I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE SHIT THIS
but i think i bungled whatever the hell was was point at the end LOL
--
I notice my shirt is too tight when I can clearly make out my bellybutton. I stare at it in the blurry reflection in the car window. This melon-baller scoop is proof I am human. That I was born. This is proof I was once a mass of translucent cells incubating in my mother’s womb.
One day maybe I will have my own mass growing inside me.
I run my finger around the rim of my bellybutton, through the thin cotton. How would that feel? A taught, bloated stomach, like a balloon grown under the skin. And then inside– some alien thing, writhing, growing, turning. Feeding.
I stick my finger into the twisted hollow where I was once connected to my mother.
I imagine going in further, pushing my entire hand under my skin. I imagine the squish of yellow fat and the palpations of skin as I drum my fingers against my stomach. Intestines under my hands like fresh pasta. Warm. Safe. I could reach up into my chest, bent over with my forearm plunged into my belly up to the elbow, and wrap my own aorta around my finger. I could press my thumb against my heart and feel myself live. I could pinch my lung and feel it expand under my fingers as I inhale.
I could pull my bellybutton open further, I could put both hands inside, and I could rearrange my spaghetti-intestines however I want. I could push them all up to the top, wedged against the stomach and the pancreas, and feel gravity drag them back down as I straighten up. I could take them out and string them across my arms like Christmas lights. I could reach all the way back and push aside my kidneys and trace my spine, outlining one vertebra at a time. Could I feel the nerves trails out, I wonder?
I wonder what kinds of contortions I would have to do to reach all the way up to the tip of the spine and tap on the base of my skull.
If I had a little alien mass inside, I could take out my womb and look at it. It would be like a water balloon. I could turn it inside out at there would be blue latex fused with the inside wall of my uterus. And there would be my little alien baby in a bath of runny jello, connected to me with a latex-flesh-umbilical chord.
I could pull the chord feel and toss the little alien aside, or I could pinch its little head and crush it, or I could toss the entire balloon away. Or I could not. I could tuck it back away in its upside down home, to feast on me some more. Or I could not. It’s mine. The blue latex is mine. I could. I might.
My hands drift from my navel up across my breast, around my neck, to the hollow of the base of my skull. My eyes are blurry in the window. Mine mine mine.
(the file also has the incomplete "Hands." and "Feet.")
Friday, August 26, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
JUNIPER LIVES!! (or... no wait...)
“Juniper?” Mariano caught my wrists, his face horrified. “What are you doing?”
“I– I–” I stuttered. I few strands of hair were caught between my fingers. Mariano slowly pulled my hands away from my head.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said calmly.
“I know, but…” I pulled my hands from his. “It’s just…” I inhaled deeply and willed my voice not to crack. “I can’t believe I’m related to that man. And now I don’t know what to do with myself, and it just… it just all came out.”
I shrugged and accepted that I probably sounded completely insane. Mariano slowly raised his arm and put a hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll go to NAME OF ORG,” he said. “And you can figure out what you want. It’ll be okay.”
On impulse, I hugged him. He took a step back, startled, but returned it. On our way to NAME OF ORG, neither of us mentioned it.
Mariano took me to a hotel on the beach, which grew out of ten or twelves trees bending and stretching themselves. Instead of normal rooms, the hotel just had halls and halls of gates.
“I want to try something,” he said. He picked a random door and had me stand in front of it.
“Imagine a mountain,” he said. I did. “It’s very steep. It’s a faded green from shurbs and grass. There are more mountains around it. And in the middle of these mountains is a lake. The lake is very still and large. It’s not quite round but close enough.”
“Is there snow on the mountains?” I asked.
“No.” I was disappointed, but I removed the snow from my mental imagine. Mariano continued, “The mountain is completely hollow. Inside, there is a secret base filled with laboratories. The only way to get into the secret base is through a metal door at the edge of the lake. I want you to focus on that door, okay?”
“Alright,” I said. I imagined that that door was this door, th on in front of me, and that it would open up the to the lake and the mountains. I opened the door.
On the other side, there was a lake not exactly like the one I had imagined, but close enough. Mountains rose up around it. “Neat,” I said.
“Nope,” said Mariano. “Try again.”
It took eight more tries before I openned the hotel door to the right mountain lake.
“Fantastic!” Mariano cried and led me through. We closed the door, turned around, and Mariano opened it again to reveal the ‘secret base’ inside the mountain.
The walls and ceiling were dull metal sheets with fluorescent lights. Periodically there would be large windows showing off strange rooms which I supposed were the labratories. One looked like a medieval alchemist’s workshop, and another had walls of buttons and blinking lights like something out of an old science fiction movie. The end of the hall opened into a large room covered with computer screens and panels of switches and keys. A man was typing furiously in front of the largest screen, and a man and a woman sat at a table in the middle of the room. They were building a card pyramid.
“I’m back!” Mariano announced. The card pyramid collapsed and the three people looked up. The first man continued typing, his face toward us instead of the screen.
“Who’s that?” he asked, nodding toward me.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Mariano said and sat down at the table. “This is Juniper. Juniper, that’s Liang–” He pointed to the man who went back to squinting at the compter screen. “And these are Pandora and–”
“Tupaqyupanki,” the other man interrumpted, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. “Don’t call me Tupaq. I don’t know why that’s funny, but some day I will figure it out, and Mariano will suffer.” He said this all very seriously. My eyes widened.
Pandora snorted. “Tuki’s just upset he can’t find anyone who can say his name.”
“Oh,” said. “Um, nice to meet you. May I sit down?”
“No,” Tuki drawled, “we make poor confused newly deads stand as a form of purgatory.”
I decided to interpret that as, “Why yes Juniper; after all, you’re our welcome guest!” I sat down next to Pandora. She looked about my age, I thought, maybe a year or two older. She was small, with long, black hair. She watched me hang my bag on the chair with brown, almond eyes.
Tuki, on the other hand, looked like he was maybe five years older. He was shorter than Mariano, but well built with dark caramel skin and glossy black hair.
“Where’s old Minestrone?” Mariano asked, propping his feet on the table. Tuki, who was sitting across from him, gave his boots a withering glance.
“Off thinking deep thoughts or whatever it is philosophers do,” Tuki answered.
