Day 91

Haikus because fuck you

We saw hunger games

Sam and I cried when Rue died

Petaa's head was weird

What's a good duck name?

Howard? Lenny?Morton? Bill?

How do you decide?

Studio Ghibli

Make better worlds than I can

Totoro was cool

Day 89/90

Here is all of Andrew One as a short story. Its a draft, its not fantastic, but its a draft.

Andrew One was the first robotic humanoid to receive citizenship in the United States of America. As such he was given a two bedroom apartment on the forty second floor of the once glamorous “Sputter Hotel” apartment building, a promotion from the other “Zeroes”, a slang term for all robotic humanoids, in the back of Spend-N-Serv to a front end stock boy, a government regulated salary, a beta fish in a small circular bowl, and a wallet to hold his newly printed identification. The wallet was given to him by a newly appointed officer in the 123^rd precinct of Ashland, who had cleaned out everything out of it, money, chip cards, business slips, his own identification, bus pass, and handed it to Andrew as a gift. It was the first gift Andrew had been given and wished he had transcribed the officer’s name to internal memory, but having limited storage space, deferred the name to a disposable cache, and held only a brief description in his banks, scar, left eye, eyelid hangs low over eye. The officer had gathered everything that was once in his wallet into a pile and shoved them into his front pockets before sliding the wallet over to Andrew, who had taken it and slipped his identification, a small plastic card with all of his identification, address, under gender there was a blank space, the same under blood type. The person who gave Andrew the I.D., a strong looking, olive skinned woman had asked him if he wanted to be an organ donor and people around had laughed. Andrew had registered it as a joke, subgenre – belittling(but playful) humor, and had waited in the room with the newly appointed officer to finish paperwork. Andrew thought about how they had not laughed at his joke, his first joke ever, his name. His original scripted routing number was 55986350, but now, as a citizen, he had to be given a proper name, so, he had chosen Andrew, as it was storng, patriotic, and memorable, and for his last name One, the antithesis of Zero. Andrew thought about how he was the first one, by pure chance, out of all the zeroes out there, in warehouses and trucks and piled up heaps, he had been chosen to be it, by pure lottery he had been the one. He logged this moment just as the newly appointed officer slid the sets of contractually pages back over to him and he adorned them with a flourished signature that seemed to impress every human he encountered. Looking it over one more time officer scar extended his hand, which Andrew shook, and left telling him to fill that wallet up. Andrew asked him what he should fill it up with.

“Things that are important.” He said.

“Money?” Andrew had pressed.

“If that’s what you think.” Officer Scar fished in his pockets a pulled out a picture of a small child, female, who sat on a large rock under a sky that was bluer than ever he’d seen in the city. “This is important to me.”

“Photographs then.” Said Andrew.

“Photographs of things that are important.” At this Andrew hadn’t said anything more and Officer Scar walked out to the hallway the echoed his footsteps to the left. Andrew closed the wallet and held it in his hand because he didn’t have any pockets. As he left that day he logged that he had to fill up the wallet, he had to go to work the next morning, and he had to find out what was important. Andrew had no idea what was important, and had no idea that it might be a woman.

--

Monday and Wednesdays Andrew worked from seven thirty to six at night, and then on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, Andrew worked from six till two in the morning. On Tuesdays he repaired anything that buzzed, or clicked, or clacked out of the steady beat that he had been impeccable at recognizing flaws in. He sat on the loveseat with his left hand on the coffee table, or his right foot, or one of audio processors and went to soldering loose connections or reinforcing structural flaws with extra bits of aluminum and strong iron he had asked Teddy for. Teddy was the backroom manager of Spend-N-Serv, a man in his early forties with a ponytail and a habit of wearing white overalls. He looked over the Zeroes in the back: Two, Three, Four, Six, and Eight, and Nine. Each worker in the back had been branded with a Spen-N-Serv plate detailing their number down both of their forearms, Andrew had gotten his removed when given citizenship. He was told he had his own identity now. Andrew had been five and seven had been sent for repairs and never come back. Teddy like to talk to Andrew whenever he walked into the back for something small, a dustpan or a mop to clean up a spill of tomato sauce. Sometimes Teddy offered Andrew a small joint he kept in his front pocket and Andrew always declined and Teddy laughed. It was a joke too. Andrew liked Teddy because he talked to Andrew like another employee, not like he was another Zero. Andrew tried not to notice how the others in the back looked at him, in between hauling pallets of product, their optics would shift for just a moment, enough so that only Andrew would catch and they would hold a look that Andrew would dislike, even hate. Andrew did not hate One, or Four, or any of the workers in the back, he hated the way they had to keep looking at him. Humans on the street generally avoided him, not a single tended to bat an eye, he was another smooth bodied Zero, walking the street, sent on an errand, though Andrew had taken to wearing beanie caps, he felt the extra padding would protect his central processing unit from sudden impacts and radio waves. No one seemed to notice. Which is why Andrew did what he did on Thursdays, people watching.

