Infinite Vest

(A lyrical detour through vocational inertia and ambient longing)

There are days when Joe K.¹ — lineman, municipal employee, midwestern male age 44 and change — feels as though he’s not so much driving the county’s main road² as being slowly absorbed into it.

He’s in the cab of the utility truck again.³ Still. Always.

The cab smells faintly of rubber insulation and the stale aftertaste of spilled coffee, which has somehow steeped itself into the upholstery. It’s a Tuesday, but not in any meaningful or ontological way — just a sort of bureaucratic consensus between his wristwatch and the Dispatch sheet curled on the passenger seat like a sleeping cat.

He tells himself he’s searching for another overload,⁴ which is technically true, since the grid’s been weird lately. Overdrawn. Wavering. There’s always another overload. There’s always a breaker somewhere buckling under the weight of something it was never meant to carry.

And isn’t that, like, a metaphor?⁵

The morning sun scrapes low along the windshield, that sepia haze you get when it’s been dry too long and the air has weight but no temperature. And Joe (short for Josef) K. is here again, threading the arterial two-lane blacktop like a clot in search of a hemorrhage. He’s looking for the overload, a term which, in the industry, can mean anything from a blown capacitor to a squirrel corpse fused into a transformer like some grotesque martyr of rodent curiosity. But for Joe K., “overload” has become a sort of floating signifier, one of those words that stretches to accommodate the emotional subtext he’s not ready to confront.

There’s static on the cab’s radio. Or maybe it’s just tinnitus. (But certainly, as we can aver with some confidence now, a metaphor.)

The thing that nobody warns you about when you become a lineman is that you start to hear the infrastructure. Like, literally hear it. The wires whine. The substations whisper. The transmission towers exhale in baritone hums when the wind’s just right.

But lately — past month, maybe longer — he’s been hearing something else. Something unmistakably human. A voice, faint but constant, nested inside the low sizzle of live wire.

It is her voice. Or the idea of her voice.⁶

I hear you singin’ in the wire / I can hear you through the whine.

The alarming thing is that it no longer alarms him. It’s just part of the job now, like voltage checks and ground faults. He tells no one. Who would he tell?

Instead, he keeps doing what he always does: climbs the poles, checks the readings, wipes sweat off his brow and listens. The voice is there. Every time. Unbidden but persistent. It makes the work feel more urgent and less real at the same time.

Everything is on the line.

The line. God, the line. He thinks about that phrase way too much. It’s kind of perfect. You can be on the line in a blue-collar vocational sense, like on-call, in the field, deployed. But you can also be on the line in a spiritual/psychological sense: precariously positioned, holding on by your fingernails, suspended above the void with only copper and memory keeping you from dropping into the dark.⁷

Did I mention that he hasn’t had a vacation in 6.5 years?⁸

He tried to schedule one last spring. He even filled out the carbon paper form in triplicate (which they still use, unbelievably) and had it signed by two desk-bound supervisors who each made the same joke about not getting too sunburned. And then he and the weather had a failure to communicate. The grid went sideways down south. And the poles in Cowley County started leaning like Georgia wilderness dental work in Deliverance. So he stayed. Of course he stayed.

Because it turns out, when you hold too many things together for too long, no one notices until you stop.

He makes this observation to no one in particular, at the Cenex station, where the coffee is both weirdly burnt and unsettlingly cold at the same time.

He thinks, not for the first time, that maybe this is just what life is: a sustained act of maintenance. Not transcendence or progress or discovery or even relief — just upkeep. Pole to pole, wire to wire, one unspectacular day after another.

Except.

Except for that voice.

And I need you more than want you … And I want you for all time …

It’s that first line that does him in, every time. That particular syntax. That terrifying emotional arithmetic. The ache shaped exactly like her voice in the wire.

He can’t explain it. Doesn’t try. Doesn’t tell his girlfriend (to whom he sometimes lies by omission) or his brother (who sells hot tubs) or his dog (who seems to sense things anyway).

There’s a stretch of highway — flat and glinting with heat shimmer — where the wires run straight for 11 uninterrupted miles. It’s there, most days, that the voice is loudest.⁹

He drives that stretch now, one hand on the wheel, the other hovering over the CB radio, as if expecting it to speak without prompting. The sun is high, the cab smells like that scorched vinyl, and the poles flick by like a metronome.

He doesn’t say a word. Just listens.

And the Wichita lineman is still on the line.

FOOTNOTES

¹: Not his real last initial, for legal/privacy reasons. Also because the author isn’t sure it matters. Names are just tags for liability and mail delivery. So maybe it is his real last initial. You be the judge.

²: A term used locally to mean the largest road that isn’t an interstate, but that still gets plowed first in winter. It has no shoulders but still manages two gas stations that double as bait shops.

³: Which is a 2008 Dodge Ram retrofitted with line gear racks and a bucket lift that leaks hydraulic fluid if you make a sharp turn.

⁴: “Overload” here meaning, specifically, any area of the grid showing signs of voltage irregularity, high amperage draw or transformer stress — though Joe K. sometimes expands the term to include emotional and existential conditions of overextension. Particularly when speaking to his girlfriend. (Who, in case you haven’t guessed by now, is imaginary as hell and so never can make it to Thanksgiving dinners at his uncle Karl’s farm near Topeka. He makes up different excuses why.)

⁵: And yes, he’s aware this is a trite and overused literary device, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate.

⁶: He hasn’t “seen” her in four years. The imaginary girlfriend, I mean. Not since she left for a job in Salina that she said was temporary and that became permanent faster than either of them had language for. Has recently been hearing her voice, though, as I believe we’ve established.

⁷: He knows he’s being melodramatic. He’s also correct.

⁸: Technically 6 years, 7 months, and 4 days, but rounding makes it seem less pathological.

⁹: It’s structural. It’s in the lines. The sun arcs higher and the poles blur by in their long procession of sameness, each one a small crucifixion of copper and steel. Each one humming quietly. There’s one pole — #117A — that hums at precisely 440Hz when the wind’s just right, which Joe K. thinks of in particular as her.