Chapter 10

 
Lesser Morrell Island, it turned out, wasn't so very far from Hawaii. But then Forks-of-Cacapon, West Virginia isn't so very far from New York City, and that doesn't mean Pan Am offers non-stop service there. In order to be easily reached, a place must be both nearby and have supplied earlier travelers with a reason to go there and build transport infrastructures to facilitate future visits. Lesser Morrell Island, it seems, had failed to do the latter. 
 "We can get you to New Zealand," the woman behind the ticket counter volunteered.
 "Is New Zealand closer to Lesser Morrell Island than Hawaii?" Dana asked.
 "Not by distance, no."
 "Can I catch a flight from New Zealand to Lesser Morrell Island?"
 "No, you can't."
 "If New Zealand isn't any closer, and there aren't any connecting flights through there, why did you suggest I fly to New Zealand?"
 "I'm just trying to be helpful," said the woman. "We're trained to be helpful."
 "But how is it helpful to send me someplace even further away."
 "I just wanted to help."
 "Yes, but…oh never mind. Can you tell me if there's someone who does fly to Lesser Morrell Island?"
 "Yes I can."
 "And…" Dana prodded.
 "No they don't. There's no airport code for Lesser Morrell Island. If anyone flew there, there would be an airport code."
 "So if you were trying to get to Lesser Morrell Island, what would you do?"
The woman mulled this over, if, indeed, it is possible to mull whilst smiling. "We fly to New Zealand," she offered finally. Dana, summoning all of her will power, did not knock out the woman's smiling teeth. 
 Eventually, Dana found her way to a small charter company that could fly her as close as Greater Morrell Island, so long as she didn't mind making stops along the way in Fakaofo, Eiao, both Pukapuka and Puka-Puka plus maybe a dozen other places that she could neither identify nor pronounce. This was fine with Dana, who would, if nothing else, be able to spend the rest of her life telling people that Pukapuka was nice, but it was no Puka-Puka, at least not in the summer. And as for Eiao, well, the less said, the better, she would add. Facing a cash crunch a few decades back, the island had been forced to sell everything it had of any value, including its consonants. It had never recovered.
 From Greater Morrell Island Dana would have to hire a boat, since there was, indeed, no airport at Lesser Morrell Island; and not even a protected harbor large enough to land a sea plane (assuming "land" is even the proper verb where sea-planes are concerned). Dana wasn't about to complain. She had spent just enough time in a South American holding cell and a Hawaiian tourist-oriented airport in the past week to consider an unreachable tropical island exactly the spot to spend a year.

June 20

I didn't see Timmy at work the next day. Timmy's place at aisle three had been taken by--well, no one, actually. The check-out girl and the customers just bagged for themselves. And with no noticeable loss in overall efficiency, I observed. Maybe Timmy had skipped town to avoid the ticket. Or perhaps he'd been thrown into debtor's prison. Either way, I was content with the result and ready to consider the score between us settled.
 But Timmy hadn't skipped town. He'd been promoted. Word filtered through the break room at lunch. There had been an additional fine. Timmy's $150 ticket would now cost him $400. Coming on top of his earlier tickets as it did, this was more than a man such as Timmy with a wife, children, and income of $5.00 an hour possibly could hope to put aside in a year. And that was a problem, since if he didn't pay within a year, he faced jail time. With this looming over him, Timmy had persuaded Sapperstein to speak to the deli manager on his behalf about an opening in that department. Deli employees were paid more than the bagger rate of $5.00 an hour. They were paid $5.50. As Timmy saw it, $5.50 an hour and a job slicing luncheon meats was all he could have hoped for out of life. Soon he would have his car back--and then he'd start saving for a house, he explained after his first shift in the deli. But the car had to come first. For one thing, he had remembered that he had left his breakfast on the front seat the day the car was towed, and he looked forward to finishing it. 
