An Amazing Warehouse
by J. M. Faulkner
part 1
Ladies and gentlemen,
Father’s scolding got me into this employment. He sat me down at the kitchen table, out of sight, like I was in trouble for something better kept from family. “Rajiv,” he told me, “I’m putting you through university. Don’t you think you should get a job?” It’s high time you got off your backside, in other words.
Out of respect, I marveled at the creases in my palms throughout much of his tirade. Being the object of scrutiny under his wooly brows, I could hardly refute him. My best bet was to stumble the treacherous line between timidity and boredom. Too much of the former, I’d lose his respect; the latter, it’d be dark before he finished straightening me out.
None of this is an exaggeration. One of the few Indians in Suffolk, Nebraska when our family immigrated in the ’70s, my dad grew up tough, and a touch mean. Even the most delinquent of children knew better than to steal from Mr. Gupta’s shop.
When I finally got a word in, I said a job was an excellent idea; sorry I hadn’t thought of it sooner.
Factory work was as good as anything else, and I knew night shifts paid better and might complement my insomnia, so I applied for several positions in my area. Only one replied.
Magnus Brassard’s Mysterious World of Toys, a colorful retailer from across the pond, had been recently bought out by a global conglomerate. The bigwigs had transformed the premises into a gigantic warehouse and were in dire need of temporary “elves” to assist with the Christmas rush.
Well, another import like myself, that was an omen if ever I saw one. What’s more, the end date was December 23rd, which only amounted to a month’s work. A bit of grafting to impress upon Father my willingness to please him, to keep up my studies in veterinary medicine, and in no time it’d be back to blankets, biscuits and footrests for me.
Showing him my acceptance email over breakfast, I could hardly have imagined what Brassard’s and its parent company had in store. My old man cocked an eyebrow, and I said, “Sounds like the very job for me.”
* * *
Lofty ceilings humming with ventilation units loomed over the drab filing cabinets and storage racks, the eastern-bloc chic blending with the austere walls and columns. Caster wheels and pallet trucks swiveled and zipped down the painted pathways, pushed by flushed workers beating through strip curtain doors. Conveyor belts dragged an endless tide of packages from A to B.
A finely tuned, soulless machine.
But on closer inspection, a few of the cogs didn’t look so well-oiled. Among the bright sparks zipping around in Christmas zeal, there were a few that dawdled as if their legs were melting into the ground, their expressions mute and wraithlike. Bruised and puffy eyelids gave the impression they had switched their faces for panda masks.
A distant corner of the warehouse squeaked. A loudspeaker buzzed and shrilled out: “Two days until Black Friday!”
I marveled at the ceiling, a child turning on the spot, in the nave of a great capitalist cathedral. Dad’s shop was a convenience store, the kind found on a street corner that sells confectionary and consumer magazines, and had nothing on this. Craning my neck to peer up made my neck muscles—
“There you are.” A hand was in mine before I could glance at its owner, shaking with a familiarity that rocked my shoulder. “Glad you could make it. Most of the Christmas team started a couple weeks ago, but I’m sure you’ll fit right in. We’re family here, not a company.”
His blond moustache held me rapt while he continued the introduction, our clasped hands still jumping.
Team supervisor Malcolm said, “Welcome to the night shift, Rajiv,” and spread his palms high over his all-American mullet like he was stringing out a banner. “It’s an A-mazing warehouse.”
“Yeah?”
“You bet. Look around, Rajiv. Our staff are A-grade A-mazing.”
A whisker above minimum wage — sorry, competitive pay — certainly didn’t feel A-mazing, but I didn’t let it show in the interview or now. Frankly, I was A-stounded he could repeat that without regurgitating in his mouth.
An overly tactile forty-something, Malcolm showed me around the aisles and such, playfully punching me on the arm in the wake of an unfunny joke, or when he felt he was making me privy to some fresh-off-the-press warehouse gossip, of which there was plenty.
“See that woman there?” He gestured with a sharp tilt of his head. Three raven-haired women were queued up at the conveyor belt, their backs to us, and he could have meant any one of them. “She clocks out five minutes early, but I can be lax, you know. She brings the most wonderful muffins on Fridays.”
In black trousers and jacket and white shirt, Malcolm dressed typically for a man of his proclivity. A middle-aged do-gooder incarnate. A man that overused your first name, as if the sound of it would cast a spell, inspire the feeling you could knock on his door if you found yourself short of butter to finish the cake you were baking.
Some days he wore a red tie, others maroon, but always plain. The only thing descript about Malcolm was the slanted MB logo sewn onto the breast of his shirt, and the gold watch he sported on his wrist that clicked like a grandfather clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
He’d say things like, “We’re glad to have you here,” and I had the overwhelming feeling he meant in America, not the warehouse, as if I’d come off the boat that morning!
First-day introductions? If you count the other staff peering up from their tasks and grunting as an introduction, I met the entire team from the get-go. Accepting my nametag a few days later, I thought, Now I’m part of the crew, the scratch-your-butt-and-sniff gang.
At first glance the only thing I had to fear during the night shift was my shuffling, dull-witted colleagues until Malcolm introduced me to the sleeping cubicle. To everyone else, it looked like a spherical spacecraft, a blessing of solitude in the far reaches of space, a sweet reprieve from the festive toiling.
I saw a Venus flytrap.
It squatted in the middle of the floor, as if to coil and hide its tentacle neck beneath it. The green with silver trim pod looked ready to yawn and snatch a passerby. Audrey III in A Warehouse of Horrors.
