Stanzi—Early Friday Morning—Fuel
IN THE PLACE OF ARRIVALS
In the middle of the night, something wakes me from deep sleep and a dream. It’s Patricia. She’s standing next to my bed, watching me sleep.
“I’m not watching you sleep,” she whispers. “I need you. Get up.”
I get up and slip my clothing on.
“Leave the coat,” she says as I try to slip my warm, slept-in lab coat back over my clothes. “It’s white. People will see us.”
I know I can’t leave the coat. She must understand because she waits as I remove my clothes and put the coat on, and then put my darker clothing back on top.
As we leave the tree house, she says, “We’ve been collecting fuel.”
I’m still just coming out of REM sleep. I think, We?
“We’ve been waiting for this day.”
“We waited for the day we had a helicopter,” she said. “It’s my turn. We decided yesterday.”
“You take turns?”
“The helicopter can only handle so much weight,” she says. “We can’t all go at once.”
“I can see it on Tuesdays.”
“I know.”
“You can see it every day, right?”
“Yes.”
“What about the others?”
“They can see it all the time, too. But they haven’t found yours. Yet.”
“How do you collect fuel?” I ask. But then I look at Patricia and I see she’s crying and say, “I’m sorry.”
She removes a small jar from the pocket of her Windbreaker, stops and holds the open jar to her cheek, and lets the tear drop in. Then she replaces the lid and continues to lead me through a forest far below where the genius village is.
I wonder if she knows that Gustav and I are all the helicopter will carry.
“It will carry exactly one hundred and forty pounds more,” she says.
I wonder where our supplies will go.
“We can’t fit any supplies.”
I wonder if we will crash.
“We won’t crash. I know you worry.”
I wonder how she knows I worry.
“I know because it’s in your face.”
I wonder if I’m a human circulatory system, turning myself around over and over like China, my heart twisting in on itself.
“That’s a strange thought. I don’t know what that would look like.”
I say, aloud, “It would look like a crash. Or a bomb. Or a school shooting. It would look like a note that says, Gone to bed. TV dinner in freezer. Make sure you turn out the lights.”
At this, Patricia stops again and retrieves her jar. She collects her tears and asks me if I want to cry and I tell her I never cry.
I tell her about my dream—the one I was having when she woke me up.
There were two coffins this time. There was a small one and a smaller one.
She says, “What does it mean?”
I answer her in my head. It means it could have been worse.
At the Place of Arrivals there is a magical spot. I don’t believe in magic, so I can only guess that something geological or chemical has caused the magic. I’ll ask Gustav in the morning. For now, I sit and watch as Patricia and two others, the law expert and the mathematics genius, collect their tears in jars. Nothing was said to make them cry. No one hit them. No one sent them a dissolution of marriage. No one gave them a standardized test. No one set off a bomb drill alarm. They simply arrived here at this spot and they began to cry.
I wonder the obvious—if tears fuel the helicopter.
“Not quite,” Patricia says.
“I’m not sure what that means,” I say.
“Well, how did you get here? Why did you leave? What made you come to a place you didn’t even know existed?”
I think about this question for one hundred of their tears. I come up with many answers. Boredom, freedom, the drills, the answers, the bush man, Gustav.
Patricia says inside my head, It had something to do with your dream, didn’t it? The two coffins?
“My parents take me to weird places on vacation,” I say. “Sometimes the hotels have pools, but we don’t swim, out of respect for the dead.” I think of the dream and the two coffins—a small one and a smaller one. There is a feeling in my chest like someone is drilling.
The three of them cry for hours. After three full jars of tears are collected, secured, and buried, the four of us leave the area of crying. I’m relieved. I felt intense pain while I was there, but I didn’t cry.
The mathematician and the law expert go in different directions. Patricia tells me to wait outside until she gets into the tree house. She tells me to count to one hundred. Before I get to fifty, the door opens and Gustav comes outside.
He says, “We’ll leave tonight.”
He says, “We’ll take Patricia.”
He says, “We’ll have to make up our tests. Probably on Monday.”