"Well, I'm NOT an interrogator. Is this room soundproof?"
"It would be but now we're under constant surveillance! Does that make you sweaty?"
"I'm wearing deodorant."
"Go! Take your questions to the other box. And you two have a good road trip."
"Are we there yet?"
The next filter box would pit us against people who were "beautiful". They'd managed to work personal care into part of their regiment. "With a desire to be on TV, I'm sure."
"I'm more of a behind-the-scenes type if I'm a type at all."
A door closed in a nervous move not sounding like a nurse's shoe in a hallway of calmed neurotics. The woman approached, lowered eyes. "I'm sure I blew it. I wanted to."
"Why?"
"I'm leaning in the direction of think tank."
"I don't even know what that is but it sounds like it would hurt my brain."
"What kind of question did they want?"
"I think they're seeking the perfect moderator."
"Let's just leave."
"That's not how to handle this." She looked at the list of allowed questions and pointed at two potentials.
everything." A woman ahead of us in the processing explained. "And if we can't know, there's a silver lining!" A random person in line was told to hold out hands. These were swabbed with something similar to an alcohol pad. There proved to be gun powder on the skin. "He had to fire a pistol." Someone else vouched.
He'd fired it the way a Colonial re-enactor had fired a musket to show us boy and girl scouts how to signal that the red coats were indeed coming.
"How can we counter terrorism without understanding what terrorism eesz?" An Indian man philosophized. Part reinforcing we'd not actually done anything wrong in busting through a Klan block of the roads to D.C., part making good on a promise to at least listen to a "talk".
Potential "mentors" for next steps on career paths came from a labyrinth of double-doored rooms. They looked at name tags. A friend snickered. Before we'd left home they'd even checked our teeth like we were horses.
"It's been quite a saga to get here. Peacefully. And not killing anyone on the roads." Our peer-group rep informed a sweatered man with a shirt pocket bulge of pens. "We appreciate the effort."
"Taking a stand on anything in such clime has actually
The line of us started moving. "My mentor is twenty-six years younger than me," a man hoarsely said into a woman's ear. She handed him her pocketbook. Took flats off feet and slightly shuffled along in nylons. "They get numb. It's not a forever mentor. I mean maybe you two will hit it off. But some of us are just here to get updates and some backstory."
Out of the building onto a sidewalk. Clouds gray. Into another building.
"A mass vetting of people willing to get shot at for Our Country?" The man's sweat was dripping out of him onto the walking belt.
The shootings in Virginia were not showing a clear pattern. Civilians buying junk food and prices-soaring gas were on the TV in the weight-training room. "The Humanities people need to get their files."
"Do we have them?"
"Supposedly. The Censor Council needed to put Arts and Science in you guys' Department."
The man swiped a face towel from the handlebars of the treadmill. Shut the brisk walk off. "Let's check on the timing of the request!"
"Why is the bee scrumpin' the roof father?"
The little little boy was a middle child in a gang of kids. The father looked down at the boy. The boy pointed above their heads where they were working on a pass-along team to repair damaged at great heights. The Dad surveyed the situation and made a ticking sound with his mouth. Debated age appropriate.
"Poor buddy." The father said of the bee. "Gots pollen and no place to put it."
"Why?"
The Dad unfurled the boy's tiny hand full of putty. "We filled up the holes with this stuff."
Other people in the early morning launch team area tiredly watched the conversation. Until they heard the Foreman cometh. "I SAID don't sweat the small stuff NOT NOT DO the small stuff. Now we're holding up the whole world!"
Sighs.
The new bikinis were stained dark with dirt and ground cover vegetation.
From a place of depression and lack of self confidence the men had decided to be different. And to be different from beaten down and runned over, bulldozed by surveillance and computers thinking for them, they'd processed the situation, and surmounted downtrodden by getting strong.
Without permission they started to re-claim theirs. Most of the women were shocked. One had the wherewithall to be a sort of spokesperson in the fluid situation. "I see y'all have regressed to Neanderthal stage in your process Tom." The man grunted and pulled harder. "You're giving me a wedgie." He sweatily re-gripped ankles and looked like a man pulling a plow. She stayed rigid.
"In sickness and health. And whatever this is," another woman called out. Her breasts exposed to the dirt as she was face down in the pull and her bikini top was up under her armpits. "Not sure this is what I had in mind for girl's day at the lake."
Other couples worked their ways from awkward capture into holding hands and becoming "one" in stealth. Most worked silently to retrieve stashed survival kits and make way back to "real life". Never again to be as simple as childhood had seemed to cared for children.
Decisions had been made between couples that made a casual goodbye impossible. In a parking area a partnerless man asked to and took a few photographs. "I can't unsee this and that." He had already explained, first exposure to therapy in a group setting. "But this is how I'll think of us!" Weary smiles and Org tees.
