I WAS ON THE VERGE when the train pulled in at half past three. For hours I’d sat with my face pressed against the glass, fogging it with my breath through the day of graceless, nauseous rocking toward the north, then far to the east, and finally south. I was tired and queasy and had been punished severely for teaching my benchmate, a mere hour into our eleven-hour journey, the English phrase long-distance telephone at her pleading. She had practiced it ceaselessly, with torturous intention, as the world changed beyond the window, grew harsher, filthier, more—then less—industrial, as we passed through the city, suburbs, exurbs, countryside, and into the infinite steppe, well beyond the cessation of electrical poles and industry markers, until, at last, the station appeared in the distance. The people in my compartment began to stir, to collect their belongings from the overhead. My neighbor swallowed audibly, straightened her skirt, and looked at me. Long-distance telephone, long-distance telephone, long-distance telephone.
I was hopeful for myself, but not for her.
We disembarked. I stood to the side, away from the rest of the travelers, breathing the sandy air and waiting for the porter to emerge by the train’s sleek, streamlined beak. He appeared through a swirl of steam and got to work unloading suitcases onto the wooden platform. I let the others collect theirs first while I looked around. The station, an imposing concrete wave, stood in a bleak expanse of dry, green brush. The air was hot, the soil red clay, fine and dusty. The others from my compartment—businessmen and businesswomen in quickly dirtying suits or jumpsuits, wearing flats—found their way inside to make their calls. I waited until only one bag remained, figuring it had to be mine. I hadn’t been allowed to do the packing myself. I’d been supplied the bag.
Down the tracks by the rear of the train, people were still cascading from the second-class cars, dropping their valises and blinking into the sunshine, a mass of threadbare gray and brown coats groping for direction. Coats in this weather meant they weren’t traveling on a roundtrip ticket. Meant they were wearing everything they owned, for whatever contingencies life might thrust at them.
I wondered why I wasn’t among them. Why I’d been ticketed a first-class berth.
A short man in a pinstriped suit and vest stood by the station holding a white sign with my name on it. He had taken pains to add serifs to each letter. No one had ever held a sign for me before. I felt exposed and quickly flushed with sweat. I nodded at him, then took out a handkerchief and wiped my brow. I was a profuse sweater and forever embarrassed by it. The porter placed my duffel at my feet. I patted my pockets for a tip.
As the driver approached, I saw that the suit he wore was made of wool and that his socks were wool, too, visible beneath pant legs that had been hemmed too high. Wool in this weather. I felt bad for him, a man who had to sweat like me. I thought about taking a stand if they made me wear a uniform like that. I reminded myself that I had agreed to come here, that I had to stand by my decision. I chastised myself for complaining. But then again, is there really a decision if the alternative is simply intolerable?
He had puffy cheeks, the driver, and a thick eyebrow that wormed when he spoke, though he was handsome, if a little haggard. It wasn’t a stretch to picture him gulping down a stein of ale or wearing overalls on some stormy quay. I placed him in his fifties. His teeth were straight and bleached.
Though I tried to resist, the driver took my bag and placed it gently in the trunk of his car, a functional, sexless hybrid that had seen cleaner days. He then opened the back door for me, but I sidestepped him and went to climb into the passenger side in front. He rushed to open that door too, the two of us doing an awkward dance of decorum. He was intent on following the instructions of his position and I was intent on showing him that I wouldn’t be a burden. I sensed little room for improvisation in his life, even the kind of friendly corner-cutting a bureaucrat might do for a friend he sees in the back of the line. He introduced himself as Henry and apologized for the mess. Cassettes and maps and lighters and a gold-plated tire pressure gauge lay in the footwell. But no dust.
We pulled out of the station parking lot and joined up with the highway. In the side mirror, I glimpsed a few of the second-class passengers piling into a big, industrial van. I thought maybe they would be taken where I was being taken—but if that were the case, why no signs for them? I couldn’t shake the feeling that if it weren’t for some unfair advantage, I would have been among them. The hybrid struggled to catch up to cruising speed and cars overtook us viciously, each one sending our little car bobbing. Earth spread out on either side in a crenelated landscape, farms demarcated by rolling hills, grain elevators, water towers, windmills chopping air. It was easy to see from the elevated road the plan of the countryside, the towering housing blocks with curved balconies arranged in clusters around airy plazas, the brutalist municipal structures, the fountains and playgrounds and regional flags—architecture not so different from home. Stunning to see so many people at once, or the evidence of them. It was like I could feel the presence of hundreds of thousands of lives as we bumped up the road to the south.
