The Wandering World

by B C Woodruff

  We placed a missing person report for Rama after a few days of waiting to see if she was going to suddenly reappear at the the ACC again. I feel a lot of guilt about the whole ordeal and, if I can take any good points from what happened that strange, wonderful evening, I was able to pull away from alcohol completely. In those first few days I started to dream up my Inner Sanctum.

  A personal pantheon of people and personifications of my life that could be referred to and dealt with in a personal way instead of heading for the bottle or the drugs.

  This is where, how, and why Arata was born.

  A couple of more sets and a few more brekkies with the gang there, and I hopped back on the train to my next location.

  Clarification: Timeline – Where I Was and How I Got Here

  Now, I’m sure you’re quite confused about the chronology of things. This is somewhat intentional, as I find it keeps the mind limber. However, I don’t want you to be too lost. Allow me to offer you the kind courtesy of clarification on these events – let’s talk about education first:

  I was born in 2000, or 1999 depending where you were at the time, or which of my parents you happen to be asking – personally, my mother was traveling across the Pacific Ocean for reasons that I never got clarification on. It was a commercial flight and my father was, understandably, not present at the time.

  That’s right, I was a true millennial baby.

  It doesn’t matter where.

  I left my home for a boarding school at age 6 or 7 (I can’t really remember), and joined the ranks of the rootless military brats. There are plenty of stories worth discussing from this period, but now is not the time. Until I graduated and was admitted to the secondary school that affiliated with the final 3 years of primary I’d transferred in time to complete. The Ravencroft Academy. A place you can still visit, so long you are prepared to walk over its remains and imagine what it could have looked like before the fire in 2021.

  I want to say that I don’t know much about the situation, but that would be a lie. I wasn’t responsible, though. I had begun my degree at Wilkson University, and by the time it happened I had not been within a hundred kilometres of my old stomping ground in years.

  20XX (yes, twenty exty-ex – fill it in yourself if it means that much to you): I completed my undergraduate and was admitted into a fast-track for a PhD.

  20XX: I successfully defended my dissertation and began my time as a more formal part of the Academic Community, such as it was. By the end of 20XX I will turn 27 years old. You can try to fight me on the maths here, but you would fail. We’ll eventually get into the specifics of why this is the case.

  20XX: I discover the existence of the ACC and begin to do my own sets.

  20XX: I’ve completely disconnected from the mainstream society and have taken to the road to discover what secrets and excitement the world might hold.

  20XX: I meet Rama, we enter the Tetranne, and we (?) return.

  2030: I’m travelling again; it’s been a while since I’ve been on the circuit and the events of Rama’s disappearance have left me in a swelling depression. I meet a wonderful woman at my hometown, Richie, and we date for a few months before she, like the other women in my life, grows tired of my pessimism. We don’t speak while I’m on the road, but she’s in the crowd when I return to my ACC.

  The Near-Present: Standing Out – She’s Not Alone

  “I spent so long living life the wrong way. I want to share this concept with you because I think there’s something important about how life is and how life can be allowed to work. See, I haven’t always been the collected, well-rounded person that I am today.”

  [Pause for laughter, if any]

  “I was, and had been for so long, a person that lived in a precarious state of future-vision, unable to cope with the idea of enjoying the present at all. I can explain this phenomenon, at least I believe I can. Follow me through this:

  “It all starts in our childhood. It all starts in those formative years when you think you’re immortal and your impatience is based around the fact that time is perceived so painfully slowly. There are plenty of videos online that explain this better than I could. Basically, you’ve only had a little taste of time, so you feel like things move slowly as a result of not being to generalize and predict experiences out of natural ignorance.

  “I think that school is what destroys our expectations of time. I’m not trying to suggest that school or education in general are wrong in doing so, only that due to how much time we spend there, we become conditioned for certain expectations. We want to be rewarded when we obey or repeat a fact or principle as initially presented, and we become fearful of self-exploration, of inquiry, because that might make us wrong. We gain reverence for authority figures that, in many cases, haven’t figured out life any better than we will – indeed, that we have – and maybe that’s a cycle we’re all doomed to follow.

  “Take this: We spend so much time listening and absorbing and eventually realizing that the only time we really have for our own experiences fall between the spaces when one subject is being closed and another is beginning. We learn to love the lacunae between obligations, the very concept of after school and weekends and vacations. Particularly vacations, though. How fair is it that many of us are eventually doomed to receive, as compensation, only two weeks of vacation for ourselves every year? And we are expected to be grateful for it. The conditioning began in primary school where we are left to believe that Summer vacation is a reward for our hard work throughout the year.

  “Summer vacation – I mean, just think of how good that sounds, even now. I can tell by your faces that some of you have children, but for the purposes of this thought experiment, just imagine they get a vacation too, and everything is taken care of for everyone. It’s the ideal. Say what you will about the promise of heaven, but I say the prospect of summer vacation can’t compete.

