Kawasaki Manufacturing of Lincoln, Nebraska
He wakes up as he does every weekday morning, abruptly, because 4:25am gets easier, not easy. Still, a routine helps. The 30 minute window is more than enough time to shake off the sleep, slide into jeans and button up his work shirt, and grab the morning's cold coffee and oats, both prepared last night alongside the tin containing lunch, without feeling rushed. And without feeling rushed, the risks of bumping his hip on the TV dresser, slamming the fridge shut, or clattering dishes reaching into the cabinet and making noise get reduced. In a state of intentional, conscious movement, he does not need to risk waking the love of his life or the small (somehow, bigger all the time) children upstairs. Scattered sleep on those infant nights some years earlier were a lesson hard learned; though they seemed to go down like rocks in a lake now, once he reviewed the manual and learned the microwave could be muted, there seemed no reason to let its siren sing that breakfast was ready. On the first play date of her life 18 months from now, the elder child would be unsettled by the beeping coming from the kitchen of her friend's home. The mother would share, and she would learn quickly enough, that there was no need to panic about popcorn, as long as you kept an eye on it and didn't let it go too long, even if some kernels are still whole at the bottom of the bag.
He had been blase when she shared about the stretches she would do at her every-other-morning classes, but in the silence before the clunk of a car door opening, 4:47 AM, he would reach his arms up to the sky. Twist left, hold, twist right, hold, center. Lean left, hold (feel it on the sides of the ribs), lean right, hold (ditto), center. It took several sessions to touch his toes, having never aspired to do so since the last mandatory PE classes junior year of high school, but he eventually discovered how much easier it felt when he stopped craning his neck to stare at the feet. They'll be on the ground where they usually are - you try to look through your legs, to the garage's wall behind you, and it's much easier. No snaps, a couple pops, and some crackling (par for the course) before the clunk, click, and quickly diminished roar.
~
Though she'd never think to mention it to him, knowing the steps he had already taken to deafen his mornings, she always stirred awake with the engine. So precise were the rhythms of his time that her unconscious body had seemed to absorb them too, sometimes coming to a full sense of alertness seconds before the car even started. She wondered if her children were awoken as well: if they, like herself by now, could fade right back to a final hour of slumber as the purr of the automobile pulled further away from their home. Or perhaps if, like herself in those preadolescent years, they would stay up for a while.
In the railroad town where she grew up, it was not activity in her own home, but the yard about a mile off. From that distance, the horns did not blare and hurt her ears, like they would when her father's truck was held at a crossing for them to pass by. But like trying to keep a count of each car that passed by on those massive serpents, she would find herself nodding off as the horns traveled over a hill, a baritone siren's song that lulled her to bed. Those same tones, she trusted, did not stop as she slept, but once or twice a week there would be one that surreptitiously passed through the walls of her home to bring her back to life. She could've looked at the clock in the hallway to check the time, as she would in high school years where the commodity of rest required a bit more calculation, but even if it meant being bleary eyed in the cafeteria at 11:30, it was more than pleasing in those moments to simply be. In the grayscale vision of her room, she would bring a blanket with her to the corduroy bean bag chair, and bask in awe of the view pouring in from the window: somewhere behind the cirrus clouds, a sky full of stars. Just the memory of that serenity put her back to sleep, decades later.
~
As usual, he was 5 minutes early to the agreed-upon quarter hour slot, which meant 3 minutes before his coworker would emerge down the wooden steps of his back door and meet him at the top of the gravel driveway, as usual. In the first 30 days of this arrangement, he would text with an admirable consistency at 5:09, :10, or :11, "Outside." After that point, both parties would silently recognize the non-necessity of this effort, and would simply expect the other. The only bubbles that have since populated their SMS exchange were the rare notification of illness the night before, or a week's notice on some semi-annual vacation time.
It was not a symbiotic process. He was pretty sure that one of his old direct team members when he first joined lived nearer to this address, that this street would be less of a deviation from his commute. I'm sure he had his own reasons for passing. Still, it wasn't so far off his own route, or from the plant itself, that he minded. Even the supposed virtue of his own actions didn't really phase him - if he thought about his hourly wage, the added 6 minutes on either end of his daily sojourn wasn't any time that he'd be using for much else anyways. It was more a dumbfoundedness that, after the family's spare car bit the dust, instead of asking for a lift right away, he had been biking every morning as the sun rose against his back. 4 miles wasn't so long, he insisted, but it was obviously dangerous (not to mention stupid) on the shoulder of the highway that everyone else was taking to drive in. He wondered if he asked for a different ride, or if still got back on the bike, on the occasional off day. What about the winter?
He never asked about it. The only topics of conversation they engaged in, always initiated by the younger coworker, during those morning windows were on the weather, their wives or their kids. It was among the most routine small talk that any human beings would engage in, in the thousand centuries of death preceding or following those moments. Their moods were not significantly altered by the chattered for better or for worse, but in their respect shares of subconscious there was a knowledge that life would somehow become achingly, searingly unbearable without it. So too would it be, without the silence between those spare words.