The bottles have been put in single file.
The belt is black rubber worn silver down the middle where the glass rides. On the left a steel guide rail with its paint flaking off in continents. On the right the drive gear, bolts and brackets and a rust that has been growing since before I was born. The bottles come up out of the bottom of the canvas at a stride and go away from you in a line, getting smaller and closer together, until they reach a doorway that has no light in it at all. Above the doorway, one fluorescent tube.
They are uncapped. Every mouth is open and every mouth is pointed at the ceiling.
Look at the spacing. It is even. Not roughly even; even. No person spaced those. A person spacing bottles by hand produces clumps and gaps because a person gets bored, and this belt has produced an interval so regular you could set a metronome by it. That interval is the honesty of the whole building. A counter cannot count a heap. It can only count things that arrive one at a time with darkness between them, and so the first thing this machine does to your morning’s work is take it apart into units and hold them at arm’s length from each other.
Upstream of this belt, a bottle belonged to a household. It stood on a windowsill for a month. Somebody drank out of it and put it down and forgot it and found it again. On this belt it belongs to nothing. It is one of a series, presented at a fixed rate, indistinguishable from the one in front of it by any measure the machine is equipped to take.
I want to say clearly that this is an improvement. Before the belt, a man counted your bags by eye, and he was tired, and he liked some people more than others, and he was not wrong on purpose. The belt likes nobody. It is the fairest thing in the building precisely because it has been emptied of everything that could prefer you.
The light is the part I keep coming back to. The tube is not over the belt. It is over the doorway. So the brightest place on the entire line is the last place a bottle passes before it goes into the dark, and the bottles nearest the door are lit hardest, and then there are no bottles, because there is no more picture.
I stood there for an hour and a half. They kept coming. Nothing happened in the doorway that I could see, and nothing came back out of it, and the interval never varied once.