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Seated behind his grand oak desk, Marcos sifted through an assortment of papers, most of which brought him concern. It was true; they had not the food to see them through the winter. They hadn’t harvested in over a year and a half and the condition of the soil meant that in all likelihood, they would not reap from another seed for as long as they continued to kick about this impotent poisoned earth.
The weather too was unrelenting and gave them little respite, sickening The Children and reducing them to an amoebic state capable of nothing more strenuous than wiping the feverish sweat from their furrowed brows.
What was most troubling was the mind of the worker Child. The Children couldn´t see the result of their work at the end of the day, and as such, they became bitter and emotionally perturbed. They longed initially for title, for promotion, for recognition of work undone. The span of their sight was dreadfully short and they desired more than they deserved and when they couldn’t bask in the spoils of their labour; if the result of their effort was not immediate, they would move on to more emotionally encompassing past times.
In the case of The Nest, this meant downing one’s tools, and in a pack, forming a circle around one and any Child and taunting that Child until he or she fell unto tears. Failing that they took to lighting small fires and destroying established crops or infrastructure. The effect of their cause was to become agitated, disorderly, violent and unfocused.
They demanded a purely emotional response, like a puppy left unattended and to its own devices. They tore, burned, ripped and smashed their way into and at anything within the immediacy of their sight and found the discipline that came down upon them by The Fathers; absolutely intoxicating.
They longed for direction; emotionally charged direction of any sort; be it a pat on the back or a fist to the face, anything at all would suffice. And just as torrential weather and painful open sores were stressful to their well-being and overall productivity; it was their famine that was debilitating.
Marcos looked not with concern for that would be illogical; instead he looked engagingly at the results of the past quarter, accepted the outcomes and the probabilities of their collateral effect and scribed action. In the face of such depressive results and the apparent bleakness of the immediate future, Marcos focused his emotional reasoning, thinking only one; no fear, no doubt and no delay.
“There does not exist”, he thought, “a problem without a solution.”
“How far have you gone?” asked Marcos looking up from the papers.
“Alone? Past the bridge; along the tracks that lead to the old station. I sat in the reeds about a couple of hundred meters off. Kept my distance” replied The Behemoth.
“What did you see?”
“Abandon,” said The Behemoth. “I saw nothing, just a few tricks of the eye; you know, faces forming under the stir of blown leaves tossed about by the bullish wind, shadows morphing in and out of barbarity, first one and then many; the form of a monster, the form of a man. I felt their eyes all over me and the generosity of their intention, inviting me to calamity. There is no kind lodging for a mind at wander” he said.
“We need to pacify further beyond the bridge. We need more soil” said Marcos.
“You want me to take you there? Today during the collection?” asked The Behemoth to Marcos who had his head buried in papers.
The sound of a door shutting pulled them both from their focus. For the briefest moment, the numbers on the documents in his hands seemed to float about wavily, dancing in and out of time of one another. He felt a moment of doubt creep on his mind and his stomach to his throat. He lowered the pages and before him The Woman pulled herself a seat and rested. Marcos swallowed against the lump in his throat, reattained his focus and put the documents aside, out of The Woman’s sight.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Can this wait until we finish our day? I am with a lot of importance right now and I could use...”
“Really? You’re with a lot of importance? And what am I? Inconvenient?” she yelled, throwing a piece of paper in front of his face and kicking away the chair then swinging the door open wildly.
“Not everything is zero and fucking one Marcos,” she said slamming the door shut, vanishing down the stairwell into the mass of moving figures below.
Marcos waded momentarily in a sea of tempestuousness; neurons firing in his mind as a torrent of uncontrollable emotion flooded his fingertips. He clenched his hands irefully until blood trickled from his fingernails down his palm then to his wrist and finally dropping in a tiny pool on a document sitting before him.
Adrenaline pumped like light into a new day leaving him staring viscerally and shaking wildly. The Behemoth looked on unmoved.
“Women?” he questioned to himself.
