Aaron Brown was not a morning person.

This wasn’t atypical, though. Very little about him was. In sleepy sequence he did all the normal things: showered, shaved, suited up, downed a bit of coffee, went to work. Traffic was light this morning, which was a relief.

Another of Aaron’s traits was that he was a quiet sort of person. From the moment the alarm died until greeting the receptionist at the firm, the only noises he heard were the incidental noises of moving about his condo in the well-established routine. It’s not that he was particularly trying for stealth; he just saw no reason to make any unnecessary noise. If he moved without any particular grace, it was with at least the smoothness of a well-rehearsed morning routine; very little noise indeed turned out to be necessary. Even his Prius was far too polite to bother anyone with the excitement of burning fossil fuels, most of the time.

The receptionist was quite otherwise: a cheerful young woman named Sally. Cheerful wasn’t quite the right word; the right one would have most of the denotations of ‘perky’ without the connotations of ‘annoying.’ She was bright in personality, if not in intelligence, and her friendly greeting typically spiked through his sensitized hearing in a way quite comparable to the alarm.

Today proved to be an exception: her desk was empty. This was an anomaly, but not one which particularly troubled Aaron. His only interaction with her was through the brief trivialities of greeting and parting as he walked past her twice each day. There was surely some perfectly reasonable reason why nobody was there today. As he summoned the elevator, his mind wandered to other things.

Upstairs, in the office, Milo Hammerschmidt was frantic. Milo Hammerschmidt was Aaron’s boss. Milo Hammerschmidt used to play football. Milo Hammerschmidt was now 60 pounds overweight. As he heard the rumble of the approaching elevator, Milo Hammerschmidt slammed down the telephone on yet another endless ringtone and prayed. When the doors dinged and began to open, he leapt from his desk with joy and paced directly over.

“Aaron! Thank god you’re here; I’ve had a devil of a time getting anybody in this morning! Nobody’s answering their phones; it’s as though they’ve all vanished off the face of the earth. Listen, I need you to hold down the fort here for a while; I’m going to go start knocking on peoples’ doors. We just can’t function if nobody shows up!”

Aaron was an actuary. His job wasn’t to sell insurance, or to investigate claims, or to answer calls: all of those jobs required assertive people, loud people. People people. They wouldn’t have been a good fit.

Aaron’s job was to investigate data, and determine probabilities. Conditional probabilities, chained probabilities, and expected values were his bread and butter. Black swans and white noise were his seasonings. Aaron could tell you about the difference between correlation and causation, the statistical tools to determine which was which, and the perfectly good reason why it didn’t matter to the company which one it was as far as setting rates went. When he ran out of data, Aaron was a man who could commission a study to collect more data.

Aaron was not a powerful man, but he had enough power to suit his desires.

He was happy enough in his job. Shortly after noon, he looked up from his work and realized that while he was engrossed some people had come into the office. They were a small fraction of the normal office population, and were mostly standing around the coffee machine, chatting quietly. This almost never happened. Milo didn’t tolerate it. The coffee maker was set up directly across from his office door for precisely this reason. Milo, Aaron presumed, was probably still out trying to round up the rest of the staff.

Aaron liked to eat at a particular cafe near the office. It wasn’t heavily patronized in the best of times, but the food was good and cheap and surprisingly healthy; if it weren’t for that last fact it could have been called a greasy spoon. As he walked in, and the bells hanging from the door handle jingled their greetings, he saw that the place was empty. It could be that the staff were all busy in the back. That wasn’t entirely implausible. A bit of his subconscious was ticking away, though, working out what the probabilities actually were, given the available information. The numbers it was coming up with were startling. They couldn’t be right. In the meantime, while waiting for the waitress to take his order, he sat and watched the television.

It was showing the news, or at least it seemed to be. A young-looking reporter was interviewing a wild-eyed man in clerical clothes.
“The Rapture has come and gone. We are the remainders! We are, all of us, the damned.”
“Surely there’s some other explanation for the disappearances. After all, the Rapture was only supposed to take 144000 people; the most current estimates are that over five billion have already vanished. How do you explain the fact that so many more people were saved?”
“Can you question God’s grace to that extent? He promised to save that many, but through His divine munificence He’s saved the majority of the people of the world!”
“Why would he have left us behind, though? What made us different?”
“I cannot say. I’ve been searching my soul to discover why I am among the wicked to endure the Tribulation, but I cannot answer for the ineffable will of the Lord.”

