The Laminator
They called him by his vocation. Just his vocation. What he did was a task considered simple by many. A task that even a child could ponder. He stood in his yellow overalls, suited in tune to the weather of the outside mountainous terrain. A bridge to reach the top surmounted the edged railings coated in irons rust which nearly matched the surface of the mountain. Everyday the man climbed these stairs, his palms turning the color of the rust so much so that when he wrote his stories, the page stained brown. But that didn’t bother him much. Time would darken these pages anyway.
Upon this mountain rested a machine whose purpose was rather simple. It required only one man to operate it and needed maintenance only once a year. Its input required just a few ingredients and the output was also a simple one. But, the man who appeared to have hired himself, made it his objective to tune in with this machine. After all, it was passed down for generations.
What this machine did was it laminated the paper on which people wrote their stories. People were afraid of this machine because they never knew which stories the machine would choose to laminate. And if their pages were to get laminated, to them it meant a lot. Because for them, probably, the written version of their life was not necessarily their real life, but rather the life that they wanted it to be. The way they wanted to be remembered.
The people's stories written on paper was the main ingredient the machine needed. But the man needed one more thing. Pens. He loved pens. His collection of them grew very quick as he used a different one every time he wrote a single story. Honestly, the man could never fully understand this strange love with pens… maybe it wasn’t love at all. Just hope. Hope that someone, somewhere would find his huge collection of used pens and wonder: ‘hell, what are those for? Why are there so many?’ And then, maybe, just maybe, will write a story. About him. Finally, about him. The only story that he himself, never wrote.
It was time for his route. The glistening sun coated his irises in a light that was familiar to him. He took his empty wheelbarrow and, a few pens. He went down the mountain, town to town, until his wheelbarrow was full of peoples stories. Upon returning to the mountain, he took each paper and examined it up and down, left to right, and side to side. He took another piece of blank paper that had nothing written on, took a pen, and started to write. Sentence after sentence. He took the papers without leaving a single one behind and placed them into the machine. Upon feeding the stories into the machine, he waited and waited. The machine began to fume. He got ready with his wheelbarrow. And, two pieces of paper out of thousands came out.
In dismay, he took the remaining papers and looked at them. He knew that he had to, but could not throw a single one away. Instead, he took a pen and started to decipher whether or not the machine missed something. It never did, but he had to be sure. He sat in his hut and read story after story. Then, he took another piece of clean paper, and started to write what he thought was important; the story about these stories.
•
When he was done, he took his empty wheelbarrow along with these two laminated pages and went to a town. With these two pages that to everyone were deemed as the most significant, they begged him to let them read them to determine what to write for his next route. Most even got upset when they got a sneak peak at what was written on them and that they didn’t write something different. He collected his wheelbarrow of thousands of papers and went back to the mountain. The same process happened again and again. Trip after trip. The machine laminated only two pages every single time. And he continued to write his story.
Perhaps a repair is in need, he thought. He asked for the repair man to come. The machine kept spitting out only two pages. What was written on these two was different every time. They were not correlated or connected, but as the machine thought, had something significant on it. Something worth to remember. It used to be better than this, the man thought as he went through the original unlaminated copies. He was still impressed by their stature. They said writing on paper would quickly expire. And to him it never felt as though it did. But to everyone else who had only two papers to read, and with the bookstores slowly lacking business, it was a sight to beholder curtains as shadows on the souls. Meanwhile, his soul was full-ish. His pens nearly ran out of ink as he refused to dispose of a single page. Indeed, he continued writing his own story about these stories.
Then, he put the original pages in the wheelbarrow and went to a town. People looked at him as if he was responsible for the way for which the machine did what it did. He thought none of it. His objective was simple. He wanted to show people that their original stories are still worth reading. So, he went bookstore to bookstore.
‘Salutations!’ he said.
‘Hey…’ said the bookkeeper. ‘Made your runs so quickly?’
