Night Hours

Working the late shift they let us drink. It’s not sanctioned, like, no one said: since you’re working at 2 AM, feel free to grab a tallboy out of the beer cave, and then another, and another, until it’s 7 and you go home. It’s more that one time, Frank came by because the alarm wouldn’t stop ringing and I had a tallboy cracked open on the counter and he didn’t say anything.

So we can drink on the late shift.

Sometimes it’s just me but tonight it’s me and April. She’s one of those girls that’s too pretty to work here but does anyway, and she doesn’t work alone, because it’s at night and she’s pretty. We’re both a tallboy deep and the night’s gone all fluorescent. It’s so bright in the store that the world outside is nothing but black and you don’t see customers until they’re already opening the door, already filling the store with the bell-song of their arrival. April and I try to sing it and can’t agree on the words. Ding-a-ling. Dooble-doo. There’ve only been a few ding-a-lings and dooble-doos tonight, which is normal for Wednesday. Longhaulers come in to piss and buy stale coffee, they come in to tell April she ought to be at home, they come in to haggle down the price of onion rings even though I don’t have any control over it. Drunks come in to get more drunk and tell April she could be a movie star. Meth Heads come in and look at all the snacks, one by one, reading the labels as if they’ve never seen them before. They buy gum and tell April to have a blessed day. Joey comes in to smoke with me in the back and he tells me April’s hot.

“I know,” I tell him every night.

Tonight there have been a couple longhaulers and one drunk. April the movie star is bringing me another beer.

“Bathroom’s all fucked,” she says to me.

“I’ll get it,” I say.

“Shit King of the Valero,” she says. She cracks open both beers and hands one to me.

“My scepter where I left it?”

“Wha?”

“The plunger.”

“Asshole.” But she laughs. “Yeah. I left it in the bathroom thinking maybe someone would save us the trouble.”

“You have so much faith in people.”

“That what it is?”

I don’t know what it is. Having faith in people makes her seem like she’s naive and innocent even though I know she can’t be, because she’s working overnight at the Valero. We don’t get here by being good. We come to the night because no one else will do it, and there is no one else who will take us. Somewhere along the line we did something that fucked everything else up, and it no longer mattered how smart or pretty we were. We came to the night.

The thing about nighttime is that it doesn’t turn into your daytime just because you’re awake during it. The morning is still the morning when the shift ends, but you can’t get coffee and eat breakfast and keep going. You need to sleep unless you have a doctor’s appointment or school like April. And if you do have to do something after work, you go feeling all dried up, standing around with all of the day-people who are just waking up, who have all that brightness ahead of them. And they think you’re one of them, that you’ve been asleep. You wear clothes like they do and you talk like they do but they don’t know you’ve been up all night, every night, and you exist backwards in a way they can’t understand. You want to come up to every person you see and say: I’ve been up all night. Because otherwise they might just think you’re some regular tired person, someone who only goes to work in the dark during winter and not year round. I need them to know I’m someone who hears what the city is like when it thinks no one’s watching.

But I gave up on trying to live a life during the day. Most mornings I just go home and I don’t see anyone.

April wants to be a nurse, but when she says it it’s like you can tell she knows she won’t finish the program. Not because she’s dumb or because she doesn’t do her homework, but because she’s a giver-upper like me.

Ding-a-ling. The meth hour falls upon the city and the fluorescent glows bright like an exit sign.

I leave April to ring people up while I go deal with the toilet. I plunge and plunge and plunge and the murky shit-water splashes back up at me. I close my mouth so tight and bite down on the inside of my lips like I’m worried my mouth will come open on its own. It flushes, but not great. I give up. I wash my hands. I steal some Axe from the toiletry shelf and spray myself down to make sure I don’t smell too much like shit-water.

A guy is lingering at the counter. He’s already paid, but April looks like a movie star and he thinks something will happen. Like she’ll go outside with him or something even though she’s at work and he smells worse than I do. He hears my feet on the floor. He turns around and looks at me like he hates me, like I’m the thing that ruined his chances. And April, with her big movie star eyes, looks at me like she’s thanking me for saving her.

