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someone who had been flown in from some more stylish city to watch us all fail.
    We took a few moments to squint at the pencil points or straighten the test sheet on the desk, like putting a place mat out for dinner. “You may begin when I say, ‘Start,’” said the woman in gold. I caught her eye and she gave me a smile. People can be nice at the strangest times, giving someone about to be booked for assault a paper towel so he can wipe the ink off his fingers.
    The volume of a cylinder equals the square of the radius times pi times height. The volume of a cone equals one-third the square of the radius of the base times pi times height. Take any number away and you have that other number that is always there, waiting, the blank eye that never closes, zero.
    When I was in third grade, I told my fellow students that the woman who invented math had been killed in a fire. It was a good thing, I said, because she was putting the finishing touches on something even worse than math, something the schools were aching to get their hands on.
    In the exam I was taking that morning, silos had to be filled with rice. Rocket fuel had been depleted by so much per minute over so many kilometers per hour. Gravel had been delivered by the cubic meter to be distributed over a parking lot that was so many square meters, over so wide a distance that I skipped the problem intending to go back to it later. Rivers flowed so much per second over dams, the basic rules of math right there for me to show off my knowledge, number added to an unknown, an unknown in a fraction, numbers with exponents. A, b, c, d. Or none of the above.
    The written part of the exam was on a lined sheet. At the top of the sheet was a blank for my Social Security number. Write an essay of two hundred words . The back of the sheet was labeled, down at the bottom, under For Official Use Only: Reader Number One, Reader Number Two, with spaces for the readers to score the paper.
    Various people have a strong influence, positive or negative, on our development. Describe such a person and explain how this person had an influence on your life .
    Who makes up these tests?

S IX
    It took fifteen minutes from the campus to my job, a brisk half-sprint across railroad tracks, past warehouses, trucks reversing up to shipping bays, air brakes gasping.
    When I saw Chief he was throwing a tarp over the back of his truck. The gray canvas was navy surplus, ALAMEDA NAVAL SHIPYARD in faded black stenciling. The new yellow nylon rope squeaked as he tugged it through the grommets, green brass holes along the border of the stiff cloth.
    Chief gave me a look of exaggerated surprise. “The crowd goes wild,” he said in a sports-announcer voice.
    I gave a little wave to the invisible crowd, a superstar too cool to show any feeling.
    â€œYou’re early,” he said, dropping his voice, implying something, not wanting to come out and say it.
    I stepped in beside him and tied an ordinary slipknot. This new yellow rope was slick, like lizard skin; it was hard to get a grip. The loading dock of Outlet Spa was empty, a wooden shelf like a theater stage. The shipping area was crushed white rock, like the gravel in the exam. Morning clouds were burning off, leaving the air silver and hot.
    â€œYou should use all the time they give you,” he said.
    Outlet Spa is in the warehouse district, several blocks west of Laney College, but another world, brick buildings with trucks backed up to the empty shipping bays, cranes and shipping containers, wooden shipping stacked among weeds. Chief swung up into the cab. He slammed the door of the GM truck and a little more paint sifted down from the rust scrape in the side.
    He found the ignition without looking. “Since you’re here,” he said. Despite his casual manner, he had deliveries in far flung reaches of Northern California for the next week, and I knew if I didn’t show up, Chief would hire someone else.
    â€œI