IT Support, Ticket #4417
1113 Words
He woke up with the laptop still in his lap and a stiff neck. The room was gray with early morning. Through the partition the family in forty-six was quiet.
He opened the laptop.
Four hundred and twelve people had read the post.
He sat with that for a moment. Then he closed the laptop and went to use the shared bathroom down the hall and by the time he came back he had decided not to think about it. He had a job that morning, two days of network work at a distribution center on the east side, and he needed to eat something before he went.
He made coffee on the single burner he kept on the folding table and stood at the narrow window while it cooled. The towers were lit the way they were always lit. Somewhere in one of them Elliott Mohr was probably already awake, already posting.
He drank the coffee and picked up his bag and left.
He had worked at St. Catherine's Hospital for six years before the war. Network administrator, which in practice meant he was responsible for everything that ran on a wire or a signal and nothing that didn't. Patient records. Medication dispensing systems. OR scheduling. Seventeen systems that nobody thought about until one of them failed, and when one failed at two in the morning his phone rang and he drove in and fixed it and went home and nobody said anything about it the next day because that was the job.
He had not minded that. He minded when things didn't work. When they worked, and the hospital ran, and sick people got what they needed, that was enough.
His office was a room the size of a large closet on the basement level, next to the server room he maintained. He kept it clean. Cable management, labelled ports, a whiteboard with current ticket numbers and status. He ate lunch at his desk most days, something from the cafeteria upstairs, and he read things on his phone while he ate. He could still hear the monitors beeping if he closed his eyes.
He was good at the job. Reliably good, the kind of good that means problems get solved before they become emergencies and emergencies get solved before they become disasters. He had never lost a system during a critical procedure. In six years, not once.
There was a doctor on the fourth floor, a cardiologist named Reyes, who stopped him in the hallway one afternoon in his third year and said she wanted him to know that the upgrade he had done to the catheterization lab's network had made a difference. She said it and then walked away.
He thought about that for the rest of the day.
He told Claire about it that evening. She was at the kitchen table grading papers, her red pen moving steadily, and she looked up when he said it and smiled and said she wasn't surprised, and went back to the papers. He sat down across from her and opened his laptop and they were quiet together for the rest of the evening.
He thought about St. Catherine's sometimes now the way you think about a place you'll never go back to. Not with grief exactly. More with the flatness of knowing something is gone and the knowing doesn't change anything.
The distribution center job was straightforward. A router issue, some misconfigured switches, a wireless access point someone had installed without knowing what they were doing. He fixed it in four hours and spent the rest of the first day documenting what he'd done in case it happened again, which it would.
On the walk back to unit forty-seven he checked the blog on his phone.
Eight hundred and thirty people.
He put his phone in his pocket and walked the rest of the way without looking at it.
He got back to unit forty-seven a little after six. He sat on the cot and opened the laptop and for the first time read the comments.
There were a lot of them.
A woman named Dara said her husband had been at work when it happened and she still set two coffee cups out in the morning without thinking. A man named Pio said he'd been in three processing centers and asked how Elias kept going. Someone who went by the name ProducerClass said people needed to stop wallowing and get back to contributing to the recovery and that self-pity was how civilizations finished dying. There were responses to that comment that Elias didn't read all the way through. A woman named Soo wrote one sentence: I didn't think anyone else felt like this.
He sat with all of it for a while.
Then he opened a new post.
Listen guys, I'm reading your comments, but I'm not the one with answers. People are asking how I keep going, but I honestly have no idea. My body tells me it needs water or food so I just do the next thing. I keep waking up and doing it over and over again. I try to work if I can find work to do, but that's it.
Some rich man commenting about how we need to stop whining and rebuild the world so he can stay rich. That's how I take what he calls 'contributing'. I've been thinking about that word a lot these days. What am I contributing to? The system that caused this to begin with? The war that took everything from me?
If that's 'contributing' to 'recovery' I don't want to recover.
Someone said they didn't think anyone else felt like this.
I think a lot of people do. I think most people do and just don't say it.
The man next door was up most of the night again. One of the kids was coughing. He kept telling them it was fine.
Nobody's asking what that turns into. Just whether he's 'contributing.'
I don't have a plan. I don't have something better to point to yet.
But if we're going to build anything, it shouldn't look exactly like what failed us the first time.
That's all I've got right now.
—E
He posted it and closed the laptop.
Through the partition the father was home. He could hear him talking to the kids, low and steady, the sound of dinner being made. Elias realized he hadn't eaten since the coffee that morning. He thought about going down to the common kitchen on the second floor and then didn't.
He lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling and thought about the word contributing until he fell asleep.
- Writer
