It was a belief once held by some people on earth that dreams were a omen of things to come. That they could foretell the future. Of course, when we made notes of this in the record, we thought it was an adorable little phase that your race was going through. Any species with an even half-assed understanding of quantum mechanics knows that there is absolutely no way of foretelling the future with any decent accuracy. Yet you have all developed so many ways that are just vague enough to work. Crystal balls, tarot cards, the so-called mediums that can see through time into the future. Your desire to know the ending is so intense, you’re willing to buy into all of that hocus pocus.
But then came a time when the role of dreams was something else altogether. They were a reflection, not of the future, but of the inner workings of a person. They brought to the surface great fears, past traumas, unknown feelings and hurts. There were still people to read these dreams and soothsay what they meant. And from the interpretation of dreams arose an entire field of analysis of the human mind. Through the understanding of symbols and metaphor, a patient’s mind could be unspun from the web of subconscious into a single thread of logic. It was very scientific.
Somewhere along the line they decided that there should be involved a type of statistical analysis that decided the experience of the most people should be the experience of everyone. It was called the norm.
The norm.
And it became the role of these mind-reading head doctors to help people achieve the norm. To keep them from the fringes, a place vilified and filled with deviants and cretins. The fringes were where drug addicts and serial killers lived. No one wanted to be one of them.
So if someone felt like maybe they were becoming a serial killer, they would go see the head doctors. And then they would talk. They would talk, an hour at a time, about their parents and their jobs and their friends and made you decide to see me? This reflection allowed patients to see more of the puzzle than ever before, and it was good.
The record shows that some point in the last hundred years, it was determined that the chemicals that people are made of are sometimes wrong. That sometimes, people had a few puzzle pieces missing or in the wrong spot, and this kept them from the norm. Thankfully, humans had developed ways of manufacturing puzzle pieces to give to people that allowed them to achieve the norm. For a lot of people, this filled them in and gave them goodness.
But the folks that made the pieces knew that there weren’t enough people with pieces missing to make them any money. A lot of these folks were the same folks that made a snuff-load of money selling tobacco. They went to their friends in government and said to them,
“Look at all the goodness we’re giving our countrymen. Let us give more goodness to everyone.” And the government looked and saw that it was good and agreed, yes it may be given it to everyone. So the folks that made puzzle pieces spent some money to make advertisements. And these advertisements would make people think that they had missing pieces, even if they didn’t.
These poor confused people that thought their pieces were missing would go to the doctor. The doctor, whose job it was to make people better, would agree that certainly they needed those missing pieces. So they would take some pills and it would put the fake pieces in them and knock the real pieces out of their place.
Now, over time the fake pieces begin to melt. So to stay at the norm, you have to keep getting more pieces. The people that made the fake pieces may have known this, but they figured that it was a sure way to keep demand high, and that it would make them a lot of money. So they did it anyway.
* * * * *
About a month ago, when Bill started living alone in his apartment, Howard had given Bill the card to the company head doctor.“I’m sure this is a difficult time for you,” Howard had said. He put a hand on Bill’s back and walked him out of the office. “I just can’t imagine what I would do if Sandra ever left me.”
“Thanks,” Bill said and he looked at the card, but never called.
Now, Howard sat in Bill’s office. He was holding two cups of coffee, both still steaming. He was still smiling then, excited about the potential of Bill’s new assignment and looking forward to giving Bill a brief overview of the project before an syn-synch with his own bosses in two hours. Bill was expected to be there at any minute and Howard had gone through the trouble of bringing him a cup of coffee. The record shows that this was intended to be a polite gesture. Howard had legitimately forgotten that Bill told him he stopped drinking coffee the day before. Howard had a tendency to gloss over the minutia of conversation, feeling that it was superficial. Howard looked at his watch and smiled.
Bill sat in the head doctor’s waiting room, three floors below his office. He had taken a ticket from the deli-style red number dispenser and when he sat down, he glanced up to a large illuminated sign where numbers made of little red dots of light told him what number they were on. There were only a few other patients ahead of him. He looked down at the stack of last year’s magazines on the table and decided to read an article about how spinach might be bad for him. He worried for a moment, thinking that he had eaten spinach at some time in the last week, but then remembered that he had larger problems in his life. For example, that morning he had seen an alien in his living room that told him he was going to save the world. Bill believed, frankly, that he was losing his mind.
