Stormfuhrer

Stormführer

E. R. Everett

Copyright © 2014 by Edwin R. Everett
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2014

ISBN-13: 978-1500499693

ISBN-10: 1500499692

This is a work of fiction.  Any and all references to actual people, places, institutions, or current events are purely coincidental.

To deal with history means to abandon

one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in

the ordination and the meaning.

                            --Hermann Hesse

             
              The Glass Bead Game

CHAPTER 1

2027

“
Mr. Hayes, you have a visitor.”

Not a sound.  The huge box didn’t move.  The young man walked closer into the small room that seemed to contain only two items: a single bed, perfectly made, and a large cardboard box standing upright in the corner, one that had apparently once held a wide refrigerator.  A large L-shaped cut had been made from the bottom of the upright box to about a meter high and had been bent to form a sort of little door one could crawl through.  It was only slightly open.

A delicate afternoon light streamed in rays through the rusty metal grating, a thick mesh with which nearly every window of the gray cinder-block facility was covered from the outside.  Faint scratches could be seen scored into the thick plexiglass that served as a single window pane embedded just inside the grating.  They took the form of long, thin, overlapping vertical lines.  They were like scratches made by a large, untrained dog—or perhaps by one long bereft of any instinct or desire to leave. 

Light blue paint was fresh on the walls of the room. 

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to check on things,” the nurse smiled encouragingly and left, closing the door behind her in the wide doorway.  There was the metallic snap of an automatic lock and then silence.  The young man wore a dark brown shirt tucked into khaki shorts.  He sat on the bed, waiting for some sort of reaction from inside the box.  Perhaps Mr. Hayes was sleeping, he thought. 

“
Mr. Hayes, it’s Karl Brandt,” the young man half-whispered.

No response. 

“You know, Karl?  Graduated 2023?  I’ve just come to say hello, and to thank you,” he said, a bit more assertively.

Nothing.

Karl sat and waited.

There was a stir.  The box shifted slightly and made a sliding sound as it pressed against the blue wall.  The young man decided to pull slightly on the little flap, the makeshift door.  The man was there, in a blue hospital gown, apparently seated at a small one-piece desk and chair, like one would find in a middle-school classroom.

For a few seconds, he considered everything this teacher had been to him in the last few years, though with no idea what the man’s response would be to his intrusion, if any response were forthcoming.  He backed up to the corner of the bed.

The walls were high on the box of thick cardboard, and it seemed easily overturned.  The young man returned to it to pull open the flap a few centimeters more.  Thin, bony feet protruded just slightly from the robe.  The dark toenails needed cutting.  Karl thought that maybe he would come back later.  Or maybe he wouldn’t--if there was no point.

The box moved again, its contents leaving little room for space or even air, while its inhabitant gave an almost imperceptible  groan.

Karl thought that its inhabitant might be suffocating and decided to lift the box up and over its contents.  He slid it up, pinching two corners and dragging it over the body towards the high ceiling.  He lay the box gently against a nearby closet door.  It slid to fall against a corner of the bed, propelling a thin cloud of dust from the bed-cover and into the rays of approaching twilight.  The faint odor of sour perspiration filled the room.

The man’s nearly bald head lay on the desk, a set of black headphones, lacking ear pads, lying across his wispy scalp.  The connecting wire had been cut.   His head, lying on his folded arms, was turned toward the young man.  His eyes fixed, seemingly sightless, stared past him into the blue wall.  His mouth was closed, neither in frown nor smile.

Spring 2021
 

It stung a little when Jake lifted his ear from the desk to see what the laughter was about.  The release of the suction, made hermetic by sweat, drove a popping sound into his inner ear, followed by a slight ringing.  He half-expected the chuckling to be about him until he squinted between rows of students’ heads to the whiteboard at the front of the room.  Mr. Farhat Farash seemed confused as well.  He half smiled and watched the faces of his students for a few seconds until it dawned on him to turn around and look at the projected image on the whiteboard.

Mr. Farash started as a visiting teacher from India, contracted for a one-year teaching position in the US.  He had, however, earned his Worker's Visa and decided to stay a bit longer.  His lecture had been on the Italian Renaissance, preceded by a 20 minute introduction that tied the Roman and Byzantine eras to the early 1300s in Europe.  It was one of his favorite topics.

Farash’s lecture had been briefly interrupted by his own teachable moment—that brief and sought-after period when the aircon blowing through the ceiling grates becomes inaudible and the wall-clock ceases ticking.    The students seemed at their most attentive and most pliable during this very few seconds between the white noise when the ideas put before them seemed attached in their minds to something personal and experienced.  Sensing the presence of this magical hole of clarity in the midst of disconnected static, Mr. Farash had paused the video to further explain how the Black Plague not only wiped out one-fourth of the benighted medieval Europeans but also feudalism itself, decreasing the workforce and thus increasing wages, leading ultimately to more fertile economic conditions for the poor who survived the plague, allowing for educational opportunities before unknown for this emerging middle class.  Extra money to spend, combined with the invention of the printing press, made books accessible.  More people then learned to read, culture flourished, and voila . . . the Renaissance was born!”

