Part 2: Three Lessons
By
Joseph Devon
(Please note: This story is a continuation of the tales begun in my previous story, “Second Choice,” and while it is designed to stand alone it does draw heavily on the foundation of characters and events that were created in “Second Choice.” Basically, I have to highly recommend that if you haven’t read “Second Choice,” you go do so now.)
The wind blowing over the rocks kicked up a mist of white powdery snow that danced like liquid across the face of the mountain. At first there was nothing, then a form rippled and began to take shape. As it became more recognizable it began to fall, arms and legs firming up in the fragile light. The arms began flailing and the legs began kicking and the body fell in a drop so long it was possible to imagine that the body was flying. A leg caught an outcropping of rock and the body bounced before flipping over to land face first on a lower plateau. The force of impact caused the back to bend so much the heels of the man’s feet almost touched the back of his head. It slipped along a few more inches, the sound of cloth rustling against ice mixing with the wind, and then it finally came to a stop.
The body remained face down, the rise and fall of its back as it continued to breathe was the only sign of motion.
“Get up, Matthew,” Epp said.
Matthew closed his eyes tighter, rolled over, and curled up into a ball. He was dressed in a tuxedo and his dinner jacket was doing little to help against the cold.
“That was the worst try yet,” Epp said.
Matthew gathered himself together enough to lift his head. As he raised his eyes a few inches off the snow he saw, a foot or so in front of him, an immaculate pair of dress shoes with charcoal pants hanging above them, a perfect break just above the cuff. Matthew wiped some blood off of his upper lip with the back of his hand.
“Epp? How long have you been standing there?”
“Since you started falling.”
Matthew pulled himself up to a sitting position. He took off his glasses and examined them before resetting them on his round face. He drew his knees up, his stocky frame bundling up against itself. “So you knew I’d land here? You were able to tell that I would land exactly,” and he slapped the snow covered rock with the flat of his palm, “here?”
“Of course not,” Epp said. Matthew looked up at him. Epp’s face was stern and showed no signs of feeling the bits of snow and ice that the wind was whipping against his dark black skin. He was tall but muscular and his entire frame was draped in a charcoal-knit suit that was tailored so perfectly is almost seemed to be making love to him.
“If I had known exactly where you’d land,” Epp said, “I’d have been standing here.” And he took one step forward, covering the foot-wide gap so that the very tips of his shoes were touching the spot on the snow Matthew’s face had just occupied.
“It’s the same thing,” Matthew said shaking his head and huddling his face in towards his knees.
“It is most certainly not,” Epp said in a voice that caused Matthew’s stomach to tense. “You have to learn, Matthew, that something being highly probably is very different from something having actualized into a definite occurrence. I didn’t know where you’d land until you had actually landed.”
“It’s the same thing,” Matthew repeated, managing to sound like Epp wasn’t there.
“Not even close,” Epp said, and there was a sudden savagery in his voice as he bent down and lifted Matthew up, gripping him by the front of his shirt and holding him up with one arm bent at the elbow.
“Oh come on, Epp,” Matthew said, not even trying to struggle, just trying to hold onto Epp’s fist and rearrange himself to be slightly more comfortable on his perch. “I’ve been up and down these mountains a thousand times. I can’t do this anymore.”
Epp drew his hand back as if to toss Matthew like a shot-put. “A thousand times,” Epp said, “and yet you still fail to grasp the very basics. You still think probability is actuality. You still bleed, failing to remember that you are pure energy. You still fall instead of fly unable to shake the belief that you have a body. A thousand times and that hasn’t sunk in yet.”
Epp flexed his knees slightly and as Matthew watched him aiming into the sky at some far off point he closed his eyes and braced himself. “You were a lot nicer to me three months ago,” Matthew said through his teeth.
“I had so much less to teach you then,” Epp said, never taking his gaze away from the distance. With a last tensing of his knees, Epp threw Matthew’s body, watching as Matthew flailed, his body hurtling off into the dark blue of the Himalayan sky.
