The standard minimum training period for an embellishment line operator is three months. While I am not a person I consider above average in intelligence, I had the basic grasp of machine operations within a few weeks. My trainer, Deacon, told me that after learning the essentials, it’s getting intimate with the machine. He did not use that word exactly, but I understood that that was necessary: getting intimate. Lots of the other workers in my department don’t want to become intimate with their machine—ignore their needs and get complacent. Deacon is the essential leader of the several other workers in E Department. While not the manager, he is the unofficial ambassador of the Second-Division Nightshift; he is the one that managers from different departments and different shifts come to to ask about the state of production in the department. He had once told me that he is paid somewhere between twenty and thirty dollars an hour and often tells me how the vague collective of higher-ups will move him up to First-Division Dayshift. He tells me how it’s no way to live.
I do not think he is a very good teacher. His lessons consist of a general explanation of what to do and then hovering just a few feet away until he becomes impatient and does it himself. Still, I find his work ethic to be inspiring and even somewhat cool compared to most other coworkers who are able to resist themselves from doing anything beyond the bare minimum. Whenever anyone is explicit in their tenacity and efforts being exactly worth what they’re paid he seems to take offense to this. If he is joking or not I am not sure. No one seems to take him seriously in this one and only regard. He reminds me of a cowboy; he’s an old archetype mutated for 21st century manufacturing work. Despite Deacon’s hovering, I believe he trusts me to do a better job than some veteran employees. This only reinforces my desire to outperform my other coworkers, though I am paid the least out of all of them.
Tonight, at the beginning of the third month of my training period, all but one of the machines are running high-priority jobs. Still considered green, I am only tasked with cleaning the one machine that was out of service tonight. The week prior was slow and after sweeping the same lanes over again and triple wiping tables around the shop I’m glad to be cleaning something else that might take up a good chunk of my shift. Still early into the twelve hour shift, I’m underneath the machine, scrubbing away at caked on ink on a roller, when a singular curse rises above and just as quickly swallowed by the regular din of heavy machinery. It is Deacon unmistakably. I wriggle out from under the machine and see Deacon in the next lane just shaking his head at the rewinding unit.
“It’s fucked,” he says, explaining how the driving shaft keeps sticking until it eventually seizes up entirely. “And of course Dayshift didn’t say a thing about it.” The Dayshift is at a constant war with the Nightshift, or vice versa. Each shift complains of another over frequent little things. I’ve done it myself and it feels good to talk shit about them, especially when they aren’t there. The anger is reciprocal and ultimately harmless. It’s good to have an enemy of such small and insignificant proportions.
Deacon is thinking of what to do next and I am not; I am only looking over the machine dumbly, attempting to find any visual malfunctions. “You know what—yeah,” he says, turning to me suddenly. “How about you fetch me some Christmas oil.” I have never heard of that in all my time here or anywhere else. “It’s this oil—think the brand is like ‘GRAAL’ or something weird like that. It’s like the—the,” he’s grasping for some sort of metaphor, but simply says “It’s the shit, basically. The machine loves it. It’s out in the chemical shed, I think. It’s a green and white bottle. You’ll know it when you see it. I’ll see if I can get it up again until you get back.”
I am already in motion before it dawns on me to ask why it’s called Christmas oil. I do not attempt to decipher why it is called so. Instead, I think about how big everything seems throughout the whole facility as I often do when walking a great length of the place. The varied machines in the differing departments are about the height of two grown men of unremarkable stature and stretch out to lengths as far as fourteen tall men in length from tip to toe. What takes up the most space however are the stacks upon stacks of blank rolls of paper. To reach the chemical shed on the other end of the facility, I am to pass through the warehouse (which I believe should be called the warehall). It is a corridor that runs the entire width of the facility and its walls reach past the boundless ceiling, marked only by the very tops of the towers of the rolls of the paper. I like to think of them as comically over-sized trees like you might see in an elementary production of some play, only perfectly and evenly sliced into large pucks. And then I immediately think of how this paper went through countless processes, ripped and sawed and pulped and dried and cooked and treated, only to end up as this silly imitation of what it once was. On this occasion, there is a fork truck retrieving one of these pucks. The huge claw clamps around it and backs up before easing the mechanical clamp back down. It sounds this awful mechanical whine the whole time. I quicken my pace as it begins to turn to deliver the roll to P Department. I always think of the terrible damage one of those fork trucks could do to me. They cruise silently with electric engines. I fear I might turn a corner and be bashed some few feet away by one that would inexplicably be going its top speed of ten miles per hour. I hope it would be instantaneous and that I would not see it coming at all.
