Shift - Omnibus Edition (13 page)

The beets were awful.

He ate the last of them while the gentleman across the table stood with his tray. It wasn’t long before someone took his place. Troy looked up and down the row of adjoining tables. The vast majority of the workers sat on the
other
side so they could see out. Only a handful sat like Hal and himself. It was strange that he’d never noticed this before.

In the past weeks, it seemed patterns were becoming easier to spot, even as other faculties slipped and stumbled. He cut into a rubbery hunk of canned ham, his knife screeching against his plate, and wondered when he’d get some real sleep. He couldn’t ask the doctors for anything to help, couldn’t show them his gums. They might find out he was off his meds. The insomnia was awful. He might doze off for a minute or two, but deep sleep eluded him. And instead of remembering anything concrete, all he had were these dull aches, these bouts of terrible sadness, and the inescapable feeling that something was deeply wrong.

He caught one of the doctors watching him. Troy looked down the table and saw men shoulder to shoulder on the other side, eyeing the view. It wasn’t long ago that he’d wanted to sit and stare, mesmerized by the gray hills on the screen. And now he felt sick when he caught even a glimpse; the view brought him close to tears.

He stood with his tray, then worried he was being obvious. The napkin fell from his lap and landed on the floor, and something skittered away from his foot.

Troy’s heart skipped a beat. He bent and snatched the napkin, hurried down the line, looking for the pill. He bumped into a chair that had been pulled back from the table, felt all the room’s eyes on him.

The pill. He found it and scooped it up with his napkin, the tray teetering dangerously in his palm. He stood and composed himself. A trickle of sweat itched his scalp and ran down the back of his neck. Everyone knew.

Troy turned and walked toward the water fountain, not daring to glance up at the cameras or over at the doctors. He was losing it. Growing paranoid. And there was just over a month left on this shift. A month that would test every inch of will he had left.

Trying to walk naturally with so many eyes on him was impossible. He rested the edge of his tray on the water fountain, stepped on the lever with his foot and topped up his glass. This was why he had gotten up: he was thirsty. He felt like announcing the fact out loud.

Returning to the tables, Troy squeezed between two other workers and sat down facing the screen. He balled up his napkin, felt the pill hidden within its folds, and tucked it between his thighs. He sat there, sipping his water, facing the screen like everyone else, like he was supposed to. But he didn’t dare look.

17

2051

Washington, DC

The fat raindrops on the canopy outside De’Angelo’s restaurant sounded like rhythmless fingers tapping on a drum. The traffic on L Street hissed through puddles gathering against the curb, and the asphalt that flashed between the cars gleamed shiny and black from the streetlights. Donald shook two pills out of a plastic vial and into his palm. Two years on the meds. Two years completely free of anxiety, gloriously numb.

He glanced at the label and thought of Charlotte, of the necessity of fulfilling the prescription under his sister’s name, then popped them in his mouth. Donald swallowed. He was sick of the rain, preferred the cleanliness of the snow. Winter had been too warm again.

Keeping out of the foot traffic flowing through the front doors, he cradled his phone against his ear and listened patiently while his wife urged Karma to pee.

‘Maybe she doesn’t need to go,’ he suggested. He dropped the vial into his coat pocket and cupped his hand over the phone as the lady beside him wrestled with her umbrella, water flicking everywhere.

Helen continued to cajole Karma with words the poor dog didn’t understand. This was typical of Helen and Donald’s conversations of late. There was nothing real to say to one another.

‘But she hasn’t been since
lunch
,’ Helen insisted.

‘She didn’t go somewhere in the house, did she?’

‘She’s four years old.’

Donald forgot. Lately, time felt locked in a bubble. He wondered if his medication was causing that or if it was the workload. Whenever anything seemed … off any more, he always assumed it must be the medication. Before, it could have been the vagaries of life; it could have been anything. Somehow, it felt worse to have something concrete and new to pin it on.

There was shouting across the street, two homeless men yelling at each other in the rain, squabbling over a bag of tin cans. More umbrellas were shaken and more fancy dresses flowed into the restaurant. Here was a city charged with governing all the others, and it couldn’t even take care of itself. These things used to worry him more. He patted the capsule in his jacket pocket, a comforting twitch he’d developed.

