by Carol Davis
She greeted him with a smile and a nod.
“Where’s–” Eli stammered.
She turned to the console as if she expected it to provide some useful information. Apparently it did, because she turned back to Eli to say, “The worker who used to be stationed here? They’ve assigned me here until Administration can find a replacement.”
Smiling, she pointed to his console, where a single token – white, which made it different from the ordinary silver ones – lay alongside his keyboard.
“Someone left you a gift,” she said. “Isn’t that nice.”
Three
____________
“These things happen,” the counselor said.
These things. As if he was talking about a failed machine part. Though in a sense… maybe that was exactly what Ben was. He’d been a part of the machine, like a bolt, or a circuit board, and he’d failed. Eli tried again for a moment to convince himself that Ben had been transferred somewhere else in the quad, or to another quad – that all the others who’d disappeared had been transferred – and that the lack of information was simply intended to prevent others from insisting that they be allowed to go too.
Ben, with his mysterious contacts…
That was it. Ben had finagled himself a better job, in some other area. And he’d left without saying goodbye because he’d been told he had to.
Surely, that was it.
But that did nothing to ease the throbbing pain behind Eli’s eyes. Because he didn’t believe that that was what had happened – and no one had attempted to lead him in that direction, or any direction at all. Ben had disappeared for the same reason Simmons had, and the man who’d been removed from the theater the other day. I should have gone with him, Eli told himself dimly, though of course that wouldn’t have changed anything. He and Ben never had the same destination in their excursions. And no one had ever been able to quiet a screamer, to prevent their being taken away.
“Mr. Christopher,” the counselor said. “Eli.”
Eli opened his eyes just a crack, then closed them again. The white wall opposite him was too bright to look at, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at the counselor. Better to look at nothing.
“You’re aware of the drawbacks to excursions from the theater,” the counselor said. “I have your signature here, on the original agreement form. It was all explained to you beforehand. That there are occasional…”
“Failures?” Eli muttered.
It was true, then. Ben had been taken out of the theater. Ben, who’d always come back safely.
“Mishaps.”
“Is that what you call it? A mishap?” Eli said, although he’d heard that term used any number of times before. It was a handy euphemism, like “passing away.” It made everything that went wrong sound like (at worst) an inconvenience. He opened his eyes and tried to glare at the counselor – though he knew there was little or no possibility of his actually intimidating the man – and to his surprise, the man actually looked chagrined.
“Please,” he said, and rested a hand on Eli’s knee. “I can assure you that everything is being dealt with properly.”
“Sure,” Eli said. “Sure it is.”
He’d picked up that white token from alongside his keyboard and had tucked it into his pocket; he imagined that he could feel it there, generating some sort of energy against his chest. Ben had to have left it there, on the console; there was no other explanation for its having been there. Why it hadn’t been discovered and confiscated before Elma had pointed it out to him, Eli had no idea. If the worker on the overnight shift hadn’t seen it, surely the cleaning crew would have.
Maybe it had been left there early this morning.
Did that mean Ben hadn’t gone to the theater? That he’d really been transferred to another quad, and that he’d run in here just for a moment to leave Eli a goodbye gift – the only way he could manage to say goodbye?
“An answer would help,” he told the counselor. “Just… some kind of an answer. I need to know what happened to my friend.”
“I don’t have that information, Mr. Christopher.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Eli leaned forward, intending to get up from the chair, but his body had gone weak and rubbery. It told him without doubt that if he tried to stand up, he’d fall. He’d collapse to the floor like a broken doll.
“I’ve arranged for an escort,” the counselor told him. “To take you home.”
“I don’t need to go home.”
I want to go back to my station. I’ll walk back out there, and Ben will be there, asking me why it took me so long to use the toilet. He’ll ask me again if I’m going to go to the theater tonight instead of staying home with Lida. None of this is happening. It’s just… I’m dreaming. I ate something that was off, and I’m having a bad dream.
“He’s working in another quad?” he whispered.
The counselor hesitated, then said firmly, “Yes. That’s exactly what’s happened. If you’d like to believe that, then by all means believe it. Either way… it’s all been handled appropriately, and you have no reason to be concerned. Now, let’s get you home so you can rest.”
~~~~
They gave him something.
He had no idea what, or how, but he was sure that someone – Security, or the counselor, or someone else he wasn’t aware of – must have slipped him something that dulled his thought processes right down to nothing, that turned his mind into soup and his limbs to jelly. That was the only reasonable explanation for the way he felt when he woke up in the evening: nauseated, aching, foggy.
Sick.
“Ssshhh.”
Lida’s voice. Then he felt her hand, bathing his face with a cool, damp cloth. The gentle touch felt both soothing and terrible at the same time, and he fought the urge to seize her wrist and force her hand away from him.
“They told me,” she said softly. “About Ben.”
