"Two Closings" by henryrocks

* * *


Stupid suit. Gray and ill fitting. He’d borrowed it from Reginald’s father, a mortician. He’d figured out how to do the tie himself – a variant of a knot he’d read about. He was certain the form was wrong, but it passed appearance.

A small group they made – all eight Dharma children, (mostly) born and raised. And yet the placement exams were necessary – the areas for occupation were so broad, they needed to at least be shafted in the appropriate area before individual recruiting could begin.

Annie was there, of course, wearing a white dress like a flower. She smiled at the boy behind her. He looked at his program.

“Attention, everyone, please, attention.” It was Mrs. Dunwald, community services coordinator. She was their closest link to the rest of the community. Looking around, Ben could see only a trickle of Dharma-ites who weren’t potential employers.

“A small group again this year, but as always, one filled with promise.” She smiled down at them. “We have high hopes for this group of young men and women, and we know Dharma’s future will continue to be bright with the futures we see ahead of them.”

She shuffled papers. “May I have Liz Adelson on the stage?”

And so it began. They were each given a certificate rolled into a scroll – Ben smiled at it – and a card of designation for their work area, outlining various occupations, contact numbers for the department, things like that.

“Ann Cutledge.” Annie rose, smiling, and there was a bit of clapping as she went up.

“Annie has been a hard worker,” she intoned, resting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “An example for all the younger ones of what it is to be gracious, thoughtful, and a true lady. Congratulations, Annie. We have placed you in Health Care.”

Her face broke into a grin, and Ben couldn’t help but applaud a little harder for her. It was what she’d always wanted.

“Benjamin Linus.” His name startled him; he hadn’t been paying attention.

No hand on his shoulder. He felt, rather than saw, her scanning her notes. “Benjamin came to us as a seven-year-old, and has always been a bit quiet in the classroom.” To put it lightly, yes. “And academic work has never been his forte.”

He looked out, met Annie’s eyes.

“But that’s the brilliant thing about Dharma. There is no one who is worthless, who is not able to contribute. Benjamin, I am proud to announce that we have placed you with Maintenance Services.”

The applause was uninspired. He accepted the scroll and card, and again looked out at Annie. Her hands were in her lap.

His father was not there. They’d talked about the ceremony a little the night before. Ben had expressed his disdain towards it (which was true), and told his father it wasn’t going to be anything different than always. He’d still hoped his father would say, “Well, even so. You’re going to become one of us working slobs now; might as well be there for posterity.” But he’d grunted, shook his newspaper. Ben’d left the living room.

Mr. Kincaid approached him afterwards. “Congratulations, Ben.”

He stiffened.

“I wouldn’t have placed you in Maintenance, myself,” he said lightly, looking away. He had always been frustratingly difficult to fool. “But hard work can do something for a man. Make him focus, give him time to think.” Looked at him again. “You won’t be working with your father forever, Ben.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man didn’t seem to hear him. He was staring at him, shaking his head. “I just don’t know. Maxwell got Primary Health Services, Justin and Carlene Engineering and Science. Top of the class.” He waited. “It should have been you.”

God, this was uncomfortable. He was actually feeling guilty. “I barely passed most of my classes, sir. I’m where I belong.”

“Yes, yes. And fish belong on land.” Shook his head again. “I did try with you, Ben. I only hope you can live with the decision you’ve made.”

Ben shook his hand. “I can. Thank you, Mr. Kincaid.”

The man gave him a final survey. “Best of luck, Benjamin.”

Annie was in a gaggle of girls not too far over. She wouldn’t look at him, he knew, but just the nearness had a kind of potency. All he wanted to do was to go to the woods, but he had to stay and be seen, a little, even if he’d only been promoted to janitor.


* * *


“Yes, we began carefully with you.” He said it almost nonchalantly, moving things about the tent. Richard was rarely like this – this open.

“We could see you’d be dissatisfied soon enough. But the high marks you would have made before that -” He shook his head. “Linda was amazing with those assignments, wasn’t she? She was always trying to stump you.”

He sat down by Ben, grinning, gave his shoulder something like a slap. “I still remember the day we thought you weren’t going to show up, and out you come all bleary-eyed -” He let out a laugh. “-dragging along that rumpled notebook and just repeating, “I finished it. I finished it.”” He shook his head. “And by God, you had. Linda almost fell over.”

