An Old Man’s Story

On one particularly slow night in November—a Thursday perhaps—a young man walked through the sliding doors and up to the Service Counter. Only because the night was so slow would I or my friends notice such a common event. Just another customer, or browser, (or harbinger?). But he was not just another customer. Was it the way he was dressed? No, a simple black and blue winter jacket, blue jeans, and a hat. No, it was something less obvious. If I believed in such things, I would say that his aura emanated a warning to all that would head it. Or maybe it was his eyes, or the fact that I was bored out of my wits. We had long ago finished fronting the shelves of the office supplies store which I had worked at for the last three years. There was nothing left to do but count the minutes till closing, and to fabricate silly suspicions of regular customers.

There was no one working the service counter, and I happened to be the closest, so I walked behind the counter and asked how I could help him. He stared at me for a moment, then produced a beautiful mechanical pencil. He dropped it on the counter, original packaging and all, and explained in an anxious voice, "I need to return this." The way he spoke the word "need," it sounded like a matter of life and death, which I think would be going a little far, even for a mechanical pencil.

It was instantly apparent, from the moment I saw the pencil that we didn’t sell anything like it, but before I told him that I told him that I had to write with it, just once. I removed it from packaging, took out a piece of paper, and to get the lead to a suitable writing length, clicked it "ARRAGG!" I dropped it immediately. A horrific sensation, a kind of pins-and-needles-charley horse-numbness shot up my arm at once. Before I could spit out a word, the "customer" was gone. The doors had not even finished closing behind him.

Chuck, who had probably worked there longer than the three of us combined, shouted out "it’s happening again, it’s happening all over again!" It took several minutes to clam down old Chuck, before we could make sense of what he was saying. But the problem was that he wasn’t making sense, and he appeared genuinely frightened.

"This has happened before" he said, "I’ve seen this happen before. When I lived in Singapore over twenty years ago, I saw this happen."

"What! What happened before?" I was getting just a tad impatient.

"The mechanical pencil plague."

"The…"

"Let me finish! You think I’m making this up, don’t you? You don’t think it’s possible, do you? Mechanical pencils, the indispensable instruments that we love and need and use everyday. Yes, you, and you, you are all too young to remember. Singapore once had a thriving economy. Unemployment less than 2%. Produced the most diligent school children in the world. Those poor kids went to school almost 300 days out of the year, they did. And loved every minute of it. But then, but then it started. The plague. It started slowly, but once it picked up steam, it spread like wild fire. Of course, it wasn’t just the kids, it was the whole country, but those poor kids, they were hit the hardest. It was a miracle though, I must say, that at least the United Nations discovered the situation before it was too late for the rest of us. They quarantined that whole country under the guise of some sort of military exercise. But those kids, a generation afraid to write. Of course pens were totally out of the question, the world would never make that mistake again. So sad. It changed the entire economy it did. Oh sure, they have their fancy computers that they use for everything now, but you know, they are only getting by. Not what they once were. Ain’t no one can quite figure out just what it is, what they are doing wrong. Things are back to normal now, things have long since been normal, (normal, what does that mean?) and likely most of the kids in school now have as little of an idea of what once spread through their own country as you do standing right here. They may not know, but sure as not, you don’t see a single one of them hand writing a single thing. A fear passed down from their parents. One of those lap top computer things for everyone of them. You’d think they’d all be little geniuses, how much they had to pay for school and everything, but something just didn’t work I tell you. Something didn’t work one bit."

We all stood there in silence, staring at each other. We wanted to believe it was all just an old man’s story, but everything he said fell into what little we, or at least I, knew about that sad little country. I remember reading something about how it was cut off from the rest of the world for a couple of years. I thought it was strange, but hey, what do I know about Singapore? There was also the part about its formerly thriving economy. At one time, it had one of the greatest GNPs for a country of its size in the world. After the country’s isolation, they adopted a radical new educational system. What little I knew about their radical new computer based education system I learned from an education class I took at college. It seemed to make sense. The students seemed to absorb more information that way and yet the country as a whole never quite recovered. By relying so heavily on computers and such, we were taught, creativity was somehow stifled. The country became so caught up with minutia that it lost sight of the big picture and that, as far as I could remember, was what had gone so horribly wrong. It kind of made sense to me at the time, the kids with their computers and all, but then again, I never really gave it all that much thought. It was only a small part of what we talked about in class, and wasn’t even on the test. Now this whole pencil theory of Chuck’s, damn, that put a whole new spin on things. Like I said, it all fit together, but I just couldn’t accept it. None of us could, not until we heard the new policy.

