YAAN-11
Mom had instructed me to go to the offices when I arrived, and so I made my way there, which wasn’t difficult, they (the offices) comprising, of the nine buildings that comprised the school, the one facing, or parallel to, the big front gate I’d just come through. There was also a wide path of stone, lined on both sides by pots of orange flowers—summertops, I thought—leading with self-proclamatory flourish from the gate to the imposing, age-darkened wooden double-doors of this first building; and if this wasn’t enough, an inscription in gold on a gold-trimmed black placard inset in the old, burnished wood of the right of the two doors announced, “Offices.”
Inside, the Offices building was spacious and high-ceilinged, but somehow drab, with a sterile soapy smell permeating the premises, high windows admitting only dusty slanting light, and walls, of a light burgundy color, and floors, of checkered white and burgundy tile, both polished and clean but faded and dull, with a burnished graininess about them, a hundred years of dust pressed and smashed and melted into them like minerals into river rock.
The offices of Offices were spaced evenly along narrow but high hallways, announced as well as hidden by doors of old wood smooth and shiny with many coats of a lacquer yellow and acrid with age. I found the one I was seeking, “Admissions,” by looking at gold-and-black placards, similar but smaller than the one on the outside door, attached not to the doors like that one had been but to the burgundy wall beside each door. Inside, I gave a quiet and officious man the envelope that Mom had given me, and he, with no word or look of encouragement yet not the least bit of annoyance at being bothered, gave me, in exchange, a tiny roll of parchment upon which neat writing informed me of my class schedule and the number of the dormitory room that was now going to be my home.
I circled almost the entire complex, then, not because I was intending to explore the place even before taking my belongings to my room, but because I walked the “right” way from the Offices. That is, I turned right, which was the wrong way from the one I would have had to go to come almost directly to the first of the three dormitories, which as it happened was the one to which I was assigned. Going the “right” wrong direction, I went past the three Classroom buildings, the gymnasium, and two of the dormitories before finally coming to my assigned room.
As I walked, I did explore, in a way, despite an unspecific anxiety—a sort of a pre-exploration I called soaking. In this case, figuratively and literally: I was soaking in salty water—my own sweat; I was soaking, also, in the afternoon, the sultriness of it, and when I passed into the shadow of a grove of trees, the cool relief of the shade, and in both sun and shade, the cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep of a red dartwing who seemed to be following me around the buildings, an at-first insistent, intrusive voice that became with repetition a welcoming song that was pleasant to soak into. I was soaking, also, in the aroma of short, cut, grass, a new odor to me, for at the Corner, what grass there was grew wild and high. The smell was different. And most of all, I soaked in the pattern of the place, letting it surround me, watching the strands of many entities, more by far clustered together in one area than I had ever experienced, weave together in a vast and thousand-colored tangle, and watching my ribbon flower extend in every direction (soaking, thus, too, in the satisfaction of the freedom of knowing I could leave at any time, this knowledge giving more savor to the staying). Five hundred students lived here, Mom had told me, and thirty teachers, and others, including administrators and janitors. I wondered why not even one of the entities whose strands I could see woven together was outside on a day when it must surely be quite stuffy inside—but of course many were outside, in the Nonagon, I just didn’t know about the Nonagon yet.
When I arrived at the first of the buildings that I reasoned, because of their preponderance of doors and windows, must be the student dormitories, I started looking for my room. It wasn’t difficult to find it, since the doors to the rooms were numbered, with figures carved right into the wood of the doors themselves—doors plain and smooth, and darkened with stain—but it did take a bit of looking around, my building being the closest of the three to the Offices, and thus the last one I came to. I found the one—#14—that was listed on the parchment the man in the Admissions office had given me before the sun shadows of evening began to grow very tall, however.
I was relieved to find that it was a bottom-floor room (There were three floors, with plain wooden staircases leading up to railed walkways that provided entry to the rooms of the higher floors). I’m not sure why I was relieved, but I was. The door was unlatched, though not ajar. Sensing an entity within, I hesitated, momentarily startled. I double-checked the number on the door and on my paper, before realizing, oh yeah, there are two to a room—you won’t get a room to yourself, Mom had told me. I wondered, should I knock? But decided, no, it’s my room too, and pushed the door open in a manner I thought non-aggressive, non-intrusive, and it rotated inward in a slow, soundless arc.
Within, a hideously distorted entity-pattern writhed before me. At least that was my initial perception of it; and only with a concerted effort did I restrain myself from fleeing. But, I stayed, and as my surprise and horror subsided, I saw that the pattern was, after all, quite beautiful, comprised of linked green and blue and aqua and teal loops and arrows and comet-tails and hoops and swirls. It was just that it was struggling against itself, parts of it unknotting itself while other parts, other sets of strands, attempted to re-knot those parts, and because these “fixer-parts,” if you will, were not succeeding alone, other parts strained from far-off areas to help with the re-knotting, and these parts, straining beyond their means, were beginning to tear and unknot as well, and still other strands of the pattern, sensing this, were grasping desperately, randomly, for anything at all to hold onto and finding nothing were reaching out, away from the main with desperate gropes, stressing the already-fraying pattern further.
Watching, I thought it must soon unravel—and I didn’t know what to do. Entities grab and pull and push at and manipulate each other constantly, but they can’t see one another, they can only sense one another, so it’s a very inexact thing. I had, of course, conceived that because I could see other entities, if I were to choose to reach into them and re-arrange some of the strands of their pattern, I would have the advantage of exactitude, yet I had never done it, nor even seriously considered doing it: it seemed to me that it would be an egre-gious invasion to do so; I found the thought of it nauseating, distasteful.
