"We're not paying your fucking tribute!"

  The father yelled.  A boy ran up as best he could being lamed by polio and whacked the man on the head with a shovel. 

  Another boy dragged the man to the pile of people who would wake up. 

  A phone rang.

  "Little girl.  Little girl.  Is your mother there?" 

  "Which half of her you monster?!" 

  As it had been happening everyday the "new" neighborhood didn't miss a beat of it's routine.  The only difference was that a view-blocking levee had been leveled so the prison guards could view all of the suburban area.

  The people in the pile awoke one by one to the sounds of the scissor bird singing.  They had been bathed, and dressed in pajamas by real nurses who'd returned from the fighting Overseas.  There were the smells of tea and coffee and toasting slices of raisin bread, homemade in a brick oven outside.

"I told you people to lay low."

  "But no.  First one and then the other." 

  The two people not tied up with silk scarves picked up various tools covered in dried blood.  A pile of teeth on a steel table prompted one in a Tyvek suit to comment, We'll know who was taken this time. 

  The day had not started out this way.  Some travel bans had been lifted, some people braved sleet and snow to carry on.  Editors pursed lips together and caved without caving to the more economic-minded.  An editor who'd been a "combat correspondent" (back before debates about "embedding") had holler-hushed through painful coversation after painful conversation regarding do you know what this is going to do to me...to my family.  He'd locked himself in a broom closet at one point so as to not be findable. 

  "We can't." 

  "Can't what?" 

  "Can't bury it." Truths so terrible and tangled up in International Affairs pieces of paper with ink on them would only endanger more general population.  Other editors slid pieces of the stuff, paper, with lists of vanished and still not heard from, unknown location, and using vacation time under the broom closet door. 

  Feet propped on desks and sweaty armpits drenching clothing.  Food in sacks untouched. 

  That can't be that.  But look at these. 

  Military photographs and maps. 

  "How'd you get in here?" A publisher demanded to know.  

  "Oh, there you are and there they are," a nervous assistant followed the publisher to the desk and neatly planted a datebook there.  Pens from a suitcoat pocket offered but declined by way of being shown a breast pocket of those lined up like soldiers.

  She'd said it so many times she finally wrote it in block lettering on a big index card which somebody glued to a tongue depressor.  The little cafè table had become an impromptu fact airing on the fly get-lost launch.  "Worst!?" 

  "Let's not go there sister." 

  An eyeroll.  Really fast mention of having seen or been to and censorship bracket.  A thinking-about-it pause, maybe a hand lingering over both little signs, and a best guess verdict.  

     That can go in a book but not a newspaper

  "At this time," a peddler of newspapers was quick to remind.  Magazine people never sit still.  And look at those sharks.  A cautious glance at people literally acting like sharks.  Sort of circling and bullying and pensive then growling teeth at too close to me.  

  Lockers and lock boxes. 

  Discarded suitcases and purses. 

  Thick rolls of contract and tear sheets. 

  Horses bred for the purpose of starting gate. 

  Not more than a girl really.  Had appeared on the weedy hump between the nothing's moving roads near "le tromphf".  Wearing? 

  "Just a short utility dress." 

  Tanks lined, poised to anchor a boulevard, stopped. 

  A grubby postal/mail sack huffed at the girl.  "I'm going back now." 

  Type, type, type. 

  A long time before a ding.

  "They used to call these, this formation, gin palaces," the old man said it with conviction.  But then his eyes wandered and took in unfamiliar, modern landscape.  "It's a stranded train car.  So what?!?" The unfed man came out of the weeds zipping up his pants.  "Did you shake honey? I don't need you with that condition again."  The man wiped his hands in some oil-spattered dirt.  "Just like home," he scoffed.  Came up to the people on the tracks from aside them like in a parade.  "'Sides, it's like summer today." 

  "Yeah, wild weather in these times." One woman said.  So another asked, "What era are we in now?" A local history tour had gotten driven through by a drunk and some of the people took a dayhike a little farther rural.  The old man came to his senses again.  "Let's let the weaker ones rest in there while we go on ahead a little bit." A head shove and backhand at the little train car.  "Go ahead," a sassy-haired woman told the pisspot.  "Why 'gin palace' Uncle Joey?" 