“Hmm,” Mariano hummed.
“More importantly,” said Pandora, “why did you bring her back with you?” She jabbed a thumb in my direction.
“Couldn’t find a relative,” Mariano said, then kicked his feet off the table, leaned over and started on his own house of cards.
“Really now,” Tuki said dryly.
“Well, we did,” Mariano explained, “but Juniper thought he was a jerk.”
I turned red. Pandora laughed.
“Hey,” she said, elbowing me good naturedly, “I think that about these two everyday and I still have to live with them.” Tuki flicked a card at her, and the motion caused Mariano’s card house to collapse.
Pandora gathered up all the cards and delt them for spades.
“So,” I said after I’d lost my third game, “is Liang the only one who does work around here or what?”
“No,” Mariano protested at the same that Liang called over, “Yes.”
“Liang’s in charge of data analysis,” Pandora said. “The three of us do field work.”
“Are you peer advisors too?” I asked.
“Suuure,” Tuki said.
“No seriously,” I said. “Mariano can’t be the only one. To be effective you’d need lots of workers.”
“Well, um,” said Pandora, “There are more people, but they’re out now, doing… work.” She started dealing again. “Tuki and I do more specialized stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know,” Tuki cut in. “We just go out, separate confused youths from their support networks, then force peer advisors on them. It’s all one big conspiracy.”
I gaped at him and he smirked back.
Before we finshed our fourth game, the man Mariano had called ‘Minestrone’ waltzed in. He was dressed in a white toga and had a neatly trimmed, sand-colored facial hair.
“Mariano!” he said jovially and slapped him on the back. “You brought a friend.” He grinned at me, inviting and friendly.
“This is Juniper,” Mariano said. “She’s a bit of a special case…”
Mariano explained my situation.
“Ah, that happens sometimes,” the ‘Minestrone’ said. “Nice to meet you, Juniper. You can call me Menestheus.”
“Nice to meet you too,” I said and shook his hand.
He told me I was welcome to stay for as long as I wanted, and told Pandora to take me to find a room. As we left the room, I heard Mariano say, “We need to talk.”
Pandora led me to an elevator and took me to “the very top.” (The button next to it was labeled “almost at the very top.”) After a very awkward ride in which Pandora fixed her hair in the mirror-plated wall, we found ourselves in a tiny round corridor with polished wound floors and neon green wallpaper.
“This floor is for girls,” Pandora said. “For some reason we let Tuki pick the colors. Tuki is not a very nice person.”
There were only four, firehydrant-red doors lining the little corridor. Either there were female employees living elsewhere or ORG NAME was not an equal opportunity employer.
“This one is the least offensive, I think,” Pandora continued and let me into a decent sized, bee-themed bedroom. Everything was black and yellow, and the comfortor on the small bed had a bee pattern. There was a lopsided honey-comb shaped beanbag chair in one corner. The desk was a bright-pink flower: an actual one, facing upward and flat, with a can of writing utensils balanced on its golden center.
“It’s… nice,” I said. Pandora shook her head.
“Don’t ever let Tuki design anything for you. He will go out of his way to make it painful for everyone. There was actually a merry-go-round bedroom that was in constant motion, with little rainbow ponies running around and neighing. Completely uninhabitable.”
I stared at her. “I’d like to see that, actually,” I said.
“Can’t,” she answered with a shrug. “I redid it for my room forever ago.”
I tentively sat down on the bed. It was comfortably soft. I dropped my bag on the floor; Minerva clinked against it.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. “Er– I mean, with ORG NAME, not… you know…”
Pandora laughed and pulled out the striped chair from the flower-desk. It had six legs.
“You don’t have to tiptoe around the whole death issue here,” she said. “Most people are over it. And if they’re not, well, screw ‘em.”
I nodded. She flipped a strand of hair over her shoulder and started twiddling it.
“I don’t actually remember dying,” she went on, “or being alive at all. I don’t even remember my real name.”
“Not even your name?” I repeated, shocked. She shrugged as if it weren’t a big deal.
“I didn’t even have one for a while. Tuki just called me ‘you’ for years. But Menestheus, being who he is, suggested Pandora.”
“So you knew Tuki before ORG?” I said. She nodded.
“Tuki and I used to wander around together. I don’t have any memories where I didn’t know who Mr. Tupaqyupanki is.”
“How old is Tuki?” I asked.
“Well, we don’t really know that either,” Pandora admitted sheepishly. “He doesn’t remember much about life. He’s got to have died at least five hundred years ago, though– somewhere in the Andes, he thinks.”
“And have you been with him that long?”
“No, I… I’m not really sure. Maybe a hundred years, living time. It’s hard to keep track if you’re not being vigilant. But we’ve just been traveling around together for so long… until we met Minest– Menestheus, of course.”
“And when was that?” I felt prying, but I was genuinely interested.
“Oh, I don’t know… twenty years ago, maybe? The ORG was pretty new then. Minest–Menestheus had just found this mountain, ready-made with labs and stuff. And it ‘resonated’–” she made finger quotes “–with Tuki or something, so we signed up, moved in, and Tuki started decorating everything horribly.”
“And where’s Menestheus from?” I asked. I wanted to ask about Mariano, but there was probably a reason he avoided talking about himself, so I had chickened out.
“Ancient Greece, of course,” replied Pandora in a duh voice. “He was a philosopher, and now he has all these great ideas for research. And for whatever it is Mariano does, of course.”
I mentally battled two questions. First, I wanted to know why a Greek man would go by an Italian nickname and stroll around in a Roman toga. Second, I continued wanting to ask about the elusive Mariano. After remembering Tuki had been sporting a pair of cargo pants, I decided fashion choices of the dead were not worth analyzing.
“And where’s Mariano from?” I asked, giving into temptation.
“No idea,” Pandora answered flippantly, crushing my hope with a wave of her hand. “He showed up a few years ago and went and schmoozed and charmed everyone, including Minestrone.”
She then announced she needed to get something out of her room and sauntered out.
I laid down on my bed. What was I going to do with myself? For all I’d seen, I didn’t actually understand how this place worked. I’d barely met any people. At home I knew what I was supposed to do: finish high school, go to college, find a useful degree I didn’t hate.
What did dead teenagers do?