—–
Ten year old Sophie Loughton ran up the three stone steps in front of her house and opened the outer door. She let the lower storm window rest against her hyper-colored backpack as she fished in her pocket for her key. Finding it she unlocked the inner door and ran inside, shedding her backpack and boots and jacket in a trail of outerwear as she tottered through the kitchen in her white cotton stockings. She stopped at the refrigerator and stared up at the various notes taped to it, scanning over black magic-marker wording on yellow sticky-sheets to see if any of them were for her. Satisfied that she had nothing pressing to do she grasped the handle of the refrigerator door and opened it, bottles of salad dressing clanking as it slipped out of her grasp, opened too quickly, and slammed against the counter. She withdrew a saran-wrapped plate and then shut the door and resumed her tottering run through the den and over to the stairs. Short legs pumping quick steps she climbed to the second floor, ran down the short hallway to her room, and slammed the door. Only then did her motion stop as she backed up against the door to make sure it was shut properly, the plate resting on her forearms and palms, fingers gripping around the edge and already feeling slick due to condensation on the saran-wrap.
There was a trembling on her face, a flicker of emotion before it froze up again in determination. When this passed she seemed, only then, to notice where she was, as if the entire trip from school to this room had been performed by someone else. She looked down at the plate now, for the first time seeing the slightly browned apple slices and the cream-white cheese stick. She set the plate on the floor and ran over to her bed, a pink cloud of overflowing comforters and pillows in colorful cases. Diving face first into the softness she then turned over and picked up a stuffed horse, holding it at arms length she made it run along the edge of the bed, but something internal seemed to reject this attempt at play and she quickly grew bored and turned to stare out the window instead.
“Epp, where are we?” Matthew asked from the corner, having watched this entire scene play out. The girl showed no signs of having heard him.
“The bedroom of Sophie Loughton.” Epp answered. He was standing next to a little desk painted a dusty pale white.
“Why?” Matthew asked.
Epp turned a slow head, his perfectly at ease body allowing him to achieve a sense of absolute calm even as he gripped Matthew with his eyes. “Would you rather have been thrown past Everest again?”
“No,” Matthew said emphatically, stepping forward towards the bed, brushing snow off his shoulders as he walked. The white dusting floated towards the floor and disappeared in a shimmering dance of light before it ever touched the ground.
“She looks sad,” Matthew said, leaning in to study Sophie’s face.
“Not quite yet,” Epp said. Matthew glanced back and saw that Epp was holding a clipboard in his hands. Running a thumb across his tongue Epp began to flip through the sheets.
“Probability photos?” Matthew asked.
Epp nodded.
“Can I see?” Matthew walked over towards Epp who was now engrossed in the contents of the clipboard. Epp would study a sheet, then flip through a few more, then glance around the room his eyes fixing on a specific object before returning to the clipboard. “Epp?” Matthew asked again, anxious about intruding. “May I see?”
Epp looked up and handed the clipboard to Matthew without a word, then walked over to the girl and began to examine her himself. Matthew looked down and glanced through some of the photos, each one depicting a different outcome, each one with a small graphed wave in the lower corner showing the probability of that outcome. He flipped through a couple of photos of Sophie before he stopped at a blurry picture of himself giving the camera a giant goofy thumbs-up.
“Epp?” Matthew asked. “Something’s not right here. I’m in these pictures.” Matthew glanced down at the corner of the photo of himself and saw that the curve was almost a straight line. “Epp?” Matthew looked up and saw, for the first time, how Epp was studying the little girl. Then Epp turned and a device appeared at the end of the bed that looked like a heart-monitor from a hospital.
“Epp, no. Absolutely not.”
Epp ignored him and continued to take readings, at one point retrieving the clipboard from Matthew’s hands before walking around the bed, glancing at almost everything in the room as he walked, the rustle of the papers on the clipboard the only thing to be heard. “Epp,” Matthew said with much more insistence in his voice. “I’m not doing this.”