The text ticker at the bottom of the screen was showing similarly apocalyptic messages:
IS THE END OF THE WORLD NIGH? VOTE ONLINE OR BY TEXTING “YES” OR “NO” TO 57668
NUCLEAR DETONATIONS DETECTED IN KOREA, PAKISTAN
5 BILLION PEOPLE AND COUNTING VANISH WITHIN HOURS. EXPERTS MYSTIFIED
US MILITARY ORDERED TO DEFCON 2: “WE ARE PREPARED TO REACT TO ANY THREAT” SAYS SECDEF
POPE IS AMONG THE MISSING
COULD THIS BE TERRORISM?
NO EVIDENCE YET OF DEAD RISING
BRITISH RECLUSE WINS 258 TRILLION EURO FROM BOOKIE FOR PREDICTION

After some twenty minutes of fascinated horror at the messages, Aaron ducked behind the counter and made himself a sandwich. He left a $20 bill on the counter without making change. It was hard to feel like it mattered.

Walking back to the office was somewhat surreal. There were people on the streets, but nearly no traffic. Occasionally a window smashed in the distance, but more people were simply walking into stores and taking what they wanted quietly. When he arrived back, he discovered he was the only person at work. He puttered for a little while, proving that using standard models the probability of current events was on the order of 1*10^(-340). Then, in the single most rebellious act of his life, he walked out of the office.

The streets were jammed with idling, empty vehicles. He walked, randomly at first, then decided to go to the park. By the time he got there, the sun was glaring blindingly golden off the glass facades of the surrounding skyscrapers. He leaned on the railing of a pedestrian bridge and looked out at it all. The trees shone verdant in the setting sunlight; the sky was a rich azure; the buildings rose haughty in the distance. The only noise was the wind through the leaves and the chittering of the small animals who lived nearby. He leaned on the railing, and became aware of a pressure in his head: the same periodic pounding which in a normal context meant that there was a signal there which his brain was refusing to interpret correctly just yet because it wasn’t yet aware enough to handle its reality. As its intensity increased, he lay back, perfectly relaxed, on a nearby park bench. He fell quietly into a painless sleep.

The scene was still but for the rise and fall of his chest. Shortly thereafter, that motion gently ceased as well. His constituent mass dissolved silently into dust, drifting lightly into the air. Only minutes after he sat down, all trace of him was gone.

Orbiting high above, in a craft no human ever detected, in a language no human would ever hear or translate, a being spoke. “It’s just hit 100%, Captain. There is no intelligent life on the planet.”
“Good job. What are the final violence statistics we’re going to have to report to the Ethics Committee?”
“Fourteen nuclear detonations in the eastern half of the major continent, though we’ve got solid evidence showing that those were aboriginal weapons. A few thousand deaths from depiloted aircraft and vehicles hitting bystanders. All told, we achieved a better than 99% peaceful resolution rate.”
“That’s excellent work, men. Stand down. Nonessential personnel are not required to report for the next three shifts.”

The captain paused, the eyes of its crew on it. “You’ve all performed above the standard for this, the most technically tricky part of this mission. Still, the hardest work is yet to come:”

“Colonization.”

The will generated the power to accomplish the work of the spell. Magic, after all, is little more than human will imposed upon the world, forcing the world to change. The precision was required to actually perform the spell, which in casting looked something like an impressionistic dance: precise, twitchy movements accompanied by precise, arpeggaited nonsense syllables. None of it was actaully nonsense though: one twitch misplaced, one word mispronounced, and the whole spell was wrong. When dealing with the kind of spell the casting of which allowed a wizard to afford a tower, even the most trivial error was often fatal.

Incidentally, most people are familiar with Merlin, the last of the great casters of the old style. He was a genius, to be sure, and was instrumental in uniting Britain. However, in the popular imagination, his prowess has eclipsed his actual accomplishments. Few people remember that the lowest 12 stories of his tower were occupied by his support staff, who did most of the work of actually inventing the grand spells that he cast. He was the performer, and an exceptional one; he was the manager, and talented at it. They were just the writers, but without them he would have been a gun without bullets. All his most famous sorceries were ghostwritten.

