Cruzer: Fight With Machi/Rascacielos Mayor

20.CRUZER READING/
FIGHT BEFORE MACHI RUNS AWAY
From Cruzer
Table at salad bar by City Center Park

Horrible fight with Machi last night. I don't remember what I was screaming at him...Something like. “This way you live, this way you want to live, is not what our family believes. You are betraying our family's revolutionary ideology...””
He screamed...”Where is the fucking revolution you and Pa were going to make? I sure as hell don't see it.”...And he was gone. And he wasn't back home when I left for work. I don't remember him ever not coming home at all. How did I get myself to work? How am I sitting at this table?
What might I have done differently if I had known I wouldn't see him again for a year?
And then I got to work.
An unexpected day at work. The thing you want to happen happened. I got to work and there was no workplace! Xiomara was standing at the door in all her deputy commissioner corporate finery (red suit, navy blue blouse with red polka dots, very high heels to give her height. I’m sitting at lunch now in a table in a salad bar by my same park, writing. Xiomara redirected us to the 92nd floor of the rascacielo mayor. Amina, it turned out, had complained to the Union (the civil servants, unlike us grant funded tenuous employees, have a Union) that asbestos was being improperly removed in our lesser rascacielos. (The funny smell in the lobby? All of us starting our terminal cancers?). And the building was shut down.
Over the weekend our offices were packed up and our work materials were moved three blocks away . Our work spaces on the 92nd floor are sheets of plywood propped on horses. We have been assigned plywood sheets and our computers are set up ready to go . All this distraction almost puts Machi's disappearance out of my head...Or is it that the raw chaos of his disappearance has spilled into the workplace. The rawness of my inner world spilled out everyplace. The building sways. Elevators have to be taken in shifts.

This morning there were window cleaners dangling outside our windows and as my jaw was dropping from the sudden appearance of two men on a board tied to what? wiping down the outside of our floor to ceiling picture windows 92 flights up, their jaws were dropping at the sight of our refugee camp office, a sea of plywood, all of us milling around. There are no walls, no partitions, except at one end of the long rectangle of open space. There they have a single office for the Commissioner. Her deputies, Xiomara and the others, have plywood on sawhorses all around the one office with a door. The lifers and the grant fundeds are now not separated by anything but the different crumbs of privilege each of us has. We have slightly higher salaries and still like our jobs. (Is the liking a matter of time?).They have job security and hate theirs.
The only reason this high floor space with views of the City all around was available is that there was a stampede away from this building after the bombs went off in the garage two years ago. That is the rumor.