“It helps with processing,” the clerk said. “Repatriation. If we know what you still have, we can—”
“Can what?”
The clerk looked at her form. It had sections. LANGUAGE (check all that apply). MOTOR SKILLS (rate 1–5). SOCIAL CONNECTIONS (list surviving contacts). ORIENTATION (temporal / spatial / personal). There was a box at the bottom labeled OTHER, which was small.
“Place you in the right program.”
Nadia had been away for four years. Not prison, not war. An assignment, they called it. A posting. She’d been posted somewhere cold and flat and far, doing work she was no longer allowed to describe, and she’d come back with a duffel bag and a folder of medical clearances and a sensation in her left hand that no one could find a cause for.
“Language,” the clerk said. “English, obviously. Any others?”
“Russian. Some.”
“Conversational or—”
“I dreamed in it for a while.”
The clerk made a note. The form was angled away from Nadia, like a hand of cards.
“Motor skills. Any changes since departure?”
“My left hand.” She held it up. It looked fine. “It knows things I don’t remember teaching it. Sequences. If I let it go, it does things.”
“Like a tic?”
“Like practice. Like it practiced while I was asleep.”
The clerk looked at the hand, then wrote something, then moved on. “Social connections. List surviving contacts.”
“My mother. A man named Paul who may or may not still live on Birch Street.”
“May or may not?”
“I didn’t write. Four years.”
The clerk set down her pen. This was the part she’d been trained not to rush. The orientation section. She’d been told that some returnees had strong opinions about their answers and that others had none, and both were flags.
“Temporal orientation. What year is it?”
“2019.”
“Month?”
“March. Late March.”
“It’s April.”
Nadia looked at the window. Trees out there. Bare branches. Could go either way.
“Spatial orientation. Where are you right now?”
“Building C, third floor, room 311. Your mug says Marta’s, which is probably local. Your lanyard says Federal Reintegration Services, Pacific Northwest Division. The rain says Washington.”
The clerk smiled. This was going well, by the standards of her form.
“Personal orientation. Who are you?”
Nadia opened her mouth. Closed it.
“That depends on whether you want the answer I had when I left or the one I have now.”
The clerk’s pen hovered. The form had one line. It didn’t have two.
“The one you have now.”
“I don’t have one now,” Nadia said. “I have the space where one should be. It’s shaped right. But it isn’t the one I had.”
The clerk looked at the box at the bottom of the form. OTHER. It was an inch tall, maybe less. She uncapped her pen and wrote carefully, in small letters, so the answer would fit. She didn’t show Nadia what she’d written. That was policy. The form went into the file, the file went into the system, and whatever the clerk had squeezed into that inch would follow Nadia into whichever program the system chose.
Nadia watched her write. The clerk’s handwriting was neat and small and practiced. Nadia’s left hand twitched once, on the armrest, running through a sequence nobody had asked about.
“You’ll get a packet,” the clerk said. “Welcome materials. There’s a number to call if the hand thing gets worse.”
“What if it gets better?”
The clerk looked up.
“No one’s asked me that before,” she said. She turned back to the form, looking for where that answer might go, and found nowhere.