The Arched World

by Davi Cao

  ∙ 9 ∙ The world outside

  “Never, never, never, anymore, never...” the old lady who used to limp said, floating on the fountain’s water.

  “Yes, we are free now, you are seeing it yourself,” Dalana said, floating by her side.

  “Never hungry, never pain, never needy... It’ll be like this forever, right?”

  “If you wish so, yes. No more senseless suffering. You’ve had enough.”

  “I have, oh yeah, I have... Enough, enough of it, sick and tired!”

  The first rays of sunshine broke in the horizon beyond the line of trees circling the fountain’s pool. For the first time in the old lady’s life, she felt no rush. No waking up wishing for more bed time, no need for getting something to eat, no fear of the future and of the vanishing years.

  If she wanted, she could stay in the waters the whole day and nothing bad would happen to her. Nothing bad, ever... The thought scared her. She splashed the water to stand and talk to Dalana, worried in her dreamy complexion.

  “Where is evil?” she said.

  “Nowhere. Evil is a creation, and it doesn’t exist in here. Do you miss it?” Dalana offered her a gentle stare to soothe her excitement.

  “No... Maybe. We’re people, we’re always bad. Will others come too?”

  “I hope they will. They’ll be good to you, don’t worry.”

  “They won’t, they never are, I know people well!”

  “How can evil thrive if you’re never hungry, if it has nothing to tempt you with?”

  “It will find a way!” The old lady half hid her face in the water, doubting her own words.

  “It won’t, not in here.” Dalana swum slowly around the lady, her yellow dress dragging in the water.

  At the fountain’s edge, where the outer world still existed, far but still just a few steps away, others marveled at the water, keeping their distance. Lured by the music, they saw two human-like specters somewhere inside the pool, their image so weak and imprecise that they considered them illusions. They could see Dalana if they entered the oasis she had created, but not outside.

  Dalana took a gentle hold of the old lady’s arm and led her to the people, so that both could greet the new ones.

  “No, they don’t deserve this here, they don’t suffer,” the woman argued.

  “Neither do you, not anymore.” Dalana filled her voice with an unshakable will.

  In the end, the old lady's hands called the new ones in. Her presence in the outside world, where her body weighed heavily and her stomach made signs of want, her presence presented her with the aura of a messenger, the messenger of Utopia.

  “All of you who suffer, this is your place. I found heaven,” she said, getting back to the oasis without further insistence.

  While she spoke, and got ready to serve as the hostess to their paradise, Dalana stood still, her gaze fixed on the outside. The old lady couldn’t see a certain presence among the crowd, a certain man waiting at the fountain’s edge, staring at Dalana, puzzled and curious.

  Colin, returned from his vigil, entered the pool, lured by the yellow dress, by the darkest of eyes. He now existed for all those inside the blessed waters, the tiny space where Creators and creations could share a life in that world.

  “Did you hear the music?” Dalana asked him, taking his hand.

  “I guess I did. I knew it came from you.” He answered her hold with a kind grip, taken aback by the pleasure coloring his mind.

  “Was it loud?”

  “Yes, very much. Can’t you play it lower? It will annoy the people around the park.” He looked puzzled at Dalana, who laughed and touched her forehead on his shoulder, such a good touch, such a nice person...

  She took him toward the fountain’s mast, opening a great distance from the outer world. Staring at the effect, Colin marveled at the infinite ahead. He wondered why he felt so lighthearted, relieved from the burden of aWa’s death.

  Those who entered before him, the mortals, they dove in the water and laughed out of sheer joy, grabbing each other’s hands and swimming like children. A piece of Utopia, he knew it, and understood why.

  “It’s wonderful in here...” he told Dalana.

  “I made it for you.” She pulled him up to make him jump and feel the water splash his belly. “We can play and dance and talk in here forever, and never have to worry about anything!”

  “Nice, nice... If we had a place like this earlier, the woman from Ai.iA’s world maybe would be saved.”

  “You didn’t want it at the time. Now you do, don’t you? Now that you see how nice it is?”

  His skin pores bristled with her proximity, with her words of friendship. She did that for him, a gift to his world, a fountain that broke the world's rules, that somehow allowed Creators and creation to share the same space.

  Water dripped from her wet hair, not a single drop confused with tears, for water reflected light and highlighted her face's joy, her healed complexion. His time away at the hospital brought him the loneliness of immortality in full. Separated from Dalana, his path became an emotional desert. The power of Utopia, he saw it clearly; it strengthened friendships.

  They ran toward the fountain’s mast, laughing at how far away the horizon became, never getting any closer to the water source itself, a flowery tower always too distant from them. A sea spread by their sides, endless, wide, and shallow, only tiny specks far, far away, people together, walking, talking, more people arriving by the hour.

  Dalana flapped her whole body in dolphin fashion, daring Colin to do the same. He mimicked what he called a mermaid instead, to which Dalana replied by giving a strong kick with her legs then falling stiff with claw shaped hands, a hollifre, according to her description.

  Water in the oasis tasted sweet, and it allowed for floating in the same manner of the saltiest of seas. Thus, Dalana floated with her limbs spread wide and invited Colin to join her play, creating tiny propellers guided by their thoughts to make them perform a choreography with their inert bodies.

