Chapter 6 | Seminar Announcement

There are mornings when everything seems normal until the exact moment someone says the word seminar.

Before that, my day was going almost well.

I had managed to open Excel without immediately feeling the need to change my identity. I had even understood, on my own, why a formula refused to cooperate.

The kind of thing you don’t dare tell anyone, because you know very well that “I corrected a cell” isn’t supposed to overturn a life.

And yet.

Clara had greeted me with:

“So, spreadsheet artist, are we making miracles or damage today?”

I had answered:

“A balanced mix of both.”

She had approved as if that were a completely normal answer.

And then the email dropped.

“Interdepartmental Meeting — 11:00 a.m.”

Another meeting??

I looked at the screen with the absurd weariness of someone discovering he has to take an oral exam a second time in a subject he didn’t choose, because of some ridiculous administrative error.

“Attendance requested.”

That kind of wording always feels to me like a threat wrapped in gift paper.

I felt my stomach tighten a little.

Not too much.

Just enough to remind me that my nervous system is a zealous employee who loves anticipating disasters.

At 10:57, I was already in front of the room.

Too early, obviously.

I’m often early to things that scare me. It’s a rather stupid way of adding stress time to an already stressful situation, but apparently my brain considers it a very valid strategy.

The room was the same as last time. Glass, light, big table, the atmosphere of a place where people know how to use the word synergy without laughing.

I sat in the same spot, almost out of superstition. My notebook in front of me, my pen between my fingers, my posture of a polite boy ready to disappear if needed.

I must have looked like a student dressed up as an employee.

I wondered after how many days you stop looking like a casting error.

Mister Delmas came in first, with his computer under his arm and that calm energy of people who have already solved three problems before others have even finished their coffee.

“Ah, Eliott, good.”

“Hello, sir.”

“You all right?”

Trap question.

A routine phrase, you might say. But with him, I always had the impression he expected a real answer.

“Yes.”

He nodded.

“Good.”

Then he plugged his computer into the screen without another word.

I think I like that way he has of being both dry and reassuring.

Like an administrative radiator.

Lyralda arrived next.

This time, she was wearing black jeans and a light blue jacket, very simple, very clean, very her. Her hair was tied in a strict bun, which made her look even more inaccessible than usual.

Not cold.

Just… organized.

She looked me straight in the eyes, with a slight smile.

“Hello, Eliott.”

“Hello.”

She sat down.

Mister Delmas looked up from his screen, before smiling at Lyralda with an almost weary expression, as if he already knew she wasn’t going to like what came next.

“Hello, Lyralda.”

“Hello, Pascal.”

There was something in the way they spoke to each other that was too fluid to be new. No demonstrative warmth. No misplaced familiarity. Just that slightly irritating ease of people who have already gone through a lot of meetings together and know exactly what to expect from each other.

Personally, I’ve never managed to be comfortable in silences.

I hear too many things in them, which is a bit… weird, actually.

I was looking at my empty notes as if I already had something intelligent to write when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Lyralda barely raise an eyebrow as she discovered the agenda displayed on the screen.

Not much.

Just a tiny movement.

Mister Delmas, meanwhile, didn’t even try to pretend he hadn’t seen it.

“Yes, I know,” he said without looking up.

Lyralda crossed her arms.

“Obviously.”

“You can complain after.”

“I’m already complaining now.”

He gave a slight smile.

“That’s also why we like you.”

I looked at them one second too long.

Not long. Just enough to tell myself they had clearly already had this conversation, or variations of it, several times. The kind of brief exchange that gives the impression of arriving in the middle of a habit.

Jade arrived five minutes late, looking as if the world was the one that had to adjust to her.

“Sorry, I had a call.”

She didn’t look sorry at all.

She sat across from me again, placed her phone on the table, and fixed her eyes on me, the kind of look that starts like a scan and ends like a silent comment.

“Hi, Eliott.”

I never know what to answer to that kind of sentence. Hi feels too dry. Hello makes me sound like a high school student on a visit.

I ended up doing that fairly pathetic social mixture that consists of smiling slightly while tilting your head.

A kind of wordless hello.

Very practical when you lack vocabulary.

My phone vibrated.

I lowered my eyes discreetly.

Jade.

“You’re already here?”

I looked up.

She was staring ahead as if she had done nothing.

I answered.

“Yes”

Another vibration almost immediately.

“You’re terrifyingly punctual”

I kept my phone near my notebook as if preparing a clandestine operation.

“Eliott: I like arriving early, and you’re the one who’s late”

“Jade: No, you like panicking longer”

I stopped breathing for half a second.

Then I looked up.

She still had that calm expression, as if her phone didn’t exist.

