What If COVID Never Happened

This is one night shift in the animal cargo hall at Amsterdam's airport, and the man working it is Joren Vos, twenty-nine, an agency cargo handler on nights.

At two in the morning a woman walks backwards in front of his tug with her hand up and tells him not to stop. Her name is Vera Stam and she is from the Chain Office. Joren knows the Chain Office as one minute out of the forty-minute film in his induction: the pneumonia in that city in 2019, found early, walled off, closed out. Six years on, nobody has asked the Chain Office to work twice. He asks which crate she wants opened. She wants nothing opened. She wants to walk beside him until six and watch him do his job exactly the way he always does it. No faster. No tidier. He asks if he is in trouble, and she says no, and he says that nobody drives out to cargo at two in the morning to tell a man he is not in trouble, and she agrees that this is fair.

He takes her through bay four first, because the ten past two is day-old chicks and day-old chicks do not wait. He puts the stab thermometer through the vent hole of the top crate and reads thirty-four, which is correct, thirty-three to thirty-five, and he would write thirty-four whether she was standing there or not. She asks what he smells when he pulls the probe out. Down, dry dust, warm paper. It is the one he does not mind. His girlfriend says he comes home smelling like the inside of a cardboard box. Vera writes nothing down. He tells her the interesting one is the reptiles in bay six, out of Southeast Asia: moss, ammonia, cedar; he can still taste it on the train home. She says, half to herself, that that route was week thirty-three, and then tells him to go on.

In bay five he puts two turns of filament tape round a crate wall where a nail has backed out and left a four-centimetre gap at the mesh. There is no carpentry kit on nights, there never has been, tape is what everybody uses. When something has already come out through a gap, you sweep it, with a yard brush, into the blue bin, general waste, and the same contractor empties the office bins on the five o'clock round. Nobody has ever told him different. The laminated card by the roller door says rinse and says nothing about disinfectant or contact time, and that is not him, that is the card.

She asks whether the drain in bay four still backs up, and he stops the tug on the word still. She would rather he kept moving. He tells her the drain takes an hour, that grey water stands three centimetres deep against the roller door after a wash-down and is gone by five. There are gloves on the wall if she wants a pair, a box of a hundred, size L always gone by one in the morning, so it is M, and they split across the knuckle. There is one dust mask in the first aid cabinet, an FFP1, elastic gone chalky, in there since before him and never opened. She knows, she says.

She takes out swabs at the gate. The PIN pad. His tug's wheel. The coupling pin. The microwave handle in the break room, the one with the note about not heating fish. The second drawer of the supervisor's desk, where the bite-and-scratch ledger lives, last entry six weeks old and the referral column never filled in. He points out that she is doing it backwards, that the animals are the other way, and she says yes. She has swabbed a microwave. He buys two coffees on his badge, two eighty each, and she thanks him and does not drink hers.

In bay six there are contractors in white hoods under a light he has never seen in this building, and a man standing well back with a clipboard, and the tugs are going round them like roadworks and nobody on the floor has stopped. She tells him to keep moving.

He coughs, then, the way he has been coughing since August, into the back of his glove. Vera takes one clean step backwards and puts her hand across her mouth, and catches herself, and puts it down. She says it was a reflex. He says it is not a reflex anybody has.

She asks him about week thirty-four, which is August. He does not know what he did in August; he did this; it is the same every week. She has the roster in the car and would rather hear it from him, so he tells her. He worked the Tuesday and the Wednesday with a temperature, because the agency applies one unpaid waiting day at the start of any sickness, and one unpaid day is ninety euro, and ninety euro is ninety euro. The cough everybody here has, from the cold doors open all night and the dust off the straw. His since August. He has not seen a doctor, because the deductible on his health insurance is three hundred and eighty-five euro and he has not touched it this year, and you do not spend that in September on a cough. She says that nobody does.

His mother has been ringing him at odd hours, twice this week, asking if he is eating properly. He had thought his brother had done something. Vera says that mothers ring.

At half past three she takes a folded sheet out of her coat and tells him to take his glove off before he touches it. Under the lamp on the tug, it is a list of names, each with a date beside it. His brother Stef. Dessie from days. Rachid, the supervisor. His girlfriend Marja's full name, spelled right, which nobody manages. His mother. His grandmother's road and the number of her flat, with Sunday written beside it. Every date is August. He asks why all of it is in the past.

Because, she tells him, he thinks she came tonight to start something, and nothing starts tonight. Their best estimate is that it finished leaving this floor in the third week of August. They are five weeks behind it. They have been walking backwards ever since, and he is the earliest place they can still stand.

He says to fence it, because that is what her people do. She says a fence needs an outside. Containment stopped being available somewhere in the second week, while he was taping a crate wall in bay five and writing thirty-four on a sheet. Tonight is measurement: drawing the shape of a thing that has already finished happening, so that somebody can be told how big it is before they have to say it out loud.

He asks for his phone, because his mother has his grandmother on Sundays and she is seventy-nine and needs to know. His mother was visited on the eleventh. Eleven days ago. They asked her not to tell him, and she agreed; people nearly always agree. She asked how long, and they said until they came to him. She rang him twice this week and asked if he was eating. That, Vera says, is what asking looks like when you have been told you cannot ask. Marja was visited on the ninth. She has been lying next to him for thirteen days with that in her. She asked what his mother asked and was given the same answer.

He folds the sheet back along its own creases, which are soft, because it has been folded and unfolded a great many times before it reached his hands, and he has to give it back twice, because the first time his hand puts it down on the bonnet instead.

What he is to do is finish his shift and change nothing. They need the next six weeks on this floor to look exactly like the last six, or they lose the shape of it.

Rachid puts his head round the roller door and asks whether he is coming for the ten past four or standing there all night. The glue on the green and white labels is failing in the cold, the way it does every night, so Joren thumbs each one down twice and sends the crate out, and the ten past four goes where the ten past four goes.