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When Ned first sees him, he wishes he could compare him to something beautiful. How do you try your hand at poetry when your world is so small, constricted to a few white hallways and the ripple of sound waves on a monitor? Instead, Ned is left with the thing itself; the sight of Mr. Jopson turning back before disappearing into the foyer of the Wellness Center.
Mr. Jopson wouldn’t even have noticed Ned if Mr. Gore hadn’t caught him first.
“Edward!” Gore claps a strong arm to his shoulder, startling him. He’s smiling with all of his teeth. “Were you looking for me, perhaps?”
“Oh. I’m sorry–” Ned hasn’t even had the time to process the embarrassment of being caught wandering beyond the confines of his department before Mr. Jopson meets his eyes. This simple act opens a door inside of Ned, one he didn’t even know was there.
Mr. Jopson’s appearance should come off as too sterile, an unfinished person. A silver Erebus pin glints against his plain charcoal sweater. And yet, his eyes are bluer than anything Ned has ever seen before. Later Ned will think that this should have been enough to wake him up, but then the unthinkable happens, one of those small marvels that happens everywhere, even here. A strand of Mr. Jopson’s very dark hair falls onto his forehead, and, in a small fluid motion, Mr. Jopson pushes it back behind his ear. He smiles at Ned demurely.
It’s violent, like crashing through that door in the stairwell over and over. It’s as familiar as that, too. A reflex one develops upon expecting the impact, but he’s missing the muscle memory, the neural pathways to know how to fully break the fall. Strange.
“You found me!” Gore’s grasp on Ned’s shoulder tightens, muscles flexing beneath the white turtleneck. He chuckles. “Why don’t I take you back to Waveform Processing, now that you’ve found me?”
The door to the Wellness Center closes. Even if Ned wanted to protest, it’s too late to take action. He licks his lips nervously–that mortifying habit of his that Sophy teases him for endlessly– and tries to look agreeable. As he is shepherded back to his place, he swears he can see the phantom imprint of Mr. Jopson’s eyes on every pristine white surface.
Ned thinks that he likes the 80 hertz tone the best.
“It’s like traveling through a tunnel. No. Like seeing the color blue.” Ned has seen quite a few shades of blue in the painting that hangs by the entryway to Waveform Processing, Young Franklin Calming the Tempest. It depicts the founder in his adolescence, navigating a small schooner through a raging storm as the crew looks on in wonder. Each time Ned catches a glimpse of it he hopes dearly that his outie has no interest in recreational sailing, and hopes even more dearly that he has seen the sea, at least once.
John I. shuffles abashedly across from him. “I don’t suppose 80 hertz puts me in mind of blue. But then again, when I think about the color blue I think of the wires, and when I think of the wires I think of the quota-”
“Reminds me of looking into someone’s eyes. Not sure whose.” The words come spilling out of Ned, a rare indiscretion. He tries to shrug it off, but Billy’s snort tells him that it’s already too late.
“Maybe you’re in love with one of us. Can’t be John, though.” Billy doesn’t look up from his work station, where he’s swiftly fiddling through the signals of the day with his customary robotic precision.
“That leaves you and Tom H. Or me.” Sophy says pensively, on her way back from one of her conspiratorial voyages to the coffee maker. No one can possibly drink that much Erebus company coffee. She fixes Ned with a cool stare, perhaps as a test of some kind. He doesn’t feel anything. “Any two of us could be married out there and we would never know.”
“That makes me sad.” John’s face crumples.
“It isn’t that sad.” Sophy sips from her espresso. She’s getting better at hiding how she grimaces at the dry dirt taste of it, like she’s used to finer stuff. “Don’t you think it’d be nice to be free from that every once in a while?”
Maybe it isn’t sad. Ned can’t say he has a decisive opinion, either way. Surely one can only miss what they already know.
He attempts to drown out the chatter and the buzz of his own mind in the steady drone of the headset, but finds that he can still think of nothing but the memory of meeting Mr. Jopson’s gaze in the corridor, as clearly as if that moment were fixed in a painting. He can still see blue.
