The Chiefs Perspective: Bottom Floor of Severens

I sit in the wooden chair, my knees just about touching the table and my feet securely planted on the carpet. It is quiet except for the footsteps and shuffles of a young boy walking down the narrow and enclosing hall. His body is hunched over and he is dragging his feet behind him. He reminds me of me. I once was a young boy just like him, attending school because Mamma directed me to. Learning math, science and all those other subjects. I never really liked school though. I never felt safe or secure. I remember one day in math class when I was around the age of 12. It was a class full of white kids and me. By my 12^th age I was beginning to get use to people treating me differently, especially in school with everyone acting like I was mute. Out of blue my teacher asked me what the answer was to the problem. She had never asked me a question, probably because all the other teachers warned her about me, but right then, that didn’t stop her. The boy next to me, Timothy Pill, began to laugh, it started out as a giggle but became more load and more powerful. I knew exactly why he was laughing, everyone knew why he was laughing and they began to join in as if the laugh was some sort of contagious disease. I remember sitting in my chair glancing around at all the white kids’ big smiles, their mouths wide open, taking in gasps of air as their stomachs began to ache from their enormous amount of laughter. The teacher’s eyes looked at me, her big, and deep sigh replays back in my head, full of disappointment and disbelief. The kids settled down and the class moved on to another question, but never again did that teacher or kids try to talk or confront me again. Ever since that day I didn’t want to be in that classroom, I didn’t want to be in that school and I didn’t want to be with those kids. But mama kept on telling me I had to go back because she wanted me to learn and have knowledge like all the other white kids. I knew Mamma wanted me to talk to those people, and I bet Papa did too, but I never did.

Silence begins to creep into the hallway. The kid is gone and my eyes wonder to the art pieces, which are placed one after another after another down the musky old hallway wall in a perfect and symmetrical order. All pieces the same size, exact same dimensions situated precisely the same way. All I can do is cringe; the sight of them makes my whole body ache. The Combine still rules over this system, it did when I was in school and it does now. I had hoped by the time I came out of the ward things would be different, but no. The Combine with the help of this system continues to make every aspect of the world the same, drilling into your brain that to be someone, you must appear the same as everyone else. This system is where this idea is mounted into the students minds, where it all begins and by the end of the students time here, the Combine hopes it is all equipped and installed, perfectly ready to take on the world.  I wish Nurse Ratchet was here to see this hallway, to see these pictures. She would drool at the sight of them.

I continue to sit in the silence, with occasional creeks of noises above me.  It has been ten minutes since the boy walked by and no one has preceded him. My eyes move away from the wall into the middle as I stare at the door at the end of the hallway. The black, metal bar across the middle of the door, directing people to push to open. Oh how simple it looks, an easy press on the bar to leave the suffocating hall, maybe some people can do it, they have all the correct machinery inside them, they can go take on the Outside World, but for me I don’t want to be conventionalized in the Outside world, the world that the Combine controls, but I don’t want to be stuck in the Inside world either.