Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 9:12 pm

Yesterday was one of those days when The City seems to be nearly empty. Bella and Chain were both disoriented by it for different reasons. Chain was all revved up for horrendous traffic down in the financial district and when he got to work it was a piece of cake. Bella had the opposite problem. She wandered in and out of the little stores and cafes looking for someone to talk to before her shift at the bookstore and found nobody.

Today was different. It was as if the denizens of The City had decided to adopt the Mardi Gras tradition right now. The streets were full of people. This filled Chain with righteous bike messenger rage, and disoriented Bella yet again. She is easy to disorient. But she functions best disoriented anyway.

Today was a special day all around. Josh and Hugo at the bookstore were excited because Harry was back and they could use him as a magnet to get the metaphysical types to come on down to the store in the evenings and listen to Harry bullshit them about the deep patterns of the universe, and then they'd buy a bunch of books depending on Harry's rap of the evening. Hugo had already felt Harry out and put in an order for books about quilting, string figures, and Ukrainian egg painting. Josh was trying to convince Harry to write a bit for the bookstore's online newsletter.

Harry was in his usual state -- dishevelled, preoccupied, mysterious, and full of crap.

Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 10:01 am

Bella is, besides a bookstore employee, an artist. She calls herself a "mixed-media putterer" and she has exhibited only at a cafe in the neighborhood and at an ice cream parlor near the park. At those two shows she had sold five pieces, which had been equal, in aggregate, to about two weeks' wages at the bookstore, which might be impressive except that it had taken her six months and a couple of hundred dollars of materials to make the pieces in that group. She wasn't thinking right now about making a living as an artist. But she hoped to do a whole lot better than that soon.

Lately Bella had been working on a series of pieces whose relationship to each other she did not know. As soon as Harry saw them, which he would soon, he would know exactly what the sequence was, and what she should do about it. For now, though, it was what occupied herself between Monkey's morning walk and the time to go downstairs, down the street half a block, and into the doors of the bookstore. Since Chain went to work before daylight, she was alone for a few hours in the day. She hated it, but she did appreciate the work she was getting done.

Chain had a notebook that he never let Bella see. He said it was just complaints about work, and he didn't want her to see it because it would piss her off and she would nag him to quit. Bella suspected it was poetry and hoped he'd do something with it. She was wrong -- Chain was lying about the content of his notebook, but he doesn't write poetry.

Thursday, October 27th, 2005 11:44 am
How Bella and Chain Met
Bella and Chain met cute. At the time it didn't seem that way. It seemed frightening, gruesome, humiliating for Bella and appalling for Chain.
The city's streets were laid out by sodden boosters who had heard rumors that Modern Cities had Rational Grids with occasional grand avenues cutting across them at mathematically precise angles. But the city lies at the nexus of really quite sincere slip faults, and it is dissected by a jumble of thrusting hills, which had disastrous effects on the grids. Streets that climb straight up the steepest faces of hills and end abruptly at sheer cliffs. Other hills where the streets gave up the attempt to meet their further ends and curled up to die in cul-de-sacs and pitiful urban oxbows.
Bella was bringing home her groceries on the back of her bicycle and she came round a blind turn going too fast to see that the intersection she came into ended in a short cement wall. It wouldn't have helped to see it at that point. She couldn't have stopped anyway. She was able to drop the bike before she would have hit the wall -- Chain said, much later, that it looked as if she would have gone over the wall. And on the other side of the wall was a drop, and the drop went down about four stories to a landscape of roofs which echoed the City's own contours.
Chain had a delivery and had just labored up the cross street. He saw Bella coming a half a block away and pulled up short so she wouldn't careen into him. He wasn't thinking of her safety at first, just his own. But when he saw that she was not taking the turn, much less making the turn, he dropped his own bike and started over to where he thought she was going to crash. So he was standing in just the right spot to take the force of Bella's flying tomatoes and one durian, which was poor payment for the services he rendered over the next several hours. She came out with her body lightly damaged: but her sense of self-worth was seriously bruised.
Chain did all the right things. His instinct was to lift her and cradle her -- which would not have been easy, as she was not a tiny girl -- and smoothe her bleeding brow. But he knew better, and while the lady with the big spotted boots made the call to 911, he checked her in situ and wouldn't let her get up. He knew what to check, and her signs were normal, but her gashes were pretty bad. She was pretty well winded, and let him keep her there until the EMT asked her some things and had her sign a paper. The only trouble she gave him was when he refused to let her get back on her bike. And that trouble was short-lived because a friend of her showed up with his delivery truck. The friend shoveled her, the bike, and what was left of the groceries into the truck and they grunted off, leaving Chain covered in tomato, durian, and her blood.
The friend was her boss, and he never explained how he happened to be on that street at that time, with a nearly-empty truck. In the truck, Bella babbled, about the street, the stupid stupid stupid way she had taken it, the fact that she was not harmed, the durian she lost, the guy who had gotten it all over him, and how was she going to thank him? She had no idea who he was.
Chain, who got the delivery in three minutes before the deadline would have passed and three fortunes destroyed forever, knew who Bella was and where to find her, because the EMT had asked her those questions: "Are you okay? What's your name? Where were you going? What day is it?" She hadn't gotten the last one right, but only because she had thought it was Thursday all day. By the time it was Thursday, Chain showed up at The Open Book to ask about her, and the rest was almost inevitable, though Bella resisted and so did Chain.
Later Bella was as suspicious about Chain's fortuitous presence on that particular hill as she was about Hugo's, but his reason for being there was iron-clad and completely in character, which was unusual for him. Not much else he did was in character, even considering that he was a bicycle messenger, and bicycle messengers in this City are frequently rumored to be without character altogether. Anyway, as it turned out, it was Bella's presence on any given street corner which was questionable. Most of the time.