Yet, I thought that if I didn’t do something, and soon, this pattern would unravel completely—it was not righting itself, its fraying and tearing and unknotting instead increasing in pace by the second. So, I took hold, first, with a few of the tendrils of my own pattern, of the biggest strands of this pattern that were groping out, twisting, roiling, and yanking the main body of the entity this way and that. I thought that if I first reduced this overall outward pull and stabilized the pattern that way, I could work on some of the inner knots that needed mending. But these strands were too strong for me, I couldn’t budge them, and they twisted from my grasp. I took hold of them again, more firmly, but again to no avail. I reached, then, into the heart of the pattern, and tied one of the unraveled knots back together. That worked, and so I moved quickly to another one, but as I was re-tying this second one, the first one came unraveled. I went back to the first one, but as I was re-tying it again, the second one came undone, and all around, the fraying and distorting of pattern was reaching a frenzy.
“What do I do?” I thought, “What do I do?” my mind spiraling towards the frenzy of the pattern’s unraveling, “What do I do? It’ll unravel, it’ll unravel!” I wasn’t exactly panicking, but I was like the child in the fairy tale charged with the picking up and putting on the shelves all the water of the waterfall. I was overwhelmed; and if I didn’t succeed, and soon, this entity would unravel! My heart raced, I burned hot and cold—and that’s when I heard, and felt, the wings.
At the border of my memory, I recall that I could see only the essence, the pattern, of things, not the shell, the outer substance, the physical world that everybody else sees, and when this was my reality, I saw it wholly, I perceived the whole pattern of things, and could see the precise way everything went together. When, in order to communicate with Mom and others, I learned to see the shadows of the world, I lost this pure vision, this absolute understanding. Further, because when I first learned to see the shadows, my mind was as yet undeveloped I sometimes had trouble with the double-vision necessary to perceive the shadows and the essence at the same time, and if I were observing the shadows, I sometimes had trouble shifting my perception back to the essence of things. When this happened, I was devastated, and I panicked. I remember screaming as I strained and groped, lurching forward in an effort to see the more beautiful real of the world. Mom, who had no idea what I was seeing or not seeing, would say to me, “Back up,” or “Sit back, Yaan, back up, sit back, sit back,” and stroke my head and neck and hair until I had calmed down enough to follow her instructions; and then I would “sit back,” and when I did, I could see again.
That’s what I did now: I sat back. It wasn’t quite so easy as it sounds, but my resolve and my very body fortified by a great beating of wings behind, above, and within me, I was able to do it. My eyes softened, I ceased to strain to comprehend the wholeness of the pattern before me, and thus “sitting back,” I saw in one look how every single one of the thousands of entity strands in her pattern interacted with every other one; and I knew what I had to do.
I grasped, with infinite gentleness, a tiny tendril, almost gossamer, at the heart of her pattern, and moved it with the utmost care, so as not to tear it. I lifted it as I might have lifted a newborn infant, in the direction of a slightly larger entity strand that was groping blindly for this tiny one. The larger strand caught hold of the smaller one, at which point a third strand, yet larger, caught hold of the second one, and a fourth, larger yet, caught hold of the third. Then, as if soothed and emboldened, other strands began catching hold of other strands and tendrils, re-tying unraveled knots, and soon the pattern was stabilized.
I was standing in a small yellow-white room, longer than wide, with tiny beds against opposite walls, and matching small wooden tables, small wooden chairs, small white shelves, a small closet, and small square windows arranged symmetrically on either side of an invisible dividing line that ran right down the middle of a brown tile floor. In the left half of the room, the bed was made, a few books lay on the desk, some clothing was hanging in the open closet, and a girl sat on the bed wiping her eyes and observing me in an attitude of combined surprise, chagrin, and expectation.
She was fairly short, probably only a half-head (or less) taller than me, and was wearing a loose purple blouse and baggy black leggings. She had a round face, wide hyacinth eyes, and striking black hair despite a light complexion (darker than mine but lighter than Jake’s, who was the lightest-skinned of all the farmhands at The Corner though he was usually red from the sun).
After completing the drying of her eyes, she said, in a voice that for a girl not yet a woman was quite strong and resonant, but tremulous, “Did you see me?” by which I comprehended she meant, “Did you see me crying?” Her pattern, which to my relief was holding fast, reached for me without touching me in the way the patterns of people who have an immediate liking for you, do.
I considered pretending that I hadn’t, and I probably would have if it had been, for example, Jake, but such a pretense seemed pointless and absurd after what had happened, and when it was obvious that I’d been staring at her, so I nodded.
She blushed, “Well this is embarrassing.” And then she laughed. That is what I remember most about meeting her: seconds after her entity had almost unraveled, she laughed, at herself, at the awkwardness of this first meeting with her new room-mate, at the irony in existence, and it was a laugh full of richness and appreciation.
“Well, at least you’re not one of the, the, the pret….” She cut herself off, and added, reddening, “This is embarrassing.” Tears began to squeeze out of her eyes again.
“No it’s not,” I was crying, too—it had been a tense day—but instead of hiding it from her, as I had from Jake, I let my tears shine in the light coming in square rays through the windows, “You’re beautiful—and so am I.”
She smiled: We were friends right from the start.