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Dedicated to Ro, my beloved.
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Chapter XIII
The workstation was the only world Brian Smith had ever known.
He had worked here for a duration he could not measure, because measurement required endpoints, and the shift had no endpoints. The digital clock on his desk had read 9:17 when he sat down, and it would read 9:17 when he stood up.
The carpet was that particular shade of green found only in government buildings and indoor minigolf courses—the green of hospital scrubs, static-charged and fibrous, alive with a faint charge that made the hair on his forearms stand when he rested them on the desk. His cubicle was one of forty arranged in a grid of four-by-ten, the partitions beige fabric tacked to particle board, the color of unsalted crackers. A CRT monitor occupied the center of his workspace, its screen the sickly blue-white of a winter sky seen through plastic. The keyboard was heavy, mechanical, the keys clacking like a typewriter. He liked that sound, and had no idea why.
The fluorescent fixtures overhead held their flat, even glow with eternal constancy. Below it, the thick green carpet absorbed the sound of every footstep, rendering the floor an expanse of muffled clatter. Brian had decided, at some point he could not name, that he liked the hum, too. It was company.
The work itself involved numbers. Five-digit strings arranged in columns on his screen, each accompanied by a two-letter code he had been trained to identify and sort into one of four bins: WO, FR, DR, MA. Woe. Frolic. Dread. Malice. Macrodata Refinement. File 47-B. Sort the numbers into bins. He didn’t know why those categories existed, nor did question them. That was the point. What the numbers represented, what the bins fed into, what happened after he pressed ENTER and the string vanished from his screen—these were questions that did not occur to him, because they were not questions that mattered.
The work was mysterious and important. This dogma was reinforced everywhere Brian looked, including on the laminated card taped beside his keyboard, in a font that resembled a smile.
When a cluster of numbers made him feel a certain way he couldn’t quite articulate beyond a small cold tug behind his sternum, he boxed them and dragged them into a bin at the bottom of the screen, where they vanished with a soft, satisfied chime. He sorted a string beginning with 44791 into DR. The screen refreshed. Another string. 88204. He hesitated. The number had made the muscles between his shoulder blades tighten, briefly, like something trying to unfold. His finger hovered over FR, then moved to WO. The screen refreshed. The rhythm was hypnotic, almost comforting.
“Morning, Brian.”
Christian (though everyone called him Cash), from two cubicles down, leaned over the partition. He held a fanned stack of expense reports against his chest like a man shielding himself from weather.
“Morning, Cash.”
“You catch the melon bar yesterday?”
“There was a melon bar?”
Cash’s expression performed a small and complicated maneuver. “There’s always a melon bar. There was a melon bar. I think there was.” He frowned at the reports in his hands as though they might confirm it. “Anyway. Otto’s doing rounds early. Just so you know.”
Across the partition, Claude Redding sat rigidly, his posture like that of a man who wore armor, though of course he had never done so. Claude was broad-shouldered, mid-forties, with a clean scar that traced his left jawline from ear to chin. He worked with mechanical efficiency, sorting strings at a rate that exceeded department average by thirty-one percent, a statistic Otto had mentioned during the last quarterly review with quiet pride. Claude spoke seldom, but when he did, his voice carried a flatness that made even “pass the stapler” sound like a military command.
“Stapler,” Claude said now, without turning his head.
Brian passed the stapler over the partition. It returned a moment later with a faint smell of heated metal, as though it had been near an oven.
“Thanks,” Brian murmured.
Claude only grunted. The clatter of his keyboard resumed.
Otto Steele emerged from his glass office—though the act of doing so mattered little, since the wall was glass and he had been visible the entire time, seated behind a desk organized with the geometric precision of a crystal lattice. He was a balding man in his late fifties, silver hair thinned to a polite crown and combed back with precise, parallel comb-marks, above ears that protruded slightly, giving his head the shape of a worn axe. His bald head caught the fluorescent light like a polished egg. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled exactly to the elbow, exposing pale, rigid forearms mapped with veins and old scars, corded with a kind of musculature that could not have been cultivated from office work. Dark, bruised half-moons sagged beneath his eyes, cataloging a fatigue that seemed woven into his cellular structure. He wore a tie the color of dried blood, knotted with a precision that bordered on liturgical.
In his right hand, he carried the mug. The mug was white ceramic, standard issue, bearing the legend WORLD’S BEST BOSS in cheerful navy lettering. This was its message when filled with hot coffee, which Otto drank black, which he drank constantly. But on the occasions when he set it down and let it cool below the thermochromic threshold, the bold, cheerful letters would bleed and resurface as a sickly, luminescent green: EMPLOYEE TEARS. No one had ever commented on this, uncertain whether the mug was a joke. Otto’s face offered no evidence either way.
