Insurance

On Tuesday morning he took a shower, because he could not think of a reason not to.

The notice had said no time. He had decided some days ago that this meant he should be dressed, so he was dressed. He put on the shirt he wore to see clients, which was the best shirt he owned. Then he sat on the end of his bed at seven in the morning and waited.

At eight he made coffee and did not drink much of it.

At nine he found himself walking around the apartment turning things off. The lamp in the corner. The power strip under the desk. The bread machine on top of the fridge, which he had not used since March and had never got around to unplugging.

He stood there for a second with the plug in his hand.

He took nothing with him. There was nothing the notice had said to bring and nothing he could think of that would help.

The container was still in the fridge with half the ziti in it. He looked at it, closed the door, and left it there, because throwing it out would have meant something and he did not want it to mean anything.

Then he was in the hall.

There was no part in between. There was his kitchen, and the fridge door under his hand. Then there was a floor that was not his floor, and the sound of a very large number of people breathing in one room.

He did not fall over. He noted that, distantly, as a thing to be grateful for.

The hall was enormous and it was plain. The ceiling was high and flat and pale and gave off an even light with no source he could find. The floor was gray and had a slight give, like a gym floor. There were no windows. There were no doors that he could see, and no signs, and nothing written on anything, and no furniture at all.

It was the size of an airport and it had been built by somebody who had never heard of decoration.

He had expected to be frightened, and he was, but underneath the fear was something closer to disappointment. He had spent thirteen days imagining what would be on the other side. It was a room. It was a very, very big room, with good light and nothing in it.

The people were the thing.

They stood in the loose groups people form when nobody has told them where to stand. There were nine thousand eight hundred and twelve of them. Ellis had never in his life seen a crowd like it.

He could not have said at first what was wrong with them. Then he worked it out. There was nobody ordinary. Not one. In any real crowd there is a spread — some tall, some soft, some tired, most unremarkable. This crowd had no unremarkable in it.

A woman near him stood the way dancers stand, with her feet turned out and her weight nowhere. Two men behind her were built like the same thing had been done to both of them on purpose. There was a boy of about nineteen who kept doing arithmetic on his fingers, quickly, and stopping, and starting again.

Everybody was in the clothes they had been taken in. Suits, hospital scrubs, running gear, one man in a wetsuit. Somebody a long way off was crying and being comforted in a language Ellis did not recognize.

It took him about ten minutes to work out what the room was doing.

They were introducing themselves. That was all. Nine thousand people with no instructions and nothing to do had defaulted to standing in circles and saying what they were.

And every one of them was saying it as a rank.

He heard world champion twice inside a minute. He heard a woman explain, carefully and without any pleasure at all, that she held a patent that eleven million people used every day. He heard somebody say the name of a unit and watched three other people's faces change.

It was not showing off. That was what he understood, standing there in his good shirt. Every single person in this room had just lost every reason they had ever had to feel safe, and the only thing any of them had left was the thing they were best at. So they were saying it out loud to strangers, over and over, to check that it was still true.

They were the most frightened people he had ever seen and they were all frightened in the same language.

Somebody asked him what he did.

There were four of them in the loose circle he had drifted into. A sprinter, or a jumper, something with legs. A surgeon. A man who had said the word doctorate and then a word Ellis did not know. And a woman in her fifties who had flown something, he had missed what.

"I'm an insurance consultant," Ellis said. "Commercial claims, mostly."

What happened next was not cruel. He wanted to be fair about that afterwards, and he was.

The circle simply had nowhere to put it. There was a pause of about a second and a half. The surgeon smiled in a kind way. Then the man with the doctorate asked the sprinter something about training blocks, and the circle closed up along the line where Ellis had been standing.

Nobody was rude to him. He was not excluded. He had said a thing that did not have a rank in it, and the conversation had gone around it the way water goes around a stone.

He was fine.

He stood at the edge of the circle with his hands in his pockets and waited to feel humiliated, and it did not come.

He thought about this for a while, because it seemed like the kind of thing worth understanding. And what he arrived at was that he had never once been the best person in a room. Not at school, not at work, not at anything he had ever picked up. He had spent thirty-four years being the fourth best guy at the table and enjoying himself anyway.

Everybody else in this hall had walked in as the most impressive person they had ever met. Every single one of them was, right now, finding out what that was worth here.

He was the only person in that hall who had already done that particular thing, over and over, on purpose, since he was a child.

So he stood there in his good shirt and he was, genuinely, all right.

Somebody came across the floor toward him.

He was a big man and he arrived fast. Early thirties, as tall as Ellis but built as though it had been the plan all along, long through the legs and heavy across the shoulders. He was standing on the balls of his feet before he had finished stopping. He looked like a man who was always about two seconds from doing something.

"Did you say insurance?"

"I did."

"Commercial or auto?"

Ellis looked at him.

"Commercial," he said. "Why?"

"I did two years of auto claims in Sacramento." The man put out his hand. "Kai Kruz."

"Ellis Vance."

"Kai Kruz," Ellis said again, because it had not sounded like a real name the first time.

"I know," Kai said, and let it go, and did not explain.

They talked for nine minutes about a job Kai had hated.

He had done it at twenty-three, between blowing out a knee and getting the knee back, in an office with a broken vending machine. He could still remember the fault codes. He wanted to know whether they still made you photograph the odometer. He asked it the way you ask about a town you used to live in.

It was the first conversation Ellis had had all day that was about anything.

Around them the room went on ranking itself, and after a while Ellis asked the question, because everybody was asking it.

"What number did they give you?"

"Sixty-one."

Ellis did not say anything for a moment.

"Four thousand four hundred and seventeen," he said.

"Huh," said Kai, in exactly the tone Denise used, and asked him whether the claims software was still the one with the green screen.

The light changed.

It did not dim and it did not flicker. It simply became a different light, everywhere at once, and the hall stopped talking inside two seconds.

Ellis felt the notice in his jacket pocket and put his hand flat against it through the cloth. Then he remembered that it had done its job, and that there was nothing left in it for him.

"Here we go," Kai said.

He sounded almost cheerful about it.