 In fact, Timmy was so pleased with his promotion that he even was willing to let bygones be bygones with me. Why not? Timmy's previously unthinkable advancement to the respected position of deli trainee meant he was once again ahead of me in the well-established supermarket caste system. From the top, this went: 
1. management
2. bakery (they got to take home three-day-old bread)
3. deli 
4. checkout
5. bagging
6. clean up crew
7. seafood (their smell cost them points)
8. parking lot cart recovery (too cold most of the year). 
Getting Timmy promoted wasn't quite what I had had in mind, but I was willing to accept the result. I'd gotten Timmy out of my life, to the extent that I had one, and that was the important part. With Timmy's career seemingly back on track, the other baggers even warmed up to me a bit. And as little as I cared about their opinions, I at least like to earn enmity before it's heaped upon me--or at very least to have the heaping done by people who know what enmity means. Everyone came out a winner--relatively speaking. 
 This pleasant situation lasted nearly a full day.

June 21

"What's with the ambulance?" I asked when I arrived for my ten a.m. shift. Tammy glared at me. "And what's with the glaring?" I added. "I thought you got over that when Timmy got his big promotion."
 "Big promotion? Christ, Bob, because of you Timmy had to take the most dangerous job in the store. How's he going to provide for his family now?" Tammy stormed off.
 Timmy, it turned out, had lost a hand in the cheese slicer. The ambulance was for him. "What's Timmy going to do with one hand?" the other baggers asked each other. "He can't go back to bagging now."
 "Everyone here is holding you responsible," everyone assured me.
 "Why am I responsible?" I responded each time. "Timmy knew the risks when he signed up for the deli." 
But I knew why I was responsible. I was responsible because for some reason I was considered responsible for all of Timmy's problems since I'd arrived. Because someone had to be responsible, or Timmy would have to accept the blame himself. Still, I continued to question each assignment of blame in my direction, afraid that someone had found out that it was my fun with Timmy's car that had played some small role in starting things down this road.
 "You gave him that advice to abandon his car with the impound lot, don't try to deny it," one fellow bagger responded.
 "I can't believe you people," I shouted in a moment of frustration. "Not one of you is smart enough to figure out that I really have been causing Timmy's problems, yet you're blaming me for them anyway, just because you don't like me. What's wrong with you? …And another thing, I don't want to hear anymore about Timmy losing a hand in the cheese slicer. You can't possibly loose more than a layer of skin to a cheese slicer. It only slices a tenth of an inch at a time."
 Later reports confirmed that it had, in fact, been the whole hand. And that was how my employment at Shiveler's Supermarket came to an end.

"We've got a problem," said Smith.
 "I anxiously await the morning where that isn't the first thing out of your mouth," said Dean Kerns. "Well, what is it this time? Is the town complaining that we don't water the campus grass enough? Are the student environmentalists complaining that we water it too much? Are the Irish students complaining that people walking on green grass is an insult to their heritage?"
 "I wish you'd stop joking," Smith admonished. "This is serious." 
 "It's always serious to you. Don't you understand that sometimes the best response to an unsolvable problem is to laugh about it?" 
Smith didn't. 
 "All right, what's the problem?"
 "It seems that you located the Jewish student center in Jackson Hall, and the Muslim student center in the Martin Building."
 "So?"
 "So? They're right next to each other. And there have already been problems. Fights broke out while the students were moving in. Honestly, this is something that could have been predicted. These groups have never seen eye to eye."
 "Okay, so what do you expect me to do. I can't settle a religious debate. I'm just an economics professor--we have no God."
 "No, no. You don't understand. This isn't a religious issue, it's about nothing more complicated than property rights. They can't agree who controls the parking lot between the buildings. I figured you could go over there and work it out in a couple of minutes."
 "Something about that theory bothers me," replied Kerns.

"But how'd he lose a whole hand?" Dave asked when I explained it to him later that day.
 "Let's just say it took a lot more than one slice and leave it at that. Clearly Timmy panicked."
Dave winced. "That's pretty grisly."
 "Unquestionably a bad day to be on the clean-up crew."
 "And they fired you for it?"
 "Sapperstein said everyone blamed me, and that was good enough for him. Ironic, isn't it? They never figured out that I really was responsible, yet they blame it on me anyway."