I curled into a ball. My borrowed skirt ended a few inches above my knees; I started to absently scratch my lower thigh there.
“Juniper?” A deep voice echoed around my room. I yelped in surprise. “This is Menestheus. Could I speak to you privately?”
“I, um…” I said, looking around the room. Did I have a microphone to talk into or something? I tried talking to a wall. “Sure, why not?”
“Excellent,” the voice answered. It didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular, just around. What an odd PA system.
He told me where to meet him and I went to the elevator and pressed the button labeled “exact midpoint,” as instructed. The button next to it said, “The floor that smells like fish.” I decided to avoid that floor if I could.
The exact midpoint was a cafeteria. It was a wide, open room: along the the back were various centuries’ worth of kitchen tools, and on the opposite side of the room were a handful of square tables. It was lit with natural light from the floor-to-ceiling window over looking the lake outside. I found this perplexing, as there was no sign of a window from the outside.
Menestheus was seated at the table closeted to the window, a tray with all the accoutrements for teatime set before him. I sat down across from him, shoulders tense.
“Hello sir,” I said. “I wanted to thank you for helping me out and taking me in. If you need anything done, I’d be happy to help out.”
Menestheus chuckled and leaned back casaully. I relaxed.
“No need to thank me, Miss Gard,” he said. “Mariano told me your story.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess it’s not normal to reject family like that…”
“It happens all the time; we’re always putting up newly deads,” he said and winked knowlingly. “Does sharing blood truly necessitate love?”
“Well no, but…” I mumbled something about ensuring one’s genetic code spread.
If bringing me to ORG was normal, then why had Tuki and Pandora acted like it was strange? Did they really enjoy being as contradictory as possible? Why was I trying to defend familial love using genetics to an ancient Greek philosopher?
“Have some tea,” the man offered. He served us both and offered me a plate of cookies. I took one politely.
We chatted pleasantly for a while, and I told him how I’d died and the adventures I’d had with Mariano. He told me about the Athens of his youth. He described the acroplois and the parthenon and his home to me, with all the detail of a painting. He told me about philosophical arguments he’d had.
“You must count yourself lucky to have such vivid memories of your life,” I said. “Since Pandora and Tuki can barely remember anything at all.”
“I do,” he agreed solemnly. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
I gave him a brief summary of what I’d told Barry.
Afterwards I said, “May I ask what’s going to happen to me here?”
He stood up and walked slowly to the window, staring down at the smooth lake. He looked quite dramatic, with his toga and regal posture.
“Do you know what we do here?” He asked.
“I know you run a peer advising program for newly deads,” I said slowly. “But I guess you must do more.” I thought of all those labratories.
“Much more,” he said. “Death offers a lot of opportunity, Miss Gard.”
“If you say so, sir,” I said.
“The peer advising program is Mariano’s pet project,” Menestheus explained. I nodded. “My goal is something much greater.”
I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He continued staring down at the lake, his expression hard as though deep in thought. I had the vague feeling he was purposely putting on a show. (no shit, junie)
“Sir?” I said. “What are you researching?”
“The link,” he said, “between life and death.” He looked me in the eyes expectantly.
“That sounds really interesting,” I said, having no idea what he meant.
“What, Miss Gard, is the difference between living and dying?”
“A pulse?” I tried, then pinched myself under the table for much a smartass reply.
“Did you know,” Menestheus continued, strolling back over to the table, “that people only come to life when they have died?” He didn’t sit. I felt he was trying to intimidate me and remained silent. “The truth is only apparent in hindsight.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. He smirked back at me.
“ORG’s goal is to bring all the opportunities of life to the dead.”
I thought “I still don’t understand” wasn’t a valid response and would make me look stupid. I hesitated, then said it anyway.
He looked thoughtful, as if my comprehension failure was baffling. He sat down and took another sip of tea.
“Miss Gard, you have noticed that we use computers here, haven’t you?” I nodded. “And we have elevators and coffee makers and blenders.” My eyes darted over to the mess of kitchen supplies on the other side of the room. They also had modern stoves and toaster ovens and Tuki wore cargo pants.
“But most of you are very old,” I said slowly.
He smiled wryly at me. “Exactly. We want to bring all the modern advances of the living to the dead, more quickly than they’re dispersing now.”
I thought of the library and their horrible information storage system. Spreading technology seemed like a worthy aim, but I tried to imagine bringing a toaster to everyone who had ever died or explaining the internet to early H. sapiens.
“Sir, don’t you think that’s a bit lofty?” I said.
Menestheus sighed. “Miss Gard, I will admit something to you. I regret my life. I regret not setting more ambitious goals for myself.”
I blinked, surprised. “But you made it sound so beautiful.”
He shook his head. “In the end, history hasn’t remembered me. I wasn’t Plato or Aristotle or Socretes. I never did anything daring. I never did anything worth remembering.”
“You found it worth remembering,” I said. He smiled sadly.
“Thank you, Miss Gard,” he said.
“I don’t understand what this has to do with that stuff about ‘the truth is only apparent in hindsight,’” I went on, swirling the contents of my teacup without paying much attention to it.
“I’m lucky in that I remember my life,” he said. “I can remember the best parts and the worst parts. And now, with ORG, I’m fixing my regrets– I’m aiming high and I will be remembered among the dead forever. But Tuki and Pandora will never have the opportunity to fix regrets.” (i hate this entire conversation DIE DIE DIE)
“Oh,” I said. My mind struggled to put what he was saying together. Modern technology would mean better information storage and easier access to new information and more efficient communication. “You want people to have more tech… so they can remember their lives? So they can have the good memories and fix any regrets?” (WHAT THAT'S STUPID STOP PULLING STUFF OUT OF YOUR ASS MICHELLE)
“Life is precious,” Menestheus affirmed. We stared at each in silence for a few moments, then he started asking me for details about my life– to learn about new advances, I supposed. I told him everything he wanted to know.
I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about myself (especially to someone who was trying to change the afterlife forever), but he seemed intrigued by everything I had to say. It seemed like hours had passed (although time was horribly relavent here) when he finally said,
“Now I should tell you want you’ll be doing to earn your keep here, Miss Gard,” he said. “You’ll be spending a lot of time with Liang.”
“Why Liang?” I asked.
