Rose Cafe

I felt so flattered this morning.

This may take me a few days.

Dr. Huffman called -- a biologist for the Alliance for Survival -- he said he wanted to drive up to talk.

We picked the Rose Cafe, since he knew it: straight up from the breakwater at Belmont and two blocks in. I pedaled down the riverside path and arrived early. He had three hours' drive up the coast, so I had time to wander in the bookstore on Los Coyotes and Bellflower, whiff the books and riffle passages to play with the rythmns of the texts. I strummed a few pages of Whitman, then Miller -- it's a mood thing, dontcha know. In bookstores I like to read from mid-paragraph to mid-paragraph, try poems backwards, so nothing exactly begins or ends.

What comfort we must take from speech before we know the words.

I arrived with time to gloat. I didn't know I was til later. The Rose has those odd tiny high stools that keep one's feet off the ground, those and the tiny tables that force one to be more than naturally precise with drinks and food and give some feeling of daintiness, I suppose. I perched. Everything cost two to three times what it would without the tiny tables and peppermint trim, or a block further from the water, but I'd decided to let the oddness of it all seep across me -- the unaffordable women in outfits calculated to some mildly alien algorythm. I suppose I savored my difference, whatever that is -- my ability to momentarily exist in their jardin like a foreign phrase or an absentminded gesture, obdurate in insignificance or unmindful of whatever meanings I might provoke in this context.

I felt friendly towards the girls and counters in an almost indistinct way and recognized the doctor the second he entered. I thought he scanned ruefully, but he took me in quickly, and I nodded him over.

He asked if I were an engineer, if I worked directly at the Casa Republica Plant, if there weren't some vital significance, some large specific infraction or documented manslaughter that he and his staff might have passed over in the documents, and nodded twice softly, eyes lowered, at my last No: "I thought not," he said. "I hoped perhaps." His palms fluttered, turned down towards the table carefully.

Doctor Huffman spent some time with me. He may have wanted to wait before driving several hours back down south. I had time to mention the pressurizer, the jumpers, their badges, the fishkill, the broken and unrepairable steamgen tubes, the missing uranium rods and pellets, the series of ad hoc experiments with water treatment to try to slow the rusting eating away the irreparable guts of the plant.

He nodded. He confirmed a few conclusions, added some detail, some legal context, radiation measures from the hills around.

"There were four items we didn't know about in all that stack of sheets. I do thank you for those, we do. And we appreciate your intent."

But I should realize that The Alliance seldom pays its labor, operates strictly on donations and volunteers, that kids like I saw in that office scanned through the documents one after another and tried to read them, that unless information can give some decent, concrete results, it only discourages the people who process it.

He shared some stories, things like camping out on the beach nearby when the radiation started to climb, and people still within the breeding population moved off. The others finally investigated the plant and found someone had left a door open, perhaps on purpose. I mentioned my fear of reprisals from ECorp, wasted his time with that; he nodded.

"You can't worry about that. My mail arrives opened. My phone clicks and buzzes and cuts out at odd times. You get used to that. But they won't kill you for sport. They'll sue you just for advertising or convenience if they can, but killing causes problems. I'd love to have something they might kill me for. I thought I might today.

"You know, this plant is a rhinoceros. It's bigger than you and I together. In some ways it's noncomprehending and aggressive. We hunt with an air rifle. There's only one soft spot, and it's right - in - the - eye. You cannot look at that eye long before the eye sees you. And if you're close enough to hit that eye, you're close enough it can hurt you. You're going to cause it any damage, you've got to take that one best shot.

"You're welcome, you know. We'd love to have you, and your talents, and your insights, any time you decide to get serious."