by Joe Sullivan
In the end, it didn't matter. Those dreams vanished. Fate yanked your opportunities away, dissolving your plans like mist in the morning sun, and suddenly?
You began to disappear.
#
After everything fell apart you spent several weeks lying around the apartment, ignoring phone calls from creditors and watching endless television programs about nothing. Dinners consisted of frozen meals washed down by the cheapest beer money could buy. Clothes you washed every other day or so, because it wasn't like anyone was around to smell them, anyway. Shaving took too much effort, but instead of a uniform beard, a patchwork of rough and uneven stubble covered your cheeks and chin, making you look homeless, and, oddly enough, five years younger. Like a child trying to grow whiskers in a desperate effort to appear grown-up.
Eventually you accept reality. Savings had dwindled. The fridge is empty, cupboards bare. You lie to yourself, however, thinking: this is only a setback. A bump in the road. Just need to get back on your feet. Find something to pay the bills until opportunity knocks.
So you turn off the television and start searching the Internet classifieds on a smartphone with only a week left on its plan. Looking for that perfect bounce-back job.
I'll show them, you think. Because you still have ambition. Still have drive. You'll adapt and overcome. Turn lemons into lemonade. Rain into rainbows. Whatever. This isn't the end.
It isn't.
#
Word travels fast, unfortunately. Especially after falling so hard. After two weeks, only one employer calls back. You debate for a day about keeping the interview. It's the most faceless job. Deep inside, you know taking it is the first step off the stage, an acceptance of your new place in the show: as part of the backdrop. A prop, nothing more.
This is only temporary.
Something to help you back onto your feet. You'll keep applying. Keep calling for interviews. This isn't the end.
It isn't.
#
At the end of a dull twenty-minute interview basically confirming proof of life, you accept the job. “Recycling materials handler in charge of brand sorting.” Or, in plain language, a soda and beer can sorter. At The Can Man, a redeemable can and bottle recycling center just outside Clifton Heights.
Sitting in a small office, you despair. The Can Man's manager—a thin middle-aged man with a grizzled face and watery eyes—goes over tax forms and other papers sent from the Personnel office (it seems odd that a can redemption center would have a Personnel office, but you're too preoccupied to worry about it). After several minutes, the manager slides the documents across the desk.
You sign numbly on the highlighted lines, not really reading them. After several minutes, you slide them back across the desk. The manager grunts his approval, which makes it official: you start your new career the following week.
Pending a drug screen, of course.
#
Unbelievable enough, three months later and it's another workday in a quickly blurring week. You pull behind the The Can Man, a dingy-white warehouse located along Route 28 North. Shift is 8-5. Monday through Friday, Saturdays and Sundays off. Half-hour lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And, a solid dental and health plan.
There's that, at least.
After parking, you enter. The backdoor screeches on rusty hinges. You pass the manager's office. He glances up from paperwork, face unreadable. He sizes you up for a heartbeat before returning his gaze wordlessly to his desk. That's the most he ever acknowledges you. After the first few weeks you asked a co-worker—a skinny guy named Jerry—why the manager never says hello.
“Why would he?” Jerry shrugged. “Why bother makin’ friends? Turnover is too high, man.”
Later, (how long, you don't exactly know) you wanted to ask him what he meant, but you discover Jerry's no longer working at The Can Man, apparently part of that turnover himself.
He's not the only one. There's also John, who used to sort glass bottles out back. The big guy with red hair who limped on his right leg. You only chatted occasionally, but he seemed nice enough. It's odd how much he knew about politics. Like he'd done something much different before The Can Man.
You remember talking about the upcoming presidential election at his locker in The Can Man's tiny breakroom. “It's a complex situation,” John said as he hung a CAT hat in his locker. “Everyone hates the president, and with good reason. God, he's loathsome. But the Democrats can't make anyone care about their platforms. I hate to say this...but that fat shit is probably going to win again.”
You've never cared about politics, so you just nodded and changed the subject to the picture hanging on the inside of his locker. It's him standing with some guys wearing matching jerseys in a bowling alley. “You bowl?”
John smiled. “Yeah. Our team won the league last year. I bowled in high school. Senior year went to state finals. Some folks thought I could go pro. Went to college instead. Pursued the 'practical dream.'”
He shut the locker and gave you a resigned smile. “That worked out great, huh?”
One morning, some indeterminate time later, he wasn't at work. No one said a word. Several days passed, still no John. When you asked the manager, he offered nothing but a vague shoulder shrug with a blank look before returning to his paperwork.
A few days after, out of curiosity, you slipped into the break room and opened John's locker. Inside hung his CAT hat, which you thought strange. He never forgot to put that on before leaving for the day. Also, still hanging on the inside of the locker's door was a picture of a bowling team. Oddly enough...you couldn't find John in it anywhere. Even now, you have a hard time remembering if he'd actually been in the picture, or if you're imagining that.
When you swipe your card through the digital time clock, it's hard to remember exactly what John looked like. You remember the limp and the red hair, but that's all. His face is nothing but an indistinct smear. Even his strangely cultured voice you can't remember. As each day passes, he fades more from your mind.
