Human Solutions Page 7

  “What kind of tasks?” I said.

  “Holding the phone to his ear,” Ernesto said. “Helping him put his clothes on.”

  I frowned, and Ernesto looked away. We closed up the chicken coop in silence.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I rolled out of bed before sunrise and pulled on my regulation pants and shirt. I hooked my suspenders over my shoulders and went to wash up. Not having to choose what clothes to wear every day was an unexpected pleasure. Maybe there was something to be said for occasionally giving up control. Maybe there was a freedom in that—a freedom that came from a lack of freedom.

  I peered into the mirror and ran a comb through my hair. I patted some water onto it and carefully parted it on the opposite side than usual. It was a trick I had been using for years to help me get into character. It was, in fact, a relic from the time when Human Solutions was created.

  There was a flurry of activity when I arrived at the kitchen. Anita saw me and waved me over. “Eggs,” she said. “They’re in the walk-in cooler. Get a box and separate them into yolks and whites.”

  “I’ll do the tables first,” I said.

  Anita shook her head. “We need to get going on these pancakes. Then you can do the tables.”

  “Yolks and whites,” I confirmed, nodding.

  I repeated that phrase over and over in my head, yolks and whites, yolks and whites. It became my mantra for the next few minutes—while I found the eggs (there were 252 in a box) and cleared some counter space for the project.

  I found two oversized bowls and put a compost pail down by my feet. Then I stood there for a moment and thought about how to go about doing the separating. Anita came over.

  “I’ve got a trick for doing this,” she said. She picked up an egg and cracked it on the edge of the stainless steel counter. She pulled the shell apart into two halves and held these upright over one of the bowls. Then she shuttled the yolk from one eggshell fragment to the other, back and forth, letting the whites slip down into the bowl. When all that was left was yolk, she moved over to the other bowl and dropped the yolk into it.

  The task grew easier as I worked my way through the layers of eggs in the box. After a while, I was able to pull my mind away from the egg task and towards the more complicated task of figuring out how to escape from the Colony. There were enough sharp knives in the kitchen to fight an army—but I knew nothing of knife fighting. The guards were younger, stronger, and more armed than I was. I would need to outsmart them.

  Someone hurried over and traded my half-filled bowls for empty ones. I could hear the griddle spitting on the other side of the kitchen and Anita calling out instructions. Then I discovered that there were no more eggs in the box. I cleaned up my work station and went out into the dining hall, but someone had already done the tables. They were shiny and slowly drying.

  The breakfast bell rang. I found a ladle and set myself up at the oatmeal-serving station. People began flooding into the dining hall, and I began dishing out oatmeal to everyone who wanted it and to those who were waffling, too. “It’s good for you,” I assured them.

  Then Eugenia came up the front of the line. She looked miserable. A thick, black thread had been stitched across her lips. There was just enough space for her to put a straw in there. Her face was blotchy, and droplets of blood still clung to the thread. She looked at me helplessly and gestured at her sewn lips.

  “Just one second,” I said. I roped a fellow kitchen worker into filling in for me at the oatmeal station, and I went to find Anita. She was already working on lunch. I explained that we needed to make some sort of blended drink for Eugenia.

  “That poor girl,” Anita said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  After the rest of the colonists had sat down to eat, I went back into the kitchen and ate my breakfast. There were still more pancakes being made at the grill—for those who would be coming back for seconds and thirds—and I helped myself to a couple of them. I put a large pat of butter on top and some homemade cherry syrup.

  “What do you think?” Anita said, appearing beside me.

  My mouth was full, but I closed my eyes and nodded. Anita patted my shoulder affectionately. “Good job today.”

  I swallowed. “Did Eugenia get something to eat?”

  Anita nodded.

  “That man,” she said, frowning.

  When I made my way over to the library, Ernesto was nowhere to be found. I stood at his desk and called his name out. He came out from a room marked “Library Staff Only” and greeted me.

  “What did you think of the pancakes?” I said.

