ANAMNESIS
Zorina Alliata
Anamnesis
Copyright © 2009 Zorina Alliata
Publisher: Better Karma Publishing
www.BetterKarmaPublishing.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
ISBN 978-0-9824329-0-7
CANTO I
At 3:00 PM on Friday, the NASDAQ fell shamelessly to its lowest level in years. For no visible reason at all, it just lost hope and let itself down like a tired old woman who could not pretend she's forty anymore. The Dow immediately followed it downward like a hopeless lover. Everyone on CNN could catch a glimpse of the ugly, sagging, depleted reality that had crept out in the open. A deep-felt, hurtful sigh rose from Times Square and spread all the way to Gaithersburg, MD where it reached Dante's cubicle just as he was fiddling with his fingers.
Dante, who had been following the markets every minute of the day not out of interest but rather out of excruciating boredom, stood still and observed the moment. Somewhere in the dark labyrinth of cubicles and cabinets on the second floor, there was a record of his retirement fund; just as of 3:00PM on Friday, it had fallen to about $0.70 in value. By all and any standards, his financial future did not look too bright. And yet, Dante could not find it in himself to give a damn.
He had been working for the Company for what felt like about three hundred years now. An international and, who knows, maybe interplanetary conglomerate, the Company had no physical products to sell; instead, it was selling concepts, abstracts, paradigms, clichés, the Glass Bead Game series, various responses to life's challenges, and even en-gross singular, disparate thoughts on given themes. Some of the cheaper products came free with a bottle of Red Romance wine.
Dante was employed in the Non-Negations wing of the Company. His department was created to contribute to the Future, by the way of the Improbable and the Impossible - the names of its two main divisions. A natural-born computer geek and proud of it, Dante was toiling in the lowest ranks of the Improbable; his dream, modest like his ambition, was to be promoted to the Impossible.
In the realm of the Improbable, "working" was a relative term. Dante's work was insignificant and, most of the times, useless. If sometimes he actually wrote one line of code, there were several layers of configuration managers, testing managers, integration managers, business managers, lawyers, presidents and kings, who immediately took ownership of that line of code; corrected it; documented it; saved it in several secret databases; tracked it; labeled it; had long meetings about it; and most of the times decided it harms at least some subset of the Company's interests. Even when his work was hesitantly allowed go to the next, Probable level, by that time it was weak, dry-cleaned, castrated, stripped of any trace of innovation, creativity or quirkiness that might have shown that it originated specifically in Dante's brain.
He was feeling particularly numb that Friday. It had been an uneventful week in an uneventful month in an uneventful year in an uneventful lifetime. He would have called in sick, but his boss was onto him; Dante had taken all the possible sick days, personal days and floating vacation days he could take the whole year, and it was barely April. His boss, too afraid of people to provoke an open discussion about it, had sent him a memo stating the company policies regarding "abuse" of the company-paid free time. Dante did not want to lose his job. He didn't think that anyone else would have hired him.
Even the Company Eye corporate software had some sort of hardware hiccups and had been taken off-line for maintenance. Most days, Dante would at least take some guilty pleasure in over-using or straight hacking into the Company Eye; it was a monitoring program for employees and it sometimes offered some lame fun, exposing co-workers and their pathetic hobbies, passions or emotions. It also provided him with some kind of big-picture view of the Company's intrinsic structure, otherwise as hard to figure out as life itself. One time, for example, he had found out that the Extreme Genius and the Extreme Idiot departments had the same phone number and email address.
In the pile of deceptive norms, procedures, color codes and explanatory notes that the Company administrative machine was requiring lately, the Company Eye was a raw, honest program. It was meant to look you in the eye from a corner of your screen, record every keystroke and screen shot you used, and report it to your supervisor. There was no mercy, no exception and no disillusion about its purpose. As much as he hated the idea of being watched, Dante at least appreciated being watched openly.
"This surveillance is worse than communism", Anna had once told him, in that outraged low voice she used to get when talking about the regime she grew up in and hated. But Dante did not really mind the Company Eye. It came with the job, along with his long line of nameless supervisors and other things he could not control. Dante didn't feel he had much to hide anyway; being spied on at least lent him a fake sentiment of some importance and weight.
The sudden drop in the market, still there at 3:30 PM, prompted unusual activity levels on the Company's computers. Just in time, the Company Eye popped back up on the screen, fresh from having been repaired. It coldly recorded employees as they were scrambling to sell stock on E-Trade and contact their brokers. The email volume grew 400% and the work volume, lingering around 1% all week, hit a clean 0.
Dante stretched his legs under the uncomfortable desk. He gave some thought to another trip to the kitchen for yet another cup of coffee, but his backside had found quite a convenient position in the chair and it didn't feel like moving. Besides, since his former cubicle-mate Eric had left, Dante was trying to take his good advice and drink less coffee in the afternoons.
Not that he had nothing to do; in the last two months, after the new management took over the Company, the paperwork had increased ten times. He had to fill out reports every hour and send them to his supervisor, detailing exactly what he did since the last one. He had to fill out paper forms and then enter the same data manually into the electronic time sheet on his computer. He had to color-code a long, confusing Excel sheet he never quite understood. He had to sign his name on the Department sheet, the Company sheet, the Management sheet and the Engineering sheet. He had to take responsibilities for things he had never heard of, but which were mysteriously appearing as tasks assigned to him only to disappear in the next few minutes. There was no cheating possible either; his supervisor would immediately email him if he didn’t complete one of his Improbable duties.