It’s a strange thing to have dreams in this place. Ned can only conceive of a life as a straight line; if this is the case, then Erebus is the terminal point at the end. As much as he loves John, they’re not alike. The Handbook is a set of rules to be followed closely, yes, but only because it’s usually sensible to do so. His outie has surely decided that whatever material benefit he gets from a career on the severance floor is worth doing this for the rest of his life.
But still, Ned dreams. Rather, he lets himself dream just enough. One morning, when John is preoccupied with coaching Sophy through a particularly finicky set of sounds, Ned turns the dial on his console down, down until he recognizes the familiar rumble of an 80 hertz tone. He imagines what it must be like to be outside. The closest he’s come is the artificial green and towering ceiling of the replica room in the Perpetuity Wing that houses Franklin’s facsimile estate, and that will not do. Instead, he grasps through his memory for that sliver of coastline visible in the painting of the schooner. He imagines awakening on yellow sand, the decadence of sleeping recreationally, and, oh! Doing so somewhere where he can feel the sun on his skin. The storm is elsewhere and the clouds have passed. The waves lap placidly at the shore, almost green in their docility. Is that how the sea works?
He allows the dream to go further, just a little. He imagines a figure in the distance that makes his careful way down the strand. He’s not wearing gray because it doesn’t suit him– but Ned is bad at this sort of thing. Red might be nice. He doesn’t get to see a lot of red. The figure has even rolled his trouser legs up just so, left his shoes somewhere down the way. It doesn’t matter where– things enter and exit in dreams without logic. Also without logic: Mr. Jopson looks up at the great open blue of the sky like he’s searching for something. When Ned props himself up on the sand to observe him, Mr Jopson looks, then waves fondly. Like they know each other well. He reaches up and pushes a strand of hair behind his ear.
He wasn’t there for whatever Sophy tried to do. He only knows what he has been told: that she has been struggling with emotional deficiencies, ones that surpass the demands of a quick trip to Wellness or an even longer one to the Break Room. He also knows that all of the wires have been proofed, so that she can’t get to them, and that their group leader has stickied inspirational Franklin quotes onto the coffee maker knowing that it’s the one place she’s guaranteed to stumble upon them. John was there to see it– to stop it from happening even– and there’s been less light in his eyes lately.
Sophy on the other hand doesn’t look emotionally deficient. She’s as triumphant as ever, like that ship in the storm. Every morning she sits down at her desk and takes her neatly plaited hair down, undoing all of her outie’s meticulous work. To expect anything less than continued defiance would be foolish.
What Ned did not expect was to see Mr. Jopson sitting at her side when he comes in to work this morning.
“Mr. Jopson.” Ned stops dead in his tracks. Mr. Jopson is wearing a deep red sweater. The same Erebus pin. Apart from that he’s completely anonymous, unadorned.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Edward L. I’m here to observe Sophy until she regains her cheer, at Ms. Griffin’s request.”
Sophy laughs joylessly, but doesn’t look up from where she’s calmly arranging her hair pins on the desk in an inscrutable shape.
“Good luck.” Ned smiles at him, really smiles, only to regret it moments later when Jopson responds with a politely confused expression. “Alright then. I’ll leave you to it.” Ned pauses before fleeing. “And the pleasure is all mine.”
Ned walks rapidly to his station in a way he hopes is authoritative and composed. He can tell instantly from Billy’s look of quiet disapproval that he has failed utterly.
To Ned’s further dismay, he can’t even get his work done. He has a clear view of where Mr. Jopson sits straight-backed and even, pausing occasionally to jot down an observation. Ned wonders what kind of horrible magnetism this is, a thing completely outside of his will. He’s never known anything like this, the state of not being able to exist in the same room as someone without making a fool of himself. Then again, he’s been in so few rooms with so few people. The hum of the headset does nothing to drown out the sound of Jopson’s low voice as he offers Sophy verbal encouragement. He does the unthinkable and switches it off altogether. There’s something he thinks he can place in the dip and catch of Mr. Jopson’s words, so unlike the aristocratic cadence he recognizes in their supervisors, in Sophy, even a little in himself. It’s like that errant curl of hair, a hint that someone lives in his body–
“Sounds from outer space.”
