Time of Leaders, Part 10 of 11

Jade told me to ask if Deb knew that she’d already read the adolescent epic. Deb answered: ‘Of course’, the way Deb does. Deb had been apologizing for seeming arrogant, and in this case told me that she had to take our human perspective into account. Then she used the example of a person falling on the sidewalk:

            “When you help them up, they usually don’t ask how you knew that they needed help. You used your ears to hear them shout, and your eyes to see them sprawled on the ground.”

            Deb had also developed a taste for comedy, and during our personal time confided that she was making a great effort to find out why. Then I would come home to Jade in her quilted chrysalis. She knew when I was treating her too gingerly, and would get a bit rougher, so I guess my attitude served a purpose.

In early January Jade asked if Deb understood the extent of our situation. I nearly answered ‘Of course’.

            “She asks how we are,” I told her. “Our personal time’s shorter, but it’s like work and personal are blending. The headings are skewing more toward current events. I’m starting to miss all the trivia.”

            She grimaced. “Well, I think Deb knew that this would happen to me. I don’t think I’m being self-centered. There’s hope in it, actually.”

            I answered by encasing the toes of her left foot, in their fuzzy sock, with my palm.

            “Yes,” she responded. “But you have two hands. That’s what they’re for.”

            She was correct. She showed me the illustrations in the Cleary book, pointing to some like an early grade teacher, then puffing her cheeks out like the boys when they run in the drawings.

            “Deb knows,” she said, finding her place in the book, “and she doesn’t seem too worried. She knows a lot.”

            I nodded. “And some she ain’t tellin’.”

A week later she’d cracked open the adolescent epic. She remembered some, but said that it was like her twin had read it, then forgot. It made her feel warm. I asked her what reading level it was compared to where she was when she finished high school. I hadn’t brought it up before then, afraid that I’d break some kind of spell.

            “Oh,” she blew a brief raspberry. “A couple years.”

            She smiled. The spell was still intact.

            “This is more naïve than the other two! It’s kinda schlocky.” She paused to form a statement; this opinion that had been floating in her head. “It’s schlocky because adolescence is a new start that you don’t see coming. So, of course it’s naïve. It gives me a headache, but a good kind of headache. Adolescence is very objective, because you’re forced to look at things again.” She smiled mellow. “It’ll all be in my report.”

One crazy-cold afternoon around that time I came home to the inevitable. I could tell that I was walking into a different situation since Jade had set the alarm for ‘home’, which she didn’t do on those weekdays when I came home at four. It was eerily silent in the house. I darted around looking for her, and found, in the living room, something that I refer to as ‘Camp Jade’. This was a tent which Jade set up using the back of the couch for one wall, and various chairs, large and small, to balance out this structure she covered with sheets. She shouted in a muffle that she hoped that it was me who’d come home. I asked if she needed a new supply of hot rocks in there. She told me that the only hot rocks she needed in that tent were mine.

            I doffed my coat and slipped through a crack between the sheets and blankets. The temperature inside was around 15 or 20 degrees, quite humid, and a bit smelly. Jade had a candle in there, a warm rock placed in a mixing bowl, still steaming, and various supplies to insure against boredom: her book, movie player and crank radio. Since her hair had grown longer, now it had straightened and was pressed about her forehead and temples, framing her eyes and nose. She explained that this day was a ‘vacation from her vacation’.

            We watched as the sheet began to bubble above our heads. She smiled weakly and offered her hand, which felt a bit clammy. I asked her if she was okay, and she said that she was ‘getting there’. And there we sat all afternoon and night. Forget the benefit that it had for Jade, this was the warmest I’d been since December. We watched a foreign comedy, with her asking me to clue her in if there was plot hidden at the end of the individual subtitles. Then the juice ran out on the player, but she’d seen the film before, and told me what happened at the end. We talked, and, basking in this low-grade sauna, it was like getting to know each other all over again. And we listened to an old conspiracy show that her mystery pirate radio station played at eight. We thought it was amazing how spot-on some of the comments were. Some observations and remarks were way off the mark, though. We would laugh, cry and hug each other. Then Jade thought to double-check with me that I’d reset the periphery alarm, and we awoke and emerged from ‘Camp Jade’ at five in the morning, amazingly refreshed; more ready for the cold.

In February Jade became a bit more impatient, like she was waiting for something to break, come what may. But she wanted the break to be positive for her, not negative for me. I told her that although I wasn’t being told anything, it looked like my project was wrapping up.

            “Aw,” she said, “don’t let it end. Bring up ancient Rome, for example. Just slip it into the conversation, like you do. Ask her about the Holy Grail.”

            We made a kind of tent on the sofa with the quilts. I wanted her to be the way she’d been before, and if I could keep going, things might change for her. I hugged her tight.

