[Fiction] Join My Startup Or Cease To Exist: Chapter 2

I.

The next soul arrived, with occupation "teacher" and religious affiliation "Buddhist". However, besides this seemingly innocent religious affiliation, the system flagged, practicing: disputed.

Sabrina looked up from her desk.

"Mr. Tanaka?" said Sabrina. The soul, Mr. Tanaka, looked startled upon hearing his name.

"You know each other, it seems!" said the founder of the afterlife startup.

"He was my fifth grade teacher," said Sabrina.

"Wonderful!" said the founder. "A reunion! This is exactly the kind of thing that—"

"Yes," said Sabrina. "Sit down, Mr. Tanaka."

She said it the way he used to say it to her, when he asked her to stay in for lunch.

II.

She had been ten years old when Mr. Tanaka first kept her after class.

The reason, that first time, was that she had left her name off of a worksheet. This was the kind of infraction that, in Sabrina's experience, teachers often mentioned once and forgot.

Mr. Tanaka had a very, very different philosophy. He waited until the other children had filed out for lunch and recess, then pulled a chair to face hers, and looked at her.

"Do you know," he said, "why I asked you to stay?"

Sabrina said that she had left her name off the worksheet.

"That's right," he said, "but not quite. I'm here to talk about responsibility."

That day, she stayed with him for forty minutes. He talked about responsibility, yes, but also about many other things, like how in Buddhism, desire is the root of suffering, which he had come to believe through wanting things for a very very long time that did not come.

And Sabrina listened to his wanting of things for a very very long time that did not come, and Sabrina thought of her wanting of lunch for a very very long time that didn't come. Sabrina missed her lunch.

This pattern repeated.

Infractions that her classmates committed daily without consequence became, for Sabrina, occasions for these long quiet sessions, just the two of them, whether during lunch or after school, Mr. Tanaka in his chair talking about Buddhist things, things that had nothing to do with why she had been kept.

She ran in the hallway, she forgot to copy the board work, she arrived one minute late, yes, but the conversation would often drift to other topics, like did she remember how last time he had said desire was the root of suffering, and well, here's another thing this Buddha guy said, and here's how he reckoned with that funny Buddha guy.

Once he told her that most adults were too guarded to really listen, that children were more honest, that she was more honest than most children he had taught.

She was ten, and she had this sneaking sense that she had been selected, without quite understanding for what.

III.

The thing that had selected her was this.

Every few weeks Mr. Tanaka would pause his lesson and ask the class a question. Has anyone here ever felt that they didn't belong? Or: raise your hand if you've ever felt invisible. Or the one Sabrina remembered most clearly, which was, raise your hand if you've ever felt truly, completely alone.

The other children had learned, by some social calculus Sabrina hadn't developed, that these questions were not to be answered honestly, that there could be serious safety concerns to answering honestly.

Mr. Tanaka would look at her hand, the only one up, and smile. He would tell the class he was surprised more hands weren't up, and this would make Sabrina glad, like she had passed some small test of character that a man like Mr. Tanaka would notice.

IV.

It was on a Tuesday in November, during one of these after-school sessions, that he stopped talking about her infraction...

This time, she had been kept for talking in class, a charge she privately disputed, as she was one of those kids who hardly talked (the number of words she said every day was usually somewhere between twelve and thirty, not counting the times she was called on to read out loud).

...and said, without particular preamble:

"I'm going to be fifty years old in March."

Sabrina waited.

"My sister got married in the spring. Did I tell you that?"

No, he hadn't, and -

"Two children already. My friends from university, most of them, same story." He sighed and looked at the window. The custodian was pushing a cart past in the hallway. "I always thought by fifty there would be more to show for it."

Sabrina considered this with the attention she gave most things.

"I don't think I want to get married, to anybody at all," she said.

Mr. Tanaka looked at her, surprised out of his self-flagellation.

"I mean," she said, "I think I'd rather have brothers. Like, an infinite tribe of brothers. And sisters, too. People who just like that you exist. Without it being—" she made a face— "that other thing."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"That other thing?" he repeated.

"You know," she said. "the part where it gets weird and they need you to... you know..."

He was incredulous. "Where does that come from?"

She thought about it.

V.

It came from her mother, mostly, although she wouldn't have said so then.

Her brother was three years older than her, and he was what a doctor would call a certain word and what her mother, who by an Asian parent's sensibilities of shame and protectiveness, would not have used that same a-certain-word.

No, instead of using that a-certain-word, she settled on special.

Some days she said it the way her own mother meant about people she loved: "mine, specifically, and more than I can explain." Other days it came out sideways, special.

Special, special. Sabrina wanted for her mother's love for her brother to be the first kind of special every day, not just some days.

She had wondered, even then, whether she could reach inside her brother's "wiring" somehow and make it easier for him, somehow.

Easier for him to what, she couldn't quite articulate, easier to be normal? (No, this was far from PC / politically correct, she erased the pages on her journal and tried again.)

