Viscosity Breakdown
by S. FosterFuckin' A! They made me a Dipstick Wrangler! Although the interview yesterday afternoon went badly, as my job interviews always do, I just got off the phone with someone from Personnel who called to offer me a temp position. I gladly accepted. In light of my qualifications, I certainly deserve better - and will hopefully soon attain better - but this is a start. At least my long spell of unemployment is finally broken.
Did I use "fuckin' A!" appropriately just now? I'm all alone here, so it makes no difference. I've always been sort of tone-deaf where idiomatic usage is concerned, especially with respect to profanity; as a kid, I used to say things like, "Twelve dollars? I don't want to have to pay twelve shitting dollars!" Most of my friends and their parents thought I was probably autistic. Maybe they were right.
Slang just doesn't roll trippingly from my tongue, ya know.
Whereas other kids could stand defiantly on a playground, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of their Toughskins, and exhale "Fuckin' A!" with perfect intonation and emphasis, I parsed the expression as "fuck an egg!" and repeated this malapropism over and over until I was eventually taken aside and corrected.
Now, as a grownup, I am familiar almost exclusively with slang terms that start with the letters A through G, since AMERICAN SLANG A-G is my favorite of the two volumes so far released. Thankfully, this volume contains the "fucks," so I can probably avoid making an error as dire as "fuck an egg" again.
"... and for that reason alone, we need to keep about 75,000 gallons of it continuously recirculating underneath the facility," says foreman Loomis with an encompassing sweep of his arm, indicating the miles of reinforced piping that coil intestinally on the high ceiling above us. We're definitely underneath: this is sub-level four. (There is no floor zero, an omission which I find irksome.)
This place is as big as an aircraft hangar; we're hemmed in on two sides by tons of whirring machinery, and the path we're on seems to vanish into infinity since it becomes progressively obscured, farther along, by irregular jets of steam that escape sideways from vertically jutting pylons. Decals, paint, and tape make up alternating patterns of slanted yellow and black almost everywhere we look. HARD HAT AREA, says a sign.
Our boots clunk on the floor's metal grate as the foreman leads us to a four-wheeled cart onto which he's placed a small specimen tray containing a formless blob of what looks almost like graphite, but is less lustrous. As I and the other new hires gather around his two-tiered cart, Loomis continues: "This is a small sample of the metamaterial I'm talking about. It has many properties not found in nature. For instance, it's neither acidic nor alkaline, but it leaves a stain on litmus paper that glows bright blue under a UV lamp. One of the weird properties you can see for yourselves right now: ordinary light makes it boil."
The phenomenon he alludes to can be correctly described as weird - none of us trainees has ever seen anything like it - but it wouldn't be called "boiling" by any standard definition. Before our eyes, the blob undergoes a slow transformation. No one speaks as we see the exposed portion of the metamaterial coalesce into serried ranks of semi-regular rods, almost like columnar basalt in miniature.
"What's more," he says as he hefts a repurposed foodservice jug marked NUTMEG from the cart's lower shelf, "the metamaterial has no measurable magnetic field of its own..." He dumps not nutmeg but iron filings onto the sheet of butcher paper on top of the cart to form a scattered ring of particles around the little tray. As promised, conspicuous by their absence are the lines of force familiar to high school science students as the telltale sign of magnetism. Upon capping and stowing the NUTMEG jug, he resumes speaking where he'd left off moments before: "... but it disrupts ordinary magnets through ellipsoid-cymatic feedback."
From a shirt pocket, he takes a horseshoe magnet. He puts it first into a clump of the filings, which produces the customary result: the particles arrange into ghostly eggbeater-like loops. Then, he wipes the magnet with a purple shop-rag, and says, "Watch this." Smiling lopsidedly, he grips the magnet tightly and pushes it toward the tub of hypo-geometric metamaterial. Presently, the horseshoe deforms like a pair of badly-abused salad tongs: north and south bend inward and eventually touch each other. With evident satisfaction, he pulls the magnet away. We (the trainees) have no idea what to make of this, and he spies us glancing furtively at one another.
"That's not the best part," he says. "Feel this. Touch it." When he apparently senses reluctance, he adds, "Come on - you won't die." Despite this reassurance, I'm the only one who reaches out to touch the magnet. It's hot! The newly-made junction of N and S is actually hot to the touch. Instinctively, I draw my hand back. The foreman turns the magnet around and, with his free hand, sweeps some of the iron filings into a pile near one corner of the paper. Since I'm very slow on the uptake in social settings, this is the first I realize that he's offering the magnet to me - and has been doing so for several seconds. "Take it," he insists, loudly, with a curt wiggle of his knobby and callused hand.
