NeWest Press

Part One: Reformatting
Chapter One

She doesn't blur them, that's Win's job, but she does feel that swipe, top to bottom, when she sees their faces. As if the process has already started in her head. She doesn't even actuate the shutter; that all happens on its own. It's her job to advance, between clicks, and provide material. So if she does see the faces blur, maybe around hour six or seven when the repetition starts to get to her, she thinks of Win, her quick swipe on the trackpad, the pixelling smudge. Finishing her work. She's viewed the results so many times that, driving in the van, she sees the faces all pre-blurred, looking at the camera, looking at her, and she doesn't know whether to wave or hide her face.

But it's a surprise how few people she sees, even after work on a weekday, even on weekends. She comes to realize that streets aren't really about locomotion, but division of plots and zones. It's different on foot, with the presence of decision, of contingency: a street walked on is a street made real. When she's in the van, she's not there. Ana will now and then catch figures coming out of doorways, bodies standing at bus stops or in line, always bent towards her, looking. Few of the frozen get caught off guard, and Win deals with the faces they angle over shoulders and out of windows, wipes them clean of curiosity and confusion. The clicks are triggered by time, not distance. Pedestrians are photographed as they walk alongside her, as, knowingly or not, they are captured over and over again. Win tells her that, when this happens, the sidewalk looks like a parade of clones on their way to the factory. She scrolls through the line, and clears their identical faces one by one.

The grid is simple. She extends down a road, reaches the end, turns the corner, and retracts. The handbook says that it is easier to think of yourself in this way -- from a fixed, satellite's-eye-view -- instead of at ground level, even though the latter is the vantage point of their products. The handbook is right, especially when the lay of the streets shifts or pivots around some central point and disorientation is a real risk. Maintaining this top-down view is harder in old cities, with their streets radiating like spokes from a hub, spliced by canals, viaducts, and ad-hoc passages just wide enough for the van to fit through. But she has little trouble keeping today's fixed grid of industrial lots from rotating in her mind. She does not think of straight, or left, or even north- or south-west, but instead only the twin coordinates of x and y. If this seems difficult to conceptualize, it doesn't stay that way.

The handbook is wrong about a few things. It says that pedestrians might try to stop you, stand in front of the van, and pose for a picture. This hasn't happened to her or any of the other drivers she knows. A coworker says she had a woman lift up her blouse and flash the camera. She asked Win, who said that if that did happen, she would just blur it out, too. She doesn't really believe the other driver's story, though. She knows the truth: that he is, she is, invisible. She's been driving for three years and not once has a passer-by mugged for her camera, posed, or even waved. The consensus seems to be that they don't exist. The van is large, and the camera rigging is hardly discreet, but pedestrians look at them quickly and then avert their eyes. The man who trained her joked that they were afraid she'd steal their soul, and that she shouldn't take it personally. She doesn't. She hears the camera click faintly behind her head, and in her mind she wipes their faces clean.

The guide also says it's a good way to get to know a city, driving the van, but Ana had lived here for twenty years before the contract. She doesn't get discovery, then, but reformatting. Streets she knew from her late twenties are repaved by the camera, cleaned of their memories, rendered into the official, sellable view. Clear, demarcated, and without emotional charge. Last week she drove the van like a pressure-washer along the driveway's edge of her childhood home. She looked, from the van, into her old bedroom. Only then did she slow down, the camera clicking out the time, the flash bouncing in sheets off of the darkened window. The images were fed in that evening, the scene scrubbed and encoded. The strangers' car in the open garage had its license plate blurred -- Win's handiwork. But Ana's left her face, just a beige wrinkle in the bedroom window, intact.