Bella moved in with Chain when she discovered that his flat was in the same block as her place of work. This was another fact which gave her pause once the role of coincidence in her life became of concern to her. But there was a reason -- which I will save for later. She liked the flat, anyway. It is a fairly large studio cobbled together of what had once been several minuscule single occupancy rooms in an old fleabag residential hotel, so there are windows every seven feet along an interior airshaft wall and more windows overlooking the street in front and the paved pocket handkerchief yard in back, giving plenty of light for Bella's "real" work. She is an artist, and she had never had such a congenial place to art in. Chain was easy about it, didn't want to dedicated some space to being entertaining space or something. He did not object to Bella's wholesome and creative young friends coming over but he wasn't about to invite any of his bike messenger comrades over for beer and profanity. Not yet, anyway.
So that's how we find them, at the beginning, young lovers in their first flat in the City, watched over by Chain's dog.
"Why is your dog named Monkey?" Bella asked the first time she came over, but it was just a way of making conversation, since she figured that Chain had merely exercised his right to irony in this as in other matters.
"I don't know, I figure he pissed off the Buddha or something," Chain said. absently, concerned at the moment with imagining how Bella's belly would look with a piercing on it. A discreet little golden ring, he thought. Or better, a trompe l'oiel, with the appearance of a tiny beast emerging from her navel.

Wednesday, October 26 09:39 pm -

This is so cool
dchain, lookity, lookity! I can talk to you all morning while you're breaking your neck downtown getting the yuppie papers from one place to another, and you can read it all night while I'm pushing paperbacks at the derilects in the bookstore.

Walk Monkey? I did this morning but it was so crowded on the street it took twice as long as usual to get sniffed. We came home after halfway. Deep sincere apologies if there's any damage.

Monkey is some kind of headcase dog, you know that? Every so often he takes this deep dislike to somebody. Doesn't attack. Doesn't bark. Doesn't growl. Just eyes them and I swear he's circling around me to keep them away. As far as I can tell, there's nothing that they have in common, not that a person would notice. Maybe something dogs care about -- some kind of smell or something, maybe.

Also, look in refrigerator for noodles with peanut butter and hot chili oil.

Thursday, October 27th, 2005 10:20 am

So, did I do this right?
I'm here on Mikey's computer. We're supposed to be taking a lunch break. I figured if I didn't do this right away, you'd bitch me out tonight whenever you dragged yourself up the stairs from the store. You do know I'm just kidding, right, Bella?

Friday, October 28th, 2005 10:39 pm

Bella didn't think too much of Harry when she first met him. He had on his old junkie outfit and he was missing a tooth or two. He looked like a person who would smell bad, though he didn't.

Josh said, "Harry's going to be living in your building, Bella. That room in the back on the first floor." It was the only room left in the building. All the others had been combined into flats. The landlord was trying to figure out a way to market the flats as lofts, but so far they were just ad hoc apartments with plumbing in unexpected places and irregular patches of flooring.

