DMV, page 13
Rosita knew she should leave, drive back home and return to bed, but she parked her car across from the DMV and walked across the dark empty street to peer through one of the building’s doors. Inside, instead of equipment and office furniture, the large room was empty save for the gathered throng. Everyone was congregating around a central point that seemed to consist of a full-sized guillotine. She could see the gleaming blade and the top of the instrument’s wooden frame, but the constantly moving crowd was so dense that she could not see who, if anyone, had been put into the mechanism. Suddenly, the blade fell, and a cheer went up from the assemblage, a cheer so loud she could hear it clearly through the muffling of the door’s safety glass.
A man in a security guard’s uniform jumped up on what must have been some type of platform, holding aloft a bloody severed head.
Jorge’s head.
Rosita jerked awake, sitting up in bed, her blurred vision not allowing her to see the exact time on the dresser clock but letting her know that it was one-something. She desperately had to pee, which told her that even going to the bathrom had been part of her dream. And everything after that? A nightmare.
One that still felt far too real.
She made a production of getting out of bed, wanting to wake Todd, and when she returned from the bathroom, he was rubbing his eyes. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” she told him, and he nodded dopily, closed his eyes and rolled onto his side away from her. She snaked an arm around his midsection and gratefully snuggled next to him.
She fell asleep almost instantly.
When she awoke, it was light outside. Birds were chirping in the yard. The sky was blue; she could see it between the partially open slats of the blinds covering the bedroom window. The temperature was pleasant. It was a perfect morning.
But underneath it all, something still felt wrong.
FOURTEEN
As he did each morning, Jorge ate breakfast early and alone, before returning to his quarters to write a short letter to Beverly without Durrell looking over his shoulder and making smartass comments. He wasn’t much of a writer, but he’d felt so alone here that around the third or fourth day, he’d actually started cranking out a letter each morning or evening, whichever was most convenient, asking Beverly what was happening back home, telling her what he was going through. He’d even written to Rosita a couple of times.
Though he wasn’t sure that any of his letters were getting through.
He’d asked about that one time. He’d just dropped an envelope into the mailbox in front of the administration building, when Mr. Dodge, one of the higher ups, stepped outside. “Dodge!” he said, gratified to see the quicksecond expression of annoyance at his refusal to use the appropriate appellation.
“Yes?” the administrator said frostily.
“Do you actually mail out these letters we write?”
“Of course.”
“How often do they go out? Do you send them each day, or do you let them pile up and do like a once-a-week run?”
“They go out every day.”
“What about incoming?”
“We both send and receive mail daily.”
“I’m just asking because I’ve been sending letters to my wife and my sister, but I haven’t heard back from them yet.”
The man smiled. “Maybe they don’t wish to correspond with you.”
Jorge didn’t believe that for a second.
It made him think that his own missives were getting lost somewhere along the way. He would not have been surprised if the letters, like those to and from prisons or concentration camps, were being read and censored by the powers that be. Which would definitely explain why they were not making it out to Beverly or Rosita.
Still, he kept writing. Just in case. In his more optimistic moments, he thought that maybe the letters he sent out were being delivered, but the ones being sent to him were not. If so, that was fine. As long as Beverly knew he was okay.
But, much more often, he imagined all of their letters being read by cackling DMV administrators before being carelessly tossed away.
Finishing today’s message, he decided to sign off with “Fuck the DMV,” before sealing it in an envelope and taking it to the mailbox.
In the morning class, they had a new computer instructor. Last minute replacements seemed to happen quite a bit, and though he’d asked about it several times, no explanation for these sudden substitutions had ever been provided. He’d tried to figure out if there was a pattern, if the instructors were switched out after a certain number of hours or at natural breaking points in the curriculum, but, as far as he could tell, the changeovers seemed to be entirely random.
“Hello,” the woman said, introducing herself once everyone was settled in place. “I am Ms. Lane. Today, we will be going over counter etiquette, what you can and cannot do while issuing a license.”
Jorge stared at Ms. Lane as she spoke. She had big hands, he noticed.
Really big hands.
He could not help himself, could not stop looking, and Jorge glanced around at his fellow trainees to see if any of them had noticed. Of course not. Hell, they were probably in on it. But he found those oversized palms and those too-long fingers extremely distracting. And unnerving. Because her hands were not just big, they were wrong. They did not match the arms to which they were attached. They did not even look real.
This wasn’t the first time he had noticed something…odd about the individuals working at the training camp. A few days ago, one of the cafeteria employees had come out during lunch with a new steaming tray of pasta, and he’d had a gigantic, peculiarly protruding forehead that made him look like a Neanderthal. Before that, there’d been an outside custodian with only one eye. And it was not as though his other eye had been lost—he had only one eye. Like a cyclops. Although the eye was not in the center of his forehead but on the left side of his nose, just below where a normal eye should be, which somehow made it more disturbing. Another woman, one of the administrators he’d seen in passing, had had a small face. It was framed by a lot of hair, but still it was impossible not to notice that the eyes, nose and mouth took up a very modest area in the center of her ordinary sized head.