License plates are blurred. Faces are blurred. Bus stop ads stay, though, depending on the city and its laws, their phone numbers may be blurred. The faces on the ads remain. House numbers are left intact, but names on mailboxes are blurred. Billboards stay, netting their advertisers a windfall of advertisement. Profanity painted on anything -- walls, billboards, bus benches, pavement, shop windows -- is usually left untouched, though this is up to the blurrer's discretion. Win leaves all but the worst, and those she prints out before blurring. Some employees choose to go through the day's images and blur out faces first, and then words and numbers; some do both at once. Win tells Ana that infant's faces come pre-blurred, and that young children are often moving too erratically for the camera's exposure to catch in any violating detail, especially in the late afternoon hours, when the shutter dilates for lost light. The rights of children are a particular concern; their company wants to avoid lawsuit, implication, expense.

Not all of them started as drivers. A handful drove other things -- milk trucks, taxi cabs, school busses -- before switching to delivering images. But these are few. Most drivers are internal hires. Most of these end up in the van on the way down from a higher position. There isn't a euphemism in place for this, it just happens, un-memoed. Ana was in the van from the first day, though she's used to driving for money. This makes her unusual, but it's hard to say how much of this is the circumstances of her hiring, and how much is some kind of in-group favouritism on the part of the lifers, the internals. According to the social strata, those coming down from office jobs, and the few who were around before the project even started, resist the idea that they're working the same position as a subway operator.

Those who are behind the wheel of the van for eight hours a day have a good amount of time to think, especially on the more minimal sections. A highway shift offers the same kind of introspection as a long road trip alone, especially since, unlike the road trip, you're not distracted by thoughts of a final destination. One of the other drivers learnt French while the camera clicked out fields of soybean plants for hours along 91 North. Another, an ex-millwright, buys books on tape, leaving them in the vans for the other drivers when he's done with them. But she prefers the more involved driving. She's bored of straight lines. She angles for shifts in knotty downtown cores, where it takes real work to stay oriented and keep from wasting shots backtracking. Whenever possible she takes travel jobs to other cities that she does not know and, over the week, covers their blank streets and alleys until she, and the camera, have seen every boulevard and storefront.

The drivers are encouraged to leave the camera going for the drive back to the depots -- the documentation of the fringes and hinterlands in which the vans sleep is of special interest to their clients. Images of near-vacant industrial lots, rezoneable and ripe, are the grist of the real estate mill. This is the new frontier: doubling back. The cities are running out of unused space, and so the cities need to be reformatted. And reformatting is their business.

Ana used to work in the public sphere in a less conflicted sense. When she dropped out of school she wanted a job she could detach herself from, so, despite her comp-sci training, she took a position at BTA. Seeing her former classmates board the trains, briefcases in hand, heading to tech firms and start-ups and security agencies, didn't bother her. There was a certain satisfaction to the work. When she re-examines what she did, the overlap is obvious -- she supposes she is, has always been, a person in motion. But in her past life, this tendency was simplified to the point of meditation. Between stations the tunnel was a dark chute, the lights illuminating only a brief figure-eight of trackbed, and the rushing of the air around the front car's blunt nose was an even, mantric hum. The controls at hand were minimal, practically binary: forward lever, brake lever, emergency brake, door control. An oval capsule on a stalk gave the speed in red LED, and below it, a matching clock. The difficulty and skill were in the precise use of these few instruments, in staying on exact schedule, in knowing by feel the distance needed to slow the train to a stop without overshooting the platform, even by a few feet. It wasn't as hard for the BTA operators as it was in the cities with overlapping tracks, where an unnoticed error in selection would lead, minutes later, to the head-on collision at full speed of two trains full of passengers -- but it was not as simple a job as her mother insisted. It was just simple enough for her at that time. She wanted a break to think, a steady, undemanding job. But that was years ago, when she was comfortable in her mind. Now, she looks for distraction, tries to lose herself in the maze.

On days that she's successful, she's only ever half in her own head. The satellite view can be taxing, especially towards an end of a shift, in the seventh hour, when you've rotated your way through mazes since the morning. The older section of the handbook encourages you to think of yourself as a miniature van, seen from above, moving around the map, but she imagines herself as less than this -- as an icon, a cursor. In her mind, she is a triangular pointer. Edges blur by five o'clock, and, with the light dying, she heads back. She pulls in, camera still clicking away, and parks the van in its slot in the depot. Only now does the shutter stop. It's hard to shut the cursor off as she makes her way home on the slow, convoluted set of bus rides she's learned; after three years in the van, her brain is programmed to equate movement with mapping. Win says she can see it on her face on the days she gives her a ride home.

