him on a dizzying tour through the tins. “Be” for “Beach” had led to “Oa” for “Ocean.” This one confused him with its sense of scale. And then the “Fish” under “F.” He had forgotten to eat that day as he explored, and the room with the radio and his little mattress had become a hazard of open books and empty tins. It had taken him a week to get things back in order. Countless times since then, he had lost himself in such excursions.
Pulling his rusty can opener and favorite fork from his breast pocket, Jimmy worked the peaches open. There was the whispering pop of air as he made the first cut. Jimmy had learned not to eat the contents if it didn’t make that pop. Luckily, the toilets were still in operation back when he’d learned that lesson. Jimmy missed the toilets something fierce.
He worked his way through the peaches, savoring each bite before drinking down the juice. He wasn’t sure if you were supposed to drink that part—the label didn’t say—but it was his favorite. He grabbed the pineapples and his opener, was listening for the pop of air, when he heard the keypad on the great steel door beep.
“Little early,” he whispered to his visitors. He set the can aside, licked his fork, and put it back in his breast pocket. Cradling the gun against his armpit, he sat and watched for the door to move. One crack, and he would open fire.
Instead, it was four beeps from the keypad as a set of numbers was entered, followed by a buzz to signal that it was the wrong code. Jimmy tightened his grip on the gun while they tried again. The screen on the keypad only had room for four digits. That meant ten thousand combinations if you included all zeros. The door allowed three incorrect attempts before it wouldn’t take any more until the following day. Jimmy had learned these things a long time ago. He felt like his mom had taught him this rule, but that was impossible. Unless she’d done it in a dream.
He listened to the keypad beep with another guess and then buzz with the good news. Good news for him, anyway. Still, that was another number down, which meant time was running out. Twelve-eighteen was the number. Jimmy cursed himself for even thinking the code; his finger went to the trigger, waiting. But thoughts couldn’t be heard. You had to speak to be heard. He tended to forget this, because he heard himself thinking all the time.
The third and final attempt for the day began, and Jimmy couldn’t wait to eat his pineapples. He and these people had this routine, these three tries every morning. It was a bit of human contact, if scary. On the server behind him, he had done the math. He assumed they’d started at 0000 and were working their way up. That’s how he would do it. Three a day meant they would stumble on the right code on day 406 on the second try. That was less than a month away.
But Jimmy’s counting didn’t figure for everything. There was the lingering fear that they might skip some numbers, that they had started somewhere else, or that they might get lucky if they were going random. For all Jimmy knew, more than one code could open the door. And since he didn’t pay attention to how his father had changed the code, he couldn’t move it higher. And what if that only got them closer? Maybe they started at 9999. He could move it lower, of course, hoping to pass one they’d already tried, but what if they hadn’t tried it yet? To take action and let them in by accident would be worse than doing nothing and then dying. And Jimmy didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to kill anyone.
This is how his brain whirled as the next four digits were entered. When the keypad chirped angrily at the good news, he was slow to relax his grip on the gun. Jimmy wiped his sweaty palms off on his thighs, and picked up his pineapples.
“Hello, pineapples,” he whispered. He bent his head toward his lap and punctured the can, listening closely.
The pineapples whispered back. They told him they were safe to eat.
•19•
Life at its essence, Jimmy learned, was a series of meals and bowel movements. There was some sleep mixed in as well, but little effort was required for that. He didn’t learn this great Rule of the World until the water stopped flushing. Nobody thinks about their bowel movements until the water stops flushing. And then it’s all one thinks about.
Jimmy started going in the corner of the server room, as far from the door as possible. He peed in the sink until the tap ran out of water and the smell got bad. Once that happened, he tapped into the cistern. The Order told him which page to look on and what to do. It was a boring book, but handy at times. Jimmy figured that was the point. The water in the cistern wouldn’t last forever, though, so he took to drinking as much of the juice in the bottom of the cans as he could. He hated tomato soup, but he drank a can every day. His pee turned bright orange.
Jimmy was draining the last drops out of a can of apples one morning when the keypad beeped. It didn’t buzz. It didn’t bark or scream or sound angry. It beeped. And a light long red—red for as long as Jimmy could remember—flashed brilliant and scary green.
Jimmy startled. The open can of peaches on his knee leaped away and tumbled to the ground, juice splashing everywhere. It was two days early for this. It was two days early.
The time had gone by so fast, and now it decided to go slowly. The great steel door made noises. Jimmy dropped his fork and fumbled with the gun. Safety off. A
The door made noises, and Jimmy wondered if he’d missed a day or two. There was the time he’d gotten sick and had a fever. There was the day he fell asleep reading and couldn’t remember what day it was when he woke. Maybe he’d missed a day. Maybe the people in the hall had skipped a number. The door opened a crack. The slow time gave him all sorts of space to fill with dread.
Jimmy wasn’t ready. His palms were slick on the gun, his heart racing. This was one of those things expected and expected. Expected so hard, with so much fervor and concentration, like blowing up a plastic bag over and over, watching it stretch out big and thin in front of your eyes, knowing it was about to burst, knowing, knowing, and when it comes, it scares you like it’d never been expected at all.
This was one of those things. The door opened further. There was a person on the other side. A person. And for a moment, for the briefest of pauses, Jimmy reconsidered a year of planning, a calendar of fear. Here was someone to talk to and listen to. Someone to take a turn with the screwdriver and hammer now that the can opener was broke. Someone with a
A face. A man with an angry sneer. And a year of planning, of shooting empty tomato cans, of ringing ears and reloading, of oiling barrels and reading, reading—and now a human face in a crack in the door.
Jimmy pulled the trigger. The barrel leaped upward like barrels do. And the angry sneer turned to something else: startlement mixed with sorrow. Jimmy had done a sad, sad thing. The man fell down, but another was pushing past him, bursting into the room, something black in his hand.
Again, the barrel leaped and leaped, and Jimmy’s eyes blinked with the bangs. Three shots. Three bullets. The running man kept coming, but he had the same sad look on his face, a look fading as he fell, crumbling just a few paces away.
Jimmy waited for the next man. He heard him out there, cursing and cursing. And the first man he’d shot was still moving around, like an empty can that danced and danced long after it was hit. The door was open. The outside and the inside were connected. The man who had opened the door lifted his head, something worse than sorrow on his face, and suddenly it was his father out there. His father lying just beyond the door, dying in the hallway. And Jimmy didn’t know why that would be.
The cursing grew faint. The unseen man out in the hallway was moving away. Jimmy took his first full breath since the door beeped and the light turned green. He didn’t have a pulse; his heart was just one long beat that wouldn’t stop. A thrumming like the insides of a whirring server.
He listened to the last man slink away, slink away, and now Jimmy could close the door. He got up and ran around the dead man who had fallen inside the server room, a black pistol near his lifeless hand. Lowering his gun,
