Poem-Operated Boy

Sid watched her from the inside of the barred window that kept him from experiencing the frenzy he was used to seeing down below. He didn’t understand much about people, but he didn’t mind her quirks. Her clothes were pressed and pleated as if she had meticulously purposed them to sit on her body a certain way, but her hair fell in wisps around her face which wrestled with the wind carelessly. She also dragged her feet. It was how he first heard her. She announced her presence with shhk, shhk echoes that hit against the walls and traveled into his ears. But as her feet dragged along the gravel, her fingers dragged along the brick wall of the barbershop that was outside his apartment building.

The way her fingers lingered behind on the grooved porous bricks standing in the alleyway wall made it something special — not that he could remember experiencing anything “special” for himself.

Surely, he thought, she must be special.

His alarm beeped between his ribs, but he didn’t move. His weight remained against the white wall until the unattractive scents and dampness returned in her absence.

He walked over to the machine that produced his daily moral transcripts and printed out his Monday “Integrity” ticket. He faced it upright and inserted it into the slot that was placed between his two upper ribs below his heart. The reassuring ding sounded and he went about his day an honest man.

She came back the next day around the same 7:30 am time frame, and Sid was already by the window waiting. That day was different, though. The dragged out shhk, shhk came to a stop about halfway through.

She stopped.

Her hand reached into the front pocket of her blouse and pulled out a piece of chalk. Her shoulders were squared back as if she was somehow emulating the broadness of the wall as she continued to stare straight ahead. Her small, delicate hands that usually ran along seams of mortar eventually went to work and the faint clacking sounds of chalk against wall filled the empty morning silence. When she stepped back she observed her work for a moment and walked away. He couldn’t see what lived on the brick wall, but he wanted to know.

Beep. Beep.

He ignored his alarm and ran downstairs and out of the building, not minding that his bare feet were stepping into polluted puddles that sopped the bottom of his pants. He stood in front of the wall and he felt himself taking on the same readied stance she took.

They were words. They were her words, each one existing on its own brick, making it easy to read:

“They saw black veins of vines,

once green,

and cut her

down,

not realizing she was resting instead of infesting.”

He didn’t understand her words, and he couldn’t be frustrated over it because it wasn’t part of his design. Patience shows good temperance.

But even though her words were out of reach, they were something special.

And he wanted to experience something special.

The alarm buzzed again and he took a mental shot of her words, repeating them over and over in his head all the way upstairs to his apartment, to his study, and to the machine that could print out a transcript using her words. No one knew Sid could operate the program on his own, but he had watched his father as a teenager in case circumstance required him to create his own moral transcripts. And because he was a prototype in a quest for behavior modification, he had easy access to his father’s company equipment.

Sid punched down on the keys, recreating her words and printing them out on a new ticket. They didn’t look the same in the tall, blocked lines of the barcode. They looked mechanical.

He didn’t know if this would work or how it would make him feel, but he lifted up his shirt and inserted the ticket upwards and waited.

Ding.

He felt the same. There was no stark revelation about the world he was set apart from. He was partially inclined to blame her for such an underwhelming feeling.

No, she is special, therefore, he decided, her words are special.

Sid carried those words out into the haze of gray left behind by the rain and into the alley where the light breeze wafted up the putrid smell of urine. He observed her words once more, taking in every intricate angle of her scratchy letters. He looked both ways and made sure no one could see him. His hand reached out and he ran his own fingers along the bricks wanting to feel what she felt each morning. They were steady, unmoving.

Sid realized that the wall would cease to exist in some lifetime. The once favored building material would be replaced with concrete blocks and steel windows to match all the other buildings. Instead of rustic-red, the wall would be gray, and her words a memory bulldozed with it.

No one would know. No one would understand. No one would grow from them.

But, Sid wanted to grow from them.

#

She put new words on the wall every week after that. Sometimes the words were hers, and sometimes they belonged to Hughes, Whitman, Ginsberg, and other names he didn’t recognize outside of his formal education. Sid hoarded the small verses and kept them in a journal he marked up to look like the brick wall, chronicling his new life forming over the past few weeks.

It didn’t stop him from experiencing a new level of guilt because he wasn’t the honest man his father purposed him to be. He was living life like a an adult-sized boy going out of his way to submerge his hand in any body of grimy water while parents chastised their kids for doing the same. He remembered a snippet of Plath who said “Perfection is terrible.” He couldn’t be terrible. He could only be special.

Sid’s father didn’t know what he was up to. There was a quick, predictable phone call in the late evening where the transcript was at its end and the melancholic feeling of one group’s oppressiveness faded off as his mind prepared to sleep. He had noticed the sound of Sid’s voice to be a little more distant. Sid brushed it off as a glitch in the system. From there on it was the usual conversation with the same questions, same answers, and same hope.

“You will change the world, Sid,” his father said. He pictured his father’s veneers underneath a thin upper lip that made his smile an imitation of happiness. “The world needs more honest men like you. You will prove that people do change.”

