Pavement Monitors

It's as if everything is directed towards the waiting-rooms, though M. does realise that this is only an appearance and that in fact the flow of people has been orchestrated from an overall viewpoint and that there is no 'destination' at all. But in this enormous city under this enormous sky it does look like all the waiting-rooms are final destinations at which the management of this flow of population ends. All these waiting-rooms: the hospital waiting-room, the passport office waiting-room, the railway station (the one in this city, little more than a building for waiting), all the interview buildings and their waiting-rooms with their water dispensers, all the enquiries buildings and their long corridors lined with these seats made for waiting. 

Seen from above, which is M.'s accustomed position, a barely regulated flow of people approaches all these buildings from one side, from a street perhaps that at one moment is completely deserted and at the next is aflow with two hundred or so, and then from the other side of these buildings emerges a stream in a perfect and steady exit from which individuals periodically peel-off into their individual doors. It appears that everything works back from these waiting-rooms, that the pavement-monitors are there to feed these rooms in a controlled way. But M. knows that in fact these pavement monitors would still be in place were the waiting-rooms never to have existed. Ah these pavement monitors.

At the entrances to all the main thoroughfares and to as many of the minor ones as our budgets allow, the population is funneled between wooden barriers toward concealed holding-pens where stand these monitors. A monitor is constantly in touch with sub-monitors, lightly uniformed men who crab about the street with wide sideways steps to keep an eye on the swellings and the thinnings of this flow of population. At hectic times the holding-pen monitor generally releases a controlled flow determined by his expert interpretation of the many voices coming through his radio device, yet occasionally he must resort to releasing people in batches which he is careful to control lest a family, for instance, get broken up, for being kindly functionaries for the most part, these monitors are eager to avoid upset when it is relatively easy for them to do so. 

On uncrowded street-days these holding-pen monitors, constantly radio informed, speedily impart conversational topics ahead - the talk at a café table perhaps - should the newly-arrived suddenly wish to hurry forward and to contribute their own voice (something admittedly they only seldom do). Also, I am eager to pass on to you, there wait other types, cousins of these monitors so to speak for they do indeed all emanate from the same building each morning, who sit in small kiosks made of green-painted planks and pointed tarred roofs, and their job it is to be an ear and a voice to a varied list of matters that ranges (for instance) from being an attentive ear to angers of any sort, even quite personal ones involving a cheating spouse, to voicing some inspirational words from the Bible or from Spinoza perhaps.

The functionary who operates all of this flow dwells in a tower opposite M.'s own. The man is tall and wears some form of official cap. Often he stands at a broad layer of glass, as broad as the tower itself for his dwelling is enormous when compared with the fruits of M.'s modest work, and from there he often gazes down (as does M.) over all these streets and their flows and their monitor-stations. M. looks across at this man sometimes, though the man never notices anyone from the buildings around him, M. sees him gazing down and he wonders whether this official is capable of the depth of . . . whatever feeling it is that M. himself experiences when gazing down. And exactly what feeling is it that people like M. experience when looking at this human flow? What's the noun? M. sometimes wonders whether he and, possibly, others like him are in fact influencing the functionary, whether in fact he can intuit what M. is thinking and is merely giving physical expression to M.'s own thoughts.