"The same room as when he left," Hugo said with inexplicable satisfaction.

"That's some coincidence," Harry leered. "Not often a man leaves town for two years and his room's waiting for him like he never left it."

What Bella surmised is that for some reason Hugo and Josh had paid the rent on Harry's room for two years and Harry wasn't completely happy about it. Maybe he had expected to find himself a cheap apartment this time out.

Hugo Banter and Josh Billings were okay, as bosses went. They were pretty flexible about the odd break a person might have to take to go get birth control, and they even liked Monkey. Payday was sometimes late, but never by more than a day. Hugo cut the checks, and it seemed to Bella that he had given up trying to figure out her hours and total pay, because he gave her the same amount every week. That was all right with Bella after the initial bad moment because he actually paid her for more hours than she worked. Not that the wages were good. But it was clear that they weren't paying themselves much more.

Bella had been "doing" the children's book section for eleven months. Now Josh asked her to take up the art, craft, and music sections. He said she should work out how much more time it took and tell Hugo to adjust her pay accordingly. And then he asked her to ask her boyfriend Chain if he wanted to work a few hours in the store. Bella knew she wanted Chain to do it. If at all possible, she wanted him to take any job besides bike messenger. She didn't mind that it was a nowhere-leading job. She minded that every day he could get hit by a delivery truck and he had no insurance. But it was his choice, so she never said anything, not directly. She made grim jokes about accidents and their consequences. But Chain didn't mind. He made the same jokes himself all the time.

Hugo had a brilliant idea. Josh thought so. It was this: Every week Harry would give a little workshop about one of his many areas of expertise. People would come in to hear Harry, to talk to Harry, to ask him questions and maybe do a little project, and there'd be a stack of related books on a table and Bella would sell them the books. It would cost a little, in extra wages for Bella, and coffee and cookies, and a one-time investment in folding chairs, and money for Harry, but they were both pretty sure that the increased sales would more than make up for it. And they'd probably end up giving Harry the money anyway. He was very good at getting people to give him money.

This was all on Thursday night. The first one of these would be the following Wednesday, so Josh got to work on the bookstore newsletter

Saturday, October 29th, 2005 6:02 am

Monkey in the Morning
Monkey was all weird this morning. I didn't have time to check, but I think we have a rat. Or something, in the area by the stove. Under the floor?

Wake me up when you get home, bellabellabella wheel.

Saturday, October 29th, 2005 11:05 pm

Chain's real name is Charlie Dain. When Bella asked him where the name "Chain" came from, he was vague. She had gotten the idea that there was some incident, something involving violence and a bicycle chain.

The truth was much more prosaic. Many years before, when Chain was underage and bulling his way into the messenger gig, he'd been given the nickname because he'd gotten chain marks on his leg. That's all. It was because he was new at it, pushing too hard, and riding a bike that was too large for him. That had been years before, though. Chain was a senior bike messenger now. Most of the bike messengers were getting out of the scene after a few years. But Chain was less worn down by the work than most, probably because he didn't much buy into the rest of the messenger package -- the hard partying, bad self-care, lack of other interests. He was like any tradesman: took pride in his work, yes, and put in that extra bit, but he had a life off the wheel, and he was saving money. That was an accomplishment. It was hard to save money in the City. But he did. He didn't say what he was saving for. But it did have something to do with Bella.

Bella only saved money because she was with Chain. He had once suggested she was making enough to put aside twenty dollars or so a week, and she had started handing him three ten-dollar bills each week to stash for her. The first time she did this, he was puzzled. He frowned at the bills and asked her, "What are these for?"

"Savings," she said, almost gone again into the land of pattern and color, the place she properly lived whenever she didn't have to be somewhere else.

"Why did you give it to me?" Chain asked.

"Because you have a savings account," Bella said. "I don't."

"Don't you think you ought to have your own?" Chain asked.

"No, I think I shouldn't," she had said, with no further explanation. But Chain figured it out over the next few months. Bella is desperate to resist the encroachment of the practical world into her mental landscape. Faced with a pile of unwashed dishes, she will whimper, and it is even money whether she will fill the sink with bubbles or wander off to the space she calls a studio, where she might stand, frozen, staring at half-finished works, or she might feverishly work for hours before emerging again, usually not, in these cases, to return to the task of the dishes. Heading for the grocery store, she might forget halfway there on what errand she had originally embarked, and maybe she would, or maybe she wouldn't, be able to reconstruct it from the things in her pockets.

