Anamnesis by Zorina Alliata (red queen free ebook TXT) 📖

to work, his life had changed significantly. Just hours before he was running naked through the woods trying to dodge a murderous mob, after he had blown up a building by boiling an expensive egg. He had followed Eric through the dark forest until they made it to a small house. Dante had knocked at the door in despair and the old man who had answered was so nice to let him in to use the phone.

The man was a woodworker; his tools were everywhere. He took quite a liking to Dante, actually. He lived alone. He had a white cat he talked with in a tender voice, and a big statue of a suffering Christ on the wall. He gave Dante a raincoat to cover himself, made him chamomile tea and patiently explained the directions to his house from I-495 while Dante hurriedly called his mother and asked her to pick him up.

While Dante and his host were talking about his adventures, someone knocked at the door. Dante cringed with such force that the man took his shotgun from the closet before answering. But it was Mr. Saccas.

"How did you make it so fast?" Dante exclaimed, jumping up and hugging him. "I just called my mom a few minutes ago."

"I was in the neighborhood when she called me," Saccas answered calmly. "Come on, I'll get you home."

As Dante was heading to the door, Saccas whispered something to the woodworker; Dante saw the man kneeling down, a smile on his face, and Saccas quickly helping him get up. “We thank you,” Saccas said. “You will not be forgotten.”

The road home was filled with Dante's tremolo voice, explaining what happened to him. Saccas listened carefully and approved of Dante's actions.

"Where's Eric?" he asked at the end.

"I have no idea," Dante answered, baffled. "He is just like that, he just disappears all the time. You can't really count on him, you know."

"Oh," Saccas said, understandably.

"Listen," Saccas said, "how about I take you to a friend of mine's house tonight? You'll get a good night's sleep and tomorrow we'll talk about what happened. What do you say?"

"I'd love to," Dante said with relief. "I don' feel like going home at all, man. Last night that lawyer came, and now there's a bunch of naked executives looking for me in three states…"

"What lawyer?" Saccas asked.

"Oh, this lawyer who told me my dad disappeared three months ago and he left me some stock or something… I know that I have no stock in the Company because I already asked around and they told me it was a mistake. So this is all just like someone is screwing with my head. I don't know - what did I do? Maybe Eric did something and they are blaming it on me. That has happened before for some reason."

"Did the lawyer leave you some paper?" Saccas asked.

"Yeah, some stuff. I think it's still in my car at the office… I was going to look through it, but then they took me to this training camp…"

"OK," Saccas smiled. "Don't worry, we'll look at it tomorrow. We'll figure it all out. Here it is," he said, pulling into a farm in Gaithersburg. "Why don't you just rest tonight, and we'll worry about other things in the morning?"

"Okay," said Dante, getting out of the car, still wearing the woodworker's raincoat. A man appeared at the door and invited him in. Saccas promptly turned the car around and left. Inside, Dante found a comfortable chair and sat down. The man gently patted him on the back, with the same loving look the woodworker had given him.

"You're okay now," the man said. "Please, consider this your home."

Later that night, when Dante took a short walk outside because he couldn't sleep, he saw the man praying between the two old apple trees on the left of the house. Dante kept quiet and walked back inside; but he felt at ease and comfortable, all of the sudden.

When he woke up in the morning, the smell of scrambled eggs and bacon had filled the house. Dante was starving. He rushed to the kitchen just in time to receive a huge plate filled with food from the hands of the good farmer.

"I'm going to leave now," he said when he finished eating, his mouth still full. "I don't have any sick days or personal days left at my company and I can't miss work. I'll call Mr. Saccas later."

"Do whatever you please," the farmer approved. "Please remember that you are always welcome in my house."

Before rushing out to the bus station at the corner of Washingtonian Boulevard and Omega Drive, Dante thanked the farmer again from his heart.

"Anytime," the farmer said. "I mean it, anytime."


CANTO VII


The Company building was quiet and sober when Dante arrived at work. In the elevator, he heard two women talking about a certain Officer Kampf who had had an unexpected heart attack and died the previous day. Dante did not think he knew the man.

He bumped into his shy boss, who immediately backed off and ran into his dark office. Dante sighed and continued through the long, lonely aisle towards his cube. He grabbed a plastic cup and filled it with water. There was nobody in the kitchen, not even the H-1B visa crowd of cheerful Indians who usually traveled in packs around the floor. He passed empty cubicles, the result of all the recent layoffs. Somebody was whispering on a phone close by, though Dante could not locate the voice in the dimly-lit corridor.