I was trying to figure out whether it would be impolite to ask Henry a question when he spoke.
“You’re going to like it,” he said. “You’re going to like everything about it.”
I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the country, the region, or our destination. He drove carefully, hands on twelve and two, his eyes darting up to the rearview every ten seconds. We passed tailgaters whose cars sported bumper stickers written in a language I couldn’t identify. Muzak drifted through the car’s tinny speakers, a reedy, vaguely melodic vamp.
“There’s a particular kind of genius to it,” he continued. “An actual brilliance.” He tapped his right temple with a pointer finger, as if to show where the brilliance was kept. “You’ll see. When you walk around the campus, how easy it is to navigate. To find your office, groceries, to get to the athletic complex. Intuitive geography. You know where to go without knowing where to go. You’ll see. It’s very simple. Elegant.”
I asked how long he’d lived in Duma.
“Since the start. Since it was a little baby settlement. And now it’s all grown up. When I first got to Duma, there was only a handful of concrete blocks in a circle in the middle of the desert.”
“What made you come out here?”
“It was so long ago I can’t remember. I’ll let you know if I do.” He smiled, glanced at the rearview, adjusted the angle. “So what’s your preference?”
“For what?”
“What you want to do. What you’re hoping for. You know, a job.”
Henry was requesting a level of transparency from me that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. I was exhausted, bled utterly dry by the long journey, my senses dulled to nubs. I decided I would just repeat what I’d been told.
“They said they needed an architect.”
Henry risked a glance at me and the car drifted a bit onto the shoulder. I squeezed the armrest. I hated driving, or being driven, or really any kind of locomotion. I’d get carsick, seasick, airsick. I got dizzy on sidewalks.
“Very unusual,” said Henry. “Good for you. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“Why not?”
“I was a dentist before I got here. Great, they said, we could use a driver. Now I’m a driver.”
“They specifically told me I’d be designing buildings,” I said. “I’m doing my graduate studies in architecture right now. My uncle already lives in Duma, as a chemical engineer.”
“Oh, yeah? How do you know?”
“He sent me a letter.”
Henry roared with laughter. “Good luck with your studies,” he said.
His dismissal made me despair. I closed my eyes to the sunlight that strobed through an oasis of trees and thought about how I would fight back against the bureaucrats. I had been told—and this had been corroborated by Uncle’s letter—that I would help design buildings necessary for the growth of Duma. I was told the settlement was nearly ready to enter a new phase, that it would be expanding infrastructure to accommodate an increased population, that the experiment was showing signs of success. If the ethos behind this place was a progressive one, and if it truly was an attempt at communal, collaborative, socialist living as I’d been told, then I wanted to contribute. I wanted to help prove that the man my parents had raised me to be could find purchase in a kind and fair society. And I wanted to do it through architecture. To show that buildings, like governments, could be democratic: bastions of equality, dismantlers of hierarchies.
I wondered how Uncle V. was getting along out here without Mela and Elam to take care of him. Without me to push around. I listened to the car radio and remembered a time, not so long past, when I was working at the kitchen table in our house on Alizabet Street. That horrid table. One leg two inches shorter than the other three. That table was the totem at the center of our poverty. We were poorer than we’d ever been, our meal tickets yielding less and less, and our house was haunted by the mysterious stench of eggs despite the citywide shortage. I sometimes wondered if the odor emanated from Uncle V. himself, given that he had stopped bathing some time before—in rueful protest, I supposed, of the continuation of his regrettable existence. He had been back from jail for a few weeks by then and had not recovered any of his character. I had yet to learn why he’d been to jail in the first place. He would tell Mela and Elam the story shortly thereafter. I would learn it from them shortly after that.
