Chapter 8: A New Life

EMETT

I headed home from my attempted suicide trip out west. As trips go, I tend to like ones that are fun, and involve things like sightseeing. But anyway. My parents interpreted my moving off as never wanting to live near them again, something I eventually amended, but for now they instead found me a place in the nearby city of Richmond.

For two people who I had supposedly estranged, Alexander and Bianca were being extraordinarily helpful, and found me a quiet place with low rent in the city outskirts. As were my Ash and Willow, my siblings. Willow gave me a hint that Gargarean was hiring (not only people's names but business names are changed). Likewise, after I quit rather than get fired from Gargarean, Ash told me about BigBlock. As such, I found a lot of things different from then on.

Let's start with the apartment. Somehow this low rent apartment seemed ideal. It was basically a divided up house with electricity, WiFi, HVAC, and running water all included. I honestly don't know why it was so inexpensive, aside from living on city outskirts. But even though it was good to be true, I started to really dislike my roommates. There was Chris, a dudebro (for those not familiar with the term, basically a jock fratboy who says "dude" and "bro" all the time), who spent a lot of time in relationship drama with his girlfriend/ex-girlfrient/re-girlfriend Jasmine. Jasmine was actually quite sweet, but with a fiery temper. Both of them were slightly abusive and dysfunctional in different ways, not seriously so but enough that I was concerned. But Jasmine wasn't exactly a battered woman either, as she gave back as good as she got. There was another roommate (we'll call him Jeremy), and one that only lasted a few months before he got fed up and moved out (who I'll call Robert). As a condition of living there, I had to keep certain areas of the house clean. Robert had left some notes along the lines of, «Dear Emett, I would appreciate it if you were to clean the downstairs bathroom. It stinks in there, and I think it's time you pulled your weight for the greater good of the household.» To which I responded, «Dear Robert, I would also appreciate you not leaving passive-aggressive notes rather than telling this to me in person. Secondly, I don't care about the "greater good" but I do care about the fact that I have just worked several ten hour shifts at Gargarean, and do not appreciate work being dumped on top of this. I never see you leave the house, so if it bothers you so, why don't you do it? Lastly, while I am willing to help out keeping the house clean, I would like to clean things I actually use, like the upstairs bathroom, the kitchen, and the room with the television.» I more or less got my wish eventually, but it was still an enormous hassle. Robert left and got replaced by a guy called James. He was easy going and more mature than either Chris or Jeremy, but had the sort of demeanor where I didn't want to make him angry. The house was frequently filled with reefer smoke, but I was neither involved in that (I was a child of the Winners Don't Use Drugs era) nor did I really care to condemn them for it. I just excused myself, and largely kept to myself. I tried to keep the house cleaned as promised, but sometimes there seemed to be phantom dirt, like where I sprayed down the toilet but I was told that it looked so dirty. But beyond that, staying in the house overall proved to be ummmm... interesting.

Aside from the landlord not wanting a lot of things in the apartment that were in there (Jasmine, drugs, alcohol, loud parties), some of the drama with Chris proved to be interesting. Chris had two moms as a result of the first one rejecting him for adoption, and he had a crushed ribcage due to a bad birth. Jasmine was a busty sorta Middle Eastern-looking gal (so she had a weird combination of brown hair and very tan skin, though I suspect she was actually half-black from her parents), who apparently used to be an escort, but now was working towards becoming a nurse. Jasmine had told Chris that nobody but her would accept his body, and another time Chris pushed Jasmine down the stairs. Yeaaaaah, it was that kind of relationship... After awhile, Chris and Jasmine broke up after a nasty phone call from her. Chris dated a blond gal who was Greek or something (let's call her Oikos). So we got really good food when she came over. But then Chris was back to dating Jasmine. I asked, "Why did you leave Oikos? She seemed very upbeat and nice. And she was good at cooking!" He shook his head like this was a really stupid question, "Nah, she was boring!" The funny thing was, Oikos looked a lot like Jasmine in the height and eyes area. It was like he was dating a blonder and more chipper version of Jasmine, yet he wanted to go back to the depressed and dysfunctional one because the other was boring. I shrugged.

