“I don’t want that,” I said. “I want Payton to care about me. Not just to use me up and toss me away.”
“That boy from the circus,” said Jabari. “He was no good. I warned you.” He whispered something to Anansi, then smiled. “You shouldn’t take on a guide if you don’t want their guidance.”
“What do I do?” I said. “I’m in love. I’m still in love. It hurts so much.”
“This isn’t a place for love,” said Jabari. “This is a place for change. A place for dreams. A place for solitude. A place for all of us to live our fantasies. His fantasies aren’t your fantasies, and they never will be.”
“Maybe I could go to space,” I said. “Learn to pilot one of those ships.”
Jabari shook his head. Anansi gave a shrill yip, wiggling his legs on Jabari’s hand. “He’s right,” said Jabari. “You haven’t learned. You’ve been in this place, but you haven’t been of it. It’s not just the ships and the space. It’s the sex. It’s the freedom. It’s the girl in every port. He wants you, but only a little of you, and only for a time. You’re asking him to give up his dreams to live yours instead. You can’t ask someone to do that. Not in here.”
“That’s what love’s about,” I said. “Compromise. Sacrifice. Each of you giving up something to be with the other.”
“And that’s why there’s no love in here,” said Jabari. “Not really. Because we have too much. And when you have too much, it’s all the more a sacrifice to give it up. Out there, you have limits. Out there, nobody lives their dreams. In here, you live any dream you want, whenever you want. You flit from fantasy to fantasy. And from friend to friend, and lover to lover. I’ve never heard of a marriage that lasted. I’ve never heard of a friendship that didn’t come to an end. Your dreams change. Other fantasies tempt you. And when the pull’s too great, you both go your separate ways. Two selves, two sets of dreams. It can’t be any other way.”
I saw everything then.
I saw why the Elders were so hesitant to change the way we lived. I saw why they let us spend our Rumspringa in here, just for a few years. I saw why they called this place the Devil’s Playground. I saw the choice, the sacrifice the English made, the price they paid for their dreams.
And I saw why I couldn’t stay.
Not if I wanted a family. Not if I wanted love.
I left the next day. I had the butler send out a call to the Caretakers, and a few hours later I woke up. Back to the Amish. Back to my family. Back to my life, and back to the Church. I met your Daed and I married him. Our parents chipped in and bought us a farm. The whole community helped us build our house. And we had our sons and our daughters. We had you. And then I failed you. I didn’t warn you. I let you come in here.
It’s been years now. And still you haven’t come out.
What was I to do, my Esther? My little girl. The joy of my life, and now my greatest pain. I wonder what you’re doing in there. I think about it every day. Are you lost to the drugs? Are you chasing false love? Have you found a fantasy of your own? And will you ever see through the dreamy haze and come back to us? To your brothers, your sisters, your Daed?
To me?
I wish this place didn’t exist. It’s torn us all apart. Your family on the outside. And inside that coffin the wicked temptations you’ve given in to. The English used to mock us. They made fun of our buggies, our clothes, our fashions. They called us backward, called us relics, called us kooks.
We weren’t backward. We were cautious.
We didn’t just change for the sake of it. We knew some change is good, and some change is dangerous. The English went willy-nilly into any new thing they could invent. They’d make some contraption, and they’d marvel at it, and they’d all start using it without even thinking about the consequences. We were always different. Slower to change, but more deliberate about it. The Elders always took their time with any new thing before letting the community start using it. To think about what it would to us. To our families, and to our way of life.
That’s the funny thing, you know?
They used to say we were the ones who were dying away. That we were relics, and that one day we’d be washed away with the times.
They’re the ones who used to say that. And now we’re the only ones left. The only ones growing, the only ones living.
We all miss you. Your Daed still loves you. I know he does. He doesn’t talk about you. He won’t even let us mention your name. But he still loves you.
He keeps it in his wallet. A photo of you when you were just four years old. He takes it out sometimes when he thinks he’s alone. I’ve caught him, but I pretend I don’t see. I know he loves you. And I know how much it hurts him to be apart. How much it hurt him to lose his daughter.
I hate the English for what they’ve done. I shouldn’t have hatred in my heart, but I do. I sin, and I guess we all do sometimes. I hate that they built this place. I hate that they love the world they created for themselves more than the world God created for them. I hate that they made a Hell and called it a Heaven. I hate that they took you from me.
I hate that they force us to take care of them, to keep their machines working so they can sin in peace. None of them want to live out here anymore, but they don’t have to. They have enough of our children in there with them. They know there’ll always be people like me. My daughter their hostage. I have to care for them. I have to because I care for you.
I have to be here. I have to see you. I have to have hope. I have to know.
Where are you my Esther?
And will you ever come back to me?
SMARTEST GUY IN THE ROOM
Gum.
There wasn’t anything I hated more than cleaning off the gum. Stuck to the bottom of the desks like it was welded on, and I was the one who had to scrape it off. It irked, you know? These kids, they paid so much to go there. A hundred grand, two hundred grand, even more sometimes. The best university in the country, and they acted like a bunch of animals. And I was the guy who had to clean up all of their shit.
