Apostle Automation
An out of work writer looks for a clean reboot in post-industrial North Carolina.
I go in early, before Russel shows up, before the soldering pen smokes. Before the busted motors spark and the cooling fans sputter. I like the quiet, or maybe I just need it more than I want to admit. The shop’s at the edge of the old industrial park, what’s left of it. I pass the same buildings every morning—half-skinned factories with busted-out windows and Kudzu wrapped around steel beams like the vines are trying to pull the place underground.
Russel gave me the job six months ago. We met at that restoration church over on Barnes Street. One of those places with a projector screen instead of a cross, where the preacher wears jeans and talks like a life coach. I went because I didn’t have anywhere else to be. After the magazine in Atlanta folded, my whole life cracked open in about four weeks—layoff, eviction, then my wife told me she’d left me for some guy in Buckhead with a convertible beamer. I found myself hauling boxes into my mother’s guest room in Reidsville, like the past had its own ideas. It was humiliating. Still is.
Russel stood next to me during worship one Sunday and asked afterward if I was good with my hands. I said no, not really, but I could learn. He told me he ran a repair shop, mostly industrial electronics, stuff from plants that shut down. Said there was still money to be made in broken things, if you knew how to fix them just right. I nodded. He said he needed someone quiet and reliable. I didn’t ask questions. I showed up the next morning.
It’s called Apostle Automation. The name’s painted on a clean piece of plexiglass above the door, not yet sooted with time. I still don’t know if he meant it as a joke or not. The shop’s inside what used to be a textile warehouse, gutted sometime in the nineties when the jobs went south and the roof opened up. They left the shell standing like a monument to bad memory. Coming in, you pass under plastic flaps that hang in strips like skin, thick and dirty, torn in places where rats or men have clawed their way through. The concrete floor stays wet no matter the weather. Fluorescents twitch above in their metal housing, a dozen half-lit tubes flickering like moths trapped in jars, and somehow none of them ever burn out.
It smells like copper and heat and the kind of plastic that melts wrong. Rust flakes down from the shelving when you bump the wrong rack. Whole place wired with old electricity, the kind that feels like it’s coming from inside your skull. We work with what’s left behind—fan motors, relay boards, lacquered keypads from shuttered tobacco plants and particleboard mills. Every piece touched by fire or flood or failure. Some of it still carries blood or soot if you look close enough. A radio plays in the corner, speaker blown out on one side. All it ever gets is that same FM station—some ex-preacher’s playlist of sanctimonious country gospel, every song about sin and deliverance and women with eyes for tractors. Russel won’t let me change it. Says it keeps the devil out of the wiring.
Russel owns the place. Tall, still fit in the shoulders, hair buzzed short like he never left basic. He keeps a folding cot in the back near the breaker wall and a 5-⅝ combo wrench on his desk he says is for intruders but we both know it’s not. First time I met him he called me “professor” and asked if I was one of those liberals who doesn’t believe in Hell. When I told him I used to write about rock bands and American poverty, he said, “Same thing.” Then laughed too loud and clapped me on the back.
He’s got a subtle way of speaking that makes you want to listen, even when you shouldn’t. Says I’ve got a gift, that words come out of me like silk, then follows it with, “Shame you ain’t got anything real to do with ‘em.” That’s his rhythm. Praise, then the knife. Every day’s some version of it. We talk in the slow hours, when the soldering irons are cooling and the fan blades have stopped spinning. He tells me about his tours, things he won’t say directly—bad sand, bad air, bad orders. I think he means Iraq. Maybe both of them. He keeps it vague but his eyes go dark when he mentions Fallujah, like there’s something specific he’s holding in abeyance.
I told him once about a story I wrote on a survivalist compound in east Tennessee. Preacher ran it like a militia, baptized folks in an old horse trough, and made the women call him Saint. Russel laughed at that. Said it reminded him of the church we both go to now, Barnes Street Restoration. Where they preach like they’re trying to wake the dead, and the baptisms look more like drowning practice. Folks come up sputtering, arms in the air, thinking they’re clean again.