  “When we are young and as we grow, we are constantly given (and in some cases subjected to) pre-set times for relaxation and leisure. Yet, as the world betrays us, these periods shrink and shrink while the obligations we face continue to grow and grow. One is replaced by the other until, somehow, we accept the idea that we deserve almost no personal time to allow us to make enough money to sustain our lifestyle. Many people are so successfully guided down this academic to productive member of society conveyor belt that at the end they are prepared to work all day, every day, with the illusion that this is what life should be. Some of them even claim to enjoy it! Just think about that for a second. When was the last time you had a good nap?

  “But it’s the way that people are so quick to accept knowledge that frightens me the most. The fact that there are people who have never travelled outside their home cities is even worse. And behind closed doors and untaken roads, ignorance grows like black mould in the walls of the mind. And that actually gets to leave home. Specious arguments against things like gay marriage or science funding or humanitarian aid or vaccinations or… there are too many, really. All of this is the byproduct of education. Sit still, it tells us, and you will be rewarded. Deviate, and you are nothing.

  No one.

  Nobody.

  “How many of you, out there in the crowd, can remember talking about a creative endeavour or a desire to be an artist with a teacher or parent, only to have them turn around and tell you to become engineer or find a practical skill? How many of you have friends that are wonderful in every way but regard your impulse for creativity and artistic development as somehow wrong?

  “How is it that these same people return home after a long day of jockeying spreadsheets, or accomplishing grand and wonderful feats worthy of universal applause and adoration, and sit down on the couch with a beer – only to turn on the television and reap the benefits of entertainment created by the same people they chastise? That they condemn?

  “There are other worlds out there. I’ve seen them – in person, yes, but also in the eyes of the performance artists, playwrights, acto
rs, musicians, and godforsakenly shitty poets that make life in the One City worthwhile. Ask anyone who’s tried and they’ll tell you: it takes time and blood to make a new world.

  “But it also takes time and blood to make this world. I can condemn the City for being a soul-sucking abyss that’ll take us long before our time all I want – because it is exactly that – but I wouldn’t last a minute against a tiger. Or the cold. That’s the trick, see. Once the City gets its teeth in you, it never lets go. But I can’t fault those that keep the beast alive, for my life is bound up in it. So balance that spreadsheet, program that traffic light – hell, sell me bottled water if you need to! I’m thirsty, and I don’t trust my tap.

  “So what do we do? What can we do? All I can think of is this: live in this world, fight for the next, and be grateful to those who can’t follow.

  “But along the way, remember that too many of us live in the idea of reward and not the present. I had this problem once, and bet there are people here tonight who have not yet realized that they are doing this too. I can’t say that it’s easy to escape the conditioning – only that, if you try, you can start to realign your imagined self with the present self. And once you do this, why, you’ll...

  “Oh, I see that I’ve gone over my limit. Thank you for listening to my rant, and I hope you enjoyed some of my thoughts on our strange relationship with time..”

  [Hold for applause, if any]

  Of course, there is rarely any applause after rants like this. For whatever reasons that might be.

  I said before that I was bored.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m also boring.

  It’s possible. I suppose.

  The Couple: After My Set – Terror

  “Excuse me.” I turn around to find a woman and a man standing at my side, awkward and youthful but… Ah, yes.

  “Ju–” “Lisa.” She says.

  “Lisa! Yes, sorry. Of course. It’s nice to see you again!” I reach over and give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Her friend doesn’t seem to appreciate this.

  “And this must be your boyfriend?” I assume.

  “Husband.”

  “Right! Husband.” I reach out and shake his reluctant hand.

  “Nobody,” I tell him.

  “Richard.” He vaguely murmurs.

  “Well, it was nice seeing you again, but I think I’m going to head back to my–” I honestly don’t have a destination in mind, I just want to get out of this situation as quickly and quietly as possible.

  “Nobody, do you remember that other time you were in town?” she asks, but I can’t tell if she’s trying to protect herself or if there is something else looming behind her question.

  “Sure. It was, what, ten or eleven months ago?” Oh, fuck. It’s all coming back to me.

  “Right. Well, do you remember that I was on a bit of a split with my husband then? That we had a little… encounter?” Don’t be pregnant. Don’t be pregnant. Please, oh god, don’t be pregnant.

  “We had a good time, didn’t we?” I’m sweating a goddamned river.

  “It was… a change that I needed, yes. Only, do you remember that story you were telling when you visited last time?”

  “Sort of.”

  Shape“It was about how you had this crazy adventure with a woman named Rama. You said that she vanished afterwards, but that it was one of the most memorable experiences that you’d ever had. There was all this amazing imagery that involved a strange allegorical world and creatures that spoke in color! I can remember like it was yesterday because it was like you were speaking directly to me and how I felt about life. It made me feel completely different. I thought we were torn from the same cloth and so when we started to speak afterwards... well, you wouldn’t drink but we had a few hits off that bong in the back and then we made our way back to my place. Do you remember how you offhandedly mentioned that after you came back from there, in the midst of that spiral of depression and self-loathing, that you just kind of made up a guy in your head? You didn’t seem to have very many – just one. You never named him when you brought him up, but…” Arata.

