Monday morning was a blinding white, a 45-degree-angled snowfield shooting straight into the sun. Blinding white - for the first time in a year-and-a-half, something moved me. It wasn't quite the old sense of wonder, as I'd known it; maybe it was wonder, but there was something new to it and not quite put together yet. I still felt tired in the bones. Strange old disjointed memories flickered in the back of my skull. Not quite put together yet. 'Sunburn in November' - the words came to mind, and I couldn't remember where I'd heard or read it.
'Are ya gonna stand there daydreaming all morning, Professor, or are ya gonna pass me the torch up here?'
Monday morning was a blinding white tile; I knew I'd be seeing purple upon climbing down from the roof - 'snow-blindness in August' was more like it. Already drenched in sweat, I braced for the weight of the soldering torch and climbed toward my co-worker's operation table. He sat on the edge of the white snowfield with legs dangling over a flatter surface, and he had already thoroughly gutted the 20-tonne air-conditioning unit in front of him.
He dropped the new compressor into position; he shook his head in disgust, 'College.' (I braced for his occasional liturgy) 'Yaknow, it's like I always say . . . ' (and to his credit he did always say it) '. . . too much education makes ya ign'rant.'
I had nothing to offer him - I never did, for such liturgy - and suddenly remembered the fictional images of Dr. Osterman reassembling himself from the sub-atomic level upward, fierce, analytical, self-reliant - 'sunburn in November.' That's where I'd seen it.
'Always lookin' down at the ground, stoppin', holdin' all us normal people up.' He dropped a screw into a compressor mount, 'Yaknow, I'd an ex-wife once - my first one - who had multiple doct'rates and master's degrees. She didn't have a lick of sense. Hand me the ratchet - no, no, the three-quarter-inch.' He shook his head again and dropped another screw into place, 'College.'
That morning in the meeting in the break-room, someone had turned the television onto the History Channel, and there was a show about some mediaeval scandal or another. Pointing at the screen with a smug look on his face, Bill postured, 'See, that's how the Catholics baptized, and that's how they baptized when I was growin' up, and that's how they still baptize: a little splash here and there.' He'd shaken his head as he always did, a sudden hair-pin but purposeful, 'See, I'm surprised after all that fancy studyin' the Bible at college that you didn't become more of a man like myself. I don't see how someone studies the Bible - really studies it - and still's lookin' into those Cattolics.' I was silent then as I always was.
Halfway through the soldering, Bill got a chirp on his work-phone; he was called down to the office. I sensed a storm coming. I was silent as I always was.
To say he seemed nervous would be an understatement, 'You got this now?'
'Yeah,' I said.
'Ya sure?'
'I got this. I've done it before.'
He nodded dubiously, 'Okay. Be right back. Don't screw it up, Professor.'
I nodded and got to work. The heat from the torch added an easy twenty degrees to the already smoldering environment of the roof. The flame and solder and copper and I had been brothers for several months now; that morning, my sweat had reached the point of a cool and constant film coating every fibre of me.
9:30 rolled around - break-time - and Bill still hadn't returned from the office. I sensed a storm. Throat-skin blistering and itching in the salt of my sweat, I enjoyed the notion of climbing down from the roof and going into the air-conditioned building below my feet; but for now I was transfixed: the roof had tried and seduced me.
The white snowfield fell away as I dropped down onto the flat inner roof, where the A/C units and corresponding equipment sat. It struck me as a distant memory, the rocks crunching under my feet, the desolation of tar, the shimmering heat off the flat waste. I had returned to Red Rock, if only a little piece of it, a doorway, an ikon.
After the morning break, before I'd finished soldering, my boss's boss chirped me to come down to the office. There, they told me Bill had been fired due to failing the drug-test they'd administered a week ago; I noticed the disembodied phone, keys, and clipboard lying off to the side of the desk like so much of a reposing corpse politely-enough covered.
Upon finishing the soldering job, I flushed with nitrogen, vacuumed the line, and filled with refrigerant. I was clock-work and efficient and generally in a good mood that Monday. The image of Dr. Osterman had lodged in my mind, the one of him spread-armed and hovering: sunburn in November. He had been taken apart to nothingness; he had persisted; he had lingered in the nether regions of the universe trying and trying to rebuild himself. He rebuilt himself.
I knew it was all fictional and furthermore bullshit. By then, of course, I'd long since known that there are some things sheer will-power can't fix. Hell, okay, most things. But you can't help what images lodge in your brain.
Bill called me a week later; I wished him the best and got back to work.
-r
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