We knelt together once. In the back, near the cot. I’d told him I was having trouble sleeping. He said, “Let’s take that to the Lord.” I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t say no. The floor was wet and cold and my knees burned against the concrete. He closed his eyes and put a hand on my shoulder. His breath smelled like coffee and Altoids. He prayed steady, voice low and calm, asking for peace, asking for clarity, asking God to straighten the crooked things in both our lives. I kept my eyes open the whole time. The phone in the office ringing. The soldering pen still glowed red. It didn’t feel like anything.
Russel hired me for fourteen bucks an hour under the table and said I was lucky to get that. Told me flat-out he could train a monkey to re-cap a board. Then he pointed at a busted motor drive the size of a suitcase and asked if I knew what a flyback diode was. I didn’t. He said, “Good. That means you won’t fuck it up with what you think you know.”
The first week he had me stripping housings and organizing bins of salvaged parts, resistors bent out like insect legs, capacitors with their heads blown open from overvoltage. Everything smelled like burnt sugar and damp socks. I kept my mouth shut, listened. Watched the way he diagnosed a bad trace with a multimeter, how he bridged a split solder pad with copper braid and spit, how his hands never stopped moving even when he talked.
By the third week I was restoring boards he’d left for dead. I found an old Omron PLC in the back, toasted from a power surge, and pulled it apart on my own. Cleaned the carbon off the relays, replaced the caps, resoldered the main bus line. When I powered it on and saw the LED blink steady, I didn’t say anything. Just left it on his bench. He came in the next morning, looked it over, didn’t ask who’d fixed it. Just nodded like it proved something he already knew. Then he tossed me a busted servo control and said, “Let’s see if you’re a fluke.”
There’s a rhythm to it. Diagnose, desolder, replace, test. Like writing, only quieter. No editor breathing down your neck, no deadlines. Just the faint sizzle of the iron, the flux smoke curling up like a wick, the satisfaction when something broken clicks back into place.
The job’s fine. Pays just enough to keep gas in the tank and groceries from giving out. I eat a lot of eggs and cheap bread. Still have a cot at my mother’s, though I don’t sleep there much—usually pass out on the couch with the TV volume low and the captions turned off. But the work keeps my hands moving. That counts for something.
Russel’s the problem.
It started with little things. Mid-afternoon check-ins that turned into confessions. He’d lean against my bench with a piece of jerky in his mouth and start in on women—never names, just types. Said there was one who worked at a vape shop in Eden, another with a tramp stamp of the word salvation in script centered above her breasts. He’d laugh at that. Said it wasn’t love, just flesh, like that cleared it up with God.
He says it soft, like doctrine: just flesh, not love. Like the phrasing itself is permission.
Then came the stuff about his wife. Said she’s got a temper like a freight train. Could run off the rails like the Old 97 anytime. Smashed a mirror once in their hallway, left the shards scattered for three days just to make him walk through it. He grinned when he told me. Like it was a joke they shared.
I don’t say much. Mostly nod, or act like I didn’t hear. Keep my eyes on the board in front of me, test leads steady in my hand. But the silences get longer. He fills them with stories I never asked for, and I let them sit.
One day he pointed to the wrench on his desk and said, “That’s not for burglars, brother. That’s for if she comes in with her daddy’s old shotgun, foaming at the mouth like one of them women from the Book of Judges.”
I nodded like I always do. But my hand shook a little when I reached for the iron.
There’s a kind of clarity that comes when everything around you is in some state of failure. Not collapse—just slow, ongoing disrepair. I see it in the way the LED panel blinks too fast on a refurbished control unit. The original capacitor’s gone, replaced with one just off-spec. Russel says it doesn’t matter. “If it lights, it works.” But it’s wrong. The flicker’s wrong. Like a skipped heartbeat.
At church, I sit in the back row near the fire exit. There’s a crack running from the baseboard to the crown molding above the baptismal tank. Paint’s peeling in thin curls, the color underneath like old bone. They hung a banner over it—Revival Is Now—but it doesn’t cover the damage, just reframes it. Same with the people. They give testimonies like reciting grocery lists, each one ending in tears and hallelujahs while the next man steps up to the mic like he’s waiting in line at the register. It isn’t dishonest. It’s just... expedient.
Russel talks about sin like it’s water. Something that just moves through. Some days are bad. Some days are better. He tells me I think too much. “You’re tryin’ to fix life like you fix a board—trace the bad leg and swap it out.” Then he laughs and tells me he likes that about me. Says it reminds him of before. I never ask what that means.