  “Heavenly.”

  “I’m going to tell you the secret to making a good pancake.”

  “I can’t be trusted with secrets.”

  “You have to separate the eggs into yolks and whites.”

  Ernesto sat down at his desk. “Thank you for that,” he said.

  “What were you doing in that room?” I asked. “Library Staff Only.”

  “Library things.”

  “What kind of library things?”

  Ernesto looked at me. “Can you be trusted?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Good,” he said, motioning for me to follow him. “You’ll want to include this in your article.”

  He pushed the door open and flicked a light switch. I stepped into the room. There were shelves from floor to ceiling. Every square inch was covered in video tapes and audio cassettes.

  “Pornography,” I said.

  Ernesto gave me a look. “It’s news reports,” he said. “All of them. Every once in a while, Uncle Peter decides to play the colonists a news report, just so they can see how bad things are out in the world.”

  “Things are not so bad out there.”

  “They are once these tapes have been edited.”

  Ernesto explained that, every few weeks, one of Uncle Peter’s confidants would come into the room to splice together a television newscast. The newscasts would invariably paint a picture of an outside world that was devastated by disease, plague, and starvation.

  “Why all the audio cassettes?” I asked.

  “Before we had a television.”

  I pulled a video off the shelf and looked at the label. “September 16, 1970—Starvation in Africa / Increased Rates of Suicide.” I picked out another. “March 12, 1981—Earthquake / Hanta Virus in Southern Chile.”

  I couldn’t help but admire the brilliance of the Manipulation: take an outside voice (the most trusted voice of all, that of a newscaster), and gently coerce it into transmitting the message that you want sent out. Simple, yet effective.

  There was a television set in the far corner of the room with two VCRs attached to it and a radio with two tape decks. I started to get a kernel of an idea.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  We went out to the coop and rounded up the chickens. It was a cold, clear morning, and we walked briskly. The chickens ducked and bobbed their heads in time to the rubber worms’ movements.

  “How did you end up at the Colony?” I asked.

  “Hold this,” Ernesto said, handing me his worm stick. He tucked his shirt into his pants and rolled up a drooping cuff. One of his suspenders straps had twisted, and he flattened it out. I handed him back the stick.

  “My wife died three years ago,” he said. “Her name was Angela. She was born in the same German town as Uncle Peter—in Troisdorf. He was an odd child, but they were good friends. They would race each other after school every day and wander around in the woods. When they finished school, she moved to Berlin and got a job at a bakery. She met a young man one night at an art show, and, within three months, they were married.”

  “You,” I said.

  “Not me,” Ernesto said. “An artist. He was from France. He read poetry to her in a language that she could not understand and smoked cigarettes with his paint-stained fingers. They weren’t married for more than a year before he started sleeping with other women. One night when he didn’t come home, she piled all hi
s belongings into their bathtub and turned on the tap. By the time it had filled up with water, she had packed up her bag. She turned the tap off and left their apartment. There was a train leaving for Troisdorf in the morning, so she slept on the hard wooden benches at the train station. She was in Troisdorf for a week before she ran into Uncle Peter. He told Angela he was going on an adventure. He had bought land in Chile and was going to start a community there. Angela wanted to be as far away from anywhere as she could, and so she asked if she could go. He told her they would be leaving in a week’s time. And, so, a week later, they took a train down to Frankfurt, picking up Uncle Peter’s followers on the way down.”

  “What followers?”

  “While my Angela was flitting around the Berlin art scene, Uncle Peter was roving across the countryside with a guitar and a heart full of sermons. He started a small congregation and soon had accumulated a few hundred followers. He even built an orphanage for children who had lost their parents in the war. Everything was going quite well, until someone discovered that he was molesting the children.”

  A group of guards was approaching us, marching in synchrony down the road.

  “Then you want to make sure that, within each genre, you place the books in alphabetical order,” Ernesto said.

  “And that’s within each genre?” I asked. “Well, that does make some—Good morning!”

