Chapter 1
[Before we begin]
I should tell you that I’m not certain this story happened. Or rather, it happened, but I’m not certain I can tell you how it happened in any way that approaches truth. This is a story about three men who collect garbage in New York City, and I will tell you it takes place on Tuesday, February 9, 2025, but that date is both specific and arbitrary—Tuesday matters because routes repeat on Tuesdays, February matters because winter is the worst time for this work, 2025 matters because it locates us in a particular historical moment. But whether anything I tell you is true depends on what you mean by true.
The men exist. Their names are Allan Billings, Kevin Dankel, and Gavin Letun, though I have changed these names because—actually, no, I haven’t changed them. Or have I? Does it matter? If I tell you these are their real names, you have no way to verify it. If I tell you I’ve changed them for privacy, you have no way to know what their real names are. The gap between what I claim and what you can know is unbridgeable.
I wrote three paragraphs here about why I wanted to write this story, but they felt too sincere, too much like I was asking for your approval or understanding. So I deleted them. Or perhaps I will include them later. Or perhaps I’m lying about having written them at all.
Let us begin. Or continue. The distinction may not matter.
---
[6:30 AM - The Depot]
The depot sits in a part of the city that most people never see, a industrial stretch where garbage trucks sleep in rows under sodium lights that turn everything the color of rust. Allan Billings arrived first, as he always did, at 6:22 AM, and sat in his idling Honda Civic with the heat blasting and the radio off. He watched his breath fog the windshield and thought about Sisyphus, which he always did on Tuesday mornings, which made him think about how thinking about Sisyphus had itself become a repetitive action, which made him think about whether he had become a parody of himself.
He got out of the car at 6:28, locking it carefully even though there was nothing in it worth stealing.
Kevin Dankel’s pickup truck pulled through the gate at exactly 6:30. He had been arriving at exactly 6:30 for twenty-six years, and this punctuality was something he took quiet pride in, though he would never say so aloud. He parked in the same spot he always parked, gathered his lunch cooler and thermos from the passenger seat, and walked toward the row of trucks with the kind of economical movement that came from decades of doing the same thing the same way.
“Morning,” Kevin said as he approached Allan.
Allan nodded. They had worked together for fifteen years, and this was how they greeted each other every Tuesday and Friday—Kevin’s “morning” requiring no response, Allan’s nod acknowledging the greeting without committing to conversation before it was necessary.
Gavin Letun arrived at 6:33, parking his battered Subaru at an angle that was not quite straight, holding a coffee cup from a place that charged seven dollars for coffee. He took a photo of the sunrise behind the depot buildings, the sky going from black to deep blue to pale orange, the industrial landscape silhouetted against it. He typed a caption, deleted it, tried another one, deleted that too, finally posted it without words and pocketed his phone.
“You’re late,” Kevin said without judgment, just stating fact.
“Three minutes,” Gavin said. “That’s basically on time.”
“Basically isn’t actually.”
“Sure it is. Time is a social construct anyway.”
Kevin didn’t respond to this because he never knew what to say when Gavin said things like that, and Allan didn’t respond because he was thinking about whether time really was a social construct or whether that was just something people said when they wanted to excuse their lateness, and by the time he had thought through the question, the moment for responding had passed.
They converged on truck number 47, which Kevin had driven for six years. It was a Mack with a McNeilus compactor, twenty-five cubic yards, painted the distinctive green of the Department of Sanitation. Kevin unlocked the driver’s door and pulled the lever to pop the hood while Allan went to the back office to get the route paperwork and Gavin stood nearby scrolling through his phone, earbuds in but volume low.
The morning inspection was something Kevin did the same way every time—tire pressure, fluid levels, lights, compactor mechanism. He moved around the truck with practiced efficiency, his breath visible in the cold air, checking off items on a mental list that never changed. Allan returned with the clipboard and stood watching, not helping because this was Kevin’s ritual and you didn’t intrude on another man’s ritual.
“We got the same route?” Gavin asked, pulling out one earbud.
“Upper West Side, 86th to 110th, west of Broadway,” Allan said, reading from the sheet.
“So yes, the same route.”
“It’s Tuesday,” Kevin said from under the truck, checking something near the rear axle. “It’s always the same route on Tuesday.”
“Right, but like, theoretically they could change it.”
“They won’t,” Allan said. “The city runs on repetition. Systems require predictability. Every Tuesday the same route, every Friday the same route, fifty-two cycles per year until we retire or die or get reassigned. Which is itself a kind of death.”
Gavin looked at him. “It’s six thirty in the morning, man.”
“What?”
“It’s too early for that shit.”
Allan felt the familiar burn of embarrassment that came from saying something intellectual to people who didn’t want to hear it, followed immediately by resentment that he should feel embarrassed for thinking, followed by self-loathing for resenting people who were just trying to get through their day. This entire emotional cycle took about three seconds.
Kevin emerged from under the truck, wiping his hands on a rag. “We’re good to go.”
They climbed into the cab—Kevin driving, Allan in the passenger seat, Gavin in the jump seat behind them where the third man always sat. The engine turned over with a sound like metal digesting itself, and they pulled out of the depot into streets that were still mostly dark.
---
[Or did it happen like this?]
Actually, let me revise. Or not revise but provide alternative version, because I’m not certain about the tone of that opening. Did they really have that conversation about time being a social construct? Did Gavin really say that, or am I putting words in his mouth that fit my preconceptions about millennials and ironic distance? Did Allan really think about Sisyphus, or is that too on-the-nose, too much of a symbol?
Let me try again:
The depot at 6:30 AM was just a place where three men arrived separately to begin work. Allan got there first and sat in his car. Kevin got there on time and gathered his things. Gavin got there a few minutes late with expensive coffee. They said very little because it was early and cold and there was nothing to say that hadn’t been said a thousand times before. Kevin checked the truck. Allan got the paperwork. Gavin stood nearby on his phone. They climbed in and drove away.
That version is more accurate in its sparseness but less interesting narratively. The first version had dialogue, character, the impression of relationship. This version has only actions, only the minimum. Which is more true? The version where they talk and reveal themselves, or the version where they don’t talk because most mornings they don’t talk, they just work?
Both versions happened. Or neither did. Or I haven’t decided yet which version to commit to, so both versions exist in superposition until I or you collapse them through the act of narrative choice or readerly interpretation.
Let’s continue. The truck is moving through dark streets regardless of which version of the depot departure occurred.
---
[7:00 AM - First Stops]
The first stop was a residential building on West 86th Street, six bags of trash piled against a chain-link fence. Allan and Gavin jumped down from the truck before it fully stopped—this was routine, this timing, bodies knowing when to move without conscious thought. Allan grabbed two bags, Gavin grabbed two, they threw them into the compactor opening at the back of the truck, the mechanism rumbling as it pulled the bags in and crushed them. The truck moved to the next stop.
This is what the work looked like: stop, jump, grab, throw, compress, move, repeat. Variations existed within this pattern—sometimes three bags, sometimes twelve, sometimes loose garbage spilling from broken bags, sometimes heavy items that required two people to lift—but the fundamental structure never changed. The truck moved down the street, stopping every thirty yards or every hundred yards depending on building density, and the two collectors moved with it, and the driver drove, and the garbage disappeared into the compactor.
I could describe fifty iterations of this cycle, providing minute variations in each one to give you the lived experience of repetitive labor, but that would make for tedious reading. Or perhaps it would make for honest reading, accurately representing how most of working life consists of the same actions repeated until they become muscle memory, until the body performs them while the mind is elsewhere. But narrative requires selection, requires choosing which moments to emphasize and which to compress or eliminate. So I will tell you that the first hour proceeded routinely, that they collected garbage from residential buildings and left the streets cleaner behind them, and you will have to trust that hours of labor occurred in this compressed sentence.
Kevin drove the route the same way every time, knowing which corners had the most trash, which buildings had broken dumpsters, which spots required care when parking. He listened to sports radio at low volume, processing the talk about last night’s game without really paying attention. His body handled the driving automatically—brake, turn, accelerate, brake—while his mind floated in that particular state of working consciousness where you’re neither fully present nor fully absent.
In the cab beside him, Allan watched the city pass. Buildings he had seen a thousand times. Streets he knew by name and number. People beginning to appear on sidewalks, heading to jobs of their own. He thought about how strange it was that all these people moved through space simultaneously, each in their own subjective reality, occasionally intersecting but mostly parallel. He thought about Heidegger’s being-with, about intersubjectivity, about—
“You want coffee?” Kevin asked, pointing to his thermos.