Once, I came in late. Office already alive with a timing relay sending pulse to a repaired control cabinet. Russel wasn’t at his bench. But his computer screen was still on. A porn site. Nothing violent, just young and stupid. A video paused on a woman bent forward in a kitchen, back arched, looking right at the camera. I stood there for a second too long before moving to my station. He came in two minutes later, breathing hard like he’d jogged the last stretch. Said nothing about it. Just closed the browser and told me the next shipment was coming before lunch. He looked tired. Ashy around the eyes. I think he knew I’d seen.
Another time, I watched him fix a power cord on an old drive unit. The insulation had split near the plug. Most guys would wrap it in tape and call it a day. Russel stripped the cord back, real careful, re-sleeved it with heat shrink, sealed the joint with a heat gun held just the right distance. Didn’t rush it. He hummed while he worked. A hymn, maybe. Something minor key and slow.
He’s not a villain. He’s just wrong. Wrong in the way rot is wrong—not because it starts, but because no one stops it.
Most nights, I go home tired in a way that doesn’t come from work. My hands aren’t blistered. My back’s not sore. But there’s this weight behind the eyes, like I’ve been looking too closely at something for too long and it still won’t make sense. In the quiet—when the TV’s off, when I’ve scraped the last bit of peanut butter onto white bread and put the spoon in the sink—I think about how I understand these machines better than Russel does. Not just the parts, but the systems. The logic. He knows how to make a board function. I know why it failed. The difference doesn’t matter here. He makes the rules because he owns the building. I’m just here to make things work again.
There’s a board we keep in a tray at the edge of the bench, fried from some surge that cooked its guts. Russel says it’s trash, that the fuse is blown and the housing’s warped. But I keep pulling it out between jobs. Staring at the traces, following them like veins.
One afternoon, I told him, “It’s not the fuse. It’s the path. The current doesn’t know where to go anymore.”
He didn’t look up from his computer. Said, “Don’t need a poet. Need it to run.”
That’s how it is here overall. This town doesn’t want insight. It wants things that click on, light up, cool air. Being smart here is like knowing the name of every species in a dying forest. Doesn’t stop the longing. Just means you feel it more. And that’s my problem.
Russel was down in Salisbury for one of those industrial auctions where half the lots are busted control systems and the rest are mystery pallets wrapped in plastic. He called just after lunch—spotty signal, engine noise in the background—and asked me to pull up a part number from his email. Something for a drive unit he’d been watching.
His computer was still open, password taped to the monitor under a sticker that said God Is Good. I typed it in slow, careful not to touch anything else. Found the part number. Read it off. He said thanks, asked if I could clean the bench before closing. I said I would. We hung up.
I should’ve stopped there. But my hand stayed on the mouse. I don’t know if I was curious or just tired of my own thoughts. The inbox was wide open. Top message was to Pastor Shane, sent Monday morning, subject line: Back On The Path.
The body was short. Said he’d come back to God. Said he loved his wife. Said he’d confessed everything—every betrayal, every urge—and laid it at the feet of the Lord. He’d asked for strength. Said he wanted to live clean. The tone was formal, measured, like a contract or a resume. I looked at the timestamp. 6:12 a.m.
Below it were two emails from Tuesday. Auto-notifications from a sugar daddy site. One titled Your Match Is Waiting. The other: Unlock Her Photos Now. The day after he’d “come back to God.”
Wednesday: a reply to a woman in Greensboro. Short. Just a time and a hotel address. In the drafts folder, a note containing his sugar daddy password: PeoplesNeedsPC.
I sat there for a minute. Screen casting a faint glow reflected from my glasses back to the monitor. The wrench was where it always was, just left of the keyboard, chrome worn smooth along the handle. I’d seen him hold it when he talked about his wife. Said it was just in case she came storming in one day, shotgun in hand, ready to settle debts he refused to pay.
I clicked back to the inbox. Closed it. Logged out.
The shop felt different then. The rows of busted fans and cracked casings, the bins of half-salvaged parts, all of it reeked of effort without meaning. A church made of motors. Russel its preacher. A preacher who preached to himself in secret and sinned in public, as if the order of things didn’t matter as long as you confessed at some point. That’s the rhythm here. Say the words. Bow your head. Pretend the turning counts more than the direction.
