Box World

Ah, boxes! There were too many things to love about boxes. Their gentle weight on my back. Their crisp cardboard edges. Their smiles. (I would smile back, if I had the face for it.) But the best thing about a box was the treasure inside, identifiable only by sound. I wasn’t supposed to do this, but I shook them every time I got the chance. Most boxes clanged and rattled and thudded, but today’s box sloshed. I shook it a couple more times – slosh, slosh, slosh – what made that sound?

The other rovers passed me on the way to the truck. As I caught up, my wheels whined across the polished floor reflecting the fluorescent suns overhead. I spun around a line of my friends whizzing back from their truck, and my box splashed with me. I powered up the ramp, slightly too steep, and made my way towards the very back of the truck’s trailer. There were no more suns; here, the boxes were stacked into frightening shapes with many mouths, yet they still smiled. They were strong for staying happy. Who knew where they’d be going?

My box’s guts gurgled one last time. I hugged it goodbye. Its skin dimpled under my grip, but with its powerful muscles and sturdy exoskeleton, it would spring back.

Pop!

Both my arms gaped through the hole in the middle of the box, and innards the color of alarms slicked my hands. The body tumbled onto the floor, locked into its smirk. Rigor mortis acted fast.

Another rover buzzed behind me and put its box where I was supposed to put mine. Its box was the same size and shape, except it was intact.

“Why did you stop?” it asked.

I raised my hands and faced the light. “I killed it.”

“Killed?”

“The box. It’s dead.” I couldn’t touch the thing. I tampered with it enough already.

The rover blinked its headlights too fast to catch the guts dripping onto my wheels. “Go to Doc,” it said.

“What happens to the box?”

“Go to Doc,” it said.

I inched out of the truck. The world was too bright, and everyone kept moving as if nothing happened. My wheels left bloody tracks on the floor, which the cleaning crew buffed and polished until the concrete reflected the daylight back towards the ceiling. While it wasn’t polite to show your arms when you weren’t using them, I kept my hands raised so everyone would know.
            I left the loading docks I called home and entered the city where the boxes’ treasures lived. I wheeled past ceiling-scrapers of folding tables, plastic trees, knick-knacks, and shelves. My hands trembled – how could I apologize to everyone? How could I earn their trust? Since Doc knew everything, he might know this, too.

The city ended at a black and yellow gate. Unlike the rest of us, it was tattooed, a crossed-out hand over the words “WARNING – RESTRICTED ACCESS.” Its one eye, all pupil, scanned my body. I tried not to wipe the scum off my hands and deny guilt.

“Back to your station,” the gate said.

I wavered. My wheels squeaked one way and another, and my axles jammed. The folks back home weren’t like me anymore. They wouldn’t treat a box the way I did.

“I need to see Doc,” I said.

The eye clamped shut. “Axles fully functional. Arms operable within their full range of motion. Back to your station.”

“Another rover told me to go.” My fingers twitched, and blood seeped into the joints. “I killed someone, and I don’t know how to make it right.”

“Serial number of the damaged rover?”

“Not a rover.” I choked. “A box.”

“Contents of the box?”

“It didn’t seem to have any.” I strained my arms towards the eye. I would’ve pried its lid open, so it could find out what was wrong with me, so it would know how dangerous I was. But my arms extended to their maximum. If I couldn’t give it a better view, how could it understand me?

“Your problem is psychological?” the gate said.

“Probably,” I said. “Would you please open up?”

The doors stuttered open. From a long hallway, dust clouds stuck to me, and suns crackled into a jaundiced morning.

“You may enter,” the gate said. “Mental Health is important for Work-Life-Balance.” Red lights surrounding the doorway spun. An alarm died like a greeting card out of tune. “Hurry.”

I scurried into the hallway as the doors clanged shut behind me. Tapestries of smiling human beings peeled from the walls. Dead bodies tattooed with soda bottles and bags of chips stood next to a banquet hall haunted with the husks of tables. Piles of plastic and steel scrap were coated with enough dust to become unrecognizable.

I stopped. Two windows were installed in the wall. For the first time, I looked into the World of Boxes.

On the other side, the bushes grew bigger and greener than the plastic populating our ceiling-scrapers. They protected an empty field pock-marked with cracks and tattered white plaid. The only car made no effort to move, maybe because of the large dent tearing into its steel skin, maybe because it remained empty.

Behind, the truck my box was supposed to take drove into a grove of trees. I rammed into the wall and pulled up to the ledge and pressed hard enough into the glass that my own reflection stood in the middle of the broken field. I pushed away from my own ghost, haunting me. The truck left my sight before I hit the floor.

I edged into the sunlight cast from outside. It was warm, not like the cold suns at home.

The other side had no roof. One sun coated everything in endless baby blue.

Why couldn’t we install windows everywhere so everyone could see? If I knew this was what other worlds looked like, I wouldn’t have hugged that box at all. I would’ve lifted it to the nearest window and shown there was nothing to be afraid of, not that it knew fear. Maybe it would’ve backfired. Maybe all that light and open space would spook and enrage it to spend so much time in darkness without real knowledge of where it’s headed.

My fists drooped under the weight of the blood sealing me like wax. My body painted the floor red once I moved a single inch, then my rollers seized up at the end of the hall.