As for my jobs, well let's start with Gargarean. Gargarean is a multi-floor football-stadium-sized factory that was arranged less like a warehouse and more like a series of bookshelves arranged by Satan. That is, in a lot of warehouses, Costco and Aldi being commercial examples, you tended to have all items of a type on the same shelf. Gargarean had its items shelved, to in turn be picked up. Using a scanning gun (or Telxon, which like the Xerox, was named after the company that made it), the prospective collector was assigned to scan the shelf, scan the item, then scan the box. When the box was filled, I can't remember if you scanned the conveyor belt or scanned the box out, or just scanned a new box. But in any case, I thought I was fairly fast at this, and certainly had more hustle than some people working there, but other people had higher quota scores. After Christmas, I was shifted to stowing on shelves, where I had to do about the same process in reverse (box, then item, then shelf, if I remember correctly). I suspect this number was based on some arbitrary measure of my ability to learn about things rather than my actual collection rate (which never majorly went up or down despite rise or fall in my pace), as I seriously didn't care enough to be bothered to figure anything out about the place. I think I usually got about 79 to 84/120 or something, the latter of which was impossible no matter how fast I walked. As it was, the only time I actually did above normal was when I won a contest of sorts for most items picked that day, and got a small gift card. That time, I saw some interesting items like limited edition games or rare stuff, because they sent me all around the place. But for the most part, no, I was more interested in a girl named Sapphire. She was more of a slacker than I was, yet somehow she stayed employed, and seemed to do better than me on the quotas even when she wasn't there due to scheduling off-days. But since she was fun to talk to, I stayed in touch with her, usually talking during breaks. That thing I said about the heart sense, we always seemed to find each other when we wanted to talk, even though it was a huge warehouse with several floors of shelves and two sides.

After a few weeks of work at Gargarean, I took a weekend trip to visit Fox. It had been a lot of work, and this was before I met Sapphire I think (I met her immediately after I was muttering to myself about how lonely this job was, literally almost bumping into her). She agreed to meet in Old Town of Fredericksburg for just some coffee. Only, coffee turned into dinner at an Asian restaurant. How? Well, I headed over to Fredericksburg, and got there roughly three hours to spare. Only there was congestion and detours, leading a square, blocking off the entire area two blocks around the coffee shop. I searched in vain for a parking spot or a way to make it even a block closer. I finally found a spot that was a block or two away from the square, and called her up. The coffee shop by this point was about to close, and apparently this was some impromptu festival that my mom knew about but sounded made up. I thought about the logistics of making a fake festival and how many construction people would need to be involved along with how many people were needed to do a fake celebration. It seemed like a very fox-like prank, and very consistent with my assumption that she was a spy. So while I wound I trying to walk there anyway, she eventually texted me to say that we should go somewhere else. I wound up driving to some other place where I ate my first taste of Peking Duck in my life. If that seems weird, it's because every other time I tried it, they were out of duck.

She was carrying a husky from another job, which she left in the car. As we entered the restaurant, I apologized for the hassle of coming here, "...I mean, I was okay with coming to the cafe, but when I finally got parked, it was too late to get there." She shrugged, "No worries! I was running late anyway." No worries. I was to hear this particular catchphrase from strangers, bosses, and friends the next few years to come. Whether male or female, many people I met said this phrase. Aside from Pokemon Diamond & Pearl and maybe the Lion King, this wasn't an expression I'd heard a great deal. I was only to piece together what this meant later.

She looked around frantically for some reason. "What's up?" I asked. Fox explained, "I'm looking for a friend of mine." But the way she was looking was strange. It wasn't like you would look for a friend who was recognizable, but like she was trying to see through a thick fog. Or some type of illusion. We ate dinner, had a few conversations, and then both headed back on our way.

The next day, it was like a fog was lifted from my eyes. I was able to look at people the same way as Fox. In the warehouse, I saw a girl with brick red hair in a ponytail, and it was sorta like I was seeing Fox in her form. I can't explain it, except from a Biblical passage that I'd read.

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him. He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”

They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” He asked, “What things?”

They replied, “About Jesus of Nazareth. He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.”

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.

Basically, while before I was unable to see Fox, now I could recognize her through her disguise. Certain mannerisms like the catchphrase above, or a certain intensity in her eyes, or something about how her face looks. I concluded that I probably did not have an accurate picture of how she actually looked, but if I had to guess, I would have described her much like this picture below. This was a picture that I came across painted by an amateur artist when I had been visiting my sister in Arizona.

Of course, I have no way of knowing that. But this is more or less how she looked when I saw Fox in the flesh.

Whether fat or skinny, white, black, or otherwise, I could often (but not always) see through the veil that was around Fox. I spent hours, on top of doing my work at Gargarean and cleaning house, recording the messages I got from text or Facebook. Most of them seemed innocuous on the surface, but the way I interpreted them (which was obviously right) was in the most strange way possible. For example, she was talking one time about how on the way back from work she saw some pathetic-looking injured deer, and I decided she meant that the deer way symbolically me, and that it was an indicator that my work at Gargarean was doing terrible.

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FOX

Actually, I literally did see a deer on the way back from work. But I decided to use that image, since it was clear that Emett was self-conscious about work. It was time to get him into therapy, as his stress was causing him to make mistakes at work. He hadn't gotten sleep in awhile either, so I used this image to let him draw the conclusions he wanted.