“Yes you are,” Epp said calmly, glancing over one last thing before lowering the clipboard to his side and looking up at Matthew. “It’s been three months since you became a tester and we’ve been training you hard, but it’s time to leave the training grounds behind and actually engage.”
Matthew stood where he was, afraid that any motion on his part would acknowledge assent. He allowed himself to shake his head. “I can’t do this.”
“You’ll learn.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because two-thousand years ago I couldn’t do this either. Now step up and remember what we’ve gone over.”
“Come on, Epp, seriously. I haven’t even seen the top of Everest yet. I haven’t even come close. You can’t really think I’m ready, can you?”
Epp had wandered over to the monitoring devise and was tuning some dials located on its front panel. “You were never going to make it to the top of Everest. Nobody ever does until their first push. That was just endurance training.”
“What.” Matthew said, no inflection in his voice, more as a robotic response to hearing something. “I fell past that thing I don’t even know how many times. Are you telling me that you had me do that for no reason?”
“Not no reason. To toughen you up. To get you striving further than you were comfortable with. Trust me, this is going to seem easy to you now.”
And in spite of the anger that was threatening to boil up as he remembered fall after face-first fall into cold rock, Matthew stayed calm, too eager to believe that this was going to be easy. “Really? All of that is going to help make this easy?”
“Absolutely,” Epp said, turning away from the control panel. “Besides, I’ll be here monitoring your every second in case something goes wrong.”
“Like what?” Matthew asked.
A storm was gathering outside and the darkening light of the room, the little girl still playing quietly by herself as they talked, the stillness of the house, all of it compiled to make nervousness creep across his back. “And how wrong could things go?”
“Nothing can really go wrong for her,” Epp said, pointing at Sophie. “If she doesn’t push back than she’ll just return to her current state. It’s only if they engage and you begin to build off each other that the meat bag can get hurt. And that won’t be happening here. That sort of thing happens when someone pushes against a target for an extended period or multiple times. One push isn’t going to do anything negative to her.”
“And me?”
“You?” Epp paused where he was, the corners of his mouth rising. “You could be destroyed.”
Matthew couldn’t tell if Epp was joking.
Epp reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a thick roll of plastic tape that looked like the yellow tape police use to seal off crime scenes. “I’ll also be using this,” he said, waggling the tape. “With time slowed to a stop I’ll be able to step in if something really starts to go wrong.”
This made Matthew feel better and he felt himself able to breathe easier. There was also the joy of watching Epp use the time tape. With his usual slow studious walk, Epp crossed over to one side of the room and, pulling a thumbtack from his suit pocket, pinned one end of the tape to the wall. He began to spool out the yellow band and Matthew watched as the area inside the boundary Epp was drawing began to warp and slow as space and time obeyed Epp’s wishes. Epp walked past Matthew, spooling the tape out, and Matthew couldn’t resist a light snort of wonder. “That is such a neat trick.”
Epp sighed as he walked past. “So I see I get to do this one more time before your first engagement.”
“Do wha-” Matthew started to say, then he started to yell the word “No” but before he could get anything out Epp had gripped his shoulder and pushed. Matthew flew back towards the wall by the door, the rush of speed making his clothes flap and his ears stand out and then he was a wavering shadow of himself and before he came into contact with the wall he disappeared.
There was a gap of a few seconds where Epp pinned another corner of tape up before Matthew came flying in backwards from the opposite wall. The heels of his shoes caught the rug and he fell onto his back, his legs straight out in front of him as he skipped backwards along the floor before crashing up against the wall. Immediately he jumped up and began swatting at himself, his hands flying all over his tuxedo, brushing against the fabric as roaches and spiders and tendrils of vine fell off of him. There were legs everywhere as they dropped onto the floor, some not even making it that far, before they began to disappear. Then Matthew was standing, his whole upper body tense, looking at the spot where the last cockroach had disappeared, his breath streaming in and out of his nose.