The Djinni of Arabia, the faculty of the research university of al-Djinn, had been advancing the world’s understanding of magic for centuries. In an inversion of European norms, the faculty themselves were the researchers and writers; they used slaves to cast the spells they wrote. They’d discovered compulsion spells as early as the 9th century AD, but it took another four centuries before anyone figured out how to make them useful: on their face, they were more complicated and more trouble to cast than simply paying someone to do whatever work would have been compelled.

The key to the revolution wasn’t immediately obvious: an efficiency improvement which allowed anyone who could cast a cantrip to at least begin a compulsion. Even then, the meticulous precision with which the actions to be performed had to be described couldn’t make compulsion cost-efficient for industrial purposes. Upon this discovery Abara Adaba, the researcher in charge of the project, lost his grant and turned to other projects.

Two years later, he made history by casting on himself a compulsion to read a given magical text, memorize it, then perform it exactly as written. The resulting spell–one which endowed an ordinary carpet with flight–had been until that moment tremendously expensive: it generally killed dozens of slaves attempting to cast it before one managed to get it right. Adaba rode his magic carpet straight into the history texts as the innovator who introduced the Industrial Age.

I’m wearing now the wings that took two years for me to rate.
A couple things were rough but overall flight school was great,
though I’m not sad I finally can get out of this state.
SO let’s all fly to Asia from Fort Rucker.

The holidays don’t matter to this world weary flight crew;
They’ll fly them all again before their flight career is through.
They just want to ensure they get the one point five they’re due,
SO let’s all fly to Asia over Easter.

So everyone who knows me asks if I’ll bring back a wife.
Apparantly that question fascinates folks in my life.
I don’t intend to but the possibilities are rife.
SO let’s all fly to Asia and get married.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure a ghost was there. There was little to indicate the presence of anyone but myself, and what little there was could be easily construed as something else. The only light in the room was filtered from distant headlights through the fence and the trees and the window, so it was no surprise that the shadows sometimes shifted.

Still, shift they did, in ways that sometimes seemed purposeful. That, and the desire to live in a more fantastic world. I could play games and talk about the sense you get when someone approaches silently behind you in a room but you still infer their presence subliminally from their breath and heartbeat, but it wouldn’t describe the scene properly. That sense wasn’t triggering because there was certainly nobody corporeal in the room with me; a flick of the lightswitch would have been enough to confirm that. Still, that sense might have a little used cousin, that deals more with potentiality than physicality. If such a thing actually exists, then it was going nuts; I had the strong impression that I might not be alone, that if I wanted it enough and was prepared to accept that kind of reality, I might get a response.

The sensible thing was to ask.

We abbreviate Night Vision Goggle as NOD, because NVG is unpronounceable and NOG is a holiday drink. They’re surprisingly simple and analog: the lens feeds the sensor feeds the amplifier feeds the phosphor screen. This all happens in a very thin column, duplicated across enough elements to form a useful image. Their response starts at the blue middle of the rainbow, increases to a peak in the near infrared, and tails off a bit thereafter.

I suppose I asked because it would reveal something of the nature of ghosts. A yes probably wouldn’t mean that they’re plainly visible in infrared, just that whatever patterns of form and shadow they’re made of exist physically even if they do not. A no, on the other hand, would imply something special about human vision, or the absence of the visible spectrum. An ‘I don’t know’ would have been most convincing that a ghost really was present, but would otherwise be unhelpful. Lack of response would imply that even if a ghost really was there, they weren’t feeling conversational.

As I thought about all this and started to properly wake up, the shadows on the wall twisted, and the heater rumbled on.

By that point, though, I couldn’t tell what the answer meant.

Surely you didn’t think this was a natural phenomenon?

Think carefully about what describes fog: silence. Obscurity. It hates and is destroyed by sunlight. It never comes inside uninvited.

Bonus fact, this one relatively unknown: its first appearance was in Transylvania. Are you starting to put the pieces together yet?

Let me digress a little bit, and tell you some facts about vampires. I’m sure you already know all this, but it is important to have the facts fresh in your mind. Vampires are nearly impossible to kill. Vampires reproduce by sucking the blood of a virgin. This process, that of forming a new vampire, takes weeks, and only succeeds if the newly undead is buried in a religious funeral. Vampires know this and intentionally leave potential progeny where they’ll be found by the living.

Did you know that vampires are an accidental byproduct of the very first experiments in ceremonial burial? That’s right, it was evolving protohumanity’s own first attempts to pay respect to the dead which created these abominations. But I digress.

