The Line

I am forty-one years old. I was born in the line. I was born in a place between two other people, my mother ahead of me and my father behind, or perhaps the other way around, and the first thing I heard was the sound of the line breathing, the long slow exhalation of people waiting. I have never questioned the line. I have never stepped out of it. I have never raised my voice above the low murmur that passes for conversation among the people who stand near me, and even that murmur is rare, and even that murmur is mostly the sound of fabric shifting, of weight being redistributed, of the small involuntary noises a body makes when it has been standing for a very long time. The line is the only thing that has ever been real. The rule seems sensible. Leaving would be unthinkable, like leaving your own skin, like stepping out of your own bones.

I put the card in my coat pocket. The lining of the pocket is soft with age, worn to a fine gray nap that catches against the card as it slides down. The card settles against my thigh with a faint weight. Above me, the sky is the color of dishwater, and the buildings on either side of the street have windows like closed eyes, and the yellow tape strung between the stanchions sags slightly in the middle, the way it has always sagged. I do not know how long I have been standing here. The line has not moved in my lifetime. I do not expect it to move now.

The man ahead of me has gray hair cut close to his skull. He wears a brown coat with a torn lining, and the tear is shaped like a small dark mouth, and I have stared at that tear for so many hours, so many days, so many years, that I know its exact dimensions, the way the threads have frayed at the top edge, the way the darker fabric beneath shows through. I have stood behind this man for as long as I can remember. His shoulders are narrow. His neck is bent slightly forward, as if he is listening for something, as if the something is very far away and very quiet, and he has been listening for it for so long that his body has forgotten how to straighten. He does not speak. He does not turn. He is as fixed as a fence post, as fixed as the stanchions, as fixed as the buildings with their closed-eye windows.

Behind me, someone coughs. The sound is wet and far away, though I know the person is close, close enough that I could reach back and touch them if I wanted to. I do not want to. I do not turn to look. Looking has never occurred to me. The line is the line. The people in it are the people in it. We stand. We wait. The day moves over us like a slow hand, and the light changes by degrees so small that I cannot perceive them, and the shadows of the buildings stretch and retract and stretch again, and still we stand.

The card in my pocket is warm against my leg. I think about the warmth. I think about the hands that wore the edges smooth, the fingers that pressed the lamination down at the corner, the thumb that traced the words over and over until the paper beneath began to soften. I think about the fact that I do not remember receiving it, and then I stop thinking about it, because a man on the other side of the street is walking past, his shoes loud on the pavement, his head down, his hands in his pockets. He does not look at the line. He does not look at us. I watch him until he disappears around a corner, and the sound of his footsteps fades, and the street is quiet again except for the sound of the line breathing.

I return my attention to the man ahead of me. His brown coat. His gray hair. The shallow depressions in the concrete where his shoes have stood for so long, depressions that catch the gray light and hold it, depressions that are smooth as polished stone. I do not think about the card again until the next rule appears.

Rule two: do not ask what the line is for.

The card is in my hand again. I do not remember taking it from my pocket. The light has changed; it is later, or earlier, or the same time on a different day, and the quality of the air has shifted, and there is a smell of wet concrete and old paper, the smell of a basement closed for a long time. The laminated surface is warm. The edges are smooth. Beneath the first rule, which I read again without meaning to, there is now a second rule. The number two is printed in the same small black type. The words are clear and even. They are the kind of words that have been printed so carefully that they seem to have been there always, waiting beneath the surface of the card for me to notice them.

I remember asking my mother once, when I was a child. I must have been six or seven. I remember the way the question felt in my mouth before I asked it, the way it sat on my tongue like a small hard stone, the way I turned it over and over before I let it out. I remember the way she looked at me after I asked, not with anger, but with a kind of pity, as if the question itself were a small death, as if the asking had changed something between us that could never be unchanged. She put her hand on the back of my head. Her fingers were cool, and they smelled of soap and something else, something metallic, like coins held too long. She did not answer. She did not need to answer. The look was enough. I never asked again.

