The Night Shift Neighbor

The server light blinks green every four seconds. I count them sometimes. Four seconds of green, four seconds of dark, and that's my whole night if the backups run clean. It's 1am on a Tuesday in the computer science building, and I'm twenty-three years old, and this is my job. Data analyst, ten to six, the shift nobody wants. I took it because it pays the rent and because I figured empty hours would be good for me. Most nights they are.

Henry, that's me. I should say that now because I'll forget later. Henry, twenty-three, live in a studio apartment eleven minutes from campus if I catch the light on Vine Street. I dated women in college. Two of them, one after the other, both fine people. The last kiss I got from a woman was when I was twenty-two, a woman named Tori at a house party, and it was nice and it was nothing. What I didn't do in college was act on the other thing. The thing where certain guys in my lecture halls made me lose my place in my notes. I'm not going to call it a struggle. It was more like a door I kept walking past because I was busy.

So I sit in my office, which is quite small, and I listen to the janitor.

He works my shift too. His name is Dan. I know this from the schedule taped inside the supply door and from the one time Facilities emailed everybody. Dan, twenty-six, nights. He's tall, dark hair, forearms I have noticed more than I should admit even to myself. Every night around one he comes through with his mop bucket and the wheels squeak on the tile, and his keys jingle on his belt loop, jingle jingle, down the hall and back. That's the soundtrack of my shift. I wait for it. Some nights I catch myself waiting for it and feel stupid about it, and then I keep waiting anyway.

We've never really talked. There's a nod. He nods, I nod. Once he held the stairwell door for me when my arms were full of backup drives, and I said thanks, and he said no problem, and that was all the conversation in three months of nights. His closet, the actual janitor's closet, shares a wall with my office. Thin wall. I hear him in there grinding coffee at 2am, which he does with a little hand grinder, and I know that because I asked Facilities about the noise once and they told me it was Dan's coffee ritual and to get over it.

The green light blinks. I check the backup queue. Two servers done, one crawling. I eat almonds out of a bag and read the same paragraph of a Wikipedia article about lighthouses. This is my life and honestly most of the time it's fine.

Then something crashed in the hallway.

Not a server. A real crash, metal and plastic, loud enough that I was up before I decided to be. I grabbed the flashlight off my desk because the hallway lights up here go to half power after midnight, half being generous. Out the door, left, and there he was.

Dan was crouched over the mop bucket like it had betrayed him. The thing had come apart somehow. The wringer lever had snapped clean off and was lying on the tile, and the mop itself had flopped out, gray and wet, across the floor. There was dirty water spreading in a slow confident circle toward the wall and my shoes.

"Oh no," I said.

"Please tell me you have a wrench," he said. He looked up at me and his face did something between a laugh and a plea. "Or a priest."

"It's 1am, the priests are all asleep."

"Story of my life."

I got down on the floor with him, which felt weird and good at the same time. The wringer mounts on a threaded post, and the nut had backed itself off over who knows how many months, and now the whole lever assembly was loose. I held the post while he tried to turn the nut with his fingers. His hands are big. His knuckles were wet with mop water. He said a bad word when the nut bit his skin.

"Facilities gave you a broken bucket," I said. "That's basically the university telling you what it thinks of you."

"They gave me this bucket in August. It's been squeaking since October. Tonight it just gave up." He got the nut started with two fingers, and I put a little pressure on the post, and the lever seated back where it belonged. He worked it up and down a few times. It still squeaked, but it wrung. He laughed. It was a real laugh, unguarded, the kind you don't do at 1am on purpose. "You just fixed a mop bucket on your first try and I've been fighting this thing since October."

"I held a nut. You did the work."

"I'm Dan, by the way."

"I know. I'm Henry."

"I know," he said, and then he looked a little surprised at himself for saying it. I did too, a little. Three months of nods and he knows my name. Then I realized he must know my name the same way I know his, off a schedule, off an email, off paying attention. The water was still spreading so we dealt with that. He fetched the wet floor sign and I stood on it like an idiot, and he laughed again, and I apologized for standing on his sign, and he said it was the best thing that sign had ever done.

