by B C Woodruff
As it turns out, it had been the curator, and one that had been very conscious of the global impact of paper waste, introducing laminated tickets that could be recycled internally. As it turns out, it had been the curator, and one that had been very conscious of the global impact of paper waste, introducing laminated tickets that could be recycled internally. Digital technology could have easily gone the extra step, but the curator had been quite proud of this practice and kept it until he retired the year before. Now, the museum’s crew had diminished to but three: the drunkard, Fidger; the guide, Cassie; and the janitor, Michelle. The occasional graduate student supplemented the museum’s staff, but the collection was so well-documented that few academics bothered to make the trip.
They ran by the replica of the Rosetta Stone without a second thought, and brushed just enough against the white sheet covering the mislabeled object to pull it halfway to the floor. A few feet ahead they barely heard the sound of the basket tumble to the ground.
Onward. Onward they ran, dashing past dioramas of Greek Olympics and mystery cults. They sprinted, perhaps unadvisedly, through an area with weapons and armour. They bounded through a short video display of a re-enactment of life in Ancient Greece interspersed with clips of Brad Pitt in the Troy movie.
One more doorway and finally, they arrived.
“Phew!” Laurel took in some air and pressed her hand up against the glass. “Made it.”
Adeline arrived a little later and with a surprisingly red face and heavy heaving, she needed a minute before she could look at the object hidden behind the glass, and contributed a hoarse (if appreciative) “Wow.”
“Yeah.”
Laurel pulled a hammer from her pocket, fresh from the toolbox in the garage.
“Here we go!” she cried, and with a swing...
The glass deflected the carpenter’s hammer without so much as a thunk to mark its passing. “Well?” Adeline shrugged.
“I’m trying, Addie! And besides which, I thought you were the athlete here.”
Adeline folded her arms. Laurel swung again.
Nothing. Again.
Nothing.
Something splintered off. How it sailed across the space like a cannonball reacting to the explosive force behind it. This was the petty anarchy that made glassmakers grimace and vandals smile. Polished to a shine, the glass grew dull as microfissures expanded enough to be seen by the human eye. Damage enough that lines were made to stream across its fragile surface.
Again.
Something.
Again and she crashed through the glass, falling into the display and catching herself on the object the glass had shielded. She was bleeding where her hands and arms had swept across the crystalline shards.
She burst into tears.
Adeline, looking on, joined her sister and tried to stop the bleeding by pressing on the areas that were now leaking red, driving the tiny shards further in and earning a few cuts of her own.
Alarms rang out.
They had been too slow.
“Are you –” Adeline had barely begun to ask when the hammer went up once more and came down with all the might a fourteen year old on a quest could muster on a jar that was thousands upon thousands of years old.
If she (or indeed anyone) could have read the Linear A written on the side, maybe her approach might have been less primitive. Perhaps she would have attempted to open the seal from the top.
This was not the case.
The hammer reflected off the surface and sent Laurel backwards into the waiting arms of the drunken (but tragically unrestrained) Fidger. “What in the blue blazes are you doing?” he asked, his voice stern and serious. His hands tightened instantly and then viciously around the vandal.
“I wake to some ropes ’round my arms and feet and this pounding headache to find some ruffians messing about!” He snorted. “Aw, you coulda at least been some of them older kids sneaking around for some nasty. That woulda been forgivable.” Laurel was white with fear, and Adeline looked ill.
“The police are on their way, girlies.” He stared Adeline down with a resentful gaze that melted into a disgusting, black-toothed grin. “You stay where yer at or your friend here’ll get some proper old-world punishing, y’ hear?” Adeline nodded.
“No– Addie, you have to open it! Remember the ledger!”
The old man’s final gift to the world had been very clear. With red lines and exclamation points around the top. It would have scared them if it hadn’t been so intriguing.
Adeline looked to the jar and back at the towering man holding her sister hostage.
“Don’t you dare.” Fidger shook his head.
“Ow!” Laurel squealed.
“Oh, puddin’, it won’t leave no mark but I can make things get a lot worse if you don’t tell your little ’complice here to stand down!” Adeline lurched forward.
“Now you done it!” Fidger’s vise-grip tightened and Laurel’s scream echoed through the entirety of the museum’s maze-like halls. Adeline’s arms were around the Jar. It was nearly her size (and she was tall for fifteen) and her hands struggled to reach the top. She felt the weight of fear and regret fill her, letting fingers swing around the rim, searching for anything to hold onto.
At first they found nothing.
“Do it!” Laurel yelled through the pain. Fidger threw her to the ground and stepped towards the tiny girl in his shadow.
Then, they did.
The pithos opened and out poured…
MODERN PHILOSOPHY
A Story About Nobody
Call me Nobody.
Most people do.
A bit about me so you can get the right visuals: I’m thirty-five, rather plain looking, but under my calm facade, I’m a jaded and scattered soul.
I’m already worn thin. Pathetic, really.
