Chapter 213
Instead Christof picked out the sandwich I had made and looked at it. I explained I brought food with me when I came here and he tasted it, as did his Brothers. They also tasted the applesauce and pudding cups I’d brought. They found the flavor not very interesting, but the texture of the applesauce was disgusting to them.
“Come into the water,” I ordered laughing. “That’s where all the fun is!
I dove into the churning ocean and went down deep. The men followed and I pointed out the fish in my memories to them. They wanted to go in the caves deeper down, but I couldn’t show them that.
“I never went that deep,” I told Master Christof underwater, “and if I got stuck in the caves I wouldn’t have a way to breath.”
We crawled onto shore and I looked down at myself. I was dressed Like I always was when I came to the beach. A faded grey t-shirt soaked and stuck to my skin and an old pair of cut off jeans.
“What is this?” Master Damien asked touching the torn denim fabric.
“Jeans,” I said Luxuriating in the sun, “I used to wear clothes all the time. No one on my world walks around naked.”
“We ornament your naked body, becuase you don’t need clothes,” Master Evan said crouching in front of me. “My Brothers and I protect you, you do not need such thick fabric. We ornament you to show you in our colors. That is how we wish to see you.”
Looking down, my outfit was changed. I was in my collar and cuffs. My torso was wrapped with a gauzy piece of blue fabric. This was much better, I agreed.
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“Still,” I told them, “this outfit would not have been good to wear at the place I Lived and worked.”
They didn’t understand, so in the dream we were there.
It was midday at the motel. The sign that permanently read “Vacancy” flashed along the roadside. The men understood the sign through me. Content provided by NôvelDrama.Org.
As we walked through the squalor that had been my Life, I felt the men judging it. Albert, the motel’s most senior resident drunk, was sitting outside his door in a lawn chair asleep and drooling. The place was dingy and they sensed my discomfort at walking here with no clothes on to shield me.
In my memories they saw the pointless violence I had witnessed in this place. They saw the bloody beer bottles I had cleaned up. As we passed room thirty two we all remembered the body of the overdosed heroin addict I had found one morning.
I took them the Long way around to my room. There was a short cut through the building down a dark hall, but a woman had been brutally raped there one afternoon. After that happened I never walked that way again. Even in the dream, I feared that dark secluded hall. The men felt my unease, but said nothing.
In my small room at the hotel, I showed them the things I was proud of.
The money I had scrimped and saved was hidden in a plastic bag in the toilet tank. Damien asked why I put it there. He understood it was an odd place for something I considered of value.
“People would steal it, if they knew where it was,” I told him, counting the bills in my memory with pride. “I locked my door every day, but that wouldn’t stop most of the people that would want to come in here and take it.”
Damien and his Brothers did not understand. Men on their world were honorable. The few men that would steal were identified and kept far from the villages by the Administrators. They had never had something like a door lock and they found my use of one odd.
“People aren’t always honorable,” I tried to explain, but the men still didn’t understand.
I failed miserably trying to describe how humans could be. There was no Administrator here that could remove thieves from society. Some humans were honest and some weren’t; it was a choice.
“It has value?” Master Bane asked taking the stack from me and examining it.
This looked like nothing to them and they didn’t understand how it was important. In my memories they saw what I could do with this. Much Like the stones, money here was a representation of wealth with no real value in itself.