Sondranos: The Narrative of Leon Bishop (3 page)

I’m not dead.

Most importantly, I’m not going
to tell you I’m dead.

Kenya Rothrock, the new
director of Literature and Language at St. Michel’s – who also
taught Postmodernism with a heart of sheet rock - couldn’t convince
me to use that trope in telling what happened. Even now I can’t
bring myself to do it because the act would effectively ruin the
memory of those who’ll die in the following pages.

Even though it was a staple of
the All-About-Me generation of Literature, my classes hardly ever
understood why I disliked that trope. I can explain it now in a way
I couldn’t before. Long ago, you couldn’t cross a bookshelf without
seeing the line ‘this is how I died’ in one out of every three
novels. Lauren Williams, a novelist of pulp romance hidden beneath
an even thinner veil of mock self-discovery, had been the biggest
offender. Rothrock threw the harlequin effigies of Williams in my
face whenever she could. ‘It’s brilliant because it’s about a
weapon-smith who hates weapons, so he dies metaphorically,’ she’d
say.

I never got enthused by her
passion.

Saying you’ve died in a first
person narrative is a cheat. I would learn later, while the ashes
of Sondranos still singed my sinuses, that living is always harder
than dying. I imagine that’s why I wasn’t afraid when I led Melanie
into the cellar of the Abbey. My body could have easily been strewn
out in the plains, eviscerated by a then-unknown enemy. The attack
could have come mid-flight, or I could have been evaporated in the
city limits.

To say I’d died would be
cheating what waited. I write this from a scattered and fractured
life, the kind of perch a bird would be insane to build a nest
upon. My words, my thoughts – which are what this story is truly
about – are the only comfort I have. Ironic, since these very words
are ones I’ve used to betray so many others, including myself.

Rothrock would probably say,
‘Hell had better plans for me.’

Blanc de
Noirs
defined Sondranos
cuisine after having been brought by the
colonists, grown, and crafted over years of agricultural exchange.
When we got to the cellar, I wasn’t surprised that the dusty cave
was a storeroom for casks of the wine.

Two large buttresses introduced
the way down while cobwebs acted like stabilizers. Some shook loose
in the destruction. Dust sprinkled the remaining ones and caught
the sunlight as I pulled the door behind us. I left the door ajar
so a sliver of light could lead us down. Lines of plastic black
grapes adorned the wall. Melanie touched a couple, picked one off,
and crushed it in her fist.

By then, Melanie had deafened
herself to the destruction both physically and mentally. She might
as well have been hiding from a thunderstorm.

The basement was coloured a
woodgrain brown, matching the shades adorning the walls and the
barrels around the room. Casks of wine lined the cellar, their
presence hinted at with the scent of mock oak and mildew. Whoever
designed the room kept a trio of empty casks in the centre,
balanced on a crease in the pavement that could have served as a
drain a long time ago. A system of stringed lights wires led from
the stairwell; ovular bulbs lit up each barrel in a spotlight.
Either the place was on a generator, or power was still on out here
– for that we were grateful. Very distant and out of place was the
sound of a barber shop quartet singing some nineteenth century
tune. Their voices reverberated off the walls through speakers
piped through the four corners of the cellar.

“
Liars,”
Melanie muttered.

It was the first she’d spoken
since we’d left the Abbey’s gift shop. When I asked her to repeat
what she’d said, she stopped on the last step and said, “Only one
station on this entire planet plays music from Earth’s golden
period – 97 Transistor Radio.”

“
I’m not
following you.”

On Sondranos, Melanie
explained, all the transmissions relayed to a series of stations
circling the crater of Sondranos. She fell easily into the role of
teacher, moving her hands around her waist to emphasize points and
maintaining eye contact. Eventually, she continued, the stations
all moved to Crater’s Edge to keep the signal more efficient. The
circumference of the crater treated the entire settlement like a
giant, ancient satellite dish turned inwards. Her best guess was
that the natural landscape allowed for optimal signal transmission
when it wasn’t being bounced off another station.

