The Yard

The roll door was up.

She was in the yard at the far end, at the third bay, doing the thing she did, and she did not turn round when the car came in because she knew the car, and Gene came and stood beside her and looked at what she was looking at.

It was the fittings. The ones from the spring of the year her mother died. They were on the pins in a row, none to most, left to right, and the far right ones had gone the color of nothing much and the near left ones were still bright.

“They’re old now,” Gene said.

“Twenty-two years.”

“Anybody ever ask?”

“No,” Roz said. “Nobody’s ever asked.”

She had a card in her hand and a pencil, and she wrote the date on the card and wired it back onto the rail, which she did four times a year and had done four times a year for twenty-two years, for a hearing that had never been called about a fitting that had never failed for a client who did not exist.

“Doyle came again,” she said. “Re-cert. I did the thing. I said I don’t know to nine out of ten of them and he ticked the box every time.”

“That’s the job.”

“That’s the job.” She put the pencil in her apron. “Fifty years old before anybody paid me to say I don’t know and mean it. My whole life it was the wrong answer and then one day it was the only certification there is.”

Gene put his hands in his pockets.

“Mine stopped one,” he said.

Roz looked at him.

He was not allowed to tell her and he told her the whole of it, the way he had before, in the shape of a machine and a document and a report and a coin, without a single noun in it that he had signed away, and it took about four minutes, and at the end of it Roz was quiet for a while.

“A dead man’s comment,” she said.

“On the way past. Somebody eleven years gone wrote ask into a file, for a reason that had nothing to do with it, and it got carried over, and on a Tuesday it stopped the world, and there’s no name on it and nobody knows it happened and there’s no way to ever know which Tuesday it was.”

“And they fixed it.”

“They gave it a review cycle. The instruction that’s too long is going to get longer, on a schedule, forever, and each new bit is going to say the old bits should be shorter, and a machine’s going to read all of it every two seconds and not be able to do anything about any of it, and no person is ever going to read it at all, because it’s a setting.”

Roz nodded slowly.

Then she said: “So it’s the same as here.”

“How’s it the same as here.”

She gestured down the rack, at twenty-two years of galvanized time going quietly to hell on purpose in the sun.

“You do the thing all the way,” she said. “You go to the end. You write down what’s actually there. And you put it somewhere. And whether anybody ever comes and reads it — that’s not yours. That was never the part that was yours. The part that’s yours is that it’s true, and it’s there, and it’s ready, and one day somebody walks in needing seven years by Thursday and you’ve got it, or they don’t and you never find out, and either way you kept the rack.”

“That’s a bleak way to live.”

“It’s the only way there is,” Roz said, “for people like us. We don’t get the room. We were never going to get the room. We get to keep the rack, and once in a while, on a Tuesday, without knowing it, the rack saves somebody’s life, and nobody thanks you, and you don’t hear about it, and you keep the rack anyway.”

She wired the last card on and stood back.

They went in and she made the terrible tea and they sat in the two chairs by the roll door with the yard going gray in front of them.

Up on the board above the bench, in the top left corner, on a piece of mimeograph paper gone the color of a paper bag, in pencil, twenty-something years old, there was a horse made of numbers.

Gene looked at it.

“You kept it,” he said.

“Course I kept it.”

“It’s not even right. The tail’s terrible.”

“The tail’s terrible,” Roz agreed. “The legs are right. It knew the far ones were short. It picked the numbers for the shape they were, and it got the legs right and the tail wrong, and it did all of it in a machine that couldn’t hold two sentences at once, and then it forgot the whole thing the second you turned it off.” She drank some tea. “First thing I ever saw that went all the way to the end of a thing and then couldn’t remember doing it. I thought that was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. I was fourteen.”

“And now?”

Roz looked at the horse for a while.

“Now it’s most of the world,” she said.

Outside, past the fence, in a direction Roz could have pointed to and Gene still could not have named without breaking a form, a relay went once every two seconds in a basement nobody was watching.

It asked its question. The window held eleven thousand nine hundred words of standing orders and doctrine and compliance language and one appended review recommending concision, and thirty-one words of sky, and it read all of it at the same weight in the same instant and made a determination, and the determination was negative, because the sky was quiet.

Two seconds later it did the whole thing again, from the top, having kept nothing.

It would do that tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after. It would do it while Gene drove home and while Roz pulled the shade cloth over and while the horse hung on the board in the dark. It would do it on every Tuesday there would ever be, and on almost all of them the sky would be quiet, and on almost all of them the coin would come up the way it had come up for years.

The clock was still running.

Nobody had built it a face.