Neanderpundit

the dream last night is no doubt the story of Leon the Cleaner, and there is no wonder; a good deal of my job is doing cleanup for other people who make sometimes very large messes. No, it is not that sort of work, exactly, but the outcomes are not all that different, in the end. Both jobs require the ability to be immune to the damage done to certain people.

I do tend to see other people’s stories in my dreams, and that is why I never write them because I’m not fond of theft of intellectual property. I have more than enough stories of my own, and someday I may jam them together into something between covers that will, in the end, resemble nothing so much as a dutch oven.

that made the dream machine spin up last night, but man it was a doozy.

Ihad an assignment in Vegas, of all places. I was doing some work in ahotel and could not stay there for several reasons, so I sublet a house in the outskirts.

My assignment only required literally minutes a day, and the house was an abandoned house of squalor, so I bought it for next to nothing and proceeded to flip it.

In a pile of rags on the second floor I found a kid who had been left there by his parents. He was skinny and fast- I had to lock him in to catch him! Finally he settled down and I fed him and got some decent clothes on him. By the end of the summer he had become like a son to me. He was fearless and smart, and in months I had taught him to read, to write, to do some electrical work- math was innate in him and he could do trig in his head. He was an artful dodger type to begin with, and now he had smarts to go with it.

The hotel I was working on was the big glass pyramid whose name I won’t mention. The kid climbed up the outside of it and mounted tiny cameras in the windows of several of the rooms. We sat in the half completed house and ate cheerios and blueberries watching the camera feeds day after day.

The assignment I was there to do is not the sort of thing a kid should see but he saw it, I couldn’t help it much. When I eventually did it, the cameras were still in place and he sat and watched the feeds.

One day the kids parents showed up, a half mad band of almost gypsies, claiming rights to the kid and the house and it looked like they had found some judge who was going to grant it to them. As much as I had learned to love the kid I had to be prepared to walk away. We met in a seedy lawyers office in a worse part of town than the house, if that was possible, and we sat down, talked for a few seconds, and the kid han soloed them all. The kid dropped the gun, pulled the glove off, and said ‘Those were evil people. I did the right thing.” and we left it at that.

I was a little fearful of what I had accidentally created but we packed up the old Vista Cruiser and headed west into the mountains to the next job.