Stories

The Library - Twelfth Scene

“Whatever possessed you to do that?” No. 6 asked Gwen, with an appalled look on his face. The storm clouds had started gathering on the horizon, darkening the sky in the middle of the day to a dusky, stark intensity. 
Here and there thick ropes of lighting put out a spectacular display, made even more impactful by the contrast with the gloomy background.
“Do what?” Gwen replied, and the puzzled expression on her face confirmed she had absolutely no idea what the fuss was about.
“You broke it!”
Gwen looked around and wondered what she could possibly have broken in a landscape which consisted entirely of rubble. 
“I don’t understand!”

The Library - Eleventh Scene

“What’s up?” No. 1 climbed on top of the flat boulder where Gwen had retired in search of solitude. To anybody else, she would have looked like she was meditating, but not to him.
They were sitting cross-legged, a good height above the desert, and from their elevated viewpoint, they enjoyed the beautiful panorama of it at dusk.
Gwen put a long pregnant pause between the question and the answer, one which, to be sure, would have garnered applause in any theatrical performance, and then declaimed, with the pathos only afforded to the young.
“What is the point of all this!”
“Meaning alert!” No. 1 yelled at the top of his lungs, loud enough to reach every eardrum within range. “Gather round, everybody, we have an emergency!”
“The point? Of this?” No.5 mumbled, irritated because he was woken from his afternoon nap. “Whatever gave you such a silly idea?”

The Library - Tenth Scene

The next morning the room was an appalling mess: every object in it had been moved from its place. There were empty cups and glasses everywhere and above it all, the chickens roamed, agitated and making a racket.
‘It’s not even Tuesday,’ was the first thought that popped in Gwen’s head, and she examined it with detachment, surprised at how different one’s habitual thought patterns became to fit the context. 
That connecting Tuesdays with chickens was not in the range of thought processes sane people accepted proved to her the psychological normal was not a matter of clear mental standards, but a majority rule: you're normal if most of the people think like you.
“Who ate all the bread?” a voice, which she recognized belonged to No. 8, boomed over the chaos.
“Sorry,” No. 3 sheepishly confessed. “That tea can build quite an appetite.”
‘What happens if whatever you intend to convey is so foreign to your fellow humans nobody resonates with it? Do you not say it, then? And if you do, does it have any more meaning than a nonsensical poem?’

The Library - Ninth Scene

Life doesn’t give you time to actually look at it except during extraordinary circumstances. 
It’s in those gaps, those experiences that don’t fit, that you see its inherent strangeness.
You notice then that things are never clean cut: the laws of physics have exceptions, moral imperatives have exceptions, even life and death have exceptions.
One doesn’t see that when things are normal, whatever that means, within the range of possibility, and one forgets that very unlikely outcomes are well within the range possibility as well. 
We understand freedom as the ability to control our fate and we’re so proud of our marketable skills, our net worth, our physical attractiveness, our fitness, in every sense of the word, and we fail to see the gigantic mechanism we’re locked into, the much larger drift of social dynamics that runs our lives and to which we blind ourselves to maintain our illusion of control.
When all our social ties are cut, when we’re thrown out of humanity and denied the facilities of civilization at first we’re overwhelmed by dread. 

The Library - Eighth Scene

“How did you end up here?” she asked No. 5, in a daze, realizing the inappropriate nature of the question before she had the time to call it back. It was no business of hers how these men ended up in the middle of the desert, enacting classic tragedies in the original Greek, and she would have been offended if they questioned her choices.
In fact, she wouldn’t have known how to answer such a question. People always like to believe they have reasons for doing things, and were they to explain themselves, they would gladly volunteer the logic of their circumstances, but that’s all self-delusion. We all make our choices before we even think about them, and fill in the blanks with reasons after the fact in order to explain them to ourselves.
Thankfully society gives us a pass on explaining our emotions, because we’d have a bear of a time shoving those into a logical frame.

