Kid

“What it like to write” the kid asked?

I looked her up and down.  The term ‘kid’ was a gift these days. All the urchins these days were short people, absorbing skills they would need to survive. It was not a good time, and being new in it, was not a blessing.  She was wearing the typical conglomeration of hand-me-downs, or found-someplaces, that covered the unwashed skin with grimy cloth.  Still, I like to assign the term to the young.  It gave me hope, that the past, my past, was not in vain.

“I don’t know.” I gruffed, pretending to be annoyed.  It didn’t take much pretending.

The kid’s face kind of changed for a second, and I watched a thought run across her brow.  She had just been bald-face lied to, but then, so had everybody else this morning, it was every bit of eight o-clock.

“Yes you do.” she informed me.  “I seen you write all the time.”

Now she probably watched a thought run across my brow, as I wondered if I could knock a contraction into her head, or at least a comma.  I decided I probably couldn’t.  Besides, she looked about eleven or maybe twelve.  They’re quick at that age, and hard to knock out to make good an escape.  But I hadn’t been lied to, just now.

“Few things piss me off, more than the words ‘I seen’ or the past tense of the same”, I offered in lieu of the apostrophe knock I had been considering.  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘write’.  Do you mean to right a wrong?  Do you mean to right a chair that has been tipped over?  Perhaps you expect some rite to come along to keep you holy, and buy you breakfast? Do you intend to be right someday?”

I had seen her pretty much every day, hanging around the coffee shop, or the bar where I would go, to get out of my apartment.  There were few things to get out about now.  The weather was eternally gray and damp, between rains.  There were few people left, and fewer healthy.  The return of commerce, that is to say the return of an economy based on something that resembled cash, was sparsely distributed along the streets in restaurants and hopeful entrepreneurs.  The distances between, combined with the lack of diversity, kept me to the single block I lived on. I’m sure most people felt the same way.  I frequented the same haunts because they left me alone.  I went out at all, only to change the light that fell on the pages I enjoyed writing.  I was expecting her to be around this morning, and here she was.

“Sixteen”, she said.

“Sixteen what” I wanted to know?

“I’m sixteen”.

“Years old?  You are not!”

She was not at all taken aback by being called out on her age.  As I think about it now, it was probably a ploy.  She instead offered several heartbeats to explore the facts laid in front of me. I had already examined those facts day by day, so there was time to wonder about the mind-reading demonstration.  There seemed to be more and more people who were able to get into your head after the war.  Some people said the radiation had caused extra-sensory-perception physicalities to move to the frontal lobes of some people’s brains.  I didn’t question that, but saw it as more of a learned survival skill than clairvoyance in most people.  Still.  I didn’t keep the thought from making its way to the front of my mind; What would it be like, to read people’s minds?

“It is like walking into a noisy room, like a church or something, where everybody is talking. The echoes of everyone thinking about different things, blurs the thoughts.  Most of the time I cannot separate the words from the noise.” she offered as an explanation to the question I had not asked. It was a canned answer, and I had heard similar descriptions from several other people.

“The question is predictable.” I countered.

“Yes it is.  I get asked that all the time when people find out I can hear them.”

“So…”

“Coff…. Latte. ”

“We are in a Starbucks.”  I reached into my pocket and took out a tenner coin.

“Quad-shot grand.” she added.

I couldn’t help my eyebrow raising.  I fished another tenner out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the table.  I wasn’t sure what she would do with the two coins. Run?  Perhaps think I was paying for the mind-reading show?  Or maybe even bring back a latte.  I intentionally thought “and bring my backpack back, while you’re at it”.  I don’t know, maybe if you think with intention, it is louder?  She slid the tenner off the table and walked away toward the counter.

I whipped my pocket notes out of my back pocket, and my pen out of the shirt.  I started to write some thoughts about the girl, thinking it would spur some writing later.  As it turned out, the ideas came pretty fast about what I would write.  I was still writing when she returned with a latte, and a cup of coffee.

“I let them keep the change, like a tip, you know?” she told me, which was about the right amount.

“Okay.”  I was still writing.

“Hey you want a pet?” she asked, her hand cradling what might eventually be a breast.

I was finished writing notes, and I looked up to catch her intention.

“No. Thank you.” I replied.  Kids were growing up too fast these days.  If fact, they weren’t growing up at all.  They were being born into adulthood, from copulations of greed or grab. Okay, that was a little harsh. I’m sure there was love to be found someplace, but it wasn’t being displayed in the kids.  I don’t know how they got past those formative Wonder Bread years, brief as they may be.

