Period Piece - § 2

The work was a game, the same one every day.

Alan sat at his console under the long tubes of light with the controller worn smooth in his hands and ran the small bright figure through its rooms. He knew the rooms. The figure jumped the gap where the gap was, climbed the ladder, gathered the coins that turned in the air, dropped down the shaft into the water and drowned, because that was where it drowned, and the screen went dark and asked him in friendly yellow letters whether he wished to continue.

He wished to continue. He pressed the button, and the figure stood up in the first room with all its lives given back, and Alan reached for the form.

The form asked how long the run had taken and where the figure had died, and then it asked a third thing, in a box at the bottom with more room in it than the other two had: what he had felt, if anything, watching it happen. He wrote the time. He wrote the place. In the third box he started to write nothing, and looked at the word, and crossed it out and left the box empty, because nothing was a kind of feeling and the box did not want a feeling. The box wanted the truth, and the truth was that he no longer knew what watching a small bright figure drown was supposed to do to a man, or whether the not-knowing was itself the thing the box was after.

Once, a long time ago, or maybe not so long, he had tried taking the figure a different way, holding it back from the gap to see what the rooms did if you did not do the thing the rooms were built for. The figure had stood at the edge and the water had gone on shining at the bottom of the shaft and nothing had happened at all. No door. No end. Only the same rooms waiting, and after a while he had walked the figure to the gap and put it over and let it drown, because that was the run, and he had written the time and the place and left the last box empty. He did not try it again.

He ran it again. He drowned it again. He filled the boxes and left the last one empty, and the morning went by like that, one small death after another, the room around him full of the soft work of other people.

Across the aisle a woman watched television commercials on a tape that hummed and clicked and rewound itself and played them again, and she wrote down what each one had made her want. Down the row a man read old magazines from a stack that never got any shorter and underlined things in them with a ruler. None of it went anywhere that Alan had ever seen. The reports went into folders and the folders went to Carmody, and Carmody carried them off past the door at the end, and the next day there were more games to play and more commercials to want and more pages to underline. That was the work. A grown man in a clean shirt, paid in his keep and his daughter's place, to send a small figure to the same death all day and write down whether it moved him.

Against the window, Carol's chair was pushed in and her desk was clear.

It had not been clear the day before. The day before there had been the calendar with the kittens and the framed picture of nobody Alan had ever asked her about. Now there was the bare laminate and the chair squared up against it, and no one in the room was looking at it, which was how he knew to look at it himself, as the slowing on the avenue had told him there was something wrong at the Wall.

He had sat near Carol for as long as he could account for sitting anywhere. She kept butterscotch in a drawer and gave him one when the afternoons got long. She had a laugh that started before the joke was done. He went looking for more than that, for where she was from or what her last name had been, and the floor ended back there the way it ended behind Robin, smooth and close and sooner than it should.

He got up and went down the row to her chair, because his legs took him there before he had weighed whether they should. He stood at the cleared desk and put his hand flat on the bare laminate where the kittens had been. It was warm. Not warm like a person. Warm like a thing recently wiped down. He opened the drawer and there was a single butterscotch lodged in the seam at the back of it, and he closed the drawer again without taking it. When he turned, the woman across the aisle was watching him over her television, her pen gone still, and she did not look away when he caught her at it, and there was nothing unkind in her face. She looked the way the man at the Wall had looked. Then her pen moved again, and Alan went back to his chair.

"She put in for a transfer," Gil said, at his elbow now, though Alan had not noticed him cross the room; a man stopped noticing a lot of things in here. "Lucky. Not everybody gets the paperwork to go through. They say it's better in some of the others." He said it like a man passing along good news, and his face stayed exactly as warm saying it as it had been a moment before, when there had been nothing to say.

Gil had a way of standing too close and being comfortable about it. He was the music man. He wrote his reports on the loud sad bands from the years they were all meant to be living in, the flannel and the feedback and the singers who had meant every word and paid for it, and he typed his own name onto the label of the folder he handed Carmody, and he liked to talk. He was talking now, telling the one about the singer, how the man had stood up at some festival in the rain with the whole field gone quiet and sung a song he had written for his mother, who had died that winter, and how he had gotten through all of it but the last line, and stopped, and just stood there with the rain coming down, and how the whole field had finished the line for him. Gil told it well. He told it like a thing he had told before and learned where the soft parts were. He came to the end and laughed his small laugh at the exact place he always laughed, the place where the field sang, and shook his head, and said they did not make them like that man anymore. Alan had the sense he had heard the story before, word for word, and he made the sounds a man makes.