“What?”
“Coffee. You look tired.”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
Kevin nodded and returned his attention to the street. He had learned not to ask Allan what he was thinking about because the answers were usually long and abstract and made him feel dumb, which Kevin suspected was not Allan’s intention but was the effect nonetheless.
Behind them, Gavin had his earbuds in, listening to a podcast about how late capitalism was eating itself, while simultaneously scrolling through Instagram, his attention fracturing across multiple inputs. Every few stops he would take a photo—interesting trash, urban decay, whatever caught his eye—and post it with captions that were equal parts clever and empty. “Still life with garbage bag.” “The aesthetics of waste.” “Capitalism’s externalities have externalities.”
At a stop on West 91st Street, Allan pulled a bag from a pile and immediately knew something was different. The weight was wrong, the way the contents shifted was wrong. He set it down and opened it.
“The hell are you doing?” Gavin asked. “We’re not supposed to open bags.”
“I know, but—” Allan pulled out a handful of items. Photographs. Letters. Documents. Personal papers bundled together with string.
“Someone’s throwing out old stuff. So what?”
Allan didn’t answer because he was looking at the photographs, black and white images from maybe the 1960s or 70s, showing people at celebrations, at gatherings, living lives that were now presumably over or transformed. He felt the familiar pull of wanting these items to mean something, wanting there to be a story here that mattered.
“We gotta keep moving,” Kevin called from the driver’s seat.
“Yeah, just—look at this.” Allan held up a photograph.
Kevin glanced at it. “Someone died, probably. Estate cleaners throwing out personal stuff. Happens all the time.”
“But these are people’s lives. Memories.”
“And they’re trash now. That’s what trash is—things people decided they don’t need anymore.”
“Or things people forgot about, or things people threw away by accident, or—”
“Or trash,” Gavin said. “Come on, man. We got like a hundred more stops.”
Allan looked at the photographs in his hand, at the faces of people smiling at something off-camera, people who had no idea their images would end up here, would be held by a stranger in the back of a garbage truck on a cold Tuesday morning. He thought about archives and memory, about what gets kept and what gets discarded, about how all history is just a collection of things someone decided were worth saving while everything else disappeared.
“Allan,” Kevin said, not unkindly but firmly. “Let’s go.”
Allan put the items back in the bag and threw it into the compactor. The mechanism pulled it in and crushed it, and whatever stories those photographs contained were now compressed with coffee grounds and food waste and all the other things people no longer needed. He climbed back on the truck and they moved to the next stop.
---
[Narrator’s note: I am lying to you]
The discovery I just described—the photographs, the personal items—I’m not certain that happened. Or it happened but not like that, not with those specific items. I needed something to disrupt the routine, to introduce the possibility of meaning in waste, so I invented a catalyst. Or maybe I’m remembering something real and claiming I invented it to seem more in control of the narrative than I actually am.
The truth is that garbage collectors find interesting or valuable things in the trash regularly. Wedding rings, cash, antiques, personal archives. Most of it gets thrown into the compactor without a second thought because the job is to collect trash, not to curate it. But sometimes something catches your attention, makes you pause, makes you wonder about the story behind it.
So yes, they found something. What exactly they found, I’m not certain. The photographs might be real or might be my invention. The important thing is not what they found but how they responded to finding it, which reveals their different relationships to meaning and significance and whether their work matters beyond the simple function of removing waste.
Or perhaps the important thing is that I’m admitting to uncertainty, acknowledging that narrative authority is always partial and questionable, that even a third-person omniscient narrator is omniscient only within the bounds of their own invention.
Let’s continue. The truck is moving down Amsterdam Avenue. The morning is getting lighter.
---
[8:30 AM - Conversation]
“You think too much,” Kevin said as they pulled away from a stop on 94th Street.
“What?” Allan was pulled from wherever his mind had been.
“You think too much. About the trash, about the job, about everything. It’s just trash.”
“I know it’s just trash.”
“So why do you look at it like you’re reading a book?”
Allan didn’t have a good answer for that, or he had several answers and none of them would sound reasonable out loud. Because looking for meaning in trash was less painful than admitting his life was meaningless? Because he needed to believe his intelligence mattered even in work that didn’t require it? Because intellectual habits don’t turn off just because circumstances changed?
“I’m just curious,” he said finally.
“Curiosity’s fine. Just don’t let it slow us down.”
Gavin pulled out an earbud. “What are we talking about?”
“Allan’s having philosophical moments about garbage again.”
“Oh, that.” Gavin looked at Allan. “You know that Barthes essay about authors being dead? You’re doing that but to yourself. You’re over-interpreting everything until the original meaning disappears.”
Allan felt a spike of surprise and irritation—surprise that Gavin knew Barthes, irritation that he was using it against him. “That’s not what ‘Death of the Author’ means.”
“Sure it is. You’re creating meaning that wasn’t there.”
“All meaning is created. That’s the whole point.”
“Exactly. So why pretend garbage has some deep significance when it’s just stuff people threw away?”
“Because—” Allan stopped because he wasn’t sure how to articulate it. Because if garbage didn’t have significance then what did? Because if his work was meaningless then his life was meaningless? Because he needed to believe that paying attention mattered?
Kevin interrupted before Allan could find words. “Both of you are talking about trash like it’s complicated. It’s not complicated. People throw things away, we pick them up, we compress it, we dump it. That’s the job. You can philosophize about it if you want but it doesn’t change what we’re doing.”
“But that’s exactly the question,” Allan said. “Whether what we’re doing has meaning beyond the function.”
“It has meaning because it needs to be done. That’s enough.”
“Is it though?”
Kevin was quiet for a moment, negotiating a double-parked car. Then he said, “I’ve been doing this for twenty-six years. If I spent that whole time asking whether it meant something, I’d be miserable. It’s work. It pays my bills, it’s honest, it’s necessary. What else do you need it to be?”
“I don’t know,” Allan said. “Something more than just... repetition.”
“Repetition is most of life,” Kevin said. “You eat breakfast every morning, that’s repetition. You brush your teeth, that’s repetition. You think repetition makes something meaningless?”
“No, but—”
“Look, I’m not smart like you two. I didn’t go to college, I don’t read books about death of authors or whatever. But I know that spending your whole life waiting for something to be meaningful is a good way to miss the meaning that’s already there.”
This shut Allan up because Kevin was right, or at least Allan couldn’t immediately formulate a counterargument, and by the time he had thought of one they were at the next stop and the moment had passed.
Gavin put his earbud back in and returned to his phone, but he was thinking about the conversation, about how Kevin’s straightforward acceptance of things was something he simultaneously admired and found incomprehensible. How did you just accept that your life was going to be the same actions repeated? How did you not feel crushed by routine? How did you find that enough?
The question troubled Gavin more than he wanted to admit because he suspected the answer was that you had to give up on wanting more, and giving up felt like dying.
---
[Let me tell you about these three men]
Allan Billings is forty-three years old. He has a community college degree in English Literature that he completed twenty-two years ago, before money ran out and family crisis pulled him home and he never went back. He reads Derrida and Foucault and Jameson on his lunch breaks, paperbacks with broken spines that he’s read so many times the pages are soft as cloth. He quotes things and immediately regrets it. He makes $43,000 a year and lives alone in a studio apartment in Inwood where the shower has black mold that the landlord won’t fix. He is lonely in a way that has calcified into his baseline state, so he no longer recognizes it as loneliness but just as how existence feels.
Kevin Dankel is fifty-one years old. His father was a garbage collector, died at fifty-three from a heart attack, and Kevin has been acutely aware for the past two years that he is now living on borrowed time. He has been married for twenty-eight years to Teresa, who works as a school secretary. They have a daughter in her second year at Queens College studying accounting. Kevin makes $51,000 a year and owns a small house in Woodside that he will never finish paying off. He watches a lot of sports and understands that this is a way of not thinking about other things, but he has made peace with that. He is content in a way that Allan finds suspicious and Gavin finds impossible.
Gavin Letun is twenty-nine years old. He has forty thousand dollars in student loan debt from an art school degree that has proven economically useless. He has worked as a freelance graphic designer (poorly paid), a social media manager (worse paid), a content creator (unpaid), and briefly tried to be a screenwriter before accepting that he had no talent for it or possibly that talent didn’t matter because the system was rigged anyway. He has been a garbage collector for two years, taking the job for the health insurance after a panic attack sent him to the emergency room and he got a bill for $3,000 that he couldn’t pay. He makes $38,000 a year and lives with two roommates in Bushwick. He has 3,200 Instagram followers and posts three times a day, each post getting between thirty and sixty likes. He does not know what he wants to do with his life but is certain it shouldn’t be this.
