Laura

The first person I met integrating into a new job was the office saint, Laura. She was a woman with a doting attitude and a pleasant demeanor. The kind of woman who would do anything for you, not because she was a pushover, but because she made a conscious effort to make the people around her happy. In my opinion, that was a stupid goal. She made quick work of learning my personal interests and some of my history, then introduced me to everyone at the office, making note of people she thought I would go well with. I would have said she had an extraordinary sense for people, except I let her believe a bunch of things about me that weren’t true. Funny enough, I didn't lie about being great at reading topographical maps or that I’d once conducted my own research in the wastelands that disproved the notion of dangerous pathogens imbued in the soil. I lied about the little things and that was what seemed to matter .Was I lazy-ass, didn’t work out like everyone else? Of course i was. Did I join the creative movement? Of course I didn’t. Did I have any siblings? No. The truth was, I was training my body for what could only be the inevitable collapse and recreation of society; I was hopelessly writing day and night; and I had seven siblings, split up, some had left this town years ago, disappeared into the wasteland, where they knew their destinies lay.

Laura took me for the placid agent of resisting change and referred me to others in the office who spent most of their time complaining about the creative movement and the people who walked the streets at night. Being change-resistors, they saw no reason to fix the problem. It turned out to be a good exchange in the long run because although Laura believed she was setting me up to be perfect friends, she’d given me the perfect cover. The government doesn’t look at people who write the wrong form of “your” or “their,” but then refuse to correct it. The government doesn’t look at average achievers, not even under or over because to be exceptional in any way takes guts.

As I watched Laura, I began to have questions. Had she as much mental capacity as she had hardworking and altruistic drive, I figured she would have seen this by now. She would have bothered to ask who we were on the inside and that was something I could not hide. Instead she signaled, through subtle glances of sympathy, that we were all suffering through this little thing called life together and therefore, how could anything be interesting or joyful? “Did they get you early?” I asked one morning after a pump up meeting; we were alone in one of the generic hallways, bleached as if it had tried and failed more than once to commit suicide.

“What do you mean?” Laura replied. I could see the look of confusion on her face. Her mind, so adept at building categories and organizing people into neat groups, could not quite figure out what I had just said. She knew what it meant, but she could not connect the face to the voice. “No, I’m my own person,” she shot back after connecting the dots.

“Is that why you give so much to other people?” I asked. It’s a fair question. I know enough bureaucrats to be skeptical of kindness; it’s usually an expression of need, if not for some physical possession or the exchange of time, to fill a greater void which occurs in the space between a person’s personal perception and the actual existence of their body. Therefore, I figured the strong had no need of kindness.

“I give so much to other people because I want to,” she answered, too polite to be indignant.

“That’s awfully good of you.”

It came to a point where we were two weeks out from a project deadline. Laura had been working hard getting everything together and had written most of the project pitch by herself. The rest of us were busy doing our own thing, mostly being mediocre and hapless, even me who had learned from the environment which had no accountability or challenge. During one of the project meetings, I caught her staring at me. She looked determined. “I know you’ve lied about who you really are,” she says after the meeting is over. “I did some digging and I found a blog full of your writing.”

“It’s nothing that can get me fired.”

“Oh hush, I think you’d like it no more than to see someone try to fire you.”

“Why don’t you give it a short, say I beat the shit out of you?”

“Why would I frame you?”

“You tell me.”

She looked thoughtful for a bit, then said, “I need some more things for this project, but I can’t get them here. I need to go somewhere where human energy still means something.”

“So nowhere in New Seattle.”

“exactly. Are you familiar with the concept of a “road trip”?”

“Yes.”

“I picked the right person, then. I’m not.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“In the North I’ve heard of cities much larger than ours which have clues about the Old World. That’s where we’re going.”

“Is this really about the project?”

“If it was, I wouldn’t have picked you. You haven’t done jack shit on that thing.”

It was settled then; a bonding experience which I had to exert extra energy to create. Like much of the world, it materialized in front of me, possibly skating around the meaning of living a fierce life. We left two days later in a government vehicle which she used her niceness and connection to get and set out past border crossings into the wasteland.