I was just the janitor. Just some dumb schmuck nobody ever paid attention to. And there I was, sitting in the back of a lecture hall at Harvard, waiting for the little bastards to finish their class so I could mop their floor, polish their chairs, and wipe their chalkboard clean.
There I was, the janitor. And I was the smartest guy in the room.
It was some intro History class for freshmen. The professor was standing in front of the whiteboard, a bored look on his face, a question scrawled in marker behind him: “When was the Declaration of Independence signed?” And all he was getting from his students were the dull stares of a bunch of drooling mouth breathers.
1776.
1776.
I kept willing the answer into their heads. Somebody. Anybody! There were a hundred kids in the room and not a single one of them knew. They were all on their phones, doing whatever kids did, not even bothering to look it up and spit it back to him. They didn’t read books, they didn’t think, and they didn’t know anything about the world other than what some megacorporate social network pushed to the top of their feeds.
The professor gave them a minute, and then he just told them the answer. Then on with the lecture, on with the bored looks, and on to another simple question about something none of them had ever even heard of. When it all was done, they filed out of the room and left me standing there with my mop, their heads as empty as when it all started.
Cattle. Just a bunch of mooing cattle.
You ever see that skit on the Late Night Show? The one where they interview people on the street, and none of them knows a damned thing about anything? They don’t know the Vice President, don’t know what the Civil War was about, don’t know where their own country is on a map. They’re mad about all this stuff but they don’t have any clue why. And this is Harvard! They’re supposed to be geniuses, but they’re just cows with a better pedigree.
The story of my life, let me tell you.
I couldn’t ever get along with people. That’s why I ended up there, doing what I did. People don’t like being corrected. They don’t like someone thinking he’s smarter than they are, especially if it’s true, and especially if he’s not our kind, dear. But if you’re born rich, you can say whatever you want and people act like you’re Einstein. Just ask the little punks I used to clean up after.
I wasn’t like them. I grew up poor. Dad in the coal mines, Mom cleaning toilets. Good people, god rest their souls. But they couldn’t teach me how to hang with the Harvard types. I didn’t act like them, didn’t talk like them, didn’t think like them. And if you’re born on the wrong side of the tracks, well, they all just expect you to stay there.
But poor doesn’t mean stupid, despite what the trust fund babies think. I’m more educated than any of them, and I’m the one who taught myself. I had to. Nobody else was going to do it for me.
I listened to NPR every day on my commute. At night it was TED Talks, not trash TV. Smart people talking about smart things instead of smart phones. And I read books, good ones, the kind nobody but me really understood. I read Gravity’s Rainbow cover to cover. And I bet none of those kids ever even heard of it. Or if they did, they thought it was just a thousand pages of total nonsense. Deep books like that were the ones I liked, the kind you have to think about to get anything out of. None of that wizard crap, not for me.
The point is I was an intellectual, even if you wouldn’t have known it from looking at me. It’s the hair, I think: too messy, and my beard’s too untrimmed. Never had the time for it, but that’s how intellectuals are. I could’ve been one of those kids if I’d really wanted to. Some punk investment banker in waiting, warming a chair and waiting out my four years of inflated grades until someone handed me the golden ticket. I know I could have, if I’d really wanted to.
But I cared about knowledge, not money.
My grades weren’t great, but that’s because I was ahead of everyone else. They couldn’t keep up, and I couldn’t keep from getting bored. Should have colored inside the lines, maybe, but that wasn’t me. That’s how I ended up where I was. Quit school too early, got the GED, and then got the hell out of Appalachia. It was a dumb move for someone so smart. You need those credentials if you wanna get anywhere in life.
But I liked my job, even if it wasn’t anything I’d ever dreamed about. I had time to think. To come up with theories, philosophies. I was going to write a book about it someday. I had the notes and everything. Sitting in my dingy little apartment in my favorite recliner, foam popping out of the seams. The cars roaring by, my neighbors screaming on the other side of the walls, a leaky faucet and yellow stains all over the wallpaper.
But none of it mattered. I had a pen in my hand and notes in my lap. And I was working on what I wanted to. The Theory of Everything, I called it, and I thought I was close. I was happy. I was living in a total shithole, but I was happy. Really and truly happy. But I was also living a lie.
And it all changed the day I met her.
I was hiding out in the Widener Library, a book about Buddhism in physics in my lap. Nobody even cared. One of the perks of my job, you know? Nobody notices you when you’re the janitor. They’re trained that way. That’s class, or what passes for it. They’re up high, and you’re down low. So they won’t even make eye contact, let alone ask you what you’re doing or why you’re dicking around on the job. You’re dirty, and if they talked to you, then they’d be dirty, too. They know it inside somehow. They tell each other they’re these great people, that they’re “woke,” that they’re activists in waiting and they’re gonna change the world.
Doesn’t stop them from treating their servants like they’re Untouchables.
But being invisible has its benefits. I was lost in my reading, the book hidden in my lap under the desk just in case. And then I started to feel it. This weird sensation blaring into my consciousness from the back of my brain, like something was wrong even if I couldn’t say exactly what.