I don't want to upset him (especially not on my first day here), so I grasp the magnet by its curved portion, which is barely warmer than usual. I'm unsteady, and my fingers fumble.
You know that feeling you get after drinking an entire two-liter bottle of highly caffeinated sugary soda at 3 AM in an attempt to stay awake while playing chess against your computer, only to realize that - although you have no genuine difficulty seeing the pieces on the chessboard - you somehow forgot that advancing one particular pawn would allow the opponent's bishop to swoop in and capture your rook - ? Imagine that sensation amplified a hundredfold and played out in front of a live studio audience, and that's basically what social situations are for me: a sort of low-bandwidth semi-awareness coupled with a pervasive flush-faced giddy nervousness.
"You obviously don't got a college degree in following directions, I can tell that much already." The foreman must have just now said something else before this, but I can't remember what. "Put it in," he demands. The other trainees snicker. He takes my densely-sleeved forearm somewhat gently and pushes it, magnet and all, toward the pile of iron filings. A remarkable thing happens: from the damaged magnet's N/S junction, a rooster-tail of filings sprays out as if launched by an air hose. The foreman has let go of me, thankfully, so I'm at liberty (physically, anyway) to experiment a little. By altering my approach vector, I can send a coherent stream of iron jetting from the magnet in any direction I choose.
"Whoa!" says someone.
"Let me try!" says one of the other trainees, and soon I need to hand over the magnet. As one and then another of my co-workers creates his own filing-spray, I look at the sample of metamaterial: distinct striations, hexagonal in profile, mar the once-puddled surface. The metamaterial seems to have darkened slightly; I manage not to say so aloud, but it occurs to me that these unearthly appurtenances now look like unsharpened number two pencils cast from number two pencil lead.
My thoughts are interrupted by the foreman, who says, "Just imagine what would happen if this stuff got near an electromagnet!" He puts heavy stress on electro. "And now, gentlemen, if you'll follow me," he says as he ascends a steep gantry. He's clearly accustomed to this, as he takes the steps two at a time, with his knees rising to almost waist-height as he goes. This is doubly remarkable, since he's wearing polyester slacks and has a pot belly.
I'm the last person up to the top. All of us in the group now stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, on a small platform made of thinner metal grating than the floor, which is, incidentally, almost twenty feet below us. Badly scuffed no-skid tape fringes the platform. "This is the Synchrodomain Downpan," says the foreman. Perhaps because such terms of art would prove inscrutable to trainees, this is spelled out in large raised block letters on the side of a metal panel near us:
SYNCHRODOMAIN
DOWNPAN
"This metamaterial," he goes on, "is the most viscous substance known to science. Under high pressure in these pipes - " he jerks a thumb upward " - it is neither solid nor liquid nor gas. It exists in an exotic state of high viscosity. It is so viscous, in fact, that it will stick to anything used to detect it - which, of course, would give a false result. That's a slight problem, because when the Facility above us is functioning at full capacity, we need to get exact level readings every thirty minutes from the Synchrodomain Downpan here. So," he says, patting one of the Downpan's vertical surfaces affectionately as if giving encouragement to a well-fed sled dog, "we have to do things the old-fashioned way: we use a special-made dipstick." With this, the same hand that patted the side of the Downpan yanks upward on a plastic pull-ring, freeing a long flat metal stick, which is partially coated with gray goo. He wipes the goo quickly with his shop-rag, plunges the metal stick just as quickly back into the machine, withdraws it again, and lays it flat against the rag in his upturned palm. He reads a set of notches stamped into the metal of the dipstick. The rest of us cluster around him and crane our necks to see better.
"Perfect," he announces, before putting the dipstick back in for good. "The level's right where we want it to be."
I raise my hand to speak. "Mm?" says Loomis.
"Why don't we j-just use a clear cylinder or a clear-walled, uh, enclosure," I ask. "Or maybe a transp-p-parent observation window. You know - that you can s-see through." I cannot prevent myself from vocabulating all over the place, and this tends to upset other people. My question is nowhere near as well-put as I'd intended it to be, primarily because dealing with normal people requires a lot of real-time self-editing: many layers of software translation. Fully half of my stuttering can be attributed to this; the other half can be attributed to the fact that I was born a stutterer.
"Weren't you paying attention during the little demo down there?" He gets no answer from me, so he specifies. "The material hardens and boils on exposure to ordinary light, which would contaminate the stream. And then the folks upstairs'd get upset. What'd I just say about viscosity?"
