Astronauts Fight Back! by A.C. Koch
I didn’t pick this fight – I wanted to be an astronaut. Cardboard and duct tape spacesuit, star maps clipped from Odyssey Magazine, exhaustive knowledge of NASA mission names and numbers – I had it all figured out. And then the next four decades sent me into deep cover, posing as an exceedingly mild-mannered school teacher in an unsuspecting American suburb. I’d sent a letter to NASA when I was ten, presenting myself for duty, and so I knew with a constant tingle in the back of my mind that the call could come at any moment to pitch me their most daring, dangerous mission yet. Establish a lunar base? Sure thing. Pull the ISS out of a decaying orbit with a combination of unlikely maneuvers and steely nerves? Of course. One way mission to Mars? Yes, goddammit, YES.
In the meantime, I was living undercover in Applewood, USA. Zooming in from space, it’s an unremarkable pocket of suburbia on the western fringe of Denver, a slice of real estate between the freeway and the foothills that used to be Native land and is now colonized by car dealerships, fast food franchises, post-war ranch homes in cul-de-sacs, condo complexes tacked onto scrubby hillsides.
In this sprawl of homogeneity, where burgers, McNuggets, pizza and subs are on offer in all directions, the hot food bar at the Whole Foods made for a special treat. In fact, most days I only had time for a microwaved cup of soup in my classroom during the twenty minutes that my second graders were freebasing tater tots and grease pizza in the school cafeteria. Once a month, however, I attended a professional development session at the school district’s central office, and this event came with the decadent perk of an hour-long lunch. Sixty uninterrupted minutes of languor, a Caligulan orgy of excess. My only regret was that I didn’t have a Marie Antoinette outfit to flounce around in during my one wild lunch hour upon this Earth. Seeking the maximum level of luxury and refinement in my beige-and-mayonnaise suburb, I strode into Whole Foods like I owned the place.
But let’s clarify who actually owned the place: Jeff Bezos, the glistening, hairless homunculus who was at that time in the news for also owning a cowboy hat, a flight suit and a private space program which he was using as a ride-sharing service to lower Earth orbit. That, plus he was charging me ten bucks a pound to eat at his hot food bar, and I could only realistically afford half of that. After all, I was supplementing my full-time teacher’s income with a second job driving for a terrestrial ride-sharing service, and ten dollars was more than I made in an entire hour. Could I afford to eat an hour’s worth of food? How long might I last on ten minutes’ worth? And how much did Bezos make in an hour? How much lunch could he get for ten minutes’ pay? Enough to fill an entire stadium – or more than one stadium? We find ourselves asking these questions at the absurd end of American civilization.
This day there was a random guy in front of me at the hot bar. He had earbuds in although he wasn’t body-grooving to some kind of piped-in beats. He was a millennial white guy and therefore, statistically speaking, probably listening to a podcast. The guy had a triangular cardstock box in which he’d already placed a slice of artichoke and asparagus pizza, but now he was standing meaningfully at the hot bar, eyeballs running over the roasted brussels sprouts, the braised kale with baby shiitake mushrooms, the herb-seasoned steak fries, the rosemary chicken cutlets with lemon medallions and fennel.
I was hungry as hell and my precious minutes were draining away before the guillotine fell and I would have to drive back to the district office to sit through another four hours of PowerPoint and platitudes (“I touch the future – I teach!“) and so naturally I wanted to shank Podcast Guy for hogging the hot bar. Then I noticed the kitchen employee – white apron, hair net, paper mask – hopping up and down on the other side of the bar.
To be sure, we were all wearing face masks; we weren’t monsters, and the pandemic was still tearing through the world. But the arrangement of items atop the hot bar hood – boxed gluten-free crackers, almond biscotti, orange macaroons – blocked the view of the bouncing kitchen master from Podcast, who was proceeding to ladle spoonfuls of veggies and fries onto his pizza slice. Holding my empty paper food box, I waited and watched.
Let’s remember: it’s been a brutal time lately for food service workers. Even in the best of times, working in a kitchen can be like digging ditches in the rain except that it also makes you wretch at the smell of pizza. But having to grind through a pandemic where you’re an ‘essential worker’ without a commensurate pay raise, with co-workers coming in sick or not coming in at all, and those home fries still need slicing, and the onions aren’t going to dice themselves, and someone’s got to stir the scoopers in the hot bar so the food doesn’t get all crusty, and mop this, and wipe down that, and don’t you dare clock out before humping out the trash and recycling – well, thank you for your service and here’s a sliver of minimum wage. Now you’re going to need to work a double.
Thus burdened with society’s apathy and management’s disdain, and muffled behind a mask and eclipsed by stacks of packaged products atop the hot bar, the poor Kitchen Master was having quite a bit of trouble making his presence known to Podcast, who was really going to town spooning heaps of yumminess onto his pizza.
