My Petition For More Space

by John Hersey

  I know what the answer will be: That like any other citizen I should be aware that space allotments vary inversely with the quality of the accommodations—and anyway I haven’t answered the question that had been implied: Why should a unique exception be made in my favor?

  But this is not, as it turns out, the window’s next response. Instead the voice says, ‘Your labor duty was extended six months, it says here, because of quarrelsomeness. Are you having quarrels with holders of adjacent spaces?’

  ‘I was assaulted that time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dumped some concrete on a man’s foot. It was an accident.’

  I have often wondered whether it was. The controls for guiding the chute to the forms were accurate and firm, and that one spill was the only one I ever let fall. Did I, in the back of my head, at the moment I tugged at the release of that load, know that I wanted to find some roundabout way to try my friend’s girlfriend?

  I pull myself away from these rapid thoughts. I am on the defensive. I am encountering precisely the mechanism Maisie warned me against in the waitline, when she told me that the bureau, by its abrupt shifts and by the most subtle indirection, had, each time she had gone to the windows, undermined her belief in the moral base of her petitions.

  Above the buzz and the clicking of the turnstiles and the echo effect of the bureau voice/voices, I hear a guffaw—the grandmothers hearty bellow. What a good time the old Tartar is having! She doesn’t care. I pull her laughter around me, wanting to be enveloped by her indifference.

  I need some not-caring as a shield for my caring.

  * * *

  —

  MY WINDOW asks, ‘Why are you in a single space?’

  In chess, my father did manage to teach me, when your opponent moves his knight you must look beyond the threat which that move in itself suggests and work out what future danger there may be, as a consequence of the move, from the bishop far across the board, the castled rook, the innocent-looking pawn screening the queen.

  I could reply: Because my wife and I are separated. But I imagine something is coming about my responsibility to my daughter. I decide not to commit myself, to keep my future moves flexible, and I say, ‘Because I am classified in the registry at Orange Street as a single person.’

  ‘It says here that fourteen years ago there were no less than sixteen faultily prepared application forms for permission to have a child.’

  ‘The seventeenth form was deemed correctly filled out.’

  ‘Ah,’ the voice says. ‘In November and December of last year and January of this year’—now the voice pauses, allowing me to wonder what is coming next. It has dropped the line about my daughter before really taking it up; the work of planting doubt on that score has been done. That castled rook can wait, lurk.

  ‘—yes, and January of this year, your monthly reports were late, and printout warnings were issued by the computer.’

  I am suddenly furious. I fight my anger bravely, as my father fought his paralysis agitans, but his hands shook with the effort, and so does my voice now. ‘I don’t call this a fair hearing on my petition. You’re just trying to impeach my character.’

  ‘Very good,’ the voice says—and means it. ‘You were telling us why Samuel David Poynter, alone of all the people in Marinson Entry Four sleeping-hall, should have his space enlarged. By the way, how much enlargement did you have in mind?’

  The voice this time has allowed itself some expression. The last question had unmistakable inflections of irony—of a very heavy sort, bespeaking the dull metal embedded in that word.

  This tone puts me on more solid ground, and I say with composure, ‘I request a space eight feet by twelve.’

  ‘Single allotments in the Marinson are——?’

  ‘Seven by eleven.’

  ‘Our question was: How much enlargement did you——’

  ‘I am requesting nineteen additional square feet.’

  ‘A space one foot wider and one foot longer would satisfy your needs?’

  ‘No. Eight by twelve is the maximum allowable by law for singles.’

  ‘But you think a space one foot wider and one foot longer would change the quality of your life?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you that your being granted this petition would mean that another single person would lose more than one-fifth of his or her allotment?’

  ‘There are other ways…’ I have worked out several plans for stealing space from neutral areas, but the petition-window is apparently not interested.

  It says, ‘How would this change your life?’

  This is a tease. Holding out possibility like a dog bone for me to gnaw on—asking me to speak of the effect on me of a (possible?) granting of my petition. Should I sit up and beg?…No! I must get the initiative back. Right now the voice is making all the pressing moves. I am special. My petition is special. I must not let myself be drawn into humdrum traps. I must not go the humble route of Maisie, Liverspots, the teacher, the lottery man walking out with a hanging head.

  I often have a dream of getting lost. We are near the labor camp. The day’s work is done. Some kind of social event has been planned, and I have an important role to play—I am to give a lecture in Italian. I have not prepared it. In fact I do not know Italian, except in gestures. I am in a great hurry to get back in time to prepare myself. There will be a sensuous reward if I do well, a terrible, bleak feeling of loss if I do not. I run through a landscape of buildings under construction—sometimes I am in trenches dug for foundations, I climb over wooden forms for concrete, I run along behind a moving crane on caterpillar-tracks, and here is a great field of rubble of knocked-down buildings. The former gymnasium is somewhere ahead, beyond a hill of half-walls and chimney stumps. There is not a single human being anywhere, not even in the cab of the moving crane. The footing is loose. My legs ache. It is almost time for the lecture. I have forgotten where it is to be held. I can hardly lift one thigh after the other. But I run! I run!…

  ‘If only I had more space,’ I hear myself saying, ‘I would have more time.’

