Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Some questions you can look at two ways: What might I have been without you? One coin, yeah, but two sides. Ed must’ve looked at both sides of that coin, too.

When Wally Cutts called me up to his glassed-in office above the Bisk’s factory line, I knew what was coming.

I’d showed up early that morning to shower. The showerhead at home was calcified — the chemicals that were dumped into the city’s water supply crystallized, meaning many of us in Cataract City had to replace our showerheads every year. I’d stood under the nozzle as the water melted the remains of the fight from my skin and nerves, working my swollen hand under the hot water.

Then I’d dressed in my whites with the other men, each of us smelling of our lines, put on my hairnet and latex gloves and passed through the disinfectant chamber onto the factory floor. We stood in a loose semicircle while the safety inspector ran his tests. There was no sound but the ticking down of the giant grey units stretching deep into the factory. A haze of flour hung in the air — our lips were already whitened with it.

While we waited we limbered up using the exercises the productivity expert taught us: deep knee bends and hip swivels. We looked like an old-timers football team prepping to take the field. Knuckles and knees cracking, elbow joints popping — I could tell whose elbow or knee without even looking: each man’s body had its own sounds.

The red lights flicked green and the line leapt to life: worn canvas cloth chattering over steel pins, chukka-chikka-chukka . We inclined our heads over the line and tried to hold that pose for eight hours.

At the end of the shift I climbed the stairs to Cutts’ office and knocked.

“Come in, Duncan. Sit down.”

Wally Cutts was the line super — it was the same job Owe’s dad had once held. His degree hung on the wall, same as Mr. Stuckey’s had. At last summer’s corporate picnic the shop steward, a ratlike creature named Stan Lowery — Adam’s older brother — hung a piñata from the crotch of a tree: a leering burglar with a black mask over his eyes. Lowery had painted the burglar’s feet to look like workboots, just like those Cutts wore while walking the shop floor. Lowery stood with his gang of line-pigs, good ol’ boys with swollen wine-cask bellies, all of them laughing as their kids beat holy hell out of that piñata. Cutts stood there with his wife and young boy, chewing potato salad and ruffling his son’s hair as if this was a big lark and he was in on it.

“Hurt your hand?” Cutts said now.

I nodded.

“But you’re okay?”

My shrug indicated it was nothing he should bother himself about.

“Duncan … you know how it’s going, yes?”

I squinted at him dumbly, as if I didn’t, or couldn’t.

“First of all, production’s way down. Not because we can’t make the stuff, but because people aren’t eating it. It’s a healthier world, Duncan — and that’s fine and dandy, unless you’re baking cookies.”

Cutts was chubby-edging-into-fat with a beery face that broke into laughter at a great many things that weren’t funny. He’d walk the line filling a paper sack with warm Chips Ahoy, plucking them off the moving belt.

“How old are you, Duncan?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty five,” he said, as if it was impossible for him to recall ever having been so young. How the hell old was he — thirty? I could’ve happily murdered him in that moment. “We’re letting you go.”

“Just like that?”

He saw I was smiling and said uneasily, “It’s a seniority thing, pure and simple. You had a lot built up, you’ll recall, but then you took that year off to go to college — that put you back down near the bottom.”

Cutts showed me his palms like I was a dog who figured he was hiding a doggy treat. “We’re offering a month in lieu. Most guys are taking that.”

“The pension plan I’ve paid into?”

“Duncan, retirement age is sixty-five. You’ve got forty years left to get a good pension under you. Edwina’s job is safe, I promise.”

We shook. His hand felt like boiled suet stuffed into a surgical glove. When I got back downstairs Stan Lowery was waiting.

“We’re going to grieve it!” he told me, sounding like a teacup chihuahua yapping at the mailman. “We’re grieving this fucker all the way up, Diggs, you set your watch to it.”

He’d made the same promise to the guys turfed before me — and most of them now spent their nights patrolling hotel parking lots with a flashlight. I nodded to a few guys on the way out. It dawned on me how little I knew them. I’d worked at the Bisk for six years, yet I couldn’t recall most of their wives’ names.

“Well,” Bovine said, “I’m sure she was nice on the inside.”

The woman was old — how old I couldn’t really say. She lay on a steel table in a white-tiled room in the basement of the Harry Bohnsack Mortuary, a white sheet draping her from neck to toes. She may have been pretty once.

“Let’s get that pesky blood out of you, dear heart,” Bovine said sweetly.

I’d spent the afternoon at the Blue Lagoon, pumping Jack and Cokes into myself. Ed was working, Dolly was sleeping, and anyway, I liked watching Bovine work.

He wore painter’s overalls and a black vulcanized apron. He shook out a length of surgical tubing and fitted one end to a long, thin needle. He fitted the other end to the toaster-oven-sized recovery unit — a funny euphemism for a machine that sucked blood out of dead folks.

Bovine worked briskly, whistling “The Old Gray Mare” while rolling a blue drum with Nestlé Formalin written on it. How strange that a company known for its chocolate syrup would be a leading producer of formaldehyde. One whiff and I was back in grade ten science class on frog-dissection day. Bovine threaded a surgical tube into the drum, clipped it with surgical shears and attached a stent, joining it with two more lengths of tube. One end of the tube went into the recovery unit; the other end was fastened to a second needle, which Bovine slid into the big vein in the woman’s neck.

He flicked the machine on. Yellow formalin flowed up one tube. Black blood trickled down the other, collecting in a plastic jug. While the woman drained, Bovine used a pair of industrial clippers to cut her hair off, then her eyebrows.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Bovine said, hunting through a bin of sterilized wigs. “Only your hairdresser will know for sure.”

At first I’d found it creepy that Bovine talked to them. But then I figured we all had our coping mechanisms. He opened a tackle box, the kind you’d keep fishing lures in, and grabbed a pair of ocular suction cups.

“You going to look away, pussy?” he said.

“You want me to throw up on the poor girl, ruin all your hard work?”

Bovine took a swig from a beaker of gin and tonic on the steel slab and eased the woman’s left eye open. The cornea had gone milky as if it had been bleached. What’s worse, it had taken some sort of awful elevator to the basement of her skull.

“The brain shrinks from lack of moisture,” Bovine said. “Eyeballs get sucked into the cranial vault.”

He peeled the sticky-tab off a suction cup, attached it to her eyeball and pulled. That sound always got to me: it was like hearing a rubber boot pulled out of thick mud. The eyeball popped into the socket. Bovine ran a bead of glue down the eyelids and pressed them together.

“Just once I’d like to leave the eyes wide open,” he said. “See the guy peering up out of the casket like: The fuck you looking at? ”

The buzzer rang.

“That must be Dr. Jekyll,” said Bovine, in a lispy Vincent Price voice. “He’s bringing more carcasses …”