“
But, at the
beginning of their broadcast every day, some advertisement says
they never record their shows. ‘Why trust the rest when we’re the
best’,” she smiled – it was a dark grin, concealed and coloured
like the shadows of the fake grapes strung down the stairwell. She
dropped the mock announcer voice to a quiver that shook the
beginning of her next sentence. “Meaning they’re transmitting from
the part of the city that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“
I guess
they’ll be in trouble.”

“
I won’t be
listening to them anymore,” Melanie laughed. It started soft and
high-pitched. The laughter continued, awkwardly. She walked down
the last step, letting her voice muffle to a groan and sat down on
a nearby cask. Melanie cupped her face in her palms and began to
weep as silently as she could, which wasn’t very quiet.

Instead of comforting her, I
searched the room.

Two small bowls lay convex
against the wall. I swabbed the inside of both bowls with my sleeve
and made sure they were clean. After a second glance around, I
found the most recently pegged barrel sitting on its side atop a
triangle of more near the stairwell. That was when Melanie looked
up and caught what I was doing. Her weeping stifled.

“
Who are you
here to visit?” she asked.

“
Nobody.”

I placed a bowl below the
spigot on the barrel and twisted, hoping something would come out.
The instantaneous scent of Blanc de Noirs filled my sinuses. I’d
once made a strawberry-rhubarb pie and, when the wine came pouring
out of the cask, my mouth watered as if expecting that same
dessert. The alcohol was barely there, an aftertaste for the
senses.

“
Then why
Sondranos? Why come here?”

“
I thought it
would be a good holiday,” I responded quickly.

It was easier than the
truth.

Trust me, I
wanted to tell Melanie how I took the A8 to the airport, booked a
flight to New York, picked up a few travel needs in Manhattan and
then clipped my way south to Miami, where
International Aeronautics
offered
hundreds of flights as part of the summer festival celebration
sale. I even got a discount for being a teacher for more than five
years. Of course, had I explained that, she would have wondered why
I’d gone through so much trouble. I didn’t look like the ‘sudden
adventure’ type of guy.

Instead of that, it was easier
to follow with: “I just needed a change of scenery.”

I believe you
can feel
lies when they settle into your
brain; you can feel them wanting to be the truth. You have this
sort of ‘If someone else believes it, then it can be true
mentality.’ If you don’t feel this, then lying has become too
comfortable and you should re-consider speaking in
public.

At that
moment, my lie nestled at the base of my skull next to thoughts of
how easy it was to convince myself I was fine and how hard it was
to remember I was no longer back on Earth. I knew that every time I
spoke to Melanie she would only think I was here for something
trivial – a
holiday.
I liked that.

But next to these lies are
moments that always live in the present. No matter when they
happened or why, they’re the neighbours to our lies: present
moments keep us from accepting that deceit is an easy task. Asking
a friend about their Mother after attending the funeral two years
prior; waking up to go to work, forgetting that work was destroyed
a week ago.

My time on Sondranos was filled
with Present Moment memories.

The best way to describe them
is a sensory explosion that lasts less than a second, but feels
like a lifetime. Go back to the past, flash forward to whatever
your mind’s fixated on: you’re stuck in time and can’t do anything
about it. All you’ll have left is the sensory ghost, a scent, a
feeling, a headache, just a reminder that you’ve been hit and
couldn’t stop the memory.

After lying to Melanie, this is
the first memory that played out in my head:

On Earth, he
is Arthur
Leontes Bishop, Ph.D. and
Professor and Director of Interstellar Literatures and Cultures. He
stands before his class and clasps his hands together. Leon longs
for the days when he can wear a jacket with leather patches on the
elbows, but the parental supervisory board has strict regulations
on clothing. As long as they aren’t placing blame on him for their
children’s shortcomings, he’ll follow the regulations.