Easier to.......... not exist and not need much of anything? (No, she felt monstrous for having thought this at all, the thought alone made her a terrible sister and a terrible human being and - is this what I raised? you wouldn't even go looking for him. don't be surprised, then, when no one comes looking for you either-)

She erased the pages once again.

Easier to... exist and just be "well"? Maybe, don't know.

Her mother sometimes read medical news aloud at the kitchen table, and once she had read something about lobotomies, and how surgeons had believed, for a while, that you could fix a person by removing the parts that caused trouble.

Upon learning this word, lobotomy, Sabrina had looked at her brother across the table and felt the temptation and then felt ashamed of this temptation, because the people from the article, upon undergoing lobotomy, had come out quieter and simpler, easier to exist, yes, but not quite themselves anymore, and that wasn't what she wanted.

She wanted something gentler than that, some way to make him "well" without changing who he was. She didn't know how. She filed it away as a problem for later, when she was bigger and knew more things.

He required her mother's sustained attention in a way that had reorganized the household around him, and her mother had given up a career to provide it.

Her mother wasn't unhappy, but she was anxious, sometimes, of having made a difficult-to-reverse decision on someone (giving up her career), that rendered her dependent on Sabrina's father. She had been out of the workforce long enough that going back would mean starting over, at the bottom, older, with a gap in her resume that would require explanation and a son whose needs meant she could not work the hours starting over would require.

The calculation that Sabrina's mother had settled on was this: if Sabrina's father stayed, it was worth it. If Sabrina's father left, for Japan, where he might meet a younger woman waiting with no complicated children, then it wasn't.

So her mother had recruited Sabrina into the project of keeping him, right here, in America. Her mother had told her, in this careful tone, that Sabrina was the one who could fix "this," that a daughter with a bright future was the kind of thing that kept a family together, that "this" was something she needed Sabrina to understand.

Sabrina had privately found this logic hard to follow. Her father went to work before she woke up and came home after dinner and then continued working at the kitchen table until she was asleep. On weekends he worked more quietly, in his study.

She could not identify, in this schedule, the window in which he was meant to be finding a younger woman. She had done the math and the math did not math out. Even he seemed unaware that he was a flight risk in the eyes of her mother.

But her mother's anxiety did not require his participation to be real, and Sabrina was ten, and as a ten year old, a bright future sounded fine to her regardless of the reason.

What Sabrina had concluded, quietly, was that eros, this whole business around the fear of being left, the need to be chosen and kept chosen by one person, looked exhausting from the outside, very exhausting.

She wanted no part of it. She wanted, instead, people who were simply glad she was there, like brothers.

She didn't say all of this to Mr. Tanaka.

So, where did it all come from? She was about to say she didn't know where it came from when he reached over and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear.

Sabrina went very still. After a moment he continued talking about something else, and she sat there and let him talk, and her face stayed still, and she thought about the schoolbuses.

The buses had left twenty minutes ago and her mother would be wondering where she was; Mr. Tanaka had sent a note home that morning saying Sabrina had been kept for disciplinary reasons, which her mother would be reading by now, and what he neglected to put in that note home was that the disciplinary reason was that Sabrina had not pushed in her chair.

(As a ten year old, she had a dim understanding that disciplinary records followed you, that colleges saw them, that future employers might too, and she was not sure how seriously that Mr. Tanaka's prosecution of her for not pushing in her chair would be taken by Harvard and Stanford and MIT, which were the only colleges she knew the names of.)

She wanted to go home. She hoped her mother would not think she was a troublemaker and Mr. Tanaka would clear her record. She did not say any of this to Mr. Tanaka, and implicitly, he knew.

"I'm going to talk to the principal about your record, about your crime with the chair," he said. "I'll tell her it's been addressed. That you've shown real maturity in how you handled the conversation."

She waited, because this sentence had not felt finished.

"These things follow you further than you think," he said. "I'd hate for it to follow you where it doesn't need to."

He smiled... charitably? Paternally? Sabrina felt a little unease behind this kindness, like he was being very kind to you and would very much like you to know it.

Even so, the sessions got longer, and the infractions multiplied in ways she didn't always understand, and he started closing the door.

VI.

The principal had a photograph of her children on her desk, two of them, smiling the gap-toothed smiles.

Sabrina looked at this photograph for most of the meeting.

The principal asked her to explain, from the beginning, what had happened. Sabrina explained it.

When Sabrina finished, the principal was quiet for a moment.

Then the principal said: I believe you. I want you to know that first. Yes, ma'am.

Then she said: he's a good teacher. The children love him, they write him letters, years later, to say so. And the parents have been requesting him specifically for years. Yes, ma'am.

Then she said: you're leaving in June in any case, whereas Mr. Tanaka has been here eleven years.. Yes, ma'am.

Then she said: these things are complicated. Yes, ma'am.

