Sign Here(27)

I got lucky with Slippery Pete. Other people’s bunkmates would bring their work home with them. I heard stories on the factory line, and screams in the nearby bunks, followed by whimpers followed by the kind of muffled silence that is worse than all the rest. Slippery Pete looked like he could be that type: as big as a house, skin blistered from fire and callused. His fist was the size of my neck. But despite appearances, Slips was one of the good ones. He worked himself ragged on the job and had no torture left in him by quitting time.

It was a century or two into my stint on the Second Floor. I still remembered some details of my life above ground then, chanting, on the top bunk as Slips snored like an angry bull beneath me, the words I’ve long since lost. Slips never said his own memory prayers, never threw out his own cut anchors. He must’ve heard me, night after night, but he never said anything.

Not until the night he told me about the loophole.

That day had been a particularly tough one. We spent the whole afternoon practicing organ removal and consumption, à la father-on-a-porch-with-his-shotgun: If you hurt a hair on her head, I’m going to pull out your heart and make you eat it. Needless to say, we had to get our hands dirty. Slips worked deftly and silently, as he always did. His rhythmic breathing, a metronome under the screams, stilled my own. That was, until he suddenly stopped.

The Downstairser on the belt was a woman, no older than forty. Not to be a traitor to my sex, but we didn’t see a lot of women come across our factory line. The Downstairs is a bit of a boys’ club. So even before Slippery Pete’s breathing caught in his throat she stood out, staying his never-before-stayed hand.

A pause on the factory line was unacceptable. We had a lot of people to torture. But Slippery Pete wouldn’t budge. He just stared at her, the braided ship ropes of muscle in his arms tense under a rubber apron. I saw someone look up and down the line, which led to another glance, and then another. The overseer would be next. No one wanted his attention.

“Slips,” I said, just loud enough to be heard over the wails and slosh.

Nothing.

The woman had the look we saw on any Downstairser who wasn’t on his or her first tour, when fear and pain lose their sparkle. Happiness and the affiliated feelings are always the first to go. Then, after quite a while, anger. By the time a person loses fear and pain, they’re nothing more than breathing meat. I remember her hair was long and black. It looked like she had once kept it very soft.

I looked back up at the overseer, who had noticed the holdup. Second-Floor workers had been sent Downstairs for less. He would be on Slips soon.

I did something then that I was sure I would regret, but it turned out to be the best decision I ever made as Peyote Trip. I left my post and pushed myself in front of Slips, who stepped backward without saying a word. I heard murmurs of confusion from the workers next to me and the unmistakable tap-tap-tap of the overseer’s steel-toed boots. I hunched down in front of Slips’s monumental weight, took the bread knife from his fist, and did what had to be done, before hitting the buzzer to send the woman down the belt to me.

“Snap out of it,” I hissed as I sidestepped toward my position and readied my pliers. “Incoming.”

Slippery Pete shook his head and stepped back up to his post. He didn’t blink once before plunging the knife into the next in line.

That night, after they turned out the lights and we fell, bone-and-innards weary, onto our regulation mattresses, Slippery Pete spoke to me for the first time.

“Why did you do that?”

I was already almost asleep.

“You were going to get busted,” I said.

“Yeah, but why did you do it? You could’ve gotten busted too for stepping off the line.”

I sighed. I didn’t know why I did it, honestly. Except that for some reason I couldn’t not.

“I suppose I didn’t want to roll the dice with a new bunkmate,” I said.

Slips was quiet for long enough that I thought we were done. I closed my eyes again.

“She looked just like my daughter.”

I exhaled. “Fuck.”

I found myself jealous that he could still remember anyone’s face. But on the other hand, it was proof that forgetting could be a blessing.

“So you remember her?” I asked. “Your daughter?”

Slips took his time answering, a habit I learned during our time together was not about disdain but rather about the sheer effort of thinking, a skill he had lost the use for long before.

“I remember enough,” he said finally.

“How? I’m forgetting by the minute.”

I heard Slips shifting on his mattress. He lowered his voice even though we were alone.

“I have a list of facts, memories. The really simple ones. And that list is the one thing I think about.”

“I’m doing that too. But it’s slipping anyway.”

“I mean, it’s the only thing I think about. The absolute only thing. When I’m on the line, when I’m eating, when I’m lying here. The list. That’s it. Nothing else.”

Even at that point in my time on the Second Floor, I’d heard the rumors about Slippery Pete. How he passed up transfers, promotions. He had been there longer than anyone, and had never said a word. To learn a new skill would require new thought. To move up would mean to move on.

He took his Hell, but he wouldn’t give up his humanity.