In the Nighttime

I’m at my desk on the night shift.

You know the story. You know the results, anyway.

The suck and drain of hot poison corroding its way down, down, into the earth.

These are things you cannot fix.

Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. The useless land that spits and gurgles out sad parodies of vegetation, the tainted meat—the off-the-scale lymphoma counts. The blank look of thirty-year-olds given death sentences for them and their families by their government.

They, the accidents, happened at night—happened between 4 and 6 A.M. And if you’ve ever worked this shift, these hours, you know why. Between four and six, the world changes into something beyond foreign and it doesn’t matter how often you’re there for it, it will stay as foreign as it was the first time you felt it. An everlasting Gobstopper of despair and loneliness. It never gets smaller and it never lessens in intensity.

People make mistakes at this hour and I know why.

It’s dark out there and you feel young and weak and alone.

At night, we are all small. It’s physical. The world is huge and you shrink into yourself.

Work the night shift and you’ll come to understand this and more.

You read books, all night-shift people try, and you’ll read, over and over, people saying that it’s silent, that’s the word they’ll use, silent, when the people stop talking. But it’s never silent.

Work nights and you’ll find how much noise there is when people think things are quiet. There’s nothing so loud as the quiet. The clank of pipes that’ve churned for years. The running pats of rat feet in the wall. Their chewing—you can hear it through cracking plaster that spiderwebs its way up and down the wall. Listen. Hear the bugs’ antennae tick the tile. Realize how busy things are in your aloneness. Hear the wind kick leaves into corners. Hear bags roll their way down the street. Listen, at 1 A.M. when Phil, the guy at the porno video place next door, closes up and scrapes his security cages over his door. Listen to the glass in the front door settle and crackle as it does every night.

Listen to the hum of wires and the hiss of tires as they drive by. You listen to this, and you understand why people talk, why they tell their stories on talk radio all night. They talk to block this out, this noise they mistake for silence. They talk to push it back, push it away. Talk talk talk.

First-time caller, longtime listener.

I have a question and I’ll take my answer off the air.

Blah, blah.

I turn off the radio. The click, like everything else, seems loud. I try to focus on blocking out the noise.

And if you can block all of this out, you’ll feel and hear the swoosh of blood through your body. You will hear your heart. You will hear you. And you’ll start to think about that heart, about how much it can do, how it just keeps thumping its way through these nights, through these days, and you’ll wonder how much it has to go and will you have time to do whatever it is you were meant to do. Or will it stop? And will you know silence then?

These are the thoughts that lead you to miss that blinking button on reactor five. The thoughts that cause you to miss the downshift and put your truck in the ravine. This is what happens between four and six in the morning.