RE: Vox Mentis
05-02-2017, 02:35 PM
“Eliot. We’re here.”
Eliot’s head bobs. “Good.”
“You want me to help you inside?” He shakes his head. “I forgot. You have to stay here. I’ll go look for the word.”
“Don’t...”
“Don’t tell you anything about it. Got it.” Eliot nods. He's been forced to take your advice: he's loosened up. He's relaxed control. Eliot is no longer in charge. “I’ll be right back.” You climb out.
You're not prepared for the silence. You shut the car door and the sound evaporates. Your shoes crunch sand. Hot air closes around you like a fist.
You move towards the paramedic van, one eye on the emergency room. The glass doors are a strange kind of black. Not painted. Stained. You slow without knowing why. Well. You do know. It's because you're not incredibly keen to face whatever reduced three thousand human beings to belt buckles and bones. You glance inside the paramedic van. A flatbed trolley, cloth straps, equipment, little bottles; nothing you wouldn’t expect. But it makes your brain crawl. You feel another tickle of familiarity. You hesitate, thinking. Eliot could benefit from some of these supplies. He could use some water. You climb into the van. You gather anything that looks medicinal and return to the Valiant with your arms full of supplies. Eliot’s eyes are closed. “Eliot!”
His eyes pop open.
“Stay awake.” You dump your load of bottles onto Eliot’s lap. “I got this stuff for you.”
Eliot stares.
“Some medicine. And water. You should drink the water.”
“What...”
“You know, I think you’re right. I did live here. It’s starting to feel familiar.”
“The fuck,” says Eliot. “Word.”
“I haven’t gone in yet. I thought you could use this stuff.” Eliot’s eyes bulge. “All right! I’m going! Jesus!”
You walk back to the emergency room. You get close enough to see shapes against the dark glass. You know what they are. There have to be two or three dozen corpses jammed up against the glass. And they're just the ones you can see. You wondered if it's airtight in there. The air could be toxic. It could actually kill you. You jog back to the car.
“Fuck!” says Eliot.
“Hang on one second,” you say. “I just want to ask this. Are we sure we want to open this box? Because what’s inside, you know, it killed a lot of people. We are talking about something incredibly dangerous. It’s striking me as kind of stupid to walk on in there and try to pick it up. That seems like a big risk. You know? You say I’m immune, but do you know that for sure? What if I just avoided it somehow the last time? I lay in a ditch and it passed over my head? I’m just saying, that emergency room, it’s wall-to-wall dead people, Eliot. It’s wall-to-wall. And there’s, I don’t know, something about a room full of corpses that makes me think about whether I want to go in there. Don’t look at me like that. I know. I know.” You shake your head. “I’ll go in. I will. It’s just... you’re asking me to maybe die, Eliot. Give me a second. Give me one... I know you’re hurting. I’m going. But appreciate what I’m doing. That’s all I want. I want you to acknowledge... for one second... the simple fact that I’m about to die. All right? I’m probably about to die. I’m happy to do it. I’m going. It’s fine. I only wanted...”
You turn away. You walk. The glass is so dark. Your feet scuff. You reach the emergency room doors. Your fingers touch the door plate. It's warm. Like there's a beating heart inside. It's not that. It's just the sun. Everything here is warm. You look back at the Valiant but can’t see it behind the paramedic van.
“If I don’t come out, Eliot,” you shout, “fuck you!” Your voice shakes.
You push open the door.
PART THREE
You try to catch Danny at inconvenient moments. When he's stepping into the shower, or just after he closes his eyes at night, or reaching for the car door, late for work. “Do you love me?” you ask. You smile, so he knows you're teasing.
“Maybe,” he says. Or nothing. Sometimes the look he gives you is like: Of course, why ask? and other times it's more like: Stop it, I’m running late.
He does love you. You're sure of it. All evidence points to yes. So why not say it? This is the part that nags at you. Yes, okay, in Danny’s world, you don’t need to say something to make it real. But come on.
You've said it. You've said it a lot, starting three weeks ago and increasing in frequency since, with the exception of a four-day drought the week before, which you'd hoped might trigger something but didn’t. And it's driving you crazy because you could force him. You don't have a lot of words, but you do have tricks, and you've figured out his set, and there's no doubt in your mind that you could compel Danny Walker to say whatever you want. But if you did that, it wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be him. It would be you, speaking to yourself, through him. It's very frustrating.
