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.