II. Processing - Part Three

She sat at a table. She drank a second cup of water. She held the clipboard. She watched.

The facility ran the way a warehouse runs — calibrated, optimized, without urgency. Sandra read it the way she read claims. She couldn't stop herself. The reading was automatic, the mind doing what the mind had been trained to do — identify patterns, track variables, find the logic governing the system.

She timed the container arrivals: one every four to six minutes, throughput-driven, not scheduled. The variation suggested a feeder system with multiple input tracks, which was consistent with her experience of the conveyance — the junctions, the branching network. She counted twelve workers in pairs, rotating on a cycle she estimated at forty-five minutes. She noted that the rotation followed a pattern: each pair worked three stations before cycling to what appeared to be a break area near the loading dock, where they sat on stacked pallets and drank coffee from a machine she hadn't noticed before and talked to each other in low voices and one of them laughed, once, the sound so normal it was startling.

She watched the clipboards. The workers filled in nothing. They distributed forms to the processed and the processed filled in what they could and the workers never collected the forms, never checked them, never cross-referenced. At MidState, every form was checked. Every field was verified. A missing field triggered a flag and a flag triggered a follow-up and the follow-up closed the loop and the loop was the system and the system worked because the system checked itself. This system did not check itself. The forms were not data collection. They were ritual. The appearance of a process that expected participation, and the participation was the point, not the data.

She studied the vending machines. No prices. No brand name. She pressed a button and a sandwich dropped. She pressed it again. Another dropped. She pressed a third time to test the limit. It dropped. The machine's inventory appeared unlimited. She looked for a restocking mechanism — a door on the back, a hatch, a panel — and found nothing. The machine was flush against the wall and the wall was concrete and the sandwiches appeared from somewhere she could not determine, and she added this to the list of things the system would not explain and the list was long and growing and each item on the list was a small, precise failure of comprehension, and the failures were accumulating into something heavier than any single one of them.

She counted the people. Twenty-six. The recent arrivals sat rigid, scanning, trying to read the room the way Sandra was reading the room. The ones who'd been here longer had settled into postures of conservation — shoulders dropped, legs extended, the body saving energy for a departure no one had scheduled. A woman three tables over had unraveled the hem of her coveralls and was knitting with two coffee stirrers, the clicking barely audible beneath the music, the small square growing row by row, and the knitting was the most frightening thing Sandra had seen in the facility because the knitting meant the woman had been here long enough to need a project and had found the materials and had started making something, which meant she had settled in, which meant she expected to be here long enough to finish it. An elderly man near the vending machines was arranging sugar packets in a grid on the table, sliding them into alignment with the tip of his finger, his concentration absolute, each packet placed and adjusted and placed again, the grid growing and tightening, and the grid was perfect and the perfection was the same kind of thing as Sandra's map of the conveyance — a system imposed on the systemless, a structure built because the mind required structure the way the lungs required air.

The man at the nearest table was finishing a sandwich. White bread, turkey, mustard. Unhurried.

"How long have you been here?" Sandra asked.

He looked up. Fiftyish. Balding. "Three days. I think. The lights don't change."

"What is this place?"

"Processing." The same word. The same flatness. "I've asked other questions. Nobody answers the other questions."

"What questions?"

"Where. Why. How long. What happens next." He counted them on his fingers. "Forty times the first day. Ten the second. Today I haven't asked." He folded his sandwich wrapper. "Vending machine's free. Bathroom through that door. Water runs. Soap works."

"Has anyone tried to leave?"

"Dock doors are open. Nobody stops you." He paused. "A guy walked out yesterday. Stood in the lot for a while. Came back in."

"Why?"

He shook his head. Not refusal. Something worse — the expression of a man who has seen the answer to a question and has chosen not to carry it. "He didn't say. He sat down and he got a sandwich and he didn't talk about it."

Sandra filled in the clipboard. Name: Sandra. She wrote it and stopped. Her surname was there — she could feel it, the first letter, the number of syllables — but it wouldn't come. She pressed for it the way you press for a word on the tip of your tongue and the word retreated, softening, the edges dissolving, less itself with each attempt to hold it.

She wrote Sandra. Left the surname blank. Date of intake: blank. Medical notes: no injuries, mild dehydration. Signature: Sandra.

"I can't remember my last name," she said. She said it the way you'd say you can't find your keys.

"Took me about a day and a half," the man said. "I'm Gary. I was Gary something. The something's gone."

"Does that scare you?"

He thought about it with the slow, careful patience of a man who has nowhere to be. "It did. First day. I kept reaching for it. Like checking your pockets for your wallet. You know it's gone but you keep checking." He paused. "Second day I wasn't checking as much. This morning I didn't check at all. It's just gone. Like it was supposed to go."