 "Yea, ironic."
 "It never once occurred to Sapperstein or the deli manager, Roahrson, that they were to blame for putting a moron like Timmy in charge of a piece of machinery with a rotating blade. They're lucky he didn't slit his throat. I mean, this is Timmy, a man who never lost his fascination with the way the supermarket carts fold into each other when they're pushed together. Dave, I tell you, there's just no sense of responsibility in this world."
 "Well, what are we going to do for lunch?"
 "Oh, I've got that taken care of," I said. "I negotiated a generous severance package in the form of dented canned goods and three-day-old bakery products."
 "Is there pumpkin pie filling?" Dave loved pumpkin pie filling--although, oddly, he wasn't very fond of pumpkin pies.
 "Now what kind of person would I be if I didn't think of my roommate?" I asked, and pulled a dented can of pumpkin innards from my grocery bag. 
 "Maybe this is a blessing in disguise," Dave said when he had emptied his can and I'd polished off some peas. "How were you ever going to find a better job if you spent all of your days bagging groceries?"
 "How am I going to find another job if I have to spend all of my days begging for spare change on the corner?"
 "Don't bother. The people in this town are cheapskates."
 "Anyway, I've been blacklisted."
 "Blacklisted by Shiveler's Supermarket?"
 "Yea. And apparently the blacklist is pretty severe. They told me I won't be able to find a minimum-wage job anywhere in Bridgeton, or, presumably, a directing job in Hollywood. I don't suppose you've made any progress towards finding work?"
 "Oh…Was I supposed to be looking?"
 "Dave, what the hell have you been doing for the past two weeks?"
 "At first I was just lying around in the sun. But then I started attending campus conferences to meet women."
 "Any luck?"
 "Not really. Most of them seemed to lose interest when I asked them to buy me food."
 "I could see how that would make the wrong first impression."
In truth, I would not have been happy if my roommate had been bagging women while I bagged groceries to feed us. "We'd better start thinking about liberating snack food again," I said. "These dented canned goods won't hold us for long."
 "No problem. Today there's a math seminar on number theory in Fisher Hall, or a Psychology Department conference on criminology in McMichaelson."
 "Any way to tell which will have better snacks?"
 "The psychology department does have better funding," Dave said. "The math department blew all their money on those computers. Anyway, I've already hit the math department a few times this summer."
 "Then psychology it is. Anyway, I like the irony of stealing the snacks from a criminology conference."
 "Agreed."
On second thought, I considered as I eyed the snack table ten minutes later, maybe the math seminar would have been a better idea. The campus food services department obviously had been alerted to the disappearing snack problem. A food services employee in a white apron stood guard over the snacks--a very large food services employee, and, for that matter, a very large white apron. Worse still, I noted from the program that the guest speaker was an actual police officer. For all we knew, there could be other police officers in the audience. But the snacks were vegetables and dip. I hadn't consumed a fresh vegetable since graduation, and I found the idea appealing. 
 "I don't know, Dave, this seems like an awful risk for a few celery sticks."
 "Don't worry, I have a plan," Dave whispered back.
 "Is this plan to grab the tray and run as fast as you can back to our building in full view of a room teeming with criminologists, leaving a trail of vegetables along the way."
 "Uh…leaving the trail wasn't really a part of the plan. It was more an inevitable consequence."
 "No offense, but I'm not certain that's the best plan I've ever heard."
 "It's pretty much what I've been doing up to this point."
 "Yea, and actually I'd been meaning to speak with you about that." But as it happened, I was fresh out of better ideas.
 "Timing, Dave, it's all just timing," I mused, back at the observatory. The food service employee had been big all right, but his lack of foot speed cost him. The man turned to shut a window, and turned back a moment later to an empty table and the sight of Dave disappearing through the door. "Bad timing's the only thing that's making my life miserable. When our grandparents' generation graduated from college, any degree meant that they were set for life. If our parents' generation graduated from law school, it meant sure success. Today..."
 "Keep in mind that most of those generations had to do things like fight in wars," Dave said, on the off chance I was in the mood to listen. "And the reason that a degree meant automatic success was that so few of them could afford to go to school. And it's my understanding that they went through something called the Great Depression."