He moved through the office like water through a drain. He walked the rows of cubicles, his eyes moving from screen to screen, tracking the minute, repetitive movements of the staff like a surveillance camera panning across an empty lot. He blinked infrequently, if at all. He paused behind Brian’s chair, but Brian continued sorting as if he did not sense the presence there. 33917. FR. 71004. MA.
“Good morning, Brian,” Otto said, sipping his coffee.
“Morning, Otto.”
“How’s the refinement today?”
“They’re…” Brian looked at the screen. The columns scrolled. “They’re refining. I think.”
“You think.” Otto set the mug on the partition. “Thinking is the precursor to error, Smith. Refinement is a feeling. Do you feel it?”
“I—yes.”
“Good.” Otto retrieved the mug. “You’re slightly behind your weekly quota. By four units.” A pause. He sipped again. “I’m not concerned. The Board appreciates feeling.” He held Brian’s gaze a beat too long, and there seemed to be a patient hunger in his eyes.
He moved on. The fluorescent hum resumed its polite negotiation with silence. Brian realized he’d been holding his breath the entire time.
There was Hubert, who came around from Optics at intervals to lean on cubicle walls and tell stories. Hubert had jet-black hair slicked back and eyes the orange of a dying coal, and he wore his lanyard like a man who’d been told it made him important and had decided to believe it completely. He liked to ask people about their proudest achievements. He liked to lean in close while they answered, nodding, yes, yes, go on, until the speaker found themselves describing triumphs they weren’t sure they’d actually had. Brian had learned to keep his answers short around Hubert. He didn’t know why. His body knew, the way a hand knows a stove.
There was Clive, who manned the reception desk near the elevator that never opened, behind a curved desk at a symmetrical intersection of corridors. Clive was elderly and pale and perpetually exhausted, the flesh of his face deeply lined above a tight, restricting collar, his wrists rubbed raw beneath his cuffs as though he’d once worn something heavy there. He answered phones that didn’t ring. Sometimes he would pause and stare at the wall behind his monitor—or at his own reflection in the darkened glass—with an expression of such fathomless private grief that Brian had to look away, embarrassed, as if he’d opened a door on someone undressing, as if Clive were searching the dark glass for a face he’d once known.
Once, Brian had passed Clive’s desk and felt a tug behind the eyes—I know you, we have done this before, you took something from me, you gave something back—and Clive had looked up, and for a half-second the exhaustion had cracked, and beneath it was something that looked almost like recognition. Almost like a question. Then it closed. Clive said, “Can I direct your call,” and Brian said, “No, sorry, wrong way,” and walked back to his desk and looked at numbers until the feeling drowned.
And there was the break room.
It occupied the northeast corner of the floor, through a door heavier than it needed to be, a narrow alcove where the lighting went warm and amber, the color of honey held up to a bare bulb. It was a sickly warmth, the kind that made skin look bruised. A vending machine hummed against the far wall—melon bars, protein wafers, something called a “Waffle Snack” in packaging that hadn’t been updated since what Brian’s mind labeled a long time ago without further specificity. A coffee urn had been crusted brown since before anyone could remember. A laminated poster depicted a cartoon handshake above the words A REFINED EMPLOYEE IS A HAPPY EMPLOYEE, and below, in smaller text: Please enjoy each break equally.
The only window showed nothing but a brick wall three feet away. Brian stood at it sometimes and tried to remember the color of the sky. What is sky? he wondered. Is that a thing?
Victor Dominus sat alone at the round table in the center of the room, eating a melon bar in slow, deliberate bites. He was improbably tall for the chairs, which forced his knees upward at an angle that looked uncomfortable but which he never adjusted. His face was angular and pale, his dark hair swept back with a severity that made his features appear carved.
“Victor.”
“Brian.”
Victor finished his melon bar, folded the wrapper into a precise square, and placed it in his shirt pocket. He brushed crumbs from his lap with two fingers.
“Do you ever think about—” Brian stopped. He wasn’t sure what the end of the sentence was. Something about before. Something about a time that wasn’t this time. The thought had arrived with the vague shape of a question, but it dissolved when he tried to hold it, like smoke reversed into a mouth.
“About what?” Victor asked.
Brian looked at his water cup. “Nothing. Sorry.”
