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cleverness in amassing this hoard of resumé to just as secret depression. I might have given up then, given up everything—this is before my current plan, of course—I might have given up all hope of finding a new job and maintaining my claw-hold on my life, this life, I might have given in completely to despair, if only there had been any other choice.
    But there wasn’t. There wasn’t, and there isn’t. I kept going then, only because there was nothing else to do. And who knows how many of these people in these resumé are in the same state? Going forward with no hope, but only because there’s nothing else to do. We’re like sharks, in that way; if we don’t keep swimming, we’ll merely sink.
    Suicide is not an option, I wouldn’t consider it for a second, though I know some of these people have considered it and some of them will do it. (This world we live in began fifteen years ago, when the air traffic controllers were all given the chop, and suicide ran briskly through that group, probably because they felt more alone than we do now.) But I don’t want to kill myself, I don’t want to
stop
. I want to go on, even when there’s no way to go on. That’s the point.
    In any event, I was feeling just about as low as I’ve ever felt, I was having real difficulty just to rouse my energy enough to send out my own resumés But just then an article in
Pulp
caught my eye and got my brain working once more.
    It was one of those inside-a-corner-of-our-fascinating-industry pieces, the sort that used to make my eyes glaze over when I was working for Halcyon, but which now I read slowly and carefully, even underlining certain trenchant sentences, because I need to keep up with the industry. Don’t ever permit yourself to become yesterday’s man, that’s one of the basic rules.
    Well, this particular piece in
Pulp
was about a new process at a plant over in New York State, at a town called Arcadia. The company, Arcadia Processing, was a wholly owned subsidiary of one of the biggest paper companies in America, one of the outfits that make their millions in toilet paper and tissues. But Arcadia was a success story in itself, so the owners were leaving it alone.
    For much of this century, Arcadia had specialized in turning out cigarette paper made from tobacco leavings, the shreds and stems that are left over after the manufacture of cigarettes. Early in the twentieth century, a couple of different processes were developed to make paper out of that stuff—it’s hard to do, because tobacco fibers are so short—and this tobacco-paper was initially used to strengthen the end of cigars, to make them chewable. Later, a variant on that paper was bleached and aerated so it could be used as the paper around ordinary cigarettes, and this is the product Arcadia produced.
    A few years ago, it seems, Arcadia’s management came to the conclusion it was no longer a good idea to be tied so closely to the fortunes of the tobacco industry, and so they looked for another area in which to diversify. The area they found, I read to my astonishment, was just the polymer paper specialty that I’d been working on the last sixteen years!
    The article writer went on to say that, rather than compete with mills that had already been in that business, and feeling they had a superior product with a new manufacturing method (wrong about that; it was precisely the system we’d installed at Halcyon back in ’91), they’d gone offshore for their customers. Aided by NAFTA, they’d found Mexican manufacturers who were delighted by their products and could afford to buy them. With Mexican customers already in hand, they’d spread their sales force farther south, and now had customers all through South America as well.
    It was a true success story, one of the few around these days, and there was something very bittersweet about reading it. But one part of the piece really snagged my attention, and that was the brief description of and interview with