Chapter 9 Gray Housing

The Gray block on the south side of the fifth ward had been built forty years ago as temporary quarters for a labor corps and had never been torn down, and the Bureau had long ago stopped pretending it was temporary. The corridors were the width of a gurney and the walls were the color of a hospital's first paint coat, and every unit had one window that faced a concrete parapet, so that the light came in gray from a gray wall and the flat was never fully dark and never fully day. Mireille's unit was on the fourth floor. It had a bed, a hotplate, a shelf, and a sink that ran cold water first thing in the morning and warm water after nine. She shared the corridor bathroom with fourteen people. She had lived in worse, briefly, in the months after her mother died, when the household had not yet been reassigned and the three of them had slept in a single room near the river. She met her neighbors in the first week, the way a person meets neighbors in a Gray block, which is to say that they did not introduce themselves, they simply noticed her and did not report her, and the not-reporting was the local greeting. There was an old teacher in the unit across the corridor, a retired mathematician whose name Mireille never learned, who had taught for thirty years in the north ward and had been folded in a single night when a cohort of former students filed reports on a lecture he had given a decade before. He told her this in the stairwell on her third morning, without preamble, the way people in Gray housing told you their number the way other people told you the weather. He was four hundred and eighty-one. He had four more points of margin before the lapsed threshold, and he was spending them slowly, on nothing, like a man eating his last bread. There was a family in the unit at the end of the corridor, two parents and a child of nine, whose household Standing had collapsed when the father's plant closed and the cohort had filed the closure as a civic failure rather than an economic one. The child was on the ward's school roll and would stay there until the family crossed the lapsed line, at which point the child would be removed from the roll, because a child of lapsed parents could not hold a school place. The mother told Mireille this in the shared kitchenette and did not cry and did not ask for anything, and Mireille understood, standing there with a mug of rationed hot water in her hand, that the whole building was full of people who were waiting to be erased and had arranged their lives around it. She learned the building's clock. The water ran warm between nine and eleven, so the corridor filled then, and the fourteen people who shared her bathroom stood in the doorway in coats and talked in the flat voices of people who had decided that politeness was cheaper than hope. The father at the end of the corridor worked days at a salvage yard on the north bank and came home gray to the elbows. The mother kept the child's uniform washed and pressed, every night, on a hotplate, because a school place was a Standing asset and a stained uniform was the kind of detail the ward office noticed. Mireille watched her press it once and understood that the woman was not cleaning the uniform. She was defending the child's number with an iron. On her fourth night in the block, the old mathematician knocked on her door and asked whether she had a ruler. He wanted a ruler to draw a straight line, and when she gave him hers he stood in the corridor and drew one, slowly, on the back of a folded page. He said he was calculating how many mornings the family at the end of the corridor had left before the father's access fell below twice-weekly, and that a person needed a straight line to make a chart of anything. He gave the page back with the line on it. The line ran from one corner to the other and did not waver, and Mireille kept it, and did not know why. She learned, that week, that the Gray block had a board of its own. It hung in the stairwell where the ward's main board was visible from the corridor, and it carried no names, only the block's average Standing, which the Bureau published to every resident once a week, so that the building could watch itself fall. The number had been four hundred and twelve the week she moved in. On her sixth day it was four hundred and nine. The Bureau called the decline a trend and never a verdict, and the residents read it the way she had once read the clinic board, as a forecast, and went about their mornings. Emre's news came on the sixth day. The renal floor had repriced his access. It happened every quarter, and the repricing was automatic, and the automatic part was the cruelty of it: the machine counted what the machine cost, and divided by the Standing of the patient, and when the quotient crossed a line the access was reduced from thrice-weekly to twice-weekly. Emre called her from the ward, and his voice on the phone was the voice he used when he wanted her not to worry, which was worse than the voice he used when he was afraid. "Twice a week now," he said. "Doctor Barrowman says it's temporary." "It's not temporary." "No," Emre said. "It's not temporary. But Barrowman says there's a window. He says if I get the activation inside the next three months, before the next repricing, it still counts. He says the board awards by margin of Standing and a household credit can close the margin." He paused. "Tal, do you still have the credit thing? The broker?" She stood in the corridor of the Gray block with the phone at her ear and the teacher's door closed across from her and the family's light on under their door, and she did not tell him about the chip, and she did not tell him about Sennett, and she said the only true thing she could say. "I'm working on it." The young man with the notebook found her the next week. He waited for her at the tram stop at the end of her shift, which was a thing the Unscored did not do, which was a thing Zorah had told her never to do, and Mireille knew before he opened his mouth that something had changed. "Crandall's office ran a code review on the fifth ward last night," he said. "They're looking for whoever has been stretching the intake grammar. Sennett says you have three days before they get close enough to name you." "Does she want me to stop?" "She said the opposite." He looked at her the way a person looks at someone who has already been counted and does not know it. "She said if you were ever going to move your brother, it has to be now." ---