Vertical Management Solutions

As he clung to the outside window of the sixth floor, gripping the concrete wall by his fingernails and taking short, hollow breaths, the man in the grey suit could only think about the meeting he was running late for. His tasteful tie flapped in the wind and his black slip-ons squeaked against the window as he hoisted himself to the next ledge. His arms and chest were adapted primarily for lightly tossing files aside. If he could stop to rest he would have felt the adrenaline burn through his muscles like an overloaded fuse, and the sweat pouring out of him like a sieve, but he kept climbing further up the tower.

The easy bit had come to an abrupt end. The ugly post-post-modern ledges that clad the building stopped after the fifth floor. Although helpful, the canted angles and placing — with the added weight of the growing pit in his stomach — provided a challenging workout as his body stretched and strained.

The man was frozen stiff by his journey up, and the way forward was now a sheer cliff-face of floor to ceiling windows; the one in front was shut and led only into a darkened corridor. The one above was slightly open, and another just up and to the left of that. There was a way up, only just out of reach.

He shrunk back into the alcoved window, mistakenly looking down. He saw the street where he had been standing just ten minutes ago, now populated by hoodies, beanies, and joggers: the surface world.

His way inside was blocked by an insurmountable climb. He knocked his head against the window. At the same time, the automatic light clicked on.

. . .

The sixth-floor janitor of Monolith Inc trekked through his day, trundling a battered hoover behind him. The office workers rarely spoke to him, and he rarely thought about what they might have to say.

The inner mechanisms of the company were a mystery to him. He knew they produced the bristles for an array of electric toothbrush brands. He never saw the memos or the invoices, what else they were producing, which paramilitary groups they were arming, and which clauses of the Geneva Convention they violated with every overseas bank account. Only a handful of people knew about that. All he did was clean their offices.

And so, when a said office worker appeared at a sixth-floor window in a crumpled suit and tie, the janitor wasn’t quite sure what to do. Any action may have broken the tenets that had protected him so far; that allowed him to go about his work uninterrupted, clock off early, and drink beer in the bath.

The man at the window had not taken his eyes off of the janitor the whole time he was consulting his personal philosophy, so he now felt obliged to open up the window and see what he wanted. It only opened at the top. A thin letterbox to let the air in, not quite big enough for a grown man to climb through — likely by design.

“Thank you!” said the strange man on the ledge. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was trying to get in the building, I have a, uh, meeting. I’m supposed to be giving a presentation, so you can understand why it’s vital that I get to the top floor in time. You see I left my security pass in my other jacket, it’s a similar grey and I stupidly picked this one up this morning, and . . . ” The man’s words fell out of his mouth like loose teeth. The janitor wanted nothing more than to bleach the men’s urinals. If the man wasn’t grasping the open window so tightly the janitor probably would have shut it without a second thought.

“ . . . and that’s why I’m asking if you could please help me up to the next window. Please.”

The strange man’s eyes were stung red and filled with small tears, but also plain unsympathetic. The janitor was about to desert the man for a wipe down of the toilet seats, but a tasteful blue caught his eye . . .

“You want my — what?” said the man on the ledge.

“I’ll help you if you give me your tie,” replied the janitor.

“What do you want with my tie?”

“I fancy it, is all.”

The man on the ledge blinked and all the wind-ushered tears dripped from his eyes. He made a head movement, about to signal no, but a sudden gust of wind nearly wrested him from his white-knuckle grip.

“Okay.”

The janitor took the tie, fixed it around the collar of his overalls, and checked himself out in a nearby mirror while the man outside tapped his cracked and scraped fingers. Good, he thought. Very tasteful. He then did as promised, pulled up a chair, and stuck out his hands out of the window-slit with interlocked fingers.

Grey suit man gave an appreciative nod. He raised his knee as high as he could and planted his foot in the janitor’s hands. The janitor gave a heave of his large forearms.

“Wait,” the man cried, “just a-”

The man flew upwards, and without thinking he looked down. The street below seemed very far away now, every millisecond getting more and more distant. At the apex, he found himself suspended between moments, outside of everything, separated from the building, and the world. It was only when the features of the street began to grow in clarity, did he stick out his hand, letting out a violently exhaled prayer.

