Intermission

Why does nothing that feels like a solution have to do with the problem? I'm so happy I forgot about the plant for a couple of hours, like a fool. On some level, craziness becomes a strategy, but probably just when one goes nuts.

Cliff's starting a basketball game among the workers, so I accepted on a whim with great relief, and told myself I would thus throw Branley off. But Branley must at least know I leave the office with papers.

For one moment I couldn't leave the stable melancholy of the weekend.

Maybe I can convince Branley I'm a fool, and he'd better go away or ignore me. My photocopy logistics will get worse, but that's not a lawsuit in itself, and I can hardly imagine I will last long anyway.

Long Weekend

Why do humans have this thing about having to tell? Knowing I was headed out to see Grey, my fingers felt good around the handlebars. I rode up Alameda, out Manchester out to Culver City through the sort-of ruins without stopping for a lot of lights Sunday morning, like cruising through a bricolage Pompeii.

L.A. streets seem dated and new, the city hollowing from center out, motilities of force, motilities of empire, the We the They concentric like rings from a drop of water or where a bullet passes through a window. Or motilities of consumption, like rings of mold through a loaf of bread.

I haven't seen Grey since before Paris; soon he gets to Perthe. I pedal across town because it's Grey, not someone else, but I spill about my Situation, which hasn't changed since Lakewood.

I have made conversation hygeinic. I'm doing that with everything. I even push fear out the pedals when I ride, pull safety from the handlebars. Since I could blow this all in a sneeze, it's just as well I sneezed at Grey's. He'll tell no one; I don't need to ask. He's even worried about me instead of the plant. I find myself defensive of my endeavor: "I'm not a fool."

Ouch.

We had a few hours; then he left for work in his cab, and I had that sense of having passed time without partaking: Has it been hygeinic for you, too?


His roommate had shot into her room with his first mention of work; Trish eventually picked up her cell, so I pedaled up to Studio City, a bit of a trek with the grit and the slope. Trish lives up Fredonia, an alley that crooks straight up into the damned mountain, so I actually got off the bike for the last couple blocks. I'd rested at the liquor store so as not to arrive early, but I felt just as well walking.

"No sex," she opens. "How was France?"

Not half what it seemed a couple of seconds ago.

"But I'd like to act in ways that might seem like we were."

I'd hoped she'd clear my mind -- a lot to ask of anybody, as you will have observed. But we sat in the jacuzzi with a demi of cold chardonnay and the sun casting shadows across the 101 so far below it seemed actually far enough, Trish stark naked and the water just over her nipples. Mn?

"No."

She's on about her website business. She does intranets, mostly: company presence for company personnel. She likes playing in Photoshop and Dreamweaver and talking to business managers about concrete desires that she can fulfill. But work takes her time and she had thought of a child and I am glad she has the place and the jacuzzi and the picture I don't remember at just that perfect place on the wall. And she's Trish whom I would tell most anything but I can't timeshare even this wine and we both know it. So I watch the freeway spread San Fernando into the Basin and vice versa to create the illusion of seeing all: the Souths go south; the Norths go north, but if one arrives, one gets off the freeway. And look at the freeway.

A musician would be perfect, Trish informs me: intense, romantic, absent.

She wants to pay for a massage: "I'll enjoy it more." I slink and accept, and stay an hour after the hour and a half touching her back and her neck until something in my insistence wakes her and she stumbles to bed, the sheet gathered around her breasts and momentarily translucent between her thighs.

She has pointed to the linen closet, and I look at the furniture and consider curling up near her cat and leaving early, but I lock her door behind pretending I'm a ghost and slide off down the river valleys past the streetlights guarding the curves and slopes so it's downhill most all the way in to Lakewood.

Which leaves us where?

Gather this:

Today Branley handed me a document:

"Have a look."

It dealt with fish impingement at SONGS -- the San Olfactory Nuclear Generating Stations, down in Southern Cal, not a ECorp project, but it has to work the same way. Suck in the cold seawater to cool the plant, boil the water to steam to turn the turbine blades, spit the heated water out through the gratings into the ocean. The sea mammals form a kind of Peaceable Kingdom outside the grate; the wait in line for the cooked fish. They can gorge on all they want; why fight?

Branley waits. Intent, patient, watery-blue eyes, stolid behind the slim brass-rimmed glasses. Do I feign disinterest?

"Oh, those fishies went and impinged themselves on us" hoots Aetna; I turn to her as to liberation.

