2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIV: Creative Courage, Chapter 78: The Unregistered Clinic
For eleven years Samar Varma did intake. Now he sits in a corridor of nine chairs behind a shuttered printing works, tells each patient how long the doctor will be, and then says nothing at all.
In Brief: Samar, who left his work as a Handler, finds an unregistered clinic of two rooms and a corridor, run by a doctor named Sanyal. He asks to sit in the corridor where patients wait for hours. Learning to do it well takes him a year, and nothing he hears there is ever recorded.
The clinic was two rooms and a corridor behind a shuttered printing works and it had, when Samar first went there, no one at the front.
He noticed it, and then he could not stop noticing it, because there was a doctor, Sanyal, the woman who drank two glasses at Fatima’s stall most evenings. She had been licensed once and had lost it in a way she described differently depending on the evening. There were two people who did the actual nursing. There was a corridor with nine chairs in it, and there was nobody whose job it was to be in the corridor. People sat there for four hours, and somebody would come out and take the next one and go back in.
“You want to do what,” Sanyal said.
“Sit in the corridor.”
“And do what.”
“I don’t know yet.”
Sanyal looked at him for a while. She was fifty-something, and she had a face that had stopped being surprised by anything in about 2070.
“You are the Handler.”
“I was.”
“Right.” She went back to the sink. “There’s a chair. Don’t touch anything. If somebody stops breathing, shout.”
He was very bad at it for the first month.
He asked people what was wrong with them. That was the first error, and it took him about nine days to see it. He was doing intake. He had done it for eleven years, and his mouth did it without him: the flat clarity, the closed question, the four-second nod. People answered him the way you answer a counter, in the words the counter wants. By the time they went in to Sanyal, they had already reduced themselves once.
He stopped asking, and that took another three weeks. It turns out to be considerably harder to sit next to a frightened person and not ask them a question than anybody who has not tried it would believe.
What he arrived at, by the third month, was this: he sat down next to whoever had just come in, and he said his name, and he said, “Sanyal will be about an hour, or two if the boy from the fabrication yard comes in, which he might.”
And then he did not say anything else unless they did. That was it. The practice was that, entire. It took him a year to be reliably good at it, and he has never been able to describe it to anybody in a way that sounds like anything.
People talked. Not all of them. Perhaps one in three did, and what they said was not medical. Samar did not relay it to Sanyal. There would have been no point if he had, because a corridor is not an intake and nothing said in it goes anywhere. In the fifth month a man was waiting on a wound that turned out to be nothing. He told Samar about a brother in Kanpur he had not spoken to in nine years, at length, in detail, for the better part of an hour. Then he went in and came out and thanked Samar for the chair and left. Nobody recorded any of it, and Samar has never written a name down.
The money was almost nothing. Sanyal paid him out of what the clinic took, which was what people gave, and in a bad month that was less than the clinic spent. At the start Kavya had asked him what he thought he was doing, and for four months he had not had an answer. When the answer came, it arrived on a Tuesday, and he told her that evening and did not dress it up.
“I sit in a corridor,” Samar said, “and I listen, and nothing I hear goes anywhere at all. No field, no summary, no terminal. It happens and then it’s over.” He turned his cup. “For eleven years I did the human part of a process that had already decided. Now I do the human part of nothing. I don’t need to have worked out which of those is worse to keep doing it.”
He was there twenty-one years.
Over that time he learned things that a person picks up sitting in a corridor for twenty-one years, and that nobody would license. He learned which cough Sanyal wanted to see now and not in an hour. He learned that a man who says it’s probably nothing three times in a sentence should be moved up the corridor. And he learned that a mother who has stopped talking to her child in the chair is more frightening than one who has not stopped.
He never once had a title. When Sanyal died in the eleventh year, a younger doctor took the rooms and asked Samar what his role was. Samar said, “I sit in the corridor,” and the younger doctor said, “Right,” and that was the end of the induction. There is no record of the work. There is no assessment of it, no score, no confidence figure. There is no way of establishing whether twenty-one years of a man in a corridor produced a single measurable outcome of any kind. And Ruhi, Kavya’s daughter, at twenty, asked him once whether he minded that.
“Minded what?”
“That there’s nothing to show.”
“There’s a chair,” Samar said.
About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.
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