Time of Leaders, Part 4 of 11

I didn’t sleep much, what with the new surroundings and excitement of having a job. At sunrise I went downstairs and Jade had a few dabs of farina for me. Over the past two days I’d caught some looks from her; she was really concerned for me physically, although I didn’t feel that bad. She’d asked if I’d been to the clinic recently, and we did have access to some medicine. We both knew that there’s only so much doctors or nurses can do about lack of food. That morning, Jade asked me if I’d ever had ‘cowboy coffee’. She had some old coffee bullets which she’d ground down further and made Turkish style with water boiled on a camp stove. Although things were looking up for me, I was having a hard time getting started, and the coffee was just what the doctor ordered. A luxury. I hadn’t had coffee in two years, and would have gladly chewed grounds.

            She got up and gathered her things, but came back to the table before she left.

            “Smile.”

            I realized that she was checking my teeth for coffee grounds and smiled for her. She went to the back porch door.

            “Keep smiling.”

I went to the little screen in the living room and looked at files Jade brought over from work. She’d limited my personal use to an hour a day, due to the life in the batteries which she charged at work. I looked around for exactly fifteen minutes, then headed off.

            When I got home, it was right back to the screen. File work had increased my interest in recent events. My hands hurt a bit from typing practice. For half an hour it was like peering out at the world obliquely, through a window that at times didn’t offer the best vantage point. Jade labeled the files better later, but that day I was just dealing with headings that she only shared with herself. A recording of a BBC broadcast revealed a situation so fluid that I could only infer my own place in the world.

            Jade returned with a small bag full of snails she’d gathered on patrol. My expertise and labor in combining them with the communal ramen would be fair trade. She had, among other things, garlic and coffee creamer packets, which would serve. It turned out that Jade was a better scrounger than I was.

            “You’ll have to kill them, or whatever,” she told me as she peered into the bag. “It’s my first time. The thing is, they seem so trusting. But I’m protein starved. And looking at you just makes me hungrier, and that did not come out the right way.”

            I told her that I’d come across people who looked worse than I did, so I knew what she meant. Then I realized that she’d seen plenty in her line of work. She asked me what files I’d looked at, and I told her about the ones I saw that afternoon.

            “It had been two years since I’ve heard any real news,” I told her.

“I’ll mark others for ya, then,” she said. “How was work?”

At work I’d learned that there was a study protocol which had to be observed between myself and the techs and the other reader on the project, who worked in Spanish. The computer showed me recent reports and would ask how important they were to me, considering not what had happened, or was happening, but how it all could have come about. I was buried in the trivia, since I was lowest on the totem pole. Some were news articles, others journalistic writing, most written in the past decade. Then I used a word processing program and an old instruction book for typing practice for two hours at the end of the day. Matthew seemed pleased with me.

            “Then, he’s your supervisor?”

            “Mostly, the computer is. It said ‘hello’ the second that I sat down.”

            Jade joined me on the sofa. She was just a bit shorter than me. In that consciously nasal-soft voice of hers, used to good effect, she began with her jokes about my boss.

            “That’s spooky. She’ll turn you into one of her minions and you’ll do all the dirty work in her bid for world domination.”

            At the time, I was half-inclined to agree with her.

            “Um.” Serious, she hesitated. “Don’t mention this there, but can’t it go verbal? Take a stylus? That’s what scares me, really.”

            “Oh, it explained everything,” I told her. “With some sort of pre-written statement. I think the machine’s all state of the art, but it wants precision. Mistakes would compound down the line.”

            “Job security for you. She never asked for leadership certificates?”

            “Not at all.”

            We were getting into dangerous territory, but it was all part of the game.

            “That’s unheard of. Lucky you?”

            “Depends.”

            “On what?”

            “Depends on what order I would feed them into the scanner.”

            She laughed and ran to her bedroom. I headed upstairs for my desk set, which held my leadership cards. It was time for us to play ‘Slap the Noodge’.

            By the time Jade and I started school, diplomas and transcripts were still important, but attendance at leadership assemblies, retreats, seminars, conferences and camps were more so. Certificates would be awarded, with a grade, which was usually high. These were our primary credentials. A leadership card was also issued; we kept those in our book bags. The cards showed the rank of the event, and how the event ranked across five leadership dimensions. In the game ‘Slap the Noodge’, a challenge would be issued with a card through one of its emphasis dimensions. The emphasis rank was multiplied by the event’s rank, and the low score won that round. Grades were used as tie breakers in a round, and the best of five won. The loser had to do what the winner demanded, within reason.

            I was fairly confident that I would win. After all, I was the block champion. That’s why they call me ‘The Professor’, although I don’t like that. I’m the professor of nothing. Perhaps twigs and berries. But I’d heard Jade referred to as ‘The Wizard’. When I swung back down to the living room, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her card book out. She was putting a card back. Then she put the book back in her desk set.

            “I don’t know if that’s fair or not.”

            “It is,” she said. “Believe me.”

            I just sat and grinned at this woman, so complex and fun to watch.

            “It’s a card that I need,” she said, “but I shouldn’t use it in slap.”