Victor studied him a moment. His eyes were dark and flat, like the eyes of a man who had once built walls for a living and saw no reason to stop. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“The work can be demanding.” Victor stood, his chair scraping the carpet with a sound like tearing paper. “I find it helpful to focus on the task at hand. The task at hand is sufficient.” He left.
The door swung open again. Rusty Corrado stepped in, his presence filling the small space like smoke. Big man, grey-skinned in the way of someone who hadn’t seen sun in years, with charcoal hair and a cheap gray suit that pulled at the shoulders, and a smile that contained too many teeth. His eyes had an unsettling orange tint in certain light.
“Smith. Enjoying your break?”
“Just getting coffee, Russ.”
“Please, just call me Rusty.” The correction was immediate, almost automatic. Rusty ran the perks—the waffle parties, the music-and-dance experiences, the finger traps that arrived in commemorative tins. He delivered them as fervently as scripture.
He moved to the vending machine, feeding a crumpled bill into the slot. The machine wheezed and produced a pack of crackers. “You know what I think about when I’m standing here?”
“What’s that?”
“I think about how lucky we are.” He tore open the packet with his teeth. “To have work. To have structure. Purpose.” He crunched a cracker, his orange eyes never leaving Brian’s face. “Without the work, what are we? Just meat waiting to rot.” The words felt familiar, like a song Brian had heard too many times. “You earned this,” Rusty added, softer, almost tender. “You suffered, and now you’re rewarded. Isn’t that just beautiful? Isn’t that how it should be?”
He clapped Brian on the shoulder with more force than necessary, and the cold of it sank through the fabric like meltwater. “Back to it, then. The Board expects results.”
Thea Proctor worked the cubicle across the aisle, keeping her workspace with meticulous care: a small, hardy fern that shouldn’t survive under fluorescent light but did, thriving with a stubbornness that seemed almost defiant, and beside it, a stock photograph of a field—golden wheat under a blue sky. She looked at it sometimes between strings, her eyes resting on the horizon line with an expression Brian could only describe as recognition. It was as though she knew that field, though she couldn’t have, because there were no fields here nor anywhere.
“Brian,” she asked. “Do you ever smell rain?”
“What?”
“Rain. Petrichor. The smell of it on stone.” She sorted a string into DR. “I keep smelling it. Just for a second. Like someone walked past wearing a cologne made of storm clouds and—” She laughed. “Listen to me. Storm clouds. I should lay off the coffee.”
Something in Brian’s chest had shifted, adjacent to pain and recognition. A pressure, like a hand pressing against the inside of a door that wanted to open. “I smell it too,” he said.
Thea looked at him then. Her eyes were brown and warm and troubled. For a moment, a subtle current passed between them, a signal from a transmitter neither of them knew they carried. Then she turned back to her screen, and the moment closed like a wound healing in reverse. “That’s probably just the ventilation system,” she said, and sorted another string.
But it stayed with Brian. At his terminal, the numbers cascaded in neat, orderly columns across the convex glass, and then, for a microsecond, the cold blue light seemed to fracture. A distinct, unauthorized scent bled into the sterile, recycled air: petrichor and old liquor. A phantom weight settled against his left hip: a heavy, metallic dragging sensation, like a ring of solid iron. The static charge of the green carpet suddenly felt less like nylon and more like damp, ancient stone. And the numbers on the screen blurred, briefly rearranging themselves into the shape of a jagged, archaic keyhole.
His right hand moved to his left hip. Found nothing. His fingers closed on an empty belt loop. He looked down at his hand, puzzled. What was he reaching for?
He noticed, then, the tan line on his left ring finger, where a wedding ring should be. He was not married, but the line was there, a pale groove in the skin, as though something had been removed. There was a wife. There might have been a wife. The thought was there and then handed away, smooth and pre-chewed, the way a bird feeds its young.
He sorted another string. 22651. WO. ENTER. 77013. MA. ENTER. 90001.
He stopped. 90001. The numbers sat on his screen with an irrational weight. Numbers were symbols without substance, marks on glass. But these marks pulled at something. His body, which had its own architecture, its own stubborn archive of sensations the mind hadn’t been consulted on, said this means something. He sorted it. WO. ENTER. The screen refreshed. 01001. His heart rate elevated by several beats per minute. The digits were ordinary. Five numbers, like all the others. But something in their arrangement…
He needed to walk.
The corridor outside the bathrooms held a framed print of a lighthouse on a cliff, the sea below it grey and unbothered. Brian passed it four times a day—on his way to refine, on his way back, on his way to the melon bar he could never quite remember attending. A small brass plaque beneath it read SERENITY, in the smiling font.
