The young woman — anyway, the young person — from the Mail Room waves at you across an archipelago of pallets.
Ms. K—! she shouts. Over here, over here!
And you stagger toward her through the crowds, past heaped and denuded cots, past old folks and younger folks: some blessedly zonked, some playing card games like Uno, Old Maid, pinochle, or CutThroat, and some gazing ceiling-ward as if awaiting the Voice of God the Freshly Merciful. One bearded old guy chunks invisible missiles at the actors in I Got Mine at Gitmo.
Barely upright, you make it to the person who called to you.
These are your duffels, she says. This is your pallet — unless you’d like to look for something nearer a wall.
Where are the restrooms?
She points. Through there, Ms. K—. You peer down a crooked aisle of bedding at a wall of wrong-way, used-adult orphans obstructing any view of the lavatories she has tried to point out. I know, I know: Just walk that way and ask again.
No, you say. No. You crawl onto the raised pallet — it’s resting on a pair of empty ammo crates — and curl up in a fetal hunch between your duffels. The woman, the person, touches your shoulder gently, and departs.
Before you can fall asleep, a line of people forms in the aisle. Your pallet rests at its head while its tail snakes back into the depths of the bay like a queue from Depression Era newsreels.
Everybody has photographs or image cubes of their slain warrior children, and as the line advances the people in it squat, kneel, or sit to show them to you, even though you see in each face either Brice’s or Elise’s, no matter how minimal the resemblance or how weary your vision.
—Very pretty. —Very handsome. — A smart-looking fella. —What a shame you’ve lost her. — How can he be gone? —Golly, what a smile!…
You compliment ten or twelve orphaned parents in this way until your tiredness and the faces of Brice and Elise, rising through the images of these other dead children, make it impossible to go on. Still horizontal, you press your palms to your eyes and shake like a storm-buffeted scarecrow.
Leave her alone, somebody says. For Pete’s sake, let the woman rest.
A hand shoves your head down into your rough olive-green blanket, but the voice that you attach to the hand’s body roars, Heal, O Lord, heal! Take her hurt away tonight, and torment her no more!
But you don’t want that. You don’t. All you want is sleep and the honest-to-God resurrection of three particular persons, but sleep is all you’re likely to get. Somebody big perches on the pallet edge and lullabies in a guttural whisper All the Pretty Little Horses; he kneads your spine with fingers that feel more like metal bolts than flesh and bone. And despite the Sleep Bay’s din and stench (and despite the hole in the middle of your chest), you drift down into a Lost Sea of Consciousness and let go of all pain but a last acrid fuse of heartbreak….
A twin rumble ghosts through the Sleep Bay, an outer one from the old orphans waking to face their pain afresh and an inner one from your complaining gut. You sit up and peer about at this new Reality.
The lavatories have to be packed — so, casting about for a solution, you find a wide-mouthed jar inside one of the crates supporting your pallet. After shaping a tent with your blanket, you relieve your bladder — no easy task — into the jar and stand there amidst the chaos wondering how to proceed.
Slops! Slops! cries an electronic voice, and a simulacrum of a person, smaller than the small cruel man who helped transport you from your life-help cottage, rolls through the crowd with a slotted tray hooked to its midsection.
It takes jars, bottles, beakers, and suchlike from other bleary residents and rattles them into the partitioned tray going before it like an antique cowcatcher. You hand over yours uncertainly.
The simulacrum — a dormitron or a refectorian, depending on its duty du jour — asks what you’d like for breakfast. You recoil at taking anything edible from this rolling slops collector, but say, Some toast, I guess, it really doesn’t matter, to keep from stalling it by saying nothing. It rolls on.
Another refectorian — for at mealtimes the Sleep Bay becomes the Refectory — cruises up behind a serving cart, the cart a part of its own fabricated anatomy, and lets you fumble at its topmost shelf for a cup of tea and a slice of toast and persimmon jam. Other such simulacra tend to others there in the bay, sometimes dropping plastic crockery or spilling sticky liquids. From a few pallets away, a woman as thin as a spaghetti strap sidles into your space.
What did your children like to eat? she asks.
Ma’am?
Your dead kids — what’d they like to eat? You can get it here, whatever it was. I always do — what mine ate, I mean. I eat it for them and feel connected to them the rest of the hideous day.
Our son liked cold pizza; our daughter even colder fresh fruit.
Want me to get you tidbits of those things?
You hesitate.
The strap-thin woman mumbles into a diamond of perforations on her inner wrist. They’re on their way, she tells you afterward.
And so you wind up with two slices of cold garbage-can pizza and a bowl of even colder cantaloupe, pineapple, muskmelon, and kiwi wedges, which you down between bites of pizza. Your benefactor watches in approval, then asks you to tell a breakfast story about Brice and Elise.
A breakfast story!
You think first of a morning on which teenager Brice sat slumped at the table, his eyes lazing in their sockets like gravid guinea pigs. Mick directed him to have some juice and cereal, to clean up afterward, and to take his sister to school, but Brice dawdled. Stop dicking around, Mick cried. Then, infuriated, he wrestled Brice from his chair, apparently to frog-march him to the cupboard, but Brice flopped deadweight to the floor; and though Mick twisted, prodded, and even tried to snatch him erect, neither his body nor his smirk budged, and he remarked, dryly, that Mick’s parenting skills had gone so far south that he’d just resorted to all-out child abuse. Stunned, Mick let Brice go and stormed outside. You and Elise exchanged stunned looks of your own.
Come on, the woman prompts again: Every mama has a breakfast story.
So you tell about the time when Brice and Elise, then nine and five, got up early one morning and made Mick and you breakfast in bed: mounds of toast, two eggs each, orange juice, and so on. But thinking it olive oil, they had scrambled the eggs in rancid tuna juice, and despite their hard work and the eggs’ lovely sunrise yellowness, you had to throw them out.
The eggs, you say, not the kids. Mick and I felt like total Eggs Benedict Arnolds. Just like I feel now.
The woman laughs and then purses her lips in sympathy. Good story, Ms. K—. Just remember: You’ll always feel like that. She grimaces grotesquely, as much for her sake as yours, and places a call via her wrist perforations to somebody in another part of the Refectory.
Meanwhile, the servitors roll on.
Feeling each of your years as a blood-borne needle of sleet, you ride a glass-faced lift to the Chantry level and follow the wives of two sick old men to the Furnace Room, which turns out to be an intensive care unit (ICU) for last-leggers and a crematorium for those who don’t make it. Indeed, when you arrive, an orderly slouches past pushing a sheeted figure on a gurney toward an oven down a claustrophobia-inducing tributary corridor. You think about following this gurney but instead continue to tag along behind the ICU widows and at length reach the care unit’s hub.