A Life Without Blood

Champlain had grown to like being a dishwasher. Every dish was different, and every place he washed them was different too. He had made great friends washing dishes at a summer camp near Lake George in Upstate New York. They talked about nothing and laughed at everything. He worked silently at a tavern in Dallas, ages ago, where he had to fetch the water he used from a nearby well. He had found a home at a local vineyard and eatery in the mountains of West Virginia, where he worked year round on two separate occasions. The second time he came to find work there, most of the people he knew from his first year there had gone, and the people who were still there he no longer recognized.

Now, he worked at a Bar in Florida’s state capitol in the smallest dish pit he had ever had the pleasure to work in. On his first night, he entered through the back alley behind the bar. It was pouring rain outside. The toxic mixture of southern humidity and festering garbage leaked into his nostrils and nearly caused a spasm. He knocked on the door profusely until the manager greeted him and let him inside.

Upon entering, he was bewildered by the small size of his compartment. To his left, a giant water heater that hummed and squealed like an air raid siren. Crammed next to each other on the same side were two large freezers. On top of each were piles of pots and plastic containers stacked so high they touched the ceiling. Overhead, a single uncovered bulb hung from a chain. Gnats buzzed around it in a filthy halo. The longer Champlain looked at the ceiling the grimier it became. The manager did not show him around, he simply said this is it and walked through the sliding door towards the bar, closing the door and closing him off from the rest of the staff there without ever being introduced to them.

Throughout his first night, the servers gradually introduced themselves as they brought him Collins and Martini glasses. There was Ty and Kerri and there was Victor. They spoke to him like they would never see him again. That was fine, he had worked at a lot of places and had been at the bottom of the food chain at each of them before.

He began setting up his station. The triple sink was devastatingly small, each of the sinks just large enough to withstand a single plate at a time. Champlain turned the hot water valve as far as it would go, and drifted his palm underneath the stream waiting for it to warm. At times it was hard to be a dishwasher. Those hours were full of work that no one else wanted to do, but the one thing that never betrayed Champlain was the system. It was always difficult and, frankly, nasty work to be doing, but the system–the order of operations–never wavered and never complicated. You receive dirty dishes, and you make them clean. Of course, you’ll be occasionally called upon to do other duties like polishing glasses, scrubbing the floors, or scraping grease of grill vents, but the order there never changes either: you take something dirty, and you make it clean.

He worked night after night. The bar opened up when the sun went down, which was perfect for Champlain. By day he would sit in his house and listen to the dirty hum of the city streets. His place was rundown but comfortable in its own way. He had no neighbors and no one bothered him. Newspapers were never dropped at his door. Come nighttime he would walk to the bar, sometimes he would take the bus and see the people of the city through the windows going to and from where they may. He was no different. He looked up at the moon. He had fallen in love with the way it sat over the city. He had lived in many places, but he was sure that the moon had never been as beautiful as it was there.

Some time had passed there and nothing ever changed. The hangnails on his fingers stung with a bite from the sanitized water and he hesitated to chew at them. He wrapped them profusely with bandages, which was called into question by Kerri. Champlain had no answer.

One night he was called to help in the kitchen. He hesitated at first but did what he was asked. The food was simple and it was a matter of preparation more so than actually cooking. Like buying a table without having to build it yourself, except he had to put it in the microwave or on the press before it was ready to use. He made sandwiches and boards and tart treats that he put up under the service light alongside the ticket. He would be careful there, wearing his gloves so as not to touch the ingredients he was allergic to. The servers would inspect each dish and tell him how beautiful they were. He took some pride in this.

Over time at the station he was able to talk to his coworkers. Slowly he ended up befriending them. They invited him to a lake trip where they would canoe and float around and drink and tell stories from their non-working lives. He said he could not go because his family was in town and they never invited him again. Which was okay.

