Sleepers

On his morning commute in a small town, Ray encounters traffic caused by construction at the town’s main railroad crossing. The track upgrade, in which “Thousands of dollars [are] being spent every minute,” is a construction project outsourced to a non-local company. Remembering this causes Ray to wish he could have found contract work on the project.

As he pulls up to a road worker directing traffic to a detour, Ray remembers waiting similarly at a construction site with his then-girlfriend Sharon. She had spoken condescendingly about the road crew then, knowing that he had previously worked as a road flagger. At the time, looking at Sharon in the passenger seat, Ray had felt “Something creeping over him like a slow anaesthetic.” Ray’s memory shifts to their breakup and being forced to move out of their shared house, with Sharon continuing to address him in a patronizing way, “like he was the thickest kid in the class.”

Ray’s focus returns to the present, where the detour points him past a boarded-up hotel and old livestock markets. Yawning, Ray realizes he will be late to his part-time job at a warehouse—which he is “lucky” to have—but he's not too worried since “everyone would be late today” and the manager never supervises them. As Ray drives past an expressionless road worker wearing sunglasses, the two of them do the “bare minimum” of gestures to acknowledge each other’s presence and the shared pretense of “doing a job of work” while “bored shitless.”

In the late afternoon, Ray is at the pub with his friends Frank and Vince when he first hears about the old railroad sleepers that are being removed by the construction crew. According to Frank, who has been unemployed for over a year, the sleepers are being sorted by quality, indicating they will be sold to a subcontractor. Vince interjects to angrily complain that a local contractor would have left the sleepers for residents to take for their personal use.

On their way home, Ray and Vince drive past a construction site and see piles of sleepers with only a token perimeter of flags to protect them. Vince predicts that the locals will soon start stealing the sleepers for landscaping and firewood. He justifies this by pointing out that there will be “millions” of sleepers pulled up, so the construction company won’t even notice the ones that are taken. This prompts Ray to think of Sharon again, this time remembering an argument they had over landscaping their garden. At the time, Ray saw no point in fixing up the garden since they were “just renting,” while she expressed more patronizing frustration toward him.

Over the next two weeks, it seems everyone Ray encounters expresses interest in the sleepers and “a sudden professed desire to landscape.” At work, Ray’s coworker Bernie boasts about grabbing a truckload of them for his backyard pool. Another person at the pub achieves infamy for “liberating thirty sleepers in broad daylight.” Bernie advises Ray in how to successfully steal some for himself—“Just do it discreetly, and […] Don’t get greedy”—but Ray is hesitant.

Meanwhile, Ray cuts open a shrink-wrapped pallet containing Buddha statues and reflects that it looks like “a submerged shipwreck, crammed full of calmly waiting monks,” noticing the smell of chemicals that the Chinese-manufactured statues emanate. He suddenly recalls waking up that morning with his dinner plate from the night before still sitting on his chest, having fallen asleep with it balanced there. The white plate looked as “round and innocuous as a moon.”

That night, Ray attends a barbecue at his friend Steve’s home. The backyard is freshly paved and landscaped with sleepers and clumps of flowers, an arrangement that Ray likens to a hair transplant but tells Steve “looks great.” He experiences a “sapped, exhausted feeling” while watching Steve grill steaks and listening to him describe with “focus and purpose” his plans to remodel the backyard. Ray thinks to himself that he should visit a doctor and get a blood test.

As Ray gets up to fill his plate with food, he thinks about the “heavy squeezing [sensation] under his sternum” that he’s been feeling for a few months and wonders if he should drink less beer. He “feel[s] the eyes of women on him,” including Steve’s wife, and realizes he is the only single man at the barbecue. Earlier that night, he saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway when passing Sharon’s house. Assuming it to be evidence that she has a new partner, Ray briefly considers chatting with the women at the barbecue to advertise himself as “a catch” and “let word get back to Sharon.” However, he decides conversation would be too much effort and sits back down with his heaping plate of food, telling himself everyone knows he is just “a 35-year-old man who live[s] in a Colorbond shed at a mate’s place” and is therefore “not a catch.”

Ray thinks about how this temporary home in his friend’s shed, where he was going to live only until he could find a more suitable place, has become permanent—he’s put in carpeting, furniture, and a TV. He keeps telling himself that he’s saving money, “Waiting for things to go from shit to good.”

Steve’s son Sean calls Ray over to look at Mars through a telescope. Despite the fact that Ray has been on a fishing trip with Steven and Sean, he does not remember the boy’s name until Steve addresses Sean, telling him to wait until the sky is darker. Ray looks through the telescope and tries fruitlessly to make out Mars but only sees his own eye reflected, noticing the wrinkles and lines that surround it. Ray calculates that if he were to have a son now, he would be 50 by the time his son was 15. He concludes that being childless is “probably all for the best” at this point and lies to Sean about seeing Mars.

Later, Ray gets in his car and thinks about driving past Sharon’s home again and pulling into “the driveway that he used to pull in to every night.” Ray thinks—or perhaps dreams—about getting out of his car to peer into the house, only to see Sharon with another person before she dismisses him as “just Ray” (“seeing him for exactly what he was”) and then retreats into the house.

When Ray opens his eyes again, he realizes that he’s still in his car parked outside of Steve’s place. He struggles to remember how many beers he had that night. Suddenly, he has the “crap idea” to steal some sleepers and surprise Sharon with them the next day. His mind skips over the logistics of showing up unannounced directly to landscaping her garden and making it “ready for some seedlings.” Although he considers asking Vince for help, he knows his friend will be have already started smoking marijuana heavily by this time of night.

When Ray arrives at the construction site, his plan changes from winning Sharon back with the sleepers to keeping them for himself to chop up for firewood and landscape a vegetable garden outside his shed. Looking at the piles of sleepers, he understands “the ire, the harmless, face-saving looting” of the discarded wood, and resents how he often finds himself lacking energy or a will to move. He begins to load some sleepers into his truck and starts feeling good from “working up a sweat,” the “cold oxygen in his lungs […] clearing his fogged head finally.”

While Ray is in the middle of loading sleepers, a police car silently shines its lights on him. He turns around and suddenly feels “his chest squeezing” again, imagining the police viewing him as “just Ray,” an easily caught scapegoat. Defeated, Ray waits for the police to arrive instead of running. He remarks that the sleepers are “discarded but with so much life in [them]”, and that it is a shame “to see [them] go to waste.”