policemen, who would proceed to interrogate him inside a small room without windows, where perhaps his counterfeiting activities would also be discovered. Nevertheless, nothing ever happened. Perhaps commuters were too preoccupied with thoughts of how they would spend their evenings to notice the subtle movements of his fingers.
For a brief period of time he attained a certain level of confidence and no longer worried about the possibility of being caught. However, it was an act that required a great degree of care and had to be performed at a tempo which would render his movements almost invisible, so that it seemed as if he had only given rise to a vague moment of shuffling or writhing that was indistinguishable from the many other anonymous movements of the crowd. He felt it was akin to a theatrical performance, one that had to be hidden from view, but which had originally needed as much practice and effort as that required by a stage actor. At first he would spend hours staring at himself in a tall mirror, mimicking his actions many times, until he became conscious of every last movement that he made, and was capable of manipulating his body into all manner of postures and poses.
Before depositing an object, it was of paramount importance that he first observe the crowd and decide which individuals were suitable candidates. He could always tell which commuter might be too sensitive or anxious for him to work on with impunity. There were always those passengers whose distraction or exhaustion or anomie left them seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was anyone else surrounding them at all. After rapidly assessing each candidate’s particulars, and ruling out the obvious dangers, Maximilian would select his targets on the basis of their appearance: the way their faces spoke to him, attracting or repelling him, suggesting particular professions or ways of living. For the most part, he chose whoever appeared to be most empty, inert, and lacking in feeling. He found that he could not help but want to jolt such people into some more “genuine” state of being, even if only for a moment or two.
He was never caught, though there were a few close calls. Certain individuals could always sense when their personal space had been trespassed, no matter what their faces communicated. A vague twitch, dimly felt, at the top of a thigh, was more than enough to arouse suspicions. Then one of the throng of commuters might suddenly come to life, startled for reasons that he or she couldn’t quite articulate, moving their heads to and fro to survey their fellow passengers and find someone to blame for their peculiar feelings of unrest. Undoubtedly it helped that Maximilian was only 5’ 2” tall. At that size he was more easily dismissed by taller people, who tend to discount shorter people when it comes to assessing threats. Maximilian often thought that the ideal agent for this particular project would be a child or a dwarf.
The best moment to act was when a train pulled into a station. Amidst the confusion of jostling limbs attempting to evade each other, it was reasonably straightforward to slip one of his objects into a pocket or a bag. Whenever he noticed a particularly large or loose pair of trousers with pockets that were easy to access, or a bag gaping open at one corner, he found it very difficult to resist the temptation to quietly drop one of his mementoes into the space provided.
After he had disembarked, Maximilian could not help but continue to meditate upon his “victims.” He would imagine their journeys home, the tiredness in the muscles of their feet, the look and feel of the properties to which they would return; the fact that in a few cases his actions might cause a quiet moment of rupture or revelation in the steady continuity of existence that most people were accustomed to inhabiting. He hoped that his creations would instigate worthwhile confusions: perhaps his recipients would ask “How did that get there?” “Who gave this to me?” “What is that?” . . . He saw their faces making their way out of crowded trains, ascending the escalators, passing through the station doors, and walking into the familiar and comforting tedium of the street, where the same newspaper vendor and flower seller sat metres apart, day after day, barely exchanging a word or a glance in the other’s direction. He imagined their walk across the rain-slicked streets, the same route every day, passing landmarks reassuring in their banality. The public house, the fish and chip shop, the bookies, the newsagent, the shops that were closed but didn’t bother to shutter their window displays. Journeying across the slabs of paving stone, a walk that added to the silent residue of other old, exhausted footsteps. And beyond each High Street the endless rows of identical houses with their creaking waist-high gates leading onto well-tended lawns and beds of flowers, before the advent at last of the long-awaited atmosphere of comfort circulating just beyond the front door, the reassurance that had settled over so many years into the odours in the kitchen, the grains in the wallpaper, the sounds of the children.
Maximilian wanted to interrupt this all-too-logical flow of events. Intruding—in a mild-mannered way, of course—he hoped to disrupt the sense of inevitability that pervaded such a scene. He imagined the few amongst the millions of men in black hats and suits who would rummage in their pockets and look for their keys, in the process discovering the unfamiliar outlines of an object that they would proceed to hold up to the diminishing light still trickling from the sky: an object that would reveal itself as a strange intruder, perhaps causing a faint wrinkle to impress itself upon their brows.
Most of his recipients would merely shrug their shoulders, he knew, whatever the nature of his gift, however extraordinary its qualities; then again, many would never even find them, or perhaps would assume that the objects were in fact their own possessions. But even if this were the case, Maximilian delighted in the fact that he had discovered another way to quietly alter the prevailing formations of social reality. To shift matter from one location to another, causing tiny disruptions in the accepted patterns of the city: this was his modest aim.
After a day spent in his habitual solitude, Maximilian sometimes found it a perverse sort of thrill to join the stream of humanity from 4:30 to 6:00 P.M., to steep himself in the tension generated by this manic convergence of workers joined together each day in order to ensure their collective survival. Even without distributing any of his objects, he felt as if he were engaged in silent communion with the populace simply by having placed his body amongst them, a location in which he could listen and observe. Surveying their faces for signs of familiarity became his own sort of comforting ritual. He liked to be part of the crowd, keeping his secrets to himself, lurking at the periphery, undetected. It soon reached the point where these expeditions were the high point of his day. He would wait the length of an afternoon in eager anticipation, unoccupied, anticipating the moment when all the offices would close and empty of their workers.
He chose to end this particular phase of his life’s work when his eagerness began to be disrupted by bouts of paranoia. Nothing had actually changed, indeed he had met with nothing but success, but the early panic he had found the confidence to ignore now began to eat away at his own comfort, and he started to feel genuinely at risk whenever he boarded a train. Many times he would tell himself that this was absurd, especially considering the far greater dangers posed by his counterfeiting activities, but to no avail. His rush-hour activity had something of the sense of a physical violation about it, however minor. It was to this that he attributed his growing anxiety. And so he turned to other pursuits.
Occurrences of an Afternoon of Leisure
(1959)
(a series of thoughts, observations, queries, possibilities, and events encountered on the twenty-ninth of october)
12.00 P.M.
Maximilian sat in his armchair at home, legs crossed, pipe smoking, pondering.
12.01
He considered the many kinds of chairs in the world and their vastly different arrangements. This led to thoughts regarding the extent to which the style of chair sat in, and its precise spatial attributes, might determine the nature of the thoughts produced when seated in those particular conditions.
12.16
