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The evening siren rings, loud and final, and Mark drops the cinderblock at his feet, the weight of the day sliding off of his sweat-slicked shoulders like relieved tears.
It’s humid and the false air of the City Dome he calls his home is thick with smog and the stench of exhaustion, but within minutes the skies will be clear again. The superior ventilation system of his particular sector (Dome #2071990) has boasted the ability to filter out toxins and pump clean, breathable air back in for as long as Mark can remember reading it in the history books.
Whether the claims are true or not, he does not know. He doesn’t care either.
It’s a Saturday and that means tomorrow is Sunday—the Day of Observation—which means no one may leave their homes or open their windows for a full 24 hours after midnight tonight. For Mark, it means that tomorrow there will be no sunset to watch with Jack.
Mark knows the sky is fake, the sun is a projection, and the clouds are just illusions. His world is a picture show projected across the ceiling of an insulated, oxygenated dome, perfectly conditioned for nurturing human life.
He doesn’t care.
He’s no hero, has no voice to soar above the crowds to question their government or their ways of life. He knows that once, there was more to the world than a few hundred isolated sectors, lidded and sealed off from the hazards of the open air. Mark has heard tales of the universe, of planet earth back when anyone could travel for miles, before the air turned sour and the oceans dried up.
He knows that had he been born a few centuries earlier, his world could have been so much bigger than a hundred square miles of fields and grey stone.
Mark thinks that had he known Jack then as well, his world would still be the same size.
Jack is a sweatshop worker—he sews plain clothes in stark white buildings and sits in a single chair for nearly twelve hours a day, and his fingers are always swollen and cramped from the bite of the needles in his tiny stitch work.
Soon, the Authorities will come to him with a pink slip and a firm set of hands, and tell him his help is no longer needed.
Jack is going blind in one eye from an infection that had struck the sweatshop a month back, and now he has to squint just to see his once perfect stitches, even in the white light of the sweatshops.
Mark has no idea where his lover will be transferred to work, but so long as the remainder of Jack’s sight is preserved, he doesn’t care.
He himself is a stonemason—he cuts rock and lifts stones onto carts day in and day out, and the carts drive away. Where they go he doesn’t know, and what they’re for no one has told him, but Mark works and sings and doesn’t question his life. It’s the only one he’s got, and all he wants is to share it with Jack.
He nods to a fellow stone worker on the way home, following the blinking lights mounted on the walls and the fake trees, guiding him on his evening march up to his apartment complex.
His building is tall, so tall he often marvels at the height of the Dome above the city, and all the books say that the first Builders made their first buildings tall because the earth was rotten and the only way to go was up.
Mark walks in single file to the beat of a silent military drum, never quite brushing shoulders with the masses of day workers making the somber trek home, preparing themselves for a day of silence and shutters and no sun at all.
Some people whisper that once all the shutters are closed at midnight and all the guards are posted, the Dome shuts off and the projections die. They say that the fake sun doesn’t rise and nothing sets in the evening, but no one has ever been able to open the shutters on a Sunday, and Mark doesn’t care either way.
He rides the elevator all the way up to his floor (number 17), and his starched white t-shirt sticks grimily to his skin. Some months are hotter than others, an attempt to simulate the change of the seasons of old times, and Mark’s been sweat soaked nearly every day for the past month.
His fifteen minute allotted showers aren’t nearly enough to wash away the labor of the entire day, but they’re enough to make the film of dust and grime a distant memory for the night at least.
The tile floor of his and Jack’s place is blessedly cool beneath his bare feet, and Mark sets his shoes by the front door, where they’ll remain until he wakes at 5 AM sharp on Monday morning. There’s another set of shoes already there, soft and dark and nearly worn through at the toes. Jack will have to apply for a new pair soon, unless he wants to break the workplace dress code yet again for failing to look ‘suitably presentable’.
Mark always arrives home second, almost ten minutes behind Jack, because the stoneyards are further away than Jack’s sweatshop and the lines of burly, muscled stonemasons move slower than the thin legs of the factory workers.
He can smell their food, bland and steaming on the table (delivered at 6:15 PM, as usual), and he bypasses it for the low framed doorway of their bedroom, situated just off to the right.
Mark doesn’t care about dinner or new shoes or the shower his body desperately needs, he only cares about watching the sunset with Jack.
“You’re just in time.” Jack’s perched on the windowsill, the only luxury he and Mark share in their tiny living space: a window with a perfect view of the sun sinking in the Dome sky, every evening except Sunday.
Mark’s never been late before, but he doesn’t say so out loud. Instead, he pulls Jack into his arms and breathes in, letting himself have this one thing that’s different from all the rest.
Jack’s ribs are thin, hard lines beneath Mark’s fingers, mile markers of stress and exhaustion overlaid with sallow skin. He’s pale and soft footed from sitting inside all day, but his grip on Mark’s hands is tight and sure.
Watching the sunset together is just another part of their routine, but it’s one that’s not dictated by the Authorities or the work sirens or even the daily meal delivery. It’s just theirs, their own time to spend together in this tiny block they call home, underneath the projection of a sky that doesn’t really exist.
Mark doesn’t care that the best part of his day is just a hologram, an attempt to simulate the transition from day to night and mark the passage of time. It’s something that he and Jack have made real all on their own, a half hour of bliss that’s just for them in the midst of an ocean of concrete and blurred faces.
Some call it quiet, some call it complacent. Mark just calls it satisfied.