Orientation by Daniel Orozco Read Free Book Online

stab hard. But then you find the rhythm of the run, or more accurately, you feel it find you , slipping into you like it was waiting for you along your route, and its heat spreads through you like a flame flaring up, and then the endorphins kick in and the pain is gone and everything is steady and true. There’s no traffic at this hour. I run through the blinking yellow lights. I go along the boulevard under the freeway, then head into the neighborhoods above it, where the rich people live. A few of them are just getting up. I can hear their alarm clocks beep, see their lights flick on. I can see the steam rolling out of their bathroom windows. I can smell their coffee brewing. I keep going, up where the roads are unpaved and the houses are farther apart, deep in the trees. Except for the occasional yapping dog or the rumble of garbage trucks down below, it’s just me up here—my breathing, the pulse in my neck, and the slap of my feet on the ground.
    When I get home, the sun is out and the rest of the city is awake. I have plenty of time to cool down, stretch again, then eat and get to work by seven-thirty.
    *   *   *
    I’ve been at the warehouse for ten years. I started out of high school. I work on the stock floor. We’re called Central Supply, and we assemble and ship orders for the county school district, everything from chalk and erasers to lightbulbs and toilet paper and basketballs on up to filing cabinets and desks. I used to be the newest guy until Ruben was hired. But they still call me the New Guy. Some kind of joke, I guess.
    Ruben is about my age, and every afternoon he disappears with one of the drivers to smoke a joint out back behind the dumpsters. Ruben is Mexican, and when he first started here, he corrected us when we called him Ru ben, telling us that it should be pronounced Ru ben . From then on everybody made sure to call him Ru ben, which is what he goes by now.
    The rest of the guys have been at the warehouse forever. Dave has been here the longest. Our foreman, Mack, says Dave came with the building—he was seventeen when he started, and it’s been twenty-four years now. In a way I owe my life to Dave. With the exception of Ruben, the men I work with are old and unhealthy. They’re all overweight, and they smoke constantly, even while they eat. Dave is the worst of them. I’ve watched him get older and sicker—he had cancer surgery a while ago—and after a few years he started getting to me. I drank a lot then, nights after work, weekends in front of the TV. You could say I was another person back then. I lived with my folks rent-free. Nothing was expected of me. I thought I had it made. But I started worrying about things. I was afraid the warehouse would be my whole life, like it was for Dave. I counted the cigarettes he smoked and the cups of coffee he drank. I counted the sugar cubes he ate. He grabbed them by the handful and snacked on them. “Sweets for the sweet,” he’d say. I watched him lick the mayonnaise off his fingers from the sandwiches his wife made him. I watched him hop down from the loading dock—a three-foot jump—and then stoop for a minute to catch his breath. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, and he got annoyed. “Am I making your heart go pitty-pat?” he said. In a way, he was. I started running that night. I went out after dark so nobody would see me. I didn’t even make it around the block before I ended up puking in somebody’s bushes. I thought I was going to die. My folks thought I was nuts. I kept at it, though, probably the only thing I’ve ever kept at.
    I run every day now. I dropped forty-five pounds, and I don’t drink anymore. My heart rate at rest is just under fifty beats per minute. I fall asleep every night like that, and I never need more than six hours. When I look in the mirror now, I see somebody who doesn’t disgust me. I see somebody who knows the difference between what he does for a paycheck and what really matters in this