“Go in the monitor room. It’s flooded with students.”
A young man with his waving stomach galloped inside and approached those whose arms were making clatter sounds at the keyboards.
“Print these, please.”
“There’s my payment yonder.”
“My ID’s missing. How will I get by?”
Holding his pen with its pointed end at the tip of his finger, it started to maneuver with a gullible approach to the twittering mouths of the impatient lass and lad. His hand movements shifted from one paper to another, with the tapping on the other end of his pen, as though a code was being retrieved. At one moment, he misspelled a surname from an ID, while he witnessed how the rest of it occupied his table – to be recorded. The scene was accompanied by the incessant noise of chairs, tramping the glittering floor as they were moved by their occupants into place.
The section from where he was formerly posted was housed of books lined up as the encoder swiftly focused on them with a column on his knees, and a single on his hand. His eyebrows curved in the failing sensation by the barcode reader, without any affirmation with his fourth swipe of the book, and a few more tries, relentless.
The woman charged on the desk-counter was encoding dissertations handed early that morning, making her signature style of writing letter “g” look as an “f”. The series of numbers on the upper left of this form were formulated to be a standard arrangement following the system of how these books are placed. At first look, the author’s name was not visible, and with further inquiry eyed, this will be found at the top middle, lower middle, with its initials sometimes written on awful errors. The surnames were found at the end, certainly do, and often at the opening, following an unknown pattern.
Soon, all forms were fixed at the monitor room, and the occupants were, as if languor by the work of their hands, begun to pour out by singles, then by groups as minutes elapsed, making the room preserved its tranquil enjoyment. This happened between one-o’clock and three, and as expected, less and less came. He decided to leaf with clippings he took out on the personal drawer. They were fastened on a folder, with a notebook under it; written were categories lined as numbers: health being 8, media 14, etc. The grandeur of reading these articles cradled his thoughts apart from his duty, with his elbows rested on the table, and arms to hand with their palms open and abreast – his chin resided.
His head moved like of a typewriter alignment as he skimmed the content of various categories. Fonts of bold to courier widen his eyes starting to fall to slumber, regenerated every time he leaf to succeeding pages as if reading a declaration scroll. His legs were wandering on different positions, one lifted, the other upside down, one on the leveled position, shaking. Wagging the sleepy sensation? That I don’t know.
He failed to ward-off the needless feeling of the afternoon siesta. His creative thoughts visited him in no time, and the destination at this hour was at the farthest south of the globe – wild-western feud, and he was caught in the middle. Feeling the need to go within this reverie, he was caught by the shin of an approaching plank, with his arms tied, his ears incapable of hearing. The sand he was facing smoked in perfection, he thought, with the rolling of circled dry grass here and there. For a moment he was on the guillotine, then at the back of a steed starting to gallop, with his feet tied – he was awake.
A man in front of him lend his ID, signed at the form and ushered his feet at monitor 1. With intervals the man with his head aligned on the monitor took glimpses of him as he was recording the in-time and marked the form with the current date.
It was the online encyclopedia the man was absorbed into. The subject of his search was not visible, and only pictures of trees with a village house with grotesque carve of faces as a spout from gutter was seen. He made this monitor view through passing a series of time on the man’s chair, pretending to work at the blinking error on the monitor beside the man’s seat. With shrilling voices heard from the monitor’s speaker, he jerked his head to query on the man absorbed in the monitor. Sudden turn of the latter’s head furnished with a scornful grin, the monitor broke out with its picture descending on its portrait view, soon with static movements, then out.
An omen of cradled memory focused to shorten the length of time made lapses in this trial. Short with its peak, a thorn on its way, and the product was anticipated. This branch of memory mocking was at least consumed with a personal desire.
Severely freckled, within the boundary of ulna and to the biceps, static numbness runs through with the vessels incorporating within the flow as it became faster in an upward terrain of body positioning, and the lower movement a speedy trial delivering the friction against the walls, resulting to pores arousal; the outside surface of the skin turned out to be a meadow with straightened grass and disillusioned cows. The reaction of the body where it occurred commands the affected part with spontaneous movements without any knowledge of the body’s existing soul.
“Are you okay, boy?” he asked, with a courteous regard in need seeing the man was actually a boy, considering his ID number with “09,” the current year.
“All of it was a mistake, sir. You are not heading somewhere; you’ll be in vain…vane…faded soul.”
Without any idea on the boy’s statement, he started his feet towards the door to report the broken monitor. His eyes were cloudy, their eyelids almost touching the lower part, and it seems that he was half-awake with his broken reverie still hanging in his head, avoiding it by looking down on the floor with the tone of his tramping feet resounding in his head, arranging them to secular rhythm, his left being the clapper cymbals, the other as a bass and snare as interchanging purpose when he desires.
