The Room

They are not trying to break you. That goes first, because it is the thing everybody assumes and it is wrong, and being wrong about it makes the rest impossible to follow.

Breaking is expensive. Breaking takes time, and attention, and a certain amount of enthusiasm, and the men doing this had none of those to spare because there were eleven of us and a schedule. Something broken also does not work properly afterward. Ask anybody who has run a business.

They are not trying to break you. They are trying to get a performance out of you that they can rely on.

That is a different thing and it is worse, and I didn’t understand the difference for weeks, and the weeks were the tuition.

The man who ran the room was not cruel. I know how that sounds. I have had this argument with myself for years and I keep arriving at the same place: he was not cruel, he was thorough, and thorough is what you should be frightened of. Cruelty gets bored. Cruelty has a bad night and lets you alone. I never once felt him enjoying it, not the way you are imagining, and I would have known, and I would have preferred it. Enjoyment is a thing you can work with. Enjoyment can be fed.

What I felt off him, most days, was the specific flat attention of a man doing a job to standard.

They fed us in the morning. Not well and not badly, which surprised me, and it stopped surprising me the day I understood that a girl who faints is a girl who has to be rescheduled.

There is the whole logic of the place, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it. Everything that looked like mercy was maintenance. The food. The water. The particular way he would stop and wait when somebody was crying too hard to continue, which the first time I took for patience and which was not patience, it was a man letting a machine cool down before it seized.

I was eighteen. I am saying that plainly once and then leaving it alone, because I am going to spend a lot of these telling you what I worked out and it is worth knowing that I was working it out at eighteen, on a concrete floor, from scratch, in a building where nobody was going to correct me if I got it wrong.

I asked about my brother on the fourth day.

I had been rehearsing it. I had a whole approach, I was going to be reasonable, I was going to make it easy to say yes to, and I got about six words out.

He did not get angry. He did not tell me to shut up. He waited until I had finished, the way you wait for a child to finish explaining why the plate broke, and then he said, do what you are told.

Not threatening. Almost kind. It was information, and he delivered it as information, and then he went back to what he had been doing and I stood there with the rest of my sentence still in my mouth.

I have thought about that more than I have thought about most of it.

The rules arrived over the first two weeks and never had to be explained twice.

You do not mark the face. That one I learned by watching, because a girl argued in the second week, properly argued, and afterward she could not sit down and there was nothing on her you could photograph. I understood the rule before I could have told you it existed. The face is the part they are selling. The rest of us was the part we were using to get there.

There is a way of telling that where it comes out a bitter joke, and I have told it that way, in company, and people laugh, and it is not a joke. It is a description of a business decision that somebody made once and wrote down, and every man in that building followed it, and not one of them ever had to think about it again.

Careful here, because I said I would tell you all of it and I meant it, and I also know the difference between telling you and handing you something to look at.

So: it started in the second week.

It was not the worst it ever was. It was the first, which is a different kind of bad and does not repeat, and the thing I remember is not what you think. It is that afterward I lay on my side on that floor and did the arithmetic on how many days I had been there, and got four, and then got five, and could not settle it, and that bothered me more than anything else that had happened.

Four days. Five. I could not settle it.

I have wondered since whether that was shock doing me a kindness, moving me off the thing and onto a number. My Abuela would have said the body knows its own business. I think the truth is duller. I think I reached for the only thing in the room that had an answer.

There was no answer. I never did settle it. It is five, probably. It does not matter and I still check sometimes.

The sickness started somewhere in there too. Not from that. From the water, or from the food, or from eleven people and one drain, and it went through the room in a week and came back a fortnight later and came back again, and I stopped thinking of it as being ill and started thinking of it as weather.

The first thing that happened to me in there that I would call damage was diarrhoea and a cough.

You were expecting something else. So was I.