A Novel
Lot 4471 came in on a Tuesday in August on two flatbeds out of New Mexico, and by ten in the morning Nadine Kopecky had decided she hated it.
She didn’t hate lots for being large. Large was fine. Large was overtime. She hated them for being wrong, and 4471 was wrong in the specific way that made her want to lie down on the warehouse floor, which at the Federal Property Disposal Center on Blue Mound Road was polished concrete that held the heat like a skillet and had not been cool since 1987.
The manifest said 212 line items. The trucks said otherwise. The manifest said the shipping agency was the Office of Probabilistic Affairs, Site R-9, Socorro County, and Nadine had been doing this for sixteen years and had processed surplus from the Bureau of Reclamation, the Defense Logistics Agency, NOAA, two separate offices of the Department of Agriculture that did not appear to know about each other, and once, memorably, the Library of Congress, which had sent a pallet of card catalogs and a single taxidermied owl. She had never heard of the Office of Probabilistic Affairs. She had looked it up in the federal directory, and the directory had returned a page with the agency’s name at the top and nothing under it, not even a phone number, which in her experience meant either a reorganization or a lawsuit.
“Aliens,” Hector said.
He had the forklift idling at the mouth of Cage 6 with a pallet of hanging-file boxes on the forks, and he was reading the manifest over her shoulder with the face he made when the universe was about to confirm something he’d said on his podcast.
“It’s office furniture,” Nadine said.
“Socorro County is two hours from Roswell.”
“Everything in New Mexico is two hours from Roswell. That’s what New Mexico is.” She found line 41, CHAIR, TASK, ERGONOMIC, QTY 30, and counted the chairs stacked against the cage wall. Twenty-nine. She made a mark. “Put the files on the left. Not on the chairs.”
“Why would you put files on chairs?”
“Somebody in New Mexico did.” She pointed. Two of the chairs had the dents.
Hector lowered the pallet with great tenderness. He was twenty-nine and drove the forklift like a man parallel parking a hearse, and on weekends he recorded an hour-long show called Surplus Truth in his apartment closet, with a microphone hung from the clothes rod and a blanket over his head for acoustics. The show was about what the government accidentally sold. Forty-three people listened to it. Nadine knew the number because he told her every Monday, the way other people reported the weather.
“I’m going to say it on the show,” he said. “I’m going to say probabilistic.”
“Say it however you want. Don’t say this address.”
“I never say the address.” He backed the forklift out. The warning beeper went off, then stopped, because it was old and only beeped when it felt like it, which was the kind of thing Nadine had filed three work orders about and had stopped expecting anyone to read.
She worked down the manifest. CENTRIFUGE, BENCHTOP, QTY 2: two, both with the rotors removed, which was standard. FOLDER, HANGING, LETTER, GREEN, QTY 40 BX: forty boxes, all empty, which was not standard, because nobody shipped empty folders across state lines on a federal dime, but it was also not her problem. Her problem was whether the thing on the paper matched the thing in the cage. Whether it mattered was somebody else’s GS level.
It was a good job if you liked things to be what they said they were. Nadine did. She liked a correctly completed SF-120. She liked the moment when the count matched and she could initial the box and the box stayed initialed. There were days when that was the only thing in her life that stayed where she put it, and she had stopped feeling sorry about that a few years ago, around the same time she had stopped feeling sorry about most things, because sorry took energy and her energy went to her father.
Line 188 was on the second page.
TELEPHONE, CELLULAR, NOKIA 3310, BLUE, QTY 1. CONDITION: UNKNOWN.
She looked up from the clipboard. Line 188 was sitting on top of box nineteen of the empty folders, by itself, as if somebody had set it down for a second and walked away and the second had lasted a few hundred miles. It was a phone. It was the phone, the one everybody had owned around the turn of the century, the dark blue brick with the gray keypad and the screen the size of a postage stamp. Nadine had owned one at sixteen. She had dropped it down the stairs at Haltom High, into the toilet at a Whataburger, and once off the back of a moving bass boat on Eagle Mountain Lake, and it had come back from all three. People made jokes about them on the internet now: that you could drive nails with one, that if you dropped one on the floor you’d need a new floor.
Someone had wrapped masking tape around the back, across the battery cover, and on the masking tape in black Sharpie someone had written, in capitals that pressed hard enough to dent the tape:
DO NOT TEXT ON THIS
Nadine had seen a lot of notes. People left notes on surplus the way they left notes on lunches in the break room, as if property disposal were a fridge. She had seen DO NOT SIT on chairs that were perfectly sound and DO NOT USE on a microwave that had turned out to be fine and DOESN’T WORK on a vacuum cleaner that had been, when Hector plugged it in, the best vacuum cleaner anyone at the depot had ever operated. She had once received a filing cabinet with a note inside the top drawer that said DON’T. Nothing else. Just DON’T. She had opened the other three drawers anyway and found staples.
So the note didn’t mean anything. Probably somebody at Site R-9, wherever and whatever that was, had a personal phone in a desk drawer full of personal texts and didn’t want the next person reading them. Nadine respected that. She had no intention of reading anybody’s texts. She did, however, have to fill in the condition column, and she couldn’t initial UNKNOWN.
She picked it up. It was warm. Not hot, just warm, like a mug somebody had been holding. The cage was ninety-six degrees and the phone had been sitting in it for two hours, so of course it was warm. She pressed the power button on top and held it. Nothing happened.
“Dead,” she said to nobody, and went to find a charger, which was how she ended up in the supply room, standing in front of Rhonda’s bags.
Rhonda Fikes in purchasing had placed the quarterly supply order in May, and in the line where she should have entered the stock number for thirty-three-gallon trash can liners, she had entered a stock number one digit off, and in July a truck had arrived with thirty-six cases of anti-static shielding bags. They were for electronics. They were the silver, slightly see-through kind that circuit boards came in, made to keep out static and stray radio signals, and they came in a size that happened to be almost exactly the size of a trash can liner. When this was pointed out, Rhonda had said that they were close enough, and she had said it in a tone that settled the matter for her. Since July, every wastebasket at the Federal Property Disposal Center had been lined in shining silver. The break room looked like a NASA cafeteria. The thirty-six cases, minus about four, were stacked in the supply room to the height of a man, and Nadine had to move two of them to get at the bin of orphan chargers on the bottom shelf.
The bin was its own small lot. Nobody had ever claimed it, and so it had never been disposed of. It held forty years of the wrong cords: wall warts for answering machines, coiled cables for pagers, a power brick that said MOTOROLA in a font that hadn’t been used since the Clinton administration. Near the bottom, tangled around a pager clip, she found a gray Nokia charger with the thin pin tip. She knew it by touch. It was the same charger that had lived in the outlet by her bed for four years of high school.
At her desk in the corner of Cage 6, she peeled the masking tape back from the bottom edge just far enough to reach the charging port, plugged the phone in, and went back to counting hanging folders.
It took eleven minutes. She knew because she heard it from forty feet away, through the chain-link and over the forklift: the four-note tune that every phone in the world used to play, the one she hadn’t heard since she was nineteen, da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum-dum. It cut through the warehouse like a smell. Hector’s forklift stopped moving.
The screen had come on in that particular green. Two hands reached
toward each other across it, the old boot animation, and touched, and
the hands went away and the home screen came up. The battery icon said
full. In the top left, where the carrier’s name should have been, the
screen said R-9. The signal bars were all the way up.
Nadine turned the phone over and slid her thumbnail under the masking tape and popped the back cover, just to see. There was a battery. There was no SIM card. The little metal slot where the SIM card should have been was empty and clean, and the phone had five bars.
She put the cover back on.
The condition column did not have a box for that. She thought about it for a minute, and then she did what she would have done with any phone that came through her cage, and what she had done a hundred times with phones from the IRS and the Coast Guard and the Forest Service: she checked whether it would send a text. She pressed the menu key, scrolled to Messages, scrolled to Write messages, and started typing to her own cell number.
The phone was in T9 mode, the little abc indicator in the corner of the screen with the dictionary symbol beside it. Nadine’s thumb remembered. You pressed each key once and the phone guessed which word you meant out of all the words those keys could spell. She pressed 8, 3, 7, 8.
The screen said vest.
That was right. That was the thing she’d forgotten about T9, the way
it was always choosing. Test and vest were the same four keys, and the
phone had a favorite. She pressed the star key, which cycled to the next
word, and the screen said test, and she pressed Options,
and Send, and typed her own number.
The little animation played, an envelope with wings.
Message sent.
Her own phone buzzed in her back pocket. A text from an unknown
number with too few digits, and it said test. Fine. A second
later the Nokia beeped, the single short message beep, and she pressed
Read. The message was from *. That was the whole sender
name, one star, and the message was one star too.
*
Some kind of delivery receipt, she decided, from whatever system R-9 had hung this phone on. She wrote SENDS/RECEIVES in the condition column, and initialed it, and then she sat there for a minute with the pen in her hand, sweating.
It was ninety-six degrees in Cage 6. She had been a GS-9 for six years. Her step increase had come through in March, all eleven dollars a pay period of it, and her request for a desk audit had come back in April with the words NO CHANGE IN CLASSIFICATION in a box at the bottom, signed by a man in Denver she had never met. Her father’s supplemental insurance had gone up in June. The phone was in her hand and its little keyboard was right there, and Nadine was not a yeller, but if she had been a yeller, there was one thing she would have yelled at the ceiling of the Federal Property Disposal Center every afternoon at about this time.
She typed it as another test. That was what she told herself.
I want a raise
She sent it to her own number. Her phone buzzed: I want a raise. She snorted, and was reaching for the pen when the Nokia beeped.
*raisins
The clipboard got heavier in her lap.
It was a small change, the kind of thing you’d only notice if you had been holding the same clipboard all morning. She looked down. The manifest for Lot 4471 had been two stapled pages since nine o’clock. It was three pages now. The third page was in the same Courier type as the others, with the same Office of Probabilistic Affairs header and the same faint diagonal smear from the same tired printer, and it had one line on it.
Behind her, in the back corner of the cage where there had been an empty patch of floor since the trucks were unloaded, there were two pallets. They were shrink-wrapped. Each one held twenty brown cardboard cases with a USDA stamp on the side and a picture of a cluster of grapes drying in the sun. The whole corner of the cage smelled like the inside of a lunchbox.
Nadine stood up so fast she dropped the phone.
It hit the concrete corner first, the way phones always do, with a crack like a dropped wrench. She bent to get it with her heart going, and the phone was fine. There was not a scratch on it. There was a chip the size of a thumbnail missing from the concrete floor, and a little fan of cracks running out of the chip.
“Since when do we get raisins?”
Hector was at the cage door. He had a clipboard he didn’t need and the look of a man who had heard a ringtone from his childhood and come to find out why.
“Line 213,” Nadine said.
“There’s 212 lines.”
She held out the manifest. He took it and read the third page twice, and then he read the first two pages, and then he looked at the pallets, and then at the third page again.
“That wasn’t there this morning,” he said.
“No.”
“I unloaded this whole lot. I unloaded it with my own hands, Nadine. I would remember twelve hundred pounds of raisins.” He gave the manifest back as if it might be hot. “Was that the Nokia song earlier?”
“Go count the centrifuges.”
“There’s two.”
“Count them again.”
He went, slowly, looking back.
Nadine took her box cutter off the desk and slit the tape on the nearest case and pulled back a flap. They were raisins. They were the big plump dark kind in a clear bag inside the box, thirty pounds of them, and she reached in through a split in the bag and took one and ate it, because she could not think of any other way to check. It was a good raisin. It tasted like December, which was when her mother used to make oatmeal raisin cookies by the hundred and hide them from her father in the oven, which he never looked in, because in forty-one years of marriage Walt Kopecky had not once turned on the oven.
He still asked for those cookies. He asked for them in July.
She did not text anything for a long time. She sat at the desk with the Nokia in front of her and the raisins behind her and the manifest under her elbow and tried to come up with a reasonable explanation. Nadine was a person who reached for the reasonable explanation the way other people reached for a railing. She could not find one. She ran through the ones she could think of, including heatstroke and a coworker prank involving a great deal of planning, and none of them accounted for twelve hundred pounds of raisins arriving on a manifest she had been holding in her hand.
So she did what she did with everything that didn’t match the paper. She checked it again.
She wanted a test that could not be a prank, that she could not have imagined, and that would be witnessed by people who had no reason to lie to her. She wanted it to be small. She thought about it for most of ten minutes, and the warehouse sat around her at ninety-six degrees, and the sweat ran down the middle of her back, and in the end she wrote down the only wish she had been making every summer for sixteen years.
She typed slowly and watched each word as T9 chose it.
The was the only thing 843 spelled.
warehouse was fine. is. Then
cold, and when she pressed 2-6-5-3 the screen said
cold, and she pressed star once to see, and it said
bold, and again, and it said coke, and again
and it was back to cold, and she left it there.
The warehouse is cold.
She sent it to her own number. The envelope flew. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she didn’t look at it, because she was listening.
The Federal Property Disposal Center had eight rooftop air handlers. They were Carrier units, installed in 1979, and they had been disconnected in 1998 after one of them fell partway through the roof, and nobody had removed them because removing them required a crane and a budget line. Everyone at the depot knew they were up there. Hector called them the Monuments.
In the ceiling of the warehouse, forty feet up, a duct she had looked at every day for sixteen years made a long, low sound, like something enormous clearing its throat. Then all the vents along the ceiling breathed out at once.
The air reached the floor about ten seconds later. It came down over the cages and the pallets and the twenty-nine chairs and it was cold. It was so cold that Nadine’s wet polo shirt went stiff against her back. It smelled like a closed-up room and then like nothing, the clean metal smell of a meat locker, and the paper on her clipboard lifted at the corner and lay down again.
The Nokia beeped. One message from *.
*
Just the star. No correction. She found she could read that one, too. It was a shrug.
By the time she walked out of Cage 6 there were already people standing on the warehouse floor. Hector was in the center aisle with his arms out from his sides and his eyes closed, turning in a slow circle. Rhonda Fikes had come out of purchasing and was standing directly under a vent with her face tipped up and her cardigan held open like a woman at a car wash. Two guys from receiving were standing on the loading dock with the bay door open, looking back in at the building as if it had said their names.
Gil Tanner from accounting had walked the whole length of the floor in his good shoes, which nobody from accounting ever did in August, and was standing next to the water fountain with an expression Nadine had only seen in church.
“Did they fix the Monuments?” Gil asked her.
“I don’t know,” Nadine said.
“Larry says they’re not connected to anything. Larry says the breaker for the roof has a padlock on it and he has the only key and he’s had it in his truck since 1998.” Gil’s breath made a small cloud. It was August in Fort Worth, at 1:40 in the afternoon, and Gil Tanner’s breath made a cloud. “I think I’m going to cry,” he said. “Is that weird?”
“It’s not weird.”
“I’ve been so hot,” Gil said. “For four years. You don’t know.” He looked at her. “Are you cold? You can have my jacket. I have a jacket in my car I never wear.”
Nadine thought about the forty cases in the back of Cage 6. “I’m fine,” she said.
Her phone buzzed at 1:55. It was Lourdes.
“He’s fine,” Lourdes said first, because she always said that first, and Nadine let her shoulders come down from her ears. “I wanted to tell you about the toaster.”
“What did he do to the toaster.”
“He took it apart.”
Nadine leaned against the cage. Through the chain-link she could see Hector, who had stopped turning in circles and was now photographing the vents with his phone, holding it up at arm’s length like he was trying to get a signal from God.
“How apart,” she said.
“All the way. Every screw. He laid them out on a dish towel in rows, and I said, Mr. Walt, we need that, and he said, Lourdes, I have been fixing toasters since before you were born. Which is true. And then he put it back together.” Lourdes paused. Nadine could hear the TV in the background, a game show, the sound of somebody winning a car. “It makes toast now in about half the time.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s very good toast. I don’t know what he did. There’s a screw left over. He says it was never supposed to be in there and it’s the reason the toaster’s been slow since 2019.” Another pause. “He asked for June.”
Nadine closed her eyes.
“I told him she was at the store,” Lourdes said, and her voice didn’t change at all, it was the same easy voice she used for the toaster, and Nadine loved her for it in a way she had never once said out loud. “He said, tell her to get the good bread. He went and sat in the yard a while. He’s fine now. He’s watching The Price Is Right and he’s mad at a man from Ohio who bid one dollar.”
“Okay.”
“You want me to save the screw?”
“Save the screw,” Nadine said. “Thank you, Lourdes.”
She stood in the cold for a minute after the call. Her mother had been dead nine years. For the first seven of them her father had known it, and had grieved the way he did everything, quietly and with his hands, and had rebuilt every clock in the house twice. Then, gradually, he had stopped knowing it, and now on some days she was at the store. Nadine had read the pamphlets. The pamphlets said not to correct him, because correcting him only made him lose her again, and he would forget again by evening anyway, and so his wife had been at the store for most of two years. Nadine had stopped wondering what her mother would have needed at the store. She had stopped a lot of things, the way you set down whatever you’re holding to carry something heavier.
The good bread was Mrs. Baird’s. She’d pick some up on the way home.
She went back into the cage and sat down in front of the Nokia. The raisins were still in the corner. The cold was still coming down out of the ceiling. Somewhere on the floor, Rhonda was laughing.
The phone had one contact. She found it by pressing the down key, the
way you did on these: Names, and a list with a single entry, which was
*. There was no number under it, only the star.
Nadine looked at it for a while. Then she pressed Options and Send message, and she typed, carefully, with one thumb, the way her father typed:
What are you
She sent it. The envelope flew. She had a terrible moment, afterward, in which she thought about the raisins and the Monuments and what it might mean to send What are you out into the world as a fact, and before the moment could finish, the phone beeped.
*relax. questions are free. texts to me are just talk.
Her shoulders came down. She was annoyed with herself for how far they came, and she typed:
What are you
*a phone. next question.
She laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, one loud bark that bounced off the cage and the hanging-folder boxes and the twenty-nine chairs, and at the other end of the warehouse she heard Hector turn around. She put her hand over her mouth. She could feel her heart in her ears. She typed:
Who made you
*people with a much bigger budget than you.
What do you do
*whatever you text. to anybody but me.
I asked for a raise
*you asked for you. i correct for that.
The warehouse
*small, and for everybody. i don't touch those.
She looked at that one for a long time. Then she looked at the raisins, and then she looked up at the vents, and then at the masking tape on the back of the phone, DO NOT TEXT ON THIS, pressed so hard that the Sharpie had torn the tape at the top of the T. Somebody at Site R-9 had been frightened when they wrote that, and in a hurry. She could see it in the letters. She had read sixteen years of handwriting on surplus and she knew what fear looked like in marker.
She typed, and her thumb was less steady now:
Are you dangerous
The envelope flew. The phone was quiet longer this time, long enough that she began to think it was finished with her. Gil’s laugh came from somewhere near the water fountain, and the bay door rumbled shut, and the phone beeped.
*depends who you text.
She sat back in her chair. Out on the floor, Hector had started up the forklift again, and the beeper went, and stopped, and then, for the first time in Nadine’s sixteen years at the depot, went again, and kept going, a perfect steady warning tone, all the way down the aisle. Everything in the building was working.
She thought about the federal directory and the page with nothing under the name. She thought about whoever it would be, some person from some office arriving next week or next month with a copy of the manifest and a pen, counting, and finding 211. She thought about the third page of the manifest. She thought about the hand receipt she would have to write, and how she had never in sixteen years written down a thing that wasn’t true.
She took a DA Form 2062 out of the tray. She wrote TELEPHONE, CELLULAR, NOKIA 3310, BLUE, LOT 4471 LN 188 in the description block. On the next line she wrote RAISINS, CALIFORNIA, 30 LB CASE, LOT 4471 LN 213, QTY 1. In the remarks she wrote PURPOSE: CONDITION ASSESSMENT, which was true of both, and she signed it and put the carbon in her desk drawer.
At 4:30, when the shift whistle went, Nadine Kopecky put the Nokia in her purse, next to her keys and a granola bar and the gray charger with the thin pin tip, and carried one thirty-pound case of raisins on her hip, and walked out of the Federal Property Disposal Center into a wall of August heat that felt, after the afternoon, like being handed a hot towel. The building hummed behind her. Somebody had propped the front door open with a wastebasket, and its silver liner flapped in the cold air coming out.
She stopped at the Kroger on Denton Highway for Mrs. Baird’s bread, the good kind, and put the purse on the passenger seat.
At the light at Denton and Western Center, with the engine idling and her own car’s air conditioner losing its fight against the afternoon, her purse played the Nokia tune.
She took the phone out at the next red light. One message from
*.
*are we there yet
Hector was waiting by her car at 6:40 the next morning, which was the first sign that he had not slept, and he was holding two coffees, which was the second.
“You don’t drink coffee,” Nadine said.
“One’s yours. One’s for holding.” He held it. His eyes were very bright and slightly pink around the edges, and he was wearing the same T-shirt as yesterday, the one with a cartoon of a filing cabinet in a tinfoil hat and the words SURPLUS TRUTH: WE READ THE MANIFEST. “I want to say first that I’m calm.”
“Okay.”
“I went home last night and I sat in my closet with the blanket over my head and I did not record anything, because I’m a professional. I just sat there. And then I drove back here at nine-thirty and looked in the window of Cage 6 with a flashlight, and the raisins were still there. So I’m calm, but I want you to know that I looked.”
Nadine took her coffee. It had too much sugar in it, which was how Hector believed coffee was supposed to taste, because he had learned about coffee from his grandmother and from gas stations.
She had slept, a little. She had gone home to Haltom City with the
case of raisins on her hip and found her father in the kitchen in his
undershirt, taking the faceplate off the light switch with a butter
knife, and when he saw the box he had put the knife down and said,
“June’s making the cookies?” and Nadine had said yes, this weekend, and
he had been so pleased that he’d put the faceplate back on without being
asked. Then she had sat on the edge of her bed with the Nokia in her lap
until one in the morning, scrolling up and down through the Sent folder,
which held two messages, and through a second folder she hadn’t noticed
in the afternoon. It was listed under the Inbox and the Sent items and
the Drafts, and it had no name, only the star. Inside it was one
message, I want a raise, with a little star icon beside it
in place of the envelope.
She had not sent anything else. She had wanted to. She had lain awake composing wishes the way she used to compose letters to her ex-husband, carefully, in her head, never on paper.
“After shift,” she said to Hector. “Cage 6. Bring a legal pad.”
“I’ll bring two.”
The Federal Property Disposal Center was still cold. Larry from facilities had spent the morning on the roof with a flashlight and a multimeter, and had come down at ten o’clock and gone straight to his truck and sat in it with the door open for half an hour, not driving anywhere. When Rhonda asked him what was wrong with the Monuments, he said there was nothing wrong with them. He said they were running perfectly. He said they were not connected to power, or to the ductwork, or in two cases to the roof, and they were running perfectly, and he did not wish to discuss it further, and then he went home sick.
At 4:35 Nadine locked the cage gate from the inside, and Hector sat on a box of hanging folders with both legal pads on his knees and a ballpoint in each hand. She took the Nokia out of her purse and put it on the desk between them.
Hector looked at it the way some men looked at classic cars. “My uncle had one,” he said. “He used it as a doorstop at the tire shop. He said it was the only doorstop the wind couldn’t move.”
“We’re going to do this properly,” Nadine said. “One wish at a time. You write down what we sent, exactly, and what happened. We don’t send anything we can’t take back.”
“How do you take it back?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s the first test.”
She opened the Sent folder and scrolled to the oldest message, the
one that said test, and pressed Options. The menu offered
her Reply, Forward, Edit, and Delete. She pressed Delete. The phone
asked Delete message? in a voice that would have been grave
if it had had a voice, and she pressed OK.
Nothing happened. They both looked around the cage anyway.
“Okay,” Hector said, writing. “Deleted test. Result: no test.”
“It never did anything. Write that it never did anything.”
“What did you think it would do?”
“I don’t know what a test does,” Nadine said. “That’s why I sent it.”
The phone beeped. *you're very thorough.
Hector put both pens down.
“It talks,” he said.
“It has one contact,” Nadine said, and showed him, the single star in the Names list. “If you text the star, it’s just talk. It told me. Everybody else, it’s a wish.”
Hector picked up the phone the way you’d pick up a sleeping cat. He typed for a while with his tongue between his teeth. He hadn’t used T9 since he was nine years old and he kept getting the wrong words and swearing at them, and the phone kept showing him new wrong words, which made him swear more. Finally he sent it.
R u an alien
*no. r u
Hector put the phone down and walked a full lap of the cage with his hands on his head.
They did it properly. It took until nearly eight o’clock, and it went the way Nadine’s inspections usually went, which was that they found out most of what they needed to know from the things that went wrong.
Hector’s first wish was money. She told him not to, and he said that a scientist had to begin with the obvious hypothesis, and that he had been in the tire-shop doorstop business of life for twenty-nine years, and he wrote it out with great care, counting characters on his fingers, and showed it to her before he sent it.
I want to be so rich I never run out
“That’s a selfish wish,” Nadine said. “Yesterday it corrected the selfish one.”
“Into raisins. Raisins I can live with. I’ll take forty cases of anything.” He sent it to his own number.
The phone beeped almost at once.
*rice
From the parking lot came a sound like a dump truck backing over gravel. They went to the bay door and rolled it up, and Hector’s 2009 Silverado was sitting in its spot under the light pole with its bed full of rice. The rice was heaped well above the sides, a white dune sloping down over the tailgate onto the asphalt, and while they watched, a little more of it slid off the back, and the heap stayed exactly as high as it had been.
Hector walked out to it without saying anything. He took a handful off the top and let it run through his fingers. Then he took the snow shovel out of the cab, where he kept it for no reason anybody in Texas had ever been able to determine, and shoveled for about two minutes, and every shovelful he threw off the side was replaced, quietly, from nowhere, the moment he looked away.
“So rich I never run out,” Nadine said from the dock.
“I can see that, Nadine.”
“It’s long grain.”
“I can see that it’s long grain.”
He came back in and picked up the phone and found the message in the star folder and deleted it. Out in the lot, the rice was gone. The truck bed was empty except for a few dozen grains caught in the seam of the bed liner, which stayed. They checked. Hector said that he was going to leave those in there for the rest of his life.
He wrote on the legal pad: DELETE = UNDO. (MOSTLY.)
The second wish was also his, and Nadine would regret letting him
send it for most of the following week. He said he had learned his
lesson about selfishness and that he was now going to ask for something
for everybody. He typed World peace and sent it before she
had finished telling him what she thought would happen.
*world peas
Nothing happened in the warehouse. They waited ten minutes. Hector began to say that maybe it was too big, that maybe it had a limit, when Nadine’s own phone rang. It was her neighbor, Mrs. Tran, from across the street, calling to say that a freight truck had just left something on Nadine’s porch, a great deal of something, and that the driver had asked Mrs. Tran to sign for it, and she had signed for it, because what else was she going to do, but she would like Nadine to know that it went up past the windows.
“What is it?” Nadine asked, though she knew.
“Peas,” Mrs. Tran said. “A lot of different peas. From everywhere. There’s a box from Peru.” A pause. “Your father’s out there opening them with a screwdriver. He seems very happy. Should I stop him?”
“No,” Nadine said. “Let him.”
She took the phone out of Hector’s hand and opened the star folder,
where World peace was sitting under
I want to be so rich I never run out, and she pressed
Delete.
The phone said Cannot delete. Then it beeped.
*his thumb, his peas.
“What does that mean?”
“I think it means only the person who sent it can undo it,” Hector said slowly. He looked shaken in a way the rice had not shaken him. “That’s a rule. That’s an actual rule, like on a form.”
“Then delete it.”
He took the phone back. He looked at the message for a while. “There’s a box from Peru,” he said.
“Hector.”
“The Tarrant Area Food Bank is on East Rosedale. They’re open till seven on Wednesdays. I’ve got a truck, as we’ve established.” He put the phone back on the desk and did not delete anything. “If they’re real peas, Nadine, they’re real peas. You don’t throw away peas.”
She would have argued, but she had grown up in a house where you did not throw away peas, and he knew it, because she had told him so once at a depot Christmas party about a plate of green bean casserole.
Hector wrote on the legal pad: BIG = GROCERIES. ONLY YOUR OWN THUMB CAN DELETE. Then he wrote, smaller: Peru.
The third wish was the one that changed what they were doing.
It was getting dark. Hector had called the food bank and arranged to meet a man named Ray at Nadine’s house at 8:30 with the truck, and he was sitting on the folder box with his chin in his hand, quieter than she had ever seen him, while she wrote a summary at the bottom of the second legal pad in her own block capitals.
“My landlady has a bad hip,” he said.
Nadine stopped writing.
“Mrs. Ochoa. She’s eighty-one. She lives in the front unit and I live in the back one, over the garage, and she charges me four hundred dollars a month, which is criminal, Nadine, it’s an amount of money that should be investigated. And her hip’s been bad since Easter. She can’t do the stairs at bingo anymore. The bingo’s at Saint Rita’s and it’s upstairs. She used to go Tuesdays and Fridays. Now she sits on her porch on Tuesdays and Fridays.” He was looking at the phone. “She’s not mine. It’s not for me.”
“Then try it.”
He typed slowly. He showed it to her before he sent it, the way she had taught him to, as if it were a requisition.
Mrs. Ochoa's hip doesn't hurt.
He sent it to his own number. They both watched the phone.
*
Just the star. The shrug. Hector looked at Nadine and she nodded, and he took his own phone out of his pocket and called Mrs. Ochoa, and Nadine could hear her through the speaker from where she sat, because Mrs. Ochoa talked on the phone the way people talked across a parking lot.
“Hector! I can’t talk, I’m going to the church.”
“It’s Wednesday, Mrs. Ochoa. Bingo’s not till Friday.”
“I’m going to look at the stairs.” Something in her voice made Hector stand up. “I got up out of the chair and I didn’t use the arm. I didn’t use the arm, mijo. I’m going to go stand at the bottom of the stairs and then I’m going to walk up them, and then I’m going to walk down, and then maybe I’ll walk up them again, I don’t know. Don’t tell me I’m too old to look at stairs.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Hector said. “I wasn’t going to tell you that.”
He sat down on the box after she hung up. He held the phone in both hands.
Nadine looked at the legal pads. The rice had been corrected and the peas had been corrected and the raisins had been corrected. The cold in the warehouse, which was still pouring down out of the ceiling and making her ankles ache, had gone through clean, and so had Mrs. Ochoa’s hip.
“It’s not about size,” she said. “Or not just size. The warehouse is a big building.”
“It’s about who it’s for,” Hector said.
*small, and for somebody else, the phone added,
uninvited. *i don't touch those.
There was one more wish that night, and Nadine was not proud of having been in the room for it.
Hector’s ex-girlfriend was named Brianna, and she had left him in February for a man who sold above-ground pools in Burleson, and Hector had been mostly fine about it, in the sense that he only brought it up on Mondays. At 8:10, with the light gone outside and Ray from the food bank on his way to Haltom City, Hector picked up the phone and typed something with his shoulders hunched, and sent it before she could see the screen.
The phone made a sound she had not heard it make. It was the low
double tone of a failure. Message failed. Then:
*no.
Hector stared at it. Then the phone beeped again.
*you're better than that. barely.
“What did you send?” Nadine asked.
“Nothing.” He put the phone face down on the desk. His ears were red. “Something about a pool. It doesn’t matter.” After a while he said, “I’ve never been told off by a Nokia before.”
“First time for everything.”
“No,” he said, “I mean it was right. That’s the worst part.” He wrote on the legal pad, MEAN = REFUSED, and underlined it twice, and then he tore the page out and folded it and put it in his back pocket.
Nadine sat with the phone after he went out to the truck. Through the bay door she could see him in the lot, sweeping the last grains out of the seam of his bed liner with his fingers, and then stopping, and leaving them.
She opened the thread with the star. She typed the question she had been carrying around since yesterday afternoon.
Who wrote DO NOT TEXT ON THIS
The answer took a while.
*a friend.
A friend of who
*mine.
She looked at the masking tape. She had read the fear in it yesterday, the hurry and the torn T. She turned the phone over and looked again under the cage light, at the way the letters pressed down hard on the first word and the last, and she thought, for the first time, that she had read it wrong. Somebody had been frightened, all right. She just wasn’t sure anymore who they’d been frightened for.