“If you continue to view these tools as tricks, Matthew, then you will never learn to use them yourself.” Epp finished closing off a square with the tape. Sophie Loughton was inside, frozen in place on her bed.
“I simply,” Matthew said, his voice containing abnormal volume and stresses as he struggled to get a hold of himself, “was saying how interesting I think the time-tape is. I have an awful lot to learn from you and some things are inherently going to be labeled in my mind as tricks, or magic, or voodoo until I get a firmer grasp on some of the more basic tools. So I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t give me a ride through the jungle underbrush every time I need to compartmentalize something away to be learned at a future point.”
Epp stared at him, his eyes bright against his dark skin. “That was very well put, Matthew,” he said, truth in his voice. “I’ll keep that in mind for the future. You have my word.”
“Thank you,” Matthew said, calming down and losing some of his tension. He walked over to Epp. “So…what’s going on here?”
“Little Sophie Loughton got dumped today.”
“She has a boyfriend?” Matthew looked past the tape and stared at Sophie. “She’s like two.”
“Ten. And her boyfriend, who used to follow her around like a puppy, decided that he would now go around with Romey Laufen.”
“That tramp.”
Epp glared at Matthew.
“Hey, I’m just saying. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free, right?”
“One would purchase the cow if the future value of all milk after deducting for risk was greater than the asking price plus the value of the amount of expected free milk, assuming a cow that provided no benefits other than milk,” Epp said, walking past Matthew and adjusting part of the tape.
“Man, you must get invited to all the best parties.”
Epp ducked under the tape and studied Sophie, his clipboard back in his hand. “That was my way of telling you that your joke didn’t make any sense and that being coy is not going to get you out of this. It is time to engage.”
Matthew ducked under the tape as well and stood next to Epp. He stared at the little girl on the bed. “You really think I can do this?”
“If you think you can, than you can,” Epp said. “What I know for sure is that it is time for you to try.”
“Seriously, how badly can this go? What’s the worst thing that can happen to me?”
Matthew expected a quick comment from Epp, or a long grave sermon, or even another trip through the jungle, but instead Epp avoided his eyes as if there was something about that question that he didn’t feel like contemplating. “You’re ready,” was all Epp said.
“And what…uh…I mean how do I…”
“To start with it’s the same drill as when you were a newbie. Once you engage you’ll notice the differences and you’ll understand what to do. You obviously won’t need to take form here; it’s all been set up. Sophie talked over her break-up with her best friend and is perfectly ready to toss her boyfriend aside in an All-Boys-Are-Stupid sort of manner. Your job is simply to make her take a second look. Your job is to rattle her enough so she has some self doubt. Make her question things a little deeper.”
“Come on, though, she’s ten. I feel weird pushing a ten year old girl.”
“Think of it as necessary surgery. If you don’t push her here, she’ll just continue through life as a meat bag.”
Matthew leaned back, ducking his head, taking a wider view of the bed and girl. “And you’ll be right here waiting?” he said.
“I’ll be right here. I have some people dropping by, but I’ll be right here.”
“People?”
“Former students. Stop stalling Matthew.”
“Yeah but if-”
“Now, Matthew.” Epp’s voice was warm, full of feeling, but commanding just the same.
Matthew glanced back at Epp and then took a few steps forward. He reached an arm out and halted, his hand poised in the air, his fingers in varying states of relaxed tension. “So it’s just like when I was a newbie?” Matthew waited for a response but nothing came. When he turned around Epp was still standing there but his face was impassive and Matthew realized that Epp wasn’t answering any more questions.
Matthew drew closer. Sophie was still holding her stuffed horse where she was frozen and as Matthew approached he felt the familiar ache in his heart begin to throb. His daughter and his wife, the two people he had loved enough to commit himself to an eternity without them, remained always in some deep pit in his chest. But now the pain of leaving them came upon him stronger than he had felt it in months. It was so deep and so internal it might as well have been physical pain and he grunted and faltered as tears welled up in his eyes and the ravenous loss of love clawed at his chest.
He passed his finger against Sophie’s hair, and then vapor-like through her head, at which point his body lurched forward. The pain of loss intensified to a degree he had never felt before, the longing to see his daughter ripping into him, and he engaged in his first test.
Epp watched as Matthew’s body spasmed then froze, Matthew’s connection with Sophie causing him to halt in time as well. Epp rifled through his clipboard, the rustling of paper loud in the still room. He checked the monitor then nodded and walked to the window, ducking under the tape as he went. He sat down against the sill and watched, glancing at the clipboard and monitor every few minutes.
There was a vibrating in his pocket and he withdrew a cell phone and flipped it open to read an incoming text message. He put the clipboard down and held the phone in both hands and the rattling of his thumbs across the keypad clacked in the air as he wrote back. A few seconds later the phone buzzed again, and again he wrote back. “Nobody talks on the phone anymore,” he muttered under his breath. Then, satisfied that the conversation was over he flipped the phone shut and returned it to his pocket.
Behind him on the road out past the front yard of Sophie’s house a car drove by playing it’s bass loud enough to hear, the deep beat warbling higher and lower as the car passed. This was followed by the soft patter of drops against leaves as the clouds outside finally began to rain.
Epp walked back over towards the bed and rotated between glancing through the clipboard, peering at Matthew, and tapping his fingers against the monitor.
“Hi, Epp,” a soft woman’s voice behind him said. Without taking his eyes from his clipboard Epp held up a hand with one finger raised requesting silence from the new person in the room. After a few seconds he rubbed a weary knuckle against one of his eyes and turned to greet the woman. “Hello, Mary.”
Mary was standing in the corner. She was short in stature but with a body like a coiled spring she seemed capable of commanding an entire room. Her hair was thick spilling down her shoulders like gold-spun hay, while her hands rested gently on hips that could easily have been holstering twin pistols. She walked forward, exiting the corner meekly, her head leading the way as if she was unsure about intruding.
She stepped around Epp and took a good look at Matthew and, while his pain had been real enough when it was happening, his freezing in time had turned him into a comical statue causing Mary to burst out laughing. “Do we look that stupid when we test?”
“Most likely, yes. Pain doesn’t freeze well.”
“Boy, he looks like he’s going through quite a bit of pain. And it’s only a little girl. It hardly seems worth it.”
“It was a rookie’s first push that caused Miss Frank to start keeping a diary,” Epp said. “Don’t judge.”
The admonishment struck Mary completely, her role as student to his teacher instantly coming to the forefront as her shoulders shrank slightly. “I’m having problems, Epp.”
Outside there was a rumble. The room had grown quite dark with most of the late afternoon sunlight being filtered out by the clouds. This was contrasted by the square around Sophie’s bed, which still contained some pre-storm light.
“What problems?” Epp asked, and as another rumble of thunder distantly echoed outside he tilted his head and squinted as if trying to hear something unspoken in the sound.
“Well with my specialty for one. And also I seem to be at a point where I’ve grasped space-time and should be capable of using the tape but I keep thinking about what you’ve taught me and I just know I’m missing something. You always told me that I would know, I mean really know when I was ready and somehow I just don’t feel that yet. And-”
Epp raised his hand again and again his finger called for silence. “We’ll start with your specialty. What is your problem there?”
“Three hundred years ago I was a nun. A nun, Epp.”
The dark parts of the room flickered with light and a rumble of thunder, much closer now, seeped in through the window panes. Epp’s head cocked again and he listened to every last note of the thunder’s dying sound. “And I’m assuming that would be Bartleby.”
