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.