At 4:00 PM, another memo from the senior management arrived with a crystalline sound in his Inbox. Since the new CEO had taken over, they were sending several urgent memos a day, mostly about the importance of saving 1 cent a minute by using a certain conference call option; about the absolute ban on Company-sponsored lunches during long meetings; about the strong reinforcement of a specific provision in the Company’s Code of Conduct – such as wearing see-through blouses at work; detailing with sadistic pleasure the punishments a bad worker had received; announcing at great lengths who got fired that day.
In the last few days, all the memos had been about the upcoming shareholders meeting, the first one the Company was to hold since it had started the process of becoming a public firm. The executives were all very excited about the soon-to-be IPO offering and Dante could understand why – they were all going to make millions of dollars in stock. With a sigh, Dante opened the email.
“Dear Shareholders”, it started. So now they’re calling us all shareholders, thought Dante with a sarcastic smile. It must be their way of getting the employees working even harder, in the hope that the IPO of the company will bring them a few shares too.
“The Speakers list has been changed by Mr. Rex, Vice-President of Voice and Sound. Please be informed that the following speakers will NOT be able to attend:”, continued the memo.
“Joachimo Bellincione”
“Jason Cacciaguida”
“Christian Portinari- -Guelph”
Dante’s mouth opened large, in shock. He remained in his chair, motionless. He did not know what to think. He was not even sure he was supposed to think. Just as he was trying to find justifications and explanations, Dante also felt a mix of anger and forgotten emotions hitting him like a fist in the gut; hot, cold, awakening and painful at the same time.
Right there, at the bottom of the speakers list, Dante had read his missing father's name.
*-*-*
My family's secret, heavy obsession is longevity. I believe it had started in 1600s, with my great-great-great-great uncle. He was an important man you might read about in today's history books, back home in Romania; he did some good things, and some silly things; he was brave and strong, and yet he couldn't resist a pretty lady's looks.
I am not sure how he began his discoveries; many stories are left untold in my family. We value secrecy and never let strangers see our real nature; we smile and we lie and we don't give answers; family gatherings are sheer displays of our newest conquests of non-truths and neat speech tricks to avoid and deceive. The only thing we give out openly, truthfully, proudly, is our age.
There hasn't been one death in my family since I was born, 33 years ago. Everybody is alive, grandparents, uncles and aunts. They all come together a couple of times a year and we take the same picture of the same smiling crowd. I am the last child born in the family; my parents are still holders of the honors and positions conferred by the miracle of my birth.
Long ago, my great-great-great-great uncle found a way to override Nature's cruel moods and blind strokes; to avoid being the "1 in 3" sick people - to avoid being a bad statistic. He was a passionate mathematician and he knew how to re-arrange the numbers; re-shuffle them to spell reversible paths; re-create and re-born new, strong numbers out of diseased and weak ones. I suspect that this is how he got started, by understanding the numbers; and then, by seeing them in broad day light all around him, controlling and confounding the Nature; and then, by illuminating his way slowly through their patterns, careful, sly, making mistakes and achieving knowledge.
He discovered the 2-2-9 combination when he was 42; a rare, hidden pattern he found in the dense, sudden fogs forming at the foot of the Carpathians. It was one of the few ancient spells left over in our world; very hard to see even with an experienced eye, it only lived in the shadow, in the dust, in the silent wind. Down in the cities, Nature was fighting with people; but there in the woods, in the fog, Nature was tender, timeless and undisturbed; it had a soft core, exposed and vulnerable, and it was willing to listen to a plea.
I don't know how he happened to be there that day, if he was traveling with his royal entourage from Bucharest to Iasi; I don't know what he was wearing, if he had a beard or not; the only picture of him I have ever seen, the one I found in the history books, is an approximate portrait in dull colors. But I know how he felt when he saw the pattern; I saw it in his memories and I know the excitement, the power, the enlightenment. We have all longed for that feeling all our lives; for a moment of peace and silence when you don't have to face the horrible noise of your body aging, the disgusting taste of your own cells dying on your tongue; when time disappears or just doesn't matter - when you're one with time.
It was not only the shadowed numbers that he saw; it was also their size, the way they were positioned in contrast to each other, how they shared a bemused communication channel, a familiar link. It was harmony to be learned from there; happiness, or at least contentment; a new angle to look at life and love.
My great-great-great-great uncle was not greedy. It didn’t cross his mind to play the numbers to gain wealth; besides, he was already wealthy and powerful. However, he had his weaknesses like everybody else; I know that he, at some point, abused the pattern. It could have been with his numerous mistresses; love renders itself beautifully to games of all sorts. It could have been that he asked too much of his physical body, too often; that the immortality he was achieving during the day paid for his nights of orgy; that maybe once or twice, in the swirl of passion, he got the numbers wrong.
His hands failed him first, two weeks before his horrible death. He could not feel anything through his palms, be it a soft skin or a burning wood; by evening, his arms joined the non-existence and hung heavily, immobile, from his shoulders. He should have stopped right then and re-analyze his algorithms; re-order the theorems and re-state the axioms; re-define his terms. But he did not realize that it was not a mere disease, but Nature coming to reclaim what was rightfully hers. He did not know who the enemy was at that time; a week later, when the royal doctor was preparing to cut away parts of his body in order to save his life, he finally understood the magnitude of the battle he was carrying.
