NEAL STEPHENSON

Shake her up a little. Which is what she needs. After Dad left, she just folded up into herself like an origami bird thrown into a fire.

There is kind of an outer cloud of small boats surrounding the Raft for a distance of a few miles. Almost all of them are fishing boats. Some of them carry men with guns, but they don’t fuck around with this ferry The ferry swings through this outer zone, making a broad turn, finally zeroing in on a white neighborhood on one flank of the Raft. Literally white. All the boats here are clean and new. There’s a couple of big rusty boats with Russian lettering on the side, and the ferry pulls up alongside one of them, ropes are thrown across, then augmented with nets, gangplanks, webs of old discarded tires.

This Raft thing does not look like good skating territory at all.. She wonders if any of the other people on board this ferry are skaters. Doesn’t seem likely. Really, they are not her kind of people at all. She has always been a dirty scum dog of the highways, not one of these happy singalong types. Maybe the Raft is just the place for her.

They take her down into one of the Russian ships and give her the grossest job of all time: cutting up fish. She does not want a job, has not asked for one. But that’s what she gets. Still, no one really talks to her, no one bothers to explain anything, and that makes her reluctant to ask. She has just run into a massive cultural shock wave, because most of the people on this ship are old and fat and Russian and don’t speak English.

For a couple of days, she spends a lot of time sleeping on the job, being prodded awake by the hefty Russian dames who work in this place. She also does some eating. Some of the fish that comes through this place looks pretty rank, but there’s a fair amount of salmon. The only way she knows this is from having sushi at the mall-salmon is the orange.red stuff. So she makes some sushi of her own, munches down on some fresh salmon meat, and it’s good. It clears her head a little.

Once she gets over the shock of it and settles into a routine, she starts looking around her, watching the other fish-cutting dames, and realizes that this is just like life must be for about 99 Percent of the people in the world. You’re in this place. There’s other people all around you, but they don’t understand you and You don’t understand them, but people do a lot of pointless

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