The Type Case

From: Hayley To: Denny Subject: night shift, again

Hi honey. It's 11:40 and I'm clocked in and the desk coffee is bad again, which surprises nobody. I've been on nights at this hospital for three years now and I still can't drink the coffee, so what does that say about me?

Two things I want to tell you about tonight. One, there's a cab driver asleep in his car in the lot out front. He's been there since ten. Empty cab, seat all the way back, one arm hanging off the wheel like he's steering in his dream. I walked past on my first round and he didn't move and I didn't wake him, because who am I to argue with a man who found a quiet corner of Panhala at midnight? Two, do you remember the wooden type case on the wall in my office? The little drawer thing with all the compartments? It's completely empty. Has been since I started. Some printer's cabinet somebody bolted up there decades ago and nobody ever filled. I keep looking at it and thinking it needs letters in it. Or keys. Or anything. It's just forty little empty rooms in a grid and I stare at it more than I should admit.

How is Mumbai? How is the tag testing? Are you still finding detachers that fail at the worst possible moment? Write me something dumb about work, I miss your dumb work stories.

Love, H.

---

The last time we were in the same room was three months ago, at that guesthouse outside Karad. Do you remember the fan? That fan wobbled so much I kept waiting for it to come down and decapitate one of us, and you said if it did, at least we'd go together, which was either the most romantic or the most alarming thing anyone has said to me in a ceiling-fan context. We had one full day. One. You'd flown in for the conference and then extended it by a single night and we spent that night eating too much and talking about nothing and I remember thinking, this is my wife, and she lives a flight away, and how did we let that happen. Two years of this now. Two years of emails and voice notes and me counting days the way a child counts school days left, except I'm thirty-four and the thing I'm counting toward is you.

I'm not complaining. Okay, I'm a little complaining. You said you'd find a way back and I believe you, I just wish the way was faster.

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VOICE MESSAGE, 1:12 AM, TRANSCRIBED

Hey, it's me, just doing my corridor round, so listen to this while I walk. East wing first. It's so quiet tonight, like properly quiet, you can hear the vending machine humming from thirty feet away. There's a night nurse at the station doing a crossword and she waved at me with her pen, which is the most conversation either of us will have until four. Second floor, all sleeping, thank god. Third floor, one light on, room 301, the old gentleman with the broken hip, he's watching something on his phone with the volume way up. I knocked and asked if he needed anything and he said no and asked if I wanted to see a video of a goat. I said yes obviously. It was a good goat.

Oh! And funny thing. I put my hand in my jacket pocket tonight and there was one of your tag detacher tools in there. The little handheld magnet thing, the ones you test at the store? It must have been in there since Karad, since you let me play with it at breakfast because I kept asking how it worked. Three months in my pocket. I've been walking around with a piece of your job in my coat this whole time. I'm going to keep it on the desk next to me, is that weird? It feels a little weird. I'm doing it anyway. Okay, going back down, love you, talk tomorrow.

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From: Hayley To: Denny Subject: re: night shift, again

Something happened about an hour ago and I keep grinning about it so I have to tell you.

There's a small festival going on this week, you know how it is this time of year, and around 2 AM a procession came up the road past the hospital gate. Not a big one, but real. Drums, maybe eight or ten drummers, all of them going at it like the drums owed them money. Then a truck painted so bright I could see it through the gate with my eyes half shut, orange and green and whatever that pink is that only exists on festival trucks. People walking behind it with lamps. Somebody's kid was asleep on somebody's shoulder with a paper crown still on, sideways. The whole thing took maybe four minutes to pass and then the road was dark again and I stood at the gate grinning like a fool at nothing.

And my whole thought, the entire thought, start to finish, was: Denny would love this. Denny would be out there with her phone. You'd have filmed the drums and the truck and the sleeping kid with the crooked crown and you'd have sent it to me within the hour with eleven emojis. I could see exactly how you'd enjoy it, and it made me miss you in that specific sharp way, you know the one, where it's not sad exactly, it's more like homesick for a person.

I looked it up, the festival runs through the weekend. So there's a decent chance I get another procession tomorrow night and I will absolutely report on it. Consider this my beat. Night security and parade correspondent.

The cab driver is still asleep, by the way. Different position now. I respect his commitment.

Come home soon. I mean it, and I know you know I mean it, but I'm putting it in writing anyway.

Love, H.

--- VOICE MESSAGE, 2:31 AM, TRANSCRIBED Okay wait, wait, something is happening. I'm at the gate again and I'm hearing horns. Like a lot of horns? And shouting. And I can hear the drums again but they sound wrong, they sound close, like too close, and the road past the gate is a dead end, Denny, it literally ends at our taxi lot, there is nowhere for a parade to GO. Hold on. I'm going to look. I'm muting so I don't just send you four minutes of honking.

Okay I'm back and you will not believe this. You will not. Believe. This. The parade came BACK. It turned around somehow, or took some other road, I don't know, but this is what matters: there's a traffic cone sitting in the middle of the road at the turn, one orange cone, and I watched three guys arguing about it just now and from what I could hear, somebody moved it as a prank? A