Obsession – The Word Worker

The Town

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The hot glue gun sat cooling beside his hand. A quick inspection of the board, a wiggle here or tap there, showed nothing loose or out of place. It was finally finished. How long had it taken him to figure out the right materials for those mossy roofs? He couldn’t even remember. It hadn’t mattered, really; the model had to be perfect.

He wasn’t sure why, exactly. He had woken one morning with an overwhelming need to build it. A town he had never seen, but he knew every detail. He’d looked it up one day, trying to convince himself it was just imagination and didn’t have to be so precise. There it was, a tiny town somewhere in the mountains clear across the world. How it could even be recorded on the internet he didn’t understand. After that he gave up fighting the urge; he never repeated his search or dug any deeper either. He had been too afraid of the reasons to want to know them.

Now, as he stood over his work, tiny lights flickered in the windows. He blinked, but they didn’t vanish. Music drifted faintly from the treeline on the far side of the model, and the tops of brightly-colored trees around the houses quivered as if a gentle breeze tickled them. The laughter of children rose from the house nearest him. He didn’t wait for more but stumbled to the door on legs that felt like jello. In his terrified hurry he forgot to shut the door.

Mr. Meanie

“I was yelling at Mr. Meanie! He just WON’T! LEAVE! ME! ALONE! I can’t do anything right anymore!”

The above came from my tearful, sobbing seven year old son. He had thrown his playthings and rushed to his room growling like a cornered tiger. To an outsider it might have looked like a temper tantrum, but tantrums are intentional and controlled. In that moment my son was helpless, trapped by his own mind and desperately screaming for help. This is the face of OCD.

My son is bright and beautiful. He can build anything he can imagine with Legos. He knows more than I ever realized existed about dinosaurs. He loves Godzilla and could probably provide sound effects for the movies with his imitation skills. He has a gift for finding the lonely and offering love. He adores his little sister and, though they fight like cats and dogs, will demolish anyone else who dares to offend her.

One tiny part of that beautiful little brain malformed. A section of neurological wiring has a short. Thoughts that feel like his but are not, unbidden and unwelcome feelings, and unwilled behaviors originate in that shorted out, alien knot. Chemical help can mute them to a whisper. Therapy can provide strategies for working around the shirt in the wiring. Nothing will ever make them go away. His whole life will be a battle with Mr. Meanie, the alien inside.

For now, we turn off the lights and snuggle on the bed, his head on my chest and his hand clutching my arm. Worship music plays from my phone, his choice, soft and soothing in its reminder of a love that bears his pain. He doesn’t fully understand it yet, but he can feel it, and his tension fades. We have quieted Mr. Meanie. For now.

The Lens

Savannah groaned. Here she was, supposed to be photographing this society fundraiser, and the camera lens was dirty. Again. She reached in her bag for the lens cloth.

After a meticulous wipe that covered every square millimeter of glass, she nodded with satisfaction and lifted the camera again. She snapped a candid of a bored looking brunette and her plasticized escort. Was that a smudge on the digital display? No, it was the stupid lens again.

The cloth went to work again. This time she sprayed the lens with cleaner and shoved the cloth into the edges with her fingernail, digging. She inspected the results with a frown and looked around for her next subject. Just in time. The host was taking the stage for the official welcome. She raised the camera.

Was that a speck? Man, that thing was huge; her boss would fire her if that thing showed up in print! That did it. There was no way she was taking any more pictures until that lens was clear. She sat down in the nearest chair and peered closely at the camera.

It had to be so small the naked eye couldn’t see it for her to be missing it so badly. The camera would obviously make it look bigger, like looking through a microscope. She breathed on the lens to fog it and pored over the results. There, did it look like the fog didn’t settle in that spot?

The world shrank. The camera lens filled her vision. That had to be a streak. And was that dust? She wiped, sprayed, wiped again. She had to get perfect pictures; her job was on the line. If she didn’t get this fixed soon the fundraiser would be over. That lens certainly was filthy.

Inexorable

He had lived his entire life in its shadow. Gazing up its sides with jaws agape like the tourists he ferried. Losing himself in the whispering roar of its invisible flow.

