The plant closed on a Wednesday. I was on the night shift, which meant I was standing in front of the time clock at six in the morning, watching my name punch through the card with a sound like a gunshot, when the foreman came out of his office and told me to go home. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. The plant was closed. They were all closed. Five thousand men, out of a job, and the only thing they had to show for thirty years of sweating over molten steel was a pink piece of paper that said "Severance Pay: Two Weeks."

I walked to the bar on Elm Street and had four beers in as many minutes, and the bartender, a guy named Ray who had been pouring beer since before I started working the plant, poured me a fifth without asking and said, "Sorry, Frank. Any word on when they'll reopen?"

I shook my head. "No word."

"Could be a month," Ray said.

"Could be a year," I said.

"Could be never," Ray said, and poured me a sixth.

I went home to the trailer on South Avenue, where my wife Mary was sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of bills in front of her, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, her mouth set in that particular way that told me she had been doing the math and the math had not been kind. Danny, my son, was in his room upstairs, listening to music and smoking cigarettes and pretending he didn't have a future, which was rich coming from a guy who had never had one to begin with.

"I'm going to the plant," I said.

Mary looked up from the bills. "Frank, they told you. The plant is closed."

"I know."

"Then why are you going?"

"Because I don't know what else to do."

She looked at me for a long time, and then she looked back down at the bills, and I went upstairs to my room and got my jacket and went back out to the truck and drove to the plant and parked in front of the gate and sat there and watched the sun come up over the smoking stacks and thought about how I had spent thirty years of my life walking through those gates every morning, how I had spent thirty years of my life sweating over molten steel, how I had spent thirty years of my life believing that if I just kept showing up, if I just kept doing my job, if I just kept my head down and my hands busy, the world would take care of me, and how the world had taken care of me by handing me a pink piece of paper and telling me to go home.

The plant was quiet. Not the normal quiet of a closed shift—the normal quiet of a plant that is not supposed to be running, the quiet of a machine that has been turned off and will never be turned on again. The gates were locked. The lights were off. The smoking stacks were silent. I walked around the perimeter, touching the brick walls, feeling the roughness of the mortar, the smoothness of the glass, the coldness of the steel, and I thought about how this building had been here for sixty years, how it had employed ten thousand men at its peak, how it had built the steel that went into the bridges and the buildings and the ships and the tanks and the cars and the appliances and the things that people use every day without thinking about where they came from or who made them or what it cost them to make them, and how now it was just a building, and the men were gone, and the things they had made were still out there, being used and worn and discarded, and nobody was thinking about them anymore, nobody was thinking about the men who had made them, nobody was thinking about the cost.

I went back to the truck and drove to a side entrance, a service door that had not been locked in thirty years, and I slipped inside and walked through the corridors, past the offices where the managers sat in their air-conditioned rooms and talked on their telephones and signed their papers and never once walked onto the floor and felt the heat and smelled the steel and heard the roar of the furnaces, past the break room where the men sat at lunch and talked about baseball and football and their kids and their wives and their plans for the weekend and their plans for retirement and their plans for the future, past the locker room where I had changed clothes every morning for thirty years, where I had hung my jacket and my boots and my gloves and my helmet, where I had left pieces of myself every single day, pieces of my strength and my youth and my health and my soul, and I had never noticed, never thought about it, never cared, because I was too busy looking forward, too busy looking at the time clock and counting down the minutes until I could go home and sit in front of the television and drink a beer and watch the game and pretend that I had a life.

In the back of the plant, in a laboratory that had been used for quality control and then abandoned when the automated systems came in, I found a machine.

It was small, no bigger than a shoebox, sitting on a metal shelf next to a stack of yellowed manuals and a box of broken gauges. It was made of grey metal, with a screen of green glass and a series of switches and dials along the front, and a label that read, in faded letters, "PROJECT ORACLE—FUTURE PREVIEW UNIT—CLASSIFIED."

I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, dense, solid, built to last. I turned it over in my hands and examined it, and then I flipped the switch on the front and the screen lit up with a green glow and a series of numbers began to scroll across it, fast at first and then slower and slower until they stopped, and I saw a date: tomorrow.

I stared at the screen. I flipped a switch. The date changed: the day after tomorrow. I flipped another switch. The date changed: next week. I flipped another. Next month. I flipped another. Next year.

I sat on the floor of the abandoned laboratory, holding a machine that could show me the future, and I laughed, and the laugh sounded like crying, and the crying sounded like laughter, and I didn't know which one I was doing.

I used it every day after that. I would come to the plant, walk through the service door, find the machine, flip the switches, and watch the future scroll across the screen. I would see myself waking up in the trailer. I would see myself sitting at the kitchen table, watching Mary go through the bills. I would see myself driving to the bar on Elm Street and having four beers in as many minutes. I would see myself sitting in front of the television, drinking a beer, watching the game, pretending that I had a life.

Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. The future was always the same: wake up, watch the bills, drink beer, watch TV, sleep, repeat. A loop. A cycle. A machine that ran itself, fueled by nothing more than habit and resignation and the slow, slow erosion of hope.

I tried to change it. I quit drinking for three months, and then I relapsed, and then I quit again, and then I relapsed again, and then I stopped trying, because what was the point? The machine showed me the future, and the future showed me that I could not change it, and so I stopped trying, and I went back to the bar every day, and I had four beers in as many minutes, and I went home to the trailer, and I sat in front of the television, and I watched the game, and I pretended that I had a life.

Danny stopped going to school. He got a job at a gas station on Route 42, pumping gas and wiping windshields and making seven dollars an hour, which was not enough to live on and not enough to quit, and when I tried to tell him he should go to college, he looked at me with eyes that were older than his twenty-two years and said, "Dad, I don't need a future. I need a beer."

I went to the plant every day, even though it was closed, even though the gates were locked, even though the lights were off, even though the smoking stacks were silent. I walked through the corridors, past the offices and the break room and the locker room, and I went to the laboratory, and I picked up the machine, and I flipped the switches, and I watched the future scroll across the screen, and I saw the same future, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, a loop, a cycle, a machine that ran itself, fueled by nothing more than habit and resignation and the slow, slow erosion of hope.

And then, one day, the machine stopped working.

I flipped the switches. The screen stayed dark. I pressed the buttons. Nothing. I shook the machine. Nothing. I opened the back panel and looked inside, and I saw that the wires had come loose, that the circuits had burned out, that the machine was broken, and I sat on the floor of the abandoned laboratory, holding a broken machine, and I felt something I had not felt in a long time: uncertainty.

I did not know what the future held. I did not know whether I would find another job, whether Mary would leave me, whether Danny would follow me into the same slow, slow erosion of hope, whether the plant would ever reopen, whether the world would ever take care of me again. I did not know. For the first time in a long time, I did not know.

I sat in the dark of the laboratory, holding the broken machine, and I listened to the silence of the plant, and I thought about how I had spent thirty years of my life believing that the world would take care of me if I just kept showing up, and how the world had taken care of me by handing me a pink piece of paper and telling me to go home, and how I had spent the last year trying to see the future, and how the future had shown me that I could not change it, and how now the machine was broken, and I did not know what to do, and I thought about how maybe that was okay, maybe not knowing was okay, maybe the uncertainty was better than the certainty, maybe the darkness was better than the green glow of a screen that showed me the same future over and over again, a loop, a cycle, a machine that ran itself, fueled by nothing more than habit and resignation and the slow, slow erosion of hope.

I sat in the dark. I did not know what the future held. That was it. That was the story. That was the ending.

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