~
“That car has been all over town,” says the woman making you a sandwich. You turn. Across the street sits a dark sedan, windows tinted, engine running against the heat. A skirt of dust betrays some serious long-haul driving. “You see it?”
“Yes,” you say.
“Not from around here.”
“No.” You look at the sandwich that the woman, Beryl, is making. You've visited this shop nearly every weekday lunchtime for the past four years. You've practically married Beryl’s sandwiches.
“It’s been to the mines.” Beryl gestures with the knife. “Look at the tires.”
You look. The tires are caked in red earth.
“Someone from the city, I suppose. Government.” Beryl flips the bread. “Salt and pepper, love?”
“No, thanks.”
“I keep thinking you might change your mind,” says Beryl, sawing bread. “I can’t imagine how you eat it so plain.”
“I like plain,” you say. You carry the sandwich out of the shop, although you no longer feel like eating it. The car crouches in your peripheral vision but you don't look at it. When it pulls out, you cross into the pedestrian mall, where it can't follow, and walk the roundabout route to Tangled Threads. You lock the door and sit behind the counter. You don’t know how to feel. Two years ago, maybe even one, you would have chased that car down the road. You would have beaten your hands against its side and begged it to stop. But now things are different. And yet...
A young man in an airy gray suit appears at the door. He pulls the handle, pushes it, then puts his hand to the glass and peers inside. When he sees you, he points at the handle and mouths: Open?
You unlock. He's young; a boy, really. You can tell from his skin that he came from nowhere near here. “Thanks,” he says. He comes inside. He brushes aside his hair, which is a style you don't know and dangles in his eyes. “Whoo. Hot.”
“What can I help you with today?” you say.
He smiles, as if he appreciates the pretense. “It’s good news. You can come home.”
You say nothing.
He glances out the window. “That was a genuinely long drive. They told me it was long, but... it’s really something. Or nothing, rather.” He looks at you. “Nothing and nothing, for as far as you go. Did you get used to it?” You don't answer. “It seems to me it would be hard to get used to.”
“You can get used to anything.”
“Of course,” he says. “We can leave right away.”
“Today?”
“Is that a problem?” His eyes are gray, like his suit.
You shake your head. You don't want problems. “Give me your phone number. I’ll call you in a couple hours.”
“I wouldn’t bother packing. There’s nothing here you’ll need again.”
“If I don’t tell people I’m leaving, they’ll look for me. I’ll be reported missing. It will get messy.”
He's silent. He's going to tell you the Organization can handle a missing persons report. But then he shrugs. “As you like.” He digs in his pockets. Had this boy attended the school? He might have been one of the kids, a skinny cavorting stick boy too small to register. But you're not sure. It all seems so long ago. “You really made yourself a part of this place, huh?”
“It’s small,” you say. “There’s no other way.”
He smiles like he doesn’t believe you and extends you a card. “I’ll be in the car.”
~
You phone the owner of Tangled Threads, Mary, and say you need to leave right away, your mother is dying. Mary’s voice floods with sympathy and tells you it's fine, take as much time as you need. She says, “I didn’t know you were still in contact with your family.”
“I wasn’t,” you say. “I just heard from them.”
Then you drive to the hospital and wait. You can never tell where Danny will be, but the best place to wait is the emergency room. Sometimes you sit and read magazines alongside farmers with their hands wrapped in black towels and mothers with green children. The emergency room has glass double doors and when the paramedic van pulls up, the sun bouncing off its white hood, it's always thrilling, like winning a prize.
But when you see him, you burst into tears. It's unexpected and shocking and if that Organization boy was around to see it, who knows what would happen. Danny comes to you, alarmed, and you hear the lie fall out of you about a mother, cancer. You hug him and inhale him while you can.
“Do you want me to come?”
“No,” you say, grateful for the offer. “You can’t.”
“How long will you be?” He shakes his head. “You don’t know. It’s okay. Take your time.” He kisses your head. “But come back.”
“I will,” you say, and as the words came out, you're surprised at how true they feel. “I will, I promise.”
Eventually you pull away. There are people watching, and the longer this goes on, the harder it becomes, so when he offers to drive you to the house you refuse. You have to walk away while you can. “I love you,” you say, and he smiles sadly, and in retrospect, it was very obvious, wasn’t it? You should have seen it coming. But love makes people stupid, and you're so very much in love. The emergency room doors part and you walk through them and the only thing that makes this bearable is the conviction that you'll be back.