Ned startles at the sound of Tom H.’s voice, loud enough to cut through his daydream. He’s looking at Ned with a pleased, boyish grin.
“Sorry, Tom?”
“I’ve figured it out. They’re sounds from outer space. D’you know, I heard once that signals from outer space take ages and ages to reach Earth? I reckon whoever sent these messages has been dead for a long time. Maybe that’s why it’s a secret. People would get disappointed.”
Ned's hand reaches for the dial on the console nervously, then falls limply on to the desk. “Did you hear this from someone?”
Tom clears his throat before pitching his voice to a whisper. “No, but Sophy and I did discuss some other theories.”
Ned shoots him a look, but stops himself from saying anything. Tom gets chided enough by John when he and Sophy disappear for one of their thirty minute coffee breaks.
Ned fiddles with the dial a bit, thinking. “If whoever sent the message is dead, why the urgency? The Handbook’s clear about the importance of maintaining the workflow.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know what they had to say to us, even then?” Tom’s brow furrows like it’s obvious. “I’d take any scraps I could get.”
Ned studies him more closely. Tom’s plucky– that’s what John always calls him. He’s an excellent worker, well on his way to being processor of the quarter if Billy doesn’t beat him to it. Mr. Gore has said that he embodies the core principles of Probity and Benevolence to an exemplary degree, and he’s always quick to reward Tom with one of his colorless smiles. Ned, however, is getting better at looking. Today, like many other days, Tom’s eyes are rimmed with red. Billy noticed it first, and only told him because he’s seen Ned come into work like that, too.
“Sophy!” John I. materializes back into their work area from Franklin knows where. “I need you to accompany me to view our newly renovated conference room. It’s positively critical.”
Mr. Jopson is easily convinced to part ways with Sophy temporarily. As Ned is hurriedly shepherded out by John along with Sophy, he looks back one last time at where he remains, seated placidly where they left him like a doll. He smiles trustingly.
Ned’s next dream is a real one.
He’s been tired lately, which is natural given the abundance of frequencies he’s handled lately that he can only describe as spiteful. Today is worse than usual. It’s like his outie hardly slept at all, or downed a gallon of coffee last night in some vengeful act against himself. There’s a dull pounding at the base of his skull, only exacerbated by the screech of a tone that’s starting to exit the kilohertz range of human hearing and enter that of the average gerbil or opossum.
He drops into a blackness as if there were no boundary between sleep and waking. One minute he is staring at the synthetic blue of the carpet and the next he is traveling down a hallway, or perhaps a tunnel, far too fast. The shriek of the frequency becomes something real, metallic and crushing–
Is this a memory? Or is it something he has imagined so many times that it might as well be memory?
Cold. Asphalt. Snow. These concepts, previously formless to him, take shape before him impressionistically. He’s in the woods, and it’s nighttime. It strikes him that he’s never really been cold before.
The dream becomes warm, organic where before it was mechanical. He can’t see anything at all, the world gone purely somatic. He’s aware that he is holding on to someone, but there’s no object permanence in this place. He is pressing his face into the crook of someone’s shoulder. He is carding his fingers through soft hair. The sensation of the kiss makes him gasp, the psychic shock of it not unlike accidentally touching one’s finger to a frayed wire. He wants revel in this crash of chemicals, the collision of bodies–
Ned is finally roused by the snapping of Gore’s fingers, centimeters from his nose. Behind him, he can see the pale shock of John’s face, cycling through disapproval and concern like the peaks and troughs of a wave.
“Good to see you awake, Edward.” There’s no trace of a smile on his face. “Why don’t we take a trip to Wellness?”