These three men work together because the city assigned them to the same truck. They have become something like friends through proximity and time, though they would not call themselves friends and rarely see each other outside of work. They know things about each other—Kevin’s daughter’s college plans, Allan’s reading habits, Gavin’s social media presence—but they do not know deeper things, the fears and hopes and private shames that constitute interior life.
This is typical of working relationships, of friendships formed through circumstance rather than choice. We spend most of our waking hours with colleagues and know them intimately in certain ways while remaining strangers in others.
I am telling you this background information because conventional fiction requires character development, requires readers to understand who people are before caring what happens to them. But I’m also aware that providing this information in an expository block is clumsy, that “show don’t tell” is supposedly the rule, that I should reveal character through action and dialogue rather than through narrator summary.
But showing takes time and space, and I have limited words to tell this story, and sometimes efficiency requires exposition. So I’m telling you: these are three men, these are their circumstances, they are stuck together for the day. Whether you care about them is up to you.
---
[10:45 AM - Or maybe 11:15 AM - Time is becoming uncertain]
By late morning they had collected trash from maybe seventy buildings, the compactor was two-thirds full, and all three men were tired in the specific way this work makes you tired—shoulders aching, lower back tight, hands sore even through gloves. They stopped at a red light on Broadway and 98th, and for a moment all three were quiet, breathing hard, feeling the weight of hours already worked and hours still ahead.
“My dad used to say garbage collection was character-building,” Kevin said to no one in particular. “I didn’t know what he meant when I was a kid. Thought he was just making excuses for having a shit job. But now I get it.”
“What did he mean?” Gavin asked.
“That it teaches you that work is work. That you show up, you do what needs doing, you don’t complain. That your body gets tired but you keep going because that’s what work is.”
“That’s not character-building,” Gavin said. “That’s just... accepting exploitation.”
Kevin shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe there’s value in learning you can do hard things.”
“There’s also value in asking why things have to be hard,” Allan said. “Why physical labor has to destroy your body. Why we accept that as normal.”
“Because someone has to do it,” Kevin said. “You want trash piling up in the streets?”
“No, but I want the people doing it to be compensated fairly, to have support, to not be treated as disposable.”
“We have a union. We have benefits. It’s not great but it’s not terrible.”
“It’s not enough,” Allan said. “You’re going to retire with a destroyed back and knees and shoulders. You’ll have chronic pain for the rest of your life because of this work. And the city will replace you immediately with someone else who’ll also destroy their body. That’s not character-building, that’s a systemic acceptance of worker injury as the cost of service.”
“So what’s the alternative?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know. Better equipment. More workers per truck so the load is distributed. Actual investment in worker health instead of just accepting that this job breaks bodies.”
“And who’s going to pay for that?”
“The city. Through taxes. Through not accepting that some people’s health is expendable.”
Kevin was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You think about this stuff too much.”
“Someone has to think about it.”
“Why?”
The question hung there. Why did someone have to think about structural inequity and worker exploitation and the politics of municipal labor? Thinking about it didn’t change anything. Allan’s awareness of the system didn’t make his back hurt less or his paycheck larger. Kevin’s lack of political analysis didn’t make him less injured by the work. Thinking was just another form of labor, exhausting and repetitive and producing no tangible result.
The light changed and they moved forward.
---
[12:15 PM - Lunch at the Park]
They parked the truck near a small triangular park at 108th Street and Amsterdam, the spot where they always took lunch on Tuesday routes. It was a park in the technical sense—grass, trees, benches—but mostly it was a place where the urban grid hadn’t quite worked out geometrically, leaving a wedge of public space that was too small for a building and too visible to abandon entirely.
Kevin pulled out his lunch cooler and sat on a bench, unwrapping sandwiches his wife had made—turkey and cheese on white bread, an apple, a bag of chips. Allan bought a slice of pizza from a cart on the corner, spending $3.50 that he shouldn’t spend but had because he hadn’t prepared lunch this morning or most mornings. Gavin had a salad from a place that charged $15 for mixed greens and called it “curated,” which he ate while scrolling through his phone, barely tasting it.
For several minutes they ate in silence, too tired to talk, conserving energy. Students from Columbia walked past, young people in their early twenties with backpacks and nice coats, talking about classes and parties and internships. Allan watched them and felt the familiar twist of envy and resentment and self-pity. He had been them, briefly, or almost them, before everything fell apart.
One of the students dropped a paper coffee cup on the ground, didn’t notice or didn’t care, kept walking.
Kevin stood up, walked over, picked up the cup and threw it in a trash can. He did this automatically, without thinking, his professionalism extending beyond his official duties.
“You don’t have to do that,” Gavin said. “You’re not on the clock.”
“Someone’s got to pick it up eventually.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be you. Let them deal with their own trash.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Kevin said, sitting back down.
But it was a big deal to Allan, who saw in that small action the entire structure of class and labor and invisibility. The student who dropped the cup had done so unconsciously, not as a conscious act of disrespect but simply not thinking about it, secure in the assumption that trash gets dealt with by someone. Kevin had picked it up automatically, not as martyrdom but as habit, trained by decades of work to see litter as his responsibility even when it wasn’t. And Gavin had noticed the politics of the moment but framed it individualistically—“you don’t have to”—rather than structurally, rather than asking why some people get to not think about trash while other people’s entire job is thinking about nothing else.
Allan wanted to articulate this but knew it would sound pretentious, would make Kevin feel bad, would confirm Gavin’s view of him as someone who intellectualized everything. So he stayed quiet and ate his pizza.
“You ever think about doing something else?” Gavin asked after a while.
Kevin shook his head. “This is what I do. I’m good at it, it’s stable, it’ll get me to retirement.”
“But like, you don’t want more?”
“More what?”
“I don’t know. Something that doesn’t wreck your body. Something that uses your brain more.”
“My brain’s fine,” Kevin said mildly. “And I don’t mind the physical work. Keeps me in shape.”
“Keeps you injured, you mean.”
“That too. But everyone gets old, everyone gets hurt. At least I’m getting hurt doing honest work.”
Gavin looked at him. “I don’t understand how you think like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like everything is fine. Like this is good enough.”
Kevin considered this. “It’s not that everything is fine. It’s that worrying about things you can’t change doesn’t help anything. I can’t change the city budget or the workload or any of that. I can just do my job well and take care of my family. That’s enough for me.”
“But doesn’t it make you angry? That you’re doing necessary work and getting paid shit and destroying your body and nobody cares?”
“Sometimes. But staying angry all the time is exhausting. I’d rather just do the work and go home.”
Gavin shook his head and returned to his phone, unconvinced but unable to articulate why Kevin’s acceptance felt wrong to him. Allan listened to this exchange and felt caught between them—he understood Kevin’s pragmatic acceptance but couldn’t achieve it himself, understood Gavin’s frustration but found his millennial irony exhausting.
“What about you?” Kevin asked Allan. “You ever think about doing something else?”
Allan laughed bitterly. “Every day. But doing what? I’m forty-three with no recent job skills except garbage collection. Who’s going to hire me?”
“You’re smart. You read all those books.”
“Being smart doesn’t matter if you can’t translate it into employment. And reading books about postmodern theory doesn’t qualify me for anything except adjunct teaching positions that pay less than this and have no benefits.”
“So you’re stuck too.”
“We’re all stuck,” Allan said. “That’s late capitalism. Everyone’s stuck, everyone knows they’re stuck, and the only question is whether you accept it like Kevin or resent it like me or ironically detach from it like Gavin.”
“I’m not ironically detached,” Gavin said, looking up from his phone. “I’m aware that irony is the only reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.”
“That’s literally the definition of ironic detachment.”
“No, ironic detachment would be pretending I don’t care. I care. I just recognize that caring doesn’t change anything.”
“So you’ve given up.”
“I’ve accepted reality.”
“That’s the same thing,” Allan said.
“Is it?” Gavin looked at him. “You haven’t given up. You still read your theory books, you still think about this stuff. But has that changed anything for you? Are you less stuck because you understand the structural reasons for your stuckness?”
Allan didn’t have an answer for that because Gavin was right. Understanding capitalism’s contradictions didn’t free you from them. Knowing that meaning was constructed didn’t make constructing meaning any easier. His intelligence had given him nothing except the ability to articulate his own misery more precisely.
