2. Rut Office

Rut walked the chasms and canyons of the City Center, high speed, head hunched in, clicking her high heels, stretching her plaid red skirt. She pictured raptor birds, bigger than she was, plunging from their high perches, shrieking, swooping just above her head.
The old woman beside her on the line for the elevator pushed into Rut's shoulder. "Can you stop breathing so hard?" Rut strode three yards away from her, let her breath out slowly, counted black spots on the granite floor slab. She clenched her fists to stop herself from breathing hard and stood away from the woman in the near empty elevator. Beyond the smoked glass double office door her breathing slowed, her hands released.
Her gray green cubicle in the corner of the huge word processing room faced computer islands like her own. She turned her gaze away from the facing windows of the twin building across the narrow street, glanced at the snapshot of Pablo, his forehead poked by a pin into the fleecy gray green wall partition, squeezed her eyes shut. She saw Pablo's face the way she'd seen it in last night's blood dream: wizened, flesh blacker than it was in life, stuck tight to the bones, lips pulled taut against the jaws, able only to grin, stretched around the jaws and the yellow long-necked teeth. Pablo is dying, was her last thought before she gave herself over to the keys.
Her hand and her eyes had their own secret circuit. She gazed at words. Her hands pressed keys. The gray screen swallowed her hours, filled with green squares, orbs and sticks. Her mind dropped her and Pablo in the park. Their dropin game. On the trail, in the forest jungle, on the sloping hillside, Rut y Pablo lay inside their best bower, on the movers' quilt Pablo took from his uncle's van. Pablo trilled and warbled. "Like real birds. My Birdboy." Rut drew close to him, almost touching. He crooned, yodeled, trilled; his face filled up, his cheeks blew out, his lips formed os and narrowed to slits, making the songs of birds he'd heard in this very park and birds he imagined.

Rut wandered the aisles of the supermarket breathing the dizzy sweet stink Pablo said was mice sex. Her eyes roved the boxes of macaroni. Pablo loved macaroni. He could have eaten it every day if she'd let him. She backstepped from the multicolored many shaped pastas to the clear bags of soft noodles, and then reached down on the low shelf for the prepackaged dinners, the store-brand in the plain white box with the blue letters. Pablo's favorite. She dropped a box into her empty plastic basket.
"Senorita."
She looked up. The voice belonged to a man, a young man, and he was smiling, showing perfect, gleaming big teeth, white against the cinnamon of his lips and skin. A new Venturan. She smiled back. She'd noticed him before. Sometime or other you noticed everyone in the Barrio. She'd seen him more than once, so vain she'd looked away from the oval face, the redbrown skin, the jet black, straight hair cut in a bowl. Someone had taken trouble to press his clothes. He must have a wife. Always, she looked away from him. Often he caught her just as she tore her gaze away. She recognized attraction and didn't like it.
"No offense, Senorita." She guessed what he would say. "Do you know someone who would marry me, por negocio, just a business deal?"
New Venturans had no papers. She, from la Isla, got to be a citizen of the City. This man wanted her for the papers. Although Ventura and La Isla shared the tiny Caribbean island shaped like a lopsided butterfly, Ventura, the bigger half, was a country; La Isla the City's only remaining colony. The cinammon skinned man touched her cheek with his index finger. Rut dropped her basket, and ran as fast as she could away from his aisle.

Rut tensed for the blood dream, then surrendered. Blood bathed the floor, glided over the worn wooden planks. She found her dream self in the darkness of the wardrobe, hidden between the folds of hanging coats, crouched on the fallen clothes on the escaparate's floor. A Blue burst open the door to the room. She heard wood splinter, the dream din shuddered through her as the door broke open. The dream Rut slipped a dress over her nightgown, pulled on lace-up boots. She jumped out through the window, landed mindless on the sidewalk on powerful superwoman legs, ran along a maze of streets, each street narrower, more winding. She reached a maze of leantos made from scraps of wood, pushed open one peeling wood door, burst into a din of welcoming noises. A dark skinned woman in a flowered vestido de casa drew her into the dark kitchen by the hand, embraced her. Three other women in vestidos de casa embraced her. The dark woman led her to a table in the center of the room, poured her coffee and milk and put the cup to her lips.
Rut sat up in bed with her flowered quilt clutched under her chin. In the mirror by the bed she saw her face upon awaking, a mask of terror, a stranger's face. She curled up around the purring Catsi and pulled the covers over her head.
She leaned forward on her chair, lifted the veil over her computer, booted it, gazed at its square eye-ball. To the right of the screen was her work to-be-processed-bin.