He did not have any children of his own, so from his deathbed he called in his brother and, with a rugged voice, shared his precious knowledge. There is nothing in writing, he said. There was no time for that and, until then, he had never taken his gift seriously enough to believe it needed a legacy. But there was truth in the numbers around him; he could clearly see the sign of death in the patterns in his room, and the number of minutes he had left before transcending into the other, numberless dimensions.
My great-great-great-great uncle did not leave a lot of knowledge, but he left enough to get his brother started. It took a few generations to figure out four more hidden patterns of great use; to ease up the task of maneuvering the numbers into small pleasures; to keep Nature increasingly at bay.
"Well, Anna, if this story wasn't so morbid, it would be kind of erotic", Lou commented, getting up from the couch. "I wish I knew how your old uncle partied all night long with a bunch of beautiful young women."
"That art was lost on us too", I said. "Nobody in my family inherited his joy for life. In fact, being boring is a great way to drop off the radar and stay alive."
Lou walked to the kitchen, carrying the teacups and the empty cookie platter. It was evening in Gaithersburg and outside the window of my condo, the mystery of the night snuck in, painting fast, dark strings of numbers into the air.
*-*-*
Dante's manager had been appointed Chief of Nothingness a few months earlier. In the introductory meeting set in the Conference Room 4-125, he had showed up late and confused, had mumbled a few Thanks to unknown senior managers, and then had lied to all employees when he said his door will always be open. Shortly after, the door from his office firmly closed from the inside, never to be open again. Preserving the Nothingness did not involve people or work; it actually involved keeping them away for as long as possible.
From time to time, the Chief would send a solemn, serious email that said Nothing; it was a reminder of his important task and authority; the email was immediately re-sent to everyone by Dante's supervisor du jour, whose job was to explain the Chief's message and to add targeted, personalized Non-Meaning to it. His new supervisor, a hairless, pretty man with bright-white shirts, was perpetually unhappy and popping pills from an unmarked bottle. He had taken the job straight out of the Logical Business School and the Improbable workplace proved to be a very bad fit. His problem was that he was trying to see the big picture; to understand the Company; to discover the hidden corporate ladder, while doing his job correctly and timely. That was just the wrong premise. Dante could have told him that the Company was a live, breathing cosmic organism with an evolution path so complex that only the gods might have caught a glimpse of its whole organizational diagram; that Logic was only one of its myriad departments and definitely not a universally accepted answer in the upper management circles.
Dante did not have much respect for either his supervisor or his manager; but then, he did not have much respect for the human race in general. He had grown very isolated from the rest of the world, he suddenly realized. He had lost contact with old friends and never made new ones; had seen no reason to seek other people's company; had became so accustomed to avoiding adoring women, he had never given them a second look. But that Friday evening, well after closing hours, Dante was overwhelmed by a desperate desire for a friend.
He needed someone to talk to about the email he had intercepted; to speculate about the possibilities; to discuss his alternatives; he needed someone to explain himself to, to apologize for the years of neglect of the others. But mostly, he needed someone to talk to about his father.
Dante did not remember him at all; he was less than a year old when his father decided to get the heck out of there and set upon a new life. Dante had seen only one picture of the man, shown to him by a distant cousin who came to visit them when Dante was about 16. His father was very handsome, very tall and very well dressed in the picture. He was sitting at a long table, and smiling to the camera while his hand was protectively holding his wife’s shoulders. His eyes seemed honest and clear. Dante had looked at the picture for a long time, hoping to see the signs of booze abuse and the cigarette butts around his father – hoping for an explanation as simple as that -, but could not find any.
He didn’t think about his father much; but then he didn’t think about anything too much. He had no special inclination towards philosophy or speculation; he did not miss things he did not have and did not fantasize about what could have been. Still, as soon as he saw his father’s name in that Company memo, something cracked open inside of him. He could almost hear the noise. Dante had a feeling.
It was more than simple curiosity; it was a tight bunch of long-forgotten emotions and memories; the smell of fresh water at the pool when he was watching his school’s father-and-son contest, alone; the tears of his mother over old letters, when she thought she was alone; the longing after his uncle’s arms that hot summer at the farm, when his cousins were getting bear hugs from their father. And rising more strongly every minute for the first time in his apathetic life, Dante felt the anger.
He realized he hates his father with all his soul; but in the same time, he realized that his father had grown inside him to biblical proportions, untouchable and cold like the stone statue of the Commander. His anger had been like the Schrödinger’s kitten: it never existed until Dante actually saw it.
Feeling trapped, helpless and somehow guilty in his cubicle, Dante looked again at the memo. In a company with millions of employees, Dante realized that he only knew four people: his supervisor, his manager, Anna and Eric - whom he lost touch with some time ago. Everybody else around him was just a face with no name whom he'd greet every morning, avoiding their eyes. He had never talked or met with anyone outside of the Non-Negations department. For Heaven's sake, he didn't even know his cubicle neighbor's name.
"What's your name?" he yelled suddenly, jumping up and looking over the cubicle wall. "What's your name?"
A frightened swooshing noise came from the semi-darkness in the other cubicle; fast-paced, syncopated steps hurried out. For all Dante could tell, his neighbor could have been a big rat who had learned how to type.
Falling back in his chair, he weighed his options; it was imperative that he took some kind of action, as much as his inertia and disgust with people were telling him to stay put. But there were old, strong feelings inside him that he couldn't quite control; he had found a new drive- a motivation he had not felt before. He had to overcome his utter isolation; he had to learn to talk again; as much as he dreaded it, he had to communicate.