  ‘How’s that again?’

  ‘My reports were late in the three months you mentioned—and they’ve been late in other months, too—because I wanted them to catch somebody’s eye. At first I tried to accomplish that by giving them a certain elegance—elegance, I mean, of proof, of the sort mathematicians speak of. I think I partly succeeded. But nothing. No attention. As far as I know, nobody read them. Then I got the idea of turning them in late. If I did this several months in a row, perhaps somebody besides the computer would wonder…would read…’

  ‘This was not good for your department.’

  ‘How many petitions do you handle a day?’

  ‘At one window, or altogether at the bureau?’

  ‘At your window.’

  I say this as if there is in fact behind this window a slight-bodied man with a domed forehead, wire-rimmed spectacles…

  ‘Fifty. More or less.’

  ‘Six days a week?’

  ‘What has this to do with Marinson Entry Four?’

  ‘Everything. Multiply this by sixteen windows. Eight hundred petitions a day. Nearly five thousand a week. No wonder the bureau hates petitioners.’

  ‘The bureau has no feeling about petitioners one way or another.’ The voice, I must say, bears out this assertion.

  ‘Exactly. You couldn’t care less…. Look, there must be three or four thousand people out there in the waitline. It goes around the corner and God knows how far down Elm Street. This is the sixth morning in a row I’ve waited to get to this window.’

  ‘And what has this to do with——’

  Now I feel that I do have the initiative, and I switch the fine. ‘My wife couldn’t have sexual pleasure with people watching.’

  There i
s a pause. Then: ‘Could you imagine it possible that something about you may have been the reason she——’

  ‘I could, and if something about me was the reason for her trouble, I’d put my bottom dollar on it that my relationship to space was that something.’

  ‘Nineteen more square feet equals sexual fulfillment?’

  If only I could see the slight-bodied figure behind the glass!…My naked wife went limp and wept at the unreal—yet also real—thought of the many eyes…I wanted eyes—many or few, or even two—to see the marks I made on paper…. This oily glass in the amber light blocks the primary sense—the sense which, more than all the others, defines space, gives lips and breasts and thighs reality and literature its power. And guides human judgment—for eyes look into eyes to find the elusive truth that spoken words so often blur. The window’s glass renders that kind of truth-seeking impossible here. This is what makes authority so infuriating: It always hides its eyes.

  * * *

  —

  ISAY, ‘No, you’re on the wrong track. Space and time for sex are only part of what I mean. How long do you think citizens are going to accept the Acceptance slogans?’

  ‘Are you suggesting——’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I am arguing a petition.’

  I have heard a tiny hint of fear and rage in the epicene counsellors voice behind the window. Yes, my petition is a frightening one. It frightens even me. The fantasy of being so deep in an ancient forest that if I shouted with all my might I would not be heard by a single human ear fills me with a delicious terror. But the potential for panic in the voice behind the glass is not in dreamed-of woods; it is out there on Church Street.

  ‘Did you hear the shouting in the waitline about half an hour ago?’

  ‘We could hear the noise—but not the words.’

  ‘A man next to me called out to the people in the line to tell them what my petition was going to be. He roused them up pretty well.’

  ‘Do you know the penalties for incitement?’

  ‘I was not inciting. I was being incited against.’

  My heart is beating fast. I am trying as hard as I can, like a tiring boxer, to keep out of range of the blows that come at me through this vague amber light, to dodge, to counterpunch the moment I sense a lowered guard, but all the while, on another level, I can hear the crowd shouting, ‘Out!…Out!…Out!…’

  My outrage, my protest—not at all popular. In the shadows of my mind, the janitor pumps his arms, and there is a look of malicious joy on his weak-chinned face. Or are those the arms of the woodcarver of the garlands over my head? He holds the chisel, he swings the mallet, and he knows the grain of the wood, he knows of the years of sunshine that went into the wood, the years of leaves going sere and drifting down to rot on the ground, unnoticed.

  ‘You told others that you were planning to enter a petition for more space?’

  I am feeling irritable. Who cares about the woodcarver’s patience? Not I! Who will ever care what I put in my reports?—or what my petition one day was?—or how deeply I could or could not breathe? My voice, when I speak, crackles with strong feeling. ‘Everybody tells everybody. There’s time to talk out there in the waitline, did you know that?’

  ‘Well, then’—the mechanical voice from behind the window pings again with the sound of assurance, doubtless because I have let myself slip into anger—’you were inciting.’

  ‘Just to talk about——’

  I break off. I feel that it is time to take one of those deep Yoga breaths.

  Inhaling, I am aware that the grandmother is leaving in a whirlwind of jaunty exclamations to people waiting at the turnstiles and slightly mocking farewells to the backs of others pleading at the windows. If her petition has been turned down, as she assumed it would be, with her lore that all are, she is still able to be proud that Robert has been selected from all the thousands of city pupils to learn to read. It has been a super morning in her life. Many new friends; fainted woman hand-passed right over her head; darling man behind her stabbed by the icepick fear of line-sickness; the teacher, too—so close by; and then the lullaby. She moves behind me from my left to my right, indiscriminately wishing people luck. Lack of discrimination is just as much a form of hatred as lack of feeling; I guess I must face it that this jolly grandmother hates everybody. Her cheerful passage, at any rate, confirms my deep pessimism, for she is the one who kept telling us that petitions are never granted.