My mother died standing in the line when I was nineteen. She had been standing behind my father, who had been standing behind a woman in a green scarf, who had been standing behind someone I never saw clearly, someone whose shape was always obscured by the angle of the street and the haze that rose from the concrete in the summer months. My mother's breathing changed in the night. I was not there. I was further back, in my own place, because the line assigns places and the places do not shift, and the distance between us was fixed by rules I did not yet know were rules. By the time I reached her, the people between us had closed the space. Her body was absorbed into the queue without ceremony. I did not see it happen. I only know that one day she was there, a shape in a gray coat, and then she was not, and the line had moved, not forward, but inward, the way a crowd tightens when someone leaves, the way a wound closes over a space that was once open.

I did not ask what the line was for then. I do not ask now. The second rule is easy to follow. It describes what I have always done.

Rule three: do not look at the front.

I have never looked at the front. I have never thought about looking at the front, and the thought of thinking about it is strange to me, the way a word becomes strange when you repeat it too many times. The front is a direction, not a place. It is the direction the line faces. It is the reason we all stand with our bodies turned the same way, our eyes on the backs of the people ahead of us, our weight distributed evenly on both feet. I look at the man ahead of me. I look at his brown coat. I look at the place where his shoes meet the concrete, the way the concrete rises slightly around the soles, the way the gray of the pavement and the gray of his shoes have begun to blend together. I do not look past him. I do not raise my eyes to the far distance, where the line bends around a corner and disappears, where the stanchions and the yellow tape continue on and on, where the people ahead of me become a single continuous shape, a wall of backs and shoulders and heads that stretches toward something I have never seen.

The first three rules are the foundation. They keep the line stable. I follow them without effort. I file forms for an agency that no longer has an office. The forms are printed on thin paper that has yellowed at the edges, and I fill them out with a pen that scratches against the surface, and I submit them to a mailbox that is never emptied, and I return each evening to my place in the queue. I do not ask what the line is for. I do not look at the front. The rules are easy to follow because they describe what I have always done.

The card goes back into my pocket. The warmth of it lingers against my fingers. I flex my hands, and the joints crack softly, a sound like small twigs snapping. The air smells like wet concrete and old paper, like the inside of a drawer that has not been opened in years, like the pages of a book left in the rain and then dried. Somewhere behind me, a child coughs. The sound is small and dry. I do not turn. I do not need to turn. The line is long. The line is patient. The line is the only institution that remains.

Rule four: do not speak to the person ahead of you.

I am standing in my place. The card is in my hand. The fourth rule has appeared beneath the third, and I read it twice, then a third time, and the words do not change, and the number four is printed in the same small black type as the numbers before it. The lamination is peeling a little more at the corner. I press it down with my thumb. It does not stay.

The man ahead of me has not moved. His brown coat is the same brown coat. His gray hair is the same gray hair. The tear in the lining is the same tear, shaped like a small dark mouth, and I can see the darker fabric beneath it, and I can see the way the threads have frayed at the top edge. I have never spoken to him. I have never wanted to speak to him. Speaking to the person ahead of you would be like speaking to a wall, except that a wall might answer, and the answer would be terrible because it would mean that the wall had been listening all along. The man ahead of me is silent. He has been silent for as long as I have stood behind him. His silence is a kind of weather, a pressure system that moves over me and around me and through me, and I have learned to stand inside it without being crushed.

I think about the words I have never said to him. The small courtesies that might have passed between us in another life: a comment about the cold, a question about the time, an observation about the way the light slants between the buildings in the late afternoon, the way it catches the edge of the yellow tape and makes it glow for a moment before fading. None of these words have ever left my mouth. My mouth has learned to stay closed. The muscles of my jaw have settled into a permanent stillness, and when I swallow, I can feel the dryness at the back of my throat, the way the air moves over my tongue and tastes of nothing, the way the silence has become a physical thing, a second tongue, a second set of teeth.

