Yeoman of the Sewers

So .. . I just finished writing a short-story. Any critical opinion is greatly appreciated. It's below, or if its easier to read in Word or something else, hit me up and I'll e-mail it to you.




“What’s Trump?” the Captain’s demand almost sourceless between the echoing of the chamber and his great mound of white beard.
A collective hesitation as Bean meekly played his card; Gus finally and sarcastically:
“Spades.”
“No table talk!” Ulf, on Bean’s team and down several tricks to Gus and the Captain. His voice annoyed and mostly serious. The Captain played a mistake and Ulf victoriously slapped his laminate right Bauer to the table.

The four of them digest long hours in this fashion. Atrophying under bulky, drab suits to protect them from parasites, viruses and the infection on virtually every surface of the Sewer they collectively scrape and maintain. During downtime they sit in the enormous Combined Sewage Overflow because it is wide enough and tall enough to fool them. And the rectangular sun above casts enough light to bathe several city blocks of stained concrete in a natural glow.

Bean hated this job. Within recent memory he’d been a student of history at a crowded community college in the suburbs. He had hoped to find some order in the entropy he saw, to convince himself through anecdotes that things weren’t getting worse. But, it seemed, academia conspired against him. Funding interests and dwindling government aid incrementally snuffed his program out of existence and he soon found himself fighting the wolves in the form of creditors, and then landlords, and then others in the breadline. Eventually, this past spring, the Sewer Department threw him a bone. He would have tured jugular veins with a spear if he had to for that first paycheck.

The novelty of making money wore off almost instantly and through the first few months it was as if the job perpetually offended him. Recently, though, he tempered. The nauseating reek of humanity gradually receded. His skin sallowed, like Ulf’s, and when fully suited he could almost take a sudden immersion in waste without a grimace.

And this sort of test of grit was not uncommon. Just last month, Gus had to pull him out of a freak rush in one of the junctions during a swell. Tense safety lines and guttural screams down in the pipes. Facemasks fogged with exasperation. Finally Gus had hauled him up onto his feet, the bastard, and dislodged Bean’s leaky helmet. He laughed as Bean spat out some vile fluid that had leaked in; it was his contention that Bean would never really be a sewer man until he’d swallowed a mouthful of the stuff. “Topside people eat shit all day,” he was fond of saying, “we just have the balls to admit it.”

The Overflow was Bean’s favorite place in the Sewer. It was the only underground that didn’t excite claustrophobia. He liked the starkness of it, unencumbered by complexes of pipes or pumps. It was not a place to populate or regulate, but rather a space through which human matter and the city’s toxic run-off passed. Great mountains of water passing back out into the natural world, consuming its own poisons. The floor plan was only disrupted by strategic channels and a hand-railing and their table bolted to the concrete floor a few feet from the shaft of afternoon sun. At the far end of the room, there was a rough-hewn rectangle cut in the concrete. Big enough to pilot a Bobcat through. If someone were to now emerge from it, Bean thought, the sudden perspective would be jarring. He would appear tiny and alien, an anonymous figure out there on the underground horizon.

One game bled into the next. Victories merely breaks to smoke a cigarette in, or walk a few feet away and piss. Bean lost focus easily during these marathons. Going mute for long stretches except for a pre-packaged “pass” or “pick it up” and lolling his head back to look up at the distant ceiling. Gus re-told some awful joke, replacing one ethnicity for another, and shuffled. The awkward, stiff cards snapped out in a flourish; tiny machine gun fire. The arrangement of things way up on the ceiling, pipes and gears and catwalks and portholes still painted their urgent red and assembled in symmetry. They allowed Bean to suspend thought for the briefest of seconds before the Captain nudged the excess of his suit and he re-entered.