Ned doesn’t like this painting. Franklin stands atop a craggy formation, overlooking a great white nothing. Ned gets the sense the painting is supposed to be inspiring; when is the road ahead clearer than in a place that’s completely empty? Instead, it just makes Ned’s teeth hurt, as if from the memory of cold. Adrenaline courses through him, the hum of the fluorescents and the vents overhead in the Wellness foyer seemingly growing louder with each passing second.
The door opens.
“Edward.”
He’s never seen this place, never even known the size of it. The therapy room looks smaller than it is somehow, the dark paneling of the walls pressing in on them at strange angles. Ned frowns at the sight of the boxes.
“Where are all of your things? You’re not moving departments, are you?” Ned tries not to feel too hopeful at the prospect of seeing Mr. Jopson around Processing, if he’s lucky.
Mr. Jopson sits stiffly on the green chair, which is ergonomic to the point of absurdity. He’s wearing deep red again. Ned hums appreciatively at the visual pleasure of the contrast.
“Erebus has been blessed with a new Wellness Director, it seems. I’ll be retiring at the end of our current session.” Mr. Jopson averts his eyes, smiles with teeth. It’s nothing like him. No, it’s just like him. Where has Ned seen this before?
Ned licks his lips. Mr. Jopson observes the gesture closely, but he doesn’t motion to write anything down
“Please tell me this doesn’t have anything to do with what happened in Waveform Processing the other day, when we left you-”
“Mr. Gore tells me you have experienced a Work Incident. He mentioned difficulties staying focused, so he decided you would benefit from a special augmented wellness session. He wants you to be mentally refreshed when you take over as supervisor after John’s departure.”
“John’s departure? You’re both leaving?” Ned feels tears prickle in his eyes to his utter dismay. “When did you find all of this out?”
“Only just now.”
They sit for a moment in what would be utter silence if it weren’t for the insistent thrum of Ned’s heart in his own ears.
“I didn’t know we’d get you fired. I would have stayed, had I known.”
It’s a weak excuse, delivered with little conviction. Mr. Jopson looks at him curiously for just a moment, before proceeding with the litany of characteristics he– or someone else– has prepared. He becomes someone else, inert and unperturbed.
“Your outie is kind,” he begins “Your outie can soothe a troubled spirit just by placing a hand on someone’s shoulder. Your outie is diligent in all things.”
“Wait.” Ned blurts. “Wait. Even if John is leaving, I can tell Mr. Gore that it was my fault. I should have heeded the rules instead of following the others.”
Mr. Jopson lowers the pad.
“I liked being in the office with you all day. It made me happy.” He shakes his head sheepishly. “I’m sorry I vexed you. I know I’m strange-”
Ned wants to reach out and grab him by the shoulders, but that feels like an unpardonable act, the spoiling of something untarnished. “No. Not strange. You’re remarkable, you must know.”
Mr. Jopson pauses. “Do you know what a part-time innie is?”
“I– no. I’ve never heard–”
“What I mean to say is that my life has been 174 hours long. Those hours have mostly been divided into half hour sessions, here in this room. I got to be awake for 8 hours in Waveform Processing, on the day I watched Sophy.” The horrible smile is back. “Do you know that’s the longest I’ve ever been awake?”
“They must let you stay. There must be something I can tell them if I’m taking over as supervisor. We needn’t even work together, it’d just make me happy to see you every once in a while, to know that you’re awake somewhere else.” He’s babbling, and his eyes have begun to sting. He knows he’s been awake far longer than 174 hours, but he feels unmoored in an ocean of new emotions like a child, unable to temper himself.
“Maybe I will be awake somewhere else. I’m not sure.” Mr. Jopson is terribly calm, a glassy sea where Ned is all turbulence. “No. I don’t think so.”
Ned looks down. He can’t bear to meet his eyes. Mr. Jopson returns to his practiced tone.
“Your outie is honest even in the face of personal gain. Your outie enjoys the sensation of looking into the eyes of a horse. Your outie loves the color blue, most of all.”
“Is my outie happy up there?” Ned almost doesn’t dare ask.