She doesn't take all this as evidence of her noble creativity but of impending insanity. She would never admit it to Chain, but she has a feeling that if she organized her life so that she couldn't ruin it by being absent-minded, then she would not disintegrate too far. Chain figured this out, too. He thinks that she'd go farther towards staying sane by doing the dishes without whimpering and by writing herself notes to keep from forgetting things. But there is no talking to her about it, because she'd worry about it, and apologize for all her lapses and some which Chain had not noticed and privately does not believe in.

Sunday, October 30th, 2005, 8:05 pm

ch ch changes
monkey woke me up right after chain left. It was all dark and stuff. i was not a happy little girl. he had something in mind, i don't know what. chain says that monkey seems to think there's something under the stove, and chain thinks it's a rat, maybe. i think it's that monkey has figured out that if he acts freaked out enough i'll get out of bed and look at his dish and maybe even give him a walk.

i did give him a walk. what else was i going to do? i was awake.

i must say that mission street is pretty well creepy before light. there are more people on the street than you would think and they all have this look, like they've got business there and you damned well don't want to know what it is, and they wish they didn't know either. and i passed the bookstore and that was creepy too, because either hugo or josh left the one light on that's over in the weird shit section and it made it look like there was somebody there reading the weird shit. but it was just the shadows.

so. ch ch changes. hugo and josh are trying to get more help in the store. they asked me to take on another section, which means more hours, which means more money, but it means less time with chain and monkey, but i guess i can deal with that at least for a while. and hugo asked me to ask chain if he'd like to pick up a few hours in the store, taking care of the sports and fitness books. i can just see chain's opinions of most of the books. chain, are you reading this? if you are, give it a thought. tell hugo or josh when you know.

more ch ch changes. some old guy friend or something of josh and hugo has showed up and he's going to be sticking around for a while. josh and hugo are really excited about this. the way this affects me is that they're going to have wednesday night readings? lectures? i'm not sure what, with this old guy, at the store, which means that yours truly is staying late to lock up and stuff. i don't know why me and not, for example, hugo, or josh, but hey, it's money, and chain's always asleep by the time i get home anyway, what's another two hours?

tomorrow: i practise the banjo. three hours, build up that stamina. monkey can put up with it. and so can the neighbors. i'm not that bad.

--Bella

Sunday, October 30th, 2005 9:46 am

Downstairs
I checked out the new neighbor this aft.

Not to worry, Bella: he's just your everyday harmless old junkie with mysterious powers of intellect and a lot of boxes. He talked me out of fifty dollars for shipping something to the Smithsonian. It seemed reasonable at the time.

Took Monkey to the park. Monkey met a Labrador named Mallard.

The whole city is insane.

Sunday, October 30th, 2005 3:40 pm

Reservoirs
What the people of the City don't know about their own home town would fill the fire safety reservoirs in every neighborhood. The reservoirs themselves are secrets from most of the people who live here. Not just the subtle, hidden ones, under the hills at Moravia Heights and the Outer Waitsee: but even the ones that rise as regular as truncated pyramids from the level of the street, crowned with cyclone fence and warning signs. The people walk by them as blind to them as they are to the chittering parasites in the wires overhead. What's in those reservoirs, besides water -- that, the people of the city don't know, don't want to know, and wouldn't believe if you told them.
Fortunately, most of all that is benign, or at the worst, and best, utterly unimportant to them. The thing that sings to the water: the thing that slithers through plumes of purifying chemicals in search of manganese: the thing that punches falling precipitates and jumps up and down on scale as it forms on the cement lining of the reservoir: in now way are these mysterious things fearsome to man, nor amenible to his study.
My neighborhood is called the Santo. I am a creature of it, a creation of it, I belong to it, but I am not bound to it. I am at home in Moravia Heights, or the Waitsee, or in Salsipuedes: there are no more and no fewer mysteries there or in any other neighborhood than there are in the Santo. But the Santo is what I know, and the Santo is where I stomp the ground.
The reservoir of the Santo is at the top of the hill at Refugee Park. Its sides are hidden by thickly grown old junipers three stories tall. The park is so steep that nobody climbs to the top except the workers charged with its maintenance, and they only do it when they can't lie or stall their way out of it.
The Refugee Park reservoir, being open rather than covered, is more alive than most. Strange fish and frogs thrive there, and in August, a curious bloom of algae that can't be killed by the usual chemicals. I've seen a snake there, not indigenous, but somehow flung here from the stagnant creeks of the faraway Gulf of Mexico. It was eating a mudskipper, but of course mudskippers don't live in the cement-lined reservoir.
Down below, on Merced Avenue, there are people who are as marvelous as the bright-faceted snake that swims in the Refugee Park Reservoir. That's what I watch for. I have my projects among them, as a gardener has her projects among the vines that escape along her fences.
That's how I've been thinking of it lately. Not long ago I was thinking of it more in terms of a long, drawn-out war, vital to be won, with all the odds against me. That wasn't much fun. Nobody likes being defeated before they start out. So I don't think about the end. Only about these projects.
Bella was a project of mine. So was Chain. It was amusing when I discovered they could be induced to become projects of each other's as well. Monkey was not a project of mine but I watched him. Harry -- well, how can an elemental figure like Harry be a project, even for me? There's not enough time in the world.
The bookstore? That's Josh and Hugo's project. Neither of them were ever a project of mine. They never needed my intervention, for on, and for another, anything you might say or do with respect to them they'd be likely to take in the wrong way.

