“Thanks Magenta. Have a seat young man,” the chief said as he motioned to Winston with his hands. Winston sat, still calm now that the unexpected no longer traveled his way with fear. “Have you been fed? You must be famished. Secilia! Bring this poor soul some food.” A tall woman in a white dress soon came and set a clay plate of meat and potatoes down in front of Winston.
“Thank you,” he said to her. “Thank you sir,” he said to the chief.
“Welcome to the meal hall,” the chief announced as he threw both of his hands and his eyes to the roof. “You missed the feast, unfortunately, but we did have a few villagers missing tonight. We all eat here together every night. It's quite nice actually. It brings a certain kind of unity, you know. It's not like where you're from, where everyone eats alone in their homes. No, we have no use for that sort of thing here. It's far better to keep all of the food in one place. Individuals just seem to waste too much when they keep their own food at home. Wouldn't you agree?” Winston chewed quickly and swallowed.
“Well, I guess I've never thought of it like that before, but you're probably right. People tend to bite off more than they can chew sometimes.”
“Ha. Yes, I think you're right. Come. Let's take a walk.” The two rose from the bench and wandered amidst the gleaming firefly-lit sky. The hand-blown prisms created a handrail which in turn created an artificial telos – a path with a set destination. The chief knew where they were going. “So, Magenta tells me that you are looking for your mother. Is that so?”
“Yes sir. My search has led me here, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, I'm not sure. Can you tell me if she is here? Her name is Martha Stone and she was very sick. I don't, well, I don't know if she is even still alive.” Seconds of silence followed, the two still strolling past firefly after firefly beneath the stars and moon of the Pacific jungle, all the while the chief fiddled in his pockets until a gold watch sat in his open palm.
“Time,” he said. “Time is a wonderful thing, a very precious thing. I don't know who created it, but I believe no one has ever been able to accomplish that same feat since. We can build many things: fire, trust, hope, love, houses, peace; but we can't build time. That has always fascinated me. Come, I must show you my garden.” Winston's heart began drowning in the conversation shift as his brief stint as a doctor had taught him what this verbal exchange meant. Mouths burst open when they are full of good news, but conversations migrate when bad news is coming. They didn't speak again for quite some time. Winston finally relinquished and asked about the children in the cave.
“How can they all be accepting of what they learn in the cave, sir?”
“Everyone has their own role, you know. Some of us are farmers, some teachers, and others who clean and serve meals perhaps. For example, after my cave time I knew that I was to be the next chief. I mean, being chief might seem like something everyone would want, but that's not quite how it works. Everyone is perfectly happy with their role regardless of what type of role it is because they have been shown that it will make them happy.”
“It just doesn't make sense though. How could a child possibly understand what they will want and need for their adult life? I mean, wouldn't these things change from the time they entered the cave to the time they exited it?”
“You see this garden over here? Here, let me show you. The roses are beautiful, aren't they? So beautiful you might even call them perfect.” Winston turned his head and saw a very humble bed of pink roses. They radiated an intense blast of sweet aroma, the emanating body of which was surrounded by soft, silky, uniform petals.
“They are perfect,” Winston exclaimed. “These are the most beautiful roses I have ever seen!”
“Yes they are wonderful, aren't they?” the chief chuckled while holding his belly with both hands. “They are absolutely perfect. Oh dear, just one second.” The chief relinquished his smile and grabbed a small knife from his pocket. He cut one of the roses and handed it to Winston. “Here. It's yours. It was getting too big.” Winston accepted.
“Too big?”
“Yes. I only allow the roses in this garden to be six inches high. No more, no less. I grow them somewhere else until they reach that perfect height and then I place them here. When they grow taller, I remove them.”
“But wouldn't they still be beautiful at seven inches? I mean, they might be even more beautiful. It just seems like it would be more rewarding to watch the roses continue to grow.”
