Tanker

The fence of the refinery was in need of repairs: there was an area in the center filled with spools of copper-insulated wire: there was a tanker to the right of that, which held the acids for C-vat, and this was held in turn by ropes above the group3 resevoir, which was moss-grown and contained rain water.

The nicest area of the facility was the hospital grounds, which were almost entirely untouched by the materials for refinement, although occasionally patients would make their way out of the secure area, and this could result in something serious –often actually carting the materials they had found back into the secure areas and cleared zones.

All roads led to the trailers yet there were other buildings also of note: offices, a helopad, a general store, and a beer hall (’Mugs’), where you would usually see some twenty or thirty of the drillers, or some stragglers from the mines. There was an immediate need for clean-up in most areas and particularly, it was wryly noted, at that same beer hall, ‘Mugs’ [...]

a touch on the arm

His left hand was beneath his stomach. His right had fallen to that side of his waist. His head had fallen to the corner of the pillow with his nose upon the mattress. His legs were crossed down at the bottom. He was wearing shoes, he was still clothed. His breathing was labored and would now become loud. Soda bottles and beer cans littered the desk, surrounded the journal, covered the trunk. Tobacco littered the trunk, the floor, the desk. Helpless, maybe sick, maybe stuck in adolescence, soughing or coughing, the sun had risen and hit upon his right, yet unbandaged eye. He felt at once the usual anger upon waking, with senses wrathfully probing the appliances — what now had we done wrong?

“”

Had he crept through the gates? Passed unnoticed by the sentries? Had he actually turned the great rust-locked wheel? “Haven’t you taken a good look at that wheel?”

89

Though without ideas concerning the paragraph problem, he drank a six pack and watched Yojimbo. He woke the next morning at four feeling refreshed –the idea being that he was Yojimbo.

He drove instead of walking; scratched his chin and neck; told himself to speak less, not to notice things. Last week, he had affected Bill Murray and spoke cloyingly to the muffins and bagels. This week, with Mifuni in mind, he was the Samurai, gruff with customers: the task was to appear, to be, grimly honorable. He was a person performing a task that was necessary.

The Doctor captured all this and — though with little bits saved here and there, to be later used in some comic montage– most all was to be poured out again, as having an excessively staged feeling. And so with his reading of the Bhagavad Gita. This all was “the source of the leak”, he acknowledged — it was the paragraphs that needed attention.

stendhal’s love

Fellini preferred speaking of business affairs; Stephens was a competent and perhaps innovative insurance operative; Faulkner was not exceptionally efficient at his postal or nightwatchman duties perhaps; Conrad was shot in a duel; Stendhal might have approved of that; Conrad, in Nostromo, made one of the best portraits of a coward ever… one could go on