In fact, the last memory you have of him is bumping into him at the end of a workday, him mumbling something about Personnel needing to see him.
You never saw him again.
You shrug off those thoughts and return your timecard to your wallet. Pull rubber gloves from your back pocket, slip them on and head toward your sorting station in the building’s far corner.
There they are, waiting. Bags of soda and beer cans. The pile never gets smaller. It doesn’t matter how slow or fast you work. It doesn't matter how big a dent you make by the day's end. Tomorrow the pile will still reach to the ceiling.
You grab several bags, drag them into the sorting bin, tear them open and dump their contents out. Cans roll with metallic rustles and dings. The sour aroma of old beer makes your stomach lurch, but only a little. You're getting used to it.
Mouth-breathing, you plunge rubber-gloved hands into the mounds of slick cans, which glimmer under the lights. Some squirt away. Others stick to your gloves. They tear loose with a fleshy sound.
You've gotten used to this, also.
You snag two Pepsi and two RC Cola cans with each hand. Turn and flick them into an empty rubber garbage can to your left. Next, you find four Budweiser cans and toss them into a can directly behind you, with barely a backward glance. Next, two Cokes and two Sprites, to your right.
A simple job which demands mindless repetition. When you fill a garbage can, you carry it to another sorter at the opposite end of the warehouse, who double-checks your work and then bags them for collection. All day you turn and throw. Memorizing which distributor goes into which garbage can.
As the days blend into each other you think less about applying for other jobs or looking for new contacts. As you continue to turn and throw, dreams fade, as surely as...John?...faded from The Can Man. Turning and throwing, you feel yourself blending into the background. You wonder how much longer before you disappear from The Can Man, as John di
d.
Still, you comfort yourself with a mantra which doesn't seem to have much meaning anymore: Only temporary.
This is only temporary.
#
Hours pass. You snatch four cans of Penguin soda. Turn sharply and flick them into a garbage can two rows back and directly behind you. Wincing at the small but insistent ache which has been blossoming in your lower back since morning. Turning and throwing five days a week has twisted up your lower back muscles, despite your lathering up each morning with warming cream. The topical analgesic only lasts until your first fifteen-minute break, when you have to hide in The Can Man's rank bathroom to rub on more.
You push through. This is only temporary. You just need to pay some bills. You won't disappear. You'll find a better job, and when you do, you won't disappear from The Can Man. You'll make a respectable but visible show of quitting. You won't disappear and be forgotten, like...John, you finally remember. You won't disappear like John.
You won't.
For the moment, however, you push away those hopes and keep working. A glance at the clock shows how little time has passed. You sigh and bury hands in sour-smelling cans. Often, they're filled with rancid chewing tobacco, water-logged old cigarettes, or other indefinable masses.
Only three more hours until lunch.
You pluck, twist and throw.
Telling yourself that low chuckling is a DJ telling jokes on the muted radio station playing through The Can Man's tinny ceiling speakers. Not the universe laughing at your insignificance.
#
Work over, home at last, you stand in the shower, eyes closed, breathing deeply, soaking in hot, pelting sprays. After spending the day saturated with the odor of sour beer, bargain-brand soap smells heavenly pure.
Some idiot tossed an unopened can of Budweiser into one of their black plastic bags, which had absorbed enough heat to make it warm to the touch. When you emptied its contents, that pressure-swollen Budweiser slipped out and smacked onto the hard, concrete floor. It exploded into a beer monsoon which you caught full in the face as you tried to catch it before it fell. Even now, you smell traces of beer lingering under soap.
Eyes still closed, you raise your hands, rub your face, sighing as the warm water relaxes sore muscles, cutting your mind adrift. You stretch, lower back protesting. Shut the water off, pull back the flimsy curtain and ease out of the shower. Moving slowly around the bathroom, you dry and then dress. Your body reports its hunger, though eating—like many things, these days—doesn't interest you much.
#
Several hours later, you're sitting very still on the futon before your flat-screen television, a relic from the days when you were “making your mark.” Your meal—a bowl of microwaved ravioli—has long since congealed. You're watching a talk show you can't seem to follow.
You lean back, close your eyes and rub the middle of your forehead, which aches, dully. Haven't sent any new applications out in weeks. Or followed up on others. Thoughts of strategies to reclaim your spot in the game have all leaked away.
You're fading.
Disappearing, and you can't seem to stop it.
You open your eyes, stretch and grunt, joints aching. It hurts, but the weird thing is, you like it. Something about the pain reaffirms your existence.
After untold hours sitting and staring at a television show you can't follow—and apparently finishing your congealed Ravioli, because the bowl is empty when you place it into the sink—you go to bed. Sleep comes quickly, as it always does, the one blessing of manual labor.
#
You dream of scrambling through a maze whose walls seem to be made of white plastic bags stacked higher than you can see. You're looking for a large man with red hair, who limps. You don't know why. Only that it seems vital to find him.
As you scramble madly through the maze, something throbs at its center. It screams in a language which doesn't sound human. Though those words fill you with a cold bowel-clenching dread, they pull you forward, their hypnotic cadence jerking you along as if you're nothing but a puppet on strings. Despite the icy terror clutching your heart, you long to find the source of those screams. You need to make your way to the maze's throbbing center, to join with It, to become It, to sink into its faceless, amorphous ooze...
