An Ocean of Minutes

by Thea Lim

  In the blue light of the evening, between the cushions on the floor, Polly and Frank fall asleep.

  Because Polly was new, she had to take the top bunk. It was days before she could sleep with that sheet of steel ceiling a foot from her face. She slept with her head under a pillow, in case of cockroaches. With the night chill there were hardly any, but the threat of feelers in the mouth was enough.

  Container 4A1 slept twenty: five bunks on either side, head to foot. Never was there a time when you didn’t hear speaking or breathing or spitting. The closest to privacy you could get was to stare at the wall. Once, they had put up sheets between the bunk beds, like cubicle partitions. Everyone liked this and some even gave up a blanket to make their wall. But one day they came back from work and the sheets had been removed. A notice was left, saying that items hung from the ceiling were considered a fire hazard.

  Everyone kept their few clothes and bedding and toothbrushes in bags tied to the bed railing, but bag straps snapped and dumped their contents. Things carefully collected went missing right away. No one could keep order. You couldn’t move without brushing wet plastic or cardboard. The air had a mealy smell, like metal and raw meat. Strange hair was in your mouth. They were haggard from the effort of peaceful endurance.

  Most people would have been able to manage a day, two days, in the containers; someone stoic, like Donna, would have done fine with a week. It was not the conditions but days of conditions, tied together. Like the threads of a rope rubbing the same ring of skin again and again, until all seven layers are gone.

  Container 4A1 was closest to the highway, no protection from the elements and the lookie-loos. Deeper into the compound, better conditions could be found. Some sold months or years to TimeRaiser to live better. No containers had plumbing, but some had electricity—lights and radios to cut the time. You could pay for any number of upgrades. Electricity, longer water hours, bedding, space heaters. A long, thick trench between the regular containers and the electrified containers prohibited freeloaders on the edge of light or music.

  Twelve minutes’ walk away, in an abandoned brewery part-condemned for asbestos, damp like a hole in the ground, crisscrossed by fallen catwalks and tumbled titanic piping, women made tiles for the bottoms of swimming pools, for decorative sidewalks, for bathroom floors in beautiful places in other worlds. Most of the workers made new tiles, working together at long tables in what used to be a brewhouse, each section completing a different part of the tile’s cycle: mixing, glazing, cutting. When they realized Polly didn’t speak Spanish and couldn’t keep up with the calls, they assigned her to the bespoke line. She worked alone in what used to be a freezer—a windowless, timeless box—cutting old plates into minuscule tiles. Floral plates, glass plates, blue-and-white plates, souvenir plates. The line’s first client was Gulf Pearl Vacation Homes, who wanted a bohemian flower-power touch for their new phase of chalets.

  On her first day, she had to buy sixty dollars’ worth of tools—a pair of nippers and a pair of callipers—so she could cut the tiles to their perfect size: round, square, rectangle, irregular. The big tiles were fine, but the mini ones, sometimes a quarter inch in diameter, could drive her to despair. Even the foreman, who hardly ever came by, once paused to watch her struggle with the intricate pieces. “Customers assume we have a machine do this,” he said. After the tiles were cut, she sorted them by shape, color, and size into bins, like filling a drum a drop at a time.

  She would rather have worked the lowest jobs. She would have rather harvested swamp cabbage, wading out in coagulated waters as snakes writhed around her knees, knowing that, if the stagnant, bubbled surface was burst by the head of a gator, she wouldn’t make it back. Up north, they bought the greens in capsules, two dollars a pill, as an immune-system booster.

  She would rather have shucked oysters and come home with bloody hands, stinking of the rotting sea. Polly would rather have done anything than spend every day as she did, alone in the tile-cutting box, in the unsafe place of her mind. A tangle of hotspots and land mines wreathed around the thought of what to do beyond the end of her bond: a yawning steppe of life, to be filled alone.

  The only salve was if she could get into a rhythm. Grab the edge of the plate on DON’T, clamp the nippers on THINK, cut on AB-B-OU-OU-UT, toss the tile on IT. Four hundred of these made up one hour. It was a blessing she had no more Sundays. There were no limits on how many days the H-1s were assigned to work.

  The women said to each other, “Don’t worry: only a few more weeks and it’ll be April.” Or “We could be in Missouri.” The cold was enduring. It got into their beds. At the showers, naked and wet in the February dark, they felt like only bones, with no more flesh. But the cold was not the true problem with the shower pit. The problem was that Polly had seen the pit from the outside.

  She could think of nothing worse than Misty or Sandy catching her inside the pit, their faces gazing down, their lips mouthing, What a shame. She would’ve showered in the dark, but the water barrels were only filled twice a day, and once the water was gone, the only option was to sleep covered in the glue of your own juices—which is what Polly did, until her skin started to burn and itch. So she bathed as fast as she could, sickening tremors running up the inside of her rib cage, like she was robbing a house, ready to bolt. Sometimes the bus came. She’d run, without rinsing, the soap dribbling down her hairline and into her eyes. She’d wait by the ladder to her bunk bed until the bus was gone. She would’ve waited on her bed, but then she’d get the sheets all tacky, and laundry was high-priced.

