Anne Bennett was a collector. However, she didn’t collect stamps or butterflies. Anne grew up in post-war Georgia. It was a place that is full of stories. Those stories were what Anne collected. She was the woman who would always be ready to come for a cup of tea, to sit and to listen. Anne wasn’t a writer; she didn’t have a museum or even recording equipment. She didn’t preserve those stories in some medium that others access. No, she did something far more particular. Whenever somebody was in trouble, whenever they needed help, she seemed to have just the story to rescue them. She recognized the power of these stories and she carried them forward, often far beyond the lives of those who lent them to her.

After she passed, a group of her friends did their best to recall what they could. They put together a little library of Anne’s stories. It is still there and occasionally referenced. Anne’s family came to me with another request. They wanted to honor not the stories themselves, but the act of collection. They wanted Anne’s most admirable trait to somehow be shared with others.

And that was the genesis of Echoes.

Echoes

Anna

I sense it then. In a sudden mad burst, I sense it. The words float in my head, not quite there – but there, on the edge of my awareness. If I look at them, I know they will flee. If I do not, I know they will persevere – demanding reality, driving at my consciousness even as I cannot quite wrap my head around them.

All is dark. All but the words that are there and not yet there at all.

I sense them, on the edge. They are cast up in shapes of razor wire and silk and wood and wool. They wrap around each other, curling into a shape that defies beginning and end. I sense them. I know they are there. I know I must capture what is before me.

A moment passes, the shapes enfold me, wrapping around me.

After just a moment, they disappear.

I open my eyes and I’m back in my apartment.

All around me I see the words. The words of previous visions. Strands of metal and glue and bits of shattered glass enameled together. Some are words encased in cubes of semi-translucent plastic. Some dangle from the ceilings, open and unencumbered. Each one has a story. Each one came with a vision. I felt each poem, sensed it, before I gave it reality.

Each one pummeled me, demanding that I give it life.

I could do nothing else until that mission was complete.

I see my life in this room. I see beauty. I see G-d.

And this poem…. this poem is no different.

I glance to my workbench. Materials are there, they are everywhere really. Scraps I’ve collected in case I might need them. But something is missing. I see a bit of metal in my mind, but not on the desk. It is gold colored, but not gold. A copper wire, perhaps?

Yes, I realize. That is it.

I stand and rush towards the door, my eyes already roving in search of my prey.

I have no choice.

Until I capture the poem in reality, until I give it life, I will be pursued by it.

I must make it real.

The poems used to be rare. My parents were so worried when I was a little girl. I had seizures, that’s what they called them. But even when I was little, I saw them as epiphanies. I would rush afterwards, as if commanded by some force, to make what I had seen real. Somehow my parents didn’t immediately connect the two events. I produced art, strange art, powerful art. They couldn’t understand where it had come from. I told them about the seizures, but they didn’t think I was having epiphanies. I had MRIs as the doctors tried to catch me in the act, as they tried to figure out what was wrong with me.

Eventually, they settled on a cocktail of anti-seizure and anti-psychotic drugs. They couldn’t figure out which was more critical. I still felt the visions although they were somehow muted. They lacked definition. They cried out to me – for me to make them real. But I could not. Because I could not begin to grasp them.

My parents were pleased, the doctors were pleased. A dose of anti-depressants were added to my daily quantity of pills. And then everybody seemed pleased. But I was not pleased. The poems were still calling to me. Quietly. I felt their distance like a loss. I mourned them as others celebrated their absence.

I knew my mission though. I poured myself into art at school. I overheard my parents speaking of their pride in me. I had such skill, such promise. They understood, on some level, that my tortured mind was behind my talent. But they still hoped that I could thread a path to greatness, without insanity.

I didn’t share their hope.

For me insanity and greatness were one and the same.

When I turned 18, I ran from my home. I didn’t want the medications any more. There was little my parents could do. The age of asylums had passed. Eventually, I found myself in another city. Then in a city-run shelter. Then in a subsidized apartment. I tried to hold down a job. But when my seizures came, in all their glorious reality, I would lose whatever job I had.