  All the people but the man with the that's a great idea moved towards the car, still, awkwardly so, parked there.  "See this?" Everybody looked down the uncle's hairy, faded tattoo arm to see what he was pointing at.  Just took turns, then settled into around to hear a tale.

In between '75 and '77

  we forced ourselves to celebrate what some people call "silly things".  No more fighting about who is and who is not a Daughter of the Revolution had both sexes wearing clean mop hair and using up leftover World War II paint. 

  Drained it and "scrubbed the moss offah the tiled bottom.  I know because my team scrubbed it." 

  "With what?" A kid asked the janitor-looking man.  "Excellent question!" He smiled even though he was missing some teeth.  "That would've been with these," he skipped over to a garbage can on a wheeled cart and brought it closer since one of us was in a wheelchair.  Every kind of broom.  Some had been cleaned of the slime but still had that flooded river mark.  "Are those binoculars?" Mama asked the man.  "I'll let you peek at 'er, but first, it says here," he held the clipboard upside down, turned it round to show, no outstanding paperwork, we're expecting a special delivery." 

  "We are??" A little girl had donned a foreman's hat.  "But nobody can approach this...what is this? 

  "Fountain area 

  "Until the clean up 

  "Preservation 

  "Right.  Is done." 

  "No worries.  Sources which I cannot reveal have hintimated it'll come through there." 

  "He pointed at a fire hydrant." 

  The littlest girlfriend started to strip down to her bathing suit so a middle sister did too.  Their mother cautioned not yet, we'll get to a beach.  "What's a beeeech?" 

  The janitor man hollered a HEAVE HO, and dropped a small rope with a weight on one end down into the firehydrant which looked to be wearing a WWI helmet.  "Look it's an old hubcap." The man drummed a rhythm on it with tough fingers.  He attached an end of the rope to a little standing bell.  "Hurry up we've got an audience!" He spoke loud in under the helmet.  Two tugs on the rope clanged the bell.  Footsteps on a metal ladder. 

  "Ohmeegodgosh that's my brother!" 

  Our mother looked around at the topside group and suddenly looked shocked and walked towards the hydrant.  She was crouching as she got closer and foot slipped on the last bit of slime so she slid into the thing like a baseball catcher.  "Hi Mom." They pecked kisses.  Then she said, "Not sure that was the best way to get to here." 

  "Why?" 

  "Not exactly sure yet how I'll get you out." 

  "Okay." 

  "PASS THAT FOREMAN BACK TO THE END OF THE LINE!" 

  Clear.

  Clear.

  Welder coming up.

  "Everybody!" 

  "What?" 

  "I fink we should STEP BACK." 

  "GOOD THINK'N LINCOLN!" 

  A bunch of brooms made an initial perimeter.  Then sparks flew.  

  The janitor man fished a teeny hammer out of a bucket on the cart, literally.  His fishing rod had a magnet on it! 

  He let our mama tap on the brackets hilding the helmet on the big pipe.  Then he gave her some small binoculars from his pocket.  "See if they can spy any of the paints up on the lady." 

  "Aye, aye Cap'n," she saluted. 

"But I'll miss Spaghetti night."

  "Honey." 

  The phone was grabbed and a woman's voice said, "I'll feed them.  Spagetts if that's what they vote on." 

  "Uh, put my husband back on." 

  "Right here." 

  "Where?" 

  "Uh, can't say exactly but I teamed up after raquetball and now they suggest we don't go directly home." 

  "Is she ugly?" 

  "Very." 

  "Okay then.  Be careful." 

  "Love you." 

  "Love you more." 

  The silence after hanging up was most unusual.  Unusual times, a man had explained about ordinary citizens being pulled in so many directions, to get the boat uprighted, another man supported. 

  A neighbor woman's face appeared in the window.  She held up a lumpy pillowcase and mouthed look what I found.  Mother mouthed back, What is it?  The two waved eachother to the back door. 

"I will give you a taste

  of what this is like for me.  Us." The women and children neared the men who'd somehow survived another workday.  They'd been blindfolded with their ties, that day.  And ransomed back to their families.  The men could only smell what had happened to their loved ones.  And those were the lucky people in a Continental drift of turn of the new Century warring over money and resources like food and water.  Of course, the dominating question of the men was Who did this to you? 