~
An hour later, you're in the black sedan, watching dust swallow Broken Hill in the side mirror. The boy brings the car up to ninety miles an hour and manipulates his phone with one hand. “Sleep, if you want,” he tells you. “There’s a whole lot of nothing for the next eight hours.”
This is true. But you can't do it. The boy keeps glancing at you and you curl up in the seat, putting your back to him. A while later, a car passes, heading in the opposite direction, gleaming on top and pancaked with dirt on the bottom. You watch it recede in the mirror. A minute later, there's another one just like it, then another.
“Are there more of you?”
“Hmm?” he says.
“The cars,” you say.
He shrugs. “Probably locals.”
You slouch back down. A truck appears on the road ahead, following the cars, a black eighteen-wheeler with no signage, hauling a steel container unlike any you've ever seen, but this time you don't say anything.
~
The journey is thirty-four hours, long enough to develop a burning hate for the Organization boy and everything he stands for. You're glad the first-class seats are like capsules, which give you space to hide your misery. You don't know what triggered the arrival of the boy, whether it was simply enough time passing for the Organization to consider you suitably chastened, or they were observing you, or something had happened, or what. But whichever it was, you'll be expected to be in charge of your emotions.
You deplane, disoriented and bruised somewhere in the core of your body, into DC winter sunshine. A limo whisks you to a grand hotel, where the boy bids you farewell, and you sleep for fourteen hours. You wake to a blinking red light on the bedside phone. You press for voice mail, thinking it might be Eliot, which would be frightening, or Thoreau, which would be more so, but it's neither. Instead, a girl you don't know tells you you're expected at a particular fashion store in thirty minutes. The girl ends her message without saying good-bye, as if she’s cut off, although you know she wasn't.
You catch a cab downtown and try on skirts and sheer shirts. In the mirror, you look freakishly tan. “This will take more than a jacket,” says the man, who introduced himself as a personal style adviser. “You’re a cavewoman in a suit, dear.”
He forwards you to a salon, where a bald man drags a brush through your hair with occasional exclamations of dismay. Now that you're alongside other women, you start to see the problem. Your hair is the wrong kind of blond: the kind from the sun. There's a gritty quality to your skin. You've absorbed Broken Hill. You've soaked it up and become savage. “Do not worry,” says the hairdresser. “We’ve beaten worse than this.”
Afterward, the floor a graveyard of fallen hair, you find herself with a short bob and bangs like a steel door. It seems like they tried to hide her face. You look strange to yourself. “Do you wear glasses?” asks the hairdresser. “You should consider that.”
You're shuttled back to the first clothing store, where your new look is praised effusively. You actually start to feel good and then the personal style adviser says, “Well, it’s an improvement, anyway.” You forgot how indirectly people speak here. You've become accustomed to taking people literally.
Hours later, laden with shopping bags, you're driven to a tall glass office building that offers no identifying logo. You enter a simple lobby, feeling newly manufactured in your gray woolen suit and stiff black shoes, your heart pounding in case you're about to meet someone you know. But there's no one. A red sofa, a few paintings; it could be anywhere. You wait at the reception desk until a young man with invisible eyebrows emerges from the rear office. “I’m Elise Jackson,” you say.
“Just a moment.” When he returns, he has a plastic card, which he places on the counter. It's blank except for the code NL-L5D6. You look at him.
“That means level five, desk six.”
“Oh,” you say. “Thank you.” You heft your bags. It takes you a minute to figure out the elevators; you have to insert the card into a slot before the buttons will do anything. Then the doors close and you rise toward whatever is up there.
~
It turns out that level five is nothing but anonymous corporate space with a dozen or so roomy cubicles. Almost all are empty. It's very quiet and as your shopping bags rustle and bang you wish you left them with the receptionist. You pass a young woman on the phone and a boy with long hair and glasses who looks up from his computer screen but his expression doesn’t change and you don’t stop walking.
You spot identifying plates on the desk corners and begin to triangulate D6. It's in a corner, with a pretty amazing view over south DC. It has a chair, a phone, a computer, and that's it. You stash your bags beneath the desk and test the chair. You wait. The phone will ring, you guess. Eventually.
