4
The foundation's abundance was gone, and Pierce had to look for a job, and quick.
"Well, you're not good for much,” Roo said. “Can't tend bar or wait tables. You'd be sunk."
He wouldn't nod agreement, but couldn't deny it. “Teaching,” he said. “Substitute teaching."
"You sign up,” she said. “Then you wait for a day here, a day there. You'd be a newbie, the last person they'd call. And school's over in a couple of weeks."
He had bought the newspapers, sat with her at the Donut Hole and went through the ads. She watched him with interest, chair tipped back. She wore the coat of all colors.
"They're hiring at Novelty Plastics,” she said. “I hear. Down in Cascadia."
"Sure,” he said.
"Well?"
He looked up to see that she was really asking.
"I can't, really,” he said. “I mean it's not exactly what I."
"It's what people do,” she said. “Work."
He shook out the inky sheets. How easily, not even aware, he had bypassed so many common hells. He had not even had to get up to go to work in the morning for over a year. And before that he was a college teacher, not really employment in any arduous sense, it was simply the extension of student days by other means: the same long vacations, the same short hours. Now he stood at a brink for sure, though, no way to go forward or sideways, down or up.
Here was their ad, in fact, his eye just then fell on it. Novelty Plastics. Hiring all departments.
"Is it,” he asked, “hard?"
She regarded him with a weird compassion. “It's a job,” she said. “It's not hard to do. If it was hard the people who do it wouldn't be doing it. You have to do it a lot, though. You know. All day. Or night."
He shook the paper. “So how much does it pay?"
"I guess minimum and up. It's an open shop, as far as I know."
He wasn't sure what an open shop was. It sounded like it ought to be good, but he had the impression that maybe it wasn't. “It would only be for a while,” he said. “I have to get a CV together. Send it out."
"Sure,” she said. “A couple of months."
His soul shrank. Not so long surely. A couple of months.
"That's if you get hired,” she said.
"What,” he said. “There's a lengthy application process?"
"No. But they don't like to hire your type."
"My type."
"Oh, you know. Fuzzy-faced wiseacres. Educated gents. They think you won't stay. That you're only there out of desperation, and something else will turn up for you.” She crossed her arms. “They see that."
How did she know these things? He thought she was vamping, but he had no way to tell. “Fuzzy-faced intellectuals,” he said. “Narrow-chested cack-handed..."
"What handed?"
"Soft-handed yellow-bellied..."
"You definitely need to lose the face hair,” she said. “And get a haircut."
"Weak-kneed,” he said. “Wet-eyed. Double-domed."
"You want a haircut?” she asked. “I'm pretty good."
He looked at her without speaking for so long that at last she goggled at him, hey? Well? But he was thinking of a haircut he had himself given, once up along the Shadow River, and a pair of gilt-handled long-beaked scissors, and the sound they made, snip snip.
"Tell me something,” he said. “Why do you keep on being so nice to me?"
"You're not worth it?"
"I'm not sure I am. And anyway."
"Are you asking what I'm expecting back?"
"No.” He tried to appear offended. “I didn't mean that."
"Just doing my job,” she said softly.
She chose clothes for him too, that wouldn't give him away, a hooded sweatshirt that was the oldest piece of clothing he owned, cheap new sneakers he had bought once thinking he might take up running for his health, a billed cap she brought him that said NABCO on it—she snorted when he asked what that meant.
Thus dressed and lamb-shorn, he went with her in a car of hers, a long livid Cougar this time, to American Novelty Plastics, which was one of the few enterprises still housed in an old factory complex, almost a small brick city, that crested the foaming yellow falls of the Blackbury River at Cascadia. He'd never been so far inside such a place before. The parking lot was crowded with cars as similar and as varied as the workers within must be. They drove in and out of the corridors of brick looking for the personnel office.
"There,” she said.
"What do I tell them about what I've done before? Do they check references?"
"They don't care what you did before. Tell ‘em you just moved here from, I don't know. And you worked at, what, something not anything like this."
She parked the car where it could be seen from the office; her plan was to make Pierce look like he had big car payments to make, maybe an expensive wife too. Ties you down, she said.
"I'll wait here,” she said.
"Okay.” Rusted railroad tracks ran around the building, long unused, he thought, where depressed-looking weeds grew. A sign on the wall, made decades ago, said NO ROOM FOR MAN ON CAR. He opened his door but for a moment he couldn't get out.
"Here,” she said. She took a plain gold ring from her right hand and worked it onto the third finger of his left. Pronubis was the name of that finger, if anyone—Pierce thought—wanted to know.
"Okay,” she said.
He got out. Geraniums, not real ones, grew in flowerpots at the windows of Personnel, and the door said, WELCOME. But this was the bottom, this bleak yard, that chain-link fence. He had come to the bottom: how strange to recognize it. Everything, everything once begun or seen in prospect or expected now foregone, lost, tossed, torn away. And no rest either. He supposed it was possible, it was probably likely, that he was going to just live on at the Morpheus Arms, and work here, if he was allowed, in this place, from now on. So many did.
The bottom. Why then was his heart so quiet, his sight so sharp; what was this new cold clear air he breathed? He glanced back to toss an insouciant wave to the Cougar, and saw her stern faced, a warning and encouraging thumb held up.
* * * *
Pierce worked at American Novelty Plastics for six months, not two, mostly in packing and shipping but sometimes in assembly, putting together toys and gimcrack “gifts” and things that were apparently parts of other things that he couldn't guess the nature of, their unintelligibility a dull ache in his mind for the time he spent handling them; nobody else cared to speculate on what they might be and seemed surprised at his curiosity.