Steelwalker
It takes about five seconds to fall 450 feet. It takes 5
seconds to reach a speed of ninety miles per hour when you fall 450 feet under
the pull of gravity starting from a state of rest. My heart stopped for the
entirety of those 5 seconds. And then it began to beat at over 180 beats per
minute. My mind completely blocked out all sound, except for the thud from the
contact with the concrete below. Slowly, I began regaining awareness of the
sound of the sirens from around me. I stared down at the Sharpie I had just
lost. Even with my heart beating wildly in my head, I felt a little relieved
that it had hit no one. I shifted tentatively, as I sat on a twenty four inch
wide, grey steel beam, 450 feet up in the air.
I had a safety harness that would catch me if I fell. But it would also
cut off my femoral artery and I would lose my life in about 30 minutes. I knew
this all along, but the Sharpie’s fall really heightened by awareness of the
fact.
There were iron workers around me. Big men, strong men. I
supposed they would walk the steel to help rescue me if I fell. I remember them
joking that I was too little and that I would simply fall out of my harness if
I tripped. They always had the same reaction when they first saw me. Their gait
would slow, their lips would curl up in mockery of how small a dude I was, then
their eyes would slowly widen in surprise as they registered, and then they
would look at my chest to confirm that I was indeed a woman. Then they’d think
I was cute because I had just spent 25 minutes making my way up to the 450 feet
tall roof just to sit around and look pretty. Then the smirks would start
amongst them. And I am sure there were bets too, of when I would freak out or
how soon I would fall. But then, as I’d slowly climb over the catwalk, and walk
onto the steel beams supporting the mammoth roof of this arena, they’d silently
acknowledge that maybe they were wrong.
I was a video board programmer, and didn’t really belong
here. As the safety inspector had insisted over and over during the
orientation, “this is an active construction site”. However, after the boards
were up in the air, welded, bolted and securely held in place against the
fiercest hurricanes, the only way to examine them was to become a steel walker.
These video boards were state of the art. We had spent months designing and
testing all the hardware and software. They had worked perfectly for the first
two days after they were put up. However, now there were dead spaces on the
display. The last time something went wrong with a similar set of video boards,
it took me a week of walking steel to find the tiny capacitor that had failed
us. I wondered how long it would take me today - especially after I had lost my
sharpie and the only way I had to track my movements and findings.
The weather was beginning to cool down. The ETFE pillows of
the gigantic roof were being put up and helped keep out the sun. It had rained
the previous night and I would have been cold had it not been for the thick
socks, steel toe boots, mandatory full sleeves t-shirt, pants, safety, harness,
thick gloves, hard hat and safety glasses. The safety vest he gave me was two
sizes too big, long and beginning to disseminate the malodors it had been
gathering from the greases, oils, paints, concrete and fade under the dust it
had been gathering. The contractor had warned me against washing it too often
for fear that the reflective stripes on it would fade. I didn’t need them to be
visible though.
The men never forgot me. It had been a year since I
inspected the video boards in Tampa, but a guy stopped me on the catwalk today
and exclaimed, “You’re the lady inspector from the arena in Tampa!” Yesterday,
when I took a two minute break to get a sip of water, the welder claimed “I am
making sure you are warm” when he turned on his torch and brought it’s
temperature up to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
I checked to make sure both the hooks form my lanyards were
still connected to the steel safety wire above me. The shaking in my legs had
stopped, so I slowly stood up and inched forward towards the last obstacle
before I reached the video boards – two giant speakers blasting Katy Perry’s
firework. The audio consultants sure had some sense of humour!
Nirakar. Formless.
“You have beautiful eyes”, said the woman as she gazed into
Alina’s face. Alina had big, brown, watery eyes. They were deep and drew you in
swiftly. Humans say eyes are the windows to your soul. Alina’s eyes were the
gateway to an old soul, who had a million stories to tell – only we don’t have
souls like humans do. We also don’t have hearts – and our chest sounds like a
human heart skipping beats. We run on what the humans called music. The
formless introduced music to humans before we left the Earth. Alina knew she
didn’t belong to Earth. And so she hid her blue eyelids and shimmering body
under human mud – makeup they called it. Funny that a formless would use
expensive mud to “make her up”.
“Thank you”, said Alina to the woman who complemented her
eyes. Alina had recently found herself in a country called Vietnam. Alina had
accepted her fate as the only formless on the Earth. We had left years ago, when we realized humans were going to destroy the Earth. Humans are
silly. It took them years to figure out what was destroying Earth, and when
they finally did, they accelerated their own destruction! They’ve written
stories about how “we create the weapons of our own destruction”. For a species
that can understand so much, they always fumble around and mess things up awfully easy.