After a minute, the boy with glasses appears, accompanied by a girl whose hair is the good kind of blond. She looks familiar, although you can't place her. She seems very young. “Wow. Welcome.”
“Hi,” you say. “Thank you.”
“Isaac Rosenberg,” the boy says. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Raine,” says the girl. “Kathleen Raine.”
“Hi,” you say again. There's an awkward silence. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Typical,” says the boy, Rosenberg. “We only got word a couple days ago that you were coming. You’re in NL.”
“Neurolinguistics?”
He nods. “Testing and Measurement. Have you done any NL work before?”
You shake your head.
“It’s good for a theoretical grounding, supposedly. Anyway, we’ll get you started. Teach you the system. If that’s okay with you.”
“Sure,” you say. The girl, Raine, is still looking at you like you're missing something, so you say, “I’m sorry, have we met?”
Several expressions flit across the girl’s face in quick succession, one of which says yes and another that tells you you're not supposed to ask. “No,” the girl says, but you remember now: You met at the school. You forgot because it was in that first week, and the girl had failed the tests and not been admitted. She was very young. You tried to make her feel better by saying she could try again the next year. Her name was Gertie.
“Hey, I apologize if this is inappropriate,” says Rosenberg, “but they really haven’t told us much and we don’t want to tread on any toes, so I’m wondering if... you know, if you actually want to do NL or if we should just leave you alone.”
“I think I’m actually here to do NL. I’m just another graduate now, I guess.”
Rosenberg and Raine laugh, then stop. “I’m sorry,” says Rosenberg. “I thought you were joking.”
“Why would that be a joke?”
“I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”
“You haven’t. But please, tell me what you know about me.”
“Well, nothing. Just your name.” He points to your partition. There's a gray rectangle of plastic. A nameplate you didn't notice before. Your first thought is that you're at the wrong desk. Then you realize you're not. Because of Thoreau. Because four years ago, he said: I have a name for you, when the time is right. The nameplate says: VIRGINIA WOOLF.
How do you spend your first day?
Eliot’s head bobs. “Good.”
“You want me to help you inside?” He shakes his head. “I forgot. You have to stay here. I’ll go look for the word.”
“Don’t...”
“Don’t tell you anything about it. Got it.” Eliot nods. He's been forced to take your advice: he's loosened up. He's relaxed control. Eliot is no longer in charge. “I’ll be right back.” You climb out.
(05-01-2017, 10:55 PM)Zephyr Nepres Wrote: »> You can't let Eliot die. You don't really give a shit about the bareword, but you've gotten kinda attached to Eliot. Find some medical equipment in the van.
(05-02-2017, 02:56 AM)tronn Wrote: »Seconding Zephyr. Eliot isn't a nice man but he isn't exactly evil either, and besides you need him. Does anyone anything in the van seem familiar?
You're not prepared for the silence. You shut the car door and the sound evaporates. Your shoes crunch sand. Hot air closes around you like a fist.
You move towards the paramedic van, one eye on the emergency room. The glass doors are a strange kind of black. Not painted. Stained. You slow without knowing why. Well. You do know. It's because you're not incredibly keen to face whatever reduced three thousand human beings to belt buckles and bones. You glance inside the paramedic van. A flatbed trolley, cloth straps, equipment, little bottles; nothing you wouldn’t expect. But it makes your brain crawl. You feel another tickle of familiarity. You hesitate, thinking. Eliot could benefit from some of these supplies. He could use some water. You climb into the van. You gather anything that looks medicinal and return to the Valiant with your arms full of supplies. Eliot’s eyes are closed. “Eliot!”
His eyes pop open.
“Stay awake.” You dump your load of bottles onto Eliot’s lap. “I got this stuff for you.”
Eliot stares.
“Some medicine. And water. You should drink the water.”
“What...”
“You know, I think you’re right. I did live here. It’s starting to feel familiar.”
“The fuck,” says Eliot. “Word.”
“I haven’t gone in yet. I thought you could use this stuff.” Eliot’s eyes bulge. “All right! I’m going! Jesus!”
You walk back to the emergency room. You get close enough to see shapes against the dark glass. You know what they are. There have to be two or three dozen corpses jammed up against the glass. And they're just the ones you can see. You wondered if it's airtight in there. The air could be toxic. It could actually kill you. You jog back to the car.
“Fuck!” says Eliot.
