Free The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating

specters on their flickering television screens. Now that he’d reached his fifty-first year, with its accompanying phantom pains, creaking knees, inflamed joints, and obligatory backaches, he felt like a brain trapped inside an antiquated machine that was in serious danger of being hauled away and melted down for scrap, and now he feared, because he had no progeny, that his storied family name would drift into obscurity and soon be expunged from the town’s collective memory.
    On a rainy morning in late May, I met with him in the lunchroom of a low brick building at the edge of campus. The entire interview lasted less than five minutes. I sat in a folding chair at a table that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, the surface crusted with mustard and ketchup and dusted with cigarette ashes. The Gonk stood in the doorway, a broad-shouldered, swag-bellied figure in denim with welding goggles strapped to his creased forehead. He lit a cigarette and turned his hard gray eyes on me.
    “What’s that?” He pointed to the book I’d brought along.
    Like a grinning idiot, I answered, “You never know when you’ll have a little downtime.”
    The fluorescent light cast a harsh shadow across his face, accentuating the deep and permanent lines of exasperation on his forehead. Without asking permission he snatched
The Odyssey
from my hands and opened it to a dog-eared page. He held it close to his pitted nose and read the words in the same plodding monotone as Professor Kingsley.
    “ ‘Cyclops, you ask my honorable name? Remember the gift you promised me, and I shall tell you. My name is Nobody: mother, father, and friends, everyone calls me Nobody.’ ” The Gonk lifted his leg and farted with impunity. He scratched his leathery neck and tossed the book on the lunchroom table. “Christ almighty, kid, what are they teaching you at this college? Don’t they have any practical courses? Accounting? Nursing? Hairdressing? Culinary school?” With his tattooed arms crossed and one foot drumming the floor, he looked me up and down and said, “Okay, Nobody, you’re hired. But better not let me catch you reading that shit on the job, or else Nobody is my meat, got it? Consider this your probationary period. I’ll be watching you. Watching you real good.”

3
    The Bloated Tick turned out to be a hideous hive of hourly humiliations and daily indignities, an indestructible organism that sucked the lifeblood from its employees and drained them of energy and ambition, mainly because the men had to attend to those menial but unavoidable tasks that fell upon all plant operations workers at every college and university across the country. Each morning we straggled through the garage doors with our lunch boxes, thermoses, and cigarettes, and for the next eight hours we cleaned and treated the Olympic-sized swimming pool at the recreation center, mowed hundreds of acres of grass, bundled and burned fallen tree limbs and branches, repaired overflowing toilets and examined the dizzying labyrinth of sewers beneath the campus for possible blockages. Eager for a cheap thrill, my coworkers pried open manhole covers and pushed me down rickety ladders. “Always fun to send our new tunnel rat into the pit!” Like everyone else in this world, I’d taken a lot of shit over the years from a lot of different people, but now for the first time in my life I had to decide, in a literal rather than figurative sense, how far into the sewer I was willing to crawl. For these labors I was paid a couple of dollars over the minimum, ditchdiggers’ wages, dirt money.
    In the summer, as I toiled in the dizzy blaze of heat, trimming shrubs and bushes, pulling weeds, spreading mulch in flowerbeds, planting flats of celosia and marigolds around the stately bell tower, I spied Professor Kingsley walking through campus with Emily Ryan. I didn’t know who she was at the time—I would find all of that out soon enough—but I certainly knew Kingsley, knew