‘She won’t go,’ his wife said exhaustedly.

‘Baby, I’m sorry I’m up here and you have all that to take care of. But look, I really need to get inside. We’re trying to wrap up final revisions on these plans tonight.’

‘How is everything going with that? Are you almost done?’

A file of taxis drove by, hunting for fares, fat tires rolling across sheets of water like hissing snakes. Donald watched as one of them slowed to a stop, brakes squealing from the wet. He didn’t recognize the man stepping out, coat held over his head. It wasn’t Mick.

‘Huh? Oh, it’s going great. Yeah, we’re basically done, maybe a few tweaks here and there. The outer shells are poured, and the lower floors are in—’

‘I meant, are you almost done working with
her
?’

He turned away from the traffic to hear better. ‘Who, Anna? Yeah. Look, I’ve told you. We’ve only consulted here and there. Most of it’s done electronically.’

‘And Mick is there?’

‘Yup.’

Another cab slowed as it passed by. Donald turned, but the car didn’t stop.

‘Okay. Well, don’t work too late. Call me tomorrow.’

‘I will. I love you.’

‘Love you— Oh! Good girl! That’s a good girl, Karma—’

‘I’ll talk to you tomorr—’

But the line was already dead. Donald glanced at his phone before putting it away, shivered once from the cool evening and from the moisture in the air. He pressed through the crowd outside the door and made his way to the table.

‘Everything okay?’ Anna asked. She sat alone at a table with three settings. A wide-necked sweater had been pulled down to expose one shoulder. She pinched her second glass of wine by its delicate stem, a pink half-moon of lipstick on its rim. Her auburn hair was tied up in a bun, the freckles across her nose almost invisible behind a thin veil of make-up. She looked, impossibly, more alluring than she had in college.

‘Yeah, everything’s fine.’ Donald twisted his wedding ring with his thumb – a habit. ‘Have you heard from Mick?’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, checked his texts. He thought of firing off another, but there were already four unanswered messages sitting there.

‘Nope. Wasn’t he flying in from Texas this morning? Maybe his flight was delayed.’

Donald saw that his glass, which he’d left near empty when he made the call outside, had been topped up. He knew Helen would disapprove of him sitting there alone with Anna, even though nothing was going to happen. Nothing ever would.

‘We could always do this another time,’ he suggested. ‘I’d hate for Mick to be left out.’

She set down her glass and studied the menu. ‘Might as well eat while we’re here. Be a little late to find something else. Besides, Mick’s logistics are independent of our design. We can send him our materials report later.’

Anna leaned to the side and reached for something in her bag, her sweater falling dangerously open. Donald looked away quickly, a flush of heat on the back of his neck. She pulled out her tablet and placed it on top of his manila folder, the screen flashing to life.

‘I think the bottom third of the design is solid.’ She spun the tablet for him to see. ‘I’d like to sign off on it so they can start layering the next few floors in.’

‘Well, a lot of these are yours,’ he said, thinking of all the mechanical spaces at the bottom. ‘I trust your judgment.’

He picked the tablet up, relieved that their conversation hadn’t veered away from work. He felt like a fool for thinking Anna had anything else in mind. They had been exchanging emails and updating each other’s plans for over two years and there had never been a hint of impropriety. He warned himself not to let the setting, the music, the white tablecloths, fool him.

‘There
is
one last-minute change you’re not going to like,’ she said. ‘The central shaft needs to be modified a little. But I think we can still work with the same general plan. It won’t affect the floors at all.’

He scrolled through the familiar files until he spotted the difference. The emergency stairwell had been moved from the side of the central shaft to the very middle. The shaft itself seemed smaller, or maybe it was because all the other gear they’d filled it with was gone. Now there was empty space, the discs turned to doughnuts. He looked up from the tablet and saw their waiter approaching.

‘What, no lift?’ He wanted to make sure he was seeing this right. He asked the waiter for a water and said he’d need more time with the menu.

The waiter bowed and left. Anna placed her napkin on the table and slid over to the adjacent chair. ‘The board said they had their reasons.’