“It was just something different.” He was tracing a pattern of wood on the tabletop. “No one told me how to do it. You treated me like an adult.”

“And it wasn’t long before you were formulating your own questions.” Richard’s very happiness made him want to smack him. “Slacking off, just conforming beautifully to the plan. And the more we showed you – the more you showed us – well, your little class rank wasn’t of concern to you anymore.”

Noting Benjamin’s silence, Richard stood, began fussing with things on the shelves. “I know you don’t regret it, but I do feel bad that they’ll never know – just who you are…”

“She’s getting married.”

Richard sat back down with him. “Annie?”

Ben said nothing.

“I thought -”

“Her parents don’t like it. Her nursing job in the new facility, her being single. I think it’s some code they carried over from before – some traditionalist nerve. Women can’t have a career only. They need a mate.” He kept tracing the tabletop. “And they found one.”

“And?” Richard pressed him.

He let his hands go limp with a sigh, looked up, and then over at his friend. “They didn’t make a bad choice. George Ploskey. Part of the security team. Nice guy, very steady. And she doesn’t seem unhappy.”

“Well.” Richard proceeded slowly. “This is good.”

Ben just looked ahead.

“It’s good for her to have this. You always said you thought she’d be an excellent mother, a family person. This is right. She’ll have a new life now, and so will you, and in time…” Richard shrugged. “She will be another relic that will go down with the others.”

She isn’t a relic to me. How could he say this? She must seem breathtakingly uninspiring to all of them – so placid, so good. He had to work sometimes to remind himself that she was the one who’d screamed in the jungle – but that had been long, long ago, when they used to be close. People are always frightening until you see the heart of them.

“I suppose you wish you had that too.” Again, nonchalant, but this time with a studied air. Ben would have to reply carefully. “You’re a man like any other.”

“You know what I am, Richard.”

“All I’m saying is – there’ll be a time and place for you, as well. Patience, Ben; as always, patience.” He grinned.

He couldn’t imagine having a wife someday, past the break. His whole world would be so functionally different – And yet he could never think about it, about what awaited him, without instinctively wincing away. It still wasn’t time.


* * *


He didn’t know how long they had been sitting there. The fan was turning slowly; there were bits of voices outside. And they were not looking at each other.

Ben tightened his hand, felt muscle gather in his arm. He’d surprised the employees at the wellness facility by showing up several afternoons a week, leaving in a lather of sweat.

"Annie and I are nothing like we used to be." He looked over at her – carefully, so as not to be seen.

She was wearing a top with spaghetti straps. The sun slid down her bare arms, lighted her back.

This place. He’d been here before, but never had it felt so exposed to him before, so personal. There before the oval mirror were her bottles of lotion, lip balm, hair clips. Basket of nail polish, though she never wore any. Sticky-notes. It was all in slight disarray, of course. Her closet door was half-open.

Her exercise books were there too. It wouldn’t be long. Preparations were underway for the ceremony, for the branching of all their lives. And Jacob. It was creeping up on him, whispering in his ear, and he clenched his eyes shut and shuddered.

Annie turned to him, quickly, and it almost undid him. But he kept his head down.

She was in her underwear, boy-cut panties. He had noticed the line of her legs before, but this was different. The five or six inches between them felt like a burning wedge.

Joe Madison had told them. In his usual jaunty half-whisper. Dan hinted. Others, you needed only to look at their faces, see the way they acted to know. Dharma-ites never went to their marriage beds virgins.

“Ben?”

Don’t speak, don’t speak.

“Ben.”

His name came off a bit chopped, he thought. ‘-I love you.’ Stillborn. Did she suddenly doubt it, feel guilty? Why else would she stop?

Or. Or she respects me enough.

Running through the grass, stopping at the top of a hill. “Which way, Benjamin?” Eyes all alight like fireflies. “Take me where you want to go.”

It was all so beautiful. “Anywhere?”

“Anywhere.”

He no longer felt she would touch him first. Of that much he was certain. But he was helpless to leave.

It would be so easy. So easy to lift his hand, slide his fingers beneath those straps, drag them down over her shoulders. They had never even kissed.