“Hang on one second,” you say. “I just want to ask this. Are we sure we want to open this box? Because what’s inside, you know, it killed a lot of people. We are talking about something incredibly dangerous. It’s striking me as kind of stupid to walk on in there and try to pick it up. That seems like a big risk. You know? You say I’m immune, but do you know that for sure? What if I just avoided it somehow the last time? I lay in a ditch and it passed over my head? I’m just saying, that emergency room, it’s wall-to-wall dead people, Eliot. It’s wall-to-wall. And there’s, I don’t know, something about a room full of corpses that makes me think about whether I want to go in there. Don’t look at me like that. I know. I know.” You shake your head. “I’ll go in. I will. It’s just... you’re asking me to maybe die, Eliot. Give me a second. Give me one... I know you’re hurting. I’m going. But appreciate what I’m doing. That’s all I want. I want you to acknowledge... for one second... the simple fact that I’m about to die. All right? I’m probably about to die. I’m happy to do it. I’m going. It’s fine. I only wanted...”
You turn away. You walk. The glass is so dark. Your feet scuff. You reach the emergency room doors. Your fingers touch the door plate. It's warm. Like there's a beating heart inside. It's not that. It's just the sun. Everything here is warm. You look back at the Valiant but can’t see it behind the paramedic van.
“If I don’t come out, Eliot,” you shout, “fuck you!” Your voice shakes.
(05-01-2017, 10:13 PM)Schazer Wrote: »Haul ass
You push open the door.
PART THREE
You try to catch Danny at inconvenient moments. When he's stepping into the shower, or just after he closes his eyes at night, or reaching for the car door, late for work. “Do you love me?” you ask. You smile, so he knows you're teasing.
“Maybe,” he says. Or nothing. Sometimes the look he gives you is like: Of course, why ask? and other times it's more like: Stop it, I’m running late.
He does love you. You're sure of it. All evidence points to yes. So why not say it? This is the part that nags at you. Yes, okay, in Danny’s world, you don’t need to say something to make it real. But come on.
You've said it. You've said it a lot, starting three weeks ago and increasing in frequency since, with the exception of a four-day drought the week before, which you'd hoped might trigger something but didn’t. And it's driving you crazy because you could force him. You don't have a lot of words, but you do have tricks, and you've figured out his set, and there's no doubt in your mind that you could compel Danny Walker to say whatever you want. But if you did that, it wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be him. It would be you, speaking to yourself, through him. It's very frustrating.
~
“That car has been all over town,” says the woman making you a sandwich. You turn. Across the street sits a dark sedan, windows tinted, engine running against the heat. A skirt of dust betrays some serious long-haul driving. “You see it?”
“Yes,” you say.
“Not from around here.”
“No.” You look at the sandwich that the woman, Beryl, is making. You've visited this shop nearly every weekday lunchtime for the past four years. You've practically married Beryl’s sandwiches.
“It’s been to the mines.” Beryl gestures with the knife. “Look at the tires.”
You look. The tires are caked in red earth.
“Someone from the city, I suppose. Government.” Beryl flips the bread. “Salt and pepper, love?”
“No, thanks.”
“I keep thinking you might change your mind,” says Beryl, sawing bread. “I can’t imagine how you eat it so plain.”
“I like plain,” you say. You carry the sandwich out of the shop, although you no longer feel like eating it. The car crouches in your peripheral vision but you don't look at it. When it pulls out, you cross into the pedestrian mall, where it can't follow, and walk the roundabout route to Tangled Threads. You lock the door and sit behind the counter. You don’t know how to feel. Two years ago, maybe even one, you would have chased that car down the road. You would have beaten your hands against its side and begged it to stop. But now things are different. And yet...
A young man in an airy gray suit appears at the door. He pulls the handle, pushes it, then puts his hand to the glass and peers inside. When he sees you, he points at the handle and mouths: Open?
You unlock. He's young; a boy, really. You can tell from his skin that he came from nowhere near here. “Thanks,” he says. He comes inside. He brushes aside his hair, which is a style you don't know and dangles in his eyes. “Whoo. Hot.”
“What can I help you with today?” you say.
He smiles, as if he appreciates the pretense. “It’s good news. You can come home.”
You say nothing.
He glances out the window. “That was a genuinely long drive. They told me it was long, but... it’s really something. Or nothing, rather.” He looks at you. “Nothing and nothing, for as far as you go. Did you get used to it?” You don't answer. “It seems to me it would be hard to get used to.”