"You like those, Jack?" She continues. "I get those every day. How many pounds, how many tons of fish."

"You know, it's the language of all this that gets me," says Earl. Earl always looks like he has an opinion -- bald, heavy, broad, grey shot through the spreading Tolstoy beard. Earl seems half like he ought to be doing something more important, half like he ought to be looking for a beer by his Harley.

"Hey, look both ways and don't impinge yourselves on any cars, kiddies."

I manage a laugh: "Yeah, what a place." If he's moved, I don't know it. I can't glance over.

"Oh, where you been, Jack?" Aetna continues, "We got impingement to go around. You don't need ECorp. Half the freaking world impinges itself on Boeing. My husband's an engineer. He can't even talk to me there's so much impingement going on. I ask him. I used to ask."

"So you're the spy!" responds Earl, but the joking tone does not reach his eyes.

"Hey, I didn't need his secrets, but there you go. No, he lays there, lays in bed sometimes. He stares at the ceiling, and his mouth works. I'm his wife; I'm not supposed to ask? He says, 'No, office stuff.'"

"Could be" Earl puts in.

"Oh, it is -- usually is, or always: he's an engineer; he can't talk. He's all -- oh, kill ratios and like that. He starts; he goes silent. He looks at me like he's ashamed or he's pissed at me cause I'm there. I shouldn't ask, but it isn't nice. It took awhile."

Branley holds holds my gaze: enough. He's awfully clean-cut.

He's complicit. Or he's baiting me.

He's a kid. Or he's female. I'm changing everything, and not just the names. Europe this summer, SC in the fall, "going to get an MBA." He's said nothing bout politics whatsoever. He's asked about Paris: What should I see What's ahead; Where should I eat Where anyone buys.

Streetlights dapple peach off the Seine before dawn. The ground chills then, so you'd might as well walk. But see the Tower in the day when the wind's down.

Les bleus run you off of the Champs d'Elysees, but by the Tuileries you can doze in the sun, while the ground's warm. Le Boubourg's the best. It's warm even when the snow falls. But it closes at night, so check the grates on the metrostops before the first frost. They leave a few broken for charity.

But yes, at the Picasso, visit the goat. There's a lady in clay you should Hullo at the Museé Rodin, right before you leave. Reddish clay, with her eyes hollowed out, but brown -- brown eyes and hair just like Katie Foster in 1990, and if you'd known her you'd remember. And look.

Am I avoiding the question over the document? Not gracefully:

He holds out the sheaf of stapled papers: "I don't need this until one."

He means right after lunch, after I get back from the library.

Fab: An Early Obit

OK, Fabienne: footnote.

I suppose :

Her fingers laced through my chest hair, drawn tightly to her mouth in the tent, I suppose. I suppose that that says all I might. She must know that hurts. She must pretend that she's asleep. She must pull the reaction out of -- my skin? my chest?

Or.

Or son corp de danseuse naked head-towards-feet curved backward over my two arms, curved again to kiss the London floor between her ankles, shaking in seizure, dying dove like doves I shot.

Or.

Or the blowjob on Havasu in daylight. "Keep paddling out" she says. "They're going to see. Fab? Fab, the lifeguards have jumped off the platform."

(Ants eat thru the tent, I pull her hand, she won't go on the lake at night.)

Or.

Or asleep suddenly on the campgound table as storm crosses the steppe, approaching strident purple-blackening tumescence cloudbank darkening our starry Utah midnight, gleaming. Her hair grown out now, a bit, as long as my finger from tip almost to the first knuckle, grown fast and blonding fast, whipping frenzy at her ears, her eyes still asleep still as I place the stones, one hand holding a corner of the tarp firm to the table as I roll another stone close, pump it with my leg and arm up on to the table to the tarp, to it hold firmly in place over her blankets.

And another stone, as though the tarp won't billow. And eight. And nine. And twelve. And another stone, as though a grave. And another only stone.

Her lashes in the wind alive.

"Oh, Jack, this finest place to die" she'd said that day. Why can't she feel the wind? I watch her still -- why can't she feel the wind? --

So, Fabienne.

Never mind:I'm standing in a library in Alambres, the girl in Paris, presumably, newly married. Pardon the drama.

What did Fabienne say? Her words and would I remember? -- something "wind might dry our bones could leave us clean as stars, so quiet, something something something.

