every engine holds all their oils on fire appeared

06/13/2007
They're having a giant, posh auction party / concert (Sufjan?) in 612-the-size-of-the-crystal-ballroom. Was I supposed to be moved out by now? It rains and the Shoreland starts leaking; Ed, James C., and MK borrow some spare rubbermaid sarcophagi I have and start shoving plates into them. Nick and I walk to the car, feeling vaguely unsettled.

06/09/2007
A stranger approaches me in Nichols Park, hands me a newspaper clipping, and leaves.
The newspaper is yellowed, but the event it describes happened recently; a little boy got trapped in the gears of an underwater ferris wheel and died.
I spend the day coding, and that evening I find two letters in my mailbox. They're both from Caltech professors, handwritten in purplish-red ink, one on filler paper and one on a yellow legal pad. I can tell they're about a government project, but I have no idea how; one letter is a word salad and the other, while clearly meant for me, is addressed to the professor's deceased grandmother and concerns household minutiae (the amount of his electric bill, the pattern on his plates).
The department pays my airfare to LAX. I arrive to find a campus composed entirely of buildings of approximately the same age as the Shoreland and slightly better condition, decorated opulently in blue, gold, turquoise, magenta and lavender. Walking through the halls with the professors who wrote for me, I open one door and narrowly missed being hit with a heavy steel hammer, thrown by a shirtless boy in shiny red boxing shorts who looks like Annie's boyfriend.
"That's the wrestling room," says one of the professors dismissively, rushing the group out the hall door to the next building over (the old physics building). "He's practicing hammer-throwing."
We finally arrive at the department office to find a table on which someone has set a clear Tom Collins glass containing a purple betta.
"You wouldn't know by looking at him, but he was an enemy combatant in World War II," begins a professor.