The other trainees nod gravely. Not that they actually understand what's just been said - he's given them a cue to nod, and they've done so.
"You'd never know it from lookin' at him," says the foreman as he gestures toward me, "but this bright young man here has just been hired as our new Dipstick Wrangler." When the other guys bat their heavy gloves together (POCK-POCK-POCK-POCK-POCK) in mock-applause, I feel a wave of red rise past my collar and into my face. "He's got an engineering degree and everything. See, we need someone who can use the proper engineering notation. He took the M-Level test, and he's the only one that ever aced the section on sig figs - significant figures and arithmetic precision. Which reminds me - " and here he unhooks a clipboard from a nearby peg " - here's your clipboard." He hands it to me. My grip is not perfectly steady.
One fellow, who must be an entire ten years younger than I am, gives me a little inverted-'U' moué that I think must mean "not bad." Or not. I'm not too good at reading faces.
"So," says Loomis, "if nobody has any more questions, that's the end of the presentation. Oh - and this is a non-smoking facility."
"That's okay, boss," says one of the guys. "All's we gotta do is just go a coupla blocks over to Sunnysides!"
This provokes immediate, rollicking laughter from everyone except me. Aware that my silence serves to reinforce my outsider status, I hear myself shout, "Fuck an egg!" for the first time since grade school, and I immediately regret having done so. The high-fiving that had occupied the last few seconds stops abruptly when everyone turns to stare at me. I pinch my clipboard like a tournament shield in front of my chest. "You know," I squeak. It's as if I have the source-code of a joke in my head, but no way to compile it. "Sunnyside is a thing that eggs can be. P-potentially, it's an eggs-attribute."
The rest of my first week on this loser dipstick job doesn't go any better.
My constant wordplay has not always been appreciated, especially during my childhood.
Upon hearing adults referring to "Adirondack chairs," I felt compelled to blurt out, "Subtractirondack chairs!" I rejoined references to an upcoming dinner party by saying, "Decidedly p-p-preferable to a Donner Party, that's for sure!" Some people called me 'Cyclopedia Brown. Some people called me things that were much worse.
After more than twenty years, I still have two metal pins in my jaw from the time when a girl at my school walloped me with her three-ring binder when I told her this joke, which I wrote myself:
Q: What's nearly as good as Thousand Island Dressing?
A: 999 Island Dressing!
Her hitting me made me prematurely lose a few baby teeth that weren't even loose, leaving a gap in my smile that ruined my school photos for a couple of years running. (As soon as my regular teeth finally came in, it was determined that I'd require not merely braces but dental headgear, which led to more beatings, and later caused me to skip school photographs altogether.) The girl's family was poor, and probably couldn't have afforded a good lawyer, but my parents didn't press charges. It was almost as if they sided with her, agreed with her - she was their proxy, their champion, for administering the beating that they'd always wanted to give me but dared not.
On that day I hobbled, sobbing, into the principal's office, spitting uprooted teeth and pulpy blood, and got laughed at by the nurse and the principal once they found out what had earned me my wallop.
There are those who would say, not without justification, that the entire notion of "body memory" is bogus - that we don't actually quote-unquote remember things with our bodies. But my jaw remembers - or, more accurately, the metal in my jaw remembers - what happened that day. It's like the PG-13 cousin of Tourette's syndrome, this malady: I cannot stop my jaw from aching when I feel a bad pun coming on, but I also cannot stop myself from punning. I'm a punny guy. Get it?
"Three's Company," I'd say in response to hearing that television program's theme song, "but I guess one is a sole proprietorship!" LL Cool J was sequelized (in my imagination, anyway) to LL Completely Frozen J. I called sparkling cider "arkling spider." That's how the 1980s went for me.
Here I am at my job, in what might be my second week or my third, settled into my little routine with the clipboard. It's demeaning, doing this sort of scut work. Did I mention that this isn't the job I originally interviewed for? Yes, I did. Some things bear repeating. Don't be surprised if I bring it up again. This nonsense involving the dipstick is a waste of my talent and experience, even though I'm apparently doing it correctly.
"Couldja c'mere a second?" I hear from somewhere below me. I'm on the platform, twenty feet up. I lean over a railing and see one of my co-workers, a hard-hatted man of maybe twenty-five, curling a single finger in that "couldja c'mere a second?" gesture that looks like an inchworm being electrocuted. He again speaks this phrase in what could be described, somewhat inconsistently, as a loud whisper: "Couldja c'mere a second?"
"What?" I shout back down to him with my waist against the metal railing. I must've been too loud, since he looks left and right. At least for now, it appears that we're the only ones in earshot.
"Needja to take a quick look at some of the 'quipment. Only take a second."
With some reluctance, I put the clipboard on its peg and descend to the floor. We walk together through a maze of noisy and imposing hardware.
After a moment, we turn a corner near a covered metal vent. Already standing there, maybe waiting for us, is one of his friends, whose presence I acknowledge with several quick nods of my head, as if saying "yes, yes, yes!" instead of the intended "dude - wassup!" I just don't have the knack for this sort of communication.
His friend walks away.
The first fellow, whose name tag says either CLIVE or OLIVE, now points to the offending machine: a Zer0magTrak ColdStak - one of the newer models, by the looks of it. "Prolly I just put it back the wrong way," he tells me.
To say that this magnetic refrigerator (the Zer0magTrak) is merely ugly is to pay it an unearned compliment. Here, I'd like to shirk some of my writerly duties if I may. Imagine that you get some sheet-metal and several hundred sheet-metal screws; assemble them in any way you like; lash together the most unappealing ductwork you can find; arrange all of this in a semi-coherent manner; put a control panel full of blinking lights on the front. Use the indicators from a guitar tuner or a battery charger if necessary. Label these indicators randomly with cryptic phrases like TRACTOR BEAM OYSTER.
Whatever you're thinking of resembles a Zer0magTrak ColdStak fairly closely. See? That wasn't so difficult. If a picture indeed be worth a thousand words, then that little thought-experiment just saved 930 words! (Or one photograph.)
"I've seen these before. I think I can probably disemporkulate it," I sigh.
"You think you can probably what - ?"
I freeze on the spot. Obviously not because of the Zer0magTrak - it's not cold enough anymore! (Get it?) He's caught me. "Disemporkulate," I mutter.
"And... what's that mean?"
"To un-fuck it up, essentially."
"Dude! Where'd you hear that?"
"I made it up myself," I admit reluctantly.
"You ought to write that down!" I haven't the heart to tell him that I have been preoccupied by compiling my own private slang dictionary, to complement the perpetually unfinished "official" version. I'm proceeding alphabetically, and I've reached 'E' (it's now about a year after I coined the term under discussion, as it happens).
"Disemporkulate!" he beams as he chucks me lightly on the shoulder. "Fuckin' A!"
I'm grateful that he now leaves me alone with the Zer0magTrak; in not too much time, I have in fact disemporkulated it, and it soon chugs away nicely and refrigeratedly. Still, these errors (any description of which would occupy several paragraphs) look as if they might have been caused deliberately. I make a mental note to mention this to the foreman.
"Acidic acid," says one of my co-workers. It doesn't matter which one. "Ain't that... y'know, kinda like sayin' the same thing all over again - ?"
Their derision has persisted for long enough - it has intensified, even, as they've drained the pitcher of beer on the table in front of us - that I feel there's very little use in explaining myself once more.
What's the name of this place? It's probably written on the paper napkin I've been fussing with for ten or twenty minutes, but I can't be bothered to read it. This revolting and noisy tavern is just a few blocks from the Facility's main entrance. Several of my co-workers invited me along. That Clive / Olive guy isn't here, which is bad, since he's the only one at work who is nice to me.
"Uh-SEE-tick," I enunciate. So far, I've taken in about six fluid ounces of beer. "Acetic acid... like in vinegar." My stutter is almost completely gone, which is a noteworthy and unexpected side-effect of the alcohol.
"So what you're sayin' is," someone else now asks me, "yer in-tire sine-tific theory... is made outta some great big gi-gannic douchebag?"
Gouts of well-churned saliva and unswallowed swill spew from several unlettered mouths. The laughter makes its way all around the bar: people I've never met before seem to find the word "douchebag" uproariously funny. The guys from work whack their beer glasses hard enough against the table's uneven wood that pretzels go flying.
The fellow sitting directly across the table from me imposes on himself - and fails - an ad hoc sobriety test by attempting to wipe something from the corner of his eye as he continues laughing. His finger skids across his sweaty brow as if he's saluting while applying sunscreen. If he's this drunk, he must have been drinking on the job today. Sometimes it's good to get a head start, I guess. Someone near him slaps him heartily on the shoulder.