About that table. For a time we used dried newspaper pulp to prop up its stunted leg. The pulp lasted a week, maybe nine days, then Mela or Elam would deliver a bit more of the stuff. They got it from the local paper crusher, in exchange for who knows what. They were always taking care of us—of you, Uncle—for reasons that escaped me for a long time. I didn’t know then what I know now: that I owed you a debt of gratitude as immense and imposing as the perilous Mount Elbrus—and as proficient at claiming souls.
They were over, both Mela and Elam, that day I was working at the table. At least one of them was at our house on any given day, typically to remind you to bathe and eat, to be nice to your nephew. I couldn’t take care of you. I didn’t want to. You had always made it clear that it was you who had to take care of me. And that I should never forget it. And that I should always feel a responsibility for it.
You had come in from the outside and stood in the open doorway, watching me. Behind you, the street glistened from a morning rain shower. The smell of sulfur wafted in. My plans were scattered about me on the tilted table, my drafting pencil rolling over and over to the edge. The humidity was turning my tracing paper to mush.
“The immigrant toils and toils,” said Uncle. “He toils forever and never sees nothing for his efforts.”
“Not you,” I said. “You don’t toil and toil.”
“I’m not an immigrant. I was born here. In this very house.” He spat dryly onto the wooden floorboards, eliciting a reprimand from Mela.
“I’m not an immigrant either,” I said.
“Stop your working, then. Your time is almost up.”
“Our time,” I said.
“What is it you’re working on anyway? So diligent and studious.”
I was in the fourth and final year, I hoped, of my graduate studies in architecture. My thesis lay before me on the crooked table. But I wouldn’t show him. He would never understand. In fact, he would be angry with me for it, furious even; he would find it indignant, pretentious, a futile attempt to make meaning out of a meaningless past. I didn’t want him to blemish it, or worse. Tracing paper was hard to come by.
“Leave him be,” said Mela. “Let him hope.” She meant it as a positive reinforcement but it came out like something you would say around a naïve child.
“I bet you,” said Uncle. “Watch: your university gates will be closed to you by month’s end.”
I couldn’t afford to think that far ahead. I had to deal with what was in front of me. And my thesis was in front of me. I kept drafting, using my set square and my French curve in equal measure, chasing equilibrium between right angles and curves. I heard him coming closer and instinctively covered my papers. But instead of poking his nose in, he let a few sticky cheese pastries fall onto the table.
Elam rushed over. “How?” He plied one with his thumbs, sniffed the glucose. “They’re still fresh?” A string of sugar thinned and then broke between his fingers.
Uncle shrugged. “I have a method.”
“Theft? Theft isn’t a method. Recklessness is your method.”
He showed his teeth, still maddeningly white.
“You’ll go back to jail,” said Elam, but Uncle was already halfway toward his bedroom.
The three of us each ate a pastry, but there was no enjoyment, since the food was tainted by Uncle’s parlor trickery, his fake kindness that came at his own expense, so that we had to feel guilty about the happiness he gave us. He wanted us to be pleased by his actions, though they were the actions of a villain. No one asked him to martyr himself, yet he chose that path anyway. And since he’d stepped in to raise me when no one else would or could, I had no choice but to be thankful to him.
Henry cleared his throat, pulled his collar away from his neck, and grimaced.
“Did you ever take those vocational tests?” he asked me. “Or are they before your time? The ones where you filled out a questionnaire and then a machine would tell you what you should be when you grow up.”
“Did yours say ‘driver’?”
This time, when Henry laughed, his shoulders pumped up and down and his head shrank into his jacket. “It told me I was going to work in finance.” He chuckled again. “Me. Finance.”
“Are you bad at math?”
“Are you kidding me? I’m great at math. When I was a kid, I was the top of my class. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, calculus. Name it, I solved it.” Henry shifted in his seat to unstick the shirt from his back. I could see the shadow of sweat the seatbelt had left across his chest.
The way he spoke made me think he might be pulling my leg. It sounded so odd to list the fields of mathematics out like that. He waited for me to ask the next question, which I did: why he hadn’t pursued the field, if he had the aptitudes.
He was ready with his answer. “Have you ever thought about how utterly inane money is? Really, truly, thought about it?”
“I haven’t.”
