The Operator's Last Night

Kimmy was forty-two years old and she had spent most of those years talking to machines. Satellite relay station, twelve-hour shifts, a headset on and a coffee going cold beside the console, and the only men who ever spoke to her were pilots halfway over the Pacific asking her to recheck a coordinate. She was good at her job. She was so good at her job that sometimes she felt like that was all she was, a good signal relay with a body attached, and the body mostly just drove her to work and back.

She had one day of layover in Bahía Ballena, which was exactly the kind of name that sounded romantic until you got there and saw it was a working port, diesel sheen on the water, fishing boats clattering against the pier all night, and dogs asleep in every patch of shade. She liked it anyway. She liked anywhere that wasn't a console room.

But sitting in the cantina that second night, nursing a beer and watching the harbor lights smear across the wet street, she got to thinking about the fact that she had never really done anything. Not anything that counted. She had been to Spain once on a package tour and spent it in the hotel because of a sinus infection. She had gone skydiving on her thirty-fifth birthday and been so terrified the whole way down that she remembered nothing but the instructor's armpit. And with men, well. There had been a few, careful and polite, all of them over in about as much time as a coordinate check, and she had laid there afterward thinking, so that was it, that's what the fuss is about.

She was forty-two, single, never married, and she had a suspicion that somewhere along the line she had missed her own life. That was the mood she was in when she noticed the man at the other end of the bar.

He was big, broad through the shoulders in the way of a man who hauled things for a living, mid-forties maybe, with a sun-beaten face and hands wrapped around a glass of water, of all things. He had an engineer's steady hands and a calm, unhurried way about him. He caught her looking, which was embarrassing, and then he didn't do the thing men usually did, didn't grin or raise the glass or come sidling down the bar. He just looked at her for a moment with a calm kind of attention, like he was reading a gauge, and then he lifted one hand and tipped his chin toward the door. Just that. A small, unhurried gesture, her, him, the door.

Kimmy sat there with her beer halfway to her mouth and her heart doing something stupid in her chest. She was not the kind of woman men gestured at. She was the kind of woman who watched men gesture at other women from across the room.

But she put the beer down and she stood up, and she walked to the door, and he followed her out into the heat.

"You're going to want to say something first," he said on the street, and his English was accented but careful. "Before you decide. My name is Herman. I'm an engineer, on leave from a rig. I have a room two streets from here. I give massages. I am asking if you would like one."

"A massage," Kimmy said.

"A massage," he agreed. "Nothing more unless you say so. I am not a creep. You can check the room, leave the door open, do whatever makes you sure. But you look like a woman whose shoulders have been up around her ears for twenty years, and I have two days of leave and nothing to do with it but be useful."

And there was something in the way he said it, plain and no fuss, that made it easy to say, "Okay. Yeah. Okay."

The room was dim and warm, one bulb in an amber shade, a wide window open to the humid night and the far-off clatter of the boats. It smelled of salt and sweat and copal incense, the smoke curling up off a little dish on the sill, and there in the corner stood a wooden massage table, properly set up, towels folded in a stack beside it. Herman had been telling the truth about the massage part anyway.

"I will be honest, I travel with it," he said, catching her look at the table. "Eleven years I have done this on rigs and in port towns. It keeps the hands honest."

"Keeps your hands honest," Kimmy repeated, and she laughed, the first real laugh she'd had in weeks, and he smiled like he'd been waiting for that sound.

She was nervous about the undressing, because of course she was, she had not stood naked in front of a stranger since, well, ever, but he turned around like a gentleman and told her where the towels were and said, "You keep the towel over your back until you are ready. This is your night. I only work here."

So she got down to her underwear and lay face down on the table with a towel over her and her face in the cradle, looking down at the floorboards, listening to him do something with a bottle and a cup, water running, a lighter clicking. Then his hands were at her shoulders for a moment, just resting, warm and still.

"Good?" he asked.

"Good," she said into the cradle.

Then came the oil. He had warmed it in a bowl of hot water, coconut oil, and he tipped it slowly along her spine from the cup, a thin hot ribbon of it that ran down between her shoulder blades and pooled in the small of her back, and Kimmy made a noise she hadn't made since she was a kid getting into a lake in summer. He spread it with flat palms, slow, from her shoulders down, working it into every inch, and his hands were enormous and impossibly steady.

Then he started to knead, and it was nothing like the chair massage she'd had once in an airport. This was methodical, patient, relentless. He dug his thumbs along either side of her spine and found knots she had been carrying since some shift three years ago, and he leaned into them with his whole weight, held them there until they gave up, and Kimmy groaned into the cradle, a long low animal sound that she would have died of embarrassment over any other night of her life.

"There it is," he said quietly. "Good. Keep making that sound. That is the sound of your body saying thank you."

"You're going to kill me," she managed. "You're going to dig a hole in my back and I'm going to die right here on this table."

"Not tonight," he said. "Tonight you live a lot."

He worked down her back, vertebra by vertebra, and out along the ribs, and every place he touched he touched like he had all night, because he did, they both did, and that was the strange comfort of it. Two strangers on layovers. The night would end at dawn. He had said it right up front, half into the walk over, that this was a one-night thing, no names exchanged beyond the first, no numbers, nothing owed. And somehow that promise, instead of cheapening it, had loosened something in her chest she hadn't known was wound tight. There was nobody to be. She could just lie there and be a body being taken care of.

Then he said, "Turn over for me," and helped her roll, keeping the towel over her front, and the table creaked and the oil had made her skin feel like something borrowed from a better woman.

He started at her feet, which surprised her, warm oiled thumbs pressing into