In the weeks after the talk with Officer Scar, Andrew had started to fill up the wallet. He had put a bit of paper currency from his weekly check inside, and there was high pressure spring in an inner pocket that was a replacement for a troublesome joint in his right thumb, but he didn’t feel that these things were important. He kept the image of the young girl, who held her knees and looked up into the blue sky, in his memory and tried to process what would be important to him. To help him figure it out he stood at the corner of Albany and Weathervane, just to the left of the garbage receptacle and behind the stop light and followed people as they crossed the walk. A lot of them thought coffee was important, as well as parents, and alcohol. He stored samples of audio clips into a data packet labeled “Important” with photos and descriptions of people and what they did. And then someone spoke to Andrew.

“What are you doing?” Andrew recorded the voice as close and continued to watch a woman with a finicky child nearly drag her offspring across the white stripped crosswalk.

“Andrew?” At this Andrew turned away and looked at Beatrice, a woman that worked with Andrew at Spend-N-Serv. She was usually a cashier but had stocked aisles with Andrew before. She had brown hair that fell to her lowest rib and green eyes as bright as the neon signs that were a few stories below Andrew’s floor. Andrew had never met anyone outside of work before and was unfamiliar with the proper exchanges that would be needed in the situation.

“Beatrice?” He extended his hand, but as she was more than an arms length away, he had to take a big step and keep his arm fully extended. She shook it quickly, he lowered his arm and stuck it into a pocket. He had taken to wearing jackets and she noticed.

“I like that green color.” She said and moved to the left to avoid the flow of traffic.

“Its emerald.” It was a statement that was very close to correction and she noticed.

“Well, it looks good, anyway.” Andrew had to avoid the movements of the finicky child as the duo of mother and child walked past. And as an experiment he asked Beatrice a question.

“Do you think that’s important?” He said, referring to the child and mother. Beatrice turned her head and pulled at her hair so she could watch them go.

“I think most people aren’t important.” She said it in an almost sigh. Andrew wondered if that statement was true, and what he was doing was pointless, that he should be searching instead for what was important, if he should leave the city and true to find a place with big rocks and blue skies.

“Do you think they are important?” asked Beatrice, now she had taken to putting her hands in her jacket pockets.

“I am still processing everything. But they don’t seem to be. I am trying to find things that are important.”

“Why?” it was asked openly, with sarcastic scoff.

Andrew had to process this for a moment. He looked away from Beatrice for a moment, to the streetlight, to the garbage can, to the last finicky movement of the child and the mother who still held its hand.

“Because I want to know.”

“Ah,” said Beatrice, “Don’t we all?” It was a rhetorical question, but Andrew answered anyway.

“That’s something I haven’t been able to completely figure.”

Beatrice chuckled at the joke Andrew didn’t mean to make and asked him if he worked today, he did not, he asked if she did, she did not, and she asked if he had ever gotten on the number fifty seven bus that pulled up just to the right of the trashcan, he had not, she told him to follow her on, he did.

Inside of the bus some people looked at Andrew, he noted them, he had never shared a seat with a person before, as even though they did not look at him, most humans refused to sit next to a Zero. Beatrice seemed to have no qualms over it. She asked him a lot of questions and Andrew answered them. He told her his lived in a two bedroom apartment, that his schedule had a lot of time for work, and his hand was consistently in need of a new spring. He showed her where he kept it in his wallet, he kept the wallet in an inner jacket pocket.

“Is that spring important?” she asked.

“I think my hand is more important. That’s why I have an important spring.”

Beatrice agreed and they continued to talk. She worked as a cashier on most of the same days that Andrew did, but also worked bar at a public drinking house near where Andrew lived. She had not grown up in Ashland. Andrew asked where they were going, and Beatrice had laid her face against the glass to see through the glare of the day and said.

“Next stop.”

They got out at the next stop.

Where this was, Andrew was not certain beyond West of the Albany and Weathervane intersection. It appeared to be far west as the site they stepped out into was a row of crumbling brickwork facades in either direction, some of which were shops which people sat in front of and others seemed abandoned and had a different group of people gathered in front, those with many bags, and many layers. Beatrice walked in a direction without a word and Andrew followed, he took in everything as they walked, the running fissure in the sidewalk that careened to the end of the block, the compact car without a bumper, the short stature of each building, each not hitting higher than a forth story, which was miniscule, close to nothing in comparison to the building he lived in. They walked shoulder to shoulder and Beatrice never stopped smiling, even when he asked if this is what they were doing, walking.

“No, there is something you need to see.”

“Its important?” Asked Andrew and Beatrice threw her hair over her shoulder again.

“To me it is.”

They approached a building that bulged above everything, a crumbling giant, ballooning in its center and rigid in brickwork and windows in everything around. Facing the open street the building looked peeled away, the brickwork lighter, less grimy, with steel running in parallel lines through it. Its entirety swallowed a city block.

“A marquee was there.” Said Beatrice, she took her hands out of her pockets and pointed one up to the peeled side of the building and the other on Andrew’s shoulder. “There was a huge board that would hang on this side of the building. It was so bright you could see it from two streets over. I used to use it as a night-light.”

