The carpet was brown.
Dark brown with gold flecks in it, matted in the middle where feet had worn a path, and I knew it before I looked down because I’d walked on it every day from the age of six to the age of seventeen.
My mother’s carpet.
The carpet from the hallway of the house I grew up in, the one that ran from the front door past the kitchen to the stairs. I could feel it through my shoes, the specific give of the padding underneath, thinner where it met the wall, and my legs stopped working and I stood there with the door closing behind me and the warm light pressing against my face and the smell of that house filling my chest.
Not the smell of a house. The smell of my mother’s house. Lemon cleaner and the ghost of cooking oil and something underneath both that was just age, just years of living soaked into the walls. The building had it exactly right. Every molecule.
The hallway stretched ahead of me. Same proportions, same ceiling height, same light fixture with the frosted glass shade that my father had installed wrong so it always sat slightly crooked.
But instead of the kitchen at the end there was an office. I could see it through the doorway where the kitchen had been. A desk, a chair, a monitor glowing blue.
I walked because standing still was worse.
The kitchen was gone. In its place was a workspace with the same linoleum my mother had picked out in 1994, yellow with white diamonds, and on top of it sat a gray metal desk and a rolling chair and a filing cabinet and a phone and a computer.
The window above the sink was still there but the sink was gone and the window showed that same impossible view of building stretching in every direction and I didn’t look at it. I couldn’t look at it twice.
I sat down at the desk that occupied the space where my family had eaten dinner and the chair was adjusted to my height and the keyboard was warm and the screen showed a spreadsheet with names and numbers and I put my hands on the keys and started entering data because that was all I knew how to do.
The living room was to my left. I could see it through the doorway. My mother’s couch was gone and in its place were two more desks, both occupied. A man and a woman, typing, working, not looking up. They wore the same business casual everyone in this building wore and they sat in the room where I’d watched television on Saturday mornings and done homework on the floor and hidden behind the couch during thunderstorms.
The woman turned and I saw her profile and something in my chest folded over on itself.
She looked like Mrs. Rosario. Not was Mrs. Rosario. Looked like her. The resemblance was close enough to make my hands stop on the keyboard but wrong in ways I couldn’t name immediately.
Mrs. Rosario had been my neighbor growing up. The woman who watched me after school when my mother worked late, the woman who’d called me Little Ghost because I moved so quietly through rooms that she’d forget I was there. She’d meant it gently. It had stuck anyway.
This woman had her jawline and her shoulders and her habit of tucking her hair behind her left ear but her eyes were different, set wider, and her hands were younger than Mrs. Rosario’s would be now and she moved differently, all the gestures recognizable but the timing off, like someone had studied the original and rebuilt her from notes.
She glanced at me. Smiled. Went back to typing.
I entered data. The spreadsheet was the same meaningless transfer as every other floor, names and numbers from a printout into fields on a screen. My hands did it. The rest of me walked through the house.
—-
My bedroom was upstairs. I found it during a break I took because my eyes were blurring and my neck ached and I’d been typing for hours in a kitchen that wasn’t a kitchen anymore and I needed to move.
The stairs were the same stairs. Same banister, same creak on the fourth step, same turn at the landing where the carpet changed from brown to the blue my mother had put in because she’d wanted the upstairs to feel different. I climbed them with one hand on the railing and my body remembering every step while my brain screamed at me to go back down.
My bedroom door was open. The room was the same size, same window, same closet door that never closed all the way. But my bed was gone and my posters were gone and my dresser was gone and in their place were filing cabinets. Four of them, tall and gray, lined up against the wall where my bed had been. A desk sat under the window with a lamp on it and nothing else.
I stood in the doorway of a room that had been mine and wasn’t anymore and the building hummed around me. Not the fluorescent hum. Something lower. Something that came through the floor and up through my shoes and into my bones, steady and patient and aware of me in a way that walls and floors should not be aware of anything.
I went back downstairs and entered data until the not-Mrs. Rosario said “That’s the day” and turned off her monitor and left through the front door, which opened onto a hallway I’d never seen, fluorescent and carpeted, and closed behind her.
