Undisturbed (3)

The cutters pulled her right shoulder down and she changed hands at the door of Building Two and changed back.

Concrete held the cold and gave it up through her boots. The lights came on in banks ahead of her and went out behind her fifteen seconds after she passed, and she counted the doors on the right-hand side of Row C and stopped at the fourth from the end.

The brass padlock sat in the slot in the latch bar exactly as it had at midnight and at half past two.

She put the master into the disc lock and turned it and took it out of the hasp and put it in her jacket pocket, so that when it was done there would be one lock on the floor and one in her pocket and nothing hanging on the door.

Then she picked up the cutters.

There was not enough room between the door and the latch bar to open the handles the way they wanted to open. She got the jaws onto the shackle at the top of the arc, where the brass was cleanest, and spread the handles as far as the door would let her and brought them together with her arms.

They stopped. The jaws sat in the brass and did not go on into it.

She backed off and looked at where they had been. Two bright marks, one on each side, no deeper than a fingernail.

She set the lower handle on the concrete and stood over it with both hands on the upper one and put her weight down through her shoulders, and the cutters took a little more and then stopped again, and her boot slid an inch on the floor and she had to catch herself against the door with her hip.

The lights went out. She stood up and waved an arm and they came back and she was looking at the same lock.

She moved the jaws down the shackle, close to the body, into the green where the metal had been sitting in its own corrosion for ten years, and she got the lower handle against the inside of her thigh and both hands on the upper and pushed with her legs.

The brass gave in two stages. It resisted, and then it did not resist, and the sound was small.

She caught the body of the lock before it hit the floor.

It was heavier than it looked and cold enough to feel through her fingers. The cut face was bright, a clean crescent of yellow metal that had been inside the thing since before she could remember. Her palms had gone the colour palms go when a handle has been across them, and there was a numb line where the grip had sat, and she opened and shut her hands twice to bring them back.

She put the lock in the other pocket, so it was not against the disc lock, and lifted the door.

---

Four feet deep, five wide. Boxes stacked two-thirds to the ceiling against the back wall, heavy ones on the bottom, squared, the tape running the same direction on every one. Marker labels in her mother's hand.

The air that came out was the corridor's air.

Dust lay across the tops in a fur that had no edge to it. Around each stack there was a clean grey rectangle where ten years of the corridor had drifted in and settled and been swept once by somebody who had not moved anything. The tape had gone the colour of an old bruise, and along the flaps it had lifted at the corners, shrunk rather than curled. She put her thumbnail against one edge. It did not peel. It split, and the line ran two inches and stopped and left a white seam in the amber.

On the front of the top box on the left-hand stack, at about the height of her waist, there was a heart in red crayon.

The wax was still standing in the grain of the cardboard, thick where the stroke had gone over twice, thin at the bottom of the left lobe where the arm had run out of room. Beside it, in pencil, in letters made one at a time by somebody still learning to keep them the same size, was her own name.

Above both, in her mother's hand: JASON — CLOTHES 4/5.

She read it twice.

Then she put both hands flat on the top of the box and pushed the dust off in one motion, and it came away in a sheet and hung in the beam and did not settle for a long time.

She worked her nail under the split seam and drew it the length of the flap. The tape broke ahead of her in short runs and left crumbs of itself on the cardboard.

She opened the flaps.

---

Folded shirts. She lifted the top one out with both hands and it unfolded partway on its own and hung from her fingers, the body coming down past her forearm, the sleeves going out wide.

She held it against herself. It reached her hip.

She turned it around and found the tag inside the collar and put the light on it. The number was 10.

The one under it had no tag at all, washed soft at the cuffs, a size bigger by the shoulders. She held that one up too and then put both of them down on the lid of the second stack because her hands wanted to be doing something else.

At the bottom of the box, under the shirts, there was a pair of sneakers with the laces tied the way somebody ties them when they mean to step out of the shoes and leave them tied. The sole of the left one had a 6 moulded into the rubber at the arch and the tread was worn through to a paler grey under the ball of the foot.

