Passage

I passed out at work today. No idea why. Hasn't happened in years. That's part of the trouble with seizures: they cover their tracks. The easiest way to seize a second time is to ponder the first: "I felt, this, then that, then -." Pfuuff.

So I left it for later rather than risk a reprise. Oh, great, Jack -- be inconspicuous. As my eyes cleared, Bettina hovered at the door, then vanished; Earl stood over me, his socks and loafers more or less in front of my face. He seemed to have just stood, probably as I started to move. Branley had risen; Edna sat somewhere behind, to judge by sounds. I figured Bill and Terry Lynn, the supers, might still be across the room. To judge by the fine texture of the tactile electric buzz as I rose, I couldn't have been out very long.

It's been so long I figured they couldn't happen anymore -- almost ten years. I went through a psychotherapy; when I could cry and speak, they just evaporated. I told everyone today that I banged my elbow on the table, hit my funnybone. But clearly something upset me. They heard it, and I forgot. The smiles could have been the smug looks one always sees when rising from seizure. Whatever griefs and vices people have, they feel they've managed when they see a man convulse.

Alternately, the smiles could mean my denials might make no sense, since any one of them might remember what someone had said when I passed out except me.

The conversation at the table had gotten pretty bizarre. They have started to joke regularly about documents. They gather stories that don't come from the documents, or not from ours, which Edna claims are filtered -- stories one or another super has told them. The stories, I think, are filtered, too. They show individual foolishness or chicanery, or principles we have to understand anyway.

1. Some engineer set the beaker of secondary fluid he meant to test for radiation near the coffeemaker as he went to the john. He couldn't find the beaker later, and the office sat and sipped their coffee some time while they discussed what he might have done with it.

2. Three engineers plugged a coolant tube with a basketball. "Natural or synthetic?" Cliff asks. The coolant tubes get heated to over 800 degrees F, apparently flipped the trio up through the concrete containment dome. No way -- does someone plant stories, to see what we will repeat?

3. At some site in Arizona, someone stole thirty earth-movers -- thirty expensive vehicles. They never showed up. Apparently workers who had purchased homes in the area did not want the plant to go online -- probably because that meant the end of their jobs. The vehicles may have been buried in the desert.

4. The golfball-sized balls used to plug the small steam generator pipes drift onto the beaches upcoast, where children collect them or play catch in the waves.

5. Sea lions, porpoises, large octopi, and sometimes sharks form a line outside the outlet valves to eat the fish cooked in the secondary fluid as it moves through the plant. They don't fight or squabble or eat each other. Apparently, there's plenty to go around.

6. The secondary water --compressed liquid at 800 or so degrees -- must depressurize and "flash" to pure steam as it approaches the generator turbines. One day it doesn't: liquid particulate stays in the steam. The particles blow the blades clear free of their axle. The blades continue to spin, ricocheting through the control room, past desks and console panels, out the other side to nick the main coolant line. The main expense to Ecorp is having to shut down the plant.

The blown pipes to radioactive to repair, the Westinghouse instructions to "blow out" the pressure chamber to the outer atmosphere while the plant's shut down -- these escape mention.

I fear a probe, or even that it's a way of discussing my activities. But why shouldn't it be boredom? And the table has gotten bizarre in other ways.

"I've stopped hitting them. I'm so proud."

That wakes me up. Edna has two girls, thirteen and eleven.

"So I can't stop the therapy: I need that."

I nod; she's addressing Branley and Earl, but this seems to want public acknowledgement.

"Now if I can just hang on here for two more weeks, I'll be able to move both of them away from their father."

With the woman who hits them. "How do they feel about that, Edna?"

"Oh, they're fine. I worried about it, but they've assured me. I asked. 'I don't need him around,' she says. My thirteen-year-old's a trooper."

And the eleven?

"She has no objections, but she's pretty quiet. But I don't know if he's done anything to her yet. He started molesting the older one a couple years ago, but I don't know whether she may be enough."

Someday maybe I'll quit judging people for knuckling under to corporate pressure. But I don't see how I had a right to start working here.

Ficus in Chief

By her desk, by the door I walk by every day, Bettina has a ficus, the only one in the entire building, as near as I can tell.

She wants to apolgise, wants me to know she's still angry. It gives an interesting expression, but I have no idea what to say.

"Nice ficus."

Colorblindness in the Abstract

I can never figure what people see. Like I spent an evening once explaining red to Carl. He let me keep at it like a student who's just discovered phenomenology. Then, knowing he's colorblind must give him fits when he looks at his paintings. But maybe not: I'm sure he left thinking it was attitudinal.

Bettina went off on me today, just really angry. Edna chirped: Bettina snapped smack in the doorway to the workroom, both of us framed like Punch and Judy. The table was looking down when I turned around, but that wouldn't last.

