Revolution in the Underground

by Michaels, S. J.

  Though Ember visited the ground frequently, he never ventured off into the deep forest. The forest was an unusually sentimental place for Ember—each visit seemed to awaken a new dormant and darkly nostalgic memory of his mother and father. When he was eight years old he watched his parents sail down the river into parts unknown. He remembered the confusion he had when they left and the sadness everyone felt when they did not return. Ever since then, Ember held a deep desire to care for and protect his younger sister—a desire that stemmed as much from his obligatory sense of chivalrous responsibility as it did his supposed promise to his departing parents.

  In fact, of all the strange memories Ember had that day, the promise to his parents was the one he was most uncertain about. It was quite possible, he believed, that he had concocted the promise as a way to subconsciously cope with his grief. His grandfather had repeated the story to him so many times that Ember also considered the possibility that his grandfather completely invented it. He knew such a fabrication would be out of character—Azure was a wise and proud man that valued honesty above all else—but the thought of an inexplicable secret remained tantalizingly persistent. Ember had considered all possible motivations, from the mundane to the scandalous—a white lie to contain his sense for adventure, protect him from the forest’s danger, and ensure his sister’s perpetual companionship, or perhaps a deceitful fiction designed to cover up a grave secret and employed to control. Ember had dreamt about the promise so often that he couldn’t help but feel that even if it were a lie, it had, to some capacity, become a reality.

  A strong wind shook the ladders above and below the balcony and woke Ember from his pensive stupor. He thrashed his head violently from side to side in an attempt to break his trance-like stare and made his way to the Falls.

  ***

  Ember arrived to the sounds of his contemporaries playing.

  “Well if it isn’t the famous Ember Oaks,” one of the younger boys called out. “I’m surprised you found the time to come out.”

  “Ya, thought for sure you would rather talk to your trees than spend some time with your friends,” chimed another.

  “Come on guys, be a-nice to the poor fellow. He’s a-got his a-Generalized Eval. today.”

  Ember stripped down to his underwear and cannon-balled into the cold water, trying as hard as possible to splash his friends. Ember had a disparate group of friends: ranging from 15 to 22 years of age, bookish to athletic, and normal to, well, Onyx. Since there were no formal schools or organized athletic associations—though there were special places devoted to both—most friends were met through random encounters. A “friend,” in the Erosan sense of the word, was merely an individual who was encountered more than would be expected by sheer probability alone. The conventional definition of “friendship” would be meaningless since Erosa was small enough and the people friendly enough that nearly everyone knew and liked one another.

  “Are you worried?” one friend teased. “It’d look awfully bad if the grandson of the great Azure failed to pass his Evaluation.”

  “Dude, don’t freak him out. If Onyx could pass then I’m pretty sure a moderately intelligent bird, let alone Ember, could pass as well.” The boys laughed before looking over to Onyx to see whether or not he was offended.

  “Actually,” Onyx said honestly, “birds are remarkably intelligent creatures. They have complex social orders and are even capable of making tools.”

  “So what you’re saying is that we shouldn’t insult birds by comparing them to the likes of you.” The boys laughed and splashed each other with water playfully.

  “No, all I’m a-saying is that birds are quite remarkable creatures. They have more efficient respiratory and excretory systems, and when it comes to fidelity they have humans beat by a mile. D’you know that most birds are monogamous?” Onyx moved his hands about in a confusing manner as if he could somehow explain the term with hand gestures. He always chose the worst terms to gesticulate.

  Ember looked at Onyx and nodded approvingly. There was something Onyx had that was absent in the others. He might not have been Ember’s brightest friend, but he had a unique sense of intellectual curiosity. Most people in Erosa seemed content to live their quiet and perfect lives. They had no need for questions because they had no thirst for knowledge. They were complacent with life’s offerings and had no need to ask for more. Not Onyx. Onyx was flawed… deeply flawed… but in a way, it was his imperfections that made him more perfect than the others. They might have been happier, but Onyx was more alive, and Ember knew it. They can splash all they want, Ember thought to himself, but only Onyx will ever make a ripple.

  “Whatever you say Dude.”

  “Hey, did you guys hear about Rouge’s Evaluation?”

  “No, what happened?” they all asked almost in unison.

  “When she got the final question, she completely froze. I don’t remember the question they asked her, but it was something really easy… and she completely panicked. She couldn’t get any words out. Apparently she started crying and then ran away before she was dismissed!”

  “What, really?!”

  “What was the question?”

  “I told you, I don’t remember.”

  “Hey Ember, don’t you like Rouge? She’s kinda cute”

  Ember’s eyes were closed and although all but his nose was submerged in the water, he could tell by the ensuing silence that someone had asked him a question. Not knowing what question was asked, he simply shrugged and waited until they resumed their chatter.

  “I don’t get it, what is even the purpose of the Evaluation,” inquired one of the younger boys.

  “They do it so they can tell whether or not you have enough common sense to take on a particular duty or begin a certain apprenticeship.”

  “No,” cried another, “it’s all just games the Elders play in order to unite everyone under a shared experience.”

  “What happens if you don’t pass?” the youngest boy asked.

