The Rust and the Water The dialysis machine made a sound like a refrigerator having a conversation with itself. Raymond Voss listened to it the way he listened to everything these days: with the half-attention of a man who had decided that most sounds were not worth the effort required to process them. His left kidney had stopped working six months ago. His right kidney was working hard and failing and he could feel the failing happening, which was not something you could feel happening to a kidney under normal circumstances, but Raymond's kidneys had never been normal. They were the kidneys of a man who had spent twenty-three years in the Navy listening to frequencies that normal human ears could not hear, and now they were the kidneys of a man who spent his mornings in a chair in a clinic on Grand River Avenue, hooked up to a machine that did for his blood what his kidneys used to do. The clinic was in a strip mall between a payday loan place and a nail salon. The vending machine in the waiting room ate dollars and occasionally spat out a bottle of water with enough force to make it bounce off the back of the machine and land on the floor, where it stayed until someone felt moved to retrieve it. The chairs were the kind that were designed for sitting but optimized for not letting you fall asleep. Raymond's nurse was a young woman named Priya who had a master's degree in nursing and a patience level that suggested she had not yet learned what the world was. "How are we feeling today, Mr. Voss?" "Same as yesterday," he said. "Same as the day before. Same as the day before that." She checked his blood pressure, her fingers warm and firm on his arm. "Your weight is up two pounds. You need to cut back on the sodium." "I eat processed noodles out of a can. The sodium is the main ingredient." She smiled without laughing. People smiled at Raymond sometimes, but never laughed. He had the face of someone who had given up on being taken seriously, which was ironic because he had been a Navy technician who worked on classified acoustic systems and knew things that most people did not. The appointment took four hours. Afterward, Raymond walked home through the strip mall parking lot, which was cracked and weeping oil and had weeds growing through the cracks because nobody in Dearborn seemed to care about curb appeal anymore. His apartment was a trailer in a trailer park off I-96, the kind of place where the grass was dead and the neighbors kept their cars on cinder blocks and the chain-link fences had been painted once and the paint had given up. His trailer was warm inside, which was a small victory. The heater worked today. Tomorrow it might not. Big Ray Johnson came by on a Thursday. Big Ray had worked at the Ford plant for twenty-two years and had been laid off three months before the plant closed, which meant he had been unemployed at about the same time Raymond's kidneys started failing, which meant that the two of them shared a particular kind of friendship that was based not on affection but on mutual recognition of being left behind. Big Ray was a big man in the way that men who eat fast food for breakfast and dinner become big men—wide and soft and carrying weight that served no purpose other than to remind you that somebody used to eat more than this. He leaned against the doorframe of Raymond's trailer and looked in at the space that Raymond called home. "You got a visitor," Big Ray said. "I got a machine that eats dollars and spits out water that lands on the floor. What do you think I need?" Big Ray stepped inside and sat down without being invited. He had that quality about him—the quality of a man who took up space whether people wanted him to or not. "There is a thing in the Gulf," he said. "A platform. They are calling it Triton." Raymond did not look at him. He was watching a television program about truck restoration, which was a show about men fixing things that were broken, which was not a show about truck restoration at all but a show about men pretending that things could be fixed. "Lots of things in the Gulf. Oil rigs. Weather stations. Sonobuoys. What about it?" "It is not any of those things. Three engineers disappeared. All three. Their families got money and a letter and a promise that everything would be taken care of, which in my experience is code for 'we are going to handle this in a way that keeps you from asking questions.'" Raymond turned up the television. A truck was being restored. It would never be the truck it was supposed to be. Nothing ever was. "Sounds sad," Raymond said. Big Ray waited. He was a patient man when patience was the only tool he had. "You used to work acoustic systems. In the Navy. You would know if this was legit or if someone was fishing." Raymond thought about the Triton system. He remembered it from his Navy service—not directly, but in the way that classified things touch your life without telling you their name. He had worked on sonar arrays in the Pacific, listening to the deep for things that moved beneath the surface. The Triton system was a refinement of that technology, but in the Gulf, not the Pacific, and aimed at something other than submarines. "I do not work for the Navy anymore," he said. "Nobody is asking you to work for them. I am asking you to look. Just look. You go out there, you see what is there, you come back, and you tell me if it is legit or if it is a con." Raymond looked at Big Ray for a long time. The television was still showing the truck being restored. It was a beautiful truck, and it would drive again, and it would not be the truck it was supposed to be. "Why me?" he asked. "Because you are the only person I know who actually understands how these things work. The rest of the guys at the bar think 'acoustic' is something you take for your ears." Raymond thought about his kidneys. He thought about the dialysis machine. He thought about his daughter Maria, who had not answered his phone in four months. He thought about the trailer and the dead grass and the chain-link fence and the heater that worked today but might not work tomorrow. He had nothing to lose. That was not a liberating thought. It was just a fact, like the weather or the price of noodles or the failure of his right kidney. "When?" he asked.

Author Note & Copyright: