Eleven Years of Hope

When the doctors asked him if he wanted to hop into a frying pan, Alexander of Severe Level III, long acquainted with doctor tongue, knew they meant they wanted to trial a new drug or a new treatment. Alexander said okay because he was tired of being shut up all day in the institution and wanted to travel to the testing lab. More to the point, he'd lost a whole portion of himself to shrapnel when he stepped on a landmine eleven years previous and continued to confound what was left of his cerebral cortex with the hope of its recovery.

The doctors assured Alexander that the new treatment, which had to be administered far from the city to avoid electrical effects, had worked well on animal subjects, and if Alexander of Severe Level III would scrawl his agreement on the bottom of a standard form, he could find his way home again.

Home seemed a dream, but a pleasant one.

Once, when he was a small child at the county fair, Alexander, then of Innocence, had strayed far from the hand of his mother who was busy with cotton candy or ice cream. He had been blinded by the midway bulbs, deafened by the shouts of shills, and had begged a tall cowboy for help. Home at that time was not only a pleasant dream, but the possibility of its loss a nightmare.

Now, minus a vital part of himself, and with the promise of retrieving it again without having to go back to the war jungle of snakes and booby traps, Alexander scribbled his consent, and climbed into an institution van with a doctor, and a driver who somehow looked like a beautiful cow. They both wore important badges and faces.

Alexander watched the bridges and buildings pass as the van moved through traffic toward the point where the natural earth broke free from the clutches of the city. He hadn't been outside the institution for eleven years, and stared, marveling, at the apartment towers with their multitude of windows and balconies. Some of the balconies held human figures aloft.

Why don't they jump? he asked the doctor.

They're not missing a part of themselves, replied the doctor.

That made good sense to Alexander of Severe Level III. He knew something in his head had blown into the treetops all those years ago when he walked point in the jungle with his brothers, but he wasn't sure what it had been. He might have been a painter before the war, or maybe a carpenter. The only thing he knew with some certainty was a faith that tickled his blood. Somewhere lived a god that smiled.

Once outside of the city, but still a long distance from the testing laboratory, they left the main highway and drove along past fields of corn and wheat.

Cultivation is the most necessary labour, said Alexander. He had read that somewhere a long time ago. He wasn't sure it was true, but it did make a certain sense.

Yes, said the doctor.

But why is that? asked Alexander.

Well, we all have to eat, I suppose.

Alexander of Severe Level III sat back in his seat, satisfied with the answer, and chewed a memory that had ripened into an edible fruit of a time in the war before the landmine blew him into the institution. He had stood around a fire with three or four other soldiers and tossed live shells one by one into the flames. The idea was not to flinch when they exploded, and with any luck, not to get bullet pierced. One guy did receive a hit that fractured his jaw, and through the wonder of medical evacuation and the benediction of medical discharge, returned home where the only institutions he had to suffer were those of reconstruction surgery, family life, and a dull factory job.