The Prior Names Department

Here come the footsteps from down the hall. Short clomp, long clomp, short clomp, long clomp, short. Footsteps in iambic pentameter. Footsteps with insidious intent.

Inside the office she sits at the desk. It’s 11am. The window washer is outside her window as he always is at 11am. They’re on the 33rd floor, the city from this perspective a tiny version of a city, like a dollhouse or a model train set. It’s sweet, from this perspective. She pretends they’re in a tree house, operating in a world where they make the rules.

The office is a corner office. They no longer live in a world where corner offices matter. She’s in here because it’s the only office that didn’t burn in the last fire and because no one noticed when she took over this space. She’s very creative with her threats, so no one has been too interested in sharing the space with her.

She translates people’s names into numbers. For ease of organization, of course. The New Regime is all about organization and structure and categorizing people by number is so much more efficient than letters. All those crazy names out there—letters hiding behind other letters, sitting silently without pronunciation and still expecting to be included in the spelling. It’s messy. Filing systems get knocked out of sync by a simple missed letter. And the humans. The way they bitch when they see a misspelling: “I can’t log in,” “I can’t get access,” “I can’t communicate.” They seem to feel it’s their right to be seen. It’s madness, really, and quite frankly, it is not The New Regime’s responsibility to coddle its citizens.

The document open on her laptop is a marriage license. The names were changed to numbers one week after The New Regime took power. She wasn’t in this department then. It took her a minute to maneuver herself to this position. The New Regime dissolved her marriage, expropriated their home, and revised her entire history to a column of numbers. She wasn’t expecting that, not that quickly. Now she’s:

10-15-3-5-12-25-14

0 dependents

Housed in Square 42, Lot 365

Square 42, Lot 365 has a bed, a toilet, a hot pot, and a small refrigerator. Her home had a wrap-around porch, windows that pulled in sunlight even on overcast days, a kitchen so comfortable it felt like a warm blanket, and him.

Here come the footsteps from down the hall. Short, long clomp, short, long clomp, short. Iambic pentameter getting closer. Closer.

Outside the window, he pulls the squeegee across a row of dripping water and then there is a row of clarity through which she can see the dim diluted sun in the distance, the gray moody clouds trying to cover it up, the tips of the other buildings on the other side of the city, the tips of the buildings right next to hers, the scaffolding he’s standing on, his graceful hands, his eyes. If these windows weren’t rendered black by the surveillance spotlight that swings back and forth across the sky, he’d be able to see in. He’d be able to see her. He’d be able to look into her eyes.

On the mirror in their bathroom in their warm home on hectic weekday mornings, when he was in the shower, when the bathroom filled up with steam and transformed all the silver surfaces to message boards, she would write with her finger, carving mirror letters into a square of grey on the medicine cabinet:

I love you

When she stepped out of the shower into a bathroom filled with steam, on the mirror she would see:

I love you back

x infinity

Over time she shorthanded: x 3

And he shorthanded: x infinity

Footsteps. Iambic pentameter. Closer. Closer. Closer.

The marriage license on the laptop screen is a mess. When The New Regime translated names to numbers, in those first weeks, they used an algorithm that, she knows now, was completely fucked. On her marriage license, her name, translated to numbers, is misspelled. They translated her name and his name into numbers and they fucked it up and this—out of everything—was the detail that flipped her from stunned and scared to methodical and vengeful.

She positions the cursor on the line, clicks the mouse, slowly taps the backspace key, and easily, beautifully, lovingly, the numbers where her name is supposed to be, the numbers where his name is supposed to be, disappear. Into the new blank spaces she types:

JOCELYN

ZANE

In caps. Because in this new world of The New Regime, caps equal fuck you.

The footsteps have stopped outside the office door. The doorknob—old, classic, the kind you find in mansions that were built when they thought about details like putting a lion’s head on a doorknob—turns and creaks. Someone pushes on it. Turn. Creak. Push. An exasperated, “Shit,” slips under the crack between the door and the floor.

She saves the changes to the marriage license. When the pop-up box asks her if she’d like to enter the changes into the permanent archive, she clicks yes. Immediately the alarm sounds. The computers are programmed to sound an alarm that implies they are rejecting the letters. But they don’t, actually. That would cost too much money and The New Regime, at this point, prefers to rely on fear and intimidation. This revision will be stored in the permanent archive, with her name and his, spelled out, correctly. If they want to delete it, they’ll have to dig it out with a melon baller. The alarm is a low moo, like a cow giving up.

A hard slam on the other side of the door. It shakes the doorframe. They’ll be inside soon.

She walks over to the window. He’s still there. Thank god. She likes to imagine he can feel her even if he can’t see her. She imagines he waits for her out there. She breathes on the window. With her index finger, she carves into the grey steam. Another breath. More carving.

The door flings open. Another breath. Insidious iambic pentameter footsteps clomping across the hard wood floor behind her. More carving. She’s writing backwards to he can read her, writing fast. There’s a voice in her ear. Bloviating words that garble together, that she assumes are a litany of her offenses. They slip the cuffs around her wrists. As they pull her out of the office, she looks only at the window:

x 3

She watches it fade while they drag her past the threshold. His face is the last thing she sees before they put the bag over her head.

Outside, on the scaffolding, he drops his squeegee. The message was only there for a second, then it disappeared. But he saw it. He knows he did. He leans into the window he just cleaned and breathes. Into the new grey bubble he carves:

x infinity