The first job I was assigned to was hell on earth. I don’t think I’ll ever be “ready” to talk about it. Partly because I can’t communicate in words how haunting the smell was. Partly because I just kind of shut down and the memory of the experience is… crackly, like a bad VHS. In self-defense, my olfactory nerve committed suicide to deaden the blow of the stench. The rest of my body and brain followed suit, leaving just enough juice to keep the engine running. Every day, just enough. The other guys on the line and I got through each shift, went home, and forgot about it. That was it. We couldn’t bear to ask if our work “meant” anything to us. We didn’t want it to. We were just there, just doing a job that needed doing, laboring quietly in the rancid gut of modernity.

Here’s all I’ll say about it: our job was to stand amidst the steam and froth in full Hazmat gear, like humdrum astronauts, sorting and cleaning the soiled laundry of L.A. and Orange County hospitals. The conveyor belt in front of us never stopped, not once. It rumbled monotonously, shepherding endless piles of sheets and towels and smocks and blankets, all stained, dripping with the insides of our fellow human beings. Blood, shit… tears, dying words… piss, bile… the effluence of broken bodies, the residual pudding new life leaves behind—it all ended up here. I once found a syringe in one of the piles.

Besides the smell, there’s only one thing that stands out. One image, I can still make out through the thick steam that’s taken over that part of my memory. A Black man, fifty-something. He’d worked there for years. I never actually saw his face, just his eyes—we all wore masks. The smell, he said, didn’t bother him none. There was a superhuman tenderness and care in the labor he did to sift through an entire civilization’s worth of human-stained laundry, without being bothered by any of it. To make it all clean again. He was Atlas, holding the world up.