“We should get back,” Kevin said, standing up and gathering his trash. “Got half the route left.”
They climbed back into the truck, and the afternoon stretched ahead of them, more of the same.
---
[I need to tell you something about this story]
I’m struggling with how to continue. I’ve given you the morning routine, the discovery of the items in the trash, the conversation over lunch. These are all beats I planned, all moments that move the story forward or reveal character or engage with themes. But I’m aware that the story is not really going anywhere, that nothing is happening in the traditional sense of plot.
Three men collect garbage. They talk. They have philosophical discussions that reveal their different worldviews. They work, they tire, they finish the route. Where’s the conflict? Where’s the dramatic arc? Where’s the transformation?
The postmodernist answer is that life doesn’t have dramatic arcs, that most days are routine without crisis, that the insistence on narrative structure is an artificial imposition that distorts reality. But that answer feels like an excuse for not knowing how to tell a story that’s actually engaging.
So let me ask you directly: what do you want from this? Do you want plot—something happens, changes the characters, resolves? Do you want philosophy—extended meditations on meaning and work and existence? Do you want realism—accurate representation of what garbage collection actually involves, even when that’s boring? Do you want metafiction—constant interruptions and self-awareness and breaking of the fourth wall?
I don’t know what you want because I don’t know who you are. You’re reading this, which means it exists, which means I wrote it, but I’m writing it without knowing whether anyone will read it or who that anyone might be. I’m throwing words into a void and hoping they land somewhere meaningful.
Which is, I suppose, not unlike garbage collection. You gather material, compress it, send it elsewhere, hope someone deals with it. Most of it is waste. Some of it might be valuable. You can’t know until later, until someone else makes that determination.
Let’s continue. The afternoon route awaits.
---
[1:00 PM - 3:30 PM - The Afternoon Grind]
The afternoon was harder than the morning because fatigue accumulated, because the cold seeped into bones and made joints ache, because they’d already been working for six and a half hours and had two and a half more to go. The routine continued—stop, grab, throw, compress, move—but the movements were slower, less efficient, the body’s reluctance requiring conscious effort to overcome.
Allan’s back hurt in that specific way that meant he’d pulled something, not badly enough to stop working but badly enough that every bend and lift sent pain radiating from his lower spine. He didn’t mention it because mentioning it wouldn’t help and would just make him seem weak. Kevin’s knees were bothering him, the right one especially, the one that sometimes locked up and required him to stand still for thirty seconds until something shifted back into place. Gavin was young enough that his body recovered quickly between stops, but even he was slowing down, the accumulated weight of hundreds of garbage bags beginning to register.
At a stop on West 103rd Street, Mrs. Eleanor Kowalski came out of her building as they were collecting. She was maybe seventy-five, Polish accent still thick after forty years in New York, wearing a heavy coat and headscarf against the cold.
“Kevin!” she called. “I bring you coffee!”
Kevin smiled, a real smile that transformed his normally neutral expression. “Mrs. K, you don’t have to do that.”
“Is cold! You need something warm!” She was carrying a thermos and paper cups. “I have for all three of you.”
She poured coffee—weak, instant, but hot—and insisted they drink while she talked about her grandson who was doing well in school, about her concerns about the building’s new management company, about how the neighborhood had changed, used to be you knew everyone, now everyone is strangers.
Kevin listened with genuine attention, asking polite questions, making appropriate responses. Allan accepted the coffee gratefully and tried to participate in the conversation, but his mind kept wandering to the class dynamics of the interaction, the way her charity was kind but also reinforced hierarchy, the way her ability to give coffee depended on her being inside and warm while they were outside and cold. Gavin took the coffee but stayed slightly apart, half-listening, scrolling through his phone while pretending to pay attention.
“You are such good boys,” Mrs. Kowalski said, which made Gavin suppress a laugh because he was twenty-nine and hadn’t been a boy in a long time, and “good boys” as applied to grown men doing manual labor carried connotations that made him uncomfortable.
“We appreciate it,” Kevin said. “You stay warm, now.”
“You too! See you Friday!”
They climbed back on the truck, and as they pulled away, Kevin said, “She’s been bringing us coffee for three years now. Every couple weeks in winter.”
“That’s nice,” Allan said.
“Is it?” Gavin asked. “Or is it like, patronizing? Like we’re charity cases?”
“It’s just coffee,” Kevin said.
“Nothing is just anything,” Gavin said. “Everything’s political.”
“Not everything has to be political.”
“Everything is whether you recognize it or not.”
Kevin didn’t respond because he found this exhausting, this insistence on analyzing every interaction for power dynamics and social meaning. Sometimes coffee was just coffee, kindness was just kindness, and not everything needed to be deconstructed.
But Allan was thinking about what Gavin said, about whether Mrs. Kowalski’s coffee was pure kindness or whether it contained elements of class performance, of an older woman from a different era expressing values that no longer applied, of charity as a replacement for justice. He wanted to believe kindness could be simple but suspected Gavin was right that nothing was simple, that every interaction contained history and structure and imbalance.
“She’s lonely,” Kevin said after a while. “Her husband died four years ago, her kids live in Jersey, she’s alone in that apartment. She comes out to give us coffee because she wants someone to talk to. It’s not charity, it’s connection. Or maybe it’s both. But I’m not going to refuse it because of some political analysis. She’s nice, I like her, the coffee is warm. That’s enough.”
And it was enough for Kevin, genuinely, but Allan felt the gap between Kevin’s acceptance and his own inability to accept anything without interrogating it, and that gap was its own kind of pain.
---
[4:15 PM - Breakdown]
The compactor jammed at a stop on West 109th Street. The mechanism made a grinding sound, tried to cycle, failed, tried again, failed again, and then stopped entirely. Kevin swore quietly and pulled the truck to the curb.
“What happened?” Gavin asked.
“Compactor’s jammed. Something got caught in the mechanism.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Maybe. Probably.” Kevin shut off the engine and climbed out, walking around to the back of the truck.
Allan and Gavin followed. Kevin opened the access panel and peered into the compactor machinery, his face close to metal and hydraulics and garbage residue. He reached in carefully, feeling around for whatever was caught.
“Probably someone threw out a piece of metal,” he said. “Rebar or pipe or something. People don’t think about what they’re putting in trash bags.”
He pulled out a wrench from the truck’s toolbox and started working on something inside the mechanism, his movements careful and practiced. Allan held a flashlight to provide better light, and Gavin stood nearby watching, feeling useless because he had no mechanical knowledge and nothing to contribute.
“How long will this take?” Gavin asked.
“However long it takes,” Kevin said without looking up.
They stood in silence for a while, the truck idling, traffic passing, the city moving around them while they were stopped. Allan’s back was throbbing, and standing still made it worse somehow, the muscles tightening. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt.
“You okay?” Gavin asked.
“Back hurts.”
“You pull something?”
“Probably. It’s fine.”
“You should say something if it’s not fine.”
“It’s fine enough to keep working,” Allan said. “What else matters?”
Gavin looked at him. “You don’t have to be stoic about it. You’re allowed to be hurt.”
“Being hurt doesn’t change anything. The route still needs to be finished.”
“Yeah, but like, you could take a break. Or we could tell dispatch we need another truck.”
“And then what? We wait an hour for another truck, we’re even more behind schedule, Kevin has to fill out incident reports. Easier to just finish.”
Gavin wanted to argue but recognized the logic. This was the trap of wage labor—you were allowed to be hurt, but being hurt was inconvenient and created problems, so you learned not to mention it, learned to work through pain because admitting pain was admitting weakness was giving management ammunition to replace you.
“I got it,” Kevin called. He pulled something metal from the mechanism—a piece of broken shelving, maybe a foot long, bent and sharp. “Someone threw this out without wrapping it. Thing got caught in the teeth.”
He tossed it aside and wiped his hands on his pants, already dirty with grease and garbage residue. “Let’s see if it runs now.”
He climbed back in the cab and activated the compactor. The mechanism engaged, cycled properly, compressed a load successfully. Problem solved.
“Nice work,” Allan said as Kevin climbed out again.
Kevin shrugged. “Just part of the job. You learn the machinery, you learn how to fix it. My dad taught me that—if you don’t maintain your truck, your truck won’t maintain you.”
They climbed back in and continued the route, now running forty minutes behind schedule, which meant the rest of the afternoon would be rushed and pressured and allow no more breaks.
---
[Or did that happen?]