"I'm so glad we have college boy here to disemporkulate these complicated issues for us," says the guy next to me, whom I recognize as Jonas. Now he puts me in one of those crooked-elbowed headlocks I've seen men do at sporting events. "Ain't we lucky they hired us a Disemporkulatin' Dipstick Wrangler who knows his fancy chemistry? You're gonna go far in this line of work, I can tell that right now." Jonas, whose IQ I'd estimate at 90 (maximum), tells weightlifting stories in the cafeteria. Yes, weightlifting stories: actual narratives detailing his weightlifting exploits. They usually go something like, "So I'm down there onna bench, bustin' out my set uh ten reps, right? So I'm up at two hunnert, not feelin' the burn, gotta set my goals, gotta push it, always gotta push it, know what I'm sayin', so I bhhupp 'em up t' two hunnert an' twenny."
I infer from context that to bhhupp is a verb. It is not spoken exactly like the English "bump," from which it may nevertheless be derived; bhhupp is said without the nasal passages open, and with a great froggy puff of the cheeks. The lips should flap. This is classic onomatopoeia; you can hardly overdo this.
Bhhupp!
Now it's my turn to get thumped on the shoulder: Jonas, with his bhhupped-up musculature, bruises me. At least he's no longer got me in a headlock.
My seat faces the distant bar, and the bar has a mirror behind it, but I can't make out my own reflection amid the pervasive tobacco smoke. So, I have no idea what sort of expression I'm wearing. My face is flushed - I can tell that much without consulting a mirror. What on earth was I attempting to tell these guys about acetic acid? Something work-related, naturally.
My head has rusty bearings. My neck sways and my earlobes roast. A song from the 1980s, some sort of half-remembered one-hit wonder, roars to life on the jukebox, which I only now notice that I'm sitting next to.
I'd been trying, I now seem to remember, to convey something important about the exotic properties of metamaterials and their potential interactions with normal matter under high pressure. Rather than listening to me, they'd occupied themselves during our walk to the tavern by whacking their extended hands against parking meters and by shouting, "Dude! Go out for a pass!" No actual football was in evidence, but they pantomimed well. Years of practice, I figured.
Probably best just to let it go, I tell myself as I knock back my half-glass of inexpensive beer. I'm glad that I don't remember the rest of the evening.
As shown by the matchbook I discover in my pocket the next morning, "Sunnysides," as I'd misheard it, is actually "Sonnyside's," owned by a gentleman named Sonny G., whose telephone number is printed beneath his name. I'm willing to wager that Sonny was never beaten or shunned for that choice bit of wordplay. People probably find it charming. That fucker. That stupid piece of fuck.
Hangover approximates a short-duration case of influenza; this is what people mean when they say "flu-like symptoms." I don't throw up today, which is fortunate. I need to find some sort of alcohol, I reason, that suppresses my stuttering but doesn't make my face turn red. I've talked myself into believing that I'm conducting important research.
My 'research' causes me to miss work on Monday. However, I've made a crucial discovery: a brand of dry champagne costing $50 per bottle is a perfect anti-stuttering medication, especially when combined with a handful of expired Darvocet from my medicine chest. And champagne doesn't make my face turn red. I make barely more than $50 in a day. This story problem will not work out satisfactorily, I can see.
A day later, possibly two, I force myself to get up and go to my job. Something I did that night at Sonnyside's has apparently served to ingratiate me with my fellow employees, but I'm afraid to ask what. Have I become a mascot? A token? They've covered for me, made excuses for my absence, told our superiors that I was sick. Upon my belated return, I thank each of them personally.
Now, this afternoon, I sip flat champagne from a pocket-flask before disemporkulating the Zer0magTrak. (I guarantee you: that string of characters has never been typed before in the history of the universe.) Ordinary white wine gives me heartburn. I need champagne.
Oliver (whose name is neither CLIVE nor OLIVE, but whose name tag is variously faulty) declines when I offer him a swig. I cap the little flask and put it away. I ask Oliver, "Want to see my impression of Johnny Rotten as an interior decorator?"
Oliver shrugs.
I bare my teeth, bug out my eyes, and shout, "NOOOOOOOO FUSCHIA!" Soon I'm making myself laugh so hard that I have to lean against the Zer0magTrak.
Oliver smiles bemusedly. "That's pretty good." A pause. "Who's Johnny Rotten?" It didn't occur to me that Oliver might be too young to know. Suddenly, he braces as if standing at attention. I turn to follow his line-of-sight.
It's foreman Loomis, and he's looking right at me. "Like to see you in my office. At your earliest convenience."
And by the way, I know that there's no such thing as a piece of fuck. I said that on purpose.
"Are you a team player?"