“You can get used to anything.”
“Of course,” he says. “We can leave right away.”
“Today?”
“Is that a problem?” His eyes are gray, like his suit.
You shake your head. You don't want problems. “Give me your phone number. I’ll call you in a couple hours.”
“I wouldn’t bother packing. There’s nothing here you’ll need again.”
“If I don’t tell people I’m leaving, they’ll look for me. I’ll be reported missing. It will get messy.”
He's silent. He's going to tell you the Organization can handle a missing persons report. But then he shrugs. “As you like.” He digs in his pockets. Had this boy attended the school? He might have been one of the kids, a skinny cavorting stick boy too small to register. But you're not sure. It all seems so long ago. “You really made yourself a part of this place, huh?”
“It’s small,” you say. “There’s no other way.”
He smiles like he doesn’t believe you and extends you a card. “I’ll be in the car.”
~
You phone the owner of Tangled Threads, Mary, and say you need to leave right away, your mother is dying. Mary’s voice floods with sympathy and tells you it's fine, take as much time as you need. She says, “I didn’t know you were still in contact with your family.”
“I wasn’t,” you say. “I just heard from them.”
Then you drive to the hospital and wait. You can never tell where Danny will be, but the best place to wait is the emergency room. Sometimes you sit and read magazines alongside farmers with their hands wrapped in black towels and mothers with green children. The emergency room has glass double doors and when the paramedic van pulls up, the sun bouncing off its white hood, it's always thrilling, like winning a prize.
But when you see him, you burst into tears. It's unexpected and shocking and if that Organization boy was around to see it, who knows what would happen. Danny comes to you, alarmed, and you hear the lie fall out of you about a mother, cancer. You hug him and inhale him while you can.
“Do you want me to come?”
“No,” you say, grateful for the offer. “You can’t.”
“How long will you be?” He shakes his head. “You don’t know. It’s okay. Take your time.” He kisses your head. “But come back.”
“I will,” you say, and as the words came out, you're surprised at how true they feel. “I will, I promise.”
Eventually you pull away. There are people watching, and the longer this goes on, the harder it becomes, so when he offers to drive you to the house you refuse. You have to walk away while you can. “I love you,” you say, and he smiles sadly, and in retrospect, it was very obvious, wasn’t it? You should have seen it coming. But love makes people stupid, and you're so very much in love. The emergency room doors part and you walk through them and the only thing that makes this bearable is the conviction that you'll be back.
~
An hour later, you're in the black sedan, watching dust swallow Broken Hill in the side mirror. The boy brings the car up to ninety miles an hour and manipulates his phone with one hand. “Sleep, if you want,” he tells you. “There’s a whole lot of nothing for the next eight hours.”
This is true. But you can't do it. The boy keeps glancing at you and you curl up in the seat, putting your back to him. A while later, a car passes, heading in the opposite direction, gleaming on top and pancaked with dirt on the bottom. You watch it recede in the mirror. A minute later, there's another one just like it, then another.
“Are there more of you?”
“Hmm?” he says.
“The cars,” you say.
He shrugs. “Probably locals.”
You slouch back down. A truck appears on the road ahead, following the cars, a black eighteen-wheeler with no signage, hauling a steel container unlike any you've ever seen, but this time you don't say anything.
~
The journey is thirty-four hours, long enough to develop a burning hate for the Organization boy and everything he stands for. You're glad the first-class seats are like capsules, which give you space to hide your misery. You don't know what triggered the arrival of the boy, whether it was simply enough time passing for the Organization to consider you suitably chastened, or they were observing you, or something had happened, or what. But whichever it was, you'll be expected to be in charge of your emotions.
You deplane, disoriented and bruised somewhere in the core of your body, into DC winter sunshine. A limo whisks you to a grand hotel, where the boy bids you farewell, and you sleep for fourteen hours. You wake to a blinking red light on the bedside phone. You press for voice mail, thinking it might be Eliot, which would be frightening, or Thoreau, which would be more so, but it's neither. Instead, a girl you don't know tells you you're expected at a particular fashion store in thirty minutes. The girl ends her message without saying good-bye, as if she’s cut off, although you know she wasn't.
