The Need for Clarity

Rachel's mind was never the calm pool that she yearned for, never truly still. It rippled even in light airs, thoughts and feelings reflected off breakwaters and jetties, reinforcing, canceling, crisscrossing. However, the events of the day that began in the freezing corridor of the MISS was hardly one of light airs. After the blustery but relatively harmless hot air of Major Munir’s office, squalls at the pharmacy had given way to the friendly fresh air of her reunions at the law library. Unfortunately, the day had ended with the detection of Flower Trunks in the stacks, an undeniably strong and adverse blow.

If the strength of that blow had been sustained, it would pin the needle in storm-force territory, the domain of winds sufficient to capsize or even pitch-pole her currently equanimous but fragile vessel. As it was, one gust in the library had whipped up cross-seas that continued to buffet her for a significant time. But the winds and seas followed the laws of physics, which decreed that, absent the injection of new disturbing energy into the system, the unstable emotional weather would meliorate. As the trek with Yarawi across town to the family dinner offered nothing but comforting, beginning-of-a-good-friendship feelings, by the time they arrived at Manqu and Joss’s petite house, Rachel was almost back to the thymic level she had attained when Yarawi pointed out to her that the elephantine legal folio had an index.

Yarawi’s parents were waiting at the door to welcome them, and the renewal of the friendship between Rachel and Joss occasioned wholehearted and mutual squeals of delight. Once exposed to the warmth of the entire family gathered in their natural environment, a firm foundation was supplied for the positive emotional structure already erected, and all Claratize cravings completely vanished from Rachel’s mind for the nonce.

She shared the two-person table with Manqu, while the mother and daughter balanced their plates on napkin-covered laps. Despite, (or more likely because of) the very modest setting, her mind crossed a threshold and became more than at ease. Rachel knew that the wonderful milieu of Manqu’s home and family played an indubitable role in the correction of her mood to a state of euthymia so emphatic it verged on ecstatic, but given Yarawi’s description of the functional nature of some of the dishes, Rachel felt sure that their special active ingredients played their part as well. Whatever they were, these possible potions in no way compromised the deliciousness of the traditional dishes, showing that, contrary to beliefs popular especially among the more value-driven cultural subsets of the NH, functionality did not preclude pleasure (and of course, vice versa.)

After dessert, Manqu glanced at the photocopies of the legal folio that his daughter had brought. Remarkably, he said that simply skimming the document had resulted in germination of a plan, but submitted that the evening was a time for celebration and reunion, not for strategizing. Part of Rachel wanted to review the scheme with its originator then and there, but it was quite late. She still needed to brave the bus system and its virtually naked, often unsavory denizens for the journey back to her apartment, and the last conveyance of the night would soon pass by the local stop. She mentioned this to the family, who immediately extended their hospitality to an invitation to stay overnight. Rachel declined, for it was obvious that there was so little room that such accommodation would only be possible if one of the family slipped outside on the sly, to sleep on the tiny front porch.

As she expected, on the bus home Rachel encountered characters who she suspected of looking for suspicious characters who fit her own description, but as her mind started elaborating the rationale for suspecting them, she felt the warm feelings in her stomach and in her psyche interrupt the spinning of the stories. Such was the power of her open, positive and accepting post-Huari dinner mental state that she even played with the idea that Flower Trunks was a purely a figment of paranoia, an idea that had never even crossed her mind before. She wanted to believe that such a disquieting creep was not real, but prudence compelled her to play devil's advocate against that possibility.

She did not feel compelled to be on as high alert on the night journey back from Manqu’s house as on the more crowded daytime buses. For much of the trip, she was the only passenger, and she used the time to reality-test her theories about the bizarre hominid who kept turning up to torture her at the worst possible moments. She forced herself to pay close attention to the replays of the snippets of time in which Flower Trunks popped into her consciousness, replays that were happening all the time in the background but because of their highly unpleasant nature, she did her best to suppress.

It was a nauseating exercise with a disappointing result. There was flawless continuity between the several cuts of her personal movie which contained the putative spy. Same colors, same flowery pattern on the trunks, same hair and eyes-all consistent from memory to memory, all apparently confirming an all-too-real, bizarre and unsavory character.

By the time the bus deposited her three blocks from her apartment, and she made the hurried middle-of-the-night-walk looking over her shoulder, the force field against negativity that had enclosed her after the dinner had eroded. Lying in bed, her mind circled in fruitless speculation about where the documents relevant to the fall in the reservoir level might reside, and if that were ever known, how the “hardened” security surrounding them could be penetrated.

She had gone from the trauma of the Flower Trunks sighting in the library, generating severe sloshing of her mental sea, which calmed as she increased her distance from the scene of the sighting, to a marvelously tranquil after-dinner midsummer lagoon without a ripple, the meal admittedly contributing by sedating the waters with the pharmacobotanical ingredients of the traditional recipes. Those effects had worn off, and now there was danger of her anxiety level completing the full circle. The eddies of anticipation and speculation formed a nascent whirlpool which, if she allowed it to take form, would suck away her peace of mind and deposit it on the ocean floor by first light.

She grabbed a Claratize from her night stand and gulped it down.

The next days continued to encourage the consumption of Claratize. Her daily trek to the base of the observation tower was now frankly torturous, as she at first thought every shirtless male was Flower Trunks. Thankfully, none of the sightings turned out to stand up to her reality testing techniques, although that after-the-event-analysis did not abolish the frisson of fear she felt in the moment of each encounter. The climb to the observation cabin became even more arduous, and the compensating wallop of exhilaration provided by the workout, dizzying height, and views of desolation had lost some of its pizazz.

Despite an overall dulling of her usual sharp focus during activities of everyday life, when it came to watching the water level in the SCHAF, she managed to maintain her raptor eye, motivated by the disquieting fact that the rate of the water level fall was increasing. When she imagined a leak siphoning the water away, she also visualized from elementary physics that the rate of loss would decrease as less overlying water reduced the force pushing the precious element out of the reservoir.

The increasing rate suggested intent rather than accident.

She shivered, although it was a windless day under the blazing desert sun. Major Munir and his nasty secretary seemed almost comical caricatures of mean-minded bureaucrats, not a truly evil Dark Lord and his heartless lady. To think they would deprive so many of the life essence...

Rachel followed up her shiver with a shudder, and tried to appreciate the soaring of a condor crossing the reservoir towards the city .