‘The medical board?’ Donald exhaled. He had grown sick of their meddling and their suggestions, but he had given up fighting with them. He never won. ‘Shouldn’t they be more worried about people falling over these railings and breaking their necks?’

Anna laughed. ‘You know they’re not into that kind of medicine. All they can think about is what these workers might go through, emotionally, if they’re ever trapped in there for a few weeks. They wanted the plan to be simpler. More …
open
.’

‘More open.’ Donald chuckled and reached for his glass of wine. ‘And what do they mean, trapped for a few weeks?’

Anna shrugged. ‘You’re the elected official. I figure you should know more about this government silliness than I do. I’m just a consultant. I’m just getting paid to lay out the pipes.’

She finished her wine, and the waiter returned with Donald’s water and to take their orders. Anna raised her eyebrow, a familiar twitch that begged a question:
Are you ready?
It used to mean much more, Donald thought, as he glanced at the menu.

‘How about you pick for me?’ he finally said, giving up.

Anna ordered, and the waiter jotted down her selections.

‘So now they want a single stairwell, huh?’ Donald imagined the concrete needed for this, then thought of a spiral design made of metal. Stronger and cheaper. ‘We can keep the service lift, right? Why couldn’t we slide this over and put it in right here?’

He showed her the tablet.

‘No. No lifts. Keep everything simple and open. That’s what they said.’

He didn’t like this. Even if the facility would never be used, it should be built as if it might. Why else bother? He’d seen a partial list of supplies they were going to stockpile inside. Lugging them by stair seemed impossible, unless they planned to stock the floors before the prebuilt sections were craned inside. That was more Mick’s department. It was one of many reasons he wished his friend were there.

‘You know, this is why I didn’t go into architecture.’ He scrolled through their plans and saw all the places where his design had been altered. ‘I remember the first class we had where we had to go out and meet with mock clients, and they always wanted either the impossible or the downright stupid – or both. And that’s when I knew it wasn’t for me.’

‘So you went into politics.’ Anna laughed.

‘Yeah. Good point.’ Donald smiled, saw the irony. ‘But hey, it worked for your father.’

‘My dad went into politics because he didn’t know what else to do. He got out of the army, sank too much money into busted venture after busted venture, then figured he’d serve his country some other way.’

She studied him a long moment.

‘This is
his
legacy, you know.’ She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, bent a graceful finger at the tablet. ‘This is one of those things they said would never get done, and
he’s
doing it.’

Donald put the tablet down and leaned back in his chair. ‘He keeps telling me the same thing,’ he said. ‘That this is our legacy, this project. I told him I feel too young to be working on my crowning achievement.’

Anna smiled. They both took sips of wine. A basket of bread was dropped off, but neither of them reached for it.

‘Speaking of legacies and leaving things behind,’ Anna asked, ‘is there a reason you and Helen decided not to have kids?’

Donald placed his glass back on the table. Anna lifted the bottle, but he waved her off. ‘Well, it’s not that we don’t want them. We just both went directly from grad school to our careers, you know? We kept thinking—’

‘That you’ll have forever, right? That you’ll always have time. There’s no hurry.’

‘No. It’s not that …’ He rubbed the tablecloth with the pads of his fingers and felt the slick and expensive fabric slide over the other tablecloth hidden below. When they were finished with their meals and out the door, he figured this top layer would be folded back and carried off with their crumbs, a new layer revealed beneath. Like skin. Or the generations. He took a sip of wine, the tannins numbing his lips.

‘I think that’s it exactly,’ Anna insisted. ‘Every generation is waiting longer and longer to pull the trigger. My mom was almost forty when she had me, and that’s getting more and more common.’

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

‘Maybe we all think we might be the first generation that simply doesn’t die,’ she continued, ‘that lives forever.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Now we all
expect
to hit a hundred and thirty, maybe longer, like it’s our right. And so this is my theory—’ She leaned closer. Donald was already uncomfortable with where the conversation was going. ‘Children
used
to be our legacy, right? They were our chance to cheat death, to pass these little bits of ourselves along. But now we hope it can simply be
us
.’