Stephanie prepared the pastry sheets, laying it one by one on the cold marble surface of the hotel's kitchen. Her flat didn't have marble countertop, but she planned to do some workaround, such as using her silicone baking sheet in an airconditioned room.
But here, they were at the complete facility of the hotel. The squares cut from each sheet were even, courtesy of the pastry cutter left in the utensil board. Mark helped her after being taught quickly. Soon after, they had ten squares of pastry sheets.
"Next, we separate the sweet and savoury galettes. For the sweet ones, you can fill them with canned fruits, bananas even, to your heart's content. Of course only what we have here, haha. I usually like the savoury galettes, so I'm gonna prepare the roux for the mushroom filling. Oh, and if you like mozzarella cheese, I saved some from my pantry. It's rare these months, I can't waste it."
Mark watched how Stephanie folded each corner of the square sheet to make an envelope, leaving a section of the fruit filling visible in the centre. He was a quick learner, his wrapping showcased the cut grapes, oranges, and strawberries on each galette prettily.
On the hob, a bubbling mixture was being spooned out by Stephanie. She skimmed the skin layer of the boiled milk, added cream, and waited it to thicken. Dipping a spoon to get some for a quick taste, she was satisfied when it matched her preference.
Mark saw this and took the spoon from her hand, dipped it, then tasted the small amount of the filling at the tip of the spoon.
"How do you find it?"
He mmh-ed and continued working on his sweet galettes.
After Stephanie was done with hers, she laid those pretty snacks, colourful of red, orange, and purple from the sweet types, and milky white and green from the savoury mushroom ones, on the baking sheets. Using a hotel industrial-grade oven, she felt she wasted energy to heat up that big of a volume only for this 2-people consumption.
But there was nothing to be done about it. So while the galettes baked, she continued her story.
~*~
The assessment room again.
"What did they give you in exchange for your presence?"
"Ready-to-eat foods, internet data, trinkets. . . So, it got me thinking, why didn't I streamline it into a business model? You might think it didn't make sense. But which successful business—before pandemic—had made sense at first? Isn't disruption painful but propelling the innovation forward? Black Death and Renaissance?"
"Agree, but your business doesn't contribute anything to the current situation. How can we measure it?"
She blinked several times as the wave of positivity flowed in from every inhale. "Measure the success of this Companionship, you mean?"
She always stumbled at this question in her mock interview sessions. Val, the perceptive and sage Val, who helped her prepare herself for that day, warned her that this question always cropped up in other people's former experiences.
And she always answered vaguely, driving him up the wall. She remembered her argument consisted of growing the number of clients, providing more jobs for the Immune, or lending a helping hand for simpler tasks at logistics that needed last-mile delivery.
Years of corporate lingo seeped out of her pores when she grunted with exasperation.
She had always been a corporate slave whose phone didn't stop screaming on the weekends. Sometimes it was just a ping, two pings. Five notifications in total within the past half an hour she went to take a shower, months before she stood in the Wellbeing department, long before the department itself existed. Everyone seemed to demand her attention for something.
A question from the finance team about the outstanding invoice from a design client. Decisions to make on next month's budget. Budgeting of the new ads. Even with the clocking in and out of the people, her boss entrusted the team development and bonding to her. Nobody had gone thus far as to look for her for any minutes of the meetings, though. Even on the weekends, when she concentrated on folding each corner of the square pastry dough—galette, her favourite, sometimes some people had the audacity to shoot random questions at her.
~*~
The 'ping' sound from the oven signalled them to bend their backs, taking the trays out.
"Whoa, the smell. . . I'm so hungry, now," Mark inhaled.
Stephanie didn't need to be told twice, she grabbed a spatula to lift individual galettes from the sheet, transferring them to the big plates.
"Cooking together and sharing food like this, I'm really happy," Mark commented after they sat down and started chewing.
Stephanie knew that it wasn't just about the two activities. They did something that touched Mark's heart. Reintegration to the normal society might be difficult. Now that the rightful eyes had gone, the inmates still had other issues with the dwindling number of humans alive. How could they form bonds back if no one was around?
Stephanie was happy to lend a hand in the time being. She thought about getting a job for him in the logistics, if the DoJ allowed.
Savouring the galette that came to her after a long time of craving, she remembered back then, before time, when everything was still normal and the galettes were enjoyed by herself alone in her flat.
Her mushroom galette had become cold when her fingers tippy-tapped on the keyboard, hitting a Reply button to a cursed work email that started with 'I hope this email finds you well'. She was until the email found her.
What was work-life balance if the boundary was as fragile as a butterfly's wings?
She remembered she had browsed the internet for a quick search that finally took her two hours after she had sent the email. Words flooded her eyes, technicalities like modern slavery or corporate burnout now placed the priorities on top of her mind.
In the first year of the pandemic, she could find no pastry sheets. Perhaps, it was deemed essential based on the commonness of the food in Indonesian households. But, hypothetically speaking, what if more people loved pastries in the remaining Indonesian population than in the initial number? That toppled the tried-and-true statistics, then, as the ratio tipped further than what we used to know.
