The Fixer

379 | Antoinette La Noire Eleuterio | Painting

The Fixer By Liam Joyce

The Fixer sat on a rusted swing set and watched the sky. Rain was coming. He pulled the rope holding the broken chain tighter and the swing seat was lifted up for a moment. But as he walked away to check on the gutters and set up the ladder the swing fell back down.

The next week the fixer turned to the roof. Winter was coming and if the cracks running down the corners didn’t get fixed… he didn’t want to think about that. The Fixer didn’t want to find out. He often wondered why nature had to work against him. All he wanted to do was preserve, and all nature had been trying to do for the last seven years is destroy. Sometimes he sat in the cafeteria and imagined he had a team of helpers. He prepared whole speeches to motivate them to continue their great work. But he read them to himself.

That weekend when the Fixer stood polishing the window he thought he saw someone far away, standing on the street and looking down the road. The Fixer slowly dropped his cloth to the ground and without taking his eyes off the window ran towards the stairwell. He hurried out the doors and into the brisk cold, but when he got to the street where the person had stood, no one was there. For a moment he looked down the road too, in the same direction the phantom person had looked. But his mind snapped back to the work at hand. After all, there was always work to be done.

The Fixer had managed to make a home for himself out of the long empty halls. Not because it was his dream to live there, but out of necessity. He would lose productivity if he lived somewhere else, and if he lost productivity there would be no telling what would happen. All his efforts, to preserve, may just be knocked down by that unfailing force of destruction. He had nightmares about that. Waking up to find everything gone. The entire plot of land empty. The playground dead.

About seven and a half years ago everyone left. They packed up their homes and memories and drove one by one out of the town, leaving it for good. They told the Fixer what they were doing. He had already started fixing by then, and the town librarian walked up the steps and rang the intercom system. Even then she was surprised by the unkempt hair and dirty clothes of the Fixer, who by that point had not been seen in public for a month. She told him everything and urged him to come with them. But he refused. “Someone,” he said, “has to preserve.” And so even after all the townspeople left and the houses, shops, and street signs had fallen like a house of cards and been reclaimed by nature, the North Williams Elementary School stood strong. Every time a crack showed, the fixer fixed it. Every time a vine wrapped its claws around the walls, he cut it.

But things were getting harder for him. He was getting weaker and he needed more time to rest. When a blizzard passed over the county and battered the town he was set back a week in clearing the doorway, and when he finally stepped outside he slipped on the ice and fractured his ankle. And though he did slowly get better the work was starting to pile up. Some days multiple different problems arose - a new leak, a rusting pipe, a sag in the roof - and with his ankle he had only enough time in the day to start one job. So as he began his eighth year alone he started to feel more and more apprehensive. There would soon come a time when the Fixer could no longer make a discernable dent in the amount of work to be done. So he began to sleep less. He worked longer days and built pulley systems to move heavy tools and materials around. During the mornings when everything was quiet he would go into town and search for materials nature hadn’t already taken.

One day the Fixer was stacking cans in the school pantry when he heard an unusual noise. A motor. He stopped for a second and waited in anticipation of the returning silence. The sound got louder, though, and before he knew it he found himself up the stairs and out the front doors. Just as he reached the main road a bus passed by and hurdled towards town. The buses began passing every week, always at the same time. And always the Fixer would be watching from the top floor of the school. The first few weeks he tried to follow it for a little bit, just see where and how far it was going. But after the fourth week he decided to stop letting it distract him. Winter was coming and there would be a lot to do.

And as winter passed, it took with it the last of the building’s willpower to continue standing. Things were now breaking left and right. The playground, the pavement, the walls, the gutters, the pipes. One day the Fixer was walking out of a side door when he noticed he had stepped up to exit the building. His heart sank. The foundation was sinking.

It was in times like these that he forgot why he was there in the first place - why he had spent almost nine years there. When he would pick up broken pieces of glass and see his reflection for the first time in weeks, he was startled. He didn’t look healthy; but more than that, he didn’t look like a full person. In the pit of his eyes you could see a dimness; a dimness in the part of the soul that gives you the willingness to choose your own path. Deep down he knew what he refused to bring into the front of his mind - that long ago he had ceased to belong to himself, that he now belonged to the North Williams Elementary School. A pile of bricks that would never thank him. And a thing, that despite years of tireless work, was slowly being recalled by nature.