Eleven
first-year students stare back at him. Some jot down notes with the
graphite pens they got at the school store during orientation,
while others soak in the information by listening. Not one of them
knows the answer to his question. He laughs the feeling of unease
away and starts towards the projector. He clicks it on where an
image of
Richter’s Guide to the Psychology
of Selfish Symbology
flashes and rotates
slowly on the holographic screen.

“
The correct
answer,” Leon begins, “is the ‘All-About-Me Generation Literature
of the early twenty-first century’. Novels like
The Garden in the Brush, Delgado’s Union,
and
the Refuge of Albion
are examples. These three novels show how the
literary tool of postmodernism assumed the blame of society and
translated it into a more subconscious, selfish level of thinking.
But stop. Selfishness is not a bad thing, it’s just got a negative
connotation. Sometimes you need to think about yourself, otherwise,
how’d you survive?”

Leon watches as a student in
the front row scribbles POSTMOD = LITERARY TOOL on her notebook and
Leon stifles a smile. Rothrock next door would have his hide if she
knew he’d allowed that. She’d only gotten her PhD in postmodernist
theory a year before it was written off as a period due to the
inability for it to be proven under a single time constraint. That,
and when the most a ‘period’ could do was offer a strange tone and
a handful on conceits, then something had to change. If there was
ever a war between the Literary periods, Leon was sure he and
Rothrock would be on opposing sides, a fight to the death, even
though he couldn’t even nail down the title of his own period. ‘All
About Me’ Literature is just one of the many threads he used to tie
them down.

But Leon is comfortable here;
he is at home. There is nothing a student or professor or adjunct
could say for which he wouldn’t have an answer or argument, and no
attention seeking parents can strip him of his pride.

Leon turns to a male student in
the front row.

“
Mr. Bell,”
he says. “Pick one of the titles I just mentioned to
you.”

Jamie Bell stares back at him,
open mouthed and eyes agape. Leon waits.

Eventually, Mr. Bell lets the
words form on the tip of his tongue and he stammers, “The last one.
The one about refuse.”

“
Refuge of
Albion,
by Pierre Albert, published in
June of 2023.”

The voice recognition system in
the projector recognizes Leon’s tone. The key words and the
rotating image of the class textbook shifts to another book – the
cover showing a castle. In the reflection of the pond below it, the
castle is decayed and destroyed. Below the author’s name is an MPAA
sticker outdated by a few hundred years. Leon doubts anyone could
find the film for the book since it was archaic by at least six or
seven forms of data management crystals, but still listens for the
clues that someone’s forgone the reading. Mostly, anyone who says
that the book had some great acting is a dead give-away.

Leon addresses the class: “The
author calls this book his ‘most important work because of its
mental capacity’ and yet this novel is about a man who runs from
his life because he can’t handle what he’s becoming. Sound
familiar? You’ve probably read a version of the same story six,
maybe seven thousand times, seen it in films, and heard it in music
and productions.”

Leon paces the room, holding
his hands in front of him. “What makes it different from all the
others is how inherently selfish the author approached the story.
He took an old tale, used that as the spine for his work, and then
proceeded to use all his own concerns, memories, defeats,
victories, and perceptions about the world to fuel the pages. If
postmodernism gave us comfort in the absurd, then it also gave us
the ability to make that same comfort a first world concern: hence,
the shorthanded AAM Generation Literature, which lasts for around
two hundred years, from 1991 to 2250. Their motto: We are always
the centre of our own story. Over four-hundred years, one
Technological Revolution, the distribution and monopolization of
the space program, and hundreds of paradigm shifts later we can
still look back and consider these works unique. Why?”

The boy, Jamie Bell, slouches
in his seat while the girl next to him cocks her head to the side,
giving Leon her attention. Leon can see a small phoenix emblazoned
across her wrist, the fire tipped wings reach around like a
bracelet of orange and yellow. On it, the name ‘Zen Koriyama’ is
inked in cursive. Lacey Barks.