The fur coat's first march

Turn 27 of 51

Check the other 15 boxes to see if they differ and they dont. you notice a paper on the top of the box and it tells you what tops go with each shoe. the converse with the sweater, mesh top and faded logo shirt, boots with the turtleneck, cardigan, lace-trimmed camisole top, flannel. the room is cold as the other 15 walk in and climb into the cot. you do the same and sleep at 10:30 like everybody.

You go down the row and open them all, one after another, kneeling on the gray floor in the bulb's hard light. Sixteen boxes, sixteen uniforms, and no difference anywhere — same boots and Converse, same seven stacks of skinny jeans, same folded tops, same lace-trimmed camisole lying on the last one the way it lay on the first. The sameness doesn't frighten you the way it should. It reads as proof of a kind: whatever this is, it holds everyone, and you are inside it.

In the second box your fingers find a sheet of paper folded on top of the clothes, and you open it under the bulb. The handwriting is the leader's, unhurried and square. Two lines: CONVERSE WITH SWEATER, MESH, FADED SHIRT. BOOTS WITH TURTLENECK, CARDIGAN, CAMISOLE, FLANNEL. Nothing else — no greeting, no signature, no reason given. You read it twice and fold it back exactly as you found it, on top of the camisole, under the lid, and your hands treat it as scripture already, something to be consulted each morning the way other people consult mirrors.

The door opens without a knock and they come in — all fifteen, filing between the cot-narrow beds in their black uniforms, and the room accepts them like a mouth accepting a number. Nobody remarks on the beds, or the boxes, or the gray. They move in a single practiced rhythm, lifting the lids, taking out tomorrow's clothes, setting boots square at the foot of each cot. The roommate comrade takes the bed beside yours without looking for another, and nobody asks how the room came to be like this, and you realize you don't remember it changing either — only that yesterday it was a dorm and tonight it is a barracks, and the change happened somewhere in the middle of all the working.

One by one they climb in, blankets pulled to the chin, faces turned up at the bare bulb until the leader of the evening — a comrade, they are all comrades — reaches and turns it off. Darkness in rows. You hear the breathing settle into one slow tide, fifteen bodies breathing at nearly the same rate, and your own breath falls into it without being asked, the way your stride falls into the column's, the way your voice fell into the table's hum.

You climb into your cot and the mattress is thin and the blanket is gray and it is the most honest bed you have ever slept in. It is ten-thirty. Sleep comes the way the portions come — the same amount, no more or less, at the same time as everyone else — and the last thing in your head is tomorrow's box, and which top goes with which shoe.