He held up his hand and extended his fingers, then lowered one with each punctuated remark. “You do a job. You get paid. You turn around and spend the money. The money swims in circles. It winds up at your job.” When he ran out of fingers, he pulled his hand into a fist and moved it like he was slamming a table. “You do the job. You get the same money. You spend it on the same things. The money just circulates. It’s like how the water you flush in the toilet goes into a plant where they clean it—supposedly—and then you drink that same water at the water fountain in the park.”
He went on like this for twenty minutes. I was grateful for his self-sustaining monologue. I didn’t have it in me to collaborate on a conversation when Henry was very clearly happy to have one by himself. I was too worn out from the noxious, interminable traveling. I had taken two trains for a total of fourteen hours. I sat facing the direction of our progress and didn’t once look at a sheet of text, lest I want to throw up.
Henry had an accent, probably New York or Chicago or Boston, one of those American cities with a lot of famous, boastful personalities, where people spoke in a loud and friendly and hammering sort of way. Cities incapable of whispering. But Henry didn’t look American. I pegged him as hailing from somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, maybe. I wondered if I’d ever get to see New York myself, after all the hours I’d poured into studying its degenerate architecture in the dark—from books I’d sent for from faraway libraries, picked up in obscure alleys, and hidden in the folds of sheets and sweaters. Henry droned on. His voice began to lull me and I worried that if I fell asleep, he would think I was being rude, would take advantage of me. But the heat through the windshield, the sun on my corduroy trousers, the haze of the highway and the repetition of the countryside, the reverberations of the road—I had no choice but to succumb.
We were still driving when I woke up, still rumbling down the highway. Water vapor poured out of the air conditioning vents. I put my hand in front of one and watched the vapor snake around my fingers. I felt disoriented and nauseated. My mouth was dry and my head responded disapprovingly to the imperfections of the road. And the music had changed. It was no longer Muzak but some kind of ambient water sounds, little staccato blips and glitches and swirls. I closed my eyes and visualized each sound as a green or blue node on a grid. Music meant to calm the worker into efficiency—but I liked it; like I was meant to.
Henry reached his right arm behind him to the pouch on the back of his seat and brought forth a small plastic water bottle. I drank it down in one go, renewing the parched landscape of my mouth. I thanked him and asked if we were close.
“We’re at Exit 470. When we hit Exit 500, we’ll be seven-eighths of the way,” said Henry, demonstrating his mathematical acumen. “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
I did, now that he asked. But I told him I could wait another eighth of time.
The landscape had changed while I napped. We were passing through lightly undulating hills. The martian earth was now spotted with inviting pockets of grass and copses of richly red-brown cypress trees. The settlements, the farms organized around metropolitan areas, the neat roadwork—they had all disappeared. Nothing but raw terra firma now. I’d never seen anything like it. Where I came from, the land beyond the town limits was crowded with collectivized farms and famished peasantry. There was nowhere to be alone.
I missed it painfully.
The sun was setting on my side of the window, blinding me. A band of orange light sliced the car. I rotated the vanity mirror so it blocked the ray but I could still feel a strip on the lower half of my face. I rubbed my chin where the light touched it. I needed a shave.
“I know I’m not supposed to ask,” said Henry, “but where are you from?”
“You’re not supposed to ask?”
He pursed his lips and moved his head ambivalently. “It’s one of their main things. You don’t know anyone’s story and no one knows yours. You come from nowhere just like everyone else. It eliminates prejudice, evens the field, et cetera, et cetera.”
That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, given what I knew about the people who’d sent me—they were people with origin fixations. I asked Henry if the strategy worked.
“It does for me,” he said. “No one knows where I’m from.”
I looked at Henry and put my hand on my chin. “United States, obviously,” I said. I made a show of studying him. “Chicago.”
He chuckled amiably. “Lyon,” he said. “France.”
This was an unpleasant surprise. I hadn’t even been close. “It’s so easy to think you know something,” I said. His English was perfect. I wondered if he’d modeled it after American television like some of my classmates. I never watched the stuff myself, and I’m sure he could tell—my own English was nothing special. “You can’t ever know anything,” I said, dismayed.
“Hey, cheer up, pal. It’s no big deal.”
