THE MONOTONOUS LANGUOR, part 2 of 4

In the clouds.

It is always good to get out of New Athena. At least for me. The concrete and the heavy breathing of, of, of…everything and everyone, is suffocating. Let me stand on your chest and invite a hundred others to stand on my shoulders—that is how it is. There is no escaping it. Vertical or horizontal. It is everywhere. Noses and elbows and knees and feet, the entire apparatus, collectively, grinding. On me. Into me.

Silent elevators propel me skyward at 8 a.m. I am packed in with fashionable people, dabbing dead eyes, wearing haute couture straight jackets—they don’t see it. This is the vertical part of my day. My destination during the week is a three-foot by five-foot workspace in the rainclouds. It drizzles incessantly since the Gates Incident three years ago. There are hawks here but of different breeding. I have no walls or glass to shield me. I am in the wild, exposed. I am a field mouse.

The roving eyes are everywhere. They hang from the ceiling and the faces of the circling Observers who carry clipboards. They incessantly take notes and the pages stack hour by hour. My day is terminated when the big, fat silver clip holding it all together is about to bust.

I am not certain what I do for a living. Fact-Checker, Grade 2. That is what flashes on my digital ID, along with my HV’s—my Health Vitals—height, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, blood type, sperm count, and vaccination status. I am shrouded in flat white light. It is pristine, perfect, except at 11:55 a.m., every day, when a brief flicker interrupts the evenness. No one seems to notice but I do—I actually wait for it. If others notice, too, they do not mention it. Primarily because we never speak to each other. Except at lunch when we say hello, pass the salt, and then take our silent good-byes. My digestion is generally insufferable. Perhaps I need to cut back on the salt.

At precisely 5 p.m., all the workstations go dark, and I rise and descend in the same elevator that started my day. There is a bit of comfort in the fact that what goes up must come down—I heard that saying as a child. It made sense to me, so I kept it in my mind. I have not told others that I have it. My grandfather, a grand man, with a magnificent curling mustache, said to keep it to myself.

The elevator is crammed with other people who do what I do, whatever that is, exactly. We all smell small and plain. We likely taste that way, too. The horizontal part of my day begins now when the elevator doors open. Technically, and to be precise, the morning trek is also a horizontal part of my day. But I choose not to chronicle it that way. That is my, that is my, that is my…right—my grandfather also used that word quite a bit. I let it rattle around my head. Often. My right, my right, my right…it is mine.

We walk, serpentine, to a bus stop—the trains are off-limits to us—and we board. The busses have windows, but no one uses them. It is better to stare straight ahead and pay attention to your breathing. It is a useful skill when the Inquisitors visit. So, we sit and stand and wait, until the groaning doors burst open, whoosh, and we are expelled onto the smooth, water-logged concrete sidewalk.

We do expulsion and concrete well.