Neverending Story

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--

"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Chapter 21

Gemini was cranky. He called for my attention but then couldn't be bothered to look up from his notebook of formulas when I responded. His words were brief. Everybody was glad I was going to a more stable place, but leaving was still awkward. I felt like a dog who, despite a loving family, was being sent to a new home because the new landlord didn't permit pets.

Nearly two months ago I am standing at the entrance to what, in a few moments, will no longer be my apartment. VJ swings one of my suitcases into his trunk and looks up the stairway to see me standing there, staring into the distance.

"Leaving is hard," he says, trying to sympathize.

I look at him a little puzzled. While I will surely never live here again, I will be back in town in about a week.

"It...feels good to be on the road again really."

"Oh?"

Its odd to explain side from one place where I lived for 9 months I haven't lived anywhere consistently for more than six months since I left for college.

We're in the present again now.

"We're going to miss you Pika," he said, giving me a big hug.

"Don't worry," I said, patting him on the back mid-hug, "I'll be back tomorrow for class."

In a sense, this "leaving" seems a bit artificial.

Months ago I tumbled out of a white jeep and turned back to look at Magpie. He's not really one for hugs anyway, although sometimes I wish he was.

"See?" he laughed, trying to make light of the situation, "and this time we didn't even need to call the feds because of bad traffic!"

PJ is probably the greatest oddity in all of this. I don't think I have ever said goodbye to him. The first time we were standing there when I shrugged and laughed about how, even though we had no plans of it, we knew the world was so small that we would run into one another again. Since then I see him about twice a year, just like clockwork. The last few times I don't think I even bothered to say "see you later" when I left.

I'm sitting at lunch in a little Mexican restaurant where my (now former) boss loves to go to to discuss work. It's about a week ago.

"I thought you were kidding when you said you had briefly gone homeless."

I shook my head, taking another bite of my burrito.

"Well I wouldn't have laughed if I had known you were serious."

"Its over now, don't worry."

This weekend we had about the same conversation at a former coworker's housewarming party. It really bothered Crash. His eyes puffed up red and he went into the corner to blow his nose a lot. It wasn't my intention to upset him.

I walked slowly back to the lab on Wednesday, now keyless to collect a last few things. Today Java offered me probably the first compliment I have ever recieved from him.

I watch my coworkers struggle to find a definitive last day to conclude things in the world of a sliding scale relationships. Since I am not moving this time I will remain peripherally involved. If nothing else I will still take classes next door to what use to be my lab. My relationship to this place is changing, but I am not leaving.

The sun is coming up through the front windows of the Torii. I have been here too long. Late nights make the dividing lines between days confusing and arbitrary seeming.

As a matter of fact I have recently begun to struggle with the concepts of the beginnings and endings of anything related to time. The reality is our relationships of all varities do not fit so neatly into the concept of starting and ending on dates unless we choose to abandon them as such.

The human impulse to compartmentalize and consider our lives in discrete chunks is substantial: days, hours, minutes, all these things are artificial constructs we impose on a steady flow of time. The same can be said of phases: high school, college, or a first job. The reality is that this world is built on tiny human connections, and that these connections deteriorate when we stop putting the effort in to mantain them.

"Playlist," I asked, passing him a beer as he sat at the desk in his room, "You're never online."

"Yeah, I hate AIM. You could call."

"What's a good day?"

The idea of these constructs having any meaning at all seems increasingly silly to me as the days pass. After all, will even my life be marked as a little discrete slice? The forces that shaped me, and the impact I leave on the world, faded into existance and will fade out again slowly over a much longer period than my own lifespan. It will not be wrapped up so neatly by the engraving of my tombstone.

I wave goodbye to the Bounty Hunters as they pile into cars to drive breakneck speed to the airport.

"Goodbye!" they call. I hear one voice through an open window, "Hope you get your tranfer to come out with us full time!"

"Don't worry about it," I laugh, "I'll be in touch!"

In Plain Sight

"I think you live here," Java said.

"That's absurd."

"No, you sleep on the lab couch, you shower upstairs and you eat the food," he pointed to the lab refrigerator, "right there."

"Why shouldn't I eat food which came from academy? Its communal, I brought it here for all of us."

"Do you have an apartment? Like one not here, that you could go back to if you wanted to?"

"Yeah."

"I don't believe you."

"It doesn't matter if you do," I said, picking up a clean ceramic bowl and a package of ramen from one of the bins of food we inherited. Sunlight hits me, first in slivers and then finally bathing me completely as I walk from the lab to the kitchen. Its not a kitchen in the strictest sense with only a microwave and a coffee maker, but for anything more I have to walk a few blocks and get into the short-term housing kitchen. I fill the bowl with water, add the brick of ramen, and put it in the microwave.

