II. Processing - Part One

She woke into the dark the way you wake from anesthesia — not all at once but in layers, each layer bringing a new piece of information that didn't connect to the piece before it, so that the first thing she knew was that she was lying on her back, and the second thing she knew was that the surface beneath her was warm, and the third thing she knew was that her arms were at her sides and when she tried to raise them they met resistance at seven inches, a ceiling or a lid, smooth and unyielding and the same temperature as the surface below, which was the temperature of her own skin, so that the boundary between her body and the container was blurred in the way that the boundary between water and a body immersed in water is blurred, and the fourth thing she knew was that she was inside something, and the fifth thing she knew was that she could not get out.

She screamed. The sound went nowhere. It left her mouth and traveled the six inches between her lips and the surface above her face and it did not bounce back, it did not echo, it was received the way a throat receives a swallow — taken in, absorbed, converted into something that was no longer sound. She screamed again and the same thing happened and she screamed a third time and her voice was already fraying, the vocal cords ragged.

She stopped screaming. She breathed. The air was warm and faintly metallic and it tasted the way the inside of a new car smells — chemical, manufactured, the taste of a space that has been sealed and climate-controlled. There was enough of it. She tested this by breathing deeply, filling her lungs, holding for a count of five, releasing. The air replenished. Something in the container was circulating it, though she could feel no vent, no fan, no movement against her skin other than the movement of her own chest rising and falling.

She pressed her palms flat against the sides. Left side: four inches from her hip. Right side: the same. The material was not metal, not wood, not plastic. It was something between — smooth, slightly yielding under pressure, warm. When she pressed hard enough her fingers left a shallow impression that faded over the course of a breath, as though the material had memory and preferred its own shape. She pressed the ceiling above her. Seven inches from her sternum. She pressed the surface below her. No give. She was lying on the bottom of the container, and the bottom was firm and warm and contoured slightly, not flat, shaped in a way that accommodated the curve of her spine and the backs of her calves and the dip between her shoulder blades, as though the container had been measured to her body or had adjusted after she was placed inside it.

She tried to sit up. She couldn't. She tried to roll onto her side and she could, barely — the width allowed a quarter-turn before her shoulder met the wall and her hip met the opposite wall and she was wedged, face to the material, breathing into a surface that breathed her breath back warm and chemical. She rolled onto her back again. The container accommodated her return, the contours readjusting, the warmth redistributing, the space settling around her the way a glove settles around a hand.

She lay still. She listened.

Her own breathing. The hiss of air through her nostrils. The whisper of her lips parting. The faint click of saliva at the back of her throat when she swallowed. Beneath that, a vibration — not sound exactly, more a pressure, a low-frequency presence that she felt in her teeth and in the plates of her skull and in the small bones of her inner ear. The container was humming, or the container was being hummed through, something outside the walls generating a frequency that traveled through the material and into her body, and she could not hear it with her ears but she could feel it in the way you feel a truck passing on a highway when you're lying in a motel bed beside the road, the vibration traveling through the foundation and the frame and the mattress and into the bones that are supposed to be resting.

And beneath that — beneath her breathing and the hum — breathing that was not hers.

To her left. Faint. Slow. The rhythm of someone sleeping or someone who has been awake for a long time and has found a pace that conserves energy. She turned her head — the container allowed this, the ceiling curving slightly upward near where her head rested — and pressed her ear against the left wall. The breathing was clearer now. Not close — separated by the wall's thickness and by a gap, an interval of air or insulation between her container and the next. But present. Undeniable. Another person, inside another container, breathing three feet away or five feet away, and the regularity of their breathing suggested that they had been here long enough to stop panicking, which meant they had been here a long time or they had given up quickly, and she did not know which was worse.

She said hello. The word was absorbed the way her screams had been absorbed — swallowed by the material, converted into vibration, rendered into something that was no longer language. She said it louder. She said her name. She knocked on the wall — three sharp raps with her knuckles — and the material yielded under the impact, softening the knock, turning percussion into a muffled pressure. The breathing on the other side did not change.

She knocked again, harder, putting the heel of her palm into it, and this time the breathing hitched — an acceleration, the rhythm breaking and resettling the way a sleeper's breathing changes when you shift your weight on the mattress beside them. Whoever was on the other side had felt the knock. They were aware of her. They could not respond or they had stopped trying to respond, and the distinction between the two possibilities was the distinction between a wall and a choice, and she could not determine which was operating.

She pressed her palm flat against the left wall. The material was warmer here than anywhere else in the container — not the regulated ambient warmth of the box's climate system but a focused warmth, concentrated, the warmth of another body radiating through the material the way a hand warms a coffee cup. She held her palm there and the warmth seeped into her skin and she closed her eyes and tried to think.