 "Today the only way to guarantee yourself a job is to know how to program a computer," I continued. "I ask you, is that right? Is it right that you can't count on a diploma to guarantee success? I mean, why did my parents work so hard all of their lives? Wasn't it so that I could have a better life even if I lacked any obvious skills?"
 "You've got it all wrong Gwaf. Why do you have to feel so damn sorry for yourself all the time? We've got it good here. We have a place to sleep, plenty of pretzel rods and celery sticks to eat, and lots of really neat telescopes. Why isn't that enough for you? Why can't you just enjoy the what you have?"
 "I can't enjoy the present because I've blown my future. Can't you see that? If they'd told me ten years ago that I would need to know about computers, then I'd have learned about computers. I'm actually not certain that there were any computers in Kansas ten years ago, but I'm sure I could have learned about them somehow."
 "What makes you think that you'd even enjoy programming computers? You get all anxious and fidgety in the time it takes vending machines to give you your can of soda."
 "What does enjoy have to do with it? Do you think computer science majors enjoy computers? Take a look at one some time--You've never seen a sadder looking bunch of S.O.B.'s in your life."
 "Sure," Dave said. "But that might have something to do with the fact that none of them can get a date. I think you're missing the big picture here. If you do what you love, you'll have a happy life, money or no money. Isn't that the real reason you chose your major in the first place?"
 "You think I enjoyed majoring in economics? No one enjoys economics. I was just doing what they told me. 'Major in economics,' they said, 'it's dull, but you'll make a lot of money in banking.' Now, four years of education later, I can’t even walk into a bank without the security guard following me."
 "Complain all you like," said Dave. "I'm sticking to my assessment: your problem is that you can't just enjoy the moment."
 "Dave, at this moment I'm penniless, jobless, my girlfriend is thousands of miles away, and I'm living as a squatter in an observatory, subsisting on stolen snack trays. Has it occurred to you that the reason I can't enjoy the moment is that each and every moment I've had for the past few weeks have conspired together to make my life shit?"
Dave took a radish from the snack tray and looked up at the sky--he had opened the building's roof that morning to put the big telescope to use, but had done something wrong and now couldn't get it back closed. "If this was television," he said finally. "I'd say 'At least it isn't raining,' then it would start raining." 
 "Let it rain," I said. "I could use a shower."
I looked up through the open observatory roof, but there was no rain. Just a blue sky and the sound of Dave chewing a vegetable. Neither of us spoke. Such silences often occurred when Dave and I attempted serious conversations. Dave had once told me he considered the silences a sign of a deep and rarely tapped thoughtfulness on my part. Personally, I was of the opinion that the more significant factor was Dave's pot habit causing him to lose his train of thought. Getting off this subject was just fine with me. "What are you thinking about?" I asked to confirm that we done talking about my life.
 "Who do you suppose made the most money per chord known, AC/DC or ZZ Top?"
 "That's what you're thinking about? Our lives have fallen apart, and you're thinking about the earnings history of untalented rock bands?"
 "Yea. What do you think?"
 "I really can't believe you sometimes."
 "And?"
 "And what?" I asked.
 "You know 'and what.' You can never let any issue, however unimportant, pass without giving your opinion. So let's hear it. You know you want to." 
 "And…it's obviously AC/DC," I said. "ZZ Top was only a national embarrassment. AC/DC sold copies of their three-chord monstrosities worldwide." 
 "Maybe," Dave conceded.
 "No 'maybe,' you know I'm right."
 "Yea, maybe."
 "I'm going to take a nap," I said finally. "Things might look better when I wake up." 
The truth, of course, was that I had no bed. I slept on a four-foot-long office couch. When I woke the situation had not substantially improved. 
 And my back hurt.

