The Calypso building was so unremarkable as to be almost invisible. On the first day, Manfred was dreadfully tardy for the only employment he’d been able to secure on account of encountering, in rapid succession, two impediments. The first was this near invisibility. The second was a homeless vagabond, yet drunk from the previous night’s tomfoolery, who apparently lived on the lone green bench outside the building. He treated Manfred to a monologue of his woes, describing in gruesome detail how he’d lost all but the bench, an insolent garden gnome (which he produced with some excessive pride from his tattered coat), and his own liquor-flavored breath. “The honest work I done in my life wouldn’t total a day,” he boasted, “and I aim to keep it that way. I got pennies from the fountain for all a body needs to keep warm.” His sloppy grin and lurching stagger indicated that his idea of what a body might need to keep warm differed radically from the rest of the world's.

When Manfred finally found the courage to interrupt (with all due respect) and ask direction, the sot snatched away his map, tore it down the middle, flung the pieces unceremoniously to the ground, and spat. “Them flimsy things is for tourists,” he growled as his foot ground firmly into the pathetic remains. “Filth. A flea don’t know the back of his dog so well as I know the places hereabouts.” Manfred was so bemused that after being directed fifty-odd yards “that-a-way,” he felt obliged to give the drunkard a five-dollar bill.

If he’d been hoping that this incident would not be indicative of working in the Calypso factory, he was morbidly disappointed. Factory positions were among the only ones available in those days; the wages were minimal, but so then was the quality of life. It was said that the depression was brought on by the broadening abyss between the educated and the poor – those wealthy enough to keep up with technology were able to generate further income by virtue of custom, while Darwin played “survival of the fittest” with the doomed. Evolution and capitalism favored the rich. And so Manfred found himself reduced to a plastic tag on his own threadbare shirt: MANFRED GREBE, MAT ROLLER. Moreover, he was a tardy mat roller, docked the status and twelve cents thereby merited. Even the wastewater operator, with her lice-trapping hair and crooked spectacles, could look down upon the one who had the lack of sagacity and propriety to be late without even having been officially hired.

That was the first day.

On the second day, an old crone with more wrinkles than years and an obnoxiously colorful blouse stormed up to Manfred and introduced herself, rather forcefully, as his supervisor. “I am Brunhilda, today.” She scowled at his obvious puzzlement. “You’ll call me what I want when I want, because I refuse to tell you my given name and because I won’t answer to anything I don’t like. Oh, and the cane’s not for walking – it’s for whacking.”

On the third day, Brunhilda changed her name to Parvati and gave Manfred a concussion with her cane. He meant to ask why, but never got around to doing so.

On the eighth day, Manfred came perilously close to resigning and searching for safer, saner work. Louise (as she demanded he call her that day) threw a fit. “You’re not here to be a quitter, Slappy! You’ll roll mats or I’ll roll your vermin-infested skull ‘til it decorates the damn floor!” The wastewater operator whispered to him that this meant that she was “really fond” of him, and he stayed.

On the twenty-second day, four different departments gathered to take bets on a wrestling match between Florence (this name lasted a good three days) and one of the security guards. Apparently the hapless man had attempted to explain, very calmly, that her cane was creating a hazardous work environment. After beating him into submission, Florence snarled to her awed mob of spectators: “I was in a sniper in the Army while the rest of you were sucking at the tits of your mothers! You can take this cane away from me the day I need it to walk!”

On the forty-ninth day, Manfred found the drunken sot, dead on his bench, the blood and booze frozen in his veins. Phoebe, fetched by Manfred, stared at the corpse wrapped around its tactlessly jovial garden gnome. The point of her cane shivered against the ground. “Was it the cold?”

Manfred supposed that it had been.

Phoebe gingerly picked up the gnome. “Almost as bad as dying of old age,” she told it. Her voice rasped quietly in contrast to the customary grunts, snarls, shrieks. “Quiet death is despicable.” Long silence. Manfred toyed with the frayed edge of his jacket, shuffled from one foot to the other. “Leave him here. Get back to work.” He left. She still held the gnome. As he left that night, he saw it in devastated fragments, surrounded by gnome shrapnel, face smirking brokenly at the sky.

This incident neither sedated nor stoked the temperament of the old harridan. All proceeded according to what was now routine and the many days following were so insignificant as to be strikingly so.

On the two hundred and sixtieth day, Diana (the feared and revered) was absent. According to the wastewater operator, she was deathly ill, hospitalized. Although the rumor had never been directly confirmed by “the Ma’am” herself, it was generally acknowledged that she was of one hundred and three years of age. The wastewater operator confided to Manfred that “they didn’t expect the old b***h to return.”

On the two hundred and sixty-first day, Manfred encountered, for the first time, his supervisor outside of the Calypso factory. She tottered down the road, stubbornly waving her cane about, refusing to lean on it in the least. “Hospitals don’t care if old biddies like me escape," she grunted at him. “Security on the ward is pathetic.” He strode alongside her, uncertainly. “I refuse to die on a bed in a hall full of feeble old lepers griping about their intestines all the time. I don’t mind so much dying – it’s the dying quietly part I can’t even think about without wanting to spew my spleen. Where am I going? You’ll see, it’s alright if you come along. Though I’ve never asked for help and I won’t now – I don’t need you.” She stabbed the frosted air with her cane just to prove how independent and feisty she really was, and failed to mask a painful grimace.

He walked slightly behind her. Despite the frailty imparted the woman by her age and illness, her strides were certain. Several times Diana nearly tumbled into the trenches lining the empty highway. Manfred simply stopped and waited for her to regain balance.

The old woman led the young man to a field. It was a field for rich people with too much time on their hands, filled with enormous, garishly colored balloons that suspended baskets the size of beds. Hot-air balloons had been a popular attraction before the depression. Now those who could afford the jaunt were too busy perfecting their robots and paying buxom women to arrange their hair.

“I operated a place like this, back when I was no older than you,” Diana told her shadow mindlessly. She wove through the looming balloons, trailing her crippled fingers along the baskets, murmuring absently to herself. At last the old woman turned to Manfred. He took the cane she offered and watched wordlessly as she entered the basket, expertly adjusted a number of things of which he did not even know the names, and finally allowed the balloon to rise into the air. “Say good-bye, Manfred!” the harpy shrieked from her perch. “Tell me you’re glad to see me gone, yell so’s I can hear!”

She took the rifle from her coat. The proprietor of the balloon field pounded furiously towards Manfred. It didn’t matter. His bellows were powerless against the altitude of the insane old lady and her final carriage.

When he could see the balloon through a circle formed with his thumb and forefinger, a shot rang through the air. An implosion of color assaulted the monotonous blue of the sky. The basket plummeted.

Manfred shattered the cane.