Every day on the job I've seen fluttering paper streamers that suggest the existence of numerous air conditioning fans, but you'd never know it, since this workplace is pretty similar to what you'd probably get if Ridley Scott designed a sauna. It gets uncomfortably hot on sub-level four, especially when the experts upstairs have the machinery running full-tilt, -steam, and -blast. It's a tad cooler here in the foreman's office, owing to the little oscillating fan clamped to the side of his desk, but the transition I made just a moment ago between temperature zones merely serves to slightly cool my sweat.
Loomis' fan sports its own little streamers: tractor-strips ripped from the edges of fanfold paper. Cute, really.
"I asked you a question," says fat old foreman Loomis. "Are you a team player?" The fan goes fffffffwwwwwUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuzzzzzzz.
"Not really," my mind says, while my mouth manages to say, "I guess so."
"We've been reviewing your performance. Not one error in your data-collection or your computations. Even so, I'm beginning to think you might not be right for this position."
I shiver. "Why? Why? Wh-what's the problem?" They're on to me: they must have detected the alcohol.
"Two problems, actually. Number one, quit distracting everyone with your so-called jokes when you're on the job. Bad for morale, and I won't have it. There's plenty of time for levity when all the work is done. Clear?"
"Got it." I don't want to say it, but make myself.
"Second, the problems with the main Zer0magTrak ColdStak began just after you were hired - problems which, I might add, you conveniently know how to fix. Or, to put it your way, disemporkulate. Again, how convenient." He times this remark to the moment that a cold burst from the oscillating fan hits me in the face; whatever the reverse of a blush is, thermally speaking, that's what my skin does. The fan's arc will do this periodically to anyone sitting in this chair, I realize; maybe this arrangement exists as much for interrogation as climate control.
"Well," I croak, "m-maybe you have some...resentful people in the workplace. They don't like their jobs. They w-were just waiting for a new guy to get hired so they could...sabotage some equipment and b-blame it on him. On the new guy." My stutter has resurfaced in spite of all the alcohol; I'd better drink more champagne! is the first thing that occurs to me. Out of the clear blue, I realize that whatever I did at Sonnyside's that served to increase my popularity must have involved, in no particular order, either karaoke or stand-up comedy. Each possibility mortifies me.
"Who said anything about sabotage?" asks deputy foreman Dippenhurst from behind me. I didn't know he was there, or even that there was enough space in the office for someone to hide. I've seen this person only once before, on the day I blew the interview for the other position. He's skinny, Dippenhurst. I realize that I've swiveled instinctively at the sound of his voice. Dippenhurst glowers. "Well?"
"So allow me... let me see if-if I have this straightened up," I say. "On the one hand, if I try to fit in with this bunch of imbeciles by cracking a few jokes - the kind of jokes I'm good at - then that's a morale problem, and I'm distracting people. I never see Jimmy or Jonas getting called into the carpet for telling 'blonde-walks-into-a-bar' jokes."
"Let us worry about that," says Loomis. "You focus on you." This is selective enforcement, I want to shout.
"And on the other hand, if my experience with magnetocaloric fittings gives me an intuitive grasp of the Zer0magTrak problems, then I'm some kind of saboteur - ? Damned if I do and half a dozen of the other!"
"Are you trained to repair our Zer0magTrak?" Dippenhurst asks me.
"Sort of... we worked on one back in - "
"Did we hire you to repair our Zer0magTrak?"
"No, but Oliver - "
"What's that called when someone oversteps his bounds?" Momentarily, Dippenhurst looks past me toward Loomis. He doesn't get a reply, so he re-locks his eyes on mine. "So what's the word for that, Mister Word-A-Day-Calendar, when someone does way more than they're supposed to?"
I take a moment, and then say, "Supererogation - ?"
"So," says Dippenhurst, "wouldn't you say that you're pretty much super-arrow-gatin' all over the place, then?"
"I suppose so. But I wanted to help out. I didn't want Oliver to get into trouble."
"He's not our responsibility anymore." A long pause. "We've had him transfered. He'll be down there packing up his stuff right now."
Now I feel both a literal and figurative chill. Reality itself is engaging in double-meaning. People make a valid point when they assert that sometimes puns aren't very funny.
Dippenhurst's beeper goes off; with a half-smile, he then quickly leaves the room. Right on cue. I'll bet he had that planned. Dippenhurst is a real smooth-time operator. Now, I'm alone with Loomis, unless there's anyone else lurking in here.