I shoved the book against the underside of the table with my knees, looking all around. There were students everywhere, and not one of them studying. Just fucking around on their laptops, clicking and liking, clicking and liking. But I was still on edge. I still felt it.
And then I saw her.
She was staring at me. Just dead on staring at me from across the room, a closed book sitting on the table in front of her. She looked gorgeous: early thirties, jet black hair, eyes green and lit with intelligence. She was the kind of person who belonged in a library, the kind of person who read books instead of stacking them on their shelves like trophies.
My kind of person. My dream girl. And she was staring right at me.
I jerked my eyes away. I was caught. I was supposed to be cleaning out a clogged sink in the men’s bathroom, and instead I’d been doing something useful. Something mind expanding. And now I might get fired for it.
I snuck another look. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. Wherever she’d gone, whatever she’d seen, she’d given up on me. I was safe. In the clear.
“Are you Jake Morgan?”
It came from right behind me. I nearly jumped out of my chair, but all I could do was stammer. She was looking down on me with those piercing eyes, and she knew who I was. I’d never seen her before in my life, but somehow she knew my name. All that came out of me was a slow, stuttered “yes.”
She sat down beside me. My book dropped between my knees, clattering to the floor. She heard it, and she knew. But she just smiled.
She held out her hand. “Professor Offredi. But call me Gina.”
A professor. I was in deep shit if she wanted me to be. I grabbed for excuses, for whatever I could. “I was just… Just on a little break. I’m waiting, see. For the parts I need. Gotta fix—”
She leaned down and picked up the book. She flipped through a few of the pages, then handed it back to me. “Physics, huh?”
“Hobby,” I said. “Gotta do something on my down time. Better than playing on those phones.”
“I’m a physicist myself,” she said with a flirty smile.
Holy shit, I thought. She wasn’t trying to call me out. This was something else. My dream girl, and she knew my name. She even wanted to talk to me. This was too good to be true. Professor meets janitor? Just doesn’t happen. Not in the real world. But here she was in the flesh.
“You like science?” said Gina.
“Science, math, history, politics,” I said, with all the confidence I had in me. “I like to study. When I can.”
“That’s good,” said Gina. “That’s always good. It’ll make things easier, Jake. For what I have to tell you.”
“Tell me?” I said. I was confused as hell.
“About the world,” said Gina. “About your life. About everything around you.”
“I’m not following,” I said.
“It’s not real,” said Gina. “Any of it. What you see, what’s presented to you, it’s all just an illusion.”
“Like Plato,” I said. “Like the cave thing.” Okay, I hadn’t read it. But I’d read about it. And I wanted to impress her, more than anything in the world. If she wanted to talk philosophy, then philosophy it was.
“Kind of like the cave thing,” said Gina. “But I mean it literally. None of it’s real. At all. I’m going to show you something. Promise not to freak out if I show you something?”
“Promise,” I said, even though I was freaking out a little already. It all clicked, and everything suddenly made a lot more sense. My dream girl was a psycho. Professors don’t fall for janitors, but that’s exactly the kind of thing a psycho would do. Go up to some guy in a library and start talking about how she knows nothing’s real? That’s psycho stuff.
And she just kept going with it. She closed her eyes. She muttered something under her breath. Just a word, nothing more.
And then it all stopped.
I mean everything. The students were still as statues. One of the librarians was at
a computer terminal drinking a Coke, the liquid frozen in place in the bottle at an awkward tilt. And the background noise was gone. All of it. No talking, no cars, no humming from the lights. Nothing. I looked out the window and I could see a bird, posed mid-flap and not moving an inch. If she was nuts, she wasn’t the only one.
“This can’t be real,” I said.
“It isn’t,” said Gina. “You like physics. You like science. You know much about virtual reality?”
“I’m not a video game guy,” I said. I should have been, but I wasn’t. Smart people liked video games. Some of them, anyway. But the more you played those games, the less time you had to read. And those boxes they used. They cost so damned much.
“This world,” said Gina. “It’s like one big video game. And in your life, you’re the only player.”
“Me,” I said. “Am I winning?” I smirked, still half-thinking it was all a joke despite what was right in front of my eyes.
“It doesn’t work like that,” said Gina. “It’s just an analogy. This world. It’s a place for you to live your life. Safe. Happy. Not a burden on the ecosystem. There’s ten billion people in these things. That’s down from twenty. We almost blew up the planet. Just ate it up like a swarm of locusts. This was the fix. The only way to save what we had left. Everyone went in here. And they didn’t get a choice.”
I walked over to one of the students, a pudgy little guy with perfectly shaped hair and thick black glasses. I waved my hand in front of his face. Pinched his arm. Poked his belly like he was the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
Nothing.
Maybe she wasn’t a psycho after all.
“It’s just me?” I said. “It’s always just been me?”
“Not always,” said Gina. “But you ended up a bit of a loner, don’t you think?”
“I just don’t like them,” I said. “People.” I looked in her eyes, and I melted. Just a little. “Most of them. And anyway, most of them don’t like me.” I glanced at the book on the table. “They don’t like what I’m into.”
Restricted Fantasies Page 20