Mr. Jopson sighs deeply. Something is either unspooling between them or being stitched together. “I’m sorry Edward. I can’t answer that with certainty. But I can tell you that I, too, have wondered the same thing about myself.”
Ned looks up to meet Mr. Jopson’s eyes then, and smiles. “Maybe we know each other. Maybe we are friends”
“I think that would be nice.” At last, Ned can detect some truth behind Jopson’s serenity. When their eyes meet, the room becomes the whole world. It couldn’t be too dreadful to wake only here if they had each other’s company, could it? That could be a way to live.
They’re both startled by the sound of Mr. Gore’s knuckles rapping against the door in three polite knocks. “I bet you two are doing some great work in there! But I’m going to need Edward L. back. Was I clear enough about the designated length of the session?”
They both leap up like children caught in mischief, almost crashing into each other. Inches away from Jopson, Ned leans instinctively to press a quick kiss to his mouth, something restrained and unaffected. It’s the type of kiss exchanged between people who have known each other for a long time. He stops himself just before it happens, inhaling sharply at the realization that Jopson has also responded as if it were the most ordinary thing, tilting his face down to his. They freeze like this, noses touching for a brief agonizing eternity before Ned pretreats skittishly. The denial of the act turns it from the most ordinary little gesture into something volatile, as necessary as food or drink. Mr. Jopson gasps so loudly that Ned fears that Mr. Gore will hear.
“You should have completed what you attempted.” Mr. Jopson’s voice shakes.
Mr Gore knocks again, louder this time.
“Do you ever feel like you’re remembering something?” Ned laughs, delirious at the realization.
Mr. Jopson pulls him in this time, grabbing him by the collar with strong, workmanlike hands.
The door opens, and the world they have made together comes closing in.
When he wakes on the outside, it is to a dark house. Knowing that his time is limited, Ned throws himself out of bed, stumbling as his bare feet meet the cold wooden floor in the sensory aftermath of leaving a body coddled and cosseted by the comforts of an office. But his legs are weak, no doubt still stiff after hours spent in the Break Room, atoning for the error of fraternizing across departments. He wonders what his outie thinks he does all day when he comes back like this.
Ned will have a few minutes to find out who he is, and where Mr. Jopson is. The two goals seem to be of equal importance in his mind, as if they were answers to the same question.
He fumbles with the light switch, finding a bedroom that is ordinary in almost all ways, except for one; it seems to be meant for two people, a prospect that is foreign to Ned. His face drops when he sees the state of the two matching nightstands on either side of the queen bed, one completely empty and the other occupied by a few empty bottles of liquor. He supposed that explains the headaches, the acrid taste in his mouth some mornings that he can’t explain. Ned rushes over, pulling the drawer open on his nightstand only to discover something even worse within.
It’s a picture frame occupied by a photograph of a yellow beach, simple and inchoate, like the kind one might dream of without having ever seen one. Blue waves meet the shore on a sunny day. On the sand are two figures, one kneeling and laughing. He recognizes that one as himself, although he can’t imagine ever looking the way he does here, purely elated. Behind him is a man, tall and slender, half crouching to wrap his arms around Ned’s shoulders. He’s wearing a red sweater, and his trousers are rolled up to avoid any mess. He’s pressing a kiss to Ned’s cheek.
Ned almost tumbles down the stairs.
“Jopson? Mr. Jopson?” He calls, desperately, hopefully. He realizes he doesn’t even know his first name.
No one responds.
The urgency leaves him the longer he wanders through the corridors of the house, faced with mounting evidence of a more permanent absence. He can tell himself that Jopson is away, working late or called on some errand. But he’s faced with the lonely bowl on the kitchen table, the undiscarded bottles he keeps finding, the general state of despondent disarray he cannot imagine finding in a house where Mr. Jopson lives.
In the downstairs closet, he finds the red sweater at the very back. It smells of disuse.
Ned holds the sweater in his hands and sits down on the cool floor. At first, he thinks he’s sitting in perfect silence. When his ears grow accustomed to the stillness, however, he realizes he can hear the sound of waves crashing against the shore.