The video game Pathologic contains a tower built out of its own blueprints. I think it’s a beautiful concept, maybe not because it's so unique, but because it literalises the lens through which I try to see all art. One of my favorite personal (probably somewhat warped) takeaways from Freud and Lacan's theories is that every work contains the story of its own creation. I would like to believe it launches vectors for analysis that are not so commonly explored these days.

In writing, there's this idea of just letting words flow, almost by means of free association, the stories somehow weaving themselves through you. Some people try to make a distinction between improvisation and planning things out in advance, but I believe in the moment itself there is just the former, as in, you can never know the exact shape of your work until you put it on paper. Unless…

(…) the further I get into this wretched profession the clearer it is I am doing very little consciously beyond some clerk routine – assembling, expediting – and that either (a) there is an Extrapersonal Source, or (b) readers are the ones who do most of the work, or all of the above. Which is not a bringdown to realize.1

This July I read Gravity’s Rainbow and enjoyed it a lot. Minor spoilers ahead.

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Before I progress, it's important to note I do not consider there to be any sense in trying to dig into some actual “hidden” meaning of anything. I believe the act of interpretation is always productive in itself, suggesting a certain reading that others can accept or disagree with, always pushing things forward in one way or another, sometimes even by sheer negation. There's never any actual permanent disentanglement of symbols, just the opposite. But, uh, feel free to let the authoritative tone fool you.

There are certain works that skirt the edge of the symbolic, making for good entry points for the aforementioned kind of analysis. Jameson suggests Beckett as one such figure, highlighting his use of the term “pseudo-couple” to refer to a pair of characters who require one another to form some kind of a complete ego2. It’s a great example, seeing as his creations often lack the energy to pretend they function as singular persons, their very interdependence made into a source of gallows humor.

The characters of Gravity’s Rainbow work in a similar manner, although their aims and methods are different. Many of them are scientists trying to work out the rules of their world, bound to forever remain at some incomplete image of it because of this very division. The relation between duos such as Mexico-Pointsman or Tantivy-Slothrop gives us an insight into Pynchon’s inner conflicts, internal splits along the lines of spiritualism, science, duty, desire.

They work for shadowy organizations, trying to predict the future trajectories of rockets, among a variety of other things, trying to find correlations in a world that, tragically, seems to actually have them. It can’t not have them. You can’t say anything without it also saying something about you. It’s not as simple as a character realizing they’re a part of a fictional story, because, okay, once you get to that point, and the character is just some aspect of your ego, what is it that moves them? Can you really answer that question any better than all of these goofballs put together?

Their names don't matter in themselves. It's the act of naming that matters, we are told. How does it work? Why those and not others? What could possess Thomas Pynchon to write character names such as Maas, Pointsman? Throsp, Enzian? Tchitcherine? Myron Grunton in London, Mason & Dixon, Byron, on and on and on?

The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes.3

What I'm suggesting here is that the shape of the names conveys a certain relation of given characters to its creator. Each of them represents some aspect of his mind. The narrator is always outside in some manner, because the act of naming creates distance. The voice screams across the sky. His mind is the grid. The city. The vague 'They' that works in mysterious ways, guiding each character into unexpected destinations.

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there…4

The Evacuation is the putting together of something. Someone. An attempt to organize and classify the part-ego splits of his mind, one name after another. It’s a controlled sacrifice. Pynchon goes a step further and suggests that the actual point of consciousness is located not within the mind-grid itself but the movement between its points. His argument is that “we” (the elusive subject) only exist when we run between the points, that is, think, and that we are the thought. Yippi!

Bleeding Edge, aside from some nice autobiographical aspects and being the only novel I know that lies at the intersection of milf footjobs and 9/11, seems like a supplementary piece to Gravity's Rainbow. It describes a piece of underground experimental software named DeepArcher, cooked up by another mysterious pseudocouple, created for… safety? Community? Death-transcending safekeeping of knowledge? There's even some hints of its inner workings, way below the surface, concepts that confuse things further… hidden keywords... 1x1 links… How paranoid do you want to get?5

A rainbow is the splitting of light into a bundle of separate frequencies. When you throw a ball into the air, the shape mass makes through space is an arc. Its exact curve is based on the principle of least action - it is the optimal path that uses the least amount of energy to arrive at its destination. Let’s zoom back into familiar territory. When you’re writing a book, do you know its final shape? Can you ever know what lies beyond the caret? The space to its right is always blank. How do you pick each new word? If language is a space, certain combinations of words are more commonly found together. Less energy is needed to jump between them. And so each novel charts its own path through our own universe of words, concepts and symbols. How can one know the final shape before it’s traced? ‘Free’ association? Come on, now.

