The Vent's Lament

The hum of the tubes never stops. You'd think it would drive a person crazy, but it does the opposite for me. Denae here, twenty-eight years old, and I've spent the last ten months cleaning drainage pits at the Merna depot, and honestly it's the best job I've ever had for my head.

Nobody talks to me down here. Jeffery waves from the catwalk, I wave back, and this is the entire social calendar of my day. The rest is me, a scrub brush, a hose, and the pit grate under the truck scale, which drains about two thousand pounds of sludge a week if the drivers are heavy-footed.

I was on my knees in the pit that Sunday, working the brush along the grate edge, when I started thinking about Elliot again. Ten months since the breakup. He said the words, I packed a bag, I moved into a rental over by the grain elevator, and it ended there. Except it wasn't, was it? Because here I was, twenty-eight years old, scrubbing drain sludge, and my brain kept doing the same stupid loop it always did.

He said it first. He said we'd grown apart and I said fine and neither of us fought about it, which is the worst way for a two-year thing to end. We met in a night course at the community college, shared a table, shared notes, then shared an apartment for eighteen months. And then he opened his mouth one Sunday and broke it all with four words. "Maybe we should stop."

Well. Thanks, Elliot.

The grate came clean under my brush. I liked that about pit work. You can see the before and the after. No arguments, no slow drifting apart. The grate is dirty and then it isn't and it stays fixed.

"Okay," I told the drain, like an idiot. "Okay."

I climbed out, wrung my gloves, and went to the storage room for clean rags. That room is mine, sort of. Jeffery lets me keep my gear there because nobody else wants the corner with the loud vent. My guitar lives there too. Cheap thing, bone-handled letter opener on the shelf above it in its leather sheath, a thermos, my lunch bag. I keep a folding chair in the corner and when my break hits I sit and play, quiet, because the vent carries sound up into the building and I learned that the hard way my first week.

I didn't know I'd be learning it again.

* * *

The Merna depot is the kind of building you draw once and then spend the rest of your career apologizing for. Concrete walls, a web of pneumatic tubes running overhead like somebody lost a game of pick-up sticks, and a ceiling so high the pigeons have their own zip code.

Elliot Cooper, twenty-nine, architect, walked in with Jeffery the shift supervisor at ten in the morning, clipboard under his arm, ready to measure the renovation footprint.

"So the scale stays," Jeffery said, leading him along the catwalk. "Seven years I've been here and that scale's been wrong maybe twice."

"And the pit?" Elliot asked.

"Drains under the scale. We've got a girl who keeps it clean. Denae. You'd like her, she does community cleanups, very..." Jeffery waved a hand. "Very reliable."

Elliot nodded and wrote pit on his clipboard, which was when he heard it.

A note came down from the vent above the catwalk. Thin, warbly, high. Then another. Then a little sliding sound like something crying.

Elliot stopped walking. "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Jeffery said.

"That. From the vent." Another note drifted down, long and mournful. "Is there an animal up there? It sounds like a cat in distress!"

"Oh! That." Jeffery laughed. "That's the old vent stack, runs down to the storage room. Nothing's wrong."

"It sounds like something's dying up there, Jeffery!" Elliot was already heading for the stairs. "We can't just leave it."

"Elliot, hey, it's fine, honestly, it's..."

But Elliot was gone, boots hammering the stairs, because in his head a small animal was trapped in a wall and he was the only one who cared. He followed the sound down the back corridor, past the break room, to a door with a laminated sign that said STORAGE, KEEP CLEAR.

He heard the note again, closer now, and something else under it. A melody. A guitar melody, played slow.

He stood there with his hand on the door and felt his face go hot, because he knew that melody. He'd heard it through a bedroom wall for eighteen months.

He knocked anyway. Old habits.

* * *

The knock about scared me to death. I'd been mid-verse, sitting in my folding chair with the guitar, and I fumbled the chord so bad it was almost jazz.

"Just a sec," I set the guitar down. "Come in?"

The door opened and there was Elliot. Elliot, in a hard hat he clearly borrowed, holding a clipboard, looking like someone who had expected a dying cat and found his ex.

"Denae?" he said.

"Elliot?" I said, louder than I meant to. "What are you doing here?"

"I thought there was an animal trapped in the wall," he said. "There's a vent. It carries sound."

"I know it carries sound. Why do you think I play quiet?" I stood up, wiping my hands on my jeans. "Nobody told me you were coming today."

"Nobody told me you worked here." He looked as thrown as I felt. "Jeffery said we have a girl who cleans the pits. A girl named Denae. I thought there were two of you."

"How'd you even end up on this job?"

"My firm bid the renovation. I drew the original tube layout for a class project back in school, so they pulled me in. Small world, huh?"

"Small world," I agreed, and then we both just stood there in my storage room like two people waiting for a bus that wasn't coming.

He looked around. Thermos. Lunch bag. Rags. His eyes went to the shelf and stopped at the letter opener, bone handle, leather sheath. I saw him remember it. I'd bought it at a flea market our second year, carried it everywhere, used it to open envelopes like some kind of Victorian ghost.

"You still have that," he said.

"I still have everything," I said, before my brain could stop my mouth. "Habit. What's the renovation?"

"New control room, reroute two tube lines, replace the scale house." He said it like a man grateful for a script. "The pit drainage is part of it. Which is apparently you."

"That's apparently me." I crossed my arms. "So you heard the guitar and thought a cat was dying?"

"In my defense, it did sound like a cat."

"Gee, thanks."