Second Shift - Order(7)

Such were the romantic and decidedly un-sexy conversations Mission had with the girl of his dreams that he could name the plant’s every phase of operation as he wound his way toward the waste room. If needed, he could also bore a porter to tears with rumors of who had said what about whom throughout the plant. This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.

The noise along the curving hallway grew louder the deeper he went. It started out as a background hum near the control rooms and offices, and just when he’d gotten used to this residual noise, another layer piled on top, more machines macerating, filtering, straining, and pumping. Mission never appreciated how loud the combined buzzing was until he left the plant with his hearing rattled and his throat sore from yelling over it all.

Inside the waste room, he spotted familiar faces all around the processing vats. Knowing who he was looking for, one of the workers pointed down the long row of low steel cylinders that held the gray and black water. Jenine was on top of one of the cylinders, which was almost as big around as his dad’s apartment and crisscrossed with pipes and valves. Crouched down, she worked a series of large valves while an older woman filled a glass vial with murky fluid and held it up to the light. Mission waited patiently. This was where the water eventually came from that his father was always cursing. He remembered his old man sitting around the dinner table, shaking his fist at the floor, grumbling about the supply of water, how it was more than he needed for his crops one day, never enough the next.

Jenine eventually felt his presence. She turned, smiled, and lifted a finger, asking him to wait a moment, then finished opening and closing the valves. The woman testing the waste water glanced up at the two of them, frowned at Mission, and carefully dispensed a dark dye into the tube before shaking it, a thumb unhygienically used to cork the end. These were dark arts, Mission thought, whatever they did to make shower water and urine safe to drink. Dark and noisy arts. But at least he had grown used to the smell, which wasn’t the foulness one would expect but rather something chemical, something caustic.

Jenine yelled to her supervisor that she was taking her break, wiped her palms on the seat of her pants, and hopped down. She led Mission away from the rows and rows of containers before digging the foam inserts out of her ears.

“Hey, Mish!” she yelled, as she pulled him into the hallway. She clasped his neck and kissed him on the cheek. By the time he thought to hug her back or return the gesture, it was already over, leaving him scrambling awkwardly at the air and feeling a fool.

She led him down two doors to the break room, which stank of microwaved soup and sweaty coveralls. It smelled almost exactly like the break room in Dispatch, fifty levels down, in fact. Mission wondered if every break room smelled just like this.

Jenine grabbed a dented metal cup from a pile of them by the sink and filled it with water. “Whadja bring me?” she asked, glancing at his shoulder.

Mission shook his head and turned to show her his empty pack. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling like an ass.

She waved her hand and took a long pull on the tin cup. “It’s fine.” She refilled the cup from the sink, and Mission noticed that she waited for the faucet to stop dripping into the vessel, even tapped it twice with her fist to get the last drop, before pulling it away. Every profession had its quirks and habits, he supposed. Like how a porter never passed a landing without checking for a signal ’chief, nor missed a rumor whispered on the stairs.

“Sorry if I made it sound like it’s your duty to shower me with gifts.” She winked at him, and Mission laughed.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I like bringing you stuff. I was just weighed down with a tandem haul this time.” He swung his arms and twisted at the waist to stretch his spine. “They’ve been pouring it on us. But this is what I’ve been told to expect our first year.”

“Tell me about it.” Jenine leaned back against the counter and waved Mission toward the jumbled pile of cups. “I thought shadowing was bad, but first year is even worse.”

He accepted her offer and filled a cup with water. He reminded himself to top up his thermos before he left as well.

“It’s almost enough to make you miss school, isn’t it?” she asked.

Mission laughed. “Oh, hell yeah it is.”

“Here’s to better days.” She held her cup up.

Mission tinked his against hers, careful not to splash any water. “To better days.”

They watched each other over the lips of their cups while they drank. And in that breathless pause, in the time it took to swallow once, twice, three times, Mission felt an incredible rush of happiness that just as quickly plummeted away. It was like a memory of something that had not yet happened, a vivid image of him and Jenine sitting at a small table in a small apartment, and then a sense of the space between them brought on by their occupations. In this imaginary future, he would find himself leaving for another week of runs before he got his next day off. And so the same dread he felt right then in that break room, the desire to maximize their time together, to sip rather than gulp, would surely haunt him in a future he could only dream about. He swallowed and peered into his cup, searching for the courage to tell her how he felt.