Tuesday

Somewhere within the reams of Sunshine's work-related jargon, among mouthfuls of cryptic initials, anagrams, and stepped quantifiers, there exists an item called a tasker. I do not know what this is, but that's hardly important. I've been hostage to the wrong end of Harvard Business School enough to equate it with any number of quasi-articulated fad outcome format composites. It means as little to me as leading indicators, dashboard flashes, or cost-versus analyses, though I imagine taskers have more in common with action plans or a goal points. What does this have to do with geckos? Vietnam has many geckos. I thought there were a lot in Monterrey, but no. Once it's dark here, around five thirty, every random restaurant's lit signage hosts dozens, their silhouettes darting to and fro across photo advertisements for phở, bún, and Huế -style whatevers. Keep looking. There are geckos up and down the sides of light-colored cement buildings, lit by the green spots aimed at lush decorative sidewalk planters. I'm sure they're all over the dark buildings, too, just harder to verify there. They are certainly all over the sidewalk; and sometimes, while walking, I get the uncanny feeling that scratchy, erratic stuff is receding before me. The geckos here are greenish, not the martial tan of Mexican geckos, and seem to grow about six inches, nose to tail. They have no trouble standing upside down on the ceiling. Recently, Sunshine was surprised by a very small and spry gecko standing on the ceiling of our eleventh-floor closet. She named the lizard Tasker, a pretty good gecko name if you ask me. Since then, we've seen Tasker on the kitchen wall and behind the bathroom door. Or maybe these are different Taskers. This last time he seemed a bit curlier than before. [Cavin]