Back in the dish pit, there was silence and heat. An old fan sat in the corner on top of a crate that was blowing pathetic wind at his legs and it made him sneeze. When he came out of the pit, it was to polish glasses at the corner of the bar or to run dishes back to the kitchen. There he could look out at all the bar patrons and hear their stories of love and life and all the rest. He heard a man tell a woman about every date he had ever been on. The woman then faked getting an important phone call, sat up, walked out, and never came back. He heard two men share their stories of being wrongfully arrested for crimes they didn’t commit. He heard people talk about films and television shows and he wrote them down in his notepad.

Sometimes if Champlain had a night off he would go to the local library. He found a book of short stories that started with a man who could not write, so he shot himself in the head and all the stories poured out of his brain and scribbled themselves down on the floors and the walls in vermillion ink. He brought it to work and read when it was slow.

…

He remembered the day as it was the last day of winter—he was at the bar corner polishing glasses and a girl walked in that he had never seen before. In all his years on Earth he had never seen someone like her. He made eye contact with her from across the bar and a lot changed then. Her perfume echoed across the floor and shocked Champlain’s senses. Her smile was as bright as her eyes were dark. From the door to her seat she glanced over at him three times and he never missed her gaze once.

From the pit he heard her laugh and knew it was her. It was like an angel was singing through the walls. The night was busy and he set the glasses at the corner and rushed the dishes to the kitchen across the bar just to see her and every time she saw him too. He thought of ways to reach her. He could catch her outside as she left but he thought that strange. He was lost in a daze trying to figure out how to speak to her, plunging the glasses and dishes into the sinks one by one. For his life he could not think. In his excitement he worked fast. He picked up a Martini Glass and clipped the side of the sink with it as he dipped it into the water.

The glass cracked open. In his rush he had been careless. He looked at the broken glass and then his hands. There was no blood but the thought of it paralyzed him and locked him into place. He collected himself. Slowly, he walked out to the alley and cast the glass into a garbage bin. He came back inside and began draining the sink out. The water receded and exposed the broken piece from the glass at the bottom. He picked it up, carefully, and walked it out to the bin and tossed it. He walked back out to the corner of the bar and looked out to where the girl had been sitting. She had left.

…

A year had passed and he hadn’t broken a glass since. Every night he looked for her. He would think she was there at times but she never was. He had committed himself fully to his craft. His dishes were spotless. He could scour them as they were handed off to him. The faint etchings of lipstick on a wine glass, the leftover foam from a glass of beer, the smell of burnt cinnamon on a glass with a hint of bourbon at its bottom. From the kitchen things were more complicated. Ingredients melted and coalesced together to form strange sensory illusions of different things. Cured meats and oils. Moroccan carrots soaked in vinaigrette. Slices of pita with smatterings of hummus strewn across plates. Certain smells would be carried into the pit and he would walk out to the alley and quietly dispose of them as they burned his nostrils.

He thought about the girl a lot but he never searched for her. Trouble had found its way into his life before without him having to go look for it, and he never took into account what did not come his way naturally. But he still thought.

A hail storm came and pelted the city one night. As the doors of the bar opened, no one came. The rain and peltings of ice tapped at the windows. Ty opened up the sliding door to the pit where Champlain was leaning up against the wall cross-legged reading his book and told him to come on.

At the bar, Ty had lined up shot glasses. Champlain asked him what would happen if someone were to walk in, to which he said: act natural.

Victor and Kerri sat beside him at the bar. Drink by drink they asked him about himself and he made up stories to tell them. Some injected with the truth and some a complete farce. They patted him on the back and asked him why he never hung out with them outside of work. All he could say was that he wasn’t the biggest outdoors person. Ty said he was weird with a chuckle and then a customer walked in.

…

Another year had passed and he felt like he had made friends. This was the longest he had worked at a single place in a very long time, and with that came comfort. He learned the sounds of everyone's footsteps as they walked up to the sliding door. Ty had a clambering and uneven step. Kerri was deathly quiet and could actually sneak up on him on occasion. Victor’s stride was scuffling. They brought him glasses and shared cigarettes with him in the alley in the moonlight and laughed at his mannerisms that they found odd and he did the same. He had been a strange man to others in the past, but there he found respite.

There he made friends and knew their walks.

One night after closing, Ty and Victor had asked him to be their third roommate in their new apartment. Champlain was scared but he said yes.

