Sardine Packing
by Robb White
part 1
“It’s for you,” the husband’s wife said.
“God, please, not another jury summons!”
She held the letter to her nose and sniffed. “Could be.”
“Don’t joke, babe,” he said. “That last one was a farce. The whole thing could have been settled in three hours instead of three days.”
“Don’t remind me,” she said. “Honey, you complained about it for three days, too.”
She told him she remembered it well because he had castigated “those boring lawyers” on both sides of that slip-and-fall case lawsuit repeating everything until “every knucklehead in the city” could have recited it by heart.
He ripped open the envelope and gave it a quick perusal. “No jury duty, at least.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “You tell me. I’m stumped.” He handed her the letter. She skimmed it front and back.
“I don’t know what this is,” she said. “It certainly sounds official. Maybe it’s another one of those nuisance surveys from some nondescript government agency again.”
They’d filled one out last month from one government agency with an alphabet of letters attesting to its importance. It requested specific household and financial information, and claimed the information the family provided would remain in confidentiality, unshared with any of the other affiliated agencies within the government’s rubric.
That was around the time the Jordans, next door, moved away without a word to anyone. Two weeks after that, the elderly couple across the street, the ones who liked gardening together, left their house and never returned. It seemed For-Sale signs were popping up like toadstools.
“What was that anyway?” he asked. He remembered a vague purpose relating to “the quality of life,” but that was all. However, the survey came with a penalty for failing to return it. It would have gone straight into the recycling bin if it weren’t for the phrase below the letterhead that warned all “randomly chosen recipients of the questionnaire must complete and return it to the locale specified within three weeks” or be subject to some vague-sounding statute being invoked, which would result in “a penalty under law,” although it was never stated anywhere what that penalty would be.
“Why do they want you to report to the YMCA, of all places?”
“God Almighty, I have no idea,” he replied. “Our stupid government can find more ways to waste people’s time and money and tangle people up than I can remember. One of those circular committees, I suppose, no one’s ever heard of.”
She laughed. “I heard there’s no accurate count of how many agencies existing within the government. How do you explain that?”
“Do you see me laughing? I can’t explain that or why half the neighborhood has vacant houses. Something’s going on, and it gives me the creeps.”
“Just your usual paranoia, dear.”
“You know what they say: ‘Paranoia is just heightened awareness.’”
On the day specified in the letter, he arrived fifteen minutes early. The woman at the desk looked bored and didn’t have any idea what he was referring to unless it had to do with the sign across from her.
He turned around and read, “Questionnaire Respondents Meeting Upstairs in Room 208,” in block print on a piece of paper with a blue arrow pointing at the stairs.
He had not been inside the “Y” since his seventh-grade class was offered swimming lessons. He remembered failing to make it all the way to the end of the pool when it was his turn. A man walking beside him along the edge of the pool carried a metal pole he extended for him to use to climb out. They gave him a certificate with “Tadpole” on it. He had envied his friend Stevie, whose simple card stated that he was a “swimmer.”
Upstairs, the echoing shouts of young men playing basketball in the gym at the end of the hall reverberated off the walls. Two smaller rooms revealed an exercise class in which a young woman in sweats exhorted a class of girls on treadmills: “Keep going,” as though they had a choice. In another, he heard only an older woman’s voice speaking soothingly to a group out of sight about “resolving conflicts and turmoil in one’s life.”
Room 208 was the last room on the left before the gym.
He saw a dozen people inside, mostly middle-aged men like himself, sitting on wooden folding chairs. A few had their questionnaires in front of them. Some had coffee from the vending machines downstairs, despite another homemade sign stating that drinks were not allowed upstairs.
He had a lifelong habit of reading everything. He was irritated whenever his wife left the closed-captioning on the TV because he couldn’t resist reading it, especially when the computer-generated words and phrases were ludicrously out of sync or sense with the actual dialogue.
As more people entered the room, the men’s heads swiveled in the direction of the door, and as quickly cut their eyes away once the newcomers were deemed to be just like them, not a person in authority.
He overheard one older gentleman in a gruff voice say he wanted to know what business the government had, knowing how much he had in his bank account. A voice behind him piped up: “None of their damned business.”
A few around that conversation chipped in with similar observations and then the talk went slack with a few remarks about personal matters here and there.
A half-hour passed and people began grumbling about the fact no one showed up to tell them what the purpose of the meeting was all about. The last comment made by someone in the back provoked a moment of laughter when, as if on cue, a man in a short-sleeved white shirt walked in and announced himself as someone from the government agency with all the names on their questionnaires, who was there “to answer all their questions.”
In fact, he didn’t address any questions. He smiled benevolently and nodded his head up and down as one person after another expressed confusion or annoyance at being summoned without a clear understanding of why their lives had to be interrupted. One of the younger men in the room, in work clothes or wearing heavy-duty boots, asked: “Are we going to be compensated for the time we missed?”
