Chapter 214: Day 213

Day 213,

Morning thought: It’s now been nine days since I told Pat I’d come back and talk with him again.  Well, I feel horrible now.  I hate breaking promises.  It’s not like I was meaning to avoid him, I just plain forgot.  Which is even worse.  I even had a day in there where I didn’t have much going on that would have been perfect for a visit but it was only three days after so it felt too soon then.  Or am I just telling myself that I thought that to give myself a better sounding excuse than forgetting?  If you don’t write it down at the time, it can be hard to tell the difference between a memory of what you thought versus a story that you made up and want to believe about what you were thinking.  That goes for anything to a degree, I suppose, but for completely internal things like actions and intentions, it’s so much easier to do.

Is that why writing in this journal feels like a compulsion at times?

 

I found Pat down on the beach once again.  Unexpectedly, he was accompanied by half a dozen young children, probably around three or four years old I’d guess, practically toddlers.  The oldest one there might have been old enough to wind up as a new student for me next rainy season.

One of them saw me and started shouting hello, which got Pat’s attention.  He waved me over to where he was sitting on a driftwood log with a child who was playing with his beard.  He hardly seemed to notice the latter.  A patient man indeed.

I must have shown some hesitation because he made a joke about most of the kids not biting.  I made a brief exhalation that could almost pass for a laugh and took a seat.  The little one on Pat’s lap shifted their attention from his beard to my hair.  I put up a hand to ward off the incoming grasp and submitted to having that grabbed instead.

I’ll admit, this scene wasn’t exactly my thing.  Sure, I’d just spent a few months acting as an elementary teacher, but that one or two year difference is a large one.  Can’t really even hold a conversation at this age.  Or maybe it’s just me that can’t figure out how to communicate with them.

Slowly moving my hand in circles to keep the toddler entertained while they moved their arms along with it, I asked Pat what the occasion was.  Nothing special, apparently.  He often winds up as a sort of communal babysitter for the Village; volunteers for it, really.  This just happened to be the first time I visited him while he was doing it.

Watching the children run and shout and laugh and play in the water and dig in the sand, I asked Pat how he doesn’t get overwhelmed by them all.  He said he’s had a lot of practice.  

Well, I can’t deny that.  

Also, liberal distribution of snacks and storytime.

That’ll do it too, I suppose.

I wondered aloud though what he would do if one of them fell down and got hurt, or went too far out into the water and started drowning, or stopped playing nice with the others and got in a fight?

He shook his head and said that outsiders always seem to ask that sort of question about the children here.  That we all seem to expect children to be drawn to danger - sticking hands onto hot surfaces, playing with sharp objects, walking in front of carts - like they don’t have any sort of survival instinct to avoid it.

I said that’s because they don’t.  They haven’t learned yet at that age what things are dangerous without firsthand experience and don’t have the pattern recognition or critical thinking to figure it out until it happens.  And telling them not to do something because it’s dangerous and will hurt rarely works the first time.  That or they’ll seem to forget about it after the one instance you managed to stop them and be right back at it the next day, if not the next minute.

Pat laughed at how much I sounded like all the other outsiders he’s had this exact conversation with.  Not the same words or even entirely the same reasoning, but still the same sentiment and picture of what children are like in the worlds we remembered being from.  It used to strike him as strange that people, even children, could somehow simply not recognize danger when they saw it and not avoid it.

He pointed at the child playing in the water, splashing about as the waves came up past their ankles.  He said that child has never tried swimming but they know they can’t, and no one’s told them to stay out of deep water, they just see it and know it will be bad for them if they go any further.  A bird doesn’t need to be taught to not fly into a storm or to avoid the jungle cats, so why should children be any different?  It’s not until they get older and learn how to question things that they start testing to determine the expanding borders of their limits and sometimes overshoot.  And yet, every outsider insists that instinct isn’t something children have.  Or not to that degree.  Pat seemed to think it’s a difference that extends into adulthood as well.

I said that might be the case, but accidents still happen.  Especially with motor skills and coordination still developing at that age.

With a grunt of exertion, Pat lifted the child between us down to the ground, scooted them off to play with the others, and proceeded to concede that’s true but added that’s why he chose this spot for them to play.  On a less placid stretch of beach or a less clear day, he wouldn’t let the children play like this without someone more spry than himself to assist with an unexpectedly large wave or unnoticed deep spot, but here and now, it’s perfectly safe.  He paused for a moment, gave a sly grin, and added that now he has someone like that on hand.

Before I could respond to that he stood up and announced that we were all going to take a walk further down the beach, and then maybe when we were done the Archivist would do today’s storytime.  If I didn’t know better I’d say that was a subtle bit of payback for waiting longer than I said I would to visit.  And while the thought crossed my mind, I don’t think that’s Pat’s style.  Lin’s maybe.  Definitely Cass’s.  But not Pat’s.