* * *

The backups were running. Nothing for me to do for an hour, so when he said he was going down to the vending machine in the basement and asked if I wanted anything, I said I'd walk with him. He had a little radio in his cart, one of those old ones with the fold-up antenna, playing some station that comes in after dark, all static and soft rock. He pushed the cart slow so I could keep pace.

The basement of the CS building is a strange place. Half of it is sealed-off server rooms and half is abandoned storage, old monitors stacked like a monument to 1998. The vending machines hum down there in the dark corner, two of them, lit up like altars. Dan put in quarters for a coffee, the powdered kind, and the machine took his money and gave him nothing and he just stared at it, and I thought he was going to break that machine too.

"Don't," I said. "You've had enough loss tonight."

He fed it quarters again and it grudgingly gave up two cups. He handed me one. We leaned against the wall under the flickering fluorescent. The coffee was terrible and hot. It tasted like sweet cardboard. I drank it anyway.

"Can I ask you something," he said. "You ever wonder if this is it? Like, this is the whole adult life. A bucket and a hallway."

"Every night, basically."

"Right." He blew on his coffee. "I came here two years ago. Had a thing end before that, a guy named Sid, it was fine, it just ended, if that makes sense. Two years single. I clean floors while everyone sleeps. Some nights I don't talk to a single human being out loud. I leave notes for the day supervisor like we're pen pals."

"You have your radio."

"I have my radio," he said, and smiled at it like an old dog.

Here's what I should have said: me too, mostly, a hallway and a blinking light. What I actually said was nothing, because I was busy realizing that I liked standing next to him more than I'd liked anything in weeks, and that thought made my ears hot. He looked over at me and I pretended to be fascinated by the abandoned monitors.

"Can I tell you something kind of embarrassing," he said.

"Please. It's the most conversation I've had since February."

"You know your office. On the hall. There's a gap under the door."

"I'm aware of the gap under my door. It lets mice in and hope out."

He laughed into his cup. "When I do my loop, coming down your hallway, I can see your shadow. Your chair is right there, and the monitor light hits it, and when you get up to stretch your shadow crosses the gap. I started noticing it weeks ago. And now, no joke, I time my loop so I walk past when I think you'll be stretching. I watch for your shadow like it's a weather report. If it's there I feel better about the whole night. If it's not there I get, I don't know, disappointed. Like the building's empty."

I stood there holding my terrible coffee. The fluorescent buzzed. Down the hall the mop bucket ticked as the wheels settled.

"You time your loop for my shadow," I said.

"I said it was embarrassing."

"It's not embarrassing. It's..." I didn't have the word. I thought about all those nights I waited for the jingle of his keys and the squeak of wheels, how I'd hear him turn the corner and sit up straighter without deciding to. "I wait for your keys. Every night. 1am, jingle jingle, and the night feels longer when you're late."

Dan looked at me. In the bad light, with the machine humming, he looked like a guy deciding something. So did I, probably. My shadow must have crossed under some door somewhere, telling the truth about me all night long.

"So," he said. "The coffee down here is terrible. But we could, you know. Do this again. Tomorrow. Or..."

The backup queue pinged on my phone. Of course it did. The server upstairs that never finishes had finished, early, like even the machines were giving me room.

"Or I could walk you back up," I said, "and we could figure out the rest on the way."

* * *

We took the freight elevator up, which is a slow ride even when you're not standing next to a guy whose shoulder keeps almost touching yours. Dan pushed the empty cart. The wheels squeaked on every floor. Neither of us said much. The radio hissed out something soft and I watched the numbers climb, two, three, and thought about how I'd been waiting three months for these keys to jingle past my door and now I couldn't stand the quiet between us without feeling like I was wasting something.

The CS building at 1am is a different building. The lights run at half power after