She sat back on her heels with her hands on her thighs.

The marker on the side of the box said 4/5 in her mother's writing. She had watched her write it. She had been on the floor of the front room with the crayon in her fist while her mother went across the flaps with the packing tape and pressed it down with the heel of her hand, twice, the way she did everything, and had asked her to keep out of the way, and she had not kept out of the way, and the heart was where it was because she had wanted to put something on the box before it went.

The tape had gone on once. She had watched it go on. There had been a sound of it coming off the roll and then her mother's hand along the seam and then the box had been shut, and after that nobody had touched it, and the proof of that was in her lap and on her thumb and all across the top of every box in the room.

She reached back into the carton.

There was one more shirt at the bottom, under where the sneakers had been. She brought it out and turned the collar to the light and the tag said 12, and stuck to the fabric at the back of the collar, still holding after however long, there was a small oblong of paper.

A markdown sticker. The price on it in dot-matrix blue, and under the price, in the same blue, the date it had been printed.

She held the light closer.

Three years ago.

She counted backward from a thing she knew, the way she had done at the file cabinet and the way she had done under the flyers in D-9, and she got fourteen.

She did it again. She did it slower, from the year on the rental agreement instead, and it came out the same.

Fourteen.

She looked at the 12 on the tag. She looked at the date. She put her thumb against the split edge of the amber tape on the flap beside her and the crumbs of it came off on her skin, and she rubbed them between her finger and thumb until they were gone.

Her chest was moving in a way she could hear against the walls.

---

She could not remember the order the shirts had been in and she was not going to guess, so she folded them the way her mother folded and set them in with the sneakers on the bottom and the one with the sticker under the others.

The card on the lanyard kept swinging out of her collar and into the box while she worked, so she took the whole thing off over her head and set it down on the lid of the second stack.

She pressed the flaps together. They did not want to sit. The old tape had gone hard along the fold and it held the cardboard in a shape it had learned, and the seam stood up a quarter inch no matter what she did with her hand.

She got the roll out of her jacket. The end had stuck to itself in the drawer and she had to work at it with a fingernail to find the lift, and when it came it came with a squeal that went the length of the corridor, and she stopped and let it finish and started again more slowly, which made it worse.

She laid a piece across the seam and ran her thumb down it. The flap came up behind her thumb as fast as she pressed it. She put a second piece across the first at an angle and held it with the heel of her hand and counted to ten, and when she took her hand away it held.

It was clear and wide and glossy over the amber and the difference showed the way glass shows over skin. She tried smoothing the new tape out toward the edges to take the shine off it. That made a wrinkle down the middle, and the wrinkle caught the light, and she stopped touching it.

Her ID lay on the lid of the second stack, face up, her photograph on it and her name and the year printed under the logo of a company that had nothing to do with this building.

She looked at it.

She lifted the box back onto the stack and it went down an inch off square, the corner hanging out over the one below. She put her hand on it. She did not straighten it. She took her hand away.

Then she went out under the door and brought it down and put the company lock through the hasp and closed it and turned the face out to the corridor to match the row.

The slot in the latch bar was empty.

---

At 5:58 she sat down at the desk.

The cold from the corridor was still in her hands. It had got into the joints of her fingers and the pen felt thick and wrong when she picked it up. She squared the log to the edge of the desk.

She wrote the time. She had to bear down on the ballpoint to keep her hand from carrying, hard enough that the letters scored through onto the page underneath, and in the same block letters she had been making since ten o'clock she wrote ALL UNITS SECURE. NO INCIDENTS.

She let the breath out of her chest and it filled the quiet in the office.

She capped the pen and set it parallel to the top edge of the page.

The monitors cycled above her. Gate. Office. Lot. Then the fourth went to black the way it did between the two outdoor rows, and for three seconds the glass gave her back to herself, a face lit from one side by the desk lamp, the mouth slightly open, and she stayed on it until the loop came round and took it away and put the east row up in its place.

She waited through the whole cycle and it came again and she was still there.

Out on the county road, a long way off and coming, headlights swung once through the trees.

 

~End~