Kerns walked towards the disputed parking lot and considered his options. The parking shortage had never been an issue before. Jackson Hall had until recently housed the environmental studies department, and the Martin Building the philosophy department. Whenever things started to get a little crowded in the lot, the philosophers would just shame the environmentalists into walking to work with an offhand philosophical remark concerning irony or ethics. The environmentalists might counter that they did drive old VW Microbuses, the most environmental vehicle known to man… and anyway they intended to walk to work once this damned weather cleared up. But eventually, the philosophers always won. 
 Neither of the new lot users seemed as likely to give in. In fact, tensions had been escalating all day. An hour earlier, campus security had issued a travel warning for the parking lot. Kerns couldn't put off the problem any longer. When he reached the disputed lot, he very surprised by what he found. In the whole lot, a paved surface large enough for 25 vehicles, there were a grand total of two cars, side by side, both half way into the same space right in the middle of the lot. Oddly, Kerns noted, there was someone crouched behind one of the cars, a blue Dodge Aries. He started towards the person when he heard a shout from behind the other car. It seemed there was someone hiding behind that one as well. "I knew it, I knew you'd side with him," the voice shouted from behind the second car, a red Plymouth Reliant.
 "I'm not siding with anyone," Kerns said. "I'm just trying to figure out what's going on here."
 "Everyone knows what's going on here," said the Aries. "You're all trying to take away my parking lot."
Kerns took a position right between the two cars. He could see movement on each side, and every now and then a head would pop up, but it was clear that neither driver intended to come out. "Why are you hiding behind your cars?" Kerns asked. "Why don't we talk face to face?"
 "I knew it, I knew it was a trick," said the Reliant. 
 "I thought you said you knew I'd side with him."
 "That too," said the Reliant. "As soon as I step out, you're going to shoot me."
 "Shoot you? Why would anyone shoot you? I thought this was about a parking space?"
 "It isn't about a parking space," explained the Aries. "It's over a parking lot. My parking lot."
 "See?" said the Reliant. "He wants to claim my parking lot as his own. There's just no reasoning with him."
 "Listen," said Kerns. "This is ridiculous. There are 25 spaces here and only two cars. And you're fighting over the worst spot in the lot. It's right in the middle; it isn't near either building. Why don't you just agree that nobody's going to shoot anybody over it, so we can talk face to face?"
 "Oh, no," said the Reliant. "I'm not conceding anything. That would mean giving up the advantage. What if I say I'm not going to shoot him, and he won't say he's not going to shoot me? Then where would I be?"
 "Okay, I think what we have here is a trust problem," said Kerns. "You behind the Aries, perhaps if you would be willing to say that you are not going to do any physical harm to the gentleman behind the Reliant, conditional on his agreeing to say the same, then we could get things started."
 "To be honest, I was considering doing him physical harm."
 "Fine, fine, but would you be willing to hold off until after our negotiations?"
 "Uh…no."
 "Jesus Christ," said Kerns. "Isn't there anything you two can agree on?"
 "Well," said the Aries, "we're pretty much in agreement that there's no Jesus Christ, if that helps."
 "Let's try to keep this to parking related matters," said Kerns. "Stay behind your damn cars for all I care. Why the big deal over this one parking space?"
 "It's not the space," said the Aries. "It's the lot. If they get this space, they'll have more spaces than us. Then they'll keep moving the car forward another space each day until they have the whole lot, and our building, too."
 "Don't listen to him," answered the Reliant. "It's them who want to get rid of us. Them and their godless late-model Dodges"
 "But there aren't even enough of you to fill all of these spots," protested Kerns. "Even when classes start again, between your two groups you probably don't have 20 cars."
 "We'll grow," said the Aries. 
 "We just want what's ours," said the Reliant. 
 "I'm going back to my office," said Kerns.
 "Did you solve the problem?" Smith asked when Kerns returned to the administration building.
 "I posted a security guard between the cars until they work the problem out between themselves."
 "Fine, fine. That shouldn't take long."
 "I had the guard bring riot gear."
 "Probably a sensible precaution."
 "And I made sure to pick a man without a family."
 "Only thing to do."

June 22
 
I got up at noon. I'd been awake for hours, but hadn't come up with a reason to actually stand. Finally my bladder gave me one. "Fucking bladder," I muttered. "Now I have to do something with my day."