Jade has no problem with space. She has enough presence for two and a half people. She slouched just enough in her chair to look comfortable without seeming careless.

I think some people instinctively know how to occupy space.

Me, even sitting down, I often feel like I should apologize for taking up a whole chair.

Mehdi arrived last.

Like the last time, with the energy of someone who had already lived six lives before noon.

“Hello, children.”

He placed a coffee cup on the table, looked around, then added:

“Ah. No. Wrong room. Here, we’re with people who enjoy suffering in front of PowerPoints.”

He sat down beside Jade, then noticed my closed notebook.

“Eliott! Still alive?”

“Apparently, yes.”

“Excellent news!”

He took a sip of coffee.

“Don’t celebrate too quickly,” Jade said.

“You, let him breathe.”

“I’m only toughening him up.”

“That’s cute, the way you call it that. Are you worried?”

“I’m taking care of the intern.”

“Taking care? Well now, usually you ignore them.”

Mister Delmas looked up.

“Can we start?”

Mehdi raised a hand.

“Always. Chaos awaits me.”

The meeting started more slowly than the previous one.

No numbers immediately crashing onto the screen. First, a few logistical updates, progress points, calendar stories.

Then Mister Delmas displayed a slide with a photo of a hotel, a very blue lake, and people in white polo shirts smiling far too much.

But actually, what have we been talking about all this time?

No one wears that kind of white polo shirt for free.

No one smiles like that for free.

“Right,” Mister Delmas said. “Next point: next month’s interdepartmental seminar.”

Ah.

Okay.

So that was it.

Obviously.

I only had to read the agenda.

Seminar.

I don’t know why that word scares me so much. Maybe because it never means: you will simply listen to useful information calmly.

No.

A seminar is always the elegant word for activities where you have to create bonds in front of colleagues who, the day before, were answering you curtly by email.

Mister Delmas continued:

“Three days. Departure Wednesday morning, return Friday evening. Attendance requested for all departments. Workshops, cross-functional meetings, team-building activities…”

Then, with an almost satisfied tone:

“I insisted that we keep the residential format. The previous seminars were very useful.”

Mehdi blew into his coffee.

“‘Useful’ is a courageous word.”

Mister Delmas ignored him with experience.

“It allows us to step outside the usual framework, smooth out exchanges, and prevent everyone from staying locked inside their own department.”

“Or force adults to pretend they enjoy group workshops by the water,” Lyralda said.

Mister Delmas turned his head toward her.

“And yet, you always came back.”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“You see.”

Cohesion.

I felt my soul take a small step backward.

On the screen, the photo of the lake shone with the arrogance of landscapes that know perfectly well they’re going to serve as a backdrop for uncomfortable people in sports shoes.

My phone vibrated under the table.

“is this your first seminar?”

I looked straight ahead.

Mister Delmas was still talking.

I answered:

“Yes”

“Ooh”

Then, almost immediately:

“peace to your soul”

I exhaled through my nose despite myself.

I glanced at Lyralda.

She barely raised an eyebrow again.

This time, it was even clearer.

She didn’t like this.

I felt immediate and irrational solidarity toward her eyebrow.

“You’ve done seminars before?” Jade said in a low voice.

I turned toward her.

She had leaned slightly toward me, enough to speak without disturbing the whole table, but not enough for her question to stay private.

I blinked.

She already knew.

“Uh… no.”

She smiled, as if I had just confirmed something very predictable.

“You’ll see. Between the mandatory activities, the people who want to ‘create bonds,’ and the ones who drink too much starting at seven p.m., it’s very instructive.”

I looked at her.

She seemed sincerely entertained by the idea. Or by me. Or by the way my brain was already starting to silently disintegrate.

At that exact moment, I was imagining one hundred and twenty-three different ways to humiliate myself near a lake.

Falling into the water.

Staying alone at the buffet.

Choking at the buffet.

Saying something embarrassing during a workshop.

Being stuck at a table with people far too comfortable.

Wearing a casual outfit that would not be the right kind of casual.

Dying socially in a too-white polo shirt.

The worst thing is that all of that had time to cross my mind while, from the outside, I probably just looked like I was blinking a little slowly.

“He’s panicking,” Mehdi commented with the cruel lucidity of funny people.

“I’m not panicking,” I answered.

“Your face says otherwise.”

“My face is… expressive.”

“I love that, really. It’s a lovely way of saying two seconds away from fainting.”

Jade let out a laugh.

My phone vibrated again.

“we’ll find you a matching life jacket”

I lowered my eyes for one second, incredulous.

“Very funny”

“i’m here for that”

Mister Delmas was still detailing the program, but I couldn’t hear everything very well anymore.

