Today is the first day of a short-term contract, which is the fourth in a series of back-to-back gigs going on three months now. I'm enjoying a spurt of steady income.

The work for my usual client is becoming unbearably tedious. The last project, which finished Saturday, was so boring I thought I was going to go out of my mind. It was ninety degrees in here, to top it off, due to some freak and short-lived heat wave that lasted only for the project's duration. It was terrible! It's not as though I'm doing something classically tedious, like proofreading or copyediting, although I am the copyeditor. I am asked to do quite a bit of structural editing and rewriting. I think what gets to me is that if the text requires restructuring or rewriting at all, it usually means I have to do that all the way through and not just in parts, which is a nightmare because the manuscripts are long. Meanwhile, a tight deadline looms, the decisions are frustrating, and so on. When I get one of those, it feels like standing before an enormous wheat field knowing that I have to harvest the damn thing with just a sickle.

This new contract will go until at least the end of June. Because I am part of a well-established editorial hierarchy, my role is pretty narrow. This means I don't have to think much except about the little problems in the text, and I am very content with this arrangement. I hope to do my time and focus energy at the day's margins. Also, I was added in the midst of a large layoff to help mitigate the re-org's effects on productivity, so there is this bonus of working in an environment with a "to hell with it!" attitude.

I'm in a vast business park. Large rectilinear concrete and glass buildings occupy dozens of acres. Wide parking lots skirt the buildings and the parking lots are buffered from each other by well-tended lawns, some of which double as recreational fields. Thousands of people must work here, but when I stepped outside for lunch, all the parking lots, lawns, and windows were devoid of movement. Only the chatter and flight of common birds broke the stillness.

Someone told me about a deli in one of the nearby buildings, which seems to be the closest amenity, aside from the requisite vending machine and coffee maker. Otherwise, you have to get in your car and drive down the road a couple of clicks to Starbuck's and its groupie chains.

I needed a walk, so I set off through the parking lot, across the lawn (wary of unpredictable sprinklers), following the directions toward the unseeable deli: "Take the path around the field to the building on the far side—not that building but that one (they kind of of look the same). When you get over there, you'll see the sign."

Each of these buildings is a variation on the same two-story, mirrored-glass and concrete theme and looks as though it has been plunked down into nature like a monolith left by a Creator. The surrounding trees are no match: All are properly rounded or conical and exactly the same height, which is about as tall as the buildings.

As I approached the black mirrored-glass building on the other side of the field, everything was still—no cars or trees moved and the mirrored surfaces revealed no sign of the activity isolated within. But once off the path and halfway through the parking lot, the sign was suddenly there, the light of the little red and blue neon OPEN just barely penetrating the opacity of the glass.

A bunch of Koreans run the hidden deli. Ajumas with their blackened and permed hair and tattooed Cindy Crawford eyebrows hustle behind the counter to serve up various combinations of the most generic deli food imaginable. Lettuce, meat, cheese, chips, and chicken teriyaki by Food Service International.

Behind them on the wall hang various sanitation-related documents, all in Korean, and some with ideogrammatic instructions or pictures of an Asian guy demonstrating what to do.

I know that asking for a plain cheese sandwich will throw these ladies for a loop.

"Cheeje OK?"
"Uun? Cheeje?"
"Yeeh, cheeje!"
"Cheeje OK."

(Cheeje! Cheeje! Cheeje!)

They have their plastic carry-out bags separated, opened, and scrunched into easy-to-fill and easy-to-grab ovals, all piled into a larger plastic bag just like in the shikpoom.

On the way back, a man and woman were lying in the grass with their faces buried in each other like hidden lovers do, as if their private places were so crowded with promise and obligation that the only solitude they could claim was in the disinterested full view of strangers.