  “Everyone in town makes fun of you for the rest of your life, and you have to wait a full year just to be evaluated again!”

  “Don’t listen to him,” another person said honestly, “he’s just yanking your chain. Most people pass their first time but it all depends on what you want to go into. If you want to go into food production then they’ll probably ask you easy things like, ‘is this mushroom poisonous’ or ‘when is such and such ripe?’ Easy stuff your Mom or Dad probably taught you when you were young. If you want to be an engineer, like me, they’ll give you hypothetical situations… like whether or not a particular arrangement of structures will support a given cluster of huts, or how you can repair a water mill if a something gets jammed in such and such. They just wanna make sure that you can do your job competently.”

  “What’s the big deal if you fail? Sounds like you get another year to relax and do nothing. Sounds like a good deal to me!” All of the boys laughed.

  Ember continued to drift in the water on his back. He slowly opened his eyes and looked at the dense foliage of the towering canopy. The Falls was a truly unique place, it had a little bit of everything: water, rocks, trees and sky. It was essentially a large precipice with a large basin carved out. Presumably the basin formed after thousands of years of weathering and erosion by the waterfall above it, but the near perfect location had caused some people to speculate that it was intentionally constructed sometime in the distant past. Unlike the other ridges in Erosa, the Falls was not well developed. There were almost no huts around it and there were only two bridges connecting it to the rest of Erosa—one of which was so dilapidated, it was hardly passable.

  Ember gazed at some of the animals in the overlying branches. He saw a pair of monkeys sharing fruit and wondered what they thought of the humans gathering below. The sun’s rays peered between the branches but were not yet sharp enough to hurt his eyes. As he floated through the water it occurred to him that he hadn’t said a single word since arriving. His friends’ chatter
ing sounded like garbled murmuring below the water, as incoherent and as rhythmic as the hum of nature. He closed his eyes again and tried to think about how far above the ground he was floating. He thought about how the water would soon join the very same river that carried his mother and father off into the distance many years prior. He dipped his nose beneath the water and pretended like he didn’t exist. When he came up to breathe, he imagined how the thin film of water slowly and smoothly fell from his face. He wiped down his wet hair, which plastered neatly to one side.

  Ember’s mind tried to make sense of the colors that were dancing across his eyelids. The inside of his eyelids looked like a strangely occupied and uniquely heterogeneous landscape—composed of innumerable transient dots that seemed to flit into and out of existence. He tried to focus on one of the dots. He tried to make sense of the images they formed. He tried to describe what he saw. But like the forest and the trees, he was unsuccessful.

  He thought about Rouge. He had actually heard about her catastrophic Evaluation a few hours after it had happened. His sister told him.

  Ember’s sister, Maggie, always seemed to be at the right place at the right time. She was always up-to-date about the latest happenings in Erosa and was never shy about sharing the latest gossip. Ember did not know why she took so much joy in such things, but he suspected it resembled his own desire for adventure and excitement—a different manifestation of a similar longing. Though she was not the type to revel in others’ misfortunes, she couldn’t help but get excited at the slightest signs of imperfection.

  In this sense, Ember was no different. He liked the thought of Rogue crying—though he did not like the thought of liking the thought. He imagined the tears slowly rolling down her rosy cheeks as she desperately tried to mutter some semblance of words. How mortified she must have felt, yet how alive! The passion, the build, the height, the fall, the despair—it was beautiful. The raw emotion. The imperfection. If only my friends knew, Ember thought to himself. If only people knew how I felt. What would they think of me if they knew how I wanted to lick her tears and caress her face? How I long to hold and comfort her—how I long to tell her that everything is okay, knowing full well that everything isn’t. Talk all night about things that wouldn’t be and could never be. To talk about mistakes and then pretend they never happened. To hope against all reason that things would get better… and then… fall down again. To hope that one day things would be great, without it never actually being great. All would not be lost, because we would always have each other and always hope would remain. They would call me crazy… but maybe that’s what I am.

  Often times Ember was happier inside his little overly dramatic world. When he closed his eyes nothing else in the world besides his own thoughts seemed to matter. It was his own special place that no one, not even Maggie, knew about. Some days Ember would close his eyes for hours at a time—building entire worlds and constructing complete realities.

  There was a part within his brain that deeply believed in the reality of these worlds. Even while in his romantic revelries he knew their existence had to take on a different form—they did not and could not exist in the same sense that Erosa existed. Several times, during his waking hours, Ember had tried to justify the existence of his worlds. He would draw upon numerous metaphysical arguments, call into question the notion of a transcendent reality and certainty, and throw around words like “subjective” and “ambiguity.” Ember wasn’t afraid of believing in his fantasies, but no matter how detailed his arguments would become, he could never get himself to truly believe in their reality—not while his eyes were open. Though he was prepared to accept all the philosophical consequences of his various lines of reasoning—some of which were considerable—he could never truly convince himself. When his eyes were opened, not even he could fool himself. Ember figured that it was his body’s natural defense mechanism to prevent his fantasies from colliding with the real world. If there was one thing he could count on, it was that the light would sterilize everything.