  They spun one on the side of the other, they met hands and feet and heads, one submerged under the other, and they used their mouths to spit water to very specific directions, where their jets should meet and explode in the air.

  They danced, surrendering to Dalana's whole different notion of dance. She took the lead, facing the obstacles of Colin's inflexibility, he who froze into a sculpture by the mere idea of dancing, ashamed of trying some moves even in the privacy of his own former bedroom.

  She grabbed his shoulders and approached his head with her face, putting her tongue out and locking her gaze on his. She lowered their backs with a push and started spinning, making an engine out of their bodies, their torsos becoming helices. He could do that, that sounded easy enough, and with the music playing again around them, he put his arms on her shoulders as well, igniting their real tour. She waited for his acceptance, so that the dance could go on.

  An oasis tour with Dalana, locked in her strange dance, having to step in the right sequence, unless they started to spin in place again, until he got it right. They moved sideways, quick steps, machine gun steps, piercing the water to make drops hit their chins with the splashes, then slow ones, inertia-defying steps, making them nearly lose balance.

  Then they dove, turning their bellies up to the surface, performing the daring trick of walking that way and hitting the right sequence. A hard performance, challenging, but fun. Colin laughed at every new discovery, seduced whole by Dalana’s introduction to her dance world.

  “The entire world could be an oasis like this one,” she said after the dance, floating by Colin’s side. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “For some...”

  “But for you? I want to know if for you.”

  “If it makes you well, then it’s good. I am afraid of hurting you.”

  “You're more likely to hurt me by refraining from honesty with me, than actually trying to hurt me. Keep that in mind.”

  Floating, under the sky
darkened with night's approach, now clear from the upper col.loc, which spun on its slow axis and got further from Terra’s creation every day, neither Colin nor Dalana took much notice of the many people getting closer to them. One hundred people populated the oasis by then, finding themselves on a vacation they’d never abandon.

  “You guys think this is really heaven on Earth?” a bald man asked Colin, the most honest smile on his face.

  “It could be,” Dalana said, looking up with her body half immersed in water.

  “I hope it is, cause it’s just way too good. I thank God he finally took pity on us poor folks.” The bald man imitated Dalana’s lost gaze to the sky. “My name is Marcus. Used to work in the bus garage, maintenance stuff, you know? And this is my wife Lorra, who was paralyzed and now isn’t anymore.”

  “We’re really fond of this place, you guys have no idea,” Lorra said, a squarish woman with grey hair, standing, marching in place to show her legs' power.

  “Nice to meet you two. I’m Dalana, and this is my friend Colin. We are Creators, Creators of Worlds.”

  Colin struck her with a shocked gaze, surprised to watch her reveal their identities to mortals, expecting terrible consequences to arise from that.

  “Oh, wow, cool, never met anybody like this before, right Lorra?” Marcus giggled in excitement.

  “No, never, and I guess we’ve hit the jackpot today, we really did, finding this place and a couple of rare people.”

  “What do you plan to do from now on?” Colin said, changing the subject.

  “Well, me? I don’t know about you guys, but I’ll never leave this place! What more do we need?” Marcus said.

  “Don’t you miss working, doing actual things? We could give you some tools, some material, if you want.”

  “Tools?” Marcus laughed. “No way! Leave it be, boy, I’ll never work anymore, never do anything else. Forget about that cheap talk of being productive and stuff. I’m in Heaven now.”

  “We are, we are in Heaven now,” Lorra said, siding with her husband with her floating self.

  Life in the oasis defined idleness for Colin. An idleness that satisfied the mind, working on the present and ending time. Why worry about work when one doesn’t need to eat? Why worry about money when one won’t need to retire in old age? Why worry about death when illness poses no threat? And in the case of Colin, why struggle to get Terra back if he felt good with Dalana and could live in friendship with her as promising as the one he had with Angeline?

  Boredom woke him up. Hearing Marcus and Lorra make short work of new working opportunities, how many times could they play and talk before it all repeated itself to infinity? There, at the edge of Utopia, Colin saw why OOOO despised Dalana’s worlds.

  “I want to see what people are doing out there. People are coming here in such vast numbers that I wonder if anybody decided to stay in the city. My piece of this world needs to still be like Terra, remember? I know you don't want death and all that, but if it changes too much, what's the point? My message won't reach Mae. So, I’m going out for a while, ok?” Colin said, standing with his hands in his pockets.

  “Do you mind if I stay? The sky is so beautiful, look at all those colors. And the water, oh, the water. So nice and warm,” Dalana said, her eyes flickering with delight.

  “Yes, stay, no problem. I’ll come back later, I just want to be sure of the damage so far.”

  At the fountain’s edge, a small crowd entered the pool, following a line that crossed the park’s paths. Sick people, disabled people, depressed people, happy people, rich, poor, a little of everybody headed for the oasis. To Colin’s surprise, a few left it as well, following his lead. They grabbed his interest.

  “Are you also tired of this?” he asked a woman, strolling toward the fountain’s edge.