Was there a reason for these deformities? Did they mean something? Jorge didn’t know, but watching the new teacher, he had the uncomfortable impression that the disfigurements were somehow connected to the function of the DMV.
Ms. Lane passed out seven-pages of guidelines and then went over the bullet points on the stapled sheets, describing proper ways to interact with members of the public who would be coming in to the DMV office seeking services. She elaborated on the guidelines, talking about differences in approach based on what the patron might be looking to do.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret here, one of the perks of working for the DMV.” The instructor grinned. “The latitude. You have a lot of individual latitude within the framework of our written rules and regulations. If you’re behind the counter and some old enemy comes up for a renewal, or an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend is looking to update an ID, or if you just don’t like someone’s face, you have options.” She chuckled. “I was working last month, filling in for a friend, as I am sometimes wont to do. A couple came up to the counter, and I decided to have a little fun with them. They were co-owners of an antique store, and on the line of the form asking for their occupation, the man had put down ‘antiques dealer.’ Antiques with an S. So I told the guy to lose the S. ‘People don’t work at groceries stores,’ I told him. ‘They work at grocery stores. You don’t go to books stores. You go to book stores. They’re not tires shops. They’re tire shops. So if you want your Real ID, you’d better put down your actual occupation—antique dealer—and not lie to a government agency.’”
Ms. Lane laughed. “Then his wife came up, used a pen to change ‘antiques dealer’ to ‘antique dealer,’ as I’d told her husband to do, and handed me the form. I scowled at her and said, ‘Antique is an adjective. If you tell me you are an antique dealer, you are telling me that you are an old dealer, but you’re not telling me what you sell. The government requires you to explain what you do. So if you sell antiques, write down ‘antiques dealer’ as your occupation.’” The instructor clapped her hands. “They were confused and angry, and it was so much fun!” She glanced around at the class. “You’ll be able to have fun, too.”
The DMV, Jorge was quickly learning, had a lot of power. Too much power, as far as he was concerned. Jorge cleared his throat. “What if a politician, like the governor or something, found out about this and tried to crack down?”
Ms. Lane’s face grew hard. “We’d pull his license. We’d make sure he was never able to drive again. Him, his family and anyone who dared to support such a plan.”
The other students, sycophants all, nodded and smiled as though this was the most reasonable thing in the world. Once again, Jorge wondered if he was the only real trainee here, if the rest of them were merely set pieces in an elaborate brainwashing game, their purpose to reinforce the party line and, through peer pressure, get Jorge to do the same.
But that was an awfully narcissistic take on things, and spending so much time, money and effort on indoctrinating one person was highly unlikely.
“Some people might consider some of the things that we’re learning to do an abuse of power,” he pressed.
Ms. Lane smiled sweetly. “And those people will never be invited to be part of the DMV family,” she said. “Some of them may even turn out to be enemies of the state, and when you are a little further along in your training, you will learn what the department does with those people. Now shall we get back to the business at hand?”
At hand.
His focus was drawn once again to the oversized appendages at the ends of her wrists. Her smile grew sly, as though she knew what he was looking at, and she wiggled her extra long fingers at him.
He quickly looked away.
****
Jorge skipped lunch for the third day in a row. Lately, he’d started pretending he had an exercise routine—although he avoided the on-site gym—and he’d begun conspicuously jogging around the compound in his spare time, using the opportunity to look for possible weaknesses in security. To reinforce the ruse, he even performed push-ups and jumping jacks, though he hadn’t done that shit since high school. Each day, he went a little farther out. He was sure they were still watching him, and he wasn’t going deep into the woods the way he had before, but if he could scope the place out and learn something without attracting attention, it would be time well spent.
Jogging along the curving sidewalk, Jorge thought about the beehives he’d seen. He couldn’t seem to get them out of his mind. The image of those tall wax shapes haunted him, and a couple of times he thought he’d heard that buzzing again, that strange shifting sound reminiscent of music or the rhythms of an unknown language. Once, he’d even dreamed about the beehives, only in his dream they were the skyline of a city in which he worked at the office of the DMV. He could see part of the skyline through the window next to his desk. He was the only human working in the building—all of his coworkers were cooperative conglomerations of insects fitted together to resemble people. They buzzed instead of talked, and he could not understand a thing any of them said.
Part of him wanted to see the beehives again, if only to verify that they were really there, but for some reason he found that he was a little bit…afraid to return to that spot. Not because of the guards who had kicked him out. That had been normal and understandable. It was the wax shapes themselves and the unholy buzzing undermining it all that frightened him and taken up residence in his mind.