There’s something about looking out into the world and seeing a vast expanse of nothing. It’s the space between our own thoughts, between the love of two people, the energy of death which does not make its way back to life, but scatters into the endless, sucking void of entropy. The wasteland was of varying colors of sand, some glasses and mottled together from the heat of the explosions which had created this place. Wind rushed past us, arbitrarily mixing particles one way or the other and scratching the scratch-proof paint on the vehicle. I imagined being able to see beyond the wasteland and visions of long gone sisters and brothers reentered my mind. Would they materialize out of the energy of the universe, come to fill the voice which existed where the sun used to be? Laura looked unnerved at the lack, the loss. True, it wasn’t a true nothingness we were witnessing, as something is always something and nothing is too much for our minds to comprehend without the aid of forbidden fruit. She was the scene so densely packed with sand and atoms, non of which meant anything. Everything had to be taken at face value; everything was real. Meaning was a privilege she was always allowed to enjoy; a meaningful carrier, family life. Not like some people in the city who tended tables or took away trash day in and day out to serve people like us who deserved it, I suppose.

“Do you regret going on this trip yet?” I asked at about day three.

“No, I just don’t understand.”

“What?”

“How much of the puzzle I was missing.”

“Go figure. You’re ahead of everyone now.”

“Why does this place exist? Does it mean to swallow us?”

“Does it matter? I don’t think we get a choice either way. If they world wants to destroy us, it will.”

“And that’s just it?”

“I can’t predict the future, but from my experience, that’s how these things usually work. Whatever is destined to happen will, without fail.”

She stewed on that for two days as we drove. She quietly shut me out of her thoughts and feelings, dropping all pretense of kindness and love. The wasteland will do that to you. It will make you wonder, keep considering what your goals and motivations are and why you have them. It’s a challenge to maintain yourself while the wasteland tries to tear apart every part of the identity that makes you, you. “I our world dying?” she eventually asked.

“No more than we are.”

“But I haven’t even reached forty yet, I don’t know what it mean to feel old, I don’t know what it mean to die.”

I stayed silent because I did and that knowledge wan’t for her to know. It was freedom, the end of it all. It’s the sense of relief you have ending a week and resting your body and finishing a task. Finally, I”m done. But at the same time, it’s an incessant paranoia, the fear of giving in and giving up everything. Death wasn’t so much a knowledge, but a discernible sense; a shift in the energy of the universe. Having seen it, I learned to smell it sneaking across a distant horizon, waiting to ambush me. It’s there, the ultimate nothingness, the bliss of closing one’s eyes as if that ends your presence.

“Death won’t find you for a long time, yet.”

“Is death judgement?” she asks and I’m confused.

“What do you mean?”

“Is it like a final exam that if you study for you will get good marks? If I do good in life, do I score well in death?”

“Does score matter to you?”

She didn’t say anything after that and was quiet for another day. By this point we had reached a vast city. Whatever she’d been hoping to find, we’d found it. A city of human energy. I realized I’d never quite asked what she meant by that. I decided to let it lie.

The first thing I noticed about this city was the luck of a bubble and walls protecting it from the wasteland. Old office buildings were intermixed with established tents. It was just another version of the apocalypse here. “Okay, my plan is to talk to these people, learn about where they live, how they live, then invite them on a return trip to New Seattle,” she said.

“Why are they coming back with us?”

“We need new workers, new ideas, more people, in order to sustain that city.”

“And what happens if they say no?”

“The offer is too great for them to refuse, and I seal the deal.”

“How’s that?”

She gave me a pointed look, one that mirrored the gaze of a bureaucrat who knew more than you. “Well, you would have been fired if it wasn’t for me.”

If it wasn’t for her being kind, I would have been fired; if it wasn’t for the constant of kindness K. Being out of a job didn’t scare me, but being trapped in a place, physically or emotionally dependent on anything did. Knowing that she had been kind to me in keeping me from getting fired was fine, but she set off a feeling of uneasiness in the way she looked at me. “Thanks,” I said, “You’ll probably have to do that again.”

“I’ve done it multiple times.”

The twinge of unease turned into a real feeling, a small anxiety. “Well, maybe that’s a sign I should move on.”

“No, you’ll learn. Besides, we need free thinkers like you.”

As we walked into the city and started interviewing the residents, most of whom lived in tents and spent their days trying to discover how to make, grow, or engineer food. Most of the day seemed to hinge on what was left unsaid. Laura recruited well and probably told a record amount of half truths and white lies. She seemed to border a dangerous style of coercion and persuasion, kind of like mixing alcohol and juice and yet she remained incredibly kind. I found myself strangely restricted in what I wanted to say. She mainly used me to give testimonials about the company and asked me to share interesting things about myself. There were points I’d say too much and she’d interrupt. She offered food, water, and life advice. Did she see herself as a saint, a Mother Theresa? I didn’t think Mother Theresa had a hidden agenda.

“Everyone gets food in our city, we invented a way to get so much.”

