Drawbridge Blues

The drawbridge is stuck open and I am stuck on the wrong side of my own courage, which honestly feels like a more serious mechanical failure than the one Abigail is cursing at out there.

Let me back up. I'm Lola, I'm twenty-eight, and I drain whey for the paneer program here at the field station. That's a real job. Somebody has to hang the cloth bags and catch the liquid and not cry about it, and that somebody is me. My boyfriend Phil is twenty-nine and he sells industrial drying equipment, which is how he ended up servicing our desiccation chamber tonight, which is how we ended up stranded together when the drawbridge refused to close after the supply boat went through.

Four times the bridge has failed and four times I have been trapped on the station side with either Gregor or Abigail or, once now, Phil, and every single time I have almost told him the thing and every single time something has caught fire, literally once, or broken, or made a sound that was a dying goose at exactly the wrong moment.

The thing is this. Phil and I met two years ago at a cheese festival in Chengdu when I was twenty-six and he was twenty-seven, and he was there because his drying equipment company had a booth and I was there because paneer adjacent hobbies, and he was shy and sweet and he bought me a sample of something briny and we've been together ever since. Two years. And in two years our sex life has been, how do I put this without sounding ungrateful, fine. It's fine. Phil is careful and gentle and asks if I'm okay roughly eleven times per encounter, and I always say yes, because I am okay, I'm just also bored in a way that makes me feel like a monster for being bored.

What I actually want involves me doing the talking and Phil doing the listening and a certain amount of me being in charge of things, and I have been rehearsing how to say this since roughly last Tuesday, and I keep chickening out because he has the face of a man who apologizes to furniture when he bumps into it.

Tonight was supposed to be the night. He was supposed to service the chamber, we were supposed to drive back to town, get dinner, go home, and I was going to say the words in a location with soft lighting and no lichen anywhere. Instead the bridge is a steel middle finger pointed at the sky and Gregor has summoned us all to the common room like we're being reprimanded at school.

Gregor is sixty and has worked at this station for twenty years and is famously grumpy in a way that everyone has learned to find comforting, the way you find a grumpy cat comforting. He stood in front of the whiteboard with his arms crossed and delivered the news.

"Nobody leaves," he said. "Bridge won't close. Abigail says the drive coupling sheared. Until it's fixed, we are an island."

"How long?" I asked.

Abigail, who is thirty-two and transferred here last year from a port in Yantai and owns more obscure tools than a museum, wiped grease off her hands onto a rag that was already mostly grease and said, "I have most of what I need. But I need the star washer, the left-hand thread one, and those are in the tool shed."

"Then go to the tool shed," Gregor said.

"The tool shed is locked, Gregor."

"Then unlock it."

"The key is with the night watchman."

"Then get the key from the night watchman."

"The night watchman," Abigail said, with the patience of a woman explaining a sample for the four hundredth time, "went home on the last boat. He is at the other end of the canal. On the other side of the bridge. The bridge that is open."

There was a silence. Gregor looked at the whiteboard like it had personally betrayed him.

"So we wait," he said finally. "Dawn, maybe. I'll radio the watchman, he can bring the key around by the far road. Long way. Could be hours." He rubbed his eyes. "Nobody does anything stupid. The chamber is mid-cycle, don't touch the chamber."

Everyone filed out except me and Phil, because Phil had one more calibration to run and I had whey bags to hang and also because I was having a small internal emergency about whether tonight was still the night.

Here's the part I haven't said yet. Last week, alone, I looked at the desiccation chamber, this big climate-controlled room where we dry lichen samples, warm and dim and quiet, and I thought, that's where I'll tell him. I don't know why the chamber. It felt private. It felt like a room where things get finished. Don't read too much into it, I'm not going to confess to him among the lichen like some kind of ritual, I just liked the room.

"Hey," Phil said, snapping the latches on his calibration kit. "We could wait in the chamber. It's climate-controlled. There are those nice bench seats. Beats sitting in the common room listening to Gregor sigh."

And I swear my soul left my body briefly, because the universe had just handed me the room. The actual room.

"Sure," I said, in a voice I hoped sounded normal and did not. "Yeah. Let's wait in the chamber."

He looked pleased with himself. He's cute when he's pleased with himself, my guy, sandy haired and a little soft in the middle and always smells faintly of machine oil, which I've decided counts as attractive because I love him.

We walked down the corridor and I was running the speech in my head. It had a structure. Opening, context, the ask. Something like, Phil, I love you, and also sometimes I think about pinning you to things, and I've been sitting on this for two years, and also please don't faint.

"So," I said, once the chamber door hissed shut behind us and the hum of the climate system filled the room. "Phil. I've been meaning to tell you something."

"Yeah?" He sat down on the bench and patted the spot next to him, which was sweet and also destroyed my standing-and-declaring posture, so I stayed standing, which apparently confused him.

"It's sort of a, um. It's a thing about us. About our, uh."

"Beds?" he offered.

"Beds," I agreed gratefully. "So the thing is, when we, when I, what I've been wanting to say is that I..."

The door banged open and Gregor came in like a storm.

"Hose clamp," he said. "The condensate line in the kitchen is spraying everywhere and Abigail is elbow deep in the bridge and I need a hose clamp. You. You're the equipment man. Tell me you have a hose clamp."

"I have a whole rep kit," Phil said, standing up, bless him, no hesitation. "Half inch? Five eighths?"

"Half inch."

"Give me two minutes." Phil grabbed his kit from the corridor and started digging through it, narrating. "Wrenches, spare gaskets, oh I've been looking for that, clamps, clamps, here, stainless, take two, they seize."

"Good man." Gregor took the clamps and pointed at me on his way out. "Lola, your west rack bags are dripping."

"I know, Gregor."

"Dripping is bad, Lola."

"I know, Gregor."

The door hissed shut. I looked at Phil. Phil looked at me. Somewhere in me a small voice said, you can do this, he's right there, just start again, third time's the charm.

"Okay," I said. "So. Beds."

"Beds," Phil said encouragingly, sitting back down.

"So when we're in bed, and you, and I've been thinking that maybe I could, if you were okay with it, be the one who, uh..."

Phil stood up, because of course he did, and said, "Oh, wait, I want to show you this first," and pulled the telescoping walking stick out of his rep kit. He carries a telescoping walking stick. He says it's for field inspections. He has never once used it for walking.

"See, the thing about these," he said, extending it with a flourish, "is people think they're flimsy, but this model is rated for, watch," and he swung it to demonstrate its structural integrity, and the tip of it cracked squarely against the pressure sensor mounted at shoulder height on the chamber wall.

There was a beep. Then a longer beep. Then a voice, calm and female and deeply ominous, said, "Emergency dehydration cycle initiated. Please exit the chamber."

"What," said Phil.

"Emergency dehydration cycle initiated. Please exit the chamber."

"Phil," I said, "what did you do."

"I didn't do anything, it's rated, it's rated for impact..."

The vents opened with a roar and the room began, with great efficiency, to become a desert.

"Out," I said, and grabbed his arm, and the two of us stumbled for the door while the