Alina was a formless and therefore logical, which also made
it hard for her to understand human beings. Formless are like historians. But we have to earn the right to be storytellers. We can only become a
storyteller when we complete our consciousness. It’s easy to complete one's consciousness - it is like a giant puzzle with millions of pieces. Our "hosts" hide
these pieces in a region they choose, sometimes they hide in many different regions. Every new formless has a host who
helps us complete our consciousness. The hosts are storytellers who’ve
written the requisite number of stories – 195 to be exact. When we write 195
stories, we get the right to host a new formless and then eventually disappear
into the ether. Sometimes other formless carry vital links to our puzzles and our hosts connect us to them. When the formless left the Earth, there was a bit of a frenzy
and Alina was left behind with an incomplete set of clues. Alina knew the best way to piece her consciousness was to
find the places that stimulated it. Hoi An, the lantern city, was
just the place – only it took
Alina many years to understand that Alina meant light. Her host was creative
in the clues they had left her with!
“So, what colour do you want the dress to be? I have pink,
green, blue, grey…too boring for
you…hmmm….red! Oh yes! This suits your face! You must get this dress in red.”
Alina agreed and spent the next 45 minutes defining the wide boat neck of the
dress. She didn’t want a revealing neck line – it would just add to the amount
of mud she would have to apply below her neck everyday. She chose a shimmering red
fabric that would distract from her shimmering chest – an area where humans
generally have a heart.
“Ok, this looks good. You come back tonight to try it on. I
will fit it to your body. Many boys will follow you!”. Alina didn’t really care
for human men. As humans would describe them, they tended to be “cry babies” –
always needy and wanting something. Alina didn’t like human women either. It
might have been because she was programmed to feel attracted to the formless that carried
missing links to her puzzle. She left the tailor to finish the red dress and
wandered around the city – lounged in cafés serving iced Vietnamese coffee,
spent hours with a street artist getting a wedding present made for one of her
few human friends, watched a water puppet show – my, these humans sure are a
creative bunch! – and then went back to the tailor in the evening. As Alina was
trying on one of the many dresses, she felt a jolt! A connection was made, a
piece of the puzzle completed. She looked around, and saw a human looking man.
But Alina knew he had blue eyelids and a shimmering chest where a heart should
have been. Deep brown eyes. A mature, kind and polite voice. That surely cannot
be a human! And then she felt another jolt and knew that he was a formless too!
It had to be – there was no way her puzzle was becoming more complete! Her
consciousness was coming together. He knew too. As did the tailor. She was
human, but apparently humans are good at sensing connections – even if they are
cosmic in nature. She saw how he snuck looks at this girl as she tried on her
dresses, stood in front of the mirror, twirled and let the fabric flare up, let
her hair down and flicked her head.
They made some human talk around the tailor – where did you
go to school, what brings you to Vietnam, and then made plans to “catch up for
drinks” after. Such a human thing, catch up for drinks – humans always dance
around the fact that you have a connection,. They’re always coy and ask, ‘do
you want to come back to mine to listen to some music?’. That’s something they
learned from the formless, because when we share music, we share the very thing
that sustains us. They started mimicking us to feel the same passion we felt,
but humans will never truly feel the power of music the way a formless can. The
tailor quickly wrapped up her red dress and his green coat. And then Alina and
the other formless left, to “catch up” with each other.
They went to a bar with drunk humans, but with very soulful
music. It had been a while since Alina had recharged! They walked over the old
bridge to Alina’s hideout. As they walked under the million lanterns Hoi Ann is
known for, Alina and the formless were careful to ensure the brightness of
their shimmering chests didn’t give them away! They locked hands. In this, they
were like humans, formless needed to hold hands to express their bond. As his
warmth flowed into hers, the mechanical sound of the skipping beats in her
chest got louder and more rapid. As they got to her hideout, he held her and
kissed her. Alina could feel the mechanical sounds of his skipping beats get
louder and begin matching hers. Alina ran her hands through his long, soft
braid. She felt his chest become warm as his generator skipped more beats, more
rapidly. He kissed and caressed her, and her chest shimmered brighter than it
ever had before. They both pieced another part of their consciousness that
night and it was the most powerful piece of the puzzle Alina had found. But
Alina still had 183 stories to write. He never told her how many more he had to
go. But the next day he left to complete his stories. She went to Malaysia to
look for the rest of the pieces of her consciousness, with her mechanical heart
skipping more beats than usual and her chest shimmering more brightly when she
thought of him.