Russel thinks fixing things redeems them. That soldering a bridge where a trace burned through erases the burn itself. That if it boots up, it’s healed. I know better.
Before he left for the auction, Russel pointed to the HIM unit boxed on the shelf behind the fan coils and said I needed to get it restored before end of day. Client in Winston, someone from his old National Guard unit who ran a cardboard plant now—one of those favors traded like gospel in this part of the state. He gave me a long talk about timelines and integrity, none of which I wrote down, and then he peeled out in his Tacoma with a trailer rattling behind him.
After the call, I ate lunch at the bench—two hard-boiled eggs, a heel of bread. I drank the coffee straight from the thermos. Cold by then. Bitter as metal. I didn’t mind. I left the human interface module untouched. The soldering pen still warm. I opened the old control board instead, the one with the melted capacitor and the char line bisecting its traces like a vein ruptured in heat. No real reason. It just held me.
Somewhere in the afternoon I opened the news. Headlines about factory shutdowns, jobless claims, the slow-motion collapse still grinding out stories two years after it started. A photograph of a man in Ohio holding a resume with both hands like it might help if he gripped it tighter. I kept scrolling, didn’t know how long.
By the time I looked up, it was ten minutes to five. The HIM unit was still in its box. I heard the truck before I saw it—gravel popping, trailer brakes squealing. Russel pushed through the plastic flaps hard enough to knock a clamp loose from the doorframe. His eyes were already wrong. Sweat drenched his collar. Something about the way he moved—too fast, not all the way in his body.
“You fix it?”
I didn’t answer. He looked past me. Saw the unit unopened.
“What the fuck do you do all day?” His voice tore through the space like something hot thrown into water. “I give you one job. One. You think this is a shelter? A retreat for sad little boys who used to write for magazines?”
He stepped closer. His boots scraped rust flakes loose from the floor. He grabbed the wrench from the desk, held it at his side.
“You wanna talk sin? This is sin. This is neglect. This is the shirking of duty.”
I didn’t move. Just looked down at the old board still open in front of me, wires splayed like nerves, the housing burned and split. Then I looked at him.
“You think control’s the same as order,” I said. “It ain’t. You’re still broken. You just run.”
He didn’t speak. Just flinched. Then he swung the wrench—fast, graceless—and it caught the edge of the server rack behind me, denting the metal with a sound like a bell struck wrong.
I left. Didn’t pick up my bag. Didn’t say anything else. The plastic door flaps hissed against the frame as they fell back into place. The radio inside was still playing. Some woman thanking Jesus for getting her out of a failed marriage.
Outside, the light cut sharper than I expected. That deep Carolina blue, too clean for the lot I stood in. Gravel kicked thin over clay, oil stains mapping the ground like past sins. I paused just past the flaps, let the heat touch my face. I lit a cigarette. First drag held bitter. I thought about Greensboro. Maybe renting a room somewhere near Market Street, finding an alt-weekly still printing on real paper. Picking up council meetings, concert briefs, bar openings—stories with no headline value but bones in them. I missed the rhythm. Missed chasing something that wasn’t mine.
Behind me, the shop didn’t stir. No apology. No noise. Just the hollow doxology of that broken radio bleeding through the cracked seal on the door. Whatever Russel was doing in there now, it didn’t involve me. I pictured him standing over the bench, jaw clenched, pretending to work while the board sat dead in front of him. He’d blame the fuse. Replace it. Miss the fault.
I’ve spent weeks pulling life from busted control systems, tracking voltage through charred paths and bad solder, thinking if I just followed the current long enough I could make something run again. But machines don’t forgive. They carry damage whether you see it or not. Surge hits wrong, and everything burns from the inside. You can’t always trace it.
Russel thinks he’s better than that. Thinks if he just says the right words—confession, forgiveness, restoration—then the current will flow clean. But wires melt. Casings crack. And no amount of repair changes what already failed.
I looked at the cigarette burning between my fingers. Thought about the apartment I hadn’t rented yet. The stories I hadn’t pitched. The part of me that still wanted to believe a clean reboot was possible.
Then I flicked the ash. Took one last drag. And walked.