In the corner, next to the little desk, a figure began to form out of mist and nothing. Slowly a sound filled the room until it was distinguishable as a low yell, growing in volume. The figure solidified into a young man, fists clenched at his sides, head tilted back, screaming at the top of his lungs. The head lowered and the scream faded and pin-straight black hair bobbed around Bartleby’s head as he cackled into a loud joyous laugh and walked forward in a strut. “This is fucking amazing,” he shouted, his fists still clenched at his sides, his enthusiasm catching on enough to make Mary smile. “It was just like you said it would be, Epp. Just like you taught me. And I can feel it, man. I really can. You know? If I concentrate, and really, I mean really deep down at the base of my testicles concentrate, I can feel it. If I focus and concentrate on the separate particles of moisture that compose the storm cloud and notice, sort of out the corner of my eye like you said, the electric charge start to build than I can control it. Actually control it. But you really have to focus with your body. I mean really tense all your muscles.” And he tensed his whole body in demonstration, his face set in harsh angles of concentration before he seemed to build up something within himself and then release it at exactly the same moment a bolt of lightning struck outside.
“You aren’t using your body,” Epp said, facing the monitor once again, clipboard in his hand, his voice barely raised in volume when compared to Bartleby’s shouting. “You exist merely as the sum of all energy you have received from the universe in exchange for steering that energy along certain channels and while you are capable of forming that energy into a mass shaped in your once human form you do not have a body.”
“No, Epp. I really think I have to feel it all the way down my body. It doesn’t work if I don’t have every muscle-”
“Mary,” Epp said, and although he again had no extra volume in his voice he easily interrupted Bartleby. “Mary, please demonstrate a lighting strike for Bartleby.”
Mary turned to face Bartleby, her hands resting on her low slung waistline. Her whole body was casual, her hips slung to one side, with no effort to speak of she reached an arm out and held her hand palm up. Her fingers curled and her thumb rested against the tip of her middle finger. Then she snapped, her fingers creating a beautiful sound as lightning struck outside.
“You don’t have a body, Bartleby,” Epp said, turning back around. “You do seem to have problems listening, however.”
“Who’s this?” Bartleby asked staring at Mary.
“This is Mary; she’s been having some problems with the time-tape as well as with her specialty.”
“What’s your specialty?”
“Sex,” Mary answered.
“Lady, from where I’m standing you don’t got no problems,” Bartleby said, walking past her and stopping at the strip of yellow tape. “And who’s that guy?”
“His name is Matthew. He’s a new student of mine.”
Bartleby grinned. “Been kicking his ass up and down the Himalayas?” Epp didn’t respond. “You know I’ve been meaning to ask you, Epp. I’ve been thinking over all that toughening up and all you like to do at the beginning, trying to force us to engage faster. Wouldn’t it just be easier to take us to a well populated graveyard? That would’ve gotten me motivated, I can tell you that.”
Mary walked forward quietly so she was standing next to Bartleby on the border of the tape. Lighting flashed outside and the dark areas of the room were illuminated, Mary and Bartleby’s figures coming into sharp relief while inside the tape, where the day’s light still existed, things remained the same.
“I don’t care to teach through fear,” Epp answered.
“Not teach through fear?” Bartleby said. “Fucking hell, Epp, you threw me off the top of the Eiffel Tower.”
“Necessity and fear are different,” Epp said, his back still turned. Mary had ducked under the tape while this conversation was taking place and she came around to Epp’s front only to have him turn away from her. “Had I shown you the consequences of what a fall from the Eiffel Tower might do to you that would have been fear. Throwing you off the top was merely condensing the amount of time you were allowed to figure things out. I never show new students a graveyard until they’ve engaged at least once.”
“I just find it amazing that with all you do you still find time to take on new students,” Mary said. There was a reaction in Epp as she said this, a barely perceptible sagging of his shoulders and Mary had the notion that she had said something wrong. She had the notion, in fact, that she and Bartleby had done nothing but say incorrect things since they had each first shown up.
