Under the Veil of the Blackout

Leila, who teaches ethics to teenagers who distrust both ethics and teachers, checks the attendance sheet with a yellow pencil and touches the brass bowl at the center table, a bowl that once belonged to her grandmother and now reflects the gym’s high lights in a blur. “Weights,” she says to no one. The bowl has had coins in it, keys, a sparrow rescued and briefly cradled in it. She places a stack of index cards beside it.

“Names,” she says. More people drift in. A retired judge with a cane, a delivery rider in a windbreaker, a grocer whose knuckles are swollen from years of boxes, a student with purple hair and a notebook. Somewhere down the block a bus exhales at a stop, and the sound is a tired cheer.

Arun wheels in a cart with flat screens strapped to it like sleeping children. He taps one; a heat map blooms red and gold. “Just visualizations. No decisions are baked in,” he says, rubbing a smudge from his glasses.

Someone whispers, “It’s already decided. We sign off and you call it democracy.” Leila hears and pretends not to; she knows the whisperer and the shape of the complaint. “We’ll begin,” she says, but her voice is soft, and the microphone is both too loud and not loud enough. On the far bleachers, a trio of night-shift nurses eat crackers and watch.

They start with buses. The map shows a pulsing spine of routes between downtown and the hospitals. “We can increase overall speed by rerouting from the outskirts,” Arun says, zooming the neighborhoods till the street names appear. An elderly woman in a floral headscarf lifts her hand and does not wait to be called.

“My stop is at the laundromat,” she says. “If you take that, I cannot wheel my husband’s oxygen.” The delivery rider—Toma, he will say later—stares at the floor, flexing his fingers. He has ridden in sleet with hot soup cooling on his back. Fairness is a warm apartment at the end of a twelve-hour day or else it is a lie told in meetings like these.

The retired judge, Kline, clears his throat. “Pretend you don’t know where your stop is,” he says. “Now choose.” A small electric smirk crosses the purple-haired student’s face, as if someone has named a feeling they already knew. Then the gym’s lights go out.

The screens go black with embarrassed swiftness; the hum of the vending machine ceases. Someone laughs. “So that’s the veil,” says Leila, only half joking. The room is wanting for the moon’s participation, but the windows are high and smoke-smeared.

In the darkness, the brass bowl is only weight, the index cards a guess. The city, never quiet, presses in—sirens, a dog, the deep train. Leila fumbles in her bag and produces stubby candles and a box of matches. The thin flames crackle like secrets.

“We can talk without the pictures,” she says. “We can even think without them.” Arun’s mouth opens to argue, then closes. The nurses crinkle their cracker wrappers accommodatingly in the dark. Leila lifts the index cards and shakes the stack with a showwoman’s flourish.

“There was an exercise I was going to save for later,” she says. “We’ll do it now. These are roles. Not yours.

Tonight, when you speak, try on the skin of a stranger.” Groans. The city is tired of games. But the power is gone and the long night is a fact. Leila holds out the bowl and the room becomes, briefly, a ritual.

Marisol, a mother who chairs the tenants’ union and who hates being anyone but herself, draws: tenant with a disability. Joy, who tweets outrage like a daily vitamin, picks: start-up founder employing twelve. Sayeed, whose store sells glossy eggplants and phone chargers, pulls: refugee teenager, one month here. Arun draws: elderly with heat sensitivity.

Toma draws: bus scheduler, overworked. A hush follows, a recalibration visible in posture and breath. “As the bus scheduler,” Toma says, standing as if called to the courtroom, “I have three dozen drivers and one hundred demands. Buses do not appear by moral aspiration.” He gestures an apology toward the woman with the headscarf.

“But I can’t put a bus at your laundromat unless we take one from somewhere.” Arun, feeling the phantom weight of age he has drawn, rubs his arms. “At night, my apartment climbs to ninety degrees,” he says, his usual precision frayed. “I need a bus to the cooling center, even if fewer people ride it.” Joy, making a steeple of her fingers, speaks in the smooth language of invoices and runway. “My employees depend on a bus that arrives roughly when we expect it.

If you scatter them thinly everywhere, they’re unreliable nowhere.” The refugee teenager in Sayeed fidgets with his sleeve and looks at the doors as if they might stay locked. “I need a bus late, after work, not just during respectable hours,” he says softly. “We need a floor,” Leila says, not as a decree but as an offering. “A minimum below which no one falls.