There is one more fact about vampires that it is very important to know. It was this discovery by the good Dr. van Helsing that allowed him to perpetrate humanity’s most successful xenocide. If a vampire does not return to its coffin each day before dawn, or at least to a coffin containing a sample of the soil in which it was originally buried, it dissipates.

Popular dramatizations to the contrary, Dr. van Helsing’s weapon was never the wooden stake or the silver bullet. Quite the contrary: his only weapons were the sledgehammer, fast parcel post, and part ownership of a fertilizer company. He never attacked the vampires themselves; to do so would have been suicidal. Instead, he destroyed their coffins, and mixed their burial soil with vast quantities of night soil.

Of course the vampires aren’t dead! He never actually killed any of them, he just orchestrated a series of  attacks which prevented any of them from ever regaining corporeal form. If you go through his notes and start looking at the scale, the logistical effort he went through to ensure that none of the remaining vampires ever suspected that they were in the midst of being exterminated, you start to get the measure of this great man.

After all, it’s not like fog has any power to communicate.

All it can do is resent.

We were fools.

The lobster grounds off Newfoundland are populous enough that it’s not particularly uncommon for us to spot another ship at sea, though more often than not we’d just steam past at a closest remove of several miles, perhaps saying hi via radio if the hull looked familiar. Every hour at sea has its price in maintenance and fatigue, and there’s no profit in deviating off course for a bit of a chat.

The ocean was uncommonly calm that morning, and the sun was just high enough to make the fog glow when the ship came into sight. It startled us all when it appeared through the haze, just off the starboard bow. We wouldn’t normally turn to meet another ship, but it makes a difference when the ship in question is a huge wooden thing, like something out a movie, with torn sails luffing in the scant breeze. The decision was sealed when we got close enough to see that the great splintered holes punched through the hull in places.

We acted like we had never seen a horror movie, like we’d never heard a sea story of a ghost ship.

Jim Tellerson was our captain. He was a good man, honest, devoted to his ship and crew. The sea was his calling, and he loved nothing better than to make his living working it. To him, it didn’t matter that this was an unexplained anachronism with what looked suspiciously like cannon damage; it was a ship clearly in distress, and that was enough. As we came around the stern, we saw worn gold lettering bearing the name of this mystery ship: Dîme à Poséidon.

The Prospector’s Sieve, our ship, was no coastal fisher. It was designed to house and hold up to fifteen people for a period of months, as well as keeping several tons of lobster alive for the same period. Compared to the Dime, it was small. The wooden warship was half again as long as the Sieve, its deck was half a story higher than ours, and its three masts towered above us. The smell of tar enveloped it, and it creaked softly in the swells.

As we tied up alongside, the captain laid out the detail. Troy, Marc, and Eric could stay asleep; they’d just come off their shift and this wasn’t important enough to get them up. Steve and I would stay aboard the Sieve and make sure that everything stayed in order. Lucy and Matt would work on some way of moving injured people aboard our ship; Lucy had been a paramedic before she decided she’d rather work at sea, and he didn’t think we were likely to find a smiling crew of healthy sailors when we got on board. John, Lee, Alex, and he himself would explore the ship and try to render aid as best seemed necessary once they had figured out what was going on. Nobody would explore alone; no pair would get more than shouting distance from another.

They say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. If we had been thinking in those terms, maybe things would have worked out differently.

What I remember best about that ship was the silence. It wasn’t at all silent in the literal sense; you could easily hear the wood creaking, the wind riffling in the sails, the water lapping around the hull. It was absent, though, of all the sounds you’d expect of something inhabited by humans: voices, activity, breath. It was the same in the visual, the tactile, the olfactory senses; the ship itself registered exactly as one would expect, except for the utter absence of any indication that any life had ever touched it before us. I’m getting ahead of myself though; I didn’t discover any of that until I was aboard. The silence, the all-encompassing synaesthetic metaphorical silence, is what I wanted to mention. Of course we hollered aboard, tried to contact them with radio and megaphone before we tied up and invited ourselves on board. It didn’t do us any good, though. There was no response.

The boarding party discovered in seconds that there was nobody on the main deck of the ship, and had confirmed within minutes that the poop deck and forecastle were also abandoned. I heard, via conversational relay through Matt, that it was a mess up there: there were long scratches and bullet holes; charred spots in the deck, and standing rigging nearly severed with deep gashes. The captain’s group found a hatch and started exploring the interior; there was nothing else for them to do.