  The guards ignored us and walked past. When they were sufficiently far, Ernesto spat on the ground.

  I nodded.

  “Angela had not been in Troisdorf long enough to find out about these accusations, so there she was, sitting next to Uncle Peter on a train that was rapidly filling up with followers. They steamed across France and down to Spain, until they reached their final destination—the port of Seville.”

  “Seville …,” I repeated. Something important had happened there, I remembered vaguely from my high school history class.

  “Seville,” Ernesto said. “Where Ferdinand Magellan left from. But more importantly, the birthplace of one Ernesto Villegas.”

  I remembered—Magellan was the first person to sail around the world.

  We had circled around the Colony and returned to the library. The chickens were returned to their coop, and Ernesto and I went into the library.

  “The Field Mice are coming by for a storytime,” Ernesto said. “You can sit with them and watch, and, when I’m done, I’ll ask you to read them a story.”

  We went over to where the children’s books lived. Ernesto picked out a few and told me to pick one. I had never read to a child before and was not sure how it was done. I told him so, but he dismissed my concerns with a wave of his hand. Then there was a stampede of footsteps at the door, and Ernesto lay down on the pillowed ground of the “Children’s Corner” and pretended to sleep.

  “Let them in, will you?” he said, opening one eye.

  I went to the door and opened it. A group of twenty or so young girls shrieked and skittered by me.

  “You’re not the librarian!” one of the girls said accusingly.

  “I found him,” a girl behind me called out. “But he’s sleeping again!”

  The girls threw themselves onto Ernesto and tried to wake him up. Their teacher gave me a weary look and told me she would be back to pick them up. I turned around in time to see Ernesto open one eye and then another, and give an exaggerated yawn.

  “You will not believe what I was just dreaming about,” he said to the girls. This seemed to be some sort of routine, because they immediately climbed off him and went to sit quietly over on the pillows. Ernesto pushed himself up, and his voice dropped to a whisper.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Once upon a time,” Ernesto said, “there was a young boy named Enrique. He lived on a small island that was part of a group of islands called the Philippines. Enrique was fourteen years old, and he had four little brothers and three little sisters.”

  “I want a little sister,” said one of the girls, waving her hand in the air. Ernesto smiled and motioned for her to put her hand down.

  “One day,” he continued, “there was a storm, and a big wave came from the ocean and destroyed all of his family’s land. They had very little to begin with, and, now, they had nothing at all. Enrique’s father—who was not a very nice man—announced one night, as they all had bowls of rice for dinner, that he would be going to town the next day and selling one of them as a slave.”

  “What’s a slave?” said one of the girls.

  Ernesto paused for a moment. “A slave is somebody who has to do everything someone else tells them to do.”

  Some of the girls looked confused.

  “When you’re someone’s slave,” Ernesto said, “you have to clean between their toes when they’re in the bathtub, and you have to wear whatever they tell you to wear, and, if they want you to jump up and down for them, you have to do that, too.

  “The next day, Enrique’s father woke him up early in the morning. Enrique hugged each of his brothers and sisters, and the last person he said goodbye to was his mother. They both cried, and Enrique promised that he would be back someday. Then his father pulled him by the arm and they left, in the early morning dark, to walk to town. It was a long ways to town, and Enrique was very tired by the time they arrived. His father fed him a banana and told him to look alive and strong. Then he gave him to a woman who looked Enrique over and nodded. The woman told Enrique to stand in a lineup with a group of other boys—most of them older. Soon a man appeared and walked down the line. Sometimes he would ask a boy to show him their teeth or to make a muscle with their arm. The man chose a boy from the lineup and gave some coins to the woman. Another man appeared and did the same, and then another. Nobody looked twice at Enrique, and, before long, almost all of the boys were gone. Then a small man appeared.

  “‘Who can understand what I’m saying?’ said the man in Spanish. Enrique looked around at the boys who stood next to him. None of them seemed to understand, but Enrique did. ‘I can,’ he said timidly. The man walked over to Enrique. He asked him if he had ever been on a boat, and Enrique said that he had, many times. This was not true.