Yes, ma'am. Sabrina nodded, and... against her will, she started crying. Yes, ma'am! She had meant to keep her face still, but she was ten years old and she heard, underneath what Ms. Principal Lady had actually said, the thing the principal had not said: I believe you and it won't matter.

She looked at the photograph. She thought the children in it looked like the kind of children whose mother would always believe them and then do something about it. She wondered whether, if she had been the principal's daughter in the photograph, the principal would have let Mr. Tanaka keep his classroom.

The principal, softly, asked her if she understood.

Sabrina was still crying, crying just enough that she didn't trust herself to say more than one word without it coming out wrong.

So she said yes, and she meant it. She understood, though she would've preferred not to, that I believe you and these things are complicated were not in contradiction for Ms. Principal Lady.

She understood that she was leaving in June, and after she left in June, another little girl would take her place, and she understood that Mr. Tanaka would keep his habit of asking children which one of them was lonely, and that the next child who raised her hand would be the next child he asked to stay one on one with him during lunchtime, and would miss her lunch, and would learn strange things.

On the way out she passed him in the hallway. He was carrying a stack of worksheets.

Sabrina kept her face still this time.

VII.

There was a part of Mr. Tanaka's onboarding to the afterlife where Sabrina reviewed the documents the living had made and kept of him.

For Mr. Tanaka there were a great many, which she had expected, and which told her before she read any of them that he had been, as she predicted, beloved.

She read them while he sat across from her. Former students, mostly. He saw something in me before I believed in myself... The thing that changed how I...

She turned to the next one. The handwriting was round and careful and her own.

Hello, Sabrina,

I'm writing this for my future self, who'll read this and not remember how she felt today unless I write it down.

I've been thinking about this. My memory is bad. Usually I only remember something because I wrote about it, and what's very funny is that what I actually remember is not the thing itself but my memory of sitting down to write it, and I don't actually have the memory of the thing I'm writing about.

Which means that whatever I write here, my future self will believe.

If I write that today was a good day, she will remember a good day. If I write that I felt something very, very strongly, she'll remember feeling it, even if I didn't feel as strongly when I was writing it. I have more power over my future self than I realized. I find this scary and remarkable.

So I'm going to be careful, very, very careful. I could write about how angry I am, and how sad, and how much I cried in the principal's office, but I don't want my future self to spend her whole life being angry and sad on my behalf. That seems like a waste of her time.

I could write that Mr. Tanaka did something bad that I had to explain to a principal, something that the principal believed and called complicated, but I don't think my future self needs the details.

So I'll write this: Mr. Tanaka was my fifth grade teacher. He was beloved by many students and he taught us things about life that were true and he was lonely in a way that I understood, and I think I was the only one who raised my hand because I was the only one who was also lonely in that particular way.

I have made my peace with what happened. I'm writing that down because it is true and because I want my future self to remember that it was true.

I would like to be as beloved as him one day. I'd like to help as many people as he has helped, and be the kind of person that a principal like Ms. Principal Lady would choose to keep.

(I'd also like to, if I am being honest, be more beloved than him, so that if I ever told someone like a principal what happened, they would believe me and choose to keep me instead of Mr. Tanaka.

But this is a small selfish feeling and I don't think my future self needs to dwell on it but also I'm writing this because I think she will like having it. Hullo, future self! You are allowed to want to win and want to beat him in belovedness.)

I forgive him. I am writing that down too.

She had forgotten writing that, and when she read it now, she found it more amusing than urgent (she no longer had any particular interest in the desire to "win" against Mr. Tanaka).

Thank you, she thought, to the girl who wrote the note. I'll take it from here.

VIII.

Mr. Tanaka looked older than she remembered, which was obvious and also strange.

She looked at him across the desk, this man who had kept her after class til the buses had left, who had written many notes to her mother about disciplinary reasons.

"Were there others," she said, "like me?"

A long pause. He was not a stupid man, and he understood what she was asking.

"Yes," he said. He responded honestly and directly without deflection, which was not what she had expected.

So... this was the thing about agape, Sabrina realized. This agape mechanism she had been trying to build, the reliable, reproducible sense that another person was glad you existed, she had imagined it as something that could be impeccably calibrated, a fair and just system in which the good and careful people received more of it, and the people who had done harm to small creatures such as children received less.

Here Mr. Tanaka was, his memory sustained by it, sitting across from her in the afterlife because enough people in the realm of living had been glad that he existed, and this mechanism had no way of knowing what he had done to deserve it or not deserve it.

She had assumed, sitting down across from him, that she would need to decide whether he deserved it, whether the warmth of those hundreds of students was warranted, given what she knew of her relation to him, and whether she would be the one to "finally" run the "correct" calculation.

She found, instead, that she was simply glad he was here.

He was here because people remembered him this way, and she was one of those people. Somewhere in the city there were students, hundreds of them, maybe more, who remembered Mr. Tanaka the way she had chosen to remember him at ten years old, when she wrote the note on pen and paper. A beloved teacher, a man who taught true things about life.

"Come on," she said, not unkindly. "Let's get you settled."