Time of Leaders, Part 3 of 11

It began when I was about ten, bored in assemblies at school. They’d increased to two sessions a week, then eventually it became once a day at a time when electric power and net connections were going the way of the printing press. The lights were turned off throughout the school, except for the auditorium stage, and we attended lectures. Variations on the golden rule, which are good to abide by. There were always new themes on harmony, though. Why we should be harmonious in thought and deed. They pointed out all sorts of obstacles to that, and I would feel my brain begin to stumble. It it all seemed self-evident to me.

One day, during a presentation on human potential, I discovered that, at the moment, the only potential I had was pushing me to the floor. I slumped in my seat, then wound up there; no one noticed. I crawled across the aisle, following my dream, and slithered under empty side rows on a personal journey of discovery. Granted, all I’d discovered so far were lodes of previously-owned gum, but now I was realizing my own unique potential as I worked my way to the doors. As I reached the back of the auditorium they were trying to explain how a new study had found that some people lacked a ‘harmony gene’, which lit a fire beneath me. I was sure that I didn’t have it.

            That day, I made it to the school library. It was dark and empty, but for the librarian, who didn’t mind my being there. She seemed to have waned a bit since half the books had been taken away, and was only concerned that I use a stool as I looked through the shelves. I couldn’t find many of my favorite books though; those had been the bad ones. I was now bored while standing on a stool, but now I could see through the windows, and the view brought my attention to the fact that the public library was really close to my school. Across the teacher’s parking lot, as a matter of fact.

            The next morning assembly was called and the lights were turned off. I marched dutifully at the end of the class line in the hallway twilight, then peeled off at the auditorium entrance. I sprinted across the teacher’s parking lot and hung around the bushes until a properly befuddled man approached the library. Then I used an elegant strategy; hard to execute. To convince the library staff that I was with him, all I had to do was tail him and pretend to pretend that he wasn’t my father. Whenever I used this entrance strategy, no acting skills were required to play the role of ‘The Parent’. They just needed to be their confused and skittish selves. The tough part was turning a particular corner which was in full view of the reference desk. From there I could head up a stairwell to non-fiction and had the whole of the adult side of the library before me. After an hour I would do the same thing backward, sometimes making use of the same adult on my way out. I’d take the rear of the class line as assembly ended. Sometimes we drew a picture about the assembly theme, but that was easy to fudge. The teacher put keywords for titles on the whiteboard, and, after all, art can be subjective.

           Jade pointed: “Keywords are great.”

            I nodded. We would talk later.

            “Do you remember the day they had to bring in the whiteboards at your school?”

            “I do!” I told her. “They even found a blackboard behind a wall at our school.”

“Chalk!” Jade shouted.

I beamed. “The teacher could keep writing even when the pens dried up.”

Charlie snorted. Jade scowled at him.

“It was…” Jade encouraged my statement with her long eyes…

“…The watershed of our generation.”

            Jade smiled, then blended it into an expression of feigned awe at my intellect, eyes at half-lid.

            “Mister Public Television.”

            “Get to the part where you went in through the back door!” Brenda shouted.

            “It was out.” Charlie corrected her.

            “Whatever!”

           So I went to Part Two; the sad-weepy part of my tale. I was never caught out of assembly outright, but eventually I wound up busted in small degrees. But whenever the school staff wondered where I was, luckily for all, they would immediately find me. My teacher became suspicious, and, as they said at the time, ‘downright pissed’. She kept a very close eye on me and began to give me little projects to do, which I loved. One was going to the school library during assembly time and searching the stacks with a list of books other students had sworn they’d turned in, but hadn’t registered. This was another, new type of lesson in harmony for me: One of harmony in the classroom. That teacher and many others gave me the knowledge, taught me process, and fostered the intellect that I use to be the smart-ass I am today. But, what I chose to do with all that has been my decision. Eventually, I couldn’t visit the main library during assemblies, so I performed my trick on Saturdays. In the biography section I found a large, empty shelf with a flap door about five feet up. Once that flap was closed from the inside, it was the top of the shelf that was open, so I could lie in it and read. Around 8 o’ clock one night I opened my eyes. I’d placed a book under my head and fallen asleep in there. The library was dark and very closed. I held my breath, and then I realized that I was in a place where no motion detector could find me. I lay there for about ten minutes, then put my escape plan into action. I fell from the shelf and ran to a fire exit in the back of the library amidst calamitous beeping noises. When I flew out the door all hell broke loose; just what a child would expect, electronic whistles, shouts, sirens, lights. But no cop would catch me in those ungainly cruisers. They just seemed to know where I was headed anyway. My aunt was shocked and worried, and it was to the bright police headquarters for me, where I made a full, tearful confession. But I never went to ‘juvie’.

