Eclipse Shift

The bunkhouse at Northern Pines smelled like sawdust and floor wax, same as every building up there, and when I walked in with my duffel over my shoulder I saw a mirror ball spinning slow from the main rafter of the common room. Not spinning fast, like a dance club. Just turning, lazy, throwing little dots of light around like it had all the time in the world. Some previous tenant had hung it there and nobody had bothered to take it down. I stood there a second wondering who the hell drags a mirror ball to a lumber camp in the Yukon, and then I heard a radio playing somewhere down the hall and figured my problems had a name already.

I'm Rolf, twenty-eight, a sergeant, ten years in, and I was three days into two weeks of leave with nowhere better to go. The army let a handful of us spend leave at this camp every year for what they called community integration, which is a fancy way of saying they wanted soldiers visible in town so the locals kept liking the base. Fine by me. A few hours of light work, a free roof. What I hadn't counted on was sharing that roof.

Isaac was twenty-six, a corporal, and I knew him from the base. Knew him and disliked him in the casual way you dislike a guy who's good at everything and smiles about it. He also had a side gig I hadn't taken seriously until that day, hosting a late-night show at the local radio station, KQTR or something like that, broadcasting to maybe four hundred people including the base mess hall.

When I got to the bunk room he was already there, unpacked, boots off, sitting on the good bed. The one by the window. The one with the mattress that didn't sag in the middle and the radiator that actually worked. My orders said bunkhouse assignment, shared room, no mention of who slept where, and here this guy had claimed the good bed like it was obvious.

"That's my bed," I said.

He looked up. "It wasn't labeled."

"It's the good bed. You know it's the good bed. That's why you took it."

He shrugged, which was the wrong answer. I dropped my duffel and told him we were sorting it out right now. He asked how, and I said arm wrestling, because that's how you sort things out when you're two soldiers with too much leave and not enough to do. He laughed but he put his elbow on the table, so I counted us even already.

We went two falls out of three. I took the first one in about four seconds and he took the second one the same way, which annoyed me. The third one went long. Really long. Our locked hands drifted up, then over toward his side, then back toward mine, and both our arms were shaking and neither of us would give, and after maybe three minutes of this he just started laughing and let go and said it was a draw.

"It's not a draw," I said. "You quit."

"You were quitting too. You just hadn't admitted it yet."

That was the kind of thing he said. The kind of thing that itched. We sat there breathing hard and he wiped his face with his sleeve and said, okay, so the bed stays where it is unless somebody wins something real. He proposed a contest. Whoever got the other one to admit defeat first, out loud, no take-backs, won the bunkhouse. The good bed, the window, the radiator, all of it. The loser ate at the far end of the mess table for the rest of leave and had to say the word out loud in front of whoever was around.

I told him that was a stupid contest. He said, "Then you're already beaten."

So we had a contest. That's how these things go.

He told me about the eclipse while we were dragging my stuff in. There was a solar eclipse coming the day after tomorrow, a big one, nearly total this far north, and the town was making a small deal of it. He was doing his show live during it. Two hours on air, starting an hour before totality, taking calls, playing whatever the station had in the library, describing the sky going dark over the treeline for people stuck indoors or driving trucks.

"You're doing a radio show during an eclipse," I said.

"During the eclipse. Live. It's the biggest thing happening in this town all year."

"That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard."

He grinned at me, which he did a lot, and said if I thought it was so easy, I should come on as his guest. He'd put me on air for a full segment. I could sit there with the microphone in front of me and see if I could handle it. He said most people clam up the second the red light comes on, and he figured I'd be one of them.

Now, I don't get baited easily, but he'd been baiting me for two years and I have a record. I said fine. I'd be his guest. He said be at the station by two, show started at two-thirty, and don't be late, and he said it in the tone of a guy who expected me to be late.

I wasn't late. I'll give myself that.

The station was two rooms above the hardware store on the main street. One room had old file cabinets and a coffee maker that hadn't been cleaned since before I was born. The other was the booth, and when I walked in I stopped in the doorway because Isaac had done something I did not expect.

He'd brought the mirror ball.

There it was, hanging from a hook he'd screwed into the ceiling of the booth, already turning, throwing dots of light all over the soundboard and the glass and his stupid grinning face. He'd carried it three blocks from the bunkhouse. He had a step ladder folded up against the wall and a bag of hardware and he looked very pleased with himself.

"You brought the mirror ball," I said.

"It's an eclipse. It's a light event. This is thematic."

"It's the bunkhouse mirror ball. That's camp property."

"It's nobody's property. Some guy left it. Possession is nine tenths."

I let it go, which turned out to be a mistake, but I didn't know that yet. I sat down in the guest chair and he handed me a pair of headphones and started walking me through the board, which switch was what, when the red light meant we were live, how the phone lines worked. He was actually good at it. I'll say that for him and never again. He had a rhythm, a patter, a way of talking into a microphone like it was a buddy sitting across the table. At two-thirty the light went red and he did a whole intro about the eclipse and the town and the weather forecast, and I sat there realizing about four minutes in that I hadn't said a word and my mouth had gone dry anyway.

Then he looked over at me, live on air, and said we had a special guest, a visiting soldier, and asked me to introduce myself. I got four words out and they came out fine, and after that it got easier. He asked about the base, about the camp work, and I answered, and the calls started coming in and it was almost fun, which irritated me.

Then he went to the callers and proposed a round of truth or dare. Live. With the town. He asked callers first, and a couple of old-timers played along, one admitted to a twenty-year-old grudge about a snowmobile, somebody's wife confessed to denting a truck and blaming a deer. The phone lines lit up. Small towns love this stuff. Then he turned to me, on air, and asked if I wanted truth or dare.

I said dare, because I'm not an idiot, and truth is where he could actually hurt me.

He leaned toward his mic and said the dare was about pressure. He said, and I'm quoting him as close as I can, "Rolf here thinks he can handle anything. So here's the dare. For the rest of the eclipse, starting now, one of us is going to be under a whole lot of pressure, and the listeners get to guess which one of us cracks first."

That's what he said. That's what I heard too, but what I heard underneath it, in that booth with the mirror ball throwing dots over his face and the red light on and four hundred people listening, was something else entirely. I'd been sharing a room with the guy for two days. I'd watched him stretch that morning. I'd been trying not to think about it and doing a bad job. And the word pressure in that tone, with that grin, live on air, went somewhere in my head it had no business going.