We're moving along dark streets, and Chico says, we have to take the keys. I'll divert him.

So Moss is stopped, and told something, and he goes away with his keys in his ignition, the way you'd sprint to a door, meaning to return quickly. But when he came back, his keys were no longer in his ignition.

We are driving along an embankment now, and Chico determines this is the place, so I cast the keyring down the slope towards the river. But they don't make it to the river; even in the dark I can tell.

We stop now. It's be cool time now. We are mingling around the government center. I make to appear helpful. It's a warren of rooms for all civic purposes, and I have a gadget which makes noise like a leafblower but is actually a sort of vacuum cleaner. I make to be intent on my work when the deputy comes to me, inconspicuous and non-authoritative but asking if I will take the test now.

I show disinterest, but agree. I don't know what the test means, and if I ask, I may incriminate myself, for what do I care if I'm innocent? Tests are offered and taken all the time in this berg.

I find ways and means to be dilatory, though, following the deputy. The test (polygraph? fingerprints from the keys they found?) is not set up as yet. I pass a structure. This is the water tower, and Chico with others has climbed it. (Unlike the one back home in Flatlandia, this is European, a boxy building of white rock.)

I am thinking, where did I hear taking keys is Grand Theft Auto?

But in my dreams the test never comes.


(There are characters like Moss and buddy Chico in my history - and Chico and brother Reloj did in fact climb the hundred foot water tower on a rainy night in Flatlandia, and we always referred to The Embankment as a down and out hotel north of Madera out of Orwell - but here they play strange roles.)