"Oh hello Pika!" a friendly voice asks behind me.

I turn to see one of the grad students smiling at me over her cup of coffee.

"You work weekends?"

"When I have a deadline," I smile.

"I saw you earlier in the lab," she smiles. She takes a Britta filter from the refrigerator and pours herself a glass of water, still grinning at me. I'm having trouble taking my eyes off the Britta filter. Has nobody really found it odd that there is a small filter pitcher in the refrigerator in a building that's completely stocked with those giant blue tanks of purified water? "You work a lot of hours," she offered as a chipper sort of compliment.

"I suppose I do."

***

I've never personally read Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter, but I do know the plot of it from watching Wishbone as a child. I'm not sure which of these facts would slay my mother more. The concept, however, of hiding things in plain sight, is something which remained dormant with me in my mind for many years. It wasn't until a dotted lined boss in college who did not even know of the term's origin became fond of the phrase that it returned to my mind.

The water filter came from Bobby who gave it to me when he moved out of Delta. It, along with many other kitchen supplies, had been dragged into the university "kitchen" and hidden, in plain sight, around the time of the new student's orientation week. The students did not know what did and did not belong, and I assume the professors thought the new students or the orientation staff had brought the supplies. Nobody was going to suspect anything until I moved them all out again into my next home.

My clothes and other blatantly domestic items were hidden as well, in nondescript cardboard boxes with the words "fiscal reports" or "short-term engineering sample, retain packaging for manufacturer return." Many people walk in and out every day, and none of them notice.

***

The building my lab is in was, according to popular legend, once a military base morgue. I'm not sure which portions were the hospital and which were the morgue, how showers appeared on the second floor, or if in-depth knowledge of this would make standing at the edge of the shower any better. I'm trying to ignore the cool slick tile under my bare feet. I'd kill for a pair of flip flops.

I can feel the edges of the tiles and little scraps of the grouting between them against the balls of my feet and my toes. How many bodies have been washed here? Do they even wash dead bodies in the shower? They probably have to wash them someplace. I curl my toes against the floor a little and apply pressure. In karate we use this to grip the floor, but right now I'm mostly forcing myself to touch it and feel it, and get over the skin-crawling feeling this place gives me. Honestly, I should probably be more concerned for my health with the amount of bleach they probably dumped on this place when they converted it to a university. I hung up my clothes and took my shower. It was easier the next day.

***

Its been on the order of weeks since I moved into this life. Java is the only one who seems to have noticed, and that's because he likes to escape to the lab on weekends to do work and always finds me here. If I lived at home I probably would too. If I could do this again from the start I would make a greater effort to leave conspicuously promptly from time to time at closing instead of "working late" and in reality just go off for a downtown bike ride. The rest of the plan was executed nearly perfectly. I told people I was living with an imaginary boyfriend and I got a male friend of mine to agree to receive mail on my behalf. I learned the janitor's schedule for cleaning so that I know which days I can sleep in and which I have to be up and working extra early.

If there is any practical advice I can offer to anybody stupid enough to try this, I'd say don't wear your pajamas ever. Sleep in normal clothes so you can always claim, if found, that you were just working late laying on the couch and fell asleep. You may want to print out a research paper and highlight portions of it, then leave the highlighter and some assorted pages of it right next to your couch as you fall asleep. Make sure whatever you write on your boxes is deadly boring so nobody wants to open them. Wake up earlier than anybody would arrive every day to tidy your space and remove traces of your presence. If you ever do oversleep and somebody comes in and wakes you, you should consider pretending to go home. Take a small bag (which you should always have packed with a spare set of clothes etc) and go to the nearest place with a bathroom that isn't your work. Clean yourself up and change your clothes, then waste about 30 minutes and go back.

I'm a little frightened by not entirely knowing what road has led me here, aside from turning down military jobs, which we all know will always be funded. People think the feds always have money, but its always about what project you're assigned to really. If the funding stops to your project and your boss is too proud to disband the project and transfer you...well sometimes the paychecks stop coming. Thankfully mine are still only "delayed" although some days I'm not sure what difference it makes in the end. I've been hunting for a new job pretty hard for about a month. I'm very hopeful about some things coming through soon. Still, I would like to derive how I got here so I can make sure to not go here again.

Thank you to Violent Acres for this post, because honestly, prior to reading that I didn't quite have the balls to think like this. I didn't know stuff like this could be pulled off. Even now, I still find it amazing and hard to believe how people can live like this with nobody knowing, right on top of their workplace illusions. I wonder how many empty offices every night aren't empty at all. I wonder how many people there are who are just like me, living completely unseen in plain sight.