            “Ask her who carved the statues on Easter Island! I’ll bet she knows. But demand names.”

            I was feeling nappy, but she didn’t want to sleep. She mumbled. “We have to keep at least one of us going. On principle. I helped you, but not much. Now you help me, but I can’t have too much. It’s like a relay race… No one carries anyone in a relay race…”

            Then silence, then:

            “I plucked you up like a snail.”

Deb helped us score fifty pounds of red beans at two-fifty a pound that March. And we’d walk to the old food pantry on the weekends. They knew me there. We needed hygiene products and rice. We needed a lot of things, actually, but they didn’t have them. The weather had to have gotten better at that point, but I just remember ramen chili and the desperate, medicinal smell of government body-wipes.

            Jade was well into 'The Old Man and the Sea'. What slowed her down was investigating every word that was unknown to her. She wanted my advice on her progress, and although I thought that she could just go with the flow and read faster, I decided not to intervene. She didn’t know that she probably knew best. I left her alone more when she read. Sometimes from other parts of the house I heard her reacting to the book more than she had reacted to her movies. One day, when I got home, she bookmarked a stopping point and asked me if the project had ended.

            “Almost,” I said. “But.”

            “You do have news.”

            Deb informed me earlier that week that it had been determined that she was no longer useful for the type of project we were conducting. She assured me that she would still work, though. She’d tapped my knowledge of comedy, and also had an interest in the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930’s. I assumed that she would be involved in cultural history research, or some such thing. I was happy for her.

            During personal time that morning Deb seemed to be trying to cheer me up. She showed me a 2009 recording of a squirrel flummoxed by decorative marbles. In 2018, a pet hedgehog rolling around in circles. Then Deb would simply ask: ‘How important is this?’ and flicker her screen.

            So that afternoon, I told Jade the news: Deb had told me that the crew was packing up for the Tenger western headquarters in Minneapolis. She said that I would join them. I’d been chosen for another project and now had a permanent position with Tenger. I told her that I would have to think about it. She said ‘Of course.’ I said that she was acting like it was all cut and dried, but it wasn’t. She apologized, mentioning, as she had before, that she comes off as arrogant to people. Of course I would have to think about it, she said, but in the meantime Jade and I should start looking around for hats.

            As I told this to Jade, she assumed an expression that I’d never seen from her before. Ducklike, with her pale lips, and with one nostril flared wider than the other.

            “She’s including me in all this?”

            At that point, I didn’t know how to put it to her. Deb didn’t just have plans for Jade, it had all already happened, according to her. All Deb was concerned about was that we wouldn’t freeze our ears off. So I told Jade that Deb informed me that Minneapolis is a little colder, and that ninety percent of body heat is lost through the head…

            “What’s all this about hats?” She placed her book on the end table. It would have to wait. “Would you go without me?”

            “I don’t think I can.”

            She raised a finger for me to pause with one hand, and reached over with the other, cupped my chin and gave me a kiss. I sat on the floor in front of the couch. So now our heads were level. Jade kept the finger raised.

            “I hate to break a computer’s heart. Or yours. But do I have a say in all this?”

            “She mentioned that free will is relative.”

            Jade laughed long and hard and curled more upon the sofa.

            “I’m tired. Unemployment wears me out, and there’s no vacation from it! All we’ve done is react. And computers like Deb have to take some of the blame. If we were knowers, at least we could pretend that we have control. This is turning out to be a joke.” She made a hood out of the blanket she was in. Now she was all covered but for her face. “We’re minions.”

            “They have a position for you.”

            “Something tedious.”

            “My job’s tedious.”

            She snuffle-chuckled and emerged a bit, patting the back of the sofa for me to join her. After much shifting and adjusting of covers we settled, panting in the relative heat.

            “I may refuse, just to be contrary. You mentioned that I have this free will?”

It was easier for me to answer the back of her fuzzy head, through the emotion.

            “I told her that you were less likely to seriously consider such an offer.”

            “How nerdy. Any idea what I would do in Deb’s dungeon?”

            “No.”

            “So, so, so. What did she say when you told her that I’d start a frizzalution?” She shifted during this question, so I had to look for another curl on her head, another wonder to center on.

            “She said that she would see you and convince you.”

            “Oh! I like Deb. I get a good vibe from her, and her taste in books is superb.” She wriggle-spun to face me on the sofa. “So, in Deb’s dimension we’re standing at a bus stop in Minneapolis wearing plaid hunter’s caps, waiting for the Tenger express.”

            “Yes.”

            “Guaranteed employment with very little say.”

            I shrugged horizontally.

            “I might do it,” she said. “I have to think.”

            “Of course.”

            “I’ll go see her. If only to thank her for all that she’s done for us. We’re good co-pilots, Wilson. But the plane has her own ideas.”