I posed as a Dr Coelacanth, a conservatively dressed woman in her mid fifties, using this as a opportunity to talk more personally. Emett was indeed suffering from quite a bit of paranoia, as well as job-induced stress, but this planted the idea in his head that maybe he needed to reach out for help. It was good that he was seeing me as Sapphire, but not so much that he was beyond recopying my texts, and had moved on to other people as well. He was too busy, too stressed, and frankly no less lonely than when I had first met him. Worse, he seemed to have the idea of a spy from James Bond films, thinking that I was going to send him on some kind of mission. Any mission right now would probably get him killed. He needed calm more than anything.

As Dr Coelacanth, I probed him on his past, getting him to talk about family, what was bothering him at work, and eventually got him to dig deep into his past. Since I wasn't a real therapist, I often missed conclusions that were logical, but it didn't matter. Emett was problematically closed off, and I needed to get him more outgoing. As Sapphire, I also tried to get him to talk more. The Gargarean warehouse eventually wanted to split the two of us to opposite sides of the factory, which I could tell made him upset. Before I moved, he gave Sapphire a note which said something along the lines of, «Dear Sapphire, I think the world of you and hope that you read this and it makes an impression. I have always cared about you, and I will miss you when I get moved over to side B of this Gargarean factory. I have drawn this cool dragon over here to show how much I care...» There was also a cool looking stylized dragon, as he said, covering the entire left side of the letter. The word impression seemed to be slightly darker than the other words. It was then that I notice the left side, that was covered with a dragon, was actually there to camouflage where he had apparently embossed the page with the back end of a pen, rendering the message, «Hey there, Fox.» He sent a text to Sapphire apologizing if he came across as weird giving that note. As I was Sapphire, I texted him, «No worries! It's fine.» He had long since figured out that I, like Fox was only available by text, so despite our being apart, it wasn't hard to contact him. Actually, in addition to working as a collector when I saw him, I worked the cameras and occasionally in disguise. I was talented at this, and the company valued me and allowed me to pursue my own agendas.

Emett was moved to shelving department after the holiday, and he seemed to be having even worse trouble. He took the position as some kind of symbol that he needed to shut up and do his work, at a time when he was particularly emotionally vulnerable. Further, the job screwed with his OCD, and he didn't like to compete against others. I determined that if he were ever to be a real spy, by the analogy of collecting and shelving, he was half-decent at analysis when he wasn't paranoid, but probably terrible at keeping secrets. I recommended that he deal with some of his isolation by joining social groups, and he tried an anime group, a church, and a D&D roleplaying group. Eventually, he was in fact final warned for poor progress, but in the mean time, he decided to give another disguise of mine in the B section a different note. I was confused, as I peered over it looked for a trick. It was a normal letter.

EMETT

That was the trick. I figured if she looked at it like a normal note, I would know that she was just a regular girl. But she closely examined it, searching for some kind of cipher or anomaly. This proved to me that she was Fox.

Originally, I thought that Gargarean was a cold and heartless place to work. It seemed as though the founder was a sociopath who intentionally set the job up to cause human suffering. Let me explain. Collectors were on a strict quota, and supposed to pick up close to 120 items per hour (but the quota didn't seem to really work based on time, as I always did horribly while people who moved slower than me like Sapphire got a better rate). They tended to make a mess sorting, which meant that when I as a shelver put items in, and the QA people checked my box, it would be all messed up to hell. Collectors also created a nuisance to the shelvers if there weren't enough of them or they didn't move fast enough, leaving no room to stow anything. The shelvers in turn tended to have to follow etiquette rules that determined where you could put things and how much. So as a shelver, I would likely force some poor collector to get on the floor for certain objects, ruining their time quota.

But now I wasn't so sure. I had checked out the book the therapist recommended, When Panic Attacks, but Gargarean itself also had a "recommendation" among the items that I worked through in shelving, a book called The Gifts of Imperfection. I slowly understood that I was being taught personally by them to work through my perfectionism, rather than being ignored as I thought. The people at Gargarean were looking out for me! But that wasn't really what got to me. You see, there were these alarms at various spots in the building that said "All Ready," "Not Ready," "Storm Warning," or "Fire Warning." I noticed one day while I was in that I was in a blue funk (hadn't seen Sapphire in awhile and my roommates were making me crazy) but I did my best to hide my feelings. Yeaaaaah, the cameras read me like a book, as the security blipped "Storm Warning." I think that day, some approached me asking if I was okay, and I realized that the entire system, rather than being very cold, actually was monitoring me down to my emotional state, my every frown and smile. I was simultaneously very pleased and very creeped out. So in some corner shelf, I went and cried for awhile, both pleased that Gargarean was not quite as heartless as I thought but I was also certain that I was emotionally not up for continuing. I could take mindless shelving or pulling items just fine, but it was this weird The next day, I got a "Fire Warning" and unfortunately, it was my final warning, meaning there was no hope of promotion.

