Wrote this last year while I was still on the job. Thought it was interesting, figured I’d put it up here:
The four of us walking in this dark corn field live alternate lives outside of the job. 27 runs a mowing business, and is always hustling to get everything in between rain. He uses the extra cash to pay for lavish vacations for his family and to follow around the grateful dead between it all. 12 owns a doggy daycare, rich people leave their pets at his premium kennel. His surplus money goes to working horses out west and competing in rodeos. 25 coaches high school football, has won state a few times. He originally got into it to spend more time with his sons when they were on the team, but turned out he really loved it and now has coached many seasons past their graduation. On the job I’m 4, I guess this writing thing is my other life. I do it to maintain my sanity, and hopefully my humanity. We use the unit numbers over the radios strapped to our armored plate carriers for brevity, but more importantly so the organized resistance to our department can’t easily crucify us if they happen to pick a name off the scanner if things go pear shaped. I use the numbers here because all of us value anonymity, and prefer to divorce the job from our lives away from it.
Most nights we work out to country music, eat our packed lunches, complain about politics, watch some netflix, and play with dogs. Tonight we’re actually working. A car passes us as we walk along a thin country road, two hours into this operation. I wonder what the driver thinks as he sees the four of us; all clad in techno-paramilitary garb. Rifles in hand, black tactical helmets, ammo strapped to our chests. These armed felon tracks we do always feel less like police work to me, and more like my time as an infantryman. I can’t help but think that driver passing us feels a bit of fear of our dark armed and armored profiles that are more akin to a soldier than a beat cop. He’s probably making his way into an early shift at three in the morning. This makes me sad; I want to yell “It’s ok! We’re normal too! We all love our families and don’t actually want to hurt anyone!” or maybe “I don’t know how it got like this either!!”. That last one would be a lie in some respects, but the dissonance this job seems to have from the normal people reality is almost palpable. Our drone flies laps around us, scanning the dark fields with its thermal, adding to the odd nagging thought that this should be the scene from some dystopia.
Terrain compounds that feel. The carjacker we’re hunting fled into a field of corn, one among many in the wide open bread basket just east of the dense city we normally work. But as we work our way through the field and the occasional dense treeline, brightly lit warehouses slowly emerge from the dark, like some evil spacefleet enroute to terminate an agrarian world. They’re all shiny and new, with banners of the corporations that own them. 27 says “Just what we need, more fucking distribution centers.”
“What kind of world does it make sense to trade farms that grow food for concrete blocks that deliver junk?” replies 12.
25 goes on “I drive by a house sometimes, used to be in the middle of a bunch of fields in the country. Now that guy can only see warehouses out of every window.”
“Bet that guys pissed” goes 12.
27 remarks “Or happy as hell in Florida, fucker probably sold them fields and is rich out his ass now”
We all chuckle, but can’t shake that eerie feeling. Things are changing all around us, and it’s hard not to think we’re just some insignificant cogs in a great machine that has run away and left sanity behind. I’ve read stuff about the economics of these centers, and about industrial agriculture. Intellectually I grasp how it all kind of makes sense, but that doesn’t help shake this disconcerting feeling deep in my bones. I can’t quite put my finger on it; like living a story that’s not entirely your own, or skating on a pond in the middle of an overcast night where the blackness of the ice becomes indistinguishable from the sky and you no longer know where they diverge. You start to feel like your floating and sinking at the same time.
Like that.
