He puts up a pretty good fight, arguing he’s been waiting here eight hours, it’s the guy who cut in line that should be booted. Instead they grab the young man who punched me and start dragging him toward the street. I’m here on a maintenance call.īoth guards ignore me. In my periphery I see a couple of security guards come running over. I don’t understand how men get strong hands working at the entropy mill. I drop to the ground, a dribble of pinkish spit leaking out my mouth, that familiar mineral taste. I’ve never been any good at taking a punch. You can’t rid a man of the violence that lives in the chasm between the life he hoped for and the one he got. I know that look he’s got, I know it from memory, and I know what’s going to happen next but I try to step around him anyway.

A few of the people in line give me dirty looks as I walk past, and one of them points at my laptop satchel and yells, “No bags!” But it’s not until I’m right at the entrance that a young man steps out in front of me and grabs my shoulder. The only way to make sure you get a spot is to show up the night before and wait till morning. They sit on folding chairs, draped in winter coats and blankets. Every day, thousands of people come to this place to churn out numbers for minimum wage, to stir the slop on which God’s tongue feasts.īy the time I get to the front entrance, the makeup of the line has changed. Now the whole thing houses the entropy mill, five-million square-feet of government-subsidized employment. Even now you can still see the phantom outline on the sides of some of the buildings, the places where the lettering was, the names of all the big box stores and movie theatres and parking garages, this congealed mass of commerce the size of a small city. The largest mall in the country, I’m told, though that was years before my time. It used to be a mega-mall before the great oil crash. This morning the line stretches for miles and miles and miles. I wonder who they’ve left alone and uncared for to be here. I wonder how many of them have spouses, children, grandchildren. The years gorge on them like yeast in a sugar bath. They look so much older than they are, these men. There’s something grotesque about watching a stooped retiree in his best Sunday suit, hair all dyed and gelled to shining, plead for a day’s wage. The older men in line, they tend to take too much care with their appearance. It is a rule at the entropy mill that all laborers must be dressed in reasonably presentable attire, but I’ve never heard of anyone turned away on account of how they looked. The younger ones look beat to all hell with hangovers and barfight bruises, dentin-colored stains on their shirts like maps of imaginary islands.

On my way to cut God’s tongue I pass a long line of slow-shuffling laborers.

Omar el akkad