Summary

While he’s at work, Chutes and Ladders sorts through a bundle of mail while dealing with an on-line client and chatting with Orangutan. The latter is excited because she’s about to board a train for Kushiro, the town where she was born. Ignoring, with increasing determination and anger, Chutes’ attempts to talk her out of it, she gives the background of the Kushiro River, where the town was located: a river straightened as part of a national make-work project, and now about to be re-curved as part of another make work project. She also reveals that she promised herself that if she made it to ninety days sober, she was going to go visit the home where she was born. Eventually, she challenges Chutes to explain why he’s being so negative. Chutes reveals that at one point in his recovery, he...