  One evening this happened and, while she waited inside, her eyes crying from the soap, she had an epiphany. All the times she had seen the women in the pit from the shuttle, she had thought, Those poor things, and partly what she was thinking was, Thank God that couldn’t happen to me. But meanwhile all the women in the pit were thinking, How could this have happened to me? This was very funny, this gash between the expected and the actual, and she started to laugh. The women lying nearby tried not to stare.

  By the time Polly got back to the pit, the water drum was empty. She dabbed the inside with her towel, but there was not enough wet to wipe the burning off her skin.

  “Take this,” someone said. “Please.”

  A woman who slept in 4A1 stood over her, holding out a bottle of water.

  “I always fill a bottle before bed. Take it.”

  Polly poured out a drop, not wanting to take more than the woman planned to give.

  “You can have it all. No hay problema,” the woman said.

  When Polly went in, the woman was waiting at her bed.

  “Do you want to look at my book?” The woman held out an exercise book. “I collect inspirational sayings.”

  Polly had to turn the pages of the yellowed exercise book gingerly so as not to detach them. Each saying had its own page, with illustrations. Life has many chapters for us; one bad chapter doesn’t mean it’s the end of the book. Rain clouds and rainbows drawn beside Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about dancing in the rain.

  “Very nice,” Polly said. The woman looked Chinese. She was under five feet tall, with wide-set eyes and a wrinkly neck.

  “How about this one? It’s good if you’re a new arrival.” She opened the book to Every end is a new beginning. “If you have a favorite one, you can write it down.” She held out a pencil.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Go on, take it.”

  “No!” Polly shouted. She hated this woman. She hated her for so conscientiously collecting these sayings and printing them out in her big, stupid script, and soppily sharing them with other needy-looking people.

  But the woman only shrugged.

  “Too bad,” she said, and went back to her bunk.

  Polly’s bunkmate who had, till then, always been pleasant said, “Stuck-up brat.”

  Polly climbed into her bed. She was shaking. I’m not stuck-up. If you had gone through what I’ve gone through, you’d
act the same way.

  But her neighbor had likely gone through everything Polly had, and worse. Yet now Polly could hear her sleeping, her breathing even and sure.

  Polly was not sure of anything. It’d taken only months to break the unit that she and Frank made. It was this fact—not the time machine, nor captives that lived in shipping containers—that called into question every other fact of her life. How love could neatly and unremarkably stop; that was more impossible and terrible than traveling through all of time.

  Sometimes in the mornings, when she was trying to leave for work, if she sat on the bed to put on her socks, Frank would crawl up behind her and wrap his arms around her waist. “I’m a deadweight,” he would say. “I’m a barnacle and I won’t let go.”

  * * *

  To get to work, Polly walked twelve minutes from the container field to the brewery, from Forty-First Street to Thirty-Third Street, along the parched tongue that was Church Street. After sundown, she could see the glow of the resorts on the horizon, on the other side of the miles-long midden of broken doors and dirt. She was at the bottom of a moat of darkness, circling a castle of light.

  They got their three daily meals at work. They got beans, pickled vegetables, usually cabbage, and every now and again a piece of dried fish, so salty it stung your tongue. “It’s only temporary,” they all said to each other. Sometimes the women brought in vegetables to share. Someone lived near a squash patch or some cucumber plants. The day after her tantrum, a bag of carrots was circulated. They took one each, marveling at their barky sweetness. Polly saved hers to give to the woman with the sayings, wrapping it in an old cloth before she put it in her pocket.

  Once a week they cleaned the showers, using thick-bristled brushes to drive soap scum and hair out and under the walls. When Polly saw the woman with the sayings heading to the showers with a bucket of brushes, she turned to her bunkmate.

  “Diana, are you on shower duty this week?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’ll do it for you.”

  Diana had already donned the communal galoshes. She looked at Polly suspiciously. She shrugged.

  “Your choice,” she said, and removed the boots.

  “Hello,” the woman said when Polly entered the pit.

  Polly handed her the carrot.

  “What’s that for?” the woman said, and dropped it in her pocket. “I’m Cookie.”

  “Polly.”

  “Mucho gusto. What do you do?”

  “Tile factory. You?”

  “Just got promoted to topiary. I’m learning the standard shapes: spiral, poodle, double spiral, Michelangelo. When did you arrive?” Cookie turned on the hose and water glugged across the pit.

  “Last September. You?” Polly asked.

  “October ’97.”

  “Is your bond up soon?”

  “Almost halfway. Twenty-four more months. How much longer you got?”

  “When I started in September, it was thirty-two months, because I had a good job. But I made a mistake and got demoted. They restarted my bond at forty-four months.” She said this quick, like trying to swallow something without tasting it. “I’m going backwards in time.”

  “That’s too bad.” Cookie handed her a broom. “What year did you leave?”

  “1981.”

  “ ’81! Never met someone from so early. You must be real adventurous.”

  “Maybe just dumb.”