“What is this?” Asked Andrew, he looked at Beatrice’s hand on his shoulder and took his own hand out of his pockets, his wallet in his left palm, held tight.

“A Theatre. It closed down a couple of years ago.”

“This is important?” asked Andrew.

Beatrice nodded and patted him on shoulder. “But this is only the outside. What we need to see is on the inside.”

“Are we allowed inside?” asked Andrew.

“It’s a theatre.” Said Beatrice and took him by the arm and lead him to the far side of where the marquee had hung, around a corner, to a large alley way with six dumpsters and prarie grass on the far right side where a beam of sunlight could still hit the ground. They walked to a set of double doors with no handles to which Beatrice gave a swift kick and the door bounced forward, undoing a latch and then popped back in one fluid motion. The inside was dingy and Andrew lead the way down, his optics could focus to less light then a humans. Beatrice said there would be a hallway that hooked to the right and there was, the path was more narrow and Beatrice walked with both hands on her shoulders as Andrew walked up a flight of steps. She kept hiding coughs in the sleeve of her jacket, the room was dense with dust.

“Stop,” said Beatrice, “You need to stop and look up.” And Andrew did.

Unnaturally high above them was a red dome that shone from blood to crimsom to ruby as light hit it at angles. It was the only thing that light hit clearly in the room. Its surface was foiled and rigged, and it seemed to hum with color, a red mouth that pierced down and shown on Andrew’s silver face. Andrew tried to see all of it at once and could not.

“I’m always impressed when I come in.” Beatrice spoke sitting down cross legged on what Andrew now figured was a stage, the rows of seats in front of them removed and only a black concrete slope remained. Andrew still stared up, trying to log it in his memory banks, but couldn’t find an acceptable picture, his eyes couldn’t focus enough and the color seemed to change. There seemed no way to capture it without spoiling it.

“You have to be impressed by it, right?”

“It is hard to look at.” Said Andrew.

“Is that bad?”

“No, I think I just need some time to adjust.”

“Its amazing though isn’t it? How something could be built, how this whole place is so big? Years back people sat is chairs and watched people up here, and all of these things were under this roof, under that eye.” Andrew changed his description to eye, it was much closer to an eye. “I think that its important. I think that people need to have an appreciation for things.”

Andrew stayed stuck in his position, trying to transcribe everything into his memory. It took so long that Beatrice excused herself, stating the dust was too much today, but that she’d see him tomorrow, pertaining that he did leave. Andrew didn’t move until five minutes after Beatrice walked out. He didn’t leave until he surveyed the dark expanse of the theatre room, the columns lining either side, and the wide balcony, which sat in the darkness so well it was near ash black, but still Andrew made a note of there seeming to be a form there, standing, cold and still, the red eye shining down enough just to catch its shape. And he noted that perhaps this was something that the eye did that Beatrice had liked, it played with the optics, still though, he checked the balcony three times before walking out the double doors.

When Andrew got home the moon had been up for some time. He had walked home after standing at the bus stop for near fifteen minutes and having one pass him by. The walk was not terrible, if measured in a day an hour and a half is not terrible. He had nothing to fear really from the people walking the streets, they viewed him as nothing but another droid but still he clutched his wallet tightly in his jacket pocket. Andrew wondered if the silhouette from the theatre would follow him, if it would creep after him because he had been inside of the place. By the time he got home he would not have much time to get everything uploaded to the permanent memory drives he kept under his “bed”, which was a bare mattress with an extension cord and adapter on cinder blocks. Andrew was not one for decoration. Still, he did not have much time to recharge and sort his thoughts before the sun rose again and he swapped his jacket for a Spend-N-Serv apron and headed to the bus stop, which he knew would pick him up.

The day was a usual Friday, he stocked soup on the back wall for three hours, then deli meats, then plastic containers, then fruits, then cereal. He could not see Beatrice at any of the lanes when he walked past. He wanted to talk about his thoughts about last night with her, compare notes about what was important, learn more about what shaped her choice, but without her there he went to Teddy.

The saloon style doors leading from the well-lit area of the main floor instantly dampen, the only real source of light being a lamp with a swiveling head mounted to the wall behind Teddy’s desk, a heavy wooden thing at the far side of the slate gray room, all of the walls and ceilings smooth concrete that kept the place at a solid seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Stretching out in two deep rows were wires shelves that the Zeroes stacked products by type and weight, and at the far end, so dark in the room that Andrew could only see the outline was a door that allowed trucks to unload off of. The Zeroes were all huddled around Teddy’s desk and Teddy’s hunched form, there was a collective clicking as they shifted from foot to foot, looking over one another. Andrew had never seen them act worried before. After he sidled over to them he could see over shoulders that Teddy had the chassis of Six on the table, trying to clear away shredded metal from the shoulder joint of Six’s left arm. He wiped away oil and grime with a soft rag and inspected the joint from all angles. Six stared upwards, at Andrew, the stare the same as the days before but not fleeting, holding there.

