Samsara
8:58. Damien clocks in. The chip in his head clicks. He feels a momentary fuzziness as his neurons realign. Routes change. One graph melds into another. The ticking of a clock extends into the sound of a creaking door into a roaring elephant into the eternal ocean, a single low eternal growl where the tttttime markeddddd-
He waves hello to his coworkers. Although they’ve been working together for almost two years, they are still mostly strangers to him. Some of them seem different — new hires? Has anyone moved on? He’s genuinely not sure. They give him silent nods in response to his greeting. He doesn’t expect more. They’re all standing around, waiting for the remaining 90 seconds to pass marking when they have to start working. A nervous-looking black girl pulling her dreads, a few nondescript high school kids, a portly Venezuelan mamita with prominent birth marks on both arms. A grizzled old white guy, surely past retirement age. An even more grizzled old black guy, who probably won’t ever retire. An obese …Pacific Islander?… guy, long, stringy black hair hung over minimalist face paint. A relatively clean looking South Asian kid.
Damien squints. That last one looks suspiciously similar to the guy who’d hired him. Family connection? The manager badge on the kid’s uniform confirms it. Typical — guy probably gets a minority scholarship to business school, circles back around to get his “management experience” bossing around his dad’s wage-slaves. Damien’s had worse bosses, but he still intends to avoid this kid as much as possible.
The buzzer rings. The crew silently shuffles toward the floor, picking up gloves, clipboards, looking around. Damien’s job today is to inventory. He grabs a clipboard and pen from the desk where they’re kept, and glances over it. Every clipboard is very detailed in how duties are to be carried out. This one describes the exact process of finding items, counting them (whether boxes need to be opened or can be left closed, when things are counted as pairs vs individually, when to measure by weight), and how to eventually do the data entry and plug all the numbers into the scuffed terminal in the corner. He wants to start with appliances, since it’s easy to count giant refrigerator boxes, but the clipboard insists he start with the by-weights, and he can feel the manager kid’s eyes boring a hole in his back. Damien checks the floor map pinned to the wall to remind himself where the equipment closet is. He trundles out the floor scale, and drags it over to the bulk goods section of the warehouse.
Soon Damien is lost in the rhythm of making a measurement, writing down the number, taking a filled sheet back to the terminal, punching in every number — it’s an unending cycle, and he can never tell if he’s near the beginning or end. The clipboard is depressingly specific, mandating even the exact method for counting (use your fingers, make a tally mark for every 10). Damien grits his teeth, and looks forward to lunch. After around an hour and a half, he wraps up the by-weights and starts packing up the floor scale. No sooner does he swing the door open than he hears an awkward cough behind him. Turning around, Damien finds the management kid looking at him anxiously.
“Damien?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to go check the gas meter outside.”
Damien paused for a second, confused. “Wh-”
“Just go do it. Now.” The kid handed him a radio. “Let me know when you’re out there.” With that he scurried away.
Damien heads towards the back door, realizing he’s not sure where the gas meter even is. All the training material he knew was what he’d seen posted on the walls and written on the clipboard. He steps through the door, heaving his weight against the heavy pushbar. One glance to either side and he spots the box, and ambles towards it. He squawks the radio, but the kid doesn’t get the message, so he clicks it again and says, “I’m here.”
“Alright, see the number after the period? Is it moving?”
Damien rolls his eyes, but keeps his thoughts to himself. “The decimal? Yeah, it’s rolling.”
“Okay…” the kid trails off, clearly unsure what he’s supposed to say next. “Okay, just- just get back in here then. Maybe I’m wrong.”
“Wrong about what?” Damien asks, moving back towards the door.
“Wrong abou-”
Firefighters get there about 20 minutes later. There’s actually not much damage beyond the initial blast — walls of aluminum don’t burn, and the warehouse is relatively empty right now. About a quarter of it has been blackened with soot, and thick, oily smoke fills the rest. The workers are all milling about aimlessly, having easily gotten out of the building after the explosion. Damien sees the islander guy, and the Latina woman, the kid, on the phone, of course, the black girl, the old dudes… he only sees two high schoolers. Weren’t there three? Or only two? He looks around the parking lot.
The kid snaps shut his phone. “Alright,” he says, glancing around at the scattered group. They’re all strewn across parking lot asphalt and grass bank, and he clearly wishes he could go back five seconds and call for attention first, but at the same time he’s obviously too proud or insecure to restart in public. Damien finds watching this kid to be the most fascinating part of his job today, and his day has included an exploding gas leak.
“Alright, so, here’s what we’re going to do. For the rest of today, we can’t get any work done with the way it is now, in the warehouse, so instead we are going to spend the day cleaning up. There is going to be a lot of soot the firefighters tell me, we have mops and sponges, we must clean as much as possible of the warehouse so that it remains usable.”
“You want us to go back in there?” the old white guy heckles. “You’re fuckin’ nuts, kid.”
