Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 8 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
About five yards from the backseat where I sat, the shoulder of the road swelled like a time-lapse shot of a festering boil. Its dirt half disintegrated. The asphalt on the other half cracked and peeled away like the skin of a rotten orange. The shockwave swept over us shattering the Humvee’s windows, making the vehicle rear up on my side as though slammed by a charge, and a flash of pain tore through the right side of my face, blinding me.
Five minutes after I woke up, I was in the shower lathering shampoo into my hair when I threw up. It splattered the wall and spread around the drain in a star of bile. The running water opened channels in the vomit until the yellowish residue vanished down the pipe. I sat on the ceramic floor under the stream that drummed against my scalp. The discomfort that had kept me from sleeping erupted into something worse, and my mouth tasted of vomit and phlegm.
I dried off and got dressed. Kneeling like a penitent before the toilet bowl, I spent the remaining minutes spitting out strands of saliva.
I drove to the workshop in a heatstroke nightmare. The heat had unraveled my cells, their contents diluted into my blood. I parked amid the chaos of workers maneuvering to slot their vehicles into free spaces, or meeting up with their line-mates. Of the faces crossing my field of vision, I recognized a few, though in civilian clothes they looked more like strangers.
I waited for most of them to head into the locker room. While I fiddled with the raised details of the action-figure-sized bronze horse in my pants pocket, I approached the waste container. Inside, miniature hills and mounds like a landfill rose to the same height they had the previous afternoon. Unseen workers would empty it on Friday. I buried the bronze horse among pieces whose casings were cracked or split.
As I waded through the workshop amid the clatter of machines and the lines waking up, I held back my nausea, but the sickness reverberated through my consciousness like interference on a radio signal. Seated at the line, working at the task that added money to my bank account, between one machine part and the next I sweated out the illness in beads so large they slipped off me. They pooled in wrinkles, tangled in my eyebrows, or flowed to the corners of my eyes, irritating my tear ducts. Breathing through my mouth, I blew droplets that spattered the parts. Water was escaping me like from a piece of fruit abandoned in the sun.
By instinct, my gaze flicked up to the supervisor’s office. She had swiveled her chair toward the window to observe me.
My heart lurched as if I’d just set off an alarm while cracking a safe. That look said I didn’t belong here. I had infiltrated this workshop, convinced myself I deserved to be hired. Hidden among these dozens of workers, I silently begged them not to look at me, hoping my eyes and the tinted lenses of my sunglasses would contain my guilt for every bad decision, every instinctive reaction I’d later regret. A guilt that had haunted me since birth and would follow me till death, my body tensing against its cramps minute by minute. I preferred suffering it myself rather than passing the burden on to others, to the police, to a courtroom, so that the so-called just and humane system could decide how I ought to be punished.
And so I kept getting up early to come to this assembly line. I sacrificed my hours for a hollow, insignificant task, just to keep up an apartment I could never afford to buy. But what else did life offer? How could I be sure some other routine would rescue me from this misery, or from something worse?
The child, his very essence, like a haunted house apparition, tormented me with these waves of foulness. He kept repeating that I had killed him, and that although no one else knew, sooner or later they’d find out.
I wiped my face with a damp palm. My skin stung under my undershirt and the clinging boxers. I tugged the collar of my shirt, twisted around, and pinched at my crotch to get some relief for a few minutes. Hours remained before I could go home. Tomorrow I’d endure another workday, and the day after that as well. Then, after the weekend, five more days. The cycle repeated over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. The hours ought to collapse faster and faster, breaking the sound barrier, chipping away at the block of time I was born with, time I was forced to trade on this stupid planet. Such was the result of this slavery: it made you wish a drain would flush your life away like piss.
My hands turned the parts over and over between my fingers. I screwed some pieces together, plugged wires into the right holes. But I’d lost all feeling in my arms. I had moved into another body, I faced the world from behind a different pair of sunglasses.
Parts slid into my hands then off to the right, one after another. Once they left us, where did they go? Did they fit under a car’s hood, or into a fridge or a washing machine? Did they become part of something that would satisfy someone who needed it? This workshop existed thanks to charity, giving broken people a purpose so we could believe our lives had value, yet also to keep us under control and out of sight until we died. The work distracted us from the surrounding society, in case we ever got the urge to blow it away with a shotgun.
