I Just Don’t Know What He Does Down There All Day via /r/nosleep

“I guess it’s fine though”, sighs Mary, getting settled on the turquoise pleather chaise longue, hesitantly resting her palms on her knees before more hesitantly dropping them to her sides — faintly embarrassed that, at 30, she still doesn’t really know what to do with her hands when talking to company.

“Honey, if it was fine you wouldn’tve called me”, I say.

“Yeah”, Mary concedes before raising two tentative fingertips to her lips, as though trying to catch that last word (finally an admission that something isn’t right with Stephen) before it stiffens into something hard and real and meaningful in the silence that follows.

“So, where is he?” I say after a short while.

“Guess.”

I know the answer, but pose it as a question anyway. “Is he at The Cutter?”

Mary starts weeping quietly and raises her little hands to cover her eyes. I catch myself thinking about how much smaller/more delicate/more beautiful her hands are than mine (which are awful and basically a man’s hands) for a moment before I move next to her on the chaise to try to stop her from crying.

She rests her head on my shoulder and I offer her a Kleenex.

“At first”, she sobs lightly, “it’s stupid, but at first I thought it was someone else, y’know…” her eyes are closed now and she’s talking into the tissue, “I thought he was seeing someone because of how different he’s…” she trails off and doesn’t say anything for a while, just moans.

I search for something comforting to say. “Y’know, Archie used to work down at The Cutter,” I say buoyantly while she continues to sob, now into my collarbone, snotstrings dribbling onto my blouse, “I’ve told you that before, right? He worked there for a long time, actually.” I say these things gently and reassuringly even though they aren’t strictly true.

“Oh yeah?” Mary detaches herself from me and looks waterishly into my eyes, grasping for some kind of hope.

“Oh yeah,” I lie to her. Well, not lie; it’s true that Archie did work at The Cutter for about two weeks when I had just gotten pregnant with Shelly, our eldest, and we needed money fast for our First New Citizen payments. What I’m careful not to tell Mary is that Archie hated it down there, with the windowless heat and the grown men crying and the misery and the no sleep (not to mention the humiliation of a Class-3 citizen working a Class-9 job, however much they paid), and that Archie managed to get out as quick as he could thanks to my Father pulling a few very frantic strings to get him work as an Overseer at The Plant. Even two weeks in The Cutter was enough to get my Archie a prescription for the ZZZx Caplets that he still, regularly, uses to sleep throughout the night.

As far as I had known him, Mary’s husband Stephen was a pretty sensitive guy, or no, maybe sentimental would be a better word for it, or soulful or something; no match for The Cutter anyhow. Stephen and Mary were similar in this way — something vulnerable about the two of them, something earthy and defenceless that made me want to help them out more than just being neighbourly.

I mean, OK, I’ll admit that like everybody else, when I first heard that They were going to transfer two Class-5 citizens to our Class-3 Segment on a Stratification Mobility Permit because of the success of Stephen’s new business, I was, shall-we-say, maybe a teensy bit apprehensive about the prospect of having a pair of former Class-5ers move into our very respectable neighbourhood, but I wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the shall-we-say more uppity members of the Seg who began a modest petitioning of Mary and Stephen’s arrival by, for example, posting ‘Keep Them Out!’ notes to the GMFoods noticeboard, contributing radicalising and xenophobic articles (‘3 and 5 Equals Ain’t: What You Can Do to Stop This’) to the town’s nightly news bursts, casting rumours in the line at the Caplet Dispensary, and of course launching into the odd rant at our monthly Segment meetings.

And yet, in spite of all the opposition, arrive they did, and in their modest way, Mary and Stephen won us round.

When he wasn’t working on his electronics delivery startup, Stephen put in regular appearances at the Segment’s bi-weekly Kindle club meetings (the only man to do ever so), where he talked inspiringly (if a little timidly) about the moral poverty of our Futuro-Capitalist ideology; humankind's burdensome capacity to love; and the spiritual bankruptcy of our Government. Mary, too, made a name for herself by getting involved at our ladies G.B.B.O. meetups every week, where her contributions became some of the most looked-forward-to in the group’s history.

In the photographs dotted about their living room, Stephen and Mary looked so young. I suppose they are still so young, and will remain forever that way because of what happened. Mary catches me eyeing one.

“That was eight years ago. Our wedding,” she says, getting up and taking the picture from mantle. I think she’s grateful for the distraction.

“You look so lovely,” I say as she hands it to me.

“Yes,” she says. “Doesn’t Stephen look lovely, too.”

It’s an old photograph, perhaps even taken from before the Border went up. A chubby, tall man with small silver-rimmed glasses and a little boy’s mess of strawberry blonde hair hugs his beautiful young bride in a vicelike embrace. A picture of happiness. Stephen’s outward tenderness, his sensitivity or sentimentality or whatever you want to call it, always set him a million miles apart from my Archie who has always been very robust and stoic by comparison (our wedding photos, though equally poignant, are perhaps not as lovey-dovey as Mary and Stephen’s). Which is why ever since Mary first told me about the failure of Stephen’s business and his having to get a new job to pay for Segment Upkeep Tax all those weeks ago, I’d been worried about the effect The Cutter might’ve had on him. It’s easy work to come by, sure, but I knew from the little that Archie had told me about it (often in his sleep) that The Cutter was no place for kindly men.

And Stephen was, of course, soon changed by his experiences beyond all repair.

Writing this now, I remember very clearly a moment that should have signalled to me that something was wrong, a time when I should’ve done something to intervene, as people so often say after tragedy befalls a small neighbourhood.

It was early, a cold and bleak morning in February, maybe five AM, and I was taking out the trash (I often find it hard to sleep with all Archie’s mumbling so I get up to do my chores early) when I saw a tall, gaunt man leaving Mary and Stephen’s house. The man stopped in the doorway and turned toward me, raising an emaciated, grey hand high over his head and holding it there, as though he’d forgotten how make even as normal a gesture as waving. I waved at him cautiously before I realised something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The man was Stephen. Probably about 70lbs lighter than I’d last seen him, cadaverous, his once boyishly chubby face now long and thin, his newly red raw eyes low and sunken in his face. His lips parted to reveal a set of teeth didn’t adequately cover the lengths of his dark gums.

I don’t normally buy into wives tales or any of the bunk that people in our Segment gossip about, but it was clear to me even before that day that The Cutter did strange things to people. I mean, I mostly don’t believe the stuff they post about it on News.24 or Mail.Cn (everybody knows how they exaggerate), but it's safe to say something they down there just isn’t right. Ever since they legalised the use of Relief Children I mean my God.

I still remember this one night, not long after Archie was able to quit The Cutter, that I sat up to listen to him murmuring the same phrase over and over in his sleep. Not knowing what he was saying, I smiled to myself and levelled my ear to his mouth, felt his warm breath on my face, and heard, among his soft little ‘tsks’ and ‘nyum-nyums’, the following words; whispered, although from the depths of dreaming, with the exactness of a well-told secret: “I am the lone sentinel of sadness, and I want so very much to die.”

On the day I went to visit Mary and she cried to me, she asked “What do you suppose he does down there all day?”

Exactly what it is I pray I never know.