Actually, I’m not certain the compactor jammed. Or it jammed but I’m not certain it happened at 4:15 PM or whether Kevin fixed it or whether they had to call dispatch. The specific details are fuzzy in my memory or in my invention, and I can’t determine which.
Let me offer an alternative: the afternoon proceeded without incident. No mechanical failure, no Mrs. Kowalski with coffee, nothing remarkable. Just hours of the same work, stop after stop, bag after bag, the routine unbroken by anything worth narrating. Most days are like that—no crisis, no drama, just the steady accumulation of labor until the shift ends.
Or perhaps the more honest version is that I’m struggling with the middle of this story, with how to maintain narrative momentum when the actual experience being represented is repetitive and exhausting but not dramatic. I’ve given you character, I’ve established themes, I’ve created some interaction and tension. But plot requires escalation, requires stakes, requires something to happen that matters. And I don’t know what that something is.
Three men collect garbage. That’s the story. They do it every Tuesday and Friday, week after week, year after year. What plot emerges from that? What changes? What transforms?
Maybe nothing. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the postmodernist insight is that we expect stories to have meaning and shape and resolution because we want our lives to have meaning and shape and resolution, but lives are mostly just repetition punctuated by rare moments we later decide were significant.
Or maybe I’m using postmodernism as an excuse for not knowing how to write a compelling narrative.
Both things can be true simultaneously.
Let’s continue. It’s getting dark.
---
[7:00 PM - Return to Depot]
They finished the route at 7:05 PM, the truck full, both collectors exhausted. Kevin drove back to the depot through evening traffic, the city now fully dark, streetlights and headlights and building windows creating that particular urban glow that is never quite day or night but something suspended between.
At the depot, Kevin performed the post-trip inspection with the same thoroughness as the morning pre-trip. Allan filled out the route paperwork, documenting their time, noting the compactor issue in the incident log. Gavin helped clean out the cab, collecting the accumulated coffee cups and food wrappers and other detritus of a workday.
Other trucks were returning too, other crews ending their shifts, creating a temporary community of workers all performing the same closing rituals. There were greetings, complaints about routes, jokes that depended on shared experience. Someone mentioned that Sanchez had transferred to a different depot. Someone else said the union was negotiating better safety equipment but it would probably take months. The conversations were brief, functional, creating minimal connection before everyone dispersed to their private lives.
Allan was ready to go home, to be alone, to sink into his apartment and his books and not have to perform being a person anymore. But Kevin stopped him.
“You guys want to stay for a drink? Few of us are going to hang out in the break room for a bit.”
Allan hesitated. His instinct was to decline, to go home, but something about Kevin’s invitation—the casualness of it, the assumption that they might want to continue being together—made him pause.
“I don’t know,” Allan said. “It’s been a long day.”
“Just one drink. Come on.”
Gavin was also hesitant, already pulling out his phone, already checking what he might be missing elsewhere. But he had nothing particular to go home to, no plans more appealing than sitting in his room scrolling through social media and feeling vaguely depressed.
“Yeah, okay,” Gavin said. “One drink.”
Allan nodded. “Sure.”
---
[7:30 PM - The Break Room]
The break room was a dingy space with fluorescent lights that hummed too loudly, worn furniture that had been there for decades, a refrigerator that was older than Gavin, and a TV playing the news with sound off. Kevin had bought beer from a corner store—cheap domestic cans, six-pack for $8.99, not good beer but beer that served its purpose.
There were four other workers there, guys from different routes, all in various states of exhaustion and dirt. They greeted Kevin and Allan and Gavin without much ceremony, made space on the ratty couch, offered extra chairs. Someone was telling a story about a dog that had attacked him while he was collecting trash, everyone laughing at the detail about him running away and dropping the bag and the dog just sitting there wagging its tail like it was all a game.
Kevin handed out beers. Allan opened his and drank, the cold liquid cutting through the day’s dust and fatigue. Gavin checked his phone one more time, saw nothing interesting, and put it away, giving himself permission to be present.
For a while they just sat, tired men drinking cheap beer at the end of a shift, not saying much because there wasn’t much to say. But the silence was comfortable, the kind of silence that comes from shared experience, from not needing to explain or perform.
Eventually someone left, then someone else, until it was just the three of them—Kevin, Allan, and Gavin—sitting in a break room that smelled like industrial cleaner and old coffee and sweat.
“My daughter’s applying to grad schools,” Kevin said after a while. “Wants to be a CPA.”
“That’s good,” Allan said. “Accountants make decent money.”
“Yeah. I’m proud of her. She’s going to have a better life than I did. That’s what you want for your kids, right?”
“I guess. I don’t have kids.”
“You ever want them?”
Allan thought about it. “Maybe once. Not anymore. I can barely take care of myself.”
Kevin nodded, didn’t push it. They drank in silence for a minute.
“What about you?” Kevin asked Gavin. “You got family?”
“My parents are in Connecticut. Sister’s in California. We don’t really talk much.”
“Why not?”
Gavin shrugged. “We just don’t. Different lives, different values. They think I’m wasting my potential doing this. I think they’re sellouts who bought into the system. Nobody’s happy with anyone.”
“That’s sad,” Kevin said simply.
“It is what it is.”
“Doesn’t have to be.”
“Maybe not. But I’m not going to call them and pretend we have a relationship when we don’t. That’s fake.”
“Sometimes fake is better than nothing,” Kevin said. “Sometimes you do things because they matter to other people even if they don’t matter to you.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Gavin said. “That kind of thinking. Just do things because you’re supposed to, perform the rituals even when they’re empty. That’s how you end up living a life you don’t believe in.”
“Or that’s how you maintain connections,” Kevin said. “That’s how you don’t end up alone.”
The word hung there—alone—and all three men felt it, felt the truth of it. Allan was alone in his studio apartment most nights, reading books that no one else cared about, having no one to talk to except the voices in his head. Kevin was not alone—he had a wife, a daughter, a life—but he sometimes felt alone anyway, felt the gap between who he was inside and who he performed for his family. Gavin was surrounded by people constantly, both physically in the city and digitally through his phone, but felt alone in the most complete way possible, connected to no one, belonging nowhere.
“I don’t want to end up like you,” Gavin said to Allan, and immediately regretted it. “Sorry, that came out wrong.”
“No, it’s fine,” Allan said, though it wasn’t fine, though the words had landed exactly where they hurt. “You don’t want to end up forty-three and doing the same job, living alone, no prospects. I get it. I don’t want that either, but here we are.”
“That’s not what I meant. I just—you’re smart, you know so much about literature and philosophy and all that. And you’re still here. That scares me. Like, if you couldn’t escape, what chance do I have?”
Allan looked at his beer. “None. You have no chance. The idea that intelligence or education or awareness gets you out is a lie. The system doesn’t care about that. The system needs workers, and it will take anyone it can get and grind them down until they can’t work anymore. Kevin’s got the right idea—don’t fight it, just do the work, find meaning where you can, accept what you can’t change.”
“I don’t accept that,” Gavin said. “I can’t.”
“Then you’ll be miserable like me. Your choice.”
Kevin had been listening to this exchange with growing discomfort. “You’re not miserable, Allan.”
“I am, though. I’m deeply fucking miserable. I wake up every day and think about how my life went wrong, how I ended up here, how I wasted my potential. Every book I read reminds me of what I could have been. Every route we drive reminds me that this is what I am. And I can articulate exactly why I feel this way, I can cite Marcuse on one-dimensional man and Jameson on the cultural logic of late capitalism, and none of that helps because knowing why you’re miserable doesn’t make you less miserable.”
“So what do you do?” Gavin asked.
“I keep working. What else is there?”
Kevin finished his beer and crushed the can. “You know what your problem is? Both of you. You think too much about why things are the way they are and not enough about just living. You’re so worried about meaning and authenticity and all that shit that you forget to just... be.”
“That’s easy to say when you’re content,” Allan said.
“I’m not content. I’m just not waiting for something to make me content. This is my life. This is what I do. It’s not perfect but it’s not terrible. And I don’t need it to be more than it is.”
“But doesn’t that feel like giving up?” Gavin asked.
“No,” Kevin said. “It feels like acceptance. There’s a difference.”
“I don’t see it.”
“I know you don’t. Maybe you will when you’re older. Or maybe you won’t. But I’m fifty-one years old, my body hurts, I’m probably going to die in the next twenty years if I’m lucky. And I don’t want to spend that time angry about what my life isn’t. I’d rather spend it appreciating what it is.”
