II. Processing - Part Two

The box moved.

Not gradually. A lurch, a vibration that started in the base and traveled through the material and into her spine, and then she was tilting, the angle shifting, her weight sliding toward her feet as the container ascended. The sensation of being inside an elevator that has begun to move in directions elevators should not move — lateral, diagonal, the body adjusting to forces it cannot see and cannot predict and cannot brace against because the walls are too close for bracing.

She pressed her hands to the sides. The material responded, firming under her palms. She could hear machinery now — surrounding the container, the ambient noise of a large mechanical system operating at scale. Rollers. Tracks. The sound of many things moving through a space designed for the moving of things.

She mapped the route. She had to. The mapping was the last tool that hadn't been stripped, and she would use it the way a drowning person uses a plank — not because it leads to shore but because it floats.

Left turn: gentle, the container banking, her weight shifting to her right hip. Duration: four seconds. She counted the seconds by heartbeat — four-point-seven seconds, to be precise, because sixty-eight heartbeats per minute means each heartbeat occupies point-eight-eight seconds and she counted five heartbeats during the turn and the math was clean and the math was something. Straightaway: level, fast, the vibration smoothing to a steady hum. Eleven seconds. She could feel the speed in the soles of her feet, a forward pressure, the body's internal accelerometer registering what the eyes could not. Incline: steep, her blood pooling in her calves, the angle perhaps twenty degrees. She estimated the angle by the distribution of her weight — seventy percent on her heels, thirty on her shoulders, which corresponded to roughly eighteen to twenty-two degrees of tilt, and she calculated this because she had taken physics in college and the physics had been useless for twelve years of insurance claims processing and now it was the only tool she had and she used it. Eight seconds. Junction: a pause, a click, a lateral shift of two or three inches as the container shunted from one track to another. The click was precise. Engineered. The sound of a decision made by a machine. Descent: gradual, the incline reversing, seven seconds. Right turn. Straightaway. Pause. Click. Left.

She assigned each segment a number. She tracked junctions — four so far. She counted inclines: three up, two down, net ascent. She estimated speed by pressure and distance by duration and she built a three-dimensional model of the system from inside a sealed box using nothing but the weight of her own body, and the model was precise and detailed and beautiful in the way that a solved equation is beautiful — elegant, complete, and entirely useless, because a map without edges is not a map but a diagram of your own imprisonment, and the system did not care that she understood its geometry, and the geometry did not lead to an exit.

The route continued. More turns. More junctions. She'd been moving for what her heartbeat-clock estimated at twenty minutes and the route had not repeated, no segment matching a previous segment. The system was enormous. A network, branching, each junction a decision made by something that was not her about a destination that was not hers to choose. She was being sorted the way a package is sorted — by criteria she could not perceive, through a system she could not influence, toward a destination she could not anticipate. Her map grew more detailed with every turn and the detail changed nothing and she held the map anyway because letting go of the map meant letting go of the last thing her mind could do.

The breathing on her left was gone. The junction had diverted her. She pressed her palm to the left wall where the warmth had been and it was cold now, uniform, the other container on a different track heading to a different junction, and the two seconds of connection — palm to palm, breath slowing, two bodies acknowledging each other — were over.

The motion stopped.

Silence. Not resting silence. Held silence — the silence of a system that has completed a sequence and is engaging the next mechanism. She felt a deep vibration beneath her. Something structural. Something large.

The foot of the box opened.

Not the top, like a lid. The foot. The wall at her feet split along a seam she hadn't known was there and the two halves retracted and light came in — white, fluorescent, industrial, the flat brutal light of a processing floor — and it hit her feet and shins and thighs and stomach and chest and face in a wave and her eyes contracted to pinpoints after the hours of dark and the tears came involuntarily and the world beyond the box was a white roar that resolved in stages, shape first and then color and then detail, each stage arriving like a layer of consciousness, and before the stages could complete she was sliding.

The surface beneath her tilted. She slid feet-first out of the container and onto a steel table.

