Chapter Forty-Seven
Garrett
Thursday was the fifteenth of May.
He marked it by arriving at the plant at six-thirty, which was earlier than his usual seven, and walking the floor before anyone else was there.
The press line was running, the night shift finishing, and the floor had the particular quality it had in the transition between shifts: productive and quiet at once, the machinery doing its work without the human layer of conversation and movement that the day shift added.
He had walked this floor dozens of times.
He knew it the way he now knew the names on the shift roster and the maintenance log and the capacity figures and the pension recovery schedule.
He had arrived here knowing none of those things and had learned them the way you learned things you had decided mattered: by paying sustained attention over a long time.
He stood near the Schuler press and thought about November.
The gap between what the file had said and what the room had contained.
Three hundred and forty: a number on a page, in a file, read on a plane over Lake Erie.
He had felt nothing particular about it then.
He felt something particular about it now, standing in the building where those three hundred and forty people came to work, hearing the machinery they operated, smelling the specific air of a facility that was alive and intended to stay that way.
He did not try to name what he felt. He noted it. He took it with him.
The day shift arrived. Ota at six fifty-three, cardigan rather than the insulated jacket now that the season had committed.
Garza at seven-oh-one, nodding when he saw Garrett near the press.
Reyes and Dunmore at seven-oh-eight, the same pair, the same station, the same easy familiarity of two people who had worked beside each other for years and had stopped needing to perform their comfort with each other.
Garrett watched this for a while. Then he went upstairs.
He packed the room at the end of the corridor in twenty minutes.
There was less than he expected: the laptop, the notepad and its accumulated pages of analysis and figures and the occasional single line that had nothing to do with figures, the three books he had brought from New York in November and finally read, a photograph his father had sent of the Evanston community centre, the acoustic performance space wired by Patrick Walsh, taken on a clear day with the light coming through the tall windows at the angle his father had spent months calculating.
He held the photograph for a moment. Then he packed it carefully between the books.
Cait appeared in the doorway at eight-forty, the usual time, the usual knock on the open door.
She looked at the bag on the desk. She looked at him.
"Ready," she said. Not a question.
"The room at the end of the corridor will need someone new," he said.
"Dubowski's already asked Victor about a replacement analyst." She came in and sat in the chair that did not wobble for what might have been the last time in her current capacity. "Victor suggested a junior associate from the New York office."
"Anyone competent."
"I'll make sure they know the floor," she said. "And Ota's schedule. And that the radiator in the small office works in intervals and the chair on the left wobbles and the coffee machine in the break room is temperamental after two in the afternoon."
He looked at her. "You're going to brief the replacement on the building's idiosyncrasies."
"Someone has to." She met his eyes. "The building matters. The details of it matter. You know that."
"I know that," he said.
He picked up the bag. He took one last look at the room: the walls with their small marks, the window with its view of the secondary parking lot in the May green, the desk that had held six months of work and one coffee ring that was not his. He turned off the light.
They went downstairs together. On the floor, the day shift was running. The press line was doing what it always did. Neither of them stopped to mark it. Some things did not require marking.
Outside, the South Side in May, the light horizontal and warm. He put the bag in the car. He looked at her.
"Midwest portfolio," he said. "First meeting with Victor next week. A facility in Wisconsin, preliminary assessment."
"Already."
"Already." He looked at her. "Different building. Different corridor."
"But still Chicago."
"Still Chicago," he said. "Still here."
She looked at him in the May light, this woman who had arrived with a canvas bag and a cold coffee and a folder with handwritten tabs and had shown him the difference between a number and a fact, and he thought: still here is the only place I intend to be.