Watch Me Break

The generator outside was doing its best impression of a dying animal. Inside The Wreck Room, the lights flickered every four seconds, which made the karaoke machine look haunted. I liked it. It was honest about being a dump.

My name is Tasha Lynch. I'm thirty-four, and I drive a container crane at the port, night shift, which means my hands shake a little when I come off a twelve and my brain is still moving boxes at eighty feet. I sat at the bar with a napkin and a pen I'd stolen from the tide-pool of a cash register, and I wrote rules.

Ten of them. Then I crossed one out and made it eleven.

Rule one: you watch. That's the job. The whole job.

Rule two: no talking until I talk first.

Rule three: if I say a word, any word, you stop. Doesn't matter which word. Stop.

The napkin was getting soggy from the ring of my beer, so I pressed harder. Outside, the power-line crew was shouting over the generator. Something about a fuse. Something about someone's mother. Every window on this block had been strobing since eight, and the crew had been out there since eight too, because the block's wiring was older than anyone who'd voted on it.

"Sign-up sheet?"

I looked up. A guy had taken the stool next to mine. Tall, forty-ish, actually thirty-eight but he carried it like forty, good jacket, the kind of tan that comes from hotel lobbies instead of sun. He was pointing at my napkin with two fingers, polite, like the napkin might bite.

"It's a list," I said.

"Yeah. For karaoke. That's the sign-up sheet, right?"

"It's a bar with a karaoke machine. It's not a karaoke bar. There's a difference, and the difference is nobody sings."

He squinted at the napkin. "Rule one, you watch. That is the entirety of the work. Huh. Weird song request."

"That's not a song."

"It's on a napkin next to a karaoke machine."

"So is a beer ring. That doesn't make it a song either."

He grinned. He had the grin of a man who sells things for a living and has never once lost a sale to a napkin. "Vic Davenport," he said, and put out a hand.

"Tasha Lynch." I shook it. His grip was firm without being a lecture about it, which I appreciated. "What do you sell?"

"Industrial lighting. I'm the regional rep, which means I drive a lot and stand in a lot of warehouses while men explain fluorescents to me."

"And you celebrate that by wandering into dying karaoke bars?"

"I celebrate it by finding the one block in the city with no power and asking why. That's how I found you. Well, not you. This bar. The crew outside said the only working outlet for six blocks is behind the building, down a hatch."

I put my pen down. "Who told you about the hatch?"

"The guy with the beard. He said a crane driver uses it."

"Lloyd would," I said, mostly to myself. Lloyd Booker, crew lead, twenty-nine, thinks the night shift is his personal variety show. He'd found my crawlspace months ago when his crew was stringing line along this street, and he'd never once let it stay a secret, because secrets hurt him physically.

"So it's not a sign-up sheet," Vic said. "What is it?"

"You read rule one."

"You watch. The entirety of the work is that. I assumed it was lyrics."

"It's for a watcher. Not a singer." I took a drink. My shift was still weighing on me, damp and clinging. "You ever heard of a person who likes being watched?"

He didn't do the thing most men do, which is laugh too fast or ask if I'm serious in a voice that shuts flat and final. He turned his stool a few degrees toward me instead. "Watched doing what?"

"Anything. Everything. Pick."

"And you wrote rules for it."

"I write rules for everything. It's how I keep from killing people at work. There are rules for lifting a forty-ton container. Rules work."

"Can I read them?"

"Rule two says no talking until I talk first."

"You're talking."

"I'm making an exception for merchandise."

He laughed, a real one, short. "Okay. Read me the list."

I read him the list. All eleven. My voice did the flat thing it does when I'm reciting procedures, which I'd decided years ago was a feature and not a bug. Rule four: no touching unless I put your hand somewhere. Rule five: you can look at anything. Rule six: I decide when it ends, and when I decide, it's over before the sentence finishes. Rule seven: no photos, no phones, nothing with a battery. Rule eight: if you get bored, leave, don't perform staying. Rule nine: I'm thirty-four and single and neither fact is an invitation. Rule ten: you don't get to ask why. Rule eleven: no gifts, no money, no favors, nothing traded. This isn't a transaction. If it feels like a transaction, it's over.

Vic was quiet through all of it. When I finished he picked up my beer, looked at it, put it back down in exactly the same spot.

"Rule nine sounds like it's for salesmen," he said.

"Rule nine is for everyone."

"And rule eleven."

