ldeadfil
DEAD FILE
by
Lauri Gardner

In a grey building far from Moscow, a clerk receives a phone call. After some grunting on the phone, he hangs up. He checks on his computer for a particular file. After several minutes of searching and sighing, he cannot find it.

He extracts from the desk drawer a cheap pack of Moskovskaja cigarettes. He then walks out of his small dimly lit office into a larger office space. Most of the rows of open desks are empty, some stragglers-on are still here. People who have been doing this for twenty years and they come to work not because there is anything for them to do or because they get paid - but due to a ingrained deep-seated habit. They look up briefly, a glint of manic eagerness flashes across their wrinkled features. With a shake of the man's head they return back to what they were doing.

The man walks on to the elevator, taking out a cigarette. Ignoring the large no smoking sign, he lights the cigarette, letting the acrid stench fill the elevator he presses a button.

The elevator seems to be suspended in time, but finally lurches to life going down for what seems like an eternity. The man finishes his cigarette and drops it on the floor and steps on it, letting it lie with dozens of other forgotten cigarette butts.

He walks out of the door to a small entryway, which had years ago a guard guarding the large steel door. The guard had died in Gorbatschov's time and had not been replaced since. The metal door was open, with a smell of old books wafting from inside like some long dead bureaucratic monster's lair.

The man continued through the open door that was several meters thick. Behind that he had another door of equally massive construction, which was kept open with a stack of files. When this system was put in thirty years ago, you needed two different keys to get in, and both doors could not be opened without an earsplitting klaxon going off and a certain phone would ring at headquarters, which would cause a brigade of paratroopers dropped on the complex. Now the key to the front door is lying in the bottom of a drawer, inherited from the previous occupant of the office. The second door's lock had jammed with the key in it and from the years of being kept open, it has developed a slight list. The klaxons were removed long time ago and the phone lines have not been working right as long as anyone can remember. Almost every New Year some heavily drunk general phones asking about a personnel file on a girl called 'Josephine'.
Inside it is a huge cold room, with shelves up to the ceiling packed with small boxes. The lanes are so small that you can barely squeeze past. Cramped corridors seem to go on forever in neat rows.

He walks down one aisle, looking around a bit nervously. As if waiting for one of the shelves to suddenly collapse or for a suicidal box leap from a high shelf. His breath curls from the cold and seems intrusive in this oppressively silent crypt.

He continues on, turning left here, turning right there. As he continues the boxes get older, the colour turning from a grey to yellowed grey to liver spotted grey. Dust hangs heavier on the boxes. Lightbulbs have gone out, leaving whole rows in darkness and casting a pall on the shelves. He avoids a few boxes which have toppled over, with their guts spilled out across the uncaring floor. Soldiers lost to an unknown battle.

Finally he stops on some unknown signal. He looks up. Keeping his eyes fixed on that spot he goes to the end of the row and brings back a ladder The squeaking of the wheels sound unnatural over the normal sound of his own breath. He climbs up the ladder and adjusts his glasses.

He pulls out a box called 'Listening Post 5'. Inside is a tied manila file that holds the hundreds of pages of material. He takes out a pen from his jacket pocket and with nicotine yellowed fingers writes 'Deceased' on the top.