I would just walk away, or run, seeking what I needed to bring reality to my living dreams.

I am not working now. I am under the power of that same force. I rush out of my apartment and down to the street. The sun bursts against my eyes. The sound of traffic from the four-lane thoroughfare outside my building assaults me. I stagger, but just for a moment. Then I lift my arm, cover my face against the sun, and begin my mad rush down the street. I ignore the noise of the road.

The neighborhood is not a good one, but the people know me. They know I have nothing worth stealing. And they know, from the crazy glint in my eye, that it would be dangerous to slow my progress. We are troubled, all of us. Yet we live more than most.

I run down the sidewalk, seeking the golden glint of my dreams.

I need it to make the poem real.

I need it to make the ball of truth wrap around the emptiness of humanity.

I need it.

And then I see it. My sight seems to focus on it, lasering in like some tactical computer in a movie. There is an old computer monitor, lying on the sidewalk, on the other side of the thoroughfare. It will have the wire I need.

I know it is all I need to make the poem real.

I rush straight towards it.

Others might say that I saw the cars too late to avoid them. But it would not be true. I saw them, but I had no choice but to go.

I needed to make the poem real.

The Cleaner

My boss hands me a clipboard. It has a list of addresses, last occupants and new addresses for those people. The list is of city apartments recently vacated by their occupants. My job is to clean them. This isn’t a dainty job; there’s a lot more hauling than scrubbing.

Most of the spaces for new addresses simply have the word “unknown” filled in. The occupants have simply disappeared. But not all have. A few have found new homes. Somebody has filled in those addresses, although I don’t know why. It’s not like we do anything with the information. “Unknown” is not the only time our trail runs cold. Some days the word “deceased” marks the end of an occupant’s residential history.

There is one such entry today. A woman named “Anna Stokes.”

“She was hit by a car,” my boss volunteers.

I nod. I’d actually seen her die. I’d been taking a break just then, looking out the window of an apartment my crew had been cleaning. I’d seen the woman running madly down the sidewalk and then dash into traffic. Psychotic woman. She probably hadn’t been taking her meds.

The whole neighborhood is psychotic.

But hey, it pays my bills.

When I’m done reviewing the list, I tuck the clipboard under my arm, gather my crew, and head out.

There are four of us. We have a truck and a chute for lower-level apartments. The job is simple. We get to crawl through the muck of the mentally disturbed and addicted dregs of society. And we get to throw out that muck; like we’re cleaning out the bottom of a hamster’s cage. Any society needs to dispose of its detritus.

Just like you would do when you clean a hamster’s cage, we isolate ourselves from our work. Depending on the apartment, we have a wide variety of safety equipment at our disposal, from full hazmat suits to simple needle-safe gloves. I tend to err on the side of caution. These people have (or had, case depending) a lot of issues.

The work isn’t awesome. But we’re City employees. We get paid union wages and union benefits in return for our efforts. I am curious sometimes though. Morbidly curious. Just how bad can an apartment get? What kind of situation does the kind of whack job who runs into traffic leave behind?

I’m thinking about that when I choose our first job for the day. I decide that we’ll start with Anna Stokes.

When we get to her apartment, we open the door, slowly. Our masks in our hands and ready for our faces. We’re used to some pretty awful – and sometimes dangerous – odors. But there’s nothing. There’s no smell of rotting food or human waste. There’s just a slight odor of rust and maybe glue.

We let the masks fall to our sides and then pull the door open the rest of the way. As I look around the apartment, I see the paint is peeling and everything is in disrepair. That’s expected. I wouldn’t maintain a city apartment. Something else is strange, though. Very strange. A tangled mass of metal and glass and who knows what else seems to fill the entirety of the space between the walls, the floor and the ceiling. You can barely walk through the crap this woman left behind.

As we look at it, we know that it will take all day to clean.

But… union wages and union benefits.

We’ll be okay.

