Blog 20-I am a lifer of job prison, used to wage enslavement

And still we couldn't bear to part. She asked me what I left behind to come here. “My job. Or rather it left me, threw me out. I look around and I think, what am I doing on a beach alone at night surrounded by a thousand strangers, no husband, no son, no home, no job? All of my life I've had a job. I don't know another life. I am a lifer of job prison, used to wage enslavement. The job had been there and would always be there.” I looked away from her eyes. “It made me dizzy, how quickly it all came undone. It went on and on for years and then it was done. There was a mass lay-off and Soli my boss who used to be my friend before I worked there and so she knew about my life, persuaded me, because I am old enough to actually retire, to just do it. She asked me, “What if you take a humanitarian layoff? That's what she said.” Patria moved around me so that I had no choice but to face her. “Humanitarian to whom?” she said and I laughed. “Humanitarian to the two young underpaid part-time teachers who could be kept on if I was gone. And at last here was the moment I had longed for, two weeks notice to wage emancipation.” Telling Patria about all this let me contain the panic. “And then, like you with the screaming Alpha Boss making the decision clear, a strange synchronicity happened the morning after my wage emancipation that made it impossible not to decide to come here.”
In the moonlight, looking rapt at me, I saw Patria's beauty, the beauty of intelligence. I wanted to tell her everything, be unburdened. “Full of the thought that I would only be doing this commute for two more weeks, I stepped outside the house the morning after I was told my lay-off was effective in two weeks and saw wanted posters on the trees. My boy Machi had been gone for almost a year and I ran downstairs terrified it would be his picture on the poster. But when I looked up close it wasn't Machi but his best friend David.”
Patria whispered, “The one who drove the stolen car in reverse down the street.” I nodded. This woman was truly listening to me! Had I ever felt somebody's mind the way I felt hers, right there with mine? Maybe, sometimes, Ori's mind.
“That's right. David. A blown up old school photo of his long face and big grin was wrapped around my sidewalk tree and all the trees and light posts up and down the block. Strange irony, those posters for David at last led me to find my son Maceo. All those years of nothing happening and now too much was happening too fast.”
We couldn't bare to end our conversation yet Patria was falling asleep. I was swimming in adrenalin, and after all of Patria's coffee I was completely awake. Just before I left she laughed and whispered,“There is great disorder under the sky...the situation is excellent.” Patria hugged and kissed me. “Go to sleep. They'll be home soon enough. They have each other's backs. They will have gone from the Camp to the Hills. Night time is their time. The world makes more room for them at night.”
Walking from Patria's casita back to our place I was afraid to walk into the wrong shelter. My father instructed me as a child that if anybody were to follow or chase me in the street I was to run to any house and knock and ask for help. I always imagined myself pounding on the door of the very house of my pursuer. That child's terror filled me and I had eyes all around my head. I thought of the rapists Patria warned me about. I was living among possible pursuers, no walls for barricades. Or, I was living among my saviors.
The adrenaline took for me to find my way in the dark among the Encampment shelters to ours, added to Patria's coffee, blasted me awake, filled my brain with its own yellow light. After a few wrong turns I got to our lean-to wired by terror and awash with exhilaration and relief. Still no Machi. What to do? Write about right now, here, how afraid I was to go to sleep in Palenque without walls and doors, surrounded by strangers, with my son gone? Was I in the wrong shelter, the home of my pursuer? Or write about how we got here?...Write about the thing I want to notice, or the thing I don't want to forget?.