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midst of her thievery. We need to swoop like silent owls. She looks up and, wow, where’d those guys come from? Got it?”
    You’re not much of a swooper. You are line-backer beefy, a bulldozer. Yet you nod at Daniel in a manner that’s serious because, yes, tonight, you will lance the night with silent grace.
    For the first hour, you see nothing. Not the lady. Not any other recycling pirates. Just two teenagers having the kind of forty-five-minute break-up fight that should take thirty seconds, one inside the car brooding, the other outside on her driveway with numerous violent-looking gestures and a loud fuck you that resonates like a church bell off the high roofs of the surrounding cul-de-sac.
    What you’re doing feels spiritual. You’re riding bikes like two tactical assassins, cruising slow and quiet through the dark, all senses on high alert. The night is warm and calm, there’s the faint echo of hip hop beats from the basement of a house with a glowing silver ball like a miniature moon shining amidst a driveway’s leafy hedge. Large screen TVs push purple and blue specters through picture windows and you glide right through them. You feel the air streaming around you as you pedal. You are swooping. You have been designed aerodynamically, not for sales, not for beer, not for husbandry or parenting, but for this slow cruise astride your bicycle. You bless that woman for stealing your Pop Tarts. She has given you this night, this liquid panther-stalk through your city. People are not messed up. People just need to get out more, need to lube their chains and glide.
    Both you and Daniel are surprised when you see her. You have long trusted Daniel’s genius, but this is something different. Predicting human behavior when you’re sitting across the table from someone in a conference room is one thing. Knowing what a woman he’s never seen will be doing past one in the morning, and where she’ll be doing it, approaches the level of prophet. “Holy shit,” Daniel says, as if he’s scared too. “There she is.”
    She’s half a block away, across the street, shuffling beneath a streetlight. You and Daniel stop pedaling and roll a little closer, angling behind a large SUV to stow your bikes. You crouch down near the front bumper so you can watch her, and as long as you’re quiet, she won’t spot you. Daniel moves into position behind you and you could be two dudes at a Bar Mitzvah in a conga line, except his hands aren’t on your hips and you’d punch him in the eye if they were.
    The woman has replaced her Dora sweatshirt with a maroon raincoat, but it looks like she’s wearing the same grease-stained jeans. There’s a rhythm to her pushing, a right-left shove forward, a pause, a hover of dead space, a right-left shove forward, a pause. She’s got three shopping carts strung together with her nylon cord, and the bottles of bleach are knotted along the rope too, situated as buffers between the carts to muffle the jangle when she shoves forward and they smack against each other. The cart she’s pushing is full and the one in front of it almost full, the lead cart empty. She’s close to two-thirds of the way through her mission.
    What do you want to call what she’s pushing? A makeshift junk-jalopy vacuum? A recycling freight-train? Performance art? She’s pilfering trash bins, but she’s also a kind of social engineer. The cardiovascular architect of Lower Edgar Park. She’s a sieve, thinning the neighborhood’s refuse, siphoning glass, aluminum and plastic nickel-nuggets, and re-injecting the discarded wealth into the blood of the city. She’s guiding a mobile laboratory, a shopping cart IV drip, and she halts it expertly with the mostly filled middle cart parallel to the next bin she investigates. Most bottles and cans she shuttles quickly from bin to cart, but when she encounters a product she’s unfamiliar with, she raises it to the streetlight and examines it like a jeweler, searching for the