Night-Shift

Posted to Work on 9 February 2007.

by Adam Szymczak—Age 19—Marblehead, MA

The store opens, the chains and bars lifted off of the windows, the lights turned on, and the registers humming. People trickle in, buying this and that, things they need and things they don’t. They slide Visa and Mastercard and Amex across Formica countertops, to people who drag the cards through clicking machines, their eyes half open and their hands moving on reflex. Trucks pull up to garage doors out back and unload pallets of pens, and computers, and reams of paper. The store ebbs and flows with activity and sound, a creature, alive as anything else. Then the lights turn off, the money is counted, and the people shuffle out. The store closes.

That’s where I come in.

It is nine o’clock, and five men are locking themselves inside a store, hollow and dark, for eight hours. They work in half-light, the buzzing fluorescent bulbs muted and weak, providing just enough of their energy so that the men can work, while at the same time the store can give off that “We’re Closed” feeling to the people outside. The men take the shipment that the truck delivered and carry it in carts and handfuls to the aisle where it belongs, stacking things in neat little rows and sliding things on neat little hooks. They sweep and mop the floors, dust the counters and change any light bulbs that need changing. They yell jokes across the store
to one another, limericks and knock-knocks echoing and reverberating across the cavernous space.

They share their world with the owls and the bats, but not people. They work their own 9-5, the opposite of the one so much of the world is accustomed to. They speak only to each other, and act in their own way. They enter when everyone else is exiting, and exit when everyone else enters. And when they go home, and check on their children and slide into bed with their wives, they know that the real world is just about to start, and that their world is over, for the day. Until the sun bleeds out of the sky, and the night takes over, and the stores close.

That’s where I come in.

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