I asked for a break to take a leak. In the bathroom, I stepped up to a wall-mounted toilet. I’d unzipped, and was taking a deep breath when someone walked in and greeted me. I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him to wait outside until I was done. I wanted to wish away his existence.
He moved to a toilet on the adjacent wall. I heard the rasp of his zipper. He spread his legs into an inverted V, and I noticed the ashen-gray folds of his right arm: thick, bulging skin. He glanced over his shoulder and psst’d me. While his stream pattered against the porcelain, he held out a ticket over that shoulder with his free hand.
“One of my buddies dropped out. You interested?”
He was inviting me to a game from the sports he loved to ramble about: soccer, basketball, baseball. The modern worker’s religion.
“I’m sure someone else on the line, or in the workshop, would appreciate it.”
“But I’m offering it to you.”
“I’ve never shown any interest.”
He soured his tone like a customer-service rep forced to remind some idiot for the thirtieth time that electrical devices need to be plugged in.
“You’d like it if you tried.”
I bowed my head and stifled a scoff. I shook off the last drops and zipped up.
“Last chance, pal,” said John—or Joseph. “Eventually people get tired of offering.”
I don’t want you to offer me anything. I want you all to leave me alone.
“That stuff doesn’t matter to me.”
He turned, hiding his face behind a thicket of hair. He clicked his tongue. As he left, he tossed me some variation of Have it your way.
I took a sip of water. While drying my mouth with toilet paper, I opened the door to the hallway. Our supervisor was climbing the stairs to her office, absorbed in the documents tucked in an open folder. The flutter of her blouse covered the butt of her leggings, whose wild pattern might have camouflaged her in a psychedelic hallucination.
I passed by the stairs while shrugging like someone caught in the rain without an umbrella, but I remembered how she’d been watching me like a prison spotlight tracking escapees. I climbed two steps. The staircase—metal, ridged—trembled, and the supervisor turned around. Her lips parted half an inch, her right hand froze in the middle of flipping a page. She took a moment to smile, as though rushing to come up with a response to an unexpected event.
I cleared my throat.
“I’m sorry I was unpleasant last time we spoke. Sometimes the memories come back. It’s hard for me to… accept it’s behind me.”
The supervisor recognized the nature of my reaction: a tormented veteran. She smiled as if inviting me to a barbecue.
“I wouldn’t pretend to know how you feel. But at least you’re out of danger now.”
She wanted me to open up. I was overwhelmed by the swampy humidity of my sweat-soaked clothes, that stale stench. I turned.
“I think that’s all.”
The supervisor stepped down a stair.
“Do they organize any veterans’ groups in this city, or in a nearby one? I imagine you all must be spread around.”
Forcing out the words while I built the context, I said, “I’ve been to groups like that. They’re all basically the same. The support helps and it’s welcome, I suppose, but it doesn’t cut out the tumor, which reacts before you can think.”
“Maybe the next group will be the one. You never know what fascinating, wonderful people you might meet. Everyone needs to connect with those who’ve lived through something similar. It’d be worth the drive, even if you had to go to Austin or San Antonio.”
“You’re right.”
When someone bothered me for any random reason, giving them the answer they wanted usually made them forget about me for a while.
The supervisor touched my right arm near the elbow. I stiffened, but she reinforced her smile.
“If you need anything, just tell me, alright?”
I nodded and said goodbye while descending the steps. I was crossing the workshop toward my station on the line when a shudder rippled through me, as though a scorpion had just scurried across my skin.
-----
Author’s note: this novella, originally written in Spanish, is contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, self-published about ten years ago.
Editing this part made me queasy, so good job, me from ten years ago. I had forgotten that whole bit with John/Joseph bothering the protagonist to get him out of his shell. It’s based on a memory that I also exploited for the first years of grief in my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. When you have been burdened with such a terrible memory as mine, and you try to avoid new experiences lest you add ammo to your intrusive thoughts, you get to recycling.
Anyway, in the real-life event, the nasty two years it took to get my programming degree were coming to an end, and a smiley classmate, likely ten years older than me, offered to get together with them for a group dinner or some shit. I refused. He said, “Are you sure? It’s your last chance.” I tasted that condescension; in his mind, I was a shy guy too nervous to hang out with them. No, buddy. Your very presence worsened my day.
