WHEN I WOKE UP, the curtain was a heap of metal and fabric at the edge of the bed. I must have pulled the rod down in the night. Morning light filtered in from the living room. The heat was stifling. I hadn’t undressed; my shoes were still on. The clock on the nightstand read eight-thirty. I rolled onto my back and something crinkled beneath me. A glossy, candy-red file folder, stamped with a crest that looked like a modernist variant of the caduceus: a central rod entwined with angular cables, which flowed into—a satellite dish? It looked more like a cobra’s hood. Curving lines—radio waves—emanated from the shape. Inside the folder was a campus map, along with a short note on heavy-stock stationary:
S— Zelnik: We are pleasing to welcome you to Duma. If you would to join us for orientations and refreshments in Fulcrum at 1000. We will acquaint with you and inquire about your questions.—Management
I examined the map. It wasn’t hard to locate the Crescent, central as it was and so absurdly shaped. But the rest of the map was difficult to read. The location names were mostly blurred beyond legibility, though I was able to get a sense of a central district where most things were clustered. The fact that the surrounding area had been redacted made it seem as if the desert were eating through Duma’s periphery, a menacing encroachment that would eventually swallow the settlement whole. It was more likely that there were elements in the areas beyond that Duma wanted kept secret. I was no stranger to maps with redactions. Where I came from, it was impossible to get an accurate city map. Avenues were never where the maps said they’d be; buildings seemed to shift a block north, a block south, depending on which map you were looking at. Addresses changed over time like rock formations licked by erosion. A so-called security measure, we supposed, a way of keeping detailed descriptions out of the hands of “the enemy.” But our only enemies were our leaders. Redacting the maps only piled more attention onto the hidden objects anyway.
I looked at the map carefully, trying to discern where I could go to ask about my uncle. Maybe a registrar, or a clerk’s office if there was one. The fact that I didn’t know exactly when he’d arrived would probably make it more complicated. By the map, Duma looked pretty big. I could imagine dozens if not hundreds of new people arriving daily. In any case, orientation in an hour meant that he’d have to wait anyway. He could stand to wait. And I would have to be fine with letting him wait. I wondered if they’d told him I was coming.
I undressed, found the bathroom—windowless, ventless, a metal showerhead placed on the wall above a lidless toilet so that I had to lean fully over the toilet bowl when I showered—and rinsed, shaved, freshened. I couldn’t remember what the weather had been like when we arrived. I felt the adrenaline of displacement as I dressed in the best-fitting clothes I could find in my bag: slacks a size too tight, a purple button-down with flared cuffs, and, of course, my pride, what I’d been wearing for the last twenty-four hours, the only meaningful artifact in my possession: a tan corduroy sport coat which had been my uncle’s. He’d bequeathed it to me one day after I complimented him on it. He took it off then and there and thrust it at me, telling me I’d get it now or soon enough, so it might as well be now. Ordinarily, this would be the kind of mawkishness I would resent—why did he always believe the torments of his inner life would find footholds among the torments of mine, would supplant them?—but I loved that jacket dearly. I felt it looked better on me than it ever could have looked on him and his nearly fleshless bones. I pictured his face when he saw me wearing it and smiled to myself, admitting to a bit of schadenfreude. I ate one nutrition bar, pocketed another, and left my room, map in hand.
It took a minute or so to get outside; I became suspicious that I was going the wrong way down the curving hallway, turned, and went back. It was ten to nine when I found the exit, pushed the glass door wide, and realized that it hadn’t mattered which way I walked from my apartment since there were exits at both ends of the Crescent leading to the same place. I stepped into the sandy valley and into the sun, which had crested the cypress trees on the ridges. In front of me was the grassy carpark and a heap of recently emptied garbage bins, all sporting the same crest as the red folder. Several raised garden beds stood off by the foot of the hill, crowded with juvenile vegetation.
I wandered a bit, looking for the main road that would lead me to the Fulcrum building. I crossed a courtyard, smelling kerosene, hearing the hum of a faraway engine. The nearby buildings were in the brutalist style, imposing and utilitarian, a contrast to the cool but cheap glass architecture of the Crescent. Beyond them sandy paths arced over hills that were barren except for cypresses.
