Passage II

Still can't figure just what in the conversation made me pass out last week. If the abuse stories got to me, I may be better off. But the last thing said could as easily have had to do with the plant.

"Oh, they'll fire him," Terry Lynn tells William as I walk by, "It takes a while when they do that, but they always get them." She could mean anyone. She dislikes me, but I doubt that makes me unique.

Moneypenney called at work today, and I told her everything was fine, of course. She started off in French, and I felt flattered even though she initially threw me and wound up apologising profusely for her supposed accent. I had to go to Bettina's desk to take the call, but what can I do? I think about her when I visit the ducks.

"Cheers, Bettina; have another ficus."

Once upon a time, Bettina, the Sátanas must have been a real creek, though it must have dried sometimes without the treated water coming out of the pipe -- meandering flat on the flattish sand, a line of trees between the sparser bush.

The story will wait.

If I leave, will they keep Edna on? Maybe I should just give Edna some money and know she's moved out.

Dust Angels

Dear Angel of Dust;

I always wanted to write that. Nathaniel Mackey wrote that. He wrote it in Bedouin Hornbook and maybe the rest of the trilogy. I should have brought a copy to the ducks today. I could have sung it.

Like roadside dust to settle myself I settled to watch the ducks today. Again. Then pedalled in darkness, glad for the rocks and gravel vibrating chill thru my shoulders from the tines, glad for darkness.

What if Mackey didn't want religion, just a book? What if he never wanted to write a book, but no one had written it or someone left it somewhere, let the leaves scatter and damp in algae and birdcrap.

The leaves I stole from the office I left on the spokes of the bike, dry, pinned by the keys.


Thank you for coming to a second post when I wrote you nothing in the first.

I must have known something when I felt guilty to take this job. I'd walked into the Voltage office, the temp place, and told them I needed a paycheck. I felt I implied that I would do most anything, and the agent smiled behind her Moneypenney dark frames as though that anything sounded just correct.

"This writing," she mentioned, and casually, "Does it ever take, well, a journalistic air? I mean, ah, pieces for newspapers, or --"

"Oh, no no, just poetry," I played a hunch, played a false modesty as though to hide false pride, "a thing about how words fit together." She smiled. I suppose I fit some part. From the stubble on my face when I'd gotten off the plane I had carved some affectation of a goatee, and as I spoke to her I had crossed my legs comfortably in a way that should feel faggy this side of the Atlantic.

"No, that's OK. That's fine," she said. "It's just. We've sent people before. They're funny over there."

I'll get to funny, but my father's keys are at the door, and he doesn't need to know.

And there isn't time. Was there? I've mislaid it. Dear Angel of Dust these four thousand years whoever ever else?

Mayday

"You work for ECorp."

I'd thrown my bicycle in the back of his pickup where he pulled over on that long stretch near Walker Narrows -- an act of faith, but an innocent one -- thrown it in and jumped into the cab grateful enough. Then I got the novelistic long moment, his head framed in the window of the pickup, the eyes the ears the nose the line of the hair no one I knew: no one from Voltage Temps, no one I'd passed in LISA's corridors sneaking to the john. And I considering how fast the truck might be going, how the asphalt would rasp and tear were I to jump, where or whether a point might come in which I could snag the bike from the back, snag it and have a few feet down some road before he might turn.

The pops of the shotguns just off at El Cuello Rojo Trap and Skeet spoke

Time

Time

Time .

12 gauge, 20 gauge -- For years my father reloaded shells from a huge tin of slow-burning Unique powder someone had special-ordered and abandoned. They'd flash a good foot out of a 25-inch barrel and roar; I listened for his roar.

Time.

"Yes," I answer, answer the driver who has pulled over. If he knows, what can I tell him?

"Ha! Look at yourself, man - no, your eyes: look in the mirror. You fool! Like I can't spot an engineer so close to ECorp, nothing else for fucking miles."

Nothing else. Voltage Temps signs my checks; I work for LISA, at the office there in Alambres, so of course I work for ECorp:

"Don't we all?"

"Who else but an engineer would peddle through the middle of nowhere on a bicycle with his shirt open and his tie flapping in the air like a goddamn dog's tongue."

I don't know any engineers: what I'll write comes without expertise.

"You headed down the bike trail, down the river?"

"Sure." A little out of my way, but I'd ride with no traffic, and that would do.

So I sat and looked at the ducks on the river. I decided to write you, to write this, to actually post it.

Just don't believe a word.