CW: Death, blood, imprisonment, implied torture.
I work in a tall brick room with peaked cathedral ceilings. At one end of the room there is a brick-lined chute, chimney-like, that opens up out of the ceiling seventy-five or a hundred feet above a yawning pit in the floor.
Every so often, without much warning, a body will fall from the chute and tumble through the air. I have two jobs—to write down whatever they scream as they fall. Mostly this is Mama, or No, or simply unintelligible throaty fear. I have surmised that those above may finish an interrogation at the moment when they drop the accused, and they hope that something useful or revealing will be uttered just before the end.
Whatever is yelled, I’m required to write it down on three separate sheets of paper, then fold these and slip them into three numbered slots on the wall farthest from the pit. I believe that perhaps I must write it three times because there are three men who must know what is said, and they are too busy and important to share one copy. Perhaps they are irreplaceable parts of some giant process that would be unacceptably delayed if they could not read the triplicate message simultaneously. I have wondered.
Adjacent to the three slots there is a fourth, bigger, where food appears as often as I order it. I take the tray and eat its contents, and then write on a sheet of paper my order for the next meal. The choices are unlimited, as far as I can tell. This fourth slot will satisfy any whim of my tongue or stomach, and the tray has never been stumped. It got to be a game with me, and for a time I indulged in every ingestible luxury I could imagine, but I ran out of ideas for exotic and wild foods with which to test its limits. Now I stick to three or four consistent preparations, and only change the order when some wind of fancy takes me. When anything is available, sometimes it’s more comforting to give oneself restrictions.
And where does the food go, after I’ve eaten it? Down the pit, with everything else.
When there is no job to do, I am permitted to read. A book I read will mention another book, or the name of an author, or a place, or event, in a familiar manner that tells me I am supposed to know about it already. I have worked my way through hundreds by now, maybe thousands, stepwise from one book to the next, each only lighting the way ahead to the next book. I have wondered about the efficacy of this and concluded that it is permitted for my mind to swirl thus slowly outwards because the messages I write will be more useful if they are written by a person with some awareness of the meaning of things. Who knows what words might get spoken, what messages might need to be transcribed? Better for me to be prepared. There does not seem to be any limit to what I can read, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of my job.
I said two jobs. I was once told there’s a third job, but I have only ever seen the two. I wonder about the third, but I am occupied by the second and it distracts me. The second is the shovel. Whenever the brick chute high overhead was built, the architects did not, I surmise, properly plan for the momentum or the spin of a body falling out of it. Thus the trajectory is very often wrong, and rather than dropping cleanly into the pit, the bodies splatter and spread on the side. In these cases—frequent cases, I’m sorry to say—I must grab the shovel and herd the remains towards their proper destination.
I am on my second shovel now. The first was low and broad, with a short handle. Perfect for placing on the bricks and scraping along like a plow, pushing everything in front of me. Unfortunately this shovel wore down from the repeated rasping friction of the wet bricks, and in time it lost the straight line of its edge. Sharp points formed on either side as the center wore away, and these would catch in the cracks between the bricks. This was a problem for a time, requiring me to use ineffective poking and sweeping motions rather than the usual push. Then I resolved to write an order for a new shovel on the same sheet of paper as my order for lunch. With my dinner arrived a brand-new shovel, although a different design, with a longer handle and thinner scoop. This one takes more effort than the first, but I have adjusted my approach. At least they didn’t give me a rake.
And the old shovel? Into the pit.
This second job is not as difficult to perform as one might guess. I’ll often be distracted by an ache in my knee, or an odd scab that has appeared on my knuckle, or a buzzing sound in my ear, and then suddenly realize that the task is completed and I’m standing in an empty patch of faintly glistening bricks.
Sometimes a detail will catch my eye. Once, the caprice of spin and speed conspired to leave nothing but a left hand, balanced delicately on the edge of the pit. It had rough callouses and a large thumb. It was a strong hand, and instead of its weeping ragged edge I could easily picture a muscled forearm, a pair of broad shoulders. A simple poke with my toe, barely any push, and it tipped gently into the pit and followed the rest of the body silently down.
Only one event has ever broken the comfortable pattern of my work. One day a body came sailing down through the chute, like all the innumerable others, but then a third of the way down it was violently arrested by an invisible force. It stopped falling and swung back and forth above me. I leapt up and inspected, and saw that around one foot was tied a cord leading back up into the shadows of the chute. Had she gotten herself tangled in some rope just before the fall? Or had the throwers above done this on purpose, perhaps to allow themselves the option of drawing her back up again? Could such a thing be done?
I immediately considered writing on three sheets of paper a message describing this anomaly, but the woman had not said any words. Whatever process was being performed by the recipients of my papers, it hinged somehow on receiving reports of exactly what words were spoken, and surely it would be slowed by a paper containing no actual quote but just an account of an odd circumstance.
I went back over to the edge of the pit and tried to ascertain some sort of useful information that I might include in the messages in order to offset the delay they would cause. The woman’s features were hidden in the gloom of the high ceiling, but I could see that she was not old. Blood dripped from her downstretched arm, but it was impossible to see from what wound this issued forth. The drafts and breezes of the high room spun the body, so that she looked like an inverted dancer. Then presently I noticed another motion, perpendicular to the spin. The woman was shaking and trying to wave her arms.
“Hello,” I cried, “Are you alive?” But there was no response. As she spun around to face me, I could suddenly see the shine of one slitted eye, couched in the pulp of her face like a gem in the folds of a dress. As I watched, this eye awoke and roved around crazily, blindly, like a climber’s hands scratching for purchase on a cliff.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m down here, below you.” The eye wobbled wildly down to me and held, until her body spun too far for her to maintain the grasp. As the body swung into its next revolution, I saw the lips flap open and slap wetly, with a brief susurration of “Ah, Ah.”
“What,” I yelled, “What do you want to tell me?” And then as the body swung around again her eye latched on to mine, and one word haltingly retched forth: “Ah-ah-OUT.”
“Out,” I repeated softly. Out. “There is no way out.” More loudly. “There’s only back up through that chute, which is impossible, or directly down into this pit, to wherever that leads. There is no way out.”
And then, as if my very words possessed a keen edge that sliced the filaments suspending it, the body dropped silently down, straight past my feet into the darkness.
I stared down after it and gathered myself. Then I returned to the other side of the room and wrote clearly in capital letters on three sheets of paper the word “Out.”
I sat and waited. Having done my two jobs, I wondered—I wonder—about the third.