“All your questions and concerns will be answered to your complete satisfaction,” the man up front said. “I’m now going to have my assistants collect the questionnaires from each of you. And after that, we’ll conduct a follow-up interview to the surveys. It won’t take long, folks, I promise, and you’ll be right back to your daily activities.”
The sideways conversations and stirring in the chairs ceased the moment the assistants walked in. They reminded him of the young men from jury duty: large males in plainclothes with sidearms on their hips. He remembered the one from last time, who recognized some of the citizens convened for jury duty and chatted pleasantly with them before crossing off their names from his list and telling them where to sit. Though cordial, he made it clear that, once we were convened, no one was allowed to leave the room except to go to the lavatories.
These men were silent as they moved among the tables. The man up front maintained his demeanor throughout the process; he did not introduce the assistants nor explain why they had to be armed to collect surveys.
When the assistants handed him the questionnaires, they took places in all four corners of the room. They folded their arms in front of them or leaned against the wall with blank looks on their faces.
The man up front looked at them once, nodded to the assistant closest to the door, and walked out.
The whispers around him turned into a steady buzz. He didn’t know anyone personally in the room, but he had a desire to say something to someone. “This whole thing is sloppy,” he said to the couple near him.
“It’s a disgrace,” his wife said. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
The whispers became murmurs, and the decibel level of discontent grew louder with every passing minute. One or two people tried to get a response from the assistants, but none spoke when addressed. Other than to shrug shoulders, they were as still as statues.
“I’m giving this bullshit one more minute,” said a man in his late thirties in white coveralls flecked with different paint colors, “and I’m out of here.”
Before that minute elapsed, six uniformed men and one woman entered the room. They were dressed in full tactical gear from visored helmets to shin guards. They replaced the assistants at each corner. Two armed men holding batons in the blocking position with the length of the handle running down the forearm to the elbow, stood at either side of the woman, who spoke to the room in a barking command voice.
“Stand up, take off and fold your clothes. Put them on the table. Place your personal possessions beside them. Do it now.”
The gasps and shouts from the room came like a clap of thunder: all at once, surrounding the room. Women sobbed, some cried aloud or moaned.
Three men rushed the front of the room. The two armed men in black uniforms reacted with speed. Three blows were dealt to the men rushing them, all at their heads. Two collapsed to the floor. The man in the paint-spattered coveralls deflected his attacker’s baton with a forearm. He bowled over the woman, who didn’t step back in time. He caromed off the arms trying to clutch at him and headed toward the door. The man at the door swung his baton at his head but dealt only a glancing blow. Two more armed men rushed forward and swung their clubs at his head, shoulders, and back. He went down under a flurry of strikes. Before he passed out, his hand reached out for the leg of one of the men hitting him.
The woman watched them drag his body to place him directly behind her. “I’ll repeat my order,” the woman up front said. Her voice held a slight quaver but she resumed her position and command voice.
He thought it was like being in one of those Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales where everyone is frozen in place. No one spoke in actual words; guttural speech from different pockets around the room, suppressed screams, prayers, louder sobbing. The bizarre tableau of armed men in prior positions reformed like water finding its equilibrium. He could still hear the muffled shouts of the basketball players next door, where the world was still normal.
He waited, thinking one of the men would assume command and they would separate from their women and all would rush the front, overtake these... What were they? Hostage-takers? Terrorists? Who were they, and why were they doing this? His mind tumbled the questions back and forth like clothes in a washing machine. That any of this was related to a lousy government questionnaire seemed ridiculous.
“If I have to repeat my order,” the woman said, her voice deeper now, “I’ll have you physically undressed.”
As she finished saying this, the man in the short-sleeved white shirt re-entered. He had the same goofy, abstract smile on his face as before. In his arms, he carried a pile of gray terry-cloth robes in his arms. He set them down on the table closest to the woman, who never looked at him.
The two plainclothes men came in carrying folded stacks of robes in their arms and placed them beside the first pile of robes.
A tall man from the back of the room stepped forward and confronted the woman. “If we do what you say,” he said, “we’re walking out of here. Don’t try to stop us.” He had a gravelly voice and seemed to carry authority.
“Agreed,” the woman said. “We won’t stop you. Five minutes.”
The man turned around and addressed the group. Whether by instinct or design, like penguins huddling against the Antarctic cold, the group had compressed into a circle for protection. “Look,” he said, his voice low but steady, “I don’t know what’s going on in here anymore than you do, but let’s get through this. Once we get outside into the hall, they can’t stop us.”
It sounded reasonable. Some people, however, objected.
“We’re wasting time here, folks,” the self-appointed leader replied. “If those guys in uniform start manhandling the women, I’m afraid we’ll have no chance. Guns will go off. Let’s be smart about this.”
The objections diminished. Not everyone liked the idea. One woman began unbuttoning her blouse.
“Wait, honey,” her husband said, stopping her. She let out a wail and broke down crying.
Copyright © 2023 by Robb White
