Anamnesis, Zorina Alliata [the dot read aloud TXT] 📗

to my mom in church, and they only had a civil ceremony. See? I have his last name but without being actually part of his family. Very subtle, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about”, said the secretary. “I don’t care about your name or your daddy’s. Never heard of any of you in my life.”

“Actually”, said Dante, “you have. You sent a memo to shareholders, and my dad’s name was in it. You see, he’s been missing since I was like 1 year old and now you sent a memo with his name in it. See? I have to find him. You have to tell me why you put his name in that memo.”

“Okaaay”, said the secretary. “You’re a cute boy and all, and I feel sorry you lost your daddy, but I know nothing about it. I don’t write the memos, I only send them. They come to me from some other secretaries in other departments. I just send them to where they tell me, okay?”

“Well, why did you send me a memo addressed to shareholders then?” asked Dante. “I am no shareholder. You see, you must have made a mistake. Sent the wrong memo to the wrong people, maybe with the wrong names in it. I mean, if it’s a mistake of any kind, I want to know before I get my hopes up here.”

The secretary looked through the papers on the desk, shaking her head. “Is it this one?” she asked, holding a piece of black paper with white letters on it.

“Yes”, said Dante. “that’s the one. See? You put me on the list of shareholders – there is my name, with one dash. And see, that’s my dad’s name right there. With two dashes.”

The secretary rolled her eyes. “Look, honey”, she said, losing the accent and the funny talking. “I may not be fast at knitting sweaters, and I may be stupid enough to let a bald man give me a bad job – but I am not a bad secretary. I made mistakes, of course, but I’m a good person, you know. I know my job. I’m organized, I have my own system that I invented, you see?”

She pulled out a drawer with files, aligned in straight rows. “I don’t trust computers that much”, she continued. “I have my own filings here, and they’re always better than the damn machines. Okay? So let’s see here: Shareholders Names and Addresses. Here you are, boy: Dante Portinari-Guelph, 52 Amber Road, Suite 205, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20878. Number of private shares: 500,000. Shares granted on: June 3rd, 1969. See? I made no mistake, hon. You are a shareholder.”

“500,000 shares?” Dante laughed. He would have laughed even louder, but his address was correct and the date mentioned in there was his birthday. “I don’t have 500,000 shares of anything”, he said. “Where did you get that number? What are you trying to do here?”

“Take it easy, sweet talker”, the secretary answered. “I made this list two months ago, when I started to work here. There was still the old management, on my first day at work. I went on to training, had a free lunch, was introduced to people, and made my own files with addresses. I sent a beautiful memo that day. Mr. S., the boss who hired me, was such an angel. But then, the next day hell broke loose. New management, new job, and I had to start knitting. Poor Mr. S., I don’t even know what became of him. He might be knitting sweaters somewhere too, poor man.”

She sighed deeply. “Look,” she told Dante, who was sitting in silence trying to make sense of the information, “why don’t you go ask the Shareholders board. I mean, if it’s a mistake, they should be able to fix it. There’s nothing much I can do from here. All I know is that they sent me the memo and they told me to send it to all shareholders in the Lower Earth. Okay?”

“Okay”, said Dante. “There is a Shareholders board?”

“Sure thing, hon. Here, let me write you down their office number. They’re right upstairs in the Medieval department.”

“Okay, then. Thanks for you help and I’ll come visit again sometime.”

“Hon?” the secretary called after him.

“Can you bring me a cup of coffee? I’m stuck here to the damn knitting station.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have a bottle of orange juice?” asked Dante. “I don’t think coffee is such a good idea. You know, it’s bad for you. My mom just told me about this article about how coffee can cause cancer and make you infertile. It’s really scary.”

“Fine, I’ll take orange then”, she decided. “Good luck with your daddy, kid. And don’t forget: Always read the fine print!”

*-*-*

Officer Kampf had watched Dante’s wanderings with great interest. He had completely given up his standing pose at the glass gates, and pulled himself a chair from the conference room right in front of the monitors. He had never before watched the monitoring system closely; he was not sure he was supposed to. His job was to sit at the gates, for what he understood in the short briefing he had received when starting his job. But there was someone in need of help out there; a young man, whose name he just found out after listening in the discussion with the secretary, was searching for his missing father, alone and clueless in the cruel, complicated jungle of the Company.