Unholy
It was a word not part of his usual vocabulary, one of his Mama’s words. But nothing else really applied here, and Jorge found himself believing that those terrible hives were somehow involved in the operation of the training camp, although he had no idea how such a thing was possible.
He’d navigated all of the paved sidewalks several times and was on his third overall loop of the campus when the bell rang for the end of lunch. He made a quick trip back to his room, splashed water on his face and changed out of his sweaty clothes before returning to the classroom for afternoon instruction.
Where today’s lesson taught them how to manage appointment times so that minorities were interspersed with white patrons throughout the day and not bunched together.
One thing he’d noticed about the training camp was that there were more people around in the late afternoon than at any other time of day. Between the end of their afternoon class and the ringing of the dinner bells, he tended to see people coming out of buildings or walking into buildings. Not that there were a lot of individuals on the sidewalks even at that hour. It was only a few men and women, here and there, but the pattern was consistent, and Jorge wondered if a shift change was occurring at that time, if workers were leaving for home or going wherever they went at night.
It was possible that the trainees weren’t being as closely monitored at that precise moment, and as today’s afternoon instructor, a man whose too-long neck was animalistically hairy, had refused to answer when asked how long training classes were going to continue, implying that they would be here for quite awhile yet, Jorge thought it might be time to try a little reconnoitering again.
So in plain sight, right in front of two business-suited men walking along the sidewalk toward him, Jorge, pretending to jog, veered off the path and headed across the open space between the recreation center and the library. He had not explored this direction before, and as soon as he determined that he was not being followed (or, at least, when he was not immediately stopped), he increased his pace.
There were fewer trees and bushes here than there had been in the other directions in which he’d scouted, although the rocky ground quickly grew hilly. Far ahead, above what trees and brush there were, blocking off everything beyond it, was the wall. He assumed it encircled the entire property, and while he was sure that, if he asked, he’d be told that its purpose was to keep others out, Jorge had no doubt that its true objective was to keep him in.
Atop a low rise, he almost tripped as his feet suddenly encountered a section of ground that was softer than the hard surrounding earth. He looked down. The dirt here had been recently dug up and replaced none too expertly. The spot was vaguely rectangular, and its familiar shape set off alarm bells in his head.
A grave?
Jorge stepped off the soft soil, feeling uneasy. He glanced back at the way he had come, to make sure he was still not being observed, and was relieved to see no one behind him.
Looking down the other side of the slope, he spotted, beyond the hillock on which he stood, what appeared to be…an entire graveyard.
He stared at the sight before him. It covered most of the land between here and the wall, small white crosses and rounded gravestones spaced unevenly across the undulating terrain. There was no road that led to this spot, no path. It was out on its own, which meant that its existence was being kept secret.
Who was buried here? Recruits who would not comply? Instructors no longer of use? Neither idea seemed as absurd as it should have, and Jorge felt anxious as he looked out upon the primitive cemetery. Who was in the grave next to him? he wondered. Whoever it might be, it must have been someone who’d died very recently, because there was no marker of any kind.
Why would a Department of Motor Vehicles training camp have a graveyard at all?
Jorge continued to gaze down the slope. Were there words carved on any of those crosses or tombstones? If so, it might give him an idea of who was buried out here. Moving quickly, in case a hidden camera had spotted him and security guards were already on their way, he hastened down the incline.
There were literally dozens of graves, and the sheer number of them left him stunned. Maybe, he thought, the cemetery had been here before the camp had been built, had been on the property when the DMV bought it and had simply been left as is when the land was acquired.
Although that didn’t explain the new grave at the top of the hill.
Or the other fairly recent one to his right.
Jorge crouched down as he moved between the graves, scrutinizing the markers. There were no names or dates on any of the crosses, nothing written on any of the tombstones. They were all blank.
Maybe it was a pet cemetery.
No, that grave on top of the hill had been human-sized. And the spacing between the ones around him indicated that the burial plots were those of adult men and/or women. He could not know for certain whether that was true unless he dug one up—but that was something he was not about to do.
A shadow crept slowly across the landscape as the sun began to sink below the top of the concrete wall, and Jorge decided it was time to go. He was not exactly superstitious, but after everything that had happened lately, he’d be a fool to tempt fate. Hiking back up the slope the way he’d come, he turned for one last look. On a faint breeze that sprang up and lightly touched his face, he thought he heard a low cadenced buzzing, and, heart pounding, he hurried back across the rolling ground toward the buildings of the campus.
It was not time for dinner—the appropriate bells had not yet rung—and as he re-entered the cul-de-sac, Jorge saw two of his fellow trainees emerge from the gym and head toward their quarters. Deciding to de-stress in his own room before going over to the cafeteria, he followed the two into the residence building. His own accommodations were in the opposite direction from theirs, and he turned left at the first corridor while they turned right.
