The buzzer rang. Instantly the second floor’s metal door banged open and people came whisking in—Paul had escaped just in time. Standing in the shipping office, he looked over the partial partition and watched the Vietnamese guys from sanding file into the caf. They looked back across the room at him and the first one, who every day wore the same denim jacket and baseball cap, smirked.
Fuckin’greasy little animals, Paul sneered internally. They thought he was a joke? Animals was the wrong word. Animals were dignified, pure—more pure and spiritually advanced than man. In touch. He always amended himself when he called people animals.
A kid from post-ops saw a candy bar unopened on a table. He scooped it up quickly and sat at a further table. He smirked at himself.
««—»»
Paul’s crew joined him in the shipping office. At once, five cigarettes ignited in celebration. Paul seated himself behind Ted’s desk, Abby at the other desk. Maureen flopped in the black bean bag chair. There were folding metal chairs to be unfolded. Things got a bit crowded. Jean chose to stand in the doorway, leaning against the partition’s threshold. She watched Paul hum to himself and doodle on a pad. He belched loudly, said in an English accent, “Sorry.”
“That’s gross,” Jean said.
“Isn’t it, though? But on the planet Mahoobie, burping is considered a fine art.”
“I knew you were from another planet,” Jean said, half masking a true sentiment.
Paul smirked and doodled, seeing beyond her half mask.
“Oh, I’m so tired,” Maureen moaned, curling up in the bean bag chair. “Wake me up at midnight, Paulie.”
“Can I tuck you in and read a bedtime story?”
“Wouldya pleez?”
“Nah.”
“Oh, you tease.” Maureen sat up. “Draw me a picture, Paul. Okay?”
“Like what?”
“Can you draw a unicorn?”
“Mmm…maybe. Why is it all girls love cute little whimsical phallic unicorns—boy, I wonder.”
“What’s phallic mean?”
Paul just hummed and stretched. Maureen came over to sit on the desk’s edge, her hair hanging down to touch his head. “You’re so talented.”
“Yeah, I know, but enough about my burping.”
Across the room came Tim, Abby’s husband, and Brad, Jean’s boyfriend—two of the six man second shift molding crew. Tim was short and muscular, with a scruffy beard and thick glasses, Brad tall and lanky, with drawling voice and motions. Both were greasy and filthy from their work, Brad particularly at odds with Jean’s Vogue image.
“That’s it, time to go home,” Tim called out before they had reached the shipping office. He and Brad stepped in. “The heads are down.”
“What?” Paul said, coming alert.
“The panel shorted out,” Brad said. “Dave’s sendin’ the molders home.”
“He can’t,” Abby said. “How am I supposed to get home if Tim goes home now? He has to go all the way to Hudson and then come back for me?”“Dave said there’s not enough work in masking or post-ops or he’d put us there,” Brad said, shrugging. “As a matter of fact, post-ops is out’ve work and Dave thinks he’ll have to send them home.”
“No,” said Paul.
“You don’t have enough work for them up here, right?”
“No—we’ve got enough to keep us busy tonight and we might even have to milk it a bit.”
Jean complained, “Well how am I gonna get home if you leave?”
“Why don’t we all just go home,” Donna said, mostly to herself.
“What shorted out?” Maureen said.
Brad answered, “The control panel that all the heads are hooked up to.”
“What are the heads?”
“The plastic injectors—they’re like hoses you insert into the molds.
Reaction injection molding—you know, R.I.M.? Rim Corp?” That was the name of their company. “There are five heads in one room and one in the other, and our five are all tied into one control system…it tells the heads how much to shoot, for how long to shoot. Dave can’t fuck with it because frankly he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
“It’s still early…why doesn’t he call Roy?” Paul asked. Roy was the first shift building supervisor.
“He tried callin’ him four times already but Roy’s phone is busy or somethin’—he can’t get him. Off the hook,” said Tim. “But Dave can’t even use a phone right…I should try Roy.”
“You know his home number?”
