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ACT XIV

September 2024

TITLE: THE NIHILISTIC RETURN

CATEGORY: Work + File + Operator

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PHOTO 01 — EVIDENCE / SCENE: clinic / drainage / return without epic

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I returned to the hotel with my neck still stiff from the drainage at the clinic and my head already out of the building for days. It was not a heroic return. It was not a matter of “getting back on my feet.” It was something else: walking back into a place that had already lost the right to call itself a project.

The metro ride had no epic quality, only that dense fatigue you feel when you are not returning because you believe in something, but because you have not yet fully deactivated the muscular habit of going to work. The kitchen was still there. The steel. The absurd circulation. The same choreography of bodies holding up a structure that never fully took responsibility for itself. Nothing seemed different and, at the same time, the physics of the place had changed completely, because my body was no longer entering it offering the same thing.

Luis was one of the first to intercept me. He did not come in with medical concern, nor with that false courtesy that at least disguises the blow. He came in with direct reproach. He said the kitchen was in bad shape, that the staff lunch had failed, and that the structure had not held up in my absence. He used my medical leave as if it were evidence against me, as if the real problem were not the broken system, but what happened when I stopped putting my back into holding it up.

I listened to him without rushing. I swallowed, over the residual pain of the abscess. And then he let out the sentence that finally put the whole map in order:

—No one cares about the kitchen.

It was not an opinion spoken on a bad day. It was a management criterion: if the productive core does not matter, then the system was not trying to improve the operation. It was trying to manage appearances. And when a structure operates on appearances alone, the burden always falls in the same place: on the body of the person who solves things.

Because if no one cared about the kitchen, then the entire month of August changed meaning. The overtime, the fever, the pressure, the almost three hundred breakfasts, the solitary openings, the demanded margins, and the theater of the executives… all of that stopped looking like a commitment to something important and revealed itself for what it truly was: a machine using intensity where there was no purpose.

I felt clarity and a dry sadness. Not sentimental. An archival sadness: the kind that comes from watching, in a single line, the last alibi the system had to justify the damage collapse.

I answered him without raising my tone, because there was no fuel left to fight from indignation:

—Then you take responsibility.