Jesse's Blog

The best short stories come from anxieties, and one of mine is the ever increasing complexity life seems to throw at us. What if there's a reason for it?*

"Have you got a minute?"

I really didn't. I was knee deep in papers to grade, each one of them the literary equivalent of a proctological exam, and I really just wanted at that moment to push through the last of them to get out of here and cleanse my mental palette, probably with alcohol.

But.. But Ted was a good guy, and just to look at him, I could tell that whatever it was, it was serious.

"Sure, Ted," I said, pushing away that last paper I'd been reading, and raising my glasses, I squeezed between my eyes, trying to coax those muscles to release the tension there that I'd only just noticed. "What's going on?"

"I need..." He trailed off. He took a step over the threshold of the classroom door, and shut it gently behind him. "I need to.. to talk to someone. But if..." He trailed off again.

I looked him over. My first glance had told me that he looked rough, but the second look told me that my first had been far too kind. He looked like hell. I was surprised that Principle Norton hadn't sent him home. He had a three day beard, his eyes were deeply blood shot, and he was carrying huge bags under his eyes. His clothes looked like he'd slept in them at least once, and his nails were dirty and ragged.

"Hey, Ted, it's okay. You can talk to me."

"I'm afraid you'll think.. You won't.. You won't listen."

"Ted, I promise you, whatever it is, I'll hear you out. Scout's honor." He sat at one of the desks, closest to me. He put his head down for a moment, running his hands through his hair, and exhaled, slowly. I could see him deflating, as if he were a hot air balloon letting out it's air after touchdown. I had an image of his empty skin hanging over the edge of the desk. He looked back up, and seemed to reach an internal decision.

"All right," he said. He thought for a moment. "You know the path from the cafeteria to the library?"

"Of course." I said.

"How man flights of stairs do you take to get there?"

"One," I said, "the cafeteria's ground floor, the library is on the second floor of the Thompson building."

"Has it always been that way?" he asked. He was watching my face very, very carefully.

Now what was that all about, I thought. I nearly said something sarcastic, but looking into those red, serious eyes, I realized that that would probably be a big mistake. So I just said "Yes." I kept it flat, short, and factual.

He shook his head, slowly, never breaking eye contact.

"I need to ask you," he said "to suspend your disbelief for me. Just for a few minutes, ok?" I nodded.

Ted stood and went back to the door frame. Opening it, he leaned out, and leaning back, I saw that he'd picked up his satchel from the hallway. He closed the door, went back to the desk, and set the satchel down with a small thump.

He struggled with the buckles for a minute, and I could see as he opened it that it was full of spiral bound notebooks. Most were the same size and width, but a few were oddly sized. He pulled one out after thumbing through their covers, and set it out on the desk. He leafed through that until he found a pages about three quarters through. He turned it around to face me, and pointed to a line of hand writing. "Can you read this?" he asked. I walked over and looked down at it.

Thursday, March 10th The grounds seem the same. For example, I have my spot in the teacher's lot, which is about 20 yards from the rear exit of Thompson. The rear door opens onto a hallway. To my left, there's the door to the teacher's lounge, and across from that door is the library. The library takes the entirety of the right side, leaving two classrooms, 110 and 111; that's Gregson's Geography and Carter's poly/sci respectively.

It went on, but I stopped, looking up at him. He was measuring my face so carefully, looking for something. I couldn't tell what it was.

"That doesn't make sense, Ted. The back door opens onto the hall, yes, but that hall is the ground floor, and you're describing the second floor."

"John," he said, "what if I told you that, two weeks ago, Thompson didn't have a second floor?"

I thought for a moment. I could have been grading those last four papers. I could be driving home. But no, I was standing in front of..

"I'm not crazy, John."

"I didn't say you were."

"You didn't have to, and it's kind of you not to have done. I would have. But you'd either be lying or crazy yourself not to be thinking it. I mean, seriously, look at me."

I started to reply, but he waived me off.

"It's OK," he said, and leaned back in the chair. "I'm comfortable with it. Hell, I wish crazy was the problem. I've spent the last three weeks trying to prove to myself that I am crazy. I hope that I am." He reached down into the satchel, and piled the notebooks in front of him. They all had the bent, dirty, dog eared, tired look about them that only those dollar store specials get under even slightly heavy use. Their owner seemed to share some of those attributes, and after a few moments, I noticed that he kept touching them.. as if he were drawing something from them.

"The older I get," he said, "the more complex life seems to get. When I was a kid, back in grammar school, there were so few choices to make. Life was programmed, and you'd just follow the program. It was easy. "Then came the blurry years of uncertainty, as more choices had to be made, so you run off to college,
hunting for a new program. You hit a groove, you graduate, and it's chaos again for a while as you hunt for a job, but then you find one, and you're working the program again, and everything seems to make sense for a while. But it doesn't last, life keeps changing anyway, and all you want is that original stability, that.. absence of hard choices.

"You watch the news, and you keep learning about new things, things that seem like they should be filling your mind with fear and demanding action, but then you find solace in the real movers and shakers being so far above you in these events that whether you choose to act or not, it's really meaningless. And that's good, you think, because that means you can go back to being just another sheep in the herds, getting with the program."

He'd been looking at the pile of notebooks, and now he looked back up to me, his head tilted slightly.

"Does that sound cowardly to you?" he asked. "We were raised in a nation worshipping, oh, I don't know, adventurers and to not even consider all of the grounding parts of life. But those parts need playing, don't they? Someone has to dig the ditches, fix the toilets, teach the kids. I can still remember Peter O' Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, saying we can't all be lion tamers.