Her name was Sandra. She was thirty-four years old. She lived in an apartment on Elm, second floor, with a cat named Biscuit who would need to be fed — today, tomorrow, whenever today and tomorrow were, the cat would need to be fed and the cat did not know that Sandra was inside a box and the cat would sit beside the empty bowl and wait and the waiting would have a duration and the duration would have a consequence and Sandra could not calculate the consequence because she could not calculate the duration because she did not know what time it was or what day it was or how long she had been here.

She worked for MidState Insurance in the claims processing department. She processed claims. The phrase came to her with the bitter precision of a punchline — she processed claims and now she was being processed and the symmetry was not lost on her, though it offered nothing useful, only the cold observation that the universe was capable of irony and the irony did not help.

Her mother was in assisted living at Greenbrook and the monthly payment was due on the fifteenth. The last thing she remembered was her apartment, the kitchen, the overhead light that buzzed at a frequency that had annoyed her for two years and that she had never called the landlord about because calling the landlord required a phone call and phone calls required energy and the energy had been allocated elsewhere. The light. The counter. The buzzing. And then here. No gap she could feel. No transition. As though the frames between the kitchen and the box had been spliced out and the two scenes joined seamlessly.

She catalogued her body. She went through it systematically, the way she processed claims — item by item, field by field, checking boxes, noting discrepancies. Head: intact. Slight pressure behind the eyes that could be dehydration or the air or the dark pressing on optic nerves that had nothing to resolve. Neck: stiff, the stiffness of hours in a fixed position. Shoulders: sore. Arms: functional. Hands: she flexed them, counting fingers, pressing each fingertip to her thumb in sequence — index, middle, ring, pinkie — the way the neurologist had tested her mother's motor function last November, the same small precision, the same careful inventory of what remained. All present. All working. Torso: a dull ache in the lumbar, the complaint of a body that has been horizontal for too long. Hips: sore. Legs: heavy, the blood pooled, the joints protesting. Feet: she flexed her ankles, pointed her toes, felt the ceiling of the container against the tops of her feet. She was wearing socks. No shoes. She was wearing the clothes she'd been wearing in the kitchen — the seam of her jeans against her thigh, the hem of her t-shirt rucked up above her navel.

She had no phone. No watch. No wallet, no keys. She had a body, a name, and a box.

She tried to measure time. She counted heartbeats — sixty-eight per minute, she knew this from the pharmacy blood pressure machine — and she counted to sixty-eight and called it a minute and counted again and called it two minutes and she did this with the focus she brought to her most complex claims, the multi-page ones with the overlapping policies and the disputed coverages, the ones that required every number to be right because a wrong number cascaded through the system and invalidated everything downstream. She counted to sixty-eight, again and again, and she lost count somewhere around forty minutes and started over and lost count around thirty and started over and the counting became its own rhythm, its own containment, a box inside the box, the mind's attempt to impose structure on a system that had taken every structural tool from her except the pulse in her own wrist.

She tried to remember the last thing before the kitchen. She retraced the day: morning, alarm at six-thirty, coffee, shower, the drive to MidState, the parking lot with the pothole near the handicapped space that nobody ever fixed, the elevator to the third floor, her desk, the stack of claims, lunch at the Greek place on Fourth where she always ordered the same thing, a chicken wrap with tzatziki, and the woman behind the counter knew her order without asking and this was the closest thing to intimacy in Sandra's daily life, the fact that a woman in a restaurant remembered what she ate. She retraced the afternoon: more claims, a meeting she attended by phone because the conference room made her claustrophobic — a fact that now contained an irony so large she could not hold it — the drive home, the apartment, Biscuit winding between her ankles, the kitchen, the light buzzing, and then the box. No gap. No violence she could remember. No hands, no chloroform, no van. Just the kitchen and then the dark, and the seam between them was invisible and she could not find it no matter how carefully she retraced.

She slept. She knew she slept because she woke, and waking was a seam, a discontinuity where the counting stopped and the dark changed texture and she surfaced in layers: back, surface, ceiling, box, breathing.

The breathing on her left had changed. Faster. Shallower. The person on the other side was awake or distressed and their breathing had the quality of someone trying hard to breathe normally and failing, the rhythm skipping, catching, the sound of a body that knows it should be calm and cannot be.

Sandra pressed her palm against the wall.

She pressed and held and after a long moment — twenty heartbeats, thirty — she felt it. Heat. Not the ambient warmth of the wall. Focused heat. Palm-sized. A concentration of warmth against her hand as though the person on the other side had pressed their palm to the same spot and the two hands were aligned through the material, separated by inches, touching in the only way the boxes allowed.

She held her hand there. The breathing on the other side slowed. Not to sleep. To something quieter. Two bodies, walled in, pressing toward each other through the material, sharing warmth across a distance they could feel but could not close.

She did not move her hand. The breathing evened. The hum continued. The dark continued. Sandra lay on her back with her left hand pressed to the wall and her right hand on her chest, counting heartbeats, losing them, starting over, losing them again, the numbers dissolving into the dark like everything else.

Go to the next part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/ii-processing-part-two