The Eclipse Shift

Ella was thirty-four years old and she had been divorced for two years, and she had learned that the best way to get through the weeks was to keep her hands busy. That was part of why she liked the landscaping job. Somebody paid her to drive a small mower around the grounds of a data center out in the middle of nowhere, near a little airstrip in the Arctic Circle region, and nobody at that job ever asked her how she was doing about the whole Mark situation. The grounds went on forever. The grass didn't hold any views.

The data center itself was a long gray box squatting in the tundra, and honestly it was uglier than anything she'd ever been paid to make look better. But the people inside were friendly enough in the way of people who work in a building with no windows. They'd come out on their breaks and stand around in the parking lot like prisoners getting yard time, squinting at her like she was some kind of rare bird. She'd learned the names of a few of them. She'd learned a lot more than the name of one of them.

Jay was thirty-eight, a flight instructor over at the airstrip who picked up part-time hours at the data center doing maintenance coordination, whatever that meant. She saw him every week, usually Thursdays, because that was when the grounds crew got access to the side of the building where the generators lived and that was where Jay usually smoked half a cigarette and then felt guilty and put it out. He was tall in a slouchy way. He had a laugh that came out of him sideways, almost accidentally, like he'd never quite gotten permission to do it and kept doing it anyway.

The divorce had been final two years ago, and Ella could say that number easily now, the way you say your shoe size. Mark had been a decent man who was terrible for her, which is a worse combination than people think. A decent terrible man will help you carry your boxes out of your own apartment and apologize while he does it, and you'll spend the whole drive to your sister's place wondering why your chest hurts when nothing technically bad happened. She'd dated one guy since, a colleague from a previous job, back when she was twenty-nine, and that had been fine and forgettable in roughly equal measure. She wasn't bitter. She was just out of practice, and she knew it, and it embarrassed her a little.

Which was a strange way to feel, standing in a parking lot in work boots, flirting with a man over half a cigarette he wasn't even going to finish.

She couldn't even call it flirting, really. She kept turning that over on the mower, hour after hour, the drone of the engine giving her brain just enough static to think in. It was more like they'd built a private little language out of nothing. He'd started it, months ago, by asking her whether the grass on the north side grew slower because of the wind off the runway, and she'd said yes, and he'd said that was the most interesting thing anyone had told him all week, and that had been that. Since then there'd been a running thing about her boots. She wore the same battered tan work boots every day, and he wore these mismatched ones, one black and one dark brown, and she'd pointed at them once and said something about the lost-and-found bin, and he'd claimed on the spot that it was intentional, a system, and that she wouldn't understand it because landscapers thought in grass and not in systems.

The whole relationship was more or less that. Ten minutes a week, Thursdays, by the generators. And yet somewhere in there she'd started thinking about him at other times, which surprised her. She'd be at home on a Sunday eating cereal straight from the box at eleven in the morning, which was a divorced person's lunch, and she'd catch herself wondering what Jay ate for lunch, and then she'd feel ridiculous about it and turn on the TV.

She was not, she kept telling herself, the kind of woman who did anything about that kind of thing. She was the kind who mowed grass and drove home and called her sister on speakerphone and talked about nothing for an hour.

Then the eclipse happened to be scheduled, which is the sort of thing that rearranges a town.

It had been on the local calendar for over a year. A total solar eclipse, the path of totality cutting right across this particular stretch of nothing, and the little town an hour south had been losing its mind about it in a slow-motion way for months. Motel prices had gone stupid. There was a hand-painted sign at the gas station that just said TOTALITY in letters that dripped a little at the bottom. Ella had been mostly indifferent to it, because her job didn't stop for celestial events and grass doesn't care about the moon. She'd figured she'd watch it from the mower if the clouds let her, which up here was a coin flip at best.

She did not figure that Jay would be part of it.