  “A bit, yeah. But I like it here. Just after a break, right?” she said, tilting her head.

  “Time to get back to action, I know. Get some work, start a new project, what do you say? Going for it?” He bobbed his forehead with every word.

  “Not sure yet. I'll see some people, that's all. Things are changing outside, getting better. For everybody, I guess.” The splashed the water with a lazy kick. “It's nice that we can choose how to live now, how to—”

  Confused by the edge's fast approach, when they seemed so far from reaching it, the woman left the fountain and stopped at Colin's disappearance. He vanished from sight, the spirit of an angel gone from his mission.

  She wore high heels, and she left the pool with a blissful smile, saying hello to those in line to enter. She had a leather purse on her side, she wore diamond earrings, an emerald necklace. Wealthy, escaping Utopia, Colin believed she had nothing to gain in the fountain, nothing she couldn’t already have in real life. Thus, he followed her, choosing the woman to guide him through the city around the oasis.

  Cars blocked the crossing outside the park, an orderly barricade of vehicles left opened and intact. A buzz populated the area, coming from the park, the sound of people queuing to enter Heaven. Colin still heard the angelical music, now only a faint murmur haunting his mind. It called others, the few people who still left the buildings to go to the park, the scarce population that occupied the sidewalks and the streets.

  The commercial zone had nobody in it. Stores had opened doors, all merchandise on display, and yet nobody took care of their goods. The rich woman glanced at those empty spaces, and her eyes searched not for things to buy, but people to talk to.

  She walked alone in the middle of the road, checking at every corner over the barricaded cars for something she couldn’t find. At last, a joyful laugh echoed at the next turn, a group of people sitting between the two lanes of the avenue in chairs and benches, with small tables in their midst. They had turned the road into a public square.

  Abundant food lay around them, excited chatter filled the air. The rich woman joined them, greeted by effusive hugs and high fives, accepted with love. She grabbed a bite of the last cake over a tray and the man by their side stood to get more.

  “Iolanda and Hector are making us more, I’ll see how they’re faring and ask them to come back now and leave that kitchen alone,” he said, going for the bakery.

  “Yey, bring them on, I’m sure they’re great people!” the woman said, clapping her hands.

  “They are, yes, fine people, you’ll love them,” another woman said, a glass of wine between her fingers. “That is a nice necklace you have there. Can I see it?”

  “Oh, please, here, I’ll take it off to show you. We have beautiful gems in nature, don’t we? You can leave it on the table, so that we can all admire it when we feel like it. And these earrings too, they’re pretty. Take it, it’s all ours now.”

  “Let’s make a toast to diamonds and emeralds, and to food and all of you wonderful people!”

  “Cheers!”

  “Cheers!”

  A man came out of the bakery, with Iolanda and Hector, who joined their toast with a cake tray. Stores became warehouses, collection depots where products disappeared without money or pay back. Silence allowed birds to sing, the avenue taken by animals and people, apartments with windows opened and empty inside.

  A couple walked by the group in the middle of the avenue, they waved and went their way, stopping by the bakery to fetch themselves a loaf of bread. Anarchy in the making, the Terra as Colin knew it destroyed once more, this time by a simple oasis.

  People needed inspiration from the great deeds of their race. They turned mountains into bridges, they used dead matter to power vehicles, they harvested the sun’s energy to turn nights into days. They were humans!

  Colin created a big TV screen on the road, in front of the talking group, breaking his vow to himself of not interfering that way in his world. He made the TV play some of the greatest presidential and entrepreneurial speeches in history, powerful men addressing the nation about the glory of labor. Together, they could fix all humanity’s problems.

  “Nothing stands
in our way when we, the people of this world, set our minds to success. The common man knows it best, by the love of his family he toils, and his labor makes him holy, for—”

  The rich woman laughed first at the screen, hearing a bald white man with glasses speak of working the fields with raw human power.

  “Yeah, right, get those tools yourself, old man!” the others echoed her.

  “Get your company on its feet without others doing work, I wanna see it!”

  “Built this road yourself, eh? Yeah, right, you don't owe a thing to anybody, that's right, you're the new Jesus, so full of powers.”

  “Others work to make you rich and you don't even smile, you greedy bastard,” a man said, throwing a can of beer at the screen.

  Colin, who had damp eyes on hearing the man’s strong words, inspired by the hopes and dreams of his mortal life, thanked Ai.iA's world for making him invisible to them. Powerful words became mockery to those people’s ears, not finding agreement even in the rich woman, she who profited the most from the effect of all those great leaders' doctrine.

  “Come work cleaning for us then, you old clown! Enjoy it and bring us some more fish, 'cause our table needs replenishing,” she yelled, causing waves of loud laughing.

  “I did it all, yeah, I did all you asked me to do, and I’m only happy now, with friends and no job!”

  They were fragile against a Creator’s will, puny creations, and they laughed at their maker’s thoughts. Rebels, people who abandoned the beauty of their world’s system in favor of a life of boredom and unsustainable celebration. They would die one day, and they had to work hard for survival. If they thought they could have a different existence, how inhuman would it make their essence?