Such was my state of mind that I did not question the possibility of this;
under the circumstances I was only too willing to confess all.
I was nearly thirty at the time.

I went to the hall in the afternoons only, on these preliminary matters.
It was dark and, I sensed, very large;
only the counter at one end was lighted by a long fluorescent tube suspended directly above it.
Sometimes I was aware of people moving about in the darkness.
I would turn away from my writing in the hope of getting a good look at them but I never quite succeeded.
A glimpse of three of four vague figures, at the most.
Drifting here and there.
Squatting, as if waiting.
The pulsing glow of a cigarette.
Since they could see me but I not them, their presence in the hall disturbed me.
The clerk paid them no attention.
This impressed me, until I realized how limited was his sphere of influence.
His job simply consisted in registering new men.
When the phone rang he answered it.
His authority extended to the far edge of the counter, no further.
None of the men hanging around the hall bothered to speak to him.
Baldness was attacking his pate.
He spoke to me in a gruff voice, an affectation which quite belied his personality.
He wore his white shirt open at the neck, revealing a bit of scrawny pale chest underneath.
It was obvious that he wished himself different from the sort of person he thought he was.
But it was not easy for him and he often slipped.
When one of the men in the hall behind us spat on the floor and scraped his boot over the gob of spittle I noticed how the clerk winced.
I felt certain he was really a spineless little man.
His hat (the cause of his baldness?
) hung on a hook on the wall, and underneath it I could see his tie, knotted, ready to be slipped over his head, a black badge of frayed respectability that ought never to have left his neck.
The morning's tabloids were on the counter, and a stack of dog-eared men's magazines.
On a shelf in the office behind the counter was a small radio dialed permanently on a station which broadcast only vulgar commercials and cheap popular music.
Everything about the clerk was trivial.
Once, pressing him, I learned that his job was only part-time, in the afternoons when nothing went on in the hall.
Noticing my disappointment he attempted to salvage what scraps and shreds of authority he felt might still be clinging to his person.
With distaste I saw him assume a pompous air.
When he saw me coming he turned his radio off.
He made a show of rearranging my forms on the shelf.
He would pick up the ringing phone with studied negligence, then bark into it with gruff importance.
What limited knowledge he possessed he forced upon me.
In the mornings, I was informed, fluorescent tubes, similar to the one above the counter, illuminated the entire hall.
They, and the two large fans which I could dimly see as daylight filtered through their vents, down at the far end of the hall, could be turned on by a master switch situated inside the office.
He pointed out the switch to me and for a moment I foolishly believed that he would let deed follow words.
I was shown, instead, a batch of white tickets of the sort handed out, he told me, every morning.
Now, here was something of obvious importance to me, yet when I reached for the tickets he snatched them away from my hand.
He couldn't afford to have anyone mess around with them, he said.
Each of those tickets was of great value to its rightful recipient.
I withdrew my hand.
Later I would remember what this pompous little man had told me about the worth of a ticket.

Having nothing else to do except wait for my forms to be processed, I gave myself over to speculations concerning the hall itself.
When suitably lighted, what would it look like?
The presence of the two exhaust fans seemed to indicate that the hall could become crowded for air.
One afternoon, upon receiving permission and the necessary instructions from the clerk, I had visited the toilet adjoining the hall.
By counting the number of stalls and urinals I attempted to form a loose estimate of how many men the hall would hold at one time.
For although I had crossed a corner of the hall on my way to the toilet I still could not tell for sure how far to the rear the darkness extended.
I could observe the two fans down at the end, but their size in themselves meant nothing to me as long as I had no measure of comparison.
I had for some time been hoping, in vain, for one of the dim figures to pass between the fan vents and myself.
I knew that three or four of them were almost always present in the hall, but what they were doing, and exactly where, I could not tell.
It was, I felt, possible that they were men who, having received no tickets for that day, had remained in the hall, to sleep perhaps, in the corners farthest removed from the counter with its overhead light.
This light did not penetrate very far back into the hall, and my eyes were hindered rather than aided by the dim daylight entering through the fan vents when I tried to pick out whatever might be lying, or squatting, on the floor below.
Also the clerk appeared to disapprove of my frequent curious glances back over my shoulder.
No sooner would I turn my head away from the counter before he would address me, at times quite sharply, in order to bring back my attention.
And I had hardly finished my business in the toilet on the aforementioned occasion when the lights in that place, like the hall lights controlled from the switch in the office, flicked off and on impatiently.
This sort of petty vigilance annoyed me.
I felt certain it was self-appointed.
It sprang from a type of mentality I'd encountered often enough but certainly had not expected to find here.
I decided to see no more of the clerk until the processing of my papers was completed.