  As Ember opened his eyes, his fantasies vaporized. Suddenly he knew just how short lived Rouge’s mortification was. He knew that she, just hours after enduring such great humiliation, was relaxing and giggling with her friends. He knew that she would hardly spend more than half an hour in the ensuing months recollecting about the event. It was nothing to her. She did not really care and he did not really love her. He loved the thought of loving her, but he did not love her.

  Ember’s body had drifted over to the waterfall. He let the water pound on his body and bury him beneath its surface. When he popped his head back out of the water, he saw the girls walking together across the bridge.

  “There they are!” one of the guys shouted.

  “What’cha all doing?” one of the more confident girls yelled, presumably speaking on behalf of her group.

  “Come on in! The water’s great!”

  Ember dipped his mouth below the water. He enjoyed the feeling of its surface against his upper lips.

  “But we didn’t bring our bathing suits!” the same girl replied, again speaking for the group.

  “Oh, that’s okay!” one of the older guys responded, thinking he was clever. A few of the girls put their fingers over their lips—actions that succeeded more in seducing than in expressing shock.

  Coquettish playfulness was the norm for young adults. In fact, behaviorally speaking, most Erosans never really matured. For the average Erosan, life is composed of three phases: pre-pubescence, adolescence, and near-death. Once the insecurity and angst of the early teenage years passed, the average Erosan would settle into a care-free and jovial manner that would change little throughout the rest of his or her life. Erosans didn’t seem to age until they reached their mid-sixties, at which point they seemed to age all at once. The maturation process occurred discretely as opposed to gradually: after one takes on the responsibility of a job, and after one reproduces. Nonetheless, it was not uncommon to see a married man, or a married woman with children, harmlessly flirting with other people. For Erosans, even the older ones, life was a game meant to be enjoyed. Only the Elders and Ember adopted serious airs.

  Ember scanned the flirtatious crowd for his sister. He knew that she was there. Maggie was always there. Any time there was anything worth doing or talking about, she was close by.

  “We had other plans,” a girl said coyly.

  “We were thinking that maybe we could include you guys in them,” the confident girl said again.

  One-by-one the guys left to join the girls. Only Onyx asked Ember whether or not it was okay if he left. Other than a few exchanges of pleasantries and a couple departing “Good luck’s,” all was quiet. Ember watched as the guys and girls walked across the bridge.

  Chapter 2: Not My Paradise

  Maggie pushed her way past the girls who were running in the opposite direction. The boys, in hot-pursuit, bottle-necked at the entrance of the bridge. A few of the girls ran further up ahead, while others remained behind to watch the spectacle. Some of the boys stammered clumsily over the wooden rungs. One of the younger boys fell and was nearly stampeded. Maggie hugged the rope railing and slowly sidestepped her way through the mass of boys.

  Amongst all the chaos and confusion, none of the guys noticed her. Owing in no small part to her beauty, playful personality, and general knowledge of Erosan happenings, Maggie was easily one of the most popular girls in Erosa, and had the guys noticed her passing, many would’ve stopped dead in their tracks and followed her. Maggie was glad no one followed her because today she wasn’t interested in little games; she was interested in her brother.

  She walked over to the water and scanned it for signs of life. Near the waterfall she spotted a nose just above the water and instantly recognized it as Ember’s.

  “Ember, get up! You know I can see you!” she shouted. At first there were no movements, but slowly the water started to stir. A head appeared.

  “Hi-ya,” he answered, knowing full well that she wa
nted him to come out of the water.

  “Meet me on the tree branch?” she asked through inflection. He was quiet. Maggie found the sight funny: Ember’s ostensibly bodiless head in the distance, innocently popped up against the backdrop of the placid water, gentle waterfall, and ridge walls. She chuckled discreetly. He blinked a few times and then dipped his head under the water again.

  “Come on!” she said between laughs. She knelt down and splashed the water playfully with her hand. She imagined Ember smiling underneath the water, though she knew he probably wasn’t. “I know you’re there!” His head popped up again, but this time more slowly. “Meet me on the tree branch, ok?”

  “Why?” he asked with more than a touch of indifference.

  She frowned, tipped her head to the side, and then turned away and headed to a nearby tree. Ember lifted his arm and skidded the tips of his fingers against the smooth surface of the water. He slowly breast-stroked to the edge of the basin, as if he had all the time in the world. He put on his shirt and joined his sister on a sturdy branch of a tall, nearby tree.

  Climbing trees and balancing on branches were activities that nearly all Erosans mastered at young ages. Though they were known to be dangerous and though injuries occurred from time to time, it was such a part of daily life that hardly anyone feared it. Erosans, as a whole, were quite adept at these activities. In fact, the last time someone fell from a tree and got seriously injured, Ember was 2 years old and Maggie wasn’t even born. Usually, if one slipped and fell, there were enough nearby branches or ropes to break the fall. This particular branch, however, was dangerous because it hung over the forest floor beyond any major town structure. To make matters worse, the branch was a “loner”—Erosan speak for a branch around which there were no other major branches. “Loners” were dangerous because if one fell from them, one would not stop until one hit the ground. The branch upon which Maggie was perched was a particularly tenuous “loner,” and she liked it for precisely that reason.