“Bean, pay attention, please. Ve don’t vant to lose another,” Ulf said in his dwindling Swiss accent. “ ‘s all strategy, you have to vatch vhat’s thrown.”
“Strategy?” Gus laughed. “It ain’t even strategy when you play this long. You just know.”
The Captain raised his eyebrow. A white cylinder, abruptly crooked at his confusion.
“You know. A Man just knows,” he continued. Swiped the trick from the table.
The blaring of the klaxons didn’t startle them. They would have been virtually unnoticeable had they all been helmeted. Ulf slammed his remaining three cards to the table; his hand was strong and he was livid. House rules said the game was over.
“Just, you know, just as a fellow is about to do something . . “
“Life happens,” the Captain said.
Gus assembled the cards and stowed them in his pouch. The players eased up out of their bolted chairs, and single-filed fifteen or twenty feet to a spot. Ulf wedged up a plate with a tool, and the Captain whistled down a ladder into the Overflow’s nerve center. The rest, Bean next, followed and Ulf again sealed the room behind them. As he stepped off the bottom rung, the small chamber vibrated. Then rumbled. And finally a jolting roar of water overhead.
The narrow hole fit three comfortably, and Bean was pushed right up to the Captain. He looked down at Bean, nearly a foot taller, and said something unintelligible.
“What?” Bean yelled. The roar of the water like the engorged howls of a prison fight above them.
“I said we are getting a lot of overflows for this time of the year,”
“Yes,” Bean said. Dimly cognizant that he might have noticed the same thing. Either way, of little import to him. “Yes we are.”
They would have as many as fifteen minutes down in the chamber with one another. The energy required for conversation keeping them awkward and blatant in their speech. Bean had embarrassed himself a number of times down there, having to shout ever louder “I just wish we could get some time off” and “I said, I don’t think there needs to be four of us.” He now just stayed quite, half-heartedly poised to respond to the Captain should he say something.
A myriad of pipes, confusing and tangled from three steps back, snaked around the room. Terminated at bulging junctions of painted steel, alien panels and gauges that Bean could not comprehend. He took a dim satisfaction the complication and order, the Sewer so vast he wondered if it was even aware of him. And yet it worked practically by itself. Of course, Ulf was constantly trudging down here; wiping the filth from his facemask and twiddling knobs heuristically. But the knobs really did the work; they told the stuff where to go, which pumps needed to be engaged, which drains needed to be uncovered.
“You think robots might be able to do take our jobs?” Bean asked, in the roar of water confusing the out-loud world with the thoughts in his head.
“What’s that, boy?” the Captain shouted back. Gus and Ulf were playing rock-paper-scissors in the white noise. Gus beating him mercilessly.
“I said, you think robots might be able to do our jobs” and the roar whined down as the last few words escaped. Bouncing off the metal pipes and eliciting shaking heads from the others. This merely meant that the largest slug of overflow had passed, there were still millions of gallons to go.
“Bean, my boy,” said the Captain, and wrapped a stained arm around him.
“Do you see these pipes?”
Bean and the Captain were squashed shoulder-to-shoulder, unable to turn fully in either direction. Sullen faces six inches from the melange.
“Yeah, I see them. Nevermind, I was just sort of . . uhm . . thinking out loud.”
“That’s the problem,” Gus said, “You think too much. What’s there to think about down here?”
“Bean,” the Captain continued, “this set-up you see before you, the controls, the pipes, the valves. It might not seem like much, but without them the City is nothing. A city swamped in its own filth cannot survive.”

“Of course, but we . . .” Bean attempted to interject. The water sloshing above them, the ocean stomach of the bloated city. “Tut tut . . without the action we take down here, the city is lost. I know it seems as though what we do is rather meaningless, tedious, and facetious,”
“Hey you sound like one of them preachers!” Gus said, pulling an apple from somewhere in the recesses of his suit.
“I sure do,” the Captain beamed “But, Bean, my point is. Something as important as that can’t be left up to computers. You young people think that technology is better than us. But I’ll tell you something . . computers can only do what we tell them to.”
“Besides,” Gus said, crunching through the snappy skin of his apple “You want to lose your job or something?”
Bean stared straight ahead.
“All I’m saying is, what I’m asking is . . do we need to be down here?”

