It closed deftly behind him. He had pulled it himself, leaving the giant oak door to swing shut and latch on its own. The boy ignored the loud thud as door met frame. He ran one sleeved arm over teary blue-green eyes and rosy-hued cheeks. Now contorting his face into a picture of pure brooding resentment he trudged down the artificially illuminated path toward the main gate. Recently, more often than not, this was the way the youngest Winner left the family estate--sulkily closing the large door and turning his back to the sound it made in shutting.
Inside the head of the Winner household would listen, the noise becoming a dagger to his heart, twisted by the silence that followed. Then the father would sit in his chair, bury his face in his hands, and question the choices he had made. Again he would ask himself if he had made the right decision in keeping the nature of his only son’s birth from him. Occasionally he would bring the question to the portrait he kept of his late wife. She reminded him so much of Quatre, her blond hair and blue eyes, her sweet smile. He recalled the way her voice remained steady and unwavering in the heat of an argument. They might have been so close, they were both stubborn and defiant, and even before Quatre's birth his mother cared more for his life than her own. Maybe with a mother to mediate the son’s and father’s many disagreements things could have been better. Had he made so many mistakes that he was in jeopardy of losing his only son?
Quatre walked farther from his home, unaware of his father’s anguish. His quick pace carried him through the crowded streets of the colony, where he narrowly avoided colliding with the passers-by. Cars drove past, honking at traffic. People yelled, greeting each other by waving hands high over their heads. No one seemed to notice him walking alone, taking a somewhat aimless path.
“Hey give that back, you twit.”
Quatre heard the command over the racket of the crowd; he paid little attention to it. He turned the corner, entering a plaza.
Business buildings surrounded the paved area; one side opening to the street. A solitary lithe sapling grew in the center of each of four planters; a futile attempt to make it feel more Earth-like. Two wide paths crossed in-between them and one continuous sidewalk led around. The only people resting were sitting on the lip of the raised cement.
“I don’t take orders,” a male voice said as the demand was repeated. “I think I should keep it.”
The blond Arabian could now see the two kids talking over all the people who were rushing through the open area. Actually there were three, students, still adorned in the mandatory uniforms; though one person in the group sat across from them and remained silent.
As soon as he entered the inner hub of the square the group left, the young girl carried by her tormentor, complaining constantly.
Quatre conquered the place they had just vacated, immediately noticing a small portfolio that they had abandoned. Carefully he picked it up making sure none of the haphazardly placed papers fell out. Tucking the folder under one arm he jogged to the corner where he last saw them. They shouldn’t be that far ahead of him; and burdened by carrying the girl only made his chances of catching up with them more probable, so Quatre was positive he could return it. Impossible to see them, because he couldn’t see over the heads of the many adults in the crowd, he listened for the discontented voice of the girl.
“You are so not on my good side right now!” Hurriedly, Quatre headed to where he head this statement followed by several other exclamations, but they were nowhere in sight. Wandering through the sideways and glancing around a few corners he failed to find the three teenagers. Returning to his own path, the blond continued on his way, quickly forgetting the small folder he had stuffed in his bag.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Silence engulfed the house throughout the evening’s meal; the same intransigent quiet that had reigned as a harsh master over the occupants since the reverberation of the main door had ceased to echo through the corridors. An all too familiar presence, the unwelcome and burdensome companion that father and son refused to dispel by giving words to the apology each had already formed.
Having no reason to linger elsewhere in the spacious mansion, Quatre returned to his room. Feigning the act of a devout scholar, he dutifully opened a textbook and plucked away at an assignment, completing a sizable portion of it before moving to a different subject. Once finished with the homework he sifted through the scattered papers on the small workspace, removing unnecessary scraps and books. When he rediscovered the portfolio he retreated with it to another corner, comfortably seating himself on a plump cushion. The folder had been in his possession for all day but he had not opened it, or even thought about it since first finding it. The folder had passed from bench to backpack to desk, all under Quatre's care, but he had barely even noticed the jacket of this new object.
The leaves, made from a thick black textured material, had assiduously protected what resided inside; though they themselves showed signs of wear. Slowly the boy turned it over, looking for anything of interest. Brass colored metal protected the corners from impact. The seam of the covering was reinforced with a double layer of the black stuff; here it was smooth from being touched and gray from bending countless times. The handles also were worn smooth from human touch.
Quatre thought it was almost too plain; nothing adorned the outside, save one tiny yellow rosebud. He ran a finger gingerly over the little decoration. Expertly stitched in the cover the threads that formed the image would not freely come undone; they were soft, closely placed, and still vibrant compared to the rest of the cover. The sight of a rose was common, and seeing it embellish the black held no meaning.
After glancing at both sides again, he wondered why he had kept it at all. He supposed it was because he thought of nothing else to do with it and trying to find its owner now was just something to amuse himself.
He had only observed what school the two older boys attended—useless information, no one would be able to place such a common object with a person, especially since he couldn’t even give a name. Anyway, he was positive it belonged to the girl. Quatre couldn’t even make an assumption about where she could be found; her skirt had been a different color than the boys’ slacks and he had not seen an emblem or any other marking he could identify in her dress.
