were too heavy or were missing parts or had no gas canisters. Swirling just shrugged. “You have to drink tea?” he asked.
Sergio was tired of working with jokers or pissing alcoholics.
Whatever those guys were.
Because he was a recovering alcoholic, and he just wanted to drink a fucking cup of tea.
He distracted himself by griping in his mind about the losers he had to work with in the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines. Swirling only heard what he wanted to hear, Jose didn’t know how to tie his shoes, and then the big boss, Enrique Pico, always away on BIZNESS. After a while, Sergio got the pump to work, the nozzle to gassify, and he lit a flame that rushed from fluttering yellow to focused blue. It emitted a small roar.
The water would only take a couple minutes to boil.
The desiccated leather chair with alkali scum of evaporation on its cracked seat looked like it would collapse if he sat on it, so he pushed it aside. It rolled with a hollow gritty noise that resounded within the office, with its wide, empty window-frames yawning out into the abyss. He’d make do temporarily with a file cabinet he laid on its side (bits of debris skittered internally, fragrance of rat shit).
Sergio relished a moment of decision, selecting a bag from his stash of matcha green tea, Ceylon breakfast tea, Pike Place Market cinnamon tea, African rooibos and Chinese restaurant oolong.
As the tea steeped, enameled cup hot in his hand, Sergio picked up the flashlight and went off looking for a chair, with the expectation that instead he might find treasure. “At the very least I will find a chair.” Part of his mind was focused on the thought that finally, now, with a cup of tea (some corner grazed his thigh, some steel angle—he immediately stopped.)
He pointed his flashlight and his headlamp down and saved himself, saved his own life (One more step and he might have fallen through the hole. Into blackness of space. Something huge and heavy falling from above had apparently torn away the steel railing and bent the walkway down into the blackness, so that one more step and he might’ve slid off into nothingness of space till he landed some second or two later with a hard slap on the concrete and debris several floors below, he saw now, with his heart thudding in his ears.) barely a tremor in his hand as he lifted the cup to his lips.
What had fallen? One of the huge, almost car-sized units formerly attached eight, ten stories or whatever it was above the plant floor? Or something brought down by teen vandals? He’d better keep his wits—or his one wit that he had left—about him. Sergio told himself that he had not had his cup of tea yet, that was his problem. That was why his thinking was muddled. That was why.
Matcha green tea would restore his thinking, he would be thinking right again. His head would be good again. He stepped back from the brink, back from the slippery slope of Death. Switched off the flashlight, then the headlamp, dropping the curtain of sudden pitch black. He sipped from the cup, allowing his sight to recover some glinting details of ambient light from the immensity of the abandoned aircraft plant they’d sent him to reconnoiter. He could hardly be irritated that they had assigned him no partner, no backup (crucial if you fell in utter darkness and broke your legs or your spine, a partner could get you some help before the death agony), since he had assiduously promoted his own reputation for utter independence, total reliability and unassailable, overwhelming competence. Dismissive as he was of others, having established urban reconnaissance skills at a far superior level in his own eyes and then in theirs, sometimes (he listened for any sound, but heard only the creak of his weight shifting on the grating, his own breathing and the sound of his slowing heartbeat, fear remaining localized like a chill in his thighs and stomach) yeah, sometimes it was stupid to go out without a partner. You could die out here. Just one wrong step, some mistake.
He switched his lights back on and checked the stability of the walkway overall, deciding it was only the outer edge that had been compromised. This by stomping on the steel grating and listening to the quality of the reverberations at a couple points. Which sounded all right, basically, so far, but in his report he would advise that work teams should exercise extraordinary caution when traversing the higher levels of the plant. And he’d need to try to think right if he wanted to survive to make that report. Why all the lame thoughts, poor thinking on his part?
Just the way it goes. Try to snap out of it. (sip of green tea) About him swirled an impenetrable darkness, falling out of the universe of night, pouring through the shattered roof eight stories above the cavernous hall. Torn, crumpled railings and bent walkway threatened death in various directions, leading him toward instant emptiness, though he had his headlamp switched on. Little swirly flecks or motes floating across murky currents of dank air reeking of rust, mold, dust heaps of history.
Sergio had no use for the emptiness pouring out of dark night and space. He furiously swept out his “office”—masonite debris, broken glass, former telephone books that were now wavy, porous blocks of cellulose, empty cans of something, strange dirt (from where?), went flying off the gangway into space. Though it was just a glorified glass booth (with some shattered panes, and a large Plexiglass window, discolored and aged with intricate fractal webs of cracks), it had a file cabinet (bottom drawer did not open), massive steel desk with cracking, charred Formica top, miscellaneous chairs (all damaged but quasi-functional), and, importantly, an old beige rotary telephone, which he plugged into a line that could not have been operative for decades. Immediately he began receiving calls.
Sergio took call after call. “East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, how may I direct your call?”
“No, sorry, he’s not here.”
Sergio sniffed, trying not to sneeze. These recycled offices always attacked his allergies with the infinitesimally ground-up particles of blasted lifetimes, stymied Chernobyl/Fukushimas of collapsed economies.
“No, those guys are never around. They might be out back. Can I take a message? They might get back to you.”
Sergio took a number of calls, and after 45 minutes he unplugged the phone. He set it on the corner of the desk at a jaunty angle, indicating its readiness to receive more calls when he plugged it back in. He set the pad (with the “ELADATL Con Safos” logo in one corner) and pencil beside it, topmost notes visible.
Then he zipped up his favorite nifty jumpsuit (with the Amoco patch over his heart that said “Ray”), hefted his tool belt, his water bottle, and his broom, and made his way along the steel mesh gangway that ran the length of the building to the stairs at one end.
They said someone would come, meaning he could count on help, but they always said that. And their volunteers were worthless even when they did show up; he had to spend more time babysitting them, keeping them from killing or maiming themselves in the hazardous environment of the abandoned facilities that were a major part of (and supplier of parts for) his job. Which was, that is, rehabbing and renovating the abandoned plants so they could be used to produce either a movie of a dirigible or the actual aircraft itself (depending on whether you spoke to Swirling or to Jose or to Ericka, or whichever ELADATL faction you might speak with, though you didn’t have to worry about getting into a face-to-face argument, because the factions hardly communicated except by Internet static, flinging little insults and wannabe cutting remarks like sparks spitting off a chain dragging behind a junk truck on a 3 a.m. street). Either the movie about dirigibles that the Fictive faction insisted would be the necessary first step aimed to cure ELADATL’s financial ills, or the clandestine dirigibles proposed by the Real World faction, which they insisted were necessary to restructure the entire transportation grid of California, which would transform the entire collapsing once-dominant U.S. economy (with a blockbuster summer dirigible movie just a spin-off and product-tie-in, its profit earmarked for more worthwhile, maximalist goals). Of course, the movie faction insisted that they themselves were the realists, while the other faction was a bunch of idealists, voluntarists, and adventurists, total lunatics untethered to reality. The rejoinder from the pilots flying actual clandestine dirigibles through the unlicensed air spaces of night was that they were the real realists, and the movie faction was just a bunch of armchair fantasists, artists, and hipsters dedicated to the idea (but not the practice) of actual lighter-than-air flight. When it got really nasty, each