Lucy, Matt said, had gone with the captain’s party when they went inside, as her skills were more likely to be of use there than tending him. There was nothing else to do, so he and I spent a while cannibalizing the sail lockers there for rope and rigging. An hour or so passed while we constructed a stretcher of sailcloth and oars, and a means to sling that stretcher under a pulley running on a taut line between the two ships. It was an interesting task, completed under orders, and Matt and I have always gotten along. We stood, and congratulated ourselves for a job well done.

Only then did we consider it alarming that we had heard nothing from the captain’s party in all this time.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll just take a look inside, ask them what they’re up to all this time.”

Steve, barely 22 years old and full of curiosity, couldn’t bear to be left behind. He would never intentionally endanger anyone or anything, but he knew as well as I that he was still on the Sieve with me because he was an untested hand and that I was there to watch over him. He begged to accompany Matt, saying that it was surely safer to explore a potentially dangerous area in pairs and that it would be safer for both of them were he to go.

Of all the things that I could have done then, I chose the worst: I let them go. Steve got to test ride our stretcher pulley system, which worked fine, to the approval of all. Then they were invisible behind the high curve of the hull. Maybe I heard the hatch open, and thump gently into its frame. Maybe it was the generalized noise of the hull.

Seconds dragged like minutes; minutes dragged like hours. I knew, in my most paranoid of hearts, that I had made the wrong decision and I should never have let them go. I knew, in my most logical of minds, that it was ridiculous to worry like that and that there was almost certainly some good, non-fatal reason why everyone who had stepped aboard that ship had vanished belowdecks without further communication. Doing nothing and just waiting to see what happens is only rarely a bad decision, but when it is, it tends to be the worst possible thing. I waited, feigning calm despite the absence of an observer, until my sense of duty abruptly defected: instead of following orders, it now advocated finding out what had happened to everyone.

That process turned out to take about half an hour.

Midmorning of a bright blue day, the fog long since lifted from a gentle sea, I went to wake up the night shift to explain that we were the only people whose safety I was sure of.

My briefing to them was hurried, scattered; I don’t have the captain’s gift of speaking precisely, concisely, immediately. I got the point across, at least; the rest of the crew was on the Dime, somewhere, and they I haven’t heard a breath from them since they went belowdecks. None of them were happy to be woken up halfway through their sleep shift, but they agreed that this was urgent. Our colleagues, companions, and friends were strangely uncommunicative. Our ship was tied securely in place. The four of us climbed onto the Dime, found the door, and entered.

They say that insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. They don’t know the meaning of insanity.

The door opened into the quarterdeck: a big open area lined on the sides with cannon. Between the cannon were tables, and above both of those hung long fabric bundles that Eric laughed to identify as hammocks. The small-arms scarring so prominent on the main deck was much less in evidence here. Instead, there were four great splintered convexities along the interior of the port wall, and one hole where a cannon shot had broken entirely through. Light streamed through, a brilliant spotlight making it hard to adjust my eyes to the surrounding gloom.

Down the stairs we went, to the gun deck. Had the gunports been open, had the ceiling stood higher, it might have been a light and airy place. Instead, it was a low cavernous area configured exactly as the quarterdeck had been. There was damage and disorder as though the ship was in some great battle, but it all seemed sterile, constructed. We walked together toward the bow, though we could see no indication that anyone else had gone that way. We walked, hunched to clear the ceiling, checking every cannon berth on the way forward for any sign of our friends. We walked, Marc in front chatting quietly with Troy behind him, with myself and Eric following. We walked, and saw no trace of anything recently amiss, and reached the front.

Marc, always with his eyes on the next goal, glanced over the galley there and turned around. Troy was rummaging around as though to find some clue among the cookpots. I got there, and was surprised at the quaver in Marc’s voice, at his question: “Where’s Eric?”

What of the rest of the exploration, you wonder. Did the three of us panic as our numbers were whittled inexorably down? In what order did we visit the holds and compartments of the ship, and what did we find in them? How did I escape to tell you this story?