‘Oh, oh no. Opposite, I brought it in. You see, I feel as though the machine is broken. It does not seem to function as it did back when my great grandad used to operate it. From a thousand it would spit out at least a hundred, even two. Now it is just two. And this lasts for at least few years. So, I collected all the papers that would otherwise vanish.’
‘So, what do you want me to do?’ asked the bookkeeper.
‘I thought, I hoped, you could make a book out of it…’
‘All these thousands of pages?! No way!’
‘Oh, oh I know. I’m aware that would take forever. This is why I organized it; see? I took all the stories and organized them. Here is your share.’ And handed him a stake of only 100 pages.
‘How many pages is this?’
‘100…’ the man responded. ‘These are the pages that didn’t get laminated. The Originals. Please, take them. Make a book out of them…’ the man pleaded. ‘It should not vanish. They’re lives. Not perfect, but lives…’
‘Honestly, I think I’ll pass…’ said the bookkeeper.
‘But, but don’t you need the business?’
‘Not this one.’
‘By the way, did you ever give me your own story?’ asked the man.
‘I didn’t, why?’
‘Don’t you want to write one?’
‘I would love to, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything worth writing.’
‘That’s impossible. There’s always something worth writing.’
‘You think?’ intrigued the bookkeeper. ‘You know what, I’ll try. Just give me some time, could you?’
‘Sure.’
‘But would they get laminated?’
‘I don’t know… for some strange reason, all of you think I’m the one who decides. But, I’m not, I’m just a worker.’
‘You know what; I am just a worker too. I’ll print your 100 pages.’
And so, the man went town to town, speaking with every bookkeeper. At first they declined to print their share until the man offered them to write their stories. And as the man returned to the mountain with his book and a folder full of book owners stories, he put each one of them into the machine.
And, the machine destroyed every single page.
•
The man was terrified. He did not expect this to happen. He was even too afraid to go back down to the stores and knew that upon his next route, he’d eventually somehow run into his broken promises.
So, for the first time in ages, he skipped his routes. He was lost. He sat and he thought. Over and over. What could be wrong with the machine? And again. And again. And he understood. Then, the repair man showed up.
‘I’ve heard there’s a problem with the machine.’
‘The problem… there is no problem…’ the man said.
‘Oh no, no. There is. Do you see this eroded bolt? It needs to be replaced!’
‘Please, please don’t touch it. This machine hasn’t malfunctioned in thousands of years.’
‘Prove it…’ said the maintenance man.
‘I don’t have anything to put in.’
‘What do you mean? Haven’t you been on your routes?’
‘I haven’t…’
‘How come?’
‘Because, it’s too difficult.’
‘Too difficult? You have an easier job than I do for darn’s sake!’
‘It’s really not that easy…’
‘Not that easy? You mean to tell me its hard to pick up papers and put them into the machine and take them out of the machine and deliver them? Pathetic!’
‘I’ve just been sitting here. Writing and thinking.’
‘Really? And what has your writing and thinking given you? And what did you understand from this writing and thinking?’
‘That the machine doesn’t need a repair…I mean, not what you consider as a repair. This machine cannot decide by itself what’s important and what’s not. It needs something else. And I’m afraid that it’s not something that you have in your repair kit.’
‘What? Are you crazy?
‘Maybe… You have all the right to call me crazy… But this machine… needs…soul…’
‘Bullshit!’ said the maintenance man. ‘Let me turn it on!’
‘Don’t touch it please, I beg you. It might get hot. The machine needs 154 degrees Celsius to operate, do you know that? It might burn you. It will definitely burn you!’
‘Don’t teach me. Let me do my job!’
What happened next, no one knows for certain.
The repair man tells that the man pushed him away, ran right into the machine, and vanished. He found himself on the mountain. Alone and in awe. And when finally able to move, he went into the man’s hut. What he found was a huge collection of tales and papers. And pens. More out of habit than from anything else, he took the pages and threw them into the machine. And the machine laminated every single one.
~