The chemical shed is a bust. It is disconnected from the main facility for what I assume to be safety reasons; everything is highly inflammable. It all smells so strongly you might suspect the drums and plastic bottles were unsealed. Among the various colors and skids of steel and plastic drums and boxes of bottles, even on the top shelf, there was no GRAAL to be found.
My next stop is to Maintenance. They lack a devoted section of the facility, but instead operate in a small area outside C Department, bordered with workshop desks and pushcarts filled with various tools and greases and etc. There is only one technician on the Nightshift and I do not know his name. This unfamiliarity only heightens my sensation of having trespassed on his domain. He comes up to me and asks if there’s something specific I’m looking for. I am in the middle of rummaging around in a tool box of which I am unsure is the property of the company or a worker—this worker. Immediately, I understand he can see how green I am, and judging by the dull look of his eyes he is clearly in no mood for this. I tell him I’m looking for the Christmas oil, trying to make the lingo sound as natural as possible. His reaction gives nothing away about my performance as he only remarks that it should be in the chemical shed. It is not, I assure him. He insists on taking a look himself. Several minutes later we come to the consensus that there indeed is not GRAAL in the chemical shed. The technician suggested I ask Ricky. He is the manager of the nearby C Department and would be able to see if the company has ordered any recently.
Ricky did not know anything about the GRAAL. “And it’s not in the chemical shed?” he says to me more than asks me.
I confirm that it is not.
“Hold on.” He keys in some commands on his desktop, a couple of searching clicks. He smells of window cleaner, despite there being no windows in the entire facility, except the front office. He begins making these mouth noises, tongue clicking and lip popping noises barely audible with the surrounding din of machinery. The machines in this department sound like many large decks of cards shuffling all the time, flipping forever. Ricky’s desk sits in the center of the department floor, like a panopticon. The C Department operators are paid the least out of anyone at the facility and are constantly the busiest. I make the same now in my training period as an embellishment operator with two years under his belt.
Despite the urgency expressed to me in the hiring process to not discuss wages with other employees, it was clear enough to grasp just from one or a couple employees. I was told that they are not to be trusted when talking about their pay, that they could just be making up numbers. “Their pay is none of your business anyhow,” HR informed me. I do not remember their names and I will not ask.
“Okay,” Ricky says. “It was delivered recently. I’ll go and check the front office.” Only managers had access to the front office after 6pm. While waiting, I imagine that upper managers and HR people in the front office never actually go home. Instead, when the sun goes down, they shrivel up like ancient corpses. Their lips pull back over their teeth and their finger nails blacken, barely hanging onto waxy skin, drying out in their shared tomb. Only when the sun touches them do they reanimate and continue whatever work they do for another eight hours or so.
After a few minutes I see him return without the GRAAL. I see this while he’s still a good distance from me, his outline kind of jiggling as he comes, and it takes a few extra moments for him to get within earshot and say, “It wasn’t there. Might want to try P Department; they use the same stuff, I think.” P Department is next to mine; they share the same side of the facility. Our machines are similar and I should have figured the GRAAL oil ought to be over there. I thank him and give him a little nod, but he is already focused on his desktop.
Each lane of machinery in P Department is operating. Industrial rolls of paper are spinning incredibly fast at the end of each machine. Some make these regular shuddering sounds because the air shafts are so old. I try to maintain faith in the machines’ sturdiness and safety measures, that the giant spinning roll wouldn’t fly off and crush me against the floor. That must be instantaneous, I think. That’d be optimistic.
As I lurk around, trying to spot the white jug, one of the operators spots me and comes over with a sort of expectancy or eagerness, I’m not sure. He’s smiling a little, definitely has something to say.
He asks me if I ever dream of this place.
I dream of places like this, I tell him. They vary, but it’s definitely an extension of this facility. The machines are similar, but the rolls of paper spin a lot faster, so much that the roll forms this extreme centrifugal bulge and I can’t find the emergency stop button. Or one of the rolls actually flies off its shaft and lands in an inexplicable river and dissolves there and then everyone is gone. Or I just work a normal and unremarkable shift and wake up to prepare for the real one.
