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1.


Millrouse Media occupied the top two floors of a glassy high-rise downtown. When the company president discovered its employees had been sleeping and peeing on the roof, word spread. These were promising young men, talented and useful.

    "Sleeping on the roof?" said the assistant vice president, called up to sniff the sodden futons.

    "Must be a kind of a sport," said another assistant vice president whose eye fell on drug paraphernalia stashed in the chimney. The pipe appeared perfectly good, so he slipped it into his pocket.

    Somebody had to be fired. Because it would be a shame to lose Trevor, Glasscock or Dewbray, whose father was a top justice official in Aruba, where the president of Millrouse vacationed, a more dispensable young man was found, a Canadian who had worked in the office six months.

    Alex Habamacher had received consistently good evaluations, and hummed as he worked. Though he rode a bike every day, only once had he asked to leave it in the stairwell.

     "Somebody has been sleeping and peeing on the roof," said Judy Gallucci from Human Resources.

    "I heard," said Alex, unaware that this was not an opening gambit, but the reason for his being called.

    "You did? You heard?" Judy uncrossed her legs and whacked her foot on the filing cabinet. "I'm very sorry then, but it just won't do, and the president would like you to pack your things immediately." She handed him a designer sneaker box. "Mertz should have emptied your desk while we were talking. Except for any personal belongings. We'll send a check for three weeks pay."

    Alex opened the sneaker box, thinking it part of his severance package. It was empty. "I'm fired, then?" he said.

    "I prefer to say let go. But yes."

    "I never slept on the roof."

    Judy waved her hand and blushed. "Now is not the time for — you know."

    "And I always peed in the — "

    "Mr. Habamacher!" The blush deepened. Judy placed her hands over her ears.

    "I'm sorry."

    "I have a nephew your age," Judy said, as if this explained everything.

    Alex nodded. From the margin of the hallway he turned to ask, "Would you like the door open or closed?"

    "Closed. But it doesn't matter."

    Alex sent out twenty-five résumés a day. To cyberspace, unseen offices, P.O. boxes. He had one-and-a-half years of work experience and five years of educational debt. If he didn't get a job, his visa would run out and he would have to return to Canada, where his mother in a small yellow house made dandelion wine and assembled dolls out of dryer lint.
"I could always use an assistant in the fiber art studio," she said. "Or in the winery. I'm wild about this work! You might be too!" Since his father's death, Alex's mother had become artistically wide and emotionally narrow.

    Alex sat with his friends Cy and Sonya in the Claddagh Irish Pub and Sports Bar.

    "Can't," Alex choked on the word. "Can't move back in with my mother."

    Cy said, "You need to get some sleep, wait it out. I'm sixty thousand in debt, just for my B.A., you know."

    "Why don't you consult an oracle?" said Sonya.

    Alex smiled politely. She might as well have suggested he paint his toenails and see if that got him a job.

    "I'm serious. Cy saw one." Sonya slid from her barstool and wrapped her arms around Cy's neck. "Cy! Tell Alex what the oracle did for you."

    Cy straightened. "It gave me a shot of hope. Got me thinking about the seeds of time. I was always future-oriented."

    A guy sitting two stools down leaned in boisterously.

    "What do they read? Tea leaves? Entrails of sacred animals? They got the, what do you call it, incense?"

    "They read you," Sonya told the stranger, heaving her bosom in reply. "But it's a service industry, like anything else. They're regulated. If you're not satisfied with the product, they give you your money back."

    The stranger's head bobbed. "No shit. That shit is guaranteed?"

    "It doesn't matter." Alex drank the last of his beer. "I could never do it," he said.