Without even meaning to, he stepped to the precipice: turned his head and met eyes with her. Freckles were scattered on her cheekbones. Her brows were long and angled; it had not always been so. And that Roman nose – he lifted a tip of a finger, touched it, scaled its edge starting from the corner of her pale forehead all the way down. Her eyes closed. It’s too late.

And yet it wasn’t. It was all washing over him, and yet he could see the faces in the woods, the look on Richard’s face when he discovered just what this boy really knew. That had a power of its own. But what was that – Dharma, the island, his own destiny, even – compared to this girl whose face he cupped in his hands?

All he knew of love he had read in classic literature. He had no mother to instruct him, no experienced friends to share tips. But with Annie, he found, that did not matter.

As if by practice he dropped his head, angled it. He tilted Annie’s face – her mouth – opposite to his own.

They stayed that way for a few moments, breathing. It had been a light day, slightly warm. But now he did not even feel the fan’s air passing, nor voices outside.

He moved his hands back, slipping them into her hair, and found that he was crying. She moved, and they were in an embrace, his head on her shoulder. Somehow, it was all going to be okay. He still got to choose.

Annie sat back, and that was the image that sent him to Wordsworth, to Milton and Donne and Homer, trying to fathom, to reign it in: tears patterns, marking emotions crossing her face, eyes, coming again from her heart.

He heard nothing that afternoon. Richard wanted to know if it was Jacob, but it was not. He had heard nothing. It was not even some inner sense of his. Ben always regarded this moment as the one in which he grew up.

He looked at her with a slight smile, and took her hand. “Annie. I meant what I said before. They’ll take you as a nurse. You’re brilliant.”

She stared back, uncomprehending. “What?”

“You’re going to make a lot of money.” He stood up, surveyed the view from the window. “You’ll wear your hair tied back, often, and people will address you with respect here. Always “ma’am,” or “Nurse Cutledge,” never as a civilian.”

“And you? I’ll see you at the community dumpster?” She was standing now too.

He gave her face one last look-over, trying to pretend it was a living picture. “Goodbye, Annie.”

To the hallway – don’t look at the framed pictures, you know them all – into the living space.

“Good-bye?” The crack on the last syllable was pitiful. “Goodbye, Ben? What the - ?”

He meant to say something, something eloquent and fitting that would put her back in her room and out of firing range. But she kept advancing and there was nothing for it. Nothing he could say that could change anything.

Out the living room, open the screen door – dammit, it always gets stuck –

“Benjamin Linus, you’ve been pretending for years.” He gave it one final push, and it opened. “You've been lying for years. You hear me, Ben? You’re a fraud, a liar. You're pathetic. You’ve been lying for years. Do you hear me? You’re a sham!”

Richard saw him first. Ben was yanking up his pack with a force that surprised even himself.

“Ben - ”

“It’s tonight.”

It was still, suddenly. Faces appeared around them; he heard a woman gasp.

“You’re – you’re going to him now?” Richard attempted to take his shoulders, steady him the way you do a child. Ben turned his head, leveled his eyes at him. Like magic, Richard dropped his hands. Moved away.

Ben grabbed a torch.

“He – he talked to you?”

“No.”

“Then how – ”

“Richard.” Even his voice sounded different. “You said once I needed to make a choice.”

Richard nodded.

“Well, I’m doing that now.”

The crowd parted for him. He heard only Richard’s voice as he went on into the blue night: “Godspeed.”


* * *


No, nothing had ever happened with Annie. Until Juliet, nothing had happened with any of the island women. He needed distance enough, assurance enough to work up a grim, cynical smile at the prospect that had awaited him one September – seeing the first grave dug (marked “Ploskey”) for the first failed pregnancy. The first of many. In Juliet’s arms, he could pretend it was part of a larger mission, that this community he cared for so tenderly was not in some sense an extension of the girl whose face still nagged at and drove him.

He had had more of a scientific bent before. He could not get enough of Richard’s training, the assigned books, the exquisite puzzles composed for him. But if Annie had taught him anything, it was that life was a far more dangerous and intricate puzzle than anything you could design on paper.

