Chapter 6: The Routine

 

The days acquired a shape.

Not a schedule---schedules implied predictability, and the Ministry
permitted no predictability. But a shape, a form that emerged from the
repetition of small things: the meals that arrived three times in each
period of light, the corrections that came from the telescreen, the
exercises that were commanded and performed.

Arthur learned the shape. He learned to fit himself inside it.

Morning began when the light through the window changed---the slow shift
from black to gray that meant the sun was rising somewhere beyond the
walls. Arthur would be awake already, sitting on his bench, facing the
telescreen. Sleep came in fragments now, brief descents into
unconsciousness that ended the moment the telescreen spoke his number.
He had learned to sleep sitting up, his back against the cold porcelain
wall, his hands visible on his knees even in sleep.

"6079 Holt, A. Stand."

Arthur stood. His knees ached from the hard bench, a dull pain that had
become as familiar as his own heartbeat.

"6079 Holt, A. Walk to the window."

Arthur walked to the window. Eight steps, the same eight steps he had
counted a hundred times. The courtyard was empty, as it always was. The
walls rose around it, gray and featureless, stained with rain that had
long since dried, the concrete darkened in streaks that might have been
water or might have been something else. Sometimes there were
birds---small dark shapes that crossed the narrow strip of sky visible
above the walls. Arthur watched them when they appeared. They were the
only living things he saw, apart from the guards and the brief glimpses
of other prisoners.

"6079 Holt, A. Return to the bench."

Arthur returned to the bench. Eight steps back.

The exercises continued for what might have been an hour. Stand. Sit.
Walk. Turn. Raise arms. Lower arms. Face left. Face right. Face forward.
The commands came in no particular order, with no apparent purpose.
Arthur performed them without thinking. His body had learned to respond
before his mind could register the words.

Then the slot in the door opened, and breakfast arrived.

#

The meals were the only reliable markers of time.

Breakfast was bread and a cup of thin porridge that tasted of nothing
but warmth. The bread was always the same---a small square, dense and
gray, with a crust that crumbled when he bit into it. Lunch was
soup---the same thin soup, lukewarm, with occasional fragments of
something that might have been vegetable floating in the gray liquid.
The soup left a film on the metal cup that Arthur learned to wipe clean
with the bread, saving nothing, wasting nothing. Dinner was bread again,
sometimes with a smear of margarine that left a yellow film on his
tongue, and water that tasted of the pipes it had traveled through.

Arthur ate everything. He chewed slowly, making each meal last as long
as possible. The eating was something to do, something that occupied his
hands and his mouth and his attention. When the meals were over, there
was only the waiting.

The waiting was the hardest part.

Between meals, between exercises, between corrections, there were vast
stretches of nothing. Arthur sat on his bench and faced the telescreen
and kept his hands visible and his eyes open. He did not move unless
commanded. He did not speak unless spoken to. He simply existed, a body
in a space, waiting for something to happen.

In the early days---the first week, perhaps, or the second---Arthur had
tried to occupy his mind during the waiting. He had recited poems he
remembered from childhood, lists of facts he had memorized in school,
the lyrics to songs that had been popular before the Party banned them.
He had replayed conversations in his head, reconstructed memories, built
elaborate fantasies of escape and revenge.

But the telescreen noticed.

"6079 Holt, A. You are moving your lips."

Arthur stopped moving his lips.

"6079 Holt, A. Your eyes are unfocused. Focus."

Arthur focused his eyes on the telescreen. Big Brother's face filled
the screen, patient and watchful, the dark eyes seeming to track every
movement.

"6079 Holt, A. You are exhibiting signs of internal dialogue. Cease."

Arthur ceased. His face went slack. His eyes went empty.

The telescreen could not read his thoughts---not yet, not directly. But
it could read his face, his body, the small involuntary movements that
betrayed mental activity. It could see when he was thinking and when he
was not. And thinking, the telescreen made clear, was not permitted.

So Arthur learned not to think.

He learned to empty his mind, to let the waiting wash through him
without resistance. He learned to exist in a state of blankness, a kind
of waking sleep where consciousness continued but thought did not. It
was not comfortable. It was not pleasant. But it was possible, and in
the Ministry of Love, possible was all that mattered.

The days passed. Arthur could not have said how many. The shape of them
was the same: light, exercises, breakfast, waiting, lunch, waiting,
dinner, waiting, darkness. The shape repeated until it became the only
reality, until the life Arthur had lived before---the speakwrite, the
Ministry of Truth, Peter, the photograph---seemed like something that
had happened to someone else, in some other world, a very long time ago.

#

Other prisoners existed. Arthur knew this because he heard them.

The woman in the cell to his left wept at night.

It was a quiet sound---not the racking sobs of acute grief, but the
steady, hopeless crying of someone who had been weeping for a very long
time. The sound came through the wall in waves, rising and falling with
a rhythm that might have been breathing or might have been something
else entirely. Arthur listened to it in the darkness, when the light
from the window had faded and the telescreen's glow was the only
illumination.