I would tell you all of those things, but panic is an ugly thing, and I don’t like to examine those memories closely. When I do, when I am forced to, I am plagued for weeks with nightmares of that time, and what I discovered. Any stories I could tell anyway would be half lies anyway, interpolated reconstructions of fragments of memory jumbled in no particular order. You’d hear the story, and think my estimation that only half was falsehood overly generous. I don’t like to believe it myself–but I was there. I can’t escape from the things that I know.

People have known the half-truths of the matter for ages anyway. Sea monsters are the oldest supervillains the world has known. The great Kraken, the great Cthulhu slumbering endlessly in the deep; those stories got only one thing wrong, really. For reasons I can’t begin to imagine, they identified the evil as being a squid.

The monster which slept underneath the sea has small, beady, stalked eyes. It has long feelers, and a great tail to sweep it from danger. It has many claws; mighty ones for aggression and dexterous ones on its rows of feet. Its children have, for all of human history, graced our dinner plates; the red-boiled cockroach of the sea.

When finally the great beast awoke, it watched, and it learned the situation. It noted how we let down clever traps from the surface, to be pulled up once the prey was inside. It saw the detritus of our warring littering its home, and it saw a point of comparison. It saw, and it thought, and it built. Really, if you can look at the situation from its point of view, the solution might even be called elegant.

All it had to do was invert the situation.

You have until Friday midnight to let me know what kind of story you want to hear. By Sunday midnight, 48 hours later, I’ll have a story for you to read. If that works out well, I’ll keep doing this. I can’t promise anything magical, anything immediately publishable, but I think that should turn out to be fun for all of us.

I was at a little traveling fair, set up in the parking lot of the local Walmart. It wasn’t much of a setup; just enough in the way of rides and stands to get some money out of local parents who thought that it’d be fun for their children. I probably wouldn’t have stuck around at all, but my date thought that having arrived, it was silly to leave immediately without at least trying a few of the more dynamic rides.

I have always liked carnival rides, rollercoasters, inverters; any machine designed to produce dizziness and disorientation has always seemed like a great way to spend my time. Growing up, my parents never seemed as enthusiastic as me for this, but I figured that they just had weak stomachs. Since the age of 10 or so, when I could go on the rides on my own anyway, it never really mattered. I figured that I was immune to all forms of motion sickness, so I may as well enjoy the opportunities that such an immunity afforded.

The inverter is perhaps the most basic carnival ride past a ferris wheel: A 15-foot pole rises from the center of the trailer. On the cap of this pole is mounted a motor and a short crossbeam. Long arms run out from each end of the crossbeam, parallel to the pole; on one end of the arm is a counterweight, and on the other is a cramped little car. The arms swing you up and about.

Having sampled each of the rides that seemed interesting, the inverter was the clear winner, so we decided to ride it once again before heading out. My stomach was complaining a little, but it’d been doing that all week. Ignoring it turned out to be a bad idea.

As we rose to the top of the swing, paused momentarily upside down, unsuppressable reflexes began to kick in. I knew that I had seen a movie at some point in my life in which someone vomits on a carnival ride, setting off a chain reaction of puking as it hits innocent bystanders. I wanted to avoid that, if possible, so I thought I would try only to release as we were on the downswing. Any ejecta would fall harmlessly to the ground, or so I figured. It doesn’t take a lot of time to decide the best course of action in a bad situation, but there wasn’t any time for examination of that plan to see if anything could go wrong.

As it happened, there was: I timed it late. I watched the stream flowing up into the night, and thought “At least that’s over with now.” Then we arced over the top, came down and accelerated through the downswing–and into the vomit, which fell with uncanny precision directly into our path.

I have never considered myself a master of romance. That experience, however, goes past any worries I had considered, into the realm of the comically awful. I can’t prove that this was in fact the worst first date in history, but if any of you have ever even heard of a worse, I’d like to know about it.

0: How I Got there
1: Culture Shock
2: Exploration as Recreation
3: A Cross-Country Drive
4: Combini and Vending Machines
5: Bicycling and Injury
6: Shopping Blind
7: The Elusive Asian Girlfriend
8: Nonverbal Communication
9: So You Want to be an Expatriate
10: All Good Things

Note that for nearly every picture included, if you right-click it and then click “View Image” in the popup menu, you will then see a significantly larger version of that image. I eventually intend to implement the proper measures so that you can click directly through–livejournal prevented that, but now that I’m self-hosting this, I now have the means to do so–but it’s a back burner thing.

[edit 20080717]

I have not only gone through and fixed all the images, this post is now its own page.

