Which Is Where We Are Now

I’ve driven into the garage of this old man, a neighbor. He has 2 MGs in their original antique green. I’m driving a newly issued one, white with black trim. The dogs are with me, in the back seat. He looks at me, turns the lights off, and closes the garage door.

I sit there for a couple of minutes in the dark and don’t know what to do. He peaks back in and asks if I’m going to come in.

We walk past his first driveway which is where I probably meant to park and overshot to that second one, which had a drive branching from the first one. I walk into his house; it’s a converted office. There are people under his employ, including a bored secretary. It’s the kind of boredom where the employee isn’t appreciated and the employee finds no value in the organization she’s helping.

He seems to think that I like Benzes. Well, I like my MG. I try to say that of course I don’t like Benzes but feel too rude to say it.

I finger my way through his metal stand of papers on display. There is a religious bent to him. I pick up a dry, medical-oriented write up on women entitled Demon. I’m kind of laughing to myself in disbelief. Just then, his wife peeks out from the inside of the office. There is a kind of I’m-trapped-here-with-this-intellectual-domineering-man shift in her eyes. Well, I put it back.

I continue to look for the Benz write up. I pick up a proposal for school lunches. So, people can just sit down and write up school lunch proposals like this… at the same time I consider a possibility I hadn’t realized before, then the sadness of one guy thinking up an entire school lunch for kids… Poor kids.

I’m a very good student at a military academy. We go through combat exercises, one troop against another, and our troop does excellently.

Now, I find myself in charge of my own troop. We come across one reconnaissance officer from the enemy troop; my entire troop is all thumbs. I realize I needed to have been giving them orders. They didn’t know what to do.

The games are halted by the commander trainers. They are dismayed at my lack of readiness.

I lay down in my bunk. The other group of trainees have left for games. I’m tired; there is no one left in the room; maybe one other person, a girl.

I think, spitefully, “if this is just becoming a place where I am giving the orders, then all of this is bullshit. I don’t have to do this. This just isn’t for me. I’m not doing army stuff if I don’t have to.”