A month later the end began. April storms hammered the town for days and washed acres of dirt away from the land. Streams enveloped yards and sidewalks and water gushed through every possible crevice. The Fixer woke up one morning to near darkness. Through the window above where he slept only a small sliver of light shone through. When he ran outside he knew why. The rain and the mud, it had all pooled together to sink the building multiple feet underground. The window above where he slept was sunken up to its top fifth in mud. The next week, only about a ninth of the window peered above the surface. As the rains continued, a near swamp began to form around the school and layers of dirt and bricks gave way to one another. The Fixer didn’t know what to do. If there was something that could be done, he would do it… but he realized quickly that really there was nothing. There was no shovel or machine he could build that could dig the school out of its grave faster than it was sinking. He was wandering around the property one morning when he saw the second floor halfway underground - and that’s when it hit him. The best part of his life was dying. And nothing he could do would save it. To the right he could see what used to be the playground, and he was sure, just beyond the slide, that he could see little kids running. They were playing tag and laughing, tagging each other and then running away and then being tagged again, and somewhere in the distance he knew he could see himself. So much smaller and different than he was now, but he was there running with the other kids and never letting the smile fade from his face. And even from so far away The Fixer knew he was watching the last time he had ever been truly happy.

He fell to his knees right there and sunk into the swampy mud. The shadowy mass that used to be a school gazed at him. After all these years they were finally at the same level. He sat there and let nature take over him. Slowly as the nights and days passed vines wrapped around his arms and legs and mushrooms surrounded his feet. Once the clouds subsided the sun came out and the swamp turned into a field of green. Flowers popped up around the walls and even creeped up on the roof of the school. As the sun rose, two and a half days after the Fixer had collapsed in resignation, he opened his eyes to the sound of birds singing. Just the very top of the roof was all that remained now, and one singular flower stood above the grass and dandelions that dressed everything. As it cascaded down from the sky the orange light of the sunrise scattered across the roof and shined onto the grass, and it lit up the one flower like a star. The school was more beautiful in that moment than it had ever been in all the years he had known it. And out of the chirping birds sprang an unmistakable sound that hit his head like an air horn. The motor.

The bus shot into view just as the Fixer turned his head and within ten seconds it had passed the driveway that led to the front entrance. He turned back to the school with an ache of guilt but there was no time to give a eulogy; the vines around his arms snapped without effort and he fell on his face trying to get up, slowly and achingly lifting the legs which he could no longer feel and catapulting himself in the direction of the bus. He sprinted down the road after it and for a moment he thought he could catch it yet as the seconds passed the distance got longer and longer. Up ahead there was a right turn he knew the bus would take, so he took the faster path, jumping over the overgrown fences and running through the thickness of his former neighbor’s backyard. Now running through straight untamed forest, he stubbed his toe on a root and almost tripped but managed to catch himself on a branch. He could see through the leaves and branches that ahead of him was the open road he was racing towards, the empty road that the bus would soon reach and then, right as he was within 20 feet, did reach and sped past. Grabbing a tree trunk to make the sharp turn onto the sidewalk he saw that he could almost reach out and touch the back of the bus; but it was still too far. Suddenly his foot slammed into a root and he fell face first into the ground. At first try his arms failed to lift him up. Then he saw next to him a huge stick. He lifted himself up with all the will he could gather and flung the stick at the bus. It bounced off and dropped to the ground. The Fixer sat back on his knees and watched as the bus faded into the distance.

Then the bus stopped. The driver got out and stormed to the back of the bus where he ran his finger along the dent that the stick had made. Then he turned and locked eyes with the Fixer.

“You do this?” he yelled. The Fixer didn’t answer but slowly stood up and inched closer. The bus driver rubbed his eyes. “Can I help you?

“I’m sorry,” the Fixer said “I missed the bus.”