What keeps me going when my hands catch on fire, or when I can’t feel them altogether, when my fingertips pool with a cool, mysterious fluid that only flushes away when I flap and shake my wrists like a man electrocuted, or when I make an impotent fist?
GG warns me my machine is idling, that I'm wasting precious moments, that my piecework is falling behind. As if I don’t know this. As if I'm not scanning frantically for the foreman. Poor GG who never farts but degasses in other ways a strange vegetal smell, the odor of cardboard boxes in the root cellar where we store our turnips, spongy-bottomed and watermarked. There’s a calendar at her station featuring Japanese pagodas, and she X’s off days less like a prisoner than like a bomb chucker counting down to some parade day full of open-windowed limousines, full of senators, caudillos, and capitalists.
What keeps me going when I’m ten hours deep, four to go, and more irritating to my eyes, nose, and throat than GG's passive ventilation—which, to be clear, she's entirely blameless for—are the bleaches and dyes, the brighteners and finishers, that settle on the skin and exacerbate my scaly condition? Both forearms are afflicted, but the right is twice as bad. Who can say why? Even the other sewists scratch their heads.
We actually call ourselves sewers, but this only works phonetically, you see.
My own genetics must be to blame. After growing puffy, the skin flakes away, leaving a hard, grainy texture like a leatherbound suitcase, or like the knockoff Moleskines they make one village over, using, according to rumor, crushed armadillo plates. This is accompanied, my “scleroderma,” by purple iridescent splotches. Skleros is Greek, if you don’t know, and shows up in the Bible when Jesus condemns the people’s hardened hearts, in particular the petty bouj of Canaan.
Everyone who doesn't know me assumes I’ve been burned, that I must operate a steam boiler or a heating press or one of those gravity-fed irons that attach to water tanks and spit like cobras, when really, no, I’ve elevated out of that caste, and the only burns I sustain these days are petty by comparison. The odd jolt from a frayed wire. The minor skinning by a naked serpentine.
A grid of exhaust fans composes the ceiling, brown steel like the belly of a starship. Their din quashes any hopes of communication, supposing there was any time for communication. Yesterday a grate wiggled loose and dropped thirty feet onto a worker's head; I’m told the corner came down in such a way that it unzipped the young woman’s scalp. You can see when you look up that this happens quite a lot. Half the faceplates are missing. Half the blades don’t even twirl, their motors fried long ago. The ones that do twirl do us no favors, churning a thunderhead above us, like a cyclotron of heavy metals crashing into mold spores, crashing into pesticides, herbicides, other biocides that saturate the spools of natural fiber, trace amounts of which are still needed, believe it or not, to civilize the plastic. That’s the verbiage here. We civilize the plastic.
And you might very well wonder in the face of all this, when, besides the already-mentioned scleroderma, my knuckles have swollen into rocks, only rather than strong they feel chalky and brittle, yes, as I say, you might very well wonder what keeps me going.
Well, I’ll tell you what. It’s that the cultural contagion called Halloween is right around the corner. It's that this medium-breed doggy dirndl speeding through my machine, complete with a sateen bodice, lace hemming, ribbon lace-ups, floral applique, and a shapeless green hat (certainly not a homburg in any recognizable sense) attached to two yellow braids, needs to arrive, per the contractual obligation with our wholesale buyers, within weeks if not days upon the novelty doormat (made four towns over out of coconut husk) of the Harkins in Pine Bluff, the Pruitts in Bozeman, the Blumes in Waupaca, the Jeffords in Muncie, so that their beloved collie, sheltie, shiba inu, cocker spaniel can heft steins of Lowenbrau or what-have-you and dance happily to polka while the Kinder bob for apples and the Mütter make puppy-eyed reels in their devil horns.
I don’t know who makes the devil horns. Zacatecans, possibly.
And the thought of my playing a part, even a critical part, if you’ll allow me to boast, in such reiterated happiness across the globe, well, believe me when I say it makes my eyes water much, much more than whatever nameless irritants might be flying around, more than the malnourished farts of my starving neighbor, more than the zig in my neck or the zag in my lower back, more than the acid in my lungs, the cancer in my blood, the mutation in my wrists, the spiders in my nerves. Because it’s like the foreman often says, “As dour as your workday may seem, ladies, or as meager as your pay, what would your life be without it, eh? Think of the alternative.” And you know, as much as we might despise him and the way he cheetah-walks the factory floor with his tally sheets and stopwatch, we have to concede there’s a lot of wisdom in that.
The alternative. That’s what keeps us going. The doggies are going to get their dirndls this year, and GG's going to get a whole separate washtub for bathing in rather than hopping in after she’s washed her clothes, marinating in soap scum and dianthus petals like a bloated sachet in a dingy human tea, and I’m going to buy my family a rooster, because as disciplined as I might seem here at my machine, back at home I’ve been slacking off ever since Javi walked out, feeding the kids Hohos and Bimbos every night, and I need a man, or at any rate a knockoff man, to keep myself in check, because for pets and proletarios alike a knockoff is more than sufficient, otherwise the doggies would get their dirndls from Munich.
