(Keri’s note: Forgive the disconnection between scenes. I have no way of segueing neatly between them. It is written as I dreamed it.)
Tromping through a dense rainforest, I come across a man that appears stark raving mad at first. Ragged beard, fired eyes, ranting and raving about “all the pieces”. But as I watch, I realize he is lost in the wilderness and is trying to fix his radio. I offer to help and he sees me for the first time.
“The transmitter works! But the antenna is broken! It’s supposed to be unidirectional but because of broken pieces it only functions along a certain direction! I don’t know which direction is my home country, and even if I did, there are too many mountain ranges in between. I can’t transmit along Line Of Sight.” He is ecstatic to find I understood his problem. But detailing his insurmountable challenges only drops him back into dismay.
“Well…” I eye his rig. “I assumed you punched through the regulatory transmission power limits if you intended to be heard by your peers.” He only grinned slyly. “You don’t need Line of Sight. You only need to aim in the general direction.” He shook his head. “So you never considered bouncing a signal off the ionosphere?”
He looked at me in confusion. Then as the implications soaked through, his face brightened. “No. No! I didn’t! I didn’t think it was possible with my rig!”
“Well, you’re overpowering it. And close to blowing circuits that can’t be replaced out here. If you try again, it will be your last attempt.” He nods. I considered where his home country is and the curvature of the earth between there and here. “I can help you aim the antenna. And because of how I am, by doing so, the signal will be boosted. But the feedback is going to blow circuits. It will be a one way, one time call. However, they will be able to use that call, to figure out precisely where you are and send help!”
“Let’s do it!” He goes through his notes and condenses his message to a few key words in Morse Code as I prepare myself for the power surge. “LAND ALIVE 5 NO MEN 5 CARTER WRONG 5 SALLY KNOWS 0”
“There. That’s enough. If they want the rest, I’ll leave my notes with the transmitter.” He looks up to see me strapping the base of the antenna to my back. “Hey! Are you nuts! You’ll be roasted!”
I just smile and laugh at him. I’m not completely lucid, but I know how to manipulate energy. I hold up my hand and let a Jacob’s Ladder play between my fingers.
“Oh. You’re part of… ” He nods. “Okay. Thank you for helping me. They said if I dropped the life I was, I would learn a different way. I guess this is part of it.” He finishes his preparation as I get down on one knee and aim the antenna using my body posture.
I close my eyes and focus on becoming part of the circuit. Whatever pulses were to come to the antenna, would be amplified by me before transmission. He begins to transmit the message. The pulses set my teeth on edge, but are sent clearly. As expected, the feedback blows the radio. It will not send, or receive another message until fully repaired.
“If they want the details, let them find my books. But that’s enough. Thank you.” I unstrap the antenna from my back and lay it among the wreckage of the radio. Together, we lay rocks over the radio and waterproof bag containing his notes.
He seems to have shed his final connection with his former life in doing so. He laughs and embraces me in a final farewell. I know if his countrymen find him, they will not recognize him. He has embraced the land and the land has embraced him.
I leave him, take three steps, and step into a different world. Entering a diner, I sit at the counter where coffee and pancakes are brought to me. My usual, it seems. I’m tired. I really don’t want to go to work. It’s 6am. I have until 6:30a to decide. The staff tells me to hang out with them all day. They don’t mind me because I tell the wildest stories. But I’m not in the mood for telling stories, at least, none of the kind that they want to hear. All the stories that come to mind today are dark, of death, of injustice, of the good dying early and the bad feasting for decades. I eat and drink and copiously murmur about having enough of this shit. I clearly see the wrongs, but am in no position to correct them. And it’s wearing on me.
At 6:25a, I pack up, pay my due, and leave for work. The staff are shaking their head at me. “They don’t pay you enough for what you go through.” Yea, the paycheck is shitty. But I think it’s worth it, for now. Because sometimes I get an assignment that makes it all worthwhile. As I leave, I realize I have no idea what my “job” is.
I leave the diner, walking out of the swinging doors into a forested range of hills with picturesque mountains in the near distance. Well, it was forested. Now it is being cut down to make way for a mansion. The local spring is being capped and a second stream is being diverted. The builders plan to use the spring as the mansion’s water source. The second stream will act as the sewer, flushing waste out of the mansion before being allowed to return to the normal stream bed a few miles away from the mansion. There is no filtering of the stream. Raw sewage will be dumped into the stream bed, along with whatever else the mansion’s inhabitants decide to pour down the drain.
I walk onto the site with a hardhat and clipboard. I don’t have to check my notes to tell this is not the project that was approved. I start red-flagging nearly everything in sight along with two other inspectors that arrived shortly before I did.