“Of course we need to be down here. What do you think we’re doing all day?” The Captain retorted.

“And, Bean. If you hate it that much, no one down here’s got a gun to your head,” Gus said, thinly sarcastic as though he were literally holding said gun.
“You’re saying we’ve got a choice . . . ” and in the middle of mounting his tirade, a perfect sentence to finally dismiss Gus’s vulgarity with cold logic, Bean slipped on brown slime and braced his impact on the metal grating with his elbow. It was incredibly painful even through the suit.
Gus helped him back up with a rough jerk. The troop fell quiet and filed up the ladder. Bean imagined a tension, that he was now at odds with the group, but Gus and the Captain never seemed to commit an exchange to memory. He could never really speak to these people. Every attempt, whether conscious or not, to talk about anything other than cards, human waste or women was met with something between condescension to his age or a brief silence.
The procedures rolled along until the four of them finally sat back down at the table, the Captain squee-geeing it off with one arm of his suit and then flicking the stuff to the floor. He was the oldest and hardiest, and Bean imagined he’d been so desensitized that had Gus left his apple on the table, and had it miraculously survived the gush, Captain would have shook it dry and sunk his teeth in.

Bean, rubbing his elbow, felt some sort of utility and value. Though much of their time was wasted, every so often they moved as a unit to tackle some necessary problem. At these times he felt like a worker gnome, hapless maybe, but nevertheless pushing through the city’s bowel movement. Denigrating work, to be sure, but vital.
A new game started. The long-absent stench now returning unevenly to Bean’s nostrils. Sour at first and not obnoxious, what a businessman might smell if he wandered by the wrong grate in August. There would probably be nothing left to do until they punched out and the smaller night crew replaced them. Gus and the Captain lost two hands, and then the Captain’s look of dumb-founded consternation (as though his cards displayed hieroglyphs instead of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds) turned to urgency.

“Who cranked the hydros back on?” He thundered, standing up instinctively.