His body hit the glass tearing the ligaments in his shoulder. His legs scrambled to find traction on the window, but all he could do was hang.

The next open window was too far to realistically leap to on his own. He called out to the janitor but he was long gone. Probably enjoying his new tie. As he hung, gripping with his fingerprints, he met his paralysed stare floating an inch behind the glass, sunken deep into a panting face. His collar flapped loosely in the wind. As soon as he got inside he would have to make a grovelling apology to his boss — no one is above a little debasement. The higher he climbed, the lower the costs sunk, but the prize for his efforts would pay off all the more. He would have a corner office on the thirtieth floor, with comfy chairs and a coffee machine to himself. A secretary he could tell to take the afternoon off, and an office of inferiors he could be respected by. That all awaited him at the top. The image sat there, an inch from his nose, in his office with his arms stretched upwards, dangling just above the beige carpet, while a cloud preyed on him from behind. Clear as day. Behind his own, another ghostly face, more haggard than his, was staring back. Pages of concerning numbers in one hand, and an espresso in the other.

The inside man’s stare widened the instant he thought he had been seen, and the Venetian blinds had snapped shut before the man outside could say: “He-”

He made an oath and shimmied along the ledge to give himself the closest thing he had to a run-up. Every ligament, tendon, and ounce of sinew in his arms were forced into overdrive, testing the suit’s sartorial quality.

The model office he had just seen propelled him with a frenzied lust. Although, if he had seen what had happened in that office to its occupant only minutes later, the terrified man clambering up the city’s tallest building may well have climbed all the way back down. But while a horde of police officers below were seizing evidence of overseas terror operations, the man in the grey suit was dangling from a higher office window, screaming terrible things.

After the vertical scramble up the base, the building took a not so gentle slope inwards, which the man in the grey suit was now lying at the bottom of. Every fibre of his body, and every fibre of his suit, was at breaking point. His body dripped with sweat, his face was red from the wind, and his joints were swollen from being repeatedly pulled from their sockets, but the first thing he did, when he was ready to resume breathing normally, was take off his jacket and inspect the damage.

The shoulders had torn. The few remaining hand-stitched threads were all that kept the sleeves attached, and although his elbow felt slightly dislocated, this was what hurt the most. That suit had worked at Monolith for all the time he had, and he had always hoped to outlast it. Just not like this. Maybe he could find a tailor at lunch and have it fixed before his one o’clock. He touched it gently, and held it up to his face, smelling the last remnants of his Friday aftershave. An unfortunate gust of wind snagged it from his delicate hold and sent it flapping away across the city. Instinct told the man to jump, but the jacket was gone. A grey kite sailing out into an ever-darkening sky.

The glass slope at least provided some traction for the man to shuffle his way up as long as he was careful. The clouds that swarmed the building were starting to sag under their own weight until letting loose their first droplets. A warning shot splashed off the man’s forehead hastening his backward shuffle. The bombardment began, soon forming a waterfall that surged around him. He could feel himself joining the current. Begrudgingly, he took off his socks and shoes, thinking that going barefoot would give him more traction. He let his black slip-ons slide down, hoping they would land gently at the lip of the slope to be collected later.

They hit the edge and tumbled straight over. He was now a tieless, jacketless, shoeless man, getting wetter by the second. His presentation would more than make up for it. It started in five minutes.

The slope ended at the central tower of Monolith Inc, an imposing shaft that jutted out of the relatively flat city. There were still twenty floors left to cover, but the climb was more straightforward; great windowpanes all the way up crossed by steel beams, just close enough to climb between. The man, in just an untucked shirt with bare feet, was sparing no moment and had already hoisted himself up the first few ledges.

The ledges were further apart than they seemed, and the half-dressed man had to nearly tear himself in two to reach. His joints let out an unnerving crack for a man of his age. The skin on his fingers was being lacerated down to the bone. Even when his legs were up and he could stand straight, the ledge was too narrow to provide stable rest, and so it was on to the next ledge. Another scream from his body, and then on to the next.

. . .

