ANOTHER DAY

“This place is not a place of honor,” began the screed some Zone-addled blight-dog had scrawled on the concrete wall the departures stood before to be filmed, probably a day before quitting. The message was there to greet the clerk, unchanging and indelible, each time another day in the office was set to start.

The clerk hadn't taken it upon himself to scrub the message out – a cursory inspection indicated that it was permanent marker, and perhaps most importantly, cleaning up a tag like that wasn't part of the clerk's job description. They'd damn him if he didn't do his duty, but he'd be damned if he lifted a finger outside that assigned role for no real gain.

An entrant shortly after the thing had been written asked the clerk if he believed it. The clerk, then, had only scoffed, wanting nothing to do with the prattle, but the body had gone on about the meaning, and while the clerk didn't bother remembering much of anything that he wasn't required to about those marching to their dooms in the Zone, he did remember the gist of it. It meant a waste-hole. A trash-heap. Somewhere garbage was disposed of.

Perhaps somewhere deep down, in a place that had a speck of caring, the clerk thought it was a fitting enough epitaph.

“No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.”

Before dawn, the clerk set out to the office. On memory and instinct he turned and weaved through the apartment building's labyrinth and out into the labyrinth of streets. Failing lamps left tight alleys between darkened concrete megaliths close and shadowed, but even if a stretch were sightless, the clerk would know the way to go, as though each footfall and worn itself into gray stone, a map of where he had been to show where he was going. Each day, the same path, the same steps, the same leaking pipe dripped into the same puddle with its same oil-sheen in the flickering light of the subway station.

Down, then, into the earth. It wasn't like much sky could be seen anyway. The rumble and screech of the trains moving through the blind tunnels echoed, relating how the rails ran senselessly, obedient only to their schedule.

The train was always empty at this hour, but the clerk sat just so, in the same chair and the same car he could have sworn had its upholstery faded and molded by his frequent habitation, careful to not even by the spread of an elbow deviate from his assigned space.

Once, its intercom had called out stops, but that was long ago. Then it had been static. Now, there were things that came through the static.

“He~ey everyone, it's me – Stacey,” the thing crackled. Like so much else, it was a memory of a memory; the clerk knew it had been shocking but had lost both the shock and why that shock had been in its daily repetition.

It was better to forget some things. The clerk still remembered some of the reports from the Zone, whether truth or lies, it didn’t matter. He remembered the satellite photo that the janitor had shared before quitting that showed Queen Mary brooding over Long Beach and her clutch, seemingly locked in a staring contest with Iowa's San Pedro lair. He remembered a group of applicants talking hopefully of the Night Parade and its procession of lights that traveled ever westward down Ventura Boulevard. He remembered how the last applicant to go in had waxed poetic about the golden song and silver shadows with their siren promises. The clerk looked forward to forgetting these things.

As the train arrived at its terminal station, and the clerk walked the last path up towards the gate and its dread beyond, the zodiacal glow crowning the mercifully unseen Zone beyond, in the dawning murk, the clerk could see a figure waiting patiently outside the office. It had been a week since the last, at least, but another applicant was here, waiting to enter the Zone.

“Nothing valued is here.”

The clerk did not expedite opening the office. That was not his role. He turned on the lights, breaking the silence with the buzz of fluorescent tubes, checked the equipment in the same dull way that always checked out, and finally at precisely nine in the morning, unlocked the main door and let the applicant in.

The applicant was a tall man, who wore a simple, hooded robe. It was dark, but not quite black and not quite gold, like a night sky polluted by an incandescent glow. As the applicant took his forms and began to fill them out, the clerk thought there was even a speck of silver somewhere on the hood, like a single star. But whenever he looked at it directly, it wasn't there. The man himself, to the clerk, was unremarkable.

Eventually, the time came when talk could not be avoided.

“I suppose it's time for the ritual,” the man said. His voice was deep and smooth, and the words he spoke equal parts soft and heavy. The kind of man who never raised his voice and never needed to, that's what he was.

“Ritual?” the clerk asked.

The man tapped the papers firmly.

“Your filming of testaments. The ritual you and your partner seem so fit to conduct.”

“Partner?” the clerk asked, against his better judgment. The man inclined his head, indicating the camcorder.

The clerk chose not to respond. Still, there was a little part of him that was conscious of how his hands and the contours of the camcorder seemed to match, how his eye lined up with the viewfinder. It was comfortable, even as the memory of a memory nagged that it oughtn't be so.

The clerk started the recording and signaled the man. The man stood there, the permanent marker screed just visible to his side, looked straight at the clerk, and began to recite his testament.

