The Sun at The Top

The Sun at the Top, The Lift Below

Zuko always had a determination to find meaning. He wanted to see the meaning of dreams, or the meaning of the air that flowed from a bird’s wings, or the symbolism of a simple toy.
At the age of three, his grandmother took him to Kansas for a riot in the fireflies and an ET marathon. He could remember people he barely knew now reciting the lines of the movie as it played. If he closed his eyes he could see the plastic bag full of the crawling lightning bugs (due to the absence of a proper jar).
For years after that, Zuko remembered these events as a simple dream, something that must have fabricated itself in his subconscious and gotten caught somehow in his memories. That is, until he found his souvenir.
It had been hiding for sixteen years behind a plaque-or rather, a black plate with his birth date painted on it in gold, balancing dangerously on a tiny black stand. He had been packing to head from Colorado to Oregon, where he would be attending college come September. It was a strange thing, so simply structured but hard to describe nevertheless. Sitting on a long, thin metal pole was a tiny wooden woodpecker, suspended by a spring from a piece of pine shaped like a donut, which slid up and down easily enough by itself. But, if one were to be so obliged, one might take the second donut at the bottom to slide the woodpecker to the top, where a tiny ball prevented it from making its escape. From here, one would have to pull the woodpecker back and let it bounce on its spring, swaying back and forth until it reached the bottom again.
When Zuko found it, he recalled his grandmother handing him the toy for the first time. He was enthralled, at three years old—for getting a toy that could entertain him for so long did not come along very often. The woodpecker could slide up, and bounce down, all with a flash of its painted eye and a flicker of the red feather plume on its head.
And suddenly, his dreams became reality, and what he thought was just a part of the imaginary world was now a real part of his personal history. Zuko tried to figure out how the function of the toy could apply to his own life, when he saw that the spring connecting the woodpecker to its donut ‘branch’ was a bit awry. It made the woodpecker sit sideways, as if it wanted a peek past its metal tree and onto something more.
He tried to force it back, but it didn’t change a thing. Eventually, Zuko shrugged and packed it away in good humor, deciding that he would make more of an effort to correct it later.

Chapter 1

Zuko would not miss Colorado. He always felt awkward underneath its mountains, at such a high altitude. He had no idea why Denver was the “Mile High City”, and when he found out, the idea of being so high above sea level made him feel unsteady on his feet. Not only that, but the traffic downtown had the ability to frustrate him to no end.
After one year of college in his home state, Zuko decided that he needed to leave. His first instinct was to be closer to sea level, so he thought first of California—but, thinking of the state led his thoughts to his recent visits; walking along the Oceanside at San Diego, where homeless people were too personal and the surfers could spout out the word ‘****’ faster than most could think it. At this thought he decided that perhaps Oregon would be a better choice for someone who needed to be alone. Yet despite his decision, Zuko knew that there would be no escaping the hoboes.
University in the state of Oregon was not a static decision. His younger sister, Lisa, was living there with their aunt. Whenever Zuko and Lisa were together, the subject of conversation often wandered to memories of their nightly escapades as young children, when they would stay up late and wander around downstairs, usually finding something to eat. One particular night they were eating chips with extremely spicy salsa. Zuko had suddenly remembered that the time, 1:30 am, was around the time that their father would get up for his nightly bathroom trip. Frightened and giddy, Lisa dragged Zuko upstairs to their rooms, only to be exposed by their alarm dog, Sandy. They could hear her high pitched barking from their parents’ room, so they ran—forcing Zuko to jump into bed and feign sleep, his mouth burning from the salsa in his last waking moments.
Lisa didn’t really explain why she went to Oregon, and Zuko never asked. Lisa was sixteen when she left exactly at the time Zuko started college. Their parents, Don and Karen, didn’t seem to care much. Zuko knew that if it were another country, they might have had some objection, but a couple of states was hardly something to fuss about for them. Sometimes Zuko got the feeling that his parents were not meant to raise children.
He knew that close to their aunt Katherine’s house was the University of Oregon, and so he could go to school and be able to see Lisa as well. He didn’t really plan on making other friends—he barely had any in Colorado, as it was—so he was not at all fazed by the idea of living alone or with Katherine.
“You don’t seem to mind solitude.” Lisa had told him during one of the two visits she had made back to Colorado. “That’s good, cause I don’t either. I think that’s kind of why I left, because of all the people here.”
“What is Oregon like?” Zuko replied.
“Just as crowded. But since I don’t know anyone, it hardly matters.”
On the way to Oregon, Zuko noticed the radio’s inability to play any stations. Something in his hands started to itch, and that was when he knew he was going to have to live off of CDs and his old MP3 player.
Oregon was just trees. For as far as he could see, the state was a giant forest. He liked it, because it smelled better on the road here than it did anywhere else, especially in Arizona, which he had to drive through in his tiny 01’ Civic. Most of that was hot and unpleasant, and he supposed that he had picked the worst month, June, to go through one of the hottest states.
But Oregon was cooler. Sometimes a fine mist dissolved between the pines and cleared to darker areas. When it was nothing but cloud coverage, Zuko could hardly imagine the hot, commercial sun shining through and drying up the plump stalks of grass or burning fires onto the trunks of the dead trees. He hoped he would never have to see the sun here.
As it turned out, his Aunt had insisted that he stay with her and Lisa, for the summer if not during college. Zuko had readily agreed, smiling as he realized that he may not have to stay at the OU dorms after all. Lisa had given him a report from her new boyfriend (an OU Freshman) that the dorms “smelled like puke, looked like ass, and sounded like college kids.” This did very little to pacify Zuko in his dorm anxiety.