“I know,” Sid had agreed. “I will be my best. I will do my best.”

Sid wasn’t doing his best. He no longer spent the hours of his days serving others at the homeless shelter downtown or adhering to his other duties. Being dependable and responsible for others exhausted him when he was operating on her lively words. But he couldn’t stop. He wanted to explore the world through someone else’s filter and not one that was mechanically engineered for him.

He wanted to be someone special.

It was all because of her that he was experiencing something he might have had long before the recalibration of his mind to be the revolution of change.

#

“You’re not as discreet as you think!” She yelled looking at him right through the bars of his window and through strands hair. “Might as well come down. Dontcha think?”

He moved back from the window, looking around the room as if he was going to find the way out of his embarrassment on the white tiles above his kitchen sink.

“It’s ok, you know,” she continued. “I really wouldn’t mind the company!”

His mind processed the list of reasons he remembered from previous transcripts about being in the company of the opposite sex: compromising the reputation of a woman or making them feel unsafe, inviting unwarranted feelings that cannot be reciprocated, or falling into the “temptation of the flesh.”

But she was special, Sid reminded himself. And he was supposed to be an honest man. Who was he to refuse her invitation for company?

She was still by the wall by the time he pushed through the back door. To be up close to her and see the strands of hair fly with the Westerlies broke the barrier that kept his imagination from coming to life.

She gave a broad smile that revealed a gap between her two front teeth as she greeted, “Hi.”

“Hello,” he responded. Sid did his best to keep his eyes on her instead of scanning her whole face and storing it in his memory to recreate later on. He remembered an old transcript: Eye contact is key to indicate to the other party that you have their focus.

He clasped his hands behind his back and waited for her to say something.

“I’m Elisa.”

She held out her hand and he stared at it.

Shaking hands is a sign of respect and the acknowledgement of a new relationship formed. To decline is rude.

He took her hand in his. “Sid.”

“Sid?” She gave him another big smile. “I wasn’t expecting your name to be Sid. I was thinking something more like Tom or Jim or Earl.”

“Earl?”

“Yeah! Earl sounds like a name for a respectable dude. Like James Earl Jones.”

His head tilted. He didn’t know the name.

“Mufasa?” She offered instead. “Darth Vader? Coming To America?!”

He shook his head.

To waste time on the frivolity of culture is to deny someone your help and time.

Her shoulders dropped and she looked him up and down like he was a new kind of species.

She wasn’t wrong.

“Priorities,” she said, adjusting her weight from one foot to the other. “I get it. A lot of people I work with don’t understand my pop culture references either.”

“Why?”

She shrugged and glanced at the wall behind her. “Because they think that wasting time on frivolous things stops you from helping others. Some self-righteous bullshit, really. Super high on their morals.”

The familiarity of her words shocked him and all he could manage was, “Oh.”

“It’s a weird job,” she explained with her eyes down to the ground and her dusty palms facing upwards. “Nothing special. But we don’t have to talk about that. What about you, Sid? You got a job you hate?”

He nodded.

“What do you do?” She asked.

“I volunteer mostly,” he said, squeezing his sweaty hands behind his back. “At a homeless shelter, animal shelter, second-hand bookstore….and I tutor sometimes.”

Her head tilted to the side, her eyes squinting and she observed him. “Wow. Nice guy.”

“B-but I don’t — ” He paused for a breath. “But I don’t do that anymore.”

“No?”

“No. I’m taking a break so I can learn more about myself.”

An honest man does not deceive.

Sid didn’t want to talk about himself anymore. He was afraid that if she let him talk for any longer he would say something that would give away something only she should have inside information on. Even if she didn’t work for his father’s company, there was no knowing how she’d react if she found out about him. He wasn’t ready for her to leave his life, especially when they were in the beginnings of something new.

He needed to be around someone special to understand more than what a barcode could feed him.

Sid pointed to the wall behind her. “So what have you written this week?”

She turned her body to the side. Her voice dropped to a serious tone as she read: “Worse case: fear and freedom abandonment. So they behave before they can belong.”

“What does it mean?”

“You know that job I hate?” she reminded him, pushing the strands of hair out of her face. “They’re coming up with a program that will help with behavioral issues for the ‘younger generation.’ It’s their hope for a better, more peaceful and lucrative future. And what’s worse is that I work with these ‘solutions.’”

Stress was pushing out an uncomfortable amount of sweat through his pores. “And you think this program is a bad thing?”

“I think it’s captivity,” she said right away. She leaned her back against the steady brick walk, pushing around a chunk of gravel with her foot.

He let her feel what she needed to feel.

To be empathetic is to understand what others feel and what they are going through. It allows you to be compassionate and offer a solution to help.

She picked her head back up and apologized to him. “I’m sorry. But...the world is a shit place. And this wall is the only damn thing that makes me happy.” She patted the wall. “A fucking brick wall in a rat-infested alley that’s probably a crime scene. I think I’d rather hear police sirens or gunshots ringing in my ears than have to hear-”

Beep. Beep.