Rounding a corner too quickly, you trip, fall, and tumble into a wall. You'd imagined the bags full of cans, but as you crash into them, they give like soft, spongy tissue. Their slimy touch fills you with revulsion.
You try to roll away but can't. The bags have closed around your left foot and thigh and are sucking you inward. You beat against the soft fleshy things which aren't bags, at all. They're like pulsating sacs filled with fluid, and in those sacks, hands reach and stretch membranous tissue, grabbing you, pulling you farther inward. Faces press there too, mouths wide in soundless screams, as soundless as your screams when the fleshy sacs close over and fill your mouth and push their spongy tissue down your throat.
#
When you wake in the morning, you recognize the maze immediately. The Sweat House. You dreamed of getting lost in The Sweat House, and for the first time in a while, you remember the large man's name—John.
#
At the end of another featureless workday, a bag of cans clatters at your feet. It was thrown there by one of your co-workers. A young guy named Sammy. Or Steve. Something like that. You can’t remember. For a moment, 'John' slips into your mind, then fades just as quickly.
You stoop and grab the bag. Stand and jam it into the pile before you. Mounds of white plastic bags, bulging with cans, reach to the cramped room’s ceiling.
Another bag rustles at your feet.
You sigh. Crack your neck, wipe your forehead on the already sodden shoulder of your shirt. Bend, grab the bag and turn, searching for space. You feel tired and aggravated. Haven't been sleeping well, plagued by dreams you can't remember when you wake. Something inside, however, says you should.
You should.
Regardless, the lack of sleep has made this part of the day even worse. It's your turn to work in the sweltering confines of the old three-story house next door to The Can Man. What your co-workers appropriately call The Sweat House. After the cans are sorted and re-sorted, then bagged according to their distributors, you and several other workers pack them into the peeling white house, storing them until distributors come to take them.
You scan the wall of bags. While you look, two more bags land at your feet. Finally, you spy a gap near the top. You stretch and stuff the bag you're holding into place. Then you step back, grab the bags lying at your feet as perspiration runs down your face, stinging your eyes, dripping off the end of your nose.
You manage to jam these bags into the same gap at the top. Turn in time to catch another bag, which you drop onto the floor. You wipe a grimy forearm over your face, breathing in rotten wood, sour beer and sickly-sweet soda. “Hold up!”
“How much room we got in there?” a distant voice replies. Ben, you think. Peter? No, Brad. It's Brad. He's not a friend, really. No one makes friends here, right? Even so, you and Brad have chatted the last few weeks about basketball, which you both played in high school. As it turns out, in the same league. You don't remember each other, but you remember the same players, and you also spent your summers on the same asphalt courts in Old Forge.
You glance around the room. Its mottled, water stained walls are bereft of wallpaper. Someone ripped up the carpet long ago, which is fortunate. The thought of it soaking up years of spoiled beer and old soda turns your stomach.
The ceiling stucco is poked through with holes showing partially rotted ceiling beams. A bare, flickering light bulb hangs from a twisted tangle of wires, giving off the only light in the room. Bags obscure the room’s windows.
This house died years ago. Now The Can Man uses its carcass like maggots teeming inside a dead animal rotting in the sun. Planting white bags of cans...like eggs.
A dead house.
Full of white squishy
eggs.
“Hey,” Brad (Peter?) calls again, sounding even further away, “How much room we got?”
You swallow and glance around the room again, ignoring its decay this time, dispassionately sizing up how much space remains. Figure in your head, then call out, “Two, maybe three more rows. At the most.”
“Okay,” Brad calls back. “That room is Budweiser, right?”
It's an important question. When distributors come to collect their returns, they wanted to do it quickly, so The Can Man stored all the cans by distributor in The Sweat House's rooms. That way, distributors could load bags onto their trucks without checking. When The Can Man mixed up bags in distributor loads, they got fined by the distributor, which was taken out of the offending party's paycheck.
Because you can't afford to lose the money, you check a few bags and see that, indeed, Brad is correct. “Yeah, it's all Bud!”
“Okay,” Brad calls back, “we got a bunch of Genesee bags here, and we filled the Genny room yesterday. They come first thing tomorrow. Bud doesn't come until next week. Gonna toss the Genny bags in. Put them aside, and I'll make sure when their truck comes, we'll grab those first.”
You scowl, because this is how it's happened at least once since you started. Tomorrow, if Brad forgets to load those Genesee bags with the others, they'll get loaded with the Budweiser bags next week. When the screw-up is discovered, whose name will be on the list as working in The Sweat House the day of the mistake?
Yours.
“Don't forget!” you yell. “I don't wanna take shit for your screw-up!”
“No worries! Heads up!”
Two more bags—full of Genesee beer cans—thump at your feet. You turn and pick them up, trying your best to push away your thoughts of things pushing out of egg sacs—you fail, miserably.
#
As you make for the exit, resigned to another evening sitting before the television eating microwaved food, Brad walks by, irritation wrinkling his brow. “What's wrong?”