It was now ten past nine and the meeting was underway. The junior accounts supervisor was nowhere to be seen, and his lack of presentation was leaving an awkward hole in the meeting.

A well-dressed man from legal, flexing his cufflinks, remarked about how ‘Team players are so rare to find these days’. The workplace-Machiavelli played long and complicated games of office politics: inviting people for dinner, knowing all the temps’ names, asking them how their kids are. The corporate despot was thinking about what colour curtains he would hang in his new corner office.

. . .

The wind-battered and exhausted man was still making his way up the building, his determination growing as his breath gradually escaped him.

An office of data analysts, one by one, had all stopped their work to gaze out of the window at the body stretched out across the frame like a flayed animal.

What clothes he was wearing were soaked with — they hoped — rain and his forearms were a yellowish-purple splattered with red. The mouth trembled open as if about to speak and defend his position, but the heads of the office workers all bobbed back down to their busy work, and a second later, he was gone. He must have had a meeting.

Unbeknownst to anyone involved, the man had left something behind. A trail like a wispy grey hair, following him up the side of the building.

The man had become a machine. Seizing up and falling apart, rusting at the joints, motor burning out. But while there was an ounce of power, the automatic process, ‘stretch, grab, pull’, would play out until he reached his goal. His fingers were torn down to bloody claws. The skin on his feet had blisters, and those blisters were torn to shreds. Every muscle in his body was seething in pain and every movement elicited a violent and inhuman noise deep within his chest. But he climbed. Higher and higher.

The top of the building, where he should have been for the past half an hour, was drawing close. For the past few floors, no one had even looked up when he paused for a breath mid hoist. The closer to the sky you worked, the more the pressure weighed you down, a firm boot from the top pushing your head to your desk until your neck gave way. These higher floors, they moved fast and busily, keeping their heads down as they pushed through stacks of paper, tearing out drawers, shredding everything. The alternative was cold and wet. It beat down on you from unforgiving skies.

The man had been making unrelenting progress. Never looking down, always focused on what was coming next. As he hung from a ledge on the thirty-fifth floor, a suspicion that had followed him for fifteen stories found its way to his core.

An office worker taking a short break from dumping Colombian invoices in barrels of Tippex was the first one to notice, and as he pointed and turned his co-workers’ heads towards the window, the whole office noticed it as well.

There was a man at the window, hanging there with a grape-pulp face and lilac boxers. What was left of his suit clung round the top of his left leg, trailing behind it a stretched-out thread of wool. The whole office fell down, one by one, destroyed by laughter.

The man’s arrival had obliterated the office’s tension. Even after he had hoisted himself away, the data analysts still stood around coming to terms with the hilariously underdressed man. The tension that had driven their scorched earth operation had well and truly dissipated, leaving them and their incriminating evidence off guard. The skull-cracking arrests that came next were swift.

The man had lost everything but the shirt on his back. The top was all that could save him now. Even if it meant nothing to anyone else, he would give his presentation and it would have all been worth it. It would have to be. He climbed the last five floors in silence.

. . .

The meeting was going as meetings do. Going. Slowly, eternally. Suited men sat around a long table, nursing the last puddles of coffee in their glass mugs. Everyone was in each other’s eye line, and the empty chair — closest to the door and furthest from the front — was incredibly noticeable.

A man in a black suit, red tie, and cufflinks, soon to be the new vice head of overseas finance, stood next to a pop-up screen adorned with well-utilised charts and muted colours. The darkened room was draped in respectful quiet, save the scribbling of notes.

Above the sound of the storm outside, in that deeply important and secure meeting, six hundred feet above the city, a faint knocking could be heard from behind the curtains. The feeble thud of glass could be — and was, in fact — mistaken for a bird. But it came again, more regularly, accompanied by a muffled, “Excuse me.”

After a few minutes, it was clear the knocking wasn’t going away, and the man with the cufflinks went to see who it was. The man on the other side of the glass gestured that he would like the window opened, and it was.

“Yes?” said Cufflinks.

“Hi,” said the man outside, “I’m terribly sorry about my lateness, there was a fiasco this morning with my card, and I couldn’t get in. But . . . ” He made a hazardous move to peek over the man’s shoulder. “I’m supposed to be giving a presentation…”

“Right… Did you climb all the way up here?”

