Waiting for Water

Daiki was living up to his name -- something about great value. I had to give him that. I questioned the sanity of my parents, though. This was the mentor they chose for me?

"Keep up, idiot." He looked back at me the way a scientist looks at a worm he knows he will have to remove from his shoe before entering the sterile environment of the lab.

Really, my parents were seeming nuttier by the second.

They sent me to Italy with this guy, and we had been to place after place. Tourist sites. This one was a re-supply stop for freshwater when the Roman fleet needed it. It was huge, and yet hardly anybody knew about it. Piscina Mirabilis. 

Keeping track of the shoulder bag, the boom microphone. The cords and shoulder camera. The lights. It all kept me juggling the equipment, and a little bit out of breath as he set up for each of his next vignettes. I tried to ignore how thirsty this work made me.

This time was a different, though. Daiki leaned back looking up through shaft of sunlight. He pressed a button on his watch. I saw a twist of brownish weed fall into his hair, and knew he wouldn't want it, so I brushed it aside. 

Coming in contact with him during the exact moment when he pushed that button on his watch, two things happened I have never seen before. Three, if you count the dust not falling… like at all… anymore. The first big thing was everybody in the ancient cistern (a place the size of a football field) suddenly appearing frozen in space. The second big thing was Daiki falling backwards into his own static statue–like self, and disappearing through a portion of the wall that really did seem solid. Before. Except my eyes were seeing something else. Now.

The semblance of my mentor remained. Fixed in space, looking up, ask if considering the benefits of the lighting. Acoustics, maybe.

I waited a few seconds. I waited a few minutes. Daiki and all the other tourists appeared so still ... so silent, I got spooked. Plus my shoulder hurt. That bag had been getting heavy. I set the bag down.

This situation was a bizarre one. Paying special attention to my own place in space, my posture, and everything about the way I have been holding equipment, I finally laid it all aside.

I located an unopened water bottle in one of the tourist backpacks. Took a long swig. I went on my own private tour of the space.

So many cubic yards of water, and more being brought by a far reaching aqueduct system gave the Romans a God-like luster in my mind. One part of my brain knew that most of them were jerks… living mostly for food… or the next conquest. Slaves. Status. Anything except an engineering masterpiece. The few that did think about designing something new  never got appreciated except millennia later by people like me. The rational part of my brain gave every Roman to much credit. I knew that.

The floors did not come to 90° angles, because the Roman engineers didn't want algae growing anywhere. Back in the day, they would have designed this place for near total darkness, and also an algae control measure in their plans.

Now that I didn't have to do the job of lackey, I could appreciate what the tour guide had told us about columns being covered with plaster, and the calcium buildup beyond actually protecting the rock. I saw the layers that other generations had chipped away for private reasons.

I took a leak in the far corner of the cistern. The corner beyond the barrier. The part of the cistern not cleaned up for tourists. Dust and spiderwebs, the trash nobody bothered to clear out because nobody would ever see it. Rodent bones. I made it easily back over the barrier and to my spot before my mentor returned.

The tourists started to move about in their shuffling way, seeming more thoughtful than they really were. I got a lucky break by resuming my posture only moments before Daiki appeared to reanimate himself. He gazed upward into the sunlight, appearing deeper even than the ridiculously deep tourists.

"What do you think, Idiot," he asked me. "Standing in the sun? Standing in the shadows with a light on me?"

He never would learn my real name. Nery. The man had been through 40 or 50 assistants. He probably called all of us "Idiot."

Father's heavily accented English now rang in my head, "He may be difficult, but Daiki has things to teach you... things you can glean."

Uh....yeah. I assumed that because all of us were Asian, father had only been trying to network within our culture. Maybe he knew something more than he had ever told me. On the other hand, maybe I was the one who knew something more.

I smoothly answered Daiki, "Definitely sunshine. At least, today." My tone changed, "The weather tomorrow predicts a nice day. If you want to do shadow with artificial lighting, you can try again then."

Plus, I wanted to observe the man. Sun in his eyes would allow me to do just that.

There were two YouTube channels. Heavily subscribed to. One, phrased in perfect mandarin, brought the following above 1 million. The other, an oxford-style English, took that total closer to 2 million. Daiki had to record each segment twice. During a break, I observed how he adeptly moved some thing into the bottom of my shoulder bag.

Was that the reason the shoulder bag seem to get heavier as the hours progressed during each workday? Becoming a mule for somebody with a YouTube cover was not my idea of a cool internship.

With the sun in his eyes, and concentrating hard to make sure his English was perfect, he never saw as I held the camera still, yet snaked my hand under the flap of the shoulder bag. I felt the outlines of a well wrapped, plastic package that clinked. A soft metallic sound softly reached my ears.

I smiled, nearly imperceptibly.

Father and mother did the right thing getting me this internship.