The voice of nineteen

Turn 18 of 26

They yell the order for top and lower bunks. Odds on the top, evens on the button. All of you follow institutions and go In order by number, 1 with 2, 3 with 4, you sleep above recruit 20, who is the exact same as you and will sleep like you and the others. You fall asleep. At 3 am, the officers come running in yelling it’s time to get up as you all wake up and stand at attention next to the bed.

'TOP AND BOTTOM BUNKS!' the yell comes down the corridor an hour before lights out, an officer in the doorway with the roster. 'ODDS TOP! EVENS BOTTOM! BY NUMBER — ONE WITH TWO, THREE WITH FOUR, MOVE!' The barracks erupts into ordered motion, and you climb — Nineteen, odd — to the upper bunk, directly above Twenty, who takes the lower with the same economy you used. Twenty bunks hold twenty women arranged in pairs by number, and the arrangement is itself a standard, odds over evens, the whole cohort filed like documents. You lie down at attention on the thin gray mattress, bun pressing into the pillow, shoes hanging over the edge in line, and the lights cut at eight exactly.

Sleep takes the room in unison. You do not dream, or if you do, the dreams have no names in them. The barracks breathes twenty times per cycle, one rhythm, and the hours pass as a single dark interval with no one inside it to feel its length.

Then the door bursts open and the lights slam on. 'UP! UP! UP! ON YOUR FEET, RECRUITS!' Boots hammer the floor as officers flood the room, and your body is moving before your mind arrives — out of the bunk, heels hitting the cold floor, attention stance locking in beside your bunk with the blanket line still squared behind you. The wall clock reads three. Twenty bodies stand at attention in twenty seconds, twenty buns shining under the white lights, and the officers walk the rows counting, finding no one late.

'GOOD MORNING, RECRUITS!' the Lead Instructor's voice, from the doorway. 'Graduation day one begins at OH THREE HUNDRED! Your first duties are assigned! The standard you became will now be USED! WASH, DRESS INSPECTION, AND FALL IN ON THE TARMAC IN FIVE MINUTES!' The officers fan out down the rows, and one of them stops at your bunk. Not passing. Stopping. Gray eyes level with yours, close enough that you can see nothing moving behind them. 'Nineteen,' she says, quietly, under the yelling, in a register none of the other recruits are getting. 'The Lead Instructor will see you after formation.' Then she is moving again, yelling at Twenty to square her blanket line, and the room roars back into routine around whatever that sentence just opened.