The unwritten code by which they operated required that Bean, the closest they had to a newb, double-back to correct mistakes in their collective memory. The urgency of potential backwash flattened any resistance, and only Bean’s uncharacteristic responsiveness kept the crew from hastily descending once again as a precaution. Unexpected action and a tiny surge in heart-rate. Perhaps it would be a close call and he would save the system with only seconds to spare.
Bean ran to the entrance, dimly envisioning the city far above him trembling in anticipation. An overwrought and complex beehive. An architecture of purposes relying on its weakest foundations. Relying now on Bean’s quick action.
He clanged down the stairs, the narrow tube and the space below completely odorless, and over to the valve they had neglected. As he moved to turn it, and alleviate enormous and building pressures, the wheel spun of its own accord. First dryly rubbing against his gloves but as he stepped back it gathered speed and made the two rotations under its own power.
Had no one hastily descended the ladder and rushed to open the valve, it would have made no difference. The captain, Gus, Ulf and especially Bean were suddenly not even drones.
He slowly returned to the game upstairs. To now truly waste time in a literal shithole with people he did not particularly like, so he could afford to eat in the scant, dark hours he got off. He dropped into his seat like a pile of antiques, letting gravity yank at his bones, and he thought, just for an instant, of saying something. He wanted to tell them so they could all give up the façade and go home and watch television or launch campaigns to win back ex-wives and girlfriends. Or maybe just go for a walk outside.
“Everything go alright down there?” the Captain asked.
But he couldn’t tell them. Either they had noticed similar goings-on and were afraid of the truth, or they would think him a pathetic liar. Or he could arrange it so they saw it for themselves; show them the grand futility laid bare like the contentious hand of a cheater.
The game resumed, and the smell returned in the way small folds of his suit would open and reassemble in the motions of snapping cards to the table.
The klaxons blared again, Ulf dropping both bauers and a trump king to the table in disgust. The siren wasn’t the same harrowing scream that signaled a complete flush but rather the meek holler of a clog somewhere under the city. One that hands would have to dislodge.
Ulf and Bean had to go, hardly any other option. Bean the newest, and his team losing at cards.
They walked away from the group, snapping buckles and tightening straps, paused at a cubbyhole to retrieve equipment and then trudged over to the stark rectangle in the wall.
The darkness in the tunnel mimics the deep, earthy black of cave diving. Stalactites of algae and filth. Their warm orange headlamps glistening over everything ahead. Bean and Ulf tied themselves together by a length of rope and sighed hunkered into a long uphill walk. The passage narrowed in stages as they climbed until they had to hunch over. A perpetual tiger trap of slick concrete. Some Pavlovian sense of duty the pressing wall at their back.
Bean was nearly dragged by the rope. A rhythm of tugs at each of Ulf’s forward steps. His legs trying to collapse or go limp at each one. The euphemism had failed, he remembered. It was over. He was not even a cog in the clockwork anymore. He was a mouth to feed, and twenty-four hours to occupy in the interest of preventing burglary or insurgency. Ulf looked back every few minutes in restrained irritation.
He, like Bean, had been given the job by some nseen bureaucratic hand after a dizzying stint of poverty and desperately waiting in lines. Swallowing dignity to beg some tender-hearted but eagle-eyed old marm for help. Support. The system, so efficient at automating and generating surplus, simply no longer needed them. Stupid day-workers like Bean, Gus, the Captain, and even Ulf could only stifle progress, could only gum up the works. As so it threw them a pittance and convinced them they were worthwhile.
“ulf!” Bean yelled.
“Vhat?” Not even fully turning.
“Hold on,”
Ulf took two or three more steps and stopped under the serrated light of a drainage. He turned and huffed, he worked too damn hard to put up with Bean sometimes.
“Listen,” Bean said to hold attention as he closed the gap. “I . . um .. I saw something down in the snakepit.”
“Really?” Ulf asked, “Vhat did the t’ermal expansion gauges say?”
“No, no. Listen. And you have to take me serious,“ where Gus and the Captain would have rolled their eyes Ulf merely looked away and then back.
“Ok. Vhat?”
“The valve that we turn, you know, the one that I turned after the flush earlier?”
“Of course,”
“Well, “ Bean said. “It moved on its own.”
“Vhat are you saying?”
“The valve turns itself, we don’t need to b e down here.” This last part under his breath as though he was suggesting it to Ulf subliminally.
Ulf looked at him with a frozen disbelief, not a reaction to Bean’s heresy, but simply unsure what to think. Barely able to articulate his confusion in Swiss, utterly incapable of doing it in English. Finally:
“I don’t beliefe you,”

A moment of passive reflection and consideration they’d be forced to call a “break” if asked and Ulf and Bean again trudged through the pipes to some nefarious trauma as far away as seemed reasonable. This time passed in silence. Ulf twice nearly turning back with some pithy insight or joking stab at the tangible doubt and biography that hung between them. Bean felt weightless and yet now bonded to the sewer by a force that acted not on appearance or heft, but on some less tangible quality. Really, some lack of quality that pulled him down through sluices of steel grating and dark shafts of concrete.
They arrived at the blockage. A stormwater reservoir that emptied out into a channel at their feet had coaxed an unprecedented mass of urban offal and the things that found solace in it to fully congeal and squeeze until the outlet was completely sealed. Bean poked at the blockage with an instrument. A blackish wad weighing hundreds of pounds.