Words floated toward me.

Group departure.

Cooking workshop.

Supervised free time.

Collective evening.

Water activity.

There are expressions that seem harmless until you remember they generally involve a life jacket, athletic humiliation, and people shouting “Come on, let go!” when you would rather just go home and eat.

“You’re going to love it,” Mehdi said.

I looked at him with the distrust of a shelter animal.

He put down his coffee.

“We’re doing yoga on paddleboards. And there’s no barrier to fall into the lake. And all of it on company expenses!”

The silence that followed was very brief.

Then Jade laughed openly.

Even Mister Delmas had something like a smile.

I felt a form of terror so pure it almost became conceptual.

“Yoga… on paddleboards?” I repeated.

“Yes!”

Mehdi seemed very pleased with himself.

“A perfect metaphor for the modern company.”

“Mostly a perfect metaphor for burnout,” Lyralda said without looking up from her notes.

Mehdi placed a hand over his heart.

“Thank you. Finally someone understands my suffering.”

The meeting resumed, but my brain had stayed stuck somewhere between a lake, a paddleboard, and the idea of being observed by colleagues while I try not to die in a lake.

I know, no one mentioned sportswear.

But fear does not respect available information.

Then my phone vibrated again.

“you can swim at least?”

I looked at the screen for two seconds.

“Yes”

“too bad, I would’ve taught you”

I closed my hand around the phone to avoid laughing like an idiot in the middle of the meeting.

And in the middle of all that, there was also something else.

That strange, almost annoying feeling of wondering what Lyralda would think of me in that kind of context. If she would mock me. If she would raise an eyebrow seeing me panic in front of a life jacket. If she would find it ridiculous.

Or cute.

No.

Definitely not that word.

I lowered my eyes to my notebook, as if that could stop my thoughts from behaving like unsupervised teenagers.

The end of the meeting stretched out with a particular slowness.

Mister Delmas talked about organization, schedules, room allocation, cross- functional objectives. Mehdi slipped in a comment from time to time, just enough to keep the whole thing from becoming completely deadly. Jade sometimes tapped on her phone before lifting her head again with the look of someone who remained convinced that all of this would, one way or another, end up amusing her.

I had stopped listening at paddleboard.

You have to know your cognitive limits. Mine begin at water activity and end very quickly at mandatory attendance.

“The logistical details will be sent by email,” Mister Delmas was saying. “Please plan suitable clothing for outdoor activities.”

Suitable clothing.

My God.

The worst thing with that kind of phrase is that it never explains anything.

Suitable clothing for whom? For normal adults, the kind who already own the right clothes by accident?

Or for people like me, who have three sweatshirts, two pairs of jeans, and the permanent impression of having missed a dress code that everyone understands intuitively except them?

I wrote useless words in my notebook, just to keep my hands busy: bus? lake? sport? die discreetly?

Beside them, without realizing it, I drew a small rectangle with a stick figure inside. It looked like a tombstone with an intern.

I closed the notebook.

“Maybe we could avoid putting the lawyers on the water,” Lyralda said.

Her voice brought me back into the room. I had not followed what they were talking about.

Mister Delmas looked up.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“False,” Mister Delmas said. “You survived the one in Annecy.”

Lyralda gave him a flat look.

“Barely.”

Mehdi laughed.

“I would pay good money to see you do yoga on a paddleboard.”

Lyralda gave him another look, even flatter.

“And I would pay good money to see you shut up for five minutes.”

“We all have dreams.”

Jade was clearly having fun.

“Honestly, I want to see Pascal in shorts.”

“That will be a no.”

“What a lack of team spirit.”

“Shorts have never strengthened anyone’s cohesion.”

“That’s false,” Mehdi said. “Certain summer camps prove it.”

I think that, for three seconds, everyone forgot this was a professional meeting.

And it was almost pleasant.

The worst part is that this kind of lightness stressed me too.

Because it makes you want to believe that you can enter the conversation, make a remark, exist a little more than usual. And as soon as that desire appears, I become wary of it.

The meeting eventually ended for real.

Computers closed. Chairs slid. The little adult theater of work began to dismantle itself, everyone collecting their things, their phone, their seriousness, their character.

Mehdi stood up first.

“Right. If I drown, I want them to write on my grave: died in the absurd exercise of cohesion.”

“You can swim?” Jade asked.

“Magnificently. But I think it’s important to remain dramatic.”

He turned toward me.

“Eliott, if you fall into the lake, try to do it with elegance. We have to think of the group memories.”

“I’ll try not to fall at all.”

“Now that lacks ambition.”

Jade shook her head.

“He’s going to love it. You can tell.”

