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FATHER – You aren’t sure you can remember, in this moment, a time when he didn’t feel so much like an ending. He has always been much more imposing than he should be for all his silence and even looks, his words clipped and carrying with them a calm air of quiet disappointment. It hides some greater upset.
EMPATHY – Such a perception – a judgment – is unfair to him. You have committed, this time, a kind of crime.
COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] – Your fragile heart beats quick, staccato, the column of your throat exposed as it swallows, unbidden. You could have run a mile instead of the few feet of stairs and hallway between here and your room. Your eyes flick between your guilt, his face, and the wall. You are running, except you are frozen here beneath his eyes.
CONCEPTUALIZATION – In the setting sun, they glint amber.
FATHER – He rubs his mouth, then his chin. His glasses frame his eyes as he looks down at the paper that he’s found, buried beneath old leftover slop and other detritus.
“Would you like to tell me what this is?”
EMPATHY – He does not understand why you’re acting like this. He’s giving you a chance to recover. He is offering you salvation.
HISTORY TEST – The paper stares up at you, stained red and brown with missed marks and old black bean sauce, dumped over the paper during its time in the trash. It cannot cover every answer you got wrong this time, nor the score at the top of the page. You can even see the erased bubbles wherever you second-guessed yourself. Most of the test, really.
21/40, or 52.5%. A failing grade.
INLAND EMPIRE – You can see in your mind’s eye ten thousand years of history, dyed and embroidered, woven like tapestry across your gray matter’s neurons. You can smell the blood and the metal of wars and the salt of sea against ships and the ozone of robotic conquest across worlds. You can recite epics engraved into temple walls – stories of kings and trials and empire.
HISTORY TEST – Except none of it is human. None of it is real.
FATHER – “Well?” His voice has no real hardness to it, except for the silicate edge you can hear because you’ve trained yourself to detect it.
LOGIC – Tell him the truth. It’ll make this less painful.
EMPATHY – He only wants the truth. In his own way, he wants to understand you.
HALF LIGHT – His shoulders square. The muscles in his face twitch. He is tense – but so are you. He can never understand the things that force your limbs to move; what makes your thoughts and breathing crawl and scrape through your sternum and throat.
FATHER – “Marcy Regina Wu, I asked you a question.”
COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] – What is this? You have no answer. Sounds and syllables, all mounting to piles of utter nothing; a million words and no conclusions. Say something. Anything!
YOU – “I don’t know.”
COMPOSURE – Wrong answer!
FATHER – He frowns.
HALF LIGHT – His jaw is working. You can see the tension in his shoulders working its way, electric, down to his fist. His fingers twitch. You can feel something cold and urgent forking down through your veins and into your hands.
FATHER – When he speaks, it’s not with any particular intonation outside of, perhaps, skepticism.
“You don’t know.”
SUGGESTION – Not a question, but a repetition. An expectation of clarity, because there’s no way he heard you correctly.
PERCEPTION – You can see his brow furrowing as he awaits your answer. You can hear the seconds ticking away though there are no analog clocks in the Wu household. It sounds like the high-pitched whine-and-click beep of a computer assessing its problems in real time.
SUGGESTION – You have dug your grave, and he’s waiting to see how you climb out of it, or how you bury yourself.
YOU – “I’ll do better next time.”
FATHER – “I’m not asking about next time,” he says, his fingers on the paper. “I’m asking about this. What is this?”
The tension in his body comes up from his mouth like vomit, so sharp and acidic you can smell it. There’s something in the way his eyes glint as the skin around them crinkles, the muscles contracting to create the visage of frustration, lack of knowing. He taps the table under the sheet, and the crackle-pound of it hurts your eardrums inside your head. You feel it right there, next to your sinuses.
“Is this acceptable to you? Do you think this can get you anywhere?”
SUGGESTION [Easy: Failure] – Have you considered saying you don’t know again?
LOGIC [Medium: Success] – Obviously, it’s not acceptable. Looking over the paper again, you actually can see all the correct answers.
EMPATHY – You just changed schools and you went through a few traumatic months. Surely he can understand that much?
RHETORIC [Easy: Failure] – But how do you even begin to explain that?
YOU – “It’s not acceptable. I’m sorry. I did my best, but I’ll work harder.”
FATHER – He’s grimacing, now. You aren’t sure if he always knows he’s doing it. His hand smooths over the table, smudging sticky sauce over his fingertips.
“Where do I even start with you?”
COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] – You flinched.
AUTHORITY – Pathetic.
FATHER – “This is your best, and you hid it?” The paper crushes in his hand. “You’re either lying to me again, or you’re stupid.”
YOU – “I was stressed and tired.”
FATHER – “That’s not an excuse.” His other hand is in his pocket, and you can see it balled inside the cloth. “Everyone gets stressed, and they don’t get these grades. You’re not working, you’re barely doing extracurriculars right now. You should be spending all your time studying, or you should have told us you needed a tutor.”