“Ah yes, but, if I let them grow, how could I ever say that I had a garden full of perfect roses? I mean, how could I ever define anything as being perfect if it always became better as it grew, the bigger it got the closer to perfection it became? If I were to do that, the whole notion of something ever being perfect would be ridiculous, impossible. No, I think this height is as big as these roses will be allowed to get. Aren't they the most beautiful roses you've ever seen though?”
“The garden is perfect,” Winston replied, knowing with all of his heart that this was true. “I've never seen a garden of roses this perfect in my entire life.” The two continued walking, one with watch in hand, the other with a dead rose. Ducks quacked in the distance, notifying that the fish in the sea were running near shore. A warm wind steamed past their faces while purple hues appeared and disappeared from the glass prisms on the trail just like they do from a path on a woman's chest during loving embrace. It seemed that Martha was surely not here, that he had lost her again. As they walked, he had a real tough time attempting to comprehend the magnitude of his past's influence on tomorrow. He'd lost something, that much he knew for sure. But trying to understand exactly what he had lost was frightening; he couldn't tell if what was gone was something big or small, great or brutal, beautiful or ugly. He didn't know if it was just a drop of water or the entire river, a single pebble or a mountain range, a single white feather or a precious angel. Loss is so difficult to weigh when you've never stopped to measure what you had.
“Here we are boy, our own downtown center,” the chief stated as he leaned against a solid oak post. “This is where all of our business is conducted. The old trading post.” A small table lay amidst four oak posts. There was no door, no walls. Just a hollow box of air with a table. “We sell nothing,” he said. “We just trade.” Winston stood listening, battered from emotional confusion, and unimpressed.
“I see, I see. So I guess you guys don't have a need for currency then?” he asked for novelty sake only. If his journey here was to be purely tourist based, then why not fill up on souvenirs?
“Oh no boy, everyone needs currency, ha ha. We have to have some sort of way to make trades fair. We just don't use money. We use freedom. Here, I'll show you. Say you were a bean farmer or something like that and you genuinely wanted to have goats too. You just thought that maybe the goats would be fun to raise and that the dung would sure be celebrated fertilizer for your bean field. Well you'd come up here and tell us that. We'd ask you what you had to offer. In turn, you might say that you didn't need to go to songs at the concert hall anymore. We could then trade you the freedom to raise goats in exchange for your freedom to attend concerts. Now ultimately the people working the post decide on what constitutes a fair trade, but that, in a nut-shell, is how it works. There's only so much freedom son. Every ounce of freedom that someone has is an ounce that someone else doesn't. You can convert it into different things, you can buy it and sell it, and you can steal it or be robbed of it. But you can't make more of it. That's why the trading post is so crucial. It keeps track of all of this: conversions, purchases, trades, and even robberies.” He looked to his feet and then firmly at Winston. “I wouldn't recommend stealing freedom son. We don't think very highly of that.”
They left the post and headed back towards the meal hall. They didn't speak for a long time and Winston still had no idea what would become of him. He no longer feared that he would become a cigar-smoking bear of amusement, but he wondered if he would be shunned back to the punishing jungle. “You were a doct
or a long time ago, weren't you son?” Winston's face leaped.
“How the hell did you know that?” he yelled in threatening anger.
“Your mum told me. I tell you what. If you let me put you to work tomorrow, I'll take you to your mother. Deal?”
“Of course we have a deal! Oh my God, of course! She's alive then?”
“Yes son, she's alive and quite healthy. Here,” he said as he handed Winston the gold watch. “This belonged to your mum. I have a feeling you should have had this in your hands a long time ago.”
Chapter 21 – Born Into a Wild Fire
“Sometimes the loudest cries never make a sound.”
Winston tried exceptionally hard to sleep that night. The way he saw it, sleeping was the only way to reduce the waiting period between the present and the future he longed for. But the anticipation and excitement overpowered his decision; he didn't sleep a wink and his imagination ran wild for what seemed like an eternity. He got out of bed that morning very tired and unrested for the tough day ahead.
