Chapter 3

Chapter 3, “The First Day of Drudgery in the Moonlight of Mystery”

It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darker interior of the store, where artificial white lights replaced the golden sunlight. He passed two workers, one a small, angular man with a razor-thin mustache and the other brown-haired and middle-aged, stress epitomized in his face and in his every movement. Each of these stood at the head of a long line of customers waiting to purchase their products. Like the atmosphere outside, the store was full and busy.

He was about to walk further into it when another hand suddenly gripped his arm and jerked him away. So sudden and fierce was the grip that Gregor thought it was Clooney again, but no, it was the stressed out man. This, as it said on his name badge, was Tom Basket himself.

“Hey look, it’s Gregor, everybody!” Tom announced to the line with a clearly and dutifully feigned cheeriness. “He’s going to be the one to help you now.” And then, in a subtle whisper laced with lethal aggravation, “When you get the lines down, come to my office. We need a word.”

Gregor stood there, frozen, as he took in the faces of the customers and the strained smile of Tom Basket. They were expecting him to take over the job Tom had just vacated. This is when Gregor realized in full force exactly who he was to these people and to this town — and it horrified him.

But just as Tom was pushing Gregor to where he had just been standing, a lucky thing happened. Tom Basket caught sight of another employee just a few aisles away, still within hearing range.

“Randolph!” he called out. The employee turned. “Come over here. I need you here.” And then to Gregor, in a low voice, “Let’s go back to the office right now.” And then, to the customers, with the cheerful grin: “Randolph’s actually gonna be the one to help you. Here he comes.”

As Randolph obeyed his boss, Tom began his walk to the back, Gregor right behind.

“How could a man with a name like ‘Tom Basket’ ever be so angry?” one customer whispered. “It’s such a cheerful name...”

Tom was already several steps ahead of Gregor, who found himself walking unusually fast to keep up. They soon arrived at the office in the back corner of the store; Tom sat behind a desk covered by papers and files and Gregor across from him.

In his mind right now Gregor was attempting to formulate his story of that morning, and in such a fashion as to be believed. But in this situation, he, too, was feeling overwhelmed by stress, not to mention nervousness, and he found that he was not terribly adept and thinking under so much pressure. And so he sat there, waiting for the lecture he assumed was coming, with no idea how to answer it or articulate his reasons for not doing whatever Tom Basket was expecting him to do and be.

Tom, upon sitting, leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands over his lap. But with the opening of his mouth came the opening of his hands, and all manner of gestures animated the words he was saying.

“What do I say? What can I say? Gregor, do you understand the stress of frustrated expectations? I don’t think you do. I don’t think you realize what we go through up here when we expect a certain situation to be the case, and then it isn’t. And what I mean by that is that you are paid to be here, and then you aren’t actually here. And then, as a result, our own plans fall apart and we have to improvise. And you know the thing about improvisation — the customers don’t understand, and they don’t care, and then they suffer in silence, and then that glare! When they look at you as if all these long lines and lack of customer service — and that’s the most important thing, Gregor, remember customer service, always remember customer service — they can’t have the impression that we don’t care, that we aren’t doing our best to serve them. Because I am doing my best to serve them! And so is everybody else out there, and I appreciate their time and skills, and that’s why I pay them. So whose fault is it that the customers aren’t getting the best possible service? The service, by the way, that they deserve, for shopping at Tom Basket’s. Because that is who and what they blame: Tom Basket. It’s my name they drag through the dirt when they tell their friends and neighbors not to shop at Tom Basket’s. My name, my own self. This little store is who I am, and it is what I do. So when they knock the store they knock me. And thus I do my absolute best to make every aspect of this store the best it can possibly be, and that includes my employees, and that then includes you. So when we expect you to be here, Gregor, and you aren’t, or at least not at the allotted hour...what was your schedule for today, anyway?”

Gregor shrugged in silent apology. Tom Basket frowned, put on a pair of reading glasses, and picked up a piece of paper from the corner of his desk.

“It says here...oh.”

He looked up from the paper, his eyes peering over the glasses.