The apparent task at hand was to skewer and slice the blockage until it conceded and fell into the channel in pieces. Here it could decompose naturally in the constant rinse of run-off. All tasks being menial, this one was of no particular notice. Save that Bean couldn’t resist the notion that if it were not for the teeming, squabbling population topside this problem would have never occurred. And yet, in the sewer’s new complexity, Bean saw no way for it to heal itself this time. He made a more determined, work-like stab at the mass.
“Vait, Bean. If you’re right, ‘zes vill fix itself. Just vait,”
And so they stood. The reservoir making incrementally angrier noises. The blockage making plastic squeaks as tons of water worked to force it through the eye of a needle. They waited, each sort of quietly daring the other to take no action as the wad pulsed and the chamber they stood in shook.
Finally the noise was replaced by a great rush of water somewhere on the other side. Some redundant and unfamiliar outlet eased the pressure on the blockage and the great squeezing mass relaxed. The sweep of water, as if blood circumventing arteries, tugged the mass away from the blockage and the channel surged.

Ulf was incredulous. Simply staring. And for Bean the smell finally pounced from the bushes. As fresh and repulsive as it was on his first day, but suddenly beyond merely nauseating. The fumes burned poisonous in his lungs. Bean’s eyes watered and crossed. His vision went blurry and after a graceless waving of arms to stay steady he careened into the channel loudly.

The current, stronger than it seemed and stronger as it deepened, yanked him beneath the filmy surface. One foot, Two feet. And then the safety line pulled taut. Warbled gibberish above the water. Bean reached a foot down, God how deep could it be, and launched himself weakly from the bottom.

His head surfaced briefly. Ulf pulling on the line, losing skittering steps to the current and Bean’s weight. A fresh shot of reek along with desperately needed air. He felt the burn of the sewer deep in his lungs and went limp. The back of his head smacking against some metal fixture, a brief unconsciousness as the indifferent Sewer pulled him back down under into the darkness and digestive system. Into the bowels, so much more profound in their strangeness. As alien to Bean as his own insides.
The line, the panicked umbilical cord between the terror and futility down in the pipes and the vindication and despair on the walkway, snapped. A jarring, hard sound somewhere in the penultimate static of water rushing over every inch of him. Swallowing him.
Bean was afraid. A hot ball of panic, starting in his gut and dispersing, splitting into smaller bursts of unbearable anxiety. The flashing images of grinding metal teeth and sharp edges testing the ferocity of the flow. He surfaced for fractions of a second in the few inches between the water and the pipe, his helmet filling with Sewer air and then back underneath to watch the invaluable little bubbles escape out into the blackness.

An unknowable quantity of time passed.

The flow of water calmed, not truly slower Bean knew, but without the turbulence, without the tiny accelerations beating away at his consciousness. He floated along, the nozzles of his helmet just above the water.

There was nothing in the pipe. Nothing he could do or any space to do it in. There was only to try and keep breathing and hope dimly that he ended up somewhere friendly to his soft, pink body. And yet even the safest fantasy of how it all might end failed to comfort him. If he could just sit down in the pipes forever, bobbing along and avoiding work.

As time went on, Bean started to convince himself that this would happen. He would drift here forever and acquiesce; learn to not care. Then there was a brief amplification in the rush and his numbing buoyancy blending almost imperceptibly, like a mother quietly exchanging a baby’s sleeping comfort in her arms for that of the bed, into pure weightlessness.
And light. Shocking and exhilarating light so that Bean’s enormous pupils could barely handle the unexpected luck and extraordinary freedom. And then plunged again into water; suddenly muffled and in slow motion. Bean was given to drift motionless for a moment as the bay scrubbed the sewer out of him. His eyes adjusted and, heavy in his suit, he looked up through the water at the purplish twilight. He had survived. And he was never going down into the Sewer again.
He pulled at his boots with an ineffective glove and just before he panicked they slipped off and he kicked himself upwards. His head broke the surface and his bleary periphery bulged with the city’s skyline. The city that thought him dead looming there in its sepia and soot, its chaotic afternoon bustle.
“It is a beehive,” Bean said, what felt like his very first words. And it didn’t really need him.
He swam toward it, no other choice really, and thought how tomorrow he’d wake up and go for a walk outside. Or visit the library. Or do absolutely nothing at all.