The Night Engineer Tends Her Selves
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The night engineer had replaced the bulb in corridor 7B seventeen times, though she was certain she'd done it eighteen. Each bulb she removed was unburnt, each new one identical. She kept the spent ones in a box beneath her cart, and sometimes, late in her shift, she thought she could hear them humming. The boilers rattled at such times, but there was that to be expected.
It was her uniform that clued her into what was really happening. She turned up at eleven each night, just before the doors were locked, and changed out of her street clothes into her uniform. She neatly folded her dress, her coat, her shoes, and left them on a chair in her quarters. Then she put on her crisp uniform, which had once, she was certain, been starched. Now a certain amount of limpness was unavoidable. The collars were very shiny, which was hard to keep that way these days. All the starch in the Crystal Tower had been used on the uniforms.
The rest of her clothing was in her locker next to the objects required for her job - electric torch, fire extinguisher, first aid kit, and yellowing directory of other emergency services. The Crystal Tower didn't have a local number.
In the morning, after she'd confirmed all the fires had burned out, she would kindly collect her discarded and neglected clothes from their chair in the hallway, and return them to the appropriate owners. She was three nights into the week. She was up to their fourth discarded, tidied, and returned coat now.
Hence the fact that it wasn't her current outfit, but that one, which signaled something truly unnatural was happening in this sick building. Your eyes pick up on what is familiar before anything else, and she'd been oddly accustomed to seeing the familiar old brown dress on the small, round chair.
Something was different about the woman she picked up - sleepy, distracted, and closer to the brink of tears. She hadn't known her long enough to be comfortable asking her how her night was - about the lump behind her ear, about the cigarette butt she'd left on the lunch room floor. At some point it wouldn't just be tonight's woman, alone and dishevelled, but perhaps tomorrow night's one as well. If it was some kind of crime she certainly wasn't in a position to identify the assailant. She picked up the old coat - smelling musty, old flowers - and helped the woman back to her apartment block. She made sure she went the long way and they talked to amuse themselves.
Midway through the week, however, she was certain of something - the bloody spiral was moving retrograde. In mornings, she checked her own wardrobe for the offending garment, before setting off for the night. She had only two sets of formal wear - the coat was nowhere to be found, only the frock. While the dress and the coat were not of a match, some reflection of each still hung in the woman. It was what she'd come to identify her and what she'd come to identify with. Some vague reflections of a couple who'd been on TV years ago worked through both.
It had been made clear to her - we're all going to die in here - though this was upsetting, it was tangential. What she truly feared, she realized in those four days, was the Crystal Tower becoming like the woman, without thought, without memory. She realized this fear was not named, but could be, as:
Concern for the Crystal Tower -
Because it is fragile.
Needs your help.
Has no other guardian in the world.
But what of her own safety - is losing one's memories painful? The more short term she became, the less moved she was by the simple traumatic details of night. Perhaps she was just making inappropriate metaphor, these details - the scars, the blood, even the memory of pain - were taken and reordered, not forgotten. Not willingly, but...
She could not fight the memory loss in the dead of night. In the mornings, when she went out to the crumbling cement and marble on which the Tower stood, and listened to it, she felt a new terror. It was a misplaced terror. What she feared was the dead building's inability to lead the Towers guardians where they were needed, to prevent lives from being lost until the new entrance opened. How would she get out? Where would she go?
They would forget about her, but the city - the Crystal Tower, so newly built and so beautiful - would live on. The entrance would open into a living labyrinth, with flowing water and cool shade, grass between your toes and a wide, wide sky below. Last night the night engineer felt the dead building try to lift her hand out of hers as she loaded her electrical equipment in her cart. She quickly took it back, but the woman - forgetting their conversation, and the maneuvers needed to get to and from her own apartment - did not.
G8 is◆ About the ending
❧ About the title