I.

The alarm clock didn't ring. There was no alarm clock. The man in the room next to me started coughing at six, which was close enough.

I lay on the mattress--it was more foam than spring at this point, compressed down to something you could call a cushion if you were generous about the definition--and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was white and cracked in a pattern that looked like a river on a map, if the river was made of disappointment.

The shelter had forty beds. I was in bed twelve. Room four, if you wanted to be specific about it. The man next to me was named Ray. He had been in the Army, he told me on the second night, in Vietnam, and he still woke up some nights thinking he heard helicopters. I believed him. He smelled like whiskey and old wool and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying something around for too long.

At six-thirty, the intercom buzzed. Breakfast. I got up, pulled on the same clothes I had worn yesterday because I only had the same clothes I was wearing, and went to the cafeteria.

The cafeteria was a long room with a linoleum floor that had been gray once and was now the color of something you'd find at the bottom of a boot. The food was oatmeal and bread and coffee that tasted like it had been brewed from the grounds that were left over from the previous brewing. I ate the oatmeal. I drank the coffee. I sat at a table with Ray and a man named Dale who used to be a mechanic and now was something that didn't have a name because nobody talked about what you were when you couldn't keep a roof over your head.

After breakfast, we lined up for the day pass. Not everyone got one. It depended on how the night went, on whether you'd been loud or quiet, whether you'd shared your food or kept it to yourself, whether the night nurse thought you looked like a man who deserved to be outside for a few hours.

I got the pass. I walked out into the parking lot and sat on the curb and watched the trucks go by on the highway. This was Pennsylvania, and the highway was I-70, and the trucks were carrying coal or steel or something that used to employ people in this county before the mills closed and the town became one of those things you see on television, a place that used to be something and now is nothing, and the nothing is what they call rust belt.

II.

I got a job at a fast food place on Route 30. It wasn't much--minimum wage, which in 2003 was five dollars and fifteen cents an hour, and that was before the tips, and the tips were rare because nobody tipped at a place where the food cost three dollars and the coffee was two dollars for a refill that you got yourself.

The manager was a kid named Brandon. He was nineteen, wore a polo shirt that was too tight, and had the kind of face that comes from growing up with parents who told you everything was going to be fine even when it wasn't. He treated me like I was something he'd found on the ground and wasn't sure if it was edible.

"Can you fry?" he asked on the first day, like the question had personal significance.

"I can do things," I said.

That was the most honest answer I could give. I could do things. I used to manage a steel mill. I could read a gauge and tell you by the sound of the rollers whether the temperature was right or whether something was about to break. I could look at a production schedule and tell you which line was going to bottleneck and by how much. I could do things.

Now I could fry. The oil splattered when the frozen patties hit the grate, and I stood there with my face half-covered in grease and thought about how different this was from the mill, and how the only real difference was that at the mill, people depended on the steel to build hospitals and bridges, and here, people depended on the burger to not be hungry for another three hours.

Ray came to visit me once. He found me at the restaurant during my break, sitting on the loading dock behind the building, eating a sandwich I'd thrown away the day before because it was past the time I was supposed to throw it away, but I hadn't been able to finish it, and now I was finishing it because throwing it away would have been a waste, and wasting things was something I was still learning how not to do.

Ray sat next to me on the dock. He was holding a beer in a brown paper bag, which was against shelter rules, but rules were like the weather in this part of the country--something that happened to other people.

"You look tired," he said.

"I am tired."

"Me too." He took a drink from the bag. "You ever think about doing something else?"

"I do something. I fry burgers."

"That's not what I mean." He looked out at the highway. "You ever think about doing something that matters?"

I thought about the answer for a while. The truth was, I didn't know what mattered anymore. At the mill, it was easy. You made steel, the steel went into buildings, the buildings had roofs, the roofs kept people dry. That mattered. But the mill was closed, and the steel didn't get made, and the buildings weren't built, and the people were wet.

"I don't know," I said.

Ray nodded. He didn't push it. He'd been asking himself the same question for longer than I had.

III.

It was winter before I heard about the new plant.