“You may wonder,” he said, “why I would venture out into the Zone. You might ask what I hope to find there, but there can be no answer when the question itself is wrong. I do not go forth because I hope to find, I go forth because I have already found what I was looking for.”

The clerk swallowed hard. He had forgotten how many times he'd heard these speeches, but in that moment, he listened.

“I do not know what will befall this body,” he said, “that much is true. But I know what befalls a soul that persists in the shadow of the Glory. What it means to rest in an empire of bones and dust, unable even to rot. Vitrified, calcified, petrified, and ultimately fossilized. I would wish for you a mirror that would show you the state of your soul, but you already possess it. So I wish you the wisdom to use it.”

The man's eyes burned with an intensity the clerk had not seen before. He knew he had not seen it, because it was not the kind of thing that could be lightly forgotten.

“If you do not like what you see in the gray gloom, venture then unto the light. Else, be the cockroach that scurries away content in its role, for I will not.”

The man nodded his head, breaking that capturing gaze, and the clerk took it as the sign to stop the recording. With the faintest of trembles in his voice, he asked if the man wanted to review the tape, went through the last assurances and last checks, and when that was all clear, faced down the ever-dreadful gate that stood as the last defense between sanity and the Zone beyond.

“What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.”

It seemed to the clerk that, with the passing of each year if not the passage of each departure, the gate to the Zone became more reluctant to open, more ceremonious in its opening. The clerk noted the all-clear light, turned the key in the lock, and set the mechanism going. Gears ground, metal strained, and the warning klaxon howled.

Ponderously, with grinding slowness, the doors began to open. A crack appeared first, a seam of light, spilling the glare of the Zone into the office. The crack widened. The glare brightened. Finally, the gate was open, yawning wide and spilling hideous light. The Zone loomed out beyond it, the place of the terror, and the clerk looked. The man walked quietly past him, and as he passed, he spoke.

“May you find your peace,” he said. And he crossed the threshold, over a twisting rainbow and into that place where reason went to die. Thus, the clerk, in the line of duty, caught another glimpse of that place, as always unlike any before. The roiling air twisted, lensing the world the man walked out into like a heat haze. A mirage showed a young woman laughing, illuminated as though by a thousand flashing cameras. Another ripple, three ambitious explorers. Other refracted faces the clerk had forgotten, twisted around, silently screaming in their contortions. There were upside-down cities on cloud-hills, streets of gold and a million-million spiders crawling out onto them from cobweb high-rises, and in the turbulent air a billion other things the clerk could not, would not, remember. Only the back of the man, walking out into the roil, stayed firm, and the sparkle of a lone star that wasn't there.

The clerk’s hand found the mechanism. The grinding gears reversed, and the groaning door began to rumble closed. Finally, it sealed with a sepulchral clang, and all was silent again.

The clerk then waited out the rest of the day, as he did when there were no applicants. Just him, the gate, the screed on the wall, and the trusty camcorder. But for the first time in a very long time, the clerk thought about it. He looked at it, the archaic thing that stood unworn by time and unbent by fate. And a thought came to the clerk, just as his shift ended. He set the camera in place, began to roll a fresh tape, and stood himself in front of it.

He could not find his words – they weren't part of the script. But he stood, and he imagined speaking. He wondered what he would say if he would really do it, but then he knew he never would. And after the minute or so of most brief partings. He stopped the recording, and then reviewed the tape.

It was, the clerk reflected with melancholy disinterest, about what he expected. Even through the camera's lens, he couldn't make out his own face anymore – just his right eye, molded perfectly for the viewfinder. His hands were clear, fingers the perfect length to coil around the camcorder, strength just sufficient to open and to shut the gate. Perfectly average. Nothing anyone would bat an eye at. The clerk had forgotten his own features long ago, and since no one else seemed bothered supposed he'd lost nothing he was to lament being rid of.

But, the clerk noticed, on that minute or so of silent confession, his name badge was out of focus. Blurred. As gray as the rest of everything. It was a small thing, an annoying memory of a memory. The clerk remembered he had a name, but he couldn't rightly remember what it was anymore.

He stopped the review, and rewound the tape to be recorded over the next time an applicant came to depart. And he looked out across the office, silence unbroken but for the buzz of the lights above. A rush of sensation struck him – the banks of tapes, undelivered as of yet. Each held a face, a name, a clear picture he'd once seen. Each was somebody.

The moment passed. How fearful to be somebody! The clerk, at least, had his place, silent, stern, and perfectly fitted to the Office of No Return.