“Liang will record anything new you have to say about the living world,” Menestheus. “I suspect not much has changed since Mariano arrived, but we want to be as up-to-date as possible.”
“Right,” I said. Again I found myself wondering just how old Mariano was.
“And you’ll be taking up some chores to keep the headquarters running,” Menestheus continued. “Cleaning, some paperwork– things like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
He told me he’d send for me when I was needed and we said our goodbyes. I retreated to the elevator and thought about what he’d said as I ascended.
Menestheus made a lot of claims I couldn’t quite agree with. I thought trying to keep up with the living world was a good idea, but I didn’t think it could solve everyone’s problems, nor did I think it was the key difference between life and death. And what was all that about people only coming alive when they were dead? Maybe Menestheus was a bit batty, having existed so long.
(juniper make better feedback on crazyman mk thanks?)
What would I be like, centeries from now? Would I remember anything at all?
The elevator doors opened, and I found a very strange sight in the neon green room. Pandora was in the corridor outside, chasing a small white creature.
“Is that a unicorn?” I asked, befuddled.
“Shut up and help,” she weezed. The little horse probably only came to my waist. It was quick, agile, and doing a very good job of dodging Pandora as she lunged after it. She managed to get her arms around its neck, but it wrenched free and she went toppling forward, her long hair splaying everywhere.
Having sufficient time to recover from the absurdity of the situation, I helped Pandora tackle the unicorn. I managed to get my arm over its back and my other hand tangled in its mane, while she demonstrated the equine equivalent of a half-nelson. The animal bucked twice and continued to rampage around the courridor, dragging us with it.
“What’s going on?” I yelled into course hair.
“Uurrrgh,” Pandora replied and dug her heels into the floor. The horse eventually slowed to a rest, although I doubted it had anything to with Pandora’ efforts.
“Okay,” she panted, smoothing her hair with one hand and fisting the unicorn’s mane with the other. “Thanks. They do that sometimes times.”
Another horned horse stuck its head out from behind her door, which had been left open a jar. This one was pink. She yelled a few angry words at it and it retreated back inside.
“It’s like the universe is conspiring to withhold explanations,” I said as Pandora led the tiny white unicorn back into her room, slamming the door behind her.
In my room I remembered Pandora mentioning the merry-go-round Tuki had made with real, miniture horses. Apparently she hadn’t been that annoyed with them afterall.
I sat down at my flower-desk and tried to think about my conversation with Menestheus more, but I was distracted by other thoughts. What would redecorating my room entail? Would I even be staying here long enough for it to matter? Why were the elevator buttons labeled like that? Why bother with an elevator and different floors at all if you could just link a bunch of rooms to the same gate?
Oh, I thought. So that’s why there’s only four doors on this floor.
I sat there for a very long time, mentally mulling over what I dubbed “ponder-tangents.” In the end, I managed to make very few conclusions.
Eventually I was summoned to go meet with Liang. He was still in the first room I’d encountered in ORG: the one where I’d played cards with Pandora and Tuki. He had moved to a new computer, however, and I dragged a chair from the card table over to him.
“You called?” I said.
He pushed his rolling chair back from the screen and reached above his head in a deep stretch. His dark hair stuck up as if he ran his hand through it frequently, and his button-up shirt had a coffee stain on it.
“Juniper, right?” he said. “I need you to answer a few questions.”
“Right,” I said. He asked me several basic questions, such as my full name and my birth and death days, and entered then on the computer. He asked where I had lived and and with whom I had lived. He asked for their names and ages.
“Why do you need to know?” I asked after I’d told him.
He shrugged. “Just formalities. What’s the most recent advance in the field of medicine?”
“I… I really don’t know. Sorry.”
“What about in any of the other sciences?”
“I don’t know. We only really talked about established things in school,” I explained.
“Hmm.” Liang typed something brief. “Why don’t you tell me about recent events, then.”
“Umm…” I was starting to feel uncomfortable. My parents watched the news during breakfast, and I tried to remember what was on the day of my death. I spluttered out something about a tree falling across a major road during a storm. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought and reached up and pulled at my hair with one hand. If Liang noticed, he didn’t care enough to show it.
“I see,” Liang said. He didn’t type anything and considered me for a moment. I started to braid my hair, and he watched without comment. Finally he said, “Who is the current leader of your country?”
I answered, and he asked me a series of questions about contemporary politics. I wasn’t as savvy as I would have liked, but I thought I did a decent job of telling him what he wanted to know.
When he was done quizzing me, Liang produced a ruler and carefully measured the diameter of the hole through my skull.
“The faster it closes,” he said, “the faster we know we’re losing your connection to your body. We can then also gauge how fast time is passing in the living world. Has it changed much since you died?”
I ran my fingers around the smooth edges. It didn’t seem like it had changed. Before, I had managed to squeeze my boney forearm though it, so I tried that again. I wiggled my fingers at Liang from the other side of my head.
“Nope,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “It means times is passing slowly.”
He led me down the hall to a supply closet and pointed to a mop and bucket.
“The floor with the cat skeleton has truly filthy floors,” he said. “See what you can do about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, picking up the mop. “The floor with the what?”
Liang sighed and ran a hand through his already mussed hair. “The cat skeleton. I’d throw it out, but that’s what it’s called in the elevator…”
He turned and shuffled away before I could ask him why they didn’t just change the name then.
I mopped all the rooms I could find on that floor. It seemed to be a labyrinth of rooms of random themes: one had a handful of fishless aquariums and another had stacks and stacks of maps. The largest room was full of mirrors and inexplicably featured a full cat skeleton, displayed in a glass box on a podium in the room’s center. When I finished mopping, I dusted the mirrors and the glass case.
I kept myself busy cleaning and lost track of time. I ran into a few other employees, but they didn’t have much to say to me and for the most part the vast rooms of ORG were empty. I wondered about that– why was the afterlife so empty?
I asked Liang about that, and he replied by handing me a bag full of clothes he’d procured for me.
Tuki found me and handed me a file to run to Menestheus.
I slept for the second time since dying. It was a strange, habitual action. I never actually physically felt tired, although I was sure I had been wandering around the compound for at least three or four days. But my mind was going off on more and more ponder-tangents, and after he found me carefully studying the bristles of a broom, Liang suggested I take a nap. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember it.