            “They were waiting for you, you know,” Charlie told me. “They thought you’d made it into the vents. I know a cop who was on that stakeout.”

            I told them that was silly. There’s no light to read by in vents. Brenda and Jade laughed at my rationale.

            “Do you remember what book you were reading?” Jade asked. I shook my head. She pointed to Charlie.

            “It was a biography of Trotsky. My friend Dave led the investigation, you see.”

            This time it was my turn to laugh.

            “Dave would say: ‘Who’s Leon Trotsky? Well, ask any ten year old.’”

            I told him that I probably wouldn’t have understood all of it, which set Jade and Brenda off even more.

            “I wouldn’t even begin to read that stuff!” Charlie chastised. “Gives you complexes, you know.”

            By that time Jade and Brenda were on a laugh roll, which wasn’t alleviated when I told them that I had to find that book and finish it.

            As we walked from the alley to the back door of her house, Jade let on that all the talk of ‘know-ers’ and ‘nors’, and of her being instructed on the difference was all fun and games. She could read, she said, but just not well. She had a ‘hard time with words’.

We went into the house, and she reset the alarm for ‘home’, it being the castle that it had to be, in that area. I told her that she was a knower as we went through the back porch to the kitchen. She qualified more than I did.

            “I have a knower job.” She pointed out the bathroom, and I followed her through the dining room. “So do you. You don’t want to be late your first day. C’mon, skin and bones.”

            She turned out of the dining room, then I could hear her thumping up stairs. By the time I made it to the base she was turning the corner of an extremely narrow stairwell. I followed and found her in a small hallway between two rooms.

            “I have an assignment for you.” She went into the smaller of the two rooms, one that was beneath the conical roof of the house.

            “We have to make sure that bugs and mice aren’t getting into these.”

            “Into what?”

She stood in the center of that small, dark room surrounded by plastic trash bags.

            “The ramen.”

            My eyes adjusted a little more, and I could see that there was about three hundred pounds of pot noodles in the room. The bags revealed more of themselves as Jade went toward the back of the room with her torchlight. She put the LED on the floor so it glared against the back wall.

            “This is the current supply.” With a rustle she reached into the top of a bag and produced a packet. She opened it expertly and extracted the flavor pouch. “Chicken, beef and shrimp. You look hungry. You can eat it plain in a pinch.” She shattered the noodle cake in its packet, then ground it with the heels of her hands.

            “How…”

            “It came with the house.” The flavor pouch was now open, and she sprinkled a bit on the noodles and scooped some into her mouth. “Once I moved here and got possession, half went to the prison for the staff. And the candidates, as they wait for the convoy west.” She handed me the packet and started preparing another. “And I’m sure they’ll need more later. This isn’t all for us, but we have to keep eating what’s here. Otherwise vermin’ll take the room over in about a year.”

            “But where did they come from?”

            Squinting, she sprinkled flavor into her noodles.

            “I didn’t steal ‘em. They came with the house.” She began to devour the dry noodles. “Some… things should remain a mys-ter-hm.”

            I could only see her eyes with a backlit glint, and her entire profile, sitting on a fifty pound bag of noodles. There was a bit of a peak on her head, her short-cropped wavy hair, parted to the side but recently untended by the habitual press of her hand. A dark and wonderful shadow; she munched.

            “It’s why you don’t see me at the food pantry. But meat and veggies are in short supply. Eat all you want, but be careful not to get plugged up.”

            I went to the open bag and caressed the packets. She chuckled.

            “Each spice packet has, like, a fleck of parsley. And that’s not sustainable. That’s where you and your foraging come in.”

            We crunched awhile. Dry ramen is not the easiest to manage, but eventually you begin to notice a subtlety in taste. I swung a hand around the room and spoke through the noodles.

            “Oh, what I could do.”

            She smiled through noodles, as least as far as I could tell.

            “What people have done for ages. I thought you’d have some ideas.”