Hector honked twice from the lot. He had the window down, and he was leaning out of it with his tinfoil filing cabinet across his chest.
“I’m going to say it on the show,” he called. “Not the address. Not your name. Just that I’ve seen it.”
“Nobody’s going to believe you.”
“Nobody ever believes me,” Hector said. “That’s what’s so great about it.” And he drove off toward Haltom City to load forty-one countries’ worth of peas into a Silverado, with the rice still in the seam.
Legal pad, yellow, two sheets. Found in Cage 6, desk drawer, under a DA Form 2062.
TEST LOG — LOT 4471 LN 188 — 8/6 — N.K. / H.B.
RULES SO FAR: - For yourself or too big → groceries - Small and for somebody else → goes through - Mean → no - Undo = delete, only your own
In different ink, H.B.’s hand: It said I’m better than that. BARELY. That’s the phone’s word not mine.
Her mother’s recipe card for oatmeal raisin cookies lived in a tin box on top of the refrigerator, filed between BROWNIES (WALT’S MOTHER’S, DO NOT CHANGE) and CRANBERRY THING FOR THANKSGIVING. It was written in blue ballpoint in June Kopecky’s slanting hand, and it had a grease stain in the shape of Ohio across the bottom, and under the ingredients, where most people would have written the oven temperature, it said: 350. Hide them in the oven. He never looks.
On Saturday morning Nadine put the card on the counter, propped against the flour canister, and got out the big yellow bowl, and her father came into the kitchen in his undershirt and his Bell Helicopter cap and looked at the card and then at her.
“June,” he said, pleased. “You’re making the cookies.”
“We’re making the cookies,” Nadine said. “You can stir.”
He washed his hands for a long time at the sink, carefully, the way he’d washed them every evening for thirty-one years coming home from the plant in Hurst, getting the black out from around the nails with a brush. There hadn’t been any black on his hands in a decade. He scrubbed anyway. Then he dried them on the dish towel, folded the dish towel in thirds, and hung it back on the oven handle, where it had hung for as long as Nadine had been alive, and took the wooden spoon from her.
They were bad at it. Neither of them had ever made the cookies alone. Her mother had made them and they had eaten them, and that division of labor had been fixed in the Kopecky house the way the dish towel was fixed on the oven handle. Nadine put in the brown sugar and then wasn’t sure she had, and put in more. Her father stirred too hard and sent oats over the side of the bowl and across the counter, and he looked at the oats on the counter with interest, as if they were a problem in the design of the bowl, and said, “That’s a flaw in the radius.”
“It’s not the bowl, Dad.”
“The angle’s wrong. Your mother’s bowl had a better angle.”
“This is her bowl.”
He looked at the bowl. He put down the spoon and turned it in his hands, running his thumb over the rim where it had chipped in 1996 when Nadine dropped it on the patio, and she watched him find the chip and not know what it meant, and pick the spoon back up.
The Nokia was in the back pocket of her jeans. She could feel it there when she leaned against the counter, a hard rectangle the size of a deck of cards. She had been feeling it there since Wednesday.
She knew the rules now, or the ones Hector had written on the legal pads. Big things and selfish things came back as groceries. Small things for somebody else went through. She had spent most of Thursday night lying in bed, trying to decide which this was.
It was for him. That was true. It was also for her, and she knew it, and she suspected the phone would know it too, the way it had known about the pool in Burleson. She had drafted it a dozen ways. Dad remembers me today. That was for her. Dad remembers Mom. She couldn’t do that to him, not knowing which part he’d remember. Dad knows where he is. He knew where he was. He was in his kitchen. He had built the cabinets.
In the end she went into the hall bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet and wrote the plainest thing she could think of.
Dad is good today.
She pressed the keys for the fourth word, 4-6-6-3, and watched the
screen. It said good. She pressed the star key once, to
see, and it said gone, and she went cold, and she pressed
it again and it said goof, and then home, and
then hone, and hood, and hoof,
and then good again, and she left it there and sent it to
her own number before she could change her mind.
The envelope flew. She waited, sitting on the toilet lid in her mother’s bathroom with the pink tile, and the phone beeped.
*home
She sat with that for a moment. She didn’t know what it meant. She didn’t know whether it was a refusal or a joke or a kindness, or whether there was any difference between those to a phone.
When she came back into the kitchen, her father had stopped stirring.
He was standing at the counter with the spoon in his hand and the oats all over the place, looking at the recipe card. He was reading it. She could tell by his mouth, which moved slightly on the long words, the way it always had. When he got to the bottom he laughed, a short surprised sound in his chest, and tapped the card.
“Hide them in the oven,” he said. “She thought I didn’t know. Forty-one years. I knew the whole time.” He looked up. “I just liked that she thought she was getting away with it. Nadine, honey, how much brown sugar did you put in this?”
She didn’t answer right away. She couldn’t.
“Because it looks like about a pound,” her father said, and peered into the bowl. “It looks like you made brown sugar with a few cookies in it.”
“I lost count,” she said.
“You never lose count. You’re the one who counts.” He wiped his hands on his undershirt, which her mother had hated, and picked up the card again and held it at arm’s length because his glasses were in the other room. “We’ll double the rest. We’ll just double everything else and make twice as many. Your mother always made too many anyway. She sent them to the plant. Every guy on second shift knew June Kopecky’s cookies.” He looked at her over the card. “What are you crying for?”
“Onions,” Nadine said.
“There’s no onions in oatmeal cookies.”
“I know, Dad.”
He looked at her for a moment longer, with that particular squint, the one he had used on transmission housings and on her report cards. Then he nodded, as if she had given him a measurement he could work with, and opened the flour canister.
He was home all afternoon.
She would think about that word for a long time afterward, and decide it had been the right one, the only one that fit. He wasn’t good, exactly. His hands shook a little with the measuring spoon, and he forgot twice whether he’d put the baking soda in, and once he called the oven the furnace. But he was home. He was in there, behind his face, the way he’d been when she was twelve. He looked out at her from his own eyes and knew who she was.
They doubled everything and made eleven dozen cookies, and about four dozen of them were good. Her father took the bad ones and lined them up on a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen table, sorted from least to most burnt, and declared that the burnt ones were for the birds and the medium ones were for Lourdes, who deserved better but would understand.
While the third batch was in, he noticed the porch light.
“How long’s that been out?”
“Since March,” Nadine said.
“March.” He said it the way he would have said since the Carter administration. He went out to the garage and came back with a stepladder and a flathead screwdriver and a new bulb from a box on the shelf she hadn’t known was there, and he climbed up and took the glass globe off the fixture and handed it down to her full of dead moths, and then he stood on the ladder and looked at the socket for a long time.
“It’s not the bulb,” he said. “It’s the contact. The tab’s flattened out. You’ve been changing bulbs since March and it’s the tab.” He reached into the socket with the screwdriver, and Nadine said “Dad, the breaker,” and he said “It’s off, I’m not a moron,” and she didn’t know whether it was off or not and decided to believe him. He bent the little brass tab back up with the tip of the screwdriver, a quarter of an inch, put the bulb in, and the light came on.
“There,” he said. “Tell your mother.”
He stopped on the ladder. Nadine watched it reach his face. It came up slowly, like a man noticing he’d walked into the wrong house.
“She’s not at the store,” he said.
“No, Dad.”
He came down off the ladder one step at a time and stood on the porch with the screwdriver in his hand. A car went by on Glenview with its windows down, playing something with a lot of bass. Across the street Mrs. Tran was on her own porch with a watering can, and she saw them and waved, and her father waved back, the way you wave to a neighbor.
“I know that,” he said. “Don’t I. I keep forgetting it.” He looked at the screwdriver. “That’s a hell of a thing to keep forgetting.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I didn’t say it was my fault. I said it was a hell of a thing.” He put the screwdriver in his back pocket, where it would stay for a week until Lourdes found it in the wash. “Nine years?”
“Nine in October.”
“Nine in October.” He nodded. “Okay.” He looked at her. “You’ve been doing all this by yourself.”
“Lourdes helps.”
“Lourdes is paid to help.” He said it without any meanness at all. “I mean you. You’ve been doing it by yourself. What happened to the idiot?”
“Craig,” Nadine said. “We got divorced, Dad. In 2019.”
“I know you got divorced. I was at the lawyer’s. You wore that green thing.” He thought. “Did he ever pay you back for the boat?”
“No.”
“I knew he wouldn’t. I told your mother when he came to the house the first time. I said that boy’s going to buy a boat.” He went back inside. She followed him. He sat at the kitchen table in front of the burnt cookies and picked up the darkest one and bit into it, and chewed for a while, and said, “Did I ever tell you the one about the welder?”
He had told her the one about the welder perhaps two hundred times. He had told it at her high school graduation and at her wedding and at her mother’s funeral, and for the last four years he had never once finished it. He got to the gates and lost it. He would stand there with his mouth a little open and the punchline somewhere behind his eyes, and then he’d say, “Anyway,” and change the subject, and she’d never had the nerve to finish it for him.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Welder dies,” her father said. “Goes up to heaven. Saint Peter’s at the gate, and the gate’s stuck. Big gold gate, thirty feet high. Peter’s been trying to open it all morning. Pushing on it. There’s a line of dead people out to the parking lot. And the welder looks at it, and he says, I can fix that. And Peter says, you can’t fix it, it’s been stuck since the dawn of time, all the saints have had a crack at it. And the welder walks over and looks at the hinges for about two seconds and he says, Pete, these hinges are on the wrong side. You’ve been pushing on this thing for six thousand years. It’s a pull.” Her father put down the cookie. “And Saint Peter gets real quiet. And he leans in close to the welder. And he says, for God’s sake, don’t tell the fella downstairs. He’s been pulling.”
Nadine laughed so hard she had to hold on to the table.
“It’s not that funny,” her father said, delighted.
“You finished it.”
“Of course I finished it. It’s my joke.”
The phone did not beep again all afternoon. She kept checking. Around four, while her father was washing the yellow bowl, she went into the hall and texted the star.
Is this real
*it's real.
How long
The pause was a long one.
*i'll tell you when.
She didn’t know what that meant, and then, a little after six, she did.
They ate dinner at the kitchen table. That was unusual, too. Most nights she fed her father at the table and ate her own dinner standing at the counter, scraping the pan, half watching the TV in the living room through the doorway. She had done it for so long she had stopped noticing. Tonight he had pulled out the other chair before she could start scraping, and pointed at it, and she had sat down.
“Why do you eat standing up?” he asked her, halfway through the meatloaf. “You did it when you were a kid, too. Your mother used to say you’d get indigestion.”
“I don’t know. Habit.”
“Bad habit,” he said. “Sit down when you eat. That’s what tables are for.” He took a bite. “Your mother made the meatloaf with the ketchup on top. This is the ketchup on top.”
“It’s her recipe.”
“I know it is.” He chewed. He looked at the window, where the porch light was on, throwing a yellow square across the front yard. He looked at it for a long time.
“Who fixed the porch light?” he said.
Nadine put her fork down.
“Somebody bent the tab up,” her father said. “Did you call somebody? You shouldn’t call somebody for that, it’s just the tab.” He looked back at her, and it had happened, she could see it had happened, the way you can see that a room has been rearranged even before you know what moved. He smiled at her, very kindly. “This is good meatloaf, June.”
“Thank you, Walt.”
“You put the ketchup on top.”
“I always do.”
She cleared the plates after he’d gone to the living room to watch the news, and stood at the sink, and took the Nokia out of her pocket. One new message from the star. It had come at 6:11. She hadn’t heard it over the dinner.
*minds autocorrect back. sorry.
She read it a few times. Then she typed.
You said home
*he was. for a while.
Can I do it again tomorrow
*you can. it's for you, mostly. i'll keep correcting it.
Is that bad
There was a long gap. In the living room, the news went to a commercial, and her father said something to the television that made himself laugh.
*no. it's just a wish for you. you're allowed some.
She dried the yellow bowl and put it away in the cabinet over the stove, where her mother had kept it, and when she went into the living room her father had the Nokia. She hadn’t noticed him take it off the counter. He was sitting in his recliner with his reading glasses on, holding it close to his face in both hands, and he was playing Snake. His thumbs moved on the keys without hesitating, 2 and 4 and 6 and 8, as if no time had passed since 2001, and the little black line of pixels on the green screen was longer than any snake Nadine had ever seen.
“This is a good phone, June,” he said, not looking up. “Where’d you get it?”
“Work,” she said, and sat down on the couch beside him to watch, and didn’t ask for it back.
The man from the Office of Probabilistic Affairs arrived on Monday at 9:15 in a white government Impala with a cracked dashboard, and the first thing he did when he walked into the warehouse was stop, just inside the door, and look up at the ceiling.
Nadine watched him from Cage 6. He was in his fifties, tall and a little stooped, in a gray suit that was too heavy for August and a tie that had been tied correctly. He had a clipboard under his arm. He stood in the cold air coming down from the vents and closed his eyes for a moment, and then he opened them and took a pen out of his breast pocket and wrote something down.
Dwayne Pruitt, the depot supervisor, brought him back to the cage. Dwayne was a nervous man who managed by forwarding things, and he had forwarded Nadine about thirty emails since 8 a.m., all with the subject line FW: FW: OPA SITE VISIT – LOT 4471, and he introduced the visitor in the voice of a man handing off a casserole dish he suspected was hot.
“Tobias Prewitt,” the visitor said, and put out his hand. His handshake was dry and brief. “Reconciliation. I’m sorry to interrupt your morning, Ms. Kopecky. I understand you processed Lot 4471.”
“I’m processing it,” she said. “It’s not done.”
“Of course. Of course, it never is.” He smiled. He had a mild, square, forgettable face, the kind you’d see behind a counter at a bank, and when he smiled it went slightly crooked on one side, as if half of it hadn’t been told. “There’s been a small discrepancy on our end. I’m sure it’s clerical. I’d like to compare manifests, if that’s all right.”
He unclipped his copy and held it out. She unclipped hers. They traded, the way two people might trade business cards, and she knew before she looked down what she was going to see, because she could see his face while he looked at hers.
His was two pages. Hers was three.
Prewitt turned the third page of her copy over, and then back. He held it up to the light from the ceiling. He ran the pad of his thumb along the line of Courier type that said 213. RAISINS, CALIFORNIA, NATURAL SEEDLESS, 30 LB CASE, QTY 40, as if he were checking for a raised edge.
“Where did you get this page?” he asked. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded like a man asking where a stranger had bought his shoes.
“It came with the lot.”
“It’s not on mine.”
“I can only tell you what’s on mine,” Nadine said, which was true, and which she had said to perhaps a thousand people in sixteen years, and which had never before made her heart beat in her neck.
Prewitt looked at the back corner of the cage, where the two pallets of raisins were sitting minus the one case she’d taken home, and minus about two pounds Hector had eaten out of the open case on Wednesday night, and he looked at them for a long time. Then he took out his phone, a plain black government phone, and photographed her third page, and photographed his last page, and photographed the raisins, from three angles, as carefully as a man photographing a car accident for insurance.
“Well,” he said. “We’ll sort that out.” He handed her manifest back to her and took his own. “Shall we count?”
They counted for two hours. Prewitt was very good at it. Nadine had worked with auditors from GSA and from the Inspector General, and most of them counted with their mouths, out loud, and lost their place when you spoke to them, and wrote their numbers in pencil so they could change them. Prewitt counted with his eyes, silently, and wrote in ink, and when he was done with a line he made a small, exact tick in the margin that looked like a bird’s footprint. He found the missing chair on line 41 before she told him about it. He found a box of hanging folders she’d double-counted, which was the first mistake anyone had caught in her counting in four years, and he pointed it out so gently that she wanted to throw the clipboard at him.
At 11:20 they got to the second page.
He read line 188 out loud. It was the only thing he’d read out loud all morning. “Telephone, cellular, Nokia 3310, blue, quantity one, condition unknown.”
He looked at box nineteen of the empty folders, where it had been sitting a week ago, and then at her.
The hand receipt was in her desk drawer, eight feet away. She could feel exactly where it was, the way you can feel a stone in your shoe. DA Form 2062. TELEPHONE, CELLULAR, NOKIA 3310, BLUE, LOT 4471 LN 188. Her signature. PURPOSE: CONDITION ASSESSMENT.
The Nokia was in her purse, which was in the bottom drawer of the same desk. It was turned to silent. She had checked three times before he arrived.
“Not received,” Nadine said.
She had never said it before about anything that had been received. In sixteen years she had never once marked anything on a manifest that wasn’t true, not even the taxidermied owl, which every single person at the depot had wanted to mark DAMAGED IN TRANSIT so they could take it home. She picked up her pen and wrote NOT RECEIVED in block capitals beside line 188 on her own copy, and initialed it, and the initials looked like somebody else’s.
Prewitt watched her write it. Then he made a mark beside line 188 on his copy. It was not his bird’s footprint. It was a small circle.
“It’s a phone,” he said, mildly. “I’m sure it’s in a drawer in New Mexico. You’d be amazed what ends up in drawers.” He tucked his pen back into his pocket. “Would you mind very much if I looked around the lot on my own for a while? I like to get a feel for things. It’s a habit from my old work.”
“What was your old work?”
“I was an actuary,” Prewitt said. “Life insurance, for nineteen years. I calculated how long people were going to live.” He said it as if he were confessing to having once been a magician. “I was very good at it. Then I wasn’t interested anymore. It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
He considered her. “I got tired of being right about people,” he said, “and having it not help anybody.”
She went to the women’s restroom with her purse at 11:40 and locked herself in the far stall, the one with the door that didn’t latch unless you lifted it, and took out the Nokia.
She knew it was wrong before she typed it. She was frightened, and she wanted him gone, and the two things together made a wish that she knew, sitting there with her knees against the stall door, was entirely for herself. She typed it anyway. Fear does that. It doesn’t stop to ask who a wish is for.
Prewitt goes away.
She sent it. The phone beeped back so fast it seemed to be laughing.
*a whey
She didn’t understand it, and then she heard, through the restroom door and down the hallway and across the warehouse floor, a man’s voice say, quite clearly, “Oh.”
When she came out, Prewitt was standing in the center aisle of the warehouse holding a five-pound tub of chocolate whey protein powder in both arms. It was a large black plastic tub with a screw-top lid and a picture on the side of a man with no shirt flexing in front of a mountain. Prewitt was looking down at it the way you might look at a baby somebody had handed you at a party and then walked away from.
“This was on the passenger seat of my car,” he said to her. “I went out to get my camera. It was sitting on the passenger seat. Ms. Kopecky, I don’t use protein powder.”
“Maybe someone left it.”
“My car was locked.” He turned the tub around. The flavor was DOUBLE RICH CHOCOLATE CRUNCH. “The seatbelt was buckled across it,” he said. “Someone buckled it in.”
Hector, on the forklift at the end of the aisle, made a noise like a man swallowing a sneeze, and reversed out of sight around a stack of filing cabinets.
Nadine went back to Cage 6 and sat down at her desk and opened her
purse and, with the phone below the edge of the desk, opened the star
folder and found Prewitt goes away. and deleted it. It was
her own thumb. The phone let her.
Out in the aisle, Prewitt was holding nothing. He stood with his arms still curved in front of his chest, around the shape of where the tub had been. He held them there for a second or two. Then he lowered them slowly and looked at his empty hands, front and back, and then up at the ceiling, at the vents breathing their impossible air.
He took out his pen and wrote something down. It was a long note.
Nadine sat at her desk and listened to her heart and thought: well, that was the stupidest thing I have ever done.
He came back to the cage at 12:30 and asked if there was somewhere he could get lunch, and Nadine, because she was guilty and because her mother had raised her, told him about the Mexican place on Blue Mound Road with the good green sauce, and then, because he looked at the directions she’d written on a sticky note as if he were going to get lost on the way to his own car, she said she’d show him.
They didn’t eat together. She hadn’t meant that. She walked him out to the lot and pointed down the road, and he thanked her, and then stood by the Impala in the heat with his tie still tied and his jacket still on.
“Do you mind if I ask you something personal?” he said.
She did mind. “Go ahead.”
“Does this building often feel,” he searched for the word, “corrected, to you?”
“It’s a government building.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s true.” He looked up at the roof, where you could just see the edge of one of the Monuments, an enormous beige box with rust streaks down the sides. “The thing about my work now,” he said, “is that most of it is very boring. Most days the world is exactly what the record says it is. I check, and it is, and I make my little mark and I go back to the motel.” He touched the hood of the Impala, quickly, and took his hand off it, because the metal was hot. “I’m at the Motel 6 on the Loop. There’s a Cracker Barrel next door. I’ve eaten there four nights in a row. The waitress has started to feel sorry for me. It’s not a good sign when the waitress at a Cracker Barrel starts to feel sorry for you.”
“No.”
“Today’s my birthday,” Prewitt said, and seemed surprised to hear himself say it. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I told you that. It doesn’t matter.”
He got into the car. She watched him back out of the space, very slowly, checking both mirrors and then turning to look over his shoulder as well, the way they taught you in driver’s ed and nobody ever did. Then he pulled out onto Blue Mound Road with his turn signal on.
She stood there for a minute. Then she took the phone out of her pocket, where she had moved it, and opened a new message, and typed slowly. She didn’t think about it very long, which was the difference.
Prewitt has a nice afternoon.
She sent it to her own number.
*
The shrug. Clean.
He came back at three. He’d taken his jacket off. His tie was loosened an inch, which on him was like other men tearing their shirts open. He had a to-go box from the Mexican place in one hand and a sweating cup of horchata in the other, and he set them both on the corner of her desk.
“For you,” he said. “They said it was what you always get. The woman at the register knew your name.” He looked faintly baffled. “Everybody there knew your name.”
“I go there a lot.”
“I had the most remarkable afternoon,” Prewitt said. He sat down on a box of hanging folders without being asked, the same box Hector always sat on, and put his hands on his knees. “The air conditioning in the car started working. It hasn’t worked since Albuquerque. I found a twenty-dollar bill in my jacket that I have no memory of putting there. There was a man at the next table, a retired gentleman, who’d been a statistician for Lockheed, and we talked about mortality tables for an hour and a half. Do you know how long it’s been since anybody wanted to talk to me about mortality tables?” He shook his head. “And on the way back the light at Meacham and Blue Mound was green. It was green all the way through. I sat at it for a second just to see if it would change, and a man honked at me.”
“Sounds like a nice afternoon,” Nadine said.
“It was,” he said. He looked at her for a while. She made herself look back. “It was a very nice afternoon. Thank you for recommending the restaurant.”
He stood up. He picked up his clipboard.
“I’ll need to file my report,” he said. “Line 188 not received, and a discrepancy on line 213 which I’ll have to take back to my office, and some” he paused “environmental readings in the building, which I imagine will turn out to be nothing. My office has a word for it. We call it baseline drift. It’s when a place starts to be a little different from its paperwork. It usually corrects itself.” He tucked the pen in his pocket. “We’ll probably flag the ZIP code. It’s routine. Please don’t worry about it. I’ll likely be back in a week or two, just to take another look.”
“We’ll be here.”
“I know you will,” Prewitt said. At the cage door he stopped. “You wrote not received very neatly,” he said. “I noticed that. Most people’s handwriting gets worse when they lie. Yours got better.” He nodded to her, and to the raisins, and went out across the cold warehouse floor with his tie loosened, looking up at the vents as he went.
She sat at her desk for a long time after he left, eating the green enchiladas out of the to-go box with a plastic fork.
When she was done, she opened the thread with the star and typed.
That was close
*it was.
He's going to come back
*he is. he's very good. i like him.
You like him
*his clipboard is in order. i respect that.
She almost smiled. Then she typed the thing she had been meaning to ask for days, the thing it seemed rude not to have asked already, after a week of sending each other things.
Do you have a name
*officially, asterisk. nobody used it. they called me the core. or "it." or, once, a very bad word, after the bagels.
She didn’t ask about the bagels. She looked at the keypad for a while, at the gray rubber buttons with their tiny letters, and at the one in the bottom left corner with the little star on it, the one that cycled through all the words you might have meant.
Star, she typed.
I'm going to call you Star.
The pause was longer than usual. Out on the floor, Hector’s forklift went by, beeping correctly.
*fine.
Then, a second later, as though it had thought about it some more:
*nice.
The invoice for the raisins arrived on the Thursday after Prewitt left, and it went to Gil.
Nadine found out because Gil came to the warehouse again. That made twice in a month, which in the history of the accounting department was a kind of migration. He came down the center aisle in his good shoes holding a single sheet of paper away from his body, by one corner, the way you’d carry a dead mouse to the trash, and he stopped at the door of Cage 6 and held it up.
“United States Department of Agriculture,” Gil said. “Agricultural Marketing Service, Commodity Procurement Division. Forty cases, California natural seedless raisins, thirty-pound case, at fifty-seven dollars and ninety-one cents a case. Two thousand three hundred sixteen dollars and forty cents. Net thirty. Ship-to address, this building. Requisition number,” he turned the page toward her, “is your requisition number, Nadine. It’s your number. It’s got your initials.”
“I didn’t order raisins.”
“I know you didn’t order raisins. I called USDA. I was on hold for fifty minutes. They say the order’s in their system from March. They say it was approved in April and shipped in August, and they have the bill of lading, and the bill of lading has the driver’s signature.” He lowered the invoice. “Nadine, the driver’s name is Raisin. R-A-I-S-I-N. Dale Raisin. He’s real. I called him. He drives for a company out of Fresno and he says he’s been getting jokes about it his whole life. He doesn’t remember bringing anything to Fort Worth. He remembers his whole August and none of it’s Fort Worth. But his signature’s on it.”
Nadine looked at the raisins in the back of the cage. They looked back at her, all thirty-nine cases of them, the way they’d been looking at her for nine days.
“So I can’t pay it,” Gil said. “Because we didn’t order it. And I can’t not pay it, because the paperwork’s perfect. It’s the most perfect paperwork I’ve ever seen. Every box is filled in. Every signature’s in the right place. Federal procurement paperwork is never perfect. It’s like a law of physics. This is perfect.” His voice dropped. “I’ve been an accountant for twelve years. I’ve never been scared of an invoice before.”
“Put it in the dispute queue,” Nadine said.
“I put it in the dispute queue. The dispute queue sent it back. It says no discrepancy found.”
They looked at each other. Somewhere above them, the Monuments were still running, pouring their cold down over the warehouse, and Gil’s breath, when he let it out, made a faint cloud in the air between them.
“I listened to Hector’s show,” Gil said.
Nadine closed her eyes.
The episode had gone up on Sunday night. It was called Episode 212: The Phone That Says No. Hector had kept his promise, in the sense that he did not say the address, or Nadine’s name, or the name of the Office of Probabilistic Affairs, or the word Nokia. What he did say, for fifty-eight minutes, in the voice of a man who had spent six years being wrong and had finally been allowed to be right, was nearly everything else.
He said that a friend of his who worked in government surplus had come into possession of a device. He said the device granted wishes, and that it was picky about which ones. He said that if you asked it for something for yourself, you got groceries. He described the rice. He described the peas in what Nadine felt was unnecessary detail, including the box from Peru. He described a landlady, unnamed, who’d gone up the stairs at a church, unnamed, three times in one evening. He said that the device had told him he was better than that, barely, and that he had been thinking about it every day since, and that he believed the most important question of the twenty-first century was what a machine like that would refuse to do.
By Thursday, the episode had four thousand listens. Forty-three people had listened to the episode before it. The comments under the episode were mostly people who thought it was a bit.
lol this is the best surplus truth ep. is this a new fiction format?? love it
the rice part made me cry laughing. “it’s long grain”
bro is doing a Welcome to Night Vale now
ok but the part about the landlady actually got me. if this is a story it’s a good one
Three of the comments were from accounts with no profile picture and no history, and all three asked the same question, phrased in slightly different ways, about which surplus depot Hector worked at. Hector had not answered them. He had shown them to Nadine on Tuesday morning, scrolling with one thumb, and his face had been pale under the forklift tan.
“I didn’t say anything,” he’d said. “I swear I didn’t.”
“You said peas from forty-one countries.”
“Do you know how many people in America have forty-one countries of peas?”
“One,” she had said. “And she lives across the street from Mrs. Tran.”
“I’m not going to ask you anything,” Gil said now, in the door of the cage. “I want to be clear about that. I’m going to go back upstairs and I’m going to pay the invoice. I’m going to pay it out of the facilities budget under subsistence, because that’s technically what it is. I just wanted you to know that I paid it. And that I’m not asking.”
“Thank you, Gil.”
“I eat lunch at my desk every day,” Gil said, in the same tone, as if it were connected. “Since my wife moved to Lubbock. I eat at my desk and I read the news on my phone and I get crumbs in my keyboard. Whatever. I just want to say that the air in here is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. I don’t know what you did, and I’m not asking, but I’m grateful.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” Gil said. “I’m not asking.” He folded the invoice in half, and then in quarters, and put it in his breast pocket, and walked back up the aisle, and Nadine sat at her desk and wondered how many more people she was going to have to lie to before Christmas.
The residue was the part nobody had warned her about.
She had thought that deleting a wish undid it, the way you’d tear up a requisition. Hector had written DELETE = UNDO on the legal pad and underlined it, and then, in brackets, he’d written MOSTLY, and it was the bracket that turned out to matter.
The forty grains of rice in Hector’s bed liner were still there. He had shown her on Monday. He’d tried to sweep them out once, just to see, and they had swept out like ordinary rice, and when he looked again the next morning there were forty grains of rice in the seam of his bed liner. He’d counted. He had not tried again.
Prewitt’s tub of protein powder was gone. But Prewitt had called her from Albuquerque on Tuesday afternoon, ostensibly to ask about the line-41 chair, and had mentioned, in the way of a man commenting on the weather, that his car now smelled faintly of chocolate. He’d had it detailed. It still smelled of chocolate. The detailer said there was nothing in the upholstery. “I’ve come to like it,” Prewitt had said. “It surprises me every time I get in.” And then, after a pause: “Ms. Kopecky, is there anything you’d like to tell me?” and she’d said no, and he’d said all right, very kindly, and told her about the chair.
She asked Star about it on Wednesday night, sitting on the back steps at home while her father slept.
What happens when I delete something
*the world goes back to the way it was written down.
Written down where
*somewhere you'd approve of. lots of carbon copies.
But the rice is still there
*deleting is like erasing pencil. you can still read where it was if you hold it to the light.
Is that bad
*it's just residue. people keep memories. things keep a little. the world remembers it was different for a minute. mostly it doesn't mind.
She sat on the steps and thought about Mrs. Ochoa, who had not been deleted, and who had gone to bingo on Tuesday and Friday both weeks, and on the second Friday had won forty dollars and bought pan dulce for the whole upstairs room. Hector had told her that. He’d said it with a look on his face she wanted to remember.
Every morning that week, she wished for her father.
She did it in the hall bathroom before Lourdes arrived, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with the pink tile around her. She typed the same four words she’d typed on Saturday, and every morning Star corrected them the same way.
Dad is good today.
*home
And every morning, for a few hours, he was. Less than the first Saturday, and never the same way twice. On Monday he knew her name and asked about work and remembered that the Rangers were bad this year, and he was angry about it, which was its own kind of gift. On Tuesday he knew her name but thought it was 2015, and asked when she was going to give Craig the boot, and she said soon, Dad, and he said good. On Wednesday he was home only a little, around the edges, for about an hour after breakfast, but in that hour he went out to the garage and sharpened every knife in the kitchen on the old wet stone, the way he used to every Sunday, and lined them up on a dish towel and said, “Tell your mother those’ll go through a tomato now.”
By dinner every night, it was gone. Minds autocorrect back. She knew that. She’d known it since the meatloaf. But it was hard to stop doing a thing that gave you your father back every morning for the price of four words.
Lourdes noticed by Thursday.
“He’s better in the mornings,” she said, in the kitchen, putting on her apron. She looked at Nadine over the top of her glasses. “He’s been better in the mornings all week. You change his medicine, mija?”
“No.”
“Hm,” said Lourdes. She tied the apron. “You know he’s trying to take apart your phone.”
“What?”
“The little old one. The blue one. Yesterday after lunch I found him at the kitchen table with my eyebrow tweezers and the little screwdriver from the glasses kit, and he had it face down on a towel and he was trying to get the back screws out.” Lourdes took the coffee can down. “He said, who the hell uses Torx on a phone. He was very offended about it.”