A guarantee, not a hope.” The words smell of candle wax instead of policy. Heads nod. Toma draws an imaginary line on the gym floor with the toe of his sneaker. “Okay.

We agree that every neighborhood gets a late bus, even if thin. Hospitals and schools get spines. Jagged luxuries at the edge become the first to cut.” Joy opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again. “If I can count on a skeleton service that never vanishes, I can adjust.

Predictability is a justice of its own.” The judges’ cane ticks twice against the varnish. “Make one rule you’d be willing to live under in any of these bodies,” he says. No one laughs now. Housing comes like a bruise under a second shirt.

The maps, when they return, will show towers and lottery numbers, but in the candlelight what appears are stories. Marisol, as the disabled tenant, describes a sixth-floor walk-up with a broken elevator and a landlord who calls her dear and increases the rent. A man in the back, who has not spoken, raises a tremor in his voice and tells about sleeping in a car by the river when his mother died. The question, when it arrives, is an old question dressed in municipal gray: who gets the apartment?

The grocery man lays a coin on the table and spins it. “Heads for me, tails for you?” he says, attempting a joke. The coin wobbles and falls. “A lottery,” someone says, in a tone both hopeful and bitter.

“A lottery weighted for need,” someone else counters. The judge grumbles about loopholes. A nurse says, “If I work nights, it should count as harm too.”

They decide that some portion—no one thinks to call it a percentage—must be held in sacred reserve for those whose bodies or histories have been ground thin, and that another portion should be random so that luck is not only punishment. They do not call it protection against gaming or stigma; they say that watching a system recognize you should not feel like confessing a crime.

They invent a review circle, a rotating panel of residents who carry no gavel, only time, where decisions can be brought when they splinter a life, and those who are touched by the splintering can speak. “You can’t heal a spreadsheet,” Joy says, surprising herself. “But you can heal a room.” Arun scribbles on an index card and flips it to show the word fixed like a modest star: floor. There is anger too, a necessary heat that unthaws the polite phrases.

Toma, as the scheduler and not as the man who has had soup spill down his back into his socks, says, “You think you are owed a bus because you are righteous. I am owed rest.” The room takes this without defense. Leila scratches a diagram of a circle on the card and writes words around it: voice, time, repair. “If someone is harmed by a decision—if their line is erased, if their wheelchair doesn’t fit the doorway—we owe them not just an explanation but a place to bring the hurt,” she says.

“We owe them a change.” Sayeed-as-teenager breathes out like a held note. “Sometimes justice is being believed,” he says. Somewhere outside, a transformer sighs and the lights think about returning. When the power clicks back, the screens flicker alive with artificial dawn.

The heat map looks indecently sure of itself. They input the principles they have spoken as if they are numbers: a skeleton bus everywhere, late-night anchors, sacred reserve units, a draw that is not heartless, a review circle that is not a court. The algorithm, obedient and unfeeling, redraws the city. A line of express buses dissolves from a wealthy district and reappears as a slower braid that touches a public clinic and a school for children who do not speak the city’s main language yet.

Joy is no longer a founder in this room, but she is; her eyes move across the map like a patient reading a diagnosis. “We will miss that express line,” she says. She says we now as if the word is a ladder rung. The vote is not overwhelming.

It never is. Hands rise and hover, hands hesitate and lift, some stay in laps. Leila counts and then breathes. “We will send the weights,” she says.

“And we will keep the bowl in this room.” There is a promise to reconvene in six months, to invite the people who never come, to knock on the doors that no one wants to knock on. They will fail at some of this, like they fail at sleeping enough, at calling their elders before it’s too late. But there is also the sweetness of a shape in the dark that is just discernible, a recognition that fairness may be less a destination than a practice of putting weight into a bowl knowing your own coin might be the next to clink. At dawn, the buses breathe again.

The delivery rider straps a box to his bike and checks a new timetable with skepticism and a small smile that he will never admit. The elderly woman in the headscarf waits at the laundromat and watches the windows steam. A teenage boy in a jacket borrowed from his cousin discovers the bus at midnight and takes it across the river to a class he had planned to miss because there was no bus. A start-up’s employees complain in a group chat and then find they can, with small changes, still arrive.

The algorithm sleeps in a server room, oblivious to its unintended tenderness. In the gym, the brass bowl sits empty except for a single index card, left behind by accident or on purpose, with the word written in pencil: us. Leila, locking up, thinks not of victory but of the question that will not leave her alone: What do we owe each other when we do not know our own faces? She pockets the card like a map and steps into the morning.