  “That afternoon, the man took Enrique to his ship and left him there with the other sailors. Enrique learned about sailing from the other men. They were impressed at how easily he could climb the long wooden beams that held up the sails. They sailed for a long time—across the Indian Ocean, down under Africa, and up the Atlantic Ocean—until they got to a country called Spain. They day after they arrived, a man came on board the ship. He was tall and had a large sea captain’s hat on his head. All of the crew members were called up to the deck to meet the man. His name was Ferdinand Magellan. He had been asked by the King and Queen of Spain to see if he could find a way to sail a ship around the world. He needed many people from different countries to come with him on this trip, so that they could help him communicate in other languages.

  “Enrique said that he would go, and he and some of the other crew members followed Ferdinand Magellan back to his own ship. They lived on his ship for the next week—it had been anchored right near land. One evening, Enrique was mopping the deck when Ferdinand Magellan called him over. ‘We’re leaving on our big trip tomorrow,’ he said to him. ‘Yes, captain,’ said Enrique. ‘We will be sailing for many days,’ said Ferdinand, ‘but if everything goes as planned, then, someday, we will return to your home.’ ‘Can I ask a question?’ said Enrique. Ferdinand Magellan nodded. ‘Somebody told me we are sailing that way,’ he said, pointing towards the west. ‘That’s right,’ said Ferdinand Magellan. ‘But my home is that way,’ he said, pointing east. Ferdinand Magellan put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and walked with him over to a barrel of apples. He picked one up and showed it to the boy.

  “‘The world is round,’ Ferdinand Magellan said, ‘like this apple.’ Enrique looked at it but did not say a word. ‘It doesn’t matter if you go west or east—soon enough, you will arrive at the same place.’ Enrique knew that the world coul
d not be round. If it were round, like Ferdinand Magellan said it was, then everyone would be falling off of it all the time. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘about what’s going to happen if we go to the edge of the world.’ Ferdinand Magellan looked at him—he realized then that Enrique was just a boy. Like many grown men, Ferdinand Magellan was not quite sure how to speak to boys. He thought for a moment and then said, ‘Tell me, boy, what does fear feel like?’ Enrique looked down. ‘I couldn’t say, captain.’ ‘Does it make your heart go faster?’ ‘It does.’ ‘Does it make you breathe harder?’ ‘It does, captain.’ A man came by asking to speak to Ferdinand Magellan—Ferdinand Magellan said he’d be ready in just a minute. ‘Now, let me ask you another question. What does excitement feel like?’ ‘I couldn’t say, captain.’ ‘Would you say it makes you breathe harder?’ ‘Yes, captain.’ ‘And what else does it do?’ ‘It makes my heart go faster.’ Ferdinand Magellan took his large sea captain’s hat off his head and placed it on Enrique’s. It hung down and covered his eyes. ‘You’re the captain,’ he said. ‘You get to decide if what you’re feeling is fear or excitement. To your body, they’re the same thing, anyhow.’ Enrique nodded, and, when Ferdinand Magellan put the hat back on his own head, the boy was smiling. ‘Get some rest, sailor—’ Ferdinand Magellan said, ‘tomorrow is a big day.’

  “The ship left port early the next morning, and they were on the open ocean for many weeks without seeing any land. One day, Enrique was sitting at the very top of the very tallest sail—he was the lookout. He saw a seagull fly by, and then another, and then he saw something in the far distance. ‘Land!’ he shouted. Finally, the ship had reached the shores of South America and the country of Argentina.”

  All of the girls turned to look at a small girl with bright-red hair. “Pepa!” they cried out.

  “I’m from Argentina,” Pepa whispered to Ernesto, apologetically.

  “It was a big and beautiful country, full of beaches and mountains and lakes and Pepas,” Ernesto said. The girls giggled, and Pepa hid her face in a pillow.