The cold forms a heavy concrete box around me and the hazardous waste that’s piled up inside. My chest vibrates and glows green and purple and emits a high-pitched hum that lands against the cold, hard walls and falls silent. The vibrations never make it to my fingers, which consequently cannot feel anything. That’s a problem, because I am holding a nail gun with one hand and grasping a two-by-four with the other. The two-by-four belongs to a truss on an unfinished roof. I perch seven feet above the bare second floor, my feet balanced on the bottom part of the truss.
A propane heater sits on the other side of the house, flickering blue and orange and emitting hazy gaseous clouds. My fingers curl inward enviously, rest stonily against my palms, inert, passive, reptilian. When I get to the end of this row, I tell myself, I can stand by the heater for two minutes.
I maneuver clumsily between the trusses. My heavy canvas jacket extends several inches beyond my shoulders on each side and scrunches into stiff folds as I bend and twist beneath it. It is difficult to bend my legs beneath my two layers of pants, which don’t do much to keep out the cold, which stiffens my joints even further. I twist my shoulders to fit between the trusses and thrust up my head so it brushes the sheathing. I need to install a bracket on the upper part of the truss, about three inches from my face. With my right hand, I tilt the gun sideways, my arm shaking; I need my left hand to brace myself against the wall. I pull the trigger, and a sharp crack reverberates in the tiny space where my head is enclosed. I take inventory of my eyes and fingers, and once all twelve are accounted for I squirm into the next pocket.
Beneath this din, the background rumble of my stomach is always present. A foil wrapper crinkles in my pocket, a crackle of color and life that complements the distant warm glow of the propane heater. Not yet, I tell myself. At ten o’clock, I can eat my snack.
My stomach continues to growl insistently. With a defeated glance at my watch, I sit on the top of the wall between the trusses, furtively extract the tiny packet, split the corner and peel away a narrow strip, watching the aluminum lining glint silver. Inside is a tightly pressed block of dates and cashews, purple-brown and softly glistening. Before I take a bite of my morning snack, I always imagine that it will melt into my body, seep into the crevices-or crevasses- that need to be filled, make me whole again so I can keep going. Instead when I chomp off the end of the bar, the sweetness jars my senses, splashes against me like water onto dry sand and trickles over the surface, not knowing where to go. It forms a shallow puddle, dust floating and swirling within it. Gradually the earth gives way, allows the water to seep in- then suddenly where there was a puddle, there is only a dark, damp splotch on the earth, and the splotch shrinks back to nothing within seconds. That is how my body deals with my energy bar. Lets it sit, uncertain, until it recognizes the incredible value of the gift, then consumes it almost instantaneously and wants more, but there is none. The thought of lunch is a mirage hanging over the desert.