What's Actually There

Harold

On Saturday mornings, I walk to school.

It's a mile and a half from my room above the dry cleaner to Paperton Central. I used to drive it, back when I taught there, back when I had a car and somewhere I had to be by 7:40. Now I walk it, because I have time, and because there's so much to see.

This morning it was spring. The real kind, the kind that smells like cut grass and wet dirt and somebody's lilacs. The sun came up over the river while I was crossing the Fifth Street bridge, and the whole town turned gold, and I stopped right there in the middle of the sidewalk like a tourist and just looked at it.

I've lived in Paperton my whole life. I'd never once stopped on that bridge.

* * *

Main Street is waking up early these days. Everyone has somewhere they want to be.

The old shoe store is a bakery now. A woman named Rita runs it. She did insurance billing for twenty-two years, in a cubicle with no window, and dreamed about bread the whole time. Now she's up at four every morning with flour to her elbows, and the line goes out the door by six, and she sings while she works. Badly. Loudly. Nobody minds.

I bought a loaf of sourdough, still warm, and paid for it with a pale green bill. On the front, there's an old man's hand, open, letting go of something. Rita took it without looking at it, the way you take money, and handed me my change and a free cinnamon roll, because she says I look like a man who appreciates a cinnamon roll.

She's right. She has no idea she's holding my hand in her till. Nobody does. I've spent hundreds of those bills now, all over town, and every single time, it makes me grin like a fool.

Next door, the pawn shop is a guitar shop. Two doors down, the check-cashing place is a bookstore called Second Chapter, run by the same man who used to cash checks there, who says he finally has customers who leave happier than they came in. Across the street, there's a little shop with a hand-painted sign that just says REPAIRS: ANYTHING, where a retired machinist fixes toasters and lawnmowers and bicycles for whatever you can pay, and teaches anybody who wants to learn.

Down by the river, two brothers who used to drive forklifts at the distribution center are building wooden boats. They've sold eleven. They waved at me from the dock with their sleeves rolled up and sawdust in their hair, and one of them yelled, "Mr. Horcross! Come see the new one!" They were in my art class in 1994. They both drew boats then, too.

That's the thing I keep noticing. Nobody in Paperton asks "What do you do?" anymore.

They ask, "What are you making?"

* * *

It turns out that when the money holds still, people stop holding their breath.

Nobody's paying interest on anything. Nobody's savings shrink while they sleep. The lights cost almost nothing, because half the basements in town have one of those 1971 batteries now, built down at the old tool-and-die shop by six guys who couldn't be happier arguing about voltage. Medical school is free. Trade school is free. Starting a business means borrowing from your neighbors at zero percent, because zero is the only number allowed.

And so people did the thing they'd always been too scared to do.

They went after it. The bread. The boats. The guitar shop, the nursing degree, the farm, the band, the book they'd been meaning to write for thirty years. Not all of them made it. Some tried three things before one worked. But trying doesn't cost you your house anymore. And a town full of people doing what they love turns out to be the best place I've ever lived.

* * *

Walt was fishing off the end of the old railroad pier, the way he is every morning now. He held up a perch as I went by, very proud, and hollered, "Eighteen months clean, Harold! Doc says there's nothing left to find!"

Walt had cancer for three years. The kind with a bill every month and no end in sight. Then the vaults opened, and out of a plain gray box in Chicago came the Sollen protocol: a treatment from 1986 that teaches the body to find the cancer and finish it, in four visits. Four. Then you go home and go fishing.

The memo clipped to that file has become the most famous sentence of the century. They teach it in schools now. A cure is sold once. A treatment is sold for life.

Once people read that, they couldn't unread it. And something changed in how the whole world thinks about getting well. Labs everywhere are racing now, not to manage diseases, but to end them, one after another, and give the answers away. Every month there's news. A cure here. A breakthrough there. My neighbor Ellen, who was in a wheelchair for eleven years, walked to her mailbox last week on her own two feet, on Halverin-9, and the whole street came out and applauded, and she curtsied.

People aren't afraid of the doctor anymore. They're afraid of missing out on their lives, which is a much better thing to be afraid of.

* * *

If the vaults taught the world anything, it's this: an idea locked in a basement helps nobody. So people stopped locking them up.

It's written right into the Charter, on page nine. Anything released to the public stays free, forever. Anyone can use it, change it, improve it, and build on it, so long as they share what they build the same way. The programmers have an old word for that. They call it copyleft. Toshi explained it to me once: "Copyright says mine. Copyleft says ours, and keep it that way."

