At a quarter past eleven, Hector feels a hungry rumble. He knows he can wait because he has waited so many times before. One out of about every thirty squares of cheese at work is torn in half, rendered unusable. Some corporate manual probably indicates that such cheese squares must be disposed of in the food-waste-can but it would be easier to imagine Jesus Christ himself stopping in for a fish sandwich than it would be to imagine someone caring enough to stop Hector from just scarfing the torn cheeses. He eats the first five rejects of every shift then starts to pile them up in a lonely corner. When his shift is about to end, he makes a “burgadilla,” squishing the gooey pile into a bun, impregnating it with a single pickle.
Today the cheese column looks different. Its orange seems less fluorescent, somehow milkier. Something about the engineering has changed: square after square peels off perfectly, never clinging to its neighbor. It is as if this new cheese was imbued with a sense of duty. Nobody would notice or care if Hector ate a flawless cheese but he can’t compromise the one rule of his one game. Without this flickering mental evaluation he would turn into a true zombie slave, he thinks. He starts to count, estimating that he has already peeled something like seventy-five unripped cheeses. Soon enough, a hundred, plus or minus.
Every other action recedes into autopilot, even more than usual. Two-hundred indistinghuishable cheeses, he counts. No blemish ever appeared. Clock-time evaporates; now time is measured in cheese. Hector blows through his usual break on the way to five-hundred, a full packaged column, sometimes enough to last an entire day. He knows he will investigate as soon as the shift ends. What did they do? How is this possible?
“¿Quiere fumar, güey?” Juan asks as usual just before three o’clock.
“Not today. I’m ocupado.” Hector doesn’t even turn his head. Juan shrugs and saunters off.
He is now just creating a new stack from the old one, piling square after square of immaculate cheese, hardly breathing, his heartbeat in sync with the tangy slap of each new layer hitting the stack. At 3:03, he peels the penultimate cheese, revealing the final smiling cheese, the fulfillment of an impossibility. His gloved fingers pinch its corner. He holds it up to his nose and rotates it, triple-checking in vain for any break of its symmetry.
“Bro,” he breathes to himself.
Hector calls over to Juan, who is engrossed in a pokerlike phone game.
“Watch my station. There’s no one here. I’ll be back in thirty seconds.”
“OK.”
Hector bolts to the ice-cold restock room. It always reminds him of his old school library. The shelves tower and the smells confuse. The long prisms of cheese come in every week; someone else files them away on the right side just behind the door.
Yeah, something’s up. The packaging is different. That’s a different shade of red. He flips the prism over and begins to read the ingredients before realizing he has no idea what he would even be looking for. He takes a picture on his phone then hoists the plasticwrapped cheese under his arm and reemerges into the hot kitchen.
Juan gives Hector a nonplussed look.
“Hay un millón de quesos allí, güey.”
“I need to check something.”
Hector strides past Juan and tears open the fresh package. It takes him seventeen minutes to restack five-hundred more perfect cheeses in an alternating one-eighth-rotation pattern. They glide as he peels them, never once resisting. Every cheese is every other cheese.
A twang of sadness hits Hector as he realizes his game is over. No more counting, no more waiting, no more munching, no more burgadillas. His hunger, so long ignored, shivers him. He turns toward the customer bathroom and grabs his backpack.
“Juan, uh, put that cheese back in the package. It’s right there.”
“¿Cómo?” Juan looks at Hector in disbelief.
Turning his head as he walks past Juan towards the exit, Hector appraises his tower and shakes his head.
He walks fast, tilted forward, double-gripping his backpack straps. He left work barely halfway through his shift but he intends to return soon, at least on some instinctual level. His head is empty, cleared out by the bigness of this deal.
The library is an eight-minute walk away. Between 2:30 and 5:00 it is its busiest, about 30% full on an average weekday, with the highest ratio of children to homeless. Hector bursts in and heads straight for the row of computers. Four stinking men in petrified jackets sit paralyzed in front of heinous pornography, breathing in irregular pulses. Hector passes them and sits at the last computer in the row.