On his computer, 214 messages were waiting to be read. Sorting by sender, he deleted most of them. They were company-wide memos and policies that usually changed in the next few days. However, one message was a meeting request from people he had never heard of. Dante looked at the email, puzzled. All he figured was that his boss had signed him up for some useless committee or task force dealing with things he did not care about.

Checking his watch, he realized that the meeting was about to start. The subject of the meeting was something to do with marketing. Hurrying up, he sprinted toward the 5B-009 conference room; no one was there. Dante waited around a bit, looking out the window at the traffic on I-270.

“Can I help you?” a loud voice suddenly broke the silence.

“Yeah,” said Dante turning around and looking at the woman who had spoken. “I have a meeting here.”

“I doubt it,” she snickered. “This is my office now, and I don’t have any meetings scheduled today.”

“But this was a conference room,” Dante replied, confused. “Do you know where they moved the conference room?”

“I have no idea,” the woman replied. “Now, if you excuse me, I have work to do.”

Dante left the room in a hurry, mumbling an apology. He spent the next 30 minutes canvassing the whole 5th floor, in search of the elusive conference room. He never found it.

He finally gave up and returned to his desk. On the screen, yet another meeting request had popped up – this one, in the Demilune Hall. He knew where that one was – he had passed it just this morning on his way in. It was one of the nice conference rooms built when the Company was founded; when the names meant something real, palpable, like an event or an important notion or symbol. Dante had never been invited to that room – it was usually reserved for senior management meetings.

No one was there either. Sitting alone at the marble table, Dante looked at the oil paintings on the wall; some of them seemed vaguely familiar. A landscape of a farm, a woman and a young boy in a car, down a country road; one of the men in a portrait looked lovingly towards him.

After 10 minutes of waiting in vain, Dante decided to go see Anna. It was already 10:15 in the morning, and he needed to talk with someone smarter than he was and sort out the madness that his life had become.


*-*-*

Dante appeared in my cubicle that morning, looking as confused as he did when beautiful women were tying to talk with him.

"Where were you?" I asked first, closing down my spreadsheet. A slight tension was between us; something that hadn't happen before. We were changed; he was gaining substance and tasting incertitude for the first time; I doubted the numbers behind his head, for the first time.

"God, some really stupid training camp with some executives," he answered. "All I know is that I owe 100,000 dollars now. And today, my stupid boss kept sending me to these meetings, and nobody else showed up! Twice!"

"What?" I asked, pretending to be surprised. As he moved graciously around, it became clear to me that Dante's place had never been there in that cubicle down the hall. It was wrong and unnatural and it was keeping him from fulfilling his destiny.

"Anna, I don’t know what’s going on," he sighed. "I had such a weird couple of days, you wouldn't believe it… I feel like I am losing my mind."

"You missed last night's beer fest," I reminded him. "I waited for you. Why don't you carry a cell phone, like normal people?"

"Why don't you?" he asked. "I just never needed one, you know. Who's gonna call me? My mom?"

"There's nobody who would call me either," I said.

"I'd call you", he said sincerely, and I believed him.

“Whatever”, I shrugged. “How about a cup of coffee at Starbucks?”

I didn’t want to lose sight of him again. Events were forming around his palms, extraordinary bursts of cosmic light poking through his fingernails; in the small wrinkles of his face, amazing stories were being written as we spoke. I was a witness to something bigger than everything I had seen before – although it had no definition, no name yet.

“I can’t,” he whined, “I am out of sick days and vacation days. I shouldn’t have taken them when I was just too lazy to get off the bed.”

“Then don’t take any,” I said. “We’ll just go for some coffee and be back in a couple of hours. No one will notice that we’re gone.”

I was somewhat wary of him, I realized. What I had considered emptiness was actually filled with light; what I had seen as weakness, was indestructible. He had escaped my senses for too long; all the things I dismissed about him just turned out to be on a different level from my understanding. The numbers had avoided him, or protected him, to leave him wide open and yet impenetrable to my eyes.

At the Starbucks across the street, I searched for the moon signs on his face while we drank our lattes in silence, feeling comfortable and safe. They were there, a pale aura surrounding his head, and a translucent number behind his ear, hidden in a curl of his hair.

In his future, already taking shape, blurred like a silhouette in the morning fog, a circle was forming. He was becoming round, complete, ripe, whole; his numbers, now brighter than before, were struggling to be round – to give birth to his true destiny, to add up to a one.

I had never seen a 1 being crafted before. People