The walk-in fridge had been on the fritz since Tuesday. It was about 10 degrees warmer than what it was supposed to be, which meant that the produce and the sauces were all getting to be about 10 degrees warmer than what they were supposed to be, which all boiled down to it probably being not FDA compliant.
The light still worked, so it wasn’t the entire system that’s jammed, said Kate, leaning out the back door with a cigarette in hand. She always smelled like grease-trap and smoke. Maybe something’s wrong with the wires. Faulty wires. It was always faulty wires, or something like that.
So the fridge was dead or dying. That was how it started. That was why we started the system in the first place. We scrounged about for four of the big industrial pickle buckets, the kind that could fit a medium sized dog if you really squashed it, and packed them three-quarters filled with snow. It could have been comical, the lot of us, in our sauce-stained uniforms and winter gear, using the scooping spoons on the parking lot snow and trying to avoid the yellow bits. Most of our jobs could have been comical, except for the parts that weren’t. There was a certain degree of seriousness that came with winter upstate, some severity that we couldn’t shake.
Maybe seriousness wasn’t the right word. It was cold, it was dreary. When we opened the store in the morning, the sun’s reflection off the ice sheet on the parking lot burned through the soft skin on our faces. The drive to work wasn’t great either, not when half the time a truck had spilled out on the highway and there was traffic down the asphalt from Syracuse to Ithaca. Still, small inconveniences were just that: small. What really smarted us was the way it piled up.
It was the way that when we hauled the buckets back inside and stuck them inside the metal tomb we called the walk-in, Luke tripped up the stairs and got a gnarly bruise on his temple. We watched it blossom and grow until it looked like he smeared a rotten banana on his face. It looked like it hurt, and it was just one more thing on top of everything else. It could have been funny, but no one ever joked about it. Not about that, at least. The customers, the weird orders, the music Scott played on the speaker he wasn’t supposed to have access to, that was all fair game. Luke’s fucked up face was off the menu.
We were getting a hang of the system. The bruise was fading. The walk-in made a sound like gargling marbles sometimes. The lettuce peeked out of its tupperware confines, buried neck deep in slowly melting snow.
We were getting the hang of it.
Work was haywire. The shop was its own contained chaos, but then again, it always had been. Of the different locations there were across the northeast, we were one of the weaker links in the chain. It was the location: close enough to the highway to keep the store afloat, but not close enough to a large city to draw in a crowd. It stocked too much food for a slow day, but too little for rush hour. Somehow, between competing forces, it always came out last.
Then came the overcompensation. Somewhere along the line, the veneer of respectability had convinced upper management that actual respectability could be achieved, so we became actors as well as workers.
Utilitarian, that’s what it was. The uniforms, the back room, the set up of the lobby, it was all meant to be utilitarian. At work, everything had a stated function. In order to complete that function, however, we had to not only be aware of the function, but also to be able to assist the thing in that function, using the thing correctly, in a timely manner, for the stated function, in the correct situation. All of this was explained in explicit detail, on pages 28-97 of the crew guidebook, which was located in the bottom shelf of the manager’s desk, and had been slowly collecting dust for the past three managers.
As it was, he had narrowed down the amount of necessary jobs in the business down to about five: cleaning, cutting, baking, washing, and checking out. Once you got the hang of it, once you understood where the tools were supposed to go and what weird little minutiae the job someone had forgotten to mention, then you were good. Once that happened, then the eye of the business would pass you over. The check-ins came less frequently. You got a little more leniency.
So it was that leniency that let the system continue. As long as the customers came in, and the food got served, and the cleaning, cutting, baking, washing, checking out, customers leaving happened, then it didn’t matter if the walk-in didn’t work.
We were making it work – had been making it work all day. 3:00 PM turned into 5:00 PM turned into 8:00 PM, a change that only felt real once the neon signs outside were thrown on and the sun sunk beneath the shape of the Walmart across the street. Luke and Neema replaced the day shift with the evening shift, and the system had worked.
That late into the night, the stream of customers had slowed to a near trickle. Luke was out cleaning the bathrooms with one of the two brooms, so there was nothing for us to do except mindlessly sweep the clean floor with the remaining one. Activity looked better on the security cameras.
Each of us had been promised a 15 minute break in the evening for dinner, in rotating order, so that no two crew members would take it at the same time. Neema was out at present. She was seated outside on the overturned milk carton, one leg slung over the other, smoking like a starlet in the dark. Her break was up in five.
Luke finished with the bathrooms, and was now messing around with the food on the line. He reached down to the storage underneath and hauled one of the batches of spinach out of its icy container.
There were no secret menu items in the business, but there were no rules about what we could do in our free time. Just last week, Scott had tried to make an omelet on the grill, using the eggs in storage. It didn’t look quite right. Nothing looked quite right using the food we got, even if it was supposedly fresh, or organic, or whatever corporate typed on the menu. Scott ate it anyway.
Luke was grabbing a handful of the spinach now, glancing at the leaves. That was more than he would do for a customer – it was different if you were going to be the one eating it. After a while handling food, each of us started to grow a little wary of what was in it. We never really knew where it came from.
In the tangle of spinach stems underneath the handful he’s uprooted, a small dusting of white crystals caught his eye.
Luke used his free hand to brush away the snow. Snow in the buckets was good, but snow in the food was bad. A small hole in the cling-wrap could mean contamination, which would mean losing a whole batch of spinach before the new shipment came in on Monday. We never knew what was in the snow, either.