Monday, October 31st, 2005, 9:50 am
Compulsive creation
I've been working on this cycle of -- pieces, I have to call them, because they're not all the same media but they has some kind of thematic quality I can't quite articulate. One is a doll, totally cloth sculpture with a stitched face -- entirely sculptural, I can't believe I pulled it off -- and her clothes are crocheted in this elaborate pattern I just dreamed up out of nowhere. Her face is like mine. Her name is Monkey. I don't know why. She doesn't remind me of the dog, and the dog is a boy anyway. There are other things, but the thing I have almost finished is a wooden wheel I picked up at a thrift store (and how do you find wooden wheels anywhere? I think it's actually part of one of those kitschy ceiling lights they used to make)which I have painted indigo and I seem to be putting little Fimo animals at the places where the spokes meet the rim.

I don't know where this stuff comes from, or what the doll has to do with the other things. Or why these animals.

Chain thinks I'm funny for complaining about it. "If you don't want to do it, don't," he says. "Nobody's making you."

Well, duh. But it feels like somebody's asking me, very nicely, and would be terribly disappointed if I didn't. But creepy.

But a lot of my work is creepy, when you look at it too long.

--Bella

Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 11:27 pm

That first Wednesday evening with Harry was amusing, but also alarming. Hugo and Josh had somehow managed to stick Bella with the whole event, after it had been announced in the store's newsletter as "Harry's Wedneday Wanderings." Harry's evenings were perfect fodder for the newsletter. Because the blogging service that Hugo had subscribed them to does not allow merchandising, Hugo barely even mentions books in the newsletter. The newsletter is skimpy, consisting of non-sales events, gossip about the publishing industry and the clients of the store, and occasional oddball philosophy. Harry provided quite a lot of all of that.

So Bella had to line up the chairs, drag the lectern up from the storeroom, clear half a table top set the lectern on, and get a coffee and cookies table set up out of the way of the books and still handy to the patrons. The lectern didn't want to stay in one place. It fell at least four times before Bella finally got it settled. And then, when the evening got under way, Harry refused to use it.

"I'm not a preacher," Harry said, leering lopsidedly. There were teeth missing, and a couple of steel ones. Not even gold, much less porcelain resin.

Bella didn't understand the topic of the discussion. But she did notice that Harry's chosen audience -- which exactly fitted into the chairs, with one old guy left over who said firmly that he didn't like to sit even when there was a chair available, because it hurt his sciatica to do it -- these people ate up everything Harry had to say, and delivered questions with straight faces that Bella would otherwise have thought were nonsense nursery rhymes. Harry cocked his head at each question, then drawled out a devastating rejection of each question, before going on, as far as Bella could tell, to discuss -- something probably entirely unrelated to the question just asked. But only probably, as Bella could not follow any of it.

It was a jolly crowd though. And fidgety. Not a one of them sat still during any part of the evening. They twitched and bubbled, clearly overstimulated, and several of them knitted, or crocheted, and two of them busily made origami figures while apparently foillowing the whole arcane conversation.

Nobody made mention of All Soul's Day, which had just passed.

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