The Liquidation Room

1...

I try not to think about it. The machine gets loud, so the maintenance office is soundproofed. Someone else would do it if it weren't me. I don't understand why I have to stay down here all the time. I could work upstairs, and they could call me down if something breaks.

The worst part is when I have to fix one of the hoists. That creeps me out. Believe it or not, the liquidation room doesn't smell. The whole process is sanitized and deodorized at every step of the way. But I can still feel it with my nostrils. A phantom odor, haunting me.

Right now I'm bored. I'm not allowed internet down here. Or any device, actually. It's pure boredom. I have a bouncy ball that I can throw against the wall. I have a book of crosswords and word searches. I have a pen and paper and a pull-up bar. I'd say a good 90 percent of the job is bouncing the ball. I never liked crosswords. I could never finish them, and the hints in this book are obscure and dated. I finished the word searches a long time ago.

But something always breaks in the liquidation room, so it's not like I don't work at all. It's a pretty new machine, so it shouldn't break as often as it does, but they run it too fast and too hard these days. A little buzzer in the maintenance room goes off when something breaks down. Bzzzzz. It's an unpleasant sound. I haven't gotten used to it.

When I hear the bzzzzz, I unlock the door to the liquidation room to see what's the matter. The key is a dull copper color, and its sawlike teeth are too sharp. It makes a satisfying clink against the knob, which I wish I could tell the janitors not to polish so much. I don't like seeing my reflection. But they don't let me talk to anyone else who comes down here. It's compartmentalized; top secret, you know?

Upstairs it's all keycards and fingerprints and retinal scans, but down here everything is mechanical. So I have to jiggle the lock a bit, lifting the door up ever so slightly to release the mechanism. It's one of those annoyances that becomes familiar over time, almost comfortable. I would hate it if I could just walk right in.

So I jiggle the door, turn the key, and open. In front of me is the troubleshooting station, a touchscreen panel with a cross-section of the machine and the location of the problem. It's called the liquidation room, but "room" always meant something smaller to me. It's a massive "room," like a factory floor.

I check the troubleshooting display, and the problem is with the stunner. Fuck me.

2...

You need to move, but you can't. You always got in trouble for fidgeting in school. You can't help it, you would say. You need to move.

But you're packed up beside dozens of other people, and you can't move an inch. You can wiggle your toes and grind your teeth and ball up your hands into a fist, but that's about it. So you do all those things, but the ache to move won't go away.

You're not sure where you're going. You've been moved all over in the last year, from camp to camp. You close your eyes and remember the best one. It was near the sea, and your tent was spacious and warm. Your neighbor woke up every morning with the sunrise and played his flute to accompany the gulls.

You remember the worst camp and bite your tongue, hoping the pain brings you back to the present. You won't try to think about that.

So you keep fidgeting, imagining the gulls and the flute and the sea, hoping this truck stops soon.

3...

There's no use bitching about it, so I get right to it. The broken stunner is at the opposite end of the liquidation room, where the process starts. I walk along the paused conveyor, trying not to look. I'm really not cut out for this.

The stunner breaking is the worst thing, obviously. With everything else, you're just working with meat. Maybe it's callous to put it that way, but that's what it is after the bleeding, just meat. But they're still alive at the stunner. Drugged up, half-conscious, emaciated, and tired from transport, but I can see their eyes move in their heads, and that bothers me.

Someone else would do it if it weren't me. Sometimes I'm not sure that's true. I mean, one other person would definitely do it. A hundred, probably. A thousand, yeah, probably too. It pays well after all. A million? I'm not sure. Most people wouldn't do it. Maybe we could all just say no. But we won't, so I keep walking, my eyes locked directly forward.

They fired the last guy because he'd do some sick shit when the stunner broke. There are definitely no cameras down here, so I'm not sure how they caught him. But that was the rumor, and I believed it. At least I wasn't capable of something like that. Weirdo freak.

And I won't say it, but it was kind of funny to me. After all we do down here, you draw the line at that? In a fucked-up way, he was humanizing them. Maybe that was the problem. But me, I just see meat.

Unless the stunner is broken, which it is. I keep walking, eyes forward, ignoring my peripheral vision as best I can. Even though it's just meat, flesh, viscera; I still don't want to see it.

4...

You're going uphill. Your body tilts backwards, your spine pushing into the knees of the woman behind you. The pressure feels nice. It's daytime now, and light trickles in through thin cuts in the truck's canvas covering. Despite the sun, it's getting colder. The man to your right is shivering, and the boy to your left is breathing heavily on his prayerful hands.

The soldiers didn't say anything when they loaded you up. They rarely do. You can't really argue with a gun in your face. They don't usually speak your language either. If they do, it's worse, because it either means you're going to be interrogated or insulted.

You wonder when it'll all be over. The riots, the crackdown, the war. The slaughter. You try not to think about it. One day at a time. At least you're still alive. Sometimes you wish you weren't. A lot of people aren't. A lot of people you remember. You try not to think about that either.

You spend a lot of time thinking about what not to think about. It becomes all you think about, and you're back to square one. You wish you were at least off the truck, setting up camp again, so you could think about something else. There's too much thinking in this world sometimes, you think. You laugh to yourself.

The road becomes steeper, and the truck slows to creep up the incline. You can hear muffled apologies as people continue to push into each other, packing even closer. You don't mind.