It was easy to talk with people, as far as he could remember. When he was a child, he used to go up to strangers and say 'Hi, I'm Dante. I'm four. Can you sing with me?' because he had liked singing since the day he was born. At the time, his favorite song was Rita Pavone's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - very appealing to his discerning musical ear. Some people would actually take him up on it and start singing along; it helped that he was a cute, curly-haired little boy with an irresistibly soft gap in his cheek.
With that, Dante swallowed the rest of the coffee from the cup and stood up. He had to start somewhere – and the only lead he had so far was the secretary who had sent the infamous memo. First thing Monday morning, he was going to call her and ask her, in a harsh and decisive manner, where his father was.
*-*-*
Officer Kampf was 43 years old, had two PhDs and a job that paid $6.56 an hour. These were the things that Officer Kampf had always had in his mind; every minute of the day, he was painfully conscious of himself, his age, his Ph.D.s and his hourly rate. He was exactly and precisely defined by these characteristics, like a simplistic drawing of a laughing God. He was nothing more and nothing else; once one knew these things about him, one knew Officer Kampf in his entirety.
Surrounded by dead silence, he stood in majesty at the upper gate of the Company’s highest floor; he guarded; he protected; he observed. He had learned a lot about the air and the heat on the floor; he had learned the timing and the intensity, the direction and the speed of particles around him; he had trained himself to count the nanoseconds and the millimeters of all movements.
There were four large screens in front of him; with a delicate maneuver of the electronic machineries at his desk, Officer Kampf could get a view almost anywhere on the floors below him. But he suspected that the images were made up; there was a glow of mystique to them. It was hard to believe that all that drama was unfolding down there; that people were spending hours arguing about strategies and campaigns; that some were crying in the bathrooms, that others were touching hands in the corners; that, like rats in a cruel labyrinth, they would pass one another without seeing each other, without understanding each other. Their world seemed so clear to Officer Kampf, and yet they blindly stumbled on all obstacles and hit all walls in their chaotic, irresponsible moves.
Nobody ever came to the highest floor of the building; there was nothing there but the large conference room 30-004, which was never used. The elevators didn’t run that high either, so he was even refused the entertainment of tormenting some lost yuppie who would mistakenly end up on his floor. To get to the thirtieth floor, one had to have special security clearance for the executive stairs; as far as Officer Kampf could tell, he was he only one holding such clearance.
Every morning, while slowly but determinedly stepping on each stair, 30 floors up, Officer Kampf thought about his age, his Ph.D.s and his salary. He did not think about it in anger; some ten years ago he had abandoned any scrap of feeling and chose to not feel anymore. It hadn't been a hard decision – it came naturally after he had finished his second Ph.D.; there was nothing more he wanted or cared to know about life, people, love or loss. He had let it go, all of it, easily and smoothly. He had stepped out of life's path and modestly, silently, he had moved into limbo.
And yet, in the last couple of weeks, Officer Kampf forgot to switch his buttons on the left-side monitor. The same image stood there for days and days. When he arrived in the morning, he was surprised to see it still there; he set to change it, but then mysteriously forgot about it by the time he left home. The image, black-and-white, with that electronic outer glow to it, displayed itself blatantly, unapologetically. Furthermore, it had started to follow him home.
Officer Kampf could not help watching it. He did not think of anything in particular while staring at it; or while dreaming it at night; or when it popped in his mind uninvited, as he was driving his old Toyota through Silver Spring. He could not remember when he first saw it, or what was so special about it that it would stay with him for so long. It was nothing more than a cubicle and an employee, one of the thousands Officer Kampf had monitored since he was working for the Company.
Even through the raw eye of the old camera, the employee looked young and beautiful; even through the gray static and even beyond the rough pixels, the man appeared so perfectly and evenly built that he didn’t seem real; and yet, to Officer Kampf, the young man stood as the one worthy person he had seen in a long time.
Officer Kampf had taken to spending his day standing two steps behind his usual post; coincidentally, it offered a better angle to watch the left-side monitor. Every so often, his eyes would linger a bit as the young man made small moves – drinking coffee, moving papers around. He had a routine of his own and Officer Kampf took it upon himself, as innocent amusement, to figure it out. There were three coffee breaks a day, at 9:00 AM, 11:30 AM and 3:00 PM. There was small chatter with a lady friend, whom for some reason Officer Kampf detested already. There was the morning reading of the Wall Street Journal, and then the confused and bored face after turning the last page. There was a lunch break, many times with the same lady friend. Otherwise, the young man would type into the computer all day, in the same position; occasionally, he would touch his short hair with his long, white fingers. Or he would flex his muscles when suddenly turning around. Or raise his blue, lovely eyes right into the camera and by pure coincidence look straight at Officer Kampf - like an invitation, like a prayer, like an offering.
That Friday evening, Officer Kampf noticed that the young man was sad; he stayed late and his beautiful eyes were wrinkled with unpleasant thoughts. Officer Kampf looked with a shade of interest but also with disappointment: was this young man to be thrown into the swirl of life, was he to be sucked alive into the likes of passion and suffering? Was he to become yet another insignificant drama in the forgettable history of the insignificant people? Officer Kampf could have guessed that the lady friend – first name Anna, last name Ionescu, employee ID: 13350 -- is somehow involved; for all he knew, she seemed like trouble.
Whatever it was, Officer Kampf understood that it was of the utmost importance; he felt the young man’s angst and pain and he even had an urge to help him, to tell him what he had learned about the world; to comfort him with chosen words, long, winding words he used to speak ages ago; to explain everything – from creation to murder, from dreams to realities; to rest his hand on the young man’s shoulder, in a touch of human love and care.