"So, how was the pitching going?" Mark asked her to continue, so continue she did.
Her mind flew back to the Wellbeing hearing. She recalled answering the question out of the line Val and she had prepared for weeks. She strayed so far she couldn't find any way to rectify the answer if she wished. "I believe measuring the success from the number of clients or application adoption does us no good, Sir. The quantitative measure is the root of capitalistic ideas anyway, that any time or other resources spent must yield results." Or something along the line.
Was it inevitable to die with an empty feeling in her chest? From waking up till sleeping, her ancestor's time belonged to the slave owners. Or in the modern world, the corporate. The paycheck and wages existed to support the employees staying alive and comfortable enough, but they did not flow to serve as a basis for a healthy living. Healthy was the keyword here.
The supervisors frowned. One of them who diligently scribbled some notes jerked at her answer. She saw their postures straightened, so she was mentally prepared for verbal abuse.
That didn't come.
The one who kept glancing at his watch visibly tried to regain composure after getting tense of the straightforward statement. "But it must be something quantitative. How could we allow you to exist without any sort of metric we can evaluate?"
"Must basic psychological needs be quantifiable? How do you measure the progress of happiness?"
By that time the word rolled out of her tongue, she cursed herself mentally for making a bed she plopped herself into. No one else to blame. She walked straight into that one.
"The Happiness Index, if that makes sense to you."
She swore his eagle eyes glimmering with amusement and victory.
She pondered too long on the present day, chewing on the crust of the galette, a snack she just made when she basked in the memory of Prattle's early days. Perfect to her liking, not too salty like her first time result. She started baking again since she managed to salvage an electric oven from an abandoned unit in her tower.
Galette was relatively easy to make, apparently, in her limited free time she could still set aside a worthy 30-minute break to prepare the dough and knead her pastry sheet. Imperfect, unlike the instant pastry sheet that she could buy aeons ago when there were enough people in the production line to make this. Did those people exist solely to make a food component for other people to enjoy? Or those people served a function in the factory just so? What encompassed essential and nonessential foods?
"What is this Happiness Index?" Mark's curiosity got the best of him, leaving his sweet snack untouched. Stephanie laughed at his innocent expression, gestured for him to continue eating while she was explaining.
Before the Companionship trend started, the Department of Wellbeing created a survey, randomly distributed to the people to assess their psychological state. Now that Companionship came into play, the expected result was the happiness of the survey respondents who received visits from their Companions would score happier.
At first, under two thousand respondents, it began at 2.5. It meant that a person, on average, scored their happiness at the value of 2.5 out of ten. Stephanie had to reread and peruse the document to ensure she was not being played at.
She discovered that there were twenty multiple-choice statements. Those twenty were divided into five sections, each section represented an individual or social dimension of a person. Digging deeper, each section's question posed an enquiry to which the respondent had to say agree or disagree in a five-point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.
The final score was calculated by the average weight of all answers in the range of nought to ten. Stephanie should not be surprised that even if the question was not doctored to skew the result towards a pessimistic view, the respondents answered so.
Who would disagree that hope had fleeted this world when three out of four people stopped living and turned into a memorial monument of the gone?
Still, two and a half was lower than her betraying worldview and she needed a lot of heavy lifting to pick it up to five; the challenge was hurled at her head against her will.
Twelve months, everyone in the Prattle and other nascent companies tried to address a specific section, which was the social and emotional support. More Companions, more coverage of the Protected. More visits made, visits that were not merely dropping the groceries or physical therapies, or house cleaning and cooking service. Visitors who would talk, make a little tea time, and keep the silence at bay. More Companions, bigger chance to hit five in the questionnaire.
You feel lonely and unsupported at times. Strongly Ag — Disagree.
You have no one to confide in. Disagree.
Still, it depended on how the respondents put it into perspective. Anyone could set the benchmark as life before pandemic, so the loneliness of that life would always be subpar to the astronomical situation now. Five could be an imaginary goalpost because they might be stuck forever at three, nothing much to tip the balance in their favour.
Perhaps, the Wellbeing people might just call a stop to the entire Companionship business and relocate them all at depots.
On the other hand, she could do well in the new job, probably. She was used to working in a team, being a cog in the machine. If she was assigned at a supply office, she imagined her day-to-day job would involve spreadsheets, checkers and barcodes, planning calendars, and other similar things that were nothing out of her league.
But who would talk to the people, who would follow up with the elderly or Lila's case? Who would know a person next door died because of extreme loneliness instead of mechanical answers like the virus, heart condition, or geriatric diseases?
As the galette kept finding its way to her stomach, she remembered she shot the question, "Our objectives are aligned. I want to support the government's project on the wellbeing of the remaining people, too. Isn't emotional support part of wellbeing standards, too?"
To which the supervisors made noncommittal sounds or vague groans from their throats for five minutes until the clock signalled the meeting to end.
When an hour later she read an approval email from the department, a green light for this initiative to run, Friday no longer felt like a traumatic day. Instead, it was the day Prattle was born.