But hunger and self-interest aligned my sympathies. That’s a freaking good idea, I thought as I watched Podcast openly thieving. The triangle box, after all, was only $3.89 for a slice, not charged by weight.
Kitchen Master was having none of it. He sprang up and down, waving his hands and saying things like, “Youmph cabgh doong thththt!” through his KN95. These words did not reach Podcast, who went on shoveling almond-slivered green beans onto his multi-layered lunch.
I am a tall man. I found myself uniquely positioned between Podcast in front of me and the nattering, gesticulating Kitchen Master behind the bar. They couldn’t see each other above the waist with the stacked cracker boxes between them, but at my triangulated position I could see and hear both.
Kitchen Master clocked this. “You can’t do that,” he tried, pulling his mask down to eject his breath and spittle across the entire hot bar, to no avail. His eyes latched onto mine. With a flick of his head, he appealed to me to relay the message to Podcast.
I looked at Podcast and, fortuitously, he turned my way. His eyes skittered around as if he’d heard something from somewhere but couldn’t locate the source. He met my eyes, questioning, as if I might have addressed him.
Ultimately, my tribal affiliation doesn’t align with either customers or shift workers. I really did want to be an astronaut. My childhood sketchbooks were filled with pages shaded graphite black, little flecks of stars in negative space. Playing The Right Stuff (double-VHS copy) over and over while doodling spaceship designs at the coffee table after school and gulping down spoonfuls of Cheerios in a soup of sugary milk. I enjoyed Star Wars while looking down on it for not being “entirely realistic.” During the years that I worked service jobs – waiter in a trendy bistro, copy jockey at Kinko’s, barista in a neighborhood coffeehouse – I always felt like an outsider, stepping-stoning my way to greater things that didn’t involve clocking in and out, or smiling on command. And when it came to the corporatized gastronomic landscape of Applewood, USA, I thought of myself as less of a consumer and more of a prisoner; I wouldn’t be within ten miles of this godforsaken wasteland if my job didn’t trap me here.
And so: both Podcast and Kitchen Master watched me at the apex of our triangle, neither of them able to see the other’s faces. I met Podcast’s questioning gaze and shook my head: No, I didn’t say anything. He turned back to his ladle and heaped one more helping of glazed yams atop his slice before pressing the stuffed box closed and then securing it with an ingeniously premeditated rubber band that he pulled from his wrist.
Kitchen Master turned a scandalized look at me as Podcast walked away, unchastened, untouched, guileless as Neil Armstrong bouncing across the lunar regolith. Outrage and injustice flared in Kitchen Master’s eyes: Someone has broken the rules! Someone has gotten away with something they didn’t pay for! But I met this look with a placid gaze; I knew he didn’t truly think those things, that was just capitalism shoving its clawed hand up his ass and puppeteering his mind. I said nothing to him, which was exactly the right thing to say, as I detoured away to grab a pack of uninfected spring rolls from the cooler and get the fuck out of there.
Things I could have said: Why not let a guy have his lunch? Let a guy enjoy a loophole! Why be a heavy for an amoral, vulgar turd of a money predator? Why get hard for capitalism when literally any reason is a better reason to get hard?
What I didn’t tell myself as I crossed the parking lot in my dwindling lunch hour: if anybody is a pro at sniffing out loopholes, it’s Jeff Freaking Bezos. No one is better at ganking a free lunch than that guy. If Bezos had witnessed the same events at the hot bar, he would have given Podcast a job on the spot, promoted him to corporate – now here’s a guy who puts the Zen in brazen. Just openly stealing shit and strolling away, not only cool with breaking the rules but seemingly impervious to any rules at all. Put that guy in charge of Acquisitions! If the Free Lunch Scam is a tribe, Podcast, Bezos and I all belong. These are thoughts I did not entertain, because to do so would fray my very identity. I couldn’t afford to go there, just like I couldn’t afford a pound of food at the hot bar. After all, I was due back in the conference room for another few hours of sloganeering and touching the future while the school district guilted me into working longer and harder, not for money but For The Children. Far above, the International Space Station sliced through its orbit, crewed by brave astronauts who had somehow found their way off this world and onto the path of daring, adventure, and touching the actual goddamn future.
One month later, I pulled off the same trick: at least a pound-and-a-half of hot food heaped atop a slice of basil and roasted garlic pizza, rubber-banded into a bulging wedge box, for which I traded the equivalent of only about twenty-five minutes of labor.
This is what we must do, you and I, until every last freeloading billionaire is ejected from society, sent out of town in tar and feathers, shunned and shamed by the good people of this nation. This is a future we can all touch. Until then, we really need to look at giving elementary school teachers at least forty-five minutes for lunch.
A.C. Koch is a teacher, writer and musician with stories in Analog, December, Meridian, Split/Lip, Puerto del Sol and forthcoming in Fantasy & Science Fiction. After some years overseas, Koch lives in Denver, Colorado, working with language learners while studying at the Mile High MFA program at Regis University.
6 December 2023
Leave a Reply