Food was given by ratio of hours worked and priority was given to volunteers. But we did not invent it, we stole the idea of farming from other cities. Volunteers were usually bureaucrats and office workers who’d been grandfathered into a system where they could report volunteer hours they didn’t work, up to the hundreds of hours and still reap the benefits.

“We have the best education system.”

However, we didn’t teach anything practical. Our method was envisioning a bunch of beautiful ideas and things we wanted to happen, making sheets of objectives, due dates, and goals, that looked rather impressive, then forgetting about those obligations, becoming disillusioned, and ignoring the hard pull of reality.

“Our projects and products change our city for the better and they give your life meaning.”

As she told that lie, I recognized that even she knew the words she spoke were fake. The wasteland had changed her perspective, but she ignored this. Engaging with her hapless reality was better than engaging with the reality of her own being.

“Do you feel free?” she asked me in response to a very astute question by a young man who looked like me at that age.

“Yes,” I answered, but I don’t know why I said that.

In truth, like all of them, I was afraid of the end of my life and the knowledge it was coming, that I would be swallowed up by the wasteland, was no more comforting. As I spoke, trying to believe I was free in my head, I became concerned with the idea of delusion. As seen by my siblings’ and parents’ ability to finally leave the city and my remaining here, that truth was objectively false and yet I kept repeating, “I am free, look at everything I’ve experienced, I experienced death. I am free,” to myself until delusion set in and I couldn’t solve the problem. Laura only made things worse, dispersing my energy to create and be free like a river flowing out over a delta, continuously diverted until there was nothing left of it. I’d seen evidence of rivers before, the kind so small with a flow so light, it was hard to believe they could ever make change. Maybe this was my fate, too. How could I be free?

“I love my life. I have a home.”

Who of us had a home anymore? Home is the base, it’s where you start all of your living. It’s values, purpose, belief. That home was gone forever, instead we were given a place to sleep and things to buy for our house, but that was not home. Both her and I had adapted to the same view of home based on what we’d been told. We were equally homeless and equally unfree. So why and where did Laura learn to be so kind?

We returned after three weeks with four new recruits. They talked animatedly in the back of the car about all of the ideas they had and what they hoped to bring back to their home town. “We should start out learning about how to revitalize our soil.”

“I want to learn what the rest of the world looks like, maybe we can invent a device that circles the Earth and takes pictures.”

Laura listened and let them talk into states of such great excitement, sometimes they would yell in the car or need to stop to draw something. So this was what she meant. These people possessed the powerful energy of life and pretty soon that energy had infected both Laura and I.

When we arrived back in New Seattle, I had the feel-good knowledge that I was now really close to this group of people and I was sure we would make great friends.

It didn’t take long to milk them for all they had, when all the job returned was money and Laura’s unwavering kindness. Surely the four new recruits, no indistinguishable in drive from the rest of the teams who spent their days organizing mediocre reports and presentations or thinking about new equipment to buy to increase productivity. I got sucked into it, too. What did I have to do to be productive? It was my duty, my high, so now I was addicted to the workplace, to Laura’s unwavering desire to recruit more people.

It eventually got to the point where I wanted to leave, where I couldn’t stand another minute in that office. In exchange for buying everyone food or spending hours acting as the office counselor, she would grill you about personal stories and collect all of your ideas. It was the idea of “people first” taken to an extreme. We were all mediocre and if we weren’t mediocre, the lack of challenge would soon render one helpless and unable to carry forward ideas. I refused Laura and her meager attempts to help, I let go of her pointless initiatives about heal and personal motivation and took my power to do things for myself. “If I became complacent in my destiny, that’s how I would make up for it, too,” I thought, trying to understand what she was doing.

I’d encountered this kind of brash overcompensation before, but never in the hands of someone who was powerful and so it seemed to be more damaging. Slowly I began to feel incredibly guilty for the people I was leading into the company. New recruits so full of ideas, “human energy” that it hurt so much more when they realized it was impossible to accomplish what the believed in. A vicious cycle I’d been through over and over again. Would I ever learn to stop the bad things from happening or would I keep wandering around in the same circle, staring at the center point, or would I step out and start walking the path of the straight and narrow?

It was at the point where I didn’t think I could take it any longer, where I was planning to take the knife my sister left me and slice my wrists, when the coffee maker appeared in the break room. No one knew what it was at first- it took two employees three days in the archives to locate a file about appliances. “This steeps coffee grounds,” one said, “A kind of magic dirt that you us to stay awake.”

“They write that it makes them productive,” the other said.

