You Say

The Maker put me in charge of this Inn because, for long stretches of life on earth, I forgot almost entirely about myself. I was too busy helping poor Chinese at the Inn of the Sixth Happiness to worry how I looked, if I was tall enough, had gone to the right schools, or been born the best gender. When they made a movie about my simple life, they made me beautiful and had a Mandarin fall in love with me. None of that ever happened. I was a small woman who had accepted my limitations, lived in the body given to me and saved hundreds of lives.” I had heard of Gladys Alyward while on earth. She was a legend in China. I had never considered, given her prodigious feats, that she was a person comfortable in her own skin. “Let me show you the first room,” said Gladys, when we had finished our tea. We left the small sun-room and entered a studio labelled “Eyes of the Beholder.” “When the world became smaller, this room had to be enlarged,” said Gladys. “When I was a teenager in England before World War Two, we compared our looks to several others in our small town. We were prettier than the older women, of course. I suppose a boy might have found me attractive, if I had noticed. But by your time in 2030, mass media had globalized images of beauty and virility that almost no one could hope to match. This room has so many who think themselves unattractive, for one small flaw or another. Stomach, chest, thighs, arms, eyes, lips. You name it. They are never quite right. Their gaze is inward and through imagined lenses of others. They are not much use to anyone and wear themselves out. Sarah!” Gladys called, and a slightly pudgy female wafted ghost-like toward us. “How are you today, Dear” asked Gladys. Sarah glanced quickly around and then at Taxenant and I, striking an Eve pose and smiling seductively. “I am well, thank you. And who are your guests?” she asked. “These two are from Old Town and they have come for a visit to learn about the limits of physical existence.” “Oh, it is a trial, a daily trial. I just saw a concert with Beyonde’ and if only I could have her curves. I am painting myself, going to the gym, doing what I can. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think my bones are just shaped wrong.” “Have you considered surgery? Implants?” puffed a thin man next to us, furiously pumping dumbells. Before him, on the wall, was a large poster of the incredible muscled Germinator, another Hollywood idol. I felt like telling this poor winded man that he too had the wrong bones, only his were too small. “These cannot accept their bodies’ limitations,” said Gladys. “They spend their days trying to be other than they are because they have accepted the judgment of others. My job is to help them see themselves through the eyes of their Creator, who made them as they are, loves and respects them wholly and wishes for them to move their gaze away from themselves to the bigger world. To accept the limitations of their bodies. Like I did, somehow.” We moved, with difficulty, through crowds in the “Eyes of the Beholder” studio to another space labelled “Boys and Girls.” “Same thing,” said Gladys. “These also see themselves through others’ eyes and do not accept their limited and glorious corporeal reality. A boy is born, every cel in his body is boy. But he is soft and serious, not a player of ball. Maybe a stick man like the poor soul in that other room. Poetry even. Someone questions his boyness. Not the Creator. The Creator wants some boys like that one. But it is other eyes that he sees through. It is an argument with limits, again.” There were girls in the room too, maybe not ‘feminine’ enough. Some were queueing for surgery, to make their bodies what they should be, to remedy nature’s error. Hormones. Conquest. There was a room for race. There it was easier to be white than any other colors. White people usually did not have to bother about their color when they woke up in the morning and went out for a walk. But a black person, especially a black man, had to consider his day and what others might think of him. Other eyes. What others thought. Gladys’ job was to tell them that the Creator wanted men like that, with that dark skin. And all kinds of colors, for that matter. There was a room for class. A room for language. Lose that accent. Learn this one. I remembered at UCSD, how we looked at people with southern accents doubtfully. Maybe those southerners started to see themselves through our eyes and tried to talk like us. Finally, we came to a room called “Being Mortal.” I peeked in and was surprised by the lack of geriatrics. There were a few old ones, of course, but most were computer nerds on machines furiously inputting data, others weighing the contents of test tubes and a line of customers at a pharmacy counter. I wandered over to the counter to see what elixers were on offer. There were drugs I had never heard of, but also some I knew from earth. All sorts of anti-aging drugs, hormones, sex enhancers, really good things on the whole. Botox. But what struck me was the anxious looks on the customers’ faces. These were people who had looked over the edge of life, saw their end coming and were furiously doing everything they could to delay the inevitable, even by a few months or years. The guys on the computers had ideas about digitizing the human genome and creating bionic images of themselves to somehow live forever. The looks on their faces were priceless. Anxiety merged into desperation and from thence to oblivion. “Those,” said Gladys pointing to the technologists, “are beyond my help. They are in full time denial of one of humanity’s most basic limitations, mortality.” There were more rooms, of course, in the House of Limitations. Gladys, the more I saw of her, exhibited a stark contrast with her guests. The longer I was there, the more I could see that, compared to Gladys, none of her guests were fully formed, solid, real, corporeal in the best sense. None were the best version of themselves. Rather, each one was trying to be something other, and that effort was destroying them, making them fuzzy, like TVs with bad reception. The Maker, never a tyrant forcing creatures to live within their limits, was nevertheless patient. He sent them to Gladys and her Inn, for as long as it might take. “Your time,” said Gladys, “was when the crisis of limits reached its climax. Your economies encouraged ever more consumption of stuff, junk really. If that did not make you happy, you thought maybe you just needed more. Maybe there was just some limit that remained unbusted, standing between you and happiness. You reached a point of screaming desperation at the end when you even tried to burst the limits of your physical bodies, and this after you saw the disaster you had wreaked, as a species, on the entire physical world! All those religions and myths taught you limits. Don’t eat from that tree in the garden. Icarus, don’t fly too near the sun or your wings will melt. There were stories about limits in all the world’s religions and mythologies. You, modern people, had no time for that old nonsense. You lived when humans thought they were beyond all bounds. You created at once a mad house and a butchery. I am a little lady sent here to sort some of that out. I have one more room to show you and then we will all need another cup of tea.” Gladys marched through a few more rooms and then out to a veranda. Stepping out the doors, I immediately sensed a calmer atmosphere than the anxiety inside of the house. “This is our therapy,” said Gladys. “Walk around and you will notice that each person is ‘losing him or herself’ in some activity. To lose oneself is a spiritual gift. It is a way station on the road to healing.