As he dug deeper into the mass of wilting green, more of the snow was revealed. Patches of it had crawled in through the cling-wrap protection that we kept all the containers in. Luke tried to move it off, but the crystals just melted into the batch, regardless of his concerns. They left wet speckles on the spinach, like rain on concrete. He poked one, and it was stiff.
Luke gently put down the handful of spinach.
On the leaves, encasing them like a spiderweb, was a thin film of latex. There was no discernable origin of the spun material, it just branched out and strangled what remained of the organic material underneath. Under the fluorescent bulbs of the store, it looked rubbery and pliant, but when he softly flicked one of the leaves with a finger, it barely moved, like hair with too much hairspray.
They were all like that.
We didn’t work with anything that was still alive in the business. There was no in-store butchering or local harvesting, but as Luke rifled through the bin, he still got the distinct impression of handling something expressly dead. Dead, but stuffed with something else. The veneer of respectability, maybe, like a taxidermied animal.
At this point, we were standing behind him, looking over his shoulder as he sorted through the carnage. The spinach was plastic, like what you would find in a child’s fake kitchen. Luke tried to tear a leaf in half, and it just stretched out before returning to its original shape. There was a sound like a crash from the walk-in, and Neema came out dragging two of the pickle buckets, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions spilling out from us as we moved to make room for them.
“They’re all full of snow,” she says, gesturing to the produce on the floor. “The cling-wrap fucking shrinks when it gets too cold.”
“How much colder is the snow than the usual fridge temp?” Luke mutters to himself. Cold enough, is the only answer we could think of. We stood there, staring at the food splayed out on the clean-swept tile of the floor. A thin layer of crisp snow had crawled its way into the bins, and sat over the food, catching the light as it fell. There was a tomato that had hit the floor and bounced underneath the counter like a ping-pong ball, the insides of it looking both bloated and supple, almost like a thick-skinned balloon.
What’s the opposite of rot?
There was no way to know where the food was from, how long it had been like this, how much of it we had already given to paying customers. How much of it we had already eaten.
We imagined it tunneling its way down our esophaguses, and living in our guts like a beer bottle wedged in the current of a stream, never dissolving, never changing, the way people think gum digests when they’re five.
There wasn’t an ounce of food anywhere in the restaurant.
No food meant no hours. No hours meant no pay, for any of us.
“We can’t use this,” Neema says. We knew that. There was an onion ring on the floor that looked stiff enough to be used as a frisbee for squirrels.
To the security cameras, we probably looked like statues, huddled in a semi-circle around spilled buckets of snow and plastic. It would look like a crime scene, a terrible accident at the faux-vegetable aisle, a break-in at the latex fruit morgue, and we all just stood there, waiting for something.
Luke bursted out laughing first.
We could tell that his face still hurt a bit when he moved it, because he was cupping a hand to his left cheek. He gave a snort that turned into a chuckle, and when it spread we were all gasping for air and clutching at the countertop.
It was completely black outside, except for the light falling of snow reflected in the faint red glow of the neons. The store had been officially closed for a couple minutes now, but we still spotted headlights pulling into the parking lot anyways. Neema cursed and rushed to lock the door, giving a trademark bright smile to the car full of college kids who tried to give it a tug. Luke was still wheezing, hunched over the assembly line, the plastic spinach thrown across the dirty white surface.
We began to pile it all up. There was nothing else left to do, so we used our brooms and shoved it back into the pickle buckets. The bloated tomatoes didn’t squish or bruise when stepped on and instead they began to leak a thin filmy substance like the stuff in IV drips. Neema realized this too late and excused herself, crying from laughing, to get some paper towels from the bathroom. The tomatoes leaked all over the floor, the liquid bubbling at the edges, and we frantically tried to sweep it back towards some semblance of a center before we realized it had coated the bottom of our thick-soled work shoes, leaving messy watery-red footprints across the tile.
We eventually managed to slop most of it back into the buckets. We could keep most of it from spewing out again if we used the hardened carapace of the onions to keep it down. Only one of the buckets could fit on the trolley and so we had to work in a group – one of us pushing the trolley while the remainder hefted the remaining two buckets down the steps and across the empty parking lot to the bins.
Luke and Neema were up ahead, crowing and lifting their heads to the blackened sky. The only answer came in the form of more snow, the back-ends of the other businesses on the strip remained silent and dark. Neema broke off and whirled herself around on the empty concrete, trying to catch snowflakes in her mouth.
When we lifted the buckets to the lip of the dumpster, Luke pulled out his phone flashlight and watched as the contents flooded out and splattered across the stained metal floor. He cackled, then gasped, and gestured for the rest of us to look.
Our toes clung on to the rungs of the dumpster’s exterior as we watched, transfixed, as rats piled out onto what was left of the food. A rotten, floral, acidic smell wafts out among the squeals of the rats as they dove in, their whiskers becoming coated in the fluids and globs of wet, rubbery flesh. Luke’s light ignited the sharp line of the rat’s fur as they swarmed over it, and cast a white sheen over each of our faces, our wide eyes, our mouths ajar.
We huddled around the dumpster like that for longer than we thought, and it was warmer than it should have been out there; we could feel all the heat trapped inside the bin from fermenting food and rotting cardboard, hot like a crucible.
The next day, the walk-in operated normally. The electric guy had been by earlier, Kate said. He patched it all up.
“Faulty wiring”, she shrugged, and walked away.