FOX

Emett surprised me by quickly bouncing back from Gargarean. Within a few weeks, he had another job. Not that it lasted. The local BigBlock store was opening, and he helped build the store shelves, then chose a job outside his comfort zone to try to become more social. He would eventually quit, mainly because the schedule of the job meant he was wearing out his car by driving it around, yet not be able to make routine repairs. Another people was that the job didn't really respect any kind of regular schedule, meaning that all of these fun activities set up in advance were difficult to plan for. He couldn't keep promises to family, to the church, to anything, because there was no way to know that week what would happen. Add to the fact that the payment scheme seemed to space out a three week schedule so only the first one and a half week counted, and it was a recipe for disappointment. On his final day at work, he tried to see if it was feasible to to get to the BigBlock store on foot. After walking nearly six miles, and having blisters on his feet, he promptly told the people to tell the boss that

But this wasn't the only surprise. In addition to church, gaming, and anime clubs, he decided to join LGBT groups. He wanted to be a she? Well, this wasn't out of nowhere based on our studies, but it was a surprise that she wanted to go through with it, and even more of a surprise, that she manage to use the last two sessions of therapy convincing me to approve it. And she kept up with the process, going to get her name changed at the legal offices, then going to the social security and changing name and gender, then heading to the DMV, and finally to the post office where she tried to get a passport. The hardest of these two were the DMV and the passport. But she prevailed. "What would you like you new name to be?" I asked her, while I was still her therapist. She paused, "Well, my father's name was Alexander. For some reason, maybe a variant of that? Allie, Allegra, Alana, Alexa..." I shook my head at the last one. I heard that Alexa was part of a rival company. I suggested, "What about Alicia? It's a nice name."

ALICIA

In other states, changing your gender is hard, sometimes requiring a legal battle for identity, or at the very least to get a year of passing followed by surgery. But in Virginia, it was super-easy, barely an inconvenience. Since I had approval from my therapist, most of the issue for things like the IRS were simply a matter of waiting in line for hours. Since I had no job anymore, I was able to set aside this time in order to do so, but the DMV, like the DMV everywhere, proved to be an enormous nuisance. I returned there again and again, until they explained that I had to send a letter to their medical department. And so, I mailed the letter, and after a few weeks, I got the note, waited in line yet again, talked to people, and finally got the form allowed me to adjust my information. Then I had to wait again for my actual driver's license. After that, although not strictly necessary, I updated my college record, taking a road trip just to visit them in person, and went to Gargarean, where they seemed to give zero shits what I called myself. I waited about an hour and a half, and they didn't seem to understand what I was even trying to do.

I had planned to move back home by April 1st, because frankly I was sick of Richmond. I just barely finished all paper work in time (well, almost, it turned out that I had IRS info for state and federal to fix as late as two years after that, which required driving to Richmond). I was fed up in large part due to the amount of driving I had to do to see friends who only sorta cared about me, and the amount of gas money that represented. I was also disgusted with that my landlord was supposedly a tolerant liberal, but appeared to be trying to force me out of the place. The landlord had tried to add a new roommate, but I'm afraid I have no flattering name for her. The landlord said that she was a good cook, and a fun roommate that I might have a lot to talk about with. I had a less than positive attitude going in, and I feel like that colored the situation, but she was a pretty awful woman. She bought so much food that I couldn't put my own food in the fridge, cluttering the counter with crap. She cooked with heavy amounts of Crisco creating burnt spots on the frypan when cooking fucking eggs. So I had to clean that up, as I had kitchen duties. I was doing laundry , and hers was in the way, so I moved it atop the dryer. She accused me of taking her panties. What?!? She slept with the lights on and the door open. She welcomed sketchy strangers into our home. Ultimately, feeling unsafe, I locked her out. She banged on the door, but I couldn't help how I felt. I was forced to open the door by the roommates. I felt so trapped and betrayed that I started banging my head against the wall until it started bleeding. And this is why I wanted to move back home.

FOX

Reality is a funny thing. The Tao te Ching describes the truth like water, that is to say that like water, reality is able to shift to great extent, much like adding sand, salt, or sugar to water. Or chamber pot water. And so, reality is like that scene in Star Wars where Luke enters the cave in Dagobah, and he is warned that in the cave there will only be what he brings with him. He mistakenly brings his sword and has to battle a nightmare. In the same way, we who are humans invite good and evil by our first impressions.

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