I was tired. It was late. She was Russian.

I was putting in 80-hour weeks at the southside engineering complex for at least three months by the time we got the hydraulics right on our machine's lifter arms. Christ, all the parts we went through — rods, pressure capsules, god knows what else — it was probably enough to pack a landfill. Every time we rigged her up for test runs something went wrong. Parts would grind together, parts would fall off, oil would shoot out all over the goddamn place. We almost lost Muckley when a jet of pressurized steam came out strong enough to tear the cheeks out of his face. Engineering is dangerous work.

The lifter arms were the final piece of our most-important project to date: the Mars rocket. When the Ruskies sent Sputnik up over our heads we all took a few minutes to bust our own balls and think hard what we could do to one-up them. We knew they were aiming for the moon: we'd make a moon trip look like child's play. Red planet, here we come.

And everything had gone smoothly until we'd gotten to the arms. Arms to lift the escape pod out of the ship and launch it into space. Simplest thing in the world, and we just couldn't make it work.

I had a family, once.

A-Level Engineers are lonely people. The best of the best of the best. We're lonely not only because we have the responsibility of carrying the worldwide standard of engineering prowess but because we see no one but other A-Level engineers. Muckley was the newest member of the staff and he had not seen his daughter enter or graduate high school.

Take a flight over the Arizona plains, you might chance to see a small cluster of buildings surrounding a large hangar. The hangar is the place of work; the small buildings are barracks. There is a helicopter pad two hundred yards north of the hangar and no roads. Our supplies are air-lifted in bi-weekly. We are three hundred miles from anything. If any of us tried to leave we would mummify in the desert.

When Muckley got his face torn off we were jealous because he got to go home.

When we weren't talking about metal or engineering, which was as often as possible, we talked about our families. We saw them once every six months for two weeks. You'd be surprised how much conversation can be made about early breakfasts, a game of catch with the boy. My boy is named Michael; he is three inches taller every time I see him. He's got a hell of an arm. I swear the last game of catch I played with him he was whipping them at me at 60MPH, easy. Maybe 70.

But I'm looking at Michael through a father's eyes.

I'm not looking at Michael through a father's eyes because he does not have a father. Michael is eight or nine years old.

You see, these are the thoughts you try not to have.

You can tell when one of the other engineers has a thought like that because they get quiet. And you understand.

Mary was one of two female engineers in the complex. She came in early summer the last year I worked there. She took a bunker in the southeast near a cluster of chaparral, where the rabbits hid. Because she was a new engineer, her security clearance was low-level; she was allowed only in the green sector, where we handled low-level technical work.

Two days a week, Mary and I worked together on the fittings for the push rods extending from the arms' joints. Double-reinforced steel shell with Titanium core, each rod about a foot thick. If we'd tried to make the whole thing from steel it would throw the craft off balance and send it into the atmosphere sideways to go careening off into space. But Mary didn't know any of this, or that she was working on a rocket to Mars: all she knew was that she was formulating ways to keep oil in small joints under changing gravity to keep metal from touching metal. I'm sure the antigrav was enough to tip her off that we were working on something to shoot into space. But she never dreamed how far we were shooting.

Mary was not married. Mary was popular.

We finished the lifting arms as the summer drew to a close.

We tweaked the angles of bends, some pressure points, the angles of push rods. We tried different metals and different temperatures. We tried different couplings between the hydraulics and the moving parts. Mary and I spent hours hovering together over blueprints. I did not notice that afternoons, mornings, nights would pass between the thousand shifting algorithms of metal and engineering, of two people moving in the half-light, not caring about sleep or missed night skies. In September, when we used a finished production model of our lifting arm to pick up a four-thousand pound ball of iron, Mary asked me what it was for. Why were we building a giant arm in secret?

Not knowing what else to say, I invited her to spend the night in my bunker.

I did not think about my wife.

When I woke up I heard drawers opening and closing in my barrack's office. Drawers I kept locked.

Mary had been asking about things more and more. She wanted more security clearance. When engineers are dispatched to the desert complex they're briefed about spies.

As quietly as I could, I found my issued pistol in my metal nightstand and crawled out of bed.

She didn't move, didn't say anything. Calmly she watched me click back the hammer. Finger tense on the trigger.

"God damn you," I said, trying not to shake, pointing the barrel of the gun squarely at Mary's forehead. Right between her bright blue Russian eyes.

I didn't have time to ask her how much info she'd leaked before she started toward me.

One of the first things they teach you is to keep your eyes open when you fire. You've got to keep your aim and see what you hit.

I didn't blink until I saw the spark.

My bullet bounced off Mary's forehead and buried itself in the ceiling. Her skin was split wide open, revealing plated, silver-colored metal.

"Don't worry," she said. "I haven't told them anything yet."

My gun fell from my hands.

"I don't think the Russian government has much to worry about anyway," she continued. "We've grossly overestimated you."

She smiled at me for a moment, brownish fluid seeping from the gash in her head. Oil. Here we were trying to go to Mars. Like children.

"I won't tell anyone about you," I stammered.

"Yes you will."

I thought I heard hydraulics hissing when she wrapped her hands around my throat.

For paraclete, who beat me to the punch.

I fell in love on the interstate and I didn't even need to leave my car.

