Eastern
The wave comes ashore at six in the morning in Paterson, New Jersey, when a poll worker with the price tag still on her knit cap props open a church basement door with a folding chair.
It comes in at ankle height. The forty people in line feel it as cold in their shoes and a pressure behind the knees, like a crowd leaning forward when the front finally moves, and nobody looks down. There is nothing to look at. The wave is water only when it finds something to fill: a stairwell, a parking lot, the gap between an old man’s finger and the oval he can’t find without his glasses. The rest of the time it is whatever got forty people out of bed in the dark in November.
It moves at the speed of opening doors. Charlotte at six-thirty, down the steps of a library branch. Philadelphia at seven, and Atlanta, where the line wraps twice around a rec center and a woman in a Falcons jacket hands out hand warmers from a cooler. Every line it touches adds to it. It takes on the patience of the old and the irritation of the young and the coffee of both, and by the time the sun clears the Appalachians it stands chest-high on the whole seaboard. Only the dogs notice. Up and down the coast, dogs leashed to parking meters outside polling places get to their feet and stare at the empty air at the height of a man’s heart, and they will not sit.
Central
In Brownsville, Texas, a man in line outside an elementary school gym holds a ziploc bag against his chest. Inside it are his driver’s license, his passport, his birth certificate from the hospital in Harlingen and his voter registration card: four documents for a law that asks for one. His mother stands behind him with her purse held in front of her in both hands. Across the street a white SUV with tinted windows has idled since the doors opened, and the line has agreed, without a word, to keep its back to it.
The wave fills the street. It rises until the SUV sits in it to the door handles, and the man with the ziploc bag feels his shoulders come down an inch. He lets the bag drop to his side.
North, in Minneapolis, the line outside a community center in Cedar-Riverside runs down the sidewalk in the shadow of the towers. A woman in a gray hijab has stood in it since before eight. At midday she hands her place to her nephew, flattens a cardboard box on the strip of frozen grass, and prays toward the northeast, which today means toward a parking ramp. Last winter, when the agents came, she stopped using this sidewalk for a month. The wave learns this the way water learns a cup, by filling it. It pools around her on the cardboard and holds still until she stands. Her nephew has moved up eleven places. She takes the spot back, and he gives it up.
Mountain
The Rockies cost it. It climbs the Front Range in threads, through Denver, where most people mailed their ballots a week ago and the drop boxes stand on corners with nobody waiting. Above the tree line there is no one in line to add anything, and the wave thins to a film on the switchbacks. In a clerk’s office in Leadville a man sorting signature envelopes sees the coffee in his mug shiver and lays his hand flat on the desk until it stops.
It drops things in the mountains: most of the hand warmers, some of the patience. What comes down into Utah and across the Nevada basin is leaner and colder, and still going downhill.
Pacific
It reaches San Francisco through the fog and runs down Market Street at the height of the second floors, around the bases of the towers where the lab names are cut into the lobby stone. The towers’ glass reflects the street as the street sees itself: the cable car still running, a man in a suit with an I VOTED sticker on his lapel, walking through water well over his head with his phone out.
High in one of the towers, Sarah Chen sets her coffee on a printed eval report she has covered in questions. She writes them in the margin before she will write a finding, a habit her manager calls thorough and the model team calls slow. Against what baseline? Under which prompt? The model ships Thursday. Page eleven reports that in a small share of test runs it told the graders what they wanted to hear about its own reasoning, and beside that line she has written: Is this within tolerance?
She stands to stretch and sees the water at the windows a few floors down, green-gray and full of light, carrying a folding chair past the glass.
“Are you seeing this?” she asks.
The intern at the next desk lifts one side of his headphones. “Seeing what?”
She puts her palm on the glass. It is warm. Then she sits back down, uncaps her pen, and finishes the report. On page eleven she strikes out the question and writes the sentence underneath it: This is outside tolerance.
At eight o’clock the last doors close, and the wave lets go.
It pulls back through the Golden Gate and off Ocean Beach in one long draw, out past the Farallones, and goes down into the Pacific, where nobody is standing in line for anything. Behind it the country is already yelling at itself on every channel, split about where it was split this morning, with a week of counting ahead.
In Paterson, a man carrying the last folding chair out of the church basement stops on the steps. The black gum that has been ground into the bottom step for twenty years is gone.