As an aside, when tech guys try to Optimize Time and ask AI to sum up Dostoyevsky in a single sentence or whatever, what do they really think is happening? Do they really believe such compression of meaning is lossless? The point is not to reach the end of a stream of thought, the point is to get lost in it. The form matters more than any of them would ever know, because they (and the system they uphold) don’t care about processes. All art contains some element of roundabout communication. Information systems accessed through peepholes (who made them and where?). Trying to read three books at once while a grinning man shuffles them about (randomly?). You just learn to see the beauty in the arcs themselves, whether manufactured or grown.

This shit is bananas
B-A-N-A-N-A-S!6

Once there are axes of death, desire, knowledge, passion and trauma, there are also extremes. Freshly developed gradients can swiftly take you from one to the other. It only takes a moment to go from 0 to 1. Recently one of my city's universities organised a tech showcase of various types of robots and rovers. It was an all-family event, wide-eyed kids staring at dancing bots, undergrads with lanyards hastily recoding some iffy drone subroutines among booths plastered with logos of Pratt & Whitney (“Our engines help connect people, grow economies and defend freedom”) and other contractors. It's like a globe-wide taunt. Develop any passion for the inner workings of our world and we'll fuel it into our own chosen directions. “That's where the money is…” No, that’s where we are. The fluctuating whims of capital are a good way to dissolve the blame, but there are a few constants embedded somewhere within. And now back to 0.

Many of the reviews and writeups on Pynchon praise his broad range of knowledge, the sheer amount of references to other works, which I’m sure I can never fully appreciate. It’s as if he was reaching out with his arms, encompassing all of the Western postwar world. It’s beautiful. Of course. All I want to suggest is that this parabola eventually becomes a closed circle of his own mind and that through talking about a variety of topics he attempts, consciously or not, to build some kind of long-lasting image of himself. People talk about him as a mysterious (or just not fond of Western Nazi-collaborator media systems) individual, but read this book and you’ll see him as a person with sincere quirks, flaws, fears about the future, love for his friends and a seemingly unstoppable passion for every aspect of our world. It’s not my only takeaway from the novel, but it is one of the big ones and I’m really happy with it.

Surface = scratched. I wish to do another writeup sooner or later. Pynchon Summer had a nice ring to it, but Pynchon Fall seems much more appropriate. So keep your head up and—ouch!—we’ll meet again.

I feel a pang of embarrassment almost every time I see some work of art described as a masterpiece, usually done in a protest-too-much manner that lets people exalt their own taste by attaching themselves to something seemingly bigger than life itself, an act of autofellatio to rival Kekule’s dreamsnake. It’s the exact point at which any potential discourse begins to wither away. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, knowing that the project has now been completed, properly understood, enjoyed and filed away to gather dust somewhere.

Recently I saw a post that attempted to provide short reviews of each of Cormac McCarthy's works. It went something like this:

No Country For Old Men: Didn't like it that much.

Blood Meridian: A masterpiece of modern fiction.

The Road: Bleak but good.

[...]

Well, that's it guys, thank you for reading my post.

What’s really going on here? Once they find a way to label you with a single word, good or bad, it signifies a certain kind of creative death. It's why the long negative review can be so kind. The amount of labor devoted to a given work says something about your relation to it, regardless of anything else, numerical scores or whatever. A long piece of text communicates that there is something within the discipline that you’re passionate about, regardless if you were able to find it in this particular work. Your personal taste, style, the values you despise or worship become vectors for discussion. It’s lovely.

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I don’t wish to blame any particular person for adopting this in-group-signifier shortcut approach. Every day on the Internet some amount of human labor is devoted to creating and sustaining these artful points of interest, holding up identities and communities, senses of self and senses of belonging. I believe the pace of today’s life and the increasing, sometimes-invisible violence of our system makes it harder and harder for people to genuinely find time for things such as literary analysis. In a world where every decision is an investment, each book needs to hold the promise of a productive experience, in itself and regardless of its reader, in a sad manner so well embodied by the self-help genre.