It's the nature of roads - no matter what direction you're going you're always going to be leaving something behind. In one direction it's traffic and smog and cheap bagels and in the other it's peace and quiet and the most insistent crickets you've ever heard, but there's always something in the one that's desired in the other, something too unique to transplant that, if you had your way, would live a city block away in a building visible only to you, a seemingly abandoned warehouse containing a thriving ecosystem of cheap cosmetics, twenty-four hour diners and rocks dropped by glaciers thousands of years ago that we still haven't figured out how to get rid of.

Cigarettes, at least, are available pretty much anywhere.

As demonstrable as this is in theory to anyone with a V6 and an atlas, there's still something missing by not doing it yourself, something governed more by a throw of the dice than by geography and an overabundance of free time.

Speaking of free time: given enough of it to devote to this little project of apathy and exhaustion born, the road changes under your tires, abandoning straight and true for curvy and eventual, and finds itself meandering through hills too expensive to build over and neighborhoods too wealthy to demolish. A driver paying the minimum amount of attention to keep from careening of the road enters a trance where the trees frame the road, engulfing whatever light there is and breaking only occasionally for puddles of even darker night.

It's calming, really. It's also the last place you'd expect to find a neon sign glaring at you as you crest another anonymous ridge, and as far as signs go, this one was a doozy.

For starters, it wasn't attached to anything. Power, I'm sure, but whatever structure it was meant to advertise had disappeared long ago or had been eaten by the treeline. From a distance it looked like it was attached to a tree itself, dangling from the forest like a phosphorescent caterpillar. The closer I got to it, the more readily apparent it became that this was impossible.

It was huge, three stories tall and and covered in ivy that was only visible on the sections of it that weren't receiving power at that moment.

It was also (and this is what made me loop back for another look) a woman. An incredibly tall, glowing, naked woman writhing in the forest.

You know those neon signs that are illuminated in stages so that they look like a cowboy is tipping his hat to you (and, in fancier versions, winking) from a quarter-mile down the strip? It was like that but not. That's kitsch; this one was art, or at least kitsch elevated to such a level as to be indistinguishable from the genuine article due to the craftsmanship that went into its construction.

There must have been thousands of filaments at work there, all wired into a diabolical brain encased deep in the ground at its base and slowly succumbing to the temptations of the undergrowth. From where I had stopped my car some fifty yards down the road, it was like being parked at the drive-in for a movie that nobody wanted to see. It was lifelike as hell and yet still obviously something that would've belonged in Atlantic City during its less geriatric years, cuz here's the thing: what it was doing was amazingly fucking dirty. I watched in something close to awe as this electric woman did things to herself that I'd assumed lived only in the minds of men.

There was something else, too, something undefinably feminine about the whole affair. Maybe it was the edenic symbolism of an overgrown road to nowhere or maybe I noticed something in the way her incandescent hair fell in an intimation of gravity, but I was convinced this was the work of a master craftsman, a lover of the translucent, and a woman.

I had fallen in love, first with the woman in front of me and then with the woman who started growing in my head, a woman who, through some artistic fervor, crafted breasts with a blowtorch.

The sculpture's cycle took about thirty seconds to complete, start to finish. I must have watched it forty or four hundred times before I caught the name spelled out in a delicate, feminine script, hidden with a degree of skill that would've given Al Hirschfeld a heart attack if he hadn't already died from one.

Ольга

I've driven that road hundreds of times between then and now, looking for my Olga, or at least looking for a distraction from her. As much as I love her she really has destroyed me, left me precious little space in my head to store much else except the unsteadily burning lights of her afterimage, her shadow, hiding behind my eyelids when I try to sleep. Escaping the city is just too much these days, though I did try to go back to business as usual - every valley I entered seemed too dark for me, too emptied of possibility. All I have now is the memory of an artist and the image of a whore, both dampened by the utterly unsatisfying incandescence of a red light district at midnight.

Olga showed me a photograph. The colours were faded and it looked older than it was. Too much time in the sun, maybe, or cheap Soviet paper. It showed a laughing girl, perhaps six years old, in fancy dress with a red top hat. So she had known how to laugh, once. She still could smile, but sadly.

I met her at a pick-up party, not as shameless as its adverts, but its purpose still clear. I only went the once, and I picked up Olga, so you could say it was effective. I don't know what she was doing there, and I don't think she did, either. She was from Novosibirsk and illegal. She worked illegally and lived illegally in a flat that belonged to her employer. He was too friendly. She spoke catastrophic German. I kissed her and we made a date for the next evening.

She sent me to a bar to wait while she got ready. An hour later she joined me, perfectly dressed, perfectly made up. "I am a cow," she said, "a real cow." After some drinks she leant against me, after some more we left. The bill was huge.

She told me to be quiet, because I shouldn't be there. She showed me her photograph. She told me Novosibirsk was a beautiful city. She told me I could undress myself a little. I undressed us both. She was small and perfect. It was the wrong time and the wrong place. She gave herself briefly to the wrong man.

She had to sleep and I had to go. We had dinner together some days later, but she hardly spoke or looked at me. That was the last time I saw her. I expect the photo is even more faded by now.

LateQuest 2007 | BrevityQuest07