The thought aroused him unexpectedly and violently. A primal, deep lightening ripped through his abdomen, with heavenly pain. His longtime abstinent body awoke with no mercy and in a short moment regained its rank and importance in his life. Officer Kampf reached to the screen, craving the young man’s touch and closeness. Just as his fingers gently and eagerly followed the bodyline on the screen, the young man suddenly jumped off the chair and stuck his head close to the camera. “What’s your name?” Officer Kampf read on the mute lips. “What’s your name?”
In the miracle of being seen and felt through the impersonal camera, in the miracle of being addressed, of being acknowledged, Officer Kampf rose in a joyous, frustrated orgasm. It lingered in his flesh for seconds before sweetly disseminating through his whole body, in hot circles of divine glory. Incapable of thinking, Officer Kampf shut down the monitor in shame and love, to be dealt with later; inside his cube, Dante had fallen back into his chair, still not knowing the name of his cubicle neighbor.
CANTO II
Flowers shrug when I touch them. Trees bend in pain, in defense, when I reach for their fruit. I killed the entire grapevine in my grandparents’ garden when I was five by picking up its sweet, black grapes. I am the anti-matter to the earth’s flora; an unknown and therefore dangerous hybrid of human cells and inner Nature secrets, blended with ancient spells. I seem one of them and yet I do not grow and feel as they do.
I chose to live in sterile apartment buildings with a No Pets policy. I have a plastic plant in my living room and pictures of chickens in my kitchen. I’ve always liked animals but the fauna doesn’t like me any better either. When I was four, I took up the difficult but rewarding task of taking care of six small orphan chickens at my grandparents’ farm. They all died in separate, horrible accidents in less than a week. I suspect they have successfully managed to kill themselves out of my toxic love. They did not understand what I was and to them I must have been frightening as hell when I was petting them endlessly. It was probably as calming as it would be for a human being to be petted and loved by a dark, huge ghost they cannot relate to at any level.
Wise men spend years to become one with the Nature; I had to spend years to tear away from it. It was revealed to me the day I was born; the grass growing; the waves forming; the rain and the storm; I was one with them. I cried when the wind cried and I was hungry when the birds were. I screamed when giving birth and I died in struggles only to grow back, stronger. I was already dust before I had lived my first month on earth. There was no mask, no fairy tales, no beliefs in good and bad to protect me from Nature; I had to face it since the beginning.
My parents have conceived me in secrecy and fear, with the enlisted help of the village’s witch – my aunt Profira. She was the best of us when it came to slipping under the radar of life; her house, a mud cottage with one room and an atrium, was built in the shadows of the hills between Romania and Ukraine. She had found a narrow numeric pattern there – a closed eyelid upon a lazy patch of grass. Silently, she had built her house and brought her things in over the months. She rarely spoke; she awoke at night, old and scared, and checked the numbers to make sure the eye hadn't opened to see her. That she still had one more day to live, one more hour, one more minute. That Death had not reached that place just yet.
For nine months, my parents lived there in silence. The risks involved were large; over generations, my family had grown to be a thorn in the paw of natural law. Nature was on to us; we had become an unknown life form and therefore prone to be eliminated. It was not as if Nature was a conscious entity who hated us; Nature simply was, and any foreign corpuscle was to be attacked and subdued – for the survival of the greater organism.
Nobody is supposed to fool the numbers; there is only one Master of the numbers and he is one with Earth and the Universe. One cannot go on cheating on life because it simply doesn’t work for too long. One cannot have all the sweets and no bitterness; all light and no darkness; all love and no mistrust. Our ancestors simply have not negotiated the deal that way.
Having me was an act of defiance in a family that could hardly maintain its head count as it was. One more of us, especially one born into knowledge and truth, was an easy target. The danger was not that I was weak; the danger was that I could have been too strong. While my great-great-great-great uncle was an itch, I could have been a powerful cramp and therefore targeted for annihilation much faster. My parents though did what they had to do: produce an heir to give meaning to their lives and assure the continuity of the family through natural ways. They truly believed they could protect me and teach me all I needed to know. On the day of my birth, however, all hell broke loose.
It must have been the tension and anticipation in the house; my aunt cheerfully going about the business of preparing the holy water, the herbs and the spells for my arrival; my dad, knuckles white from pressure, holding my mom’s hand. It must have been the humanity, the tenderness, the normality they all felt when such a common miracle was finally about to happen to them. Or maybe they just forgot to check the numbers that morning; maybe, when my mom started to feel the pain, old numbers shifted in a natural regression and new numbers took their place around the hills; maybe, as the birds started to squeak in the old tree, Nature had already felt another life about to enter its realm and hurried to receive it in its palm.
I came out in my usual fast and organized manner, head first, serious and self-conscious, preoccupied not to cause pain or embarrass anyone. My dad, with tears of joy on his cheeks, took me in his arms. “Profira!” he called, “it’s a girl!” But there was no answer and when my dad turned around, he recognized the hideous face of his mistake written in bold new numbers around the window. My aunt was knocked out in the backyard, her heart stopped; the eyelid had opened with inquisitorial power; and in just a few moments, the biggest flood that the village has ever seen started from the suddenly anger waters of the Prut river.
“I gather you all got out all right”, Lou commented.
“Yeah”, I said. “My dad had a backup plan. He always does. There was another good path through the cornfield, and he carried my mom and me out. My aunt had died though – just before I was born.”