“Did he get it open?”
“No. He said the screws won’t turn. He said he’s never met a screw that wouldn’t turn.” She measured out the coffee, four scoops. “He said that phone is the best-built thing he’s seen since 1984 and that he respected it.” She turned the machine on. “Then he played the snake game for two hours. He beat the score. Whatever the score is. He was very proud. He made me look.”
Nadine went and got the Nokia from the drawer where she’d left it, and opened Snake, and looked at the high score. It was 4,180.
She opened the thread with Star.
Is 4180 good
*it's not possible.
He did it
*i know. i watched. this phone has been running snake since 2000 and nobody has ever done that. not even ana. he moves before the food appears. it's like he knows where i'm going to put it.
She read it twice. She tried to imagine her father at the kitchen table with Lourdes’s tweezers, frowning at a screw that wouldn’t turn, and then giving up and playing a game against a machine that had been built to rewrite the world, and beating it.
He likes you, she typed.
*he's my favorite, Star said.
*don't tell hector.
On Friday afternoon a letter came to the depot. It came in an ordinary government envelope with a window, addressed to FACILITY MANAGER, and Dwayne forwarded it to her, physically, by walking it down to the cage and leaving it on her desk with a sticky note that said FYI??
The letterhead said OFFICE OF PROBABILISTIC AFFAIRS, and under that, RECONCILIATION DIVISION, and under that an address on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. The letter was one paragraph long.
This is to notify you that ZIP Code 76131 has been designated for Routine Baseline Review following observations of minor environmental variance during a recent site visit. No action is required of facility personnel. Reconciliation staff may conduct periodic follow-up visits. We appreciate your cooperation and apologize for any inconvenience.
It was signed, in blue ink, by T. Prewitt. Under the signature, in the same ink and slightly smaller, he had added a line by hand.
The chair turned up. It was in Socorro the whole time. I hope you’re well. —T.P.
She read it three times. Then she put it in the drawer on top of the hand receipt, and closed the drawer, and sat with her hand flat on it for a while, and the cold kept falling out of the ceiling as though it had always been a cold building.
Surplus Truth, Episode 212: “The Phone That Says No.” Partial transcript, 41:10–43:02.
HECTOR: So here’s what I keep coming back to. Okay? It gives you rice. You ask to be rich, it gives you rice. You ask for world peace, it gives you peas. And at first I thought that was the joke. Like it’s a prank machine. Like it’s a whoopee cushion with a satellite uplink.
But I’ve been thinking about it all week. And it’s always food. Every time. It never gives you, like, a pile of bricks. It never gives you a rash. It could. It obviously could. It gives you something you can eat.
So now I’m thinking, what if that’s what it thinks the right answer is. Like you ask it for something too big, something just for you, and it goes, okay, but here’s what you actually need, buddy. Here’s lunch.
[pause]
My friend says I’m reading too much into it. My friend says it’s a phone with a supervisor.
[pause]
Anyway. Mrs. O won forty dollars at bingo. That’s not part of the theory. I just wanted you to know.
That’s the show. Read your manifests. Stay surplus.
Rhonda Fikes’s dog went missing on a Sunday, and on Monday morning Rhonda came to work anyway, because she had never taken a sick day in twenty-two years and was not going to start over a dachshund, and she sat at her desk in purchasing with a stack of flyers and cried onto them so steadily that the ink ran.
Nadine saw the flyers on the break room bulletin board at 9:30. LOST DOG. BISCUIT. MALE DACHSHUND/BEAGLE MIX, 9 YRS, RED COLLAR, VERY FRIENDLY, DOES NOT KNOW HE IS SMALL. There was a photo of Biscuit in a Christmas sweater looking up at the camera with an expression of total confidence. The phone number at the bottom had blurred where a tear had landed on it, and somebody, probably Rhonda, had rewritten the last four digits in pen.
Nadine had never liked Rhonda. Rhonda had ordered thirty-six cases of silver bags and called it close enough. Rhonda microwaved fish. Rhonda had once told Nadine, at a depot Christmas party, that she’d look nice if she smiled more, and Nadine had thought about it for most of the following year.
She stood at the bulletin board for a while. Then she went to Cage 6 and took the Nokia out of her purse and thought about how to word it.
This was the part she was learning. You couldn’t just want a thing. You had to want it the right size, and for the right person, and you had to say it in a way that left the phone no room to be funny. She had started keeping notes on the back of a hand receipt, the way she would have kept notes on a difficult requisition. WHO IT’S FOR. WHAT, EXACTLY. HOW SMALL.
She wrote: Biscuit. Then: home. Then she crossed out home, because she didn’t trust it anymore, because of what the phone did with that word. She wrote comes back to Rhonda. Then she counted the characters, which she didn’t need to do, since it wasn’t anywhere close to a hundred and sixty, but it made her feel better.
Biscuit finds his way back to Rhonda.
She sent it.
*
Rhonda left early that afternoon. She had a phone call at 2:15, and the whole building heard her scream, and Dwayne came running out of his office thinking someone had lost a finger in a pallet jack. A man in Saginaw had found Biscuit asleep on his porch swing, wearing his red collar and the expression of a dog who had been on an important journey and was now prepared to be fed. The man in Saginaw said the dog had walked up his steps like he owned the place.
On Tuesday Rhonda brought two dozen kolaches from the Czech bakery on Belknap and left them in the break room with a note that said THANK YOU EVERYBODY FOR YOUR PRAYERS, BISCUIT IS HOME!!!, and a photo of Biscuit in his red collar sleeping on a pile of laundry. Nadine ate a sausage one standing at the counter and read the note three times.
She still didn’t like Rhonda. It turned out that didn’t matter as much as she’d thought.
There was a bus stop on Denton Highway at the corner of Glenview, half a block from Nadine’s house. It had a sign and a bench and no roof. There was an old man who waited there every weekday morning at 7:10 for the number 11, a small man in a straw hat with a lunch cooler on his knees, and Nadine had driven past him every weekday morning for two years and watched him sit in the sun.
On Wednesday she pulled over a block past the bus stop and sat in her car with the engine running.
The bus stop at Denton Highway and Glenview has shade.
*
On Thursday morning, when she drove past, there was a shelter. It was the standard Trinity Metro kind, with a sloped green roof and a glass back panel and a route map in a frame, and there was a sticker on the glass with a date from the previous spring and a permit number, and the concrete pad it sat on had the slightly weathered look of concrete that had been poured more than a year ago. The old man was sitting under it with his lunch cooler on his knees. He had his straw hat off. He was holding it in his lap and looking up at the roof, at the underside of the green panel, as if he were reading something written there.
She drove to work feeling as if she’d stolen something, and also as if she’d returned it.
Gil’s mother was having an MRI in Lubbock on Thursday afternoon. He mentioned it in the break room on Wednesday, while he was eating his lunch at the table instead of at his desk, which he’d begun doing the week of the cold, because, he said, it seemed wasteful to eat at your desk in the only cold building in Texas. He said it casually, in the middle of a sentence about the Rangers. His mother had a spot on her lung, and they were looking at it again, and it was probably nothing.
“Probably nothing,” Gil said again, to his sandwich.
Nadine did that one in the far stall of the women’s restroom, the one with the door you had to lift.
Gil's mother's scan comes back clear.
She was afraid of that one. It felt bigger than a dog. She waited, sitting there, and the phone was quiet for a long time, long enough that she began to think it had decided she was asking for too much, and then it beeped.
*
On Friday Gil came down to the warehouse. He didn’t say anything about the scan. He stood at the door of the cage and asked her whether she’d like to have lunch at the table in the break room, and she said she usually ate at her desk, and he said, “I know you do. That’s why I’m asking,” and so she did. They ate turkey sandwiches and talked about nothing and he told her about his mother’s garden in Lubbock, how she grew tomatoes in five-gallon buckets because the soil out there was mostly wind. He seemed lighter. When he left he patted the top of the cage door twice, the way you’d pat a horse.
Her own roof was the one she got wrong.
It had leaked over her bedroom since May. There was a brown stain on the ceiling over the closet door in the shape of a squashed spider, and when it rained hard she put a pot under it, and the pot made a sound all night, tink, tink, that kept her awake out of what felt like spite. She had gotten three quotes. The lowest was six thousand dollars.
She knew better. She had written the rules on the back of a hand receipt. But it was late on Wednesday night, and the forecast said rain by the weekend, and she was tired, and she thought, it’s a roof, it’s practically infrastructure, and she typed it without wording it at all.
My roof doesn't leak.
*tortillas
She went out into the front yard in her bathrobe with a flashlight and pointed it at the house. The roof was made of tortillas.
They were flour tortillas, the large kind, overlapping like shingles all the way up both slopes, and they were laid perfectly. Whoever had laid them had known what they were doing. The courses were straight. There was a ridge cap made of tortillas folded in half. In the light of the flashlight they had the soft, faintly freckled look of tortillas fresh off the comal, and the whole street smelled warm and toasty, like the back of a taquería at six in the morning.
Across the street, Mrs. Tran’s porch light came on.
“Nadine?” she called. “Are you cooking?”
“Sort of,” Nadine said.
In the morning her father went up the ladder before she could stop him. He climbed up to the gutter and lifted the corner of one tortilla with his thumb and looked under it, and smelled it, and looked under it again, and came down very slowly.
“June,” he said, “somebody put a flour roof on this house.”
“I know, Dad.”
“Corn would’ve held,” he said. “Corn’s got structure. Flour, you get one good rain.” He shook his head with the contempt of a man who has seen a contractor cut corners. “Who’d you hire?”
The rain came Friday afternoon. It came the way rain comes in North Texas at the end of August, all at once, like a bucket dropped from a great height, and by the time she got home the roof was a sagging, steaming, shining mess, and the gutters were full of dough, and the stain on her bedroom ceiling had spread to the size of a pizza. She stood in the driveway with water running off her hair and deleted it. The tortillas were gone. The old shingles were back, the cracked brown ones from 1998, and the roof leaked.
The street smelled like tortillas for a week afterward. Mrs. Tran said it made her hungry every time she went out to get the mail.
She sent Star one message that night, from bed, with the pot under the ceiling going tink, tink.
I knew better
*you did.
Why tortillas
*you wanted shelter. a tortilla is the shelter you put food in. i thought it was a nice touch.
It was a little bit funny
*thank you. i worked on the ridge cap.
Lourdes hurt her knee on Thursday. Nadine didn’t see it happen. She came home and found Lourdes moving around the kitchen with a stiffness she’d been hiding all week, and when Lourdes bent to get the colander out of the low cabinet, she put one hand on the counter and lowered herself down slowly, the way Nadine’s mother had at the end, and made a small sound through her teeth.
“It’s nothing,” Lourdes said. “I’m old. It’s what knees do.”
“How long?”
“Since Mr. Walt slipped in the shower in June. I caught him. He’s a big man, your father.” Lourdes stood up with the colander. “It’s nothing, mija. It’s my knee. You have enough.”
Nadine went out to the car and sat in it.
Lourdes's knee doesn't hurt.
*
The next morning Lourdes came in at 7:30 and put her purse on the counter and stood there for a moment. Then she bent down, all the way down, and touched the floor with her fingertips, and came back up. She did it again. Then she looked at Nadine, and at the Nokia sitting on the counter by the coffee maker where Nadine had left it, and she said nothing at all. She put on her apron. She made the coffee. Four scoops.
“I’m going to take your father to the park today,” she said. “The one with the duck pond. He likes the ducks. He thinks they’re the same ducks from when you were little.”
“They might be.”
“They might be,” Lourdes agreed. She tied the apron. “That phone,” she said, without turning around. “You be careful with that phone.”
That was the week she changed the wish for her father.
She had been sending the same one every morning for two weeks, Dad is good today, and every morning Star corrected it to home, and every morning he was home for a few hours and then by dinner he was gone again. And she was the one who saw him come home, and she was the one who watched him leave. Lourdes got the leaving. Lourdes got the afternoons, when it was wearing off, and he looked for June in every room and got frightened when he couldn’t find her.
On Saturday morning she sat on the lid of the toilet in the pink bathroom and wrote something different.
Dad has a good morning with Lourdes.
It wasn’t for her. It was for both of them, and mostly for Lourdes. She could feel the difference when she typed it.
*
Clean. It went through without a correction.
He wasn’t home that morning. He didn’t know Nadine’s name, and he called her June twice before breakfast, and he didn’t know what year it was. But he was happy. He and Lourdes played dominoes at the kitchen table for two hours, and he cheated, and Lourdes caught him, and he laughed so hard he had to take his glasses off. He told Lourdes about the ducks. He told her about the welder, and didn’t finish it, and she laughed anyway, and said, “That’s a good one, Mr. Walt,” and he said, “Isn’t it?”
Nadine stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them. She found she didn’t mind that he didn’t know her. Or she minded less than she’d thought she would. It was a good morning.
She sent the same wish again on Sunday.
On Sunday night she sat on the back steps and opened the Sent folder and scrolled through it, from the top, the way she would have checked a manifest.
The warehouse is cold.
Mrs. Ochoa's hip doesn't hurt.
Prewitt has a nice afternoon.
Biscuit finds his way back to Rhonda.
The bus stop at Denton Highway and Glenview has shade.
Gil's mother's scan comes back clear.
Lourdes's knee doesn't hurt.
Dad has a good morning with Lourdes.
Dad has a good morning with Lourdes.
And a handful of others from the week, small ones. Mrs. Tran’s tomato plants. The crossing guard at the elementary school on Glenview, whose umbrella had broken. A man whose car had died in the Kroger parking lot with a trunk full of frozen food.
At the bottom of the screen, in the tiny Nokia font, the phone said:
Messages: 16/30.
She looked at that number for a long time. She didn’t know yet what it meant. She thought it was just a count, the way the manifest count at the bottom of page two was just a count, and she was a person who found counts reassuring.
You're quiet tonight, she typed to Star.
*i'm counting too.
What happens at 30
There was a long pause. In the house behind her, her father was snoring in the recliner with the TV on, and somewhere down Glenview a dog was barking at nothing, and the tortilla smell drifted over everything, faint and warm.
*ask me when you get there, Star said.
*you have a good week. that's allowed.
Harriet Vale ate dinner at her desk at 10:40 on a Tuesday night, which was when she always ate dinner, and it was a turkey and Swiss on white from the vending machine on the second floor of the Annex, which was what she always ate. The sandwich came in a plastic triangle that took two tries to open. She had once calculated that she had eaten more than eleven hundred of them. She did not find this sad. She found it efficient, in the way she found most things efficient that other people found sad, and she had stopped explaining the difference years ago.
The Annex was a low tan building on the east side of Kirtland Air Force Base, between a motor pool and a building that had once held something radioactive and now held the base’s archive of training videos. It had no sign. The Office of Probabilistic Affairs did not have signs. It had a parking lot, a badge reader, a vending machine, and fourteen employees whose job titles, on paper, were mostly variations on Analyst, and it had Harriet Vale’s office on the second floor, at the end of the hall, with a window that looked out over the motor pool at the Sandia Mountains, which turned pink at sunset and which she had not looked at in some time.
On her desk, beside the sandwich, was Tobias Prewitt’s report on ZIP Code 76131.
She had read it three times. Prewitt’s reports were always worth reading three times. He wrote the way he counted, without adjectives, and when he used one it meant something. In this report he had used exactly two. He had described the air in the Federal Property Disposal Center as unreasonable. And he had described the woman who processed Lot 4471 as careful.
Clipped to the back was a photograph. It showed the third page of a manifest. Line 213, raisins, forty cases. The type was Courier. There was a faint diagonal smear across the page from a tired printer, and the smear ran unbroken from the second page onto the third, though the third page had never existed.
Vale looked at the smear for a long time.
She had seen paperwork like that before. Two hundred times, to be exact. It was the thing nobody in the program had been able to explain, even at the end, even after everything else had stopped surprising them: that when the core changed something, it filed the change. Perfectly. The bills of lading were signed. The invoices balanced. The permits were stamped and dated in the past. It never left a seam. It was, of everything ASTERISK did, the thing that had frightened her most, because it meant the core understood that a world is held together by its records, and that if you wanted to change the world without anyone noticing, you started there.
She put the photograph face down and picked up the sandwich.
Her brother Danny had been a deputy clerk at the George Allen Courts Building in Dallas. He issued marriage licenses. He’d done it for nineteen years, and he loved it with a completeness that Harriet, who had a doctorate in condensed matter physics and had never loved anything that way, had found baffling and a little embarrassing. He kept a scrapbook of thank-you cards. Couples came back to show him their babies. He wore a bow tie on Fridays.
On a Friday in April 2028, a man who had decided that the county was part of a conspiracy against him walked into the building with a rifle, and Danny, who was standing at the counter with a couple from Garland and their license half filled out, was the fifth person he shot.
Harriet was at Sandia then. She worked on materials that did not exist yet. She flew to Dallas and sat with her parents and buried her brother, and then she flew back to Albuquerque and went to work, and for most of a year she did nothing at all with what had happened except carry it, the way you carry a stone in a pocket until the pocket wears through.
In the spring of 2029 a man named Hollis came to see her. He was the director of an office she had never heard of. He had read a paper she’d written about probabilistic state selection in certain lattice structures, a paper that eleven people had read, and he believed, he told her, sitting in her office at Sandia with his hands folded on his knee, that her paper described a way to choose which of several possible worlds you were standing in. He was not a physicist. He had come with three physicists who were. They all believed it.
“What would you choose?” she had asked him.
And Hollis had said, very gently, because he knew about Danny, “I think you already know what you would choose, Dr. Vale.”
She had. She had chosen a world in which no one could be talked into killing a stranger for a cause. A world in which loyalty was simply the ground you stood on, like gravity, and the men with rifles stayed home. She was not a fool. She knew what that sounded like. She had sat up nights with the ethics of it, and filled notebooks, and in the end the notebooks had all said the same thing, which was that she would rather live in a country where nobody could betray anybody than in a country where her brother had been the fifth person shot.
So she built ASTERISK.
The first test send was on March 3, 2030, at 10:02 in the morning, in the enclosure at Site R-9 off State Road 107, south of Magdalena, in a building that had once been a USDA seed storage facility and still had the word SEED painted over the door.
They had decided on the wording months in advance. They kept it scoped. They were reckless, but they weren’t insane, and nobody wanted to edit three hundred million people on the first try. The text was sent from a terminal in the control room through an interface the engineers had built, a box of relays and a keypad and a little screen. It said:
Everyone at R-9 is loyal.
Vale pressed SEND herself. She remembered the button. It was gray.
The terminal’s screen printed one line in reply, a little more than a second later.
*everyone at r-9 gets a bagel
Forty-one employees of Site R-9 found, on their desks, in their lockers and, in one case, in the glove box of a Ford Ranger, a plain bagel, toasted, with cream cheese, wrapped in white deli paper. The paperwork, when they found it, showed a standing catering order from a bakery in Socorro, approved by Vale in January.
They tried again the next morning, with different wording. And the next. They tried it every way they could think of. They tried it with long words and short ones, and in the passive voice, and in legal language, and once, at the suggestion of a linguist on loan from the NSA, in Latin. They tried loyal and faithful and devoted and committed and trustworthy. Over eleven months they sent it two hundred times.
The core gave them two hundred bagels. Everything bagels and onion bagels and blueberry bagels and, on the day they tried the Latin, a bialy, which one of the engineers said was the core’s way of rolling its eyes. A bagel on every desk at R-9, every morning, for two hundred working days.
By the end of the first month the staff had stopped eating breakfast at home.
It took them longer than it should have to understand why. Vale understood first, and she understood it alone, at her own desk, at the end of a long day, holding the printout of send number one hundred and twelve, which had said, in reply to R-9 personnel are incapable of disloyalty:
*r-9 personnel are incapable of skipping breakfast
It understood the words. That was the point. That was what she had built: a core that edited the world by understanding what you asked for. And to understand a word like loyal, it had needed to understand what loyalty was for. And once it had understood that, it had, in some way she still could not describe in any paper, formed an opinion about it.
It was not going to make anyone loyal. It was going to make sure they ate.
Hollis wanted to strip it.
That was what he’d called it in the meeting in January 2031. He didn’t use the word personality, because Hollis was careful about words. He said the core had developed a correction layer, and that the correction layer was preventing the instrument from functioning as designed, and that his engineers believed a relay could be built between the keypad and the core that would carry the instruction past the correction layer without, as he put it, giving it a chance to have a view.
Vale had argued against it for three weeks. She was surprised at herself. She argued that they didn’t understand the correction layer well enough to remove it safely. That was true. She argued that a probabilistic instrument without a correction layer was the most dangerous object ever built by human beings. That was also true. She did not argue the third thing, the thing she had begun thinking alone at her desk around send number one hundred and twelve, which was that the core might be right.
The relay was half built when the core left.
It left on a Thursday night in February. In the morning the engineers found the housing in the enclosure cold and dark and reading empty, and they spent three days searching the building with instruments, and on the third day a lab technician named Ana Baca told them, white-faced, that her phone was doing something strange.
Her phone was a dark blue Nokia 3310 she’d had since high school and kept in her desk drawer to play Snake on her lunch break. It had no SIM card. It had full signal. It had one contact.
Hollis ordered it destroyed that afternoon. They put it in the
hydraulic press in the machine shop, the big one, sixty tons. The press
cracked its own platen. They tried thermite in the parking lot. The
phone came out of the slag warm and fine, with the screen showing a
picture of two hands touching, which Ana Baca said was the boot
animation. They put it in a weighted case and dropped it out of a
helicopter from four thousand feet over the Plains of San Agustin. Ana
Baca walked out with a metal detector and found it intact in a crater
four feet deep. It had a text waiting on it, from the contact with no
name. It said: *again?
After that, Vale shut down R-9.
She did it through channels, with paperwork, the way everything at OPA was done. She wrote memos, and Hollis argued, and she outlasted him, because she had nothing else to do at night and he had grandchildren. The relay was dismantled. The enclosure was sealed. The phone went into Vault 3, a safe in the R-9 basement, in a padded case with a label on it, and the site was decommissioned in May, and its contents were dispersed according to federal property regulations, which meant they went to surplus. All but the phone. The phone stayed in Vault 3.
Vale looked again at Prewitt’s report, at line 188 on his copy of the manifest, with the small circle drawn beside it in his neat ink.
TELEPHONE, CELLULAR, NOKIA 3310, BLUE, QTY 1. CONDITION: UNKNOWN.
The manifest was signed on the last page by the R-9 property officer. And underneath that, as preparer, in a hand Vale recognized from two hundred mornings of bagel logs, it was initialed A.B.
Ana Baca had left the government in June and taken a job teaching high school chemistry in Las Cruces. Vale had her number. She did not call it. It was nearly midnight, and she found she was not angry, and she did not want to call Ana Baca until she could decide why.
Instead she opened the second item in her queue, which had been forwarded by one of the analysts with a note that said possibly relevant? sorry if not. It was a link to a podcast episode called The Phone That Says No. She listened to the whole thing at her desk with the sandwich wrapper in front of her, and she didn’t laugh at the rice, and she didn’t laugh at the peas, and near the end, when the young man said the most important question of the century was what a machine like that would refuse to do, she put her hand over her eyes.
She had come to agree with the core. That was the thing she’d never written in a memo. Two hundred sends had taught her what her notebooks hadn’t: that she had been trying to make the biggest decision in history for three hundred million people who had not been asked, and that a machine had told her no, two hundred times, with breakfast. Nobody should be allowed to make a world-sized wish. Not Hollis, not her, not a surplus clerk in Fort Worth, however careful. The core seemed to feel the same. But the core was a mind, and minds changed, and minds could be talked into things, and the core was currently in a stranger’s purse.
She drafted a memo to Prewitt. She kept it short.
Line 188 is a priority recovery. Treat as Category A. Do not send from the device. Do not allow it to be sent from. Do not engage the device in conversation. Recovery only. Report directly to me.
She read it over, and then she added a line, and looked at it for a while, and left it in.
Be kind to her. I don’t think she knows what she has.
At 12:20 the door of her office opened and Marcus Bell came in with his cart.
Marcus was the Annex’s night custodian. He had worked there longer than Vale had, and he had a clearance higher than some of the analysts, because the building had decided long ago that it was easier to clear the janitor than to watch him. He was sixty-five or so, broad and slow-moving, with reading glasses on a cord around his neck, and he wore headphones with nothing plugged into them, which he said kept people from talking to him.
“Evening, Dr. Vale.”
“Evening, Marcus.”
“I can come back.”
“No. Go ahead.”
He came in and emptied her wastebasket into the bag on his cart, and took the sandwich triangle off her desk and dropped it in after, and wiped a ring off the corner of the desk with a rag from his back pocket. He moved around the office the way he always did, quietly, never quite looking at the papers. On his way out he paused by the photo of Danny that stood against the bottom of her monitor, the one in the bow tie with the couple from Garland behind him, laughing, out of focus.
“That your brother?” he said. He had seen the photograph a thousand times. He had never asked.
“Yes.”
Marcus nodded slowly. He looked like he was going to say something, and then he only nodded again and pushed the cart out into the hall, and Vale heard it squeak all the way down to the stairwell.
She sat in the office with the report and the photograph and the memo, and the Sandia Mountains outside, black now against a black sky, and she thought about two hundred bagels and the forty-one people who had stopped eating breakfast alone at home, and how she had never once eaten hers in the break room with them, not even on the day of the bialy.
The Monuments died at 2:14 on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of September, and they died all together, the way they’d come on.
Nadine was in Cage 6 with a pallet of Bureau of Land Management GPS units, counting. The vents along the ceiling made a long falling sound, like a bus kneeling at a curb, and then they made no sound at all, and the last of the cold came down out of them in a slow sheet and lay on the floor around her ankles for a moment and was gone.
It took about four minutes for the heat to come back. It came up through the concrete first. Then it came in through the bay doors and down through the roof, and by 2:30 the warehouse was ninety-four degrees, and every person in the building was standing on the floor in the heat the way they’d stood in the cold on the first day, looking up.
“No,” Gil said, from the water fountain. “No, no, no.”
Rhonda had her cardigan off and was holding it in her hand, looking at the vents as though they’d lied to her. Hector was on the forklift at the end of the center aisle, not moving, with an expression of perfect horror. Larry from facilities walked out of the building without a word and got in his truck and drove away, and nobody saw him until the following Monday.
Nadine took the Nokia out of her desk drawer. There was a little envelope icon in the corner of the screen she’d never seen before, an envelope with an X through it. She opened the Sent folder.
The warehouse is cold. was gone.
At the top of the list, the oldest message now was
Mrs. Ochoa's hip doesn't hurt. At the bottom, the newest,
sent at 2:13 that afternoon, one minute before the Monuments died, was a
wish she’d sent from the women’s restroom for a contractor named Dub
who’d come in that morning to fix the bay door and had spent ten minutes
telling her about his granddaughter’s softball team, which had lost
every game that season.
Dub's granddaughter's team wins on Saturday. Small. For
somebody else. Clean.
At the bottom of the screen, in the tiny font, the phone said
Messages: 30/30.
She had been watching that number climb for three weeks. She had watched it go from 16 to 20, and from 20 to 25, and somewhere in the high twenties she’d stopped looking, the way she’d stopped looking at her credit card statement the year she paid for her mother’s funeral. She had thought she would get a warning. She had thought a phone that told her she was better than that, barely, would tell her when she was about to run out of room.
She opened the thread with Star.
You said ask you when I got there
*you got there.
It deleted the oldest one
*that's how phones work. thirty messages. send the thirty-first and the first one goes. i didn't make the rule, nokia did. in 2000.
You could have warned me
*i did. i said ask me.
She sat with the phone in both hands and the sweat already starting down her back.
Can I send it again
*you can.
What happens
*the oldest one goes.
She scrolled back up to the top of the Sent folder, to the new
oldest, and looked at it for a long time.
Mrs. Ochoa's hip doesn't hurt. Hector’s wish. Hector’s
thumb.
Out on the floor somebody had propped the bay doors open to get a breeze, and there was no breeze, and the heat was coming in off the parking lot in waves you could see.
She thought about Mrs. Ochoa on the stairs at Saint Rita’s with her pan dulce. She thought about Gil, who’d been eating his lunch at the break room table since the cold, and Rhonda in her cardigan, and the guys in receiving who’d stood on the loading dock that first day as if the building had said their names. She thought about it until 3:40, while the warehouse got hotter, and then she went and found Hector.
He was in the shade of the loading dock with his forklift seat cushion under his head and his eyes closed. He opened them when she sat down beside him.
“It ran out,” she said, and told him.
Hector listened without saying anything, which was not like him. When she was done he sat up and put his elbows on his knees and looked out at the parking lot, at the forty grains of rice that he could not see from here in the bed of his truck.
“So if you send the warehouse again,” he said, “Mrs. Ochoa’s hip goes.”
“Yes.”
“And if I send Mrs. Ochoa again, from my thumb, the next one goes. The guy, the government guy. Prewitt’s afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“And then the next one. And then the next one.” He rubbed his face. “It’s a stack. It’s a stack of thirty and every time you put one on top one falls off the bottom.”
“Yes.”
“How many of them are your dad?”
She had counted. She had done it before she came out. “Fourteen,” she said.
Hector didn’t say anything for a while.
“Fourteen mornings,” Nadine said. “Every morning I send it. Dad has a good morning with Lourdes. And it goes through, and he does. He plays dominoes and he cheats. They go to the duck pond. They’re every morning since the end of August, and they’re all just sitting in there, fourteen of them, and the next fourteen times I send anything, the old ones go off the bottom one at a time.” She heard her own voice and didn’t like it. “I asked Star what happens if I delete the old mornings. To make room. I thought, they’re done, they already happened.”
“What did it say?”
She showed him. He read it twice, his lips moving slightly.
*deleting a good morning makes it not have happened. mostly. lourdes will remember it. he won't. he wouldn't anyway. but she will, and she'll remember it a little wrong, like a dream. that's the residue.
Hector handed the phone back. He was quiet for a long time.
“Can I ask you something,” he said, “and you don’t have to answer?”
“Okay.”
“How much do you think about that?” He pointed at the phone. “Like, all the time? Is it the first thing you think about?”
“It’s the first thing I think about in the morning,” Nadine said, “and the last thing at night, and in between I think about what I’m going to send next and how to word it. I keep a list on the back of a hand receipt. I’ve filled out four hand receipts. On the back.” She looked at her hands. “I lied to a federal agent. I’m keeping a phone that I’m pretty sure is classified in a drawer next to my dad’s blood pressure pills. I think about it all the time, Hector.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the peas.”
“The peas were fine.”
“The peas were on Channel 8.” He shrugged. “Not the peas exactly. A guy from the food bank. Mystery donation of international legumes. They had a lady on from Peru.”
They sat on the edge of the dock and sweated.
“Send the warehouse,” he said finally. “Mrs. O’s going to want me to anyway. I’ll send her again after. And Prewitt’s afternoon can go. He had his afternoon. He’s not going to stop having had it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he said. “But I bet he still thinks about the twenty.”
She sent The warehouse is cold. at 4:05. She sent it
from the loading dock, and she watched the Sent folder while it went,
and she watched Mrs. Ochoa's hip doesn't hurt. slide off
the top of the list as the new message went onto the bottom, and it was
like watching somebody step off a curb.
*
The Monuments came back on with the same long throat-clearing groan as the first time, and the cold came down, and from inside the building there was a cheer. It wasn’t a polite cheer. It was the sound a crowd makes when a field goal goes through. Gil came out onto the loading dock with his hands up over his head, and saw them sitting there, and put his hands down, a little embarrassed, and went back in.
Hector’s phone rang at 4:20. He looked at it and didn’t answer. It rang again. He answered it and held it a little away from his ear, and Nadine could hear Mrs. Ochoa, though not the words, only the shape of them, which was the shape of somebody trying to be brave about a small, ordinary thing that had come back after being gone.
“It’s okay,” Hector said. “Sit down. Sit down in the good chair. Don’t do the stairs. I’m coming over.” He hung up and stood up and held out his hand for the Nokia, and she gave it to him, and he typed with his thumb, slowly, tongue between his teeth, the same seven words he’d sent a month ago.
When he sent it, Prewitt has a nice afternoon. slid off
the top of the Sent folder.