All in all, though, I feel like I’ve done a pretty decent job at getting as far away from the rat races to stop infecting others with my negative energies and pessimism. Only, in doing so (five years ago today), I came across something different and wonderful. In my attempts to escape the hardships of reality, I’ve entered, as an intellectual explorer, a distant archipelago that exists on the fringes of society. If you aspire to understand what I write here, you deserve to know that these places are real.
Perhaps you deserve to know that you are not alone.
Or maybe when you look back, you will see that I was only a herald of greater things, of our shared destiny of chaos and delight.
As I approached the social periphery, my worry curdled into sour anxiety. Like a gnome standing on the edge of a flat world lying in a deep fog, I saw nothing in the bleakness that extended outward beyond what I was told I should believe in. Instead, I felt gnawing thoughts of self-destruction beckoning me to an early grave.
I was prepared to be convinced to jump.
Have you ever felt used and abused?
Have you ever been used and abused?
It starts with the little lies, I’m told.
It starts with things like Santa Claus, and it’s punctuated by grandiose, unquantifiable things like dark matter and God and the promise that the future is going to be brighter than the present.
Now, in my depression, I thought to myself: Have I gone too far, become too indifferent to my fellow man? Have I lost touch with what grounds us to the Earth and to one another? What is it to be human – and can it be lost? Must we tear down the canvas of the world to see if anything lay behind it? Do we even dare?
Sometimes we don’t.
Take work.
I’m disgusted to the point of physical illness by the prospect of being held to a nine-to-five. I mean, what better encouragement is there to follow up with a cinq-à-sept and perhaps a few more glasses to still the mind and dull the senses?
To make you feel alive again?
If you ever were before.
I used to live for the workweek and dream about the weekend and vacation plans. I used to live in the tomorrow a
nd the days after that. I couldn’t appreciate the present.
Yeah, I was stupid back then.
Things make more sense now than they ever did before.
I like to think of it in abstract terms.
As tempting as it might be to believe otherwise, we are gestalt creatures – biologically and psychologically – and what makes up the command centre of our consciousness is sometimes easier to understand as an extensive network – not unlike your own web of friends and family – that unites the personas and phenomena that comprise an identity. It’s busier up there than you think.
Let’s take a look at my biopsychology as I like to describe it. Let’s start with a welcomed newcomer:
My Inner Reality: The Apothecary – Arata
After what happened to… Well, we’ll get there. Finding myself in dire need of intellectual and emotional balance, I convened a council of personified psychological states to assist me when I feel too far detached from normalcy.
Near the top of this imaginary inner sanctum and self-developed psyche-confidants is the venerable Doctor. Oh, I know he’s not really a doctor. He’s just a figment that helps sort my thoughts. A fact checker. A pencil pusher. A bureaucrat from one end of his governing neurons to the other.
Just a guy who I pretend likes to pressure me into drinking and other tempting debaucheries. A reflection of some strange place where my mind goes when reality becomes too… real.
He’s someone I can argue with and feel validated for winning against.
I’m weird like that.
His name is Shinji Arata and he’s Japanese. I don’t know why, exactly. That’s just how I’ve always pictured him since he manifested. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I feel like I can see what he’s doing: organizing papers and walking through a large, aseptically-white office filled with hundreds of like-dressed men and women, silently going about their days, lost in their tasks and compelled by some near-instinctual drive that only makes sense to them – a reason to eke out their meagre existences.
Doing as they are told.
Obeying some corporate higher calling.
Wearing out and losing themselves to the machinations and the Grand Human Automation Project (GHAP*).
Nah, not really, I just made that up.
Whatever. It’s a welcome refuge from the life I live, even if it’s a little unnerving how real my mind wants to make it all seem. The power of the imagination is our only true weapon against time and space, boredom and peace, love and hate.
Arata is ordered. He’s well-mannered and deadly serious in his commitment to the job. Nothing sways him from his missions. I like to imagine him in slacks and wearing a white shirt and a tie that’s just a few tones off from the standard black colour – an exhilarating (albeit subtle) rebellion that differentiates him from the others there. It’s the only personality he is allowed, or allows himself. (I’m never quite sure which.) His fellow drones take this stab at individuality as a threat, and as a result observe him with critical, judgmental eyes. Arata relishes the attention, confident they’ll never understand how it validates his choices.
In the morning, my evening, I close my eyes and watch as if through his eyes as he hangs his just-black and a bit blue jacket on a chrome hanger and hooks it to the back of his door. He sits at his desk, data filtering in from my mind to be sorted, pouring out through a mechanism something like a printer. There are other machines there, sure, but they’re just cosmetic. Arata works for me and he knows it.
He walks slowly through the office while he collates the most important concepts he’s collected to be further analysed down the line. Those tiny strides are not done because he is tired or old; instead, it’s a product of patient thoroughness. He conserves his energy. He makes himself blend into time and space like black ice on a mountain highway. Like the tide eroding the side of a mountain. He doesn’t know that I follow him through these workaday motions in any formal sense, and yet he sorts and suggests and expresses his fears and concerns in a succinct and simple way as if he did. We get along quite well in this respect. This is true even if sometimes I don’t quite understand where he gets his conclusions from or how to apply his findings.
