Her hands were on the table, palms down, the way she placed them every morning on the kitchen counter before deciding whether this was a day when her hands would work or not, because since Amala had quit, and quitting was not the right word but it was the one she used with her partner, with the doctor, with anyone who asked what she did now and she would answer 'I quit' as if she had quit smoking, without specifying that for eight hours a day from the laptop in her room she had looked at images of violence that a company loaded onto her screen and had decided which were violent enough to be removed and which were not, since she had quit her hands had become the first thing to check, every morning, the temperature of the knuckles, the sensitivity of the fingertips, the ability to open and close the fist without the gesture feeling like the gesture of someone else; if the hands responded the day could begin, if the hands did not respond, if there was that delay between the command and the execution that the doctor called 'somatic dissociation' and that Amala called the delay, then the day began anyway but from a lower step, from a point where every object touched would require an act of 'verification' before being truly felt, 'is it me touching the cup or is the cup being touched,' and the difference, for someone who has not experienced it, is nonexistent, and for Amala it was everything.

The 'training' had lasted three weeks, and in those three weeks Amala had learned the 'categories,' fourteen main and forty-two subcategories, each with an alphanumeric code, a colour in the interface, a description in English that explained what she was supposed to look for, and inside the categories there was a vocabulary that had never been her vocabulary, 'explicit content,' 'violent content,' 'escalation,' 'priority flagging,' 'level four material,' words that had deposited in her head the way limescale deposits in a pipe, layer after layer, without anyone deciding it, until the pipe is no longer the pipe but the limescale, and now, a year later, the 'categories' were still there, inside the structure with which Amala looked at the world, because the problem was not what she had seen, it was not the images themselves, 'oh if only it were just that,' the eight hundred a day for six months that made one hundred and forty-four thousand images in total that one night she had calculated because numbers when you put them in a column become a fact and not a memory and facts can be endured, the problem was that looking at the images had taught her to 'classify' ; classifying had become the way her hands touched things, the way her eyes read a face, the way her skin registered contact before the contact became sensation, every contact passed through the filter of the fourteen categories as if the body had installed a 'verification protocol' between the world and perception, 'is this safe,' 'is this appropriate,' 'does this fall within parameters,' and the protocol could not be uninstalled, the doctor said it would take time and had prescribed exercises that consisted of touching different surfaces, wood, fabric, metal, water, and saying aloud what she felt, but Amala did the exercises and what she felt was the category before the surface, like a subtitle that appears on the film before the scene; the hands that touched wood touched the code for wood first, the hands that touched fabric searched first in the taxonomy whether fabric was 'content' or 'context,' because in the 'training' they had taught her the difference between the content to be classified and the context that surrounds the content; the difference had remained in her hands like a reflex that responds not to the will but to the muscle.

Her partner touched her shoulder. The hand was warm, Amala knew it as a fact, knew it the way she knew that water boils at one hundred degrees and that her contract had expired in August, but between the knowing and the feeling there was the delay, that second, perhaps less than a second, in which the hand on the shoulder was not yet a hand on a shoulder but was a 'contact' to be 'classified,' and Amala felt the trapezius muscle contract, not from fear, not from pain: from 'categorization,' the body responding to the hand the way it had responded to an image on the screen, first the category then the sensation, first the code then the warmth, and in that second Amala knew, with the cold clarity of someone looking at an X-ray and seeing the shadow that should not be there, that the damage was not in the one hundred and forty-four thousand images she had seen but in the way seeing them had taught her to feel, 'how much breath have you got left,' she thought, 'how much breath have you got left if every time someone touches you the first thing you do is decide whether the touch is permitted before feeling it,' and her partner withdrew the hand, not because he had felt the contraction of the muscle, or perhaps yes, but because Amala's silence after being touched had become a response that her partner had learned to read without asking, because asking produced the vocabulary; the vocabulary produced the 'categories' and the categories produced the delay and the delay produced a larger silence.

Amala stood up. She went to the kitchen. She opened the tap and put her hands under the water. The water was cold, colder than it should have been at that hour of the day, and her hands felt it with a delay that this time was longer, three seconds perhaps four, in which her hands were under the water and the water was not there, in which her hands were matter under a stream that did not reach them, and then the cold arrived, arrived all at once the way sound arrives after lightning; the hands responded. Amala kept them there, under the stream, without moving them, waiting for the cold to become pain and the pain to become sensation and the sensation to become something that did not need to be 'classified' to exist.