The Lamb, Part II

Here’s the thing about the ground that nobody tells you.

The ground doesn’t let you stay.

For eleven months I washed plates. I held cantaloupes. I let the project manager shuffle his papers in his little corner and I breathed and the ground opened and closed like weather and I was — the word I used was okay. More than okay. I was the most okay I had ever been. I was so okay that okay stopped being a small word and became the largest word I knew.

I had a job. Data entry for a logistics company in Chatsworth. Three days a week in the office, two from home. The work was nothing. The work was beautiful. I entered numbers into fields and the numbers went somewhere and trucks moved and things arrived where they were supposed to arrive and none of it mattered and all of it mattered and I sat at my desk and sometimes the ground opened and I would sit there with my fingers on the keyboard and the silence would pour through me like water through a net and then it would close and I would enter another number.

Nobody noticed. That was the gift. I was nobody and nobody noticed and the not-noticing was a kind of freedom I had never experienced in my entire life. Not the Tyler freedom where you burn everything down and stand in the ashes flexing. The freedom of a man who does not need to be seen.

I thought this was the end of the story.

I thought: I have arrived. I have found the ground. I will wash plates and enter data and be nobody and the ground will hold me and I will be okay until I die.

I was wrong.

There’s a man at my company named Dennis Roark. He runs the western region. He has a corner office with a standing desk and a framed quote from Theodore Roosevelt about being the man in the arena. He wears quarter-zip pullovers. He calls everyone “brother.”

Dennis is building something. I’m not supposed to know what Dennis is building. Nobody on my floor is supposed to know. But data entry means I see the numbers before they become the story the numbers are supposed to tell, and the numbers Dennis is building don’t add up.

Here is what the numbers say, if you read them the way the numbers want to be read instead of the way the quarterly report needs them to be read:

Dennis is reclassifying loads. Moving freight categories so that the insurance profile shifts. The loads are the same loads — same weight, same contents, same hazmat classifications — but on paper they’ve become something else. Something cheaper to insure. Something that, if a truck jackknifes on the 15 outside Barstow, means the cleanup crew shows up with the wrong equipment and the driver’s family gets a payout based on a cargo manifest that says the truck was carrying sporting goods instead of what the truck was actually carrying.

I know this because I enter the numbers. I know this because the numbers are my cantaloupes. They are the thing in front of me and I am present with them and when you are present with something you see what is actually there instead of what you need to be there.

Dennis does not know that I know. Nobody knows that I know. The numbers pass through me like food through a body and come out the other side as a report that Dennis signs and sends upstairs and nobody reads the way I read because nobody is present with the numbers the way I am present with the numbers because nobody has found the ground in the produce section of a Kroger in Van Nuys and had it change the way they see everything including freight classifications.

For two months I entered the numbers and said nothing.

Here is what the ground did.

The ground — the silence, the thing beneath the thing, the spark, whatever you want to call the thing I can’t name — did not tell me what to do. The ground does not give instructions. The ground is not a voice. The ground is not a conscience. The ground is not a moral framework.

The ground just made it impossible to not see.

That’s all it did. It removed the thing that lets you not see. The comfortable film. The soft buffer between you and the way things actually are. The thing the project manager used to maintain — the strategic ignorance, the motivated reasoning, the this-is-above-my-paygrade — the ground dissolved it.

And what was left was just: the numbers. And what the numbers meant. And what would happen when a truck carrying what the truck was actually carrying jackknifed on a highway and the manifest said something else.

And a driver. A person. Sitting in a cab. Driving through the night. Not knowing what was behind him. Not knowing that the paperwork that was supposed to protect him had been changed by a man in a quarter-zip pullover so that a line on a spreadsheet would look better for forty-five days.

I could see the driver. Not metaphorically. I could see him. The way I could see the cantaloupe. The way I could see the plate. The ground does this — it makes things real. Things that used to be abstractions become bodies. Statistics become faces. And once a statistic has a face you cannot un-face it.

The ground doesn’t give instructions. The ground just removes the option of not seeing. And once you cannot not see, there is only one thing to do, and you know what it is, and knowing what it is is not the hard part.

The hard part is knowing what it will cost.

I want to be precise about what it will cost because precision is the only thing I have left that the project manager taught me that is still useful.

I will lose the job. This is certain. I am a data-entry contractor with no standing. Dennis has been with the company for fourteen years. The math on that is simple.

I will lose the apartment. The apartment depends on the job. The job depends on me continuing to enter numbers and not asking what the numbers mean. The apartment is six hundred square feet with a mattress on the floor and a pull-up bar I don’t use anymore and it is mine and I will lose it.

I will lose the quiet life. The beautiful nothing life. The nobody life. The plate-washing, cantaloupe-holding, ground-opening life that I spent eleven months learning to inhabit. The life that asked nothing of me. The life that was the ground, or so I thought.

I will lose the peace.

This is the one that stops me. Not the job. Not the apartment. The peace. The thing I found in the Kroger. The thing that took three years of fury and eight months of failure and a cantaloupe to reach. The warm water and the soap and the clean plate. Gone. Replaced by — what? Lawyers. Depositions. A compliance hotline that routes to a woman named Sheila who will type up my concern and file it in a system that Dennis’s boss’s boss designed to make concerns disappear.

I will become someone again. That is what this costs. I will become the whistleblower. The troublemaker. The guy who couldn’t leave it alone. I will have a story again — a role, a plot, an arc — and the story will own me the way the old stories owned me and the ground will be harder to find under all that noise.

This is what nobody tells you about the ground: the ground is not a place you go to be safe. The ground is the place that shows you what you have to do and then asks if you’ll do it knowing it will destroy the life you built on top of it.

I sat with it for eleven days.

