Brad thought he'd extended an olive branch, or maybe even hit on her. But Marion seemed colder, not warmer to him as he'd expected. She gave him a brief, ball-constricting, dismissive glance, and she turned all the way away from him. He felt his stomach clench as she did, and he hunched his shoulders down into the day's new posture of normalcy: defeat.

"You don't jump places when you've got a daughter in school," Marion said. "The best I can jump for is a pay grade. You really should go find some work to do before Robert goes wandering."

"Yeah, I, uh, guess so. And that does make running away, or running the show, kinda hard. I don't mean to forget sometimes."

"Of course you don't mean it," Marion said. "If you meant it, nobody'd ever talk to you. You just want something. And you need to bounce around like a jumping bean 'til you figure out what it is. But I can't help you. I didn't jump the right way when I was a bean myself. Maybe you'll get luckier than I did. You seem like the type."

The conversation was going all wrong. Some voice in his head chimed in and pointed out that, at this point, the best he could do would be to just back out and shut up. Another voice gleefully suggested he dig a deeper hole, because it was funny as hell to watch. Other, less cogent voices filled the rest of his nooks and crannies with the white noise of unattainable advice.

Brad wished he were high, or madly in love with Marion (which he sort of thought he might be, sometimes), but with her madly in love with him right back. And that, when he opened his mouth, she'd keep that look she got every so often, like she got his joke already. Like they were in synch. This clashing, alien space, where everything he said was wrong…it just made no sense. Like the dream where you tried to watch TV, but the channels wouldn't change, and whatever was on had nothing but bad commercials. Giant trucks for men with small dicks, replete with head-pounding background music. Reruns of bad sitcoms.

"Nobody's a type," Brad said. "You can jump anywhere you want, yo. Hell, we could jump together. Hold Robert for ransom, then take the 200 bucks that nets us, grab your daughter, hit the road, and never stop driving. Maybe go south. Find some Second World country and figure out a way to make a buck off of our wits, and the fact that we're honest-to-god Americans. Just being American is worth something, right?"

"Nobody's jumping anywhere with you today," Marion said. But at least she gave him a smile. Not much of one; the sort of tired look where the corners barely lifted. Still, it was something.

He tried to smile back, like he really meant it, and slowly eased away from her desk, knowing that the smarter man – the guy who knew women – he'd know what to say. He'd have kept the chitchat going. It wasn't like she was busy, after all, like she had anything better to do than blow a few hours talking with him. But he'd barely rated a handful of minutes.

Brad sort of wished he'd brought a stopwatch. He could've measured just how long "polite tolerance" was, in a quantifiable way. That little datum would've been worth something, he was pretty sure.

Another voice chimed in – yelled, really – and said that he was being a jackass again, and that he'd read her all wrong. She was into him. He just had to approach her more directly.

Brad didn't listen. He never listened to voices like that. Or hardly ever did. Voices like that were full of optimism. Optimism was how you found yourself doing stupid things, and looking like the idiot you were in the process. There was no better way to implode than to hit on a girl who was out of your league. Solitude wasn't fun, but it beat embarrassed and alone, every time.

"Yeah, I guess," Brad said. She'd dismissed him, but sometimes he felt like he had a spine. Or like he'd like to have a spine…and the next best thing to actually beingbrave was pretending you were. Doing the brave thing even when your stomach had gone all watery, and your mind had fallen backwards to a tiny room with this long tunnel in front of it, leading to your eyes – the edge of out-of-body.

Brad sat in one of the never-used chairs that lined the reception area near the windows, on the off chance that the department would ever have a visitor who actually needed to sit and wait for something. The chairs, thankfully, had no armrests, so his bulk didn't do that thing where rolls of fat couldn't wedge their way down and instead spilled out to give his body a mushroom appearance. Tugging at his shirt to pull it away from his flesh, he blinked at Marion a few times, searching for more words.

"Nobody ever really makes it out," Brad said. "It's kinda an American thing. Which is funny, because we're a whole nation founded on people who struck out for someplace new. There's more mobility amongst Americans than amongst any population anywhere, I mean, aside from your average war zone. But we don't ever really go anywhere. We just shift from one strip mall to another. It's all the same."

"There's the mountains," Marion pointed out.

"Hey, good point," Brad said. "And probably some places don't have fire ants. Or stinging caterpillars."

"Live oak versus evergreens," Marion said. "Dirt or sidewalk. Ranch houses or high-rises."

"Snow or tropical storms," Brad said, bringing up one of his favorite features of the region, although Katrina had been a rough welcome to the state. "Jungle or desert. But everywhere, Applebee’s^®. That's the reason you can't really run. Wherever you end up, all you got is a different horizon, and a bunch of new streets to learn. At least where you are, you know how to get places.

“But I did say south, man. We get down Mexico way, maybe even further, then things change. Get away from the Paper Tiger, and chill out in one of its manifest destiny client states, where at least you can pretend you're free."

"You even have your passport?" Marion asked.

"Well, no, not exactly," Brad said. "I mean, this isn't like the office coup. Not so fully fleshed-out a plan. There's bound to be a few obstacles."

"I've been here long enough, any change sounds good," Marion said. "But I've also been here long enough that change is impossible. You need someone who has never settled down anywhere. Not someone like me. And anyone like that is probably already two steps ahead of you, headed for wherever they're touching down next."

"Guess you're right," Brad said, his false bravado finally faltering. "I'm too restless to be happy where I am. Too settled to move. It's like my favorite song: ‘Everything Beautiful Is Far Away.’"

"Never heard of it," Marion said, turning away from her solitaire for a moment.

"It's by Grandaddy," Brad said. "They broke up. Kinda a niche thing, I guess, as far as music goes. They had just enough commercial success to scrape by, but after a decade, they got sick of scraping by."

"See?" Marion asked. "Maybe you should've been in a band. That'd give you a good dose of wanderlust."

"Nah, man, no talent," Brad said. "I can't even play air guitar. I don't have a single bit of musical instinct or ability or whatever. I remember in grade school, whenever we'd do music class, they'd give me one of the stupid instruments, like that split-wood thing you hit with a stick. Or, if I was really lucky, one of those round wood things with bells in it. And then usually the teacher would tell me that the important thing with the instrument was to play it softly."

Marion laughed.

To be continued...