Hank's Arc

Chapter 11 of 14

The intake room smelled like bleach and cold coffee. Hank sat on a plastic chair while a woman behind a desk slid a paper across to Queen V. Queen V. signed it without reading. A small TV bolted in the corner ran the local morning news on mute. Hank watched the screen out of habit. Then he saw her face on it. Queen V.'s face, with her full name running under it in white letters, and the words TREATMENT CENTRE printed beside a photo of the building they were sitting in right now. Queen V. looked up. The pen stopped. Her hand stayed flat on the desk. The intake woman turned and saw the screen too and pretended she hadn't. Hank watched Queen V.'s jaw set and then loosen, like she'd decided something quick. She slid the signed paper back. "Word travels," she said. Hank thought of the board seats, the votes, the quiet calls she'd promised to make on his behalf. All of it on that screen now, public, finished. Later, in the hall, Queen V. handed Hank a folded sheet from her bag. The permit application she'd been holding for him. Council seal, neat lines, his name half-filled in pencil. "I can't move this anymore," she said. "By noon the board will know. By tomorrow they'll be voting me off." She didn't apologize. She just gave him the paper and walked toward her room. Hank held the permit in both hands. Two years of waiting, dead in a hallway that smelled like bleach. That afternoon, somewhere miles back, his land sat under the sun. Beams half-raised. A roof started and stopped. Stools waiting around tables nobody had pulled up to. Hank folded the permit into quarters and slid it into his shirt pocket. Whatever came next, it wasn't coming through her. He walked down the hall to find his room.