"I'm assuming both of you want the Jim? Scoop of butter pecan, then a scoop of raspberry ripple, and pistachio on top?" The man behind the counter dips his scooper into a hot-water well and pauses expectantly.
"What tipped you off, Sal?" Yenni Mender inquires. "Was it the lifeless gaze or the bad haircut? Yeah, we'll each have one."
Sal smiles, and scoops a Jim for Yenni, and one for Fayban Rorch. Both of them take a single lick of their cone, and then thank Sal and walk outside.
The way the clouds are stacked today makes the roadway look grayer than usual. There are three wrought iron café chairs lined up by the plate glass windows in front of Sal's. Each chair has a rosebush design that digs uncomfortably into your back whenever you sit in it. A familiar-looking man walks past and makes a clasped-hands signal to them. Yenni raises her ice cream cone to him in a subtle gesture.
"That guy's a . . . dregger, isn't he? Is he with Rita's tong? I think I met him at a social dance a couple quarters ago."
"Yeah, he's a dregger," Fayban pronounces, "I think he's with Immington's outfit, actually. They're a marine cargo tong."
"Chris Immington and the Christian Indians?"
"That's them . . . Okay, are we gonna do this?" Fayban is already tilting his cone so that the ice cream scoops are precariously sliding across each other.
"That's what we're here for."
As if it were a choreographed action, Yenni and Fayban tip their cones just enough so that the scoops fall off and plop onto the edge of the sidewalk. Six forlorn globes of ice cream, arrayed like the impacts on a crater field, begin to melt into the gutter. This path the pair are tramping, the Way of Jim, started as a joke but it's become a thing of some earnestness, or maybe it's the other way around.
Yenni started it, or Jad or Riggs did, but now dozens of TotalTong people participate in tramping the Way. Jim was a retail clerk, maybe totally made up, or maybe a synthesis of a few such people. One day Jim was split up with at a fast food restaurant, discovered his car had been booted at a mini golf parking lot, unwittingly dropped his cone in front of an ice cream parlor, and finally theatrically quit his job at a makeup store in order finally to take back his life via a newfound sense of agency. Jim's is a story of resistance against one's prevailing loserdom, and acceptance of the subsequent tolerable situation one stumbles into from there. Tramping the Way involves following Jim's route of that fateful day, visiting his four stops in order (four existing places on the map) and performing a symbolic devotional at each stop.
Having completed their dropped-cone devotional, Yenni and Fayban proceed down the sidewalk in the direction of Cosmologie, the Grent Road location of the makeup franchise where Jim tendered his resignation.
The news of the moment, likely to be the news of the next several weeks, is Jad's successful interview at the HomeHub. It's been almost two months since the day he was Queueing for Queers in his astral tractor. Apparently the interim effort has paid off. Yenni had seen Jad off three days ago by sea train. It had taken a full day's travel there, to the land where Mispa had long ago plied her craft. Jad had reported to the HomeHub as soon as he'd arrived, but the fusebox had denied him interview and had physically locked him out until the next day. The interview itself, once it had commenced, had lasted the better part of a day; morning and night. Naturally, Jad was fitted with his electrode skullcap the whole while. He hardly spoke a word. Most of the assessment was done using neurofeedback, and an array of other biofeedbacks at the same time. Part of the interview consisted of Jad's handworking a model relay about the size of a cat carrier. When the relay was run against a simulation, it had miscalculated the neighborhood's natural gas requirements for the month by about the amount that would fill a dirigible, and had successfully contained about half the second-alarm fires, but in the end Jad had passed the interview and had accepted the houseringer position then and there.
