‘You don’t talk much do you?’ Garen smiled kindly with his yellow teeth and gestured toward the apprentice with a casual wave, ‘Don’t think that you need to though, people talk too much, listen too little. I think you’ll be a quick learner if the fumes don’t get to you.’
Placing a pair of wire glasses upon the ridge of his nose, the systems electrician turned his attention to the depths of a merrily clacking cabinet and stood silent for a moment, regarding the contactors before him with the immutable calm of a problem solver.
He was a man of knobbly bones and stood with the complexion of a man who washed his clothes in cigar smoke. Garen seemed to exist within what was a separate timespan when compared to the other workers within the turbine. He moved slowly, there were always small things to fix as he wandered through the corridors; there was a globe that needed changing by the gossiping fitters, some dials that needed to be examined while he paused to roll out another cigarette of damply fragranced tobacco. Garen was kept busy by his slow wanderings and from the carefree lack of structure that he worked with the apprentice now understood why Helma was so frustrated by him.
‘This is the parrel supply bus,’ he mumbled as he puffed a cloud of thick smoke around his words and opened a locked panel to reveal several bars of brightly polished copper, ‘If the East were to ever go offline, we’d have to use it again. Dunil wants to strip it out for the scrap but Helma has shouted down braver managers than him before.’
Garen’s clothes were old but kept together in a way that was neatly disinterested. They were creased from lack of ironing but unfaded from apparent careful washing: years of scrubbing the dirt and grime away from a thing that has life still left in its knit. They were different to the many of the other’s clothes too, there was a hidden blue to their fabric that could have once been described as royal.
Wondering how old Garen was for a moment, the Apprentice summoned up the courage to ask a question about a time before the East.
‘There was less need back then,’ Garen said while scratching his chin and looking contemplatively at trembling dial, ‘although the West still has enough guts to boil a kettle in each yurt this side of the Dekkou plains. People lose the trust in old things. They say, it must be close to breaking because it hasn’t broken down yet. But they don’t work here, they don’t see that the old machines are the ones with character; you learn what they like and what causes them to stall, you guide them, change small parts when they fail, but in essence it’s still the same old beast that you’ve always known.’
Tapping fondly on the side of a humming box, Garen had that same look of quiet pride that the apprentice had noticed in Helma.
‘This is an air breaker,’ he continued with his tour of the switch room, ‘It doesn’t break air, that’s more a job for Mika. But what it does do is use a pressurised ram to hammer the contacts into place before they can arc and end up turning every light globe in the turbine into a flamethrower. All you have to do is panic, and the begin to charge the breaker with this crank,’ he said, pulling down on a heavy looking leaver that whirred with greater intensity upon each successive pump. ‘Then, when you hear the click,’ there was a click, ‘you close your eyes and press this button.’
There was a concussive shot that shook the room with noise and knocked the apprentice backward. Every hair upon their body felt as though it was urging them to run from a deep pit that was opening below their stomach. Scrambling to their feet the apprentice looked about the switch room in panic feeling their breath slowly begin to catch back up to a normal rhythm.
Leaning on the breaker with a radiant calm, Garen was relighting his cigarette and tapping the toe of his boot on the ground.
‘Of course, the East would have to be offline for it to actually kick in but I’d rather show you now than have you forget to hold onto something later. It’s a much bigger kick when there’s load on it.’
Moving from the room with his casual gait, the old electrician looked back to the apprentice with another smile.
‘Come on, I need to grab some more tobacco.’
The apprentice had watched Garen for the last hour was beginning to understand his humour. It was kinder than Helma’s, he would say things for little reason and circle back to them as if it were a joke that only you and he shared. His aloof manner and plain voice also obscured his intelligence. He’d listen patiently to the other workers and gently suggest an answer to their complaints.
‘You’ve got to keep the feed rate higher,’ he said in passing to a boilermaker who had just welded a part of his thermos to the side of the turbine, ‘it’s overworking the transformer.’
The two had walked for some time before the apprentice noticed a small change to Garen’s nature. Here in the dark confines of the sluice gates, he began looking over his shoulder more, glancing around corners before moving forward. The apprentice noticed that he had stopped writing down the incoming frequency at each terminal, that he had been sniffing at the air every so often as if searching for something on the wind.
‘Stop!’ he said abruptly as darkness crept its way into the room with reaching claws and as silky silent as a crow upon the death of morning, ‘do you smell lilac?’
‘Hello Garen,’ a whisp of a voice unfurled itself from within the shadow, its edge was cold and held no line of humour as it glinted dully.
‘Mika!’ the electrician took a deep breath in and became ridged with worry, ‘how nice of you to sneak up. I’ve been hoping you’d corner me at some point.’
A snake like creature emerged from the darkness. Two green eyes of hidden emotion glinted in the orange glow of the bunker light. She walked with a cunning strength, there was a litheness held across her broad shoulders that gave no allusion to weakness or surrender. The plumber turned her head to the side and delicately bounced a wrench upon a section of pipe with concerning resonance.
‘I seem to remember a game of cards,’ Mika had barely whispered but her voice still cut larger than a shout: it demanded that it was heard, and the normal rumble of the turbine had silenced as if obliging to her whim.
‘I remember that a forgetful electrician had lost some money to a patient plumber, I remember that the plumber, in her grace, also knows where silly little men choose to hide their tobacco.
A threat to his plants wilting his composure, Garen began to sweat and motioned for the apprentice to stand behind him.
‘I didn’t forget you,’ He gulped, staring at Mika as if she was a viper, ‘just been busy with the boilers, remember when they blew out in the south?’
His excuse brought a smile to Mika’s face, she stepped forward again, further backing the frightened electrician into a corner.
‘Oh, you have a lamb with you,’ she said noticing the apprentice for the first time, ‘well, I think that it’s time that they had a wander through the turbine by themselves for a while. You have some float switches that need changing in sewer.’
Leaping forward and catching the unresisting Garen by his collar, Mika nodded to the apprentice and began to drag the sad looking electrician back toward the darkness that she had just appeared from.
‘Tell the boss that Garen has volunteered to help the plumber for a while. It’s about time he’s gotten some dirt under his fingernails.‘
And with that the apprentice was alone.
A labyrinth of corridors and hatchways sprawled infinitely outward across sections of the turbine that were still unknown. Steam jets would burst from valves in white plumes of panic and then abate into a simple burble of discordant unrest. Countless ticks, bangs, and hums became a cacophonic underscore that replaced the silence of the desert below, the silence of their home.
But this was a new place, a place that the apprentice was to be responsible for.
And now, they were alone.
A deep breath was followed by a step.
The apprentice closed their eyes and remembered the sun bird for a moment. Warmth blazing from its radiant wings as if a god of sunlight and beauty.
There was so much to learn.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 