a path forward. To have established that, at least, is a relief.
Focus.
One possible function of the cardboard, you ascertain, is simply to cover—for aesthetic reasons—the hole immediately behind it. But if this is the sole function, it makes the enterprise a rather uninteresting one as the square’s removal will result only in a space no more revealing than what lies over it. There are, though, several epistemically more promising possibilities. One of which is draft—it is quite possible that the cardboard separates two areas of unequal air pressure such that its absence would result in a discomfiting current. The positioning of the cardboard at roughly eye-level and in close proximity to the desk of your colleague, Anita, who you know to be of a physically sensitive nature, lends more credence to this theory. Conversely, the presence of the interstitial spaces detracts from its likelihood, as, if the goal is to prevent air flowing through a hole, then, presumably, a priority would be to cover that hole fully. But the positioning of the interstitial spaces, which deny such closure, seems deliberately precise.
An enigma…
Your musings are abruptly interrupted by a beeping sound that signals a colleague is entering a code on the electronic panel of the door of your office and is about to intrude into your physical and psychological space. You have found in the cardboard an intellectual refreshment suddenly threatened. If this puzzle has been previously solved by someone else, and that someone is the someone now entering (the door swings ominously ajar) or is someone aware of the solution from a third party, you may soon be, given your position near the cardboard, subject to an unwelcome outburst. This realization crackles through you, and, in the split second before you are confronted by the unknown interloper, and without any calculative thought at all, you act decisively, jumping and twisting boldly away from the wall while splaying your legs and pirouetting balletically (or so you imagine) upwards. It is at the apex of this upward maneuver that first eye-contact is made, and, as you lack the time to construct an appropriate expression to frame said movement with an impression of emotional coherence (and are having difficulty even imagining such an expression), it’s likely what is impressed upon the intruder is, instead, a rather bizarre combination of facial and bodily comportment. And so, you realize, even before you land and complete your move, that some explanation is required in order to mitigate the psychological disturbance you have likely just imparted.
And you land.
‘Exercise,’ you say.
The man staring at you, a colleague named Bernard, pauses, then grunts and walks away towards his desk. Easy… But what concerns you now is Bernard’s likely angle of view from his destination, as this may determine the possibility of discreetly completing your mission. You wait for the man to seat himself and settle into a stable position so that you can begin preliminary calculations. He sits, opens a drawer, rummages around, turns in his swivel chair, grabs his mouse, and orientates himself towards his screen. As you now consider him satisfactorily stable and reckon yourself to be just outside (probably by about 10°) the 180° benchmark that you consider a safe angle of view, you continue your work, committing to regular, precisely timed, neck-twisting checks to make sure no readjustments are needed.
Refocus.
The cardboard.
Definite elimination of the possibility of draft as the reason for the cardboard’s presence is a fairly elementary task. You note that a thin fibre (such as, for example, a human hair, of which many of suitable length are currently available on your scalp) held in front of one of the interstitial spaces will waft noticeably back and forth in any passing air current (and a number of experimental controls involving dangling the fibre elsewhere in the room will be carried out to dispel potential error). In order to further elucidate the nature of the draft so discovered—if indeed it is—a moistened finger held closely to one or both spaces has the potential to provide information on temperature which could be crucial in terms of your final conclusion.
Resolved, you pluck from your scalp a hair. But between the plucking and the placing of the hair anteriorly in relation to the upper interstitial space—which you have chosen to begin the experiment, your routine visual check of Bernard reveals his body to be no longer at his desk but, in fact, as a hasty swivel action of your head reveals, in motion towards your current position with—critically—his facial demeanor indicating immediate communicative intent. He may very well be in the process of revealing, just as you had feared, the answer to everything before you, yourself, can discover it.
Emergency!
Your body, reflexively subsumed in the logic of your task and, therefore, once again conditioned to deal with such a threat on a purely subconscious level, swings into action. Your arms raise your hands towards the sides of your head, and your hands flatten then cup as they are pushed neatly over your ears, and your diaphragm contracts and releases a stream of air that, with a quick contortion of your vocal chords, effects a loud siren-like wail that cascades over your minimally arched tongue and fully encompasses your aural environment such that there is no possibility of external sound penetrating. Bernard’s mouth does move several times, but fruitlessly, and his demeanor, particularly his heavy frown, precipitates his rapid defeat. He shakes his head and leaves the room.
Success.
After some post-hoc consideration concerning whether your emergency action may have been a breach of company etiquette, you conclude that it is at least not a breach implying disciplinary action and return to your experiment.
You pluck a new hair (the last one having been lost in the previous maneuver), place it close to the upper interstitial space, and watch for movement. There is not even a shiver. You change position several times. The result remains disappointingly constant across both upper and lower interstitial spaces and control positions. With no air current detected, the moistened finger check seems superfluous, but for the purpose of comprehensiveness you carry it out anyway and avail of the expected result. The null hypothesis is thus confirmed and your hopes of a quick conclusion to this business dashed.
Deflation.
This, of course, was but the first incursion into the territory of doubt, but your previous expectation that additional functional possibilities would, subsequent to your initial test, arise for experimentation is not met with the imaginative manifestations required for further progress, and an avalanche of despair collapses upon you. All of a sudden, it seems much more likely that the cardboard really is no more than an aesthetic device, a simple slap-dash stop-gap measure (both literally and figuratively) in advance of a dollop of plaster soon to be administered by one of the maintenance staff, and, therefore, serving no important purpose whatsoever despite the apparent predetermination behind the placement of the interstitial spaces. So far and still so far…
What now?
You could shift your focus to wondering how the hole behind the cardboard came to be, but that seems a rather artificial move, considering the energy you’ve already invested in the cardboard itself, and also futilely speculative as no direct information beyond the dark lines of interstitial space exists regarding the hole, which remains, for example, of indeterminate penetration.
The world shrinks to this sad realization—to understand the hole, the cardboard must be removed, and this risks its breakage due to the immediate unavailability of a suitable fast-acting solvent that might dissolve the adhesive and allow for non-destructive extraction from the wall (this fact being ascertained from a quick mental accounting of office provisions). And such a mutilation, considering your deepened entanglement with the cardboard’s teleology, seems a much greater sin to you now than before. Your dilemma then is whether to opt for destruction or ignorance. Does the potential epistemic value outweigh the material and symbolic loss? Can you live without knowing? Can you live with transgressing? Is ignorance itself transgressing? Knowing that ignorance may remain, that there may be nothing to know, and only material loss, do you dare risk the worst of all possible outcomes?—To know you know nothing.
You sit and sweat and ponder and pout and look through the office window into the velvet stretch of night as if there in the void the answer might form and leap through the glass into your aching vessel of self. And though it doesn’t, you will wait. You will wait as long as it takes, with patience, and perseverance, and love. It may be the making of you.