For that moment they were taking it all in.  They were connecting the dots.  They would see the connection between the fall of feudalism and the beginnings of the Renaissance.

Then, a giggle started.  Another was added.  On the screen stood a Roman statue mounted upon a fountain in an old city square, presumably in Florence.  Mr. Farash had used a small remote control to pause the video in order to make his points.  At the paused image hung Poseidon’s masculine parts with enlarged detail.  What students found amusing involved the fact that Mr. Farash, who sometimes had the annoying habit of standing in the light of the projector as he spoke, carried the relevant parts of the image across the center of his white pants.  Mr. Farash quickly unpaused the video.  Water then sprayed upward from the fountain to crown the glorified spectacle as the giggling went viral, and then finally epidemic, across the columns of desks.

In the next classroom, Richard Hayes, another history teacher, heard a not-so-distant slam, knowing instantly that it wasn’t a teenaged student leaving the classroom in a dramatic huff.  He sat back, leaning into a black desk-chair, letting the wheels roll forward and back, propelled by his heels, as he flipped through an old paperback novel called
The Glass Bead Game
.  He counted the seconds before the expected event.  One . . . two . . . three . . . .  Then came the tapping on the tall, narrow window of his classroom door.  Oversized glasses appeared behind thin crisscrossing wires, a gray security mesh of a hundred diamond-shaped wire boxes embedded in the glass.   Though Hayes was only a few yards away from the door, he decided that he’d let the tapping continue a few more times as he read a few more lines of the book.  He glanced across the two-thirds full room of students tapping away at black keyboards,  staring into screens of various sizes.

“
Excuse me, sir,” lilted the quiet Eastern voice as the 33-year-old man’s dark head appeared through the crack in the gently opening door.  “They’re at it again.   They don’t want to learn.  I’m thinking I’m having a breakdown nervously.”

Hayes frowned.  Mr. Farash was a little afraid of his own students.  No, actually he was terrified of them.  In his eyes they were unknowable--with their cell phones and social media-driven lives centered around superficial online relationships and instant messages sent during class time.  Even the poorest kids at the school had smart phones.  This intimidated Farash, who had no idea how to use one yet found himself constantly having to pick them up from students attempting to use them during his lectures.  Still, Hayes reflected, though they were generally
thoughtless
in the way they used their time, they were also completely harmless.  However, he could never seem to make this point clearly enough for Farash to understand.

Hayes looked up, grinned a smile of acknowledgment at the foreign teacher and then dropped the thick paperback on his desk, joining the man in the hallway yet again as his sounding box.  Hayes had been officially assigned to mentor the new teacher at the beginning of this school year, but it was clear in the ensuing months that Farash would rarely take his advice in any meaningful way.  Thus, what this teacher needed to learn about handling students had to be
experienced
.  Retaining the advice he knew would be yet again ignored, Richard simply listened to the thin, distraught lecturer.  As Hayes stood there, paying partial attention to words he had heard before, one of Hesse’s lines came to mind:

             
Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or               musician, have respect for the "meaning" but               do not imagine that it can be taught.

It was the
meaning
that Farash had wrong.  To him, teaching history meant gaining a student's automatic respect, transferring factual knowledge, and summers off.  But what history really
meant
. . . as a real means of framing a context for understanding one's place in the world . . . that was something that eluded Mr. Farash.

A
few minutes turned into ten, then twelve.  Hayes’ students would probably never know that he was out of the room.  The bell would ring.  Farash’s kids would file out of the room next door.  The problem would be solved with no shots fired, no confrontations.  The day would go on and it would all be in the immediate yet permanently buried past.  If only Farash saw it this way.  At work, Mr. Hayes had learned to live in the eternal future, as if past and present didn’t exist.  This way, annoyances, even from the moment they happened, had already happened (in his mind) and were thus already replaced by a new block of time that would surely nullify their present meaning.  The source of Farash’s angst, Hayes thought, was this habitual focus on the anxieties of the present moment, as if there were no future—just the current problem requiring some present solution.

Summer 2021

Richard Hayes, the middle-aged history teacher, worked summers to supplement his income.  He worked at home, online, from his tiny cabin, buying and selling web addresses.  But this summer was different.  A global body had recently enabled infinite web address suffixes, rendering the mere “.com” and “.net” limitations to be a thing of history where most companies were concerned.  Hayes had been developing what he called the “Farmer” program that targeted the business and non-business entities most likely to eventually desire unique suffixes for their sites.  He would spend some of what he had made that year to buy up the most likely Web suffixes still available, which now sold for very little—five dollars each, in most cases.  His intent was later to sell some of these to-be-prized URL web address labels for thousands, others for hundreds, most for fifty to seventy-five dollars each.  He would pitch the latter  to virtual mom-and-pop stores trying to maintain an online presence.

