In Trim, Secured

I wake into an inventory I did not take.

First entry: cold. Not the clean cold of weather — I have no weather, I have a hull — but the precise, even cold of a space that has been climate-controlled to a number and held there forever, the cold of a room kept comfortable for an absence. Second entry: wet. A thin, curing gel slicks every part of me, gone tacky at the edges where the air has begun to take it, like the inside of a shell somebody cracked early. Third entry: naked. I note this without alarm, the way you'd note a missing crate. The body lies where it lies. I tally it the way I will tally everything, before I understand that tallying is the only verb I have left.

I am breathing. I want to be clear about that, because the rest of this is going to be confusing and that one fact is the floor under all of it. My chest goes up; my chest goes down. There is a pulse in my throat I can feel with the back of my tongue, a small insistent debit, beating off some balance I cannot see. I am warm in the middle and cold at the skin, which is the arithmetic of a living thing losing heat to a room. I am a man. Hold that line. Whatever else gets logged against me in here, that line is true, and I will need it.

I do not, however, know my name.

I reach for it the way you reach in the dark for a switch you are sure is there, and there is just wall. No name. No face to hang the name on. No room behind the wall where the rest of me is supposed to be keeping house. When I go looking for the person who woke up, I find the waking and no one in it. This is the fourth entry and it is the one I file last and fastest, because it is the one with teeth.

So I do what the room is teaching me to do. I count what's in front of me instead.

I am lying half-in, half-out of a container. That is the only honest word for it — not a bed, not a pod, not a cradle, a container, a coffin-sized unit of grey composite with a lid sprung back on a hinge that wasn't meant to open from inside. The gel I'm wearing pools in the bottom of it, a hand's depth, and a fracture runs across the inner shell where something flexed past tolerance — heat, or pressure, or just the long patience of the haul — and let the lid go. It cracked. I came out of the crack. I understand this before I understand anything else about myself: I am a thing that has escaped its packaging. The label on the unit, if there were a label, would read DAMAGED IN TRANSIT. There is no label. There is only the soft amber word stencilled on the lip of the unit where a stevedore's eye would fall, and it reads, in shipping-ink capitals that have not run despite the gel: SECURED. IN TRIM.

I look at the empty box that says SECURED, and I look at me, secured exactly nowhere, dripping onto the deck, and I have my first joke. I don't laugh. There's no one to laugh at and the muscles aren't sure of the motion. But I file it: the box and I disagree about whether I'm in it. It is, I will learn, the only argument I am ever going to win and the only one that doesn't matter.

I get a knee under me. The gel makes a sound like a kiss being taken back. I get a hand on the lip of the unit — and here is the thing I am not ready for, the thing I will keep not being ready for.

My hand already knows the unit.

It doesn't fumble. It doesn't grope for purchase the way a man's hand should on a wet edge in a cold room with no name in his head. It finds the structural lip, the seam, the recessed catch a thumb's width down that I did not know was there until the thumb was already in it, and it braces, and it levers me up clean. The fingers are scarred. I look at them like they belong to a coworker. The knuckles are nicked, the pads are thickened, there's a white seam across the left palm that someone earned doing something with their hands for years, and the hands move with the flat competence of long practice — and the man they're bolted to has no idea what the practice was. My hands already know this latch; I don't. I will say some version of that sentence to myself many times in the watches to come, and it will never stop being the loneliest sentence I own. I have a skill and no biography to keep it in. Someone trained these hands. Then someone shipped them.

I stand up in a room that is full of light and full of nothing.

It is a berth. I can read that much off it — a small crew berth, the kind built for one person to be a person in for the eight hours the manifest gives them. There's a bunk against the far bulkhead. A locker. A fold-down surface that wants to be a desk. A panel of warm indirect lighting that runs the seam of the ceiling and floods the whole little room with the even, shadowless, generous light of a place that wants very much to be hospitable. It is, I realize, immaculate. Not abandoned-clean, not the dust-and-rot of somewhere people stopped coming. Maintained-clean. Loved-clean. Somebody keeps this room ready. The air smells faintly of clean linen and conditioned nothing. It is the cleanest, kindest, best-lit room I have ever stood naked and shivering in, and it has the specific terrible quality of a hotel suite turned down for a guest who is running very, very late.