"People get weird about money. I've seen what happens. The second cash enters a room, someone thinks they bought something." I shrugged. "Nobody buys anything here. Ever."

"Agreed. All of it."

"You haven't heard the catch."

"There's a catch?"

"There's always a catch." I tapped the napkin. "The catch is I've never actually done it. Had a watcher. I've thought about it for ten years, since I was twenty-four and kissed a girl in the walk-in cooler at a karaoke bar in Gdansk while the whole staff pretended not to look through the door glass. That's the last time I felt watched and liked it. So the rules are theory. The rules might be garbage. The rules might fall apart in the first five minutes."

"Then I'll follow them until they fall apart," Vic said. "And after that?"

"After that we find out what I actually want, I guess."

"Deal." He said it fast, no pause for drama, and that told me something about him. "One condition of my own. You can't give orders. If you want to direct me around the room like a foreman, this isn't watching, it's a work site. I'll watch a person. I won't watch a performance you're stage-managing."

"I run a crane for a living. Directing people is most of my personality."

"So I've heard, from Lloyd, who talks about you the way some men talk about a boxing match."

"Of course he does." I finished the beer and stood. My legs did the post-shift wobble and hid it well. "Come on then. Tour's starting."

The hatch is behind The Wreck Room, under the fire escape of the building next door, which is a decommissioned indoor go-kart track that went under sometime before I moved here. Lloyd's crew had strung a temporary line and clipped a work light to the brick, so the alley had one clean cone of yellow in it. Vic looked at the hatch, the bolt, the stairs going down into black, and didn't do the polite male thing of going first without asking. He waited.

"Ladies first?"

"Nobody's first. We go together, because I know where the light switch is and you don't."

Inside, the crawlspace smelled like dust and cold concrete, and my model railway ran along the west wall. I built it when I was a kid and never finished it, and when I found this place two years ago I brought the whole thing here in six banana boxes. N scale. Two loops, a freight yard, a mountain made of plaster and impatience. Half the track still dead-ends into a tunnel I never cut through.

"You built this?" Vic crouched at the edge of the table. The work light through the hatch gridded across the rails.

"When I was twelve. Never finished."

"Which part's unfinished?"

"The mountain. The train goes in and doesn't come out. I keep meaning to fix it."

He stood and looked around the space, the bare bulb Lloyd's crew had wired to that blessed outlet, the mattress I'd dragged down here in February, the lock on the inside of the door. He took his time. I let him.

"So," he said. "What happens when you turn it on?"

I reached over and flipped the switch on the little transformer. The train woke up with a whine, picked its way out of the freight yard, and ran the outer loop. When it hit the mountain it went into the tunnel and didn't come out. The signal light by the yard glowed green, a tiny green sun about the size of a lentil.

Vic watched the whole lap like it was cargo he was responsible for.

"Okay," I said. "Rules. Again. Down here they count double."

"Double. Got it."

I sat on the mattress and pulled the napkin out of my coveralls pocket. It was soft from beer and handling. "Rules one through six, same as at the bar. Rule seven, no photos, no phones, nothing with a battery."

"Your train has a battery," he said.

"The train is crew. The train doesn't count."

"Noted. The train is exempt."

"Rules eight through eleven, same as at the bar. No gifts, no money, no favors, nothing traded."

"Still agreed," he said. "All eleven."

"Then sit down."

There was an overturned cable spool against the wall, one of Lloyd's, left behind from some job and too heavy to carry back up the stairs. Vic sat on it. His knees were higher than his hips and he looked, somehow, comfortable anyway. A man who could sit anywhere. Salesmen can do that. I've seen them take meetings on crates.

"You're sure," he said. Not a question really. A check.

"I'm sure. Rule two starts now!"

He closed his mouth. Good. He'd listened.

I stood, and my hands did the shake they do after twelve hours on the crane, the fine tremor in the fingers that no amount of gripping fixes. I let him see it. That was part of it too, maybe. The hands that steer two hundred tons of container all night, shaking over six small buttons.

The coveralls had a zipper and eleven buttons, which felt like a joke the universe had written for me. I started at the collar. First button. The bare bulb hummed. The train ran its loop and vanished into the mountain and I heard Vic's breath change, just slightly, when it didn't come out.

Second button. Third. The air down here was cold, and my skin knew it immediately, goosebumps walking up from my collarbone.

I looked at him. He was looking at me. Not at the railway, not at the mattress, not anywhere useful. At me. And it didn't feel like the port, where men watch you