Fin

Done!

I can't believe it took me so long. In some way, I romanced myself (take that as you will) with the business of writing this thing up, with my attachment to the project - to such an extent that I didn't realize there would be other people fighting against the plant who would be happy to get information I could give them, who know other people, who had some idea what to do about it.

Today I just walked in to the office, call it office, of the Alliance for Survival. They're in an old house with the pillarpost porch just west and south of downtown. I made the requisite trip by bike without event. I didn't bother with the stupid tie or jacket; I didn't have to strap the stupid bookbag on the frame between my legs.

And I rode back with an empty pack, playing with traffic.

So, home free.

The kid behind the desk at the Alliance -- sneakers, T-shirt, all that -- said they had a lawsuit in progress about the very plant, seemed pleased. I left him the number at my dad's and an email, said I'd answer questions if there were any and apologised that the docs were pretty scattered and disordered since there didn't seem to be any one special way to order them, and walked out the door.

So, in net, I had earned a little over three thousand bucks. Voltage had called before I got back. I called Moneypenney, who seemed pained. Apparently LISA had called with the complaint that I had "simply not done the work." I pointed out that they might have noticed a complete absence of work before four months, particularly given that they had laid off over 90% of the people who started with me before they dropped me. She mentioned that LISA was "strange," and not for the first time, but seemed incompletely convinced.

I could read her reaction, and LISA's, in a lot of ways, I guess, but I doubt I'll need either. I'll pedal down the river to Seal Beach tomorrow, then call Carl and Colin and see who's renting out on the Westside. Rolling into summer Patrick will will have work on the trucks, so the next few months I can find money without temping. And whatever the Alliance finds to do with those docs, LISA isn't likely to have more on me than whatever they have now.

And if they do, I'm relieved to have nothing whatever that I can do but sleep.

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.