Transferred…
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Eli. I know he didn’t think much of me, and I can’t honestly say I was very fond of him. But I know he was your friend. So I’m sorry. You should try to rest. Go back to sleep for a while.”
Nausea swept through him in a wave, and he curled violently into a ball, away from Lida’s touch.
“They said you might have a reaction. It’ll pass.”
Pass?
So I’ll forget.
“They left this too. Here. It’s water. First label, Eli. They left you some first label, to make you feel better.” She tried to roll him over, but he fought her, curling tighter, knees pressed to his chest. “They’re not unkind, Eli,” Lida said with a wobble in her voice. “There are rules, but they really are for our own good.”
He didn’t loosen up, and after a minute he felt her climb off the bed. A moment later he heard a creak that said she’d sat down on the lounger.
“You drink it,” he told her. “I don’t want it.”
“It’s here for you. I’m going to leave it right here, because they left it for you.”
What was that? he wondered. Generosity? Fear of being found out? It’s only a damned bottle of water.
“There’s… a door,” he said. “At the theater. There’s a long corridor, with a door at the end. It says No Admittance.”
“I know.”
“How could you know? You’ve never been there.”
“Everyone knows, Eli. Everybody knows about the door.”
Even if you’ve never been there. Even if you’ve never even looked inside the lobby. “They take people there. When they break down. Security takes them in there, and they don’t come back out. I think people die in there, Lida. Because they’ve broken, and they’re no longer of any use. We’re supposed to be in control at all times. Steady hands. Steady minds. If we’re broken, we can’t do the work. We’d just be taking up space. Using up resources.”
He half expected her to disagree. To parrot the little bit of information that Administratio
n was willing to share.
Workers in need of rehabilitation are relocated to a facility elsewhere.
You need not be concerned about them.
Instead, she said, “I know.”
He peered at her from the bed. She’d put the water bottle down on the table, and was wringing her hands in her lap.
“It’s supposed to be safe,” she said.
“It’s not.”
“Then why do you go?”
The was pain in her voice, a gut-deep anguish that sounded like it had been held inside for a good long time. It made her as vulnerable as Eli had ever seen her, and he began to understand that the person he’d thought Lida was was largely a construct – something she’d pieced together so that other people wouldn’t look at her too closely. All of it, her expression said – her prickly nature, her refusal to clean up after herself, her reluctance to go along with anything he suggested – was a mask, and underneath it was someone he didn’t think he’d ever met before.
Someone who was fighting back tears.
“I lost someone,” she muttered, talking more to her lap than to Eli. “My first partner. We were only together a little while.”
“No one told me that.”
“They wouldn’t, would they?”
“He went to the theater?”
He sat up slowly, wary of the way his head swam, still in the grip of whatever medication they’d given him. He shivered convulsively, even though the room was perfectly warm. Really, too warm. It was always too warm. Stuffy. Dusty.
“We both did,” Lida said.
She looked as if she was going to break loose from the lounger, as if she was going to explode like a coiled spring suddenly set free and ricochet around the room. He’d never seen anyone look quite like that before – as if she was going to suddenly and completely lose her mind.
“He was sitting next to me,” she said. “We had a nice journey. It was… lovely. When I came back, he was holding my hand, and I thought how nice it was going to be to go home and eat some dinner. I wanted to look into his eyes. I wanted to spend a long time touching him. And then… he…”
She pressed her hand to her mouth.
“Don’t talk about it,” Eli said. “You’ll make it worse.”
“They told me he’d be fine,” she said behind her hand. “That he was being taken away to be rehabbed. That everything would be fine, but I wouldn’t see him again, because he’d be cared for in a place I couldn’t go. They told me I should feel free to move on. Choose another partner.”
From somewhere far away, Eli could hear the echoes of a scream.
Of a lot of screams.
“I wanted you to choose something else,” Lida’s voice said, and she too sounded far away. “I wanted you to try watching the games. Maybe take part in them. My friend Ocana’s partner is in one of the lower weight classes – he says it’s good exercise, and no one really gets hurt. Bruised a little. Sometimes, a cut. He’s only seen one broken bone. He loves it, and he’s very good at it. He’s one of the top scorers in the quad. Did you know that?”
Did you know that? got through, and Eli shook his head. The rest of it he couldn’t quite grasp.
“You’d be good at it,” Lida said. “You’re very… nimble.”
“I don’t like games,” Eli told her.
He’d gone once, with a couple of fellow workers. He remembered little about it other than the dirt, and the grunting.
It certainly didn’t seem to be a way to relax.
“I like the theater,” he murmured. “They explained it to me when I started working, and it made sense. I don’t create anything that’s hard to walk away from. I know the theater is always going to be there, and that I can always go back. I work hard, and earn my tokens. I can always go back. There aren’t any broken bones. It’s not dangerous, Lida. It’s not a danger unless you do it wrong.”
He watched her hands curl into fists.