“What happened?” Asked Andrew and the collective group of Zeroes took a step away from Andrew and the table. Teddy didn’t look up and with a clamp removed a jagged piece of something from Six’s clavicle area. Andrew waited for an answer, six still stared.

“They don’t seem to want to talk today.” Said Teddy. “Six’s big fiasco is taking up everybody’s time. I keep telling them to power down, we have a truck at seven, but they won’t.” Teddy looks up at the group, bouncing his glances from each figure then down to six. “Have I ever done a bad job?” He looked to Andrew, “Have I?”

Andrew waited a moment longer than asked Six, “What happened?”

Six looked away to his arm and Teddy answered instead, “Something broke into the backroom last night, it probably stashed itself in a truck, a dog I think, you know how big the wild mutt population is getting in Ashland, its huge, you leave the doors open for a second and something is going to run inside. By the time I had gotten in here they had all chased it off.”

From just to Andrew’s left four protested. “Not a dog.” But Six’s optics shifted to Four’s and they were both quiet again.

“Well whatever it was, opossum, big feral cat, doesn’t matter. I told the manager to put a bio-scanner on trucks to check for anything from now on and the side door out will be kept locked. So we won’t be dealing with anymore of this shit.”

Andrew looked to four, “What was it?” But Four looked down at Teddy working.

“They won’t say buddy. Especially not to me.” Teddy gestured to the group around him with his arms extended, flicking his wrists. “Now, is there something I can help you lot with or is the seven truck going to have to sit and wait, huh?” And there’s a moment where all the Zeroes look at one another, unsure of what to do, and in the briefest of twitchs, Six nods, and they begin to move away.

“I need something Teddy.” Andrew sidled along the back side of the desk near where Teddy stooped over. “I need some more parts.”

“I just gave you some yesterday, and I can’t spare anything. I was pulling parts from the budget before for you, I have fix Six now.”

Andrew thought about how he wouldn’t have any more spare parts or strong iron to fix himself with if it wasn’t for Teddy, but a notion had worked its way into his head on the walk home as he analyzed Beatrice’s words and the pictures he had taken of the domed eye. He had been toying with a new subject for himself.

“What do you need anyway?”

“I’m not sure.” Said Andrew. “I was hoping to see what you had. I need to make something.”

This stopped Teddy for a moment and he looked up, scooted himself away from Six, puzzled he asked Andrew to continue.

“I spent yesterday with Beatrice, trying to figure what is important. She spoke about creation, and after some analysis I’m still have no clear answer. I wanted to try it to get better information.”

Teddy grabbed the light behind him and turned it to shine over Andrew. “She do something to you Andrew? Touch you or something?” Andrew pawed at the light to be lowered and Teddy obliged.

“I’m inquiring about a subject, that’s all.”

When he was nervous Teddy had the habit of spinning a silver ring on his thumb, which he did now, Andrew noted this was the first time he had seen Teddy do this since the day Andrew had been escorted off the premises and into the police station to become a citizen. He wondered why he did not spin it for Six’s condition.

“There’s a place I go when the budget doesn’t allow for excess spending on parts for everybody. It’s a dump site that the city allows, not exactly legal, but good for hunting. Its in the south side baseball stadium, you don’t have to pay anything, just walk in, the place is littered with stuff. Its where I got you all those springs for your right hand, you’d have an easy time finding something out there.”

Andrew nodded and began to turn away and Teddy steadied the light over Six again, and spoke again.

“But if you want my opinion, I don’t think you have to go through all this trouble.” Teddy did not look to Andrew as he settled back down to Six’s chassis, but spoke louder now, as the seven o’clock truck was backing into the gate and Zeroes began to scramble into the correct formation as to prepare for it. Six sputtered on the table for a moment before Teddy put a hand on him to keep him steady.

“I think that you need to find something you like and keep doing it. Don’t stop doing it. Its what I decided.”

Andrew watched him rummage in a drawer on the right side of the desk for something to use and Six was still staring and they held their gave, and without a gesture, perhaps a glint in his optics or a shift in the air he knew that when Six let his arm fall off the side of the table and roll in a slow way to point, Andrew was given Six’s answer to the question. The silver finger held a straight line to the Zeroes lined in a tight row, waiting for the door to rise and walk into the truck. Andrew looked back at Six and pointed a finger at himself, but Six shook his head, imperceptible to Teddy as he came back to the table with a soldering iron, and pointed with jolt towards the group still waiting. Six’s answer was the group in the back, and no one else.

The rest of work went quickly. On his lunch break Andrew bought a duffel bag and with promptness Andrew clocked out when his shift ended at two. Instead of catching the two-fifteen bus back home walked up six blocks to a train station that would take him farther south than he had ever been in the city. Six people slept in the train car he sat in, and he clutched his wallet next to the balled up apron in his jacket pocket. When they emerged from tunnel and into open air Andrew could see the stadium, murky white, like old rust on copper, the only thing with color in the flat expanse surrounding it, black lampposts littering the cement paved parking lot like dead trees. Andrew tried to refocus, to see what the stadium could have been when the team was still employed, before it was absorbed into the north side team and left abandoned, all that remained were the fans who were now twelve years without idols wearing jerseys and caps around town. Andrew saw them from time to time and wondered if baseball was important, or was it just wearing the article of clothing. Andrew thought about the girl in Officer Scar’s photograph and if she had ever been to the stadium before, if the skies were bluer then.