Maybe she lied about the plant in Bretagne or the radioactive tailings by the coal mine in Anjou where she played con los hijos de los campesinos españoles in convincing castellano. Or even her leukemia. She might have thought I'd leave politely, leave her to the man she must have known on our first night that she would marry, the man who had reviewed her work in Le canard enchainé, whom she found comfortable but did not love -- she claimed.

If I can't say this is true, why not a paean to a ghost? Besides, Fab wouldn't die on me so quickly; she's just extremely gone.

Therefore :

"Hello. I walk in here several days a week, once or twice a day, photocopy a few documents, stroll into the stacks for a few seconds only, then always leave without a book."

And how should I presume?

Buddy, Can You Spare $0.15/Sheet?

This kills me: having pressed the documents up under my jacket, having walked past the guard and skipped my lunch to make copies, I can't ask the librarian for change. No ATM, no credit card. What a leap of faith, moral training. A leap to a fall.

I stand beside the photocopy machine at the Alambres Public Library trying to look like I'm considering just anything else. I could just walk to the librarian's desk; I could say "I need twenty-five cents" for whatever reason -- "I have a class that starts tomorrow". I could beg it in the parking lot. But no, I can't.

Is this important? The sheet in front of me reads "JUMPERS" with a diagram. Jumpers go in: they clean the pressure chamber. These are the "ZZPTech people I've read so many documents about. Hot mops and buckets, discarded rad suits -- the catwalks become impassable with so much crap.

ZZPTech hires "drunks off the beach at El Castillo," per Suit Man. My colleagues object.

"You hire drunks to clean nuclear facilities? Don't they make mistakes?"

"Oh, there are problems. Who should we get?"

"Well, engineers, at least to direct it."

He laughs, briefly: "You can't have engineers clean a plant. They know what's inside it."

"Someone, then -- you have to advertise."

"We're willing. Hey, do you want it?"

"Besides, even if you did, we couldn't hire you for very long. By the time we train someone, they're almost done working. We rehearse them, we show them how to use the suits, we take them through each step. But from the time they cross that hatch, they have about 45 minutes,"

"45 minutes? How can anyone make a living with that? How much does it pay per hour?"

"Not much. At the beginning it was about seven dollars an hour -- no no! it's more now. But it's not something most people who have useful lives would consider.

The diagram shows the badges that go off" when they exceed their lifetime exposure to radiation: lifetime. Pop-tarts, y'all? It takes about 45 minutes. Apparently the suits tend to tear open on the hatches. Sometimes, it appears, they leave in a hurry.

The diagram, the original, has a T-short sketched in clean black lines with a baseball cap centered directly over the neck, everything perfectly regular, perfectly symmetrical in dumbshow of objectivity. Should I avoid calling the librarian's attention to me, or am I making excuses rather than bum a quarter?

I grab a pencil that's lying by a computer to copy Dewey Decimal numbers, fish a couple sheets discarded beside the printer, and sketch:

Badge in front.

Badge on top of head.

Badge in center of the back.

The badge on top above the scrubbing, the badge behind away from the scrubbing, the badge in front in case contamination comes from behind. The worker stays until all three badges go off, reports the lowest two figures: TickticktickticktickTicktickticktickTicktickticktickTicktickticktick--done!

"Oh, we don't force them," Suit says.

Apparently the workers lie about having worked previously, the better to beg back on.

That's a funny volition with the DT's in the sand. In Paris, I learned to recognize by the chafing on the face how many nights a man had spent outdoors. I suppose it's a bit better by the beach. I picture how it would be scooping the hollow shallow so as not to hit groundwater, anchoring cardboard over the top. In practice most people seem to prefer parks a couple blocks off, where the first row of buildings has blunted the wind.

My ownership this agreement that I may exclude my friends from certain objects

My money a lien on some person's time

My status en différance from another failure,

Tick Tick Tick

The top of the desk I write at is still grooved from angry notes I wrote my mother when she confined me to my room "until you learn to behave." I remember the details you might imagine, but I can't remember what the librarian at Alambres looks like. I find that odd: she's female. I walked by her desk today. I know she is about 35 or 40, caucasian, brown hair, light eyes of some sort, curls with a lighter color against a darker. I can see her hair from the side, the hairs on her neck. Her face is slanted away -- my memory covering its faults? The curls are probably set, faux curls, as Frank Norris calls them somewhere.

One question -- in what sense may I care for her opinion more than for Fabienne?

Of course, Fabienne I'll never see again.