He says to me that sometimes he dreams they’re alive. The web is like their innards—their tendon-flesh or something and the actual machines are like their shell-bodies. He saw the web break once and the rewinding unit on the end just sucked it up through the whole machine in like a second. Like a tendon snapping and coiling up in a leg. He asks me if I’ve ever seen that as he rubs his calf. He says he sometimes throws himself into the machine, in the dream, and it flattens him. It’s like he’s dead, but aware of it, but doesn’t feel any of it, but knows what’s happening. Not on any technical level in that instance, but something more fundamentally primal. Like what a rat must be thinking when it gets swallowed by a snake. It doesn’t scare him though, it’s more like he accepts it, or even wants it. Like if a rat willingly hopped into a snake’s mouth, he clarifies.
While he’s caught up thinking about that final metaphor, I spit out that I’m looking for the Christmas oil and ask if there’s any around here.
He tells me there is, but it’s needed here for the printing machines. But he says that he put a spare bottle way out towards the very edge of the facility.
There, miscellaneous scrap and metal junk composed about two thousand square feet. There are sections of various machines all tucked away to be picked for parts when the need arises, unused air hoses, old lengths of ventilation ducts, crates of worn and/or cracked air shafts, buckets of dried up ink, etc., etc., and it’s all there just collecting dust and serving as hideouts for starving stinkbugs and spider husks.
I was about to ask why he put the oil so out of the way, but something on the other end of his machine spits out an urgent-sounding wail and he immediately power-walks over towards it.
All the sound dims as I get closer to the far corner and completely stops by the time I’m actually there. I look back at the rows of machinery that are almost beyond the horizon now, their sounds only a meaningless hum, like highway traffic outside a hotel window.
I find the unit with its compartment door ajar. I’ve seen one of these open before; it houses the main gear and the belt that spins the shafts. Inside there’s a surprising amount of space underneath the belt system. And finally, sitting in the far corner of the compartment, slightly jammed up under a gear is the GRAAL oil. I fish it out and examine it in my hands. It sloshes and it almost sounds like it gulps.
On the label, there is a winking knight with gears and other industrial motifs on his armor. He promises that GRAAL gear oil will decrease slip and increase the longevity of your high-temperature machinery. Guaranteed.
I open the top and peel back the foil, giving into the curious urge to actually see the oil itself. It’s incredibly viscous, like syrup, and it sticks to the inside of the bottle a long time before oozing back into the rest of the goop. The smell makes me hungry for something savory, cooked thoroughly in a heavy sauce. The oil is also very red—at first I think it’s pitch black, but it is dark like wine or blood.
The gallon jug is so heavy that my right side leans slightly, dragged down by the GRAAL oil. The choir of machinery returns with an additional performer and I know it is Deacon’s machine before I see it. When he spots me, he has this look that makes me feel silly, like a child almost. Like when Mom is worried about the rent and so you bring over your mason jar of coins that could not have been more than a few dollars to help pay for it. Touched, amused, but still a little sad.
“Sorry bud, I won’t be needing that any more,” he says.
I say nothing, my arm hanging, swaying slightly with its load.
“Here, let me show you what it was.” And he shows me how it was actually just an error in the job settings that were plugged into the machine. “Yeah, Dayshift always does shit like that. Sorry to make you go on a side-quest. But hey—we got the oil now. We’ll probably need it eventually. Just set it over by the other chemicals and stuff.”
I set it on the bottom rung of our department’s supply shelf and return to my machine. I look at it a while, not really thinking of anything. I realize I am trying to dissect my mind, looking for any animosity toward Dayshift, but I only find smoke. I scrooch myself down into the position I had been in. I lay there a while, mind in stasis, before I squeeze some strong solvent onto a rag and scrub away the ink build-up.
A thought permeates through the static: I hope it rains tomorrow.
When I leave in the small hours of the morning, it will still be dark. Dark until I get home and then I can watch the world breathe, wake up with the grey morning. And I will sleep the day away as the rain falls on the streets and on the commuters. I might dream of this place again, before I return to work again on the Nightshift. And when I have my nights off, I will live again, tucked away in my secret and mundane life.
Oh. I just realized: white bottle, green cap, red oil—Christmas. It’s so stupid a giggle escapes me before my face melts back and solidifies to blank as my thoughts settle back into a straight line with very little alteration. I continue to scrub the same spot as before.
— Derek Whorley is a writer living and working in Lynchburg, VA. He writes his little stories and is chipping away at a novel in his chair in the corner. See his posts on Twitter at @WhorleyDerek.