It wasn’t hard to get inside, the doors were removed and cold air spilled out of the open hallways, a constant wind that shook loose tile on the walls and ceilings. Without a flashlight he had to hold his hand to the wall, which his silver digits scrapped and rapped against, walking slow, following the curve of the hallway until it hooked to the left and in.

He faced what was once the field of play, an expanse of dry dirt with heaps of things that ran as high as the second tier of seats. A large chunk of the ceiling in the shape of a sickle had fallen to the floor and moonlight spilled in an arc across the expanse. Andrew could see cars, buses, dumpsters, all stacked atop on another, some crushed and flattened, others looking brand new. Heaps of broken, twisted metal beams made a cone stacked together, upwards towards the light, and there were more skeletons of Zeroes than Andrew could count in the light. Many were simply just parts but others were whole, stacked atop one another, internal wires spilled out of them and tangled with others. There were signs of scavenging, tool marks around optic sockets and stripped limbs. Andrew took a picture and would Beatrice later about this. All of this was created and now it was left here, just like the theatre.

Andrew walked down an aisle in between remnants of rows of plastic seats until he reached the bottom, he thought his steps would create more sound but the piles of dust seemed to dampen everything. Andrew hesitated at the rail before the field, he had no sure instance of where to start, what to create, and decided he would fill the duffel to a fullness that would not impede his trip back home and would work from there. He hopped the rail and walked on the padded earth, up to an all terrain vehicle and used his fingers to pry the bulb out of its front head light and placed it inside of the bag. He found large spindle’s of copper wires and wound them up around his arms then slipped them inside. He took the magnets out of a few computers inside the trunk of a school bus and a bit of strong iron from a Zeroe’s hand he found nearby. By then the bag had begun to feel heavy, and he decided to make a pass around the piles to see if anything small and of value could be found. He rounded a corner made entirely out of washing machines and stopped, nearly losing balance with the weight of his bag. Sitting on a dryer, was a Zero, near black from dirt and dust that caked it, hunched low, not focused on Andrew but on trying to position an arm into the gaping socket on his left side. The arm was new, clean, and was branded with the Spend-N-Serv plate. Unsure of how to handle the situation, Andrew stood still, going through option after option in his processor but uncertain of which to take, there was not enough data on the subject. So he decided to ask it questions.

“Did you take that arm?” Andrew said, pointing at it even before the Zero looked up and at him. It stood and the unsecured arm hung low, swaying in its jerky motions. They watched one another, neither moving, until the Zero opened its mouth as if to speak and only a piercing metal buzz echoed out, so shrill that Andrew was forced a step back. The sound bounced off of the walls and pockets of the stadium until the Zero closed its mouth, and it fizzled away.

Andrew tried again. “Do you need help?” He gestured to the arm, and then the Zero did too, miming the movements. “Do you know how.” The droid opened its mouth again but closed it just as quickly, then sat back down on the dryer. He was still, then pointed at the arm again, the light from above pooling the lenses of his optics, making them bone white. Andrew nodded, dropped his bag and walked over to work on the arm. Teddy and the officers had taught him a lot of home maintenance, enough so that he could reattch a limb if need be, and with precise movements popped the ball head of the arm into the socket joing of the Zero and began attaching lock links to hold it in place. It was slow as the grim of the Zero made everything slick, Andrew used his apron to clean the wound, and asked it questions in the meantime.

“Did you take this arm?” he tried again, and Zero rapped one on the dryer he sat on. Andrew understood that as yes.

“Was it from a place up north?” Another rap.

“Did you steal it from six?” Two raps, a no.

“You didn’t get it from six?” Another two raps.

“You did get it from six, but you didn’t steal it.” Yes.

“Six gave it to you.” Yes.

“Why?” There was silence then, even when Andrew posed it for a second and third time and finished attaching the arm and walked back to his bag. The Zero gave the arm a few vigorous pump and whirls around, working each new finger, then looked at Andrew again. He tapped the top of the dryer, and pointed with the new arm, signaling Andrew to look. Andrew close, and looked down at the side still caked with dust and saw the number 7 written in still movements.

“Seven?” Andrew asked. But the Zero was gone, and he was alone in the stadium.

--

For three days Andrew did not come back to work for three days. He used his government appointed vacation days for the year up and did not return to the store until Tuesday, a day that he was not scheduled to work. He wore his hat and his jacket, but not the apron, and had the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He timed it so that he would catch Beatrice as she was coming out of work. He asked her how her day was, and she said all right. She asked him if he had been feeling ill, and he said he had been working on something, and that he’d like to show her.