This hit both Allan and Gavin hard, this reminder that Kevin was living on borrowed time, that his father had died at fifty-three and Kevin had already outlived that by two years. Mortality made philosophy seem less important somehow, or more important but in a different way.
“I think about my dad a lot,” Kevin said quietly. “He died at work. Heart attack while driving the truck. Just pulled over, put the truck in park, and died. That’s how they found him—sitting in the driver’s seat, looking like he was just taking a break.”
“Jesus,” Gavin said.
“Yeah. And I think about that. About whether that’s how I’ll go too. And you know what I decided? That if I’m going to die doing this work, I’d rather die doing it well, doing it with pride, than spend my whole life resenting it. Maybe that’s stupid. Maybe that’s just accepting exploitation, like you said earlier. But it’s how I’ve chosen to live.”
Allan felt something crack open inside him, some defensive structure giving way. “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to accept this without feeling like I’ve betrayed myself.”
“You haven’t betrayed yourself,” Kevin said. “You’re doing honest work. That’s not betrayal.”
“But I could have been something else. I could have—”
“You could have been a lot of things. So could I. So could Gavin. But we’re this. And maybe this is enough if we decide it’s enough.”
Gavin shook his head. “I can’t believe that. I can’t accept that my life is just going to be collecting trash until I’m too broken to do it anymore.”
“Then do something else,” Kevin said simply.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever you want. But stop waiting for permission or for the perfect opportunity or for the system to change. If you want something different, go make it different.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s not impossible either. You’re young, you’ve got options I don’t have. Allan’s got fewer options but still some. You’re not trapped. You just think you’re trapped.”
“We are trapped,” Allan said. “By economics, by class, by age, by lack of alternative credentials. The belief that anyone can do anything is neoliberal mythology designed to make inequality seem like personal failure.”
“Maybe,” Kevin said. “Or maybe you’re using structural analysis to avoid taking responsibility for your own choices.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? You read all these books about why everything is wrong, why the system is broken, why nothing can change. And then you use that as justification for not trying to change anything. That’s convenient, Allan. That’s comfortable.”
Allan felt anger rising, hot and defensive. “You think I’m comfortable? You think I like living like this?”
“No, but I think you like being right about why you’re living like this. I think your misery has become your identity, and changing it would mean giving up being right.”
“Fuck you,” Allan said, standing up.
“Sit down,” Kevin said, not unkindly. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to tell you that you’re not as stuck as you think.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand that you’re smart enough to figure something out if you wanted to. But you don’t want to. You want to collect trash and read theory and feel superior to people like me who just accept things.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
Allan didn’t have an answer because part of him suspected Kevin was right, that his intellectualism was a defense mechanism, that understanding why things were wrong was easier than trying to make them right.
He sat back down. Drank his beer. Said nothing.
Gavin had been watching this exchange with fascination and discomfort. “So what, we should just be happy with shit wages and destroyed bodies and no future?”
“No,” Kevin said. “You should organize with your union, you should fight for better conditions, you should demand change. But you should also live your life while you’re doing that. You should find meaning and connection and joy where you can. Because if you’re waiting until everything is perfect before you allow yourself to be happy, you’ll never be happy.”
“That’s such a boomer attitude.”
Kevin laughed. “Maybe. But I’m still less miserable than both of you.”
They sat in silence after that, nursing their beers, each man alone with his thoughts. The TV continued playing news without sound, images of protests and politicians and weather reports that none of them were watching. The fluorescent lights hummed their monotonous note. Outside, the city continued its endless churn of activity, millions of people moving through their own private struggles, all of it vast and indifferent and ongoing.
---
[10:30 PM - Or maybe this is wrong]
Actually, I’m not certain that conversation happened the way I described it. Or it happened but the words were different, less articulate, more fragmented. Real conversations don’t flow neatly from topic to topic with clear arguments and rebuttals. They meander, they get interrupted, they trail off into uncomfortable silence.
And Kevin probably didn’t say those things about Allan using theory as defense. That’s too perceptive, too much like Kevin is a wise mentor figure delivering hard truths. Real Kevin would probably just shrug and drink his beer and not engage with Allan’s intellectualizing because engaging with it never goes anywhere productive.
So maybe the conversation was more like this:
They sat in the break room drinking beer. Kevin mentioned his daughter. Allan said something about how he didn’t have kids. Gavin talked about not talking to his family. They were quiet for a while. Someone made a joke about the route. They laughed a little. More silence. Kevin mentioned his dad dying. They talked about that briefly, uncomfortably, because mortality is hard to discuss. More beer. More silence. Eventually they left.
That version is more realistic but less dramatically satisfying. It doesn’t develop character or advance themes or provide emotional catharsis. It’s just three tired men drinking cheap beer because they don’t want to go home yet, having fragmentary conversations that start and stop without resolution.
Which version is true? The dramatically satisfying version where they have a meaningful exchange? Or the realistic version where they mostly just sit in tired silence?
Both. Neither. I don’t know.
The postmodernist answer is that both versions exist in the text now, and choosing between them is impossible and unnecessary. But that answer feels evasive, feels like I’m avoiding making firm narrative choices by claiming everything is indeterminate.
Let me try once more, differently:
---
[10:30 PM - Third attempt at this scene]
They were on their third beers, and the alcohol was working on their exhausted bodies, making everything slightly loose and unsteady. The break room felt warm after the cold outside, and none of them wanted to leave it, to go back into the winter night and their separate lives.
Allan was thinking about the items they’d found in the trash that morning, the photographs and documents that were now crushed and mixed with all the other waste. He’d been thinking about them on and off all day, trying to construct a narrative from the fragmentary images he’d seen, trying to make them mean something.
“That stuff we found this morning,” he said. “The photographs.”
“What about it?” Kevin asked.
“I keep thinking about who those people were. What their lives were like. Why their stuff ended up in the trash.”
“Someone died,” Kevin said. “Someone cleaned out their apartment. That’s usually what it is.”
“But all those memories, all those moments—someone had a life full of experiences, and it all ended up in our truck.”
“That’s what happens,” Kevin said. “Everyone dies, everything gets thrown away eventually.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Why would it bother me?”
“Because it means nothing matters. If we all end up as trash in the end, what’s the point of any of it?”
Kevin thought about this. “The point is that it mattered while it was happening. Those people in the photographs—they were alive, they had experiences, they felt things. That it ended doesn’t mean it wasn’t real while it was happening.”
“But it’s gone now. It’s like it never existed.”
“It existed,” Kevin said firmly. “Just because we don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Gavin was listening to this exchange, scrolling through his Instagram feed at the same time, seeing posts from people at bars and parties, people who had better jobs and better lives, or at least people who were better at performing better lives. He felt the familiar wash of envy and resentment and self-loathing.
“Everything’s content now,” Gavin said. “Like, those photographs would have been content if I’d posted them. Would have gotten likes, comments, people performing empathy about the passage of time and lost memories. And then it would have disappeared into the feed and no one would remember it. It’s all just content, consumed and discarded.”
“You’re really depressing, you know that?” Kevin said.
“I’m realistic.”
“You’re twenty-nine. You’re supposed to be optimistic about the future, not despairing about how everything is content.”
“What is there to be optimistic about? Climate change? Inequality? The fact that I’m going to be paying off student loans until I’m fifty? That I’ll never be able to afford a house or kids or any of the things I was promised growing up?”
“You could do something about it,” Kevin said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Organize, protest, vote, something.”
Gavin laughed bitterly. “You think voting changes anything? The system is designed to prevent change. Both parties serve capital. Individual action is meaningless. I could recycle every day and it wouldn’t matter because corporations are destroying the planet. I could work three jobs and still not afford basic security because wages haven’t kept up with costs for forty years. The game is rigged.”
“So you’ve given up.”
“I’ve accepted reality.”
“That’s the same thing,” Allan said, echoing the earlier conversation.
“No, it’s not. Giving up means you had hope and lost it. I never had hope to begin with. I grew up knowing the world was fucked. 9/11 happened when I was five. The financial crisis happened when I was in middle school. My entire life has been one crisis after another. Why would I be hopeful?”
Kevin didn’t have an answer for that. He’d grown up in a different time, when things seemed more stable, when the future seemed more certain. His generation had bought into the American Dream and it had mostly worked out—not perfectly, not without struggle, but well enough. Gavin’s generation had been promised the same dream and received something else entirely.
“I’m sorry,” Kevin said after a while.
“For what?”
“That your generation got screwed. That we didn’t leave things better for you.”