This week has Ana recovering old ground, starting with the highway that cuts through the southern end of town and divides it between residential and commercial, then, the commercial zone itself. A real audiobook job, but there aren't any in the van. She drove this section last year, but, with the rapid development of the area -- once reserved for the factories that now, in the absence of demand for their products, are unpeopled shells -- the images need updating. Post-industrial becoming pre-residential, and at the cutting edge of this transformation, her, camera clicking, driving in silence for eight hours a day in a barren grid of warehouses where condos and offices have begun to bloom.

It is now the fourth day of scanning. The boredom of identical lots, mechanical grey paint spray-gunned across concrete. Each factory, plant, shipping centre an anonymous squatting cube. The sound of the radio at these outer limits of the metropolis fuzzing between stations. Or is it all the cement, rebar, I-beams, sleeping asbestos, the dead matter that insulates these blocks from the signal? Not insulated enough: on her right is a set of lofts, inset into the face of a warehouse, floor-to-ceiling windows lighting up empty living rooms. Next door, an abandoned wholesale furniture depot, guarding itself with cyclone fence, waiting its turn. She takes its picture, or, the van does, the image cued and compiled for future use. The rest of the long industrial block is more cyclone fences, more empty warehouses, more plywood windows. She records it all. As she reaches the end of the block, the radio scratches into life: a commercial for an oscillating clothes dryer. The end of the street describes a T with narrow aerials that cut on each side between the last row of buildings and an adjacent lumberyard. Through a gap between structures tower colossal pyramids of wet sawdust. She turns a right that is actually a left, from the top-down view, and, with mute thirty-foot exterior walls rising on each side, the radio falls quiet.

When she emerges, nothing is different, and for a moment she loses the grid. Cells upon cells of identical warehouses, signs weathered smooth, vinyl lettering sun-peeled into strips. The factories in their dilapidation looking like old, battered houses, the new residential units in their brutal geometry and exposed structures looking like factories. Only the alternation between these two giving some sense of trajectory and time, but not direction. She knows that must be going straight, or, north, y, but the referents are gone. The camera clicks out a dozen images of the same, panoramic view: a shallow parking lot, its fence yellowed with rust -- shuttered brickworks -- sidewalk that ends abruptly in yellow turf -- the cracked asphalt of the road, its black tracery of patchwork -- the opposite sidewalk -- an empty security kiosk, its automated gate stuck open -- pallets stacked in a vacant parking space -- around the curve of the camera's orb -- now, the same road, from behind, light grey and tire-smoothed, the shining black filler like a kind of writing -- behind, in mid-distance, the towering mountains of sawdust, filling the frame -- the curb, fractured from the passage of heavy sixteen-wheelers -- a many-tiered sign, all its acetate inserts taken out and reinserted upside down -- the start of the brief sidewalk -- the narrow lot with its rusted fence -- the brickworks again, at the end of the loop, its manila siding streaked green from plant matter. The camera clicks one last time as she put the van back into drive.

This is the second-last interior row in a grid of two dozen. At every division of lots, she and the camera look to the side, crosswise, through the set of nested, identical intersections. With each added row, the mirror-within-a-mirror effect grows frame by frame to a narrowing point, the blocks' facing edges enclosing each other like parentheses wrapping around parentheses. The manual names this doubling positive redundancy, as the shift in perspective allows them a second, third, fourth chance at capturing information previously obscured by trees, pedestrians, street traffic. But there is little here to interfere: she is the only soul, the only vehicle, the only movement, in this grid, and every repeated shot of the same empty street corner reveals the same contentless information, unobscured but for the obscurity of its own repetition. She reaches the end of the row -- she thinks -- and cuts once again through a narrow lane. One more line of the grid, then, the periphery of the grid itself, then, back to the depot, home.