The text came on a Tuesday night. She was on her couch with her feet on the coffee table, half watching a rerun, when her phone buzzed and it was him. She had his number from months ago, work logistics, something about gate access, and they'd never once used it for anything human. She looked at the message for a longer time than she'd admit to anyone.

It said the eclipse was going to be visible from the data center's east lot, obviously, everyone knew that. But then it said the interesting part. There was a viewing window in the cold aisle, the long room between the server racks, and during the eclipse the building would be in a low-power cycle for cooling, which meant the lights would dim in there, and the window looked east over the flats, and it would be, and she read this part three times, quote, a cool view.

A cool view. From the cold aisle. The man had been sitting on that pun for weeks, she was almost sure of it. You could tell when a joke had been marinating. It had that overcooked quality.

She typed back something noncommittal, then deleted it, then typed something else, then deleted that too, and finally settled on asking if it was even allowed, employees only, security, all of that. She was reasonably sure the grounds crew didn't count as employees for the purposes of the server room, whatever the purposes of the server room were. His reply came fast, like he'd been holding the phone. He said he'd already asked. He said she was cleared as a contractor escort situation, which sounded made up, and he said Thursday was the day anyway, the eclipse was Thursday, so she'd be on site regardless, and all he needed was a yes.

And there it was. The yes. Sitting in her lap like a package she hadn't ordered.

She thought about it for a while, sitting there with the TV talking to nobody. She thought about how she'd spent two years being careful, which had felt like maturity at first and had slowly curdled into just a habit, the way so many reasonable things do. She thought about how she was thirty-four and her knees ached in the morning and she was not going to get decades of Thursdays forever. She thought about the mismatched boots, and the sideways laugh, and the way he'd once waited in the cold ten minutes past the end of his break just to hear the end of her story about the drunk wedding party who'd trampled a flowerbed, and how he'd asked her to start over from the beginning when he realized he'd missed the first half.

None of that was a promise of anything. She knew that. Men were friendly and then they weren't, or they were friendly and then they turned out to be married, or friendly and then weird about it the next week. But the text said cold aisle, and the cold aisle was about as private as anything got in that building, and private was a word that meant something.

She typed yes, with a period, which felt appropriately committed, and then she panicked slightly and added a joke about the boots, that he'd better wear the system. He sent back a thumbs up and then, a minute later, separately, a photograph of both boots side by side on a floor, one black, one brown, captioned with something about calibration. She laughed out loud alone in her living room, which she noted was not a thing she'd done in a while.

Then she lay awake until two in the morning doing arithmetic about Thursday, which was two days away, and about what a person wore to an eclipse in a server room, and about whether a cooling cycle dimming the lights was romantic or just cold, and about whether she was about to ruin the one pleasant ten minutes of her week by wanting more from it.

The answer to that last one, she figured somewhere around the second hour of ceiling-gazing, was maybe, but the not trying was already a kind of ruin, just a quieter one. She'd done quiet ruins before. She had the boxes to prove it.

Wednesday she mowed the west side and did not see him at all, which she decided was the universe being merciful, because she was not sure her face could have kept a secret for ten minutes. Wednesday night she laid out her clothes on a chair the way a person does before a job interview, then told herself off, then moved the good sweater to the top of the pile anyway. It was going to be cold in that room. Server rooms were kept cold, that was their entire point, and she'd be dressed for the weather, that was all, that was her story and she was keeping it.

Thursday came up bright and cold, the sky scoured clean, not a cloud anywhere, the kind of sky you got maybe a handful of times a year up there. She drove in with the mower on the trailer and her heart doing something she refused to name, and the parking lot was already half full of cars from town, people who had driven an hour to stand in a gravel lot and look up. She signed in at the desk. The woman at the desk looked her up and down and said Jay was expecting her, which made her ears go hot, and pointed her down the corridor toward the cold aisle doors.

She stood in front of those doors for a second longer than she needed to, breathed out, and pushed one open.