LOGIC – A tutor would require them to pay.
INLAND EMPIRE – You recall tutors, from before you learned to self study. You recall encouraging words, warm afternoons, instruments of learning, snacks you no longer eat, smiles you no longer trust. There’s a numbness, uncomfortable, icy and sharp, as you begin to recall a hand and an uncertainty, perhaps confusion; a certain sense of distant betrayal.
PAIN THRESHOLD – You are barred from recalling much more. You have not had a tutor in a long time.
ENCYCLOPEDIA – Dissociation: A concept that, while possessing a great number of definitions and implications developed over time and study of various experiences, here may describe a mild emotional detachment from the immediate surroundings as well as a more severe disconnection from physical and emotional experiences.
VOLITION – Come back. You are still in the middle of a conversation.
FATHER – “I thought you were studying. Have you been lying to us?”
He holds a hand up, silencing words that weren’t coming.
“Don’t answer. I don’t want to hear more lies from you. I know you’ve been staying up late talking to your friends. I can hear you laughing and talking, and I let it slide, but if you’re going to keep performing like this,” he picks up the paper and waves it in the air, “then I’m going to have to act.”
RHETORIC – He means to take them away from you. It’s been a long time since he’s taken your phone, but you know this is his implied “action.”
COMPOSURE [Formidable: Failure] – Not that. Anything but that. A hot flash runs up your neck, followed by a bolt of cold as it sinks and collapses straight through your chest and into your stomach. You feel tears at the back of your eyes and you hold them in, until you don’t.
YOU – Look away.
HALF-DARK WALL – There is nothing there except plaster. It’s a blank wall that your mother has not figured out a decoration for, yet.
CONCEPTUALIZATION – Cast shadows in the twilight, dancing as cars pass and refract the reflections. Orange diamonds paint themselves over the plaster, setting sun cracked by crystals hanging from a chandelier. It’s a remnant from the previous residents – a piece of them left behind. They remind you of icicle tears, as though the house mourns the loss of what it had. Of who.
HALF LIGHT – A slow, long, terrible grin begins to split its way across your face.
VOLITION [Challenging: Success] – Hide that. Now.
FATHER – He waits for you to say something, despite what he said earlier. He scrutinizes you in silence.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” He sets the paper down again. It’s not hard, but it makes that same ugly crackle. “How did this happen? Have you been playing games this whole time, too? You spend hours in your room, and for what?”
He gestures in the air, pulling his glasses off as he does. “Do you think we’re just a bank for you to take loans from? Those need to be paid back, Marcy. You’re not just some bum that can take and take from us. Do you understand how much of an investment you are?”
He doesn’t sigh at you, and that is part of what makes it so hard.
EMPATHY – He does not hate you.
FATHER – The tendons and muscles in his neck work, not quite flexing or swallowing, but moving like cord and snake tangled beneath the warm, irritated skin. His eyes are gold with blame. “Are you stupid, or are you lazy?”
AUTHORITY – Yes, sir; no, sir; I’m sorry, sir; it won’t happen again, sir; I’ll do better, sir. You’ve heard this before. He knows the answers, and this charade of pulling the test out of the trash and hunting you down, demanding these answers, are all just to shame you. And you’re just going to take it?
COMPOSURE – Yes.
SUGGESTION [Formidable: Success] – If you use just the right tone and feign just enough sincerity and calm, you can get out of this. It’s easy. Lower your voice, look him in the eye, speak evenly.
DRAMA – Master Marcy: Perform.
YOU – “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the test. I have another tomorrow, and I need to study. Can I go? I’ll show you what I get done tonight.”
FATHER – His eyes narrow, his brow furrowing in dismay.
“You’re going to give me more work? That’s your solution?”
He looks off to the side, now, before he pinches the bridge of his nose and wipes oil and sweat from his skin.
EMPATHY – He’s tired himself, after a long day at work. This is the last conversation he wanted to have today.
FATHER – “Fine. I don’t need to see your work. But you will show me your test, and you will pull your grades up on the computer and show us every week.”
YOU – Turn and walk upstairs. Measure your steps and match your breaths to their tempo. It will make you seem calmer.
SHIVERS – When you reach the top of the stairs, a breeze catches your hair, wafting in from an open window. There is a room here on the precipice of the stairs that has not been unpacked, the dust still unsettled and falling slow like spores through the air. If you look out the window, you can see Hopkinton, Massachusetts, passing the minutes by without you. The sun has already passed over this side of the house, bathing it in a blue like a bruise. Somehow, though it isn’t as bright as LA, the sky here offers you no more stars than the sky back home.
