StrangeReality

Life in a strange reality isn't easy. I frequently have to put up with incidents like the following.

It happened at work. Returning from lunch one day last week I spotted a half-smoked cigarette on the windowsill outside the office entrance door. I tut-tutted to myself and, after thinking about it for a moment, picked it up. I took it inside and disposed of it in a litterbin in the corridor, making sure it dropped to the bottom and was well-hidden among all the other rubbish.

I thought it was lucky that I had been the one who came across it, instead of one of the managers, who would have gone berserk and probably banned all smoking everywhere on site as they're always threatening to. As a smoker myself I thought it was extremely careless of whoever had left it. What were they trying to do, ruin things for everyone?

I pushed open the door to my office, and resumed my seat at my desk. (My seat. My desk. Whoever thought their life would turn out like this? I don't think anyone did.) There was a commotion on the other side of the room. I looked over.

Jeff and Dean, two of the company's blue-overalled maintenance guys, were chatting to and having a laugh with some of the ladies. I vaguely know most of the maintenance guys. My job requires me to speak with them several times a day. I can do a quite passable line of jokey, blokey banter when necessary. I am a master at conveying to them the impression that I go out on the town every night, bedding women and sinking foaming tankards of ale.

They saw me and shouted over. I said Hello back to them and pretended to get on with some work. A minute later, Jeff and Dean left the office to get back to their many and varied maintenance tasks. As they went out of the door they bade me farewell. “See you later, lads,” I said in a casually gruff kind of way. I am just a regular guy like you.

About five minutes passed. I got on with some actual work. Then the phone rang. I answered. “It's Jeff,” said Jeff. He jumped straight into it. “Did you pick up my cigarette off the window outside your office when you came back from lunch?”

They knew everything. I equivocated, playing for thinking time: “Your cigarette? The window?”

“I always chip my cigarette and leave it on the windowsill before I go into the office,” exposited Jeff, while I got my mental shit together. “Then I smoke the rest of it when I come out. It was gone just now, and you were the only one who came in after us, so...”

“No,” I said. “I didn't see a cigarette.”

“Oh,” said Jeff. “That's strange.”

“Maybe it blew off? In the wind?”

“No. Me and Dean checked all over the ground. Someone's had it.”

“Sorry Jeff. Don't know anything about it.”

“Okay. See you.”

“Bye.”

It was obvious that I was lying – that I had not only seen Jeff's half-smoked cigarette on the windowsill, but had taken it. The big question probably running through Jeff's mind was: why? He must think that I had taken it for myself, to smoke later.

I preferred him thinking that, rather than knowing the truth. I did not want to tell him that I had indeed seen it and taken it for the real reason I had taken it, which was to forestall a manager possibly happening along and seeing it, and launching an instant and possibly effective campaign to ban all smoking everywhere on site. I was thinking about all of us, Jeff. I was thinking about all of us smokers. I only had good intentions. He wouldn't understand.

Keen to get my reading back to its pre-internet levels, I've been taking a book with me to work every day, and devoutly reading it in the restaurant during breaks. I have always found it difficult to read in public. Reading is a form of meditation. You do not see many people sitting in zazen in crowded marketplaces, but you do often see people reading. I've been trying to become one of them.

Over a span of three decades I have done 99% of my reading alone in rooms – a multitude of rooms, of varying hues and dimensions, scattered in time and space. My concentration upon text has to be absolute, or as near-absolute as makes no practical difference. In public, I am rarely able to shut out the distractions of noise and activity in the vicinity. Reading in the restaurant at work is about more than simply wanting to read more: it's also about training myself to ignore the immediate presence of other people in more and better ways. I'm already quite good at it, but I want to be great. The ultimate test of my powers is to try to read a book in public.

The book is called The Mezzanine. It's by Nicholson Baker. I have read it three times already, and am embarked upon my fourth. I'm halfway through and enjoying it as if it's the first time. On Sunday I was early for work – half an hour early. I made my way to the restaurant, bought a cardboard beaker of tea and an oatmeal flapjack, and sat down.

I started to read from where my bookmark – a torn-off corner of newspaper, one edge flat and smooth where the book grips it overnight, the other edge curled up and wispy due to open-air exposure – told me I had left off the day before. The restaurant was not busy. It was Sunday. There were a few groups of people occupying a few tables. None were particularly close to me. I got into the meat of the page. I was doing quite well.

Abruptly, a hand shot across my cone of vision from the right. The hand's fingers seized the top edge of the book, and pushed it up toward me. I looked up. It was a young bloke named Gary. He worked in an office down the corridor from mine. He was having a look at the title of my book. He twisted his mouth and said 'Hmm' in confusion, not knowing what to say. He released his hold on the book. I greeted him, and he greeted me back, and said he was just passing through on his way to work. I said 'See you' and he left.

After he had gone I was unable to continue reading. I tried, but my eye was slipping off the page, returning to the start of sentences; I kept looking out of the window at the chest-high, uncut grass in the field behind the restaurant, and all around me at the other people. Gary had imagined that he had a perfect right to do what he had done – to peremptorily seize my book, break my concentration (my meditation), examine the book cover, and pass some kind of comment. It had infuriated me.

If I'd been listening to an mp3 player, would he have yanked the earphones from my ears, and held them up to his ears to listen to what I was listening to? No, he would not have. But books are a different matter. People feel licensed to interrupt readers, to take liberties with their reading material, to completely disregard the reader's privacy. I think that I know why. People despise the notion of people reading books. It's as simple as that.

It could be that the only solution is to set up a kind of perimeter, perhaps using some kind of specially-manufactured sandwich board:

“Yes, I'm sitting here reading a book. Yes, I'm reading it because I want to. No, I'm not pining for some social interaction. No, I do not want to talk to you. No, you must not come over and start chatting to me as if you're providing a welcome distraction. No, you definitely must not grab at my book. Yes, you had better just walk on by, as if I'm not even here.”