The air inside hit her like a walk-in freezer, and the lights were already dimming, the whole long aisle of racks humming and blinking in the gloom, and somewhere down at the far end, by the window, she could see a shape that could only be Jay, waiting.

The floor of the cold aisle was a different texture than anything else in the building, some kind of gridded panel that clanked faintly under her boots with every step, and she was acutely aware of the clanking all the way down. The racks rose up on both sides of her like cabinets in a very expensive pantry, tall and dark and breathing out cold air through their grilles, and the little lights on them blinked in patterns that probably meant something to somebody but looked to her like a city seen from very high up at night.

Jay turned when he heard her coming. He was standing by the window at the end of the aisle, the one that looked out over the gravel lot and the flats, and he had his hands in the pockets of a jacket that was clearly not warm enough for the room, which she noted with some satisfaction.

"There she is," he said. "Welcome to the nicest walk-in fridge in the Arctic."

"You said dimmed lights and a window," Ella said, stopping a few feet away. "You did not say I'd need gloves."

"You get used to it after about ten minutes. Or you don't, and you suffer, but in an interesting setting." He glanced down and did not even try to hide it. "Let me see the boots. Please tell me."

She looked down at her own feet. In the hurry of the morning she had pulled on one of her battered tan work boots and one of her hiking boots, the brown ones with the good tread, and had walked through a parking lot full of eclipse tourists, past a desk clerk, and down an entire corridor without noticing.

"Oh, for," she said. She lifted one foot and then the other, examining them like they belonged to a stranger. "Well. One of us had to commit to the theme."

"Matching boots is for people with nothing left to prove," Jay said, sticking out his own feet, one black and one dark brown. "We're calibrated. The building should be proud."

She laughed, and the laugh echoed a little down the aisle, and a rack somewhere behind her hummed louder for a second as if commenting. It was colder than she'd expected, was the thing. Colder than cold, almost, the kind of cold that made the air feel like it had edges, and the hum of the servers ran through the floor and up into her shins, a low steady vibration like standing near a hive that never slept. She had mowed outside this building for months and had never once thought about what went on inside it, and now she was standing in the middle of it and it felt like the inside of a machine that was thinking about something very important and did not intend to be interrupted.

Outside the window, the light was starting to change.

It happened slowly and then all at once, the way everyone in town had promised. The morning had been bright and flat and white, and now there was a quality to it she didn't have a word for, a thinning, like the sky was being turned down by a dimmer switch somebody in another room was operating. The gravel lot took on a color it had no business having at eleven in the morning. Down in the lot the tourists had stopped walking around and were standing in clusters, all of them facing the same direction, faces tipped up.

"It's starting," Jay said.

"You've seen one before?"

"Never. Grew up thinking I'd have to travel to Patagonia or somewhere to catch one." He leaned a hip against the window frame. "And then the path came to us. Felt rude not to."

They watched. The light went strange, then stranger, a silver-gray that made everything outside look like a photograph of itself, and the shadows on the gravel sharpened until they were almost too dark for daytime. Ella felt the cold of the aisle and the strangeness of the light and the hum of the racks all mixing together in her chest, and she had the odd, unshareable thought that the building and the sky were doing the same thing at the same time, both of them dimming, both of them going quiet, as if somebody had thrown a switch for the whole world.

The room lights dropped further. She realized Jay had a tablet tucked under his arm, one of the building's control units, and he was doing something on it, and then the overhead strips faded to a deep amber night-mode glow, barely anything, just enough to see the outlines of the racks and each other.

"Low-power cooling cycle kicks in during totality," he said. "Building does it automatically. I may have also manually encouraged it."

"You turned the lights off."

"I turned the lights appropriate. There's a difference." He nodded at the window. "You're going to want to see this part."

Totality, when it came, was not at all what she had expected. She had thought it would be dark. It was not dark, it was something else, a deep blue twilight with a black hole punched in the sky and a white ring around it, and the horizon all around