In the main room, Dave was still staring through the telescope. Or maybe he was asleep. Or maybe dead. He'd pushed a desk under the big telescope's eyepiece so he could lie down and stare up. Since then it had been hard to tell if Dave was still among the living, in as much as Dave wasn't a big fan of unnecessary physical activity. I didn't bother to check for a pulse. "What are you watching, Dave?"
 "Clouds," he said.
 "Uh huh. And what do clouds look like up close?"
 "Bigger clouds," Dave answered, without shifting his gaze.
 "Analytical ability like that and you still can't find a job."
 "You can't find a job," Dave corrected. "I don't want to find a job."
 "I don't get it, Dave," I said, heading for the bathroom. "How can you be so afraid of a little hard work when the alternative is starvation?"
 "I'm not afraid of a little hard work. I'm afraid of a lot of hard work. I'm only mildly anxious about a little hard work. In fact, if you had been up earlier, you would have seen me do a little hard work. I went out and got us breakfast." Dave gestured in the general direction of a pile of doughnuts stacked on a desk.
I picked one up. "Dave, where did you get these doughnuts."
 "The Doughnut Shoppe on Main Street."
I was skeptical. While it had been a while since I'd eaten a doughnut, I was less than convinced that this was what one was supposed to look like. "By 'The Doughnut Shoppe on Main Street,' do you mean the Doughnut Shoppe on Main Street itself, or the dumpster behind the Doughnut Shop on Main Street?"
I waited for an answer. 
Dave stared up at the clouds. "What gave it away?" he asked finally.
 "They seem a bit crunchy--not crispy, mind you, but crunchy. It's a minor distinction, I grant you, but one that I believe is worth noting. That, and I'd never seen a donut with green creme filling."
 "Damn it, I knew I should have left the crème-filleds behind. Now you're going to refuse to eat them, right?"
 "Dave, are you telling me that you ate dumpster doughnuts?"
 "I didn't intend to. I just went to pick up some coffee."
 "By which you mean used and discarded coffee grounds?"
 "It seemed like a good idea until I saw them."
 "Right," I said. "I'm going to take a leak." And I did. 
 "What made you this way?" I asked when I returned. "How'd you become such a master at just taking whatever comes along without complaint or concern? How can you not do anything, believe in anything or dream of anything?"
 "Oh, it's genetic, I suppose. I come from a long line of people who didn't much give a damn one way or the other."
 "Really?"
 "Sure. My great-great grandfather, Jeremiah Orr, for example. He's the one who first moved the family to California. Everyone else on his wagon train was going for the gold rush or for the farmland. My great-great grandfather joined up because he'd heard California was a place a man could lie around all year without ever freezing to death."
 "Are you making this up?"
 "Nope. And that's not even the half of it. Great-great-grandpa Orr's wagon train got snowed in for the winter before it could get across the mountains. Everyone else on the wagon train were Christians, true believers, you know. But my great-great-granddad, he'd never bothered a whole lot with religious faith. The Christians who were with him were sure they would go off to a better place when they died, assuming they had good, Christian burials. And they did die; starved one by one. My great-great-grandfather, he lived."
 "You're saying he had a greater will to live because he didn't believe he'd get any eternal reward when he died?"
 "Well, that…and he kept digging up the Christians and eating them after they'd been buried. See, a devout religious person wouldn't have done that."
 "That's it. I'm going for a walk." Considering Dave's family background, it seemed like a good idea to steer clear of him when he was hungry.
 I'd never really been the sort to go out for a walk. I'd walk here and there, of course, as events might warrant, but such walks were mainly a function of needing to reach some specific destination and lacking access to a functioning vehicle or mass-transit system. With this new freedom to walk wherever I chose, I found myself at something of a loss. I stood outside the door of the Native American Observatory ready to start, but uncertain how these things worked. I took a few steps forward, towards the center of campus, but that direction offered nothing I hadn't seen many times before. To my right lay downtown Bridgeton, such as it was, with its bookstore and barbershop and supermarket, none of which offered much to the young pedestrian with a 32-cent bankroll. Behind me--that is, behind both me and the building I'd just exited--was a residential neighborhood full of residents living happy residential lives. I have to admit I looked pretty unkempt by that point in the summer; in fact, I was a fairly good distance from kempt. And an unkempt individual wandering through a residential area while the decent folk are off at work might not go over so well with the local constabulary. 
