The Grease Monkey

Tom Briggs was fixing the coffee machine again. It was the third one this month, and he was starting to think the machines had it in for him, or maybe it was just that everything on this station was old and breaking and nobody had the parts or the money or the will to fix it properly. The coffee machine was a piece of junk when they launched it, a mass-produced unit that had been bought by the lowest bidder and installed by a technician who was rushing to meet a deadline and had probably tightened the wrong bolt on purpose just to get it over with. Tom had been told to keep it running. He had been told it was important for morale. He had nodded and said yes sir and gone back to turning wrenches and replacing gaskets and making things work that were never meant to work in the first place.

He was fifty-two years old. He had been a mechanic at the Ford plant in Dearborn for twenty-seven years before the plant closed, closed like a mouth that had stopped chewing, the doors locked, the signs taken down, the parking lot filled with weeds and broken glass and the kind of silence that comes when a thousand engines stop running at the same time. Before that, he had been a mechanic at the Chevrolet plant for eight years before that closed too, closed for the same reasons, the same global competition, the same cheaper labor somewhere else, the same shareholders who wanted more profit and the same workers who got less. Now he was a mechanic on a space station, fixing coffee machines and water recyclers and air filters that never worked right and lights that flickered and doors that stuck and everything that could break had broken and Tom was the only one who knew how to put it back together, not because he was specially trained, but because he had been doing it his whole life and his hands remembered things his mind had forgotten.

The war was happening somewhere. He knew that. The news said so. Some border conflict. America versus nobody in particular. Nobody ever said who the enemy was. Nobody cared. The war was just another thing that was happening, like the weather or the price of gas or his back pain, which had been getting worse for years and would probably get worse after he retired, which was twenty years away, which felt like a joke, which was probably a joke. The war was just background noise, like the hum of the ventilation system or the occasional vibration of the thrusters firing, something you noticed when it stopped and then forgot about when it started again.

"Tom," Dutch said, floating into the workshop. Dutch was sixty, almost retired, his face a map of every shift he had ever worked, every hour he had spent in a uniform that had been issued to him by a government that had promised to take care of him and had delivered a pension that might not exist by the time he was eligible to collect it. "How's the coffee?"

"Dead," Tom said. He did not look up. He was focused on the gasket, his wrench turning slowly, his muscles remembering the motion even though his mind was somewhere else, somewhere in Ohio, somewhere in a house that had seen better days, somewhere in a kitchen where a woman with rough hands was making breakfast for a daughter who wanted to be a nurse and a father who could not afford to be anything but a mechanic. "Same as the last two."

"Figures." Dutch floated away. He was thinking about his pension. Tom was thinking about Sarah's tuition.

Sarah was seventeen. She wanted to go to community college. She wanted to study nursing. She was good at it. She took care of her mother, who had diabetes and worked at Walmart and came home tired every day, her feet swollen, her back aching, her smile still there even though it was getting harder to find. Tom sent her money every paycheck. It was never enough. It was all he had. He had calculated it a thousand times, the numbers running through his head like an abacus, the money coming in and the money going out and the gap between them widening every month, every year, every day. He had sold his truck. He had cashed in his 401k early and taken the penalty. He had picked up extra shifts at the station, fixing things that did not need fixing just to earn the overtime. It was never enough. But it was all he had.

The station shook. Not much. Just a vibration, like a truck passing outside, like the distant thump of something exploding somewhere far away, like the kind of thing that happens when two countries that should be talking are instead shooting at each other with missiles that cost more than the entire GDP of the countries they were aimed at. Probably another missile. Probably nothing. Tom went back to the coffee machine. He replaced the gasket. He tested the pressure. It held. For now. For now was all any of them had. For now was the only thing that mattered.

Linda had written. He had read the letter that morning, sitting on the edge of his bunk in the dim light of the reading lamp, the paper creased from being folded and unfolded and refolded until the edges were soft and the ink had faded in places. Sarah had gotten into the community college. Tuition was two thousand dollars a semester. Books were three hundred. She needed a bed. She needed a desk. She needed a laptop. She needed everything. Tom had written back: I'll send what I can. Love, Dad. He had signed it with a D and a dot, the only way he knew how to sign his name, a D and a dot, because his hands had been trained to hold wrenches and screwdrivers and torque wrenches and pipe wrenches and not pens, and pens felt strange in his grip, like tools that had been designed for someone else.

He did not tell her he was on a space station. He did not tell her about the war. He did not tell her that the station was armed with chemicals that could be used as weapons if somebody decided to use them, chemicals that had been loaded into the cargo bay by men in uniforms who had not explained why they were there and men in uniforms who had not explained what they were for. He told her the station was a research facility. He told her he was fixing equipment. He told her he would be home soon. He told her these things because they were the kinds of things fathers tell their daughters, the kinds of things that keep the world spinning, the kinds of lies that are really truths wearing different clothes.

He would not be home soon. Nothing ever happened soon. Nothing ever arrived when you needed it to. The paycheck came late. The letter came late. The medicine came late. The help came late. Everything came late, and by the time it arrived, it had usually stopped being useful.

The shift ended. Tom floated to the observation window. The earth was below him, blue and white and indifferent, its clouds swirling in patterns that had nothing to do with him or Linda or Sarah or Dutch or anyone on this station or anyone on that planet, just water and air and gravity doing what they had always done since the beginning of time. He thought about the coffee machine. He thought about Sarah. He thought about Linda's hands, rough from washing dishes and scrubbing floors and holding onto things that wanted to fall. He thought about Dutch, almost retired, waiting for a pension that might not come, sitting in a house in Ohio that was too big for one old man and too small for the memories that filled it. He thought about nothing. Nothing was easy. Nothing was honest. Nothing asked anything of you.

The alarm sounded. Not loud. Just a beep. The station was launching. Not him. The payload. Whatever it was. He did not care. He went back to the workshop. There was another coffee machine to fix. It was probably dead. Same as the last three. He started on the fourth one. He did not hurry. He did not slow down. He just worked. Bolt by bolt. Gasket by gasket. Coffee by coffee. That was the job. That was the life. That was all there was. And it was enough. It had to be enough. Because there was nothing else. There had never been anything else. There would never be anything else.

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