Weeks later that night was still running through my mind. I had talked to my friends that were with me when it all went down, and they all wrote it off as one hell of a crazy night. Nothing more, nothing less. Well, all of them; all of them, that’s a funny way of putting it. There were only five of us working that night in the entire building. Birney was in back, so he missed the whole thing. And Chuck, the one who caused the commotion in the first place, no one felt too comfortable talking to him about anything more profound than the weather or who won the game last night. Besides, since that night, he didn’t seen up to keeping up his end of any conversation. He hardly spoke a word, to the point of being standoffish to customers. It was unsettling to see him that way. Dirty old man, I think, would be a little harsh, but he had always been, at least as long as I’ve known him, shall we say, animated. Always quick to laugh. Well, he didn’t have much of a choice I figure. A 60 year old in a predominantly college aged workplace had better be able to keep up, and he did, easily. We all got along just fine, at least until that night.

As it turned out, Scott and Dave were the only two people I could actually talk to about that night, and I only talked to Dave at work. One night I was at Scott’s house watching TV, and we saw it. We stared at each other in disbelief. A wave of panic swept over me. The announcement must have seemed relatively uneventful enough to the general public, if not a little intrusive, but we knew better. Our impression of Chuck instantly shifted from crazy old kook to that of a prophet. If only I knew his phone number, I would have called that night to apologize. Who am I kidding? An apology would only have been my excuse, a polite way of starting a conversation that I could have eventually shifted toward my real reason for calling, information collection. If he had lived through something like this before, and apparently escaped unscathed, then I needed to know how he did it. I needed to know his secrets, I needed to be prepared for the worse. For me, the only thing worse than a disaster is an unprepared for disaster.

"Kenneth Brockman here, to bring you the latest evidence that we are letting an inflated bureaucracy run this great nation. It appears the government is forming another program for the ‘benefit’ of it’s ‘fortunate’ citizens. This one is called Pencil Personal for the Preservation of Public Prosperity, or 5P. As we all know, lead prices have been climbing recently, to what some insiders consider an ‘unreasonable’ figure. The way I see it, they will climb to what the market can bear, and they won’t go beyond that. The way I see it, you can’t go wrong with simply starting with a quality pencil. Screw the inefficient imitation crap. What’s wrong with some people? Anyway, you may expect to be visited by a member of the 5P at school or work to have your mechanical pencil inspected for efficiency. What will they do if they deem your pencil unacceptable? This memo says, get this, ‘results vary’. Why thank you very much, that’s informative. They way I see it, if someone wants to use a cheap pencil, that’s his own fool decision. Let him be a fool, it’s his right, he pays his taxes just like the rest of us. Though we have not yet received the final figures, it looks as though the 5P initiative is going to be far reaching, with volunteers from the National Guard, the military, the police, and other organizations being recruited in alarming numbers. Call me paranoid, but this is starting to remind me just a little too much like the disastrous ink plagues of the late nineteenth century. If any of you need me to remind you of what happened there, you can blame it on the lack of respect given to history the world over. Ask your grandparents about it, it’s an old man’s story now. Anyway, this all seems to be a bit of an overkill for a simple lead efficiency program. But fear not, I will keep you apprized of any and all new developments in this story. This is Kenneth Brockman, and that’s the way I see it."

We stared at each other, and we stared at the pencils we were both unconsciously clenching. "There ain’t no freaking 5P nark going anywhere near my baby" Scott shouted.

"My sentiments exactly," I said. I could think of no one who did not remember in detail the events that occurred on the day of the ceremony. That beautiful day where each one of us earned the right to use our very own mechanical pencil. Before that, we were regulated to the use of crayons and magic markers. Good enough for coloring or drawing pictures with, there wasn’t a single student in my class that I knew who wasn’t counting the seconds until the presentation. We would all likely replace that first pencil with a much more expensive and elaborate one someday, but that day, at least for me, was still a few years away. Most of my friends were still using their first, and the few who weren’t, I think secretly wish they were. You can kind of see it in their eyes. But even as we grow older and move on, as they say, I know we always treasure our first.

These images careening through my mind, I could scarcely focus on a single thought. How could I be expected to under the circumstances? Scott and I talked for hours that night, about the ceremony, our pencils, our friends, and just about life in general. It was a very cold night.

As it turned out, Kenneth Brockman, overbearing, unprofessional, and opinioned as he is, was right on the money this time around. For the next three weeks, you couldn’t watch the news for more than five minutes without falling victim to a barrage of 5P articles. The worst was the riots. The human rights activists who formed the anti-5P, and the 45P, who either believed in what the affiliation was doing, or were affiliated with an actual member somehow. I think a large percentage of the 45P was made up of the friends and family members of the official members of the 5P, and the rest were people like Chuck, who either knew, or heard about, the true situation with Singapore. I got most of my information from Chuck himself who now, after I convinced him I believed him, was more than happy to tell me everything he knew, or what he thought he knew. I knew he was opinionated, so I didn’t take his word for the gospel, but I figured I had better listen to everything he said, and sort it out later.

