Fables of Failure
Page 23
A savage jolt rocked the craft, and I started spiraling down in a whirl of alarms and flashing lights. My story would perish with me. But I was sure of one thing—if I was going to die, I was going to die as a man and not as a wyg tree. Struggling against the vertigo, I reached into my pocket. The ground was rushing up towards me. I placed the ring on my finger. It was time to press ‘eject.’
“EPILOGUE: OLLY’S EULOGY”
I first met Olly twelve years ago. Back then, I was only a resident at Weeping Willows Asylum, idealistic and ready to improve the plight of Provisia’s mentally ill. Olly limped up to me. I was taking a meditative walk just outside the main gate. He was frail then, and he looked like he was in a terrible state. He explained to me that he had lost his memory, and he had no friends or family that he knew of. He didn’t have a dime to his name. In fact, it took him quite some time to remember that he had a name—Oliver, or Olly for short—though he couldn’t be sure.
In those days, Weeping Willows refused to take destitute patients in even the most desperate need. The reforms that were to sweep Provisia from top to bottom were unimaginable at the time, as hard as it is to believe. Weeping Willows was a place for the rich to reclaim their sanity and to heal, and the poor were lucky if they were harvested, and very lucky if they were turned away at the door.
But there was something about Olly that I found deeply likable, a humility and broadness of spirit that was even more rare then than it is now. I was able to tell pretty quickly that Olly wasn’t insane. If anything, it seemed that his amnesia might be the result of some kind of physical accident. But I wanted to help him, and I told him that the Asylum had a position open for a groundskeeper, which would bring in some money and give him a place to live while he got back on his feet.
Olly gratefully accepted, and his efforts can only be described as heroic. Keep in mind, his memory of almost everything before his accident had been wiped out. His leg was in bad shape, and he had to limp between clean-up and maintenance tasks. He was blind in one eye. To make matters worse, his left hand was burned and almost unusable, a ring from some long-ago marriage seared onto his skin.
But despite these handicaps, he brought effort and energy to his work. To me, Olly came to physically represent the rebirth that Provisia went through during those years. He was hurt and injured by the past in ways that he couldn’t understand, but he was optimistic about the future and willing to put in the work to try to turn the page. The world gradually opened up to him, just like it did for all of us when we rediscovered the books of old and the lost magic of the ‘Inter-net.’
Soon I was appointed the chief medical officer of Weeping Willows, and I came to depend on Olly’s good sense and wisdom. There were many days when he seemed far and away the sanest person there, including the staff. Whatever he had done in his past life, it had clearly brought him a kindness and centeredness that he radiated out to everyone who knew him.
We live in an age where the mighty have fallen, where scandals and revelations have sunken Presidents, corporate executives, elite fraternities, and even the Gods themselves. We have realized that our fears and anxieties have been manipulated in a kind of puppet show, a performance to channel our paranoia and rage at the wrong targets. We are waking from a nightmare of collective amnesia, a time when we forgot the human values of friendship and compassion in favor of bigotry, jingoism, and fear.
I will always cherish the memory of a man who didn’t walk in those circles, who wasn’t powerful or prestigious in the traditional sense, but who still was a wellspring of hope in tumultuous times, a tree that shaded his friends and adoptive family from the burning heat of uncertainty, instability, and chaos. We remember you, Olly. We’re all so grateful to have known you. May your legend live on forever.