            I looked at my cards and waited, wondering which of mine could rate such ambiguity.

            “Shit. Ok,” she said. “I need your help in my life, so you should know about this.”

She dug out the book and gave me the card.

            “It’s real, but I shouldn’t use it in slap.”

            I looked at the card and told her that she’d won. It was a Brazewell, the missile-platform satellite of slap. The rank and ratings: all ‘ones’. I’d never seen one, but I’d heard stories about riots in school courtyards when they were used, held by the owner in a vice-like pinch, never actually played in a game, just impressive enough to bring about its disintegration. Our past two presidents had Brazewells, from a yearly conference in Pennsylvania. I handed the card back to Jade on the flat of my palm. I did have a question, but she pre-empted me.

            “It was when I was ten.”

            “But Brazewell’s at least high school.”

            “They had junior attendees. It’s real, but I don’t play games with it.”

            I leaned back against the sofa, there on the floor with Jade, and waited again. With my weakened state, I’d found the value in it. She cursed, opened her desk set, found a photo album and pulled out a picture.

            “Have you seen this girl?”

            I had seen her, and I finally understood why I thought that I knew Jade back in the funnel. Meanwhile, she had thrown herself back in a bit of a roll on the carpet and was curled with her head propped up with hand, arm and elbow in a chuckle afterglow.

            “I so wanted to show you that but I didn’t.”

            She had been a bit of a local star, you see, back when I was darting between the school and library, between rote learning and discovery of things disappearing. Then this girl on the billboard disappeared, too. Jade had been the Wizard; it was there in the studio shot portrait for a public service ad campaign promoting reading for children. She wore a dark felt cloak and cap, held a magician’s wand, and had a book open on her lap. The ad was on a billboard up near St. Joseph’s for about a year. After a few months, someone got up there and defaced it. People would point to it and say that she went to Coolidge.

            “You went to Coolidge.”

            “Yep. But not for long after that.”

            “Then where did you go?”

            “They hid me at the high school. I was in an accelerated program. The billboards were all over town.”

            I handed the photo back. “I saw them. I know what you look like with a mustache.”

            She slid her head down her arm and hid her face in the crook of her elbow. She had all of my heart, but was still unapproachable. You see, they rejected my application to Harvard that I never sent. Sometime near the end of television there was a flash-forward scene at the end of a sit-com episode where the sad kid in the striped shirt was now chairman of NAFTA with a Brazewell. I asked her if they hid her in the high school because of stalkers.

            “Oh, no,” she answered. “They kept an eye out for that, though. Remember the state scoring scandal at Coolidge?”

            I nodded. She rolled up and pointed.

            “I didn’t cheat.”

            “They were clear about that in the news.”

            She began her story sing-song. She’d told it before.

            “Word got out that some of us were below average, and the schools were frizzed. My friend Aggie. The starship captain?”

            “That picture was up on the avenue.”

            “She was one at Coolidge who was okay. I wasn’t the other one. So, someone changed the test scores. At first, all that attention and direction was good for me, but then I got cynical real quick. The scoring thing got found out, and hit the news, and they pulled us out of class and did all sorts of things like force-feeding us books or sending us to Pennsylvania like we were a buncha geniuses. They had a lot of meetings at the school at the time. Some of them stood up for us, but others wanted to keep covering up things that didn’t need covering. I told one teacher that I wanted to go to one of those meetings. I wanted to stand up for them like they stood up for me, but she just told me that I was doing fine and that my job was to progress in reading.”

            “Did they ever find out who changed the scores?”

            Jade shook her head. “I think I know, but it doesn’t matter now. The school motto was: ‘Leadership Happens Here’.”

            I shrugged.

            “You’re a word person. Does that phrase even make sense?”

            “Not much, considering.”

            “You don’t think I cheated, do you?”

            “How could you have.” I stood. “Not to change the subject, but I think you need some ramen escargot.”

            “Oh, no. We gotta play. First I’m gonna slap you…” She put the Brazewell back in the case… “without that. Then you’ll have to butcher the snails for me.”

And so it happened. The game was close, and I like to think that I fumbled my strategy, but that might be Saturday morning slapping on my part. I promised that dinner would be edible, and started to head to the kitchen, but Jade stopped me, telling me that she had a concern over seeing eyes in the noodles. I told her that with all the snails I had eaten, I had never seen the eyes. Then she informed me that snails must have eyes, however small. I told her that I would dice the snails very fine. Which led to her shuddering request that I not actually dice them through the eyes. At no point during all of this did I bring up the subject of antennae. I simply protested that she was now being ‘slap-happy’, which is when a slapper asks too much of a slappee. She patted her head with the fingers of each hand, shuddered more, and waved me off.

             The snail ramen turned out pretty good. It was quick and easy. Jade said that the snails were like chewy mushrooms. I was on an upswing in my life that I hadn’t expected, needed suddenly in two places. I had a new friend who smelled good and laughed at my jokes. I was in awe of Jade, even though she devalued what she had. I knew that there was more to her and was looking forward to discovering it. I was also very busy.