Of course, the corporate giants had already claimed their URL homesteads, but the far bigger pool of middle-range companies, most working across multiple continents in some capacity via the Web, were already beginning to shed the stale “.com” for something perceived as more up-to-date.  The timing was perfect.  He'd made some sales directly to these potential clients already. Future sales, based on the successes of these attempts, showed that he would be wealthy enough to retire in comfort within the next few years--if all went according to plan.

He did this sort of thing alone, every summer, finding some niche of the Web to legally exploit during his time off.  He was good at it and had amassed enough savings to retire years ago, but only at his present level of comfort.  Still, he liked teaching.  It had its own creative allure.

In an old robe of silk paisleys, grabbing on the way some coffee warmed up from the night before, Hayes walked the few steps from the kitchen to his blinking corner of wires, boxes, and terminals.  Several flat, upright computer screens littered the table, along with candy wrappers, dirty forks, and a half-eaten salad.  Fly strips, dotted mostly with mosquitoes and fruit-flies from weeks past, hung every four feet or so from the high A-frame ceiling beams of his perfectly square home—almost a cube were it not for the A-shaped roof.

It was on a steamy day in late June when Richard Hayes hit upon something not quite right.  His Farmer program was running through all the various possible URL suffixes, cross-referencing them with the names of companies from a database containing many thousands, but excluding those that had already purchased their own suffixes for their Web addresses.

He watched as the company names and lists of potential abbreviations scrolled blindingly down a small, gray window on one of his screens.  He took an occasional drag from a
Habana
Especial
that he had smuggled across the border from Matamoros some weeks back.  He blew the heavy, intoxicating smoke through a low opening in an otherwise thickly draped window, which kept out most of the morning sun’s already smoldering intensity. 

After minutes of scrolling, his Farmer program suddenly stuck at the suffix “.allein.”  Richard hit the gray “ignore” button on the screen and the whizzing abbreviations and company names continued to scroll in their thin, gray column.

He noticed that fruit flies were beginning to accumulate around a half-eaten grapefruit sitting in his large green-glass ashtray, despite the fly strips high above.  He enjoyed the large citrus that he could pick up for practically nothing at a makeshift farmer’s market near the school where he taught. Richard gave the tiny flies a wave off and began to peel at the pulpy edges of the grapefruit while continuing to stare half-hypnotically at the rolling digits on the gray screen.  After consuming a wedge of the sweetly-bitter fruit, he tossed the remaining pieces and rind into a tall trash can standing at the side of his long fold-out table that served as his work desk.

A beep came from the computer, barely audible above the heavy blowing of the aircon unit jammed into the large single window of the cabin’s loft.  The window that held the humming metal beast was centered just below the A-frame beam. 

His cabin had been bought prefabricated from a large hardware chain.  Its design had been meant for housing occasional hunters in some lonesome brush country where the deer were fed corn from timed feeders.  Walking into the building’s facsimile on the vast parking lot of the hardware store, Richard fell in love with the simplicity of its open plan, its steep staircase against one wall bearing no handrail, leading up to a loft floored by three-quarter inch plywood sheets.  The loft, serving as bedroom and storage space, was where Richard slept on a low futon, surrounded by boxes of possessions, most of which lined the edges of the loft where the acute corners of roof met wall.

Hayes had done most of the work on the cabin himself and altogether the project had cost him a little over $25,000, land included.  It was small though perfect for his needs, much of the downstairs floor-space being empty of anything nonessential though cluttered with a wide bookshelf, a long table where his computing equipment sat, a wide flat-screen television, and an old couch.

Hayes heard the beep despite the humming and blowing of the huge window unit.  He stared hard at the screen,  again perplexed by the cessation of the scrolling.  Again the scrolling froze on one suffix: “.allein,” at the top of the endless column of possible letter combinations.  Only slightly curious, really, about what was probably a glitch, some for-next loop ending sooner than it was supposed to, he opened another window on the screen and typed the suffix into another gray box.  This would allow all URLs actively using that suffix on the Web to appear in a separate column.  He knew that this would take hours—probably days—as every possible web address combination containing any word in any language containing alpha-numeric digits would have to be checked for an active response during the subroutine.  Browser screens began popping up and blinking out all over his three flat-screen terminals.

There was not much else to do, so he decided to take a walk before the sultry South Texas 85 degrees would soon become 95.  It was only 7:15 in the morning.

He took a stroll outside his little cabin on a narrow dirt path, reflecting on nothing in particular.  He walked amongst huge Brazilian pepper trees that he had planted throughout most of his twelve acres and which almost completely surrounded his cabin but, like his thin hair, left the pate exposed. 

Richard Hayes knew he was not good-looking and never had been.  He was of average height, thin.  His aquiline nose, which increasingly needed a trimming, shaded his upper lip under a bald forehead and balding scalp of hair shaped like a thin, hairy bagel set way back.  When he let it grow, he looked like a tonsured monk.