  A slight bend at the knees and a whiff of magazine perfume, rubbing noses and a tender kiss on the lips.  "Oh my God.  Do I taste blood?" The necktie blindfold was removed.  "I bit my lip on the bump in the road near the pay tolls." 

  Stunned to see each other as the ties came off.  One man had several ties choking, over his mouth, broken nose, and lopsided over his eyes.  Handcuffed with a raw fish stuffed into his hands. 

  Nobody move.  The photographers obliterated existing light in the room with the flashbulbs.  The men were moved from rescue, through crisis/impact, and into survivor status rooms. 

  "Oddly, if you can stand and walk on your own, you're free to leave." 

  Each drove by pre-planning from the epicenter of "the pie" outward through an economic zone. 

The fact is...

  "Some of the facts are in competition with some of the facts." The woman's eyemakeup was awry for she had cried like Veronica not just for herself that night. 

  "Facts like what?" 

  "Like..." A final brush of tears like accepting skinned knees.  "Like, our gang of girlfriends.  We can be awesomely close but we can't get married or be romantic." 

  People, young and driven by raging against time, came and went from cabanas and closets snorting powder off trays and furniture.  "They'll get away with whatever they can," another woman maybe a decade out from teenager plopped a pillowcase of cheap cameras on the stone and cement slant siding the staircase.  "And I've brought these." Hands removed a box of condoms and a bag of film from big pockets.  "Yeah, that'll help.  We'll just give every female condoms and film as security."  

  "Wait a minute, you were there the other night," a young girl came over from peeing in the bushes.  "IT WORKED!  WE, 

  Ssssssh, shuush

  "had almost no fatalities." 

  "People have been dying?" 

  "Yah.  Happens everyday.  Don't they even teach you that in schools here?" 

  "We call it a fatality when some asshole makes a girl do anything against her will." Crossed her arms over well endowed only with breasteses. 

  "And we're the party crashers," one guy said as a few joined the talking. 

  One ripped open a can of beer and drank it in one gulp.  "Belch, TO THE ISLAND." 

By then everything had been gridded.

  Up, down, forward, and backwards.  Artists had done ballets and installations and games on such imposition on free will, freedom, and homesoil. 

  It wasn't that people weren't believing each other and evidence (as well as destroyed evidence), it became matters of Affairs.  Each topic and bracket of information was put through human and machine tests to press the "minds" to coordinate and generate possible outcomes.  Trajectories and impacts were routinely discovered.  As well, moods and discernible characteristics of people about to use certain equipment and hardware and software.

  Tensions around greatly debated stuff eased and tightened, waxed and waned.  A lot of matters that had been tabled and shelved reappeared on the scene with many more pairs of eyes and sounding boards for ideas. 

  There were known hot spots of fighting and fighting's consequences.  And the list of unknowns dwindled into sources of power for some.  Just loss for others. 

  The work of getting un-infiltrated from farm to big city politics sort of resettled as old Continent impressionistic work.  More "moderates" and defending the "grind" that at least keeps it from being anarchy. 

  "Last one," a group of Surveyors allowed some people hungry for hiking to have some insight into how does it work.  How can computering need human observation?  How can a phone be a map? 

  A person already hot and bothered walked into the center of a square.  There happened to be a shade spot there, so person just sat.  Gadgets whirred to work, so to speak, and wallah, like magicians people had real time coordinates of the gridsquare.  Even directions to get there.  Person fell asleep.  Day moved on. 

  Sometime in the middle of the night, people who analyze data and meaning realized...something up above is not ours.  And that something was using the information to at least try and manipulate geographic, political, and cultural doings.

"I would neither like nor dislike this recommendation,"

  was furiously being typed as a father was trying to explain to a daughter about Colonials.  About how the trained and paid mercenaries outdid farmland militia by killing eldests and 

  Shit, shit the daughter looked at the countdown timer she had been given by a thug in a costume.  "Okay Daddy, you know I love you and all my moms, relatives, she took off a high heeled boot to reveal barefoot. 

