The Teacher

The Teacher: Part III The Soul Stitchers, Chapter 44

Chapter 44

IT WAS UP THE BACK STEPS WITH ALL of us to the second-floor bathroom. They'd done this many times before with so many others, but the routine was still ghastly and dehumanizing. First, our dirty clothes were shredded from our scrawny bodies and thrown right into a trash barrel. Next, our hair was shorn military style to an easy-to-keep-clean buzz cut with electric clippers and a few quick front-to-back strokes.

There were shower stalls in this large industrial washroom. It was the dead of winter, but Egoor was too cheap to keep a hot water heater lit. The boiler he kept set on low, and so there also wasn't much heat for the factory. The old iron radiators, when working would begin belching and huffing as the steam strangled its way through the pipes moving about the building. We were pushed into an ice-cold shower stream and told to wash each other with a common bar of strong lye soap designed to kill anything crawling on our skin.

That done, we dried off with those rolls of rough brown paper towels used more typically for washing your hands. Before we could get completely dry we were hustled to an adjacent hall.

Inside each locker was a sort of uniform that all the workers wore; a cap to keep hair out of our workspace, white deck shoes, and a baggy one-size-fits-all pair of white coveralls, like painters bibs—not warm enough in winter, sweltering in summer. Another cost-savings measure, underwear was not included—no bra, socks, or panties.

There were two uniform sets in each locker—one to wear, one being washed, and they were only changed once a week considering we worked and slept in them day and night.

Instead of a name, we were each assigned a six-digit number which matched our lockers. The girls weren't provided with medical attention. It was not uncommon for one of them to get sick and pass out or even die, in which case the body was removed in the middle of the night and disposed of.

There was no longer any effective law enforcement in New York City. Bribes ruled the day. If you had the money you could get anything you wanted, or, have anything you wanted done including getting rid of a corpse without any questions asked. Society had quickly stratified into a castes where the less fortunate were trapped into a life of hopeless low-wage servitude to the rich.

In this post-Kingdom-Age period people were disconnected from their conscience. That spark of the divine that kept the conscience alert and morally active was removed from peoples' souls. The result—souls like Egoor became capable of acts and attitudes that would have been unthinkable only a few decades earlier.

Because of the stories told by Egoor's relatives sitting around the Seder meal table down through the generations, about the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust, even Egoor couldn't watch during the final phase of processing a new worker.

"You know what to do now. I'm going to get home. I'll see you in the morning. These five are a good start, but we're going to need more—probably twenty at least over the next few months," Egoor ordered, his cold soul no longer capable of any remorse or empathy for the suffering of anyone other than himself.

His henchmen, no better than Egoor, blindly followed his orders. After simply nodding their compliance they each grabbed one or two of us by the arm and forcefully ushered us into onto the shop floor, to an area in the northeast corner where five new workstations had been prepared.

We stopped at a table where a crude inking device was waiting. Names were not used, nor were any records kept. The number we were assigned, however, was painfully tattooed onto the top of our left forearm. The individual numbers were outlined by pins and once pushed into the skin, ink was spread over the wounds. The other girls were still groggy from the Rohypnol they were given, but I felt the full sting of the needles sinking into my skin and it hurt.