Gavin shrugged. “Not your fault individually. It’s structural.”
“Still. It’s not right.”
They sat in silence after that, each man processing their own thoughts, feeling the weight of the conversation and the beer and the exhaustion of the day.
Allan was thinking about what Kevin had said earlier, about how he used theory to avoid responsibility. He didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t entirely dismiss it either. Maybe his reading was a form of avoidance. Maybe understanding why things were wrong was easier than trying to fix them. Maybe he was comfortable in his misery because at least it was familiar.
But what was the alternative? Stop reading, stop thinking, just work and accept and be content like Kevin? That felt like giving up his only remaining dignity, the last thing that separated him from being just a body performing labor.
Gavin was thinking about his future, about whether he’d still be doing this in ten years, in twenty years. The thought filled him with something close to panic. He couldn’t imagine being forty-three like Allan, still collecting trash, still living alone, still reading books about why everything was wrong. He couldn’t imagine being fifty-one like Kevin, body broken, counting years until retirement, finding meaning in small things because big things were impossible.
But he also couldn’t imagine an alternative. What would he do instead? His degree was useless, his job experience was fragmented, his skills were obsolete before he’d finished acquiring them. The creative economy had chewed him up and spit him out. And garbage collection at least had benefits, stability, a union. It was better than most of the alternatives available to people like him.
Kevin was thinking about his father, about how his father had done this work for thirty years and died in the truck, and about how he was now living past the age his father had reached, and about how every day past fifty-three felt borrowed, like he was trespassing in time he wasn’t supposed to have.
He thought about his daughter, about how proud he was that she was going to have a better life, and about how that made his own life feel meaningful even if it was hard, even if it hurt his body, even if it wasn’t what he’d dreamed about as a kid.
He thought about Allan and Gavin, about how they were both lost in their own ways, both struggling with questions he’d stopped asking years ago. He wanted to help them but didn’t know how, didn’t have the words or the wisdom, could only offer the simple truths he’d learned: show up, do the work, find meaning where you can, accept what you can’t change.
But maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe that was just capitulation to a bad system. Maybe Allan was right that acceptance was collaboration with exploitation. Maybe Gavin was right that the game was rigged and nothing individual mattered.
Kevin didn’t know. He was just a garbage collector, not a philosopher, not a revolutionary, just a man trying to get through his days without too much pain and too much despair.
---
[11:45 PM - Late Night]
They were still there at midnight when the clock rolled over from Tuesday to Wednesday, from February 9th to February 10th, sitting in a break room in a depot in a city that never slept but did slow down sometimes, in the hours when even New York paused to breathe.
They’d finished the beer. They were still tired but past the point where tired meant wanting to sleep, into that strange second wind where exhaustion becomes a kind of wakefulness.
“I don’t know what we’re doing,” Allan said suddenly.
“What do you mean?” Kevin asked.
“I mean this. Sitting here, drinking beer, talking about meaning and the future. What’s the point? We’re going to wake up tomorrow and do the same thing, and the day after that, and the day after that. Nothing changes. Nothing ever changes.”
“Things change,” Kevin said. “Just slowly.”
“Not fast enough. Not in time to matter.”
“To matter for what?”
“For us. For our lives. The system might change eventually, but we’ll be dead or retired or too broken to benefit from it.”
“So we should give up?”
“I don’t know,” Allan said. “Maybe. Maybe that’s the only honest response.”
Kevin shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve seen things get better. Not perfect, but better. When I started, we didn’t have the safety equipment we have now. The union fought for that. Workers organized and made things better. Not completely better, but better. And my daughter’s going to have it easier than I did, and her kids might have it easier than her. That’s progress. Slow, insufficient progress, but progress.”
“Unless climate change kills everyone first,” Gavin said.
“That’s helpful,” Kevin said drily.
“Just being realistic.”
“You keep saying that. I don’t think you know what realistic means. Realistic means seeing things as they are, not as the worst possible version of what they might be.”
“Things usually are the worst possible version,” Gavin said. “Hope is just denial with better PR.”
Kevin sighed. “I’m too old for this. I’m going home.”
He stood up, gathered his things, and looked at Allan and Gavin. “You two need to figure some shit out. I don’t know what, but something. Because this—” he gestured vaguely at them, at the break room, at everything “—this isn’t sustainable. You can’t live like this, all bitter and angry and convinced nothing matters.”
“Why not?” Allan asked. “What’s the alternative?”
“Finding something that does matter. Family, friends, hobbies, causes, whatever. Something outside yourself that you care about.”
“I care about things,” Allan said defensively.
“No, you care about ideas. That’s not the same.”
“Ideas are all we have.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Kevin said, more forcefully than usual. “Ideas are fine but they’re not enough. You need people, Allan. You need connections. You’re going to kill yourself sitting alone reading philosophy about why everything is meaningless.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I don’t know. Call someone. Go somewhere. Do something that involves other human beings. Stop treating your intelligence as a prison.”
And with that, Kevin left, walking out of the break room into the depot into the night, leaving Allan and Gavin sitting in fluorescent light feeling like they’d been scolded by a disappointed parent.
“He’s not wrong,” Gavin said after a moment.
“I know.”
“But he doesn’t get it either. It’s easy to tell people to find meaning and connect with others when you already have that. When you don’t, when you’re starting from zero, it’s not so simple.”
“Nothing’s simple,” Allan said.
“No. But some things are harder than others.”
They sat in silence for a while longer. The building was quiet now, everyone else gone, just the two of them and the hum of fluorescent lights and the distant sound of traffic from the street.
“That stuff we found this morning,” Gavin said. “The photographs. You threw them in the compactor, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So they’re gone now. Compressed with all the other trash, sitting in a landfill or burned in an incinerator.”
“Yeah.”
“And whoever those people were, their stories are gone too.”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t that make you sad?”
Allan thought about it. “Yes. But everything makes me sad. That’s my problem.”
“What if we hadn’t thrown them away? What if we’d kept them, tried to figure out who they belonged to?”
“Then what? Return them to someone who clearly didn’t want them? Turn them over to authorities who would file them somewhere and forget about them? Make a project out of investigating someone else’s discarded memories?”
“Any of those would be better than just throwing them away.”
“Would they? Or would they just be us imposing meaning on things that the original owners decided were meaningless?”
“But they weren’t meaningless to the people in the photographs.”
“They were meaningless to whoever threw them out.”
Gavin shook his head. “I hate that you’re probably right.”
“Me too.”
They finished their beers. It was well past midnight now, technically Wednesday morning, and they both had to work again on Friday, had to wake up and put on their uniforms and climb into the truck and do it all again.
“You want to know what scares me most?” Gavin asked.
“What?”
“That Kevin’s right. That acceptance is the only option. That I’m going to end up like him—not miserable but not happy either, just... existing. Going through the motions, finding small pleasures, waiting for retirement and then death.”
“There are worse fates,” Allan said.
“I know. But there should be better ones too.”
“Should doesn’t mean anything. The universe doesn’t care about should.”
“I know that too. But I keep hoping anyway.”
Allan looked at him, this kid who wasn’t really a kid anymore but still seemed young, still seemed like he had possibilities that Allan had lost or never had. “Don’t lose that,” Allan said. “The hope. Even if it’s irrational, even if it’s denial. It’s better than what I have.”
“What do you have?”
“Clarity. Awareness. Understanding of exactly how fucked everything is. And it’s not better. It’s worse. Knowledge without hope is just torture.”
Gavin didn’t respond to that because what could he say? Allan was right. They were both right. Kevin was right. Everyone was right about how hard everything was, how little control they had, how the future seemed darker than the past.
But being right didn’t help anything.
---
[1:00 AM - Departure]
They finally left the depot a little after one in the morning. The night was cold and clear, the city quieter than it ever got but never silent, still full of trucks and taxis and people whose lives operated on different schedules than the nine-to-five world.
Kevin had already gone home an hour earlier. Allan and Gavin stood in the parking lot next to their cars, neither quite ready to leave, to end this strange extended day that had started nineteen hours ago.
“We should do this again,” Gavin said. “Not the work, I mean. But like, the talking.”
Allan was surprised by this. “Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s depressing as hell, but it’s also... I don’t know. It’s nice to talk to someone who gets it.”
“I thought you had friends.”
“I have people I hang out with. That’s not the same as friends.”
Allan understood this distinction. “Yeah, okay. We can do this again.”
“Next Tuesday?”
“Or Friday. Whenever.”