There were other people around, many of them wearing denim overalls and white shirts, or austere jumpsuits laden with pockets. They held toolboxes or briefcases, walked in pairs or alone, and appeared to run the spectrum of age from twenty to fifty, though one man did cross my path with a spine so bent he couldn’t have been younger than seventy. Some of the people nodded at me, or even smiled. There was no common denominator among them that I could perceive. No dominant skin tone, no gender more prevalent than another. Snippets of language floated through the hot air. All of it accented English. I had to stop so a pair of girls in pleated skirts could skip past holding hands. They laughed their way across a hosed-down courtyard where little pools of water flickered in the dusty sunshine.
There was something about the diversity that I found perturbing. I wasn’t used to it. Instead of feeling like the hallmark of a progressive, multicultural society—people from all over the world meeting in grassy fields, shaking hands, smiling in the sun—it made Duma feel like a transit camp.
I walked another quarter mile before consulting the map, turning it twice before we understood each other. It told me to take Reeps Street, which I did, walking alongside two parallel, overgrown ditches probably meant for trolley tracks. The Fulcrum building appeared: a thundering concrete shed that rose five stories above a bustling courtyard filled with bench-like concrete slabs and concrete planters filled with spiky desert plants. People milled about with their briefcases and backpacks, wearing more work uniforms—overalls and hardhats; suits and assorted office attire. Some sat on the concrete slabs, eating apples and reading newspapers. The Fulcrum building loomed over them, blotting out the sun and blanketing the courtyard in shade. It lacked any real architectural detail: just a malformed block of material with thin, vertical glass windows stenciled into the concrete, and only one larger concentration of glass: a meeting space that cantilevered over the courtyard in the shape of the letter T. In the sunshine beyond the shadowy courtyard, there was mud.
The lobby was a windowless, intimidating tunnel, its sloping walls creating the illusion that it was swallowing itself. A man in a black suit stood behind a concrete block, illuminated by a mushroom-shaped brass lamp bright enough to make me squint. He looked like he could have been from anywhere—an unplaceable skin tone, Jordanian, maybe, or Dutch, or Siberian. He wore his hair in a ponytail as black as his suit. It was still wet from the shower and pulled back so tightly that not a single hair was free. I had never met anyone this serious who had a ponytail.
I showed him the note I’d received from “Management.” He glanced at it briefly.
“There’s an elevator behind me,” he said. “You’re on the fourth floor.” Then he fed the note through a shredder behind the concrete slab and handed me a name tag. “Pin it on your breast.” It was gold-colored with my name scrawled in black marker.
The elevator released me onto a cavernous floor with the same cast-cement waffle ceiling as my apartment, only several stories up. Doors lined the walls. Another desk, another concrete block, another concierge tracking my approach—this time a woman with soft features, a broad forehead, and bobbed red hair. She wore dark brown lipstick and smiled when I said hello. My voice echoed off the walls. She consulted my name tag, then consulted a folder on the block before her.
“Room 2B,” she said. She leaned over the block and pointed to a door behind me, a little to the left. “Just over there,” she said, her suit fabric crinkling. Her breath smelled fresh with peppermint.
My heels clicked loudly against the Grand Antique marble floor. A room furnished like this, with a floor like this—I couldn’t imagine the expense, the effort required to haul the materials out into the middle of the desert. A plaque on the door read Processing. I entered and met a bank of chairs arranged against a concrete wall. They faced another cement block, with another concierge behind it. This one gestured kindly to an empty chair halfway down the wall. The rest of the chairs were occupied by men and women. Some sat forward, their elbows resting on their knees; others reclined with folded legs. We all looked very different from each other. No one spoke; no music played. They stared into space or rested with their eyes closed. I wondered if they were new arrivals like me. Or perhaps they were here to be repurposed, like how Henry had gone from dentistry to chauffeuring. Some of them seemed nervous, but I might have been projecting. I was nervous. Imposing, anonymous architecture, vast windowless interiors, echoing hallways. This was egalitarianism in building form, yet I did not feel reassured. Back home, a building meant for the processing of people into classes of varying importance would reveal its purpose through pompous Neoclassical flourishes and stately columns. Architecture that did everything it could to tell you that you were not worthy. This was the opposite, yet deep within me the worry wouldn’t settle. Where I came from, you did not transition from a waiting room into greener pastures.
A clock ticked on the wall. We waited. One by one, fifteen minutes apart, my neighbors were called through a closed door at the end of a hallway. It was hot in the room, poorly ventilated. I grew sleepy, still jet-lagged, many time zones behind.