I awoke to knocking. There was no intermediate feeling of drowsiness between the state of sleep and waking, so I hopped up and answered the door as energetically as if I’d already been awake.
“Good morning!” Mariano greeted when I opened the door. He appraised the pajamas I’d barrowed from Pandora. They were fuschia. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
I leaned against the doorway and grinned teasingly. “I fail to see the point,” I said, “in using temporal greetings when time runs according to whim. Look, I can make it evening: And will you be having the stake or the chicken at dinner?”
“Ha,” Mariano answered. “You make fun of it now, but you know you like it.” I shrugged and continued grinning. “And you’ll like what I want to show you,” he said. “Get dressed.”
I shut the door for privacy and rooted through the pile of clothes I’d obtained. Liang either had a very strange sense of style or had been very lazy with his shopping, as it seemed he had raided a series of high school locker rooms to produce gym clothes of varying colors.
Ignoring the morbidity of it, I put on the clothes in which I’d woken up dead.
“Okay then,” Mariano said when I emerged from my room. He was eyeing the tears around the right calf of my lucky jeans.
“Where are we going?” I asked, following him into the elevator. He pressed the “very bottom” button. Oddly, it was at the top.
“For a walk,” he said.
“I– I–” I stuttered. I few strands of hair were caught between my fingers. Mariano slowly pulled my hands away from my head.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said calmly.
“I know, but…” I pulled my hands from his. “It’s just…” I inhaled deeply and willed my voice not to crack. “I can’t believe I’m related to that man. And now I don’t know what to do with myself, and it just… it just all came out.”
I shrugged and accepted that I probably sounded completely insane. Mariano slowly raised his arm and put a hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll go to NAME OF ORG,” he said. “And you can figure out what you want. It’ll be okay.”
On impulse, I hugged him. He took a step back, startled, but returned it. On our way to NAME OF ORG, neither of us mentioned it.
Mariano took me to a hotel on the beach, which grew out of ten or twelves trees bending and stretching themselves. Instead of normal rooms, the hotel just had halls and halls of gates.
“I want to try something,” he said. He picked a random door and had me stand in front of it.
“Imagine a mountain,” he said. I did. “It’s very steep. It’s a faded green from shurbs and grass. There are more mountains around it. And in the middle of these mountains is a lake. The lake is very still and large. It’s not quite round but close enough.”
“Is there snow on the mountains?” I asked.
“No.” I was disappointed, but I removed the snow from my mental imagine. Mariano continued, “The mountain is completely hollow. Inside, there is a secret base filled with laboratories. The only way to get into the secret base is through a metal door at the edge of the lake. I want you to focus on that door, okay?”
“Alright,” I said. I imagined that that door was this door, th on in front of me, and that it would open up the to the lake and the mountains. I opened the door.
On the other side, there was a lake not exactly like the one I had imagined, but close enough. Mountains rose up around it. “Neat,” I said.
“Nope,” said Mariano. “Try again.”
It took eight more tries before I openned the hotel door to the right mountain lake.
“Fantastic!” Mariano cried and led me through. We closed the door, turned around, and Mariano opened it again to reveal the ‘secret base’ inside the mountain.
The walls and ceiling were dull metal sheets with fluorescent lights. Periodically there would be large windows showing off strange rooms which I supposed were the labratories. One looked like a medieval alchemist’s workshop, and another had walls of buttons and blinking lights like something out of an old science fiction movie. The end of the hall opened into a large room covered with computer screens and panels of switches and keys. A man was typing furiously in front of the largest screen, and a man and a woman sat at a table in the middle of the room. They were building a card pyramid.
“I’m back!” Mariano announced. The card pyramid collapsed and the three people looked up. The first man continued typing, his face toward us instead of the screen.
“Who’s that?” he asked, nodding toward me.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Mariano said and sat down at the table. “This is Juniper. Juniper, that’s Liang–” He pointed to the man who went back to squinting at the compter screen. “And these are Pandora and–”
“Tupaqyupanki,” the other man interrumpted, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. “Don’t call me Tupaq. I don’t know why that’s funny, but some day I will figure it out, and Mariano will suffer.” He said this all very seriously. My eyes widened.
Pandora snorted. “Tuki’s just upset he can’t find anyone who can say his name.”
“Oh,” said. “Um, nice to meet you. May I sit down?”
“No,” Tuki drawled, “we make poor confused newly deads stand as a form of purgatory.”
I decided to interpret that as, “Why yes Juniper; after all, you’re our welcome guest!” I sat down next to Pandora. She looked about my age, I thought, maybe a year or two older. She was small, with long, black hair. She watched me hang my bag on the chair with brown, almond eyes.
Tuki, on the other hand, looked like he was maybe five years older. He was shorter than Mariano, but well built with dark caramel skin and glossy black hair.
“Where’s old Minestrone?” Mariano asked, propping his feet on the table. Tuki, who was sitting across from him, gave his boots a withering glance.
“Off thinking deep thoughts or whatever it is philosophers do,” Tuki answered.
“Hmm,” Mariano hummed.
“More importantly,” said Pandora, “why did you bring her back with you?” She jabbed a thumb in my direction.
“Couldn’t find a relative,” Mariano said, then kicked his feet off the table, leaned over and started on his own house of cards.
“Really now,” Tuki said dryly.
“Well, we did,” Mariano explained, “but Juniper thought he was a jerk.”
I turned red. Pandora laughed.
“Hey,” she said, elbowing me good naturedly, “I think that about these two everyday and I still have to live with them.” Tuki flicked a card at her, and the motion caused Mariano’s card house to collapse.
Pandora gathered up all the cards and delt them for spades.
“So,” I said after I’d lost my third game, “is Liang the only one who does work around here or what?”
“No,” Mariano protested at the same that Liang called over, “Yes.”
“Liang’s in charge of data analysis,” Pandora said. “The three of us do field work.”
“Are you peer advisors too?” I asked.
“Suuure,” Tuki said.
“No seriously,” I said. “Mariano can’t be the only one. To be effective you’d need lots of workers.”
“Well, um,” said Pandora, “There are more people, but they’re out now, doing… work.” She started dealing again. “Tuki and I do more specialized stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know,” Tuki cut in. “We just go out, separate confused youths from their support networks, then force peer advisors on them. It’s all one big conspiracy.”