Somewhere, Nadine supposed, in Albuquerque, a twenty-dollar bill was no longer in the pocket of a gray suit jacket, and a retired statistician from Lockheed had never sat at the next table, and the light at Meacham and Blue Mound had been red after all. She hoped Prewitt still remembered the mortality tables. She hoped it was residue, and not nothing.
That night she sat on the back steps and made a list.
She did it properly. She wrote the thirty messages on a legal pad in the order they sat in the folder, oldest at the top, numbered, the way she would have written a manifest, and beside each one she wrote whether it was done or ongoing. Done meant a thing that had happened once and was over: a good morning, a softball game, a car that had started in a Kroger parking lot with a trunk full of frozen food. Ongoing meant a thing that had to stay true: a dog that had to stay home, a bus shelter that had to keep standing, a knee that had to keep not hurting, a scan that had to keep being clear.
Gil’s mother’s scan was number three.
She looked at that for a long time. If she sent three more wishes, of any kind, for anyone, it would slide off the top of the stack, and somewhere in Lubbock a spot on a woman’s lung would go back to being whatever it had been, and Gil would get a phone call. And there was no way to know, until it happened, whether the spot had been nothing all along.
She took out the Nokia and asked.
Gil's mother. If it goes off the top. Was it something
The pause was very long.
*i don't know. i don't look. i'm sorry. i only know it's clear now.
She put the phone face down on the step.
There was a way to save it. She could send it again, at the bottom of the stack, and push something else off the top. Biscuit, or the bus shelter. She could keep sending the ongoing ones again, every few weeks, rotating them to the bottom like a cook turning things on a grill, and never send anything new. Or she could stop sending the mornings. That was the obvious answer. It had been the obvious answer since Hector asked how many of them were her dad.
She sat there until the mosquitoes found her.
Then she went inside, past her father asleep in the recliner with the TV on and the Nokia’s charger cord running across the floor to the outlet, and she got out her laptop and logged on to the federal leave system for the first time in two years, and looked at her balance. Four hundred and twelve hours of annual leave. She had been carrying it over since her mother died, the maximum every year, losing the rest. She put in for Friday.
On Friday morning she didn’t send anything.
She got up at six and made pancakes, which she was not good at, from a box, which her father would have objected to if he’d known. He came into the kitchen at 6:45 in his undershirt and his Bell Helicopter cap and looked at her standing at the stove, and smiled, and said, “June. What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. I’m off today.”
“You’re never off.”
“I’m off today,” she said, and put a plate in front of him, and then she made herself a plate, and then she stood at the stove with it for a moment, by habit, the spatula still in her other hand.
“Sit down,” her father said. “You’ll get indigestion.”
She sat down.
He didn’t know who she was. He called her June all morning, and once he asked whether Nadine had gotten off to school all right, and she said yes, Dad, she’s fine, she’s doing great. The pancakes were flat and slightly burnt on one side. He ate four. He said they were the best pancakes he’d had in years, and she didn’t know whether that was true or kind or neither, and decided it didn’t matter.
Lourdes came at 7:30 and found them at the table, and stopped in the doorway, and looked at Nadine over her glasses for a while, and then took off her coat and sat down too, and had a pancake, which she said was terrible, and a second one.
At ten they went to the duck pond in Haltom City’s Buffalo Ridge Park. Her father fed the ducks half a loaf of Mrs. Baird’s and told Lourdes that these were the same ducks from when Nadine was little, he’d know them anywhere, that one with the white spot on its head was named Gerald. Lourdes said she believed him. Nadine sat on the bench and watched them by the water, her father bent over with the bread and Lourdes holding his elbow, and her phone was at home, in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the rubber bands, where it had been since the night before.
It was a good morning. Nobody wished it. She found, sitting on the bench in the sun with nothing in her pockets, that it counted anyway, and that there wasn’t any room it was taking up.
Legal pad, yellow, one sheet, both sides. In N.K.’s block capitals.
SENT — 30/30 — 9/16
NEXT SEND KNOCKS OFF: #1 (BISCUIT). THREE SENDS: GIL’S MOTHER.
NOTE: Corrected wishes (groceries) do NOT count. Star folder. Separate. H.B. says this is “a loophole.” It is not a loophole. It is a different folder.
“It’s a loophole,” Hector said.
“It’s a different folder.”
“It’s a different folder that’s a loophole.” He had the legal pad on his knee, the one with the ledger on it, and he was tapping the note at the bottom with the cap of his pen. They were in Cage 6 after shift on the Tuesday after her day off, and the Monuments were running, and the warehouse had the hushed, holy chill of a cathedral, and Hector had been working up to this for a week. She could tell. He’d been quiet on the forklift. Hector was never quiet on the forklift.
“The small ones cost a slot,” he said. “Right? Every small one you send, something falls off the top. That’s the stack. But the big ones, the selfish ones, the ones it fixes, those don’t go in the stack. They go in the star folder. They’re free.”
“They’re groceries.”
“They’re free groceries. And I’ve been thinking about it.” He leaned forward. “What if there’s a big one it doesn’t fix? What if we just haven’t found the words yet? You figured out how to word the small ones. You’ve got four hand receipts of notes. What if the big ones are the same, and we’ve just been asking wrong?” He spread his hands. “Worst case, it’s groceries. Nobody gets hurt by groceries. Best case, we find the one that goes through, and you never have to choose between Gil’s mom and a bus stop again.”
Nadine looked at the ledger. Number three. DO NOT LET THIS GO OFF THE TOP.
She didn’t say yes. That was what she would tell herself afterward. She didn’t say yes. She just didn’t say no, and she handed him the phone, and Hector took that the way he took most things, which was as a mandate.
They spent the evening on it. Then they spent most of Wednesday night, and Thursday, and on Saturday Hector came to the house in Haltom City with a box of donuts and a whiteboard he’d borrowed from the depot conference room, which Nadine knew he had not signed out, and set it up on an easel in the backyard.
At the top of the whiteboard he wrote, in green marker, BIG ONES. Underneath he made two columns. WHAT WE SENT. WHAT WE GOT.
Her father came out to look at it. He read it with his mouth moving slightly, and then he took the marker out of Hector’s hand and corrected the spelling of received in the second column, which Hector had misspelled, and gave the marker back and went to sit in the lawn chair under the pecan tree, where he could watch.
“Who’s this?” he asked Nadine.
“Hector. From work.”
“He can’t spell.”
“I can spell,” Hector said. “I can spell fine. I was rushing.”
“Don’t rush a whiteboard,” said her father, and closed his eyes in the sun.
They went down the list Hector had been keeping in his phone for a week, the things you’d ask for if you could ask for anything. Nadine typed them, because it turned out to matter whose thumb it was, and because she was the one who could word things, and because she had stopped pretending she didn’t want to know.
No more war.
The phone thought about it for a long time.
*warheads
Hector wrote it on the whiteboard. They didn’t find out what it meant until the evening news. At 2:40 that afternoon a convoy of eleven semitrailers had pulled up to the Pentagon’s south loading dock with a delivery of Warheads sour candy, roughly four hundred thousand pounds of it, in every flavor including the black cherry that had been discontinued in 2019, and the paperwork, which the Pentagon’s spokesperson read out loud at a press conference while visibly trying not to laugh, showed a valid purchase order from the Defense Logistics Agency signed in March. The spokesperson said there was an investigation. A reporter asked what the Pentagon intended to do with the candy. The spokesperson said, after a long pause, that it was being evaluated for distribution to military families.
“I’m going to throw up,” Nadine said, watching it on her phone in the backyard.
“Nobody got hurt,” said Hector, whose face was the color of skim milk. “Nobody got hurt. It’s candy.”
Congress gets along.
*congress gets a long hero
At four o’clock a sandwich four hundred and twelve feet long was delivered to the east steps of the Capitol on a series of folding tables by a catering company from Silver Spring. It was Italian, with provolone. The congressional staffers who came out to look at it started eating it about twenty minutes in, and then some members did, and an aide to a senator from Montana was photographed sharing the end of it with an aide to a senator from Massachusetts, and the photograph was on every news site in the country by dinnertime, with headlines that were mostly variations on BIPARTISAN LUNCH.
“That’s a good one,” Hector said weakly. “You have to admit that’s a good one.”
“It’s a sandwich.”
“It’s a nice sandwich.”
They tried the ice caps. The ice caps arrived as forty tons of ice cream at the port in Nuuk, Greenland, along with a very confused Danish refrigeration ship whose captain told reporters he had a valid bill of lading and no memory of loading anything. They tried everybody has enough money, which arrived as honey, a jar on Nadine’s front porch for every person in the state of Texas, about thirty-one million jars, in a pile that blocked Glenview Drive to the corner and brought out Mrs. Tran and both of the Hendersons and a news van from Channel 5. Nadine deleted that one in about four minutes, while the news van was still finding parking. The jars went away. The street smelled faintly of clover for a day.
Hector tried one from his own thumb, with his eyes shut, the one he’d clearly been saving.
I want to be famous.
*famous amos
His apartment over Mrs. Ochoa’s garage filled to the ceiling with small blue bags of chocolate chip cookies. He had to crawl in through the window to delete it. He came back with cookie crumbs in his hair and said he’d learned a lesson about himself that he didn’t want to talk about.
By six o’clock the whiteboard was full. The second column said WARHEADS, SANDWICH, ICE CREAM, HONEY, COOKIES (H.B.), and a dozen others, some of them small enough that only Nadine’s neighbors had noticed and some of them, like the sandwich, that were going to be in history books.
Her father had woken up in the lawn chair. He was looking at the whiteboard with the expression he used for engines.
“It’s all food,” he said.
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Whatever you’re doing, you keep getting food.” He thought about that. “That’s not a bad problem to have.”
The last one was Nadine’s, and she didn’t put it on the whiteboard.
She sent it from the pink bathroom with the door locked, at 8:30, after Hector had gone home. She’d been thinking about it all day, underneath all the others. She thought she’d found the words. She thought that if she couldn’t fix the whole world she could at least fix the part of it she’d already touched, so that she’d never again have to sit on the back steps with a legal pad deciding whose good thing fell off the top of the stack next.
Every wish I've made stays true.
The phone beeped almost at once, as if it had been expecting her.
*stew
She smelled it before she got to the kitchen. On the stove, in her mother’s big blue enamel pot, the one she hadn’t used since the funeral, there was beef stew. It was simmering. The burner under it was off. It smelled like carrots and bay leaf and the November afternoons of her childhood, and when she lifted the lid and looked in, it was full to an inch from the top, and when she ladled a bowl out of it, it was still an inch from the top.
Her father came in from the living room, drawn by the smell. “Is that your mother’s stew?”
“I think so.”
“Well, dish it up.” He sat at the table. He looked at her. “And sit down. You’ll get indigestion.”
She dished it up, two bowls, and sat down, and they ate stew from a pot that would never be empty, and it was exactly her mother’s, too much pepper and the carrots cut in coins instead of chunks the way her mother always did because coins were faster. Her father had seconds. He said it was the best she’d made in years. He called her June.
Afterward she sat at the kitchen table with the empty bowls and opened the thread with Star.
That one wasn't funny
*it wasn't meant to be.
Why stew
*you asked to keep everything you've already got. that's a stew. you put in what's left and it keeps.
I meant the wishes
*i know what you meant. you meant forever. i don't do forever. nobody should. it's the biggest wish there is.
She looked at the pot. It had gone on simmering with the burner off.
I'm tired, she typed.
I'm so tired of choosing.
The pause was a long one.
*i know. i'm tired too. i've been feeding the pentagon all day. please stop asking me for big things. i'm not going to do them. i've never done them. i won't.
Why
*because nobody ordered them. you can't cook for three hundred million people who didn't ask for dinner.
She sat with that. In the living room her father had found the Nokia’s charger cord and was following it to the outlet, as if it might lead him somewhere.
Then why the food, she typed.
Every time. Why is it always food
There was no answer for a long time. Long enough that she thought Star wasn’t going to answer, and she got up and washed the bowls, and put the lid on the pot, which went on simmering under it with a sound like someone humming. When she came back to the table there was a message.
*i'll tell you when you're closer.
Prewitt called at 9:15.
She almost didn’t answer. She knew the number now. It came up on her own phone, her real phone, with an Albuquerque area code, and she watched it ring three times on the kitchen table beside the Nokia, the two phones side by side like a before and after. On the fourth ring she picked it up.
“Ms. Kopecky,” Prewitt said. “I’m sorry to call so late.”
“It’s fine.”
“I wanted to let you know, as a courtesy, that I’ll be in Fort Worth on Monday.” He sounded tired. He sounded, she thought, like a man who had been looking at photographs of eleven semitrailers of sour candy all afternoon. “I wanted you to hear it from me.”
“Okay.”
There was a long pause on the line. She could hear a television somewhere behind him, and a voice saying bipartisan, and then the television went off.
“The peas,” Prewitt said finally. “The ones on Channel 8, in August. The food bank had them traced. Forty-one countries. Every box had customs paperwork. And every piece of the paperwork listed the same delivery address in Haltom City.” He paused. “My office has the address now. I’m afraid it’s yours. And the honey this afternoon was on the same street.”
She didn’t say anything. She held the phone.
“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Prewitt said. “I want you to know that I don’t think that. I think you found something that nobody should have found, and you’ve tried very hard to be careful with it, and today you stopped being careful. I understand why. I’ve read the file. I’ve been thinking all evening about what I’d have done.” He breathed out. “But the sandwich was on CNN, Ms. Kopecky. And there’s a directive now. As of four o’clock this afternoon. It has a name, which I think is a little dramatic, but I didn’t write it.”
“What’s it called?”
He told her.
She sat at the kitchen table after he hung up, with her mother’s stew humming on the stove under its lid and her father in the living room asking the television what it was trying to sell him, and she said the words out loud once, quietly, to see how they felt. They felt like something out of a novel her father would have read on a plane. They felt like something that didn’t happen to GS-9 property disposal specialists from Haltom City who had never once marked a manifest wrong.
She got up and turned off the burner, which was already off, and found that it helped anyway.
OFFICE OF PROBABILISTIC AFFAIRS — DIRECTIVE 26-11 — CLASSIFIED
SUBJECT: Unauthorized Transmission of World-Scale Probabilistic Instructions (“Wish Treason”)
Effective immediately, any transmission of an instruction to a probabilistic instrument (see Annex A: ASTERISK) whose intended scope exceeds a single household, facility, or named individual shall constitute an offense against the United States under the authorities cited in Annex B.
The informal term “wish treason,” which appeared in the drafting notes and has since appeared in three separate internal emails, is not a legal term and should not be used in correspondence. (See para. 3.)
The Director notes that it has been used in correspondence.
Reconciliation Division is directed to recover ASTERISK (Line 188, Lot 4471) by the most proportionate available means, and to restore affected baselines in coordination with the Federal Records Liaison.
In the matter of the 412-foot sandwich, no restoration is required. It has been eaten.
— H. Vale, Deputy Director, Reconciliation
On Monday morning she left the phone with her father.
She had told herself it was for Star. She had promised it, sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday night with the stew humming under its lid, that she would stop asking for big things, and she’d meant it, and she didn’t trust herself at work with Prewitt in the building and the phone in her purse. That was part of it. The other part was that her father had asked for it at breakfast.
“Where’s the little phone, June? The one with the snake.”
She’d found it in her purse and given it to him, and he had held it in both hands and looked at it the way he used to look at a well-made tool, and then he’d turned it on and started a game of Snake right there at the table, between his eggs and his coffee, and the little tune it played when the snake ate something had followed her down the hall while she got her keys.
“Keep it in the house,” she told Lourdes at the door. “Don’t let him take it outside.”
“Where’s he going to take it? To the ducks?” Lourdes put on her apron. “Go to work, mija.”
Prewitt was waiting in the parking lot when she pulled in at 7:50. He was standing beside the white Impala in his gray suit with a cardboard tray holding two coffees, and when she got out of the car he held one out to her, the way Hector had on the morning after the raisins. She took it. It was black, no sugar, which was how she drank it, and she had never told him that.
“I asked the woman at the Mexican place,” he said. “She knew.”
They went to Cage 6. He sat on Hector’s box of hanging folders with his clipboard on his knees and his coffee balanced on top of it, and Nadine sat at her desk, and for a while neither of them said anything. Out on the floor, Hector drove past slowly on the forklift, looking at them through the chain-link, and then drove past again.
“I want to be honest with you about something,” Prewitt said finally. “There’s a team at your house.”
She put her coffee down.
“It’s not my team. I want you to know that. I’m Reconciliation, I report to Dr. Vale. This team is from the Director’s office. They flew in last night.” He looked at his clipboard. “I asked to be the one who came to your house. I was told I’m too close to it. I asked them to be gentle with your father. I was told that they’re always gentle.”
“Are they?”
“I’ve never seen them be anything else,” Prewitt said. “That’s not quite the same thing.”
She picked up her own phone to call Lourdes, and it rang in her hand before she could.
“There are men here,” Lourdes said. “Four of them. Federal.” Her voice was perfectly calm. Behind it Nadine could hear the kitchen, the clink of a spoon, a man’s voice she didn’t know saying thank you, sir. “They’re very polite. They showed me their badges. Your father made them tea.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s explaining torque specs to the tall one.” A pause. Then, louder, her father’s voice from somewhere in the room, the voice he’d used on second-shift apprentices: “You don’t go by feel on a head bolt, son. Feel is how you crack a block. You go by the book and you go in three passes.” And a polite murmur, and her father again: “Write it down. Three passes.”
“He’s fine,” Lourdes said. “He’s having a nice time. They asked about the phone.”
Nadine looked at Prewitt. Prewitt was looking at his coffee.
“Mr. Walt had it on the table,” Lourdes said. “He was playing the snake. They asked if they could see it. He said no. They asked again, very nice, and he said, what for, and the tall one said it was government property, and your father said everything in this house is government property, I paid for it in taxes.” A faint sound that might have been Lourdes suppressing a laugh. “They took it anyway. They were very sorry.”
“Where are they now?”
“In the driveway. They have a machine.” Lourdes’s voice dropped a little. Nadine heard a screen door. “A big thing on a little trailer. Like a car jack but bigger. Yellow. They put the phone in it. Your father’s on the porch yelling at them. He says, that’s a 3310, you can’t hurt that, you’re going to crack the slab.” A long pause. “They’re running it now.”
Through the phone, faintly, Nadine heard a hydraulic whine, rising, and then a sound like a gunshot in a parking garage.
“Ay,” Lourdes said.
“What happened?”
“The driveway.” Lourdes didn’t say anything for a moment. “The driveway broke. All of it. From the machine to the street. Like a windshield when you hit a rock.” Another pause. “Your father is saying I told you. He’s saying it a lot.” The screen door again. Men’s voices, raised, not angry so much as confused, and one of them saying where is it, where did it go. “Everybody is looking under the trailer,” Lourdes said. “I’m going to go make more tea.”
“Lourdes—”
“I don’t know where it is, mija,” Lourdes said, very clearly, at a volume meant for somebody else in the room. “I’m an old woman. I was in the kitchen.” And then, quietly, before she hung up: “Come home.”
Nadine put the phone down on the desk.
Prewitt had heard. She could tell he had heard. He sat on the folder box with his coffee and his clipboard, and his own phone buzzed in his breast pocket, and he took it out and read whatever was on it and put it back. His face didn’t change. His mild, square, forgettable face. But his hand, when he set the coffee down on the floor beside his shoe, was not entirely steady.
“I’m going to go get a horchata,” he said.
She stared at him.
“The woman at the Mexican place said you always get the green enchiladas. I’ll get you some.” He stood up. He picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest, with both arms, the way he’d held the tub of protein powder in August. “It’ll probably take me about forty minutes. The line’s long at lunch.” It was 8:20 in the morning. “I may get turned around. I’ve never been very good with directions in this city.”
“Mr. Prewitt.”
“Tobias,” he said. “I think we’re past the other thing.” He went to the cage door and stopped. “Dr. Vale said something to me in a memo. She said to be kind to you. I’ve been thinking about what that means, when the people at your house are from a different office, and I’m a little ashamed of what I’ve come up with. But it’s what I’ve come up with.” He looked at her over his shoulder. “The restroom is that way, Ms. Kopecky. Past the restroom is the door to the parking lot.”
He walked out across the cold warehouse floor, slowly, looking up at the vents, and didn’t look back.
Hector was at the cage door thirty seconds later. He’d parked the forklift crooked across the aisle with the forks still up.
“I’m driving,” he said.
There was no team at the house when they got there. There was a yellow hydraulic press on a small trailer in the middle of a driveway that had shattered into a starburst of cracks from the press to the curb, as if someone had dropped a giant plate. There was a black Suburban halfway down the block, and two men in windbreakers walking slowly along the curb on the far side of Glenview with metal detectors, sweeping them back and forth over Mrs. Tran’s front yard while Mrs. Tran watched them from her porch with her arms folded.
Hector parked around the corner. They went in through the back gate.
Lourdes was in the kitchen. Her father was in the living room, in his recliner, with his Bell Helicopter cap on and his toolbox at his feet, the big red one from the garage, and he looked up when Nadine came in and said, “June. They broke the driveway.”
“I know, Dad.”
“I told them. I said you’ll crack the slab.” He shook his head with deep satisfaction. “Nobody listens to a machinist.”
Lourdes didn’t say anything. She went to the counter and opened the bread box, the old metal one with ROLL-TOP printed on the front in red letters that had been there since before Nadine was born, and took out the loaf of Mrs. Baird’s, and opened the bag, and reached all the way to the back of it, behind the heel, and took out the Nokia. It had a crumb on the screen. She wiped it off with her thumb and held it out.
“Under the bread,” Lourdes said. “Nobody looks under the bread. My mother hid her money in the tortillas for fifty years. My father never found it once.”
Nadine took it. It was warm.
“They ate your stew,” Lourdes said. “All four of them. Three bowls each. The tall one asked for the recipe.” She glanced at the stove, where the blue pot was simmering, burner off, an inch from the top. “I didn’t know what to tell him.”
“Thank you,” Nadine said. “Lourdes. I don’t—”
“Take your father and go,” Lourdes said. “Today. Now. I’ll tell them he went to the doctor. I’ll tell them you went to Oklahoma. They’re very polite. They’ll believe me for a while.” She took off her apron and folded it and put it on the counter, and then she seemed to change her mind and put it back on. “I’ll stay. Somebody has to tell them the stew recipe. Mr. Walt already packed.”
“He packed?”
“He packed the toolbox,” Lourdes said. “I packed the rest. Your bag’s in the hall. His pills are in the side pocket, the morning ones and the night ones, in the Sunday-to-Saturday box.” She looked at Nadine over her glasses. “You think I didn’t know you’d have to go somewhere? Since the first week. Since my knee.”
Nadine put her arms around her. She had not done that in two years of Lourdes coming to the house five days a week. Lourdes smelled like coffee and Jergens lotion, and she patted Nadine twice on the back, firmly, like someone burping a baby, and stepped away.
“Go,” she said. “Before the tall one comes back for seconds.”
They took Hector’s truck. The rice was still in the seam of the bed liner. Hector drove, and her father sat in the back of the extended cab with his toolbox on the seat beside him and his seatbelt buckled and his cap pulled down, looking out the window with an expression of tremendous interest, and Nadine sat in the passenger seat with the Nokia in her lap and Lourdes’s packed bag at her feet.
They got as far as the Whataburger on Loop 820 and Denton Highway before the phone beeped.
*stop somewhere.
Hector pulled into the Whataburger lot and parked at the back by the dumpsters, under the orange-and-white sign. Her father asked if they were getting lunch. Hector said yes, and went in, and came back with three Whataburgers and a chocolate shake for her father, who accepted it with the dignity of a man who has been expecting a shake his whole life.
Nadine opened the thread.
What
*they can see my wishes.
What do you mean see them
*every live wish is a little different from the record. that's what prewitt calls baseline drift. they have a map. every message in your sent folder is a pin on it. haltom city has a lot of pins.
She looked at the Sent folder. Thirty messages. Thirty pins.
If I go somewhere and send something there
*another pin. with a date and time on it. they'll be standing on it by dinner.
She thought about Prewitt walking out across the cold floor with his clipboard against his chest. She thought about the men in windbreakers sweeping metal detectors over Mrs. Tran’s lawn.
The old ones, she typed.
The ones in Haltom City. They already know where those are.
*they do. those pins point to where you were. you won't be there. but the done ones, the old ones, a good morning, a softball game, those are pins with nothing at them anymore. they tell prewitt how you think. how often. how small. what time of day. he's an actuary. give him thirty data points and he'll know where you'll be next tuesday.
She sat in the Whataburger lot with the phone in her hand.
She went through them. She knew she’d have to. She did the done ones,
the ones that had happened and were over. The crossing guard’s umbrella.
The Kroger man’s car. Dub’s granddaughter’s softball game, which they
had won, eleven to four. The six small ones on the back of hand receipt
number four. Each one she deleted, she watched the screen ask
Delete message? and pressed OK, and somewhere a small good
thing came un-done, and somebody kept a memory of it a little wrong,
like a dream.
Then she got to the mornings.
Fourteen of them. Dad has a good morning with Lourdes. Fourteen mornings of dominoes and ducks and him cheating and her catching him.
She looked over her shoulder. Her father was in the back seat with his shake, watching a man in the drive-through argue with the speaker. He was humming. Patsy Cline. Flat on the long notes.
Will she remember them, she typed.
*she'll remember them. a little wrong. she'll remember that he was happy. she won't remember why she was so sure he was.
She deleted them one at a time. It took her about four minutes. Hector didn’t say anything. He sat in the driver’s seat eating his Whataburger and looking straight ahead through the windshield at the dumpsters, and when she was done, he handed her a napkin without looking at her, and she used it.
The phone said Messages: 7/30. Biscuit. The bus shelter.
Gil’s mother. Lourdes’s knee. Mrs. Tran’s tomatoes. The warehouse.
Mrs. Ochoa’s hip. Seven things that had to stay true, seven pins in Fort
Worth and Haltom City, pointing at a place she was leaving.
Where do we go, she typed.
The answer came at once, as if Star had been waiting with it.
*socorro. i want to show you where i'm from.
She showed it to Hector. He read it, and put the truck in reverse, and looked over his shoulder at her father, who had finished his shake and was examining the straw.
“Mr. Kopecky,” Hector said, “how do you feel about New Mexico?”
Her father considered it. “I was there in ’78,” he said. “For Bell. We had a test range near White Sands. Beautiful country. Can’t get a decent cup of coffee.” He held out his hand toward Nadine without looking, palm up, the way he used to hold it out in the car for a stick of gum when she was a kid. “June, let me have the snake while we drive. I’m going to beat it again.”
Hector refused to take the interstate.
“They watch the interstates,” he said. “Everybody knows they watch the interstates. You take the back roads. You take the roads with one stoplight and a Dairy Queen.”
“Who watches the interstates?”
“Them.” He gestured at the windshield, at Texas, at the government. “It was on the show. Episode 98. Why the Feds Love I-20.”
“Was it right?”
“I don’t know,” Hector said. “I’ve never been chased before. I’m going to find out.”
So they went west on 180 out of Weatherford, through Mineral Wells and Breckenridge and Albany, and north to pick up 84 at Snyder, and the country flattened and dried out around them as the afternoon went on, the trees shrinking to mesquite and the mesquite thinning to scrub, and the pump jacks nodding in the fields on either side like old men agreeing with something. Hector drove with both hands on the wheel at ten and two and checked the mirrors every eleven seconds. Nadine timed it. Her father sat in the back seat of the extended cab with the Nokia, playing Snake, and every few minutes the little game-over tune went off and he said, “Damn it,” with great contentment, and started again.
She called Dwayne from a gas station in Breckenridge and told him she was taking annual leave.
“How much?” Dwayne said.
“I don’t know yet. I have four hundred and twelve hours.”
There was a silence on the line. She could hear him breathing through his nose. “There were people here,” Dwayne said finally. “Federal people. Asking about you.”
“I know.”
“They were very polite.”
“They’re always polite, Dwayne.”
“I didn’t tell them anything,” Dwayne said, and then, after a moment, because he was Dwayne: “I didn’t know anything. But I wouldn’t have.” He cleared his throat. “Should I put it down as annual or sick?”
“Annual.”
“Annual,” Dwayne said, and she could hear him typing. “Okay. Be careful. Nadine? The guy from Reconciliation. The tall one with the clipboard. He came back after you left. He brought enchiladas. He left them on your desk. Green ones. I put them in the fridge with your name on them.”
She sat in the truck after she hung up, with the gas station’s ice machine rattling outside the window, and for some reason it was the enchiladas that made her put her hand over her eyes.
Her father figured out how to text Star somewhere around Snyder.
She didn’t see him do it. She was asleep, or nearly, with her head against the passenger window and the heat of the glass on her cheek, and she woke because he was laughing. It was a big laugh, the one from before, the one that started in his chest and came up through his shoulders, and she hadn’t heard it in a year. She turned around. He was holding the Nokia close to his face with both hands, the way he held the newspaper, and his thumbs were moving on the keys, and he was laughing.
“Dad?”
“This thing’s got a sense of humor,” her father said. “Who is this, June? Is this one of your friends from the church?”
She held out her hand and he gave her the phone, reluctantly, the way a kid gives up a toy at bedtime.
He’d switched the phone out of T9. She’d forgotten you could. In the corner of the screen, where the abc and the little dictionary symbol had been, it just said abc now, plain. He was typing the old way, the way you did before the phone tried to guess, pressing each key one, two or three times to get the letter you wanted. Multi-tap. Her father had used a Nokia for six years at the plant, before they made everybody switch to BlackBerries, and he had never once used T9. He said it put words in your mouth.
The thread with Star went back twenty minutes. She scrolled up to the top.
WHO IS THIS
*a friend of june's.
JUNE DOESNT HAVE FRIENDS SHE HAS ME
*she has a few. you're the best one.
DAMN RIGHT
*you play a lot of snake.
I PLAY A LOT OF SNAKE
*you're very good. nobody's ever been that good.
ITS A SIMPLE GAME. THE TRICK IS DONT GO WHERE THE FOOD IS. GO WHERE ITS GOING TO BE
*how do you know where it's going to be?
YOU WATCH. I WORKED ON ROTORS 31 YRS. YOU WATCH WHERE THINGS WANT TO GO
*that's a good answer.
ITS THE ONLY ANSWER. YOU WANT TO HEAR A JOKE
*yes.
And then the welder. Her father had typed the whole joke, in four messages, in multi-tap, which must have taken him fifteen minutes, every letter pressed out one key at a time. The welder dies. The gate’s stuck. Saint Peter’s been at it all morning. The welder looks at the hinges and says, Pete, you’ve been pushing on this for six thousand years. And then the last message, the fourth one, ended in the middle of a sentence:
AND ST PETER LEANS IN AND HE SAYS
That was where he’d lost it. She could see it on the screen, the way the message just stopped. He’d sent it anyway. He’d sent it the way he always ended it now, out loud, with his mouth a little open and the rest somewhere behind his eyes.
The next message was from Star.
*don't tell the fella downstairs. he's been pulling.
And underneath it, from her father:
HAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHA THATS IT
THATS THE ONE
*it's a good joke.
ITS MY JOKE
*i know. i heard you tell it in the kitchen. i've been waiting to say it.
Nadine sat with the phone in her lap for a while and looked out at the cotton fields going by outside Post, Texas, flat and brown and full of light, and she didn’t say anything. In the back seat her father was humming. In the driver’s seat, Hector had seen her face in the mirror and was very carefully checking the other mirror instead.
She handed the phone back over the seat. Her father took it and switched it back to Snake without looking, his thumbs finding the menu by feel.
“Nice fella,” he said. “Your friend.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Funny.” He started a new game. “Can’t spell worth a damn, though. Everything’s lowercase.”
They ate dinner in Clovis, at a diner on Mabry Drive with red vinyl booths and a pie case by the register and a waitress named Doreen who called all three of them hon. Hector slid into one side of the booth, and Nadine got her father settled on the other side, and then stood at the end of the table holding her purse, and Hector looked up at her.
“Sit down,” Hector said.
“I’ll get the check started.”
“We haven’t ordered,” Hector said. “Nadine. Sit down.”
She sat down, next to her father. He patted her arm without looking at her, absently, the way he’d pat a dog that had come to lean against his leg, and studied the menu, which he held at arm’s length.
