Number 285

At 5:55 in the morning, I was already number 285.

I had reached a military processing center in Ankara before six, which felt early enough to deserve some kind of reward. Instead, I was placed in the sixth group and given proof that several hundred men had apparently had the same clever idea.

The city was still waking up. We were already waiting.

The examination itself was not especially frightening. There was tea, cigarette smoke, conversation, and the temporary friendship that appears when strangers are trapped inside the same procedure. Everyone had heard something from someone who had come the day before. Everyone seemed to know how long the next stage would take. Naturally, nobody really knew.

The difficulty was that we moved as a group.

Finishing your own part did not mean you were finished. If one person was still checking an answer, everyone remained. From his point of view, he had every right to use the available time. From mine, he had become the most important obstacle between me and the outside world.

I arrived at 5:55 and left around 11:30.

By then, the queue number outside had climbed into the thousands. My 285, which had looked terrible before sunrise, suddenly seemed almost privileged.

That morning taught me the mathematics of mass bureaucracy. You wake earlier, hundreds of people wake earlier than you, and all private effort becomes a public sequence.

I had arrived before six.

The system had already been awake for hours.