by Ed Hurst
parameters of her official authority to query him, he was quite forthcoming.
His current contract made him simply a reporter in the sense of writing for the agency that hired him. There was actually a large stack of surveys for all the different offices and installations served by the bureaucratic mess where they sat at that moment. Each survey was of a different type for each of the different offices. In some cases, he had two or more different surveys for each official entity, with parameters requiring he carry out interviews at different times in their various projects, etc. He would be going back to some locations repeatedly throughout the coming year. He seemed to think riding thirty of forty miles round-trip was no big deal, but was prepared to take his bike along on the occasional train ride for more distant locations, and then cycling the rest of the way.
Most of his surveys seemed somehow the indirect result of investigations into a recent string of scandals back in Washington, DC. However, this particular approach was completely different from what anyone else had seen in the past. She noted this carefully, leaving it up to him to explain if he wanted. Something inside her said his answer was plausible and honest, so she took it at face value. There was not a shred of boasting, but he explained he did have an important unnamed Somebody sponsoring him. This sponsor believed Rod could provide some unique perspective based on his published writings and previous experience as a military veteran.
Something told her simply calling him a writer would be a mistake, though. She asked, and received, from him a couple of Internet links to his published work. He asked for a rough outline of religious activity on the installation. They had a contract chaplain and the occasional visit from a military one, but only about half the community engaged in any part of the religious activities on a regular basis. She was officially the point of contact for that stuff, holding some Christian beliefs of her own, but didn’t really care much for what was available up to that point. Nothing of that sort was ever going to please everyone.
That was when he shocked her. Glancing at his watch, he rose and remarked that he’d love to visit with her again, but had an appointment on the other side of the installation about his quarters. He paused and said, “I can’t blame you for wishing there was something better. I believe if you glance through my writings, you’ll understand what I mean. Something tells me we are kindred souls in some ways; I would highly value having someone I could talk to about it.” He dropped a card on her desk with his email address.
5
Her mind was spinning. Nothing in her official duties kept Becky from using her office computer to peruse the links Rod had offered. His writing was like a magnet for her eyes. She found herself still reading when the lights went off in the hallway. The rumbling in her stomach brought to her awareness that she had stayed past dinner time and would have to eat something from the snack bar out by the gate. Tasty, but the only reason anyone ate their junk food was because the nearest off-base eatery was a long walk. On second thought, she needed the walk.
Becky wasn’t just torn. This was inner turmoil, a cognitive dissonance. She was intelligent enough to recognize that much. As she made her way down the stairs in the company of just a few who had lingered that evening, she was very glad to see Sam from Finance. He was a big time lover of literature and she was hoping to get his help on this stuff.
Sam was ancient, but had never bothered to retire. His vast experience with number crunching had made him too valuable, and he was one of the few people who actually wanted to stay at the installation. He owned a house on the economy and had married a local widow, and willingly worked as a host nation hire. Still, Sam’s true genius was his hobby, English literature. Not just fiction, but almost all academic fields. Sam was like a librarian who had read all the books in the library and wanted more. Becky knew she could trust his judgment on some things.
She summarized what she could remember and asked if he had ever heard of Rod. Oddly, Sam mentioned hunting Rod down online when he first saw the contract paperwork. While he didn’t share so much of Becky’s interest in the material, he recognized it readily enough.
“A part of me worries just a little this guy might be a charismatic cult leader, but he doesn’t fit any of the official profiles for that sort of thing,” she said.
“No, no. I don’t believe so, Becky. He’s just very different. There are plenty who agree with him, enough that he lists others as references on site. But the key is that he professes no interest in controlling anything and refuses to organize what he does in the typical sense. It’s entirely voluntary, so anyone who isn’t internally driven won’t much care for his work.”
Becky was silent a moment. “That just raises more questions about why it draws me. It can’t be he’s such a great writing talent. You’ve shown me better stuff than that.”
Sam smiled, “Then perhaps you are a good prospect for what he teaches. That, or you are thoroughly enamored with him.” He chuckled at that.
“If I am, I’m hardly the only one, Sam. The flirts seem gaga over him, but he scarcely talks to them. It’s as if he’s completely uninterested in them. I’m not even in their class. All I did was my job, so why would he be so open with me and so closed to them?”
Sam seemed thoughtful for a moment. “If his writing has any meaning at all, I would suggest he measures everything from an entirely alien frame of reference. That man-hungry bunch isn’t even on his radar, but you may be in his eyes a rare treasure. Even if it’s not romantic in any ordinary sense, I’d say your self-presentation makes more sense to him than theirs. That might explain why you find his writing so fascinating; you are his kind of gal.”
She slowed, and then stopped just inside the opening, staring at the ground as Sam stepped into a waiting car at the curb right outside the gate. The damp pavement offered no new insights to her puzzle.
6
She never even pretended to sleep that night. There had been enough sleepless nights in her life that she knew how to make the most of it. Three books, dozens of articles and some links to associates left her with a bigger, but still confused picture. Staring into her morning coffee cup, she knew her biggest problem was de-tangling what was plainly her own romantic fascination with her boundless intellectual curiosity. All the reading only made it worse, her feelings more tightly bound into a single twisted braid. All she knew was the relentless drive to keep poking at it.
This was no schoolgirl fascination. Indeed, it was of such a different quality she almost didn’t realize the romantic edge to her feelings until Sam’s offhand comment about it. Sam’s piercing insight was like that, and she had come to rely on it not long after first taking the assignment to work in this awful place. She mustered her cynicism just long enough to tell herself this was at least the best entertainment she’d ever had so far in her dreary life, and would make this place memorable even if it all turned out to be nothing.
She tried once more to find some place on this earth where she knew her feet didn’t feel somehow disconnected from the ground. At the lowest level, she readily admitted if Rod simply asked, she would disrobe for him in a heartbeat. Not that there would be much to see. She was rather skinny, with only a healthy muscle tone to offer. Her face had been described as “mousy” and that was probably fair enough. She seldom cut her hair, which made her a spare minority among the women there. Almost all of them had cut theirs into various fashionable styles, but she had always resisted having anything to do with their habits. They were all rather pretty and shapely. Whatever they got from their competitive flaunting, she wanted no part of it. Their chatter showed they took romantic disappointment as a given, that the whole thing was simply having a good time when it was possible. They were in love with romance, not men. All of the flirts had at least one recurrent romping partner among the various men who worked there, plus a selection of the dashing visiting officials and so forth who passed through at irregular intervals. If that was all there was, she’d rather die an old maid.
Still, some part of her
had always believed something better must be out there somewhere. Maybe she missed her cue somewhere along the way before reaching this point, but it never seemed quite right. Something in her couldn’t settle for half-way okay on the vain hope it would get better. Her career path had shown her far too many marriages built in convenience alone, dreary lives with joys far too few and too brief.
So here she was, suddenly willing to give as much or as little as a man would take just to be near him some part of his day.
After a perfunctory workout and shower, still wide awake with eyes just short of bloodshot, she broke her routine and actually went into the dining hall to sit down and eat. She normally carried breakfast to her office, but needed a break from the routine to see if she could shake something loose. And yes, perhaps she could catch Rod on his irregular routine.
She was staring across the open hall and nearly died when Rod came up and asked if he could join her. After the initial start, she couldn’t remember to say, “Yes.” He apologized for interrupting her reverie, but sat down anyway, as if it didn’t matter. Somehow, it wasn’t the least bit rude, but reassuring.
He waved absently at the chorus of greeting