He realizes he has no idea what to type.
cheese science
There’s a blog run by some hobbyist in Lancashire, an article in a PopSci periodical, and printable activities for schoolteachers.
cheeseology
A shop in Tampa pops up. This is not the right name of the discipline, he thinks.
what are the components of cheese
Hector wonders if the miracle cheese is even cheese as defined by usdairy.com, having four ingredients: milk, salt, a bacterial culture, and an enzyme. He whips out his photo from earlier. A much-longer-than-four list of ingredients confronts him. Sodium citrate? Calcium phosphate? Is that what makes the difference? What the heck is natamycin?
Tabs accumulate on the local-government-issued computer. Hector loses himself to a damp bliss, ocean waves of information lapping at him but never penetrating. Five minutes turns into an hour. He ignores his phone exploding in his pocket.
donde estas
regresa aqui amigo !!!
estas bien??
He ignores his initial plan to return within half-an-hour. He ignores his growling hunger. He ignores the entire existence of his job. His job is an unspoken agreement, sort-of protected by a paper contract, an exchange of time and life energy for numbers in an account, numbers he watches go down so that he can live indoors instead of outdoors, so that he can turn on lights at will, so that he can eat more than he can find in non-existent nature. His job is nothing at all. It has no substance and no essence. Cheese is the essence of substance. Its chaotic, probabilistic tendency to tear into an unpredictable shape at an unpredictable time imbue it with a sense of organic meaningfulness; now the will of mankind has scrubbed away its most endearing behavior besides melting.
“Oh God,” mouths Hector. He thinks, what if it melts in a perfect square too?
The thought stabs him in the soul. He cannot bear the imagined loss of the random lactic variations that have amused him enough to drag his consciousness along and prevent time itself from becoming a uniform, uninflected circle. It tears and it melts, never twice the same way. It is the only Law of the Universe that has any contact with him. The others reach in other directions, towards scientists and artists, into the stars and into the particles that comprise them, not into the schedules of burgerworkers. If the Universe loses contact with him, is he even alive? Does he even exist? That his answer to those questions is not an immediate, emphatic “yes” shrivels his soul. He recoils from the screen, a portal to a realm of information he cannot grasp, whose existence nonetheless shreds him. His neck stiffens and his lips sag. Hector, as he knows himself, dies, silently, without disrupting his neighbor’s masturbation.
If Hector had been a little more detailed-oriented he would have eventually found Oberg et al’s 2005 article on the influence of calcium on the protein matrix structure of nonfat mozzarella, a collaboration between the Microbiology Department of Weber State in Ogden, Utah, and Utah State’s Department of Nutrition and Food Science’s Western Dairy Center, with funding provided by Dairy Management Inc. based in Rosemont, Illinois. The article controls for a narrow range of acidity and thus demonstrates that while 0.3% calcium nonfat mozzarella cheese has a more homogenous texture under electron microscope inspection, the additional folds and serum pockets in the protein matrix of 0.6% calcium nonfat mozzarella cheese make it less adhesive and prevent excess irregular flow when melted. This clue would have led Hector to investigate calcium levels in so-called American cheeses as purchased by multinational gigafranchises such as his employer, and although the findings of internal laboratory experiments are, in general, hidden from public view, a video of a presentation from a recent food science conference in St. Louis was never set to ‘unlisted’ and was indeed accessible using the keywords ‘calcium,’ ‘American,’ ‘cheese,’ ‘adhesiveness,’ and ‘study,’ or some other resonant list of keywords. The presentation, given by a bearded man with purple, blotchy skin, ends with a flamboyant demonstration of the uniform unstickiness of a new type of square American cheese slice in which the purple man haphazardly grabs square after square from a stack identical to the one Hector unwrapped, no square tearing even as the presenter flops them around, at one point even slapping the remaining stack with a single cheese over and over, proving that it will always release and never attach to its neighboring slice. In his closing remarks, the presenter explains that industrial capacity to deliver the new cheese formula to all franchises will ramp up by the third quarter of the following year, which is to say the exact week before Hector noticed a change. Instead, his life lost all meaning.