“The other day I was sitting in the park,” I said. “I was on a blanket by a little, scummy pond we have, reading a novel. I had sunglasses on my head. I was in the shade and it was cloudy, you know, so I didn’t need them. I had them perched on top of my head like this.” I mimed the motion.
“I know the expression.”
“I was reading on the blanket and I noticed, from the corner of my eye, a man striding toward me. A man with shaggy blond hair in a messy part. He was wearing a baggy shirt and baggy jeans. He had a bit of a belly. He was listening to music. Just cutting through the park, following desire lines, ignoring the pavement.”
“So what’d he do? Pull a gun on you?”
I looked at Henry. “How did you know?”
He shrugged. “It’s where stories go.”
“He didn’t have a gun,” I said. “He walked up to me, so close that I thought he was going to step on my blanket, nodded at me, and said, ‘Cool glasses, mister.’ And that was it. Then he walked away.”
We were both quiet for a moment. Saying this out loud made me feel stupid, but I couldn’t finish the story prematurely.
Finally, I went on. “I was so convinced he was going to pull out a pistol and slaughter me that by the time he’d gone, I thought my heart was giving out. I knew it so deeply, so personally, that he was going to shoot me. I knew it intuitively. To the point where it was almost disappointing when he didn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I guess I’m still thinking about it. Why would he compliment my sunglasses, if I weren’t wearing them? They were on my head. The fact that I wasn’t wearing them made his compliment seem so sinister to me. And why did he walk up so close to me? He didn’t have to. He was doing this to intimidate me, right? To antagonize me. To spy on me.”
“To spy on you?”
“It’s what people do where I live.”
“How old was this guy, you think?”
“Fourteen. Maybe fifteen.”
Henry looked at me with something like disgust. “That’s not a man,” he said. “That’s a kid.”
“Kids have guns.”
Henry massaged his temples with one hand. “Not where I’m from,” he said.
I turned my attention back to the music, which was reaching a kind of crescendo of watery blips. The movement came together in a swirl of disparate currents, each comprised of unique electronic noises—statics, scratches, interferences. When it finished, Henry popped out the tape and flipped it over. Side B was more of the same, and kids didn’t have guns in Lyon, France. Another place I’d never been. I resisted the urge to ask more questions about Lyon, reminding myself to stay reflective and quiet.
“So you came here to run away from guns,” Henry said.
“That’s not it at all,” I said. I was about to defend myself but thought better of it. I didn’t know Henry. I told him my reasons were personal. He raised his hands in a backing-off motion. We drove on in silence. I thought I detected a change in his posture.
By the time we reached Exit 500, the sun had mostly disappeared behind hills laden with tilting cypresses. The exit ramp seemed to curve infinitely. From above it would look like we were traveling on an ouroboros, these loops of pavement and yellow and white paint and metal barriers. The ramp spat us out onto a desolate road one notch above dirt, and we traveled down into a valley bordered on both sides by those gentle hills and their sentinel cypresses. Once the sun had set completely, Henry suggested we drive the rest of the way with the windows down. I didn’t object. I was starved for fresh air.
And this air was fresh. A cool, rejuvenating breeze entered the car, washing out our effluences and replacing them with a fresh, woodsy, and vaguely salty smell. I stuck my head out of the window like a dog and gulped it in. Between the trains and the car, I hadn’t had a real deep breath in close to twenty-four hours.
I was immediately refreshed. I took the opportunity to pass the gas I’d been holding in for the last five hours. I glanced at Henry to see if he’d noticed. He wrinkled his nose and I blushed deeply, turning my face to the window to avoid eye contact. He must have sensed my embarrassment, for he ejected the tape and put in a new one. “Tous les garçons et les filles” began to play, and Henry sang along with a surprisingly sweet alto in the French that was his native tongue.
After the song’s conclusion, Henry said, “You won’t hear French in Duma. Don’t get used to it.”
“Too bad. I’ve always loved the sound of it.”
“The city discourages the use of any language other than English.”
“And yours is excellent. It’s hard to believe it’s not your first language.”