His boat had been a favorite; no one knew the glacier like he did. Every pop, every boom, was a message. His passengers returned again and again for the thrill of watching the birth of icebergs, the formation of bridges, and the crumbling of secret worlds.

When not on the boat he had walked the white expanse of its surface. He could walk the same path every week for a year and never become bored. Crevasses opened and sealed. Turquoise pools formed and drained and left intricate honeycombed tunnels that summoned impotent longing. Caves appeared and just as magically vanished again as snow became ice and slid to its eventual doom.

Ten years ago he had ferried his last load of gasping, camera happy tourists. His body, like the ice, cracked and moaned under the weight of time passing, and at eighty-two, the crevasses in his memory formed honeycomb of their own. But he remembered the glacier. She had been the love of his life. He had pored over her ever-changing yet changeless face every day for sixty years, extolled her unpredictable beauty to hundreds of thousands who marveled with him. He remembered the glacier.

Glitch

“Hey, Job, you’re glitching again.” Mara’s voice came through the neural transmitter. “What’s up?”

“This uniform doesn’t fit,” Job’s voice sounded tinny. “The collar has restricted blood flow and the shoulder seams are in the wrong place.” His shoulders twitched repeatedly, and one finger ran first left, then right, then left again under the thin collar, pulling it out of shape.

“The uniform is one solid piece, specially made to form fit,” Mara reminded him. “And you don’t have blood.”

“I cannot perform properly.” Job’s voice thinned farther. “My sensors are certain this uniform is wrong. I must have a new uniform.”

“Job, the uniform is not the problem.” Mara checked her feed. “Run a self-diagnostic immediately. These readings are out of balance; you need to find the source.”

“Uniform is sh-sh-shutting down central p-p-processing.” Job’s voice broke and stuttered, and he ripped at the collar of the uniform. “M-m-m-must cha-cha-“

“Manual override, freeze program,” Mara sighed. “Run full diagnostic on all Job circuits. Not just sensors this time! All circuits! This is the fifteenth test run; clearly the central processor is affected because he’s had a different glitch every time.”

“Unfreeze program.” Mara watched the robot press its cheeks until the face clicked open. “Job, put your face back on. Disconnecting your main sensors is not going to fix your processor. Oh good grief, you’ve done it anyway.”

The Dust Siren

“Come with me, my lord,” she whispered in his ear. She was perfect, enchanting in her beauty. She laughed, silver notes of music, and caught his fingertips with hers as she danced lightly away. He followed, allowing the touch to remain. She twirled with delight, the hem of her robe indistinguishable from the dust on the path for one distracting moment.

“Where shall we go, my lady?” he asked, held captive by the gray that seemed to whirl in her irises. The city faded from memory, the path disappeared beneath his feet. He cared nothing for where his sandals carried him so long as that laughing smile flashed before him.

“Eat with me, my lord,” she crooned, leading him to a gray couch beside a laden table. She sat beside him as he lay back, a bowl of sweet plums in her hand. Her lithe fingers slipped one between her teeth, rosy lips closing over it just as its juice began to flow. His own mouth parted, and he leaned toward her, his hand reaching out to touch her arm with reverence. She blushed winningly and popped another fruit into his mouth with a giggle.

“Stay with me, my lord,” she pleaded, running a hand through his hair. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, her scent of earth and dried grasses filling his senses. Her fingers stroked his forehead as he drowsed with his head in her lap. His own hands played with the folds of her gown as it seemed to flow through his fingers.

“I must sleep, my lady,” he whispered, arms drooping weakly from the couch to trail in the dust. She wailed in anguish, slipping from beneath his head to kneel beside him. He felt her arms around him, as if her skin blended with his. Strange, he thought as he fixed his eyes upon her face. The color faded from her cheeks, leaving nothing but gray that matched her eyes.

“Come back to me, my lord,” she wept to the skull that lay alone in the dirt. The tatters of her robe formed furrows in her skin as she buried her colorless face in one crumbling hand. The wind blew across the bare ground, lifting dirty clouds into the air to obscure the ruin of his city in the distance. She knelt there, cracked and crumbling, in the accusing gaze of his empty bones.