The man ahead of me shifts his weight. It is the first time I have seen him move in years. The movement is small, a redistribution of pressure from one leg to the other, and then he is still again. The depressions in the concrete hold his shoes. I wonder if he felt the movement the way I felt it, as a small rupture in the fabric of the day, a tear that closed as soon as it opened. I do not speak to him. The rule does not need to forbid it. The silence has always been there.

Rule five: do not speak to the person behind you.

I have never spoken to the person behind me. I do not know who stands there now. I knew once, when I was younger, but the people behind me have changed over the years, the way the people ahead of me have not. The line behind me is longer than it was when I was a child. It stretches back and back, past the buildings, past the intersection, past the place where the street bends and the pavement buckles, past the places I have never seen and never will see. I have never walked to the back of the line. I have only seen it in photographs, and in the way the crowd thickens when I turn my head too quickly, the way the shapes of the people blur together into a single continuous mass.

The people behind me are starting to look familiar. This is a thing I have noticed without noticing. A woman with a red scarf. A man with a limp. A child who stands very still, holding the hand of someone I cannot see. They are always there. They have always been there. I do not know their names. I do not speak to them. The rule is easy to follow.

I think about the sound of their breathing. It is a sound I have heard for so long that I no longer register it as separate from my own. In the quiet hours, when the traffic on the next street has faded and the birds have stopped calling, I can hear the rise and fall of the people behind me, a collective respiration that moves through the line like wind through a field of dry grass. It is not a sound I could describe to anyone. It is not a sound I would want to describe. It is the sound of waiting, and I have heard it since before I had words for what I was doing.

The woman with the red scarf coughs. The man with the limp shifts his weight. The child stands very still. I do not turn around. The back of my neck is cold. The air moves over it in a slow current, and I can feel the presence of the people behind me as a kind of pressure, a weight that is not physical but that presses against me all the same. They are waiting for me to do something. They are always waiting for me to do something. I do not know what the something is. I do not ask. The rule does not say I cannot wonder.

Rule six: do not remember the names of the dead.

The card is warm. The edges are smooth. I read the sixth rule and feel the words settle into me like stones dropping into still water, and the ripples spread outward through my chest, through my arms, through the long muscles of my legs. My mother's name was Ellen. I have not said her name in years. I have not thought her name in years. The rule says I should not remember it. I remember it now, because the rule tells me not to, and the act of remembering feels like a transgression, like reaching into a drawer I have been told to keep closed.

My father's name was Samuel. He died before my mother, standing in the line, his body absorbed into the queue without ceremony. I remember the way his hands looked, folded over his belt, the knuckles white and smooth, the nails cut short and even. I remember the way he smelled, of tobacco and wool and something metallic, like coins, like the smell of my mother's fingers on the back of my head. I remember his voice, low and even, telling me to stand still, to wait, to be patient. The line is long, he said. The line is patient. He said this the way other fathers might say the sky is blue, the way other fathers might say the sun will rise tomorrow.

I should not remember his name. The rule says so. But the rule is new, and the memory is old, and I do not know how to unremember a thing that has lived in me for so long. I put the card back in my pocket. The warmth of it spreads through the fabric. I stand very still. The line does not move.

The people ahead of me are not standing on the ground. They are standing in it. I notice this for the first time, though I have seen it every day of my life. The man ahead of me, his ankles are swallowed by the concrete, the way a tree's roots are swallowed by the earth. The concrete rises around his shoes in a smooth, gray lip. The ground has risen to meet him, to hold him, to keep him where he stands. I look at my own shoes. The concrete is flat beneath them. But I can feel the way it presses against the soles, the way it waits.

