The Tower

There's something ominous about cell towers. 

They stand on hills or in clearings beyond forested acres, huge and unsettling, with their mysterious bracketing and wide panels that blot out the sun, the discs that stand in what almost seems a defiant opposition to the light of the sky. 

They hide in plain sight, disguised under cathedral belfries and standing alongside the church bells that, long before telephone came along to usurp the role of mass communication, would ring out in code when something was wrong.

The day I took the CritiCall, I sat alone in a tiny room with one small window overlooking the county jail, visible through the trees only because of how starkly contrasted its rigid cinderblock construction was against the disorder of the natural world. 

A fish tank bubbled softly from somewhere behind my chair, its sole occupant gazing at me with the indifference of a long-forgotten eldritch god. For a moment I imagined the fish had human teeth, teeth that were grinning at me, or perhaps through me, as it contemplated my inconsequence. I imagined its penetrating awareness of me filling that hour in which I took the exam, a frame of time that might have seemed as long as decades to me but was, for the fish, but a drop in an endless tank. 

The fish itself would live a short life, meaningless when stacked against the century a human may live to see pass if cared for properly. But it would be replaced by another, as this had replaced the one before, and on and on until the end of time. I would later learn that his name was Echo. Fitting, for the creature whose existence was a mere echo of whatever paradigm he exists to facsimile. How many Echos had there been, and how many were still yet to come... come... come...? 

Standing adjacent to the jail out my window was a communications tower that seemed to rise from deep within the earth, or perhaps from whatever lies beneath. The tower leaned down to where I could hear its voice, and whispered in magnificent bellows just two words: Brace yourself.

There was an echo to its endless voice, which had not the capacity for gentleness. Echo stirred in his tank, caught up in the resonance that disturbed his shallow water.

Once upon a time, the Tower was a symbol of destruction, a harbinger of change. Upright, it meant disaster, upheaval, unrest. Inversion meant delay of the inevitable, resistance to changes deemed necessary by fate. The Tower was feared not for its intrinsic danger, but of what it foretold. Destruction. Suffering.

The day I went in for my test, I had drawn from the tarot deck the Tower. Something was coming, and at the time of the omen I was not yet sure what it would be. 

But then the call, the invitation to try my hand at the career of my dreams. Maybe this was what it had promised. I was heading into a great unknown, and the reminder of the draw, one that foretold a painful transition drawing nearer on my horizon, echoed in my mind as I stood beneath that cell tower and looked up into the expanse of the future. 

Learning more of how they work, the cell phone towers dotting the expanses became less mysterious. A feat of engineering to stand almost a mile high in stature, and a medal upon the lapel of human ingenuity that they were able to broadcast the signals that keep us connected in spite of miles in between. As I came to appreciate the beauty of our condition, tied together by telephone wires even as we drift further and further apart, I began to see the Tower in a new light, too. 

In burning can be found a catharsis. In the aftermath of an upheaval, be it a political revolution of millions or the change in career of just one, change was a force neutral by default. Change is made beautiful or devastating or both all at once by the perceptions of those who stand at the tower's base, looking up, as I once did in the parking lot of my new job, at the start of something new.