'They won't stay,' he says, airily. 'Out here it never really changes. They pretend to clean it up, but they just pick up a few deviants and everybody else hides and two hours later the meat market is back in business.'
Hot night for a meat market. I've seen it change. Used to be there wasn't anything out here, no couples, no hotdogs, just boarded up stands, the coneys and the chickenhawks and the squatters. The squatters are mostly gone and the whole place is now free marketeers and the people who want housing in the city bad enough to stick it out. They clean up the two hundred year old buildings, then make the neighborhood domestic.
He's so fresh and young. Is he waiting for me to make a move? I would if I could. 'I have to get back,' I say, regretfully.
'Good talking to you,' he says.
'I come out here and walk pretty often,' I say. 'What's your name?'
'Invierno,' he says. In Spanish that means winter. What kind of name is Invierno? Obviously not his real name. Not giving one's real name or number is a time-honored tradition out here on the boardwalk.
'I'm Rafael,' I say. 'Like the angel.'
He grins and makes the sign of benediction, standing at the top of the steps.
When I glance back a second time he has already turned and stalks back down the boardwalk, prowling.
Back at Peter's building two women are carting boxes out the front door and piling them on the sidewalk. They watch me, flat, hostile faces. Their belongings make the usual pitiful pile on the sidewalk. I step over bluegreen pillows like the kind Peter has tossed on the floor, palm the door.
The hallway and the elevator are hot and airless, in China even the hallways were kept cool. I wonder how much money it would cost to keep the halls heated and cooled. There are old ducts, at one time the halls of this building were temperature controlled. In an old building like this it would help the tenants keep their own costs a little lower.
'Hey,' I say, 'someone is moving out of the building.'
Peter is flicking through vid programs. 'Who was it?'
'Two girls. No one I know.' Peter must be as frustrated as I am. I leave coneys on the boardwalk, he talks to his flier. 'Maybe I could rent their place.'
'Don't rent, save your money until you get a job,' Peter says.
'You need your own place back,' I say.
'You're no problem, and you pay half the rent.'
'How's what's his name, the flier.' I say pointedly. How's your love life? I've got this roommate and he's driving me crazy.
Peter glances up at me, back at the vid. 'Cinnabar's just a friend. He's not a flier, he's retired.' He sits stiff and defensive. I shouldn't have said it.
'I need a place of my own,' I say and sit down next to him.
'You don't get a job,' he says, 'you'll start borrowing money from me. Pretty soon they'll kick both of us out.'
'Hey,' I say, 'I'll rent for a few months and then we'll move to Pennsylvania together.'
Then I get him a beer and rub his shoulders.
'A regular Florence Nightingale,' he says.
The room has ghosts.
So I become a tenant. I move to the fifth floor, griping about having to take the psychopathic elevator to the top of the building. Moving is not difficult; as Peter remarks, for a man with a truly astounding wardrobe, I seem painfully short of possessions. (Not that my wardrobe is really much, it's just Chinese.) The flat is two rooms, not counting the tiny kitchen and bathroom, both about the same size.
I live in a dump. 'The floor has to go,' I say. Someone painted the walls aqua, the floor is bluegreen slip, it's like living under water on a bad film set. Cheap. But this building was built before the second depression, when they built to last, and underneath that garbage is a solid floor, underneath the walls is good solid wood frame. I wonder what would happen if I knocked the wall out between the two big rooms. The little front room, which is supposed to be the main room, has no window. The back room is barely big enough for a bed. Together they would make one decent room.
But it's my own. Once moved in I decide I have to take my life in hand. I've been home for two weeks and haven't done anything but sleep on Peter's couch and walk the boardwalk.
The morning after I move in I put on my black suit and go to the Office of Occupational Resources.
The office has carpeting, something that marks it as a step up on the scale of bureaucracy, but why is it all so ugly? This office is dirty green; gray-green carpeting (the kind that doesn't show dirt, wear or aesthetic value) pond-scum green halfway up the wall and scuffed white the rest of the way. I meet a middle-aged woman, dressed in a boxy beige suit with tails that come precisely to the backs of her knees.
'Comrade Zhang?' she says, 'I'm Cecily Hester. I'm the counselor who will be assigned to your placement.'
I have a counselor assigned to me. I am not certain how to feel about this. 'Counselor,' I say, politely.
She indicates a seat, not at the desk but at the flyspecked window that looks out on the street, and sits down beside me. 'Tell me, just exactly what does an organic engineer do? Are you a medical engineer?'
So I launch into a description of my training.
'We'll have to start looking around to see who could use your particular skills,' she says, thoughtfully. I suspect she still isn't sure just what I do.
'What kind of people do you usually place?' I ask.
'Doctors and highly technical people like yourself.' She gets up, 'I'll need to get some information on the system.' I follow her over and we sit, she behind the desk.
'How long does it take to place someone?' I ask.
'That depends on what they do. A few months. Do you have a preferences as to what part of the country you'd work in?'
'New York City,' I say.
'East Coast,' she says, entering the information, 'Northeast.'
'I'd really like to stay in New York.'
'Engineer,' she says, 'you have a very specialized skill. Hopefully I'll be able to find a firm in the city that is interested in you, but it's not very likely.'
'Do you mean I won't be able to get a job?' I ask. 'They offered me work in China.' Marx and Mao Zedong but I sound desperate.
'You'll be able to get a job,' she says. 'Off the top of my head, I can think of two places that will probably be interested in you. One is in California, one is in Arizona.'
'The Corridor,' I say. Baffin Island, only permanently.
'They have a beautiful compound,' she says.
She asks me to repeat my education, enters it all. I give her a rec with my resume and final project, my beach house, on it.
I sense dislocation ahead. Moving. I feel so tired, life was a hell of a lot easier when I was just a job engineer, another dumb construction tech.
What the hell am I going to do? All that time, Baffin Island, Nanjing. All that, so I can work in the Corridor? 'Ah, if this is going to take a few months, can you help me get some sort of short term work, maybe as a construction tech? The only housing available is in Pennsylvania, and they told me it doesn't have running water, so I'm living in a commune out in Coney Island and I have to help with the building maintenance.'
'I'm sure you don't need to be a construction tech,' she says, sounding a little as if I were research scientist who just offered to be a janitor. 'Let me think about it and I'll call you.'
The ride out to Coney Island takes forever.
All this time on my hands. When I finished the job on Baffin Island and passed my exams, I waited ten months to go to China, but I worked construction jobs for all but the last month. I don't remember time hanging on me during that month. Since then I have been in China, always struggling to catch up, struggling with language, with taking three years worth of courses in two regular school years and a summer.