"I'm ok with that. But this isn't what I'm trying to say."

He stood, and paced in the row between the desks. He was trying to find the words.

While he paced, I picked up the first notebook and leafed through it.

February 20th My nightstand has a single drawer. I think that's new; I don't recall it being there before. Inside is a rick rack of loose papers; there's a folded sheet that lays out instructions for setting the time on my watch. A funeral card from the passing of Chris' mom. Not sure I recall going to the service, but the date on it's from before I started writing everything down.

An old tin of Bayer aspirin. Wow, they stopped making those so long ago. They're harder to open than I remembered. I think it's full of aspirin, but I can't get it open to tell. There's a dollar and eighty-three cents (four quarters, two dimes, two nickels, three pennies) in loose change.

It went on. I flipped through further, finding similar descriptions of.. anything. Everything.

"It started with the car," he said. He wasn't looking at me. His eyes were unfocused, staring out into the middle distance. "I was in traffic. I was trying to get to my exit, coming back from grocery shopping, and no one would let me over. I ended up driving back from the next one, ten miles out of my way. So I'm back home, putting things away and fuming about the wasted time, when it hits me; why was I on the interstate?"

He paused, looking at me expectantly.

"Why wouldn't you be?" I asked

"Because my grocery store is four blocks from home." he said. "On light trips, I don't drive. So why had I been on the interstate?" He resumed pacing.

"What really bothered me was why it seemed to have made sense to me at the time. Harvest Pantry was my store, had been since it opened two years ago. But I could also remember Save Plus's cashiers, and walking home. I couldn't have done both, John. I'm a creature of habit, and I like doing things the same way every time.

"So I go online and check my credit receipts. And do you know what I found?"

Ted expected me to say no, so I did, but I knew already what he was going to say.

"Harvest Pantry, nothing but, for as far back as I back as I could pull them. Not one from Save Plus."

I asked, "Did you go to Sav Plus after this happened?"

"Same day, yeah. And I knew where absolutely everything was. Recognized the cashiers. My favorite, Sally, was freaked out when I asked how her mom was doing, so I left, but I knew the whole story about the broken left, the lost job. She, however, had never seen me before in her life."

"Ted, have you seen a doctor? I don't mean a shrink."

He nodded. "Not right away, but yeah, I have been since the Save Plus visit. Clean bill of health, big bill to go along with it. I pressed as far down that angle as I could afford to."

"When was that?"

"Two months ago."

"What made you decide to go?"

"Laundry."

I waited, but he was going to make me ask, so after a good thirty seconds, I did. "What about the laundry?"

"This is the part where crazy is the secret song playing in my head all of the time, John. I'm going to ask you to stay with me while we move through it.

"I woke up one morning with three doors in my bedroom, where the night before, there'd been only two. The new one opened on a tiny little room that I'd never seen before filled with clothes I didn't recognize. All in my size."

"So you forgot you had a closet?"

"That's what it sounds like, sure. But that's not what it felt like. It felt like I was discovering .. the idea of clothing. On one level, I knew what it was, but on another.. it was all completely new to me. Alien. The acts of pouring detergent into a washer, and starting the machine; I watched my hands going through the motions, but I could only explain what I was doing after I'd already done it.

"That's when I started getting checked out."

"And they said you were OK, physically?"

He nodded, then looked at the notebooks. "That's when I started these."

"Why?"

"I thought.. I thought that if I could describe everything, and then see in my own handwriting that I had described things that I later thought I'd forgotten.. then I could.. could.."

"You thought you could snap yourself out it, didn't you?"

He absently ran his sleeve across his eyes, nodding. "Yeah," he said, "or at least prove to myself that I needed help."

"But the library.."

"Yeah, that's one, but there's so many more. Baseball. The war. At first, I couldn't find contradictions, so I started looking for absences, so I had to keep writing." He rubbed his right forearm, winced. "Weeks of late nights, writing things down whatever I could think of. But the library was the first contradiction, and when.. when I started.." I waited for nearly a full minute. I had my eyebrows lifted int he class 'go on' expression, but ne never looked up to see it. "When what started, Ted?"

"Skip to March eleventh."

So I did.

Friday, March 11th:

A whole floor! Thompson was ground level, I and echo that, knew that, wrote it! I'm not echo crazy! I don't echo know how I'll echo prove it, since there's no reason to believe that I'm not echo lying. I echo could echo just be crazy, and echo not choosing to echo things down and then echo them the next echo, but I've convinced myself that I echo echo echo

What am I writing? This doesn't echo

echo

echo

echo echo

echo

echo

echo

"I had some trouble after that," Ted says. "I had some difficulty writing, and then speaking got hard." "Ted.. I.."

"No, don't. It's OK. I'm this far in, I'll finish. I think.. I think that there are.. beings. They change things, make the world different. I've always had a good memory, better than most. Your memory is like an echo compared to mine. And mine, mine is an echo of the old ones, John. The Great Old Ones, whom are beneath, and I can remember so much. Oh, John, so much; I don't need the notebooks anymore echo, I can see it all now, so clearly!"

He seems to grow larger in front of me, and I am frozen. I cannot move as he screams "I can see it all now, I can see everything, echo! EVERYTHING! "

All goes dark.

"Paulson, what's going on?" asks French.

"Oh, hello sir. Yeah, you remember that slow memory lek we've had since we added new modules to the city model."

"Yes."

"We found it. Typo on one simulated citizen. Took up way too many cycles, adding debug lines trying to find the leak. By the time we found the comments in the server logs, it had already crashed one server node."

"Did we recover? "Oh, yeah, we're back to normal."