"What do you do," I ask, "watch until New Mexico-Texas posts a job?" Seems foolish to me, why couldn't they just offer it to her?

"No," she frowns at me. "You don't understand. New Mexico-Texas didn't post these. They're office complexes for other companies, not for New Mexico-Texas. The first one is for Intek, the second is for Senkai's Western Division. I find a posting that looks interesting to me, and I submit a bid in New Mexico-Texas's name. It's a way to keep my hand in."

"What about the fees? How do they pay you if you submit the bid as New Mexico-Texas?"

"Well, the company gets the fee, then they give me a bonus."

It takes me a moment to figure out. She is looking up postings, designing complexes on her own time, and New Mexico-Texas gets the fees. "But you do all the work," I say.

"I use the company's system," she says. "I work for New Mexico-Texas. I'm not a company. If I sell a project, good, I get a bonus. If I don't," she shrugged, "it doesn't matter. They still pay my salary. And I get all the benefits, medical, housing, all of it. If I was on my own, I'd have to take care of all of that."

I nod. I understand. But it bothers me. "So most of the organic engineering you do, you do at night or on weekends?"

She shakes her head. "Mostly I run the department. There's not enough time to do it all."

"Do you teach?" I ask, thinking of Woo Eubong.

"No," she says, looking at the readout hanging in the air in front of us, the clean, spare lines of her office complex. Without looking at me she says, "It is not like China. Why didn't you stay in China?"

"I wanted to come home," I say.

That evening, over dinner, Vice President Wang explains salary and living arrangements. He tells me that I would work with Mang Li-zi until she goes back to Hainandao, after which I would be Senior Engineer. It is, he points out, only three years until I would be Senior Engineer. "I understand you were offered a job with Wuxi," he says. "May I ask why you didn't take it?"

"I was grateful for the opportunity, but I did not feel comfortable. Comrade Huang is fond of saying that a placement is like a marriage." I know better than to say to this man that I didn't want to live in China.

"If you were interested in the position, when would you be available?" he asks.

"I am teaching a class at Brooklyn College," I say. "I would not be able to come until the class finishes."

That's fine. "You look very Chinese," he says casually.

I know he has access to my records. "Gene splicing," I say. And add in Chinese, "It does not matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." An old political saying.

Vice President Wang laughs appreciably. The dinner is a spicy southwestern dish; chicken in mole with a salad of avacados, tomatoes and onions. As there was at lunch there is icy Mexican beer. Outside the window the sun sets. The landscape glows brilliant and beautiful red, then lavender, and as we sit talking over coffee and a sweet chocolate desert, it grows black. We are reflected in the glass of the window. Someone who didn't know better would look at us and say that I, in my Chinese suit, was the one with citizenship and he, in his khaki, the ABC.

"You are not married, Engineer. Anyone special in your life?"

Just a fag I met on the boardwalk in the part of New York City they call Bangladesh. I don't know if he'll ever call me again. "No," I say, "I think I've been moving around so much I haven't had much chance,"

He nods. "This might strike you as a difficult place to meet someone but you'll be surprised. We have number of single women on staff." He smiles, "I think that you are already a topic of discussion, an eligible bachelor. Someone like yourself should have no trouble making friends."

I am shown a comfortable room in the guesthouse. There is a big double bed, carpeting on the floor, fantastically colored prints of the southwestern landscape. All very nice.(I wake up alone in the middle of the night, disoriented, and it takes me a moment to settle myself, to think, 'The door is THAT way, the window THIS way, the bathroom in the direction of my feet.')

We discuss salary and living conditions in the morning. The salary they have offered is extraordinarily high, 103 hundred. There would be a tax rate of forty percent, they will take care of all taxes. After taxes my salary would be in the area of 62 hundred. Plus they would provide housing, and I would have unlimited system time.

I tell them I think the offer is very generous. I will give it very serious consideration and I will be in touch with them through Office of Employment Resources. I am very polite, I thank Vice President Wang in Mandarin. I hear my own voice, my old-fashioned phrasing, my northern pronunciation. Haibao always found it so amusing.

Vice President Wang seems impressed, maybe pleased.

I am, in fact, terrified. I cannot live that way, I can't live in a compound in the middle of the desert, surrounded by chainlink. Like Baffin Island, except for the rest of my life.

I have to think. What do I want?

I want to keep teaching. None of my subsequent lectures have been as exciting as the first, but I like the work. I don't want to end up in a corporate compound. So I must make some money.

While I am thinking, I use the number Mang Li-zi showed me to access the job postings. There are well over a hundred of them. I go through them, stopping to look something up when it strikes my fancy. I get a call while I'm in the middle of the proposal specs for an office complex and I just switch over audio.

"This is Zhang," I say, trying to decide if this complex is too big.

"Pardon me? I was given this number for Rafael?"

It is Invierno. I flick over to vid. "That's me."

"Rafael," he says. "Rafael Zhang. Or Zhang Rafael, which?"

I laugh, "Neither. Either Rafael Luis, or Zhang Zhong Shan."

"Okay," he looks cautious. "Which is your real name?"

"Both, my mother is hispanic and my father is ABC. I use Zhang when I work, but a lot of my friends call me Rafael."

He bats his long eyelashes while he considers this.

"Hey, a man with a name like 'Winter' doesn't have a lot of space to complain. What are you doing?"

"Nothing much," he says. "My first name is Jeremy. Invierno's my last name, but I like it better."

"Let's go to the kite races," I say.

He ignores that. "That's why you speak Spanish?" he says.

"Street Spanish. Nothing they would understand in Bogata."

"You sure as hell don't look Spanish." He is frowning.

"I'll tell you all about it at the kite races."

"One more thing," he says. "Where the hell have you been?"

"What," I say, "you left your wallet over here or something?"

He gets visibly flustered, "No, it's just a friend of mine had a party last night and I though you'd like to go. Look, I was just asking." The matador look is back, pouty and sensitive to slights.

"I was in Arizona interviewing for a job."

"Arizona," he says, aghast. "What the fuck do you want to go to Arizona for?"

"I don't."

"Then why did you go," he says, reasonably.

"Who made you my mother?" I ask, laughing. He makes me laugh, Invierno, and as usual, he doesn't really take offense. So we go to the kite races, and Invierno comes home with me since it's Friday and he doesn't have to work on Saturday.

He rolls over in the morning and I'm staring at the ceiling, thinking of Mang Li-zi. Thinking of myself stuck out in Arizona.

He pillows his chin on his arms. "You sure as hell don't look like much fun."

"I'm worried," I say.

"Oh," He says.

After a long bit of silence he says resignedly, "What are you worried about?"

"I just had a job offer to make about sixty a year, but I have to live in a compound in Arizona and be an administrator, and incidently they'd really like me to marry someone within the company." I climb across him and pad into the kitchen to start coffee.