The boiler house heats eleven blocks. Inside it is 34 degrees and loud like the inside of a drum. The three men of the night shift have worked together for nineteen years. They have a kettle, a chessboard with one pawn replaced by a bolt, and a calendar from 2011 that nobody has changed because, they say, the girl on it is still good.
"In winter nobody remembers us until we stop. Then everybody remembers our telephone number."
Every hour one of them walks the gauges with a torch and writes numbers in a book, by hand, as in 1979. There is a computer for the numbers. It is under a cloth in the corner and they call it "the director".
At six the day shift comes. The night men drink a last tea, walk out into minus fifteen, and the eleven blocks behind them wake up warm and do not think about it. That, the oldest of them says, is the whole point.
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