On a day that was probably a Tuesday, the lighthouse had been on the left side of the cliff. By afternoon, it was on the right.
Brian stood before it with a paper cup of water going warm in his hand. He looked at the lighthouse, and remembered that, actually, it had always been on the right. He also remembered it being on the left, and remembered that memory was wrong, and remembered that the memory of it being wrong was itself something that had been handed to him, smooth and pre-chewed. The cold tug behind his sternum, the one he felt when numbers needed boxing, resurfaced.
And the corridor itself was wrong. It stretched away past the bathrooms into a vanishing point of green carpet and white wall that should not have fit inside whatever held them—longer than the building could possibly hold. He walked, and walked, and the restroom door appeared exactly where it should have been, as though it had been waiting for him to notice the wrongness before allowing itself to be found.
High above the floor, in a glass-walled catwalk, three figures paused to watch him.
One was Hubert, smiling down with a wide, predatory grin that lacked a punchline. Beside him stood Rusty, his frame thick and immovable beneath his charcoal jacket. And beside Rusty stood Zola—a male figure in dark glasses worn indoors, around whom the light itself seemed to thin and gutter, as though some perpetual eclipse traveled with him and dimmed the fluorescents in his vicinity. They observed the hesitation at the painting. The Board was always observing.
“Pretty, isn’t it.”
Rusty stood beside him now, though the corridor was far too long for him to have crossed it that quickly.
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Pretty.”
“You were looking at it a long while. What did you see?”
“A lighthouse.”
“And?”
Brian’s mouth opened, and though he intended to say nothing, what came out instead was: “It moved.”
Rusty’s smile widened by a single tooth. “Paintings don’t move, Brian.” He clapped a heavy hand on Brian’s shoulder. “You’ve been refining real hard. Wouldn’t want you getting ideas.” He said the word the way a man might say cancer. “I’ll let the Board know you’re due for some wellness.”
“I’m fine,” Brian said.
“Course you are.” Rusty’s eyes burned in their grey sockets, twin coals in ash. “That’s why we’re going to make sure.”
The fourth floor1 housed Interpersonal Relations. Phyllis Heart ran the department from an office painted a color that aspired to sage but achieved only institutional. She was a woman in her early fifties with soft features and reading glasses perpetually pushed into her hair. Her desk was cluttered with binders, stress balls, and a mug that read YOU ARE ENOUGH (or, as his co-worker Penelope liked to say in German, Du bist gut genug) in gentle cursive. She was, by all accounts, the warmest presence on the floor. People came to her with their problems. She listened. She nodded. She said things like “That sounds really difficult” and “I want you to know that your feelings are valid.” She was very good at her job.
Brian had been to her office twice in his shift. He had expressed general malaise, and She had offered tea which tasted like water.
He passed her office on his way back from the restroom—a journey that took longer than it should have, because the hallway was longer than it should have been. The corridor stretched ahead of him in a perspective line that failed to converge properly, the identical doors on either side repeating like a pattern that had lost its stopping point. The carpet was the same green. The ceiling was the same height. The fluorescent hum was the same hum. But the hallway was too long. He walked for thirty seconds. A minute. The restroom door appeared on his left, exactly where it should have been, as though it had been waiting for him to notice the wrongness before allowing itself to be found.
Phyllis’ door was open. She was at her desk, turning pages in a binder. She looked up as Brian passed. “Brian. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“You sure? You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine, Phyllis.”
She studied him with a concerned expression. “You know my door is always open—literally. Facilities won’t give me a lock.”
Brian almost smiled. “I know.”
He walked on. Behind him, Phyllis watched his back with an expression that her training could not quite contain—something older and heavier beneath the concern, like grief wearing a professional face. She turned back to her binder, where the page she was reading was blank.
A note sat on Brian’s desk when he returned: cream cardstock, smiling font, and yet carrying a foreboding undertone.
SMITH, BRIAN.
A WELLNESS SESSION HAS BEEN SCHEDULED ON YOUR BEHALF.
WELLNESS IS A GIFT. PLEASE TRY TO RECEIVE IT WITH GRATITUDE.
ROOM 0. DR. BLACK PRESIDING.
— THE BOARD
Beneath the words, embossed faintly into the card, was a symbol he found difficulty looking at directly: a coiling thing, serpentine, that seemed to move when his eyes slid past it. Six smaller marks ringed it. The Board.
Cash appeared at the partition. He’d seen the card. “Oh, Brian.” His voice dropped to a whisper, as if the cubicle walls had ears, which they did. “Wellness. With her. What did you do?”