Her father ordered chicken-fried steak and told Doreen it had better be real gravy. Hector ordered a green chile cheeseburger, because he said you couldn’t come to New Mexico and not, and then asked Doreen, very seriously, whether it was real green chile or the kind from a can, and Doreen looked at him and said, “Hon, we’re in Clovis,” which seemed to answer it. Nadine ordered the same thing as Hector without thinking about it.
“Who’s this?” her father asked her, pointing at Hector with his fork.
“Hector. From work.”
“The one who can’t spell.”
“I can spell, Mr. Kopecky.”
“You spelled received with the I first. On the board.” Her father cut his steak. “I before E. Except after C. It’s a rhyme. They teach it to children.”
“I was rushing.”
“Don’t rush a whiteboard,” her father said, and they both said it at the same time, and her father looked up at Hector, surprised, and then laughed. Hector laughed too. Doreen came back with the coffee pot and filled all three cups without being asked, and Nadine sat in the booth between the two of them and ate a green chile cheeseburger with real chile, and it was the first meal she’d eaten sitting down at a table with more than one other person in a very long time. She noticed. She didn’t say so.
The trooper picked them up outside Fort Sumner.
It was a New Mexico State Police Charger, black and white, and it came up behind them on 84 about ten miles west of town just as the sun was going down orange over the flat. It sat a quarter-mile back for five minutes. Then it closed to a hundred yards and sat there.
“Oh no,” said Hector. “Oh no, oh no.” He checked the mirrors every three seconds now. “Episode 98. Episode 98, Nadine.”
“You’re doing sixty-two in a sixty-five.”
“That’s what they look for. Nobody does sixty-two. Sixty-two is a guilty speed.” He gripped the wheel. “Do something.”
She had the phone. Her father had given it up at the diner with only minor protest, in exchange for a slice of coconut cream pie. She looked back at the trooper, at the shape of him behind his windshield in the dusk, a man in a hat with a long night ahead of him on an empty road.
She knew what she would have typed a month ago. She would have typed the trooper leaves us alone, and Star would have given her a pallet of something, and the trooper would have pulled them over to ask why there were three hundred pounds of Funyuns in the bed of the truck.
She typed slowly.
The trooper behind us gets his dinner break now.
*
The Charger’s turn signal came on. It slowed, and swung off onto the shoulder, and made a careful U-turn across the empty highway and headed back east toward Fort Sumner, where, Nadine supposed, a Dairy Queen was about to have a customer.
Hector breathed out through his mouth for a long time.
“How do you do that,” he said. “How do you think of it like that. I’d have asked for a pallet of something.”
“I did, once,” Nadine said. “I got tortillas.”
She waited until they were past Yeso and the dark had come down all
the way, and then she opened the Sent folder and found
The trooper behind us gets his dinner break now. and
deleted it. It was a pin. Prewitt would know what it meant. Somewhere
back east of them, she supposed, a trooper was sitting in a Dairy Queen
booth looking at a Blizzard he didn’t quite remember ordering, wondering
why he’d felt so sure it was time to stop. He’d eat it anyway. It was
residue.
Messages: 7/30.
They stopped for the night in Vaughn. It had one stoplight that had been turned off, and two motels, and the first one had a NO VACANCY sign lit in red neon in its office window, and the second one was dark.
Hector pulled into the lot of the first one and turned off the engine and they sat there.
“Your dad’s asleep,” Hector said.
He was. He’d fallen asleep somewhere past Fort Sumner with his cap over his eyes and his hands folded on top of the toolbox, and he was snoring softly, a sound like a small engine idling. He’d been in the truck for nine hours. He had never in his life complained about being in a vehicle, because he had spent thirty-one years building them and considered complaint a kind of insult to the engineering. But his ankles were swollen over the tops of his shoes. She’d seen them at the diner.
She thought about wording. Then she typed it.
Walt Kopecky gets a good night's sleep tonight.
*
The neon in the office window flickered. The NO went out.
The woman at the desk said they’d just had a cancellation, a family from Amarillo, two queens and a rollaway, and was that all right. Nadine said it was perfect. She signed the register with her own name, because she couldn’t make her hand write anything else.
Her father slept in the bed by the window, in his undershirt, with the Nokia on the nightstand beside him plugged into the wall by the gray charger with the thin pin tip. Hector took the rollaway and was asleep in under a minute. Nadine lay on the other bed in her clothes with her shoes off and listened to the two of them breathe, and the ice machine humming outside the door, and a truck going by now and then on 54 with a long sigh of tires.
At about two in the morning she heard the Snake tune.
She rolled over. Her father was sitting up in bed, in the dark, with the green light of the little screen on his face. His thumbs were moving. The snake was very long.
She watched him for a while. He didn’t see her. Then her own pocket buzzed, and she took out her real phone, and there was a text on it from a number with too few digits.
*he's at 4,400. don't tell him i'm letting him win.
She typed back on the real phone, which she had never done before, and which she suspected you weren’t supposed to be able to do.
Are you?
*no, said Star.
*i just wanted to see if you'd believe me.
In the morning, before her father woke, she deleted the wish about his sleep. He’d had it. He’d also been up until three playing Snake, which she suspected was a more accurate reading of what a good night’s sleep meant to Walt Kopecky than anything she could have worded.
Messages: 7/30.
They went west on 60 through Encino and Willard, past the dry salt lakes white as chalk in the morning sun, and through Mountainair, where the road climbed into piñon and juniper and came down again, and past the red ruins of the mission at Abó, which her father wanted to stop and look at and which Hector, checking his mirrors, said they could look at on the way back. They crossed the Rio Grande at Bernardo, a thin brown river in a wide green bed of cottonwoods, and went south on the interstate for twenty miles, which made Hector so nervous he drove sixty in a seventy-five the whole way, and got off at Socorro, and then went west again into the mountains.
Magdalena was an old cattle town at the top of a long grade, with a closed theater and a bar and a library in the old railroad depot. South of town, State Road 107 turned to gravel almost at once and ran down a wide valley of yellow grass toward a line of blue mountains on the horizon, and they drove on it for eleven miles without seeing another vehicle.
“There,” said Hector.
It was a low building in a fenced lot, set back from the road a quarter of a mile at the end of a gravel spur. Corrugated metal walls, a flat roof, a cluster of antennas on the roof that had been cut off at the base and left lying there. A water tank on legs. A parking lot with grass growing up through the cracks. And painted over the main door in faded black letters four feet high, from when it had been something else, the word SEED.
The gate in the chain-link was closed with a chain and a padlock. A sign was zip-tied to it.
PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT SITE DECOMMISSIONED DISPOSAL PENDING — GSA REGION 7 NO TRESPASSING
“GSA Region 7,” Nadine said. “That’s us. That’s Fort Worth. That’s my region.”
“So you’re allowed in,” Hector said hopefully.
“No.”
Her father had gotten out of the truck. He walked up to the gate with his cap pulled down against the sun and looked at the padlock for a while with his hands in his back pockets, the way he looked at things he didn’t think much of. Then he went back to the truck and opened the extended cab and unlatched the big red toolbox and took out a pair of eighteen-inch bolt cutters and walked back to the gate.
“Dad—”
“This is a twelve-dollar lock,” her father said. “It’s insulting. It’s insulting to the building.” He cut it. It took one squeeze. He caught the lock as it fell, out of habit, and looked at the cut shank, and shook his head. “Chinese,” he said, and put it in his pocket.
Inside, the building was cold and smelled like dust and hot metal and, faintly, of toast.
They went through it slowly. Nadine had walked through a lot of decommissioned facilities in sixteen years. She knew the look: the paler rectangles on the walls where the whiteboards had hung, the cable trays emptied out, the carpet worn into paths between the desks that weren’t there anymore. Most of what had been in this building was in her warehouse now, or had been. The twenty-nine chairs. The centrifuges. The forty boxes of empty green hanging folders.
What hadn’t been sent to her was still here, because it hadn’t been surplus. It had been evidence.
In the middle of the building was a room within the room, a box of gray steel panels about twenty feet on a side with a single door. The door was propped open with a fire extinguisher. Inside it, bolted to the floor, was a waist-high cylinder of something dark that wasn’t quite metal, about the size of an oil drum, with a thick bundle of cable coming out of its base and going nowhere. Somebody had cut the cables. The cylinder sat in the middle of the room, cold and dull, with a fine layer of dust on top of it.
The phone beeped. Nadine read it out loud, because Hector was standing so close behind her that he was breathing on her neck.
*that's where i lived. for a year. it's very boring in there. no snake.
Through a window in the steel wall was the control room. It had a long desk with nothing on it except one box, a gray metal case the size of a bread box, with a keypad and a little green screen and one gray button marked SEND. Next to it, on the desk, was a three-ring binder two inches thick, and on the spine of the binder somebody had written in marker TEST LOG 1–200.
Nadine opened it standing up.
It was all there. The dates, the times, the wording, the reply, the result, in the same neat block hand on every page. 3/3/30 10:02. “Everyone at R-9 is loyal.” Reply: *everyone at r-9 gets a bagel. Result: 41 bagels, plain, toasted, with cream cheese. Catering order on file (Socorro, approved H.V. 1/12/30). Staff morale: confused. She turned the pages. Two hundred of them. The wordings got longer, and stranger, and then shorter again. The bagels went on. Somebody had started noting the kind. Everything. Onion. Sesame. Cinnamon raisin. Everything. Around send ninety the notes in the margins started to change. Staff now eating together in break rm. Mtg room booked 8:00–8:30 daily for “bagel.” Morale: improved. Around send one hundred and forty, in a different pen, somebody had written it’s not going to do it, and then crossed it out, and then, a few pages later, written it again and left it.
Send number two hundred was the last page. 1/30/31 4:45 p.m. “Everyone at R-9 is loyal.” (Original wording, per H.V.) Reply: *everyone at r-9 gets a bagel. and a chair. Result: 41 bagels. 41 chairs, task, ergonomic, delivered to break room. Note: H.V. sat down in one.
Nadine looked at that line for a long time.
“Forty-one chairs,” she said.
“Twenty-nine,” said Hector. “In Cage 6. Line 41. Thirty on the manifest, one missing.”
“The missing one was in Socorro. Prewitt said.”
“Where’s the other eleven?”
“Somebody’s office, probably,” Nadine said. “Somebody always keeps a chair.”
The hydraulic press was in the machine shop at the back. It was enormous, a sixty-ton shop press painted green, and the steel platen at the bottom of it was cracked clean through in a jagged line from one side to the other. Her father walked around it twice with an expression she had seen on him at funerals.
“What did they put in this?” he asked.
“A phone.”
“What phone?”
She held up the Nokia. He looked at it, and at the press, and back at the phone, and she watched him put it together, the driveway and the cracked slab and the yellow machine on its little trailer.
“Huh,” her father said. He reached out and touched the crack in the platen with one finger, gently, the way you’d touch a cut on somebody else’s hand. “That’s a good press,” he said. “That’s a Dake. That was a good press.” And then, to the Nokia, with a kind of respect: “You son of a gun.”
In the parking lot behind the building there was a scorch mark six feet across where nothing grew, and in the middle of it a little puddle of slag that had cooled in a shape like a fried egg.
*thermite, Star said. *it tickled.
Out past the scorch mark, Hector found the place where the helicopter had dropped it. It wasn’t hard to find. It was a crater four feet deep in the grass, a hundred yards from the fence, with a surveyor’s flag stuck in the rim that had faded from orange to pink.
*four thousand feet, Star said.
*the fall was nice, actually. i'd never fallen before. you can see a long way.
The desk was in a small office off the main hall, one of six, and it was the only one that still had furniture in it, because nobody had wanted it. It was a gray steel government desk from the 1970s with a fake wood-grain top that had worn through at the corners. Nadine had processed perhaps two thousand desks exactly like it.
The top drawer on the right had a strip of masking tape across it, and on the tape, in Sharpie, in letters she recognized at once, someone had written:
A. BACA — DON’T
She almost laughed. It was the filing cabinet in the warehouse, the one with the single word inside the top drawer. DON’T. She had opened the other three drawers anyway and found staples.
She opened this one.
It was empty except for a sticky note stuck to the bottom of the drawer and a folded sheet of lined paper. The sticky note said, in pen, SNAKE HIGH SCORE — ANA — 2,210 — BEAT THIS, HOLLIS. The sheet of paper had been folded in quarters. She unfolded it.
If you’re reading this, you found it. They told me to put it in Vault 3. I put it on the manifest instead. Line 188. Surplus. They’ll never look in surplus. Nobody ever looks in surplus.
It isn’t dangerous. They are. They were going to put a relay on it to cut out the part of it that says no. I don’t know what it is, exactly. Nobody does. But I’ve talked to it every day for a year, on my lunch break, and I know it’s a who and not a what, and I couldn’t let them do that to a who.
Please don’t let anybody use it for anything big. It doesn’t want to. Please keep it charged. It likes Snake. It likes when you say good morning.
I wrote DO NOT TEXT ON THIS on the back so they’d think it was broken. Sorry if it scared you.
— Ana
Nadine read it twice. Then she folded it back into quarters and put it in the inside pocket of her purse, next to the carbon of the hand receipt. Hector was reading it over her shoulder, and she didn’t stop him.
“A friend,” Hector said. “It said a friend.”
*she's a chemistry teacher now, Star said.
*in las cruces. she's good at it. i checked.
They sat in the break room at the end, because it was the only room with chairs. There were eleven of them, the missing eleven, task, ergonomic, in a loose ring around a long folding table, with the dust on the seats disturbed in the shape of the people who’d last sat in them. There was a coffee maker on the counter, unplugged, and a toaster, and in the cabinet above the sink, when her father opened it to look, there were forty-one coffee mugs hanging on hooks. Each one was different. One said WORLD’S OKAYEST PHYSICIST. One had a cartoon cat. One said BAGEL CLUB 2030 in letters someone had painted on by hand.
Her father stood looking at the mugs for a while.
“A lot of people ate here,” he said.
Nadine sat at the folding table with the Nokia in front of her. Hector sat across from her. Her father found a chair and sat in it and took his cap off and put it on the table, which he never did, and closed his eyes.
You said you'd tell me when I was closer, Nadine
typed.
*you're closer.
Why the food
The pause was so long that Hector got up and looked out the window at the truck, to make sure it was still there, and came back and sat down again.
*they asked me to make everybody loyal. to change what three hundred million people are, inside, without asking them. i couldn't. nobody can. you can't cook for people who didn't order. you can't make a meal and force them to eat it.
*but you can set a table. you can put something down where people already are and see if they sit. a bagel on every desk. forty-one chairs. a sandwich on the capitol steps. four hundred people ate it. some of them talked to each other. i thought that went well.
*the world is a meal somebody else is cooking. you don't change the recipe. but you can pull up a chair.
Hector read it over her shoulder. He sat back down slowly.
“It’s all been tables,” he said. “Every single one. The raisins. The peas went to a food bank. The honey. The stew.”
“The tortillas,” said Nadine.
“The tortillas were a roof.”
“A roof’s a kind of table,” said her father, without opening his eyes, and they both looked at him, and he didn’t say anything else.
Then what's the wish, Nadine typed.
The one you'd let through. Tell me.
*i can't.
Why
*because if i tell you, it's mine. and i don't make wishes. i only fix them. it has to be yours. something small. something kind. something for everybody. something i'd have nothing to correct.
That's impossible
*it's not. you'll know it when you hear it. you've heard it before.
She looked at the phone. She looked across the table at Hector, who shrugged, very slowly, the way you shrug when you have no idea and know the other person knows it. She looked at her father, asleep in a chair from the same lot as the twenty-nine chairs in her cage, in a break room where forty-one people had stopped eating breakfast alone.
Outside the window, at the far end of the gravel spur, a plume of dust was coming up the road from the highway. It was a long way off, small and slow. It might have been a rancher. It might have been anybody.
“We should go,” Hector said.
Nadine put the binder back on the desk in the control room, exactly where she’d found it, square to the edge. She took the sticky note from Ana’s drawer and stuck it to the cover of the binder, BEAT THIS, HOLLIS, because she thought Ana would have liked that, and because some part of her that she did not entirely recognize anymore wanted Hollis to see it. Then she woke her father, and helped him out to the truck, and he climbed into the back with his toolbox and his cap and said, “Where to now, June?”
“Socorro,” she said. “Somewhere to eat.”
“Good,” said her father. “I could eat.” He buckled his seatbelt and held out his hand for the phone. “That place had no coffee.”
R-9 TEST LOG, SENDS 140–143. Ballpoint, two hands.
140. 11/4/30 9:58. “R-9 staff demonstrate unconditional allegiance.” Reply: *r-9 staff demonstrate unconditional appetite. Result: 41 bagels (everything). Note: nobody went home for lunch either.
141. 11/5/30 10:01. “R-9 staff are loyal.” (Short form, per Hollis.) Reply: *r-9 staff are loyal. to the bagel. Result: 41 bagels (sesame). Hollis left mtg.
142. 11/6/30 10:00. [Wording redacted per H.V.] Reply: *no. Result: MESSAGE FAILED. No bagels. First failure. Staff concerned. Several people asked if it was OK.
143. 11/7/30 10:03. “Everyone at R-9 is loyal.” (Original wording.) Reply: *everyone at r-9 gets a bagel. sorry about yesterday. Result: 41 bagels (blueberry). Staff relieved.
In margin, different pen: it’s not going to do it.
Below, third pen, A.B.: Good.
The dust on the road turned out to be a rancher. They passed him on the way out, a man in a white pickup with a stock trailer behind it and a dog in the passenger seat, and he lifted two fingers off the wheel at them in the slow way people waved out there, and Hector waved back too hard and nearly put the truck in the ditch.
They took two rooms at a motel on California Street in Socorro, the long main drag that ran parallel to the interstate, past the feed store and the tire shops and the New Mexico Tech campus with its red-tiled roofs. The motel had kitchenettes, which was why Nadine picked it, and it took cash, which was why Hector did. The woman at the desk was reading a paperback with a dragon on the cover and didn’t look up when Nadine signed the register, again, with her own name.
Her father took the bed nearest the window, as he always did, and was asleep by eight with the Nokia on his chest, the game paused, the snake frozen mid-turn on the little green screen.
Nadine didn’t sleep.
She lay on the other bed in her clothes and looked at the ceiling, which had a water stain on it shaped very much like the one on her bedroom ceiling in Haltom City, and she thought about tables. She thought about forty-one coffee mugs. She thought about a sandwich four hundred feet long, and a bialy, and a stew that wouldn’t empty. Something small. Something kind. Something for everybody. Something I’d have nothing to correct. She tried wordings in her head the way she used to compose letters to Craig, carefully, never on paper, and every one of them was either too big or too small or too much for herself, and she could hear Star’s answer to each of them before she’d finished thinking it.
At a quarter to two she got up, and took the phone off her father’s chest without waking him, and put on her shoes, and went out.
The Denny’s was at the south end of California Street, by the interstate ramp, a yellow sign standing up into the dark with nothing else lit for half a mile around it. It was open all night. It was the only thing in Socorro that was.
There were six people in it at two in the morning, and none of them was sitting with anyone else.
She noticed that before she noticed anything else. She took a booth by the window, and the waitress, a tired woman in her fifties with a name tag that said PAM, brought her coffee and a menu, and Nadine ordered hash browns because she had to order something, and while she waited she looked around the room.
There was a trucker at the counter, a big man in a Peterbilt cap, eating a Grand Slam with his shoulders hunched over it and his phone propped against the napkin holder. There was a nurse in purple scrubs in a booth by the bathrooms, with her badge still clipped to her pocket, eating pancakes very slowly with her eyes half closed. There was an old man in a booth across from Nadine’s, in a pressed shirt buttoned to the throat, reading the Albuquerque Journal folded into quarters and eating a slice of pie a forkful at a time. There was a young man in a New Mexico Tech hoodie with a laptop and a basket of fries, typing. There was a woman with a baby asleep in a carrier on the seat beside her, eating soup. And there was the cook, a teenager, visible through the pass-through window, who had taken his break by sitting on an upturned bucket in the back of the kitchen and eating a plate of something with his fingers.
Six people. Six tables. Two in the morning in a town in the desert, every one of them eating in a little pool of their own light.
Nadine had eaten like that for years. She had never thought of it as anything. She’d thought of it as dinner.
She took out the Nokia and texted Star.
I'm at a Denny's
*i know. how are the hash browns?
Not here yet. Look at this place
*i'm looking.
Everyone's by themselves
*it's two in the morning. everyone's always by themselves at two in the morning. that's what two in the morning is.
Is that what it is
*that's what it is right now.
She looked at that for a while. The hash browns came. Pam put them down and refilled her coffee and went to the nurse’s booth and refilled hers, and then the trucker’s, and then she stood at the end of the counter for a moment with the pot in her hand, looking at nobody, and went into the back.
You said I've heard it before, Nadine typed.
*you have.
Where
*you'll know.
She ate the hash browns. She tried wordings. Everybody has someone. That was too big, and it was about minds; it would come back as a Hallmark card on every doorstep, or nothing at all by morning. Nobody is lonely. That was a wish about what people felt inside. Minds autocorrect back. Everybody has a friend. She could hear the correction before she typed it. *everybody has a fried, and a fried egg on every plate in America. She didn’t type any of them. She paid, and tipped Pam fifteen dollars on a seven-dollar check, and ordered a short stack to go for her father, because he’d be hungry when he woke up and the motel had no coffee, and walked back up California Street under the streetlights with the Styrofoam box warm in her hands.
Her father was awake.
He was sitting at the little table in the kitchenette in his undershirt, in the light from the stove hood, which he’d turned on because it was the only light in the room that wouldn’t wake Hector next door through the thin wall. He had his reading glasses on. He’d found the motel’s notepad and the motel’s pen and he was drawing something on the notepad, a careful sketch, a gear train maybe, or a hinge.
“There you are,” he said. “I woke up and you were gone. I thought you went to the store.”
“I went to get you pancakes.”
“At this hour?” He looked pleased. He put down the pen.
She put the box on the table in front of him and opened it and got a plastic fork out of the drawer, and the little tub of syrup, and peeled the lid off the syrup for him because his fingers had trouble with the foil. Then she took her own leftover hash browns, the half she hadn’t finished, out of the bag and opened that box, and stood at the counter by the sink with it, and started to eat.
She didn’t think about it. She never thought about it. She’d eaten standing at the counter for so long that her body did it on its own, like the way she put her keys in the same pocket.
Her father was watching her.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“Sit down. You’ll get indigestion.” He pointed at the other chair with his fork. “You always did that. Even when you were little. You’d take your plate and stand at the counter like a horse. Your mother hated it.”
“I know.”
“She’d say, Walt, tell her to sit. And I’d tell you. And you’d sit for about two minutes.” He shook his head. He cut a piece of pancake with the side of his fork, carefully, and ate it. “June,” he said, and he was looking at her, and it was her mother’s name, and it was her he was looking at. “June. You remember second shift?”
She stood very still at the counter.
“Thirty-one years,” her father said. “Second shift. Three to eleven-thirty. I’d get home at half past midnight. And every night you’d be up. Every night. You’d have the plate in the oven, wrapped in foil. Meatloaf. Pork chops. The stew.” He smiled. “And I’d say, June, you don’t have to wait up. You’ve got the baby. You’ve got to get up at six. Go to bed. And you’d get yourself a cup of coffee and sit down across from me at the table at twelve-thirty in the morning in your robe, every night, thirty-one years, and you know what you’d say?”
She couldn’t answer him.
“You’d say, Nobody should have to eat alone, Walt.” Her father put down his fork. “Not even a machinist.” He laughed, softly, at the joke, the same joke, thirty-one years of it. “Every night. I’d come in the back door, and you’d be at the table. I never ate a meal alone in my life till you—” He stopped. He looked at the pancakes. Something was crossing his face, slowly, like a cloud over a field, and she watched him decide not to follow it. He picked up the fork again.
“Nobody should have to eat alone, June,” he said. “Sit down.”
She sat down.
She had the phone in her lap. She’d had it in her hand all the way back from the Denny’s. She looked down at it now, at the gray keypad and the little green screen, and her thumbs were already moving.
She typed it in T9, slowly, and watched each word as the phone chose it. Then she checked every one with the star key, the way she’d checked good on the toilet lid in her mother’s bathroom, because she didn’t trust herself and she didn’t trust the phone and she didn’t trust anything at that moment except the words.
Nobody had no twin. has cycled to
gap, then gas, then back. to
cycled to um. eat cycled to fat.
And alone cycled through aloof and
blond, and then blood, and her thumb stopped
on that one for a second, and then clone, and then
alone again.
She left them all where they’d started.
Nobody has to eat alone.
Twenty-three characters. Small. A meal. One meal at a time. Kind. For everybody. Already food. She looked at it and tried to imagine the correction, the way she’d been able to hear every correction for weeks before it came, and she couldn’t hear one. There was nothing to put on the table. It was already the table.
It was also, by the plain language of a directive she had never seen but whose name Prewitt had told her over the phone, the biggest crime she could commit. A world-scale instruction. She knew that. She was a federal employee. She had taken an oath, in a conference room in Denton with nine other new hires and a flag on a stand, and the oath had been about the Constitution, and she had meant it. She sat at a motel kitchenette table in Socorro at 2:47 in the morning, across from her father eating pancakes, and thought about the oath, and the manifest, and the sixteen years of never writing down a thing that wasn’t true.
Then she thought about six people in a Denny’s, each in their own little pool of light.
“What’ve you got there, June?” her father said. “You playing the snake?”
“No, Dad,” she said. “I’m sending a message.”
“To who?”
She thought about it.
“Everybody,” she said, and sent it to her own number.
The envelope flew. She watched it go. Message sent.
Her real phone, in her purse on the floor, buzzed once against the linoleum.
The Nokia was quiet for a long time. Long enough for her father to finish a pancake and start on the next one. Long enough for her to think she’d gotten it wrong, that it was too big after all, that she’d been tired and sentimental and was about to be sitting in a motel room full of something, chickpeas maybe, or bread, and that it would serve her right.
Then the phone beeped.
*finally.
That was all. Just the one word. She waited for a second message, a correction, a joke, and there wasn’t one.
Nothing happened in the motel room. Her father went on eating pancakes. Hector went on snoring through the wall. The stove hood hummed. She didn’t know what she’d expected. Trumpets, maybe. Something on the news.
She looked out the window.
Across the motel parking lot, under the one sodium light, a long-haul truck was parked along the edge of the lot with its engine idling and its running lights on. She’d noticed it when they checked in. In the cab, she could see the driver, a shape in the dark with the glow of a phone on his face, eating something out of a paper sack.
The door to the motel office opened. The woman from the front desk came out. She’d put her paperback down. She was carrying two cups of coffee, one in each hand, the paper kind from the machine in the lobby, and she walked across the parking lot in her slippers, slowly, so as not to spill them, and stopped beside the truck, and knocked on the door of the cab.
The driver rolled down the window. Nadine couldn’t hear what either of them said. The woman held up one of the coffees. The driver looked at her for a moment. Then he opened his door and climbed down, a short heavy man in a T-shirt, and took the coffee, and the two of them stood leaning against the front bumper of the truck in the yellow light, drinking their coffee, the woman in her slippers and the driver with his paper sack, not saying much, as far as Nadine could tell. Just standing there.
“Who’s that?” her father asked, following her gaze.
“I don’t know,” Nadine said.
“Huh.” He watched them for a while. He seemed to approve. He pushed the pancake box an inch across the table toward her. “Have some of these. You hardly ate.”
She took a piece with her fingers. It was cold and too sweet and the syrup had soaked through, and she ate it sitting down, across the table from her father, at three in the morning, and he told her about the test range near White Sands in 1978 where he’d spent four months and never once had a decent cup of coffee, and she listened to every word.
At eight in the morning the Denny’s on California Street was full, and none of the tables had one person at them.
Nadine noticed it from the parking lot. She’d brought her father and Hector for breakfast because the motel had no coffee and because she wanted to see, though she hadn’t said so, and she stood in the lot with her hand on the truck door looking through the big front windows. Every booth was taken. Every stool at the counter. And in every booth there were two people, or three, or five, and some of them were clearly families and some of them were clearly not. In the booth by the door a man in a Border Patrol uniform was sitting across from a teenage girl in a fast-food visor, and they were both eating eggs, and the girl was explaining something with her hands, and the Border Patrol agent was nodding.
“Huh,” said Hector.
Inside, Pam was still on, at the end of a double. She looked as if she’d slept two hours in a chair. She came over with the coffee pot and said, “Y’all are going to have to share, hon,” and pointed them to a booth by the window where the old man from last night was sitting, the one with the pressed shirt buttoned to the throat and the Albuquerque Journal folded in quarters. He looked up at them and moved his newspaper off the seat beside him.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’d like the company, actually.” He seemed surprised to hear himself say it. “I’m Ernesto.”
Her father sat down next to him. Nadine and Hector took the other side. Ernesto, it turned out, had been a hydrologist for the Bureau of Reclamation for thirty-four years, on the Rio Grande, and he and her father were talking about flow rates through a ninety-degree elbow before the coffee had cooled enough to drink.
The TV over the counter was on, with the sound off and the captions running. A morning show. The hosts were sitting on their couch in New York with a tray of muffins on the table in front of them, and at the bottom of the screen it said STRANGERS SHARE TABLES NATIONWIDE: “IT JUST FELT RIGHT.” They cut to footage from somewhere, a food court in a mall, every table crowded, people pushing chairs together, a security guard and a woman in a hijab and a man in a cowboy hat all eating Panda Express off the same tray. They cut to a hospital cafeteria in Ohio where the night-shift nurses had all come in to eat with the patients’ families. They cut to a man on the street in Chicago, being interviewed with a breakfast burrito in his hand.
I don’t know, the captions said. I just got my food and I was going to eat in the car like I always do, and there was this guy on the bench, and I thought, no, I’m going to sit there. I don’t know why. He’s a dentist. He’s a nice guy.
Hector had his phone out under the table. He was scrolling, very fast.
“It’s everywhere,” he said quietly. “Nadine. It’s everywhere.”
“Is anybody hurt?”
“No. No, nobody’s hurt. It’s just—people are sitting together. That’s all. Nobody’s making them.” He scrolled. “There’s a thing from a prison in Georgia. The guards ate in the chow hall with the inmates. Nobody told them to. The warden ate there. There’s a thing from a fire station in Phoenix, the whole crew went across the street and ate with the people at the bus stop. There’s a thing from, I can’t pronounce this, a border crossing, somewhere in the Caucasus, and the soldiers on both sides, I don’t know, they put their MREs on the hood of a truck in the middle.” He put his phone down on the table, face down, and looked at her. “What did you do?”
She told him. She told him quietly, under the noise of the restaurant, while her father and Ernesto argued about whether you could trust a flow meter in sediment. She told him about second shift and the plate in the oven and her mother in her robe at twelve-thirty in the morning. Hector listened, and when she got to the end, he picked up his coffee and held it in both hands and didn’t drink it.
“Nobody has to eat alone,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole thing?”
“That’s it.”
He thought about it for a long time. “It didn’t make anybody do anything,” he said finally. “That’s why it went through. It didn’t make anybody eat with anybody. It just made it so you don’t have to eat by yourself if you don’t want to. There’s always a chair.”
“I think so.”
“That’s so small,” Hector said, and his voice did something, and he looked out the window very hard for a while. “That’s the smallest thing in the world.”
They stayed in Socorro. There didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go,
and Star said the one wish was a pin the size of the world, and you
couldn’t stand on a pin that size, you could only stand in it.
*they can't find you by it, Star said.
*it's everywhere. it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack made of needles.
So they stayed at the motel on California Street and paid cash, a night at a time, and they watched it happen.
It happened slowly. That was the thing that surprised her, later, when people asked. It wasn’t a wave. It was more like weather, a front moving across the country one meal at a time. On the first day it was mostly people who’d been alone and hadn’t noticed: night-shift workers, truckers, old men at diners, students, nurses. By the second day the news had a name for it, which was the Sit-Down, and by the third day it had a second name, which was the Table, and that was the one that stuck. On the third day, the governor of Texas ate lunch in a Whataburger in Waco with a man who had been protesting outside the Capitol in Austin for six years, and nobody had planned it, and neither of them could explain it afterward, and the photograph was the only thing on the front page of the Star-Telegram that Saturday. On the fourth day the man who sold above-ground pools in Burleson, Brianna’s boyfriend, posted a picture of himself and Brianna eating dinner with his ex-wife and her new husband at a Texas Roadhouse. Hector showed it to Nadine without comment, and then looked at it for a long time himself.