He did not know what the woman wept for. He did not know her name or her
number or her crime. He knew only the sound of her grief, filtering
through the porcelain walls, filling the space between his heartbeats.

The man in the cell to his right laughed.

Not often. Perhaps once a day, sometimes twice. A sudden bark of sound
that began as laughter and ended as something else---a cough, a choke, a
noise that was not quite human. The laughter had no apparent cause. It
came without warning and stopped without resolution. It was the laughter
of a man who had found something funny in a place where nothing was
funny, and the finding had broken something inside him.

Arthur listened to both sounds---the weeping and the laughing---and he
wondered which of them he would become. Would he weep when the pressure
grew too great, when the emptiness finally cracked the shell he was
building around himself? Or would he laugh, finding some terrible joke
in the machinery of his destruction?

He did not know. He could not know. The future was as blank as the walls
that surrounded him.

#

On what might have been the third week, the guards took him to a
different room.

Not an interrogation room---Arthur had learned to recognize those, with
their single tables and their waiting chairs. This room was larger, with
a concrete floor and drains set into it at regular intervals, the metal
grates stained dark. The walls were tiled in white, and the tiles were
stained with something that might have been rust or might have been
blood, the discoloration spreading from the drains upward in patterns
that suggested water had been used here, water and other things. The air
smelled of disinfectant and something underneath it, something older and
harder to name.

There were other prisoners in the room. Perhaps a dozen, standing in a
row, facing a wall. Arthur was placed at the end of the row. The guards
withdrew, their footsteps echoing on the concrete.

For a long moment, nothing happened. The prisoners stood in silence,
facing the wall. Arthur could see their backs---thin shoulders beneath
gray uniforms, spines that curved with exhaustion or defeat. He could
smell them---the sour smell of unwashed bodies, the metallic tang of
fear. One man's hands were shaking visibly, a continuous tremor he
could not control. Another man's uniform hung loose on his frame, as
though the body inside it had shrunk.

Then a door opened behind them.

"Turn," a voice said.

They turned. Arthur turned with them, the movement automatic, his body
responding before his mind could process the command.

A man stood in the doorway. He was not wearing the black overalls of the
Thought Police. He wore a white coat, the kind a doctor might wear, and
he carried a clipboard. His face was thin and unremarkable, the face of
someone who had performed this routine a thousand times.

"You will be examined," the man said. "You will submit to all
procedures. You will not resist. You will not speak unless spoken to. Is
this understood?"

No one answered. No answer was expected.

The man consulted his clipboard. "6112 Aaronson, J. Step forward."

A prisoner at the far end of the row stepped forward---an old man,
perhaps seventy, with white hair and hands that trembled at his sides.
He walked toward the man in the white coat with the slow, careful steps
of someone who expected to be struck at any moment.

The examination took perhaps ten minutes. Arthur could not see what was
happening---the old man had been taken to a corner of the room, hidden
by a curtain that had been pulled across on a metal rail. But he could
hear: the murmur of voices, the clink of metal instruments, the
occasional sharp intake of breath that suggested pain.

Then the old man emerged from behind the curtain. His face was pale, and
there was a small bandage on his arm, but he was otherwise unchanged. He
was returned to his place in the row.

"6079 Holt, A. Step forward."

Arthur stepped forward.

#

The examination was thorough.

They measured his height, his weight, his blood pressure. The scale was
cold beneath his bare feet, the metal surface pitted with use. They
looked into his eyes with a light that was too bright, listened to his
heart and lungs with a stethoscope that felt like ice against his chest,
pressed their fingers into his abdomen until he gasped. They drew blood
from his arm---three vials, the needle sliding into his vein with
practiced efficiency, the dark red filling the glass tubes one after
another.

The man in the white coat made notes on his clipboard throughout. He did
not speak to Arthur except to give commands: breathe in, breathe out,
look left, look right, open your mouth, close your mouth. His pen
scratched against the paper after each measurement, recording data that
would go into a file Arthur would never see.

Arthur obeyed. His body was not his own. His body belonged to the
Ministry, to be measured and catalogued and used as the Ministry saw
fit.

When the examination was complete, Arthur was returned to the row. Other
prisoners were called, one by one. The process continued for what might
have been hours. Arthur stood and waited, his arm aching where the
needle had gone in, watching the curtain and listening to the sounds
behind it.

Finally, the man in the white coat set down his clipboard.

"You are all in adequate condition for processing," he said. "Those
who require medical attention will receive it. Those who do not will
continue as before."

He turned and walked out of the room. The guards returned. The prisoners
were taken, one by one, back to their cells.

Arthur sat on his bench and faced the telescreen. His arm ached where
the needle had gone in. A small bruise was forming, purple against the
pale skin. He looked at the bruise for a long time. It was evidence that
something had happened, that time was passing, that his body still
existed and could still be marked.

Adequate for processing. The words echoed in his mind, refusing to be
silenced.

The light from the window faded. The telescreen hummed its eternal
surveillance. The woman in the cell to his left began to weep.

(Cont.)