Malcolm clapped me on the shoulder and gave me a tour around the dome’s perimeter. “Feel dizzy, take twenty minutes in here, and you’ll feel right as rain. Most struggle with nightwork to begin with, but don’t pay it any mind. Soon you’ll be one of the team... sorry, family.”
He beamed at me, and the hair on my arms pricked up. The man was overall too clean-cut: a Mr. Rogers, children’s TV show presenter plastic Ken and, above all, the epitome of the company pet.
But life at the warehouse couldn’t be so bad, right?
I swallowed. “How long’s lunch?”
Malcolm looked me in the eye, steady. “Make your quota.”
Not so lax where muffins weren’t concerned, then.
* * *
The zombie tottering through the warehouse a week later was me. Black eyelids. Heavy arms. Spotlights blazed on my shoulders, and I could no more look at the ceiling lights than I could the sun outside, not that I remembered the look of daylight. After my shifts and during the day, I slept like a cadaver.
Any prejudice I held against my colleagues had since been replaced with admiration. In fact, something that had been nagging me since day one was fast bubbling to the surface. Everyone on the night shift, including myself, was a person of color working close to minimum wage — sorry, competitive pay. And we took orders from Malcolm, a man whose skin was paler than the sole of an Irishman’s foot.
Malcolm and the incessant tick of his gold watch; it hounded me to whatever corner of the warehouse I fled. Make your quota. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
“Malcolm, I think your watch is broken.” I was sweeping one aisle of cardboard and polystyrene, quite surprised I had spoken up, when he paused at the entrance. My larynx caught like Velcro on the way down. “Uh, you might want to ch-che...”
His slitted eyes brought me to a stop. The watch knocked its taunting rhythm on the inside of my forehead that, in my exhausted haze, just about deafened me to everything else. I shouldn’t wonder if a bark from the loudspeaker to assemble at the fire exit would have gone unheard, and I can’t say if it did or didn’t, being half the man I was when I started.
“You should take a nap in the cubicle, Rajiv. You’re imagining things. The night shifts get like that if you don’t take a nap. Hey, everyone else has. Look, sleep as long as you need, go to the canteen for a snack, and you can make up time afterward. Don’t let the side down, eh?” He offered a reassuring smile. “Be part of the team.”
“Right. Of course.”
* * *
But I refused to put a foot in that stinking slave cubicle, on principle. Work was for work, leisure was for home, and I wouldn’t accept the theft of my downtime in that horrendous machine.
My beaten colleagues, meanwhile, took their twenty minutes kip. They bounded from the cubicle with their eyes aglow, like for the first time they were dealing with a full deck of cards where before they had been playing a few short.
Production increased, but I slipped further behind. A languid web nested in my head and held me stupefied. Malcolm’s jovial expression slipped by degrees. He said I should take a nap or risk losing my job. He quoted the job posting: “fast-paced,” “high energy,” “highly motivated,” “flexible.” I hadn’t been reading between the lines.
Yawning, I took myself to a dark corner, hidden from the security cameras, to catch my breath and rest my eyes. Soon I was dozing on my feet with only my forearms propped on the worktop for support. A cerebral duvet cocooned me, and into this inviting warmth I surrendered.
A pat came down on my shoulder. The touch wasn’t heavy, but my knees buckled, nonetheless. I wheeled around, expecting Malcolm and his all A-merican mullet. Instead, a frowning colleague of about my age greeted me. Tall, wiry and sporting a five o’clock shadow.
“Rajiv, right?” His feet appeared to be doing a faintly repressed jig, and I thought he meant to ask me directions to the toilet. “I’m Juan. Juan Torres.”
He held out a trembling hand, so I took it. “Rajiv Gupta.”
“Pleasure.” He shifted nervously, eyes darting to check we were alone. “Hope you don’t mind me coming over, but I see you’re struggling some. This job blows, right?”
“Huh?” I didn’t hear that correctly and it took a hot moment for my mind process it, but when I caught up, some tension ebbed from my shoulders. “Oh. You bet.”
You bet? That sounded like something Malcolm would say. You bet, champ. The supervisor was under my skin. Even now, alone with Juan in a quiet corner, his damned watch was ticking between my ears.
“I’m dead on my feet,” I said. “Been here two or three weeks, and I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”
“Exactly!” Both Juan’s heels left the ground and he shook a victorious fist. His shiny expression suggested either he hadn’t noticed the outburst or didn’t care. “So why does nobody quit, huh? We got this inhuman workload. Why does nobody walk out?”
As a child, my dad would give me a wicked hiding if I gave up on something, and he prided himself on tenacity. As an adult, I shouldn’t wonder if he would have disowned me, so I reckoned I had a valid reason for staying put.
“It was this or work in my dad’s shop again,” I told Juan. “Did that a fair bit as a kid. If you knew him, you’d know why I’m here. I’d rather work in the sewers than deal with his micromanagement.”
“You too, huh? My dad bucked the stereotype and became a mechanic. Credit to him, nearly has enough to put me through college; I’m going to be an architect. But I couldn’t work for him, either. Life’s better here in America, he said. More opportunities. The way he works, though” — he smacked his lips — “you wouldn’t know it. And he’d see me working to the bone, too.”
“First-generation problems, am I right?”
He nodded sagely. “Where are you from? You said ‘shop’ a moment ago. That some British Empire stuff?”
“Straight out my mouth, yeah.” I shrugged. “I’m surprised anyone in this country understands me. My dad moved because—”
His left eye twitched. While the right one remained open, the left was suddenly tacked shut.
“You okay, Juan?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Okay, so we know our reason for sticking it out. But why does nobody else quit, hm? It’s temporary work — Christmas work — but why? Could everyone here be that desperate?”
Copyright © 2024 by J. M. Faulkner