The yellow tape that cordons the line has begun to peel. I notice it now. The tape is strung between waist-high stanchions, and its color is the color of old teeth, the color of paper left in the sun too long. Where it has peeled, I can see a second layer of tape beneath it. And beneath that, a third. And beneath that, a fourth. The layers are pressed together, yellow on yellow on yellow, like the rings of a tree, like the pages of a book that has been glued shut. I do not touch the tape. I only look. The layers go down and down, and I cannot see where they end.

I hear a child crying somewhere far ahead. The sound is high and thin, the same cry every time. I have heard it before. I will hear it again. The same child, always the same cry, like a recording that loops and loops, like a bell that has been ringing for so long that the ringing has become silence. I do not look for the child. I do not ask about the child. The rules do not say I cannot hear.

The rules are not instructions for waiting. I understand this now, in the way you understand a thing without putting it into words, in the way you understand that the sky is dark because the sun has gone and not because the sky has forgotten how to be light. The rules are instructions for becoming part of the line. Rule four: do not speak to the person ahead of you. Rule five: do not speak to the person behind you. Rule six: do not remember the names of the dead. Each rule removes something. Each rule pares away a piece of the person I was. The line is not a place where people wait for something. The line is the thing they are waiting for. The line is the procedure. The line is the only institution that remains.

I can feel the hum beneath the concrete. It is a low vibration, barely perceptible, like a machine running deep below the street. I have felt it for so long that I have stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing the sound of your own heartbeat, the way you stop noticing the weight of your own body. But now, standing in my place, holding the card with its six rules, I feel it again. It moves up through the soles of my shoes, through the bones of my ankles, through the long muscles of my legs. It is the sound of the line itself, the sound of the procedure continuing, the sound of something that has been running for so long that it no longer needs a purpose. It runs because it has always run. It runs because running is what it does.

The child is still crying. The hum is still vibrating. The people ahead of me are still standing in the ground. I am still standing in my place. The card is warm in my pocket. The rules are multiplying. And I am beginning to understand that they will not stop multiplying until there is nothing left of me to remove.

Rule seven: when the person ahead of you leaves the line, do not take their place.

I read the seventh rule and feel something shift. The card is warm in my hand. The edges are smooth. The lamination has peeled back further, and I can see the paper beneath, soft and frayed, the fibers separating from each other. The words are clear. They are the clearest words on the card. I read them again. When the person ahead of you leaves the line, do not take their place.

The man ahead of me has been standing in the same spot for decades. His shoes have worn shallow depressions into the concrete. His posture is identical to photographs from before I was born. I have stood behind him for my entire life. I have watched the back of his head, the set of his shoulders, the way his brown coat hangs from his frame. I have never seen his face. I have never heard his voice. He is as fixed as a fence post, as permanent as the buildings on either side of the street.

And then, one evening, he steps forward.

It is evening. The light is the color of weak tea, and it slants between the buildings at a low angle, and it catches the edge of the yellow tape and makes it glow for a moment before fading. The air smells like rain that has not fallen, like dust and ozone and the faint metallic tang of the stanchions. I am standing in my place, holding the card, reading the seventh rule for what feels like the hundredth time. The man ahead of me shifts his weight. It is a small movement, the kind of movement a person makes when they have been standing too long, the kind of movement I have made a thousand times. I do not look up. I am still reading. And then he steps forward.

The movement is not small. It is deliberate. He lifts one foot, and then the other, and he steps forward, out of the depressions his shoes have worn into the concrete. The sound of his soles leaving the ground is a soft, tearing sound, like roots being pulled from earth, like paper being separated from paper. He takes another step. And another. And then he is walking, walking away from me, walking toward the front of the line, and the people ahead of him are moving aside to let him pass, and I am watching him go.

I watch his brown coat until I cannot see it anymore. The crowd ahead of him closes around the space where he was walking, and the shape of him dissolves into the shapes of the people who were already there. The sound of his footsteps fades into the general murmur of the line, the low shuffling that is not quite footsteps, the distant hum that runs beneath everything. The space where he stood is empty.

