105
There’s a spaceship in my brain, but people weren’t at their stations, they were running around, screaming, trying to pilot the ship so that it crashed into a nearby moon. There was my internal stress, frustrated that it wasn’t loved, gripping the steering wheel. I asked him where he should be.
“We’re all going down, man!” he yelled at me, his hands a static pulse.
“No, we’re not,” I said. “You’re not the pilot. Where is the pilot?”
“You don’t understand! If you’re not loved, the entire ship is going down!”
“No, that’s not true,” I said. “You’re here to protect me from abandonment and loss, but you’re not the pilot of this ship. You should be over there, in your station for empathy, understanding people and their needs. You do your function well, but you do not pilot this ship.”
Then he went back to his station. Seething with anger, more static than person, but he walked back.
And I went searching for the pilot. There was anger, stress, screaming. He needed to go back to “directed anger,” not running around the hall. He’d help me with my creative process, but he couldn’t crash my ship either.
I saw several more stations as I searched, and made sure everyone was working at their correct position, doing what they were functionally designed to do. And each station was marked, had a purpose, clearly laid out in the grid of my ship. I didn’t stop to examine them. They were all in working order.
I went down into the terrarium - where plants were grown and oxygen was cultivated, as well as medicinal cures and food. There were red flowers everywhere, in neat little rows on the ground, as if they’d been carefully cultivated for years, bred from several strains over several generations to produce what I saw now. And there was my pilot, with his thick-rimmed glasses and dark hair, skinny and quiet and studious, completely entranced with tending to the flowers.
He’d been down there for years, maybe all my life.
“You should be piloting the ship,” I said.
He’d forgotten he was the pilot at all, looked up at me, confused.
“You’re the pilot, not a gardener, not a biologist. I can understand why you were down here, because you were scared, because everyone else wanted to drive the ship, because you found something beautiful and worthwhile you wanted to cultivate. But we have other people for this function. You need to go pilot the ship.”
And he did.
106
The pilot sunk into a deep depression after he came back to the cockpit, and although he flew the ship with an adeptness that none of the other crew members could, he missed the greenhouse, dirt on his fingers. He missed the quiet that came from not having to eat in the crowded mess hall or listen to the rest of the crew argue.
“Is this what I’m resigned to?” he asked me.
“Without you, we’ll crash,” I said.
As he steered through a meteor shower, his hands barely touching the console, he sighed and all the light seemed to leave his face. I never knew tiredness could seep through the pores like that and hover on the skin, an almost perceptible residue of weariness.
So I went down into the greenhouse with the civic engineers, and we rerouted the systems. We sent flowers through the wires, and they grow over the pilot’s console as he flies. A consolation, maybe, as he’s still surrounded by crew-members like angry specters and he has to keep his hands on the wheel so that someone else doesn’t wrest it from his hands and street us straight into the dark side of a planet.
But this way we don’t all die, at least.
He breathes them in and I breathe him in and I put my hand on his shoulder as he steers us through a pirate zone, careful not to speak, not to move. Concentration is important here.
He can’t go back to the greenhouse but always, the flowers remain in the pilot’s periphery.
And I like it like that.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
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