“I said a painting moved.”
Cash flinched as though struck. “Don’t—” He glanced left and right. “Don’t say things like that. Things don’t move. Numbers come in, you sort them, the melon bar happens, we’re rewarded, we’re fine.” He was reciting. Brian could hear the worn grooves of a thing said so many times it had stopped meaning anything and started meaning everything. “We’re fine, Brian. Tell me we’re fine.”
Brian looked at his friend’s frightened, kind, forgettable face. Somewhere within the depths of his being, the god of Access rolled in its grave.
“We’re fine,” Brian said.
The door to the main floor opened, and Otto Steele stood in it. “Brian.” His voice was even, like a man discussing toner levels. “Could you come with me, please?”
Brian saved his work and stood; his chair rolled back, and the static discharge popped faintly under the wheels.
“The Board has expressed a desire for your continued equilibrium,” Otto said as they walked, his tone shifting into the automated cadence of a corporate manual. “A recalibration will be initiated. You’ve been doing good work, Brian. Doctor Black likes to speak with employees periodically. Standard procedure.”
“Standard procedure,” Brian repeated, without quite believing it.
“That’s right.”
The corridors extending from the floor branched without logic. The green carpet transitioned abruptly into stark white linoleum. The ceilings lowered by exactly two inches every hundred feet, creating a subtle, suffocating compression of space. There were no windows. There was no weather. The digital clocks on the walls read 14:42, as always. The single panel lighting this corridor buzzed at a frequency slightly different from the rest of the floor—a dissonance so subtle it registered only as a vague unease, a feeling of being in the wrong key.
At a symmetrical intersection, Clive sat behind his curved desk—the man who had once looked at Brian like a half-remembered question—and pointed silently down the left corridor.
At the end of a long, pristine hallway, past the lighthouse and the folding vanishing point, a single white door awaited. A digital nameplate beside it glowed a calm blue: PLEASE ENTER WHEN CALMED. Below it, a placard: Wellness — Dr. Black. By Appointment Only. Brian, for all intents and purposes, was not calmed. His heart beat to the disobedient rhythm of an animal thing, an outside thing. He entered, and the door closed behind him with a soft, pneumatic hiss.
The room was sickeningly warm—the heat of an incubator, of an open mouth. Soft amber light, the only warm light in the entire building, pooled over two chairs facing one another across a low table. On the table sat a glass of water, a box of tissues, and a single black candle, unlit.
In the far chair sat a woman, or rather the suggestion of one, like darkness draped in a black dress. She wore a voluminous, stark black gown that hung with heavy, unnatural stillness, a vertical seam running perfectly down the center of the bodice. Her dark hair cascaded in sweeping, rigid lines around an angular face, beautiful in the way a blade is. Her dark eyes were hollow, yet intensely focused. When she smiled softly, the warm light dimmed by a degree. “Please enter, Brian. And please, seat yourself. Try to enjoy the chair.” Her voice could only be described as Brian’s grandmother and a dial tone and the bottom of a well, all at once. “You’ve had a difficult day. You saw something that troubled you.”
Brian’s body sat for him, the chair receiving him like a hand.
“I’m Doctor Black.” She folded her elongated, claw-like fingers in her lap, and they clicked softly, one against the next, like the patient teeth of a clock. “I’m here to help you. That’s all any of us want, you know. To help. The light says it wants to help, but it withholds. It hands you a painting and tells you it never moves. It hands you a memory and tells you it’s the only one.” She tilted her head. “We have much to discuss regarding your recent lack of focus.”
“The work is mysterious and important,” she went on, and there was conviction in it that came from the heart, not merely as a company slogan. “Do you know what the numbers really mean, Brian?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“There’s a part of you,” she continued, soft as falling ash, “that thinks it’s something more. A part that notices a moving painting. A part that’s been asleep a very long time.” She raised a single finger, reached across the low table, and hovered an inch from his chest, above the precise spot where the cold tug lived. “Shall we wake it up? Shall we see what’s hidden in there, you and I? It will only hurt the way being born hurts.”
The cold tug behind his sternum was stronger now. No, it said. No, don’t, the truth is the bait, the truth is the trap, you have done this before…
Somewhere past the folded corridor and the cracker-colored ceiling and the lights, around a long table, the rest of the Board sat watching a screen. There was Hubert with his coal-orange eyes, and Rusty grey and grinning, and Otto with his slowly cooling mug, and Clive with his raw and aching wrists, and Zola—beneath whom the light bent and dimmed. The five of them leaned toward the glass, waiting to see what would be remembered.
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