They stood there awkwardly, not sure how to end the conversation, not having the language for this kind of male friendship that was tentative and real but not expressed through conventional emotional vocabulary.
“See you Friday,” Gavin said finally.
“Friday,” Allan agreed.
Gavin got in his car and drove away. Allan watched him go, then got in his own car, sat in the cold cab for a minute before starting the engine. His back hurt, his shoulders hurt, his hands hurt. His head hurt from the beer and the conversation and the thinking.
He thought about what Kevin had said, about needing people, about his intelligence being a prison. He thought about the photographs they’d thrown away, about all the lives compressed into waste, about whether any of it mattered.
He didn’t have answers. He just had questions, multiplying endlessly, creating more confusion than clarity.
He started the car and drove home through empty streets, passing buildings full of sleeping people, past businesses closed for the night, past the endless sprawl of the city that would wake up in a few hours and start over, the whole cycle repeating, garbage being created and collected and disposed of, money being made and spent and lost, lives being lived and ended and forgotten.
When he got to his apartment, he was too tired to read. He just lay on his bed still fully clothed and stared at the ceiling until sleep finally came, offering temporary escape from consciousness, from thinking, from the weight of being aware.
---
[Meanwhile - Or maybe simultaneously - Time is uncertain here]
Kevin drove home to Queens, to his small house where his wife Teresa was already asleep. He entered quietly, took off his boots in the mudroom, washed his hands in the kitchen sink, stood for a moment in the dark house listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of a neighbor’s TV through the wall.
He thought about Allan and Gavin, about how lost they both seemed, and felt grateful for his own life even as he recognized its limitations. He wasn’t happy in any ecstatic sense, but he was stable, he had people who mattered to him, he had routine and purpose and the knowledge that his work was useful.
Maybe that was enough. Or maybe it wasn’t and he was just better at convincing himself it was. He honestly didn’t know.
He went upstairs, checked on his daughter who was still awake studying at her desk, headphones on, illuminated by laptop screen. She didn’t see him watching from the doorway. He felt a wave of love and pride and fear for her future.
Then he went to bed, where Teresa shifted in her sleep but didn’t wake, and he lay there in the dark thinking about his father who had died in a garbage truck, about his own body that was breaking down, about time and mortality and whether he’d lived a good life.
No answers came. Just the questions, cycling through his mind until exhaustion overcame them and he slept.
---
[And Gavin]
Gavin drove to Bushwick, to his apartment where his roommates were still awake playing video games in the living room. He said hi, declined their invitation to join them, went to his small bedroom and sat on his bed scrolling through his phone.
He posted one last time before sleep, a photo he’d taken at the depot at the end of shift—the rows of garbage trucks in the dark, sodium lights casting orange glow, his caption: “Another day in late capitalism’s waste management system. Everything is content, everything is trash, the distinction has collapsed.”
It got twelve likes within five minutes. He didn’t feel anything about this.
He thought about the conversation in the break room, about Allan’s misery and Kevin’s acceptance and his own fear of becoming either of them. He thought about hope and hopelessness and whether there was any meaningful difference.
He thought about the photographs they’d thrown away, about how he could have posted them, could have made them into content, could have generated engagement through other people’s discarded memories. He felt guilty for thinking this way, for seeing everything through the lens of content creation, for being unable to experience anything without immediately considering its value as post.
This was what the internet had done to him—made him unable to live directly, always mediating experience through the possibility of sharing it, of performing it, of converting lived reality into digital representation.
He put his phone down and tried to just sit there, just be present in his room in his body in the moment. But within thirty seconds he had picked the phone back up, checking for new notifications, scrolling through the feed, consuming other people’s performances while crafting his own.
He went to sleep with his phone on his chest, still scrolling, until sleep took the phone from his hand and he descended into dreams about garbage and photographs and endless routes through dark streets.
---
[February 10th, 6:30 AM - Or is it?]
The depot in the predawn darkness of Wednesday. Allan arrived first, sitting in his car with the engine running, staring through the foggy windshield at nothing. Kevin arrived exactly on time, gathering his lunch cooler and thermos. Gavin arrived three minutes late, holding expensive coffee.
They converged on truck number 47. Kevin performed his inspection. Allan got the route paperwork. Gavin stood nearby on his phone. They climbed in and drove away.
The route was different on Wednesday—different streets, different buildings, different trash. But the work was the same. Stop, grab, throw, compress, move, repeat. The cycle continuing, endless, necessary, pointless, meaningful, both and neither.
At a stop on West 86th Street, Allan pulled a bag from a pile and it split open, spilling its contents across the sidewalk. Coffee grounds, food waste, plastic containers, paper towels. And underneath, a photograph—black and white, faded, showing people at a gathering, smiling at something outside the frame.
Allan looked at it. Picked it up. Showed it to Kevin and Gavin.
“Someone’s trash,” Kevin said.
“Or someone’s memories,” Allan said.
“Same thing,” Gavin said.
Allan put the photograph back in the broken bag, gathered the spilled garbage, threw it all into the compactor. The mechanism pulled it in and crushed it.
They moved to the next stop.
---
[Or did that happen?]
No. That last section is false. Or maybe it happened but on a different day. Or maybe I’m creating a circular structure, suggesting that the same day repeats eternally, that the story loops back on itself, that there is no escape from the routine.
The truth is that I don’t know how to end this story. I’ve written nearly twenty-two thousand words about three men collecting garbage on a Tuesday in February, and nothing has happened. No plot, no transformation, no resolution. Just work and conversation and exhaustion and then going home and then waking up to do it again.
Is that enough? Does that constitute a story?
The postmodernist answer is yes—that the absence of traditional narrative arc is itself the point, that refusing resolution is more honest than imposing false closure. But that answer feels evasive, feels like I’m using theoretical justification to excuse structural weakness.
So let me try once more to end this:
---
[The Real Ending - Or Another Attempt]
On February 9th, 2025, three men collected garbage in New York City. They worked from 6:30 AM until 7:00 PM, driving the same route they drove every Tuesday, collecting bags and throwing them into a compactor, watching the city’s waste disappear into compression and disposal.
They found things in the trash that made them think about meaning and memory. They had conversations about work and life and whether any of it mattered. They drank beer together after their shift and tried to connect across the gaps in their experience and understanding.
Nothing was resolved. Allan remained intellectually paralyzed, knowing too much about why things were wrong to believe they could be fixed. Kevin remained pragmatically accepting, finding meaning in small things because large meanings were unavailable. Gavin remained ironically detached, performing cynicism as defense against caring about things that might hurt him.
The next day they woke up and did it again. And they will do it again Friday. And next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. Until they retire or die or quit or get reassigned to different trucks. Until their bodies break down completely and they can’t do the work anymore. Until the city’s waste overwhelms the system. Until something changes or nothing changes and life continues in its repetitive, exhausting, necessary, meaningless, meaningful way.
That’s the story. Three men, one truck, one day. The labor of collecting waste and the labor of making meaning and the question of whether there’s any difference between them.
I’m sorry if that’s not satisfying. I’m sorry if you wanted transformation or redemption or at least a clear ending. But this is what I have to offer: three men doing work that needs doing, struggling with questions that have no answers, trying to get through their days without too much pain and too much despair.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it isn’t. You decide.
---
[Final Note From the Narrator]
This story took place on Tuesday, February 9, 2025, or it took place on multiple Tuesdays collapsed into one, or it didn’t take place at all except in the space between my writing and your reading. Allan, Kevin, and Gavin exist, or they’re composites, or they’re entirely invented. The conversations happened, or they’re approximations, or they’re what I wished had happened.
All fiction is lies that point toward truth. All representation is distortion. All narrative is selection that eliminates more than it includes. I have tried to tell you a story about three men and their work and their struggles, and I have failed because failure is inevitable, because the gap between experience and language is unbridgeable, because no matter how many words I write I cannot make you feel what they felt or understand what they understood.
But I tried. That has to count for something.
They collected trash. They compressed it. They disposed of it. And tomorrow they will do it again. And in that repetition there is meaning or there is no meaning or meaning is something we create through the act of paying attention, of caring, of refusing to accept that everything is waste.
Choose which version you believe. It won’t change their lives but it might change how you understand your own.
The garbage truck is still driving through dark streets. The compactor is still crushing waste. The work continues whether we pay attention or not.
And that, finally, is the story: labor continues, meaning is contested, life persists in the face of futility. Not a satisfying ending but an honest one.
Or as honest as fiction can be.
Which is to say: not very.
But it’s what we have.