He ate his breakfast of eggs, goat meat, and potatoes and drank four glasses of pineapple juice as the sleeplessness had destroyed all of his stored up H2O. The chief walked him to the birthing clinic where he was to work for the day. The clinic itself was very small, but it did have walls at least. Ferns formed shingles atop the thatched roof and palm bark covered bamboo beams to form the outside of the clinic. There were no windows and one door. A large wooden box full of heavy dirt lay in front of the entry. Footprints of various sizes were imprinted deeply and possibly even permanently into the strange looking dirt in such a uniform manner that not even the smallest amount of space was unaffected. Before Winston could ask, the chief's voice boomed, “You're not to step in that unless told to by me. Never step in that.” Winston was puzzled, but dismissed the harshness of the warning and stepped over the box.
The single door of the clinic burnt Winston's hands like a hot lighter or an air-borne campfire spark as he entered. Steam dominated the room and moisture crawled down his face, soaking his shirt and lubricating his hands to the point of uselessness. “You'll get used to it,” a young blonde woman said as she shook his sweaty hand. “It's the only way we can keep things sterilized in here. My name is Sugi and I'll be giving you your duties. Get washed up and changed over there and then we'll get started.”
Winston's face burnt like hell and he was sure that the beads of sweat on his face were literally boiling, but what was the difference he thought. At least no one was screaming in this hospital. He found a bucket sitting against a wall and scrubbed up the best he could, but the sweating continued. “Your body will stop dripping soon,” she said. “You'll adjust soon enough. Come meet your patients.” She led him through the curtains of steam to three stretchers at the back of the room that held three resting women. Two were pregnant and one very young woman – possibly in her late teens or early twenties – looked positively exhausted. “She just gave birth to twins yesterday,” Sugi said. “These two women, however, will not be able to give birth to their children. You see Dr. Stone, we need you to help us today because both of these women need to have their pregnancies aborted. It's kind of like fate that we found you when we did. Now we can alleviate the suffering these women are in. You can abort their pregnancies and they can begin the road to recovery and return to their jobs. With your help, they can go back to their lives instead of laying here in pain.” Winston began to feel as if spiders were trying to crawl up his belly from the inside and then his skin began to hurt terribly. He was certainly not prepared for this.
“I..., I, I really don't think that I should do this. I mean, we could wait until the birth and I could try to save the babies. I just don't see why I should abort the pregnancies now.”
“Because they are suffering Dr. Stone. Because the children will not survive anyways. That is why you should do this Dr. Stone. Look at me, here, look in my eyes. I've been working in this clinic for an awful long time. This is the right thing to do. Trust me, these women are so lucky that fate brought you to them. They are suffering more than we could ever imagine Dr. Stone, and for nothing. I've been here so long. The children in their wombs have no chance of living. Dr. Stone, I inserted the Devil's Apron yesterday when I heard that you were here.” Winston lifted up the night-gown of one of the women and saw that Sugi wasn't bluffing. A small piece of kelp could be seen dangling from between the woman's legs and it came to symbolize the optionless environment he was now in. The kelp, or Devil's Apron, would absorb moisture to dilate the cervix until it induced labor. There was inevitable that this woman would soon be in labor.
“Has her water broke yet?”
“ Both women are ready yes. I gave them both root extracts an hour ago to keep them docile. Here are your forceps. I'll get you the suction tube.” The suction tube was a long hose that ran from a hole in the wall. The air pressure difference between the inside of the clinic and the village outside was large enough to give the tube ample power. Over the course of the following hour, Winston helplessly rotated both fetuses and pulled them out of their mothers' wombs feet first. When the heads arrived, small incisions were made at the base of the skulls and then the brains were sucked out with the tube. Finally, the entirety of the fetuses were removed. It was done.
“You're not sweating anymore Dr. Stone,” Sugi piped with jubilation.
“I think I'm going to be sick,” was all he said before he passed out.
***********************************************************************
He awoke to two beautiful dark eyes staring intently into his. “Hi,” the eyes said. “My name is Ollua. You must be the doctor. You did a very great thing you know. Those women are darned lucky to have had your help.”