  “Yes? What about him?”

  The little man in an almost comically tiny beanie spoke up at last.

  “Did he look like this?” He held up a sketch.

  Shinji Arata: The Doctor – The Disease

  “I… Uh…” It’s him. It’s 100% him! How the capital-F Fuck did... “How the fuck… What is this? What are you… Whaaaa?” I can be quite eloquent sometimes.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said.

  “I don’t think I quite get what’s going on here.”

  “Richard is the one who came up with the theory, so I’ll let him tell you.” She turned to her short husband who stretched himself a little taller as he cleared his throat and started in what would, I was sure, count among the strangest things I’d ever heard.

  “You and Lisa slept together, right?” He held up his hand to save me from additional stammering. “It’s fine. We’ve had this chat. I needed to know because only if that’s true does any of this make any sense. And that’s stretching the term. See, I figure, somehow you must have picked something off of that Rama woman. She was Japanese, right? Maybe there’s… I just call it a neurovirus.

  I’m sure there’s a better term or way to explain it. Whatever. So, you got it from that woman and then you gave it to Lisa. We got back together about three months ago and, well, after we got back together, well, I started to have these… flashes. Or visions. Or, uh, I don’t want to sound like a broken record but… whatever the hell it is. Sometimes they were just abstract feelings and sometimes it was like I was where he was. I could taste his food. I could see him going about his business and then, poof. Back to normal.”

  “Neurovirus?” I considered this, playing the implications out in my mind. “Are you saying… it’s like a… mental… neurological...

  STD?”

  “I guess that’s a way to put it.” He sighed.

  I looked at them. Paused. Waited for something to follow like: Haha, just kidding. But nothing followed. Just absent, albeit concerned, stares.

  “So. So… Sooo? What do, what do… Uh.” Eloquence.

  “It gets weirder.” Oh great. “After we compared our experiences we started to do some searching. You know, just a light digging here and there. And we found this–” Lisa handed me a few sheets of printed paper.

  I read it: Arata, Shinji. Ichinomiya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan.

  “No. Fucking. Way.”

  “Haha – look, he said the same thing you did!” Lisa laughed as Richard scowled.

  “Look. Nobody. We’re going to Japan. We’ve got tickets. We’re heading off tonight.” I was at a loss for words but, thankfully, found enough of them to respond.

  “Good luck with that madness.” I was ready to get away when Richard held out a ticket in my direction.

  “We’re all going.” He glared. “You started this. Don’t you want to get to the bottom of it?”

  “Do I want to go meet a guy that I thought was a figment of my imagination until all of five minutes ago, but who is somehow intimately related to my… intimacy? Do I want to find out what the hell is going on with my life up to this point, even though the whole damned world might explode when we get too close to the universal law?” I paused. Took the ticket. “Yes, I do. Sounds like fun.”

  Airborne: Character Profiles – Star-crossed Lovers

  We left North America and expected to arrive at Narita International Airport the following day. It’s one of those things that you appreciate more when you’re traveling back in the opposite direction. Still, the lost time was enough for the three of us to chat a lot about... life and all those fun bits.

  It didn’t take long to figure out why Lisa and I were so compatible when we met. Despite his stature (which we can’t really fault him on), Richard and I shared a remarkable number of similarities. He, like me, had had a difficult time adjusting to the demands of normalcy.
He had broken free of that when he founded a dotcom web service back in the 90s. It was a story of untold millions and crushing bankruptcy.

  A modern tragic figure, he was. Now, he supported the two of them through consultation services that took him away from home pretty often. Lisa somewhat understandably wanted a family and couldn’t let that happen until Richard settled down in a single place. They argued, words were said, and a relationship of ten years faltered... and was revitalized, somewhat painfully, by her mistake with me.

  All things considered, he was awfully composed about the situation we found ourselves in.

  Ex-lover, and all that.

  Supernaturally infectious ex-lover, I mean.

  Lisa, well, she was an artist, wasn’t she?

  Loved to paint and had some really neat-o things, too. But she only sold maybe one or two a year, and that wasn’t nearly enough to support their future on. So, reluctantly, she went back to work in a huge office doing graphic design for smaller offices and companies. It paid the bills. Some might say it was worth it. But all that stress had been the catalyst for their problems. Now, though, they were united by the strangeness that I had brought into their lives.

  Call me fucking Cupid.

  We watched a film.

  We slept for a few hours.

  And we awoke as the Red Sun rose in and burned at the backside of our metal carriage. Through customs, onto a bus, into a queue for train tickets and then off-off-and-away on the bullet train we went towards the innocuous city of Ichinomiya to meet our collective fates and/or destroy reality when we came face to face with our psychologically-bound salaryman.

  Nihon: Lonely City – Lost Promises

  The train rolls up to a city that, Wikipedia tells me, has a population in the range of 350,000 people.

  It has an official flower (how cute): The Chinese Bellflower.