The Fate of Droplets (iii)

I want to apologize for the poor formatting that happens when I post these excerpts. They frustrate me as well as any readers. If it were a shorter piece, I would probably do something silly and painstaking to make it look better, but I am leaving it as is. A friend commented that she enjoys the story, so I am posting both parts iii and iv today. I hope they are well received.

...

Henry and I attended a party that Saturday. I eagerly shared the conversation I had had with George and it then occurred to me that the two might gain something from one another. It was obvious that Henry was distant, glancing frequently over his shoulder and peering down the roads where street lamps had burned out. I thought he jumped when one blinked out overhead.
The house was an old but well-maintained and recently refurbished estate. During the daytime, I might have fallen in love with its steeple roof-line and shutters, the way it stood in its happy, simple lot with the vegetable garden stretched all along the left-side iron fence. As it was, with the clouds flitting quickly overhead, casting moonlight eerily, and the murmur that the party-goers' talk made from outside alarmed me. Henry shared some of my concern, but it may have just been his condition at the time that set him off-kilter.
“Lex! How are you? Come on in.”
“Hey Jessica, this is Henry, a friend from high school.” Henry shook Jessica's hand and she leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. He received it, but seemed more uncomfortable afterward.
“Well come in! The clouds and cold are on their way, aren't they?” She laughed and led us in. She pointed out food and the facilities, but spent most of her time highlighting the flourishes of the design. I had met Jessica when I was home from school through a friend of a friend, and though we had never particularly bonded, we always tried to be amicable and welcoming to one another. She wore this wonderful, simple, knee-length dress that rippled in a soft red as she walked, some thin jewelry jingled at her wrists.
When I caught a glimpse of Mona sipping wine in the living room, I became exceedingly distracted. She and I had had dinner the evening following the day at the Buddhism Center with Henry and that had gone well, but closing abruptly due to a call to the hospital for nursing work. She was still a student, but only barely, and after some astounding work with traumatized adolescents the fellow staff treated her with great respect.
“Henry, I am going, um... over there,” adding a slight gesture. “Will you be alright?”
“Yeah, I'll be great. Something about the night was getting to me, but there's Karen and Gabby, and I saw Jason with Colin in the entryway.”
“Just let me know how you're doing, okay?” We had spoken a little on the way about how Henry was feeling, but it had been ambiguous; he had seemed to refuse to give whatever he was thinking about or feeling real shape, but not obviously hoping that I would give it one either.
He nodded and I spun off to find Mona. I picked up a drink from Jessica's brother who was happily gabbing away and mixing behind their bar in the study-gone-salon, which led into the living room via a tall, sliding door which could act as a false wall. Jessica had excitedly pointed out some of the clever crannies and flairs on the ground-floor, but I had paid little attention. The salon walls remained filled with bookshelves replete with ancient book spines and sturdy, red leather furniture on which familiar faces lounged and chattered. The living room was a lengthy and spacious affair that filled the back of the house, wide, tall windows revealed the flower garden behind, as well as a tidy brick patio where a few men and a women smoked amidst sharp gusts. Most guests had dressed up a little for the evening, but all of us were trumped for the fine air in the room made by all the furnishing and décor.
Mona wore this fantastic black, pin-stripe dress that seemed to shimmer despite its hue. Her hair was up in a tight bun with a few whispers of hair almost tickling her neck. She appeared heightened and statuesque, holding her glass primly but with a personal assurance. Her sharp features and tall neck seemed to set her up in contrast to her surroundings, or at least that is how she appeared to me. When she spotted me, she came over and hugged me, slyly kissing my cheek along my jaw and I absently shivered.
“Took you long enough to get here.”
“Well, if I had seen you before, I would have hurried up.”
Our fingertips lightly touched one another.
“Come over and meet some of my friends.” We joined her friends, our hands almost holding, and I made my way into their circle. I switched my drink to my left hand to shake their hands. “This is Jeremy and Amy, Anaïs, Thomas, Billie, and Owen.” I shook everyones' hands, leaning in to kiss Amy's, Anaïs's, and Billie's cheeks. I immediately felt underdressed, noticing some of the niceties that each wore, but their smiles and apparent genuineness calmed me.
We breezed through the small talk of introductions; school, work, some travels, family, and so on, before picking up on the conversation from before, which Thomas and Billie tended to lead.
“So Mona, how do reports from the frontlines go? Do you think your work is worse than it was a decade ago?” asked Thomas.
“Frontlines,” Amy explained in my ear, “is how Thomas refers to Mona's work.”
“Well, the trauma work is about the same, but we have more knowledge and skill with some subtleties of psychological health and care issues. We see more cases of neglect among children and the elderly, which was pretty unheard of even a few decades ago. Then again, we may just be more aware of what was going on.”
“I don't buy that,” chimed in Billie. “Generally speaking, people can tell when something is wrong with someone else. I know, for example, that Jeremy's grandmother lives with his parents. If I ask about her and he acts uncomfortable, or if no one sees her for a while, or if she acts funny when someone in the neighborhood does see her, it is easy to consider that something is wrong. What you're talking about, we haven't really seen before.”
Mona responded, “For the most part, I agree. Something is happening with our culture, our communities, our families that makes it possible or more likely or whatever for people to just set one another aside.”
“So, do you think we're treating one another like commodities or objects somehow because of our market-culture or because we don't see our family members like real persons anymore?” Thomas asked, pointedly to Mona, but for everyone to ponder.
“I guess I am too busy trying to take care of people, to wonder. I know that I have to see even the kid with gunshot wounds, even the abusive parent, and the neglectful mother as a person or else I can't do my work. Those are real people, no matter how we try to reason them into statistics or new articles or into TV shows.”
Anaïs noted, “What are you suggesting, Thomas? You talk like you already know the answer here and you just want to argue us down.” Thomas was finishing law student, and a nod from Amy suggested that this was the case.
“I'm not on a soapbox here or anything, but I do want to know if you think that this is an internal force of change, like that our culture or market is converting us into less feeling and more aggressive people; or if something outside is impacting the way we feel and act toward one another.”
“What do you mean, 'something outside?' That sounds like subliminal messages from the Soviets like in we're in the Cold War or something,” Jeremy added snidely, making the notion sound more astrological than sociological.
“Well, what about the way commercials and other PR campaigns indoctrinate us early, as children, into buying certain things or favoring certain styles or body types,” questioned Amy. Jeremy squeezed her around the waist supportively, warmly. I then felt how close Mona was to me and smiled quietly, dropping my hand next to hers so that the backs of our hands might graze against one another, though they did not right away.
“I'm skeptical at our inability to make up our own decisions the way businesses and politicians want to think.” Thomas looked right at me, coaxing a response as he continued, “We might get a few cues as kids, but our responses to advertising are fickle and chaotic, what worked yesterday is offensive today and passé tomorrow. And now we have more people trying to establish an anti-commercial counter-culture, like we're mustering our forces against something that's coming.”
“You present two options, then,” I said, “either our internal mechanisms of culture are more powerful and subtle than we have really begun to suppose, much more intricate than a soda commercial or fashion billboard; or some socio-culturally alien force is playing games with us to change how we react, something that we—we as a people—are increasingly sensitive to and have begun to combat.” I breathed slowly, happy that my thoroughly considered response had come out without a hitch, then added, “so what do you think, Thomas?”
Thomas smiled, somewhat maniacally, “I like to ask questions. I studied philosophy and now law, we aren't that good with answers.” To this, everyone besides me laughed, as if saying, “Oh, Thomas, that is just how you are.”