“We didn’t do it wrong,” she said. “Petrov and me. We didn’t do it wrong at all. Something just… happened. Something happened, and it broke him, and they took him away. Rehab, they said,” she told him with tears streaming down her face. “Someplace I couldn’t go. Someplace safe, where he’d be well and happy. But I don’t believe it. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. All I can do is not think about it. All I can do is take the pills so I don’t have to think about it. So I don’t have to think about what might happen to you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
“Don’t be stupid, Eli. Did you ever think Ben would break?”
“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t.”
~~~~
He lay in bed with Lida breathing softly beside him, the only light nearby coming from the dim fixture over the toilet. He could hear the faint hum of the air circulator and imagined it diligently circulating dust through the building: picking up dust from one unit and sending it to another. He thought he could feel the dust settling on his face as he lay there.
Games.
It was wrestling, more or less; wrestling mixed with some running, and throwing and chasing a ball.
Appealing to some people, he supposed.
When he closed his eyes he tried to put himself alongside the stream, to lie down on cool grass and listen to birdsong and the bubbling of that cold water nearby. He tried to recapture the smell of flowers and crushed grass, of damp soil and sunlight.
It didn’t work well. At best, it was only a memory.
Frustrated, he got up from the bed and paced the length and width of the unit. It was only five meters long, and a little bit more than that wide. Just a few steps. All the units were the same, as far as he knew: five meters by a little less than six, furnished with a bed, a lounger, a small table with two chairs. The kitchen facilities were on the wall opposite the door. Everything was pale in color, except for the few things Lida had bought: her leisure clothing, a long strip of fabric meant to decorate the foot of the bed, a small striped ceramic pot. Those were all bright.
Nobody had anything that was very different, as far as he knew.
You have her. She’s different.
She was sleeping quietly, muscles and limbs relaxed, one hand tucked between her cheek and the pillow. She’d stopped crying, finally, after they’d had something to eat, a meal he was sure was nothing very different from what everyone else was eating. When she finally quieted her eyes were puffy and red, and she looked very young. Fragile. When they went to bed he held her in his arms until she drifted off.
“They made me forget him,” she said before she slid into sleep.
The strange white token was lying on the table. It was the only thing on the table; he and Lida had worked together to clean up after dinner, and the unit looked tidier and more carefully kept than it had since they’d moved in together. Because it was close to the alcove doorway, the token caught the light from that dim fixture over the toilet. It almost seemed to have a glow of its own, which Eli supposed was some property of the metal it was made of.
It was marked universal on its face, something Eli had never seen before.
A goodbye from Ben, who somehow could get hold of things no one else had access to.
Frowning, Eli picked up the token and turned it over and over in his hands. It was the same size and shape as the ordinary tokens; only its color was different, and that odd designation on its face.
Universal?
Useable by anyone? At any time?
Maybe it wasn’t a gift from Ben at all. Maybe the cleaning crew had found it on the floor near his station and had assumed it was his, that he’d dropped it at some point during the work day. They might have thought it was coded, and non-transferrable (like the normal tokens, in spite of that word universal) and that trying to use it themselves would do them no good. Eli had no idea who it really belonged to.
Odd, though, that it had made its way to him.
He sat at the table for a while watching Lida sleep, watching her breathe, sorry for the a
ssumptions he’d made about her over the past few months. She’d done a good job of hiding what had happened to her partner, but instead of wiping away how it had made her feel, she’d morphed her feelings into bad behavior. Resentment. Lack of pride – in herself, in their home, in their relationship.
Instead of mourning. Because no one was allowed to mourn.
One day: that was all anyone got. A single day to get themselves together, to accept the story they’d been told about a rehabilitation facility in some mysterious, inaccessible place. Today had been Eli’s one day; tomorrow he’d be expected to return to work, to stand alongside the woman Elma and pretend he’d never worked beside anyone else.
But the more he thought of Production, the more he pondered that chilled and sterile place, the more he realized he couldn’t go there. That he couldn’t greet Elma cheerfully and go about building a casual camaraderie with her.
He didn’t know her.
He knew Ben. Ben, who’d been his friend since they began working.
And Ben had meant for him to go to the theater. Wherever that strange token had really come from, Eli could see it only as a gift from Ben.
Because it was Ben’s last gift to him, and because he could see no use in the games, in getting dirty and battered for someone else’s amusement, and no use in dulling his mind with pills, he knew where he had to go come morning.
Dreams weren’t good enough, nor was his imagination.
In the morning, he was going to the theater.
Four
____________
It was the first time Eli had ever been to the theater without someone he knew: Ben, someone from work, even some casually familiar face. There were several theaters in the quad, but people tended to frequent the same one, and he could count a few dozen as “regulars,” men and women he’d seen any number of times.
Today, because he was going in the morning – when the night shift workers normally went – he saw no one familiar.