Filing Stolen Papers

So,

someone analyzes my responses to see I'm too stupid to be an engineer. I don't suppose I'll confuse them. They dumped over a hundred temps that trained with me, all but eight or nine. We repeat that the others read too slow -- nervously, I suppose, though I wish as often I were laid off. The supers nod, but I can't make those numbers work. For what Ecorp spent to train that room, the slowboats can't have cost too much.

What might LISA check? We each get documents, fresh stacks, each the size of a novel in printed type. We each wade through a couple stacks or so a day. We read, we classify each doc by site, date, topic, activity, personnel -- a set of numbers, a couple words. The supers get a batch, record hour and minute, hand out another batch. They spot-check everything, revise nothing. They send it back. The slowest get laid off, they say, plus Jim.

But I have to photocopy at lunch or evening. I skim ahead, hang onto docs overtime. I can't photocopy at LISA, of course. A guard actually stands at the machine. Branley told me, laughing, and I actually walked back down the hall with him to say hello to the guard. We annoyed him, I suspect, but mildly; and it seemed like the least suspicious thing to do at the time.

So I copy the docs at the library, Alambres Public Library, just across the street and about a half a block down. But that means I have to skim thru the docs and look for copy, then hang onto the docs til lunch or 5 oclock. If I copy at noon, I leave the copies in a copy of Sartre's Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr -- something no one's apt to disturb.

The irony of which makes this work better as fiction, doesn't it? Assuming there's no dead body turns up, or none with a name on it.

Orwell Rockin in the Free World ~or~ A Little Bit of Hairy in the Night.

Pity Orwell in his grave. Someone's going to have to dig him up and install a rotisserie spit.

LISA caught Jim today, assuming he's guilty or that his guilt matches their accusations. Something in his responses said Westinghouse, so SuitMan the PR Pro didst regale us, trailing a litany of consequentia. Suit:

"When you know something, it's hard to hide."

If you don't know squat but you're trying to think, maybe that's easier: they haven't caught me, so far as I know. They'd bust immediately were they certain. Why wait until after a leak?

On the other hand, one person might lead to another.

I worked with Jim for a couple months w/o camaradery -- dumb luck, or a strategy of his. I took him for stupid -- a misstep that starts to look like a pattern. Now I want to know what he had for breakfast.

I can draw his face back. A bit. He sat, so, hung his face so: Muuaoouuw

-- I turn from the keyboard to practice the gesture. He stroked his thin whiskers, stared frontwards during training

-- hopelessly corporeal meatpuppet with the rest of us caught in the geometric tines of LISA's will.

Mostly his mouth would go slack.

Pray he's guilty; maybe he'll get off. At least Westinghouse might spring for a lawyer with claws, something more feral than the Rex Todd thing that David Keogh got in Britain.

You may not know: The NY Times put Keogh and O'Connor's story wa-a-ay down on A-12 today. Had Bettina not double-folded the paper in front of that white blouse at break I might have missed it: "British Court Convicts 2 of Leaking Secret Memo on Bush-Blair Conversation." Seems George II spoke to Blair about blowing up Al Jazeera News in Qatar. Of course, the prosecutor's paid to play Pilate:

Diplomacy is a delicate and sensitive act, and it cannot properly be carried out in our interest when what one government says to another cannot be kept secret or confidential.

Even the attorney for the defense characterized the defendent's action as "misguided" and done "in a way that was likely to cause damage." The defendent had pleaded innocent, BTW.

Why, do turn your pretty blue eyes, Scarlett. How one does blush to see the delicate diplomacy of a Patriot missile exposed!

First the Il Deuce-style crotch-shot on the aircraft carrier, now this. Bush's handlers must miss their jobs at the Washington Zoo.

Maybe I could grant delicacy to the diplomacy behind MSNBC's decision to can top-rated Donahue -- delicacy in an Alberto Gonzalez kind of way: they had the sagacity to lie about it. Their sagacity makes me wish I'd watched the program, but I guess we won't get reruns right away. But no, a Patriot Missile right across the desk of the Late Edition. That's escalating discourse.

Musing Whitman

self
of passions whittled

rhythms of memoire
forgettings

in absence
event leaves

dried

unfold enfold no

explanation

....


/*Let's go back, Walt,
& let you explain the grass*/

Orwell's Grave

"Four verbs," Aetna says -- Edna. Edna -- Aetna -- is from The Far Side, roughly pyramidal, sits beside me or across the table in the War Room at LISA M-F 8-5 and jokes with the dozen or so of us who've survived the recent eighty-some percent attrition rate.

