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.
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