I couldn’t tell if it was pure irony or just her way of placing a finger on my panic to see if it reacted.

Her phone vibrated. She looked down, then threw me a glance.

Lyralda put away her papers without commenting.

But I saw the very slight movement of her mouth. Not really a smile, more an internal reaction, discreet. As if my silent terror amused her just enough not to seem entirely ridiculous to her. Which was, in a way, already kinder than many things.

We walked out into the corridor almost at the same time.

The others dispersed quickly. Mehdi joined the elevator, already telling Jade something. Mister Delmas was swallowed by a call.

Before moving away, he said to Lyralda:

“We’ll talk again about workshop allocation.”

“Obviously,” she answered with very well-practiced weariness.

Another sentence that gave the impression they had already prepared this kind of thing together more than once.

In less than ten seconds, only Lyralda and I were left, side by side, walking down that long clean corridor that smelled of cold coffee and paper.

I held my notebook against me with the energy of a student expecting to be questioned.

Lyralda walked calmly, her heels regular on the gray floor.

“You look like you’ve seen your own autopsy,” she said.

I looked at her.

“Is it that visible?”

“Yes.”

“Great.”

“It’s fine.”

I don’t know why her it’s fine affected me more than it should have. Maybe because it wasn’t trying to reassure me with big sentences. Just putting the catastrophe back to its actual size.

“I don’t really like group things,” I admitted.

“Oh really? I’m surprised.”

Her tone was so flat that I immediately understood she was mocking me.

“I hide it well, though.”

“No.”

I lowered my eyes.

“Okay.”

We kept walking for a few more steps.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

Her voice had returned to something more neutral. Less mocking.

“No one dies during those things.”

Small pause.

“Well… almost no one.”

I let out a nervous laugh.

“Thank you, that’s very reassuring.”

“That’s the maximum softness I have to offer before noon.”

I think I smiled openly.

She threw me a quick look, as if checking that it had worked, before stopping and leaning slightly toward me.

“I’ll fish you out if you fall in the water, don’t worry.”

Then she continued:

“In general, the worst thing that can happen is ending up stuck with colleagues who want to ‘break the ice.’”

“That already seems like a pretty solid worst.”

“Yes.”

“And you? You hate that too?”

She lifted one shoulder.

“I don’t like mandatory activities.”

“Because they’re mandatory?”

“Because they’re ridiculous.”

It reassured me in an almost disproportionate way.

Not only that she didn’t like it. But that she said it like that, without embarrassment, without trying to look adapted to everything.

I don’t know if that was what fascinated me about her, deep down, that way of never apologizing for her reactions.

She stopped in front of her office.

“You’ll survive, Eliott.”

“You seem very convinced of my survival lately.”

“Yes.”

She put her hand on the handle.

“Experience.”

I looked at her one second too long.

Experience of what, exactly, I wouldn’t have been able to say.

Seminars?

Me?

People who panic in silence?

Then she went into her office, leaving me alone in the corridor with my notebook, my badge, and a level of inner disturbance I preferred not to analyze right away.

I went back to my desk.

The open space had resumed its usual rhythm, which was almost vexing. I felt like I had just come back from a small social apocalypse, and around me people were simply continuing to type on keyboards as if nothing had happened.

I sat down. I reopened Excel. The numbers reappeared with their stable coldness, almost comforting. At least they don’t suggest doing yoga on a floating object.

I tried to get back to work.

Really.

I read one line.

Then a second.

Then my brain decided to project me, without permission, into every possible version of the seminar.

Me getting off the bus too early.

Me wearing the wrong shoes.

Me not knowing where to put myself at breakfast.

Me smiling stupidly during a group activity.

Me falling into the lake.

I placed my hands on either side of the keyboard.

I breathed in.

Breathed out.

I opened my notes without thinking.

When I panic, writing sometimes helps me store things into little boxes. Even if they still overflow a little.

I typed:

Interdepartmental seminar. Probability of catastrophe: high. Probability of humiliating myself by a lake: very high. Probability that Lyralda sees me ridiculous: unfortunately real.

I stopped there.

Then I deleted the last line.

Immediately.

As if my phone could judge me.

Before putting the device down.

At the back of the open space, behind the glass partition of her office, Lyralda was visible in profile. She was reading something, one elbow on the armrest, looking focused, completely absorbed.

She had nothing reassuring in the classic sense of the word.

Not soft, nor especially warm.

And yet, for the past few days, every time she appeared in my field of vision, I had the strange impression that the room became more readable.

That too, I preferred not to think about too much.

I reopened my file. One cell. Then another.

The work was moving forward, but slowly.

My thoughts, meanwhile, kept circling around the lake like stupid birds around a lamppost.