Language barrier, probably.
Heh.
Arata, at an automated leisure for which he is known, moves through clogged arteries, analyzing cellular decay, dust in my mind, sore muscles and even recently hurt feelings, then he logs down everything in a ledger that in turn goes into a report on his computer. Everything exists in written and digital format – such is the nature of the bureaucratic system. Sending along the information as his training has specified him to do, he returns to his office and continues his task.
This breakdown of my breaking down covers the basic physical ailments and psychological neuroses that life burdens me with. He usually arrives at the same short-term prescription. He tries to tell me that I’m Normal. Capital-N.
Only… sometimes his advice looks like a fractal of cups and glasses with fine, expensive liquid swimming in clear, clean and shining crystal and it gets worse and more vivid every time I find myself in a depressive spiral. I can feel him insisting that I exceed the recommended dosage for ever-stronger and more liver demanding cure-alls. How advice can taste like fire, I’ll never know, but there you have it.
I used to be quite the drunk.
But I can’t listen to him anymore.
He’s a sick and twisted bastard who, during his off-hours, will sit around and soak up the guilt I feel like a sponge, surviving on the nourishment the angst offers – and then he heads home to his little apartment and sits awake at night, doing unpaid overtime for a boss that probably hates him. We lose our connection in these moments, as if he needs a vacation from me as much as I do from him.
Sometimes, before he goes home, I like to send him out to do karaoke or, if he’s lucky, to his family’s old home in the countryside, the only maintained building in an abandoned village that was almost entirely swallowed up by the Japanese economic crash a few decades ago.
He vanishes for the duration and we get much-needed time apart.
I’m not crazy.
I don’t drink either.
Not anymore.
I’m just bored.
Looking Back: Who I Was – and What I Wasn’t
I worked at a university for four years after graduating from a specialized degree program that yielded few real world opportunities. Details don’t really matter, and I’m not about to advertise. Experience is what matters. In my time there, I watched mind after mind get warped into a shape that supports the sick orthodoxy of our age.
A way of thinking that insists, time after time after time, that the exploration of new paradigms or the development of new ideas and concepts is wrong.
Unless, of course, you do it their way.
I sat in my office and blanketed my vision with thoughts of elsewhere as the time passed and became the past. I would sit and I would pretend that I could agree with the way things were.
Every time you lie to yourself, that you deny the manifest truth, you lose a little bit of time. Not at the end, or close to the end – rather, you lose time from important experiences that have occurred… or will.
Isn’t that a scary thought?
Right?
I even welcomed the opportunity to listen to others complain to me about frivolous things like tuition costs, the state of the world, politics, the promise of youth, the power of the 1%, and a thousand other irrelevancies that swept aside the memories that made me – like the first person I loved and how it all ended.
No, that’s not quite right.
I guess I only pretended to listen.
I was lying to these mouthpieces as much as I was lying to myself.
As they spoke, I let myself be carried away on the financial rollercoster (get it?) as I envisioned little boats filled to the gunwales with their tuition destined for the educompanies’ vast storehouses, growing the wealth of the aristocracy.
; Then I made the dream mine, and watched them burn – tiny Viking funerals for their financial futures. How drôle.
ShapeI shrugged, wondering how many of them knew that the more time they spent in my office, the more their funds dissolved and vanished into a system of education that operates far more like a manufacturing plant than it does a think-tank or a Platonic symposium of knowledge.
Maybe this isn’t everyone’s experience, but it was mine.
I sat behind a desk, like my inner Arata, and absorbed the life-altering energies of abandoned dreams and forgotten ideas. Sometimes, in the deep of night when the hallways were clear of shuffling feet, sighs, and sweaty armpits, I would take my five wheeled leather chair and ride it from one side of my department to the other with a broom as my oar and… pretend.
Have we all forgotten how to pretend?
Anyway, this is me.
Now, I work down at the Alternative Comedy Club on Some Street. You won’t find a sign there. You won’t find anything to give you the idea that there’s something nefarious or revolutionary happening behind the peeled-purple-paint of what is mistakenly called the English door. Ah, yes, The Door. It’s a fun story, so
I’ll tell it.
Side story: The English Door – Pimm’s Definition
The owner, Pimm, likes to tell the story, so pretend you haven’t heard it if it comes up casually in conversation. As far as it goes, his father, a millwright in an area that he will only ever call the Old Country, bought the door when he was traveling through the United Kingdom prior to the big move to North America.
‘That’s why it’s an English door’.
And, to those who dare correct him by suggesting it is, in fact, a French door, be wary lest you join the long and storied list of banned patrons. If he’s feeling particularly kind, you’ll only receive a warning but your reputation and credibility will carry that tainted mark forever. Pimm can do that. Don’t test him.