Breakfast's boiled egg, the overhead hum of fluorescent lights, the midmorning coffee break daily routines keep the world running. But when people are pushed by a coworker's taunt, a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall from a bridge cracks appear, revealing alienation, casual cruelty, madness, and above all a simultaneous hunger for and fear of the unknown.

Daniel Orozco leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night...