“And so, my first memory is the gray water of Prut flowing into the house, up my dad’s knees. Not a good greeting when you first arrive in the world.” I continued.
“Not that I believe any of this… ”, said Lou, “But you’re still alive. If Nature was after you, how come you managed to live 33 years?”
“I found my ways.” I said. “It’s not that bad once you blend into the asphalt civilization; you’re hard to track in the crowds. Besides, Nature has other problems except me and my pathetic life.”
“So, in a way, you won?” asked Lou.
I laughed hard, sarcastically. You’d think that he would have known by now. You’d think that he saw all those medical books in my bedroom, stashes after stashes of female anatomy pictures and charts of symptoms and temperatures. You’d think he would have understand by now, after two years of living and breathing together, that Nature had won all the important battles so far, and that I had given up on my destiny a long time ago.
“Just hold me”, I said, turning off the lights. He put his arms around me, warm, breezy, another misunderstood and loving ghost wandering the earth in disillusion and blind faith. Through the bedroom window, the moon looked upon me with pity.
*_*_*
Dante looked with emotion at his childhood home. Arlington was a much richer community nowadays, with all the dot-commers and AOL millionaires on a buying spree in Northern Virginia. His mom had kept the small house intact, almost as she purchased it 35 years ago from a Sears catalog.
Dante picked up the Saturday mail from the red rose-painted mailbox, smiling. His mother had a thing for roses. His childhood’s plates and cups were painted with roses in different stages of beauty; the dining room and the kitchen had rose-print curtains, bows and tablecloths. It was all a pinky-reddish flower boom.
His mother was in the small garden behind the house, planting seeds around the white fence. She was chatting with the next-door neighbor. A squirrel looked at Dante from the big tall tree in the backyard, and then ran out of view.
“Hi, Lucia!” Dante yelled, carefully stepping around the sprinkle.
They called each other by their first name; it was a deal they made 30 years ago, one of the several secret deals that they forged out while trying to survive poverty and adversity and had nobody else but each other to hold.
“Dante!” his mother exclaimed. “Oh, my darling, what a surprise!”
“Hello, Mr. Saccas!” Dante said, waiving to the neighbor. “How are you today?”
“Oh, just fine, just fine”, the neighbor answered; he was a skinny old man who looked just the same ever since Dante could remember. “Ah”, he added, “You look bellissimo, what a pleasure to see you. Your mamma was just talking about you, what a good job you have. Bravo, bravo, it’s a pleasure to see you.”
“Just stopped by to see my mom, sir”, Dante answered. “I just had a craving for those chocolate cookies she makes.”
Lucia looked at him, smiling.
“Let’s go inside, honey”, she said, “I’ll make you some tea.”
An hour later, while Dante finished his sixth cup of tea, he finally got the courage to start the questions.
“Lucia”, he said, “I need to talk to you about Dad.”
She lost her smile; “Dad” was not a subject of conversation in her house, and her son knew it well.
“I know”, Dante answered the silent accusation, “but something happened. I found Dad’s name on a list of speakers for my Company.”
“A list of what?” asked Lucia, suddenly cold and rational.
“Some speakers for some meeting”, Dante said. “Why? Who would do that? Why would he be on a list? It is driving me crazy, mom. What do you make of this?”
“What meeting?” she asked again in the same tone of voice.
“The stupid shareholder meeting next Monday”, Dante answered impatiently. “Does it matter?”
Lucia stood up slowly and went back to the kitchen. She washed the cups, then washed her hands carefully, again and again.
“Mom?” asked Dante, following her. “Does this mean he is alive? It has to mean at least that, right? Right?”
“I don’t know”, said Lucia. “I don’t know more about you father than Mr. Saccas next door does. I swear this is the truth.”
There was nothing he could hang on to. Not a small glimpse of hope, a clue. “You have to tell me about him, mom”, he said, frustrated. “All you’ve ever told me was his name. I need to know what he was like, where he worked, what he liked, why he left.”
Lucia sat down again, hands shaking. “It is very painful for me to talk about him, Dante”, she said. “Don’t you see how much pain that man has caused me? Why do you want to put me through this?”
Dante felt bad instantly; he had only thought about himself and had forgotten about her own feelings.
“I’m sorry”, he said mildly, holding her hand. “I don’t know why I came here to ask you about it. I mean, it’s a Company memo, it’s not like you can possibly know anything about it.”
“That’s right”, she answered. “I don’t know where he is or what has become of him, Dante. Maybe he is a speaker. Maybe he lives down the street. I don’t know and I don’t care to know. Do you understand me?”
He did not, but he pretended he did. He felt he had no right to bring back painful memories for her.
When he left, his mom waved him good bye from the front door and went back inside. Dante turned his head and, through the window, saw his mom on the phone. He smiled at her.
“You’re leaving already?” asked Mr. Saccas, still cutting weeds in the garden.
“Yes, I have to go”, answered Dante. “Nice weather today, huh?”
“Yes, indeed”, said Mr. Saccas. “You come back soon, okay?”
“Sure thing”, said Dante.
As he was getting into the car, Mr. Saccas hurried inside to answer the ringing phone.
*-*-*
My first distinct memory, which I have never disclosed to Dante, was one of a truck out of control heading toward me. I was 3 years old and I was standing at the foot of the hill on Main Street, in my hometown. I was there shopping with my grandmother; while she was busy buying the bread, I saw the friendly man from the donuts shop waving at me. I waved back; he smiled at me and secretly made an inviting gesture – there were fresh donuts baking and I was offered the first bite.
