Shift Work

Raymond Cross accepted the job because the money was obscene, not because he believed the job description.

"Night illumination specialist," the advertisement read. "One shift per day, four hours. Must be comfortable working alone at night. Prior experience not required. Compensation: $12,000 per month."

Fourteen hundred dollars an hour to push a button. Raymond had pushed buttons his whole life—he'd been an assembly line worker at Ford for eleven years before the plant closed, then a delivery driver, then a guy who pushed buttons at a parking garage that had been replaced by a app—and he had never made more than eighteen thousand a year. This was fourteen hundred times that.

The interview took six minutes. A woman in a gray suit asked him three questions: Can you show up every night at midnight? Can you work alone? Can you keep a secret? Raymond said yes to all of them, which was not entirely truthful—he could show up, he could work alone, but the secret part worried him. But $12,000 a month worried him less.

The site was an offshore platform in the Chesapeake Bay, accessible only by a private ferry that ran twice nightly. It consisted of a concrete pad the size of a tennis court, a corrugated steel shack, a cot, a microwave, a mini-fridge, and a console with a single red button mounted on a steel pedestal. Next to the button was a digital clock that counted down to 4:15 AM, when the button had to be pressed.

"Press it at 4:15," the gray-suited man said. "Exactly 4:15. Not 4:14. Not 4:16. 4:15. The clock will tell you when. You press the button. You wait for the sunrise. You go home. You come back the next night. You do this for as long as they want you to."

"What happens when I press it?"

"It does its job. You do yours."

Raymond's first shift started at midnight. The platform groaned in the wind. The bay was black as ink. The clock ticked down: 23:59, 23:58, 23:57. Raymond sat on the cot and drank a beer. Then another. Then a third. At 3:45, he stood up and walked to the console. He stared at the button. It was not large. Not impressive. The size of a car's cigarette lighter. Red. Round. Slightly worn, as if someone before him had been nervous about pressing it.

At 4:14, Raymond pressed the button.

The sunrise came.

It was not spectacular. It was a gray morning over a gray bay, the kind of sunrise you'd see from any highway in the mid-Atlantic states. Raymond drove back to the mainland, slept for ten hours, woke up, drank coffee, checked his bank account ($12,000 had appeared), and went back to the platform that night.

He did this for four months. He drank beer. He watched the countdown. He pressed the button at 4:15. He went home. He came back. The sun rose. The bay stayed gray.

Then, on a Tuesday in May, he didn't press the button.

He had a dream the night before—of his wife leaving, of the Ford plant closing, of his son asking why his dad never stayed anywhere long enough to learn the name of the principal—and he woke up at 3:00 AM with a clarity so sharp it felt like falling. He sat on the edge of the cot on the platform and stared at the clock: 4:12. Three minutes from the most important action of his life, and he couldn't bring himself to do it.

At 4:15, Raymond Cross did nothing.

He waited for darkness. He waited for the world to end. He waited for the sky to go black and for his life to be proven meaningless in the most literal way possible.

At 4:16, the sun came up anyway.

It was a normal sunrise. Gray over gray. Nothing different. Raymond walked back to his truck and drove home and told himself that if the sun could rise without him pressing a button, then nothing he did mattered—nothing he'd ever done, nothing he would ever do—and he sat in his kitchen and drank coffee and cried in a way he hadn't since he was sixteen and his father died.

The next night, he went back to the platform. He pressed the button at 4:15. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. But he pressed it anyway, because the alternative was sitting on that cot and thinking about it, and thinking was worse.

He goes back every night. He presses the button at 4:15. He goes home. He comes back. The sun rises. He doesn't think about it anymore, because thinking requires a framework of meaning, and Raymond Cross had learned, finally and completely, that there is no framework. There is only the button, the clock, and the sunrise.

The alarm goes off at 4:00 AM. He turns it off. He gets in his truck. He drives to the platform. He presses the button.

The sun rises.

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