“Oh geeze, I fainted, didn't I? God, that was rough. So you are the lady who gave birth to the twins, aren't you?” Winston asked from his slumbering position in his own clinic stretcher.
“Yes I am.”
“Congratulations. I'm so happy for you.” He paused for a moment. “So where do they keep the newborns? I'd love to go see your children. Have you been well enough to see them yet?”
“No I haven't. I was too weak to attend the fire last night, but some day I will be ready to see them. You will be too, but not today. I believe the chief is going to reward you for what you have done. You have saved those two women a lot of time.”
“Son, it's time!” The booming distant voice belonged to the chief. “It's time to go meet your mother.”
Chapter 22 – The Illness of Existentialism
“Mistakes were made and debts continue to be paid.”
Last night I had a dream in which social indecision didn't exist. Social confusion never occurred and actions were always chosen wisely. Life was so wonderful. There was no guess-work to be done; I always knew exactly why someone did what they did and why I did what I did. If, by chance, the answer wasn't clear, a study was conducted to reveal conclusions so that grudges were never formed from cluttered isolation. Wrong-doings were eliminated and confused broken-hearts made extinct. Oh it was so wonderful! All of our relationship puzzles were solved scientifically. We called it the science of society or, better yet, we called it social science! But it was just a silly dream.
The milky way flowed doubtlessly across gleaming heavenly bodies towards infinite vastness like a river current dancing to the beach of a great ocean channel. The path was no longer illuminated by fireflies, but Winston assumed that they were excluded due to a lack of necessity; why have lights in a place where the stars are so bright? Winston dreamed in the stars and let his ears direct his feet to follow the crunch of pebbles grinding into dirt in front of him. A warm wind pierced through bull rushes to produce the same whistles as an Alberta Clipper does as it storms through endless fields of wheat along the prairies. The crunching sounds stopped and Winston's feet now felt as if they were on a cloud. His ears could no longer guide him and his dream ceased to engross. The rocky dirt path was now a trail of lush, d
ark green grass fine enough for a young woman's imaginary meadow of happiness and contentment.
As they walked, shadows took to form and became abandoned fire pits and tall trees. One shadow, much larger than its predecessors, finally gave birth to a steep hill of long invasive marram grass bent by the warm breeze. A beige rope ran across trampled-down grass to the top of the hill. The chief grabbed hold and began using it to scale upwards. Winston followed tightly behind. Mice jumped out from the tall grass and scampered past their feet with small chunks of bright red food dangling from their mouths. The mice stopped, looked up at them, and then quickly scampered back into the sanctuary of the marram.
Winston had a particularly tough time judging the duration of the ascent. His mind should have been racing, but instead it idled with protective nothingness. A big part of him still felt as if there was something left inside of his soul that could be let down. A big part of him had not managed to find its exile to freedom, but had merely just been playing dead for decades. He had thought that he was long past such attachments and doubts, but now, in the middle of what he felt was the most important climb of his life, he fell into a time-lapse.
He began dreaming about tomorrow while simultaneously worrying about the implications of yesterday until he could no longer cherish the magic of the climb. The only things that seemed vivid and clear were the past and the future, but they were, and always had been, either a self-manifested mythical worry or an illusion created solely to warm his blood and beat his heart; the present was a blurry time-lapse that only seemed pleasant when it didn't match its place in time. The fear that this reality trapped him in aged his mind and body years in minutes; it was as if he was freezing cold but didn't shiver. He felt like he couldn't breath, but didn't black-out. He reached to his pocket and pulled out a small piece of goat meat. He quickly ate it, but felt no nourishment from it. It was as if the only thing that could nourish him was the worry he felt from regretting the past or imagining the future. He fell to the ground and his body remained still and motionless, cradled in a ball to keep warm in the middle of the South Pacific summer. He was subsequently met with a hard slap to the face by the chief. “Get up son! We're here! It's time! It's time son!”
Searching for the Fountain of Youth Page 11