He takes his cigarettes and hobbles out. Dooble-doo. We tap our cans together to another rape un-happened.

She opens her nursing textbook. When I walk by behind her I see that she’s learning about the nervous system. There’s a picture of a guy, I think it’s a guy, with his arms splayed out and his skin is see-through. His bones are see-through too, and there, in an almost neon-pink, are his nerves, spreading like window-cracks on the page. I don’t like to think of the body as a wound-up braid of pink strings that tell me what’s soft and what’s sharp and what’s wet and what’s dry. I don’t like to think about how inside, behind the opaque bones, we’re delicate. Layer after layer of stringy meat, embroidered with blood and electric pulses. Two of us bone-frames, stuck here in the dead of night when it’s so easy to die.

Sometimes we get the early-risers. The 4 AM-ers that have a long way to go because somewhere along the way they made a mistake, just like me and April have. But for them it’s moving to a place that’s far away from where you make your money, but you probably drive there in a nice car and go home to a nice house and your family. The big-bucks mistakes that make you look back on your earlier life and wonder what other mistakes you could have made. Maybe you’d end up working the night shift at the gas station, but it would at least be different.

A 4 AM-er wearing a suit comes in. Ding-a-ling. He’s already got a thermos of coffee but his BMW is on empty and that’s what he needs. He asks April to break a one-hundred dollar bill. She gives him back four twenties and he fills his tank, holding the handle down with care, his fingers in a delicate half moon shape to avoid getting any gas on his smooth, clean palm.

The 4 AM-ers mean it’s almost over. It’s almost the real morning, when normal people wake up. It’s just three hours until the day shift, when Patty comes in, and I go home, and April goes to class.

I don’t know how anyone can be that tired all the time. I look at the pretty bags beneath her eyes as she sips more beer. She’ll get tanked by morning but still drive herself to class, every morning until she’s too tired and she gives up because it’s easier to just go home. I want my bed like I want April, and I always want April towards the end of the shift. Because we can drink. Because I can tell there’s something squirming in her at this hour, something that wants to blow off her morning classes and go to sleep.

Another beer and she sighs and she says the thing she always says, which is how I know she’s been squirming:

“I don’t wanna go to claaaaaass,” she says.

“Then don’t,” I say every time, but she goes. “You can still pass if you do shitty.”

“I’m already doing too shitty.”

“Is it because you’re tired?”

“I’m starting to think it’s not that. That maybe I’m just really, really stupid, and even if I slept eight hours a night I’d still do shitty.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I just don’t understand shit, you know? I feel like I read, and I know what each word by itself means, but you put them together and it’s nothing. Then I repeat the nothing on the page, but I don’t know what I’m saying. Know what I mean?”

I don’t.

“Yeah,” I say. I feel brave and full of beer, so I say some stupid shit: “I don’t think you’re stupid, April. And you don’t have to be a nurse. Maybe there’s something else.”

“Nothing else lets you start making good money after two years of school,” she says, and I can tell it’s something she’s repeated out loud, both to others and to herself.

I drink a lot more of my beer and we are both quiet while I do it.

“Don’t go to school at all. Work here forever. Be the Shit Queen.”

“Long live.”

“Be my Shit Wife in our Shit Palace.”

“I’m too young to get married.”

“Not in Shit Years, you aren’t.”

“Stop,” she says, grinning-drunk. “Fine. If I fail my finals, I’ll wear the Shit Crown.”

I close her textbook. She kisses me and I finally understand what the bells are trying to say.

But listen: there’s something fucked up about 6 AM. It’s the time of night that’s morning, the reasonable morning when normal people start waking up. I think there are too many people awake then for the world to hold them all. It’s during this time, when we get real busy at the pumps and with the coffee, that we stop drinking. The garbage bin behind the counter full of our cans, we are forced to transition into the common waking world, and the store doesn’t like it. The fluorescent lights whine a little louder, the frozen section feels a little too cold and frost forms on the pizza boxes and the ice cream cartons.