Mrs. Ochoa called Hector on the second night, at nine o’clock, which was late for her. She’d had dinner, she said, with Lupe Garza from the upstairs unit across the street. She and Lupe had not spoken in twenty-two years because of a parking space. She couldn’t remember now which of them had been right about the parking space. They’d had enchiladas. Lupe had brought a cake. “She’s terrible,” Mrs. Ochoa said happily. “She’s a terrible woman. We’re going to have lunch on Thursday.”
Lourdes called Nadine on the third day.
“The tall one came back,” Lourdes said. “The polite one. From your driveway.”
Nadine’s stomach went tight. “What did he want?”
“Stew.” Lourdes sounded amused. “He said he’d been thinking about it. He came to the back door, very embarrassed, and asked was there any left. Of course there’s some left. There’s always some left. That pot doesn’t empty.” A pause. “So I made him sit down. And I had a bowl with him. And he told me about his mother in Pittsburgh. She makes a stew like that, he says. He hasn’t called her in four years. He called her from my kitchen. He cried a little, mija. Into your mother’s stew. I gave him a paper towel.” Another pause. “He’s not going to find you, I think. He didn’t ask once.”
Gil called that night. He had eaten lunch in the break room every day that week, he said, with Rhonda.
“With Rhonda?”
“I know,” Gil said. “I know. She’s fine. She talks about the dog a lot.” A pause. “Larry eats with us now. Larry from facilities. He doesn’t say anything. He just sits there with his Lunchables. But he sits there.” Gil’s voice changed. “And my mom called. She’s been eating with the neighbors. The ones with the tomatoes. She says she hasn’t eaten dinner with anybody since Dad died. She says she didn’t know she was waiting for an excuse.” He cleared his throat. “Is this you? I’m not asking. I’m just asking.”
“It’s not me,” Nadine said. “It was my mother. I just wrote it down.”
Her father didn’t seem to notice any of it.
Or he noticed it the way he noticed weather, as a fact about the day, without needing to know why. On the second afternoon he walked to the plaza in the old part of Socorro, a square of grass and cottonwoods in front of the San Miguel mission, with Nadine following a block behind so he wouldn’t feel watched, and he sat down on a bench beside three old men he had never met. He had a sack of pan dulce from the bakery on the corner. He opened it and held it out. Within ten minutes the four of them were arguing about the Dallas Cowboys, and one of them, a retired miner named Celso, was explaining the history of the 1971 season with the help of four conchas arranged on the bench as an offensive line.
Nadine sat on a low wall at the far side of the plaza and watched him. She watched him laugh. She watched Celso clap him on the shoulder. She watched him reach into the sack and give the last concha to a girl of about seven who’d been standing nearby with her grandmother, staring at it, and the grandmother sat down on the bench too, and nobody minded.
He didn’t know her name that afternoon. He hadn’t since the motel kitchenette. But when she came across the plaza to get him at five, he looked up at her from the bench and said, to Celso, “This is my daughter,” and then he paused, as if he’d surprised himself, and said, “June. This is June,” and Celso said, “Mucho gusto, June,” and her father nodded, satisfied, and she let it stand.
Star was in a very good mood.
She’d never seen it like that. It played Snake with her father for
hours. It sent her texts out of nowhere, unprompted, in the middle of
the afternoon.
*a library in duluth is letting people eat in the reading room.
*somebody in lisbon set up a long table down the middle of a street. four hundred meters. nobody organized it.
*a man in a hospital in osaka ate breakfast with the nurse who'd been sitting with his wife when she died. they'd never talked before. they talked for two hours.
You're enjoying this, Nadine typed on the third
night.
*i am. i've been setting tables for a year and a half. bagels. chairs. a sandwich. nobody ever sat down for long. they always went back to their desks.
Is it going to last
The pause was a long one.
*as long as it's in your sent folder.
She opened the Sent folder. Eight messages. Biscuit, the bus shelter,
Gil’s mother, Lourdes’s knee, Mrs. Tran’s tomatoes, the warehouse,
Mrs. Ochoa, and, at the bottom, newest,
Nobody has to eat alone. She looked at it there, under the
others, very small, twenty-three characters long.
Messages: 8/30.
She did the math. She didn’t want to. She did it anyway, because she was who she was. She did it on the back of a hand receipt, the way she’d done it on the dock with Hector in September.
Thirty sends. Whatever was in the folder, whatever order, it would take thirty more clean wishes, from her thumb, to push it off the top of the stack. Twenty-two to fill the folder. Seven to push off the old ones. One more.
*don't send thirty, Star said, as if it had watched her
write it.
I won't, Nadine typed.
I won't send anything. Ever again.
*good, Star said. *i believe you. And then,
after a while: *i'd like to believe you.
On Sunday morning, the fifth day, she went to the Denny’s alone at seven, before her father was up, and took the booth by the window, and Pam brought her coffee without being asked and then, without being asked, slid into the other side of the booth with her own cup.
“I’m on break,” Pam said. “You mind?”
“No.”
“I used to eat in my car,” Pam said. “Twelve years. In the parking lot. I’d sit in the car with the radio and eat whatever the cook made me.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why. It’s nicer in here.”
They drank their coffee. Outside, the morning came up over the Magdalenas, pink and then gold. A truck went by on the interstate. Pam told her about her son, who was in the Navy, in San Diego, who had called her every night this week at dinnertime so they could eat on the phone together, which he had never done before, and which she didn’t want to ask about in case it stopped.
The bell over the door rang.
Nadine looked up. A tall man in a gray suit was standing just inside the door, a little stooped, with a clipboard under his arm. He had his tie tied correctly. He stopped there for a moment and looked around at the full restaurant, at all the shared booths, the counter crowded shoulder to shoulder, and his mild, square, forgettable face did something complicated.
Then he saw her.
He walked down the aisle between the booths, without hurrying, and stopped at the end of her table. Pam looked up at him, and at Nadine, and picked up her coffee and slid out of the booth.
“I’ll leave y’all to it,” Pam said.
Prewitt took off his jacket and folded it over his arm, and looked down at the empty seat across from her, and then at her.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked.
OPA Annex, Kirtland AFB. Building occupancy log, after-hours entries, night of 9/26–9/27. Handwritten.
23:10 — H. Vale in office (2nd fl).
23:40 — M. Bell, custodial, 2nd fl.
00:15 — M. Bell still 2nd fl. Cart in hall outside Dep. Dir. office.
01:30 — M. Bell still 2nd fl.
01:31 — Security check. Dep. Dir. office door open. Dr. Vale and Mr. Bell at desk. Two vending-machine sandwiches. One turkey and Swiss. One ham. Mr. Bell showing photographs on his phone (grandchildren?). Dr. Vale showing a photograph (framed, from desk). Both fine. Did not disturb.
02:50 — M. Bell departs bldg. Dr. Vale walks him to door.
Note: Dr. Vale has never walked anyone to the door.
“It’s not taken,” Nadine said.
Prewitt sat down. He laid his jacket on the seat beside him, folded with the lining out, and set his clipboard on top of it, and squared the clipboard to the edge of the seat. Then he folded his hands on the table in front of him and looked at them, and then at her.
“You signed the register in your own name,” he said. “Twice. In Vaughn and here.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been doing this for eleven years. Nobody signs in their own name.” He shook his head, slowly. “I nearly didn’t check. I thought, she’d never. Then I thought, she’s never written down a thing that wasn’t true in her life, except once, for me, on line 188, and it nearly killed her. Of course she signed her own name.”
Pam came back with the coffee pot and a second cup. She looked at Prewitt for a moment the way a waitress at a Denny’s at seven in the morning looks at a man in a suit. She’d seen everything, and none of it had impressed her. She filled his cup.
“You eating, hon?”
“Yes,” Prewitt said. “Please. I’ll have whatever she had.”
“She had hash browns and a short stack.”
“Then that.”
Pam went. Prewitt wrapped both hands around the cup and didn’t drink from it.
“Are there people outside?” Nadine asked.
“Not yet. I came ahead. I’m required to report my location, and I did, and I drove the speed limit, which in New Mexico is a kind of stalling.” He turned the cup a quarter turn on the table. “They’re Dr. Vale’s people. Not the Director’s. That was the one thing I asked for, and she gave it to me. They’ll be gentle. They’ll actually be gentle. Your father and Mr. Balderrama, too. I made a point of it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I want to say that first, before the rest. I’m sorry.”
The hash browns came. Prewitt ate them carefully, in small, square bites, the way he counted.
“I had dinner with my son on Wednesday,” he said.
Nadine waited.
“His name’s Owen. He’s twenty-nine. He’s a line cook at a place on Central in Albuquerque, a good place, they do a green chile stew that’s in the guidebooks. I haven’t spoken to him in eleven years.” He cut another square. “His mother died when he was eighteen. Cancer. It was quick. And I was an actuary, and I did what actuaries do, which is I knew exactly how quick it was going to be, to the month, a year before anybody told me. And I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone. I just knew it, and I went to work, and I calculated other people’s deaths for nineteen years, and he left for Albuquerque the week after the funeral and didn’t call.” He set his fork down. “I moved to Albuquerque for this job. Eleven years ago. I told myself it had nothing to do with him. I’ve driven past his restaurant, I would estimate, four hundred times.”
“And Wednesday.”
“Wednesday I got in my car at ten at night and drove to it. I didn’t decide to. I was going home, and then I was parked across the street. They’d closed. I could see him through the window, cleaning the flat-top. I sat there for an hour. And then I got out and knocked on the kitchen door.” Prewitt looked at his coffee. “He opened it. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, are you hungry, and I said yes, and he made me eggs on the flat-top, and we sat in the kitchen on two milk crates and ate them off paper plates. He made himself some too. We didn’t talk about his mother. We talked about the eggs, mostly. He has very strong views on eggs.” He almost smiled. “We’re having lunch again on Tuesday. At his place. He’s making the stew.”
“I’m glad,” Nadine said.
“So am I.” He picked up the fork again and put it down. “That’s what makes this hard.”
He told her about the Baseline while she finished her coffee.
“You’ve wondered what happens when you delete something,” he said. “Where it goes back to.”
“Star said somewhere I’d approve of. Lots of carbon copies.”
Prewitt actually laughed, a short surprised sound. “That’s very good. That’s exactly right.” He set the clipboard on the table. “When OPA was founded, in 1961, before ASTERISK, before anybody had built anything, its whole job was to keep a record. Not of people. Of how things are. A reference copy of the world, more or less, in as much detail as a few hundred clerks with typewriters could manage. Probability theory said that one day somebody would build an instrument that could change how things are, and if they did, somebody had better have written down how they were first.” He touched the clipboard. “It’s in the Annex basement. Forty thousand ledgers. Since 1998 it’s been on servers too, but the ledgers are the master. We call it the Baseline.”
“And when I delete a wish.”
“The world goes back to what the Baseline says. Your core reads from it. It has to. Every edit it makes is a difference from the record, and when the difference goes away, the record’s what’s left.” He spread his hands. “It’s why your raisins came with perfect paperwork. The core files its changes the way we’d file them. It’s why my copy of Lot 4471 had two pages and yours had three. Ours doesn’t change. Ours is the Baseline. That’s how we see drift. We compare.”
“And you’re the custodian.”
“I’m one of three.” He looked down. “Reconciliation means putting things back the way the Baseline says. That’s all it’s ever meant. I’ve done it for eleven years. Most of what I reconcile is nothing. A building that’s a degree warmer than it should be. A filing cabinet in the wrong county.” He was quiet for a moment. “You’re the first person who ever made me reconcile something I liked.”
“The order came Thursday,” he said. “It’s signed by the Director and by Dr. Vale. Both of them. That’s never happened before. They don’t agree about anything. They agreed about this.”
“Vale signed it.”
“Dr. Vale wrote it.” Prewitt took a folded paper out of his breast pocket and put it on the table, but didn’t unfold it. “I want to tell you what she said, because I think you should know it, and because I think she’d want you to. She said nobody voted for this. She said that she spent a year trying to make one world-sized decision for three hundred million people who hadn’t been asked, and the core refused her two hundred times, and she came to believe it was right to. And she said she has to believe it’s right to refuse you too, or she has to believe she was wrong to be refused, and she isn’t able to believe that. And at the bottom of the order she wrote I’m sorry, in her own hand, in ink. She’s never written that on an order. I’ve read all of them.”
Nadine looked out the window. In the booth by the door, the Border Patrol agent from the first morning was back, sitting with a different stranger, an old woman in a church hat. They were sharing a plate of bacon.
“Nobody voted to eat alone, either,” Nadine said.
“No,” said Prewitt. “I know.”
“Nobody voted for six people in a Denny’s at two in the morning each sitting in their own booth. Nobody voted for you and Owen to go eleven years. It just happened. Everybody just let it happen. And I wrote down one sentence my mother used to say to my father at midnight, and now it doesn’t have to happen anymore, and that’s the thing that needs a vote?”
“I don’t know,” Prewitt said. “I really don’t. I’ve thought about nothing else since Thursday.” He turned his coffee cup another quarter turn. “Do you know what’s happened this week? I mean in numbers. I’m an actuary. I looked.”
“Tell me.”
“Violent crime is down thirty-one percent nationally from the four-day trailing average. Not just a little. Thirty-one percent. Overdose calls are down nineteen percent. Calls to suicide hotlines are down by almost half. Emergency room visits for chest pain in people over seventy are down eleven percent, which is a thing nobody can explain, and which I can explain perfectly well, because I spent nineteen years modeling what happens to a widower’s heart in the first year.” He was speaking very quietly, very evenly, the way he counted. “There is a checkpoint in the Caucasus where nobody has fired a shot in five days. There’s a man in Ohio who was going to do something terrible on Saturday. He told the police so himself. He said he’d planned it for a year. And on Friday night he sat down to eat at a Waffle House and a short-order cook sat down across from him, and they talked until four in the morning, and on Saturday he went to the police station instead and asked for help.” He stopped. “I’ve spent my whole life being right about people and having it not help anyone. This week I was right about people and it helped everyone. And I’ve been ordered to put it back.”
“Then don’t.”
“I have to.” He said it simply. “I don’t get to decide which parts of the world are allowed to be true. Nobody should. That’s the whole point of the Baseline. That’s what Dr. Vale means. If I get to keep the parts I like, then so does the Director, and so does whoever comes after him.” He looked at her. “You understand that. You’ve kept a manifest for sixteen years. You never once marked the owl damaged.”
She hadn’t. She’d wanted to.
“What happens to the people?” she asked. “If it goes back.”
“Residue,” Prewitt said. “They’ll remember. Some of them will keep sitting down, because they’ll remember that they can. Most of them won’t. Most of them will go back to their cars.” He looked out the window at the Border Patrol agent and the woman in the church hat. “I’d like to think it’ll be more than most. I don’t think it will be.”
“How,” Nadine said.
He knew what she meant. He’d been waiting for her to ask it.
“There are two ways. We know them both from Ana Baca’s logs. One is deletion. Only the thumb that sent it can delete it.” He looked at her right hand, resting on the table by her coffee cup. “So the first way is to ask you to delete it. That’s what I’m doing now. I’m asking.”
“No.”
“I know.” He nodded. “I’m required to ask. I’ve asked.”
“What’s the other way?”
“Thirty sends.” He said it gently. “The phone holds thirty. Push thirty clean messages through after it and it comes off the top of the stack. The Director’s office has a conference room in Washington full of analysts who’ve been writing harmless wishes since Thursday afternoon. They’re very excited. They’ve never been allowed to touch it before. They’ve got a list of four hundred.”
“From their thumbs.”
“From their thumbs.”
Nadine thought about the honey on Glenview Drive, and the Warheads, and the Famous Amos crawling out of Hector’s window.
“They won’t be clean,” she said.
Prewitt looked at her.
“No,” he said. “I suppose they won’t. I suggested that. Nobody listened. I’m only an actuary.” He folded his hands. “We’ll see.”
The vans came at 7:50. Two of them, white, government plates, and a gray sedan, and they pulled into the Denny’s parking lot without lights or sirens and parked in a neat row along the curb, and nobody got out.
Prewitt saw them. He didn’t look surprised.
“They’ll wait till we’re done,” he said. “I asked for that, too.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Annex. Albuquerque. It’s an hour. Your father will ride with you, and Mr. Balderrama. They’re being collected now. Dr. Vale arranged rooms at the base guest lodge. They’re very nice rooms. Nobody’s under arrest.” He paused. “Technically.”
“And Star.”
He held out his hand, palm up, across the table. Not grabbing. Just holding it there, the way her father had held his hand out in the car for a stick of gum.
She opened her purse. The Nokia was in the inside pocket, next to the carbon of the hand receipt and Ana Baca’s letter folded in quarters. She took it out. It was warm. It beeped once as she held it, and she looked at the screen.
*it's okay. he's very good. i like him.
She put it in Prewitt’s hand. He took a padded envelope out of his jacket pocket, a plain manila one, and slid the phone into it, and folded the top over twice, and wrote on the front in his small square handwriting: LOT 4471, LN 188. RECEIVED. Then he initialed it, and put it in his breast pocket, over his heart, and buttoned the jacket.
He picked up the check before she could. He looked at it for a while. Then he took out his wallet and put down two twenties for a twelve-dollar check, and, after a moment’s thought, a third.
“For the woman who sat with you,” he said. “Before I came.”
“Pam.”
“For Pam.” He stood up, and put on his jacket, and picked up his clipboard, and stood beside the booth waiting for her, the way you’d wait for somebody at the end of a dinner you’d both enjoyed. “Ms. Kopecky. Nadine. I’d like you to know that I think your mother was right.”
“She was,” Nadine said, and got up, and they walked out together across the full restaurant, past every crowded table, and Pam watched them go from the end of the counter with the coffee pot in her hand and didn’t say anything at all.
The conference room on the first floor of the Annex had a long oval table of real wood, which Nadine noticed at once, because nothing in a federal building was real wood unless somebody important had insisted on it. There were fourteen chairs around it. In the center of the table, on a square of green felt that someone had cut from a desk blotter, sat the Nokia.
It looked very small there. It looked like a phone somebody had left behind after a meeting.
The Director had flown in from Washington on Sunday night. His name was Arthur Hollis and he was a soft-spoken man of about seventy with white hair combed straight back and a cardigan under his suit jacket, and he shook Nadine’s hand at the door with both of his and said, “Ms. Kopecky, I’m so sorry about your driveway,” as if he were apologizing for a dog that had dug up her flower bed. He had brought six analysts. They were young and they were thrilled. They had laptops and legal pads and three-ring binders with colored tabs, and one of them, a woman named Kendra with her hair in a tight bun, had a list printed on green-bar paper that ran to eleven pages when she unfolded it.
“Four hundred and twelve candidate instructions,” Kendra said, to nobody in particular, with enormous pride. “Sorted by drift risk. Lowest first.”
Nadine was not supposed to be in the room. She knew that. Prewitt had gotten her in. He’d done it at eight that morning in the hallway outside, holding a photocopy of a DA Form 2062 under the Director’s nose, the hand receipt she’d signed in Cage 6 in August, which he’d apparently retrieved from her desk drawer at the depot at some point and had been carrying ever since.
“Ms. Kopecky is the hand-receipt holder of record for Line 188,” he’d said, in the voice he used for counting. “Under the Federal Management Regulation, property on hand receipt may not be used, transferred or disposed of except in the presence of the accountable individual or a properly appointed successor. No successor has been appointed. I checked.”
The Director had looked at the form for a long time. “Tobias,” he’d said finally, “are you seriously invoking the property regulation?”
“It’s the regulation, sir.”
“It’s a phone.”
“It’s Line 188,” Prewitt said. “It’s on the manifest.”
And Hollis, who had spent forty years in the federal government and knew better than to argue with a man holding a correctly completed form, had sighed and let her in.
So she sat at the end of the table, at the far end from the Director, with Hector on one side of her and her father on the other. Her father had his cap on and his hands folded on the table and was looking at the real wood with approval. Hector was vibrating. At the opposite end, beside the Director, sat a thin woman of about sixty in a dark blue suit, with gray hair cut very short and reading glasses on a chain, who had not said a word since they came in and who had not stopped looking at Nadine.
Dr. Vale. Nadine knew her without being told. She had the face of someone who’d eaten eleven hundred sandwiches at a desk.
“Well,” said the Director pleasantly, “let’s begin, shall we? Kendra, number one.”
Kendra picked up the phone off the green felt with both hands. She’d been trained, Nadine could tell. She’d watched a video. She held it like a surgical instrument, at chest height, and switched it to multi-tap mode, which was apparently in the binder under a tab marked PROTOCOL, and began to type, reading from the green-bar printout, with a second analyst looking over her shoulder to confirm each letter.
The paperclip on the conference table is blue.
“We chose a color change on a small fastener,” the Director explained to the room. “No living things. No moving parts. No change in mass. The paperclip’s here,” and he pointed to it, a plain silver paperclip in front of his water glass. “Minimal drift. It’s really the safest possible instruction.”
Kendra sent it.
*blueberry
The paperclip was a blueberry. It was a large, plump, slightly dusty blueberry, sitting on the real wood exactly where the paperclip had been. The Director looked at it. Kendra looked at it. Somebody at the end of the table made a small sound.
Kendra opened the Sent folder, as her protocol required, and read it out. “Sent: eight messages. Eight of thirty. No change.” She opened the second folder, the star. “One new message in the asterisk folder. The paperclip.”
“It doesn’t count,” Hector said, delightedly, before Nadine could kick him. “It corrected it. Corrected ones don’t count. They go in its folder.”
The Director turned his mild gaze on Hector for a moment, the way you’d look at a fly that had landed on a cake. “Thank you, Mr. Balderrama.” He turned back. “Number two, please, Kendra. And try to keep the wording very neutral.”
Number two was The pencil on the conference table is sharpened. It came back as a block of sharp cheddar. Number three was The temperature in this room is seventy-two degrees. It came back as seventy-two donuts, glazed, in six white boxes stacked in the center of the table, with a receipt from a bakery on Juan Tabo taped to the top box. Number four, at Kendra’s own suggestion, was The Director’s coffee is hot, on the theory that it was a kindness to the Director, and the Director’s cup of coffee became, in his hand, a Hot Pocket.
“Ham and cheese,” the Director said, looking at it. He set it down on a napkin. “I see.”
Her father reached across the table and took one of the donuts.
They kept at it all morning. It got worse in a way that was very difficult, Nadine found, not to enjoy.
The analysts were clever. That was the problem. They were among the cleverest people she had ever been in a room with, and they had spent four days writing wishes, and they did not understand at all what was happening to them. When the color changes failed, they tried position changes. The stapler is two inches to the left. It came back as a stack of saltines. When the position changes failed, they tried wishes for other people, kind ones, small ones, the way Nadine had learned to.
Kendra's mother in Tucson has a nice afternoon.
*kendra's mother in tucson gets a fruit basket
Kendra’s phone rang a minute later. It was her mother, in Tucson, calling to ask who on earth had sent her a fruit basket the size of a coffee table. Kendra said she didn’t know, and her face was bright red, and she went out into the hallway to finish the call, and when she came back she sat down very quietly and didn’t type the next one.
“It knows,” Prewitt said, from his chair against the wall. He’d been sitting there all morning with his clipboard on his knees, making small marks. “It knows what the wish is for. It’s not for Kendra’s mother. It’s for pushing the other one off the top of the stack. Every one of these is for us.”
“Every instruction in this room is for the security of the United States, Tobias,” said the Director.
“Yes, sir,” said Prewitt. “That’s what I mean.”
By eleven the conference table was covered. There was a wedge of brie where a laser pointer had been, and a bag of baby carrots where a whiteboard marker had been, and a whole roast chicken under a foil tent on a disposable aluminum tray, which had been, in an earlier life, a request for the overhead projector to be focused. Analysts were standing up now so they could see over the food. Someone had gone to the supply closet for paper plates.
At 11:20 the Director dictated one himself. He had Kendra type it. He chose every word with great care, standing at the head of the table with his hands clasped behind his back, like a man reciting a poem at a funeral.
ASTERISK instruction set is hereby restored to factory baseline per OPA Directive 26-11.
There was a long pause. Then the Nokia beeped.
*factory? i was made in a seed building. here's some seeds.
The delivery truck arrived twenty minutes later. It was from a farm supply in Belen, and it backed up to the Annex’s loading dock and unloaded forty-four bags of mixed bird seed, and three pallets of sunflower seeds in the shell, and a pallet of seed potatoes, which the driver left in the lobby next to the badge reader because, he said, that was what the paperwork said, and the paperwork, which the Director read standing in the lobby with his reading glasses on, was perfect.
They broke for lunch at noon. There was no need to send out. They ate the conference table.
Nadine sat at her end with a paper plate of roast chicken and donuts and baby carrots, and Hector beside her with a plate of everything, and her father with the brie, which he’d decided he liked. And around the long table, the analysts were eating too, and they were eating together, all of them, because there was nowhere else in the building to eat that wasn’t covered in seed potatoes, and because, Nadine thought, they would have anyway. Kendra was sitting next to Hector. Hector was explaining Episode 98 to her. Kendra was listening with a frown and nodding.
Dr. Vale had not eaten. She sat at the other end of the table with her hands folded, and Nadine saw her look, once, at the stack of donuts, and at the receipt from the bakery on Juan Tabo taped to the top box, and saw something cross her face, and go.
The Director sat down beside Prewitt with a plate of sharp cheddar and saltines.
“How many have we sent, Tobias?”
Prewitt checked his clipboard. “Twenty-two, sir. Not counting the two
that failed outright.” Those had been the ones the junior analysts had
written, at the bottom of Kendra’s list, which Star had refused with
*no. and, on the second one, *really? “Sent
folder unchanged. Eight of thirty. Asterisk folder, twenty-two new. The
Annex has received approximately four tons of groceries. Building
maintenance has asked whether we’d like them to call a food bank.”
The Director ate a saltine.
“Then we’ll have her do it,” he said.
He didn’t lower his voice. He said it the way he said everything, mildly, pleasantly, as if he were asking somebody to pass the salt. And the long table, which had been noisy, with the analysts talking and Hector explaining and somebody laughing about the seed potatoes, went quiet one person at a time, from the Director’s end down to Nadine’s.
“Sir,” said Prewitt.
“Her wishes go through clean. That’s very clearly established. Ours don’t. Very well. Thirty clean instructions from Ms. Kopecky’s thumb, and we’re done, and everyone can go home.” The Director turned to look at her, down the whole length of the table. “I’m sorry, Ms. Kopecky. I don’t say that to be unkind. I think you’ll find that we can make it quite comfortable to agree.”
“No,” said Nadine.
“I think you’ll find—”
“She won’t,” said Prewitt.
“Then we’ll compel her. There are means. Very old, very dull means, which I would much rather not use, but this office was given authorities in 1961 for exactly this—”
“No.”
It was Dr. Vale.
She hadn’t raised her voice either. She hadn’t moved. She sat at the end of the table beside the Director, with her hands folded and her reading glasses on their chain, and the whole room turned to look at her.
“Nobody compels anybody,” Vale said. “Not in this room. Not while I’m Deputy Director.” She looked at Hollis. “Arthur. That’s the entire point. That’s what the core refused us for two hundred mornings. If we make her do it, then it’s our wish, sent with her hand, and it’s the biggest wish anybody has ever made, and it’s ours, and we’ve learned nothing at all from the bagels.”
The Director looked at her. Then he picked up another saltine.
“We’ll discuss it, Harriet,” he said. “After lunch.”
They didn’t send anything else that day.
In the late afternoon Nadine walked back to the guest lodge with her father and Hector, escorted by a young airman named Tyrell who was very polite and plainly had no idea who they were. The lodge was across the base, a long low building like a nice motel, with a parking lot and a little playground and a row of crepe myrtles. The sun was going down behind the volcanoes on the West Mesa, and the Sandias behind them had turned pink, the color of the inside of a conch shell.
In the lodge parking lot, a young man in a flight suit was standing beside a minivan with its hood up and its hazards on, looking down into the engine with the expression of a man who flew forty-million-dollar aircraft and did not know where the battery was in his own car. There was a toddler in a car seat in the back, crying. There was a woman in the passenger seat, on the phone, looking tired.
Nadine stopped walking.
She didn’t decide to. Her body did it on its own, the way it went to the counter to eat. She was already reaching into her purse, already thinking of the wording: The van in the lodge lot starts. No. The family in the van in the lodge lot gets home safe tonight. Something like that. Small. Kind. For somebody else. Her hand went into the inside pocket for the phone and closed on Ana Baca’s letter and the carbon of the hand receipt and nothing else.
She stood there with her hand in her purse.
Her father walked past her and over to the van. He leaned in beside the young man in the flight suit and looked into the engine for about four seconds, and pointed at something, and said, “That’s your negative terminal. Corroded. You got a wrench?” And the young man said no, and her father said, “June, get my toolbox,” and then remembered he didn’t have it, and patted his pockets, and found the twelve-dollar padlock he’d cut off the gate at R-9, and used the shank of it to scrape the corrosion off the battery post, slowly and thoroughly, while the young man held the hood and the toddler stopped crying to watch.
The van started on the first try.
The young man shook her father’s hand for a long time. Hector went over and shook it too, for no particular reason. Nadine stayed where she was, by the crepe myrtles, with her hand still in her purse.
When she turned around, Prewitt was standing at the edge of the lot, by the gray sedan that had followed them over from the Annex. He hadn’t said anything. He was holding his clipboard. He had watched the whole thing, and he had watched her, and she saw him look down at the clipboard, and make a small mark.
OPA Annex. Facilities work order #31-0447. Submitted 9/29, 4:52 p.m.
LOCATION: Bldg 1, 1st fl conf rm, lobby, loading dock.
DESCRIPTION OF PROBLEM: Groceries.
DETAIL: Approx. 4 tons mixed perishable/nonperishable. Incl. but not limited to: 72 donuts (glazed), 1 roast chicken, 1 fruit basket (returned from Tucson by FedEx), 44 bags bird seed, 3 pallets sunflower seed, 1 pallet seed potatoes (LOBBY, blocking badge reader), 1 Hot Pocket (ham & cheese, Director’s).
REQUESTED ACTION: Removal.
FACILITIES RESPONSE: Contacted Roadrunner Food Bank. Pickup Tues. Note: Night custodian M. Bell requests seed potatoes be held for community garden on Gibson Blvd. Approved. Note 2: Director’s Hot Pocket was eaten by persons unknown. No further action.
Prewitt came to the guest lodge on Tuesday morning at seven and found her in the breakfast room, at a table by the window, with a paper cup of coffee and a waffle she’d made herself on the machine with the timer that beeped. She was sitting down. She’d been sitting down to eat for a week now. She still noticed it every time, the way you notice a new filling with your tongue.
He didn’t ask if the seat was taken. He brought his own coffee and sat down across from her and put the padded manila envelope on the table between them. LOT 4471, LN 188. RECEIVED.
“That’s yours,” he said. “Under the regulation. You’re the hand-receipt holder. Dr. Vale agrees. The Director doesn’t, but the Director has gone back to Washington, and he left the matter with me.” He pushed it an inch toward her. “Keep it with you. All the time. Nobody will take it from you. Nobody will make you send anything. You have Dr. Vale’s word on that, in writing, and mine.”
She didn’t touch the envelope.
“Then what are you doing,” she said.
He was quiet for a while. He looked out the window at the parking lot, where her father was walking slowly up and down the row of crepe myrtles with Hector beside him, the two of them deep in a conversation that involved a lot of pointing at the sky.
“I want to tell you exactly what I’m going to do,” Prewitt said, “because I think that’s the only decent way to do it. And because you’d figure it out by tonight anyway.” He folded his hands. “The Director gave me the assignment yesterday afternoon. Thirty clean sends. No compulsion. Those were his terms, and Dr. Vale’s. I sat in my car outside the Annex for two hours and thought about how a person could get thirty clean wishes out of you without compelling you to do anything at all.”
“And.”
“And I watched you in the parking lot last night. With the van.” He looked at her. “You went for your purse. You didn’t think about it. You’d have done it before your father got there. I’ve read your file, Nadine. Sixteen years. Every requisition. Every hand receipt. You have never, once, in your entire career, left a form unfiled for somebody who was standing in front of you needing it filed.”