Her radio cuts out again, and this time she turns the knob to mute. She catches her face's reflection in the screen of the dash-mounted display, which, as always, she has left off. Her phone, its GPS safety net, is buttoned into her jacket pocket. Paper maps on the passenger seat, even these folded, though she'll allow herself them in an emergency. In three years she's learned, as all drivers do, that this job is as complicated as you let it be, but, unlike her coworkers, she has taken this in the opposite direction. She volunteers for the mess, breeds complication willingly. Yet no inner-city runs on the books this week, just this industrial drudge, a challenge in its own right. This work predates the technology that makes it brainless, even if she doesn't; there are entire sections of the manual on cartography, way-finding, chapters she's read over and over, relishing the intricacy of technique, the antiquated, pre-digital tactics of location. They have been scanning the city long before doing so became a hobby. Longer still before this information was freely broadcast under the auspices of public use.

The mountain of sawdust is gone, blocked from view by the monolithic lumber processing plant, the machinery of which these pyramids are the exhaust. Silent, though whether this is temporary or permanent disuse she cannot tell. Win calls Ana and her colleagues vultures, and she's not wrong -- here she is, circling these industrial skeletons. As she pulls past there is a deafening, metallic screech, and the saws start up again. Not yet, she thinks. And: If I'm a vulture, what is Win? What follows after carrion, finishes what's left? The backs of these megaplexes, their vulnerable array of loading docks and fire exits, are nothing like their bland, faceless fronts. A colossal dumpster, half off of its concrete pad, passes by, and out of the corner of her eye she sees something small and dark dart up the side and through a crack in the lid. A vision from a past life: rats, startled into motion by the electric hum of the rail and the clatter of steel on steel, disappearing into shadows.

She pushes it back like a physical thing, and focuses on the final row of units, mostly foreclosed warehouses, brick and cinderblock under white paint. Mentally she punches twelve-foot windows out of their blank facades, extrudes tennis-court sized balconies, adds exterior detailing, carves out new facades, doing the work of future architects in her head. And her prediction is correct: a lone green sign marks the whole section for rezoning and redevelopment. It's hard to keep the correct pace, when there's so little to see. She keeps wanting to accelerate, but to speed up above the determined limit means missing key wedges of image. The manual advises drivers to imagine that they are controlling a film projector, to think of the street outside of their windows as a long spool of celluloid that they need to play at the correct rate to maintain the realism of the picture. The verisimilitude, a beautiful world. She watches the needle, trying to keep it right at the notch that reads twenty, another thing that she is good at. It doesn't matter how she slows or stops the van -- any freeze-frames are removed in the first pass of editing -- but she does so with a single, gradual motion, smooth enough that a standing passenger with only one hand on the pole wouldn't even have to shift their weight. A skill she has made obsolete for herself.

Many other transit systems were phasing out manually-driven subway trains for automated ones, but the cost kept the tax-starved city hesitant and herself employed, for the time being. She returns to this often: what if they had made the switch? Would she then be spared this psychic reformatting, this need for constant distraction, variation? Would she still be a vulture? She slows the van to a rolling stop, grateful for the change, and turns around to head back, halfway down the row, to the exit. Another empty security kiosk, but this gate is automated; it rises for her and she passes through. She checks her watch: she is on schedule for the last item on the list, a roundabout sweep of the outside of the subdivision to explore possibilities of expansion. Standard practice, especially for these kinds of property -- once the process gets going, it's hard to stop, and within years entire sub-cities spring up in the vacuum of industrial deserts. And a desert this is: outside the exterior walls of the outermost buildings there is nothing, just sheets of asphalt cut into grids by temporary fencing. Hundreds of yards beyond the final fence, some vacant farmland offers even less resistance. All gone soon, she knows.