  ‘Do you know,’ my window is asking me, ‘the penalties for incitement?’

  ‘Do you know what your bureau is famous for?’

  Again a pause. I can imagine a gleam of anxious curiosity in the eyes (if there really are eyes) behind the wire-rimmed glasses behind the nacreous glass—but the bureau person surely does not want to admit wanting to know the answer to my question.

  I offer it: ‘Denial.’

  This time the voice comes smartly back. Your time is nearly up. Say what you want to say.’

  * * *

  —

  I HAVE STOPPED wearing a watch. It began to sicken me to think of the proportion of the remainder of my life that would be spent waiting. I am driven, anyway, to be punctual. My heartbeat tells me all too clearly when I am late, and I also have reason to know that the computer keeps track of my tardiness.

  The voice has told me, as my heart also has, that it is time to say whatever it is I want to say.

  I suddenly think, as I am trying to remember what it is I want to say: If my time is nearly up, Maisie’s must already have expired. I look to the right. A stranger, a fat man with a sallow, shrewd face, has taken Liverspots’ place; and at the next window the sighing black woman who was to the right of the painter in the line is now speaking with bulging eyes and a moist upper lip; and at the window beyond hers, the janitor’s nose no longer rides his emphases. So Maisie has left the windows. I look farther along the line; she agreed to wait for me off to the right. I cannot see her.

  ‘What I want to say——’

  ‘You have exactly one minute.’

  One minute! But that is ridiculous. ‘I haven’t even begun to tell you——’

  ‘Better begin.’

  Beginning when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and up until the very eve of my departure for labor duty, part of me simply couldn’t stand to be anywhere near my parents. Their most gentle inquiries I rewarded with snarls. Whenever friends of mine came to see me, and my parents were in the room, I walked around with awkward heavy steps, as if a diver’s suit of embarrassment were tightly stretched over my skin. What seemed to be on my mind, if I can recall it from this distance, was that they had started me off in the world all wrong; they were different from other parents, they had no understanding of the world my friends and I lived in, and they were trying their best to make me be like themselves—different from everyone else and, above all, different from my contemporaries. In other words, they wanted me to be special. One night as I was going to bed, I broke into tears and began to pour all this out to them. They were shocked and responded lovingly, at first gently belittling my complaints, then blaming themselves and praising me, and I, sensing their heartfelt consternation, seeing what a splendid impression I was making on them, could not resist going beyond the sincere feelings I’d been venting up till then, and I began acting to the hilt the role of a son ill-prepared for the world I luridly described, which they would never comprehend. Their agony fanned out like a glorious peacock’s tail. I almost laughed through my tears…. My summons to labor duty, which was to tear me once and for all from their arms, partly opened my eyes again to their love; but it must have been two years later, one evening in our labor battalion dormitory, that crowded gym, when my friend, the one on whose foot I was eventually to drop the load of cement, and whose girl in due course I took away, told me, as we reminisced about younger years, of a scene in which, at about the same age, he ha
d dealt with his parents exactly as I had with mine—the same grievance, the same tears, the same heightened drama, the same pleasure beneath the same pain; and I suddenly saw, much too late to make decent amends to my sad mother and my sick old father, that it was quite possible that I was not as special as I had thought….

  A flicker of this memory cuts into what I have wanted to say, and what I do say is not what I have wanted to say at all, but is a hopelessly flat confirmation of my misgivings back then. What I say is, ‘I’ve figured out a way of taking space away from neutral areas in the sleeping-hall, so no one else loses anything.’

  This sentence is only halfway out when I hear its slightly whining, apologetic tone. I must not end on this note. The voice behind the window is silent; the bureau person apparently means to give me my full minute without interruption. Every time my heart beats, almost a second is forever lost.

  It hits me very hard that a few minutes ago, after I said, ‘If only I had more space, I would have more time,’ and the voice asked me what I meant by that, I did not explain, but instead went on to talk about my idea that if my reports were late, then someone might read them.

  So now I am finally responsive. ‘When I said, “If only I had more space, I would have more time,” this is what I meant: I spend so much physical and psychic energy pushing against people and limits that I am always too tired to do quickly the things I want and need to do.’

  ‘True for everyone,’ the voice replies with an alacrity that seems to say, I am not too tired to be quick, despite the fact that what you have noticed is also true even for a bureau person.

  I suppose it is simply not enough to be the son of a kind mother and a brave father; at this moment I am not feeling at all special. The word from behind the window, everyone, has shaken me…. Three heartbeats. Is this minute going to last forever? It seems tensely stretched out like the rubber bands of a slingshot. If time is indeed space, this minute is as long as the Green, as deep as the ancient forest which the whispering leaves on the trees on the Green seem to remember. And I am lost in that forest. I shout, but no human ear hears me.