Epp turned around to face them. Whole body looked weary. “When I was a slave,” he said, “I used to hang around the kitchen. I enjoyed learning new things and cooking always interested me. And one day I opted to cook for some of the other house slaves,” he paused. “I’m assuming that if I tell this story with dormice stuffed with rose petals as the finished dish I’ll only lose you further, so I’ll switch it over to something more accessible, like potatoes. So let’s say I opted to cook a potato dish for some of the other slaves, and one of them stayed in the kitchen with me the whole time. When I washed the potatoes he laughed this off, saying they were clean enough from the kitchen slaves and this wasn’t needed. When I chopped the potatoes I took the time to make sure they were all cut into as uniform a cube as I could make them so they would cook evenly. He laughed this off as not needed and too much attention to detail. When I soaked the potatoes in water to remove some of their starch, he told me this wasn’t needed and was a waste of time. When I parboiled them first he told me he never bothered to do that. When I tested the oil temperature, when I seasoned them on both sides while frying, when I drained them carefully after cooking, when I did all of these things he told me that he never bothered with such steps and that they weren’t needed. And then we ate. And he thought the potatoes were the best dish served that night. And do you know what he asked me? Honestly asked me?”
Epp looked at Mary and Bartleby each in turn, his eyes running over them carefully. “He said the potatoes were amazing and he asked me what my secret was.”
“I don’t get it,” Bartleby said.
“He means that taking care of rookies like this guy,” Mary pointed at Matthew, “is all part of it. He didn’t get to where he is and then start doing this stuff on top of all his work. This is his work.” Mary nervously slid her fingers along a golden ringlet of hair that was hanging off to the side of her face. “Is that right?”
At those words something inside of Epp seemed to unhinge, some set of internal wires and supports sagged at its foundation and he turned, once again to look at Matthew and Sophie. “If you have to ask if you’re right, Mary, then you’re not.”
“I get it,” Bartleby said, picking up Sophie’s stuffed horse. “So you’re saying I should take on a student? You really think I’m ready for that?”
“I don’t think you are anywhere close.”
“So what then? You just tell me what to do, Epp, and I’ll do it.”
“That is precisely the problem.” Epp was staring at Matthew now.
“Seriously, Epp,” Bartleby said, trying to catch Epp’s attention. “Just give me another challenge. Anything. Let me have it. Whatever you want.”
Epp froze, his charcoal suit highlighting his eyes squinted in thought. “I’ve failed you,” he said, dropping the statement like a weight into the conversation.
“What?!” Mary shouted. “Epp don’t say that.”
“Yeah, Epp. Do you know how much I’ve learned under you? How can you say you’ve failed us?”
“Because you are still under me. Because if you really wanted to make me proud as students you would seek to surpass me, but I’ve let you down. I’ve kept you too sheltered or led you too strictly. You’ve come to view learning the tricks I teach you as a replacement for actual experience, you’ve come to regard accomplishing what I set out for you as more important than the work.
“You,” he glanced at Mary, “you’re upset because your specialty doesn’t seem to fit you. Well that is how it goes. You are what you are and you don’t get to choose every step of your path. You’re not the first tester to find themselves blundering into a specialty that seems all wrong for them. It happens quite often. Poets find themselves pushing mathematicians, thieves pushing saints. Hell, Ricardo was pushed to his theory of comparative advantage by a lute player. You are here to learn, not to continue with the illusion of who you once were. You can’t move forward with your skills if you continue to fight them. You want to use the time tape? Then use it just as you are.
“And you,” he turned to Bartleby. “You are so caught up in whether you’re outperforming your contemporaries that you haven’t done an honest days work in centuries. The test is not the lesson, Bartleby.
“And you both seek to avoid the real challenges of the outside world by residing as my students forever. You aren’t making sure I approve of your steps because you need teaching; you’re doing it to avoid having to take steps of your own.
