Who Is Last?

Four words assemble the institution: cine e ultimul, who is last? The newcomer asks it of the gathering in general, somebody answers I am, and the transaction is complete: the newcomer is now the last, the previous last has been relieved of the office, and a legal relationship exists between two strangers who need never speak again. The question does not ask for information. It files an application, and the application has never once in recorded history been denied.

Understand what has just been engineered, because the engineering is invisible precisely where it is most elegant. The queue you are picturing, the Western one, is a physical object: a line of bodies, ordered by position, policed by geometry and glares. The queue my grandmother's world perfected is not physical at all. It is a data structure held in common memory: each member needs to know exactly one fact, the identity of the person before them, and from that single chain of pointers the whole order reconstructs itself on demand. Bodies are optional. Having filed your application, you may sit on the curb, stand in the shade, or, in the fully developed form of the art, leave entirely: run a second errand, hold a place in a second queue, return in forty minutes. Your place waits. It is not where your feet are. It is a slot in a distributed ledger maintained by everyone and administered by no one, and it survives your absence the way a reputation does.

The scholars of shortage have documented the world that trained this discipline, the decades when the queue was a second workday and households deployed themselves across the city like a small firm: one member at the meat line, one at the gas canisters, grandmother as the anchor tenant at whichever counter promised most. The era produced its own folklore, including the joke that deserves permanent preservation, in which a man joins a forming queue and only then asks his neighbor what they are giving. The joke is usually told against the joiner, and the joke is wrong. Joining first and inquiring second was flawless reasoning under the circumstances: the queue itself was the information, a probability made visible, and a man who waited to learn the details before committing would eat the details for dinner. Read correctly, the joke records a population that could price uncertainty faster than any exchange.

And the deeper commodity in circulation was never the meat or the canisters. A queue of the classical type is a continuous, unsupervised exercise in mutual recognition: every member has testified, by asking the question, that all the others exist and have rights; every held place is a small loan of trust, extended to a stranger, repaid hundreds of times a day across the city without collateral or contract. Sociologists call this social capital and measure it with surveys. The queue measured it directly: it was social capital, performing itself, in front of the pharmacy. Quarrels erupted, naturally, and were adjudicated on the spot by the assembly, with witnesses called and verdicts rendered; the queue was also everyone's small claims court, and its jurisprudence was sophisticated. The place held for a pensioner ranked above almost everything. The returning place-holder was heard, verified, and reinstated. The queue-jumper was destroyed by choral means no bailiff could improve on.

Waiting itself, note, was transformed by the arrangement. A Western queue wastes time and knows it; the waiting is dead freight, resented by every participant, which is why every airport now tries to disguise it. The classical queue converted the same minutes into a standing occasion: news was exchanged, remedies recommended, marriages arranged at one remove, governments dissected. Nobody chose the waiting, but the waiting had a society in it, and people who had stood together for two hours parted acquainted. The line was a misfortune that assembled a public, several times a week, out of whoever happened to need flour.

The heirs of all this now wait in queues that have been decomposed into tickets and applications, each of us holding a number issued by a machine, adjacent and unintroduced, heads bowed into the private elsewhere. Efficiency has improved; nobody disputes it. Only the four words have gone quiet, and with them the small daily ceremony in which a stranger turned to a gathering of strangers and asked, in effect, to be counted among them, and was, instantly, without paperwork, by unanimous consent. Ask the question today at any bus stop in the old countries and watch: the heads still come up, the reflex still lives, somebody still says I am. The institution is not dead. It is holding its place, off to the side, in the shade, and it knows exactly who is before it.