"I don't think you're such a bad guy," he says as I swivel back toward him. "And I feel more comfortable saying this without Dippenhurst here: you'll go far. Someone of your intelligence is an asset. No promises, but they could use someone like you upstairs. There may be a position coming open sometime soon - not the one you interviewed for, but certainly something you're bound to like better than the work you're doing with the dipstick. But in the meantime, you've got to clean up your act. Clear?"
His cadence, a moment ago, was really more like "CLEAN... UP... YOUR... ACT." I want to agree, and my aching chin bobs in acknowledgment, but I know somehow I'll eventually let everyone down.
I don't gossip... or, at least that's what I've heard. I'm never privy to the back-channel communication that takes place between all of the popular people when they go upstairs on break. In hushed tones, my co-workers have been lamenting the sudden absence of Oliver, who seems to have been generally well-liked. As far as I can tell, no one else has learned exactly what happened in Loomis' office; they just know that Oliver made the mistake of associating with that weird guy - me - and that now he doesn't work here anymore.
Recently, I've needed to hold onto railings when I walk. Yes, alcohol is implicated in my loss of balance. I'm out of pain pills, so alcohol and alcohol alone must be the culprit.
Mainly, I've been checking the dipstick on the Downpan whenever I've been in the mood. The readings have always been within the published guidelines (within five percent tolerance, that is), and I therefore have no cause to expect that it could ever be otherwise.
This is what high school English teachers refer to as "foreshadowing."
You'd think that getting a talking-to like the one I got a while back would cause me to clean up my act (or even CLEAN... UP... MY... ACT...) in a hurry. Wrong, at least in this case. Not that I want to get fired. But this job is a barf. It's been another week now, and no job offer from upstairs has arrived.
As long as I'm stuck down here, I reason, I might as well try to get along with my co-workers in the only way I know how. Actually, I've just finished telling this joke when the alarm goes off: "German geologists have discovered a new mineral that prevents sneezing. It's called Gazoontite!"
Not only does the alarm begin to blare, but the lights go out. A great cry erupts from grown men who are understandably frightened about walking through a darkened area where almost everything is labeled NOT A STEP.
Someone has a flashlight on his utility belt, and soon the ghostly cone of a beam sweeps erratically through the dark. The alarm persists... and persists. It's painful. Stark, battery-powered emergency lighting switches on, and casts the milling crowd in unusual hues.
As I try to get out of everyone's way, I step in something that sticks to my boot sole like chewing gum in a summer parking lot. When I pull my foot away, I hear the farty sigh of a suction cup un-sticking from wet glass; I kneel to see the tread-imprints I've left in a glob of metamaterial.
How'd that get there?
As I stand up and raise a hand to divert the lip of my lopsided hard hat from my brow, I get shouldered into by someone who shouts, "Watch it!"
Within that moment, before I even realize what's happened, my so-called colleague has moved on, and my hard hat has clattered uselessly down a nearby stairway. The hand that had adjusted the hat only a moment before rests on my clammy forehead in what I'm sure comprises a cartoon sketch of a universal "oh, crap!" posture. I am looking up. With my hat knocked off, my view is unobstructed. The overhead pipes have cracked in several places, and grayish goo is dripping out.
I look at my clipboard, which I've managed to hold onto despite the collision, suddenly aware of the blank spaces comprising a tacit indictment of my recent neglect.
With laborers still streaming past me, I leave the main walkway and duck behind a sturdy pylon. My fussy fingers grip the nub of the worn-down grease-pencil that dangles from the clipboard by a string. In the half-darkness, I try to peel away the tightly-wound paper on the grease-pencil's end. This takes a while. Finally, I've begun scribbling some plausible-looking values into the blanks when skinny little Dippenhurst shouts at me, from across the floor, "You! Give me the last three readings from the Downpan!"
"Uh..." is all that escapes my lips. His rapid approach doesn't make it any easier for me to think. Are engineers allowed to use ditto marks, I wonder. Would a few columns of " " " " mean the same thing as, 'looked pretty much okay to me, I guess, until it blew up and we all died'?
My co-workers are regrouping. My narrow window on their traffic patterns makes it unclear to me whether they're rallying behind Dippenhurst, but it certainly looks that way. Due to their extreme disorganization, they don't yet resemble the torch-wielding mob from an old film about witch-trials. So far, they look more worried than angry.
Dippenhurst grabs me by the collar and drags me from the nook I've backed myself into. Now, I'm in full view of everyone there. He takes the clipboard from me, holds it in front of his face, adjusts his posture slightly so that his shadow no longer falls on it, and then demands, "Where's the data? The Downpan data?"
