Shift Work

"You can't eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours a day--all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy." --William Faulkner

The shame is what she called his office, and he couldn't argue with her. It was full of books and papers and remnants of ideas tried and hobbies quit. Hockey skates, tennis rackets, frisbees for disc golf, golf clubs, a glockenspiel, a trumpet, a clarinet, canvases for painting, watercolor kits, playing cards, chess sets, yarn for making blankets, buttons, maps and compasses, air pumps and hydroponic nutrients, poker chips, a skateboard, a pool cue, a pellet gun, a handheld gps device, scuba fins, and piles of books explaining in detail how to use all that's accumulated over the years.

All that is just in his office where he gets his "work" done. She supplies the quotes, and every morning as she boils the water for the french press she stands in the doorway making mental notes of all the things that she would get rid of before exhaling and closing the door on it all as the kettle blows its whistle. She goes to the stove and turns off the heat.

He sleeps until noon most days, and today is no different. She drinks her coffee and starts buzzing around the kitchen, making food for the week, making lists of things to get done, writing appointments on the calendar, crossing things off lists. He sleeps until noon because he works the second shift, and her frenetic routine makes his head spin. She works the second shift, too, but prefers mornings to late nights. He's the opposite, but he'll get up with her when their days off align.

She leaves their apartment most days just after he wakes up, and he typically reheats the leftover coffee she leaves for him in the microwave after she's kissed him good-bye. Today is no different and he picks out a record to put on the turntable while the coffee reheats, and he finds his place in the book he's been reading. The microwave buzzes.

He sips at the coffee, black, and he settles into a worn sofa, old stains and cigarette burns covered by a blanket. She's been pestering him to find a new job, and he's in learning mode, trying to decide what to be. The book he's reading is about all the different kinds of jobs there are out in the world and how people who have done those jobs feel about the work they do. It's written by a former attorney, turned writer, who made a career out of interviewing people and writing about what they were like and what they did. To him it seemed like a good place to start since he couldn't go back to the work he did before taking shift-work. That work nearly killed him.

The trouble is he can't sit still for longer than half an hour, and he's always needing something to do with his hands. The coffee helps, the page-turning helps, and reading just a chapter a day is a strategy that has been working lately. Today he's reading about a farmer named Pierce Walker who farms 500 acres of land, 200 of which he owns, and the idea of becoming a farmer is appealing to him because of a hobby that he picked up before they moved in together.

When they first started dating she insisted that he get a plant to take care of, and he bought an orange tree and a philodendron at a nursery. The philodendron was a safety-plant in case it turned out his thumb was any color other than green. But it turned out that he had a knack for keeping things alive, and it was because he read a book about the things that plants need to thrive. One thing lead to another, and eventually he was tending an outdoor vegetable garden and playing with indoor hydroponics in his spare time. He gave up the hydroponics when they moved in together.

The idea of farming sounded like a hard but fulfilling way to make a living, and after reading Mr. Walker's experience he decides that it's an impractical and most likely foolish career change. The idea swims in his head for awhile, and when the record finishes, he puts down his coffee and goes to the rear window to check on his garden.

The garden is on the rooftop of the garage which faces an alley, and he's rigged up an automatic watering system that waters the plants, six different varieties of tomatoes, seven times daily with a nutrient rich solution pumped from a rain-barrel in the garage. He designed the watering system himself through a process of trial and error, and he made some mistakes in his first attempts. She hadn't said a word, but he saw her eyes roll when his first contraption was an utter failure. He tried again, and it worked now.

The garden was popping, and it was a problem because the tomato plants were in containers and blew over easily because they had grown so large to become a wind-sail. There's no need to go up there today, and he returns to living room and takes out his guitar.

It's an old Fender acoustic parlor guitar that has a tinny and bright sound, and he plucks through the various forms of scales he learned from a book while in graduate school to distract himself from his class work when he wasn't playing video games. As he goes through the motions his mind wanders and a thought, not fully-defined, bubbles up into consciousness and the a-string buzzes on the 12th fret. He stops playing the scale and plucks the string again, taking care to place his ring-finger more carefully near the fret, and the note rings clear.

He stops playing, and the silence in the room is like a vacuum, drawing that thought further up to the surface of consciousness, and he can't tell if it's the coffee that is responsible for the clamping in his chest and the sweat on the back of his neck, but he sets the guitar back in its case.

He sits with the feeling for a moment, but as the room gets smaller and as the sweat intensifies he stands up and paces across the room. He stops at the front window and looks out to see if there's anyone outside, but the street is quiet as usual, lined with trees, leaves scattering broken sunlight.

The feeling is not a new one, but he didn't expect to find it here. Not in this home. Not in this attempt. She is not the first woman he's lived with, but the third, and the feeling is related to the first two. The scattered sunlight dances on the leaves of the orange tree he's kept alive. The philodendron has split into multiple plants and the whole window-sill is covered in green. He thinks to himself, "I could do this, but why? Plants won't pay the bills. Not these plants, anyway."

He looks at the clock, and it's time to get ready for his shift at a job he enjoys. It's a living--shift-work but a living that allows things like gardens and guitars and piles of books that make the work worth it.

It isn't until he gets in the shower, and the water runs down his back that the feeling hits him again. He tries to remember the last time they laughed together or went out together. Nothing comes, but maybe he's trying too hard trying to remember.

"She's leaving," he says out loud.

The second he says it out loud, he knows it's true. It has to do with his job, that he's a shift-worker, but he can't figure out why it matters now when it didn't matter before. Maybe things change when you share an apartment.

He steps out of the shower, and looks at himself in the mirror and as he lathers his face to shave he turns the question over in his head again and again. The money is enough, there's health and dental, and a man has to work. "It's a good job, so what is it?"

He finishes shaving, fixes his hair, gets dressed in his uniform, and as he leaves for work his only thought is how he can change her mind. But he won't. It has all happened before, and it's the same goddamned feeling that nothing is ever enough for some people.