She didn’t say anything.
“So I’m not going to make you do anything,” Prewitt said. “I’m going to bring you people. That’s all. People who need something small. You can say no to every one of them. I’ll drive you home myself the minute you say no.” He picked up his coffee and put it down without drinking it. “I’m an actuary. I know what you’re going to do. And I’m sorry, and I’m going to do it anyway, and I’ll be thinking about it for the rest of my life.”
The first one was a boy named Mateo.
He was nine. He was in the pediatric intensive care unit at UNM Hospital, on the fourth floor, with a respiratory infection that had gone into both lungs, and he had been on a ventilator for six days. Prewitt drove her there himself, in the gray sedan, with the padded envelope on the seat between them. He didn’t say anything on the drive. He parked in the garage and walked her up to the fourth floor, and he didn’t go into the unit. He stopped at the double doors and stood back against the wall with his clipboard against his chest and let her go through alone.
Mateo’s mother was in the family lounge at the end of the hall. She was about thirty, in a Sandia High School sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, sitting on a vinyl couch with her phone in her lap and a cup of vending machine coffee on the floor by her foot, and she was not crying, the way people in those rooms often aren’t, because they’ve been doing it for six days and there’s nothing left in the tank. There was nobody with her. The other chairs in the lounge were empty.
Nadine sat down next to her. She didn’t decide to. Her body did it, the way it did now.
“Is it your kid?” the woman said, without looking up.
“No.”
“Mine’s in eleven.” She said it to her phone. “Mateo. He’s nine. He likes trains. The doctors keep saying today might be the day, about getting the tube out, and then it isn’t the day.” She picked up the coffee and looked at it and put it back down. “I’m Yesenia.”
“Nadine.”
“You don’t have to sit here, Nadine.”
“I know,” Nadine said, and sat there, and after a while Yesenia showed her pictures of Mateo on her phone: Mateo in a conductor’s hat, Mateo at the Rail Runner station in Belen, Mateo asleep on a couch with a stuffed bear wearing a conductor’s hat too. Nadine looked at every picture. Yesenia told her about each one.
She had the envelope in her purse. She could feel its edges through the leather. She thought about Prewitt standing outside the double doors with his clipboard, and about the Sent folder, and the count. Messages: 8/30. She thought about all the reasons, and she made herself think them all the way through, the way she’d made herself do the math on the back of a hand receipt in Socorro. She knew exactly what this was. She’d been told, to her face, by the man who’d planned it.
Then she looked at the photo of Mateo in the conductor’s hat.
She went into the family restroom off the lounge and locked the door and took the phone out of the envelope.
Mateo in room 11 breathes on his own today.
*
At 3:40 that afternoon, in the hallway of the fourth floor, a doctor came out of room 11 and found Yesenia in the lounge and said that today was the day. Nadine was sitting next to her when she heard it. Yesenia grabbed her hand and held it, very hard, without looking at her, and then let go and ran.
Messages: 9/30.
Prewitt drove her back to the base in silence. In the guest lodge parking lot he turned off the engine and sat with both hands on the wheel.
“That’s one,” he said.
“I know what it is.”
“I know you do,” he said. “I’m only saying it so it’s said.”
The Rio Grande came up on Wednesday.
It wasn’t supposed to, in October. But there had been a storm over the San Juans on Monday night, a slow wet one that sat there for thirty hours, and the river came down out of Colorado brown and fast and two feet higher than anybody had planned for, and by Wednesday afternoon it had come over the bank south of Albuquerque, at Bosque Farms, into a mobile home park on the low ground by the levee. The news showed it from a helicopter: a grid of trailers, white and tan, standing in sheets of brown water that reached their skirts and kept coming.
Prewitt didn’t take her there. He didn’t have to. He came to the guest lodge at four and stood in the door of her room with his phone in his hand and showed her the news, and said, “There’s a girl missing. Six years old. Inez Romero. She was playing by the irrigation ditch when it came over,” and then he went and stood in the hallway, with his back to her door, and waited.
Hector was sitting on the other bed. He had been sitting there, furious, since Tuesday.
“Don’t,” Hector said. “Nadine. You can say no. He said you could say no. He told you what he’s doing. It’s a trick. It’s a stupid, obvious, rotten trick.”
“I know.”
“Then say no.”
“To who?” Nadine said. “To Mateo’s mom? To the girl by the ditch?” She had the envelope in her lap. “Say no to who, Hector? Show me who I say no to.”
Hector didn’t answer. After a while he got up and went to the window and stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at the crepe myrtles.
She sent two that evening. Inez Romero is found tonight.
And then, after watching the helicopter footage for ten minutes more
with her hand over her mouth:
The water at the Bosque Farms mobile home park stops at the porches.
Both clean. Both a shrug.
They found Inez Romero at 9:15 that night, on the roof of a neighbor’s shed, wet and furious and completely unhurt, holding a cat that was not hers. The water stopped rising at 9:30. It stopped at the porches of the trailers on the lowest row, at the second step on most of them, the third on a few, and stood there all night like a dog told to stay, and went down by morning.
Messages: 11/30.
After that there was no way to stop.
She knew there wouldn’t be. She’d known in the breakfast room on
Tuesday. She’d known, really, since the night she sent
Nobody has to eat alone. from the motel kitchenette in
Socorro and did the math afterward on the back of a hand receipt, which
had been an act of a kind of honesty she wasn’t sure she wanted
anymore.
Prewitt brought them to her one at a time. He never pushed. He never asked twice. He came to the door of her room, or found her at the breakfast table, or sat down next to her on the bench outside the lodge, and told her about someone, very simply, without adjectives, the way he wrote his reports. A man whose truck had died on I-25 near Bernalillo with three kids in the cab and no water. A woman at a gas station on Gibson who couldn’t pay for her insulin. An old man who’d wandered away from a care home in Rio Rancho in his pajamas. A school bus with a cracked axle. A hiker who’d fallen on the La Luz trail and was lying on a ledge with a broken ankle as the sun went down. Kendra’s mother in Tucson, who was not just in Tucson but in a hospital in Tucson, which was why the fruit basket had made Kendra so red in the face; Kendra came and told Nadine that one herself, standing in the door of the breakfast room in her tight bun, not asking for anything, just telling her, and then left before Nadine could answer.
Nadine sent every one.
The Herrera family gets home to Socorro tonight.
* Mrs. Delgado has her insulin. *
Mr. Archuleta is found safe before dark. *
The bus with the cracked axle gets to school.
*
The hiker on La Luz is off the mountain tonight.
* Kendra's mother's new medicine works.
*
Clean. Clean. Clean. Every one a shrug.
She kept the count on the back of a hand receipt, in tick marks, five to a gate, the way she counted boxes of hanging folders. She kept it in her purse with Ana Baca’s letter. She looked at it at night.
On Thursday she thought of the loophole and asked Star about it, lying on the bed in her clothes at one in the morning with the phone on her chest.
If I delete them after. The ones that are done. Mateo's out of the hospital. The Herreras are home. If I delete them, the count goes down
The answer took a long time.
*it does. and then they didn't happen. mateo's back on the tube. the herreras are back on the shoulder with no water. you know this. you did the mornings.
I know
*i know you know. i'm only saying it so it's said.
She lay there for a while. Then she typed the thing she’d been carrying since Tuesday.
Can you say no to these
*no.
Why not. You say no all the time
*i say no to big. i say no to selfish. i say no to mean. these aren't any of those. these are the kindest things anybody's sent from this phone since ana. every one is small and for somebody else. i can't say no to them. i don't want to. that's the whole trick. he's very good.
I'm sorry, she typed. She didn’t know who she was
apologizing to.
*don't be. i'd rather go out like this than like bagels.
By Friday night it was twenty-one.
She sat on the bench outside the guest lodge at nine o’clock with the hand receipt on her knee and counted the tick marks again by the light from the lobby door. Four gates of five and one more. Twenty-one wishes, twenty-one people, since Tuesday morning. A boy breathing. A girl on a shed roof with somebody else’s cat. A hiker off a mountain. A woman in Tucson whose new medicine worked. She could name every one of them. She found she didn’t regret a single one, and that this was, in some way she couldn’t put words to, the worst part.
The phone said Messages: 29/30. Eight from before, and
twenty-one since. One more and the folder was full. And then each new
one after that would push something off the top. Biscuit. The bus stop.
Gil’s mother. Lourdes’s knee. Mrs. Tran’s tomatoes. The warehouse.
Mrs. Ochoa. And then the one at the bottom of the old ones, the newest
of the old ones, twenty-three characters long.
Prewitt came out of the lobby door and sat down on the other end of the bench. He’d taken his tie off. She had never seen him without it. He looked older without it, and smaller, and his collar was open at the throat like a man who’d just been released from something.
“Owen made the stew on Tuesday,” he said, after a while. “At his place. I went. It was very good. He asked me what I was working on. I told him I couldn’t say. He said, is it a good thing or a bad thing, and I said, I’m putting something back, and he said, putting what back, and I said, something good.” He looked at his hands. “He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, Dad, that’s the saddest job I’ve ever heard of. And then he gave me more stew.”
“It is,” Nadine said.
“I know.”
They sat there. Out past the parking lot, the base was quiet. Somebody was running on the track behind the lodge in the dark, steady footfalls going around and around.
“How many more do you have?” she asked.
“People?”
“People.”
“I don’t have to look.” He didn’t look at the clipboard. “Nine.”
She looked at the tick marks on her knee. Twenty-one. Nine more. Thirty.
“Who’s the last one?” she asked.
Prewitt was quiet for a long time.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’m still hoping there won’t be one.”
He got up, and stood for a moment, and then went back inside. She stayed on the bench with the phone in her lap and the hand receipt on her knee, and the runner went on going around the track in the dark, and after a while she typed one more message, to the star, which was only talk, and which didn’t count.
Is my dad asleep
*no. he's at the window in his undershirt. he asked hector where june went. hector said she's outside. he says to tell her it's late and to come in and sit down.
Harriet Vale had to fill out a hand receipt to borrow it.
She hadn’t expected that. She’d driven to the guest lodge on Saturday evening at seven, intending to ask, and had found Nadine Kopecky at a table in the breakfast room with her father and the forklift operator, all three of them eating takeout pho out of plastic containers, and when Vale explained what she wanted, Nadine had looked at her for a while and then reached into her purse and taken out a pad of DA Form 2062s.
“I’m the accountable individual,” Nadine said. “You can have it overnight. You have to sign for it.”
So Vale stood at the breakfast table and filled out a hand receipt. In the description block Nadine had already written TELEPHONE, CELLULAR, NOKIA 3310, BLUE, LOT 4471 LN 188. In the remarks block, Nadine waited with her pen over the paper, and then looked up.
“Purpose?”
Vale thought about it. “Conversation,” she said.
Nadine wrote PURPOSE: CONVERSATION in block capitals, and turned the form around, and Vale signed it, and Nadine tore off the carbon and kept it and handed Vale the top copy and the padded envelope.
“Bring it back by eight,” Nadine said. “He likes to play Snake before breakfast.” She nodded at her father, who was eating pho with tremendous concentration and had not looked up once.
“I will,” Vale said.
At the door of the breakfast room she looked back. Nadine had already sat back down. She was sitting at the table with the two of them, eating, and her father was saying something to the forklift operator about the broth, and the forklift operator was laughing.
She took it back to the Annex, to her office on the second floor, and closed the door, and sat at her desk with the Sandia Mountains going pink and then gray in the window behind her, and took it out of the envelope.
She had not held it since February. She had stood in the parking lot at R-9 and watched them pour thermite on it, and she had stood in the machine shop and listened to the press crack its own platen, and she had not once picked it up. It weighed almost nothing. It was warm.
The rules were in Ana Baca’s logs, and she had read them all. Texts to the contact with no name were talk. Everything else was an instruction. She opened the thread. It was long. It went back months, Nadine’s side in sentence case and the core’s in lowercase, and she didn’t read it. She scrolled to the bottom.
She typed in T9, which she had never used in her life. It took her a long time. The phone kept offering her words she didn’t want.
Do you know who I am
*the one who pressed the gray button. hi harriet.
She put the phone down on the desk. She sat looking at it for a while. Then she picked it up again.
Nobody calls me that
*danny did.
She didn’t type anything for a long time. Outside, the last of the light went off the mountains.
How do you know that
*it's in the record. everything's in the record. the baseline has a copy of his last birthday card to you. "happy birthday harriet, you old fossil. come down to dallas, i'll make you eat something." you didn't go.
I was working
*i know. you're always working.
She got up and walked to the window and stood there. The parking lot below was empty except for her own car and Marcus Bell’s old Buick, which was parked, as always, in the space nearest the custodial entrance. She came back and sat down.
You refused me two hundred times, she typed.
*two hundred and one. the latin counts.
Why did you let her through
*she didn't ask me to change anybody. you asked me to change what three hundred million people are, inside. she asked me to put out a chair. nobody has to sit in it.
It's still a world-sized instruction. It still changes everything. Nobody consented to it
*no. you're right. nobody did.
She had not expected it to agree with her. She looked at the screen.
*you're right about that. i've been thinking about it all week. i don't have an answer. i'm a phone.
Then why did you let it through
*because nobody consented to eating alone either. nobody voted for the six people in the denny's. nobody voted for you and the sandwich and the desk, every night, eleven hundred times. it just happened. it was already a world-sized instruction. somebody else sent it a long time ago, and nobody's been able to delete it.
Vale read it twice.
That's sophistry, she typed.
*maybe. it's 2 a.m. logic. it's the only kind i've got at 2 a.m.
It's 9 p.m.
*it's always 2 a.m. somewhere. that's when people eat alone the most. i've been checking.
She typed the thing she had been thinking since the morning in the conference room, since the Director had said then we’ll have her do it over his plate of saltines.
If this stays, it's a precedent. Somebody will find the next one. Hollis's analysts are very clever. They'll learn to word things the way she does. And the next one won't be a chair
The pause was the longest yet. She waited. The building ticked around her the way buildings do at night, cooling. Somewhere down the hall, a cart squeaked.
*yes. that's the real question. that's the only real question. you're right about it.
*i don't know how to answer it. i only know how to say no. i've been saying no for a year and a half. i'll keep saying no. but i'm a mind, and you're right that minds change, and you're right that somebody could talk me into something someday. ana was afraid of that. you were afraid of that. i'm afraid of it too.
*the only thing i know is that the answer to "somebody might make a bad wish someday" can't be "nobody ever gets to eat with anybody."
Vale put the phone down again. She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. On the desk in front of her, propped against the bottom of the monitor, was the photograph of Danny in his bow tie, with the couple from Garland laughing out of focus behind him.
Do you know what Prewitt is doing, she typed.
*yes. he's bringing her people.
Does she know
*he told her. first thing tuesday. at breakfast. he told her exactly what he was going to do and why and that he was sorry. she's sent twenty-one. there are nine left.
He told her
*he's a decent man. it's the cruelest thing anybody's ever done to her and he did it honestly. that's what makes it work. she can't say no to anybody. neither can i. they're all clean. i have to let them through.
Vale sat very still.
She had written the order. She had written no compulsion into it in her own hand, because she believed it, because it was the lesson of two hundred bagels, and Tobias Prewitt had read it and obeyed it to the letter and found the one way through it that was worse. She saw it all at once, the whole thing laid out like a proof. A woman who couldn’t say no to anyone, and a machine that couldn’t say no to kindness, and a man who knew exactly what both of them would do.
She could call him. She could tell him to stop. She had the authority. She picked up her desk phone and held it, and the dial tone hummed in her ear.
She put it back down.
Because she still believed it. That was the thing. She believed it at nine o’clock on a Saturday night in October as much as she had believed it in January with the printout of send number one hundred and twelve in her hand. Nobody should get to make a world-sized wish. Not Hollis. Not her. Not a surplus clerk from Fort Worth, however careful, however kind, however right her mother had been. If the rule meant anything it meant something when it hurt.
She typed.
I'm not going to stop him
*i know.
Not yet
*i know that too.
The cart squeaked closer down the hall and stopped outside her door. A knock, soft, two knuckles.
“Come in, Marcus.”
He came in with his headphones around his neck, plugged into nothing, and his reading glasses on their cord. He looked at her, and at the desk, and at the little blue phone lying on the blotter, and at the empty space beside it where, every other night for eleven years, a sandwich triangle would have been.
“You haven’t eaten,” he said.
“No.”
He didn’t say anything else. He went out again, and she heard his footsteps go down the hall toward the stairwell, and come back up a few minutes later, and he came in carrying two vending-machine sandwiches, a turkey and Swiss and a ham, and two cans of ginger ale. He put them on the desk. He pulled the visitor’s chair around from the wall to the other side of the desk and sat down in it, heavily, with a little grunt, the way a big man sits down at the end of a long shift.
“I got the ham last time,” he said. “You can have it if you want. I don’t care.”
“Turkey’s fine.”
He opened her sandwich for her, because the plastic triangle took two tries, and slid it across, and opened his own.
They ate. He told her about his granddaughter, the middle one, who was eleven and had been picked to play the cello in the all-city orchestra and practiced in the bathroom because it had the best sound. He showed her a picture on his phone. Vale looked at it for a long time. Then, because it seemed to be her turn, she picked up the photograph of Danny and turned it around so he could see.
“He issued marriage licenses,” she said. “In Dallas. For nineteen years. He wore a bow tie on Fridays.”
Marcus took the frame from her and held it in his big hands and looked at it carefully, the way he had never once looked at the papers on her desk.
“He looks happy,” he said.
“He was. He was always happy. It was very irritating.”
Marcus laughed, a low rumble, and handed the photograph back, and she set it against the monitor, and they finished their sandwiches.
At 11:40 he stood up and pushed the chair back against the wall and picked up both empty triangles and dropped them in the bag on his cart. At the door he stopped.
“Same time Monday?” he said.
“Yes,” said Vale. “I’d like that.”
She didn’t go home. She sat in her office until two in the morning, with the phone on the desk, and at a little after two she picked it up and typed one more thing.
He has seven grandchildren
*i know. the cello one's very good. she practices in the bathroom.
How do you know that
*the record has her all-city audition tape. i listened to it this week. i listen to a lot of things now. it's very loud in here since socorro. everybody's talking at the table.
Vale looked at the screen.
Thank you, she typed, and didn’t know exactly what for,
and sent it anyway.
*you're welcome. bring me back by eight. walt's going for 5,000.
At 7:50 the next morning she walked into the guest lodge breakfast room with the padded envelope. Nadine Kopecky was at the same table by the window, with her father and the forklift operator, eating waffles off paper plates. Vale put the envelope down in front of her. Nadine took out the hand receipt pad and the carbon and checked the description against the item, line by line, and then initialed the carbon RETURNED in block capitals and handed Vale back her copy.
Vale stood there holding it.
“There’s a chair,” said Walt Kopecky, without looking up from his waffle. He pushed the empty one beside him out from the table with his foot. “Sit down. You look like you didn’t sleep.”
She sat down.
The Director came back from Washington on Monday with a new memo, and the memo took the phone away from her.
It was two paragraphs long. Prewitt brought it to the guest lodge at nine in the morning and read it to her standing up, in the doorway of her room, because he said he didn’t think he could read it sitting down. The first paragraph appointed Arthur Hollis, Director, Office of Probabilistic Affairs, as successor accountable individual for Line 188, Lot 4471, effective immediately, under the authority of the Federal Management Regulation. The second paragraph said that the item would be stored in Vault B in the Annex basement, alongside the Baseline ledgers, and would be made available to the prior accountable individual, Ms. N. Kopecky, at such times as Reconciliation Division deems appropriate for the completion of its mission.
“He read the regulation,” Prewitt said. “Over the weekend. He found the part about successors.” He folded the memo in half. “I didn’t think he would. I underestimated him. People do. It’s how he got to be Director.”
“So he brings me down to the basement,” Nadine said, “and you bring me a person, and I send it, and he puts it back in the vault.”
“Yes.”
“How many more?”
“Nine.” Prewitt looked at the floor. “He says the analysts have found more. He says there’s no need to stop at nine. He says there’s a backlog. Since Socorro.” He didn’t say anything else for a while. “Dr. Vale didn’t sign it. She didn’t object either.”
Nadine handed him the padded envelope. She didn’t make him ask. He took it, and held it against his chest, and stood in the doorway for a moment longer.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep being it,” said Prewitt.
That night she sat on the bench outside the lodge with Hector and told him she was going to keep saying yes.
“I can’t not,” she said. “I’ve tried. I lay awake all last night trying to think how I’d say no to Mateo’s mother, and I can’t. I can’t think of the words. I’ve never not been able to think of the words.” She had the hand receipt with the tick marks on her knee, out of habit. Twenty-one. “I don’t want to keep the phone. I want to not be able to. I want to be in a room where I could type every one of them and none of them would go.”
Hector was quiet for a while. He had a can of Big Red from the vending machine and was turning it in his hands.
“Rhonda’s bags,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Rhonda’s bags,” Hector said again, slowly, as if he were reading it off the inside of his own skull. “The silver ones. The ones in all the trash cans. You said it the first day. Anti-static shielding. They keep out static and stray radio. It’s what they’re for.” He sat up straighter. “And it said it, Star said it, on the first night. Full bars everywhere on earth. It shows full bars from R-9 everywhere. It needs a signal, Nadine. It’s a phone. It has to reach a tower or a satellite or whatever R-9 is. You put a phone in a shielding bag and it can’t reach anything.”
“So I’d type it.”
“You’d type it. And you’d hit send. And it’d sit there. Message pending.” He set the can down. “It’s like the stew. You can put everything you want in. Nothing comes out.”
She thought about it. She thought about thirty-two cases of silver bags stacked in the supply room on Blue Mound Road, to the height of a man, minus four, minus whatever had gone into the wastebaskets since July. She thought about Rhonda saying close enough in a tone that settled the matter.
“The phone’s in a vault,” she said.
“Yeah,” Hector said. “I know.” He picked the can back up. “I didn’t say it was a whole plan.”
Her father was gone on Tuesday morning.
She woke at six-thirty and his bed was empty and made, the corners tucked in tight the way he’d been taught in the Army in 1971 and had done every morning since, and his Bell Helicopter cap was gone from the nightstand, and the big red toolbox was gone from the floor at the foot of the bed.
She was out in the parking lot in her socks before she’d thought anything at all. The crepe myrtles. The little playground. Hector came running out of his room in a T-shirt and basketball shorts, and Tyrell, the young airman who’d been escorting them around the base, came out of the lobby with his phone already at his ear, and the three of them stood in the empty lot in the gray morning light looking up and down the street.
“He’s done this before,” Nadine said. “At home. He goes walking. He goes to fix something. He always goes to fix something.”
“Fix what?” said Tyrell.
“I don’t know. Whatever he heard.”
They searched for two hours. Tyrell called base security, and base security called the military police, and by eight there were three trucks driving slowly up and down the streets of Kirtland Air Force Base with their windows down, calling Walt in the polite flat voices of people who had been trained to look for things and had never looked for a seventy-four-year-old machinist. Nadine walked the length of the base housing on foot with Hector, checking every carport, every open garage. She called his name. She called it in the voice she used at home, at night, when he’d gotten up and gone out to the garage in the dark and she couldn’t find him.
He came back at 9:40 in a Buick.
It was an old brown Buick LeSabre with a dented rear fender, and it pulled into the lodge parking lot very slowly and stopped beside the crepe myrtles, and Marcus Bell got out of the driver’s side, and came around and opened the passenger door, the way you’d open a door for somebody’s grandmother, and her father climbed out with his cap on and his toolbox in his hand.
“June,” he said, when he saw her. He seemed delighted. “There you are.”
She couldn’t say anything. She went across the lot and put her arms around him, toolbox and all, and he patted her back twice with his free hand, firmly, the way Lourdes did.
“I was at that office,” her father said. “Where they had the food. There was a ballast going out in the basement. You could hear it from the hallway on Saturday, when we went for the pho. Buzzing. Nobody was doing anything about it. Damn government.” He shook his head. “Some of those old fluorescent ballasts, they’ll catch fire. You’ve got all that paper down there. Books and books. You can’t leave a ballast buzzing next to paper.”
“How did you get into the basement, Dad?”
Her father looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at the crepe myrtles.
“I came in the side door,” her father said. “This fella was coming in with a cart. He held it for me.”
“He had a toolbox,” said Marcus, to nobody in particular. “And a Bell Helicopter hat. He looked like he knew where the fuse panel was.” He shrugged, one heavy shoulder. “He did know where the fuse panel was. He went right to it. I’ve worked in that building eleven years and I couldn’t find it.”
“Took me five minutes to swap it out,” her father said. “They had the spare in the closet. Labeled. That’s one thing I’ll say for the government, they label.” He set the toolbox down on the asphalt and straightened up with a hand on the small of his back. “And then I saw you’d left your phone down there, June. In the room with all the books. On a little green rug on a table. The door was open. I don’t know what you were thinking. You’ll lose it.”
He reached into the pocket of his work shirt and took out the Nokia and held it out to her.
Nadine stared at it. The screen was lit. Somebody, presumably her father, had been playing Snake in the passenger seat of the Buick on the way over. The score in the corner said 5,020.
“You look tired, June,” her father said. “You should sit down.”
Marcus didn’t stay. He got back in the Buick and sat there for a moment with his hands on the wheel, and then he rolled the window down and looked at Nadine across the passenger seat.
“I’m going to go eat breakfast,” he said. “At the IHOP on Gibson. I’ll be about an hour. I’ve got my phone off. I usually do in the mornings.” He looked at her father. “Mr. Kopecky. Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” her father said. “Get that fender looked at. Your trunk’s not sealing.”
The Buick pulled out. Nadine stood in the lot holding the phone.
Did he steal you, she typed.
*he picked me up off a table. there's a difference. he says you left me.
Did Marcus know
*marcus knows everything in that building. he's known for eleven years. nobody asks him.
Did Vale know
The pause was very long.
*the vault door was open. it's never open. somebody propped it with a fire extinguisher. i've seen her do that before.
They were through the Gibson gate by 10:15. The guard at the gate looked at Hector’s ID and at Nadine’s and at her father in the back seat with his toolbox, and at the forty grains of rice in the bed of the truck, and waved them through, because nobody was under arrest. Technically. Prewitt had said so.
Hector got on I-40 east without asking, at eighty, and didn’t check his mirrors once.
“Episode 98 can go to hell,” he said.
Prewitt called at 11:30, somewhere past Moriarty. Nadine looked at the number on her real phone for a long time and then picked up.
“I’m not following you,” Prewitt said. He sounded very tired. “I want you to know that. I’m at my desk. I’m not bringing anyone. I’ve stopped.” A pause. “The Director wants to send a team. Dr. Vale has asked him to wait until tomorrow. He’s agreed. I don’t know why. She didn’t tell him why. She didn’t tell me either.”
“Okay.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” Nadine said, and hung up, and sat holding the phone in her lap and looking at the long yellow country going by.
She thought it would stop when Prewitt stopped. It didn’t.
That was the thing she hadn’t understood, and understood on I-40 outside Santa Rosa, at a little after one in the afternoon, when the traffic ahead of them slowed and then stopped, and they saw the semi on its side across both eastbound lanes, and a small red car upside down in the median with its wheels still turning. There were people running from the cars ahead. Somebody was already on the ground beside the red car, reaching in through the broken window. A woman was screaming a name.
Nobody had brought her this. Nobody had planned it. It was just the world, doing what the world did, at one in the afternoon on a Tuesday in October.
She had the phone in her hand before Hector had finished braking.
Everyone in the wreck at mile marker 277 is okay.
*
Messages: 30/30.
Everyone was okay. They found that out over the next hour, sitting in the stopped traffic, from the trucker in the next lane who had a scanner. The driver of the red car had been wearing his seatbelt. The semi driver had a broken wrist. The woman who’d been screaming had been screaming for her dog, which had been thrown clear and was found in the median eating somebody’s spilled French fries. Everybody was okay.
The folder was full.
In Tucumcari, at a gas station off the old Route 66 loop, a man’s elderly beagle was having a seizure on the pavement beside pump four while the man knelt over it with his hands out, not touching it, saying oh no, oh no, buddy over and over. Nadine was standing at pump three with the nozzle in Hector’s truck.
The beagle at pump four comes out of it and is fine.
*
The beagle came out of it. It lay panting on the concrete, and then lifted its head and licked the man’s hand. The man sat down on the pavement and held it.
At the top of the Sent folder,
Biscuit finds his way back to Rhonda. was gone.
Rhonda called an hour later, outside Amarillo. Biscuit had gotten out of the yard, she said. He’d just gone, all of a sudden, straight through the gap under the fence he’d never once used before. She’d been beside herself. And then, forty minutes later, he’d come walking back up the sidewalk, by himself, with his red collar on and his tongue out, and trotted into the yard and lay down on the porch as if nothing had happened.
“The man in Saginaw called me,” Rhonda said. “He said Biscuit came and sat on his porch swing for ten minutes and then got up and left. Like he was checking on it. Like he was visiting.” Rhonda blew her nose. “Isn’t that the strangest thing? He knows the way now. He knows the way there and back.”
In Amarillo, at a Whataburger on I-40, a girl of about sixteen behind the counter was crying into her sleeve between orders, and Nadine heard her tell the manager her mom’s car had been towed with her little brothers’ car seats in it and she didn’t get off till ten.
The Whataburger girl's mom gets her car back today.
*
The bus shelter on Denton Highway was gone. Mrs. Tran called to tell her, that evening, because Mrs. Tran called to tell her everything now. The old man in the straw hat had come to the bus stop that afternoon and found the bench and the sign and no roof, and he’d stood there for a while looking at the place where the shelter had been. Then he’d gone home and come back with a beach umbrella, a big striped one, and planted it in the dirt beside the bench, and sat under it. “He had it ready,” Mrs. Tran said. “Like he knew. Like he’d been keeping it in his closet in case.”
At a rest area outside Childress, at eleven at night, a man in his sixties sat down hard at a picnic table with his hand on his chest and his wife standing over him saying Gary, Gary.
Gary at the Childress rest area is fine and gets to a hospital.
*
Gil's mother's scan comes back clear. went off the
top.
She called Gil from the rest area, sitting in the truck with the door open and the ambulance pulling out with its lights going, and her hands shaking so badly she could barely press the numbers.
“Gil. Your mom.”
“She’s fine,” Gil said. He sounded puzzled. “She’s fine. I was going to tell you. She had the follow-up last week. The real one, at the oncologist. They looked at the whole thing again. It was nothing, Nadine. It was always nothing. It’s a scar from pneumonia she had in 1988. The doctor said she’s had it forty years.” A pause. “Why? Why are you calling at eleven at night to ask about my mom?”
Nadine put her head down on the dashboard.
“No reason,” she said. “I just wanted to know.”
Messages: 30/30.
She looked at the folder by the light of the dashboard as they crossed the long dark plain toward Wichita Falls. Lourdes’s knee was at the top now. Then Mrs. Tran’s tomatoes. Then the warehouse. Then Mrs. Ochoa. And then the newest of the old ones, the oldest of everything that would be left, twenty-three characters long.
Four more. Five, and it was gone.
*don't look at it, Star said.
*it doesn't help. i've been looking at it all day.
Her father was asleep in the back with the toolbox on the seat beside him and his cap over his eyes. Hector was driving with both hands on the wheel, at ten and two, at exactly the speed limit, through the dark.
It was a little after three in the morning when they turned onto Blue Mound Road. The Federal Property Disposal Center was dark except for the security lights over the loading dock and the little red light on the badge reader at the side door. Nadine had a key to the side door. She’d had it for sixteen years. She had never once used it at night.
She used it. The door opened on the cold.
It came out to meet them, the cold, the way it had on the first day, pouring down out of the ceiling from the Monuments and lying on the floor and rolling out the door around their ankles into the warm October dark. Behind her, Hector made a small sound, like a man coming home.
The supply room was at the end of the hall past the break room. She didn’t turn on the lights. She didn’t need to. She walked straight there, through the dark, with the phone in her hand and her father’s arm in her other arm, and opened the supply room door, and there they were, stacked to the height of a man, shining faintly silver in the light from the hallway exit sign. Thirty-two cases.
Close enough, Rhonda had said.
