The morning after I move in I put on my black suit and go to the Office of Occupational Resources.
The office has carpeting, something that marks it as a step up on the scale of bureaucracy, but why is it all so ugly? This office is dirty green; gray-green carpeting (the kind that doesn't show dirt, wear or aesthetic value) pond-scum green halfway up the wall and scuffed white the rest of the way. I meet a middle-aged woman, dressed in a boxy beige suit with tails that come precisely to the backs of her knees.
"Comrade Zhang?" she says, "I'm Cecily Hester. I'm the counselor who will be assigned to your placement."
I have a counselor assigned to me. I am not certain how to feel about this. "Counselor," I say, politely.
She indicates a seat, not at the desk but at the flyspecked window that looks out on the street, and sits down beside me. "Tell me, just exactly what does an organic engineer do? Are you a medical engineer?"
So I launch into a description of my training.
"We'll have to start looking around to see who could use your particular skills," she says, thoughtfully. I suspect she still isn't sure just what I do.
"What kind of people do you usually place?" I ask.
"Doctors and highly technical people like yourself." She gets up, "I'll need to get some information on the system." I follow her over and we sit, she behind the desk.
"How long does it take to place someone?" I ask.
"That depends on what they do. A few months. Do you have a preferences as to what part of the country you'd work in?"
"New York City," I say.
"East Coast," she says, entering the information, "Northeast."
"I'd really like to stay in New York."
"Engineer," she says, "you have a very specialized skill. Hopefully I'll be able to find a firm in the city that is interested in you, but it's not very likely."
"Do you mean I won't be able to get a job?" I ask. "They offered me work in China." Marx and Mao Zedong but I sound desperate.
"You'll be able to get a job," she says. "Off the top of my head, I can think of two places that will probably be interested in you. One is in California, one is in Arizona."
"The Corridor," I say. Baffin Island, only permanently.
"They have a beautiful compound," she says.
She asks me to repeat my education, enters it all. I give her a rec with my resume and final project, my beach house, on it.
I sense dislocation ahead. Moving. I feel so tired, life was a hell of a lot easier when I was just a job engineer, another dumb construction tech.
What the hell am I going to do? All that time, Baffin Island, Nanjing. All that, so I can work in the Corridor? "Ah, if this is going to take a few months, can you help me get some sort of short term work, maybe as a construction tech? The only housing available is in Pennsylvania, and they told me it doesn't have running water, so I'm living in a commune out in Coney Island and I have to help with the building maintenance."
"I'm sure you don't need to be a construction tech," she says, sounding a little as if I were research scientist who just offered to be a janitor. "Let me think about it and I'll call you."
The ride out to Coney Island takes forever.
All this time on my hands. When I finished the job on Baffin Island and passed my exams, I waited ten months to go to China, but I worked construction jobs for all but the last month. I don't remember time hanging on me during that month. Since then I have been in China, always struggling to catch up, struggling with language, with taking three years worth of courses in two regular school years and a summer.
China falls into two, neat halves-not chronologically, the first 'half' is really only about three, four months, the last 'half' the better part of two years. But there is Haibao, and then there is the time after Haibao, the white time. That's the way I think of it, I don't know why. Or rather, I know some of the reasons why, but they don't seem sufficient to describe the feeling.
The white time is crowded with activity. I have never studied so intently as I did in the year after Haibao died, I don't suppose I ever will again. For a year I was this amazing creature, the envy of my classmates, Zhang, the huaqiao who destroys grade curves. I read the assignments, did supplemental readings. I got tutoring assignments because I discovered having to explain systems analysis to some Martian made it clearer in my own head (especially because Alexi had an agenda of his own, he asked questions that made me think about systems in different ways than the textbooks did.)
I did it the way you'll play solitaire for an afternoon, because the alternative was being alone with myself.
The apartment is depressing. All that green. I try to read, but I start thinking about what I could do with it. On a job once, we used this sandstone flooring. The flat isn't very big, the flooring wasn't outrageously expensive and it would be better than bluegreen slip. I wonder what the subflooring is like.
I shut off the climate control, open the door and put my new bed and boxes out in the hall and tear up a corner of the flooring. Underneath the flooring is hundred year old thinsulation and under that was chipboard. Imagine having so much wood you can use it as trash building material.
"What are you doing?" Someone says from the doorway. It's Yoni, one of the two people who chair the co-op's managing committee.
"I'm going to replace the floor," I say.
"You should have cleared it with the committee first," he says.
"I'll pay for it," I say.
"That's not the point. What if you get halfway through and stop. The co-op would have to replace the rest of it. You're damaging the building." He strokes his walrus moustache.
"I'll put some money in an zhuazhu account until I get it finished," I say.
"A what?" he asks.
"Zhuazhu." I say. I'm not exactly sure how to translate. "An account to hold money. A holding account. I'll put the cost of replacing the floor in a bank account in the co-op's name. When I'm finished, you can give it back. It's what they do in China. Look at this, you know what's underneath this floor? Chipboard."
"What's chipboard?" he asks.
"Pressed wood chips. Look at it."
He comes and crouches next to me. "Hey," he says, "it's kind of pretty. Do you think that's under most of the floors?"
I shrug. "Depends on how the place was put together, if this flat was remodeled. I'd say they have it next door, it looks like these two flats used to be one. See how it goes under the wall?"
"Vanni might like this stuff on her floor," Yoni says.
"You have to seal it." He wants to know why and I explain how wood is soft and damages. Then I explain about sealers.
He goes next door and gets Vanni, my neighbor. It's noon but Vanni is a bartender and at first she's not at all thrilled about being woken up to look at her neighbor's floor. She's come by a couple of times to see what I was doing, she's a little dark thing, not more than twenty-five.
She crouches down sleepily. "There's that under the blue stuff?"
"Hard to tell," I say, "but probably. These old buildings are like archeology, they come in layers."
"Hey Yoni," she says, grinning, "do you think there's another layer under that garbage I've got for plumbing? Some sort of decent pipes? Maybe copper?"
"Most archeology is done on garbage dumps, isn't it?" Yoni asks.
"You mean under the garbage is more garbage. Rafael," she says, "want to come rip up my floor? I can't pay much."
"If I don't get a job soon I'll rip it up and if you've got chipboard I'll seal it."
I don't seal the chipboard on my floor. I knock out the dividing wall and repair the wallboard at the break, paint the walls white and then lay pale sandstone squares from somewhere out in the Corridor. The whole job takes six days, mostly because I don't have much in the way of tools. I rent a cutter for four hours for the wall, and buy a little hand cutter to trim stone, but other than that the whole thing is pretty much done by hand. Once in awhile I find myself looking for shapes of states in the insulation and stone. Divining my future. Some people read tea leaves, I read building materials. The stone is a bitch to haul in, but when I'm finished the place is light and clean looking. Next job will be making the window bigger.