  "That had to be the footprint in the dust back there," three counselors got shocked and awed looks.  "The one on the seventeenth floor?" A slow, painful nod.  "Where the Ibeams were sticking out?" 

  Aha, that building, another person said into a sat phone, then waved.  A red laser beam waivered onto the rooftop.  "Next one stings," the radios somewhere said. 

  The daughter was unzipping the back of a fancy black pantsuit.  "But nobody in your generation is taking this seriously." She back-stepped up onto the ledge.  "And I have to.  This is about the last hair of defense between the people I love and REAL EVIL.  DEFENDING" she untangled a push button wand from the sleeve of the pantsuit, "Our COUNTRY 

  "HeLLO!  REMEMBER US?  SHE WAS showing us some real estate." Dazed tourist-looking people wandered out of an arch covering over a steel ladder chute. 

  "It was always going to be between the movies and politics," she pressed the button but nothing happened.  She told her watch, "I'm coming down." The father's face blanched and he gripped his chest.  She almost went towards him, but stood ground.  Ripped off the pantsuit and little wings seemed to pop out of her armpits or the pit area of a secondary suit-type outfit.  She looked at the watch, took it off, as well as pulling the wand-tube from the inflator hole of the suit. Beckoned a person over, instructed, hold these

  And stepped off the ledge into a breeze that spun her.

  A cell-phone rang.  "I need to speak to...this is she...jumped off the top of the building in a flying squirrel suit...okay...not really.  Inventor's last words were, guy who showed up to test it got taken."

We'd made it to the barricades like

  fish in a fishbowl.  

  Breathe.  Breathe.  You're the last person I need dead right this minute, whack translated into a thud way down under a vest.  A cracking sound in the earpiece.  Dead, dead reverberated with the echoes of machine gun fire.

  Then total silence.  Everybody slightly on the move stiffened into a nest of coral.  The amplified soundscape blared a cigarette being crushed out by a foot atop pulverized building materials.  We wait.

  Like a magazine centerfold the seperatists had turned the whole scene inside out.

"This is very different," one envoy

  said to another envoy.  "How different?" The one opened a rolling suitcase and took out a stack of reports a foot and a half thick, put it on the man's lap.  "And that's just since the disruptions in budget cycle." 

  "I can't even read.  Don't know why you just put all that there." 

  "Our time assessing is over." 

  "What will you do now?" 

  The man sat in a chair beside the lap-laden man.  "Well, let's see, political shitstorm at homeplate," he ticked off reasons to just get lost for a minute on his fingers.  The fourth finger was made into a hook as he described the pathetic state of neighborhoods the world over.  "That's the bottom of my foodbowl," he stroked the crook of his finger.  "I don't own, don't plan to, and eat on the fly.  Between the drugs and violence more than an okay percent is making even getting lost an impossibility." 

  A woman walked up. 

  "Where you been all my life?" One asked. 

 "I was up at the big Courthouse waiting on decisions when people came and had to rearrange everybody in the building because their Directory made them sitting ducks ever since 

  "Spare me the details." 

  "You want some lunch?" The man put the pounds of paperwork into a briefcase sachel that then looked like it had swallowed a medium sized mammal.

After September 11th happened being

  involved with "governance" at any org was quite different than it had been before that attack.  In Academia and non-profits there was a period of seemingly complete disjointedness as each layer of to-be-addressed was readied for "surgery".  People used the many hats of personality and skill sets to peruse, criticize, discuss, analyze, and fight for how rules and guidance should be expressed.  How to reinforce appropriate-to-situation-behavior. And there was lots of observance of how selves and groups navigate.  

  We were all contending with stationary and moveable parts.  And we were not all interested in doing things the same way. 

  "What's your mission statement?" 

  "How was your reconn different after the Guidelines were updated?" 

  The editors had come out of their lodgings after coffeetime together and peppered everyone around with group questions.  "Not everybody in this group is doing the same thing," said a woman with a tangled beehive of hair on her head.  "Oh?" One editor said.  

  "Looks like you've been in the wind tunnel," the other said. 

  "There's a wind tunnel?" Someone asked. 

  "Would you like a tour? That can be arranged." Several people were enthusiastic.