He emerged from his car into the fog, and there it was, the processing center, immense, blockish and crude. The fog had been drawn around the perimeter of the grounds like a curtain, the backdrop to a stage, so that it seemed as if the processing center was all there was – no more strip mall across the valley, no more office block next door where an insurance company housed its claims department. Even the lamps in the parking lot were muted, suffocated by a billion tiny droplets of water that bent and refracted the light, over and over again, until it turned the air a jaundiced yellow. He checked his watch but did not want to believe what time it was, cursing his wife and God and the circumstances that had brought him here, as the processing center towered over him, massive and yet – isolated by the fog – seemingly infinitesimal, like a freighter alone on an ink-dark sea.
The guard at the booth demanded to see his security badge. They had done this dance every night for six years, six long years and still they pretended as if they were perfect strangers, though the man knew every crease and crevice in the guard’s face, better, even, than he knew his own wife’s. He did not know the guard’s name, though. The bosses liked it that way, even had a term for it – “formalized impersonality” – a sort of institutionalized sociopathy that was supposed to increase productivity. The guard grunted and waved him through the gate.
Inside the building, he passed down a long, beige corridor, static electricity gathering on his fingertips as he shuffled across the industrial carpeting. They claimed it was made from recycled tires, a thing that had impressed him when he first heard it, but in the end it was still just carpeting, iron-gray and trim and leading nowhere.
He passed a series of doors, beside each of which, built into the wall, was a keypad. At the end of the corridor he stopped. Behind a door like all the others, he could hear the clattering of fingertips on keyboards and the hive-like drone of voices murmuring rote pleasantries into their headset phones. It occurred to him that he had not seen the sun in almost three days. He had left the office last night in darkness, and in darkness he was returning.
It was just before five. In eight hours it would be one o’clock. He imagined the lake near his apartment, felt the breeze, lightly chilled, as it rolled in over the surface of the water, and the softness of the grass as he lay along the bank, a dream so vivid it hung before him like a mirage, suddenly dissipating as an old, familiar shiver crept down his spine. He reached for the keypad, winced at the tiny, blue bolt that crackled from his finger as he grazed the metal paneling, then punched in ‘5-3-2-4-#’. The light on the keypad switched from red to green.