“I put a lot of work into it,” he said proudly. “It’s the result of years of training. My best attempt at a non-regional, international accent.” He held out his palm as if to display the words coming out of his mouth. “Personally, I think I sound like one of those wise guys from the movies.” He scrunched his face strangely, made a gun with his pointer and thumb.
“You do sound wise,” I said.
“In Duma, we try to get rid of the differences between people,” he said. “No divisions. No power imbalances.”
It sounded too good to be true, of course, but it was mostly in line with what Uncle had written. Fairness. Equality. Worker protection.
I said, “That’s obviously impossible, though, right?”
“It’s aspirational. I admire it.”
“In my country, any time we hear that rhetoric we know an autocrat isn’t far behind.”
“This is different.”
“That’s what the autocrats always say.”
Henry smirked. “I don’t blame you for feeling that way,” he said. “I guess you’ll just have to see for yourself.”
I let his words hang in the air and turned my attention to the outdoors, rushing past in the darkness. Lone streetlamps cast jaundiced cones of light onto the road. Cypress trees still appeared now and then, muted in the moonless night. Between the lamps I could see purple clouds tacked to the sky.
At last, Henry took a sharp turn that curved dramatically downward, even deeper into the valley. When we leveled out, we made one final turn, and civilization came into view: an inconceivably large structure, as wide and tall as a stadium, made out of one seemingly seamless chunk of concrete which served as a podium for an even more startling shape. From the podium rose a concrete shaft, upon which flowered a tulip-like cube, twice as tall as wide, and covered with segmented glazed glass windows. Light poured out of those windows, illuminating the carpark in front, and the rectangular artificial lake beside it. As we drew closer, I could make out the silhouettes of dozens of people inside the head of the tulip, huddled close together, perhaps dancing or in conversation. The elongated reflections of light warbled on the surface of the lake.
We drove on. I could hear the faint sounds of brass, of jazz—real jazz, not Muzak—leaking from the glass tulip. I was drawn to it: the sounds of the music, the figures in the glass. The calm but brooding presence of the building, which was gravitational, which seemed to hum in my ears. My mind raced as I thought of secret passages and corridors, of a maze of concentric circles spinning out into infinity. The room inside had to be enormous. I wanted to know what was beneath the tulip, too, in the structure on which the flower stood.
“Listen,” Henry said, as we drove into a new section of Duma. “What I said before, about where I’m from, just—just don’t tell anyone about it, okay? I shouldn’t have said anything. I regret it. It’s between us. Okay?”
He had slowed the car down and was mostly looking at me now, suddenly rattled.
“Okay?” he said again. “Okay?”
“Fine, sure,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me to catalog this detail for later use. In fact, I probably would have forgotten, if it weren’t for his comment. Now I’d take pains not to.
I liked Henry, but you never know.
By the same token, I feared that I’d said something I shouldn’t have, too. I definitely shouldn’t have said the word autocrat.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said.
He relaxed, and we sped up. I could make out the darkened shapes of more ordinary buildings now, large and small, fronted with glass and reinforced gray concrete. Long flat roofs with uninterrupted lines. I asked Henry where he was taking me. He said he was “under instruction” to drop me at the residency for new arrivals. He called it “The Crescent.” He would personally show me to my room, he said, and in the morning, someone would call for me. I felt a wave of relief that I wouldn’t have to report to someone tonight. Little floating neon fibers flashed in the periphery of my vision. I was exhausted.
“One more turn,” said Henry.
We curved down a gravelly street that gave way to grass, then stopped abruptly at a glass-sided building that reflected our headlights back at us like two bulging yellow eyes as we pulled into a parking space. The building was boomerang-shaped, two or three stories tall, its many panes of glass staggered at uneven intervals with silver mullions in between—dividing the apartments, I gathered. It was a large enough curve that when I got out of the car, the length of it stretched past either side of me, leaving me in the dark inner part of the crescent. If every resident of the building looked out of their windows, they would all see me.
Henry appeared at my side with my bag. My one bag. Who knew what they had packed for me? Not my own clothes, surely. I shuddered to think who these new ones had belonged to before they wound up in my possession. I shuddered to think what it would feel like when I slipped into them. Would it feel like I was wearing someone else’s skin? Would I forget myself?