Marcos picked up the document that lay below his sight and wiped away the droplets of blood on the cover creating a red smear across the page. He looked into the smear, still worn by the emotional rage which overcame him but now stupefied somewhat in an opiated endorphin induced trance. His vision blurred and swam with the mix of reds and whites on the paper and in his ears; torment beckoned. Gone was the immediacy of his sight. Lost was he now, to the theatre of the emotionally and mentally unhinged.
The sound of a woman screaming in dire need was paralysing. The sheer force of her desperation tore at the inside of his mind shattering his calm. He pulled his hands up to his head clasping his ears and grinding his teeth. Sweat poured down his face and saturated his body. The eye in his mind awakened and he saw a flood of white, bright blinding luminescence, and from it, a spectre of dark in the distance at first miniscule and non-forming, then blackening and stencilling the light about his sight. The white fell onto the backdrop of black and grey wheels swinging wildly, left then right, left then right and turning with ferocious velocity, forward, forward, forward, vehemency, the fuel that drove its direction. The sound of voices, discoursing with one another, lexicalising the severity of the woman’s screams as they pressed on; her body thrashing about, her arms and legs strapped into place. A set of doors burst open as a knock on the door pulled Marcos from his stupor.
He instantaneously pulled upon the reigns of his sanity lashing wildly at his disobedient conscious mind.
“All things are one,” he thought.
Composure became him and he rose from his table, folding the blood stained document into an infinitesimal square and placing it in his pocket. His body looked physically battled; his face was sickly pale, yet his eyes, where every Father, Mother and Child kept their stare, were hardened, clear, convincing, certain and directing.
He opened the door to be greeted by an adolescent child; so strange looking; so unseasoned; long straight black hair, fair pale white skin and emerald green eyes, a colour like he had never seen before in his life; one that swept you into distraction and cast you back out into your own reflection.
She stood in front of Marcos with apparent sadness and feigned worry in her eyes and yet, the emotion in her voice was so convincing.
“Safrine has gone,” she said holding a thousand yard stare.
“Safrine is your friend then?” said Marcos as he lowered his heaving self to be at level with the adolescent girl’s eyes.
It was uncommon for children of any age to be At Father. Their place was below in the maze of corridors and addressing only of the four secular states of being and activity. Marcos rested both his hands on the girl’s shoulder; sensitivity uncommon from Father to Child, but in the wake of his own recent emotional decline, unexplainably warranted.
“What do The Mothers call you?” he asked.
“Milena” she replied.
“Speak to me Milena. What has happened to Safrine?” he asked without a hint of condescension or mockery in his tone.
Any other Father would have walked straight past the child, cursing the lack of discipline being administered in the four primal quadrants below. They would have walked through the girl and disguised her bruisin
g as a lesson and the dislocation of their compassion as education.
It wouldn´t be because they were wrong or ill mannered, it was simply the logic of their being that they followed under the philosophical rationale of Marcos; Mother listens through her breast and Father speaks through his fist. One would keep the emotional threat at bay, quelling the sensation of indecisiveness while the other would aggress upon any and all physical threats.
Marcos was very much unlike the other fathers and becoming it seemed, quite unlike his self. A group of fathers passing through the adjacent hall had stopped and gathered in curious wonder at their truculent leader on one knee addressing an adolescent child benignantly. Their lingering stares grew that of Marcos who raised his own stern cast of an eye and as such, in an instant, the bulking men lowered their heads and briskly made their way to wherever it was that was not there. Marcos returned to the girl. She looked at him adoringly and smiled.
“You are Marcos, yes? You don’t, look, like a giant” she said.
“And who says that I am a giant?”
“The other children” she replied. “They say you are a million feet tall and that The Fathers had to build a hole in the sky, just to fit your head,” said the girl.
“They do, do they? And what else do they say?” laughed Marcos with a grin widening and the colour returning to his face.
“That you eat children who don’t follow the rules. And that you’re mean and that you stink sometimes. And that your breath is like…” she said.
“Ok, ok,” he said putting an index finger gently to her mouth. “Tell me, Milena, what evidence have you of Safrine’s disappearance?” he asked.
“My eyes, Father. I saw her with my own two eyes” she said with a sense of honest panic filling her focused stare.
“And where did she go?” he asked.
“She was taken.”