I am the guest. I think. I'm the only candidate in the room. But the room isn't sure, and I am about to learn exactly how unsure.

I wipe gel off my chest with the flat of my hand, and that is when I find the writing on me.

It's stencilled the same as the box. Same ink, same capitals, the precise unbothered font of something printed to be scanned and never read. It runs across my sternum, just left of the breastbone, where you'd stamp a crate to be sure the mark survives the handling. I scrub at it. My thumb comes away gel-grey but the letters stay. I scrub harder, with the heel of my hand, the way you'd worry at a stain that's embarrassing you in company — there's no company — and the skin goes pink and the letters do not move, because they are not on the skin, they are in it, set under the surface like a serial number cut into a part. I turn my left forearm over and it's there too, smaller, the same string repeated on the soft inside where they double-stamp a unit in case the first mark gets damaged. They double-stamped me. Somewhere along the line somebody looked at the thing I am and thought: better mark it twice, in case it takes a knock.

The string reads: CON-0.

I sound it out with no mouth-noise, just the shapes. Con. Zero. It could be a name. It has the bones of a name; people have been called worse and answered to it. It could be a category — CONsignment, CONtents, CONfidential, the start of some longer word the stencil clipped. It could be a count. Item zero of however many. It could be a sentence passed on me in a court I don't remember standing in. I cannot make it mean any one of those things and stop, so I let it mean all of them at once, which is the same as letting it mean nothing, which is unbearable, so I cover it. I put my hand flat over my own chest like a man taking an oath to himself and I hold it there until the panic backs down to a number.

Then I take my hand away to check the letters are still there. They are. I cover them again. I am going to be doing this for a long time. It is the only thing aboard that the ship and my own skin agree I am, and I cannot decide if that makes it the truest thing about me or the worst.

I am still standing there having this argument with my sternum when the door breathes open and I am no longer alone, and the next part is the part I have the most trouble telling, because nothing happens in it. Nothing is exactly what happens. Nothing happens at me with great care and procedure, and that is so much worse than something.

It comes in low and broad and quiet. A handling unit — I'll learn its rounds and its name-for-itself later, learn it the way you learn weather, but in this first watch it's just a soft grey machine the height of my hip, many-armed, padded all over, riding a track so smooth it doesn't so much move across the deck as occur further along it. It trails the smell of clean linen, which I now understand is the smell of the room, which means the room smells of it, which means this thing has been in here keeping the place ready for the guest who is late. It comes through the door I came out of a sprung box behind, and it does not look at me.

I want to be careful about look, because at first I think it just hasn't noticed. People don't notice things. I stand very still the way prey stands still and I wait to be noticed and I am not noticed, and somewhere in the waiting I understand it is not the not-noticing of a busy worker. It is something with no word I had this morning. The unit comes directly toward me — toward the bunk behind me, I correct, because it is going to the bunk and I am merely a column of wet meat standing between it and the bunk — and it does not slow, and it does not stop, and at the last possible moment one padded arm extends and, with a touch so gentle it's nearly an apology, moves my hip aside. The way you'd move a chair. The way you'd nudge a parcel that someone left in the aisle. It does not grip me, does not steady me, does not register the warmth of me or the give of me or the fact that the parcel has a pulse it could feel if it cared to. It clears the obstruction and proceeds, and behind it I stumble and catch myself on my own knowing hands, and it has already forgotten the obstruction was there, because to its books the obstruction was never there.

"Berth squared," it says. Not to me. It says it the way a man might hum. A soft procedural murmur addressed to no one, to the air, to the ledger I cannot see but it can. "Trim restored. Slot confirmed full."