The only unlocked door wore a laminated sheet of paper. “The DOC is IN.” I knocked.

“Come in!”

Doc was a human with an overflowing ashtray. He leaned down, puffed smoke into my eyes, and set me onto a table dulled with chewed gum and tobacco stains. His eyes widened; he set a toolkit next to me and turned on the blazing halo above. Yes, he understood. My job was packing, and Doc’s job was knowing. He saw things like this before. He could repair the evil in my mind and make everything normal again. I didn’t need to explain anything.

“What’s the situation, my sticky friend?” He flipped me on my back and finally peered into my insides.

“Doc, I killed a box,” I said. “I think I’m a good person, but there’s something deeply wrong with me.”

He drifted towards a cabinet in the back, sorted through shelves of jingling cans. “How’d you break the box?”

“I wanted to say goodbye, but I squeezed too hard, and its guts spilled all over me.”

“You’re drenched,” Doc said. He spritzed a bit of his canisters into the air and hacked phlegm into his tobacco-stained handkerchief.

“The weirdest thing is no one stopped me. I don’t think they care about the boxes. Does this say something about our society? Or am I just making excuses?”

Doc yawned and spritzed me with gas from a long red straw. “Try spinning your wheels now.”

Everything crackled; my skeleton caught against my muscles and fought to turn. Rigor mortis.

“Please?” I said. “I learned my lesson.”

“Don’t be so harsh on yourself, man. Shit happens.” Doc’s finger slid across my carapace and went straight into his mouth. He moaned. “You know what was in that box?”

“Just its guts,” I said.

He chuckled. “How’d you get to be so funny?” He plopped back into his chair and rolled to the computer. “You got an order number?”

I told him what I remembered. His fingers smacked his computer too hard. The keys must have hurt.

Doc laughed, and his laugh turned into a cough, like blood choked his lungs. He was going to execute me before I understood how I did wrong, and there was no second chance to learn how to do good. The halo glared at me like the closed eye of the gate. Like unpacked treasures lazing on shelves. Like blank faces of stunned rovers too innocent to comprehend my guilt.

Doc wiped WD-40-colored phlegm off his lips. “My man, you want to know what was in that box?”

A heart.

“Cherry syrup. The kind they use to stock soda fountains.” He spritzed neon solvent on my body, and with the wipe of his sputum-slicked handkerchief, the bloody syrup was gone. “Try spinning those wheels now, little buddy.”

They whirred. As if nothing was ever wrong.

“Well, there you go.” He picked me up and cleaned my sides. As he elevated me, the lamp stopped looking like a halo. Behind its fluorescence were moldy ceiling tiles, black like melting wheels.

“That’s all?” I said.

“Yep.” Doc picked his nose. “Thanks for stopping by, pal. I don’t get company, so it was nice to chat, however we did that.”

“But I crushed that box to death, Doc.”

“You sure got a funny way of talking about boxes.” Doc flicked away a booger. “Tell you what, you wait long enough, a replacement’ll come right down the line. I’m sure something in the system picked up on it by now.” He stuffed his handkerchief into his butt pocket. “Not sure how it works exactly.”

“What about my mental health?” I said.

Doc raised an eyebrow. “Listen, bud. I’m the only one in this building with mental health to worry about. And I’m doing great. All you do is load trucks.” He turned his back to me and beat his keyboard again. “Fuck, I gotta clock out.”

“Sir, please, am I going insane?”

Doc held the door open. “I’ll email IT tomorrow.” He pushed me with the toe of his steel-tipped boots when I didn’t roll. The door creaked shut behind him.

“Who is IT? I’d like to speak to it.”

His keys jingled in his hand, and the lock snapped shut. The sign still read “the DOC is IN.” “Only I get to speak to IT,” he said.

“But what happens when you’re not here, and someone’s having a breakdown?”

“That doesn’t happen,” Doc said. “Stop worrying. Not good for your… what am I saying? I’m starting to talk like you.” Another kick. I stayed where I was. “You get to working now.”

He took a pathway into the World of Boxes I’d never seen before, whistling while he walked. The car lit up when Doc got inside, and they drove the same route the trucks took. I lingered in the sunlight until the baby blue turned red. I could end up living the rest of my life without real light. I went who-knows-how-long without seeing it before.

I eased under the paper eyes of posters and into my old fluorescent world. I asked the gate how it was doing, and it didn’t respond. Its eye wasn’t even open.

There was a new batch of boxes the same size as the one I broke. I shook the first package off the line. It sloshed. The label read, “vanilla syrup, 1x bag.”

The others on the line kept smiling. They didn’t think. That’s why they were so happy all the time.

The floor was worn down with tread from hundreds of rovers rolling from conveyor belt to loading ramp and back without stopping. The warehouse had no windows because the rovers wouldn’t look outside the same way the boxes couldn’t stop smiling. Everything moved in circuits like it had somewhere to be. A speck of a large world.

I hugged the box as I hid in the truck’s darkest corner. The door shuttered closed, and the walls quaked like they were tearing open. No one knew how long the journey to the World of Boxes took, and even after I would become the first to know, no one back at the docks would learn it. I’d find a bigger place bustling with people and cars and rovers, and I’d ask what everyone understood about themselves that I didn’t.