I gaped at him and he smirked back.
Before we finshed our fourth game, the man Mariano had called ‘Minestrone’ waltzed in. He was dressed in a white toga and had a neatly trimmed, sand-colored facial hair.
“Mariano!” he said jovially and slapped him on the back. “You brought a friend.” He grinned at me, inviting and friendly.
“This is Juniper,” Mariano said. “She’s a bit of a special case…”
Mariano explained my situation.
“Ah, that happens sometimes,” the ‘Minestrone’ said. “Nice to meet you, Juniper. You can call me Menestheus.”
“Nice to meet you too,” I said and shook his hand.
He told me I was welcome to stay for as long as I wanted, and told Pandora to take me to find a room. As we left the room, I heard Mariano say, “We need to talk.”
Pandora led me to an elevator and took me to “the very top.” (The button next to it was labeled “almost at the very top.”) After a very awkward ride in which Pandora fixed her hair in the mirror-plated wall, we found ourselves in a tiny round corridor with polished wound floors and neon green wallpaper.
“This floor is for girls,” Pandora said. “For some reason we let Tuki pick the colors. Tuki is not a very nice person.”
There were only four, firehydrant-red doors lining the little corridor. Either there were female employees living elsewhere or ORG NAME was not an equal opportunity employer.
“This one is the least offensive, I think,” Pandora continued and let me into a decent sized, bee-themed bedroom. Everything was black and yellow, and the comfortor on the small bed had a bee pattern. There was a lopsided honey-comb shaped beanbag chair in one corner. The desk was a bright-pink flower: an actual one, facing upward and flat, with a can of writing utensils balanced on its golden center.
“It’s… nice,” I said. Pandora shook her head.
“Don’t ever let Tuki design anything for you. He will go out of his way to make it painful for everyone. There was actually a merry-go-round bedroom that was in constant motion, with little rainbow ponies running around and neighing. Completely uninhabitable.”
I stared at her. “I’d like to see that, actually,” I said.
“Can’t,” she answered with a shrug. “I redid it for my room forever ago.”
I tentively sat down on the bed. It was comfortably soft. I dropped my bag on the floor; Minerva clinked against it.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. “Er– I mean, with ORG NAME, not… you know…”
Pandora laughed and pulled out the striped chair from the flower-desk. It had six legs.
“You don’t have to tiptoe around the whole death issue here,” she said. “Most people are over it. And if they’re not, well, screw ‘em.”
I nodded. She flipped a strand of hair over her shoulder and started twiddling it.
“I don’t actually remember dying,” she went on, “or being alive at all. I don’t even remember my real name.”
“Not even your name?” I repeated, shocked. She shrugged as if it weren’t a big deal.
“I didn’t even have one for a while. Tuki just called me ‘you’ for years. But Menestheus, being who he is, suggested Pandora.”
“So you knew Tuki before ORG?” I said. She nodded.
“Tuki and I used to wander around together. I don’t have any memories where I didn’t know who Mr. Tupaqyupanki is.”
“How old is Tuki?” I asked.
“Well, we don’t really know that either,” Pandora admitted sheepishly. “He doesn’t remember much about life. He’s got to have died at least five hundred years ago, though– somewhere in the Andes, he thinks.”
“And have you been with him that long?”
“No, I… I’m not really sure. Maybe a hundred years, living time. It’s hard to keep track if you’re not being vigilant. But we’ve just been traveling around together for so long… until we met Minest– Menestheus, of course.”
“And when was that?” I felt prying, but I was genuinely interested.
“Oh, I don’t know… twenty years ago, maybe? The ORG was pretty new then. Minest–Menestheus had just found this mountain, ready-made with labs and stuff. And it ‘resonated’–” she made finger quotes “–with Tuki or something, so we signed up, moved in, and Tuki started decorating everything horribly.”
“And where’s Menestheus from?” I asked. I wanted to ask about Mariano, but there was probably a reason he avoided talking about himself, so I had chickened out.
“Ancient Greece, of course,” replied Pandora in a duh voice. “He was a philosopher, and now he has all these great ideas for research. And for whatever it is Mariano does, of course.”
I mentally battled two questions. First, I wanted to know why a Greek man would go by an Italian nickname and stroll around in a Roman toga. Second, I continued wanting to ask about the elusive Mariano. After remembering Tuki had been sporting a pair of cargo pants, I decided fashion choices of the dead were not worth analyzing.
“And where’s Mariano from?” I asked, giving into temptation.
“No idea,” Pandora answered flippantly, crushing my hope with a wave of her hand. “He showed up a few years ago and went and schmoozed and charmed everyone, including Minestrone.”
She then announced she needed to get something out of her room and sauntered out.
I laid down on my bed. What was I going to do with myself? For all I’d seen, I didn’t actually understand how this place worked. I’d barely met any people. At home I knew what I was supposed to do: finish high school, go to college, find a useful degree I didn’t hate.
What did dead teenagers do?
I curled into a ball. My borrowed skirt ended a few inches above my knees; I started to absently scratch my lower thigh there.
“Juniper?” A deep voice echoed around my room. I yelped in surprise. “This is Menestheus. Could I speak to you privately?”
“I, um…” I said, looking around the room. Did I have a microphone to talk into or something? I tried talking to a wall. “Sure, why not?”
“Excellent,” the voice answered. It didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular, just around. What an odd PA system.
He told me where to meet him and I went to the elevator and pressed the button labeled “exact midpoint,” as instructed. The button next to it said, “The floor that smells like fish.” I decided to avoid that floor if I could.
The exact midpoint was a cafeteria. It was a wide, open room: along the the back were various centuries’ worth of kitchen tools, and on the opposite side of the room were a handful of square tables. It was lit with natural light from the floor-to-ceiling window over looking the lake outside. I found this perplexing, as there was no sign of a window from the outside.
Menestheus was seated at the table closeted to the window, a tray with all the accoutrements for teatime set before him. I sat down across from him, shoulders tense.
“Hello sir,” I said. “I wanted to thank you for helping me out and taking me in. If you need anything done, I’d be happy to help out.”
Menestheus chuckled and leaned back casaully. I relaxed.