And all straight lines. Now that she is outside of it, the industrial zone seems even more sprawling and immense. She accelerates to the designated speed but seems to make no progress against the blank, anonymous walls or the empty lots opposite. It is as if here, in the open, is farther from culture, the human signal. Her mind, yielding, starts to disengage, and whatever few distinguishing details go soft. She nearly coasts right through the red light and, though the intersection is empty, she hits the brakes hard, and waits for the change before turning left to follow along the zone's eastern edge. The light turns green, she rounds the corner, and, suddenly, it is night. The factories' bulk, their heat-proof and cold-proof walls, block out the last of the sun's arc and throw her into blue-black shade. Automatic street lights click on, the halogen bulbs warming up against the early spring air in sporadic flashes. Their flicker against the van's windows, her eye on the speedometer, the late-shift weariness, transports her to precisely where she doesn't want to go, brings her in an irreversible sliding to the same, repeating scene. Nothing worked. One therapy session didn't work; a hundred boring conversations with friends and family didn't work. Changing jobs didn't work. The thing waited for her, waited for an opening, whether in dreams or in waking life, and she couldn't close off these weak points fast enough to keep it out. She feels it begin to start, like a machine winding up to spin out, so she pulls the van to the side of the road. She braces for the attack, as if this will help. She forgets to reach above her head and turn the camera off.

Mastering the braking system was an exercise in prosthesis, in the knowing of delay. Unmasterable. You're in the head of a long, many-thoraxed creature, whose joints are made of lag and imprecision. Now, on-board computers handle this. But were this train driverless, could it have gone otherwise? Would an automated subway car have known to stop, have tried to stop at all? But an automated train wouldn't experience the mental and visual fatigue that made this possible. What happened wasn't just a possibility, though, but an inevitability, wasn't it? She repeats this to herself: it was someone's decision other than your own, something outside of your control. Something executed faster than reaction time could comprehend, faster than any reflex, let alone one mediated by a hundred feet of trailing machine, could respond to. Or could you have, if you weren't so tired, if you weren't trying so hard not to think? No, even fatigue, even a kind of meditation, can't be at fault. And neither can you. Your eyes were on the track, were looking where they were supposed to be looking, at that point you didn't even need to glance down at the controls. You had already started to slow the train down, slowly, but maybe if it hadn't been so slowly, if you had already scrubbed off enough speed by that point -- But, again, that was what you were supposed to be doing, avoiding a jolting, harsh stop. Although that came. It was you, you were there. But a driverless train would have done no better, would have slowed down just the same, if not slower, and more than that would not have even tried to stop. It wouldn't have seen him come out from the far side of the column.

The feeling is like a kind of acceleration inside her, a keening and rising sheet of nausea. You did, she tells herself. You did see. The station was underlit and there was a crowd on the platform but you did see him, at the last moment, ten or fifteen feet away, as he came out from behind the column, out of the shadow. No one else noticed him, not so much running as striding, stepping out -- But you did see him, knew what you were seeing right away, or thought you did, but by then there was so little distance in front of the subway car. He had done this on purpose, picked a spot as close as possible to the station's opening and the train's top speed. And the old magnetic brakes. A newer train, not just fully automated but with double-locking brakes on every car, with electronic instead of just electric braking, would have stopped in time. But it would not have known to stop. And if it did, it would have scattered its passengers, all two hundred of them, down the aisle, some, especially the young, old, infirm, sustaining serious injury, if it would have stopped.

This logic is too abstracted, too hypothetical, to work. She tries it every time and it doesn't slow anything down. Nothing works. But she tries it again: If the brakes were new and you stopped in time it would have been just as bad. You felt it yourself. You hit the brakes as hard as you could, wrenching the lever back towards you so hard that the steel handle bent flat to the console. And it wasn't a sudden stop, not as sudden as it needed to be, but sudden enough that it sent you into the windshield of the conductor car just as he was crushed into it from the other side. You fell back into your seat, but he went underneath. You did see him. You did.

The silence of the van, punctuated by the clicking of the camera. The sound of her breathing, and of the body going under.