There he had found a normal life.

…

The fourth of July came and the bar was packed. The pit was a sound chamber of brambling conversations and the distant bombardment of fireworks. He could feel it all rattling in his bones. His head was down all night with the work. Dish, plunge, plunge, dry, place. Glass, plunge, plunge, plunge, polish, place. Every hour on the hour he drained the dirty sink water and filled it anew, timing the purge with the lulls in the work. The stainless countertop had been filled to the brim with glass. Champlain’s record of how many glasses he could hold at one time was six. He stretched his hands apart and was able to manage seven. He picked them up and before he even slid the door open to the bar he knew she had come back.

He briskly walked over to the bar corner where he polished the glasses and saw her from the exact same place he had all that time ago. Nothing had changed. Her eyes sang songs to him and he could hear their tone so clearly. Her skin glowed like a lamplight and her voice was soft like the oldest and most trustworthy warmth. She met his eyes and he felt like she had seen him there as his true self never shown to the world. It was then that his life had ended. Outside of her gaze he had become dust and he knew he could not live any other way. He had made a plan. He would speak to her that night. He did not know how but he would. She was not alone and with friends, but he would. He did not know what he would say but he would.

He polished the glasses he had carried over to the bar. As he put them back in their spots behind the bartenders, he walked over to Ty and whispered in his ear.

Do you see that girl over there? With the Purple blouse.

He looked over. Yes.

When she orders a drink, will you let me carry it over to her table?

Ha, sure. Do you think she’s cute?

Yes.

Hey, good luck.

Thank you. Let me know.

You’re funny man.

Champlain walked back towards the pit and looked over his shoulder at the girl’s table. She looked at him and smiled.

The pit had begun to overflow with dishes. He went to work. He dipped two, three glasses at a time in each sink. Soap, rinse, sanitizer. His hands pruned over and dried out. He worked so quickly his breath had run out in the vapid heat. He knelt in front of the fan for a moment. Kerri opened up the sliding door with a panicked pull.

Can you run a flute through real quick for me?

There’s one drying right there. Champlain pointed towards the edge of the stainless sink where the drying glasses sat.

Thanks.

Kerri pulled it off and started polishing it there quickly at the edge of the sink. Champlain let the musty air hit his face and dry his mopped brow.

He heard the glass crack in her hands and she yelped. He stood up straight at the sound and looked at her. She dropped the glass at her feet, broken in two and the blood gushed out from her palm. It had split open and the gates of hell had poured out onto the floor. He could hear it pulsing and rushing from her hand as she shook and held it. It took over the air with iron. Champlain’s tongue glided over the inside of his gums as the ancient feeling crept into him. His pupils widened. He could feel his molars sliding over to make room for those teeth that had been hiding now for so long.

He held himself at risk. He forced his eyes shut and held his breath. Kerri opened the door to the back alley and rushed outside. He thought about the girl sitting at the table in the barroom, but he couldn’t feel her anymore. He exhaled sharply. Iron pelted his nostrils, he could hear it rushing even from outside. He knew if he did what he was going to do his life here was over. He would have to run away, like he had run away from Lake George. The Blue Ridge Mountains. From Dallas all that time ago now. He felt this place that he had begun to call home in secret start to slip away and he cried.

Ty opened the sliding door with a smile.

She ordered. Manhattan, come on you can help me with it and carry it out.

Champlain faced away from him. Yeah okay, just give me a second.

Are you okay dude?

Yeah just give me a second.

Ty pursed his lips and slid the door closed.

Champlain could see her face but he didn’t know her name. He could feel his own blood rushing now. Standing there in the pit in silence he tried to block the world out. Then he knew his nature and could no longer think. He had lived a life without blood for so long that he had forgotten who he was. What it was that he had forced himself to not remember.

He opened the door to the outside and saw Kerri kneeling with a bar towel wrapped around her hand, soaked in red with all her stories and thoughts dripping onto the ground. She was crying from the pain and he told her it was okay. He put his hand on her back as she wept. He opened his mouth. The moon looked down from her watchtower and observed all the things she could not change.