Bettina someone I see in the hall, or at her desk. We'd never spoken, just Hello and some joke on the company or the brown paper wrapper over LISA windows, more to slow her down or excuse my lingering an extra second than anything. Normally, I'd call her response attraction, but I doubt it. She must be five foot nine in stockings -- were one to see her in stockings -- and becomes amazing with the office heels. I'm s-h-o-r-t. All I'd done was shave the goat beard finally. But she talked like I'd betrayed a trust.

I'd get rid of one writerly trait at a time, I figured -- just quietly, no comment, no matter how little any of it has with typing even a word. I'd have better acted like a ficus, strange as an actual green ficus would be at LISA. People forget what doesn't change. She must have felt some complicity in the jokes, when I wanted to say, Hey, for $2.75 and a gallon tank, I could solve all LISA's problems and clean the building.

I suppose there's no way to mention what I'm doing here.

From how she looks and where she sits, does everyone slogg by each day and forget to ask if she has a brain? Must be some kind of supply and demand thing applies.

Objectors, Conscientious & Otherwise

"They can force me to shoot; they just can't force me to shoot well."

One of Earl's better moments, I think. Earl sits across from me at Ecorp. His formulations sound better as LISA smells worse. When 50,000 guys stand in two lines facing each other, let's bless everyone who shoots badly.

"I went into the National Guard," he starts, as he has a couple of times.

Vietnam-era guy -- he figures avoiding the draft gave him some special training for corporate life.

"Where there's a job, I'm a nonparticipant. Any of you like what we're doing? "

"You get your batches done on time." Edna signs she's on to him. Branley smiles, what could be solidarity. Earl continues.

"Oh, I acknowledge authority, no question. They can force me to do things."

"Well, alright, but all of us --"

"But I volunteer no extra. I don't want much: a little land -- in Africa, for all I care. I'd prefer somewhere people speak English -- I'm not a polyglot like Jack here. But English, that's not hard; the Brits spread it like syphilis and tobacco. I don't want much -- just house, someone to staff it, enough to live."

"That's all any of us do."

"I figure."

Class Inaction

If LISA offered to hire me on permanent, what would I do? I need to exit somehow. It's like Fabienne talking about her attempted lawsuit. The way she put it herself,

"I tried a class action suit. I thought it would work, you know, many people die, no one cares. I had been a small role in a movie. I am young enough men will feel sorry for me.

"But I spoke to a lawyer, no? He said my chance of leukemia was a few percentage points higher for the background radiation of the plant. There might be some chance, perhaps, a class action suit. Who wants to live in court with cameras?"

Sometimes I even wish LISA would catch me, just so the fear would end. That scares me. Maybe Carl's take makes more sense. Stealing from LISA is like the drunkard's walk. (You may know this. The drunkard walks north with a street at his right and a wall at his left? There's a 50% chance he stumbles left, 50% chance he stumbles right. Where does he end up?

Answer: He always ends at the wall, of course. In my case, that means I leave without being caught or when LISA catches me. The hour basketball game may be just the thing. It's more a gesture anyway, best because it's pointless, as though we had no idea whom we were flipping off. Which I suppose I don't.

Basketball for Lunch

The game was fun in its way -- the basketball -- ties pulling on and off, hustling back to the office, shirts too sweaty, oddly tight. I'm too bullnecked for the clip-on ties, so I'm half-standing in the back of Cliff's mustang, trying to get my neck in his rear-view and get the damned noose tied while he careens around the downtown alleys he seems to know. The guys laugh and swear at my stumbling. "Five minutes" Cliff keeps promising. I'm thrilled to worry about getting in to work late: piss-all, maybe they'll lay me off. I might be lucky that way. Rudy's on about a class-action suit, but all he means is that LISA doesn't have the right to take back our work.

"We're temps, Rood." Could there be a case?

"We still have rights. No one does this."

If LISA offered to hire me on permanently, what would I do? I do feel some responsibility to stay on, to get as much as I can. But then I even wish LISA would catch me, just so the fear would end. That scares me: you know that feeling when you watch someone at the side of the road and the car starts to track off?

I will exit somehow. It's like Fabienne talking about her own considerations when the doctors diagnosed her leukemia. As she put it,

"I tried a class action suit. I thought it would work, you know, many people die, no one cares. I had been a small role in a movie. I am young enough men will feel sorry for me.

"But I spoke to a lawyer, no? He said my chance of leukemia was a few percentage points higher for the background radiation of the plant. There might be some chance, perhaps, a class action suit. Who wants to live in court with cameras?"

Maybe Carl makes the most sense. Stealing from LISA is a drunkard's walk.

In my case, that means I leave without being caught or LISA catches me. I can never know it's too late until it is. I can never feel I've got enough on ECorp: no information will shut it down. The hour basketball game may be just the thing. It's more a gesture anyway, best because it's pointless, as though we had no idea whom we were flipping off. Which I suppose one never does.