I am Gideon: Chapter #5

The Laundry Master – My world expands.

His name was Jasper Ing. 

It took me a bit to figure out that people had surnames.  His was Ing.  He explained that to me while we separated the sheets and blankets into piles – those that had urine, those that had feces, those that were simply two weeks old and ready to change.He asked me if I had a surname.  I just looked away from his face and shrugged, and he laughed and said, “You can borrow mine anytime you need one.”

I didn’t know how to ask questions, really, so he would talk to me about things in general while we sorted, and stuffed, and moved arm loads of things from washers to dryers, and folded sheets and white shifts into neat stacks.  And I learned to fold sheets and blankets and shifts, and while that sounds ridiculous now, then, it was a blessing for me.  It taught me that I could learn to do things other than obey predators.  I could follow instructions.

Jasper never asked me why I was in the building.  Maybe he already knew, or didn’t want to know, but I appreciated that I didn’t have to recite my shame as a preamble to any sort of conversation.  I was just me.  He was just him.  He did ask me how old I was, and I said I reckoned I was twelve or so.

“You’re tall,” he said.  “You could be older.”

I knew I wasn’t, but I filed that piece of information away.  I looked older than I was. 

He was a plump fellow who had contacts in the kitchen, and when there was a pause in our work he would hand me a roll, or even one of the sweet cakes that were baked for the staff. 

After a while he started sending me up to the kitchen with hampers of clean dish towels, and the cooks and staff members would smile at me like I was a real person, and ask me how I was and how things were down in the laundry, and I learned how to respond to questions that were asked by people who didn’t want anything in return, who had no agenda.  I learned to smile and respond casually.  Maybe even chuckle.  It became more and more natural, and again my world expanded.  They’d slip food into my hamper to take back to Jasper, and he shared it with me – just because he had it to share.  He never asked for anything in return. 

One day he gave me a pair of loose-fitting white trousers and a white, belted tunic to wear while I was working in the laundry, and when I was through every day, I would fold it carefully and put it away down there and put on my white shift and go back to being an endless experiment for the doctors. 

I was in the building a long time. Years, I think.  The trousers Jasper gave me were too short, and he gave me a new pair.  Looking back, I was happy.  Words can be life-experience, and I learned a lot.  In our conversations I learned how to navigate the outside world, and how to appear to be a real person – a normal person.  I hung around the kitchen sometimes and they showed me how to wash dishes and glasses and stack them carefully so as not to break them.

My only real shock was in learning that Jasper – that the kitchen staff – were “residents” of the building.  They didn’t go home at night.  This was home.  So, it became home for me, too.  I asked Jasper once if the doctors ever saw him, and he said, “I’m not that kind of a resident.”

One day I was taken into the examination room, my shift was pulled over my head, and I was branded front and back.  I can still hear myself screaming with pain. 

“We can’t do anything more for you,” they said. 

They put me in street clothes, put me on a bus, and sent me home. I didn’t get to say goodbye to Jasper. 

Image Designer Credit: Sage Hollis