A Writing Exercise: _ecilia and the Restarting of the Printing Process

When people ask you what you are doing, tell them you’re doing a writing exercise. When they ask how come your writing sucks, tell them it’s because you’re doing a writing exercise. When they ask why your page is titled “Literature Page” instead of “Writing Exercises Page” tell them… well… that you’re just doing a writing exercise.

Of the Halting of the Printing Process a lot can give you the tale, but only a few can actually accost you in the middle of the street, drag you by the shirt sleeves to a semi-expensive diner, and tell you in full how the Halted Printing Process got to start working again.

I’m not one of them, but this short account I’m about to give, I believe touches lightly on the matter…

As soon as _ecilia’s space transport left the Printing Hub, I was left with only a question: Will I ever see her again? and a quickly fading memory of having been allowed to palm her forehead before she left.

I stared at my palm—indeed the very one that not an hour ago, grazed and caressed that smooth, divine forehead—then touched that palm to my own forehead.

Something felt missing. And the emptiness _ecilia’s abrupt departure inflicted on my life was so devastating, I was unable to control the welling of emotion that gripped me. I sobbed by the hangar floor, shivering, salivating, delirious. The reality of the light years that now separated me from _ecilia came sinking in, and it tore at my very being.

The reality was that by the time _ecilia her reached her destination at the other extreme end of the galaxy, I would have been long dead. After she was sealed inside her capsule, it would take some three hundred million years before she came out again, and reward the universe with the existence of a forehead as lovely as hers.

Despair gripped me, and for four days I was accounted for dead. Afterall, it was a time when even the most powerful process made by Man—The Printing Process—proved defective, and anyone could be dead at any given time.

I am therefore inclined not to think that a janitor’s having found me on the fifth day, fourteenth hour, twenty-seventh minute, and eleventh second since _ecilia’s departure was a mere coincidence. It will forever be to me an act of Destiny, a testament—like the very Halting of the Printing Process—that there are powers greater than our Bosses, and What Will Happen Will Happen.

He introduced himself to me as a Wednesday spaceport cleaner. He was in a space port janitorial uniform—a pair of blue overalls and a cap—and equipped with the most advanced cleaning instruments, plus a comm link. This last he used to report that I was as a matter of fact, alive.

“What lie is that?” I said, still upset over _ecilia’s departure. “I am dead! My life has been forfeit since I lost _ecilia!”

The sound of the name I had just mentioned pricked my discoverer’s ears; the name seemed to be something he had heard of before.

“_ecilia?” he said. “_ecilia *****?” (In the place of the *****, the janitor mentioned _ecilia’s surname.) Something was happening to his face not very much unlike the shifting of continents in an unstable young planet.

I didn’t know yet very much at that time, so my first reaction was jealousy. Could this janitor, like myself, have a yearning for _ecilia? How dare him, I thought at that time. How dare he share my infatuation when he was but a janitor, and I was a Galactic Elevator Stability Checker?

I thought of punching him in the face and start beating him up if only to make me forget my sorrow, but then I quickly realized nothing I would do from that point on would bring me back the happiness I had lost when _ecilia left. And besides the man was about a foot and a half taller than I was, and with a body with twice bulk as mine.

So instead I replied, “Yes, that _ecilia. Do you know her?”

He nodded. His face had the look of a child that has just learned that monkeys are real. “Tell me, has she left? If so, when?” He gripped me by the shoulders, excited like an actual monkey himself.

I, on the other hand, felt doomed to the actuality of _ecilia’s departure: I was being asked to recall it once more. “Yes, she has. It has been some five days, fourteen hours, and thirty-one minutes since her space craft departed from this very port. I don’t imagine anyone alive today will ever have the chance of gazing into her lovely forehead again…”

My gloomy words had an opposite effect on the janitor. His face cracked into a smile. He was at that moment in both our lives a Happy Man. “Five days, you say?”

He didn’t, however, wait for my response, but in the cheerfulness of his heart, took me by the hand and led me to skip the way gaily to the nearest TV. He left his cleaning tools as though what we were about to view was far more important than his duties for the day. “Then today must be the day!”

We found a TV in a cafeteria close to where he had discovered me. It was tuned in to a galactic news program. I found it odd, because judging from the hour, some stupid weekday noontime show should be on, and not a galactic news program.

“What day?” I asked my companion, as we stood in the line of patrons to be served.

“The day they restart the Printing Process.”

If we had been eating, I would have snorted bits of food out my nose and into his face. “What are you talking about? The Printing Process is not to restart in another five hundred years.”

“Yes, that’s true. But some people realized something could be done to restart it sooner, that’s why they recruited people like our _ecilia ***** to do the job.”

“Our _ecilia? You mean you know _ecilia was sent to the other end of the galaxy to restart the Printing Process?”

The way he stared at me had the verbal equivalent of “Duh!”

I remembered then that while I was busy palming her forehead before she left, _ecilia was trying to tell me something, but I was not listening.

“Don’t take me for some dumb elevator stability checker,” I said. “It’d take more than five hundred years before _ecilia reached the Main Printing Hub.”

As I was just speaking, the news program showed a live feed of what appeared to be the Main Printing Hub itself, and I couldn’t believe my eyes with what I saw next: _ecilia in a Printing Processor uniform, her hair pulled back exposing her full forehead, smiling and waving at the cheering crowd. When finally, the cheering died down, she approached the microphone and declared in a voice as smooth and clear as her forehead, “The Printing Process is restarted!”

The succeeding events are now a blur in my mind. The cafeteria went in an uproar. An overwhelming merriment filled the place, I was almost suffocated in it.

Except that I wasn’t, for I joined in with them. It was the first time since _ecilia had let me palm her forehead five days, fourteen hours, fifty minutes, and forty-eight seconds ago that I actually felt happy.

For most, the restarting of the Printing Process meant they would have their jobs and their old and convenient way of life back—and it was for me, too. It was just that more importantly for me, the restarting of the Printing Process gave me back the hope that I thought I’d lost: _ecilia would be with me again.

I turned to thank and hug the janitor who saved me, but to my amazement found that he was gone.

© Jay Santos 2004.