He gets no response from me. With the clipboard, he clouts me squarely on the ear. If I still had my hard hat, which I don't, it would have flown ten feet sideways; that's what the clipboard does after its brief encounter with my head.
"Does anyone know where Loomis is?" asks Dippenhurst. No one does. As Dippenhurst makes his exit, he shouts over his shoulder, "Keep an eye on him!"
"Don't worry," says Jonas, he of the bhhupped-up physique. "He ain't goin' noplace."
"This is your fault," says someone, "all what's just happened here. You musta not checked on that dipstick. You musta not written what's on the dipstick down on that little clipboard uh yers. You musta not done yer job like yer sposta."
I keep silent. However inchoately spoken, that assessment is essentially correct.
Some of the conventional illumination comes on, but the alarm is still going. Nearby, an LCD wall-clock reads 12:00. Whether it's been reset like a microwave oven after a power outage, or whether it's really twelve noon, I can't tell. I feel hungry, so it's probably noon. Jonas settles the issue: "Lunchtime!" he shouts. "Time for boy genius to eat his words."
What happens next maps imperfectly onto the concept of "eating one's words" as I understand it, but the vagaries of cliché have certainly confounded me before ("tongue-in-cheek" or "eat your heart out," for instance).
"You like this stuff so much, smarty-pants," shouts Jonas, "why don'cha get down there 'n' eat it?" Everybody starts cheering. When their hooting falls into time with the staccato HONK-HONK of the alarm, it constitutes the worst sound I've ever heard. The conventional illumination fails again, leaving only the emergency lights.
My knees give out. The grimy fist that constrains my shirt-collar pushes me toward a little lump of metamaterial, as if I'm a disobedient pet having its nose rubbed in something that does not belong on a living room rug.
"Eat it!" shrieks Jonas. The metamaterial is perfectly odorless. I take a bite.
"How's it taste, egghead?" I intend not to give him the satisfaction of a response, but he persists. "I said, how's it taste?"
As I chew, the shock of the familiar assails me. "S-s-salad dressing," I whimper, straining against my constricted clothing.
They obviously didn't expect this answer. Plainly, they want me to keep eating the stuff.
"What the blazes is going on down here?" says foreman Loomis as he flings wide the heavy door.
"It's him," says Jonas. "He didn't check the dipstick, and then - " he makes a throat-clearing 'kablooey-chugga' noise. "We're showin' smarty-pants here the error of his ways."
One of the older employees points at me. "Boy genius here is chowin' down - ain't that right, 'Cyclopedia Brown?" This merits laughter and a round of the same leather-gloved facsimile applause that I earned on my first day here. "What'd you say just now? You say it tastes kind of like salad dressing?"
The foreman's face blanches; this registers even in the unusual light from the emergency lamps. The alarm goes silent.
I draw a sharp breath before speaking. "This isn't... p-poisonous, is it?" I spit out a chunk of the stuff; it clunks to the floor like a pewter tooth.
"No, no - biologically inert. Might take a few days. Like passing a stone. Shut up." He sloppily hitches up the polyester beneath his gut. "If the metamaterial has taken on the molecular structure of acetic acid, that means we've got about thirty minutes to evacuate the Facility."
No one speaks; he must be getting blank stares all around.
"You dum-dums - if it tastes like vinegar, then that can only mean that the interior coating has failed - the stuff the insides of all the pipes are covered with."
"He didn't say vinegar," says one of the louts. "He said salad dressing."
As the foreman approaches me, the hand at my collar loosens. Presently, I stand and look helplessly at my superior.
"Alright, what kind of salad dressing?"
"I'd... rather not say." My jaw tenses. The two pins holding together my healed-over bones ache in much the way that they do on cold mornings. Moments from now, I may not be able to speak, whether I want to or not.
"You'd rather not say? How about I beat your fucking head in? This is important! Life or death! Answer me - what kind of salad dressing does it taste like?"
"Um, v-very sim-similar to Thousand Island."
"What's the big deal?" says someone behind me - someone who used to laugh at my jokes. A stern glance from the foreman silences the questioner. The foreman steps even closer to me. "Precisely how much? You've got about five seconds to tell me exactly how similar this metamaterial is to Thousand Island dressing, or, so help me, I'll strangle you."
You can sense my dilemma. Quaking, quavering, and holding back tears, I manage to ask, "How many digits of precision do you want?"
©S. Foster
S. Foster lives in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in Reflection's Edge previously, "Congestive Heart Success."