And then there are the printers.

There's a 3D printer in every library in Paperton now, and the high school, and the fire station, and the back of the repair shop on Main Street. There's even one in the corner of Room 114. You find a design someone shared, anyone, anywhere in the world, and you print it. A part for your tractor. A pump for your well. A battery casing. A brace for your bad knee. A tiny hand for a little girl who was born without one, printed in her favorite color, purple, at the library on a Tuesday afternoon, while her mother cried and the librarian pretended not to.

The cures work the same way now. A lab in Nairobi improved the Sollen protocol last fall and posted it the same day. A lab in Cleveland improved that one in the winter. A grad student in Seoul found a way to make Halverin-9 out of things you can grow. Nobody's hiding anything. Nobody's sitting on anything, waiting for the price to go up. The answers go out into the world as fast as people find them, and the next person picks them up and runs.

And here's the part I love: good ideas get rewarded.

Every shared design, every formula, every invention carries its maker's wallet address, right there at the bottom, like a signature. When something you downloaded helps you, you send a little thanks, in People's Currency, straight to the person who made it. No bank in the middle. No company taking a cut. Just one person saying thank you to another.

A sixteen-year-old in Toledo designed that little printable hand. It's been printed two million times, in a hundred and forty countries. The thank-yous paid for her college, and her mother's house, and a workshop where she's teaching other kids to design hands.

The old system paid people for owning ideas. The new one pays them for sharing.

Turns out sharing works better.

* * *

I hear from the others, now and then.

Toshi sends postcards from Columbus, no return address. The last one said: The logs are clean. Somebody found the bottle. Turns out it was fixable. He's teaching a free coding class for kids. He says half of them want to build robots and the other half want to build money, and he teaches every one of them the genesis code.

Marcy runs the town halls in four states, and laughs more than anyone I've ever met.

Dolores lends money at zero percent to young people starting businesses in Youngstown. Her pickle jar sits on her kitchen shelf, empty, next to a picture of her grandson in his graduation gown. She calls me sometimes. She doesn't know who I am. She thinks I'm just a nice old man from Paperton who once sent her a letter. That's true.

Cyrus Vail teaches a night class called Ethics. There's a waiting list.

And the robot is everywhere.

People see him at a town hall in Arizona, sitting in the back, listening. On a farm in Iowa, helping with the harvest. At a children's hospital in Detroit, reading out loud. Holding a place in line every November at polling places all over the country. There were more than twenty of him by the end, after all. I like to think all the stories are true.

* * *

Room 114 was full when I got there.

Full. Every table. Kids, mostly, with their parents dropping them off and then staying, because the parents wanted to draw too. A delivery driver who's working on a comic book. A grandmother learning watercolors. The two boat brothers, who came by to show me the drawings for their next hull. And the boy in the Cincinnati Reds T-shirt, nine years old, who draws nothing but robots.

I set an old work glove on the table in the middle of the room and told them to draw it.

The boy drew a robot hand, shiny and perfect, with lightning bolts coming out of the fingers. I sat down beside him.

"That's a great robot hand," I said. "Now look again. Draw what's actually there."

He looked at the glove for a long time. The cracked leather. The hole in the thumb. The one bent finger, like it remembered holding something.

Then he turned his paper over and started again, and what he drew was lopsided and heavy-handed and the thumb was much too big, and it was the most honest thing anyone made in that room all morning. When he held it up, the whole class clapped. He went pink right up to his ears.

Then, in the corner of the page, very small, he added a little robot. Waving.

"Is that allowed?" he asked.

"That," I said, "is the whole point."

* * *

When everyone had gone, I stayed a while. The Saturday sun was pouring in sideways through the big windows, and from down the hall, I could hear a pickup basketball game in the gym, and from outside, somebody's radio playing, and somebody laughing.

I took out a fresh sheet of paper and a pencil.

For most of my life, I drew what was in front of me: the empty storefronts, the shut-down plant, the tired faces at the bar. I drew what was actually there, because that's what you're supposed to do, and because back then, that's all there was.

But what's actually there has changed.

So I drew the bridge in the morning light. Rita with flour to her elbows. Walt holding up his perch. The boat brothers. Ellen at her mailbox. A boy in a Reds shirt, holding up a lopsided glove.

And somewhere, very soft, the way you feel a hand on your shoulder, I felt it.

We, it said.

I smiled, and I turned the page.

There's so much left to draw.