Life's Work

Lisa turned her car off, cracked the window for some misty morning air, and got ready for a fresh round of worrying. It wasn't just that she'd shown up an hour early for her new job, although she had. It wasn't because her car had begun to make an ominous ticking noise, either. No indeed: she was thinking about her student loans. The job market was bad-- really bad-- radioactive, even-- and she had delayed the payments as long as she could...

But now, in just one week, they were set to stage a roaring return. Every month she would owe her creditors $450, and she couldn't keep up with her basic expenses right now. She needed a miracle-- but what she had instead was a new part-time job to go along with the other two. Again and again she tried to make the math work on her spreadsheet, adding in plasma sales and pawning the last of her old video games, but the numbers refused to budge. Her credit card was maxed out, her checking account a goose egg. The only cash she had was a $100 bill she'd received the day before, in a birthday card from her aunt. After work she was going to use it to pay a portion of her overdue rent.

Finally, near her start time, Lisa rolled the window back up and stepped outside. Suburban homes surrounded her, most of them shaded and sleepy despite the steady rise of the summer sun. Lisa crossed the street that divided them and started down the sidewalk, dodging a jogger. Just a hundred yards later and she was climbing the porch steps of an old, tall and narrow home with peeling paint.

Her boss, Barry, was already up there. "You probably need to get her some garlic. No, GARLIC, with a g. I don't know where you got garland from, unless you want to take her to your prom. Anyways, I gotta go-- talk to you later," he said to whoever was on the other side of his flip phone, and then he offered her a handshake. "It's nice to meet you. It's Lisa, right?"

"Right! It's nice to meet you, too," Lisa said, with all the manufactured pep she carried into all her jobs.

Barry nodded. "Look, I'm not a BS'er, so I'll just get right to it: I've got some bad news."

"Oh?" She envisioned the job disappearing right in front of her, taking away the income she had needed to make up the lost time, the gas, the new ticking in the car, that monthly $450 boulder which she'd be trying to push up a mountain for the next 25 years of her life, provided it didn't kill her before then...

"Yeah," Barry said. "My other guy called in sick-- his grandmother has lupus or something. I don't know; we had a bad connection on our call. But it's going to be just the two of us cleaning this place... So I guess we'd better get to it, huh? This is a pretty simple job, cleaning up after a dearly departed bachelor, but there are some ground rules you’ve got to follow. One, don't get hurt. Two, don't steal anything-- we're just here to clean this place out so that the homeowners can start renting it again. If we break that contract, they can sue me," he said. "Now, as for the specifics. Leave the furniture-- dust it and then leave it. Everything else goes into garbage bags; just haul them out to the lawn and the porch and I’ll get them to the landfill myself. You can take the top floor and I'll get this one here-- I don't do so well with stairs these days. That concludes your training program. Are we good?"

"We're good-- I’ll let you know if I need anything," Lisa said. During her commute she had already worked out a little system to follow-- it had been a choice between doing that fun activity or having a nervous breakdown about her money problems. She'd haul the garbage out first, dust whatever needed it, and lastly sweep and mop and vacuum. It would be perfect, and orderly. It would, in other words, be everything her regular life wasn't.

###

Four hours into it, and Lisa was wrangling her final pre-lunch garbage bag back down the stairs. Bathroom towels and bedsheets were inside. Like the home, they were old and worn-out, but still holding on to respectability as best as they could, even though they were doomed. Lisa could sympathize. She didn't like throwing away the remnants of a lonely old man's life, but that was the job and she needed the money.

Downstairs at the kitchen table, she found Barry, duct-taping a fresh battery into the back of his flip phone. "Hey, how's it going up there?"

"It’s been good, I think,” Lisa said.

"Just good? You’re ten garbage bags ahead of me, so I’d bump that up and say you're doing fantastic," Barry said, pushing up from the table. "I'm going to go get some lunch from the deli up here on the corner-- they have some pretty good sandwiches. I’m going to get some scratch-off tickets too-- I'm feeling lucky. Do you want anything?"

"No thank you."

"You're sure you don’t want a nice water?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Lisa said, even though she wasn't.

"Hmm. I think I'll get some extra ones anyway-- this day's a scorcher, and the air conditioner in here barely feels like it is working," Barry said. "I'll be back in a few."

When he was halfway out of the door, Barry turned back to her. "Hey, you're a computer programmer, right? I saw it on your resume."

"I thought I'd be." As soon as she said that, Lisa had to blink fast and look away.

"That's really cool," Barry said. "You hang in there, okay? Life has its ups and downs. This AI stuff won't last. The good jobs'll be back any day now, I'd bet money on it."

Lisa stood there in the silence and the dust, listening to Barry roar down the street in his pickup truck. Then she went back upstairs, to the library she would be gutting that afternoon. A plaid recliner that would never recline again sat in one corner, and, save for the windows, every other inch of wall space was occupied by bookshelves stocked with old science fiction and fantasy novels. Lisa had already fought down the urge to run web searches on the titles to see how much they'd be worth. Instead, her attention was on the elegant black book, located on one of the lower-middle shelves-- which had its very own shelf tag named LIFE'S WORK. What else was there to do, except to pay it a little attention before it was thrown away forever? Time had taken his life away—- the least that she could give him was the remainder of her lunch break.

Lisa opened the cover with trembling hands, afraid but also intrigued by whatever it was that awaited her. Would it be recipes? The first draft of the man’s very own novel? A carefully written confession? She would only ever know if she tore her gaze away from the roof, and so finally she did it.

Inside Lisa found a sprawling realm of 1's and 0's; and brackets and parentheses; and hexadecimals and more. All of it was neatly penned, all of it perfect.

From one end to the other, the small black book contained computer code.

Behind and beyond that realm, shining through the bookshelf, Lisa also beheld a spear of silver moonlight. She got down on one knee to investigate that impossibility, and through a breach in the shelf she saw what was almost a mirror image of the library, except that the books were different and the pattern of the recliner was, too. It shouldn't have been possible. The little home didn't have space for a hidden room and/or sinister dungeon, and when she got up to look behind the shelf there was only a solid wood-paneled wall...

Yet when Lisa looked through the breach again the other world was still there, beckoning; and its call became that much louder when she figured out that removing extra books from the shelf made the opening just big enough for her to wriggle through. She stared, wondering what the other side would be like. Would she be happy over there-- or was she already?

Should she go over there and check?

Finally Lisa reached for the black book and the ink pen, and went back through the code. His work remained as excellent as it had been during her first review, but in the end she was able to make two changes. First, she fixed the glitch; after a long search, all it took in the end was adding a comma. Then she flipped forward a few more pages and inked some extra zeroes into a lonely margin-- enough to change a few things, but maybe not all of them.

When Lisa looked up again, the breach in the shelf had disappeared. In the pocket of her jeans she had 199 new $100 dollar bills to go along with the one Aunt Eileen had mailed her. In a moment too strange to be panicked Lisa checked some of the serial numbers, afraid they'd be identical, but they were different. That particular problem had autocorrected itself.

###

Barry returned from his sojourn half an hour behind schedule, pulling up in his truck just as Lisa was hauling out her second bag of old, yellowy novels. "Here, just take it-- they messed up my order and gave me an extra," he said, handing her a combo meal which included a chocolate chip cookie the size of a dinner plate.

Then, a few minutes later, as Lisa ate her late lunch on the porch swing: "Are you hanging in there, buddy?"

"I think I'll be okay," Lisa said, and for the first time in years she honestly meant it.

"Good. You're doing better than me, then," Barry said, crunching on his drink’s ice. "I really got my tail kicked on those scratch-offs."