“Oh,” he said again. “Um... well you aren’t scheduled for today. You requested this day off. Why are you here then?”

Again, a shrug. “I didn’t know where else to go...”

It was then that both Tom and Gregor discovered that the door had not been closed all the way, because it opened a few inches without a turn of the knob. Gregor’s cat walked in — totally silently, as cats are prone — and jumped onto his lap.

“Who’s this?”

The cat leaped up to Gregor’s shoulder — “Uh — oh, this is Macata” — and then onto Tom Basket’s desk, and was now rubbing up against the latter’s outstretched hand, which then went on to pet him.

“I like cats, Gregor. I’ll let you keep him around. Maybe he’ll cheer up the customers, too.” Macata was purring now. Tom was softening. He rubbed his forehead as he scratched the back of the cat’s neck. His face looked pained. “It’s just the stress. I’m sorry for my manner. It’s the biggest sale day of the year, and when my employees don’t — well, again, that’s not your fault. You weren’t even scheduled today, and then you came in anyway. Well, Gregor, could you work today anyway? We really need the coverage.”

Gregor nodded, unsure of what else he could or would do.

Tom stood up and Macata leaped back onto the table and then all the way back up to Gregor’s shoulder in one continuous bound. Tom held out his hand to Gregor, and they shook across the table.

“So thanks, and I apologize,” Tom said, and went to the door to see Gregor out. “Now go out there and do your job. And have fun with those brand new hand scanners. They’re from Metagopolis.”

Macata suddenly hissed at Tom Basket. Tom frowned, and Gregor stood up to go. After two hesitant steps out the door, however, he stopped and turned around.

“Do you have any more questions?” Tom said with a sigh.

“Yes,” Gregor answered.

“Fire away.”

“What exactly is my job?”

Tom looked at him blankly and let forth another heavy sigh as he shut the door on Gregor without another word.

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Gregor wandered tepidly through the aisles of the store, paying only lukewarm attention to the products on the shelves. He passed by customers and the occasional worker, the latter either helping the former or doing some other duty like stocking shelves or cleaning an area. Eventually he made it to the front end, but stayed half-hidden behind a corner, watching the work he knew Tom Basket wanted him to do.

The cashier, whose name tag said “Zissner,” stood at a station holding a little orange gun in his hand. The customer placed the basket of products she wanted to buy on the station’s desk. Zissner pointed the gun at a product in the basket and pulled the trigger. The gun emitted a green light that hit the product and, after a second or two, beeped. Then the green light disappeared, and the trigger was pulled on another product. He went on to scan every different product, but never multiples of the same product. When the process was finished, Zissner turned to a screen that Gregor could not see and touched it once. He then announced a number to the customer, presumably the price, and the customer proceeded to give him several coins. He placed these coins in little slots below the screen, and handed the customer a piece of paper. This allowed the customer to leave with both the products and a clear conscience. Zissner then took the next customer from a line of about four parties.

“Excuse me?” said a voice.

Gregor turned sharply around to find a middle-aged woman with a basket hanging from her arm.

“Can you direct me to the paint?” she asked.

Gregor looked at her, a blank expression on his face. His mouth opened to say words but none came. The most he could do was shake his head and stutter.

“I-I-I don’t...I don’t know...”

“I’ve seen you here before. Aren’t you supposed to know everything?”

Gregor looked at her apologetically and meekly shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

She sighed with disgust and walked away.

“Hey, Gregor!” called out yet another voice. Again Gregor turned and saw Randolph, his temporary replacement at the far cashier’s desk, calling to him. “Get over here! They need me at tile.”

Gregor swallowed a few times and made his way over, feeling the heat of the stares from the customers like spotlights.

“Look alive, Greg,” Randolph said as he shoved the orange gun into Gregor’s sweaty hand and left the scene.