“No need to thank me, Miss Gard,” he said. “Mariano told me your story.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess it’s not normal to reject family like that…”
“It happens all the time; we’re always putting up newly deads,” he said and winked knowlingly. “Does sharing blood truly necessitate love?”
“Well no, but…” I mumbled something about ensuring one’s genetic code spread.
If bringing me to ORG was normal, then why had Tuki and Pandora acted like it was strange? Did they really enjoy being as contradictory as possible? Why was I trying to defend familial love using genetics to an ancient Greek philosopher?
“Have some tea,” the man offered. He served us both and offered me a plate of cookies. I took one politely.
We chatted pleasantly for a while, and I told him how I’d died and the adventures I’d had with Mariano. He told me about the Athens of his youth. He described the acroplois and the parthenon and his home to me, with all the detail of a painting. He told me about philosophical arguments he’d had.
“You must count yourself lucky to have such vivid memories of your life,” I said. “Since Pandora and Tuki can barely remember anything at all.”
“I do,” he agreed solemnly. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
I gave him a brief summary of what I’d told Barry.
Afterwards I said, “May I ask what’s going to happen to me here?”
He stood up and walked slowly to the window, staring down at the smooth lake. He looked quite dramatic, with his toga and regal posture.
“Do you know what we do here?” He asked.
“I know you run a peer advising program for newly deads,” I said slowly. “But I guess you must do more.” I thought of all those labratories.
“Much more,” he said. “Death offers a lot of opportunity, Miss Gard.”
“If you say so, sir,” I said.
“The peer advising program is Mariano’s pet project,” Menestheus explained. I nodded. “My goal is something much greater.”
I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He continued staring down at the lake, his expression hard as though deep in thought. I had the vague feeling he was purposely putting on a show. (no shit, junie)
“Sir?” I said. “What are you researching?”
“The link,” he said, “between life and death.” He looked me in the eyes expectantly.
“That sounds really interesting,” I said, having no idea what he meant.
“What, Miss Gard, is the difference between living and dying?”
“A pulse?” I tried, then pinched myself under the table for much a smartass reply.
“Did you know,” Menestheus continued, strolling back over to the table, “that people only come to life when they have died?” He didn’t sit. I felt he was trying to intimidate me and remained silent. “The truth is only apparent in hindsight.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. He smirked back at me.
“ORG’s goal is to bring all the opportunities of life to the dead.”
I thought “I still don’t understand” wasn’t a valid response and would make me look stupid. I hesitated, then said it anyway.
He looked thoughtful, as if my comprehension failure was baffling. He sat down and took another sip of tea.
“Miss Gard, you have noticed that we use computers here, haven’t you?” I nodded. “And we have elevators and coffee makers and blenders.” My eyes darted over to the mess of kitchen supplies on the other side of the room. They also had modern stoves and toaster ovens and Tuki wore cargo pants.
“But most of you are very old,” I said slowly.
He smiled wryly at me. “Exactly. We want to bring all the modern advances of the living to the dead, more quickly than they’re dispersing now.”
I thought of the library and their horrible information storage system. Spreading technology seemed like a worthy aim, but I tried to imagine bringing a toaster to everyone who had ever died or explaining the internet to early H. sapiens.
“Sir, don’t you think that’s a bit lofty?” I said.
Menestheus sighed. “Miss Gard, I will admit something to you. I regret my life. I regret not setting more ambitious goals for myself.”
I blinked, surprised. “But you made it sound so beautiful.”
He shook his head. “In the end, history hasn’t remembered me. I wasn’t Plato or Aristotle or Socretes. I never did anything daring. I never did anything worth remembering.”
“You found it worth remembering,” I said. He smiled sadly.
“Thank you, Miss Gard,” he said.
“I don’t understand what this has to do with that stuff about ‘the truth is only apparent in hindsight,’” I went on, swirling the contents of my teacup without paying much attention to it.
“I’m lucky in that I remember my life,” he said. “I can remember the best parts and the worst parts. And now, with ORG, I’m fixing my regrets– I’m aiming high and I will be remembered among the dead forever. But Tuki and Pandora will never have the opportunity to fix regrets.” (i hate this entire conversation DIE DIE DIE)
“Oh,” I said. My mind struggled to put what he was saying together. Modern technology would mean better information storage and easier access to new information and more efficient communication. “You want people to have more tech… so they can remember their lives? So they can have the good memories and fix any regrets?” (WHAT THAT'S STUPID STOP PULLING STUFF OUT OF YOUR ASS MICHELLE)
“Life is precious,” Menestheus affirmed. We stared at each in silence for a few moments, then he started asking me for details about my life– to learn about new advances, I supposed. I told him everything he wanted to know.
I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about myself (especially to someone who was trying to change the afterlife forever), but he seemed intrigued by everything I had to say. It seemed like hours had passed (although time was horribly relavent here) when he finally said,
“Now I should tell you want you’ll be doing to earn your keep here, Miss Gard,” he said. “You’ll be spending a lot of time with Liang.”
“Why Liang?” I asked.
“Liang will record anything new you have to say about the living world,” Menestheus. “I suspect not much has changed since Mariano arrived, but we want to be as up-to-date as possible.”
“Right,” I said. Again I found myself wondering just how old Mariano was.
“And you’ll be taking up some chores to keep the headquarters running,” Menestheus continued. “Cleaning, some paperwork– things like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
He told me he’d send for me when I was needed and we said our goodbyes. I retreated to the elevator and thought about what he’d said as I ascended.
Menestheus made a lot of claims I couldn’t quite agree with. I thought trying to keep up with the living world was a good idea, but I didn’t think it could solve everyone’s problems, nor did I think it was the key difference between life and death. And what was all that about people only coming alive when they were dead? Maybe Menestheus was a bit batty, having existed so long.
(juniper make better feedback on crazyman mk thanks?)
What would I be like, centeries from now? Would I remember anything at all?
The elevator doors opened, and I found a very strange sight in the neon green room. Pandora was in the corridor outside, chasing a small white creature.
“Is that a unicorn?” I asked, befuddled.
“Shut up and help,” she weezed. The little horse probably only came to my waist. It was quick, agile, and doing a very good job of dodging Pandora as she lunged after it. She managed to get her arms around its neck, but it wrenched free and she went toppling forward, her long hair splaying everywhere.
