The Drifter - chapter 4

“May I speak with you in my office?”

Oh great, A meeting with the boss. Well at least I get a glimpse of the outside world while I'm in his office. There will be delusions of grandeur and everything. I can vision myself sitting in a desk in a real office with a bunch of drones underneath me kissing my ass and obeying my every command like a well trained dog. Weeding out those bad apples and defining the meaning of “bad times” for them when they lose their job and can't start a new one because I won't give them a good recommendation. Ah yes to be an office manager, the power of having something when you really don't. You still have to answer to those in the corner offices and the nice seats in the board room.

“Come in. I've noticed that you haven't quite started to fit in here yet. How long have you worked here, six months?”

“I believe that is right.”

“We here work as a team and when someone isn't fitting in to that team we have to correct that and make sure that this machine stays well oiled.”

“Are you trying to fire me? Or are trying to rebuild me.”

“Well I have tried in the past to get you to change your ways, but taking extended lunches, coming to work whenever you feel, and leaving at five when you haven't put in a full eight hours is not what I call a team player. And what is this, a tee shirt with some hobo printed on it?”

“It's Pig Pen.”

“Who?”

“The first Keyboardist for the Dead.”

“Oh, I was a Deadhead, until I got a life.”

A life! He calls this a life. Strangling himself with a suit and tie everyday. Sitting in the same cramped room seven days a week, fifty to fifty-one weeks a year. Telling people what to do while he just fumbles through paperwork figuring out how to make things run more efficiently.

But wait, didn't I envision myself in his chair didn't I want his job. What is it that compels me to be like this man I hate. The success, the money, is that all the greed of power and money has reared its ugly head in the very core of my soul that I have lost sight of who I am.

Man this is getting confusing, first I'm in some exit-less town, then when I found the exit I became the only resident of a bridge in the sky and the only known consumer of a pedestal of fruit and now I'm traveling in mid flight across a sky with no visible walkway beneath me, no viable way of being transported if any motion is involved. I have found myself in a predicament that to my knowledge is a first. No one has ever came up to me and told me, “You want to hear something strange? Well I was Hitchhiking this one time and I went to far. So far that I couldn't find my way out of this deserted city for weeks. Then when I finally did, I walked up this staircase for weeks until I arrived at this bridge in the sky that went on until I realized that I was walking on air.

Well now that I have summarized my reality, I guess I should figure out what is next. Though that has not been up to me for some time now. Just then a whirlwind flew around me as I felt like Dorthy, nay Toto as I felt clutched in the grasp of a larger being as I flew through the air. Up and down left and right, diagonal up three and over one I flew while I lay limp knowing that whatever may happen it will be the last thing I expect.

What!

Did I black out?

“Yes you did”

For the entire time I had been here - weeks, months, however long it had been, I had yet to come in contact with anything living – even the fruit had been dead.

“Where am I?”

“That will be revealed when you are ready, right now it is best if you just relax.”

“Relax, I have been traveling through the most strangest places of my entire life and you tell my to relax. I have been in seclusion for months and all you can tell me is to relax. No food, no companionship, no stimulation of any kind and all you can tell me is relax. I have been locked up in the most depressing city I have ever known of, Strolling across the most unusual bridge in the sky - that could have instilled a fear of heights into anyone - only to be taken away so that I found myself hovering a few thousand feet in the air - just to wonder if I were about to fall to my death if I took a wrong step.

Now I am here in, wait I can't see anything. Am I anywhere. There is Nothing around me,

no color,

no substance,

no air,

no feeling.

Where Have you Brought me?”

“You have already answered that.”

by Zach Chisholm