Officer Kampf thought about it for a while. He did not like to rush into anything. There was a possibility that the young man was simply wrong, or lying; there was even a possibility that Officer Kampf’s boss had hired him as bait, to get Officer Kampf fired. But his instinct denied these theories; one look at Dante and it was clear to everyone that this was an honest, beautiful person.

He watched Dante taking the elevator to the Medieval floor and getting off with a confused look on his face. It was pretty clear Dante had never visited that floor before; he stood in the front of the secured glass doors and waved his badge in front of the electronic reader. Nothing. Dante tried again, unsuccessfully.

Officer Kampf smiled – obviously, Dante did not have enough security clearance to visit that floor. His badge access was most probably only for the Lower departments, floors 3 and down. The Medieval was the 5th. Officer Kampf did not hesitate much this time – there was finally an opportunity to help and he took it right away.

Dante, who had figured out his lack of access too, was about to turn around and get back in the elevator, when an electronic beep stopped him. The security light was green and, in front of him, the glass door opened slowly. “Wow”, he said loudly, “so at this floor it takes a couple of minutes until your badge opens the door. Ha!”

Officer Kampf laughed heartily. With fast moves, he switched the images on the monitors trying to follow Dante’s path through the cubicle rows. He was heading to the department manager’s office, hidden in the Rainbow at the end of the Castle. A minstrel sang sadly in the lunchroom while receiving a fax. Officer Kampf enabled the sound option and waited for Dante to knock at the manager’s door.

And then, an alarm sounded. Officer Kampf jumped off the chair and immediately took his position at the door; he stood there for a few minutes, waiting for something terrible to happen. The worst scenarios went through his mind – maybe they saw him using the monitors, leaving his post, falling in love, spying. Maybe they were coming up to fire him and shame him.

But nothing else happened. The alarm, which, he now realized, had sounded too muffled to be close to him, stopped for good. He heard an ambulance downstairs and peeked out of the window to see a couple of people being taking away by paramedics. He stepped backwards, looking at the monitors only to discover the same old picture everywhere.

Officer Kampf breathed deeply. Taking his seat again, he listened in different rooms until he got the whole story. It turned out that all the fuss was about some bad coffee in the lunchroom at the 2nd floor. It made a few people sick and they called the ambulance. On the right screen, Officer Kampf saw the knitting secretary getting up and dismantling the knitting station with a solid boot kick. She was jumping around in happy circles. As it soon made it to Officer Kampf’s ears, it turned out that her boss had drunk the bad coffee and was sick. Not only that, but when he got sick he had spilled coffee on his desk, completely destroying the small print on her contract.

Officer Kampf shook his head. A theory was forming in his mind; although he already knew that Dante was no ordinary man, he had never realized the terrific magnitude of his reach. There was forgiveness then for his own abject sins – because Dante was love in its purest form, and no one could resist it. He should have seen it – a simple, clean mind, an abstinent body, those caring eyes – Dante was a savior with a miraculous touch.

Officer Kampf bowed in the direction of everything, feeling relief and tenderness. He gave thanks for things he could not name. He converted to a new religion, right there. All that it took was a pot of bad coffee in the lunchroom on the 2nd floor.

*-*-*

I was running out of time and I knew it. I could feel it in every fiber of my tired body, and in the strong, invisible cords linking me to my family. Even though I had moved from Romania to the US, our bond was not diminished by space; it simply did not have space as a dimension of its existence.

I had avoided talking with my parents for the last two months. I wrote short, cold email messages telling them how busy I was at work with the Company going public and all that. It’s not like I could ever lie to them – because they know me so well. But we like to keep appearances in my family. We don’t make scenes and say great words, and throw our hearts on the table. We’d rather write cold, short messages rather than say it straight as it was. But they knew things were wrong.

They have tried to find me a mate since I was 16. It was very important that I have children, hopefully lots of them. I was the last one in the family who could carry on life, the best suited because of my instinct, my femininity, my beauty. Attracting unsuspecting males was easy; converting them to our beliefs – very possible. The probability rate on that was almost 95%. Nobody in my family understood my complete denial of any relationships they suggested; my absolute frigidity; my terror when they would even mention mating.

My parents tried to protect me; they said I was still too young, they said I was too special; too smart; too gifted; all the good things they could think of. That the man for me was not born yet. And through it all, I could not bring myself to tell them the truth; to destroy their hopes with a few words.

“I think that you should tell them”, Lou commented. We were watching the season finale of Friends and all that talk about babies had made me sad.

“I