Tim pulled a grubby, warped spiral pad out of his back pocket, paged to a list of telephone numbers. “I’ll get him in here.” He used the phone on Ted’s desk.
“Come on,” drawled Brad, “why spoil a godsend? Man.”
“Company man,” cracked Donna.
`“Really.”
Tim wagged his head, held out the receiver. A busy signal. He hung up. “I dunno.”
“Call Gary,” Abby said. Gary was the plant’s big foreman, the head man under the owner.
“Fuck that,” Brad said. “ I need a night off. How often does the panel konk out? I wanna get outta here and fast before Dave gets it goin’ or before post-ops finds they do have some work put aside.”
“What a night, huh?” Paul said. He returned to the unicorn.
“So what about my transportation, Brad?” Jean continued.
“Okay, look.” Abby took control. Al Haig, thought Paul sometimes.
‘Brad, you take Timmy home now and drop him off. When we get out I’ll take our car and drop Jean off. Right?”
“Mm, I suppose. Might as well.”
“It beats you and Tim hanging around getting drunk in a bar for six hours.”
“That might not be so bad.” Tim grinned.
“Tim.”
“I can’t believe post-ops might be getting out,” mumbled Paul, sketching. “Weird.”
`“Lay-offs on the way, maybe,” said Tim, “the way production is going.”
“Great,” said Jean. First week and talk of lay-offs.
“Such is life,” Paul said. He took a yellow marker from a cup on Ted’s desk and gilded the unicorn’s horn.
“Ooh,” said Maureen appreciatively.
“Paul my man,” Brad said, “have you got thirty cents I can borrow for a frosty beverage?”
You mean thirty cents you can have, right? Paul thought. But he dug for it anyway, gave it to him.
“Gracias, gracias. Oh well, I’ll be on my way. Jean, I’ll be thinking of you when I’m home lyin’ on the sofa watchin’ TV… I’ll be thinking of how hard you’ll be pretending to be working.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Not to gloat, but…” Brad jingled his thirty cents and began to leave for the cafeteria. He looked back. “You know who shorted out the panel, don’t ya? The Rim Corp ghost. Roy’s wife saw it today.”
“No, are you kidding?” Paul gasped.
“What ghost?” Maureen said.
Paul asked, “Where, up here?” Roy’s wife Peggy was one of the first shift refinishing crew Paul’s team replaced.
Brad gestured beyond the cafeteria. “In the cardboard room. She was packing parts so she went to get some boxes. A few minutes later she came out white as a ghost, pardon the pun. They asked her what was wrong and she said she saw a guy with curly hair jump behind some stacks of cardboard, so she went over to see who it was…she thought it was one of those two curly-haired brothers who do shipping…but there was nobody there.”
“Holy shit,” said Paul.
“Doo-doo doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo.” Brad made Twilight Zone music.
“What was he wearing? What color hair?”
“I dunno, all I heard was curly hair. She went and asked the brothers if it was one of them ‘cause they’re in there a lot but neither of them had been in there for a while. So it’s either a ghost or a saboteur from a rival reaction injection molding company.”
“That’s scary,” complained Maureen.
“Bye,” Jean called after him self-pityingly.
“Holy shit, I don’t believe it. The ghost,” Paul laughed.
“Has anyone seen one in here before?” asked Maureen.
“That’s a long story—I’ll save it for after break.”
“Ghost in the Machine,” Donna said mostly to herself, thinking of the album of that title by the Police.
««—»»
The buzzer rang, the cafeteria emptied. Tim gave his wife a kiss good-bye and left to catch a ride with Brad. The masking crew filed back into their work area.
Maureen planted herself in her chair, grinned her apple-cheeked cherub grin. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“Why don’t you work and listen at the same time?” Paul suggested.
“Oh, well excuse me.” Maureen pulled a plastic piece in front of her, stretched masking tape across one section and sliced off excess with her exacto knife.