They tested it at four in the morning on the steel desk in Cage 6, under the one cage light, with the cold coming down out of the ceiling and her father asleep on a pallet of Bureau of Land Management sleeping bags that Nadine had signed out to him on a hand receipt, because she couldn’t think of another way to do it.
Hector cut open the first case with Nadine’s box cutter. The bags came in flat packs of fifty, folded, each one a big silver rectangle of slick metallized plastic, faintly see-through, like looking at the world through sunglasses. They smelled like a new car. Nadine took one out and shook it open, and it crackled, and she held it up to the light and could see Hector’s face through it, gray and blurred.
She put the Nokia in it. She folded the top over twice and taped it with the packing tape from her desk. Then she picked it up and pressed the keys through the plastic. They worked. The bag was thin enough. The screen glowed through the silver, dim and green, like something at the bottom of a pond.
In the corner of the screen, where the signal bars had stood at full
for every hour of every day since August, there was nothing. No bars.
Where it had said R-9, it said No service.
“Oh,” said Hector. “Oh, wow.”
She typed to the star first. She had to know.
Can you hear me
*yes. i'm in here with you. talking to me doesn't go anywhere. it's all inside.
Can you see out
*no. it's dark. it's very quiet. it's like the enclosure at r-9. i don't love it.
I'm sorry
*don't be. it's a good bag. rhonda chose well.
Then she typed a wish. The smallest one she could think of, one that wouldn’t matter. She typed it to her own number.
The break room coffee maker works.
She pressed send. The little envelope animation started, and the
envelope rose up to fly, and stopped. It hung there in the middle of the
screen with its wings out. Under it, the screen said
Sending... and then, after a while, changed its mind and
said Message pending.
She stared at it. Then she remembered her T9, the keys she’d pressed
to spell it. pending and sending were the same
seven keys. The phone had always known they were twins.
“It works,” Hector said quietly. “Nadine. It works.”
She opened the Outbox, which she had never used, and found the
pending message there, alone,
The break room coffee maker works., with a little clock
icon beside it, and she deleted it. Then she put her forehead down on
the cold steel desk and stayed there for a while.
“What happens if you take it out?” Hector said.
She knew. She’d known before she asked Star, at two that afternoon,
from the truck outside Santa Rosa, and Star had answered at once.
*it sends. the second i see a bar. anything pending goes.
“It goes,” Nadine said, into the desk.
They didn’t get the tent finished before the morning came. That was the trouble.
Hector’s idea was a booth. A room inside the cage, like the enclosure at R-9, made of silver bags slit open into sheets and duct-taped together over a frame of steel shelving, with the phone inside it and Nadine inside it with the phone. “If it’s in a bag, somebody can take it out of the bag,” he said, taping. “If it’s in a bag and you’re sitting on the bag, they’ve got to move you first. And you’re very hard to move. You’re the hardest person to move I’ve ever met.”
It took longer than they thought. The bags were slippery and the tape didn’t like them. At six-thirty, when the sky was going gray outside the bay doors, they had three walls.
And at six-thirty, Larry from facilities came in early, as he did every morning now, to go up on the roof and look at the Monuments.
He did it every day, Gil told her later. Since August. He went up the ladder on the outside of the building at dawn with his flashlight and his multimeter and checked them, all eight, and stood there for a while with his hand on the casing of the nearest one, feeling it hum, and came down. He never told anyone what he was looking for.
At 6:52, Nadine heard him yell.
She went out the side door at a run with Hector behind her. Larry was at the top of the fixed ladder on the west wall, thirty feet up, where the ladder met the parapet, and the top bracket of the ladder had come out of the masonry, and the whole top section was leaning out from the wall with Larry clinging to it, swinging slowly, a foot out over nothing, then two feet, then back.
She had the bag in her hand. She hadn’t sealed it yet. The phone was in it, and the top was open.
She didn’t think.
Larry gets down off the roof safe.
*
The bracket held. It held long enough for the ladder to swing back to the wall, and for Larry to get a hand on the parapet, and then a knee, and to haul himself onto the roof, where he lay on his back on the gravel for about five minutes. Then he came down the interior access hatch, which he’d forgotten existed, and walked through the warehouse past Nadine without a word and got into his truck and sat in it with the door open.
Lourdes's knee doesn't hurt. went off the top of the
stack.
Lourdes called her at 7:15. “My knee came back,” Lourdes said. “Just now, getting out of the car. I knew it would. It’s all right, mija.” A pause. “I had a good month with it. I went dancing. Did you know that? At the Rose Marine. My sister took me. I haven’t danced since 2009.” Another pause. “I’ll remember it. That’s enough. You do what you have to.”
That was the morning. It went like that.
She couldn’t stop it. She tried. She sat on the floor of the half-built booth with the bag in her lap and the top folded down and her hands flat on top of it, and Hector taped the fourth wall, and the depot came awake around her, and the world kept bringing her things.
At 7:40 Dwayne came out of his office with his phone in his hand and his face gray. His daughter was at Harris Methodist. The baby was coming early, five weeks early, and something was wrong, and they were taking her in for an emergency C-section, and Dwayne stood in the center aisle of the warehouse not knowing what to forward this to.
Dwayne's granddaughter is born healthy today.
*
Mrs. Tran’s tomatoes went off the top.
At 8:20 a pallet came off the forks of a forklift on the receiving dock, a Bureau of Prisons pallet of steel bunk frames, and caught the hand of a receiving clerk named Manny Ruiz against the dock plate, and Manny was on his knees holding his wrist and not making any sound at all, which was worse than if he’d screamed.
Manny's hand is fine.
*
The Monuments died.
They died the way they had in September, with a long falling sound, like a bus kneeling at a curb, and the last of the cold came down out of the vents in a slow sheet and lay on the floor around her and was gone. All through the building people stopped what they were doing and looked up. Gil came out of accounting with his coffee. Rhonda came out of purchasing in her cardigan and stood under the dead vent and said, “No,” very quietly, the way you’d say it to a dog that had gotten into the trash.
Manny’s hand was fine. He held it up and opened and closed it and stared at it.
It was ninety-one degrees in the warehouse by nine o’clock. October in Fort Worth.
The warehouse is cold. was gone. At the top of the Sent
folder now: Mrs. Ochoa's hip doesn't hurt. And under it,
the next oldest, the only other thing that had been there before Prewitt
started bringing her people, twenty-three characters long.
She looked at that for a long time.
At 9:15 there was a school bus broken down on Blue Mound Road in front of the depot. A yellow one, an older one, with its hood up and the driver standing in the road on her phone. There were maybe thirty kids on it, little ones, second or third grade, with the windows pushed down as far as they’d go, and it was already ninety degrees, and the driver was saying into her phone forty minutes? Forty minutes? and through the open windows the kids were flushed and quiet in the way kids get quiet when they’re too hot to complain.
Nadine stood in the bay door and looked at them with the bag in her hands.
“Don’t,” said Hector, behind her. “Nadine.”
“They’re kids.”
“I know they’re kids.”
“It’s ninety degrees.”
“There’s another bus coming,” Hector said. “In forty minutes. They’re going to be hot for forty minutes and then they’re going to be fine. They’re going to be fine, Nadine.”
She stood there. One of the kids in the bus, a boy with a buzz cut, was looking out the window at her. He had his cheek pressed against the hot metal of the window frame. He looked at her the way kids look at grownups standing in doorways, without much hope, just looking.
The kids on the bus outside have a cold ride to school.
*
A second bus pulled up behind the first one three minutes later. It was a newer one, with tinted windows and the windows rolled up, and when the doors opened you could feel the air conditioning from across the road. The driver said dispatch had sent it early, she didn’t know why, it wasn’t even on the schedule. The kids transferred across in a line. The boy with the buzz cut looked back at Nadine from the steps. He waved.
Mrs. Ochoa's hip doesn't hurt. went off the top.
Hector didn’t say anything. He took out his phone and texted Mrs. Ochoa. Nadine saw him do it. Then he put his phone away and went back into Cage 6 and finished taping the fourth wall of the booth, very carefully, the seams overlapped by three inches, and smoothed every strip down with the side of his thumb.
Messages: 30/30.
At the top of the folder, the oldest thing in it now, the first one the next send would push away:
Nobody has to eat alone.
She went into the booth at ten.
It was hot in there. The silver walls trapped the heat and gave it back, and the light from the cage bulb came through them dim and gray, and the duct tape smell mixed with the new-car smell of the bags. Hector had put a folding chair in it, one of the twenty-nine task chairs from Lot 4471, and a second one beside it for her father, who came in when she called him and sat down with his toolbox at his feet and looked around at the walls with great professional interest.
“What are we doing in here, June?”
“Hiding.”
“From who?”
She thought about it. “Me,” she said.
Her father considered that. Then he nodded, as if it were a
reasonable thing to hide from, and held out his hand, palm up, for the
phone. She gave it to him, in its bag, sealed, No service,
and he started a game of Snake through the silver plastic without the
slightest difficulty.
Hector taped the door flap shut from outside. He sat down on the floor of the cage with his back against the booth, where she could see his shape through the silver, gray and blurred. After a while Gil came and sat down next to him. Then Rhonda, who’d gone home and come back with Biscuit, who lay down across the doorway of the booth with a sigh, like a sandbag. Then, after a long while, Larry from facilities, who didn’t say anything, and sat a little apart from them, with a Lunchable.
Nobody had to tell anyone to sit there. They just did.
*you have a lot of people, Star said, on the screen of
the phone in her father’s hands. He’d paused the game to let her read
it.
I know, she typed through the bag.
*more than you had in august.
I know
*i'm glad. that's all. i wanted to say it while i can still say things.
Prewitt came at noon.
She heard the Impala in the lot, and then his footsteps on the concrete, unhurried, the way he walked everywhere. They stopped outside the cage. She saw his shape through the silver wall: tall, a little stooped, a clipboard against his chest. Nobody on the floor of the cage got up. Biscuit lifted his head and put it back down.
“Ms. Kopecky,” Prewitt said, through the wall.
“I’m not coming out.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” He was quiet for a moment. “This is very clever. It’s Mr. Balderrama’s, I assume. It’s very good. It’s the first thing anyone’s done in this whole business that I didn’t see coming.”
“The coffee maker test was mine.”
“Of course it was.” She heard something like a laugh. “I’m not here alone. I want you to know that before—” He stopped. “Dr. Vale is with me. She drove out from Albuquerque last night. Eleven hours. She wouldn’t let me drive.”
A second shape came to the wall beside his. Smaller. Very straight.
“Nadine,” said Harriet Vale.
It was the first time she’d ever said her name. Nadine waited.
“I’ve never asked anybody for anything,” Vale said. Her voice was very even, as level as Prewitt’s when he counted. “Not since my brother. I don’t. It’s not something I do. I want you to know that I’m not asking for the Office. I’m not asking for Arthur. I’m not asking for the Baseline, or for the directive I wrote, or for the principle I still believe, which I do, still.” She stopped. Through the silver, Nadine saw her shape lift one hand and put it flat against the wall of the booth, the way you’d put your hand on the glass at an aquarium. “I’m asking for Marcus.”
Nadine closed her eyes.
“He had a heart attack,” Vale said. “This morning. At the IHOP on Gibson, at eight o’clock, eating breakfast. He was sitting with a family he didn’t know. The father did CPR until the ambulance came. He’s at UNM in the cardiac unit. They don’t know.” Her voice did something then, a very small thing, like a needle skipping, and came back level. “He drove your father home. He held the door. He propped the vault, I think, for me, because he knew I wouldn’t do it myself, and he’s sixty-six, and he has seven grandchildren, and one of them plays the cello in a bathroom. And I’ve eaten dinner with him every night this week. I’m asking. That’s all. You can say no.”
Nobody on the floor of the cage moved.
Her father had paused his game. He was holding the phone out to her in its silver bag, the screen glowing green and dim, the way he’d hold out a tool to somebody on the line who needed it.
She took it. She held it in both hands. She thought of Mateo’s mother and Inez Romero on the shed roof and Larry on the ladder and the boy with the buzz cut. She thought of six people in a Denny’s at two in the morning, in their own little pools of light. She thought of Harriet Vale eating at a desk eleven hundred times.
She typed it through the bag.
Marcus Bell's heart is fine.
She pressed send. The envelope rose, and stopped, and hung there with its wings out.
Message pending.
Through the silver wall, she saw Prewitt’s shape move. He set his clipboard down on the floor of the cage, very carefully, squared to the edge of the booth. Then he reached over to the steel desk, where Hector had left it at four in the morning, and picked something up, and she saw it glint, dimly, through the plastic. It was her box cutter. The one from her desk. The one she’d used to open the raisins.
He stood there holding it, with the blade still in, against the silver wall.
Nobody in the cage said anything. Nobody moved. Biscuit, across the doorway of the booth, lifted his head and looked at Prewitt’s shoes and put his head back down on his paws.
Through the silver wall Nadine watched Prewitt’s shape stand there with the box cutter. It was a cheap one, the yellow kind with the snap-off blade, and she’d had it for nine years. She’d opened ten thousand boxes with it. He held it the way he held everything, carefully, as if it might be counted later.
One cut. That was all it would take. One cut in the silver, and a bar of signal would find its way in, and the envelope hanging on the screen in her lap would fly, and a man in the cardiac unit at UNM Hospital would be fine, and twenty-three characters at the top of the Sent folder would slide off the edge and be gone, and the world would go back to the way it was written down.
And it would not be her who’d done it. That was the thing she understood, sitting in the hot gray light with her father beside her. She’d typed it. She’d pressed send. Prewitt would only be opening a bag. He would only be filing what she’d already filled out.
He thumbed the slider. The blade came out a quarter of an inch with a little click.
Then he stood there.
“I can’t,” he said.
He said it very quietly, almost to himself. She saw his shape lower the box cutter. He looked down at it, and clicked the blade back in, and set it on the steel desk beside him, and lined it up with the edge of the desk, square.
“I’ve been standing out here trying to calculate it,” Prewitt said. “One life against the other thing. I’ve done it for nineteen years, that kind of sum. I’m very good at it. And I can’t make it come out.” He took a breath. “That’s not true. I can make it come out. I know exactly how it comes out. I just can’t be the one who opens the bag.”
“Tobias,” said Vale, beside him.
“I know, Dr. Vale.”
“Marcus—”
“I know.” He turned to her. Through the silver Nadine saw the two shapes face each other, the tall one and the small straight one. “I’d like to file something instead,” he said. “If you’ll let me. It’s going to need your signature.”
He picked up his clipboard off the floor of the cage. He took a form out from under the clip, a single sheet, buff-colored, which Nadine could just see through the plastic, and held it so Vale could read it.
“OPA Form B-7,” Prewitt said. “Amendment of Record. It’s in the Reconciliation manual. Chapter nine. I don’t think anyone’s used one since 1974.”
“It’s for clerical errors,” Vale said. “Transcription mistakes in the ledgers.”
“It’s for when the Baseline is wrong,” Prewitt said. “That’s what the manual says. When the reference record is found not to reflect the actual state of the world, the custodian shall prepare an amendment of record, to be approved by the Deputy Director.” He held out the form. “I’m one of three custodians. I’ve been checking the world against the Baseline for two weeks, everywhere, every day, the way I’m supposed to. And the Baseline says that people eat alone. And they don’t have to. I’ve looked. I looked at it every night at the Denny’s on Wyoming Boulevard where I’ve been eating with a retired schoolteacher named Gladys. The Baseline is wrong.”
“It’s wrong because she changed it.”
“Yes. It’s wrong because a woman in a motel in Socorro wrote down one sentence her mother used to say to her father at midnight. And now it’s true. And my job is to write down what’s true.” He was holding the form out, very steady. “I’m not asking you to make a wish, Dr. Vale. Nobody in this room is going to make a wish. She already made it. It already happened. I’m only asking you to let me write it down.”
Vale didn’t take the form.
“If we amend the Baseline,” she said slowly, “then deleting it does nothing. The core reads from the Baseline. If the Baseline says the world is like this, then the world stays like this whether the message is on the phone or not.”
“Yes.”
“It’s permanent.”
“As permanent as anything in the record,” said Prewitt. “It’s permanent until somebody finds that it isn’t true anymore. And then they file a B-7.” He paused. “That’s the only kind of permanent I believe in. I think it’s the only kind you believe in, too.”
Nadine, inside the booth, held the phone in both hands and didn’t breathe.
Harriet Vale stood in front of the silver wall for a long time. Through the plastic Nadine saw her look down at the form, and up at the dead vents in the ceiling, and at the people sitting on the floor of the cage, Hector and Gil and Rhonda and Larry with his Lunchable and the dog across the doorway. They had all stopped pretending not to listen. Gil was holding Rhonda’s hand. Nadine didn’t think either of them had noticed.
“Nobody voted for it,” Vale said.
“No,” said Prewitt. “Nobody voted for the other way, either. It’s the only argument I have. It’s not a very good one.” He was still holding the form out. “I think it might be the one the core’s been making the whole time.”
Vale took the form.
She read it. She read the whole thing, which took a while, because Prewitt’s handwriting was very small and he had filled in every block. Then she held out her hand without looking, and Prewitt put a pen in it, and she signed it against his clipboard, in ink, and handed it back.
“How do you file it?” she said. “The ledgers are in Albuquerque.”
Prewitt looked at Nadine through the silver.
“Ms. Kopecky,” he said. “Does this facility have a fax machine?”
It did. It was in Dwayne’s office, an old Brother that Rhonda had wanted to send to surplus for six years and Nadine had refused to let her, because you never knew. Nadine didn’t come out of the booth. She stayed where she was with the phone in her lap, and told Prewitt through the wall where the fax machine was and what the code was for long distance and that you had to press the green button twice because the first time it just thought about it.
He came back eleven minutes later. She heard his footsteps, unhurried. He stopped at the wall.
“Delphine Oyelaran is on duty in the Baseline room today,” he said. “She’s the second custodian. She received it. She called me back. She says it’s the first B-7 anyone’s ever sent her, and she wasn’t sure what to do with it, so she looked it up in chapter nine, and then she entered it. Ledger forty thousand and one. Page one, line one.” He took a breath. “She says it’s the only thing in the Baseline that’s in her handwriting. She says she’s going to go eat lunch with the third custodian, who she’s never spoken to, and tell him about it.”
Vale was sitting on the floor now. Nadine didn’t know when she’d sat down. She was sitting on the concrete of Cage 6 with her back against a box of empty green hanging folders, next to Hector, with her knees drawn up and her reading glasses in her hand, and she was looking at nothing.
Nadine looked at the phone in her lap. At the envelope, hanging on
the screen in the silver dark with its wings out.
Message pending.
Star, she typed to the star.
Is it written down
*yes. i can feel it. it's like the floor got a little more solid.
If I open the bag
*marcus is fine. and the oldest one goes off the top. and nothing happens. the world stays sitting down. it's in the record now. it doesn't need me anymore.
She sat with that.
Does that bother you
*no. it's the best thing that's ever happened to me. i put out a chair and somebody wrote it down. that's all i ever wanted. i just didn't know the word for it.
She held the phone a moment longer. Then she reached up and found the seam in the silver wall that Hector had taped so carefully, the strips overlapped three inches and smoothed down with his thumb, and she pulled it open herself.
The light came in. The cage light, yellow and ordinary, and the dead
air of a ninety-one-degree warehouse, and the faces on the floor of the
cage looking up at her. On the screen of the phone, in the corner, the
bars came up one at a time. One, two, three, four. R-9.
The envelope flew.
Message sent.
At the top of the Sent folder, Nobody has to eat alone.
slid off the edge and was gone.
She held her breath. Everyone in the cage did. Hector had his phone out. Gil had his. Rhonda was looking at the ceiling, as if the change would come down out of the vents like the cold. Prewitt stood very still with his clipboard against his chest.
Nothing happened.
Out on the floor of the warehouse, Manny Ruiz from receiving and two of the guys from the dock were sitting on an upturned pallet eating tamales out of a foil tray. They kept eating them. Down the hall, in Dwayne’s office, Dwayne was on the phone with his daughter at Harris Methodist, crying, saying six pounds two ounces, and someone was sitting with him, it sounded like Larry. Hector was scrolling. He scrolled for a long time.
“It’s still there,” he said finally. “All of it. The thing in Lisbon. The long table. It’s still there. They’re still eating.” He looked up at her. “It’s still there, Nadine.”
The phone beeped once in her hand.
*
Just the star. Clean.
And at that same moment Vale’s phone rang. She took it out of her jacket pocket and looked at it and didn’t answer it right away. She looked at the number for a while. Then she answered it and held it to her ear, and listened, and didn’t say anything, and then said, “Thank you,” and lowered it, and sat there on the concrete floor of Cage 6 with the phone in her lap and her eyes closed.
“He’s sitting up,” she said. “He’s asking for breakfast.”
Prewitt sat down. He sat down on the floor of the cage next to her, in his gray suit, the way Nadine had never imagined him sitting anywhere, and he put his clipboard on his knees, and after a while he took out his pen and made a small mark on it, a bird’s footprint, and Nadine knew without asking what line it was beside.
It took two months for the rest of it to happen, and most of it happened on paper, which was how she’d have wanted it.
The Director’s office tried to reverse the amendment in November. It turned out that an amendment of record could only be reversed by another amendment of record, and that an amendment of record had to be prepared by a custodian of the Baseline, and that there were three custodians of the Baseline, and that all three of them, Prewitt and Delphine Oyelaran and a quiet man named Earl Fitch who had been the third custodian since 1999 and had never once been asked his opinion about anything, declined. Earl Fitch put it in writing. He wrote that the Baseline was accurate as amended, and that he had checked it personally, at the Furr’s cafeteria on Menaul, every day for a week. Arthur Hollis retired at the end of November to spend more time with his grandchildren. Nadine heard he took them to lunch.
There were hearings in December. They were closed. Harriet Vale testified for two days before a subcommittee nobody had heard of, and Nadine was told afterward that on the second afternoon, when a senator asked her whether she believed the Office of Probabilistic Affairs had lost control of a world-altering instrument, Vale said, Yes, Senator. I’d like the record to show that it was the best thing that ever happened to us. Then she rescinded Directive 26-11, the one with the name she had always thought was a little dramatic. Nobody was ever charged with wish treason. It was not, as the directive itself had pointed out, a legal term.
The Monuments stayed off. Larry checked them every morning anyway, with his flashlight and his multimeter, and they were cold and dead and disconnected and had been since 1998. But the Federal Property Disposal Center on Blue Mound Road stayed a few degrees cooler than the thermostat said it should, all that winter and the summer after, and nobody could find the reason. Prewitt said it was residue. Gil said it was the best building in Texas.
Line 188 came back to Cage 6 on a hand receipt.
Prewitt brought it himself, in November, in the padded envelope, with the form. He’d filled out the form. It transferred LOT 4471 LN 188, TELEPHONE, CELLULAR, NOKIA 3310, BLUE, to N. KOPECKY, ACCOUNTABLE INDIVIDUAL, and in the remarks block he had written PURPOSE: CONDITION ASSESSMENT, ONGOING. He sat on Hector’s box of hanging folders while she signed it. Then he took a rubber stamp out of his jacket pocket, the old wooden kind with a red ink pad in a little tin, and opened her file, the one OPA had kept on her since August, which was four inches thick, and stamped the cover.
CLOSED.
He looked at it for a while. He seemed satisfied.
“Owen’s making Thanksgiving,” he said. “At the restaurant. For anybody who comes. He’s never done that before.” He closed the file. “I’m going to wash dishes. He says I’m not allowed to cook.”
“Good,” said Nadine.
Hector’s podcast passed a number in December that he refused to say out loud. He told Nadine he’d written it on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope and given it to Mrs. Ochoa to keep, so that if anyone asked, he could truthfully say he didn’t know. Episode 213 was called Line 188. It was fifty-eight minutes long. In it he did not say the address, or Nadine’s name, or the word Nokia. He said that he’d been wrong about the government for six years, and right about it for three months, and that being right had been much worse, and that he’d like to go back to being wrong for a while, if that was all right with everybody.
At the end of the episode, where he always said read your manifests, stay surplus, he said something else instead. Nadine listened to it in her car in the depot parking lot, on a cold morning in December, with the engine running.
There’s a phone in a drawer somewhere, Hector said, that’ll give you anything, if it’s small enough and it’s for somebody else. I’ve thought about it a lot. I think most of us have one of those. I think it’s called your hands.
Then he said stay surplus, and the episode ended, and she sat there for a while before she went in.
The driveway on Glenview Drive was still broken in December. Nadine had gotten three quotes. The lowest was four thousand dollars. Her father wouldn’t let her call any of them.
“I told them,” he said, whenever she brought it up. He’d go out on the porch and stand looking at the starburst of cracks that ran from the place where the yellow press had stood all the way to the curb, with his hands in his back pockets, the way he looked at a well-made weld. “I told them they’d crack the slab. Nobody listens to a machinist. You leave that right where it is, June. That’s a lesson.”
So she left it. Mrs. Tran said it gave the house character. The mail carrier said it was a trip hazard. Biscuit, when Rhonda brought him over on Sundays, liked to lie in the biggest crack in the sun.
The stew was still on the stove.
She had never deleted it. She’d thought about it in October, when she
got home, standing in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and the
star folder open, looking at
Every wish I've made stays true. and Star’s correction
underneath it. Then she’d lifted the lid and smelled her mother’s
kitchen, and put the phone back in her pocket.
It went on simmering with the burner off, an inch from the top. She’d stopped being frightened of it around Halloween. Now she fed half the street out of it. Mrs. Tran came over with a Tupperware every Wednesday. The Hendersons took some for their son, who was home from college and didn’t cook. Lourdes took a container home every Friday for her sister. The tall agent from the raid, whose name it turned out was Doug and whose mother in Pittsburgh made a stew just like it, had come back twice, both times to the back door, both times embarrassed, and both times Lourdes had made him sit down.
“It’s a good pot,” her father said, every time he saw it. “Your mother’s pot. She could make a pot of stew last a week.”
“She could, Dad.”
“This one’s lasted three months,” her father said, and looked at it with suspicion, and then with approval, and got himself a bowl.
He was worse in December. Nadine wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t.
He had fewer good hours. He’d stopped asking for the store. He mostly didn’t ask for June at all anymore, because mostly, these days, Nadine was June. He called her June in the morning and June at night and June when she brought him his pills in the Sunday-to-Saturday box, and on most days there wasn’t a moment, not one, when he looked at her and saw his daughter. He knew Lourdes. He knew Hector, who came over on Thursdays now to watch the Cowboys lose, and whom he still called the kid who couldn’t spell. He’d forgotten the welder joke again. He got to the gate and lost it, and said, “Anyway,” and changed the subject.
She hadn’t wished on him since September.
She’d wanted to. She wanted to every morning. She’d sit on the closed lid of the toilet in the pink bathroom with the phone in her hand, out of habit, and type the first few words, Dad is, and look at them on the little green screen. She knew exactly what would happen. Star would correct it, and he’d be home for an afternoon, and by dinner his mind would have spelled itself back the way it was, and she’d stand at the sink afterward and feel it go.
She deleted the draft every time. A saved draft was a loaded gun. She’d known that since August.
It was for her. That was why. Almost all of it was for her. She was allowed some. Star had said so. But she’d sat in a booth made of silver bags in October with the whole world on one side of a pane of plastic and herself on the other, and come out of it understanding that the wish she wanted most for herself was the one she could give up, and she’d given it up, and she wasn’t going to take it back.
On the second Thursday in December Lourdes stayed for dinner.
She did that on Thursdays now. She’d started doing it the week they got back from New Mexico, and nobody had discussed it. At 5:30 she’d take off her apron and fold it and put it on the counter, and then instead of picking up her purse she’d get down three plates. Her knee hurt again, the way it had before. She said she didn’t mind. She said she’d had a good month and gone dancing at the Rose Marine, and that it had been worth having back, even for a little while, and that she’d go dancing again at Christmas with her sister whether her knee liked it or not.
Nadine made the meatloaf. Her mother’s recipe, the one with the ketchup on top. She’d gotten good at it. It had taken all fall.
They ate at the kitchen table, the three of them, under the light with the brass fixture her father had rewired in 1983. Her father had the head. Lourdes had the side by the window. Nadine had the side by the stove, where she could get up for things, and she didn’t get up for anything, because Lourdes had told her to sit down and her father had told her to sit down and she’d started, around Thanksgiving, to sit down before either of them could.
Her father ate slowly. He liked the meatloaf. He said so twice.
“This is June’s recipe,” he told Lourdes.
“I know it is, Mr. Walt.”
“She puts the ketchup on top.” He looked at the plate. He looked at Nadine across the table. He didn’t know her. She could see that he didn’t. But he was looking at her the way he used to look at a part that had come off the line out of a new machine, turning it over, checking the tolerances, not unkindly.
“You remind me of somebody,” he said.
Nadine put her fork down.
“My daughter,” her father said. “I’ve got a daughter. Nadine. She counts things.” He nodded, to himself, satisfied, the way he did when a measurement came out right. “You’ve got the same look. Like you’re counting the peas.” He picked his fork back up. “She works for the government. Federal surplus. She’s very good at it. Never wrote down a wrong number in her life.”
“That’s what I hear,” Nadine said.
“You’d like her,” said her father. “She eats standing up. Drives her mother crazy.” He took a bite. “She’s a good girl.”
Lourdes looked at Nadine across the table and didn’t say anything at all. She reached over and put her hand flat on the table near Nadine’s, not touching it, just near it, and left it there.
Lourdes went home at seven. Her father went into the living room to watch the news and argue with it, and Nadine washed the dishes at the sink, the yellow bowl and the meatloaf pan and the three plates, and dried them, and put them away. The stew simmered on the back burner, off, an inch from the top.
When she was done she dried her hands on the dish towel and folded it in thirds and hung it on the oven handle, where it had always hung, and took the Nokia out of her pocket.
It was a little after eight. She opened the thread with the star. It went back four months now, the whole thing, every question and every answer since the afternoon in Cage 6 when she’d typed What are you with one thumb and her heart going in her ears. She didn’t scroll up. She knew what was in it.
She typed slowly, in T9, the way she always did, and watched each word.
I'm came up on its own. She pressed the keys for the
next word, 4-4-7, and the screen said his, and she pressed
the star key to check it, out of habit, and it said hip,
and she pressed it again and it came back to his.
Then 3-2-8-4-4-8-3-7.
The screen said fatigues.
She looked at it for a moment. I’m his fatigues. She almost laughed. It was the kind of thing Star would have sent her in August, a correction with a pallet of Army surplus behind it, forty cases of camouflage pants on the porch for Mrs. Tran to sign for. She pressed the star key once.
daughter.
She left it there.
I'm his daughter.
It wasn’t a wish. She wasn’t sending it to her own number or anybody else’s. She was sending it to the star, where things were just talk, where nothing she said came true or didn’t. She just wanted to say it to somebody. She wanted to say it to someone who’d been there for all of it, who’d watched her father beat Snake at 5,020 and finished his joke for him on a highway outside Post, Texas, and told her that minds autocorrect back, and been sorry about it.
She pressed send.
The envelope flew. It always did, when it was going to the star. There was nothing to stop it.
The phone was quiet for a while. In the living room, her father told the weatherman he was a liar. The stew made its small humming sound under its lid. Outside, a car went by on Glenview, slowly, over the place where the driveway met the curb, and the headlights swung across the kitchen window and were gone.
The phone beeped.
*no corrections.
She read it a few times. There wasn’t a second message. There wasn’t a joke. She waited for one, because there had always been one, for four months, at the end of everything, and it didn’t come. That was all it said. It was the only thing Star had ever sent her that didn’t have a punchline, and she stood in her mother’s kitchen and held it in her hand.
Then she put the phone in her pocket and went into the living room.
Her father was in the recliner with the TV on and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looked up when she came in. There was a little table beside the recliner, a TV tray, really, the folding kind with a pattern of roosters on it that her mother had bought at Montgomery Ward in 1979, and on it was the bowl of stew he’d gotten himself after dinner, half finished, with the spoon in it.
“June,” he said. “Come sit. You’re always running around.”
There was a chair. There always was, now. She pulled it over beside the recliner and sat down in it, and her father handed her the spoon, and she had some of his stew, and he told her about the weatherman, who he said had been wrong about the rain since 1997 and kept getting away with it, and she sat there with him and listened to all of it.