“Letter from 6C”
Short story by Brandon James, 2007
I met you only once, though I’ve seen you a hundred times. On the elevator, do you remember me? Usually, four or five of us took it down to the lobby and we’d all go our separate ways to work. In that elevator crowd, I could look over someone’s shoulder and see you there, staring at the door and waiting as we fell. But this one time, the time we met, it was only you and I. I think we both missed the morning rush where everyone goes to work at the same time. We must’ve been dreaming to the same ringing alarm clock because we were alone in the elevator that time.
“Hello,” I said. We both looked unready to start the day, but you looked more fetching than ever, with your hair not all the way fixed and your bra strap carelessly visible. “I’m Felix, from 6C.”
You smiled but I didn’t get your name. You said, “You hit the snooze button too many times, right?”
I said, “Yeah.” Then the bell rang, and we got off.
You know my name, but I don’t know yours.
The couple from 4E died first. I kept thinking, if I’d had the courage to move out of the building in which my parents lived, in which I’d been raised — I’d never have been in this situation. But if I’d had the courage to do that, I never would have met you.
Ask me why I felt relieved when the couple from 4E died. Ask me why I merely sighed after the CDC officer, in his plastic white space suit, gave me the news. From behind his mask, with the light reflecting off of his goggles so I couldn’t see his eyes, I couldn’t tell if he was being sympathetic or not.
The pamphlet’s title was “Your Legal RIGHTS Under Quarantine.”
The CDC officer slid it under my door, along with several other papers that I never bothered to read. I picked them up and set them on the kitchen counter like I’d done for all the bills and solicitations I’d ever received. After that, I lost all the clothes in my dresser and an officer told me that we all had to wear a blue suit so we could be easily distinguished. The suit felt like pajamas and made me tired so I fell asleep in the hallway.
On the second day of quarantine, one of the officers asked me if I understood what was happening. I told him what I knew — that the couple from 4E died first, and that they had died of an unknown airborne pathogen.
“Do you understand your rights?”
“Sorry?”
“Did you read the pamphlets we gave you?”
“Summarize them for me.”
According to the officer, under quarantine is nothing like being imprisoned. It’s like a vacation in a lovely hotel off the sandy beaches of some Mediterranean island. You can order whatever you want for dinner, and you can borrow books from the local library, and it’s all delivered to your door for free. The catch, he tells me, is that you can never, ever leave your room.
“I need you to sign this paper stating that you understand these rights,” he said. He slid the paper through the slot in the new plastic door. All of the old wooden doors had been removed and replaced with heavy transparent plastic sheets. Looking through them was much like looking through a frozen waterfall, so we saw each other only distortedly.
I signed the paper and gave it back to him and asked, “How long will it take for you to make sure everyone is OK?”
“We’ve found cases of infection in several units,” he explained. He stood, and said, “A team will come soon to take blood samples from this floor. If you’re infected, we’ll inform you and take appropriate measures to prevent further spreading.”
“And if I’m not?”
He nodded and walked away.
All of the CDC officers looked exactly the same, except that in some cases you could distinguish men from women based on the curves visible through the white suits. I preferred when female officers took my blood because they did it so tenderly, and their eyes looked so lovely when I could see them. I tried to make conversation with them, and sometimes they talked to me and sometimes they didn’t.
I asked, “How are the other tenants?”
“We can’t give you any information regarding the other tenants,” she said, flicking the needle point with her gloved finger. She was giving me an injection of something–I never read the paperwork or the pamphlets, I just signed whatever they wanted me to sign and hoped they would send me a female officer.
“I liked my neighbors,” I said. “Can you tell me how Mr. Lovelace in six-F is getting along?”
The officer smiled, I could tell by her eyes. She and I were alone in the room. I overheard one time that only a few tenants could be trusted not to try and fight the officers, and it made me smile to know I was one of them. I knew in my mind that you were one of them, too, and that made me smile.
Her smile was of a consolatory nature, though. She told me that Mr. Lovelace died a few days ago. After being informed of his infection, he shattered the mirror in his room and used a shard to slit his throat. I stopped smiling because Mr. Lovelace used to be such a nice person, and because I knew then why the CDC had removed the mirror from my apartment.
Though we had cable television, including all of the premium channels courtesy of the CDC, I liked to sit by the window. Though the window was covered with the same distorting plastic sheet that replaced my door, I could still make out shapes on the street below if I pressed my head against the plastic. I saw people moving like ants, each with individual purpose. If I pressed my ear against the plastic, I could hear things, too. Sound bounced off of the building across the street so I could hear, and I wondered if the next building was also quarantined.