“The Rim Corp ghost,” Paul said, working on his more involved plastic part, the outer shell housing for a computer terminal. He began removing some screws in one section before masking it. “Well, let’s see.”
His back to his audience. Donna and Abby worked and listened, but Jean just stopped working to listen and sip her coffee.
“Okay, the first incident was with my boss Red when I was a molder…”
“You were a molder?” Maureen broke in.
“Yeah, it sucked. I got tired of getting foamed with back-fires all over my clothes, in my face—hot liquid plastic. Toxic chemical fumes…real fun. Loud fucking rock music from eighty million radios down there.
Anyway, this guy Red was my boss then and I like him a lot, but you gotta understand that a lotta people thought he was full of shit. He told me he went to Vietnam and all these stories; he tossed a gook out’ve a helicopter once and used to use a crossbow over there and everything. I personally believe him but other people didn’t.”
“Well some people did go to Vietnam,” Jean said.
“Yeah, really. Anyway, Red was there in molding one night after second shift, the only person in the place, and he was repairing a mold. It was big and he was sitting right inside it so he had it switched to manual control so it couldn’t close by itself. So it starts to close and he jumps out—he opens the mold. It had switched to automatic.”
“Wow,” breathed Maureen.
“Yeah, then a few minutes later one of the hot water lines that heat the molds popped out and sprayed the back of his neck. Then, he was standing there and a yard-long flat piece of metal flies across the molding area and lands a few feet from his feet. So he left everything the way it was to show people the next day—the metal, the puddle of water—but I guess nobody really believed him.”
“Wow,” said Donna.
“Okay, so another day Red went in early and he was alone again and he heard the clacking of footsteps, so he turned and saw a little girl in pig-tails and a brown checkered dress run past the time clock.”
“Maybe all this is just people sneaking in,” suggested Jean.
“Oh, come on,” said Abby. “Why would they? And how would they get away with it and not get caught?”
`”Is that it?” Maureen asked.
“Ha—just gettin’ warmed up. Lots of times we’d hear footsteps upstairs when there was just between five and ten people in the whole place, and everybody was downstairs and accounted for.”
“That would mean the footsteps came from our floor?”
“Maybe. Check this out—this was the day before I got laid off once.
A few molders and some part-time deflashers were the only people in there and everyone was on the ground floor. We heard distinct, I mean distinct footsteps upstairs and then a big crash…so I ran upstairs and this deflasher kid yells, ‘No, Paul!’ So he came after me, and the minute we stepped into this room here, our room, a clock radio came on. Now maybe somebody had set the alarm to turn the radio on then and it was a big coincidence, but come on!”
Maureen asked, “So what was the crash?”
“We didn’t find anything that looked knocked over to my recollection. Okay, so one time it was just me and two other molders in the entire building and I was talking to one guy who was standing with an open door behind him leading outside, and I saw a dark figure pass by the door either inside or outside. It was probably someone outside the building, but it looked too close and it felt weird. But anyway, another time our lead molder Jack was up here in the cafeteria alone rolling a joint and there was only four people in the building, and he saw someone in a white shirt walk past the cafeteria window, so he asked if any of us had been upstairs and we hadn’t, and nobody was wearing a white shirt that night.”
“Shit,” said Abby in an awed hiss.
Paul had somewhere in the midst of talking abandoned his part to turn in his chair and face the girls. Now only Donna was masking while she listened, and at a greatly reduced speed. Paul continued, “Then there was this guy Lou, and of course he was always doing coke, but anyway he was in this corridor downstairs—it’s really dark and old looking…it leads to the back dock—and he was sweeping out there, so he turned and he said he saw a dark figure in a big hat, whatever that means, and it turned and walked into the wall.”
“I see things like that all the time when I do coke,” Jean cracked.
“Okay,” Paul said, “in that same hall, this molder who was a heavy-duty Born Again Christian went in there to smoke a cigarette while he waited for his mold to open, because there’s this big sliding metal door that leads from molding into this corridor. So there’s these plastic strips hanging down like on our dock up here, hanging down separating the corridor from the back dock area. The kid saw the lights flick on and off in the dock room. So he goes in there and there’s a pile of old molds between the two garage doors. He saw a blond person in a blue shirt walk behind the pile of old molds and he called out my name—he thought it was me.
