In Memoriam

record /var/records/cidy ...

name	Cidy. No surname was ever filed, and he was asked twice.
born	1983. He never wrote down where.
died	2017-03-26, in the driveway, at approximately 04:50
place	A private house outside Cuernavaca, Morelos
cause	Gunshot, in the driveway. He had the car door open.
attributed to	Baron Bravado — exonerated of all charges
motive	Organised labour action, January 2015. Hair nets.
last entry	2017-03-05, 09:12. He did not come back to it.
survived by	Nobody, legally. Magnum. Scalerazor. Petey, who still works the line.
machine	Left running. Still running.

He got there. That is the part that keeps getting left out of it, so it is going at the top: he got the money, and he got the house, and for about three weeks at the end of it he was happy, in the plain way, the way he had been telling everybody he would be since 2011.

The meeting on the fifth of March was the one. He had said that about a great many afternoons and it had never once been true and then it was. He did not write down what he brought to it and nobody has established it since, and the people who would know are not the sort who tell you. What is known is that he left that room with money in a way he had never had money, and that three days later he took a house outside Cuernavaca with a wall around it and a gate that worked.

He paid Magnum back first. All of it, every Tuesday and Thursday since the transmission went in 2014, in cash, put into his hand so that it had to be held. Magnum has been asked about this by three separate people and gives the same answer to all of them, which is that he tried to give it back, and that Cidy would not take it back, and that the two of them sat in the truck about ten minutes afterwards without either of them saying anything.

None of which is why he was killed. To get to that you have to go back two years, to a Thursday morning in January 2015, when he was still a fry cook and still broke and had not yet been anywhere.

The Protest

On the eighth of January 2015, forty-one people stood outside the Cidy Burger on Route 9 for four and a half hours over a hair net policy that affects, by the company's own count, eleven employees across the chain who have nothing on their heads to net.

He organised it himself, on his own time, off the clock, out of a room above a laundromat with no car and a phone he was behind on. He printed the sheets at the library. He called people he had not spoken to in six years and by every account he was bad at it, and he did it anyway, sixty or seventy times, until forty-one of them said yes. Nine of them had never worked a shift in that building in their lives.

He was on the line at six the following morning. He kept one thing from it, a video, in a folder on this machine, with a note on it in his own words: six years I was the only man in the truck on this. Not that morning.

What Happened Next

Nothing.

No response was issued. No policy was reviewed. Nobody from above the store came down, and the hair net requirement is in force at every location today, unamended, in the same wording. The only document produced by anybody in the chain in the eight days that followed was a memo reminding staff that the corral is not a break area.

He handed in nothing and gave no notice and did not come in on the Saturday, and the complaint log stops that week, after six years, on a line that reads: that is the last complaint. There is nothing left in there worth complaining about, which is the worst thing I can say about a place I gave six years to.

The Ambush

Two men came over the pool-side wall at some time after four on the morning of the twenty-sixth. He was awake. He had been awake at four every morning since the day he moved in, which the file records and does not comment on.

He did not go out the front. He went along the back of the house, through the sun room, with the keys already in his hand. He covered thirty-one metres of open gravel and he got the driver's door shut behind him.

He had been shot before. Twice, in 2014, twelve rounds on each occasion, and he walked away from both of them and typed both of them up and filed them under Log, and anybody who has read that entry will understand why the people who knew him assumed for most of a day that he had walked away from this one too.

He did not. He got the door open and he got into the seat and he did not get it started. It was over before six. Nothing was taken from the house.

timeline 2015 — 2017 ...

2015-01-08	Forty-one people outside the Route 9 store, four and a half hours, over hair nets.
2015-01-16	Nothing had changed. He walked out after six years. (I Am Not Coming In)
2015-03-19	Thirty-one hours on a bus. (New Country, Same Hat)
2017-01-30	Four marks on the door frame, low, near the strike plate. (see the log)
2017-03-05	Entry written, 09:12. Shirt ironed, crest shaved down, meeting at four. (Big Day)
2017-03-05	The meeting, 16:00. It went his way. The first one that ever did.
2017-03-08	Takes the house outside Cuernavaca. Wall, gate, and a room at the back that holds the sun until four.
2017-03-26	Men over the pool-side wall, approx. 04:40. He reached the car.
2017-04-02	This page added to the machine.

The Investigation

It took the state eleven days to establish a motive and rather less than an afternoon to put it away again. The file is public. It says the action on Route 9 on the eighth of January 2015 represented a material and continuing risk to a commercial interest, and it names the holder of that interest, and the name is the part that nobody was ready for.

Twenty-six months is a long time to hold a thing. The file does not explain the gap and nobody has been made to. The working assumption of everyone who has read it is that the gap is not a gap at all, and that it took that long to find him, and that he was easier to find once he had a house with his own gate on it.

Baron Bravado has owned Cidy Burger since 2004. All of it. The sign on Route 9, the sign on the roof that Cidy spent six years apologising for, the hair net policy, the clipboard, the forty-one item closing checklist, Harry's job, and the name tag that read CIDY on the chest of a man who told anybody who would stand still that there was no relation.

He had been standing inside that man's building since 2009. He crossed a border to get away from the life it had made for him, and went to work for the underworld, and fought his way to a house with a gate on it, and every single thing he was running from had the same owner. He wrote thirteen thousand words about the typo. He never once wrote down who was cashing it.

Statements

Three people were asked. All three said yes, which is two more than he would have put money on.

I told him to come home or stop calling. I have thought about that sentence every day since January. He did not do either one. He paid me back in cash so that I would have to hold it, and then he went and got himself shot in a driveway. He was the most exhausting person I have ever known and I drove him in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for three years and I would do it again tomorrow.

— Magnum

He counted the times we met. He said that to me once, plainly, as if it were an ordinary thing to tell a person. It was four. I would like it written down that it was four, and that he was decent every one of them, because I have read what he wrote about himself on here and he was harder on him than any of us ever were.

— Scalerazor

I want to be straight with you because they said this would be printed. I did not know his name. Five years across that lot and I said morning to him most days and I assumed he worked there and I never once asked, and they are telling me now that there was a whole thing about it. I would have asked. It was forty feet. He could have come over.

— Gary, hardware store, Route 9

Counsel for Baron Bravado was also approached, and declined, in writing, in one line, which is reproduced here in full.

My client has no recollection of the individual.

— on behalf of Baron Bravado, 2017-05-11

The Last Entry

He wrote it three weeks before, at nine twelve in the morning, on the day everything turned. It is still on the machine, unedited, at the top of the log. The last two lines of it read back tonight, I will write it all up and this is the one, and he was right on the second one and never got to the first.

$ ls -lt ~/blog | head -3
-rw-r--r--  1 cidy cidy  2017-03-05 09:12  big-day.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 cidy cidy  2017-01-30 23:41  somebody-has-been-at-the-door.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 cidy cidy  2016-11-22 02:15  the-deal.txt

read it →

A Note About The Rest Of It

There is a directory on this machine that is not in the menu and does not come up in ls. Everybody who has had to go through the files has found it, and nobody who has found it has been able to make an argument for taking it off. It stays exactly as he left it, including the six years of sightings and the entry from 2014 where he sets out, in order, four reasons why the man behind the store could not possibly have been who it was.

He was thirty-four. He was difficult, and he was not kind about anybody, least of all himself, and he wrote down every single thing that happened to him for six years on the assumption that one day it would matter to somebody. It is on a machine on a shelf and you are reading it. He was right about that part, and nobody ever got to tell him.