“I’ve let you down. Reality is far more rewarding than anything I can show you. And reality is far more dangerous than anything I can prepare you for. Reality will not pull its punches.”
He looked from Mary to Bartleby, his eyes scratching across their faces, before turning around and looking at Matthew. “School is out,” he said, and he reached a hand up and grabbed the yellow tape. With a tug he popped it loose from the wall and the square of light inside the room became a jumble of yells and shifting shades and lightning flashes. Epp ripped the tape off of all four corners and everything finally synched up to where it was in the present.
Matthew fell to the floor, screaming in pain as Sophie reappeared seated at her desk. She was frantically scribbling in a notebook, her mood matching Matthew’s yells although she showed no signs of hearing him.
Matthew’s screams turned into individual words: “Let me see my daughter!” Then he was on all fours, crying and begging, “Let me see my daughter,” over and over, “let me see my daughter.”
Epp walked over to Bartleby and gripped his shoulder. Without a word he shoved and Bartleby flew towards the window disappearing after a few feet.
Then Epp traced a loose rectangle in the air with his fingers and a few seconds later a door appeared out of a shimmering blend of colors. He opened it. “Through here. Both of you. Now.”
Mary knelt down to give Matthew a hand and half lead half carried him through the door. Once they were through Epp slammed it shut, then walked over to Sophie’s desk. He reached a hand out and gripped the corner of the sheet she was writing on. Sophie’s hand continued on through his arm as she wrote. Epp waited a few more seconds then yanked at the corner, the sheet duplicating and splitting into two copies, one remaining exactly in place, the other forming in Epp’s hand. He folded the sheet and slipped it into his suit pocket. He walked through the door and slammed it shut behind him. In a blink it shrank into oblivion and nothing remained in the room but the sound of the rain outside and Sophie’s pen scratching across the page.
—–
Matthew sat up. After walking through the door he had lost track of things. The door had done something strange and he had separated from the woman who had helped him through. And he really was very tired. He realized the ground he was sitting on was muddy and the seat of his pants was soaking through. He started to scramble back to try and stop the seeping water from drenching his pants but he found himself lacking in energy and when his back came up against something solid he settled for leaning back against it in a sitting position. Everything smelled like rotting leaves.
It was dark but street lamps from somewhere close by made vision possible and he figured he was close by to where he had just been because the weather seemed to match. It wasn’t currently raining but a storm was moving through. He looked to the ground at his right and breathed in slowly. Then he groaned and leaned his head back, clunking it against his support a few times. “This just keeps getting better,” he said.
He looked back at the corpse lying on the ground at his right. “Hey,” he said, nudging it with one hand. This was a reflex; he did it without thinking, and even as he did it he knew it was a stupid gesture. The man’s clothes were soaked through and covered with moss, his skin was rotting away in parts and he was lying face down in the soft dirt deep enough to obstruct any breathing he might have been doing. He was dead. But, not knowing how to process anything that had happened to him in the last hour not to mention the last three months, Matthew adjusted the glasses on his face and once again nudged the corpse. “Come on,” he pleaded, “come on, wake up.”
When this again accomplished nothing Matthew leaned back against his support and closed his eyes. He felt the need to be alone with his exhaustion if only for a few seconds.
Rain started to fall.
He heard a rustling close by.
He opened his eyes.
“My god I’ve raised the dead,” he thought stupidly as he watched the corpse next to him begin to move. A shower of dirt dribbled across his leg as the corpse’s arm lifted and moved sluggishly toward his leg. The hand lowered onto his leg at the same instant that the head raised up and Matthew felt cold shock spread through him as he saw that the half-rotted face was staring at him; dead eyes glossy with rainwater were locked onto his face and a hungry grin spread across the thing’s yellowed teeth. He looked down at the hand clamped onto his knee and he saw the thing’s fingers, two of them nothing but bare bone, sink into his flesh. He felt his skin teari