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Mentally reeling from having been suddenly volunteered as I had been, I almost didn’t register how readily, if excitedly, the kids all abandoned whatever they’d been in the middle of to start following Pat up the beach.  Well, “following” was a loose term here.  More like all running in the direction they saw Pat going and then either stopping to look at/play with something or run back to him when they got too far ahead.  Still, surprisingly well behaved and quick to obey.  I’d noticed similar when I first started teaching, but seeing it again with even younger kids made the vaguely spooky feeling come back fresh.

As we walked Pat guessed what I was thinking and whispered to me that I was probably wondering if the villagers are human in the same way I am.

I gave another brief almost-laugh, said that he really has had this conversation a lot, and then admitted that while it seemed rude to phrase it that way he was right.  It’s been a thought that’s crossed my mind on a number of occasions, and not just because of the children being weirdly well-behaved and good at self-preservation in a way that implied a difference in nature as well in nurture.  The Blossom Field was the big one.  Also, the fact that no one ever seems to get sunburned despite going around with a lack of protection from the hot tropical sun, even with a wide range of skin pigmentation in the population.  And that wide range itself is an oddity given the Village’s small population and the centuries or more it’s been around as the world’s apparent sole civilization.  I suppose the occasional outsider once a generation or so might partially explain that, especially if they used to be more common, but I don’t know if that’d be enough.  Not to mention the near lack of disease and the weird link between births and deaths, but the former might be environmental and the latter might be supernatural, so they sort of get a pass in this case.

I realized around that point that not only was I rambling, but I’d stopped whispering and was getting weird looks from a couple of the kids.  I stopped talking, smiled and waved, and they went back about their business, such as it was.

After a brief lull  in the conversation, Pat picked it back up and confirmed that I wasn’t the first outsider to make those observations.  All the even mildly inquisitive ones do.  But while our memories of past lives might indicate differences in human biology, once we wash up here we’re the same as the villagers, in body if not in mind.  Even back when there were enough outsiders here at a time for them to form romantic relationships with one another they still couldn’t produce children together without a visit to the Blossom Field.  The drive to danger and disobedience seems to be something else though.  Maybe spirit more than mind.  All of us, villager and outsider, still human though all the same.

I probably would have spent more time mulling all that over except I was reminded that I was expected to do “storytime” for these kids and spent the rest of the walk trying to think of something appropriate.

The walk went the other way around the coast than Pat and I usually did (“usually?” has it even been twice?) and we stopped at the base of Siren Overlook.  To my surprise, it had a tunnel down here at the bottom that I’d never seen from up top connecting to the beach on the other side.  Definitely not a natural tunnel.  Walls too straight, ceiling too perfectly arched.  Fairly worn by age and tides though.

It was in the shade of this tunnel mouth that we unpacked the picnic lunch (from a basket that I’d also been volunteered to carry) and I was asked for a story.  I managed one.  Got into it enough to enjoy it even.  And the kids seemed to like it, which was the important part.

After that the kids played for a while longer in that new location until they started to get tired out and we turned around to go back to the Village.  No more existential discussions with Pat.  At first I was too busy watching the kids, assuming that it was now my job to be keeping them safe now that we’d moved to a new spot, and then by the time we were on our way back I was feeling tired myself.

We wound up taking them back to Pat’s house until parents started coming by for them over the next few hours.  Pat said I was free to go when we arrived, but I volunteered (actually voluntarily volunteered this time) to stick around and help babysit.  I was feeling a strange tinge of familiarity by that point.  I’m certain I never had kids of my own in the past life I remember, but perhaps babysitting was a thing I’ve done before.  Admittedly, I might have been slightly less eager to stick around if most of the kids weren’t about ready to start taking naps curled up in Pat’s large chairs or on blankets spread on the floor.

While they slept, I finally got around to making my apology to Pat for not coming by to visit as soon as I said I would.  

He said not to worry about it.  What’s a day or three of difference when all of us have nothing but time?  Especially him.  I started to say that the difference was a broken promise and to me that was a world of difference, but he interrupted me.  Said that he was sure that I’d tried to keep it and failed, which wasn’t the same as choosing to break it and that he’d forgotten too.  Or rather, if I hadn’t brought it up he would have assumed it was a conversation he’d had with some other outsider in the past.  Truth is, more often than he likes to admit he gets things mixed up.  What happened yesterday or what happened a decade ago.  So many memories.  Eventually you stop having new conversations, just new iterations of old ones, albeit some get far more or less iterations than others.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

Pat offered me tea.

I accepted.

When the parents did arrive, my presence was a surprise, but not an unwelcome one.  Most of them seemed glad to see someone helping Pat, especially when that someone would be the kids’ teacher in a year or two.  Headstart on education and all that.

Staying around until the last of the kids were picked up meant I didn’t get much time in the library today.  Well enough, I guess.  Like Pat said, what do any of us have but time here?

I talked with Maiko a bit about my unusual day on the way back home.  Over dinner I asked if she had any sort of “instinct” when she was that young for staying out of trouble or behaving and obeying her mother.

She said she didn’t remember either way.

 

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