The Endless Queue

K arrived at the "Comprehensive Affairs Processing Center" on a grey morning. No one knew exactly what "comprehensive affairs" this center processed, only that if you wanted to legally continue breathing, walking, existing in this city, you had to obtain a specific permit from here. No one remembered the permit's specific name; people vaguely referred to it as "that thing" or "the permit."

The Center was a massive, ugly concrete building, like a crouching grey beast, swallowing and spitting out anxious crowds. K took a deep breath; the air was thick with dust, sweat, and an indescribable musty odor, like old paper. He entered the main door and was immediately seized by the sight before him—a queue so long it disappeared from view, like a giant, docile, grey python composed of countless human figures, coiling through the hall and vanishing around a distant corner.

The queue moved extremely slowly, almost imperceptibly. People stood silently, their expressions numb, eyes staring emptily at some vague point ahead. Occasionally, someone would speak in hushed tones, but the sound was quickly swallowed by the hall's empty echo and the muffled announcements from afar. The announcements seemed to be reading out numbers and instructions, but the sound was distorted; K couldn't make out a single word.

He had no choice but to go to the end of the queue. Ahead of him was a middle-aged man in a worn coat; behind him, a haggard woman holding a child. No one looked at him, as if his joining was a preordained, unremarkable part of the cosmic order.

Time passed in a strange way. Sometimes, minutes stretched like hours; other times, hours slipped away unnoticed. K tried to calculate the queue's speed, but soon gave up. The unit of movement wasn't meters, but "people." Occasionally, the queue would shuffle forward a tiny step, sparking a brief rustle of faint hope, before settling back into dead silence.

The walls were a monotonous greyish-white, devoid of decoration, save for some faded notices pasted on them. The writing on them was illegible from age and countless touches. K tried to read them, but the words seemed to form meaningless sentences discussing philosophical paradoxes about form-filling, types of seals, and waiting times. In the corner of one notice, someone had scrawled in pencil: "Time is circular; we are all standing still." K shuddered.

Days turned into days. The food K had brought ran out. He began, like the others, to subsist on "nutrient blocks" occasionally handed out from some mysterious window, tasting like damp cardboard. At night, people curled up and slept where they stood; the queue itself was their bed and shelter. By day, they resumed their silent standing, waiting.

K tried to talk to the man in front of him. "Excuse me, do you have any idea how much longer we have to wait?"

The middle-aged man turned his head slowly, his eyes like stagnant pools. "How long?" He seemed to savor the words. "When I arrived, the person ahead of me told me that when he arrived, the person ahead of him..." He didn't finish, just shook his head, as if the question itself were taboo, or too absurd to answer.

K then asked the woman behind him holding the child: "Your child..."

The woman held her child tighter; the child was still, like a sleeping doll. "He was born here," she said softly, her voice devoid of emotion. "Perhaps he'll get his 'permit' here too."

K felt a wave of dizziness. He began to observe the people around him more closely. Their clothes varied in style—some looked decades old, others relatively new. But all faces were covered by the same grey layer of exhaustion. He even thought he saw, far ahead in the queue, a figure, hunched and slow-moving, who looked disturbingly like himself, years older. He rubbed his eyes, and the figure disappeared into the crowd.

The queue occasionally passed junctions leading to other, equally dim corridors, where other queues seemed to exist, waiting for other, equally vague purposes. Sometimes, two queues would run parallel briefly. People would exchange indifferent glances, as if looking at their reflections in a mirror, before merging back into separate darknesses.

K began to suspect that the "Comprehensive Affairs Processing Center" was itself a giant labyrinth, and this queue merely one path within it, perhaps leading only to another beginning. Did the so-called "window," the place where the "permit" was issued, actually exist? Or was it just a collective hallucination, a fragile belief supporting people's continued waiting?

He remembered a story he had once read about a library containing all possible books, combinations of letters encompassing past and future, truth and falsehood. Perhaps this "Center" was such a place, containing all possible forms of waiting, all bureaucratic procedures, and these people, including himself, were merely footnotes, endlessly repeating paragraphs within it.

One day, the queue moved into a vast, circular hall. In the center stood a pillar reaching to the ceiling, covered in densely packed names and dates, like some kind of monument. K looked closer and saw that the earliest dates went back decades, perhaps longer. Some names had small marks beside them, seemingly indicating "completed," but most were followed by blank space. He even found several "K"s sharing his name; their wait had apparently begun long ago and had never ended.

At that moment, K felt an unprecedented weariness, not physical, but a deep fatigue of the soul. He no longer cared about the "permit," nor about what lay at the end of the queue. He just stood, like a stone being slowly eroded by the river of time. He felt himself merging into this grey dragon, becoming a part of it. His individual consciousness was blurring, replaced by a collective, numb patience.

The queue continued its slow movement, like an endless river flowing towards an unknown destination. K looked up at the throng of heads before him, then back at the equally endless crowd behind. They were all waiting, for a permission that might never arrive, exhausting their lives within a vast, indifferent system. Perhaps this waiting itself was the entire meaning of their existence. Perhaps this endless queue was the absurd and inescapable truth of life itself. The distant announcements sounded again, still indistinct, like an irrelevant echo from another world. K sighed softly and shuffled forward one small step.