Turn 9 of 26

Watch as everyone gets asked 15 questions from the book and yell ma’am. She starts with one and ends with 20. The officers look proud when they hear the yell. You Yell yes ma'am alone when the officer yells if you understood the question. You do this for all 15 questions. Everyone does the same thing for their 15 questions. They they yell that next is stuff involving your bodies as you all march.

The black cases open again and the officers come back down the line holding the gray books, and now they are not for holding — they are for asking. 'FIFTEEN QUESTIONS, RECRUIT!' the officer at the front of the hall bellows. 'ANSWER ONLY WHAT IS ASKED! NUMBER ONE, FORWARD!' One steps out, and the drill begins: the officer reads a question from the book in a flat voice — 'DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE STANDARD?' — and One's answer detonates in the white hall. 'YES MA'AM.' The officers along the wall straighten. Something like pride moves across their faces without disturbing a single feature. 'DO YOU ACCEPT CORRECTION?' 'YES MA'AM.' 'WILL YOU LOOK THE SAME?' 'YES MA'AM.' Fifteen questions, fifteen detonations, and then Two is called forward and it starts again.

The line works through them in number order while you stand squared and wait, and the sound of it becomes the architecture of the room — question, yell, question, yell — the hundred deeper voices in the building reciting beneath it like a bass line under a hymn. Six goes before you. Her answers come out perfect, hard, in the voice that is not hers, and the officer reading to her pauses once after the ninth question, looking at the small pale woman yelling like a stack of gray iron, and says nothing at all.

'NINETEEN. FORWARD.' You step to the mark. The book opens in the officer's hands. 'DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE QUESTION?' she reads, and you yell it, loud, alone, in the voice that came out of you all morning and belongs to none of you: 'YES MA'AM.' She works down the page — fifteen questions, the same fifteen, and each one ends with you, alone, in front of twenty officers and nineteen uniforms, yelling the only answer left in the world. Your throat is raw by the eighth. It doesn't slow down. The yell comes from somewhere below the questions, below the answers, from the place where your voice used to live.

'WILL YOU BECOME THE STANDARD?' 'YES MA'AM.' The officer closes the book on the fifteenth question and steps back, and the officers along the wall are all standing a little straighter, the way people stand when the work has come out right.

'TWENTY. FORWARD.' The last one finishes, the cases close, and the Lead Instructor takes the front of the hall. 'Books away. Your faces are fixed. Your voices are one voice. Next is the body,' she says, and the words land with the weight of the tie clip at your throat. 'PHYSICAL STANDARDS INTAKE. You will march. You will not fall out. You will not slow down. What leaves your mouth is YES MA'AM and nothing else, and what your body does is what we say. FALL IN, SINGLE FILE, NUMBER ORDER — MOVE!'

The line snaps into existence around you and the doors at the far end of the hall swing open onto a corridor of white, and the hundred voices deeper in the building change their cadence to match your boots as the twenty of you march toward whatever happens to bodies next.