"Remember the old one with the dog," Alan said, and heard the word the moment it was out of him. Old. You did not say old. The games were not old in here. They were the thing itself, the now, the only year there was, and to call one old was to step outside the year and stand there pointing back at it where anyone could watch you do it.

Gil was already over it. "The dog, sure," he said, his hand coming light onto Alan's shoulder, "my cousin wore that cartridge right out, played it till the dog wouldn't bark anymore," carrying the words on past the place where Alan had stepped wrong as though there were no wrong place to step, closing it over, smooth. He did not look at Alan any differently. He did not stop being kind.

Alan watched him do it. The save had come faster than a thing you think your way to. It had come like your hand coming up to catch a glass before you know the glass is falling. And under the kindness of it, it was the same motion exactly as a father's hand laid flat and gentle over his son's mouth at a school gate.

At the half-hour the screen on the break-room wall woke by itself and played the film it played. Alan stood at the back with a paper cup of coffee gone cool and watched it as everyone watched it, which was to point your face at it and let your eyes go on past.

A voice that wanted very much to be liked talked over pictures of clean hallways and quiet machines. Inside the walls, it said, a person could expect a long life and a well one. Sickness had been all but set aside. Every tool the world still had that did not depend on the unmanaged systems beyond the perimeter had been turned, the voice said, to the care of the people in here, and what was that, if not a gift. And for anyone who could not keep their place among that care, the voice went on, gentler, there was always the rest that waited past the perimeter, the long ease of it, the placement they had all earned in the end. Paradise, people called it, when they called it anything, said in the warm way you name a reward and the flat way you name a place no one had ever come back from to tell how it was. The film ended. The screen went dark. No one had looked up from what they were holding.

On his way back the magazine man caught his sleeve, not hard. "Watch your last box," he said, low, not looking up from his page. "A blank kicks the whole row back for review. Put nominal. Put unchanged. Don't leave it empty and make somebody come down here." He let go and ran his ruler under a line and underlined it. Alan thought of the box he had left empty that morning, and every morning, and said nothing.

Alan thought of Robin then, like thinking of a hand near a stove before you have decided to be afraid of fire. While the film had talked about the care they took of the people in here, his own hand had gone up to the back of his head, the fingers moving along the bone there as though there were a seam to find, and he had not felt it start and had to make it stop. She was four blocks and a school day from him, and she asked the kind of questions that had no answer you could give in this year. He could see her at eight. He could not get in under that.

He did not let the thought go any farther. He had learned where that floor ended too.

The afternoon ran the way the morning had. He drowned the figure and continued it and drowned it again. He filled the boxes. The light did not change, because the light in here never changed.

Carmody came through near three, as he came through every day, walking the rows with his hands behind his back and his eyes going desk to desk, not hurrying, not stopping, collecting nothing yet and seeing everything. He paused half a step at the cleared desk by the window and then went on. He stopped behind Alan and stood there a moment, and Alan ran the figure clean over the gap and up the ladder and did not miss a coin, and Carmody said, "Good," once, quietly, to the back of his head, and went on down the row. The word sat on Alan's neck a long time after.

And the question that had started up in him at the cleared desk did not leave; it sat and waited and grew.

Gil came back near the end of the day, folder under his arm, finished, easy. And the thing Alan had been carrying came all the way up in him. It was the question Robin had handed him at the gate, the one he had swallowed for her, turned around now and aimed the other way. He wanted to ask Gil whether he ever got tired of it. He wanted to ask whether Gil had told that story about the singer before, to someone else, in those same words, with that same laugh at that same place, or whether he only felt as though he had.

His mouth did not open. He felt it not open. He felt the not-opening happen the way you feel a door drawn shut from the far side, his own face going on holding its easy pleasant set while the question stood in him with nowhere to go. The holding had not waited on him to choose it. It had decided ahead of him. That was the part that went through him cold, colder than the cleared desk, colder than the kind fast hand: not that he had kept the question in, but that something in him had kept it for him, without asking, and would keep the next one too, and he would go on wearing whatever face it left him while it did.

"You all right," Gil said, warm, with the warmth that had not moved a hair all day.

"Long morning," Alan said. It came out level and easy, the right words in the right voice, and he had not made it. It made itself.

His hand was in his pocket. The change was going over under his thumb, one coin and the next, around and around, and he closed his fingers and held them still, and felt his thumb start again beneath the held fingers, working the coins where it could, where he could not stop it.

§§ : https://www.abctales.com/collection/period-pieces