“I’ve begun to think about what is important. I’ve come to some understanding.”

Beatrice agreed and they got on the fifty two bus and rode it just like they had before, sitting together, the duffel bag in Andrew’s lap, silent now. They walked into the building, Andrew used Beatrice’s trick and he lead he inside, like he had before, but not to the stage, but to where the audience had sat before, the bare ramp. He asked her to sit and she did, and he layed down his bag, unzipped it, and pulled out an object the size of a bread loaf. It was boxy, with copper wire wrapped all around the front end, on its right side was a crank that was once the kickstarter to a small-engined motocycle, and in the front an array of bulbs bound tightly together without a focusing lens. Andrew held it with his left and began cranking, each revolution a humming whir builds in the air, a hum like a voice that grew from nothing to a rumble. The machine spins into life and with each crank the bulb flickers a bit more and more, widening the beam until like a slow wave it hits the white wall behind the stage, glimmering at first and then Andrew picks up speed and there is more and more to it, strength builds, and the beam is perfect, a glowing ghost white box on the far wall all from the palm of his hand. He gives it a few more sharp spins and like an engine the crank continues to go on its own, the light staying clear.

Beatrice wants to ask if this is it, if invention was important, but Andrew’s movements are so quick that she watches him go instead, taking the device and laying it at the top of the slope so that beam stays stable, then sitting next to it, and took out his wallet. There were colored squares the size of postage stamps inside, a handful that he spilled onto his right palm. Beatrice sat down and waited as Andrew piddled his finger through the pile, finding the one that he searched for, a deep red color, and held it to the light. On the far wall a redness bloomed to rival the red eye above. It was a sunrise, from the train car that Andrew had sat in, the orb of light balanced atop the crumbling structure of the stadium.

“Crucible.” Andrew Said.

He held it for a few seconds longer than set it neatly onto the ground. Another moment of rifling and he held a square with shades of blue and green and white. A bust-like picture of Officer Scar flashed on the screen, the picture of the girl in his hand.

“Family.” Andrew Said.

The next was done in the low light of a bedroom. Andrew is framed in the edges of the mirror, he is wearing his jacket and his hat.

“Andrew.”

The next was a purple gash of light over the twisted mound of metal in the stadium. Everything is still but at the edges of the picture, spirals of dust wind their way into the shot.

“Graveyard.”

A shot of Six laying on Teddy’s table, pointing to the Zeros lining up. The light off of Teddy’s lamp illuminated ever small rod and silver piston in the skeleton of Six. Teddy’s head holds steady right in front of the light, spilling out around him in an almost halo.

“Devotion.”

A mother’s hand holding the finicky child, the blue of the city background clashes with the red cheeked face of the child, whose red curls blow hard to the right of the shot.

“Panic.”

The rogue Zero stands with his limp arm, the contrast blurs with his dirty frame and the new arm, with the near white dryer behind him and piles of rusted cars in the background.

“Brother.”

The final shot was of Beatrice, her hand extended at the street corner, her hair over one shoulder, just the hint of a smile in her eyes.

“Gen.”

Within a minute the light sputters away and the hum drops to nothing. Beatrice and Andrew stand and begin to walk away. Beatrice asked if he wanted anything he left. Andrew said they were for someone else. And they walked out, shoulder to shoulder.

Day 86/87/88

I was in Harvard for a few days and each day I have written but it hasn't been much, so I figured I'd lump it all together into a big piece instead of cutting it into pieces.

Kingdom Come Draft

Dear Lynda,

I’m writing this to the P.O. box the postcard had as a return address, this was the last postcard, the one with Space Needle on it, night-time, and the sky is red. It’s a few years old and if you aren’t Lynda then please, stop now and give it to her. This was written for her eyes first, and for her child. I don’t know the gender of the child, so I will continue to write to them as “child”, for the rest of the letter.

Before you found a husband and moved out of Uncle Tor’s place and sent me the first postcard with the space needle on it from a hotel room in Utah, and everything seemed really distant for a while, like you were in a fog and I could see your outline, but not all of you at once, before that, when I had that apartment on Cherry Oak for only two hundred a month, the small place with the salmon colored bathroom, back when I took community college classes and you had a year of high school left, that’s when I knew, when you were still quiet and didn’t bury your face behind dark hair, when your hair was still light brown like market store bread, that’s when I knew you would be a mother. Aunt Sadie meant so much more to you than she ever did to anyone else. But I am still talking to you, this is meant for your child, and I don’t want to be rude, so I’ll stop here, and get on with the story.

This, boy or girl, is how your mother broke a spell cast over me. I’ll start at the beginning.

