The Unusual Contingencies Which Led To My Appointment to the Restabilization Campaign.

There are some who wouldn't think twice about blaming me outright. And there are at least a few others who would actually accompany me into one of the tubes. The one I'm thinking of—and he has the hands to prove it—sometimes makes a deadly comment before I've even had time to remove my sweater. One night, after he entered the lounge area, he saw where I kept my extra skins and helped himself at length. I told him I wouldn't be but a minute and snuck out to find a napkin in which to hold my teething blade. When I got back I discovered that he'd leaked isolated water into my converter box. Sometime around midnight I approached his lawyer near the second hole. I handed him my Official Notice and became aware as I did so that he was sporting sort of an ambiguous antagonism. Within minutes I knew I had him by the balls! Score: me 1, him zero.

By the next day things started to sort themselves out, or so I thought until I heard my name called out near a service road at the Old Branchway Bridge Exit. When I asked whose concern it was anyway, I was told to 'pipe down'. The next year, after I launched her singing career in a series of false starts that left me with a telltale stain on my left instep, I became an Honorary Associate of the Restabilization Campaign. I was presented with a diagram of an office which I would one day place in a folder marked 'to be continued'. After lunch I doused her antiquated shawl with pine-scented benzene in an effort to remove the remaining flecks of dried gopher blood. My career in Abstract Expressionism was, quite frankly, in the toilet. I found it difficult to chew in the pre-dawn hours but I still believed in my original vision.

After Tube 4 had been closed permanently, the Committee decided that I would no longer be allowed to hum softly while the men were dissolving clearances within the migrontic light. That suited me just fine as I was now old enough to sew my own patches onto whatever relief pattern suited me. This was when I learned the value of true friendship. Because even though my only friend had gone missing while driving innocently through suburban Ontario, Delaware, I still kept a framed picture of her wallet secreted in a soba box underneath the stairs to the third floor servant's quarters. And I can tell you this: it gave me great comfort!

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