Monaural sounds grouped in shallow, outer layer of his ears came in without any direct roots around the room. His eyesight scrambled around his surroundings and changed into a kind of milieu of smiling faces, clattering keyboards and flying papers, leaving a remnant smoke like of a passing jet plane. The more he initiates deliberate movements, his stand with this situation groped hard to take grasp of being eluded. The actual positioning of his stance was protruded outside the monitor room, and half his body was in the middle of the room’s door in equally shared parts, mixing the latter sounds with the stale-waxed air of the outward way of the room.
In the glare of luminescent bulbs built to circular finish, visible in his eyes, traded a narrowing on parts between his eyelids, adapting in the ray of light cruising through a line that act as a bridge that transport its glow within the pupil which caused temporary blindness on his total view.
The memory that enhanced his view of the situation was found behind his colossal ambiguity, and the signs of pulling sanity from beyond his other side struck every sensitive reason to maintain creed without lamenting behind the bars of pretention on the belief that a rescuer of the unseen will alight from his white-washed chariot behind the wills of faith.
“All of it was a mistake…” a resonance in one straight line of his reconsidering. Hiding the truth at the back of his sidewall at the tone of the man’s query aggravated the gleaming blanket that a long time of searching at his deepest, and beliefs would never be possible to be discovered. He was never an open man to anybody. Alongside his killing times were his knack of plotting venues, characters and additives in his mind, and playing with them at the heat and sweat inside the bathroom. These subjects of utter illusions were all out of his fondness with moveable graphics at the center of picture-reflecting, four-cornered box aided by tangled wires of its reflector. This console of dreams was his partner in every venture of endorphin secretion and became a habit. For others this was a prerogative of mishandling the imperative obligation of the mind to scour the imaginable milieu out of nothing at all.
The lights went out with the ringing of bells penetrating the door appended by foams with bristles on all corners. The man at the counter soon came in with the barcode reader clinging at the side of his arms, pulled out all plugs of the monitors and shut the door even with his existence. On a sudden hit of conscience in his view, all things were within proximity. The man who occupied monitor 1 was gone. Monitor room again relinquished.
The quarter of the afternoon arrived with heat and roars by the exuberant students at the entrance. The loud conversations out of humiliating remarks spark a shrilling grief in him. He was now stationed at the counter, with the front desk almost deserted of anything this section might persist. The horizontal red light thinned as it touched and spread through the canvass of the barcode stickers on books; the books lined up underneath the table were of classics, health, and Rogette’s infamous modern, all heading to the room labeled for binding.
Monitor 1 was out again, and the files from the rest were endangered by this err, only accessible by the provided network gained through the main head. The connection from the web was hitting its lowest rate resulting to irritation of its users. The monitor room was soon completely out of users.
An unfortunate happening for the garrulous woman: a gift from the unseen upon her delegates. The cause of diminutives on their work was added on the columns of book shelves. They were walking right in the middle in a swift motion, and abruptly parted from one another as if following a synchronized formation directed by the head at the counter. She was never a callous woman. At large and at them she was a mother goose upon her chicks, guiding them to do no wrong at the state of pressure and ambiguity due to the rush and howling of the students; and during mealtime she was their commander, waiting for any orders before the clock makes its spawning feel of the noon that it is a chance to take a break. But now it was different. Her hands on this situation were at their best – pulling there, push here, with her temple a pair of nerve lump, greening as though they were also speaking as she commands them. Along these commands were the laughter and provoking comedy that were hidden in every single frown with her range and parameters.
Three of them met at the section were books, and the shelves of rusty color, suffer more of the rage and humid bearing within the palms of the morning battalion. The stacks were each compiled with their call-numbers aligned, preceded by “St093” to “St096”. They arranged every row, ensuring that none of them was forgotten to be embraced, and brought about on their alignment with clever fingers – thumbs as their aces. One of them complained of students who disregard the essence of returning into place the books they had borrowed.
“Foolish ones,” he remarked. “How could they forget to return these precious classics back on their thrones?”
“That’s the reason we’re here,” the other said. “Even with this dire of dirt on my palm, I’ll make them stand at their shelves in every end of the afternoon – how noble I am?”
The last hour stretched with continuous mobility at all sides and turns of every soul, working their way to call it a day through the past tedious afternoon. The woman at the counter soon changed flip-flops to high-heels, turned and cried good-bye – disappeared to the vertical stretch of the hallway. There followed the entrance of the blue-shirted group, with their introductory laugh, sweep and wipe here and there, moved the chairs and tables at the heat of their reflexes – and they soon left, only the four of them at the counter, giggling because the face of one has whiskers of dust and dirt.
Then they were all silent. As he was about to take the form of their time record, the rest jerked their heads upon him, facing their very backs with sinister grin, and murmurs cradled to carry out in him.
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