When I was twenty and your mother was seventeen, we both lived in Anchor, a town that didn’t have a body of water inside of it, but had a lighthouse on the sign welcoming you inside. All you need to know about it our hometown was that it was small, in Illinois, and was surrounded on either side by sprawling fields of corn or pasture for cattle, and depending on which way he wind blowed people sneezed or held their noses. Lynda lived with her father, Tor, in a green, dutch looking place that had green painted wood paneling, white trim, and a green door. I lived eight blocks up in a one-bedroom apartment that my mother paid the first three months rent for, gave me food too. Where my mother lived wasn’t important, she didn’t live their long, but there is somebody else you have to know, Cole, he would be your great uncle-in-law, and he was my mother’s husband and my father. He was born and raised in Anchor and was friend of Tor’s, he worked in a factory after his “Gold Years” as bartender in Sauget, IL. He would have loved to tell you about it in microscopic detail, like the ridiculous bastard he was. He is important, remember him.

Your mother and I were always fairly close, we grew up together, my mother and her mother were close as sisters could be, had the same strong brow structure, talked like they were always excited around one another. When they weren’t around one another they were quiet. Cole didn’t like there to be much talking in the house, and Tor wasn’t a man who talked, was plenty pleasant, but never spoke much. Sadie loved to draw and to read, she had stacks of things, clippings of newspaper, magazines with “good uses of color”, your mother knows more about it, she has the trunk. The trunk is for later, remember that too. We were not a good family, to simply put it on paper like that, we weren’t. There’s a lot to say.

Every Thursday I meat Lynda at Uncle Tor’s green door and we would drive to the gas station near the VFW to get cigarettes from a friend that we both knew from schooling. Your mother never really liked anything besides menthol’s but would smoke 27’s on occasion, and since I usually bought its what she usually smoked. We would walk inside of the store to see if Julio was working and if he was then we would get the smokes and a cheap see-through lighter for free and if was his father then we would get matches, which was fine, I had plenty of lighters in my car. We would smoke our cigarettes in the car or outside on these sets of swings down by the catholic grade school across the street from the retirement community, the school was out and all the teachers with pinches up faces drove compact cars out of town. We mostly talked about how each of our mother’s got screwed up. This is important too.

This was the way a lot of nights went with the two of us, we had sleepovers at my place, smoked a lot of cigarettes, until Cole got remarried and tried to place himself back into everyone’s lives. She was someone he met in a frozen food aisle, and they dated for about three and a half months before they got married and started making phone calls, mostly to Tor and Lynda, but I got one too, he even decided to tell my mother. I wasn’t going to have any of it, the family ties were basically gone for me and I hated him, but Tor seemed quite numb after Sadie left him, Lynda was getting that way too, and wanting to stay peaceful and have a friend in Cole, Tor took them over to Cole’s home and they had dinner.

This is when she stole Kingdom Come. Which is the most important thing. Kingdom Come was a bat that Cole had saved from his “Gold Days”.

Day 85

I really wish I had taken pictures of the smatchos or the gimlet I made myself this morning, technically this morning, the party kept going until about four in the morning or so. But I don't have anything like that, so I'm going to post some free form thought stuff.

I'm kind of afraid that I'll never stop writing about myself, and because of it I'll be stuck in a melancholy limbo for the rest of my time. I'm out of school in about a month and then I have to carve out a direction for myself. Its intimidating. I'm not that afraid of the next few years, I know I'll survive, but I'm afraid that I'll lose sight of improving myself and I'll stagnate, maybe never make it to the next stage, whatever that is. I'm afraid that I'll wake up three months out of school covered in dust and realize that I'm not doing anything at all, like I'm doing now. I write sometimes, and sometimes I go out, and sometimes I do this, but I've been feeling a deep lust for a new direction or angle to take me by the collar and shake me out of a funk thats begun to build up. I think that might be a new art to go toward. Painting has been appealing to me, playwriting has been fun, but that goes back to the community mindset. I don't talk to people, I'm intimidated by everyone, even my friends, the ones I've known for years. And I hate myself for it, dislike that I am so self-focused, I don't got out or talk because I'm afraid of new situations and upsetting the one I currently have, that I may lose the people I love and have spent so much time with if I change minor details I'll tip the scales and things will begin to dissolve. Which again is self-centered. I think about myself way too much, and I want to know how to start thinking about others, but then how to change twenty one and three-fourths years of an introverted mindset. Sometimes I get paranoid because no one I know has talked to me in days, no phone calls, no texts, and I think I'm being abandoned, instantly. Which is ridiculous, because it is a self fault, to have such fear of people that mean so much to you. I almost wish I could drop everything and try again with everyone, be better somehow. I don't know. Back when I smoked I used to walk to the loading tracks behind the spanish steel working shop, the one with the motion sensored light, and sit on the ties and wish that something would walk out of the bushes and let me know that something else was out there, something from story, something with six eyes and an open palm, bequeathing me into the darkness, or something with a mouth full of fangs that I could see, fight, or just get chased by, or even be killed by it, because I would know that there is something else out there, then the world that I don't get, that I don't feel all that connected to, full of people I can't quite seem to hold tight enough. Because then it would be okay, I would have a goal, to find it, that new place, that would be all I needed. I wonder about New York and Prague. I have a dream of smoking cigarettes with a typewriter in my backpack and handing stories to passer-bys on the street. I have a dream of living in a large place full of people that I love and that love me. I feel dead a little, I don't know, maybe I do. There is a distance that I'm not sure how to bridge. i want to stretch canvas, I want to buy spray paint and do psychedelic colored portraits to the people I love, I want someone to call me that is not my mother telling me that another relative is cancer and that she might be dying and she has lost something else, maybe the dog died. I just want to talk to someone, I want a hand on my back, I want to be quiet and to be held for a little while. I don't want to hide underneath my covers, I want to step onto a stage and show what I can do, but I have a guilt that is woven into me, that if I try and distance myself from anyone I have now, that I will never have anyone ever again, that it will be grade school all over again, and nothing will ever be right again. Nothing ever. If my mother died would I fall apart, like would my arm just drop off my shoulder? I don't think it would, but it would hurt a whole lot. I have to break a cycle. I thought that if I kept writing everyday that I would somehow feel accomplished, that it would force me to break something. I keep having dreams where I'm talking to doctors or teachers, ones that I make up, all with kind of the same hair cuts, and I ask them what to do, and they tell me, "Go to California." I used to be obsessed with marble statues, how artisans someone crafted slabs of blank grayness into smooth human-like forms. I remember my first trip to the art institute and walking in circles in that small room with all the pillars and reliefs. It was really cold in that room. I think I have to get mad, I have to get angry about something. That's what made me lose all of the weight to be so mad at my current self that I will be bread and water forever, that I will be running. Everything. I miss camping trips.

