Gray is how you would have to describe it. From your vantage point. From the way you see it.

You’re standing on the roof of the adjacent factory. You just went right up – pathetic – no security – not that they could have stopped you.

It’s drizzling rain in semen smears. The strikers are walking in a slow circle. From where you stand, from your perspective, their steps shuffle forward in zombie lurches, their faces diminish into shades of absent pallor, everything blends into the wall behind them – another grey building, another grey tottering episode of unrest, another gaggle of grey birds trying to make their squawks and cries heard above the clanks and grinds of machine-bent backs.

At least, that’s the way you see it.

Through the lens of your camera, maybe, or the telescopic focus of your spy-on-spy monocular.

One of them, in particular, is of interest to you. He’s standing outside of the circle though he absolutely belongs to the picketing workers. He’s writing in a notebook, hunched over, scribbling furiously. Intermittently, he stops writing to rip out a page, throws it into the drum fire. It’s a muggy foul July afternoon, the overcast spit-down sizzles on the sidewalk, but they’ve got the fire going. Idiots, you shake your head, peer through one eye. It’s like they’ve watched a few grainy documentaries on video to figure out how a strike is supposed to look. But this isn’t the Thirties, it’s put or shut up, it’s lock out or log-in and you want to know what the man with the red hair and razor-thin lips is writing and burning so passionately, partly because you hate passion, and partly because solutions aren’t solutions until they’ve solved all your problems.

Stephan Courne actually for a while imagined something better for himself, took a few courses at community college, sat next to the homely girls he figured no one would talk to, except him; he’d have a chance, he figured, though it didn’t work out that way.

It’s not like he thinks he’s a genius but he does recognize in himself the potential to exceed the strictures of the day to day. He’s lonely most of the time, that is, alone most of the time. He doesn’t really have any conception of his needs.

Back from a hard day of picketing, he just remembers to stoop as he steps through the door and into his basement apartment. He congratulates himself for the small triumph, living day to day, that’s his new motto, the little things, he throws his bag on the floor. He’s damp – not cold – hot wet, soaked through the bone, skin shrivelled and spongy. He isn’t attractive. It’s something he lives with.

His apartment. Jumble-heap of mouldy belongings, a bed with a stained mattress and no sheets. The bed’s maybe worth describing in detail. The whole place is maybe – just maybe – worth another look.

He moved in thinking: This is temporary. Only now he’s pretty much convinced that he’ll die in this cloistered space, stagger around clutching at himself, knock over his collection of 286 PCs found over the years discarded on various sidewalks, land heavy on a stack of Robert Heinlen and Isaac Asimov novels, their soft margins going mildew green, end up face first in a heap of dirty clothes smelling, actually, unbelievably, better than the rank fog soup stench that permeates his sunken domicile. Some nights Stephan wakes up in the middle, blinks and thinks he can see it, a shifting stink eating the air like dark into dark. Temporary.

He unbuttons his shirt, lets it fall off his smooth shoulders. His body smells of wet cheese. He’s got scabs on his chest, from leaning against the rattling conveyor belt of the box factory. He picks the scabs at night, they open, bleed, heal over, bleed again. But his shoulders are smooth and white-freckled.

Love isn’t really an option.

He’s thirty-four, works in the box factory, believed when he was a young man he might one day find a vessel into which he could pour the abstractions that bulge his brain out against his skull – not a medical condition, he thinks, a moral one. Because nothing seems quite real to Stephan. Everything is always only just turned on the edge, change falling in rattling improbabilities, a mother’s sweet kisses sour like the foreman’s breath. There was a time when Stephan Courne thought he would find a method, a form that would make the way he knows things to be actually be, exist, take shape, have function in the voided swirl of possibilities that otherwise govern his life.

Day to day. Moment to moment. He has to keep reminding himself.

Otherwise he just stands there, head slightly bent to avoid hitting the water-stained ceiling. Or he pulls his notebook out of his ratted backpack and starts writing again. He writes in a birdclaw script that swirls over the lined pages, occupying white space, margins pushed back, the kind of sense that makes no sense at all.

You’re in your twenties, surreptitiously nervous, outwardly quite relaxed. You’ve got a live-in girlfriend and an on-going interest in the covert, the operational, the conspiratorial. You tell her secrets because she thinks they’re lies and you tell her lies and she believes them easy enough, repeats them to her friends on the phone, tells her mother how well you’re doing. And that’s true, at least. You’ve been promoted. You have your own cellphone, your own laptop, your own sporty little getaway car.

You love her. You don’t know what you would do without her.

You’re not passionate, to the contrary, you’re disgusted with yourself, your needs, your nervous habits, ticks and nose picks, a dandruff situation that can be controlled with medication, special shampoos, creams and lotions and solutions and rubs. Even so you wake up with your head all over the pillow, bits of scalp like fake snowflakes, no two the same though they never melt and you can’t imagine it snowing, what with this goddamned heat.

You fuck her from behind, she’s down on all fours, likes it that way, immediately after you’re repulsed, need to shower, need to climb out of your skin and into something perfect and permanent. Once, you caught yourself in a high-priced jewel-lery store fingering a huge diamond. You were pretending to want to buy it for her.

You fuck her from behind, can’t help it, know you aren’t any better than the rest of us though at your superior moments you see yourself as superior.

She says: How was your day? and kisses you on the cheek.

You put down your leather case and the Styrofoam containers: grilled chicken pieces, french-fried potatoes, Caesar salad. Neither of you could be bothered to cook.

This heat, you say.

I know, she says.

She’s wearing a t-shirt. White panties.

You couldn’t live without her.

You’ll never tell her the truth.

She’s so goddamned sexy.

The news is on, they’re reporting the strike, the latest in a series of labour incidents to rock the city. Later, after the usual updates – the traffic, the arsons, the rapes and murders and commercial breaks – you will eat chicken with a panel of experts discussing the implications. There’s a shortage of boxes, for starters, the traditional summer moving season is grinding to a standstill. Retail stock is also getting low, no boxes for refrigerators or VCRs or toaster ovens, this box supplier being the largest box supplier on the east coast.

You strip the white meat off with your teeth, crack the bone in half, taste splinters.

She says: Do you want to go out with Jen and Dave this weekend? They called to make plans.

An economics professor from the local city college notes that layoffs are continuing despite the box company’s record profits, points out that job security is tenuous at best, that out-sourcing the lids is just another grab at profits, the workers barely make a living, he says.

You shove fries in your mouth, chew mechanically, dry swallow.

Well, do you want to? She’s got that quizzical smile on her lips, as if she’s looking at something she can’t understand but has seen before. She doesn’t like being ignored. Her blonde hair flounces in bobbing ripples.

She’s beautiful. You don’t think you could live without her. How could you live without her?

Sure, why not? you sigh.

Poor baby, she says. Want me to rub your back? Hard day at work?

It’s hot in here, you say. Is the air on?