10: Futures

in our school jesus call him the love vulture though he responded to alvi i'm not sure if he ever knew what it meant when we first met him we noticed that any time he saw a girl in distress whether on the verge of tears or howling and full throttled anguish he would levitate towards them circling in an ever tightening spiral until he reached his target and then in muted puppy-like tones he would seem to smother the source of the emphatic emotion and bring it back into a state of equilibrium we were jealous though jealous of the physical contacts that he made with pretty much every girl in the school whilst we barely had the guts to even talk to them but whether he was hugging them to quell their trimmers or simply brushing the sodden hair away from their tear-stained faces the effect would always be the same a steadying of the pulse a deep drawing of breath from his appearance you wouldn't have guessed he could have this kind of effect on people a hulking bovine body that seemed somehow to be old and new at the same time like a kind of temporal crossbreed between an aged sacred cow and a newborn calf whose flesh had not yet settled on its bones and to top this off as my mother used to say he had a face like a tall skull with red jammy lips perpetually blighted by cold sores he once told me the story of this infection about how at a very early age maybe a two or three years old he had visited his grandmother on what as far as i can remember was an annual occasion he had seen the outbreak around her lips the pustules glistening in the clear morning light when he had felt that if those red emissions touched him then he would become like them dispersed into some kind of bubbling mass that could barely lay claim to unity let alone herself but at the same time he had felt so keenly the hurt that she would feel if he turned his face away when she came to kiss him he had felt it with such insistence that it was impossible to do anything else and accept her kiss and with it the inevitable but this gift of his was anathema to our school and it flew in the face of many of the principles it espoused one such principle was that of the emotional reflux reward program every time we expressed an emotion that was deemed to be let's say progressive for our age we were rewarded with coupons that could be used in the school canteen i'm not sure where this policy came from but it seemed as if it was an experiment that had been instigated long ago and never revised in light of its findings and possibly like many legacy precepts misunderstood by subsequent rule it was left as it was as if out of the certainty that somewhere in the musty courtesies there was an airtight exposition that worcester seifert would lay plain simple and compelling language the purpose and desired outcome of the peculiar practice but most likely no one had had the ghoul to have the tones disentangled let alone to set about the heady task of reading them though it may have been a little misguided in its execution often leading to a cycle of abuse i see now that they were trying to develop us into complete human beings that would otherwise have been expected ones who could express a whole range of emotions beyond those few foul excretions were usually labeled as our emotional palate but at the time it looked strangely ominous as if we had stepped unwittingly into the flimsily folded world of the watchtower or some such aberration woven into our curriculum with laughter workshops crying workshops anger workshops christ we even had kegel workshops strengthening the pelvic floor to increase orgasm intensity they didn't phrase it like this in this key stages in our final year this was advertised as an additional benefit to the exercises we've been doing over the past five years or so as we became more attuned to the lucrative nature of our emotions we realized that it was in our interests to cry and catching up with the girls who returned this page long ago we soon found that elvi's apparent predatory predilections were more complex than we had imagined perhaps we were also catching up with the idea that not everything towed the line of that monotonous throne of desire not every drive was a one-way street but all that's to say far from being the pest that has feebly drawn impression he may have suggested he was in fact closer in aspects to a rosary that had been hastily strung together using knuckle bones and twine and then polished to an ivory sheen through persistent handling for we were the ones using him on any given day after the rally and cry of hearts on sleeves echoes from teacher to students and back again as we pressed our thumbs over our hearts and splayed our fingers across our biceps in a quarter salute courage and vulnerability in one awkward stretch we would file out a class with a kind of half gallop to reach the breakthrough in time for the opening of the coupon exchange the one place where elvi reigned supreme the market was held twice a day during the first five minutes of morning and afternoon break here people sold off their coupons for ready cash we even had a sub sale of futures where you could buy the tears at tomorrow at a cut down price often so low that it was quite likely to induce the tears it speculated on as chief caller or the cinch in our school parlance he assessed the quantity of coupons available at each given time adjusting the value accordingly and then his white gloved hands held in high suspense slowly descending like two doves and from heaven growled and raptured as he brought silence to court he would declare the market open with a solemn bow as far as i know there was only one time that he ever received a coupon himself we were on a site visit to the local avatar as part of our immersive economics class which led us through the whole process from the arrival of the animals to the departure of the meat when the first delivery backed into the loading bay and the ramp lowered releasing the torrent of bleating lambs i saw elvi transform the calm almost floating quality of his eyes became frozen he didn't know where to look where to go what to do he seemed like a bird with clipped wings there was so much suffering so much fear too much for them and too many dams for him so he turned away and for once tears appeared in his startled eyes as for us and i mean all of us the butcher the caretaker the director the driver our you teacher into tears a wild whaling that drowned out the sound of the lambs to the point they stopped when time to look at us with curious gazes and the odd inquisitive bleed we let the abattoir drained needless to say we all ate well that day in the following months we saw elvie less than desks until around the time of the final exams he stopped coming to school together his absence was particularly noticeable due to the stress that a lot of us were under and the consequent breakdowns that became daily occurrence without him we had no way of coping we were like an orchestra of no conductor shifting imperceptibly out of time it should have been obvious but it took me a while to realize where he was spending his time return to the abattoir the following day asking if he could be with the animals before they died the manager quite naturally declined this obscure a potentially obscene request and continue taking off the inventory and the butcher who had witnessed the events the day before came up to them with a trembling hand pointing at elvi rasped it's you it's you thank you stretching out his arms tattooed as densely as chainmail and with tears in his eyes he embraced him with an intensity only matched by that with extension blood in consequence lv was allowed to stay he had a sense of what to do but he couldn't express it at first he could only act by spending time with the animals they seem to become calmer more docile and this appeared to be of some benefit to the process many customers claimed that the meat suddenly tasted better i know they couldn't quite put their fingers on what the difference was several words reoccurred glowing letters of appreciation began to arrive soon after tender mellow gentle one even labeling the flavors faithful eventually out of a keen respect for revenue he was given his own room a grave windowless concrete box with muted acoustics and dim ocrish wall lighting that tended to flicker as the power tools were sucked and surged through one door the animals would be admitted standing at the opposite door with his hands gently placed together like two feathers held in a stable updraft would speak in his lowering tone and invite the animal to sit with him for a while often suspicious always coming they left the room in a tranquil state prepared for death perhaps even numb to it the abattoir under the auspices of this unensuing emperor of the dead had become silent saved for the groans and chatter of metal melding with flesh to him now life was in the dispersal of suffering for every ounce of compassion he gave an ounce of meat he made yeah