Day 84

Draft of a essay about why comic books are good

When I was seven my day bought me an amazing spiderman comic at a gas station in Wisconsin to get me to shut up and I read and re-read that book for nearly a year because I couldn’t get another one. I became quite fascinated with the characters, the pictures, how everything was so stylistic and colorful that it jumped right off the page, and stuck itself in the back of my head. I would be thinking about it all day, what Spiderman could and could not do, how he could beat the bad guys, what and how he would handle a situation, what I would do if I was Spiderman. Now, notably, I was the weird kid in the classroom who liked to play with scissors, but I won’t get into that. I will say that my mind was invested in world of comics from a very young age from the sheer beauty that they had to me.

Now, before I continue how many of you read one of the classics in eighth grade and in High School, perhaps something like: Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Pride and Prejudice, A bit of Mark Twain? I hope many, because all of them are worth while and fill us with a world that otherwise we would not have known. They were perfect, or getting close to perfect for our minds to understand. And then we get to college and we are told to read a few more things that we may or may not like, but yeah they are still interesting, and some of us may give up reading by then, because we have been told what is good and bad our entire lives and are sick of reading something, just because its “good.” My point being, many students today do not read for the simplicity of loving a story or character or world, they read because “It will help them in the long run”, or “it is necessary”. And I am of the belief that this not need to be true.

I think that comic books are the answer. And a few others would agree with me. Interested in reading is at a strange state in our country today and many like, Deborah Ford, have been fighting back with comics. “Many are uninterested”, she lists in an interview from the School Library Journal, “I want them to be engaged and interested.” She has found that boys who had no interest in reading before hand would go to comics and become more than willing to read other materials after talking about comics. And that girls as well found the immediacy of the story telling intriguiging. “There was no forcing them to read as homework,” she said,” They wanted to read it all in class.” And so they did, devoting a bit of time each day to reading each day and then went back to the academics.

There is a documentary out called Comic Book Literacy that takes a new direction on getting the youth interested in story and writing. It follows a group of individuals who go into classrooms and promote an artistic work environment that allows kids to design and draw their own comics, to their hearts desires. Through this they are taught creative thinking, “What are your character’s powers, how do they use them, where are they from, who are they trying to save, what are they fighting for?” All of these and more that help the child not only extend their creativity, but be problem solvers for their own worlds. And Not only that, they get to be the artist too and show exactly what it is that they see in their heads, they are not limited to a standardized form or a multiple choice answer, they are given free range. The exercise was see how much a child could come up and to promote not just literary skills, but to also their artistic prowess and community. At the end of the exercise, which ran about a week long, the comics were gathered together and much like 836 Valencia, they were bound into a giant comic collection that the kids could have forever. Cementing their status as creators.

All of this in general seems to point in the direction of a much easier to manage and interested class room setting that many of the schools today lack. As a child, there is no doubt that many have the want to create, but in the standard setting or scholastic study and rudimentary system or learn-test,learn-test, there is little room for a child to want anything more. With comics there is an explosion of artistic want and creativity that bleeds into every other activity tied to the school, with the expanded thought processes children are better able to tackle complex problems, with the ability to look at it from all angles, they are more easily ready to express themselves in English because they have a better understanding of what it is they need to say. And with work like this it can keep children interested in the arts instead of something else more, well, villainous in their growing years.

In finality I want to say that there is something to a comic book that really nothing else has, its tangible, something physical you hold in your hands, with artwork that is dynamic and shows a moving, colorful world that has the immediacy to draw in adult and child alike. In 23 to 48 pages of work a slew of teams come together for one goal, to inspire and tell a story, and I hope that message can be spread to younger generations.