The Queue
A short story.
In Neoalexandria there are so many anthologies of short fiction. Figures: the amount of books knows no limit, saying there are “many” of any categories is a logical fallacy since they cannot be numbered. But I digress.
The following story is written by some Karim Jassim and it’s taken from a volume titled “Twenty Unsettling Tales From Around The World” published in 2001. I have yet to discover anything more about the author or the publication.
Enjoy.
It was like waking up after a long, long sleep. One of those night sleeps that does the opposite of its purpose, and the next morning you’re more tired than you were before getting in bed: your neck hurts, you need rest, your thoughts aren’t lucid, your mood is awful and you perceive everything in a fuzzy mess.
That’s what happened to Number 3301 when she woke up. She had no idea if that was her actual name, nor did she care as soon as she woke up, but people around her would refer to her with that term: “Number 3301, move on!” someone would say behind her, with a mean but weirdly dissociated voice tone, a figure she could not see clearly since her eyes were still trying to fight the gravity trying to close them up; she would not have the clarity of mind to reply to her, either, and ask her pieces of information, or maybe start arguing because of the demanding tone she used: her mouth was sealed, and her brain was like a puddle of thoughts that had no uniformity. She could not form a phrase that had sense in its entirety. Nevertheless, she followed the order.
Slowly she kept on going forward, following the shoulders of someone who was in front of her. She was acquiring conscience slowly but surely, and she knew it was a woman in front of her, it was clear from the shape of her body and the length of her hair, but mainly from the way she walked. Her eyes slowly started to get used to the darkness she was in; more importantly, her mind started processing what was going on around her.
She was in a gigantic room, it would appear, and she was right in the middle of a long, long, perhaps infinite, still, silent queue. The room was big, not extremely wide, but only the middle of it was occupied, and it looked like it was way longer than any other room she had ever seen before. It was also particularly tall. She imagined how many clones of herself she’d need to reach the ceiling; she thought at least 5 of herself were needed to do that. It looked like they were inside of a depot. An unusual depot, it is: that long, narrow building had no windows at all.
The lights, projected by big reflectors every 20 metres, approximatively, had a red undertone. They were dark lights. They looked like they were coming through a filter of clotted blood. She didn’t feel scared, although the situation surely called for it: in fact, she realized she was tranquil though she should’ve been feeling something different. That worried her, somewhat, but that worry soon disappeared, leaving space in her mind for other thoughts. Her thoughts looked like the little waves that come out when a rock is thrown into the water. First, it looks convoluted, it’s chaotic, and so she felt as soon as something new came to her mind: chaos. A swarm, coming and going. Then, slowly, the waves got more distant from one another, and the chaos left its place to order or an appearance of order.
The thought that came after the worries about not being worried was about her name: that led to thinking about her memory, and her identity. Who was she? She wouldn’t have known. She tried to ask herself questions that would’ve led her somewhere constructive, that could help her find a solution to the problem: therefore she tried to dig out of the graveyard of her mind some memories about what happened before she woke up standing in the middle of a queue.
Did she wake up? The feeling was the one she knew she’d feel when waking up. But thinking about it she had no memories of actually waking up, and she even lacked memories of falling asleep before that: not earlier that day, nor anytime in her life. She actually had absolutely no memories of her life before the queue. She had no consciousness of who she was. It was a weird feeling, she confirmed to herself: she had so much knowledge that, she knew, she wouldn’t have got if she was the victim of an episode of memory loss.
She possessed a lot of notions, about different topics; but she had no idea who she was. It was like someone, a real person, an evil villain she’d imagine, cherry-picked the notions she should’ve had to forget and ripped them out of her brain. She did not even know if all that she knew was, indeed, all there was to know, if she was not completely ignoring some major part of life – besides her own identity, it is.
She did not know anything about neurology. At least she knew that people could forget entire periods of their lives after brain damage, but she did not only forget her life: she forgot every single notion about her own self. Who was she? She knew she was a woman, from an apparently trivial detail: the voice in her head, the voice that dubbed her thoughts in her mind, was the voice of a woman. She also knew she did not have a penis, and she, knowing what a woman was, felt like she could identify as one for every possible reason. But how old was she? She wouldn’t have known how to answer. Nor did she know what her name was, nor what she looked like, nor what she even liked doing. What her favourite movies were. What food she liked. She had no idea about any of that.
Suddenly a bigger rock was thrown in the waters of her mind and the waves it created overshadowed all the other little circular waves. What was she doing there? She felt like every other thought, every other question she asked herself until that point, just served to cover up – to ignore the real issue, the thing in front of her, the elephant in the room (again: she knew it was an expression, but she had no idea how she gained knowledge, as she didn’t have any memory of direct social interaction with anyone except the woman behind her in line): she was in such a weird situation and she didn’t know how that happened.
She was caught in the middle of a seemingly endless queue. She kept taking little steps forward, and the end of the room looked closer and closer. While she was thinking, the apparently infinite room found one of its edges. The big, tinned door. It was enormous: went all the way from the floor to almost the ceiling, and occupied all the width of the room as well. A monitor, hanging standing in that little space on the wall over the door, a big, dark monitor with red analogical numbers written on it, stood vigilant. And the door opened every fifteen seconds, approximately.
She could not see what was going on inside of it, but she knew the number was 3277, and the number she had printed on her hand, the one she apparently got her name from, was 3301. She assumed it was almost her turn to get inside. But she did not know what to expect.
She knew queues are usually something people find themselves in on an independent, voluntary basis: you want to buy something, so you’re in a queue at the supermarket to pay for the thing you’re buying. Or a queue to get to a particular attraction at a Luna Park. So, why was she inside a queue with a lot of other women?
Why were they all silent, still, and diligent? Were they all asking themselves questions, wondering how they got there, wondering exactly what happened? She could move, go away, run. But a force was keeping her there. Where would she go, anyway? She did not even know who she was, where she was, where to go, who to call, she did not know who she’d find if she tried to escape. So she stayed there in the queue, waiting for her number.
She noticed, looking around roughly, how everyone, her included, looked alike. Everyone was a woman, and everyone had her brown, either lighter or darker, hair straight and cut to their shoulders. They all had straight faces, with no clear signs of aging: they all looked young, she would’ve guessed mid-thirties.
They were all roughly one hundred and sixty centimetres tall, and they were all relatively skinny. Everyone was wearing red trousers, similar to the undertone of the light that was illuminating them; and a grey, anonymous t-shirt. She realized she also had the same type of clothing; therefore there was no reason to think she was different from the others in any significant way. She tried to have a dialogue with the women around her. Most would not reply.
The only one who’d give short and unrelated answers was the one behind her, number 3302, who’d just regularly tell her to go one step further. She tried to ask her who she was, if she knew what was going on, and what was happening. Seeing how she would refuse those questions, but she wouldn’t completely avoid the option of talking, she tried to ask some mundane questions: what was her favourite ice cream flavour, or where was the last place she went to on vacation. Those were questions that, were she to ask them to herself, she would not know the answers to.
She spent so much time wondering about what was going on that she, once again, deliberately ignored her fate: it was her time. She got in front of the big door, and when it opened again, she got inside, stopping all the thinking. The puddle’s waves stopped. The waters were, once again, calm. Her every thought, worry, and question disappeared in a myst that came out of nowhere. She got inside and stopped feeling anything. As if one enormous rock was thrown into that lake, causing all the water to overflow. Everything went pitch black.
It was like waking up after a long, long sleep. One of those night sleeps that does the opposite of its purpose, and the next morning you’re more tired than you were before getting in bed...
Goated
I love ur writing so much you are so talented