The only possessions I had that were really mine were the money in my wallet, my jacket, and my keys to the house on Alizabet Street.
We walked along the building’s curve until a door appeared, seamlessly, in the façade’s continuous glass membrane. Lights came on one by one as I trailed Henry down the hall, doors on one side, clean, cool concrete on the other. As soon as the next motion-sensing light switched on, the one behind us shut off, so it was like walking slowly around the circle of a zoetrope, the lights illuminating each frozen step of our orbital journey. Every twenty yards or so we reached an opening in the ceiling that rose the full height of the building, terminating with a small glass dome through which I could make out stars. Henry halted after we passed under one of these. Our architecture at home was rudimentary, compared to this. I couldn’t even name the materials used. “Here we are,” he said. He took a key out of his jacket pocket and let us in.
The room was long but not wide, with everything laid out railroad-style. A living area fitted with cherry-red modular furniture sat against the glass wall, where blinds were drawn. There was a bare-bones kitchenette featuring a single-burner induction stove plugged into a wall outlet and a minifridge; a large print of abstract geometric shapes hanging on the wall opposite the kitchen; and a curtain at the far end of the room, beyond which, I presumed, I’d find a recess for a bed.
Henry nudged me out of the way and moved into the living area, where he put my bags down. Then he placed his hands on the small of his back and stretched so that his chin pointed up at the cast-cement waffle ceiling. When he finished, he stood there silently; I could make out points of light in his eyes. He surveyed me. Either he was about to attack me, or he was waiting for a tip. It was true: he had just driven me hundreds of miles and lugged my bags about like a chauffeur. I began to reach for my wallet. This seemed to do the trick, for Henry took a few paces toward me and stopped, expectantly, as I took out the wallet and started to unfold it. But before I could give him anything, he plucked it from my hands and quickly stored it in his back pocket. He smiled apologetically, though I did detect a hint of arrogance in his eyes.
“Doctor’s orders,” he said. I didn’t have it in me to protest. He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and told me: “You’ll get a call in the morning. Get some rest. I’m sure I’ll see you around. It’s not so big here, anyway. Good night.” He turned to leave but I caught him by the elbow.
“Wait,” I whispered. “Do you drive people from the station often?”
Henry’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“I’m looking for someone. My uncle.”
“Hey, I don’t know anything.”
“Where were those other people being taken?”
“What people?”
“The people from the other compartments.”
Henry drew close to me. “I drive the people who see their name on my signs,” he said. “I don’t drive anyone but them.” He smiled at me—sadly, I thought—then left.
I plopped down on the plush red chaise lounge by the wall of windows and looked out across the living room. Now that I was finally alone, it felt like something hostile had just happened. I hadn’t been expecting the welcome of a luxury hotel’s concierge, but I had expected a welcome of some kind, and not just from Henry the driver. I thought at least there’d be a packet, a folder of informative documents, a campus map, a list of vital services. For instance: I was hungry. Where would I get food at this hour? At home, the meager foodstuffs I wrung out of my ration card hadn’t produced nearly enough food to get me through twenty-four hours of traveling without my stomach eating itself.
I roused myself from the chair and rummaged in the kitchen. I couldn’t bring myself to find the light switch, and anyway my eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I found the handle on the minifridge—a horizontal metal handle; even the fridge was stylized, Streamline Moderne—and clicked it open, knowing full well it’d be empty.
The light blasted me, froze me. I saw stars. Then I saw food products. A dazzling array of products in perfect geometric order: rectangular cartons of water and milk and juice, white with bold black sans-serif lettering; a square metal container containing apples and oranges and grapes, their colors practically vibrating; nutrition bars in crisp clean plastic; condiments in identical tubes stacked side by side in the fridge door panel; a loaf of bread in crinkle wrapper; a crisper drawer full of lettuce, onion, pepper, and garlic; and several vacuum-sealed packages of synthetic meat. I stood before the glowing minifridge and stuffed myself with fruit, then washed it down with juice. It had probably been years since I’d eaten that much produce. When I finished, I closed the fridge, plunging the room back into darkness. I found the wall and followed it. When I felt the curtain, I pushed through, and fell onto a bed on the other side.