Alphy Doodles. Scanned and re-edited by Gabriel David, February, 2018
Previously Published: Sedona Times, 9/1/1985 1,157 words, First Serial Rights
@1985 Michael David
ALPHY DOODLES
By
Michael David
Imagine, if you will, a society, somewhere, sometime, in the not too distant future. A culture of high technological achievements. A world virtually automated by the combined uses of electricity and computer chips. A society which did not encourage the artistic-self, but instead, helped the techno-self. That left-brained unit, that’s what they called themselves, “units”, was taught all the needed skills called for by the machine society. Nothing else was ever required of them, outside of a little Sunday macramé lessons. But, whatever anyone did, it had to be of some use. That is, it had to have a function. It was actually again the law to expend energy units on frivolous projects which had no serious chance of being useful in some way.
Then, one day, as often happens in good stories, one of the units, that is, a person of that excessively arranged society, did a rather childish thing. While writing a letter, he became lost in thought and daydreamed a bit. When he awakened some moments later, he found that he had been doodling. He was astonished at himself, as if he had wet his pants. He hadn’t, but he quickly covered his drawing and stashed the paper in his shirt.
When he arrived back at his cubicle, he breathed a sigh of relief. Carrying the blasphemous paper around in his shirt all day had caused no end to his anguish. In fact, a sense of guilt had tentacled him in a grip of fear of being found out. Un-crumpling it, he spread it out on the counter top. There it was. He hadn’t meant to do it. It just happened. But, that was unheard of. Nothing ever was left to chance, The Auditors made sure of that. His entire life was arranged for him. He wasn’t ever required to think. But, this doodling had stirred up some kind of primitive urges in him that all of his training had not prepared him for. His mind was not taught to handle foreign data. The picture was insistent. It pulled at his mind, urging it, seducing it, as if it were really modeling his brain into a new shape, a shape that could think.
Unit A, he was called. We’ll call him Alphy, because from that day on there was no Unit A, there was only Alphy.
Alphy stared at the paper and tried to figure out what to do. He thought and thought, but all he could think of to do was to hide it somewhere. Strangely, he couldn’t make himself throw it away. He couldn’t admit it to himself, the techno-self, but he liked it. What’s more, looking at it reminded him of that moment when he had drifted away in his daydream, when he had created something unplanned. Something which was useless, yet seemed to open the door on a vast landscape of experiences, which here-to-fore, Alphy had not known existed.
Alphy finally made a decision. He would keep the picture, look at it, and remember that one, beautiful, blissful moment when he had daydreamed and created it. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was taking his first tentative steps away from the world as he had known it and entering a new world through his newly remodeled, thinking mind. All of his surroundings remained the same, but there was a new interpretation placed on everything. He, in effect, was seeing the world anew.
He got so caught up in this new awareness that he was late getting to his assigned booth. No one seemed to notice his lateness, but just before his lunch break his immediate supervisor came by and asked if things were all right at home. This did not ease his mind at all. He thought of it all day long. He just couldn’t concentrate on his work. The picture, the experience of it, was too enticing to ignore. He made several mistakes in his work that day, but by the time he was on his way home he didn’t care about that anymore. He only wanted to do it again. This time, to be more observant as he did it.
Upon arriving home, he got the picture out of its hiding place and taped it to the inside of a cabinet door. Then, he opened it wide so that he could see it from his stool at the counter. Out of a drawer he withdrew several sheets of requisition papers which were blank on the back sides. Out of the same drawer, a fine bead pen. Sitting up on the stool at the counter, he arranged his materials and took up the pen. But, he was so keyed up by then that he was at a loss as to what he was going to do. Looking up at the picture taped to the cabinet door, he decided to copy that. Carefully, he looked at the picture and back to his blank page. He started down at the right hand corner and tried to make the pen trace the first line. After he had accomplished this, he started on the second line, which went off at an angle from the first and made a peculiar curve where it met another line, which itself went off in an entirely different direction. And so on, until he had· drawn in every line which was on the first drawing. He thought he liked the results at first, but when he placed the new drawing next to the first one, he knew almost instinctively that the first one was better. The second, a feeble copy. The original picture had a fresh quality about it that Alphy guessed had something to do with his state of reverie at the time he had made it.
Alphy made several more attempts to copy the original, but he soon discovered that each drawing came out totally different. Not one was a duplicate of any other. Drawing on into the night, Alphy finally fell asleep, only to be awakened by the alarm, which informed him how late he was. Clutching his coat, he rushed off for his job. He was late again.
This time, his lateness was not unnoticed. His supervisor and two armed security units were waiting at the punch clock for him. They handcuffed him and took him back to his cubicle, where several other security units were pulling pictures off his walls and piling them on the counter. Others were rifling through his personal effects, in search of what, he did not know. They took him, and his pictures, before the magistrate and he was convicted and sentenced to hard labor for crimes against the State.
There’s not much else to tell of Alphy. They remodeled his brain again, and gave him a job making propaganda posters for the State. He never strayed so far as to doodle, but every once in a while, he would steal away in his mind… and daydream.
Thomas Michael David 1985 