“Yes,”

“Oh. Well, um, blimey.” He rubbed the back of his head and sighed. “You’re a bit underdressed, aren’t you?”

“I am a bit,” laughed the man outside.

“The meeting’s already started. There’d be a lot of catching up to do-”

“Quite alright. I have a pen, um, somewhere.”

“Your presentation wouldn’t happen to be on projected quarterly-”

“-fiscal challenges and vertical management solutions, that’s the one.”

“Right…” The man with the cufflinks kissed the backs of his teeth. “I’ve sort of . . . given it.”

The pantless man had not prepared a reaction.

“Given it?” His lip trembled. “My presentation? You’ve just given it?” His knucklebones were about to tear through his skin, and his teeth gritted till a fine enamel powder formed in his mouth. “Did they like it?”

“I think so. I heard a rumour that this might land me a promotion.”

“Mmm-hmm. Do you think I could be let in now? I have several apologies to make.”

“Do you have your security pass on you?”

“No,”

“Then I think it might be easier if you took the rest of the morning off”

“But I-” And the window was shut. The nearly naked man was now six hundred feet in the air, pelted by rain, with no way of getting down. A perilous climb that had started with his first day at Monolith Inc had come to an end in the space of an hour, and he would have to take the long way down. He might have laughed if a scream hadn’t found its way out first.

. . .

The rain had quietened down to a light splatter, but the cloud it came from was now a dark swirling vortex of grey, bloated and clinging to the top of the tall, tall building. It was up there, thought the man, or down there. The city folded out underneath his perch, spilling out into the fog-laden country. Ant-like people moved about doing unimportant things, just as he had done before. If he had come this far it would be insanity to not go all the way. See the world before he returns to the surface.

All he could see for the remainder of his climb was his hands being planted one after the other on the ledges, his fingertips just drifting off into the cloud. His body had given up on feeling pain and made its last mission to robotically carry him to his final destination.

The top of the building started to slope gently to a point. He could make the last leg crawling like an insect, until he found, buried in the cloud, a cross-work of red girders. He clung to it, hoping he could look out on the world as a new man, but his vision ended at the thick soup of clouds. Above him, the cloud was thinning out into a crisp white, and then a glowing yellow. One last climb, he thought. Then I’ll head down. His hands froze to the metal beams. He pulled them free as he climbed, rising through the black tar-like clouds, into the wispy greys, and out . . .

The sun struck him, returning a healthy pink to his weather-beaten face. It burned in the middle of his view, rising its way to its noon position. It hung in a dome of the most magnificent shades of blue, splitting the sky into all its composite shades: amber all the way to the rarest pink-gold. The bottom of the clouds reflected the concrete below. But up here, the colours were pristine.

The man stuck out like a periscope, observing the hills of condensing vapour, surveying every soft, white peak. The heavy feeling in his stomach had gone after twenty long years. Nothing he had done today mattered, except for this moment. He was naked and bruised, with no recognisable life to return to, but for this serene moment, he would simply be happy to be at the top. He closed his eyes and breathed in one last gulp of unclaimed air, before letting loose his fingers, and being carried away on a gust of wind.

. . .

On the street outside Monolith Inc, a commotion was coming to a head. Office workers were filing out of the building, ushered out by men in suits with badges and guns. A wall of police stopped anyone from entering, only officers carrying evidence boxes of documents were allowed past.

Bringing up the rear of the swarm, a man was being brought out, flanked by police and government agents. The handcuffs went nicely with his cufflinks.

“I was set up!” He screamed at all the onlookers, who all looked either genuinely shocked or embarrassingly guilty. “This company will be the death of us-”. But his voice was shut inside a police van.

The least interested watcher stood some ways back, smoking his last cigarette of the morning in his blue overalls. The janitor didn’t know what was happening and didn’t care to find out. He only wanted to know if he’d be expected to come in on Monday.

He looked up and noticed an object falling from the sky. Something small, grey, and heading for the crowd. He decided not to say anything, and walked off home, while the streets were treated to a touch of colour from above.