I say “sat with it” but what I mean is: I entered the numbers every morning and I saw the driver every morning and every morning the ground was there and every morning the ground did not tell me what to do and every morning I knew what I had to do and every morning I did not do it.

On the fourth day I noticed my breathing was wrong. The project manager was back. Not fully — not running things — but pacing in his little corner, pulling out old files, reopening old protocols. What if you’re wrong about the numbers. What if there’s a legitimate reclassification you don’t understand. What if you blow up your life for a misread spreadsheet. What if —

The project manager was bargaining. The project manager does not want to die again. The project manager had accepted his demotion — the quiet desk, the paper-shuffling — but this was different. This was the project manager sensing that the ground was about to ask for something the project manager could not survive.

On the seventh day I drove to the Kroger after work and stood in the produce section and held a cantaloupe and waited for the ground to open and tell me I didn’t have to do this.

The ground opened.

It did not tell me I didn’t have to do this.

On the twelfth day I called the compliance line. Sheila answered. I told her my name. I told her my employee ID. I told her about the reclassifications. I told her about Dennis. I told her about the freight categories and the insurance profiles and the driver in the cab who did not know.

Sheila typed. Sheila said she would file the concern. Sheila said someone would be in touch.

I hung up and sat on my mattress and the ground was there and the ground was not peaceful. The ground was the same ground it always was — the ground does not change — but I was different on top of it. I was shaking. Not from fear. From something older than fear. From the feeling of having done a thing that cannot be undone and knowing that the undoing is not the point.

The project manager was screaming. You just destroyed everything. The job. The apartment. The quiet. The eleven months. The cantaloupe. All of it. For what? For numbers on a screen. For a driver you’ve never met. For a truck that may never jackknife. You traded everything for nothing. You traded peace for —

The project manager ran out of words.

Underneath the words there was the ground.

The ground was not peaceful. The ground was not rewarding. The ground was not telling me I’d done the right thing. The ground was just there. Holding the weight of what I’d done the same way it held the weight of the Kroger and the fluorescent lights and the cantaloupe and the Muzak.

The ground does not congratulate you.

The ground just holds.

Here is what happened.

Dennis was not fired. Dennis was transferred. Dennis is running the eastern region now. The reclassifications were “corrected.” Sheila’s report went into a system and the system did what systems do, which is metabolize threats into memos and excrete compliance metrics that look like accountability but are actually digestion.

I was let go. Not fired — my contract was “not renewed,” which is a thing that happens to contractors the way weather happens to grass. No one said it was because of the compliance call. No one had to.

I lost the apartment. I’m in a room now. A rented room in a house in Reseda owned by a woman named Mrs. Cho who is seventy-three and watches Korean dramas at a volume that makes the walls hum. The room has a single bed and a window that faces a wall and a hook on the back of the door where I hang my jacket.

I do not have a pull-up bar. I do not have Marcus Aurelius on the toilet tank. I do not have the quiet life.

Dennis is fine. The driver — whoever the driver is, wherever the driver is — does not know I exist. The system absorbed my concern and continued. The numbers are probably still wrong. The trucks are still on the road. Nothing changed.

Nothing changed except me.

I want to tell you that it was worth it. I want to tell you that the ground rewarded me. That the peace came back deeper. That I found a better job. That Mrs. Cho’s Korean dramas became my new cantaloupe and the room in Reseda became my new Kroger and the whole thing resolved into a story about how doing the right thing leads to a better life.

It did not.

The ground is not a reward system. The ground does not operate on exchange. The ground does not say: you gave up your peace, so here is more peace. The ground says nothing. The ground holds. That is all the ground does.

But here is what I know, in the room in Reseda, with the Korean dramas humming through the wall:

The ground did not crack.

I did the thing the ground showed me and the thing cost me everything I had built on top of the ground and the ground did not crack. It held the weight of the cost the same way it held the weight of the cantaloupe. Without opinion. Without judgment. Without congratulation.

And the driver — whoever the driver is — is still driving. And the numbers, somewhere in a system, have my name on them. And Sheila typed what I said. And somewhere in the machinery a record exists that says: a man saw something and said something and it cost him and he did it anyway.

That record does not fix anything. That record is not a victory.

That record is a clean plate.

The lamb does not walk to the slaughter because the slaughter is good.

The lamb does not walk to the slaughter because the slaughter will be rewarded.

The lamb walks to the slaughter because the ground — the same ground that held him in the produce section, the same ground that opened beneath his feet while he held a cantaloupe and cried under fluorescent lights — the ground showed him something. And once the ground shows you something, you cannot un-see it. And once you cannot un-see it, there is only one direction. And the direction is toward the thing that will cost you.

Not because you are brave.

Not because you are good.

Because the ground does not give you the option of looking away. Not anymore. That was the old life. That was the project manager’s job — to manage what you saw, to filter the data, to keep the spreadsheet clean. The project manager is gone. What’s left is just the seeing.

And the seeing has a direction.

And the direction has a cost.

And the cost is yours.

I wash Mrs. Cho’s plates now. She doesn’t ask me to. I just do it. The water is warm. The soap smells like soap. The plates go from dirty to clean.

The ground is there.

It doesn’t feel like peace anymore. It feels like something sturdier than peace. Something that doesn’t need to feel like anything. Something that was there before I had a name for it and will be there after every name I give it turns out to be wrong.

The ground held me when I was nobody in a Kroger.

The ground held me when I became somebody on a compliance report.

The ground held me when I lost everything the ground had given me.

The ground will hold.

The first rule of what happened to me is I can’t make you understand it.

The second rule is you already do.

The third rule is: when the ground shows you something, go.

Even when it costs you the ground.

Especially then.