It didn’t seem to Burris now that he had a body at all — he’d been invisible to himself in the bathroom mirror, he could scarcely feel himself inhabiting his own clothes — because the world of events had changed him from a person into a story. He was one of the Houston boys: bastard son of the murderer H. C. Sandover, brother of the killer Bill Houston. He was somebody he could never have imagined, member of a clan joined more deeply than the blood. You can do whatever you want to us, he thought; but you can’t pretend like we never lived. It came over him that everything surrounding him in the darkness was fake, and that only he was true, the front of his body bathed in light from the tortured screen, where the James brothers abandoned their bleeding comrades in the forest and took themselves empty-handed into a future of assassination and imprisonment: a future exactly like the past.
In an acre of space, hundreds of machines competing to drown the head in sound made a noise as immense and palpable as silence. The meetings and partings of tens of thousands of empty plastic bottles gave the building the clattering atmospherics of a feverish, underwater bowling alley that stretched forever in any direction and yet was contained within itself — which was, as Burris understood it, the condition of the universe. In such a storm of sound the ears lost consciousness. No one spoke save during breaks, when the machines were alarming in their metal sleep and the necessity to shout wasn’t felt. And yet, when the machines were running, any worker was able to hear small, other noises within the general clamor of industry. On line number six, adjacent to Burris’s line, a woman who was privileged to smoke big cigars and play the radio while working kept her disintegrating Sony tuned to golden oldies all night long, and Burris heard these songs clearly as if by a sixth sense, in a way not quite like hearing, but more like knowing.
Either they were coming for him or they weren’t.
He was the hopper loader for line number five. A forklift brought him a skid stacked with four hundred eighty cardboard boxes, each box holding twelve empty plastic bottles. With a razor blade he cut the strings that held the massive bundle together. He lifted and upended each box, spilling the contents into a larger cardboard box, until he’d emptied eight boxes and the larger one was full. The use of this larger receptacle saved him from having to repeat eight times the next and most important part of his job, which was to stand on tiptoe, lifting the box above his head, and tumble ninety-six empty bottles into the hopper. In a sea of noise the cigar-smoking lady’s radio played “Louie Louie.” Burris adjusted his movements to the tempo.
At the hopper’s base a mountain of a woman sat by its smaller mouth where the white anonymous bottles drooled onto the conveyor belt before her, and she set the bottles upright on the belt two at a time. For months she and Burris had worked in partnership, attending to these ministrations, but because of the noise and the woman’s personal ugliness, he had never had a wish to speak to her. She was a stoop-shouldered old woman whose face seemed fashioned by a child from dough, puffy and wearing a single expression of permanent grim sorrow.
Burris stacked on top of one another the eight cardboard boxes he’d emptied, and then, as the bottles moved beneath the silk screens down the line, he pushed the stack around to the end of the conveyor belt, where a black youth with his hair tied up in tiny bunches packed the bottles, now printed with labels and instructions, back into these boxes they’d arrived in nine or ten minutes earlier. Near him an old man with a scarred face, skinny and tense and proud to work quickly, arranged the packed boxes into bundles of four hundred eighty, fastened them all together with steel bands, and waved with authority while a forklift, its operator ignoring his gestures, carried the boxes out of the building to waiting trucks and ultimately to the bathrooms and kitchens of the nation. Burris hated this old man, because Burris hated this work and the old man seemed to prize it.
Today he was at his job because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to be. He was a little drunk and he had no more money for movies.
He wore a teeshirt and cut-offs, that the authorities might see he was unarmed.
Lunch in thirty minutes, and he felt the power and grace of a man working well under the influence of amphetamines bartered for in the men’s room at shift-change. He turned, lifted, spilled shapes; turned, lifted, spilled shapes. The incredible noise owned everything, but he was in it, a part of it, turning, lifting, spilling, a denizen of this turbulent mechanical flood. The larger box was full. He turned, grasped, hoisted, and raised it, spilling shapes into the hopper. The double doors to the building were open, and in the square of white light they admitted he could see squad cars coming to a halt. “Like a Rolling Stone” was playing on the cigar lady’s radio, and Burris was a part of that, too, and it was all a gigantic maelstrom from which escaped tiny bottle-shapes into the waters of American daily life. Something in his inner ear — more known than heard — was saying Burris, Burris as he turned, lifted, spilled: an officer, leveling a riot gun at Burris’s chest. The officer’s mouth was erupting in his flushed face, and Burris, Burris Houston was known within Burris. As you stare into the vackyoom, of his eyes was also known, and as he walked away from it all dressed in terror the radio was letting him know, How does it feel. Tell me how does it feel.
5
On the first day Bill Houston stayed on his back in the lower bunk and failed to know whether he was awake or sleeping. He became involved in his mind with red squares and triangles
On the second day he woke to a curious sensation and found that his left hand, trailing over the edge of his bunk, was adrift in water. Christ Jesus save me. They’re doing it to us. We’ll all be drowned.
The bars, tinted a pale institutional green, might not have been there at all. The spaces between them might have been colorless panels affixed to green air.
He gripped the upper bunk’s edge and hoisted upright. The queries and exclamations from neighboring cells gave him to understand there was trouble with the building’s pipes. He removed his socks — his shoes had been taken from him, and his shirt — and waded two steps through a three-inch tide to the combination toilet-and-sink. As he approached the wall there, and the mirror — a circle of polished metal welded above the sink at the end of his cell — he knew he travelled the last small distance of a journey he’d undertaken to complete a very long time ago. And now it was finished. And now another was beginning.
He was alone here, one of the special captives isolated because they were believed capable of great violence. His head ached from the back of the neck through the cranium and down the bridge of his nose: in the mirror he saw that both his eyes had been blackened. Bruises circled his belly below the ribs. More than anything at this juncture, more than innocence, liberty, or another chance, he wished for a drink of Seagram’s Seven and Seven-Up. Then he thought of drinking it with friendly strangers amid a place of calm: a barroom of polished oaken tables and imitation leather stools. The chest-fever of his need broke in his throat; before he could tell if he was crying tears, he turned on the faucet and splashed his face.