Drifting into an afternoon nap with my head against that cool plastic window, I was pretty sure I’d dream of you. But from the street below I heard someone shouting “Stop! Stop!” It rattled me. I looked down at the street and saw white shapes scrambling and one shape in particular standing out–a blue shape, someone like us. The blue shape dodged the approaching white shapes, leaping all over and swinging its arms, and then a gunshot rang out and the blue shape dropped to its knees and stopped fighting.
I pressed my head against the plastic and watched as the shape lay still in the middle of the street. Shortly after the flamethrowers hissed as napalm liquid poured out and drenched it in roaring orange flame. I listened and it reminded me of a lullaby I hummed the other day while you were in the other room.
Ask me why late last night, I saw a stuffed tiger on the bookshelf by my bed and thought of you. It wasn’t the tiger itself. I don’t think of you as a tiger. But the eyes of the tiger made me think of you. They were black, just black, not like yours, which were brown, I remember so clearly. The tiger’s eyes, uncovered by the blinding glare of goggles, and just… ask me why I projected human feeling onto that stuffed tiger and I worried that he felt cold.
“Come here,” I said to it, but it didn’t move. I got out of bed in my blue pajamas and walked across the cool floor and picked up the tiger. Though I don’t remember where it came from — a fair or one of those claw machines — I loved it then and took it to my bed and hid it under my covers to make it warm.
Maybe as I fell asleep and felt the plush against the hairs on my skin, I thought it was you and I hummed it a lullaby.
The blue shape on the street below was gone, replaced in the morning by the black, torched scars on the concrete, so black it could be a hole and as I watched people walking towards that black scar, I wanted to shout and say, no, stop, and say, don’t go there, you’ll fall in there.
The real nice officer who told me about Mr. Lovelace, she took my blood again today and told me I was infected. She gave me a candy bar because she noticed that I’d never requested candy before. I think she assumed that I didn’t know I could order candy, so she gave me a Hershey’s bar after she told me what was in my blood.
“We’re still trying to understand the virus,” she said, tapping my vein. “But for now we’re going to change your medication regimen and see what that does.”
She could’ve been you. Behind that mask, I couldn’t see much of her face — only her eyes, and they were blue like I remember yours being as we fell. Would she, would you have taken off your mask and kissed me if I’d asked you to?
I wrote you a letter on the day I found out I was infected, because one of the officers advised me to start making my final arrangements. He explained that, though my body would have to be cremated as a safety precaution, I could still have a traditional funeral, or any kind of funeral I wanted, complimentary of the CDC.
I hadn’t seen the stars since the couple in 4E died, because at night the plastic cover over my windows turned the sky into a dark void. I saw stars on the television screen, though, and they reminded me of you because they were lovely. I saw the aurora borealis on television, and smiled because you could’ve been watching the same program.
That officer who gave me the chocolate bar noticed I was sad, and she saw I had a thick, sealed envelope on my desk but it didn’t have an address or a name on it. She put her hand on my knee and asked, “Is that a letter for someone special?”
“I don’t know her name,” I explained. “She lives in this building, on the floor above mine I think. I don’t know her name, but I think I love her.”
Admitting it to her, I was afraid she would reject me, that meeting on the elevator wasn’t enough. I felt like choking and I was afraid I would die right there in front of her.
“Maybe I can find out her name for you,” said the officer. In the way a person’s voice sounds, you can tell if they’re smiling and if they mean it. She meant it.
After awhile, they confined me to my bedroom and removed a wall and replaced it with plastic so they could observe me. They plugged me into machines, and I couldn’t get up anymore. The lovely officer who gave me candy didn’t come back for awhile.
In the other room sat my tiger and I wondered, was he cold or was he lonely.
Sometimes I wondered if the alarm clock would go off soon, and I’d wake up and find you in the elevator, a little disheveled and hurried like me, late for work. Maybe this time, I’d ask for your name. Do you remember mine?
The officer came into my room today. Though all of the CDC officers look the same, I could tell it was her because of her body shape beneath the plastic suit. In a breathless sort of way, she sat on the edge of the bed and didn’t say anything.
“Do you remember my name?” I asked her.
“It’s Felix,” she said. She wasn’t smiling. “Felix, listen to me. That woman you love, she’s not with us anymore.” Her gloved hand fell onto my shoulder, and her blue eyes became wet, I wondered why. “She tried to escape a couple weeks ago and… Do you still want her name, Felix?”
If I would’ve told the officer that she reminded me of the aurora borealis, just then when I looked at her eyes and saw all the colors of the universe behind her goggles, would you have told me it was going to be fine, that we’d never have to die?
“I’m Felix from 6C,” I said.
“I’m Alison,” said the officer. “It was very nice meeting you, Felix.”
And that was it.
You know my name, and now I know yours.
is not an exit 
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Nice premise, but characterisation felt too stale