Chapter 3: Gladys

The philosopher's impulse and the distant cause of Gratian's bad day.

We cannot progress without repair. We cannot repair without progress.

—Gladys Pitzia, The Art of Science

Decades before Gratian lost some keys and fell down, Gladys Pitzia lost apathy and gained a dumb idea. The picture of her grandmother was what did it. She had felt off-kilter and out of place for some time. She had sensed something strange in her life for years, and it was unwelcome. It was less a presence than an absence, a uselessness, a sad, whimpering need to know where she was. It wasn’t something she could see or speak to, at least for a long time. At least until she noticed the eyewear on Grandma’s picture.

And she did speak to that photograph. From childhood to her 30s, Gladys spoke to the picture, asking it questions about her family, her people, and her life. Her grandmother, standing behind her grandfather who was sitting on a stool, a hand tentatively perched on his right shoulder, wore a pair of eyeglasses Gladys had just seen on a young woman earlier on that particular day.

Thin and fragile, the frames were octagonal and cute and spare. Gladys liked them and took notice as the young woman walked past her on the sidewalk in downtown Casul. They were so similar to her grandmother’s glasses in the old picture hanging in the hallway, the picture that had been there since Gladys was a child. Why was her long dead grandmother wearing apparently trendy glasses in a photo taken before Gladys was born, but which had become so much a fixture that child-Gladys had thought it was built into the wall?

Her observation of the similarities between her grandmother’s glasses and those of the young woman was stylistic, cultural, a matter of youth culture. But as a 30-something anthropologist living in her parents’ home, Gladys had to read into it. She read a lot into it.

She read so much into it, in fact, that those glasses would eventually become a political rallying symbol and stand-in for a whole worldview and its voracious adherents. The intellectuals and politicians would refer to it as reparative integration, but even if they hadn’t read the dozens of books Gladys Pitzia wrote in the subsequent years, most people knew the octagonal glasses meant something important, change, conflict.

Gladys knew her thought process was illogical. At least initially. But she couldn’t stop looking at the glasses once she noticed. This was obviously a coincidence and utterly superficial. Yet, it compelled her to reconsider the stories her mother had told her.

Decades before Gratian lost his keys and fell down, Gladys Pitzia pulled her eyes away from the picture and the glasses and wrote. A lot.

And, slowly, people read.

They read that history is in the cracks, not the buildings surrounding the cracks. Cultures emerge through collective and long-term choices, generally unintentional and unwitting, but choices. Cultures, like people, choose to do certain things, but choosing not to do things is equally important.

Pitzia would become almost obsessive about forcing historical cohesion, not representation, into her followers’ communal consciousness.

She didn’t know how seriously they would take it, codify it, and build institutions around it.

Gratian was part of that, but Gladys wouldn’t know that.

Gratian knew Gladys only through brochures and government training sessions.

What he knew was as follows: The mission of the Hadler Archeological Directorate was to further knowledge of the ancient Hadler people by supporting, approving, and funding research that adhered to the fundamental principle of reparative integration.

Gladys knew Grandma’s eyes, watching her, through 2-dimensional octagons.