“This is our job for today. Tomorrow you will be sent a new address to work at temporarily, while other crews clean up here, but for today, since we’re all here already, this is what we are going to do.”
The employees are nervous. Damien is cursing internally — he’d been looking forward to going home early and lighting up. He suspects this kid was told to let them go, and is keeping them illegally to try and clean up the mess, before his dad gets there and beats him for it. Damien briefly considers that he might not be the one deepest in shit here, and actually sympathizes with the kid for half a second, before remembering what the kid is about to make him do. Then he starts cursing again.
The high school students are whispering to each other anxiously. Damien swore there had been three, but the chip sometimes blurred details like that. He looks back towards the warehouse, and can see firefighters moving in the smoke.
“You couldn’t pay me enough, man, I’m going home.”
“I will have to note your unexcused absence and report it. You will lose pay.”
“Man, fuck you, I told you, you couldn’t pay me enough.”
“Please people,” the kid sighs, heavily, “let’s not make this harder than it is.”
Damien is pretty sure he could scrub at the blackened aluminum with muriatic acid and it wouldn’t come clean. It’s permanently wrecked. Melt it down and start over. The black got baked in, yet every time Damien swabs the soapy cloth over the metal again it always comes away running gray with sooty water. He’s beginning to lose his grip, washing away endless layers of char in the broiling metal sun. The A/C is out. They’d had to cut the power. The firefighters had said ‘no one go in there’, but as soon as they were gone it was ‘let’s get to work’. He still hasn’t seen a third high school student, but he had seen an ambulance, but the kid told him that was just to check on everyone. A paramedic had asked him if he was alright. Damien managed to get a bottle of water off the guy.
Damien stands up, rolling the kinks out of his back. He looks around. The Venezuelan woman is pushing a wheelbarrow of soggy, burnt papers. The old black dude has been wordlessly carting boxes of ruined goods off to the dumpster all afternoon. Damien doesn’t even know what the old guy’s voice sounds like. The old guy is in survival mode, trying to just hang on until the bell.
Damien walks around for a bit, and hears a commotion. Murmuring voices, scuffling of feet. It’s coming from the manager’s office. He walks towards the door, wondering what’s going on. It’s not his business, but he’s stopped thinking of this as a low paying job. The ashen warehouse is his life now.
Damien decides to swing the door open confidently, as if he has a purpose to be in the room. It’s a good thing he does, because it let’s him get the lay of the land quickly. It’s the fat guy and the black chick, his shadow obscuring her body. Damien hears, more than he sees, the woman straightening her clothing, brushing herself off. The fat guy is staring at Damien, eyes unreadable between the tattoos. The girl’s eyes, however, are very readable, since the overhead light is glinting off her tears.
The fat guy starts walking toward the doorway, making as if to get past Damien, who blocks him off. They stare down for a second, but before either can say anything, the kid bursts in.
“Hey!” he shouts. “Hey, hey, why are you all in here? What kind of a party are you having in the office, when there’s work to be done?” He looks around the room — catches sight of the black girl, the state she’s in, and quickly looks away. “Please, everyone, get out there and keep working. We need to clean up as much as possible. Your shift is almost up. Just please, go.” He starts straightening papers on the desk, not making eye contact with any of them.
Damien walks out between the other man and the girl, and tries to figure out what to do next. He makes eye contact with her, and she nods at him. She’s regained her composure quickly, now she just looks angry. “Thanks,” she says.
“Yeah,” Damien says, “you want me to do anything else?” He looks around, but the fat guy has already made scarce.
She shakes her head. “No, I, I’m going to… tomorrow…”
Damien waits for her to finish her thought, looking at the pores on her nose. They glisten with sweat, dusky light in the smoke, dirt caked over skin over cartilage, the surface of the moon, he traces the Sea of Tranquility across her cheek with his sight through the barrel of a dusty telescope in his eye as the tttttime markeddddd-
He stares at the woman who he presumably just finished a shift with, and wonders what they must have been talking about. Then he realizes he feels dirty. And smoky. The air is hot, his clothes are ruined, and his body feels exhausted. They both look around at the ruined warehouse, their equally oblivious coworkers, and each other. Damien and the woman burst out laughing at the same time.
“We must have had a hell of a shift,” she says.
“Hot damn, am I glad I don’t remember whatever just happened,” Damien jokes.
They wave goodbye to each other. Damien walks past a couple of teenagers on his way out of the building, both apparently trying to phone a friend. He waves goodbye to an old black guy, who just looks at him and shakes his head.
“What’s wrong, Gramps?” Damien asks. He feels exhausted, but good, somehow. As if he’d just experienced an adrenaline rush.
“This place‘s a mess,” the old man mutters. “You got a chip?”
Damien shrugs. “Yeah, sure, why not?”
The old guy shakes his head again. “Should get it taken out.” He picks up another box. “This place’s a mess,” he says again.
Damien chooses to ignore him, and walks out of the warehouse into the late afternoon sun.