 That left the left. To the left lay the ocean, or such was my understanding. In four years, I'd never actually followed the road to its end and confirmed the presence of the sea. This wasn't as odd as it might seem. Bridgeton's beach isn't a beach in the lay-in-the-sand, drink-margaritas, watch-women-play-volleyball sense of the word. It was just a rocky edge to the nation beyond which one had better be prepared to swim. Still, I'd always appreciated that the ocean was there if I needed it. Such things meant a lot to a boy from Kansas. I walked left.
 It was late afternoon when I returned from my walk. The coast had been further off than I had expected, a tough slog on an empty stomach. I'd kept walking only because I didn't want to turn around just a few minutes before I got there, and having never before been down that stretch of road, I was just a few minutes away the whole time, so far as I knew. When I finally did reach the coast, I simply turned around and headed home. 
 Back at the observatory, Dave was putting his clothes in a suitcase. "Planning a trip?"
 "Yea," Dave answered in his usual unhurried fashion. "I'm going to take a trip around the world. Wanna come?"
 "You're asking if I want to take a trip around the world?"
 "Right. But you've got to decide now. I'm leaving in ten minutes."
 "Dave, we don't have enough money to live for free here in just one place in the world. How are you going to pay for a trip all the way around?"
 "I'm going to hitchhike."
 "What about the oceans?"
 "I don't know. Do boats take hitchhikers?"
 "I can see that you've really thought this one through."
 "Beats sitting around here staring at clouds."
 "I thought you liked staring at clouds."
 "I did. But I've been at it a while now, and this morning I'm pretty sure I saw the same cloud I saw when I started, blown all the way back around. I figured if a cloud could make it around the world, then so could I."
 "Where are you going to sleep? How will you eat? What about visas? And foreign languages? Do you even have a passport?"
 "I'll figure that stuff out as I go."
 "Dave, I don't think clouds actually go all the way around the world."
 "Then where do they go? Listen Gwaf, I'm going around the world." Dave snapped the suitcase shut. "Last chance. Do you want to come?"
 "No," I answered. "I can't. I've got to get a job. Be responsible. Earn money. Open a 401(k). Get a dental plan. Get married. Start a family. Barbecue hot dogs with the neighbors. Worry about dry rot. You know, have a life. I can't just pick up today and travel around the world."
 "Then when will you?"
 "I don't know," I admitted. "I never thought about it. Maybe when I retire."
 "Fine," said Dave. "I'll have your suitcase back to you by then." 
I noted that it was, indeed, my suitcase that Dave had packed. I also realized what this meant. "If you used my suitcase, then you knew I wouldn't come," I said.
 "Call it a hunch. I'll say 'hi' to Dana when I pass through South America."
 "Dave, South America's a big place. I don't think you'll just run into her even if you manage to get there."
 "I've got a better chance of running into her than you do sitting here. I'll tell her 'hi.' Take care of the rest of my stuff," Dave said, waving at the pile of old clothes and drug paraphernalia that he couldn't fit into my suitcase. Then he was gone. 
 "He'll be back," I thought to myself, staring at the pile of clothes and bongs. No one would pick up a hitchhiker who looked as disheveled as Dave. And traveling with no money is even more difficult than being sedentary with no money. And Dave was too lazy to stick with any plan too long. Besides, he's left his favorite bong behind. He'll be back. 
 "It'll be nice to have some privacy," I said to the big telescope. Dave had spent so much of the past few weeks staring through that eyepiece that I'd hardly had a chance to use the thing myself. I leaned over Dave's desk and took a peak. Just clouds, I saw. Nothing but clouds. I lay on the desk as Dave had so often and looked through the lens. 
 "What am I still doing here?" I asked the clouds.