The Library - Seventh Scene

“Sit down,” No. 5 ordered, “you’re late for class.”
‘What class?’ Gwen looked around and saw everybody was sitting in a semicircle around the speaker, ostensibly to attend class.
“Just sit!” No. 5 rolled his eyes, displeased by the time wasting.
No. 4 and No. 1 scooted over to make room for her. By means unknown, someone had produced a notepad and a pencil, sharpened to a fine point, and the two implements were now getting passed around the group until they reached her.
“What exactly am I supposed to do with these?” she whispered towards No. 4, trying to disturb the assembly as little as possible, but the latter looked annoyed by the interruption and didn’t answer.
She sat herself quietly between the two numbers, notepad in her lap.
“What’s the class about?” she leaned over to whisper in No. 4’s ear again, undeterred by the latter’s cold shoulder.
“The afterlife,” he answered curtly.
“The what?”
“Shhh!”
“Do you have anything to contribute?” No. 5 asked her directly, trying to put this class disturbance to good use.
“I believe I do, yes.”

The Library - Sixth Scene

The crickets were loud in the night air, Gwen never realized there were so many insects in the desert, and their combined noise was loud enough to pierce through the gasps of the fire and the monotonous rhythm of the conversation, slowed down by the smokes and the tequila.
No. 4 wielded a stick with which he kept poking at the fire, absentminded, and he looked as if he had retreated into a world of his own, the world behind his eyes, to ponder on the mysteries of existence undisturbed. He smiled a sibylline smile into the distance, which made Gwen think that world of his, behind his eyes, must have been pretty wonderful.
“Why do you say you were The Library?” she asked abruptly and regretted disturbing his contemplation the moment the words left her lips.
He turned around to face her, the smile still lighting up his face.

The Library - Fifth Scene

The purpose of the serenity path finally made itself clear a couple of mornings later when Gwen woke up very early to find No. 1 meditating at its end, perfectly at peace. 
One would have assumed he was watching the sunrise, but a closer look revealed he was gazing way farther than that, through the sunrise into another reality, shielded from perception by the limitations of our senses. 
An even closer look revealed he wasn’t even there. 
His animating force was still occupying his body, breathing his lungs and beating his heart, but his consciousness was not there, that which made him who he was, the unique personality impossible to mistake for another.
Gwen daren’t bother him in that state, which, even from the perspective of a detached bystander, looked like a deeply intimate experience. 
She just sat on a boulder, a short distance from him, watching him blend into the surroundings with the grace of a tree, or a cloud formation, breathing with the morning breeze roused by the first rays of light warming up the rocky mesa.
“I appreciate your discretion,” he whispered, as if from a dream, “but I need to let you know I’ve been aware of your presence the entire time.”
He opened his eyes wide and all his spirit rushed back into its shell, bringing him to full attention.

The Library - Fourth Scene

The next morning Gwen awoke to a sustained but orderly shuffling of boots, bags and paraphernalia and watched in bewilderment how the seven were quietly preparing for what looked like a military campaign.
They looked serious and none of them was speaking, which rose Gwen’s anxiety to panic levels. She didn’t dare ask what they were doing.
No. 5 spoke eventually.
“Are you coming?”
“Where are you going?”
“Fishing.”
“In the middle of the desert?”
No. 5 pointed to the creek in the valley. Its waters looked murky and ochre after the rain, and raged, powerless, against their banks, carrying dead sticks, straw and debris.
“What could possibly live in that?”
“Catfish.”
“I don’t know how to fish,” she hesitated.
“Suit yourself,” No. 5 replied as he walked to the door.

The Library - Third Scene

When Gwen was awakened by the chill of the desert night, she found herself in an empty house, dead quiet except for the eerie clinking of the bead curtains. 
The quiet of the desert reaches beyond silence; it preempts the emergence of sounds, like an anechoic chamber.
In the desert, one only hears two things: the wind and total silence.
She tried to go back to sleep, but her three nights in the desert had conditioned her to a different sleeping schedule. The empty house felt creepy at night, with no light and no sound, almost like a tomb.