Cold. The table was cold. After hours of body-temperature warmth the steel was a shock that went through her legs and her back and she gasped — not from pain but from the fact of temperature, different temperature, external temperature, the world making itself known through the skin after hours of the container's sameness. She could feel every inch of the table's surface against her body, each point of contact a signal, the skin suddenly alive with information after a long fast.

Air. The air moved. It moved against her arms and her face and the movement was ventilation, the ordinary circulation of a large room, but after the box's stillness it registered as wind and the wind was on every surface of her skin simultaneously and the sensation was so vivid it was nearly painful, the nervous system overloaded, every receptor firing, the body gorging on data after deprivation.

She sat up. She could sit up. The ceiling was thirty feet above her and the distance was dizzying, a vertigo of space, the opposite of claustrophobia — the room was too large, the air too open, and she felt exposed in a way she hadn't felt even in the box. The box had been terrible but it had been complete. It had held her. This room did not hold her. This room let her go in every direction and the letting-go was its own kind of cruelty.

She raised her arms — slowly, the muscles trembling from disuse — and her hands went up into open air and there was no resistance at seven inches and no resistance at twelve inches and no resistance at all and the absence was so vast she lowered them again because the openness felt like falling upward, the body expecting the ceiling that had been there for hours and finding nothing, nothing, nothing.

She looked down. She was wearing gray coveralls.

Gray fabric. Cotton blend. Zippered front. The jeans from her kitchen were gone. The t-shirt was gone. She touched the zipper. She pulled it down two inches and looked and she was wearing nothing underneath the coveralls — no bra, no underwear — and someone had removed every piece of clothing from her body while she was unconscious and dressed her in this and the knowing moved through her in a slow wave, hands on her skin, the intimacy of buttons and clasps and elastic, the particular violation of a body handled while the mind was absent, and she zipped the coveralls back up and pressed her palms flat against the table and breathed through it because she had already learned that screaming did nothing and she needed the breath for other things.

A woman stood beside the table. Mid-forties. Coveralls. Clipboard. Paper cup of water.

"Welcome to processing. You'll feel disoriented for about an hour."

Flat voice. Not unkind. A sentence worn smooth by repetition, the words like stones in a creek, the meaning abraded to function.

Sandra took the cup. Her hands shook. She drank all of it.

The room. Large. Concrete floor. Steel tables in rows — she counted eight rows, four tables per row, bolted to the floor, the bolting visible, the hex heads of the bolts flush with the concrete, which meant the tables had been installed permanently, which meant the room had been designed for this, which meant this was not improvised, not temporary, not an emergency measure. This was infrastructure. Fluorescent grid across the ceiling, the tubes long and yellowed at the ends, the light they produced not quite white but shifted toward green in a way that made the skin of the people in the room look faintly ill. A PA system on the far wall, playing hold music — and the music was the thing, the specific, terrible thing, because it was hold music, the kind you hear when you're on hold with a cable company or a government office, the kind that has been engineered to exist without being perceived, a melody that occupied the air the way anesthesia occupies a body, smoothing everything, softening edges, making the room bearable in the way that morphine makes a wound bearable, by reducing your ability to perceive it accurately. Sandra listened to the music and she could not identify the instruments and she could not follow the melody and after thirty seconds she couldn't hear it at all, and the not-hearing was the point.

Vending machines along one wall. A loading dock with roll-up doors at the back, two of the three doors open, the light beyond them flat and gray. Workers in coveralls moving between stations with clipboards, and the clipboards were the same heavy stock as hers and the workers held them the way workers in every warehouse she'd ever seen held clipboards — loosely, habitually, the clipboard an extension of the hand rather than a tool in it.

"Where am I?"

"Processing."

"Processing for what?"

The worker extended the clipboard. Sandra took it. Heavy stock. At the top: 51,407. Fields below: name, date, medical notes, signature. Mostly blank.

"Fill in what you can. Retain the document."

The worker moved to the next table. Another container opening. Another body in the light.

Sandra turned the clipboard over. Small print on the back: Retain this document. You will not be issued a replacement.

She held it to her chest.