Free Throw Line

Today, halfway through your shift, your first shift alone, without Arturo, it stopped. It all just came to an end, expired, gave up the ghost, right there in front of your eyes, right there in the gymnasium. You didn’t expect it to make a sound, but it did.

When a dream comes to an end, you wake up, right? Isn’t that supposed to be how it works? When a life project that has consumed seventeen years of your life, that has dried you out and permanently removed the glimmer from your eyes and the storminess from your smile and the glow from the surface of your skin, leaving you brittle and grey and dry and heavy-limbed, when a project like that runs aground and you wash up on shore, you might feel like a fool and a castaway need some time to get your bearings, but an actual sound? And not just any sound but the tiniest and most delicate of sounds, like a bird bone, the smallest one in the body, as it breaks, almost imperceptible but unmistakable nonetheless?

Perhaps it was the tension, the tension that had been building over the past few years, since your arrival in This New Country, throughout your doctorate program, with its coursework, comprehensive exams, dissertation, and defense, all the way through to the classes that you taught, as a sessional lecturer, as a precarious intellectual laborer, which, however precarious, was at least something, something to hold on to, to keep you afloat, your head above water, that is, until it all got taken away, just like that, a contract that The Department refused to renew, without an explanation, though it wasn’t difficult to read between the lines, after your refusal “to assist the department in its time of need, especially considering the sensitivity of your status within the institution,” according to the words of the email that the Chair of the Department had sent you, an email that she later recalled, to avoid legal action being taken against her, for having put you in the position of having to choose between your colleagues and The Department, a choice which should have been as much as a no-brainer for her as it was for you, because anyone who knows you knows that you would never cross the picket line and, to add insult to injury, earlier in the semester you had spoken out against the war, on university property, another unforgiveable offense, grounds for having your contract thrown out the window, despite being the only lecturer to have taught the class previously, despite having the most “teaching priority points,” to borrow a phrase from the corporate-speak of the university.

Yes, all of it, the whole stinking mess of it, with its layers of misunderstandings and lies and abuses of power, it all just came to a screeching halt, right there on the floor of the gym, in the basement of The Community Center. Like a breakdown in the syntax of a syntagmatic sequence, like a gap in the signifying chain, it lost all coherence. The curtain fell, the disguises were removed, the spell was broken, and you could finally see your situation for what it was.

The engine of the Zamboni Industrial Electric Walk-Behind Auto Floor Scrubber shut off right there in the middle of the floor of the gymnasium, the coolest and quietest part of The Community Center, especially once the rest of the employees have left, once the doors have been locked and the overhead lights shut off. The control panel of the Zamboni went blank. The twenty inch red scrub pad at the helm of the vehicle, its main feature, its crown jewel, stopped spinning, sending suds shooting out from underneath the protective hood. No more green flashing rectangles on the slots for the variables for the scrub pad spinning speed, for the suction strength, for the soap volume, and for the battery life. I immediately realized my mistake, a beginner’s mistake: I had unplugged the Zamboni from the charging dock too soon in my shift, and the battery hadn’t lasted quite as long as I calculated that it would.

The gymnasium was a shadowy realm, more Dionysian than Apollonian. The windows to the outside, high up on the east wall, close to the ceiling, were the only source of light. The gym manager turns off the overhead lights at the end of her shift, and Arturo had instructed you to turn them back on before doing the gym floor with the Zamboni, but you preferred the darkness. Your eyes adjusted quickly and, what’s more, you needed it, the peace, like a forest at dusk, when the critters begin to stir, like a shawl that you wrap around your shoulders. 

Working the levers of your trusty Zamboni Industrial Electric Walk-Behind Auto Floor Scrubber, you had made it through approximately three fourths of way across the floor, all the way to the free throw line of the visitor’s half of the court, before everything went quiet. The silence, at first, startled you, so unexpected, such a sharp contrast to the sound of the twenty-inch red circular scrub pad spinning wildly underneath the hood of the Zamboni. In its immediate wake, you heard the bird bone snap, like a twig breaking underneath a bed of leaves as you step on it.

Just like that, the project that had defined the previous seventeen years of your life expired.

You knew what had to be done, knew that you had to push the Zamboni back to the charging block and quickly rearrange the order of tasks on your list of things to clean before the end of your shift, change lanes, so to speak, from floors to toilets, and then switch back again later in your shift, once the battery was charged enough to finish the job. The features of the plan, this new improvised strategy, quickly solidified in your thoughts, yet for some reason, when you turned to move, to put the plan into action, you couldn’t do so. It was as if your feet, your Sketchers Steel Toe Slip-On Work Shoes, were glued to the free-throw line.

If you had had a basketball within reach, you would have taken the shot, the winning shot, the last before the buzzer, to break the tie. The crowd, so silent just a second earlier, would have gone wild, sending the bleachers ablaze with cheers and chants and face paint and confetti. The fans would have breached the security perimeter, and the court would have fill up with them, like the swell of the tide and every bit as indominable. They would have raised you up, no doubt, onto their shoulders, and paraded you around triumphantly, high enough for you to catch a glimpse The Other Shore, the shore where dreams come true, where hard work and talent are rewarded, not disparaged. Eventually the festivities would have reached a wild pitch, the tipping point, and an invisible line would be crossed, like the sound of tiny bone snapping, a forest twig. You would have been thrown from the crest of the wave, the tides would have receded, and the crowd would have deposited you where you started, at the free throw line, except that, now, everything would have returned to its disenchanted state, its bare existence.

The Zamboni Industrial Electric Walk-Behind Auto Floor Scrubber would still have to be plugged in to the charging dock. The toilets of The Community Center, all of them, would still have to be cleaned. There was still plenty of work to do. Your new life, an aftermath, disenchanted and honest, was waiting, if only you could get your Sketchers Steel-Toe Slip-On Work Shoes off the free throw line, if only you could take that first step.