Chapter 3 What the panel read
The Bureau was just the type of building that made you feel as if you were asking for something that you didn't deserve.
Ethan was outside of it longer than he should have been. Three streets north of the steps was the transit junction that the man had indicated, and he found it easily enough, since that was the kind of building that announced itself; tall, deliberately imposing, the architecture of an institution that needed no excuse to anyone standing outside it to justify its own existence. There was some lighting at the entrance. There was a queue. Normal people doing a normal thing in a world not his, and he was on the pavement outside it, in a dead man's coat, with his hands not very steady, and no idea what he was walking into.
He went in anyway. There was no choice and he could not stand in the dark somewhere knowing someone with a yellow-green wristband was still out there.
The inside felt less human than the outside. The sound was distorted by high ceilings. Long counters with people that had been asked the same questions so many times that the questions had retired to the realm of fiction. The lighting was flat institutional that did not cast shadows giving any warmth or dimension to the space. Ethan was standing at the door and noticed the eyes of the people in line scanning his bare hands and moving on, and for the hundredth time since waking up, he realized how vulnerable he felt without understanding the rules of the place he was in.
He got in line.
He watched. It was the one thing he could do without learning anything new: it was the attention, and he could give that. He saw how they interacted with the counter staff, what they handed over and being given back. It was interesting to observe the wristbands and to attempt to decipher the hierarchy of color by observing the placement of individuals in relation to one another. Yellow bands were higher than white bands. Occasional green deferred to yellow. The counters' staff were deep blue and moved with the confidence of people who have never been around a counter on the asking side.
By the time he got to the front he had a clear picture of how things worked, he was about to ask for something and bare wrists in this building meant that he was at the bottom of whatever hierarchy there was for asking for things.
The woman at the counter looked at his wrists, before she looked at his face. Then she gazed at his face as though calculating.
"First registration?" she said.
"Yes," Ethan said. “Yes,” was going to be his response to everything until he got enough information to change his answer.
She led him along a corridor from the main hall. There a young man met him, efficient, the neutrality of one who has dealt with hundreds of first registrations and found them all uninteresting. She pointed to a black panel mounted on the wall, directing him there. Smooth and without features, about the size of a door. He directed him to flatten his palm and stop moving it.
Ethan pushed his hand against the panel.
It was warm. He was caught off-guard by that. It reached under his skin, in a way he felt but could not name, something without a physical name pulled in response, somewhere under his sternum the pressure that had been there since he awoke responded. A recognition. Two things becoming aware of each other.
He studied the man's face.
Thirty seconds passed. Her face was turned to her tablet as if that was something she was reading regularly. Then she stopped. The expression didn't drastically alter, she was trained to resist the dramatic expression, but the quality of her attention has changed, and when she changes it in a way that Ethan is looking for, he catches it. She examined the board. She glanced at her tablet. She pressed something and looked at the panel again.
Ethan asked "Is there a problem?”
She said “Please wait”.
People came. It was not dramatic, it's not hurried, but done quietly, like an institution doing something they never thought it would. The corridor emptied. Various staff members came in, glanced at the panel, glanced at him and went out. Nobody explained anything. There was no water, there was no chair, there was no basic courtesy of offering a man who was left standing in a corridor for six hours, no explanation.
He was exhausted. Not the usual fatigue of a long day or a poor night's sleep, but the tiredness of a man who was died and came back and now stood in a corridor, looking at something that the panel had read and making a decision that he wasn't part of, that his body had been exhausted and depleted, and come back to stand in the corridor. The trembling in his hands was not quite so large, it could be controlled if he pressed his hands onto his thighs, but it was there, under the shaking, it was there. There was that thing that came when he thought about the alley, the man who hadn't run, the forty-three dollars, the sister, the grief or shock or whatever it was — the grief or shock or whatever — that thing was still there, in his chest with the pressure of the panel, two things in the same space.
After 6 hours, a man came down the corridor.
He was a middle aged man. Well-dressed and silver haired, and a face that was set so many times that the setness was no special effort. His travels were made with the nonchalant assurance of a man who had never been put to the test for a second in his career. Sitting across from Ethan was a man who had arrived at some point during the six hours without Ethan noticing — and introduced himself as Director Harmon, with the tone of a man who expected the title to do much work in the room.
He informed Ethan, "The evaluation came back as inconclusive. It was sometimes with late one-awakeners," he said. He used the words provisional, secondary examination, and thirty days with the ease of someone reciting a decision that had already been made before he walked in. Ethan was sitting across from him, and he was listening and he was trying to determine what was being said under what was being said.
He wasn't very sharp. He knew that. It was difficult to be sharp after 6 hours and no sleep and the shock of having died. But he was watching Harmon's face as he had watched the technician's face, and what he saw in that one instant when Harmon looked him directly that first time when he walked in, when nothing else was going on in his body or his mind: that was something that he filed.
The word fear didn't fit. Harmon wasn't scared of Ethan. He was not afraid of the thing, but of the other thing: the thing that was different, the thing that was specific, and in less than a second, the calmness returned, like water over a stone.
It was now over, and there was only the smooth delivery and the thirty days and the provisional classification.
A staff member came to put the grey band on his wrist. Ethan looked down at it. Gray. The color of a thing which has not been classified into a category. He thought of a woman who had pulled her child away and the yellow-green bands which circled the street and knew, sitting in that corridor with a gray band on his wrist and six hours of deliberate silence behind him, that the category which he had not been assigned was not an accident.
Harmon was about to leave.
Ethan asked, "What does gray mean?”
Harmon paused. Turned. looked at him with the subtlety of a mature man considering whether or not he should give him a real answer. He said “it means unregistered until the secondary exam determines classification.”
If the secondary exam is the same as this one, Ethan said, "then...If the secondary exam comes up as the same,” Ethan said
There was something that flashed very quickly behind Harmon's eyes. “It would be unusual,” he said.
He left.
Ethan sat in the corridor by himself for a while. The dark panel on the wall was off, silent, offering no illumination. He glanced at the grey band. He examined his hands, which were now more certain than they had been, but not yet certain, and would not be still for a long time, and he was content. That was honest. A man who died Wednesday and came back to this city in a parallel universe on what seemed like the same Wednesday didn't have steady hands.
He stood up. He received a thin pamphlet of resources available in the outer district, and no other -- no housing, no guidance, no introduction to a world into which he did not choose to come. He came out of the Bureau and got on the street and began to breathe in the night air.
The gloomy band of gray light caught on the building's entrance on his wrist.
Harmon had been in fear of something. Not of Ethan. Of what Ethan was. Then, after 30 days, provisional classification, and a gray band, he had it laid to rest swiftly and efficiently, and with the seasoned confidence of a man who had done it before.
Ethan was still unaware of what he was yet. He didn't know what the panel had read or why it had taken six hours and what provisional really meant in a city that ranked its citizens by the light on their wrists. He was unaware of all this.
He recognized the expression though. That one instant where Harmon slipped — a man that practiced and composed, cracking for just a second. He had seen it before in all the landlords and supervisors, and all those who had looked him in the eye and found something that didn't fit and decided to make it smaller.
He was very tired of being made smaller.
He retrieved the pamphlet from his pocket, read it for a moment and replaced it. Then he began to walk, not to go anywhere, but because a gray band person in the dark of evening in front of the Bureau was the sort of stillness that attracted the wrong sort of attention.
He would lie down somewhere to sleep. He would stay alive for the whole night. Tomorrow he will see what he has landed in.
Do one thing at a time.
It was the only thing it had ever been. Take one step at a time.