About five yards from the backseat where I sat, the shoulder of the road swelled like a time-lapse shot of a festering boil. Its dirt half disintegrated. The asphalt on the other half cracked and peeled away like the skin of a rotten orange. The shockwave swept over us shattering the Humvee’s windows, making the vehicle rear up on my side as though slammed by a charge, and a flash of pain tore through the right side of my face, blinding me.
Five minutes after I woke up, I was in the shower lathering shampoo into my hair when I threw up. It splattered the wall and spread around the drain in a star of bile. The running water opened channels in the vomit until the yellowish residue vanished down the pipe. I sat on the ceramic floor under the stream that drummed against my scalp. The discomfort that had kept me from sleeping erupted into something worse, and my mouth tasted of vomit and phlegm.
I dried off and got dressed. Kneeling like a penitent before the toilet bowl, I spent the remaining minutes spitting out strands of saliva.
I drove to the workshop in a heatstroke nightmare. The heat had unraveled my cells, their contents diluted into my blood. I parked amid the chaos of workers maneuvering to slot their vehicles into free spaces, or meeting up with their line-mates. Of the faces crossing my field of vision, I recognized a few, though in civilian clothes they looked more like strangers.
I waited for most of them to head into the locker room. While I fiddled with the raised details of the action-figure-sized bronze horse in my pants pocket, I approached the waste container. Inside, miniature hills and mounds like a landfill rose to the same height they had the previous afternoon. Unseen workers would empty it on Friday. I buried the bronze horse among pieces whose casings were cracked or split.
As I waded through the workshop amid the clatter of machines and the lines waking up, I held back my nausea, but the sickness reverberated through my consciousness like interference on a radio signal. Seated at the line, working at the task that added money to my bank account, between one machine part and the next I sweated out the illness in beads so large they slipped off me. They pooled in wrinkles, tangled in my eyebrows, or flowed to the corners of my eyes, irritating my tear ducts. Breathing through my mouth, I blew droplets that spattered the parts. Water was escaping me like from a piece of fruit abandoned in the sun.
By instinct, my gaze flicked up to the supervisor’s office. She had swiveled her chair toward the window to observe me.
My heart lurched as if I’d just set off an alarm while cracking a safe. That look said I didn’t belong here. I had infiltrated this workshop, convinced myself I deserved to be hired. Hidden among these dozens of workers, I silently begged them not to look at me, hoping my eyes and the tinted lenses of my sunglasses would contain my guilt for every bad decision, every instinctive reaction I’d later regret. A guilt that had haunted me since birth and would follow me till death, my body tensing against its cramps minute by minute. I preferred suffering it myself rather than passing the burden on to others, to the police, to a courtroom, so that the so-called just and humane system could decide how I ought to be punished.
And so I kept getting up early to come to this assembly line. I sacrificed my hours for a hollow, insignificant task, just to keep up an apartment I could never afford to buy. But what else did life offer? How could I be sure some other routine would rescue me from this misery, or from something worse?
The child, his very essence, like a haunted house apparition, tormented me with these waves of foulness. He kept repeating that I had killed him, and that although no one else knew, sooner or later they’d find out.
I wiped my face with a damp palm. My skin stung under my undershirt and the clinging boxers. I tugged the collar of my shirt, twisted around, and pinched at my crotch to get some relief for a few minutes. Hours remained before I could go home. Tomorrow I’d endure another workday, and the day after that as well. Then, after the weekend, five more days. The cycle repeated over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. The hours ought to collapse faster and faster, breaking the sound barrier, chipping away at the block of time I was born with, time I was forced to trade on this stupid planet. Such was the result of this slavery: it made you wish a drain would flush your life away like piss.
My hands turned the parts over and over between my fingers. I screwed some pieces together, plugged wires into the right holes. But I’d lost all feeling in my arms. I had moved into another body, I faced the world from behind a different pair of sunglasses.
Parts slid into my hands then off to the right, one after another. Once they left us, where did they go? Did they fit under a car’s hood, or into a fridge or a washing machine? Did they become part of something that would satisfy someone who needed it? This workshop existed thanks to charity, giving broken people a purpose so we could believe our lives had value, yet also to keep us under control and out of sight until we died. The work distracted us from the surrounding society, in case we ever got the urge to blow it away with a shotgun.