You catch a cab downtown and try on skirts and sheer shirts. In the mirror, you look freakishly tan. “This will take more than a jacket,” says the man, who introduced himself as a personal style adviser. “You’re a cavewoman in a suit, dear.”
He forwards you to a salon, where a bald man drags a brush through your hair with occasional exclamations of dismay. Now that you're alongside other women, you start to see the problem. Your hair is the wrong kind of blond: the kind from the sun. There's a gritty quality to your skin. You've absorbed Broken Hill. You've soaked it up and become savage. “Do not worry,” says the hairdresser. “We’ve beaten worse than this.”
Afterward, the floor a graveyard of fallen hair, you find herself with a short bob and bangs like a steel door. It seems like they tried to hide her face. You look strange to yourself. “Do you wear glasses?” asks the hairdresser. “You should consider that.”
You're shuttled back to the first clothing store, where your new look is praised effusively. You actually start to feel good and then the personal style adviser says, “Well, it’s an improvement, anyway.” You forgot how indirectly people speak here. You've become accustomed to taking people literally.
Hours later, laden with shopping bags, you're driven to a tall glass office building that offers no identifying logo. You enter a simple lobby, feeling newly manufactured in your gray woolen suit and stiff black shoes, your heart pounding in case you're about to meet someone you know. But there's no one. A red sofa, a few paintings; it could be anywhere. You wait at the reception desk until a young man with invisible eyebrows emerges from the rear office. “I’m Elise Jackson,” you say.
“Just a moment.” When he returns, he has a plastic card, which he places on the counter. It's blank except for the code NL-L5D6. You look at him.
“That means level five, desk six.”
“Oh,” you say. “Thank you.” You heft your bags. It takes you a minute to figure out the elevators; you have to insert the card into a slot before the buttons will do anything. Then the doors close and you rise toward whatever is up there.
~
It turns out that level five is nothing but anonymous corporate space with a dozen or so roomy cubicles. Almost all are empty. It's very quiet and as your shopping bags rustle and bang you wish you left them with the receptionist. You pass a young woman on the phone and a boy with long hair and glasses who looks up from his computer screen but his expression doesn’t change and you don’t stop walking.
You spot identifying plates on the desk corners and begin to triangulate D6. It's in a corner, with a pretty amazing view over south DC. It has a chair, a phone, a computer, and that's it. You stash your bags beneath the desk and test the chair. You wait. The phone will ring, you guess. Eventually.
After a minute, the boy with glasses appears, accompanied by a girl whose hair is the good kind of blond. She looks familiar, although you can't place her. She seems very young. “Wow. Welcome.”
“Hi,” you say. “Thank you.”
“Isaac Rosenberg,” the boy says. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Raine,” says the girl. “Kathleen Raine.”
“Hi,” you say again. There's an awkward silence. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Typical,” says the boy, Rosenberg. “We only got word a couple days ago that you were coming. You’re in NL.”
“Neurolinguistics?”
He nods. “Testing and Measurement. Have you done any NL work before?”
You shake your head.
“It’s good for a theoretical grounding, supposedly. Anyway, we’ll get you started. Teach you the system. If that’s okay with you.”
“Sure,” you say. The girl, Raine, is still looking at you like you're missing something, so you say, “I’m sorry, have we met?”
Several expressions flit across the girl’s face in quick succession, one of which says yes and another that tells you you're not supposed to ask. “No,” the girl says, but you remember now: You met at the school. You forgot because it was in that first week, and the girl had failed the tests and not been admitted. She was very young. You tried to make her feel better by saying she could try again the next year. Her name was Gertie.
“Hey, I apologize if this is inappropriate,” says Rosenberg, “but they really haven’t told us much and we don’t want to tread on any toes, so I’m wondering if... you know, if you actually want to do NL or if we should just leave you alone.”
“I think I’m actually here to do NL. I’m just another graduate now, I guess.”
Rosenberg and Raine laugh, then stop. “I’m sorry,” says Rosenberg. “I thought you were joking.”
“Why would that be a joke?”
“I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”
“You haven’t. But please, tell me what you know about me.”
“Well, nothing. Just your name.” He points to your partition. There's a gray rectangle of plastic. A nameplate you didn't notice before. Your first thought is that you're at the wrong desk. Then you realize you're not. Because of Thoreau. Because four years ago, he said: I have a name for you, when the time is right. The nameplate says: VIRGINIA WOOLF.
How do you spend your first day?