When he arrived at the factory near the docks, he was met by a smoking, grunting manager who positively cackled when he asked to borrow a calculator, and refused to help him locate the required records. Everything smelled of smoke, salt, and burnt sugar. His stomach growled relentlessly.
Jack left long after everyone else, with his neck miserably sore, and numbers scrawled incoherently across his notes and forms.
He was going to be fired.Fuck. After tomorrow’s journey back, he’d turn in the forms and see himself out of the office. They wouldn’t even have to tell him off. Shame alone would keep him from returning.
But maybe there was some hope. He could go over the numbers tonight, make sure that they were correct (or mostly correct). After all, he’d managed to the collect all the pertinentpaperwork from the foreman when he arrived for the afternoon shift.
If he played his cards right, it would all be OK.
The night passed slowly. His stomach grumbled despite the hot dog he’d purchased on the way home. Tomorrow, he would eat the candy bar for breakfast. He’d skipped lunch at the factory, too embarrassed to admit that he had less money than he had sense to a bunch of workers who seemed like they would openly mock him. They wouldn’t believe him even if he told them his father was a factory man, that he’d been eager to follow in his footsteps.
But they hadn’t hired him, so he spent two ill-fated years in college instead, working as the world’s most haphazard waiter.
The degree got him nowhere special, but managed to impress the occasional office manager. He’d gone through a litany of desk jobs and earned himself a reputation as a pencil pusher, to his father’s continued embarrassment and his younger brother’s eternal amusement.
Now he was going to have to start over.Again. In a city of one million, he could find other opportunities. But he was tired, and he’d liked this position, or the idea of it, anyway, and now it was going to be ripped away from him because he’d gotten flustered and given into the manager’s attempts to humiliate him.
Maybe the degree counted for something, but the work sure didn’t—Jack would take benefits and a union over the bullshit he’d suffered in the office. Delaying Dan’s wife in the lobby so that the private meetings with his secretary wouldn’t be interrupted, getting berated for ordering catering from the wrong restaurant, scheduling a client incorrectly, or turning in a report with too many typos. Every morning, he woke wondering what he’d fuck up today, and if it would cost him his employment, or worse, render him the office dunce.
There had to be something better out there. Maybe he could become a cabbie. That seemed kind of interesting. All kinds of people visited the city every day. Maybe he could meet some of them.
Or maybe he could go back to college, become a teacher or something.
Then he remembered the way his classmates had mocked their teachers until they cried and thought that maybe he didn’t want to be made fun of by a bunch of pint-sized sadists for the next thirty years.
A thousand options ran through his mind, and none of them were good enough. The problem, he supposed, was that he didn’t like to be abused and insulted, which eliminated the majority of customer service jobs—the only kinds of job he could get.
What he really needed was a good vacation, a few days to let his mind rest. Maybe by the end of it, he’d know what it was that he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
But there was no ending this cycle. He couldn’t afford a vacation. This was the only opportunity he’d had in years, and he’d squandered it.
No rest for the wicked, he thought, deflated. It felt a little wicked to be so foolish—constantly tired and lonely and afraid and terrible at keeping track ofanything(calendars, address books, and voice recorders couldn't save him from the chaos of his own mind). He regularly kidnapped library books and owed fines that totaled more than the cost of the book, missed the first ten minutes of every movie, and often had to forcibly remove the neighbor’s cat from his apartment because he kept leaving the window open. His Rainy was a good girl, old and content. She rarely sneaked outside, but Mister Blues was a young tom determined to piss in the laundry basket, throw dishes from the counter, and chew the curtains. He also had a maddening habit of balancing on the toilet seat and slipping, forcing Jack to evict a yowling, toilet-water soaked tuxedo from his apartment.
Perhaps he should’ve been harsher in his removals. If he scared Mr. Blues, he might not return so readily. But that seemed cruel, especially when he started to look a little scraggly and scrawny. When he scratched at the neighbor’s door late into thenight, crying. When he crammed himself into Jack’s lap and purred like a piece of dying machinery.
Begrudgingly, he’d become Mr. Blues’ safe haven. Rainy tolerated it all with the occasional hiss and a smack—more or less a ringing endorsement.
Tomorrow, he’d go home and cuddle his cats, and this would be nothing more than a dream.
CHAPTER
THREE
The phone startledJack from a deep sleep. When he answered it, Boris thundered, “Wake up, motherfucker!”
Jack blinked groggily at the alarm clock. “It’s seven-oh-three,” he mumbled. “Thought I asked for eight last night.”
“Nope,” said Boris with a huff. “You said seven a.m. when you checked in.”
“Oh.” Jack barely registered the words. “Thanks, then.”
“Fuck off,” said Boris cheerfully. The dial tone rang in Jack’s ear.
Had he really told Boris seven? He was almost certain he’d requested eight a.m., gleeful at the prospect of an extra hour of sleep.
The alarm clock, too, was set for seven. Dismayed, Jack dragged himself out of bed. The train wouldn’t arrive until eleven or so, but he’d not risk missing it. Alarm clocks were too easily silenced. At home, he set multiple alarms ten minutes apart and placed them across the room so that he would have to get out of bed in order to turn them off. In large numbers, they couldn’t be ignored.
It was the only way to get to work on time.