I asked for a break to take a leak. In the bathroom, I stepped up to a wall-mounted toilet. I’d unzipped, and was taking a deep breath when someone walked in and greeted me. I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him to wait outside until I was done. I wanted to wish away his existence.
He moved to a toilet on the adjacent wall. I heard the rasp of his zipper. He spread his legs into an inverted V, and I noticed the ashen-gray folds of his right arm: thick, bulging skin. He glanced over his shoulder and psst’d me. While his stream pattered against the porcelain, he held out a ticket over that shoulder with his free hand.
“One of my buddies dropped out. You interested?”
He was inviting me to a game from the sports he loved to ramble about: soccer, basketball, baseball. The modern worker’s religion.
“I’m sure someone else on the line, or in the workshop, would appreciate it.”
“But I’m offering it to you.”
“I’ve never shown any interest.”
He soured his tone like a customer-service rep forced to remind some idiot for the thirtieth time that electrical devices need to be plugged in.
“You’d like it if you tried.”
I bowed my head and stifled a scoff. I shook off the last drops and zipped up.
“Last chance, pal,” said John—or Joseph. “Eventually people get tired of offering.”
I don’t want you to offer me anything. I want you all to leave me alone.
“That stuff doesn’t matter to me.”
He turned, hiding his face behind a thicket of hair. He clicked his tongue. As he left, he tossed me some variation of Have it your way.
I took a sip of water. While drying my mouth with toilet paper, I opened the door to the hallway. Our supervisor was climbing the stairs to her office, absorbed in the documents tucked in an open folder. The flutter of her blouse covered the butt of her leggings, whose wild pattern might have camouflaged her in a psychedelic hallucination.
I passed by the stairs while shrugging like someone caught in the rain without an umbrella, but I remembered how she’d been watching me like a prison spotlight tracking escapees. I climbed two steps. The staircase—metal, ridged—trembled, and the supervisor turned around. Her lips parted half an inch, her right hand froze in the middle of flipping a page. She took a moment to smile, as though rushing to come up with a response to an unexpected event.
I cleared my throat.
“I’m sorry I was unpleasant last time we spoke. Sometimes the memories come back. It’s hard for me to… accept it’s behind me.”
The supervisor recognized the nature of my reaction: a tormented veteran. She smiled as if inviting me to a barbecue.
“I wouldn’t pretend to know how you feel. But at least you’re out of danger now.”
She wanted me to open up. I was overwhelmed by the swampy humidity of my sweat-soaked clothes, that stale stench. I turned.
“I think that’s all.”
The supervisor stepped down a stair.
“Do they organize any veterans’ groups in this city, or in a nearby one? I imagine you all must be spread around.”
Forcing out the words while I built the context, I said, “I’ve been to groups like that. They’re all basically the same. The support helps and it’s welcome, I suppose, but it doesn’t cut out the tumor, which reacts before you can think.”
“Maybe the next group will be the one. You never know what fascinating, wonderful people you might meet. Everyone needs to connect with those who’ve lived through something similar. It’d be worth the drive, even if you had to go to Austin or San Antonio.”
“You’re right.”
When someone bothered me for any random reason, giving them the answer they wanted usually made them forget about me for a while.
The supervisor touched my right arm near the elbow. I stiffened, but she reinforced her smile.
“If you need anything, just tell me, alright?”
I nodded and said goodbye while descending the steps. I was crossing the workshop toward my station on the line when a shudder rippled through me, as though a scorpion had just scurried across my skin.
-----
Author’s note: this novella, originally written in Spanish, is contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, self-published about ten years ago.
Editing this part made me queasy, so good job, me from ten years ago. I had forgotten that whole bit with John/Joseph bothering the protagonist to get him out of his shell. It’s based on a memory that I also exploited for the first years of grief in my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. When you have been burdened with such a terrible memory as mine, and you try to avoid new experiences lest you add ammo to your intrusive thoughts, you get to recycling.
Anyway, in the real-life event, the nasty two years it took to get my programming degree were coming to an end, and a smiley classmate, likely ten years older than me, offered to get together with them for a group dinner or some shit. I refused. He said, “Are you sure? It’s your last chance.” I tasted that condescension; in his mind, I was a shy guy too nervous to hang out with them. No, buddy. Your very presence worsened my day.
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