The information came from a guy named Mike, who worked at the shelter's job center. Job centers are places where unemployed people go to fill out forms and wait for phone calls that never come. Mike was a government employee, which in the shelter world meant he made enough to have a apartment and a car and a life that existed entirely separately from mine.

"There's a new steel plant opening in Ohio," he told me. "Corporate Steel. They're hiring."

"That's good," I said.

"It would be, if they weren't doing the same thing your old mill was doing. They hire workers, they run the place for a couple years, they find some reason to close it, they collect the government shutdown subsidies, and they move on to the next town. It's a business model."

I looked at him. "You sound like you know about it."

"I know about a lot of things." He leaned back in his chair. "Your old mill? They closed it after they accused you of embezzlement. I looked into it. The guy who replaced you--he was Corporate Steel's man before you. They set you up. It's how they do it. Create a crisis, remove the person who knows how the place actually works, take over, run it into the ground, close it, collect the money."

I sat there and thought about it. It wasn't a revelation. I had suspected something like this for years, but hearing it confirmed by a man who worked at a government job center, a man who was supposed to be neutral and was probably being paid to be neutral, made it real in a way it hadn't been before.

"Who else knows?" I asked.

"Nobody who's going to do anything about it." Mike shrugged. "That's the way it is."

That night at the shelter, I lay on my cot and listened to Ray breathing in the next bed and the trucks going by on the highway and the pipes in the walls groaning because the water was too cold and the heating system was too old and nobody had the money to fix it.

I thought about Corporate Steel. I thought about the new plant in Ohio. I thought about the workers who were going to show up there on Monday morning, looking for a job, looking for a way to feed their families, looking for something that mattered.

And I thought about the letter.

IV.

I wrote the letter on a piece of paper I borrowed from the shelter's mail station. I used a pen that belonged to the woman in bed seven, and I promised to give it back, which was a promise I intended to keep, although the pen was probably not going to survive the night because it only wrote on the downstroke and even then it was unreliable.

The letter was short. I didn't have the energy for anything longer.

"My name doesn't matter. I used to work at a Corporate Steel plant in Pennsylvania. They framed me to take over the place. They're doing it in Ohio too. The new plant is going to close in two years, and the workers are going to lose their jobs, and the town is going to lose its identity, and Corporate Steel is going to collect their subsidies and move on. I know this because I've seen it before. I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm asking you to ask questions. Who owns Corporate Steel? Who are the government officials who give them subsidies? Why does a company's business model seem to depend on destroying the towns it operates in? You don't have to do anything. But ask the questions. That's all."

I addressed it to the employees of the new Corporate Steel plant in Ohio. I didn't know their names, so I just wrote it to the address and hoped it would get to someone who would read it and think about it and maybe ask someone else.

I mailed it from a post office in town. The post office was on Main Street, next to a bank that had been a grocery store before the grocery store closed and the bank moved in and then the bank closed and nobody knew what to do with the building because Main Street was full of buildings that nobody knew what to do with.

I walked back to the shelter after mailing the letter. It was cold, the kind of cold that gets into your bones and stays there until spring, which was three months away. The sky was gray, the streets were empty, and the only sound was my own footsteps on the sidewalk and the occasional truck on the highway.

I got back to the shelter and went to bed. Ray was awake, which was unusual for nine o'clock on a Tuesday.

"Did you do something?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"What?"

"I wrote a letter."

He was quiet for a while. Then: "That's something."

"Yeah. It is."

We lay in the dark and listened to the shelter settling around us, the sounds of forty people trying to sleep in rooms that weren't designed for sleeping, in a building that wasn't designed for living, in a town that wasn't designed for being nothing.

I didn't expect anything to happen after I sent the letter. I wasn't naive. I knew that a letter from a man who couldn't keep a roof over his head was not going to bring down a multi-billion-dollar corporation. But I also knew that questions, once asked, tend to keep asking themselves. And sometimes, if you're lucky, they spread.

I closed my eyes and went to sleep. In the morning, the alarm clock wouldn't ring, because there was no alarm clock. But Ray would start coughing at six, and I would get up, and I would go to the cafeteria, and I would eat the oatmeal, and I would walk to the fast food place, and I would fry the burgers, and I would live.

And that, in a town that was nothing, was something.