TE Clue in the Harbor

Concealed from nearly all angles of view by surrounding parked vehicles, protected from the weather by the top and sides of a plastic-lined blue shipping container, a man in a red jumpsuit is hard at work on a papercraft project. He does not wear obvious earphones. However, the noise of the nearby street to the east and the harbor to west, northwest, and north, all combine to drown out any sound less shattering than a gunshot.

The man wears a crimson jumpsuit with matching gloves. His gloves are particularly noteworthy because of how obsessively his hands move in their task.

He has stacked close to his body an assortment of corrugated cardboard boxes, the sort used by businesses and libraries and certified public accountants and law offices all use to contain piles of paper. Certainly in the five or so currently open boxes, the contents are papers of varying sizes. Some are in folders or binders. Some are loose. Some look to have been torn out of notebooks or printed, bound texts. Also visible are loose microfiches and a few paper maps.

The man in the red jumpsuit dismantles material from these many boxes. He fastens a target portion from each demolished page onto a large, trifold posterboard currently hanging on a wooden stand. The posterboard is already more than a third covered in such pieces.

As for the rest of the demolished page, it gets tossed into an equally crimson burn barrel. Leaning on the barrel are its lid, a bristle-free old broom likely used as a plunger to compact the material, a longnecked lighter, an actuator pole, and a longshoreman's hook with a bent tip.