He placed it on his lap, leaving both leaves open as he looked at the papers. Maybe a name, a school, an address, any clue to the owner could be found inside. Since Quatre had kept the folder this long it only made sense to look at the contents to learn to whom it belonged.
If an inanimate object could have a will of its own, this folder, obstinate and stubborn, craved for an ownerless life. Everything in it was no more than a doodle, nothing distinct or out of the ordinary: multiple unfinished drawings of people and places; knights and maidens, castles, lakes, various geometric designs and nothing more. Many papers with the line “The dream of what I’d really like to be” scribbled in the corner, none of them with anything complete: faces lacking detail, and the first lines of a body.
One sheet was calculatedly grided and a face, partially constructed, filled the squares, under it was a small copy of a magazine cut-out. The face of a soldier, an incredibly young man from wars that memory had long ago lost, adorned the torn paper, printed next to it the phrase, “Will what I’ve done remain forgotten?” His face felt familiar, his broad checks and commanding presence, the rest of his features marred by stubble and dirt. Then it came, the picture reminded him of Rashid, and the promise to make it to Earth after becoming stronger. Had he let that goal squander its value? Somehow it looked now as if it would be impossible for him to fulfill that vow.
At the sound of a knock, the blond boy stashed the drawings back into their home, “What?”
The door opened and Quatre made a sound that was neither consent nor refusal in response to his father’s request to come in. Apparently the remnants of the tense mood that prevailed after their fierce argument that morning still held some kind of perverse power over both men. When the head of the Winner household spoke it sounded as though reciting minutes of an earlier board meeting.
“Tomorrow I’ll be leaving…” It began the same way every time and Quatre only vaguely listened, never making eye contact with the older man. As the father continued to explain the necessity of the trip to one of the companies many resource satellites his son’s attention wandered farther away. The young Arabian had no intention of even pretending to care about any of the aspects of this new business excursion.
"How long?” Amid all the other details the duration of this journey escaped the father’s attention and though Quatre was less than attentive he noticed.
“Four days.”
Blue-green eyes once again stared blankly out the only window, trying to carry a look of indifference in the features of a face that would never lose its appearance of innocence.
“How was school? Did you finish your homework?” Pure dad-mode, Quatre could think of no other way to describe it when his father went into the standard parental questions; the neutral, safe, boring questions. What else could a father ask when he felt his only son was severing himself from his family; almost in essence distancing himself from the world?
“Most of it,” Quatre waved a nonchalant hand in the general direction of his desk.
“You could have done better.” Upon seeing a literature assignment and skimming through the work, Mr. Winner gave his son a gentle chastising in his deep, unbending voice. “There is so much more you are capable of, this hardly meets the minimum.”
“So, I’m still passing the class. What does it matter? You’ve already decided everything.”
Quatre, an extremely bright person with extraordinary talents, never applied himself to anything, which aggravated his father to no end.
“Quatre!” Exhausted with his son’s philosophy, this was the only response. Regardless of how hard they fought, no matter where the conversation started, it always ended in the same place. The head of the Winner family left the room with the same pang that the slamming oak door brought.
Frustrated, perhaps a little angry, and, most defiantly, confused, the boy tossed the folder and all its former belongings onto the floor. It landed without complaint in the corner, where, at the moment, he hoped the papers would decompose into dust. For a brief few minutes, Quatre thought his homework should suffer the same fate.
Fully dressed, with the exception of shoes, he slid under the covers, pulling the blankets high over his head to brood in the warmth and darkness they provided.
Morning came, as it always does, and found the youngest Winner still in a deep, dreamless sleep, blond strands falling over a creamy white forehead, blue eyes buttoned shut. Quatre peered hazily through his thick eyelashes, the desk lamp casting crisp light through the jade colored shade. The blue-tinted light mingled freely with the growing brightness of the colony’s fluorescent bulbs.
Mechanically, Quatre followed the usual rituals to prepare for the day: changing clothes, combing hair, gathering homework and other school items. Breakfast--a flawless reflection of all other meals, father and son sitting in obdurate silence. Class following class always the same; even the short journey between home and school passed unaltered. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, all melded together as Quatre watched the people surrounding him, not really seeing them. On the busy street, their faces, their voices, the paths they chose vanished from the boy’s memories before crossing the threshold of his home. His mind too full of the seemingly endless phrases repeated to him, so many contradicting things.
Like the night before, the evening meal remained enraptured to the stony silence. The presence of the elder Winner acutely missed; even if father and son refused to exchange words, the absence of the flesh cut more grievously than the want of conversation. In somewhat habitual movements Quatre picked at the food served to him, head bowed, eyes never focusing on anything in the elegant dinning room.
After roaming aimlessly about the grounds, for what felt to him no more than a few minutes, Quatre heavily fell onto his bed’s plush comforter. Sitting there, his thoughts running in rapid succession through the biggest fights he had recently had with his father, the young boy’s attention was once again diverted by the black portfolio.