In the distance of your disquieted mind, your hand resting here on the banister, you wonder if, perhaps, you’re just too selfish or self-absorbed to see more stars. You are, perhaps, too unwilling to move on to see what this new town has to offer you. Beyond yourself, you know that there’s a Thai restaurant, and churches preaching of death and resurrection, and there are corporate headquarters manufacturing computers for empires, and there are cheerleaders in schoolyards compelling their teams to win against all odds.
But the grasp of your mind’s eye collapses as you reach these familiar-yet-alien places, because they are not your haunts. That is not your best friend’s family inside that kitchen, that is not the king that broke your heart, and there is no cheerleader there that would have torn you from the clutches of the devil himself, nor worn his mask as he danced a dangerous waltz through the years with you. They do not worship your god, with all her curls and mess and love and heavy consequence, in those pews and rows. The wine is vinegar in your psyche’s tongue, and the air from the window creates in your chest a hard iron ball that steals the breath from your lungs.
It is not yet night in Los Angeles, and yet those shadows call to you. The distance settles in the white and jagged lines of your deep-rooted scars.
You cough, wet, and you are torn from this wandering to return to your room.
DESK – In the lamplight, you can see your stacks of books and papers, notebooks and journals askew on the worn, brown surface. Your pencils and pens have rolled a bit since you were last here, lolling to the side like idle heads in sleep.
PHONE, YOUR LIFELINE – Turned off and flung into your bed sheets, there will be no distractions. It rests, nestled like a bird in branches, and waits for your return.
DESK – You pull yourself in on a somewhat uncomfortable chair, pull out your history book and flashcards, and begin.
CLOCK, EVER-TICKING – Time begins to pass, tethered to space and the way it warps and conforms to the steady march and beat of work, work, work.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
A sound that stretches and stretches, on and on, into a darkness that creeps through the world outside from the night as the sun disappears, and cars stop running, and the light outside in the hall smothers itself beneath the flick of a switch.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
TEXTBOOK, MELTING – The sound of your pencil against the desk, the graphite so dark it’s near-black on the page and grinding itself to dust as you read a sentence over and over and over and over and never comprehend a word of it. The shapes are wrong, the letters skipping and bleeding into each other. Your palms sweat against the paper and tear it when you erase something you can’t even read anymore.
YOU – Curse at it. Look at the clock.
CLOCK, EVER-TICKING – It is now 2:52 am.
ENDURANCE – You are exhausted. Your heart performs odd, off-time dances inside your rib cage, forcing your breathing into patterns of hiccups and panting. You can feel your blood ebbing and flowing inside your veins like polluted ocean water, or amniotic fluid, or something green and viscous made to keep you alive in the wake of your heart’s implosion.
CLOCK, HANDS STUCK – The numbers swim in front of your eyes and you swear they’re melting. It’s so hot in here. The breeze is hot. You swear it’s like a fire is burning through the house, but there’s no light to it.
YOU – Try to look at the work you’ve done.
SCHOOLWORK, FAILED – Everything here is incorrect or, worse, written in some language beyond comprehension. It’s not even Ancient Amphibian – it’s some off-kilter jumble of sentences started and stopped in different languages with blended-together grammatical structures.
A different page, lifted between shaking fingers, displays equations that run together as though two hands wrote them, one half for each hand.
LOGIC – That can’t be right. You remember distinctly that you knew this material, wrote it correctly, checked the answers in the back of the book.
SCHOOLWORK, BLAZING – And yet your numbers burn your finger tips, flickering when you blink. The gray could slide off the paper for all it does for you. This is the catalyst to set fire to your tinderbox soul. You’re about to go up in a blaze of stupid, lazy, wasted potential. You’re going to be crucified and cremated for your incompetence, and you didn’t even tell Anne and Sasha why you were ignoring their texts.
CEILING, BLURRING – The stucco reminds you of currents in an ocean, swimming over your head. You are so, so hot. Your head feels heavy, leaned back like this to watch the boiling water pour over you.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT [Medium: Success] – Get your ass up and drink water before you pass out and die here, idiot.
YOU – Stumble to the door.
HALLWAY – The world is empty, black, cold; and yet you are still so warm. The firelight of your lamp’s glow casts shadows along the walls that flicker in your eyes. It shouldn’t, it’s not fire – except you can’t help but think it is. The orange sends a shock and shiver down your spine that you try to shake, but cannot. A kind of dull, blazing ache, delicious in the way you deserve it, radiates from the cord outward.
Down the hall, your parents sleep, unaware of your struggle as you crawl, slow and shuddering, to the bathroom. The pads of your feet prickle with cold sweat, sticking to the floorboards through your socks as though you are some sort of skittering amphibian searching for a waterhole.
INLAND EMPIRE – Along the walls, black shadows snake their way towards you. They’re claws, you think, you feel, you know. You can hear the whir, you can smell the biomechanical electricity as its scalpel edges make their way towards you.