A great interest was spurred about the idea of a substance that makes one more productive. Laura jumped on the idea immediately and spent hours pouring over documents about coffee. She eventually discovered it grew south of our world, if anything grew there at all. Me, being her “head of road trips” I was predestined to go on this trip. Instead of collecting documents as she always did before our trips, she procured a large truck and filled it with water and nonperishable food. One morning, she woke me up with a knock on my door and announced that we were leaving within the hour. I checked the time and saw it was barely five.

After we’d left the city, it took her a few days to tell me where we were going exactly. I’d expected that there was something else going on, but I couldn’t guess for sure from Laura’s enigmatic exterior. “I discovered that there is a world out there that isn’t part of the wasteland,” Laura said eventually. “This tropical place we once saw, where the coffee comes from, is still there.”

In my heart, I knew this, but I don’t know hwy I held on to that fact. All my life, I chose to ignore the existence of the outside world, even though it was much more beautiful than the delusion of the wasteland. Here one could achieve a certain sense of their self that would forever be restricted by the wasteland and the bonds of society that protected us from the exisitential terror of a force that exists only to consume until there is no energy left to create existence. Outside, though, was real in a way that no town could ever be. There, things grew because the sun still shined and plants and animals worked together in a symbiosis. Laura didn’t know et that this was what she had been searching for her whole life. That she expected to find completion within the lines of a project proposal or in the hundreds of hundreds of meetings was absurd.

“Do you know what we expect to find there?” I asked.

“Coffee,” she answered, “Everyone is excited about the idea of being more productive, so I have to search for it for them.”

“That’s absurd. You don’t take someone on a road trip with that kind of reasoning.”

She was quiet and I wondered if I had questioned her too far, if she would want to turn back. “You’re right, she answered, “I want to see if it’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“They tell us the wasteland is all we have, that looking everywhere for a way out just wastes time and energy, but that can’t be true. Why does the coffee maker exist? Why did I find pictures of a beautiful world in those books?”

“So you don’t know for sure if this place is there?”

“No, I know, I have a feeling.”

For anything we did, we had to have truth and justification to back up our actions. Companies and leaders demanded continuous improvement and every action taken to have a constant goal towards a positive outcome. Nothing else could stand because just living seemed to be lazy. Everything had to be more than it already was. I’d recognized this feeling in myself before because I knew my family had reached the promise land. I still felt as though places like that had existed on this Earth. No matter how I chose to ignore it, I couldn’t run from the feeling there was meaning beyond the wasteland.

The interesting thing about Laura was, although she knew that the wasteland was soul consuming, she did not possess the fear that would protect her mind. She wasn’t fragile, but to know that the world is a lie and to have believed that lie for so long would be difficult to grasp. Laura wasn’t afraid; maybe because she believed so wholeheartedly in her mission or that she had no other choice. Days later and our trek continued. We’d started to tell each other stories about what it would be like to build a home i the wasteland and how that would look. Was it possible to live in a place that literally drained life away and was it possible to generate a new culture based on the gifts and specializations of being a human, rather tan on old ideas and structures that people wanted to reside in? The more we spoke about creating a world, the more overconfident we seemed to feel. All of a sudden, we wanted so much from the world. “We’ll create rivers that will roll across the desert and every person will have the ability to have a family and a community.”

“We’ll have education, but people won’t have to work in dead end jobs just to put food on teh table. Some people will grow food and they will exchange food for books and shoes.”

“Books? Will thought be the currency?”

“Of course, thought is the only real currency. Art, work, it’s all human energy, it’s all thought.”

“What about time?”

“Well, after we create our society, we’ll have all the time in the world.”

“Don’t you want to leave the future to the future? After all your experience, don’t you know that ambition is the root of all evil? It brings out the worst of people.”

“But what if it’s just you and me? We’ve already seen the worst in each other.”

“But I want to focus on living in the moment.”

“is it so bad to see how much we would be?”

“Is it so bad to be ourselves?”

“We need to do this so we can beat the wasteland.”

“We don’t need to beat the wasteland, we can’t beat the wasteland. We just need to ensure that our time on this Earth is spent in a way that means something.”

The debate between the now and what we could dream waged on for days, the angle of the conversation eventually seemed itself a kind of journey. I awoke once from a deep sleep, having heard a voice cry out and looked around the cabin to see only Laura, who believed in dream and I who believed in only the wasteland. However, in my dreams I saw a better world where people didn’t have to escape their bodies into twisted reveries to be happy. Where passion and productivity walked hand in hand towards personal success. Where everyone had an equal chance at happiness and leaders knew how to get there. All of this was build in the midst of the wasteland, but not out of what was left for us and in the distance one could see a few pioneer species spreading their roots into a thin soil.