A Diogenes Barrel

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I tell him. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I tell him. I was like a fairytale giant, burying his heart in a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, I tell W. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in the style of a Swiss mountain chalet?

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machine. I stared off through the windows. I sat on the leather sofas in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?