Gregor smiled weakly at the next customer in line and looked down at the desk. A hammer. That’s all his first customer had. Trigger pulled. Green light and BEEP. Showed up on the screen, along with a number a dozen digits long. In the upper right was a button that said “Total.” He did as Zissner had done and touched it with his finger. A total price was produced, the cost of the hammer with tax added. Twelve lontais and two rences. Gregor found himself instantly grateful for Daniel Clayton Clooney’s words about money; otherwise he would be completely clueless as to how to properly do his job.

This process he repeated minute by minute, hour by hour, for the rest of the day. It took him very little time to familiarize himself with the work, so simplistic it was. But however simple, it also was tiring, in how long he had to stand in virtually the same spot for such long periods of time. He got a break every couple of hours, but didn’t have any kind of timepiece on him so he never knew how much time had passed, or how much there was left until his next break.

But nothing that day gave him a true break from his work. Nothing took him away from his innermost thoughts, the tormenting paradox in which he lived, the nightmare that he could not wake from.

Nothing until a moment that came towards the end of the day, when the light was fading and the sky was near eventide. A moment in which he happened to see the setting sun through the entranceway of Tom Basket’s. The sky was hot pink, and the sun a searing red. Blue clouds streaked across the heavens, masterfully painted as with the graceful sweep of an artist’s brush. Gregor looked straight into that red sun for four solid seconds, not deviating until his eyes burned. In that time, at that sight, he again heard the words that the day’s work had so successfully smothered.

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.

He was interrupted by a customer shortly thereafter. “Customer service,” Tom Basket had said. “Always remember customer service.” So Gregor resignedly returned to his work.

Half an hour later Gregor was excused for the day. The cat and bird joined up with him again as he left into the market plaza, now only occupied by a spare few. He walked the rest of the way home by the light of the moon.

He stared almost constantly at the black cloud still hanging there, alone in the sky. No other clouds hung with it; the unveiled moonlight cast illumination over the whole of the vast fields around him. When he entered his cottage he switched on a bedside lamp, sat on the bed, and looked around at all his possessions.

Ordinary household furnishings filled the room: a fireplace, a sink, and a stove; a desk, a stool, and a dresser; a sink, a few cupboards, and a doorway to a bathroom. He knew what these things were, but had no recollection of seeing or using any of them before. He knew what other things were, too. He knew language, and how to write. He knew laws of physics and simple ideas like cause and effect, freedom and responsibility.

He just did not know himself. Our white-haired young man was lost in an inverted fog. And he needed someone to listen to him. His eyes traveled over to the cat, who had followed him inside and made the area right next to Gregor’s pillow its bed. There he had curled up, seemingly apathetic to Gregor’s crisis, but there alongside him nonetheless.

But no, the cat would not do as his listener. Perhaps as a comforter, yes, and companion, along with the bird, but he needed his words to be caught somewhere, to empty out to someone or something that would understand.

And so his eyes left the cat and turned instead onto his satchel. He reached for it and pulled out the notebook and pen from inside. Then he opened to the first page. He saw those three one-word questions, and bitterly wrote down the answers as he knew them to be.

Who? — Gregor Townsend, a cashier

Where? — Middleton, Tom Basket’s Hardware Emporium

Why? — to sleep and eat

After staring at them a while he scratched out the whole thing. Then his gaze moved up the page to the first words he had written.

soar

sky

light

The dream. He had almost forgotten about the dream. The world from which he had awoken. He remembered little of it now. But for whatever reason, his thoughts turned to the sun he had seen falling just a little while before...

Below the scratched out portion, he wrote an amendment.

Those aren’t the real answers. I am not who I am right now. I am not the Gregor Townsend that works at the hardware store. I am not the Gregor Townsend that child saw yesterday. Somehow I know that I am different. I don’t know how, other than that I would not choose to live this life. I want to know where I came from, the real me, and where I’m going, where I need to go. And above all, I want to know why. I want to know what that wise and glorious purpose is.

He looked up from the notebook and let his eyes wander. Lost in thought, or perhaps in feeling, the white-haired young man stared at the opposite wall, upon which light from the lamp from the window fell. He did not immediately register what his eyes were perceiving, but when he did, he sat bolt upright, just as he had that morning.