Having sufficient time to recover from the absurdity of the situation, I helped Pandora tackle the unicorn. I managed to get my arm over its back and my other hand tangled in its mane, while she demonstrated the equine equivalent of a half-nelson. The animal bucked twice and continued to rampage around the courridor, dragging us with it.
“What’s going on?” I yelled into course hair.
“Uurrrgh,” Pandora replied and dug her heels into the floor. The horse eventually slowed to a rest, although I doubted it had anything to with Pandora’ efforts.
“Okay,” she panted, smoothing her hair with one hand and fisting the unicorn’s mane with the other. “Thanks. They do that sometimes times.”
Another horned horse stuck its head out from behind her door, which had been left open a jar. This one was pink. She yelled a few angry words at it and it retreated back inside.
“It’s like the universe is conspiring to withhold explanations,” I said as Pandora led the tiny white unicorn back into her room, slamming the door behind her.
In my room I remembered Pandora mentioning the merry-go-round Tuki had made with real, miniture horses. Apparently she hadn’t been that annoyed with them afterall.
I sat down at my flower-desk and tried to think about my conversation with Menestheus more, but I was distracted by other thoughts. What would redecorating my room entail? Would I even be staying here long enough for it to matter? Why were the elevator buttons labeled like that? Why bother with an elevator and different floors at all if you could just link a bunch of rooms to the same gate?
Oh, I thought. So that’s why there’s only four doors on this floor.
I sat there for a very long time, mentally mulling over what I dubbed “ponder-tangents.” In the end, I managed to make very few conclusions.
Eventually I was summoned to go meet with Liang. He was still in the first room I’d encountered in ORG: the one where I’d played cards with Pandora and Tuki. He had moved to a new computer, however, and I dragged a chair from the card table over to him.
“You called?” I said.
He pushed his rolling chair back from the screen and reached above his head in a deep stretch. His dark hair stuck up as if he ran his hand through it frequently, and his button-up shirt had a coffee stain on it.
“Juniper, right?” he said. “I need you to answer a few questions.”
“Right,” I said. He asked me several basic questions, such as my full name and my birth and death days, and entered then on the computer. He asked where I had lived and and with whom I had lived. He asked for their names and ages.
“Why do you need to know?” I asked after I’d told him.
He shrugged. “Just formalities. What’s the most recent advance in the field of medicine?”
“I… I really don’t know. Sorry.”
“What about in any of the other sciences?”
“I don’t know. We only really talked about established things in school,” I explained.
“Hmm.” Liang typed something brief. “Why don’t you tell me about recent events, then.”
“Umm…” I was starting to feel uncomfortable. My parents watched the news during breakfast, and I tried to remember what was on the day of my death. I spluttered out something about a tree falling across a major road during a storm. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought and reached up and pulled at my hair with one hand. If Liang noticed, he didn’t care enough to show it.
“I see,” Liang said. He didn’t type anything and considered me for a moment. I started to braid my hair, and he watched without comment. Finally he said, “Who is the current leader of your country?”
I answered, and he asked me a series of questions about contemporary politics. I wasn’t as savvy as I would have liked, but I thought I did a decent job of telling him what he wanted to know.
When he was done quizzing me, Liang produced a ruler and carefully measured the diameter of the hole through my skull.
“The faster it closes,” he said, “the faster we know we’re losing your connection to your body. We can then also gauge how fast time is passing in the living world. Has it changed much since you died?”
I ran my fingers around the smooth edges. It didn’t seem like it had changed. Before, I had managed to squeeze my boney forearm though it, so I tried that again. I wiggled my fingers at Liang from the other side of my head.
“Nope,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “It means times is passing slowly.”
He led me down the hall to a supply closet and pointed to a mop and bucket.
“The floor with the cat skeleton has truly filthy floors,” he said. “See what you can do about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, picking up the mop. “The floor with the what?”
Liang sighed and ran a hand through his already mussed hair. “The cat skeleton. I’d throw it out, but that’s what it’s called in the elevator…”
He turned and shuffled away before I could ask him why they didn’t just change the name then.
I mopped all the rooms I could find on that floor. It seemed to be a labyrinth of rooms of random themes: one had a handful of fishless aquariums and another had stacks and stacks of maps. The largest room was full of mirrors and inexplicably featured a full cat skeleton, displayed in a glass box on a podium in the room’s center. When I finished mopping, I dusted the mirrors and the glass case.
I kept myself busy cleaning and lost track of time. I ran into a few other employees, but they didn’t have much to say to me and for the most part the vast rooms of ORG were empty. I wondered about that– why was the afterlife so empty?
I asked Liang about that, and he replied by handing me a bag full of clothes he’d procured for me.
Tuki found me and handed me a file to run to Menestheus.
I slept for the second time since dying. It was a strange, habitual action. I never actually physically felt tired, although I was sure I had been wandering around the compound for at least three or four days. But my mind was going off on more and more ponder-tangents, and after he found me carefully studying the bristles of a broom, Liang suggested I take a nap. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember it.
I awoke to knocking. There was no intermediate feeling of drowsiness between the state of sleep and waking, so I hopped up and answered the door as energetically as if I’d already been awake.
“Good morning!” Mariano greeted when I opened the door. He appraised the pajamas I’d barrowed from Pandora. They were fuschia. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
I leaned against the doorway and grinned teasingly. “I fail to see the point,” I said, “in using temporal greetings when time runs according to whim. Look, I can make it evening: And will you be having the stake or the chicken at dinner?”
“Ha,” Mariano answered. “You make fun of it now, but you know you like it.” I shrugged and continued grinning. “And you’ll like what I want to show you,” he said. “Get dressed.”
I shut the door for privacy and rooted through the pile of clothes I’d obtained. Liang either had a very strange sense of style or had been very lazy with his shopping, as it seemed he had raided a series of high school locker rooms to produce gym clothes of varying colors.
Ignoring the morbidity of it, I put on the clothes in which I’d woken up dead.
“Okay then,” Mariano said when I emerged from my room. He was eyeing the tears around the right calf of my lucky jeans.
“Where are we going?” I asked, following him into the elevator. He pressed the “very bottom” button. Oddly, it was at the top.
“For a walk,” he said.
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