//Future_Total:A-AD1974
the-first-day-of-winter,-400pm,-gibraltar
    When I was under the Looming Bridge in Ceuta I saw the giant cranes and dozers scraping up the hillside.I was looking back at the continent, across the straight of Gibraltar. They were not on the Rock, (thank Saints) the biggest hill, but the others were fair game. And they were being chewed up. And I was excited because I thought they might actually finish the bridge or go bankrupt trying. In those days, I was hard Poly, and a Springer, too sore toward the bridge's political symbolism to notice what it looked like, or if it was shoddy engineering, or if it would be scary to drive across or pleasant.I took a ferry over and talked with a woman who was on the hillside investigating. She called herself a reporter. This was a lie, but she had a notebook. She explained her backstory to me but I had trouble following. She was ethnically something but was raised somewhere, and went to school somewhere else, and spoke this and that language, but not in years, Milan and Palestine were mentioned, and I took her to be worldly and interesting without being specifically interested. We both thought we were writers, and that was a good enough reason to sleep together. So we did."They're not building the fucking bridge." she said one day."of course not." I said, going along with it."So you know?""Well, I mean, no, not really.""They're building hotels." She explained that hotels had to be built before the bridge is finished."The bankers would only give them more loans if they built hotels first, or, what I really mean is, the owner of the hotel chain said he would underwrite them if the architects build his hotels for him. Like, according to his vision. So he's bailing them out on this one condition.""I'm not sure I follow." I said.She worked at the architecture hall, Ironloom, as office help. This was how she thought she was a reporter; she wrote press releases for them. But when I met her outside the construction sight, she wasn't on the clock. She wasn't reporting on the firm's behalf, she was trying to write an expose about them. Corporate Sedition. Her lie about being a reporter was fading into truth. She explained later that her friend was using their employer's presses to start a left-wing magazine, Ex Tempore. This expose would be the the coverstory, published under a pen name:"El Tigre" she said.