The supers kicked back my Friday batch of documents today; I must have looked perplexed.

"They'd really like everything that happens in these documents to fit under four verbs," she continued. I'd really like that, too. LISA gets the documents from ECorp, her only customer after five years of happy corporate marriage. ECorp seems to get them from all over. They're from the NRC, Zzptech, Westinghouse, Bechtel: resumes, discussions of steam generator corrosion, redundant signatures for shipments coming & going -- it's hard to tell which.

Four verbs. The super actually walked over to my desk to mention that the word accident did not exist for LISA: "We call that an incident. No. Accident, if there ever were an accident, I'm not a highly enough placed official to chew you out about it." Then, walking away: "And that's not to imply that there is such a thing."

Does this sound like something I was supposed to have known?

So imagine, George Orwell writes a book, calls it 1984. He gets it published, even read, read so much his folks incorporate his words into daily English. I'd call that time for brews and congratulations. But no, the people he would burlesque use his piece as a guidebook -- to the extent that no one in charge anywhere at any time during six weeks of training could say or would say, "Yo! Asshole! four verbs."

So why write why move? Hey, go ahead, buy a place in Seaside or San Anselmo and let the wind blow when Zztech opens the pressurizer and "blows it out" for cleaning. I'll go write loveletters to carp.

Aetna took it better. She does:

"Don't worry. This sort of work is hard for people like you."

She must have meant to be comforting: she near-swallowd the guffaw when my eyes bugged. Like me? Am I unzipped? Should I shave my whiskers, or does that look like I'm trying to hide?

I barely talk at LISA. I try not to look long at anyone or swing my shoulders as I walk. Maybe she saw the bicycle I lock to a phone pole outside the office lot. I had not taken Aetna to be perceptive. So clearly she has perceived more than I and is willing to be generous.

"No, really," she went on, "What is it you do?"

Eat, sleep, move when poked. Until five seconds ago I smuggled documents out of the information service of a nuclear energy facility.

"I mean, do you paint, do you write?"

I flatter myself -- but, well, you see.

"You're not invisible, you know."

"No." I don't have a third eye either. Is this something everybody sees?

"Oh, Jack, you're fine. But all this regularity has to just bug you, this business of having to classify things just the way we-all do, of having the supervisors review each little thing and send things back when you would normally classify everything some way no one even imagines."

No one even imagines?

She talks on to smooth my nerves, but the gestures hint broadly that she knows nothing of what would make me nervous, then:

"People know things about you, Jack, just like you know things about them. Sometimes we find it easier to not speak. Don't we?"

Do we?

I need to be misunderstood. I need someone who doesn't care:

O gentle reader, do not leave!

Day Off

Bronzediamond carp grouts
At the shore
At the work the work the root the reed ~*

Did I ever think a trout was finer

the grandeur of the colors on the side
the colors of the carp against mud the floating algae
the tan and green and yellow reed

colors of a person I recall at night
colors of a person I might see in her child in her aunt in her cousin

Push that the seen bend
Push at colors

Ever the work obrar filtrar the slow
consumation


.done ~*


So wd I work
& work@ LISA

So who's LISA?
Legal Information Service Associates
And who is LISA to me?

Better sleep with the fishies.

snoitisnarT

Sorry to leave abruptly. There's a rhythm to this; I'll get it. I imagine a You: When I don't write, You get pissed. When I get pretentious, you feel shame; you don't forward the site. You stay away, but only for a bit.

So go ahead, pretend I'm real.

I'm staying with my father, have for months since I got back from Paris broke and 40-some hours awake, startled at the width of suburban streets.

I explain for myself if not you.

I don't mean to present this as romantic or deliberate or other-than-fuckupped. I came, I wrote, I floundered. I had some idea that I could write truth, so no one read to say I sucked. I sat ripping pages out of Writer's Market, nothing to smoke them with. Phillipe loaned me a couple grand to relocate: "Come to Paris." Whyever not? About the time the money left I left my address book and passport on a car in the Rue de francs bourgeois long enough to get a couple car-lengths away and turn -- oops.

The Embassy folk Place Concord felt I'd behaved badly. The Embassy must be a fun place to work. "You meet the strangest people," as an elegant ancient man with a curling handlebar moustache told my aunt Monica one time on a bus in Culver City as she leaned over and glanced at his sketchbook to verify that he was, indeed, Salvador Dali.

The embassy does filter the people entering. But then, I qualified -- a blue-eyes-no-Qu'ran thing, I suppose: as an American citizen, I had a right to know why I couldn't return home.