April peaks in her squirminess– she has still not decided if she is going to class today. She has decided she’s going to come over later before our shift, to my apartment. The sex of the evening feels so far away and I’ve made three fresh pots of coffee but they keep running out and running out. The bells on the door make a new noise, one that neither of us can articulate, one that doesn’t stop long enough to be tried on by our teeth and tongues. Someone comes in and someone is going out, or someone is coming in and someone is following right behind. I feel the ringing making me older, tireder.

This time of year it’s still pretty dark out but you can see the sky rimming with periwinkle light. The sun wants to come up and the chaos of so many feet on the tile floor and the cracked cement of the parking lot wind the winch that carries it into the day. The world creaks as the sun is hoisted, and as the night approaches 7 AM, even in the winter, even when it’s still a dark dawn, the sky is unmistakably the sky of the daytime. That’s when it’s wrong for me to be around but it’s also time to do the last inventory check, which is something we do at the start and the end of our shifts. It’s when I have to go into the back storage, the wrongest place of the early morning, where the light flickers and snaps so bad we just keep it off and the space between the towering shelves feels narrower and narrower the longer I spend in there. April is scared of it, so I do the checks, even though I’m scared of it too. The darkness of the room is like the store can’t tell what time of day it is. There are no windows and the light from the main store barely survives the little hallway that separates it from the stockroom. I pretend to count the things we have not sold, but I can’t really count because I am too focused on getting the fuck out of there, on how my brain feels squeezed by the incoming hangover, on how April is alone up front dealing with the coffee and the upfront gas payments and the daytime breeds of guys that want to fuck her.

I make my marks on the list: I say that everything is the same as it was at 11 PM, because it probably is, because I don’t think either of us have gone back there since. I say I don’t think, because as I sober up it becomes clear just how drunk I’d been. In the moment it had felt good, I’d felt free, I’d felt like 6 AM would never come and the rest of my life would just be me, April, and the good part of the night. We could have just kept kissing behind the counter and feeling over and over the mortified thrill of having to stop when a customer came. Both of us holding a secret behind our giddy smiles as we hand out the cigarettes, the lotto tickets, the change. I wanted to live there forever.

But I’m in the pitch-black sobriety of the stock room, no longer feeling romantic, no longer, for the moment, feeling capable of wanting. My lips feel cold, even at the thought of April’s kiss. My hands didn’t feel the empty way they usually do when she’s there, like they need to touch–now they shrink into fists, curling in towards my body, and I hold myself tight even though my own skin sickens. The room is wrong and I am wrong and there is something that lives underneath the shelves that you can never see because it is too dark for it to cast a shadow. But you hear it. April heard it and she’s never gone back here again. I’ve heard it, I hear it, it tells me that the night will eat me and it will never be daylight again.

It shouldn’t scare me. I live in the dark. But even living in the dark I still know that it is light out when I’m sleeping. I’m comforted by the idea that the night isn’t everything, that, if I got my shit together, maybe I could be a day-person and see the sun when I wake up and check the weather, check if there will be clouds because when you’re a day person it matters. I need the day to be there, even if I never see it through rested eyes like everyone else.

I think I’m in there for an hour. I talk to the thing under the shelves. I tell it fuck you, I’m going to get laid, how’s that for sunshine, but it doesn’t shut up.

It knows I’ll have to bask only in the fleeting happiness of sex with April. The night still comes, no matter what you do before 11 PM. We will drink through the night and the thing will get thirsty and jealous, meaner in the morning when I come back.

But I go home. In bed I think about how April will be here and we will close all the windows and curtains and pretend that the night can’t get us, pretend that there is no night at all.

***

Aaron J. Muller is an author from the Hudson Valley, NY, where he lives with his husband and their two cats. He holds a BA in English from SUNY New Paltz, where he was awarded the 2019 Tomaselli Award for Creative Nonfiction. He has an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College. Muller’s work has appeared in print and online journals such as Inverted Syntax, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Cold Signal.