HALF LIGHT – You can barely move. You can only really struggle, tug yourself from one side to the other, and twitch like a cockroach in a glue trap. Your knees shake, your arms weak, your breaths hitching in your throat and getting trapped behind your tongue. Your fingers slip pathetically against a doorknob.
LOGIC [Medium: Failure] – You are in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, United States of America, Earth.
And yet, somehow, it has found you.
HALF LIGHT – It’s coming. Your head feels so heavy now, it’s so hot, you can’t hear anything except the machines, you need to get behind this door now or it’s over. Open it. OPEN IT.
DOOR, SALVATION – You trip inside and close the door, locking it behind you. You think maybe you can hear a struggle – a kind of rhythmic, demanding bang-BANG, bang-BANG.
COMPOSURE – Take a deep breath. You should be safe, here.
BATHROOM – The walls are blank, evenly tiled and smooth, surrounding you with a quiet and a cold calm that forces your smoldering, pounding head to steam. The faucet drips.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
HALF LIGHT – You have never been safe anywhere. Not alone. Not like you are now.
YOU – Turn on the light.
LOGIC [Formidable: Success] – What you perceive to be happening is not real and the rising panic is something you can very likely out-think if you review the facts at hand carefully. It's likely the bad grade, and the stress of the move, the fact your friends are three hours behind you, as well as your father's lecture, all compounding to create this situation.
YOU – Try to take that information and internalize it.
PERCEPTION – You are sitting on the bathroom floor at 3 am in Hopkins, Massachusetts. Were the walls always that close? Why does your nose smell like iron? Why does your mouth taste so salty, bitter, metallic? It's still too hot. You can hear your heart and a symphony of mosquito-high whining in your ears.
YOU – Get up and look at the reflection in the mirror.
SAVOIR FAIRE [Medium: Success] – You manage not to slip on your own half-pulled-up sock and avoid smashing your head open on the porcelain.
MIRROR – Your haggard face stares back at you, and in the blue-green light reflecting off the cold, old-wet tile, you can see the colors in your eyes flickering, black to brown to amber to orange. Your breath comes out hard enough to fog the glass, and the face reflected in the silvered surface recoils and contorts in what you assume to be agony, or perhaps disgust.
COMPOSURE – Your therapist taught you something for this. Close your eyes. Breathe. Meditate. Focus.
INLAND EMPIRE – You find yourself suspended, leaking, drowning in a marinade of your own fluids and staring through green. You realize that you've been split open, heart harvested and replaced by something foreign that squirms in your chest behind a sternum still strange from accelerated regrowth. You need to get out before you are pulled back under, into unconsciousness, but you can't move.
ENCYCLOPEDIA – You are experiencing a psychotic break. You may also call this, "losing touch with reality." Some definitions would only really describe this event in this manner if it is your first time. This is very much not the case with you, however.
INLAND EMPIRE – You recognize this feeling. You remember the hot, electric suffocation and the staring; the bright pulsing amber of the Core's violent gaze, the horror you felt not just from your shivering, rabbit heart, but also from Lady Olivia, from General Yunan, perhaps even from the Betrayer-King, Andrias Leviathan. That helmet – it's still on you, still eating you, still taking things away. Your head is too hot. You're going to be pulled in again.
YOU – I don't want to be here. I want to open my eyes.
MIRROR – There is a dark carapace over your head.
COMPOSURE [Impossible: Failure] – Oh God. Oh God. Do something. Struggle.
HALF LIGHT – CUT IT OFF CUT IT OFF CUT IT OFF CUT IT OFF
-<(–)>-
This is what you can remember when you wake, one morning, in class:
A clipper – the one your father uses when he cuts his hair.
Blood, dried, black, hidden at the bottom of your laundry.
A pile of your hair, shaggy, stuffed into the trash outside the house, wrapped in torn-up papers.
You come to yourself wearing a smile and a hat.
You have passed your test.
You remember none of the answers.
-<(o)>-
It must be very difficult for you to read this, knowing that, under ordinary circumstances, you might be able to change this outcome.
Branching dialogues, rerolls for a chance at success, reloading a saved game to retry while using an FAQ, perhaps a redistribution of stats. There could be code to hack into and modifiers to change, if nothing else. If this game were at all fair to you, you could at least scroll through options.
But this is not a game, and you are not a player. You read. You watch. All that there is, is to spectate. We must watch over them as they create this spectacle, tripping and scraping and bleeding their way across these pages and screens.
Quietly, if you listen, they ask for us to follow them. They’re asking so that they might not be alone, and we, you and me, us ghosts, we may haunt her thanklessly. Worlds apart, we are unable to intervene.
If we choose to follow them along this story, we will be unable to divert them from the path their story’s ship steers. We do not guide these currents.
You and I – we do not control this narrative.
They, too, have yet to discover that they can.