Perhaps it was she who made him what he was. Would he ever have went in to Jacob without her? That first meeting was a deflowering of its own. When he left that first night, quivering, he knew for certain that the man who had first appeared in Annie’s bedroom was now set in stone. He thought of Moses descending Sinai, sudden white beard and God-changed countenance. Everything clicked. And after they’d had their fill of staring, the words began coming, falling from his lips like rain.

He’d always been a bit awkward. But how beautiful, this sudden propensity for leadership! The teaching came in well, coloring and shaping the commands and thoughts springing from his mouth. Richard grinned often now, seeming to know he’d made the right choices. But Ben had a grimmer outlook on things. Having been inside the shack, he saw the storm clouds in their entirety, the ones promising to enwrap him too. Things were going to be ugly before they were over.

In the meantime, there was Juliet, and there were books. Her contrariness amused him. She was distinctly anti-intellectual, and quite open about her differing opinions in the book club. She amused Ben when that familiar smirk appeared, when that jaunty tone came to her voice and she took him to task in front of a group of perhaps thirteen other people. Often he generated comebacks in his head, but never had the heart to deliver them. She suggested places to walk – the beach, old ruins, a waterfall. And when he moved to kiss her she more than met him. The first time, he’d had to push her back against a tree to regain control.

And she had a brilliant mind. But even at 3 a.m., studying her golden form in his sheets, he felt her presence smacking against the mirrors, seeing only parts of herself. Was she even in the water? He had thought he could teach her to swim, to love the landscape like he did. But more and more it seemed they were people driven in two different directions.

Or was it he that was on dry land?

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we know of hell.
- Emily Dickinson

---

I'm interested to see if you thought this worked.

Oh, and there's probably "errors" as far as when events happened, if you look for them... but I'm not concerned about that in fan-fic, especially.

How long? Well... I wrote the meat of it in one sitting. It's a bit like word association - one thing leads to another. I had to stop writing because it was late at night and come back to it later ;D I'm not a freak, though - I can't do that at will. ;D Like you, just rarely something will spark my brain.

Heartened indeed that you liked it. The past few days I've been revising it here and there, and I'm not entirely certain I got it where I wanted it to go.

You would be correct with the Giver reference. That situation was more specific, though - telling them their exact job positions. In my version they're only given general areas

You mean the first little 'section,' right? I guessed (and I'm horrible at guessing children's ages) that he was seven when he came to the island, so this would be a year or two later. He's able to cover up his change in attitude at school for awhile, but this is when Annie realizes what's happening.

Thanks again!

Hee hee! I guess I wasn't kidding about those time errors.

To those who read it: catch the Michael Easter Egg? ;D Bach's Goldberg Variations, music that Michael recommends to listen to in the hatch. www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=2091 I'm not very knowledgeable about classical music, unfortunately.

and just for possible clarification... none of the sequences in the story are placed in chronological order.

What did you think?

Maybe I'm thinking Ben is more gifted than the character is meant to be... What I was thinking is, why would Dharma let this guy mope around in a laborer's position if they knew him to be a brilliant and gifted student and mind? They'd see him as a valuable asset. Of course, many truly gifted kids in classrooms don't appear to be so at all - they're slacking off and making trouble and getting poor grades because they're bored. (That happened with one kid I know - his grades prompted his family to take him to Colorado for testing for learning disorders - and it turns out the kid is off-the-charts smart and simply bored out of his mind.) But since Ben had a whole different avenue where he could be completely challenged (in my little world ;D), he was just kind of a dead weight in school.




I see now my poor wording on that sentence. The focus was on Richard and his reaction to Ben's notebook, so I assumed a second "he" would harken back to Richard as well. Sorry.

The beginning of that paragraph is referring to Ben's urge to be with his 'real' people out in the woods. He can't stand the Dharma community, but he can't raise suspicion by leaving too often. Ben has enough knowledge now that he can critique his grade's textbooks - read between the lines, see what points they're going for and what is missing. For him, those textbooks are a symbol of the false life Dharma has created, and everything about them that he hates. Cataloguing all his reactions to the books in that notebook the hostiles gave him was a way of getting out some of that anger - which Ben had certainly expressed/complained to Richard's people before.


Um, not sure my story merits such analysis, but you asked for it

Awesome to know Michael's site and photo gallery are in his hands.

Thank you



btw... how long is this one page going to continue to grow?? Sometimes threads just seem like they refuse to go to a second page here.