I stare at the space. The concrete there is dark, darker than the surrounding pavement. It is smooth, worn to a polish by decades of standing, by the constant pressure of his weight, by the small movements he made when he shifted from one leg to the other. The depressions where his shoes rested are shallow, and they hold the shape of his feet, the imprint of his weight. The air above the space is warm. I can feel it from where I stand, a faint heat rising from the concrete, like the heat that comes off a road in summer, like the heat that comes off a stone that has been held in someone's hand.

The line behind me presses closer. I feel it as a pressure, a shift in the air, a movement that is not movement. The people behind me are waiting. They are always waiting. They are waiting for me to step forward, to fill the space, to take the place that has opened. The seventh rule says I should not. The seventh rule says: do not take their place.

I understand that the rule was never about the line. It was about me.

The warmth of the concrete where the man stood is still radiating. I can feel it through my shoes, though I have not moved. I can feel it in the soles of my feet, in the bones of my ankles, in the place where my own weight has pressed into the ground for so long. The space is empty. The space is warm. The space is waiting.

I step forward.

The warmth rises through me. The concrete is smooth beneath my shoes. The depressions the man left are still there, and my feet do not fit them exactly, my feet are smaller, my weight distributed differently, but the ground accepts me. The ground has always accepted me. I stand in the space where the man stood for decades, and the line closes behind me like a wound.

The card is still in my hand. I look down at it. The seventh rule is printed there, clear and even. When the person ahead of you leaves the line, do not take their place. I have broken the rule. I have stepped forward. I have taken the place of the man who left. And now I am standing where he stood, in the warmth of the concrete, in the depressions his shoes made, in the space the line has given me.

The line behind me has already forgotten the man who stood ahead of me. I can feel it. The pressure of the crowd has shifted. The people behind me are looking at the back of my head now. They are watching my shoulders, my coat, the set of my neck. They are waiting for me to be still. I am still. I am very still.

The card is warm in my hand. I read the rules again. Rule one: do not leave the line. Rule two: do not ask what the line is for. Rule three: do not look at the front. Rule four: do not speak to the person ahead of you. Rule five: do not speak to the person behind you. Rule six: do not remember the names of the dead. Rule seven: when the person ahead of you leaves the line, do not take their place.

The last item now reads differently. It was never a rule for the line. It was a rule for me. And I have broken it. Or I have fulfilled it. I cannot tell the difference. The line does not tell me the difference. The line only stands, and waits, and holds me in my place.

Somewhere far ahead, the child is still crying. The same child, always the same cry. I listen to it now, the way I have listened to it my whole life, and I think I recognize the sound. It is thin and high and endless. It is the sound of a child who has been crying for so long that the crying has become a kind of breathing. It is the sound of a child who does not know why they are crying, only that they cannot stop.

I do not turn around. The queue is long. The queue is patient. The queue stretches back through the city, back through the years, back through the lives of everyone I have ever known. My parents met in the line. My grandparents died in the line. I was born in the line, and I have been standing in it ever since. The front has never moved. The front has never been there. The line is the only thing that has ever been real.

The warmth of the concrete is fading now. My body is settling into the space the man left behind. The depressions his shoes made are still there, and I can feel them beneath my feet, the ghost of his weight, the memory of his standing. I will stand here until my own shoes wear new depressions. I will stand here until my ankles are swallowed by the ground. I will stand here until the next rule appears, and the next, and the next.

The card is in my hand. The edges are smooth. The lamination is peeling. The print is small and even. I read the first rule again, because it is the only rule I have ever needed. Rule one: do not leave the line.

I do not leave the line.

The child is still crying somewhere far ahead. The sound is the same as it has always been. The sound is the same as it will always be. I stand in my new place, in the warmth of the man who stood before me, and I wait. The line does not move. The line does not need to move. The line is the purpose. The line is the procedure. The line is the only thing that has ever been real.

And the front has never moved because it was never there.