We don gloves and set to work, bagging object after object in our extra thick plastic bags. I notice that some of the shapes seem to contain something resembling letters, words and even sentences. They are laid out in screwed-up patterns, their media forced into some unnatural configuration.

The woman was clearly insane.

I pick up one of the objects. It is a small sphere. It fits in my hand. The outside is a roughly formed mirror, but not quite. I can just make out shapes within it. I stare at it and see there is a word in there, but I can’t tell what it is. I don’t know why, but I stick that little sphere in my own bag.

I’ll take it home.

Maybe I’ll show it to my dog.

It takes all day to finish the job. We leave the apartment empty and drive our truck full of reinforced plastic bags straight to the dump. That’s all there is.

Another mess of a life disposed of. Everything gone.

Nothing worth saving. Probably not even that little sphere.

I get home, put the sphere on my little kitchen table, and do what I always do: Grab a beer and some leftovers. Watch a game. Pet the dog. Go to sleep.

I don’t sleep well, though. The sphere is in my dreams. I’m looking at it, trying to see what is inside. But all I can see is myself. I turn it in my hands. I stare at it.

I try, somehow, to get through that strange outer skin.

But all I can see is myself.

I wake up suddenly, my body covered in sweat.

For a second, I don’t know where I am. And then I notice the clock. 3:05 AM.

I get out of bed and make my way to the kitchen. The sphere is there, sitting on the kitchen table. I pick it up, almost like I’m programmed to do exactly that. Somehow, it seems more opaque than it had the day before. I hold it up to the light, but I still can’t make out what lays on the inside.

Eventually, I go back to sleep. The sphere is still there, hiding its inner self from me.

I keep working, in the days and weeks that follow. But the sphere becomes an obsession. I need to know what it contains. It is an irrational drive, but I can’t seem to stop it. I consider destroying the outer shell, but the thought repulses me almost as soon as I conceive of it.

I spend my off hours turning the little object in my hands. Gradually, I realize just how beautifully it is constructed. It is not simply a glass ball, but a ball made of pieces of glass fused together to create something I know is entirely intentional. There is nothing sloppy about it.

Whatever it is, the woman who made it put both heart and skill into its reality.

As the weeks pass, I begin to understand that the thing is precious. Even magical.

I begin to understand that I have it for a reason.

One day, I’m cleaning out the apartment of a man who overdosed on Fentanyl when I see his diary. I pick it up in my gloved hands. And I open it. I see the man’s pain pouring out of the pages.

I take it.

I take his diary and put it in my bag. I don’t know why. I never used to save anything.

When I get home, I open the diary. I read it from cover to cover. I learn what drove the man to drugs long before the drugs drove him to death. I spend hours reading his story.

When I finally close the little book and look up at the sphere, it has changed.

Just a bit of it has somehow clarified.

I can make out a single letter inside. It is a ‘T’.

I feel a sudden regret that I destroyed all the other objects in Anna Stokes’ apartment. I realize now that I’d stuffed treasures into those thick plastic bags, never to be seen again.

That night, I dream of the sphere again. It is the same dream. But it doesn’t torture me in the same way.

The next day, the next job, I steal a trinket from a woman’s house. It is a knot of metal, worried into shape by the unceasing hands of a meth addict.

I steal again. And again.

My apartment begins to fill with the leftovers of tragic lives. I mail some of it away, to the addresses listed on the job sheet. But most of it has no place to go. So, I keep it.

With those little objects I see, somehow, into the lives of those who have gone.

Strangest of all, the sphere begins to open to me. After months have passed, I find myself able to see past my own distorted image.

There is a word inside, written in stone so finely carved that it looks like bone.

The word is ‘TRUTH.’

I keep collecting the leftovers of lives lost. Eventually, they outgrow my apartment. I rent another space and it becomes a gallery of sorts. I invite others to visit; to learn about the lives of those who struggled.

The gallery grows. Others bring what they have collected. Soon it is a museum. Volunteers begin to care for it and all that it contains. It lives on the charity of others.

I still clean for the City. But it has become far more than a good union job with good union benefits.

It has become a sacred calling.