I worried that waiting would be my only activity here. I worried that I had made a catastrophic error in following Uncle here, in taking the bait, in not putting up a scrappier fight. For all its own horrors, I worried that I would never see home again, or Mela and Elam, or my university, which resented my membership, or my drafty house, which attracted pranksters, or my streets, which were filled with the rotting bodies of dogs. And I worried that my name would never be called.
My name was called.
I shook my head free of the heat and stood. The concierge gestured to the hallway behind her and entered through the unmarked door into a terribly long room with a low, claustrophobic ceiling, inlaid with vents and lights.
There was a sculpture at the far end of the room, oriented away from me so that I was looking at its rear. It was a fish, I guessed—I identified something like a tailfin. The body was attached to metal stands that were attached to a concrete podium. I squinted to understand it better but couldn’t. As I was looking, someone cleared their throat. A woman was standing by the door, middle-aged, with brunette hair that fell in ringlets over her collarbone. She wore blocky red glasses and a form-fitting jumpsuit. A small person who stood so erect that I felt I was in for a time-out.
“Do you like sharks?”
The question startled me. “I don’t know.”
“You must know,” she said gamely. She closed the gap between us. A band of freckles peppered the bridge of her nose.
“I never thought about it before. Sure. I like them.”
“This is a basking shark.” She extended her hand like a tour guide and began to walk. I caught up and followed. Her accent was unplaceable. I thought about Henry’s accent-reduction training as I listened to the unnatural cadences in her speech, its alien timbre. I thought about why English was Duma’s lingua franca and what that said about the people that made up its governing body, whether they thought of English as a superior language—or a more strategically useful one. Then I realized that I hadn’t been paying attention.
“They’re filter feeders,” she was explaining, “meaning they filter out the inessential. Scientists call them a cosmopolitan migratory species because they go wherever there are temperate oceans. They swim slowly along, water passing through them.” She made wave motions with her hand. “Gill rakers, little bonelike bits of cartilage, capture traveling plankton. The basking shark is the second-largest extant shark, the only surviving member of the family Cetorhinidae.”
She stopped suddenly. I could now see most of the shark’s profile. It looked real enough to be an actual specimen. Its skin was mottled, a kind of sickly brown-gray pattern. A patina of striated stains and shapes ran along its body. If it was a replica, then it was a truly outstanding one. There was a caudal fin, huge and sail-like, a dorsal fin, and two separate fins on each side, one much larger than the other. I didn’t know what those fins were called. Gallery lights shone onto the shark, illuminating it in three separate cones.
“You understand that the shark is a metaphor, yes?”
I liked to think in terms of metaphor. I was studying to be an architect. I believed first and foremost in representation. I believed that every built thing casts a shadow; that the shadows say as much if not more than the structure; that structure both is defined by and defines builder and dweller; that all homes are also the signs of homes; that all buildings are symbolic of buildings; and that all constructs of whatever kind are signs and symbols.
I had no idea what the shark stood for.
“Of course,” I said.
“Tell me of what.”
The woman watched me watching the shark. Aware of this, my heartbeat began to race. It occurred to me that I was being tested. She might be a psychologist of some kind, evaluating my reactions to our conversation. The shark was a Rorschach Test, an ink blot, my reaction to it determining my worth, my aptitude, my function—was I inspired by it? Afraid of it? Did I empathize with its plight, how tragic it was to have been made a tool of cognitive appraisal rather than remaining free to bask and filter and be a member of a cosmopolitan migratory species? I felt the coldness of the room and shivered involuntarily. I looked at the woman: she wore a vacant smile with the practiced ease of a doctor delivering bad news. Despite the cold, I realized I was sweating. My jaw began to hurt. To my great relief, she turned away and resumed walking, this time in silence, until she was close enough to the sculpture to run her hand along its body.
“I came here because Duma represented a cohesion between labor and human worth that, in my country, was seen as outlandish,” she began. “A place where workers could find fulfilment in their work, where they could be treated with humanity. To work for the benefit of a common goal and see the rewards of their labor. Yes, this is why I came here. Because I had to come here, do you see? In my country, we were worked until we had no life left. Forced collectivization left our farms decimated and our people to die. My mother and father watched soldiers load our tractors and our carriages with our wheat and drive them away into the city, to feed people who would become other soldiers, soldiers who would return to the countryside to repeat the ugly process in a cycle that Nietzsche predicted as the eternal return. Nevertheless, my mother and father decided to stay on their so-called farm, to die of starvation or be raped to death. I ran away. I left my family behind; they did not understand. I came to where I would be valued. Where I could see workers love their work; where the peasantry ate the food they grew, or gave it to a greater good that they believed in. Where the things I made with my hands would join other handmade objects and sculptures far larger than this building, far more valuable than you or I.”