"All you have to do is bring in five Americans who do have ID's to vouch for you."

"Can I get them to come into some office in Los Angeles?"

"Don't you know anyone?"

"I'm American."

"The United States Government will not issue a passport with no way of
identifying you."

"Can I get a dozen Frenchmen to say I'm not French?"

"American citizens with identification. Do your best."

Now I wish I were back at le Beaubourg, thankful again at the grey rain slanting outside, proud owner of a chair with a view of two library stacks. Do I miss it? Or does seeing the rainwater jet through the handcarved gargoyle mouths on Rue Saint Denis give me a way to avoid being in my father's home in Lakewood CA speaking Aeromilitary with you --

-- and dealing with my job for ECorp, at LISA, where I classify the documents of said industry in a language which contains just four verbs, none of which involve leak, break down, irradiate, brainfart or fuck up.

No no no: moi, je suis poete: so I've just got to find what rhymes with incident.

Dust Angels

Dear Angel of Dust;

I always wanted to write that. Nathaniel Mackey wrote that. He wrote it in Bedouin Hornbook and maybe the rest of the trilogy. I should have brought a copy to the ducks today. I could have sung it.

Like roadside dust to settle myself I settled to watch the ducks today. Again. Then pedalled in darkness, glad for the rocks and gravel vibrating chill thru my shoulders from the tines, glad for darkness.

What if Mackey didn't want religion, just a book? What if he never wanted to write a book, but no one had written it or someone left it somewhere, let the leaves scatter and damp in algae and birdcrap.

The leaves I stole from the office I left on the spokes of the bike, dry, pinned by the keys.


Thank you for coming to a second post when I wrote you nothing in the first.

I must have known something when I felt guilty to take this job. I'd walked into the Voltage office, the temp place, and told them I needed a paycheck. I felt I implied that I would do most anything, and the agent smiled behind her Moneypenney dark frames as though that anything sounded just correct.

"This writing," she mentioned, and casually, "Does it ever take, well, a journalistic air? I mean, ah, pieces for newspapers, or --"

"Oh, no no, just poetry," I played a hunch, played a false modesty as though to hide false pride, "a thing about how words fit together." She smiled. I suppose I fit some part. From the stubble on my face when I'd gotten off the plane I had carved some affectation of a goatee, and as I spoke to her I had crossed my legs comfortably in a way that should feel faggy this side of the Atlantic.

"No, that's OK. That's fine," she said. "It's just. We've sent people before. They're funny over there."

I'll get to funny, but my father's keys are at the door, and he doesn't need to know.

And there isn't time. Was there? I've mislaid it. Dear Angel of Dust these four thousand years whoever ever else?

Mayday

"You work for ECorp."

I'd thrown my bicycle in the back of his pickup where he pulled over on that long stretch near Walker Narrows -- an act of faith, but an innocent one -- thrown it in and jumped into the cab grateful enough. Then I got the novelistic long moment, his head framed in the window of the pickup, the eyes the ears the nose the line of the hair no one I knew: no one from Voltage Temps, no one I'd passed in LISA's corridors sneaking to the john. And I considering how fast the truck might be going, how the asphalt would rasp and tear were I to jump, where or whether a point might come in which I could snag the bike from the back, snag it and have a few feet down some road before he might turn.

The pops of the shotguns just off at El Cuello Rojo Trap and Skeet spoke

Time

Time

Time .

12 gauge, 20 gauge -- For years my father reloaded shells from a huge tin of slow-burning Unique powder someone had special-ordered and abandoned. They'd flash a good foot out of a 25-inch barrel and roar; I listened for his roar.

Time.

"Yes," I answer, answer the driver who has pulled over. If he knows, what can I tell him?

"Ha! Look at yourself, man - no, your eyes: look in the mirror. You fool! Like I can't spot an engineer so close to ECorp, nothing else for fucking miles."

Nothing else. Voltage Temps signs my checks; I work for LISA, at the office there in Alambres, so of course I work for ECorp:

"Don't we all?"

"Who else but an engineer would peddle through the middle of nowhere on a bicycle with his shirt open and his tie flapping in the air like a goddamn dog's tongue."

I don't know any engineers: what I'll write comes without expertise.

"You headed down the bike trail, down the river?"

"Sure." A little out of my way, but I'd ride with no traffic, and that would do.

So I sat and looked at the ducks on the river. I decided to write you, to write this, to actually post it.

Just don't believe a word.