  “Nah. Where you from?”

  “Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo. That’s a ways from Mexico.”

  “Yes, it is,” Polly said, confused. “Are you from Mexico?”

  “No. I’m from 1985 Oklahoma. Before, Vietnam.”

  They started their scrubbing. Old soap squatting in the pores of the pavement foamed in gray clods.

  “Why did you mention Mexico?” Polly asked.

  “I thought you were from Mexico. You’re not from Mexico?”

  “No.”

  “Guatemala?”

  “Buffalo. You’re not from Mexico? You speak Spanish.”

  “Well, I pick up words here and there from the other girls. You ain’t Hispanic?”

  “No. I look Hispanic?”

  “People might think so.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What are you?”

  “Caucasian.”

  “Only Caucasian?”

  “My father was Lebanese, but I didn’t know him, and nobody ever said I looked anything but Caucasian. I don’t know why everyone here speaks Spanish to me.”

  “Everyone? Like other Hispanic people?”

  “I don’t know.” She thought of the women she worked with in the tile factory, and of Norberto. “No. Other Caucasians.”

  Cookie laughed. “It’s because you’re a laborer.” She had reached the edge of the pit. She leaned against her broom. “What did you do before? Before you traveled.”

  “I was an upholsterer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I fixed furniture.”

  “Oh yeah? Can you make furniture?”

  “Sort of. Mostly I make old furniture new again.”

  “Is that high-end work? You made a good living?”

  “I was just starting out, but people can do okay.”

  “So you looked white until you went broke. That’s funny.”

  “I don’t think that’s right,” Polly said. “It might be because I have a tan.”

  Cookie nodded knowingly. A thick gold chain, like the kind Carlo wore, had been knocked outside her collar by the vigor of her scrubbing. She noticed it there and tucked it quickly back under her coveralls.

  “My son’s,” she said, patting the chain beneath her collar. “We arrived from 1985 together, but right away he was taken to work construction in the Gulf. I got transferred down here to be close to him, but I can’t find him. Though maybe he’s not here. Could be in Corpus Christi.” She rubbed the underside of her chin. “Everyone has a story like this,” she said, as if to anticipate dismissal.

  “You don’t have any leads on where he could be?”

  Cookie shook her head. “Where to even look?”

  “Did you try the Demographics Center?”

  “What’s that?”

  Polly straightened in surprise. She had knowledge to offer someone else.

  “You’ll have to go into debt. It’ll extend your bond,” she said, one to give bad news first.

  Cookie shrugged. “Lay it on me.”

  Polly explained how the center worked.

  “But this is amazing,” Cookie said.

  She explained when it was open and how Cookie would have to bargain for time to go.

  “Amazing . . . amazing!” Cookie said.

  “It’s no big deal,” Polly said.

  She drew Cookie a map on the back of a piece of paper taken from her book of sayings, so that she wouldn’t get lost.

  “Simply amazing,” she said, and Polly felt uneasy. What kind of disappointment was she setting this woman up for?

  “They might find nothing. They found nothing for me.”

  Then she wished she hadn’t said this. She sounded like Sandy. She didn’t want to be old and craggy.

  But Cookie’s delight was resilient.

  “You have to find a good attitude. Look and hope that your missing person comes back, but your life cannot be based on that. Make friends. Make plans. Move on. If you pause your life until your missing person shows up, you will never be happy.”

  “You’re not going to go to the Demographics Center?” Polly was disappointed. Her offering was no good.

  “Of course I’ll go! But a fool will lose tomorrow reaching back for yesterday.”

  “Who said that?” Polly asked begrudgingly.

  “Dionne Warwick,” she said.

  * * *

  The next week Polly was walking the final stretch of Church Street, when she saw a clutch of women gathered around Cookie in a slip of sunshine beside 4A1. One by one, each of the women handle
d the receipt the Demographics Center had issued Cookie. They chattered in Spanish and Vietnamese, but Polly caught some English.

  “Just a few weeks and they can tell you where he is?”

  “So fast!”

  “But it cost you two months.”

  “If we start a cundina, I can do a search.”

  “There she is!” Cookie cried. “The one who showed me!”

  “Ahhh,” the women said all together, and when she reached them, they started to clap.

  Polly giggled, terrified. The air was infused with unhedged expectations. They looked at her, maybe waiting for her to say something, and she did not want the first words out of her mouth to be negative, but the temptation to pad them in case of a fall was excruciating.

  “Look at your face!” Cookie shouted. “She’s worried we’ll be disappointed. Shoot for the moon! Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

  They laughed and squeezed her into the circle and patted her shoulders. They handed her the receipt so she could look too, and by the light of their excitement it did seem like a harbinger of possibility.

  How nice it was to be in that circle of warm bodies, released from the misery of possessing only solo concerns, like a din you hear only when it stops. A narrow world opened.

  “Who’s that?” Cookie said.

  A man was by the container door, twisting his baseball hat in his hands.

  “It’s Norberto,” Polly said, even though she couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Hello,” Norberto said. “How are you? Can we talk?”