She gazed at the shark admiringly.
“What happened to your family?” I asked.
She turned fiercely to me and said, “No one has family in Duma.”
I decided I would not ask this woman to help me find my uncle.
“There were people in my country that were valued more than other people in my country,” she said. “The people with more value were able to consolidate the power. They had control over everything. Even the way you think.”
I recognized elements from my country, too, in her tale of corruption. I thought, maybe, that I could find like-minded people here—people who could help me. I suddenly understood the metaphor.
“Does the shark represent Duma?” I said. “The shark filters out the malignancies in the ideology. The cancer that breeds corruption.”
“It purifies the water,” said the woman. She seemed proud of me. Against my better judgment, I felt proud of me, too.
She threaded her arm through mine and escorted me to the front of the shark, but I watched her. I congratulated myself on getting on her good side. Fans in the ceiling whirred to life. Cool, musty air blew on my neck. Old air.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“With what?”
She tilted her head toward the shark and, at last, giving into the temptation I had strangely been resisting, I looked. I stepped back in horror. It was an appalling face, with the snout of a manatee and the mouth of the devil. I didn’t see its eyes in the two globular bulges above; I didn’t see anything but the dark. The universe collapsed into its mouth. A bucket of ringed bones, the gill arches, looped around the cavern of the mouth cavity, spaced every few inches, and hundreds, thousands, of tiny hooked teeth sprouted like grass. My vision blurred. I reached out in space and found the woman’s elbow. She shook free of my hand and stepped away.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Put your head in it.”
“What?” I tried to find her face but couldn’t see well enough. The room began to tilt. Everything was askew.
“Do it,” she said. “You must do it.”
“I don’t even know your name,” I said, dumbfounded.
“What difference does it make?” She had become openly hostile. Her smile was gone, her tone defiant.
“Is this part of the test?” I careened forward and grabbed onto the snout of the shark, my head hanging limply between my shoulders.
“When will I receive my grade?” I asked. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say.
“That’s up to you,” she said. I twisted my head to see an inversion of her. She glanced at her watch, then at the ceiling, then back at me. “Well?”
I turned back to the basking shark and its seductive mouth. I saw through its throat into the vertigo of abyss. The path at the end of the abyss rushed forward as I fell backwards, but I fell backwards into the mouth. My head entered the horizon of the mouth and above and below and on all sides of me were rows and rows of crooked baby teeth, bending in toward me as I fell further inside. My vision blurred again, and then was gone. Before my head hit the bent scaffolding of the gill arches, I had a thought that I was doing the right thing. That I was on the right path. I was confident that I had made the correct choice. Inside of me an oven of ecstasy fired to life.
I woke in a stuffy half-light, feeling a headache blooming where they usually do in the nook between my right eye and eyebrow. I massaged the nook with my thumb. I felt hungover, sensitive to the light, but I couldn’t remember drinking. I was sure I hadn’t: drinking for me came with a paroxysmal stomach, nausea. I didn’t have those—I only had the headache.
I rolled onto my side and noticed a folder on the nightstand. I must have brought it back with me after my meeting in the Fulcrum, though I was struggling to remember what had happened once I’d left the building. I was aware of a sense of uncertainty, of displacement in my mind as I thought about it. And then I realized: I couldn’t account for the time. I sat up, horrified—tried to focus on remembering, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t coming to me. I was overwhelmed with feelings of self-hatred and disgust, as if I had done something humiliating, something unforgivable. What was it?
It was late morning, past ten. I rubbed my eyes, then opened the folder across my lap. There was a note inside.
S— Zelnik: Congratulations to you and welcome to you to Duma. It is your pleasure to be assigned to Factory 7A. We have reviewed the data information you have provided to us with and determined that your field of labor will be:
MANUAL LABOR
We are pleasing to invite you to arrive at Factory 7A tomorrow at 0800. Please to take this day to acquaint yourself with Duma. You may take a bus from Beau Gino Plaza. Please to address concerns to foreman at site of work.