She seemed satisfied with my answer.  

“Some guys do.”, and lifted her cup of coffee for a sip.  Her eyes followed my hand, as I replaced the cap, and slipped my pen, and paper back into their respective pockets.

“Will you tell me?  What it like to write?” she asked again.

“What is it like to write?” I was not correcting her. I was contemplating the question. “Do you know anything at all about letters?  Can you read, at all?” I asked bluntly, although I knew the answer. There were still words, here and there around the city. A piece of a sign, some metal symbol in an impossible font, welded to the hulk of a burned out car. Hell, the sign out front still said Starbucks. Of course, that wouldn’t be all that useful as a reading exercise, but the cemeteries were filled with granite flashcards of words to read.

“I’m not asking you to teach me to read, just what it like to write.” she snapped.

“But writing is reading. It’s about the letters, that make words to be read!” This was going to make me question why I bothered to write again. I jotted down a mental note, to write about a tree falling in a forest.  “They are words that I am writing, ideas, descriptions, stories.  Conversations with people far away, maybe love letters to people that will never read them again.  You can’t write, if you don’t know how to read.”  I felt bad about the truth, but that’s the way it was these days.  Kids didn’t go to school anymore.  The three R’s weren’t necessary.  Those days were all over.

She slumped back in her chair with a genuine crestfallen look people seldom see and survive.  She seemed to turn to her own thoughts for a while.  I turned to the river and watched boats float by, and thought about the birds you never see anymore.  I was being careful, not to think about her.

She didn’t gain the energy she had just a few minutes ago, but said to me, “I need to know”.

“You need to know what” I asked?

“What it like to write.” she stated, but not as a question this time.

“Why?  Why do you think writing is at all important? It isn’t! There’s nobody to read it anymore!” I was really getting bummed out about this.

She leaned forward, “Because you are quiet” she whispered, as if we were sharing a conspiracy.  “When you are writing, I cannot hear you think.  I have tried. A lot!  You are sitting in a shadow of nothing, there are no words in the room around you.  They seem to go from your mind, to writing, but not to the room.  Not to me.  Not even the room is around you.  I need to know how to do that.”

There it was.  She could read minds.  She could actually read minds! I had thought maybe she could, but here was proof.

“Are you feeling left out?  Is your newfound hidden garden a challenge to you?  I should say, My hidden garden.”  I wasn’t as angry as I may have let on to be.  I wasn’t sure a mind-reader could be tricked by words anyway.  I knew, I couldn’t be.

“No!” she cried a little too loud.  She was getting upset.  “I am not trying to hear your secrets at all.”  She leaned back in. “It is because I cannot hear you!” She slumped back in her chair and went back to a normal volume of speaking. “Man, you are stupid!”

That was to convince the people around us, how grown-up she could be, telling some old guy he was stupid. She leaned back in to whisper, and I did too, to listen.

“There are lots of people that can hear minds.  They can hear my mind, just like yours.  Then they hit me, or lock me in my room, if I think about things they don’t want me to know.”  There was a note of desperation in her voice.

“Like what?” I whispered in kind.

“Like leaving. Like being on my own. Being my own boss, so I can keep the coins from the pets.” she hissed.

I wondered if she knew what she was talking about.

“What if they can read?” I suggested. “They can read your thoughts and know what you were thinking anyway, if they can read.”

“What?”

“Here, let me read what I was writing.”

I got the notebook out of my pocket, and turned to the last page; “I met the girl today, and had coffee with her.”

I intentionally thought about my bag, around the corner, by the restrooms.  She got up from the table, with an air of resignation, and trod over to pick it up.

“I wasn’t going to take it.” she offered, as she returned with my stuff.  “I just didn’t want you to leave until I could talk to you.”

“You would have been sorely disappointed if you had taken it.” I told her.  “I emptied it last night, and only put a journal, with a pen in it. For you”.

She asked with her eyes, and then opened my backpack to verify, and removed the contents.

I had decided on a beautiful, leather journal, with paper that was made to look old, with those torn and feathered edges they used to sell.  It really was old.  I had bought several journals like this one, before the war.  I wouldn’t be able to use them all, if I lived to be a hundred.

She touched the cover, the raised design in the leather.  It was a dragon.  A peaceful dragon, sitting at some ancient stone pedestal, writing.  She didn’t look up as she turned a few pages, and pretended to write in it with a capped pen.

“Hey you want a pet” she asked again?

“I was hoping to find a cat somewhere, but I guess you’ll do.”