THE NIGHT SHIFT is for me a luxury, the freedom to indulge my insomnia by writing at a Dunkin’ Donuts, one of the only places open at midnight where I live, up north on the river between Vermont and New Hampshire. Lately, though, my insomnia doesn’t feel like such a gift. Too much to think about. So click, click, goes the camera—the phone—looking for other people’s stories to fill the hours. This is Mike; he’s thirty-four, he’s been a night baker for a year, and tonight’s his last shift. Come six a.m., “no more uniform.” He decided to start early. He’s says he’s going to be a painter. What kind? “Well, I’m painting a church . . .” He means the walls. The new job started early, too. “So I’m working, like, eighty-hour days.” He means weeks. He’s tired. He doesn’t like baking. Rotten pay, rotten hours, rotten work. “You don’t think. It’s just repetition.” Painting, you pay attention. “You can’t be afraid up there.” The ladder, up high. “I’m not afraid,” he says. “I can do anything.” He says he could be a carpenter. “But it hasn’t happened.” Why does he bake? “Couldn’t get a job.” Work’s like that, he says, there are bad times. Everything’s like that, he says. There are bad times.

“Who’s the tear for?” The tattoo by his right eye.

“For my son,” he says, “who died when he was two months old.”