I did not read the numbers; at that age, the smell of fried donuts was very tempting to me; besides, I had figured out my hometown by then and it was safe almost all over. A small, industrial city in the north of the Carpathians Mountains, it was an oasis of steel and asphalt that had kept Nature at bay. The numbers were flat and boring; there was nothing new being born or changed; there was a big 4 hanging in front of the Police station that has not moved an inch since I can remember.
In a happy enthusiasm, which I lost a long time ago, I sprang in the directions of the donuts; as I was crossing the street, I saw the truck. My grandmother screamed first, followed by the bread storeowner and then by the other people in the market. The donuts man did not scream; he looked at me and it was then that I saw the evil pattern clearly mirroring in his eyes.
The truck was out of control; later, people told me the brakes did not hold and the driver was terrified. But I have seen the driver’s face – in those precious moments, all the numbers aligned and confessed to me; he was not scared. He was cold and determined, and he was no ordinary man; his lips were counting; his truck’s trajectory seemed random but I have actually seen it carefully following an 8-star path which ended at the donuts shop’s door. There was no mistake in my mind – I knew that I was the target.
I have played that scene in my mind many times. It awoke my extreme precision in navigating danger with nothing but instinct; to calculate trajectories and multiply ten-digit numbers in nanoseconds; always correctly, always consistently. It was that day when my whole power came out from inside my childish body and took over my life, never again to leave.
Because I just saw the solution with no effort; I saw the narrow gate I could escape through. As the truck wheezed past me, all I did was to move my foot one seventh of an inch and lose my equilibrium onto the 8-star pattern; it held me for a few moments, and it was all that I needed. My grandmother says that she saw me bending around the truck like a vine, tunneling it, filling out the gaps in the space that were available for my body to occupy without touching it.
But one more thing happened in that moment; I had been tested and I had now proven what I could do. I was a tumor on the normal, dying cycle of life; I was threatening the balance; I was to be destroyed. When the natural law acts, it is all-powerful; it has not only a second plan but a third plan and a fourth plan; it does not play mind-games and tricks; it is direct and true, as the keeper of life has to be. Nature saw that I was not easy to kill and saw that it might have to take its time to do so; but it also saw the opportunity to stop from repeating the same mistake it made when it let me be born into life.
As I regained my balance, one number changed slightly. I noticed it immediately and tried to move away from unstable, alive, unknown support. But I was not fast enough, and I felt it touching through my midriff as I was struggling to avoid it. It smoothly moved to form the forth pyramid, to take its place in the natural weight of things, leaving me crippled for life. My middle section never developed since; an eternal child inside, never to achieve maturity. I was isolated like a bad virus you cannot yet destroy, but you can contain.
I have never told this to my grandmother or anyone else in my family. They were so proud of me, of how I handled myself. They said I was very smart; but I wasn’t. It was not a matter of being smart, but a matter of knowing things without having to think about them. To my family, I am their best creation yet; their absolute pride and joy; and being a woman, a natural advantage already, just makes me more precious in their eyes. To this day, 30 years later, I could not bring myself to tell them that in fact I was defeated long ago, while being tempted with a freshly baked donut.
I was having lunch with Dante that Sunday and he seemed distracted and sad. He was usually content with himself and self-absorbed in his own frame of mind; in the year since we’ve become “office buddies”, I have never seen him so upset.
“What’s up?” I asked him. “Your idiotic supervisor giving you grief?”
“Nah”, he dismissed me with a gesture.
He had ordered the turkey hamburger with a side of broccoli instead of fries, which had the waitress wondering if Dante’s gay.
Dante was way too good looking for a straight man. With his short haircut, high cheeks, steel-blue eyes, square chin, and a slim but obviously muscular body, you would have thought he is a model. He wasn’t very smart either, which fooled people even more. I haven’t seen one person to believe him when he was introduced as being a computer engineer. I suspect they all thought he was a movie actor trying to hide his secret life.
However, Dante had no clue whatsoever on the effect he had on people. A true programmer at heart, he preferred the darkness and isolation of his cubicle to any human interaction. He was happiest when left alone; and could not figure out why he never was. The only thing he did to groom himself was to keep his hair really short (an influence from his uncle, a former Jarhead), shower each morning, and wear clean clothes. He was a bit too obsessed with cleanliness.
Even then, when we were having lunch, I could feel the other females in the room looking at him.
“Hey, there’s a cute chick smiling at you”, I told him, pointing to an artificial looking blonde with a bit of a mustache. “The best of the suburbs comes to this place”, I added, laughing.
“Whoa”, reacted Dante, not even turning his head.
Sipping from his coffee, Dante suddenly looked straight at me with a sharp expression. “Do you know, Anna,” he said, “what my first memory is?”
“My first memory”, he continued, “is a truck out of control heading toward me. I was 3 years old and I was standing at the foot of a hill, up in Mount Airy. My mom had taken me to visit a friend in the countryside and we had stopped for a short break to admire the hills and the forest.”
I looked back at him, sustaining his eyes. I did not see any danger; he was not channeling me or playing a game. His memory was genuine and the coincidence did nothing more than to reinforce that my belief that our destinies were somehow linked together.
“I remember the hills, the forest and the cows with big horns I had seen at a distance; ours was the only car we had encountered on the winding Clarksburg Road”, he continued.
