DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Jones leaned against the subway doors, mopping the sweat from his upper lip with the last dry corner of a paper napkin.
“Hey!” Marlo said, slamming his palm on the polished steel wall. “Don’t you ruin this.”
The napkin dropped from Jones’s hand with the weight of all that sweat.
THWUP was the sound it made as it hit the floor, and Jones could do nothing but hold his hands up as if fending off an attack as Marlo’s mustached upper lip went damp.
No attack came, just a heavy silence that only an empty subway car could make at 11:39 PM on the Saturday night before Inspection.
Marlo’s squeezed fist sounded like an eggshell cracking, and the excema wounds around his knuckles wept. “Now look at what you did. Gonna have to wear gloves to salvage this mess you’ve made, and you know they slow me down.”
The door at Jones’s back was no longer refreshing.
“And get off the fucking door,” Marlo said. “You even put up the goddamn sign.”
Jones couldn’t move. Marlo’s hulking frame blocked the space between the two benches. He used it to his advantage and staked a gloved finger to the center of Jones’s chest, right on the zipper of his coveralls and pressed hard enough for it to catch on Jones’s chest hair on the other side of his cotton shirt, a 6-ounce heavyweight he’d purchased just for this job.
“Feel that?” Marlo asked. “That’s a fraction of what it’ll be like if Inspection goes bad. You don’t know what they do to guys like us. We’re expendable. The dregs.” Marlo’s face scrunched at that last word, and his staked finger retracted. “But we’re better than that. I know we’re better. I chose you just for this job because I know you’re better.”
“S-sorry,” Jones said.
Marlo nodded and put a hand on Jones’s shoulder. “I know you are. I am, too. But we have–” he checked his watch”–exactly fifteen minutes now to get this job done. Get things to Berfection.”
“Berfection?”
“Better than perfection,” Marlo said with glassy eyes, ready to be broken by the slightest touch. “Been working on that one for a while. I’m what you call a creative type. Better than this work, but I’m good at it, and–” he tapped his temple “–I can do the creative work in here, while I do the physical work out here.” His smile trembled, and one of his longer mustache hairs quivered like a tuning fork. “Hear that?”
Jones did, like a hornet in his ear.
“Tunnel C,” Marlo said looking over his shoulder down the subway car. “The most difficult stretch before Inspection.”
Jones looked too.
LEDs along the ceiling bowed to the turbulence, and the triangular straps hanging just below them swung like Newton’s cradle. The floor shook and kept shaking. The whole car. Jones grabbed a pole to steady himself.
“This is where you prove to me I was right,” Marlo said. “That you have what it takes. That all the backbreaking work down at the loading dock was the cakewalk that did nothing but prepare you for this moment. I chose you, Jones. I chose you.”
“No way can we finish off this car while it shakes like this,” Jones said. “I can barely stand up.”
A drop of sweat dangled off Marlo’s long mustache hair. “You’ll do it. You won’t let me down.”
Teeth chattering, spine rattling, all Jones could do was nod.
Marlo nodded back, his deep smile squeezing his face into a stack of pancakes, and went to work.
Jones found his footing with a wide stance, fingertips the only thing touching the subway pole, and he watched Marlo’s virtuosic performance. The man used the chaos of the car’s motion to his advantage, going against it when he needed to tighten a bench screw or straighten a poster or affix a warning sticker, then going with it when he needed to close the seam from a bad bolt job on a bench or reseat a subway pole. Marlo’s grace was infectious, a viral spray that infused everything. Jones couldn’t escape it.
He mirrored Marlo the best he could, garnering the highest form of approval from the man, which was autonomy.
Jones tripped up a few times as the car hit new rhythms, until he envisioned them like tracks on an album, anticipating the change before the final fade out or drum hit. He saw the breadcrumbs Marlo left for him, little things off just enough to alert the discerning eyes of Inspection, at least what he’d been told.
Jones had never been an artistic man, but he imagined these to be his final brushstrokes, the coda to his symphony.
Then the subway car fell into a stasis, almost as if it had no weight at all, and the two men stared at each other from opposite sides of the car. Marlo where Jones had begun, where he went to clean what must have been the smudge from Jones’s head when he’d rested against the door, where the large man’s foot found the discarded napkin.
Marlo left the ground in a backward somersault to meet the ground again with the sound of a coffin lid closing.
Jones rushed to him.
Marlo pointed. “The bench. False wall. We can . . .”
Marlo was out. Jones was alone. He did what Marlo asked after getting the napkin. They both lay as lovers behind the grated wall beneath the bench when the subway eased to a stop and a door opened.
In walked a man wearing a suit with a newspaper under his arm. He paid no attention to the state of things. The glass, the metal, the plastic. He merely sat on a bench and shook his newspaper open. He scanned the words there. He licked a finger. He turned a page.
He left.
Jones let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. So did Marlo, through broken teeth and blood, and he said, “Berfection.”
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