Refuse

2

Having plentiful paper was no easy thing, and making it outside of regulated and well-monitored channels was both a chore and a crime. Considering her reality, Leah knew that spiritually she was born into a long line of criminals.

“You gonna be there today, Leah?”

It was Ivan, cohort in crime and fellow picker. The two friends usually teamed up together as they worked through the stacks of reclamation bags. Ivan was twenty years old, fully five years younger than Leah, but he was smart and kind, and to her he always seemed to be older and wiser than his years. He smiled as he pulled half a dozen square metal containers from a bag with both hands and dropped them into a recycling bin.

“Yeah. I’ll be there,” she answered as she ran the back of a gloved hand across her forehead, pushing some stray wisps of her dark hair out of her face. “I have to help my mother with the apartment today, though. She gets tired a lot now, and Dad’s been in the down-deep for… (what was it?) …weeks now helping re-design and upgrade the heating vents.”

As she talked with Ivan, her mind—as always—churned on in another direction altogether. She thought of the heating vents, and that thought brought forth for her the texture of her artificial environment. Heating.

The ever evident coolness of the recycling section—of the whole silo—pressed in and down on her. Cool radiated from the surrounding dirt and through the thick concrete walls and permeated everyone and everything. The omnipresent cold could only be combated with brute force. Alexander had explained it all to her, and so had her father. The human body exists in its healthy state at 37 degrees Celsius. Now, in this silo, humans were unnaturally populating a concrete silo that, without brute force being applied, wanted to maintain a temperature of around 12.78 degrees Celsius. There were some minimal amounts of heat provided by the existence of so many bodies and machines and activity, but that was not enough to raise the temperature to the point where most people could be comfortable without wearing more than just their coveralls. So heating became a reality of life.

Heating. Brute force alteration of the environment.

“But you’ll be there, right?” Ivan said. He looked around the floor trying to act casually even though what he was really doing was making sure that no one was watching them. When he was certain that no one was looking their way, he bent over and Leah watched as he tore a white cardboard carton into flat strips that he then tucked up into the pants leg of his work coveralls. He pulled his socks up over the strips and then smoothed the pants legs back down into place.

“I’ll be there,” Leah replied. She also scanned the room to see if anyone was paying them any undue attention. Paul and Joseph were working together near Chute #3, and both seemed to be in some kind of restrained argument. Neither looked over to where Leah and Ivan sorted under Chute #1. Paul she liked, though she really didn’t know him. Joseph Kind was another story altogether. She felt sorry for Paul having to work with Joseph, and she was thankful that she always had Ivan when she needed to talk. Joseph was a strange bird, secretive and brooding, always looking at everyone else like he rejected their right to live and breathe. Maybe she was being harsh in her judgment of Joseph—she really didn’t know him either. But the way he watched and scowled made her want to give him a wide berth.

The tumbling sound of a reclamation bag bouncing down twenty stories of stainless steel ducting drew her attention and provided emphasis to the unspoken fact that the work of recycling in an artificial world made by man was never done.