I felt strongly attached to the hall, however, and hardly a day passed when I did not go to look at it from a distance.
I lived in a state of suspense because of it.
I could not cling to my past nor did I wish to.
I had signed it off on the forms.
My future lay solely with the hall, yet what did I know about the hall at this point?
Although I had been inside it I had not yet seen it functioning.
I wished to prepare myself but did not even know what sort of clothes I ought to be wearing.
I did not despair, however;
far from it!
I was constantly searching for clues around the neighborhood of the hall.
Though only a relatively short walk separated it from my own part of town, its character was wholly foreign to me.
Large warehouses flanked the street on which the hall fronted.
The river was only a few blocks away but an unbroken line of piers prevented me from seeing it.
Sometimes I noticed the tops of ships' masts and funnels reaching above the pier roofs.
The sounds issuing from beyond -- winches whirring, men shouting -- indicated great activity and excited me.
The hall, on the other hand, appeared lifeless and deserted on these long waterfront afternoons.
It resembled nothing I'd ever seen before.
Its front was windowless, but irregularities in the masonry might be an indication that windows, now blinded, had once looked out upon the street.
I kept circling the block hoping to see, from the street behind it, the rear of the hall.
But it was not a tall structure and other buildings concealed it.
For weeks I wandered about this neighborhood of warehouses and garages, truck terminals and taxi repair shops, gasoline pumps and longshoremen's lunch counters, yet never did I cease to feel myself a stranger there.

I returned to the hall, despite my dislike for the clerk.
As I had expected, he insisted that my visits to the hall would do nothing to further the process of my application.
Meanwhile spring had passed well into summer.
At last, when I put it to him directly, the clerk was forced to admit that the delay in my case was unusual.
When I asked him what, if anything, I could do about it, he surprised me by referring me to the director of the hall.
I could consult this personage on any weekday morning, though not before ten o'clock.
The clerk impressed this upon me: that I should not arrive in the hall before ten o'clock.
When I went for my interview with the director I saw why.
Although it was dark as usual I could see that the hall had only recently contained a great many people.
Cigarette butts littered the floor.
The big fans were going, drawing from the large room the remnants of stale smoke which drifted about in pale strata underneath the ceiling.
I had felt the draft they were making while mounting the stairs.
The staircase itself seemed still to be echoing the heavy footfalls of many men.
I stopped by the counter.
No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.
Past it I could see part part of a desk, a flag in a corner, a rug on the floor.
The director's office.
I rapped my knuckles on the counter.
The director came to the door.
I was at once disappointed, although just what I had expected him to look like I could not have explained.
He was a man in his late forties, with graying hair, of medium height;
he looked dapper in a lightweight summer suit, brown silk tie and green-tinted soft collar.
He wore perforated, white-topped shoes;
they somehow made me expect to see him launch into a vaudeville tapdance routine any moment.
But he came toward me sedately enough, showed me around the counter, offered me a seat inside his office, then walked to a file cabinet and got out my application.
I had the impression that he had read my forms, perhaps several times.
He did not look at them now.
As he lowered himself on the chair behind his desk I wondered what this dapper, slightly ridiculous man could possibly have to do with the workings of the hall.
He spoke, in a voice as immaculate as his appearance.
Why had I registered?
Begging my pardon, he must express his astonishment over seeing a person of my background applying at the hall.
He had looked over my forms and was impressed by what he had seen there;
indeed, my scholastic qualifications were such that he, a college graduate himself, must envy me them.
Was I sure, he asked, that I knew what I was applying for?
What sort of men I would come into contact with, at the hall?
These questions did not surprise me;
I felt certain that the director, like the afternoon clerk, seldom moved beyond the counter, that the hall, to them, was a jungle, a dark and unwelcome place.
Though I doubted that he would understand me, I told the director my motives for applying.
I had always, I said, hankered after working hard with my hands.
This desire, I went on, growing voluble as my conviction was aroused, had mounted at such a rate recently that I now found its realization necessary not only to my physical but also to my spiritual wellbeing.
To this effect I had already severed all connections which bound me to my former existence.