Sandra felt her own name. Sandra. She reached for what came after. An M. Or an N. The letter was there and then it was soft and then it was nothing and she let it go because the reaching made it worse, the way pressing on a bruise tells you the damage is deeper than the surface.

The hold music shifted. Same tempo. Same instrumentation. Different melody — though Sandra couldn't have hummed the previous one if her life depended on it, and for all she knew her life did depend on things and she didn't know what they were. The music was designed not to be remembered. It was designed to fill space and prevent silence and to be nothing, and it was very good at being nothing, and the nothing it produced filled the facility the way the warm air had filled the container — completely, invisibly, so that after a while you stopped noticing it was there and then you stopped noticing that you'd stopped noticing, and the not-noticing was the final stage of a process she was watching happen to everyone in the room, including herself.

The knitting woman's square was two inches by three inches now. Sandra had been watching it grow. The woman's hands moved with the steady, undramatic rhythm of someone who has made a decision about how to spend her time and the decision is permanent. The coffee-stirrer needles clicked. The yarn — unraveled gray cotton from the coverall hem — looped and tightened and the square grew and the growing was the only progress anyone in the facility was making on anything.

Gary looked at his wrapper. He'd folded it into a small square. He unfolded it. Folded it again. Same creases. Same square. He did it the way the woman did her knitting and the man did his sugar packets — the hands needing occupation, the mind needing a problem it could solve.

"You want the other half?" he said. He held up a wrapped sandwich. "Got two from the machine. Habit. My wife —" He stopped. Not because of the wife. Because of the word, and the attachment thinning behind it, and he could feel it going and he was choosing not to follow.

"My wife used to say I always bought too much at the store," he said. Carefully. Holding the sentence at arm's length the way you'd hold a photograph by its edges to keep the oils from your fingers off the image. "I don't remember her name. But I remember the thing about the store."

He held out the sandwich.

Sandra took it. She unwrapped it. She took a bite. The bread was soft and the turkey was dry and the mustard was sharp and yellow and it tasted like every sandwich she had ever eaten in every waiting room and hospital cafeteria and airport terminal where she'd been stuck and hungry and between. The taste of transit. The taste of a place that was not the place before and not the place after but the place where you sit and eat and wait.

She chewed. She swallowed. She took another bite.

The facility ran around her. Containers arriving at the dock on steel rollers. Bodies sliding into light. Workers extending cups and clipboards. The hold music playing. The vending machine humming. The woman clicking her coffee-stirrer needles. The man sliding his sugar packets into their grid. Gary folding and unfolding his wrapper. The boy two tables down turning a paper cup in his fingers, around and around, the rotation steady, the cup already soft from the turning.

Sandra ate the sandwich. She set the clipboard on the table. 51,407. She looked at the number and she thought about MidState Insurance, the claims department, the desk with the monitor and the stack of forms and the number she'd been assigned when she started — her employee ID, her extension, her station — and she thought about how each claim that came through her desk was a number and behind the number was a person and behind the person was an event — an accident, an illness, a loss — and she processed the number and verified the fields and closed the file and moved to the next, and the person was the number and the number was the system and the system was what Sandra did for a living, and the system was what was being done to Sandra, and the parallel was not irony or coincidence but geometry, the same shape at different scales, and the shape was: a body enters a system and the system assigns a number and the number is retained and the body is processed and the processing is the thing that happens and nobody explains what the processing is for because the processing is not for anything, the processing is the system, and the system is its own purpose.

She took a breath. It came easily. Her lungs filled and the air tasted like metal and manufacturing and it was enough to sustain her and the ease of the breath was the thing, the specific terrible thing, because six hours ago she had been in the box counting heartbeats and pressing her palm to a wall to feel the warmth of someone she would never see, and the breath had been labor, each one an act of will, each one a decision to continue. And now the breath was easy. Automatic. The body had decided. The body had assessed the environment — air, water, food, temperature, the absence of immediate threat — and the body had clicked on, the systems engaging one by one, digestion and respiration and the small muscular adjustments of sitting in a chair, and the clicking-on was not surrender, it was machinery, it was the body deciding that this was the world now and the world must be survived and survival required breathing easily and eating when food was offered and holding a clipboard and listening to hold music and not asking the questions that nobody answered.

Sandra sat. Clipboard in her lap. Mustard on her tongue. Gary beside her, folding his wrapper, unfolding it, folding it.

She took another breath. Easy. Even. The breath of a person who is no longer fighting.

The facility hummed. The containers arrived. The music played.

Sandra breathed.
 

— end —