“The dream of what I’d really like to be,” Quatre bitterly recited the line scrawled in loopy, girlish cursive.
It seemed at so many times, even in his young life, dreams were made too easily and in turn wasted; the author of that line could only be a naive child. Quickly Quatre picked up the folder, preparing to throw it and all its contents into the garbage. As he snatched the corner, and pulled it closer to him, the papers plummeted with muffled exuberance to the carpet, the mocking quote and penciled face lying exposed at his feet. Without thinking he kicked the offending picture away, sending several of the other sketches flying with it.
Now properly vented, Quatre sat down amid the numerous drawings. The floor, once cover with an intricately woven rug, lay hidden under the debris; an amusing view, a room carpeted with a stranger’s art. Legs crossed, elbows pressed on his thighs, chin cupped in both hands, the boy inhaled deeply, releasing the air slowly as he glanced around.
“Is this what I dreamt as a child, when I wondered what I would be? Did I ever think I’d need to ask, who am I, am I free?” The words peeked out from under his bent knee, peering at the boy with its deliberately printed characters. There was more, a carefully written answer that Quatre read as he pulled the paper out from under him. “To be free, to be truly free is a marvelous thing. I heard a new definition of that word: freedom, it is to know who you really are.”
Under this short phrase, another sheet bearing those same words, “The dream of what I’d really like to be," now sat exposed to the boy’s skeptical eye.
He turned the paper in his hand over; contrary to the many others, this picture was finished, colored with a mixture of chalks and pencils. It was the red-haired soldier, the same one from the copied photo, the man who might have been so familiar, drawn bigger and slightly changed. Quatre searched for and picked out the three papers, the ones ornamented with the soldier. He cleared his desk, adding to the growing mess on the floor. Carefully he lined up the pictures: the photo, the rough sketch, the finished product. Each seemed somehow so different from the magazine cut-out, like the man in the picture had changed who he was.
Taking a pencil, gripping it firmly, and adding a fresh sheet of paper to his collection, Quatre painstakingly began to sketch a man. A vision of all those things he had wanted to be, the traits he had wanted to exemplify: the man who would fill that new definition of freedom, a person who has faced his fears, who is courageous and lacking doubt; the great, noble warrior who could and would fulfill the promise to the Maguanacs. He finished long after the colony’s lights had been dimmed, long after the chimes of twelve.
Quatre stepped back and stretched, pausing a moment to admire his creation, the portrait of the dream of what he wanted to be. There lay a successfully made and fairly convincing portrayal of this man who knew what he was fighting for, with a dream he would risk his all just to hold.
“But who am I?” This question came with but a short passing of time, almost as though whispered from elsewhere. “A meaningless life form, a cipher, created at my father’s whim, able to do things on my own, but for what purpose?”
The view of being a nonentity grew stealthily as he faced the dream. To be something more than ivy climbing a wall solely because it serves no other purpose, was it a possibility? Quatre wondered why he couldn’t suddenly become that man he envisioned, with all those traits he had chosen. Why couldn’t he instantaneously transform into his paper man? This tall, virtuous, passionate man, who had a deep understanding of life, mustn’t escape his grasp. Quatre’s vision could not be allowed to melt into another fleeting dream, if he could only become that man, he could join Rashid and the Maguanacs on Earth, having fulfilled his promise.
“But who am I? The foolish child that I am, how can I be him? Where does my dream and freedom lie? What can I fight for? Quatre’s dithery words solemnly drifted away, never finding a listener who could answer the recondite, soul-searching questions.
In every moment this vision of the paper man waited, imprisoned in the boy’s mind. Nightly, small white fingers consciously pressed their tips against the smooth edge of a pencil, again in preparation to draw the dream, and still the young boy earnestly yearned to be him.
Composed but almost hesitant, Quatre approached the Doctor, a self-proclaimed “mad scientist” whom he had met on the resource satellite, and had recently been dwelling in the Winner’s home. Quatre’s father had returned several weeks prior to this ultimate, life-altering decision.
Afraid of the answer he would receive, yet determined to begin the journey to become the man he drew, Quatre braced himself, confirming in his mind that this was possibly the only way to reach his goal. Without plowing through the common pleasantries, leaving no holes or cracks in his resolve, allowing no time to think of absolute failure, the blonde offered his solution to the Doctor’s recent problem. “I would like to volunteer to be the pilot.”
Somehow unfazed by this bold proposition from the gentle child, the doctor merely paused for a moment in making his decision. Whether it was his intention from the beginning to have Quatre pilot the gundam or not the boy and his father never knew. Sensing that this appeal wasn’t open defiance against a pacifist father, the reply was, “Follow me.”
Quatre readily accepted all aspects of the training that followed. Still everyday he would work on the sketch of the vision, every night try to see again what he hoped to become; making great strides in physical strength.
The final preparations for launch were all made. The commencement of Operation Meteor, a day dreaded by one father but long waited for by many others. With the earth in view and his cherished drawing, his most precious dream, in his hand, Quatre Winner whispered, “Chances are I can’t be him, but I will try.”