Around the end of January, seven months into my stay, I started thinking seriously about whether or not I should renew the contract. I wasn’t worried at all about whether corporate would decide to retain me; both the area head teacher and the parents who came in during open-house week had given me very positive reviews. I couldn’t complain about the compensation; I was paid a full time salary for less than 20 hours of work weekly, and it was enough that I was saving about a third of it in an average month. I got along well enough with my coworkers, liked my students, and loved living in Japan.

The only real problem was my job itself: teaching. I dated a woman for a year and a half who was training to be a teacher, but that was as close as I ever got to formal qualifications for the job. Over the course of my stay in Japan, I learned enough to perform adequately, but the the job just wasn’t fun. I don’t know if, with the proper training, I could have been a dynamic teacher investing a lot into creating unique lesson plans and working to truly develop my students; I do know that without that training, I was just teaching straight from the book and desperately inventing tactics on the fly to try to keep the students engaged. Despite the feedback from the parents and the area teacher, I felt underqualified; despite the assurances of my coworkers and my adult students that I was doing well, I couldn’t help but notice that every few months a student would leave, and it took a lot longer for new students to enroll. A decline in the customer base, no matter how gradual, is a bad thing for any business. It was hard to escape the conclusion that, as the only actual teacher in that school, I had something to do with that decline.

Once the time came to notify corporate, I had decided not to stay at that job another year. I would attempt to stay in Japan if possible–there aren’t very many options for people of limited Japanese ability there which aren’t teaching English–and I would also look into other options in the US. On 15 April, I sent an email to the Army on a whim asking if they had any options for a direct path to flying helicopters. Flying helicopters sounded like it might be cool; I actually expected them to say that no, I could enlist in the hopes of earning flight but there could be no guarantees. I was startled and pleased when, two days later, they told me that I could get a guaranteed pilot slot if I was willing to become a Warrant Officer.

Exactly one week after I sent that email, my immediate boss died. A month after that, I was informed that his heir was going to shut down the business at the end of July. Technically, my contract expired a month earlier, but I wasn’t going to stick the bereaved with the responsibility of finding a replacement teacher for a single month. All of a sudden, there was a definite end point in sight. I found myself scheduling a return flight, and making decisions as to how to dispose of my stuff. My experience moving to Japan taught me that the less I tried to bring back, the happier I would be. I ended up selling my bicycle to a tiny Japanese woman who could barely reach the pedals; one of my adult students volunteered to interpret at a pawn shop so I could sell those miscellaneous things I didn’t think worth the price of shipping home.

In the meantime, the only fruitful job leads were to be English-speaking tech support in Japan, or to go with the Army to fly. There was no question about which was the better deal; while I wanted to remain in Japan, it wasn’t a higher priority than the opportunity to become a pilot. The decision to leave, when it came, hardly felt like a decision at all. It was just the natural course of things; I follow interesting opportunities the way water follows the lowest path. I had about as much choice as the water does.

People react to endings in various ways. When my students found out that the business was closing, some of them quit immediately. Some, including all of the adults, decided to stick it out through the end. Some stayed exactly long enough to determine which other English school in the area they preferred, at which point they transferred without any duplication of service. For my own part, it was an intensely bittersweet feeling to realize that there would be nobody to train up as a replacement; that shortly after I left, there would be nothing left of the business but memories. Despite my lack of training, I was doing my best to teach well and improve the school in whatever ways I could think of; all of that effort, in the end, turned out not to mean very much at all.

With one chapter of my life closing, I turned almost instinctually to the next one. I counted down the days and hours to various final events in Japan. Even as I said any number of fond goodbyes, I was already thinking of the upcoming hellos. I’m not a real fan of the emotion of loss; perhaps that’s why I concentrated so very hard at that time on looking forward to upcoming adventures.

As it turns out, moving internationally is a lot easier the second time, despite all the TSA’s efforts to ensure that every year flying is more annoying than it was the year before. I shipped the majority of my luggage to the airport in advance, I took some final photos of the area where I lived, and I cleaned the place. The morning of my departure was beautiful: sunny, cool, scattered clouds. Somehow, 16 months after the fact, I can’t remember the bus ride, or the trains, or the flight. All I remember is locking up my apartment for the last time, checking carefully to ensure I hadn’t left anything behind. I adjusted my backpack, and then I moved out.