Across the dull waiting room, kicking his legs beneath his chair, a boy no older than six sat impatiently with his father. Every so often he would start to squirm in his chair. He was squirming then, when he jumped up to his feet and proclaimed, “The floor is lava!” And he jumped up onto his chair and from the chair onto the coffee table, then onto a chair next to Bill. The child’s father looked up at the boy and rolled his eyes.
“Buddy,” the father said, “come on guy, get down from there.” There was a meekness to the father’s voice that was enough for the child to know the father wouldn’t do anything.
“I want toys!” the boy shouted. “I want my Mr. Action Man!”
“I don’t have your Mr. Action Man. Maybe we can get it when we get home,” the father said, continuing to read his paper.
The boy walked down the row of chairs, stomping loudly on each one, then back down the line to Bill where he stopped, put his hands on his hips, and put his face right in Bill’s.
“Move!” The boy said.
“Excuse me?” Bill said. The boy put his hands on Bill’s face and wriggled them around.
“Move it, doo doo head!” The boy shouted this time. The father looked up from his paper.
“Don’t do that buddy,” the father said. The boy looked at him for a second and then back to Bill and pantomimed his father with a wagging finger. Bill wrung his hands together and coughed nervously.
“Don’t do that buddy,” the boy said wagging his finger in Bill’s face and speaking through his nose. Bill bit his lip and looked away, trying to ignore the child the way the father was. Again the child repeated his father’s words.
Bill sat there and stared in astonishment. Never in Bill’s childhood would he have dared to do something like that. He tried once, and we have notes of it in the record.
When Bill was eight he pointed his toy gun at the ice cream man. The ice cream man stopped the truck, grabbed Bill by the ear, walked up to Bill’s house and told his father. His father apologized to the man, thanked him, and took Bill inside. Bill’s father took off his belt and tanned his hide. Says here, that’s what Bill’s father called it, tanning a hide. Foot note says that it is a term borrowed from leather making.
Bill turned from the boy, who was still mocking his father in his nasally voice, to the father, who was now continuing to ignore his child. “Excuse me,” Bill said. The father set down his paper and raised an eyebrow as if to say, can I help you? “Could you do something?” Bill asked then added, “please?”
“Kids, huh?” The father said, and smirked. “You got any?” Bill shook his head. “They’re a handful, that’s for sure!” And the father laughed. The child kept repeating his father and adopted the line “you got any?” and put his hands back on Bill’s face and pushed the halves alternately up and down.
“Go away,” Bill said to the child. The father lowered his newspaper.
“Go away,” the child took up as his new mantra. As Bill’s face was smushed together and spread apart by the tiny hands of a six year old, he thought about how this was not how the world was supposed to work. The thought went through his mind that there were supposed to be rules against children smushing together the faces of strangers. This violation of the rules could not go on any longer.
Bill grabbed the child’s hands and removed them from his face, then pointed at a chair across the room and shouted, “Go sit down in that chair and do not get up again.” A stunned silence filled the room for a moment. Even the receptionist was staring at them. The father stood up from his seat, throwing the paper to the floor.
“You don’t touch my son.” His eyes filled with righteousness and the fury of a choir of cherubs. He glared down at Bill. It was when his son stepped down from the chair that the man’s face softened. The boy dismounted with a hop and walked across the room to the seat that Bill had pointed, where he sat down and kicked his feet beneath him. The father looked from the boy then to Bill and did a double take in confusion, unsure how Bill managed to wrangle the little monster. Then, he exhaled, shrugged, and sat down, picking up his paper.
Shortly after the scene had been made, the receptionist called the man’s name and he lead the boy, who Bill was beginning to believe was actually named Buddy, into the back. Before the large wooden door clicked shut, Bill could make out the father saying, “I’d like to get him on Ritalin, or whatever. He gets out of control and I just don’t know what to do.” And the nurse nodding.
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