One inspector is immediately bought off. He scribbles his approval on the form only fifteen minutes after arriving on the site. The other inspector is intimidated into silence. The foreman makes many references to the silent man’s wife and family. However, I continue documenting and uploading violations live with my cellular tablet. The property owner confronts me. “You one of them nature fuckers? You going to tell me I’m supposed to live in harmony and shit? Man conquers everything you naive bitch.” The implied threat was displayed in the way he pulled up the front of his pants, and the way he visually sized me up as so much meat.
I look at him coolly and pull up a picture of the exposed dirt on the tablet. “Did you know you’re building on two different types of soil? The front is compacted clay but the back is lahar deposits. Did you consider what would happen when the pressure from the capped spring finds an alternate route? Did you see the evidence that alternate route runs in that boundary? You have a heavy weight on a slanted slab, sitting on impatient earth. Want a lawsuit? Just add water.” He looked at my picture and claimed I had altered it. I told him to go take a look, as that very dirt bed is still exposed.
He turned away and did just that, looking at the very obvious feature while claiming he was going to prove me wrong, then “teach [me] a lesson”. He started looking around with open eyes and saw the many dangers he was building on and around. He muttered something about his private inspectors giving him clearance and never mentioning the hill’s instability.
I finish my inspection, failing the site so thoroughly, it would take years before all the corrections were completed, and note in the comments the builder may have been misled by shady contractors. The investigation that will follow may open a snake pit, or may be quietly hushed. But either way, I get the feeling the hill itself is going to end the project. I remove my yellow and white hard hat and enter my jeep.
Only to walk through the doors of a classroom. Three teachers are seated at a table. One has been working tirelessly to get class materials together. She is exhausted. The other two are gossiping about the perma-sub in Social Sciences, making many comments about his beautiful appearance and speculating how easy it would be to bed him in the janitor’s closet. She asks for help, but the other two give her stink eye, get up from the table and sit by the window. They mutter about she’s always demanding help and bossing them around.
“I’ll help.” She rolls back from the table in her wheelchair to see me. On seeing my sincerity, she smiles through the exhaustion. “I can’t reach the rolls of craft paper. They’re on the top shelves. Would you get them for me?” Not a problem. For the next couple of hours, I run as her assistant. It is faster for me to get the materials when she needs them, than for her to have to balance so many things wheeling back and forth.
She is making customized lesson modules for her students. When the students finish, they’ll bring it all together for a class project. They will learn how a tight community needs each person, how it needs the messy jobs and the clean jobs, and how when everyone works together, the community can thrive.
Her hands start to shake from exhaustion, so I start doing most of the physical work under her guidance. We complete the modules and I place them in the kids’ assignment boxes.
The gossipers see we are done and are excited. They can leave now, and do just that, congratulating each other for being so patient with the ‘gimp’. I know it is not my place to confront them, so I say nothing as they pass. The teacher thanks me and tells me the other two were assigned to help her. “This is my last class. After this, I’ll be in the hospital. I won’t be coming out, you understand. I wanted the kids to learn something that will stay with them after I’m gone. Your help means so much to me.” She leaves to get rest before tomorrow’s class, exiting to the hall via an open entryway. I exit a via different doorway off to the side.
I enter a large classroom devoid of tables and chairs. Against one wall is a felted bullseye. In front of that wall are movable barriers, each covered in a different cloth or tarp. A teacher was handing a target to an adult male student and motioning to the bullseye. When the student asked for clarification, the teacher yelled at him to “Just fucking do it!”, and walked away from him to join a second teacher leaning against another wall.
I recognized them as the two gossiping teachers from before. The student was supposed to climb over the barriers. But it was clear the texture of the covering cloth was repulsive to him. I came to the two teachers but they didn’t see me. Instead, they were loudly bitching about finding out the perma-sub in Social Sciences is not only openly gay, but is not interested in hooking up with any colleagues. They were deriding his professionalism as being elitist, deriding his sexuality because it excludes them, and openly suggesting the wheelchair-bound teacher would be a perfect sexual partner for him because “it’s not like she could do anything anyway”. The women made me ill just listening to them.
The student had managed to cross the first barrier with ease. The second barrier made him whimper when he touched the slick plastic. But at the third barrier, he lost his composure and fell. I was able to cut through the gossipers’ conversation to inform them of the fallen student.
“That’s his fucking problem! He needs to get the fuck over himself and deal with his own shit! Fucking lazy bastards. Useless fucks like him should be shot. Waste of air, he is. And mind your own fucking business. This is my class, and I’ll do as I know I should!” She turned away muttering something about bleeding heart liberals to her peer. The two women snorted at me and left the classroom, entering a side office where they could close the door and continue their bitching about being friendzoned.
I went to the barriers and started moving them out the way. I found the student between the third and fourth barrier on the floor. When my head came into view, he tried to hide his face. He had urinated and vomited on himself. He was crying and ashamed. Curled up into a tight ball, he was gripping himself tightly and trying to rock on the cold floor.