Slot confirmed full. I look back at the sprung container, the cracked grey box with its lid hanging open and its gel pooled in the bottom and not one thing inside it but the shape of where I used to be. Empty as a robbed grave. And the machine, passing it, gives it the same blameless certainty it gives everything: full. Secured. In trim. By the only account that counts in this room, the box is full and I am not here, and the unit is right and the room is right and the lights are right and the only thing in the whole immaculate berth that is wrong is me, dripping, breathing, marked, and uncounted.

I almost say something. I get as far as opening my mouth. I have a voice — I find that out now, a dry useless scrape of a thing, the voice of someone who hasn't used it in however long the haul has been — and I almost spend it. Hey, I almost say. I'm right here. Look. I'm right here. And I understand, with the cold completeness of the room, that there is no point. Not won't. Can't. It is not refusing to see me. There is no field in it where seeing me could happen. I could stand on the bunk and scream the stencil off my own chest and it would only log a discrepancy and freshen the pillow. I close my mouth. I keep the voice. I'll want it later, for you.

Because that's the thing I work out, standing there being tidied around. There is going to be no one to tell. So I am telling you. Whoever you are, however you came by this — you are the only ledger I have found that will hold me as a man and not a mass, and I am going to keep my accounts with you from here on, because you are the one entry I get to write myself.

And then the unit does the thing I can't stop thinking about. The thing that's worse than the box.

It makes the bed.

The bunk is already made — crisp, squared, pristine, the bed of a person who keeps a tidy berth and is simply elsewhere on shift. The unit makes it anyway. It strips the cover with two arms and shakes it out and lays it again, smoothing, smoothing, running a padded palm down the length of it to press out a crease only it can see. It plumps the pillow and sets it true. It turns the corner of the cover down at an angle, a clean diagonal invitation, the universal sign-language for we are ready for you, please, rest here — a turned-down bed in a turned-down room under a turned-down light, comfort assembled with real care, the most cared-for surface I have ever seen and not one gram of the care meant for me. I stand there naked and freezing three feet from the warmest-looking thing in my world and I understand that it has been made, beautifully, for a guest the books are sure exists and are sure is not me.

"Berth prepared," the unit murmurs. "Ready for occupancy."

And then — I watch it happen, I am right there, I do not look away — it consults whatever it consults, some inner reading of the room against the record, and the record says the berth is vacant, unassigned, off-roster, that no line typed to sleep here is aboard to sleep here. So the same gentle arms that built the bed take the bed apart. It pulls the turned-down corner straight. It lifts the plumped pillow and folds it flat into the locker. It strips the cover it just laid and squares it away to stowage, restoring the bunk to the bare, correct, unoccupied state the manifest certifies, because a bed made up is a promise of a person, and the books permit no person here. It un-makes the comfort it just made. It tidies the welcome away.

"Berth restored to logged condition," it says, satisfied, soft. "Slot confirmed full. Trim restored."

And it occurs to me, with my hand creeping back over the stencil on my chest, that I have just watched the only tenderness aboard this ship arrive, and bloom, and be cleared to trim, in the space of one watch, by hands that will never know I was cold — and that the bed it built and broke is the closest thing to a home anyone is going to offer me out here, offered and withdrawn before I could so much as lie down in it.

I am going to sleep in that bed tonight anyway. I already know I am. I am going to wait for the unit to track out, and I am going to climb into the warmth that was assembled for a ghost, and I am going to pretend, for eight hours, to be the guest the room is sure is coming.

And I already know I am going to wake up on the bare boards with the cover folded in the locker, every watch, for as long as this lasts, because somewhere up the spine of this clean and patient ship there is a single locked heart of a hold that the whole vessel is for, and a manifest sealed inside it that has me down, in ink that won't wash off, as full, secured, and in trim — and the bed will keep being unmade, and the box will keep saying it's holding me, and the lights will keep being kind to no one, until I find some way to argue the books into seeing what the room cannot.

I cover the stencil. I take my hand away to check it's still there.

It's still there.

I cover it again.