The man in the living room left too. Through the same door, same hallway visible for a moment, then gone. The front door clicked shut and I was alone in the house that wasn’t a house. In the building that had built my childhood around me and put a desk where the kitchen table had been and filing cabinets where I used to sleep.
—-
I went upstairs.
The filing cabinets pulled at me. They’d been pulling at me since I first saw them, a gravity that had nothing to do with curiosity and everything to do with the feeling that they were there for me specifically, that whatever was inside them had been waiting for me to be alone before it could be found.
The top drawer of the first cabinet was full of folders. Manila, tabbed, alphabetical. Names I didn’t recognize. I thumbed through them without reading because I was looking for something and I didn’t know what it was until my fingers stopped on a tab that said MORALES, ELAINE.
My folder. My name, spelled right, typed on a white label in a font I’d seen on every form I’d ever filled out in every temp agency I’d ever walked into.
I pulled it out. It was heavier than the others. I carried it to the desk under the window and sat down and opened it under the lamp and the light fell across the first page and I read it.
PERFORMANCE REVIEW. MORALES, ELAINE. ONGOING.
Below that, a table. Two columns. The left column had categories. The right column had scores.
NOTICEABILITY: 2/100 DISPLACEMENT: 0 RESISTANCE: 14/100 PATTERN RECOGNITION: 31/100 SATURATION: PENDING
I read it again. My eyes went over each line and my brain tried to make it mean something that made sense and it wouldn’t. Noticeability, two out of a hundred. I thought about the guard who’d looked through me and the woman who couldn’t finish my title and every room I’d ever walked into where nobody turned around.
Two out of a hundred. Someone had scored it. Something had measured how visible I was to other human beings and given me a two and written it down.
I turned the page. There were more categories. Dozens of them. ADAPTABILITY: 67/100. COMPLIANCE: 89/100. SELF-PRESERVATION: 22/100. Each one scored and recorded and some of them had notes in the margin, small handwriting I couldn’t read in the lamplight, annotations on a test I hadn’t known I was taking.
At the bottom of the third page, a line in red ink.
SUBJECT PROGRESSING. FLOORS 1-4 COMPLETE. RECOMMEND CONTINUED PROCESSING.
I closed the folder. My hands were shaking and my jaw was tight and the lamp buzzed and the window behind me showed building in every direction and I sat at a desk in my childhood bedroom and held a file that had scored my entire life and found it worth continuing.
I opened the cabinet again. More folders. Dozens of them. I pulled one at random. PRUITT, DALE. Same format, same categories, same scores. His noticeability was 6. His compliance was 92. At the bottom of his last page, in the same red ink, the word COMPLETE.
I pulled another. WATTS, SUSAN. Noticeability 4. Displacement 0. The last page was blank except for one word stamped in black ink, centered on the page.
ABSORBED.
I put Susan Watts back. I pulled three more. Two were marked COMPLETE. One was blank inside, empty, no pages at all, just a folder with a name on the tab and nothing to show for it.
I went to the second cabinet. More folders. More names. More scores. I was looking for something specific now and my hands knew it before I did, flipping through tabs, scanning names, and I found it in the third drawer of the second cabinet.
GIL, THEODORE.
His folder was thick. Dog-eared. The performance review inside had more pages than mine, more categories, more annotations in the margins. His noticeability was 3. His compliance was 94. His resistance had been 41 and then someone had crossed it out and written 7.
On his last page, in the same red ink, two words.
COMPLETE. RETAINED.
I held his folder and thought about him sitting in the break room with his coffee, calm and tired and helpful, showing me the window because someone had shown him the window, saying “see you around” because he knew I’d be back. Because he was still here. Because he’d been completed and kept.
I put his folder back and closed the drawer and sat in the dark of my old bedroom with my file on the desk in front of me and the building humming beneath me and the word PENDING next to SATURATION and I didn’t know what saturation meant but I knew the building did and I knew it was watching me figure that out.
The lamp flickered once and the elevator dinged from somewhere far away, down the stairs, through the front door that wasn’t a front door, and the sound was patient and familiar and I sat there and listened to it and didn’t move.