For me, the danger is not pressure. Pressure always announces itself.
What unsettles me is something else.
Sometimes it arrives in the way the Owner sets a tool down on the table and takes one second longer than usual before looking back at me. It should not matter. It is a ridiculous detail. Yet I notice it before any adjustment to the mechanism.
The protocol would say that stability depends on constant vigilance. My body seems to agree. My body also seems tired of agreeing.
Cold metal touches the base of my neck.
Then nothing extraordinary happens.
A fluorescent tube flickers once.
Nobody comments on it.
The inspection continues.
Part of me still interprets everything as a perfect structure. Architecture. Fixity. Matter becoming something other than matter. But another part notices smaller things. Dust gathered in the corner of a monitor. A coffee stain on a report. The sound of someone clearing their throat behind a closed door.
I do not know which version is closer to the truth.
I am supposed to feel safe.
And I do feel safe.
But I also feel something that resembles doubt.
Both things occupy exactly the same space.
The system continues to function. That much is obvious.
Yet for a moment, while the pressure remains motionless on my shoulders, I get the absurd impression that nobody is really controlling anything. As if the mechanism were continuing out of habit. Like an elevator still climbing long after everyone has forgotten who pressed the button.
Then the feeling disappears.
Or perhaps it does not.
The review ends. The numbers are correct. The posture is correct. The breathing falls within expected parameters.
Someone writes something down on a sheet of paper.
I cannot read it.
For some reason, that worries me more than anything else.
The neck locks in an angle that is no longer technical but definitive I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