I checked the cabinets and found some rags, a bucket, and a white sheet. Filling the bucket with water, I moved the barriers completely out of the way. I didn’t say a word to him as I stripped the soiled clothing off of him. I cleaned him up the best I could without further wounding his dignity and wrapped him in the clean sheet. He stopped openly crying, but was clearly embarrassed and still deeply ashamed.
“What can I do for you?” He was surprised to hear me speak to him. “How can I help you?” I think I knew what was going on, but I didn’t want to assume wrongfully.
“W-w-would you hold me? Tight?” He looked down quickly, like he was expecting some sort of abuse for asking. “I-i-i know I sound like a perv. I’m not… It’s just…”
I led him to an empty section of wall and sat on the floor against it. I pulled the man, naked but for a sheet, into my arms in a tight embrace. I did my best to give him a whole-body hug. He started crying again, but not in embarrassment. When he relaxed, he started rocking. I just went with it, and rocked him gently in the tightest hug I could.
The main doors opened. More adult students came in. “Hey! What are… oh… did he overload again?” I looked at them and nodded. “Where’s the hugging machine? He’s supposed to have a hugging machine in here!” I just shrugged. I made a great show of looking around the mostly empty room. “Those bitches couldn’t even bother to pull it in here? I hate them!” Most of the students left to find the machine. A few stayed and started cleaning the floor and the barriers.
The man in my arms was not asleep, but he wasn’t quite awake either. I understood that he needed time to get over what had just happened. I had all the time he needed. I did not mind holding him. I did not feel threatened by his nakedness under the sheet. The other students thanked me for holding him, and wondered how I was able to gain his trust enough for him to relax in my arms.
“It’s broke the fuck up! They broke it!” The hugging machine had been found. Or rather, the pieces of it. The students went to work trying to fix it. Turns out it was merely disassembled. They started working furiously to put it back together, mumbling about nearly being out of time. The gossiping teachers never come out of the office. I can hear them bitching loudly about their charges.
Outside I can see the night approaching. It will be sunset soon. I am suddenly fully lucid. A fierce instinct grips me, urging me to fledge out. Still holding the man, I become Weaver Raven-winged. The flight feathers on my arm extend downward, covering the man completely. He notices the sudden feathers, but is not afraid. He is fascinated with them and snuggles deeper into my embrace.
As I’m watching his face, I miss the moment of sunset. The clanking of machine parts against the floor catch my attention. I look up just in time to watch the forms of the students shimmer and fade, leaving only glowing balls of light where they stood. The building itself shimmers and changes. I’m in the roofless room of an abandoned school. Leaves from the high canopy overhead fall in sighs around me. The machine parts are rusted and covered with ivy. The side room has collapsed, leaving the two floating balls of light that were the gossiping teachers exposed.
But the man in my arms is still the same.
“Is it time to leave?” He peeks out from around my arms. “Everything is gone. Everyone is gone. They said they would be back for us when the alarms sounded. They locked us in our rooms and left saying they would come back. I could see my friend outside. He said he wouldn’t leave without me. Did you see my friend when you came in?”
The stars are my only illumination. It is enough. The young male in my arms looked up at me with a charred and deformed face. It did not frighten me.
“I didn’t see him. Do you? Can you hear him?” The man lifted himself away from me. The sheet fell away in scraps and cinders. I could smell the smouldering flesh. He looked around and held still.
“Yes. I can hear him! He’s calling me!”
“Well then. Why don’t you go catch up with your friend? They locked you in your room and abandoned you. But your friend, didn’t.”
“But if I leave, I get lost, and the teachers bring me back here.”
“You’re out! You’re free!” Another man burst through the wall. I couldn’t tell which was the phantom, the man or the wall, or both. Appearing as if he is made of pure light, he rushes forward and embraces the burned student. “You’re finally free! I’ve been waiting… I knew if I waited long enough…” He looks down at me. “How did you free him?”
I really don’t know. I just shrug. The burned student’s charred flesh starts dropping off of him. I stand to move out of the way of the macabre chunks. Soon there are two glowing bodies of light in front of me.
“She said I could leave with you. Can I? Really?”
“Yea. Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here. This is the past now.”
“But what about the others?” Good question. But as I look around, I get the sense that I’ve done all I could do. Come the morning, the day will be reset for them, but they will carry on as if he was never among their number.
“I don’t know. I can’t see them.” A sudden wind blows through the charred remains of the school. It blows me out of this world, into the gray In Between. I know I’m being pulled (pushed?) to waking. I should be happy at the freeing of the one student. But as I consider all the scenes, I am strangely morose.
It’s going to be a long day.
Good morning.