But nobody was there. The only way he could’ve gotten out was the two garage doors and another door and they were locked. Now this kid doesn’t believe ghosts can exist, it’s against his religion or somethin’, but he absolutely swears he saw this happen.”
“It was just you playin’ tricks, come on,” Jean said.
“No way, uh-uh. Listen to this. We were working Saturday, just the molders, and I was in the doorway with Jack talking to Jack’s friend outside on the street and I happened to glance into the molding room off the main molding room—the one with the orange molds now? Only then it was refinishing, just tables with parts on ‘em. I saws a person behind a table, wearing a light blue shirt. It seemed natural for a second and I saw the person slowly move behind a part on a table out of view, so suddenly I threw my can of soda on the floor and charged in there—my body was goin’ ape-shit and tingling with fear because I realized that I saw the ghost. Nobody was in there.”
“That’s scary,” Maureen cooed, subdued, the most attentive listener.
She looked like a six-year-old sitting by a campfire.
“This one’s real weird. Where post-ops is now it used to be just endless racks of parts, and through the beams of the racks I saw a figure—it wore blue jeans, a light blue T-shirt, with blond hair and a pale face with like shadowy sunken features. When I looked again it was gone, so I told everybody I saw the ghost. Like ten minutes later, a truck driver came in for a load and more than one person said, ‘Paul, there’s the ghost!’ The trucker had blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, blond hair, everything.”
“So it was him,” said Jean, “come on.”
“Nope—he had just arrived that minute. You ever hear of doppelgangers? Forerunners, some girl told me she calls stuff like that?”
“No,” said Jean.
“It’s like astral projection…”
“Oh yeah.”
“The ghost of a living person projected out of him. Being two places at once—there’s been lots of cases lik
e that. So maybe that was the ghost, the forerunner, of that trucker, and maybe today that first shift girl saw the forerunner of that curly-haired shipping brother, and maybe even that Born Again kid saw my forerunner. Maybe they didn’t see these figures, though, except in their minds, like a psychic prediction.”
“If more than one person ever saw one, though, then it would have to be there,” Abby said.
“Check this out. I know it sounds crazy, but when my cousin Ray and I were kids and he lived with us, this one morning we were playing in the kitchen and my sister went into the bathroom. She was in a nightgown and she looked really like she was sleepwalking. About five or ten seconds after she goes in there, an exact double of my sister goes drifting into the bathroom after her, only it was totally white, like a ghost double catching up with her. I know it was a long time ago but Ray and I can swear it happened.”
“Holy fuck,” said Abby. “That’s weird.”
“We lived in that house a couple years and moved back to the house we lived in before, but some strange shit happened there. Are you ready for this revelation?”
“What?” said Maureen.
“About my telekinesis?”
“Let’s hear it,” sighed Jean with a smile.
“Okay—my cousin Ray was downstairs so I thought I’d freak him out and pretend a ghost was upstairs, so I knocked some books out of my bookcase and I tossed a few out on the landing. I was gonna tell him a ghost did it. All of a sudden books started falling out of the bookcase by themselves—it might’ve been an accident but I got scared and went out on the landing and called for Ray. When he came running up the stairs, he swears to this day he saw two or three books either fly or slide out onto the landing by themselves and land near me. We went into the room and nobody was there…and one of the books on the landing was a book about ghosts and poltergeists.”
“Oh, I saw that movie,” said Donna.
“Poltergeist? Yeah, that was a good movie but it wasn’t accurate. A poltergeist is a…it’s created by a disturbed person, it’s their psychic energy on a rampage. Telekinesis. Maybe it was a ghost, but Ray and I think that my mind finished up what my body started by tossing those books out on the landing. I got two better stories to prove my incredible psychic ability.”
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