I’m sending you psychic messages to inform you of my adventure, which might seem boring or of zero consequence, but I’m convinced that there are infinite tiny variations that could be studied, and since I’m here as part of your plan for me, which is a small model of the plan for everyone who is expected to perform somehow in civilization, I thought that you’d like to be kept informed. You can go about doing whatever it is that you do at your own job at this moment, because my dispatches will be discrete murmurs in your brain. I’m staying in touch, I’m being convincing.

I’m going to get something to drink. I’ve been given a break, along with all of the old ladies. Even though we are inside, it’s as hot as no shelter because the only air-conditioning is the cooled air that has spilled out of the freezer cases. The air-conditioning system is broken today. I have to buy a drink, because there are no drinking fountains in or near the Commissary, and the florescent tubes that hum over us all seem to speed dehydration, so that all you think of, the whole time you have to be here, is fluid and desiccation, your brain monitoring how fast it dries out by sending itself increasing-frequency headache messages. The opening to the aisle marked Bottled Juice/ Sodas/ Canned Vegetables is clogged and I have to walk down the next and then back up. Everything on the shelves is too large, gallon-sized, or stuff I can’t or wouldn’t want to drink such as little six-packs of Meeter’s Kraut Juice in cardboard packages. Juice from cabbages, though in all probability mostly water, would be a last resort. I choose from a limited selection of cranberry juices in little boxes.

This is my first job ever, which you set up for me, and you got me a military ID, and there I am in the picture on it, with an appropriately shaved head, though that was a coincidence. It’s not really the job I had in mind, because I didn’t really have a job in mind. I don’t have a boss, I have a commanding officer. He’s the Commanding Officer of the Commissary. When he’s briefing me on the first day, I’m wondering what kind of military pinball machine pegs he smashed into on his way down to become the supermarket sarge. Also I got zero instruction about the right way to bag groceries, which I think is strange. I thought that there would be an official system, but each bagger is left to invent their own, using common sense, and since nobody checks, you could do it differently each time if you wanted to. All the other baggers, the old ladies, look like they’d have it down by now, through years of experience and by sharing pointers in their own language, which I think is Korean. The CO looks at me as I pass him on the way to the automatic doors but I pretend not to notice, because I’ve decided that, since I haven’t been paid, I haven’t been paid enough to talk to anybody. You are temporarily satisfied that I’m now employed, even though, as a grocery bagger, I’m not going to be paid, and neither will any of the old ladies. Signs hanging from the ceiling inform shoppers that baggers work for tips only. I’m assuming that the ladies who work as checkout clerks get paid something, but it can’t be much. There’s nowhere to sit outside, and more importantly, nowhere to sit that’s at least shaded by something, except for one spot of curb underneath a military landscape tree, which is casting a flickery shadow on the sidewalk below. I can see it, the shadow, through a gap in parked cars. I’m walking down a row of gaps. The parking lot blows heat straight up, not on moving air, but on superheated rays of asphalt atoms.