The Line Manager

A story about a windswept type place.

When it gets dark that means I can start drinking again. I can’t drink in my house because it fills up with sleep. I go out into the garage and start taking cans out of the refrigerator that hums by the wall. I sit and I listen to the wind battering against the retractable door that’s installed in the front of the garage and watch the color fade in the sky through the small windows set into the door in a row that’s above my head when I’m sitting. My tools hang on the pegboard: my hammer and saw. Nothing else. It was all I had left of that world to take with me. Later I bought some nails and strong tape at the all-purpose store. I keep them on hand on a shelf near the door just to keep up appearances. I sit and I drink and the light gives its glow. I keep it on so I know it’s above me, that it hasn’t been taken somewhere. The car has its bents. I set my chair down behind it, in front of the retractable door. The car came with this place and it smells like a memory inside and I can’t find the latch that will open its trunk. I don’t think it runs anymore. The garage is a smell that’s mostly old grass and turpentine. A poured concrete floor and a roof that doesn’t keep everything in. I got used to it fast. This is a windswept type place where not many live and the people that do are all angry all of the time. Outside my door there’s a driveway and a rose bush and beside it the ground dips down into a wide dismal marshy place between me and my neighbor and the cliff and the ocean beyond it. It’s grassy and silent and the wind blows across it and makes ripples sometimes. When the sun shines it can make blinding white sparks but it’s usually overcast here. And at night when I drink it doesn’t make any difference at all. I sit in my garage in a lime green folding lawn chair and I open a can and I drink. I put the can down on the concrete beside me and look mostly ahead at the retractable door that stays closed. The wind bangs and rattles against it and I can see it sometimes slightly shake in its place. Sometimes the wind comes from another direction and just whistles around but mostly it batters right into the door like it wants to get in and I sit there and watch it and listen. I don’t do much of anything else. There’s not much of anything else to do. I look at the door and I let my mind wander around. I pick up the can off the concrete and drink some more. I might take out my phone but the battery’s dead and I get no reception here anyway. On this whole island you can barely find any signal. The people are old and they have old phones too that connect to each other on wires that run underground. They talk on these phones through these wires but none of the wires lead to a line that leads out of here. It’s a completely closed system and they want it that way, it’s the way that they like it, they have nothing to say to the rest of the world. They only want to hiss back and forth through these underground wires the details of how they really feel to each other. The feelings don’t change so the impulse stays steady. They sit at their tables and dial the numbers and trade bitterness back and forth through the wires for most of the day. I know this because I manage the lines. That’s what they brought me here for. Here, to this place. The last line manager died and they sent me a letter and I came right away. I expect I will stay here forever. It’s the last place I want to be. I manage the lines and I listen in, too. I do not know if they know that I listen. If they do, they don’t seem to care. I hear them say: “Your son was a fuck-up. That’s why he died.” “Your husband never loved you. He just knew you were a pushover who would put up with anything.” “I should have shot you forty years ago, when I had the chance. Your family would have thanked me.” “It’s a good thing your wife had that miscarriage. You’re just not cut out to be a father.” “One of these days I’m going to string up your mangy cat in my garden.” “One of these days I’m going to put a bullet in your idiot dog’s brain.” “I thought the Nativity scene you put up was disgusting.” “Your daughter got what was coming to her.” “If I were you I would stick my head in the oven and turn the gas on. I would have done it forty years ago.” I hear them say other things, too. Some of it is just too foul for me to repeat. It goes on all day. They talk through the wires and the wind blows outside. There’s hardly a car on the roads. And then at night I can go into the garage and start drinking again. I sit in the chair and open the can and drink and put the can down on the floor. I pick it up again and drink more. I drink one can then another. I drink the cans slowly but they pile up anyway. There’s nowhere to put them. They have nowhere to go. When the wind dies down I hear the thin sound of rustling from inside the pile and I knock the cans over and I pick them back up again. Then the wind bangs on the retractable door and I get up again and go to the grimy refrigerator that hums by the wall and take out another. I take out another. In brief, I begin to feel looser. I look at the wall and I look at my tools and I take one off the peg and I put it back on. I pick up the tape and put it back down. I pretend to push a nail through my thumb. I go to the side door and open it and unzip my fly and start pissing out onto the grass. I piss for a long time and while I piss I look into the darkness. I see a light in a window across the wide dismal marshy place, a small attic window with nails pounded at angles into the sill. It flickers a while and then it snuffs out. I won’t see it again. I go back inside my garage and kick a hole through an old cathode TV. I drink and I wait for the fog to roll in. I have been waiting a very long time.