Your transport hits flat ground and stops. Suddenly, you're blinded by light. The soldiers order everyone out. It's a long drop, and you bend your knees when you hit the ground to soften the blow. You still fall over onto the asphalt. A soldier kicks your ribs before pulling you up and shoving you into a single-file line. He puts your hands on the back shoulders of a man in front of you. "Keep them there," he barks.

Seconds later, someone grabs your shoulders with a light, unsure grip. Their hands are comforting, and you hope they grip harder.

You take a moment to look around. You're in a small clearing on the side of a mountain where the road ends. The limestone cliffs match the drab concrete pillboxes that guard the area. The line of refugees leads into the mountain, through a large, arched tunnel carved into the face of a cliff.

"Put your fucking head down!" A soldier yells. He rams his rifle into the back of your knee. When you stumble, he smacks the top of your head. You look down at the dirt. There's a worm wiggling on the surface between two blades of grass.

You need to fidget again, so you rub the shoulders of the man in front of you. You start to really massage him, pushing your fingers into the nooks of his back.

"Walk!" A soldier commands. The line shuffles forward.

5...

I often imagine I'm drifting through space, out in the void. Not like in a movie, where you can see stars and planets in the background. Real, empty space. Pure blackness. I'm slowly pulling away from the space shuttle, seeing it disappear into the cosmic night. I don't know why.

The stunner overloaded on an old man, blowing the eyes out of his skull. His limp body dangles on a hoist. The flesh near the stunning point is burnt, and maybe I'm imagining it, but his body continues to twitch.

What no one tells you is that burnt flesh smells good, like cooking beef. The deodorizers can’t mask such a recent mishap. The bodies haven't been bled yet, so there’s a metallic hint in the air as well, a coppery aroma. My mouth waters. I suck down the spit as I prepare my tools.

Behind the old man is the rest of the line. Before the stunner, they're still conscious, but barely. I don't know what they give them before they put them on the hoists, but they all have a dull, blissful look on their faces. I sometimes wish they would simply shoot them, or poison them, or throw them off a cliff. But their blood and organs are too useful for that.

I get to work. In my head I'm out in space. In the blackness. In the void. In heaven. There's really nothing there. That's where I belong.

I'm out in space, and I hear breathing. Not the lull of automatic breaths, but purposeful, deep breaths. As if someone was drowning and finally found air. Someone is pulling me back from the void, back towards the space shuttle, back to Earth, to hell.

I look up from my work. There's a boy behind the dead man. His eyes dart around the room, and his face is panicked. The hoist restricts most of his movement, but he's fidgeting about in any way he can. I reach for the panic button on my radio, but I don't press it.

Instead, I try not to think about it.

6...

The line of refugees inches down the barely illuminated maw of the mountain. After several minutes, you reach a door, and the man in front of you is ripped from your grasp and frogmarched inside. Then it's your turn.

Your vision blurs after a woman in scrubs administers a shot to your right arm. You're not quite asleep, but you're dreaming. It's vivid and feverish, prophetic and frenzied. You see a many-headed serpent with rainbow scales swallowing dozens of eggs all at once, an egg for each head. The serpent lies on a bed of red moss.

You feel a dull pinch on the nape of your neck, and suddenly you're flying through an ovular portal, carried onward by some strange power. The serpent hisses as you speed by, and a single one of its forked tongues grazes your flesh.

As you pass through the portal, you enter into a hallway of mirrors that reflect nothing. The floor of the hallway is made of square marble tiles speckled with gold. At the end of the hallway you're greeted by a many-armed angel with silver wings. The angel has no face and speaks without words.

Then you're in a room with one hundred clocks. None of them are synced, and each tick blends together to create a constant din of noise. One by one, the clocks stop.

You taste something bitter in your mouth, and saliva pools under your tongue. You open your eyes and see a man on the floor a few feet beneath you. He’s dressed in military fatigues but carries no weapon, and his brown hair is tied into a neat ponytail. He reaches for something but quickly puts it away.

You really want to move. You can't. You're not sure where you are. There's a naked body in front of you, twisting on a hoist. You're now aware of your own nakedness. You try to think, but there is nothing in your head but a deep fog. You try to speak but can only slur your words and choke on your tongue.

After a short while, the strange power draws you forward. You take another look at the man below and nod at him.

7...

I looked away, but I can't stop thinking about you. I don't know why. I've seen the whole process before, even with kids. But they were always stunned. Just meat. But you were more than meat; you were alive and alert and nodded right at me.

I don't know what kind of nod it was. At first, I thought it was a greeting. Or maybe an acknowledgment. But when I got to my room and sunk into my couch and I really thought about it, I think you were targeting me, taking a picture of me in your mind.

So that when your soul reaches heaven, you can show it to God and keep me out.

I should've looked. I should've witnessed you. I should've waited to see the eyes pop out of your head, the incisions made on your neck and wrists and feet to bleed you dry, the machine suck out your blood and rip out your organs, and the rest of your husk of a body turned into slop for pigs and chickens.

I should've watched the machine all day, counting the bodies, counting the people passing through the stunner, each one a universe to someone else. A universe-extinguishing machine. Snuffing out galaxies. And me in the void, watching until everything is emptiness.

I should, but I won't. I'll keep ignoring it. Wouldn't you?

Art by Supreme Hinton.