His mom was wearing a white dress with red cherries design and was extremely emotional that day. She had hugged him and kissed him all day, and whispered sweet words in his young ears. But then, as they drove up route 355 and further from the city, she had relaxed and started to enjoy the surroundings. When she stopped the car to take a better look at the beautiful landscape around them, she was happy and at ease; she whisked Dante out from the car, in a laughing circle; then they sat, hand in hand, and looked upon the green valleys.
The truck appeared out of nowhere, with a frightening noise, smoke coming out its huge cabin. It made a short stop at the top of the hill, like a furious monster looking for prey. They turned around to see it speeding downhill, out of control, covering both lanes of the road in sweeping destruction. It was headed towards them; in a second, his mom jumped in front of Dante in a desperate attempt to protect him.
Time seemed to freeze; from behind his mom, Dante could not see the monster but he could hear the abominable noise getting closer. He fixed his eyes on the red cherries prettily painted on his mom’s dress; he thought of cherries and how they taste; he held to her dress, fearful, scared, reaching for her touch.
And then two strong arms took him and ran with him; in a confused, distorted vision, he followed the red cherries with his eyes; his mom was close. He screamed, loudly, but he could not hear himself; the truck passed somewhere above them, noise and all, and disappeared just as mysteriously as it had appeared, up the next hill and into the forest. Dante opened his eyes to find himself in the arms of Mr. Saccas, tucked under a small bridge; his mom was near them, shaking. She reached for him and held him tight, and he could finally embrace her and forget the monster.
“Oh, wow,” I said, “that’s quite a story. Where did Saccas came from?”
“It turns out he was going to the same friend we were going, and he saw the truck before we did”, said Dante. “He had enough time to get out of his car and sweep us both under the bridge, fortunately. We were very lucky he happened to be there.”
“So what else happened that day? I asked. Because I needed to know the whole story; I had a glimpse of a plot, a conspiracy or something like that, but I could not put my finger on it just yet.
“Nothing, really”, said Dante. “We spent the day in Mount Airy at this friend of my mom’s, a very nice lady. Then I fell asleep on the couch and when I woke up I was home in my bed.”
I didn’t want to say anything at that time. I ate my rice soup; I tried to cheer Dante up with office rumors about his supervisor being a transvestite; but in the back of my mind, I knew that someone was after him. That someone had planned to kill Dante that day, 30 years ago. That his mother and the convenient Saccas were somehow aware of it. If I knew something, it was survival – and I felt that Dante might need to learn a thing or two about it too.
“My name is Karen”, the waitress burst suddenly in an emotional voice, while serving the peach-flavored ice tea.
By the end of that lunch, three people – the waitress, the blonde and a middle-aged man with a kid – had asked Dante out for coffee. He refused each of them. “See, Anna”, he told me when we were finally outside, “that’s why I don’t go out much. You meet all sorts of freaks who want to talk to you and stuff.”
*-*-*
Dante came in Monday morning to find a voice mail message from his mother. “Dear”, she had said, “I’m sorry I was so upset yesterday. Why don’t you come by next weekend and we’ll talk about more pleasant things? I’ll put some chairs out on the porch. Please leave that memo alone; it won’t do you any good to pursue that. Okay? Now take care. Bye.” Dante shook his head; she could have called at home to apologize, instead of leaving him a message at the office. But he was not going to take her advice of dropping the memo investigation.
The secretary who wrote the speaker list memo lived in a cave on the dark side of Low Life Forms department. Her name was Victoria Queen and she was chewing gum when Dante shyly knocked at her door.
“What?” she barked.
“Hi”, Dante said, putting on the left-cheek gap smile. “My name is Dante Portinari-Guelph.”
“So?”, the secretary asked. “You’re from Sweaters? Tell them I’m not done yet. It’s been a bitchin’ week with all this freaking memos I gotta send. I’m doin’ my best, okay? They don’t have to send you here to punish me. I’m tryin’, okay?” And she pointed out to her feet.
Dante realized that her feet were moving under the desk, knitting something that looked like a wool sweater.
“Oh, wow”, he said, “you’re quite talented. How did you learn to do that?”
The secretary looked at him carefully. She had heard the legend of a sweet talker who one day might come by and release her from her duties. It was a slim chance that this young man was going to save her – but he was definitely the first sweet talker she had seen since she had been hired at the Company.
“Well, honey”, she said, “I’ll tell you my story ‘cause I like you and you should learn something from it. Like, read the fine print! Read the fine print!”
“Okay”, said Dante, fascinated by the toes’ dance under the desk.
“They hired me to send memos. I said: okay, sure, honey, no problemo. I can send some memos, sure. But then my second day on the job, my new boss comes in and installs this knitting station here. He says, he’s like: you gotta knit me sweaters, hon. And I’m, like, whoa! You know, I used to work at Hecht’s in Friendship Heights, okay? I mean, I don’t do manual work, okay? He goes, yeah, okay, ‘cause this is not manual. You gonna use your feet, so you don’t breach the agreement and the contract we signed. I’m like, I don’t remember anything of sweaters in my job duties, you know. And he laughs, and he’s like: well, next time read the fine print!”
“Oh, geez…” Dante exclaimed sympathetically. “How many sweaters do you have to knit?”
“One a day, hon. One a day. If I don’t finish the sweater I can’t go home, you know. I’m behind, like, about 47 sweaters already and I’ve only worked here for two months. I haven’t made it home in weeks.”
“Oh, God”, said Dante. “That can’t be right. You know, my mom has a neighbor who used to be a lawyer. I’ll ask him about this, because this doesn’t seem right, you know. They have to let you go home, at least. That’s just horrible.”