Singapore, I learned, had fallen as hard as it did because it’s own government did not acknowledge or address the epidemic before it was too late. It was the foresight (quite an unnatural enlightenment it seemed to me) of the United Nations that led to the plague’s containment. If our own country’s government could eliminate the source of the contagion fast enough, perhaps it could be nipped in the bud. "Yes, individual rights are important" he said, "but the well being, damn it, down right survival of this country supersedes that of any individual." He was getting angry again, and tiny flecks of spittle were ejecting themselves from his mouth every time he talked. It was nauseous, but now was not the time to worry about such things. The importance of Countries usually "supersede" spittle, especially in times of crises.

I did my best to research the subjects of the ink plague, Singapore, and the history of my own government to find anything at all that could help me in the least bit, but was saddened to find so little history actually written down. Well, I mean important history. Oh sure, there were books upon books written about the origins of the country, who "discovered" it, and who all the original mayors were, but the stuff that was the most important, the stuff that might give us an edge this time around if history really was repeating itself, was sorely lacking. I think that what hurt the situation the most was not that the government did not act fast enough, but that it acted to quickly, and much to publicly. It was all handled so poorly, it a wonder any of us made it out. Chuck’s theory was that either someone close to the president, or the president herself had some degree of personal experience with the situation in Singapore, and that in her haste to quell the situation before it got out of control, she inadvertently exacerbated it. Instead of localizing the contagion to a few logical localized areas, she let loose a nation wide which hunt. 5P groups were condemning perfectly healthy pencils in an effort to meet some imaginary quotas. Some of the more questionable members had less of a problem with misplaced ambitions, and more of a problem with greed. The abduction and subsequent reselling of falsely accused pencils for prophet was a major concern. I imagine it must have been incredibly lucrative, at least until the bastards were caught and hung for treason. The entire program was a hastily slapped together mess. Sending out thousands of poorly trained personal on a job they didn’t fully understand themselves. It was destined to fail. It wasn’t the plague that ended up destroying the country, it was the fear of it.

One had to see the irony of the situation. If you didn’t, it would drive you insane. By the time the pencil plague actually did start to spread, the governments reputation had been tarnished to such an extent that it was almost incapacitated. See, it started so slowly, so calmly, that the 5P, in their fevered desperate state of mind all but ignored it. I don’t know who trained them, but it was unfortunate to say the least. Broken pencil lead. Think about it, what else would be the first symptom of a sick mechanical pencil? Most of the 5P mistakenly attributed the increase in broken pencil lead as a sign of anxiety on the part of the user. I guess it must have made them feel powerful for them to have pontificated students and workers so intimidated by their presence that they were simply pressing their pencils too hard on the paper. They found out after it was too late that that was how it spread. Each lead that broke released lead fibers into the air. These fibers, which had been added to lead for years now, were the carriers of the virus. Microscopically small, and devastatingly potent, pencils could be considered to be in danger residing in a room with less than one part per billion of the contagion in the air. No one knew how or where it started, but they figured it must have started with a single infected pencil, and spread exponentially from there. It was just by chance the first pencil could even have had the opportunity to infect another pencil, unless its lead happened to break in a crowed area.

As I’ve told you before, it started with weak lead. If you had a light enough touch, and managed not to break it, you would eventually notice your writing getting slightly lighter, then more significantly as time went on. Then the beautiful clicking sound to which we are all so accustomed would weaken to a muffled sound, and did not feel as clean. This eventually degraded into a fingernails-on-chalkboard noise, and provided a similar sensation. Yellowish crustaceans would form around the lead well, and the tip would swell until it would no longer permit lead to flow through it. Eventually unsightly cracks would form along the contours if its body and it would emit a foul odor. Refrigeration was found to slow the transformation into oblivion, but nothing was ever discovered to reverse the process.

Parents were keeping their children from going to school. Investors were pulling their money from the market. Businesses devoted to the manufacture, maintenance, and wellbeing of mechanical pencils were failing. Crime rates soared. Moral plummeted. Neighboring countries cut us off from trade and communications months before. One of our enemy nations took advantage of our situation and reclaimed control of our islands in the Pacific. Every disastrous event fed on another. We were going down, it was inevitable, but no one could have predicted what was going to happen nex…

—Blip—

"Awe mom, why’d you have to shut of my monitor, this was just getting cool."

"Now now Billy, I told you that you could read some of your great grandfathers old stories, but only on the contingency that you wouldn’t take them to seriously, after all, your great grandfather had, euphemistically speaking, an active imagination. Now, come downstairs, your father just came home, and he brought home a new magic marker!"