A pattern of strange, dark lines had appeared on the wall. A system of arcane symbols and mysterious drawings. It could have been a map, or a diagram, or even a language. Painted on his wall? No, that wasn’t paint. As he stood and moved closer, the lines disappeared. But, he was surprised to realize, only where his person blocked the lamplight and created shadow. Testing this hypothesis, he stepped to the side, allowing the light to touch the wall. The lines reappeared. He tested it further, by turning off the lamp altogether. The cottage was in instant darkness, save for a crack of moonlight coming from the slightly open window shutters. He took their handles in hand and pulled them open. Moonlight poured copiously through, and the lines again reappeared, but this time with less intensity. Due, no doubt, to the dimmer light of the moon.

He stood there in fear and awe. Lines of real shadow, of material darkness, ablaze in the midst of light, impossible to be seen otherwise. Something mystical that our white-haired young man did not understand. Something he would one day come to.

Then he did a double-take at the open window.

It was not the scene outside that jolted his senses; that scene was rather ordinary: shadows of an oak tree, and a flowing stream beneath it; moonlight sifting through its growth and into the cottage window. No, it was none of that, but the window itself.

It proved not to be an ordinary pane of glass, for it rippled like liquid, like a wind-kissed pond. It distorted the outside world like glass or water would, almost as if the moonlit stream and tree were a painting, not yet dry. He reached up to touch it, entranced...

And as it looked, it felt. Wet, but more so: his fingers, upon penetrating this strange, fluid-like matter, lost their material form and added their color to the world beyond. A puddle of pink mixed into the dark green field where he had touched. At first this frightened him, and he quickly drew his hand away. The alien color twirled back in to the point where he had entered, and his finger returned to its original form.

He looked back and forth between his hand and the window, or whatever it was. No harm had been done. Cautious, but very much curious, he again reached in, this time with his whole hand. The pinkish color his hand supplied swirled into the nighttime colors of the outside world, mixing with the green of the grass and blue of the sky, interrupting their place in this painting that had depth in addition to height and width. He moved his hand from the dark rocks of the stream, up the tree trunk, through its many leaves, into the navy blue sky, across the sea of stars, and, with slight trepidation for a reason he did not understand and did not think about, into the very center of the full moon.

But the darker colors never got that far. Instead, they faded away as they went higher, disappearing as the moon’s shine grew closer. Upon reaching the source of night’s light, the dark colors had gone completely, for even reflected light destroys darkness.

The young man’s understanding of this, however, was currently very limited, and what he saw did not compute with his implicit understanding of pigment. But he took this in stride, for he understood that he didn’t understand, and respected the strangeness of this window, this strange, beautiful, interactive painting of reality. There was no way he could at that time. And as fascinating as he found it, its mystery did not compare with his own.

But it was, without any doubt, an integral part of his mystery. Something about this window felt right to him. As if it were another piece to his puzzle, and he had connected it with the few pieces he possessed. Of course, the puzzle would surely take hundreds, perhaps thousands more pieces to complete, and what he had so far remained positively inconclusive, but this was a start, and as everybody knows, a journey has to start somewhere.

He stripped his clothes off and prepared for bed. Nakedness felt much more natural to him. In the bathroom he saw his face for the first time in his memory. But while it was of course instantly familiar to him, it felt new at the same time. Like it had not existed until he saw it personally, and now it did and it made perfect sense.

As he was about to switch off the bathroom light, he noticed something on his nightstand, something that had thus far escaped his detection. It was small and round like a ball, made of glass or some other transparent, light-refracting material. In its center floated a red orb, like an egg yolk. After examining it for another minute, he set it back down, turned off the light, and made to close the window shutters. Before shutting them all the way, however, he chanced to see Buzby, the little blue songbird, singing and dancing in the tree.

And as he laid down in the dark, and thought about the strange and marvelous things he had just witnessed in his own home, and as he further considered the day’s experiences, both perplexing and piddling, mystical and mind-numbing, the Sentence continued to beat on, echoing back and forth against the walls of his skull, filling his otherwise empty mind.

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.