Manual labor? Clearly a bureaucratic error. They didn’t need me for manual labor. Nobody needed me for manual labor. Flat feet, bad knees, a snake of a spine—misaligned, weak, short of vertebrae. Blocked sinuses, spiritual malaise, itchy eyes. There was no reason to have undertaken the great expense of sending me out here only to assign me to a manual labor outfit. My training would be wasted. Besides, there were undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people in reasonable geographical proximity to Duma who would be more than grateful for the opportunity to work. This place was an Eden compared to most communities that dotted the globe. People would sell their families out for a chance to sleep in a bed as soft as this one. For a chance to be assigned a job, to earn a wage. Simply having a job was a privilege for much of the world.
Not that there was anything wrong with manual labor. The world was built on the bent and flagellated backs of workers, and I was proud to have once associated with a movement that championed their rights, even if we had to do so secretly, namelessly, through the dissemination of subversive material on utility poles in plazas.
Nevertheless, the idea of engaging in it embarrassed me.
I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I knew that it would be wiser to keep my head down and accept the position I’d been assigned, but I believed too much in my craft to be complacent. And I wanted to believe in the promise of Duma. I wanted to believe that there were better, kinder places out there—out here—in the world. The note said I could address my concerns to the foreman at the factory. I would do just that. That’s what I would do.
It was time to get up. I got out of bed and made it, dressed and washed, then fished through the minifridge and made a sandwich out of two chunks of gooey wheat bread and several slices of the vacuum-sealed synthetic meat, which was rubbery and salty and tasted vaguely like bologna and cheddar. I wiped the crumbs and ran the tap, which spread a sulfuric odor through the room. A laminated note above the sink assured me that the water was safe to drink despite the smell. As I choked it down, I wondered when I’d hear from Uncle—or if he’d even learned yet that I’d made it.
When I locked up, I noticed a note had been tacked to the door. Come by the cluster of houses on the hill and say hi. Well, there was my answer: he had found me already. I took a deep breath and consulted the map. There were shapes that somewhat resembled a cluster of houses a bit south of the Crescent.
It was already hot; my sweat already saturated the liner of the coat. Worried that I’d soak through the map, I refolded it and tucked it into an outer pocket. Uncle would be surprised to see the jacket even if he wasn’t surprised to see me. Truthfully, I had no idea how he would react to seeing me. His letter hadn’t been an invitation, exactly. Half manifesto of excuses masquerading as bridge-building, half wildly unintelligible zealotry about Duma. It had been over a year since I’d last seen or heard from him, until that letter arrived. He hadn’t left us a forwarding address when he went away, only a terse goodbye note, making it clear that his intention was to sever his relationships. The truth is we had figured him for dead, figured he had left this cruel world at last, taking one last stab at being the driving force in his own life by choosing to end it.
I wish I could say that my reaction to hearing the news that not only was he alive but that he’d been sent here as a chemical engineer to do something useful was one of pleasant surprise—but it wasn’t. Mostly I just felt dread and irritation. You had a full year to send a letter home to Alizabet Street, to let Mela and Elam know you were all right, to let me know you were all right—and you didn’t. It didn’t even cross your mind, I’d bet. It was a fantasy that you’d worried about us, about me. And now, a fantasy that you would care that I was here in Duma. In the years before you left, the years after your return from the first time you were imprisoned, you stopped worrying about your own personal hygiene, failing to bathe for days on end. And you certainly didn’t care about the lives of others, even those closest to you, the ones who took care of you—who reminded you to bathe. So why would you care that I was here now?
But to not even let Mela or Elam know—that was selfish. Unspeakable. They took care of you for years, more than I ever did—more than you ever let me. You owed it to them to let them know. They would have seen the letter when they collected your mail every week, as they had for the last year, just in case. They didn’t know worrying about you was a one-way street. I’d tell them myself. They were too good to you. Your suffering never made you virtuous.
I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was walking, lost in the fantasy argument I would have with Uncle when I saw him. When I took in what was around me, I found that I was standing at the boundary of a cluster of short, modular homes sitting on a hill, small enough to be single-family homes but big enough to be impressive. They had small, decorative perimeter walls that were raised and lowered and broken and fragmented as the builder had seen fit and etched with geometric patterns. Beautiful, functionless walls.