Had the briefest of discussions with a young woman from China that now works out of our office. Despite vast differences in culture, interests and experience I have found our politics align famously. Making me wonder if my mentality too is sprung from an oppression that we refuse to admit. I've nearly stopped paying attention to politics; almost completely resigned to the G3 theory that things need to get much worse before they get better. With my own modification: the world needs to collapse before humanity can restore itself and actualize. Every mention of long-term financial planning or real estate investment or even the tentative schedule of the next year or two seems ridiculous to me in light of shadow governments plotting war with Iran, the looming environmental catastrophe, the erosion of economic stability. Even if the optimistic wager proves true, living in the short-term satisfies me more. As if the only thing that matters is my personal reflection on this quixotic life in that final breath, whenever it may come.
Next week I'm attending a conference to read aloud a story about wading through the remains, and three poems about my paranoia and hesitation and cold looks back over my shoulder. As it turns out I will be opening the conference. The very first reader for whatever reason. Nerves like electricity simply looking at the schedule on the screen.
I'm currently working on a short-story that starts something like this:
“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 scraped and maintained. During downtime they sat in the enormous Combined Sewage Overflow because it was wide enough and tall enough to fool them. And the rectangular sun above let in enough natural light to bathe several city blocks of stained concrete in a natural glow.
Bean hated this job. Being the youngest, they had hired him off the streets one chaotic spring and had a good laugh at his tangible disdain. It was as if the job perpetually offended him. After several months, though, he tempered. His skin sallowed, like Ulf’s, and when fully suited he could almost take a sudden immersion in waste without a grimace.
This was not uncommon. Gus had pulled him out of a freak rush in one of the junctions during a swell the following spring and dislodged Bean’s leaky helmet. Laughing the whole time that he could not really be a sewer man until he’d swallowed a mouthful of the stuff.
“Topside people eat shit all day, they just don’t want to admit it,” he was fond of saying.
The Overflow was perhaps 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 to pass human matter and the city’s toxic run-off through. Great mountains of water passing back out into the natural world, consuming its own poison. 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 other than 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 man. We don’t want to lose another,” Ulf said in his dwindling Swiss accent. “ ‘s all strategy, you have to watch what’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 be virtually unnoticeable if they were all helmeted. Ulf slammed his remaining three cards to the table; his hand was strong and he was livid.
“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. 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 devoid of nuance. 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. An entire level of sewer work many levels above him. And yet all the same. Ulf was constantly trudging down here; wiping the filth from his facemask and twiddling knobs heuristically. 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 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 take 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 pipes.
“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 and robots. You young people think that technology is better than us. But I’ll tell you something . . we made technology. It needs us, not the other way around.”
“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 down here all day?” The Captain retorted.
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