Keep in mind the actual quality of any book is not being debated here. I’ve enjoyed most of McCarthy’s writing. His style will continue to haunt us in ways more and less subtle (I’m down to discuss The Passenger and Stella Maris as a meeting point between two core aspects of his being, the curt man of action and the incomplete theoretician), but I fear his death made it all too easy to further dehumanize him.

Looking at these giant Masterpieces looming over our heads I can't stop imagining a network of humans (made just a bit more literal by the Internet) existing solely as a derivative to these great islands of Art, our bodies their transport mechanism, most visitors just passively admiring the ruins, rarely any additional excavation being done for fear of toppling the structure. It's not a system of books, films, music passing from person to person, but the other way around. We continue to make ourselves smaller while looking up at them.

The illusion is that these works exist independently of our perception as separate cultural objects that one can “get” or not. The humble reader approaches the great text already feeling insignificant, barely able to pierce its surface. Another one stands nearby, all in somber reflection, going, Alas, I understand only some of it… But maybe someone someday… etc. The ultimate content awaiting its ultimate consumer.

I don't wish to pretend I'm somehow outside of this system (most of the writers I wish to dig into are either pigs or just plain bananas…), but at the very least I would like to leave the objects of my passion open to good-faith criticism. I want to question the authors I love more than the ones I despise. We’re doing them a disservice by holding them up like fragile pieces of porcelain. If the works we worship are sturdy enough, they won’t mind some roughhousing, and if it turns out they are easily broken, all the better. Use them to make something new. So let’s do a Strangers on a Train act and kill each other’s darlings.

We have reached the part of this text where you look at the state of culture, movies, literature, everything, and proceed to despair, the feeling at this point a generational hand-me-down. In the unending war between the past and the future we remain, as always, sore losers, lowlifes having to resort to dirty traps of all kinds. So be it. Either way, let’s make an attempt to release ourselves from the gravitational pull of big-A Art. Even if it’s bound to fail, it will throw us onto new, unexpected trajectories, hopefully equipped with enough reference points not to just continue writing in spite of singular people, but instead moving against entire market-approved trends, currents and information systems.

Am I addressing readers or writers? To be truthful, I don’t think there is much of a difference. With more and more people trying to find ways not to read “performatively,” it’s important to remember that (to wrap it up in a quaint academic metaphor) it's all group masturbation, and everyone does it. Some are just too shy to look the rest of us in the eyes. Well hold your head up for just a second pardner. Look up from your bent worm and look at me. Why Ive been smiling this entire goddam time.

Let's cut to the chase. Why does our world continue like this? So much suffering recorded and shared everyday, and so what? It goes on. Everyone goes on until they too are picked as a target for violence.

People don't go to Dubai despite the conditions of workers there, in fact, it's this exact fact that "certifies" the other side of the coin, the luxury provided to all tourists. It's one of the places where extreme wealth meets extreme suffering. Not everyone can stomach being this close, of course, well, not yet. Hotels in Gaza are an extension of the same idea. As capital tries to rebalance itself, why not have more places around the world razed to the ground in order to increase potential tourist value?

It seems so naive these days to believe that "exposing" misdeeds, lies and hurt has any effect in the current system. I wish it weren't so. But some kind of screen is always present, and it provides safety through separation. I watched a documentary on a warzone photographer recently and he described, well, having good intentions, winning awards, having his work displayed on buildings in Manhattan and such. A giant screen with the photo of a poor third-world child on it. Some informational text, maybe. What awareness is it really raising? How is it materially different from a conqueror nation hanging the skins of slain enemies from the castle walls?

Point being, seeing documented atrocities is not likely to suddenly change the trajectory of your life. The only thing it can make you do is feel assured that labor is being put in to enact violence in order to manufacture a sense of safety. Everything behind the screen is not you, and if you're watching it, it means you're not there, which is why I keep checking the news, perhaps. If you can hear the sound of the bullet, it wasn't meant for you, so why not learn to enjoy that sound? Seeing a dead body means you're alive. You're on the good side for now. Too strong? Maybe just homeless, then. Hate seeing them? It's enough just to be aware of their existence.

Each of these vectors that still has to be somewhat modulated and weakened through media seems to be intensifying over time. As the world speeds up, there's only so much morality that this international system of countries can feign. Sooner or later it's bound to give in to capital. It's already profitable to stream yourself harassing women or mistreating the homeless or starving someone. As the world gets more unstable and chaotic, why would any of it stop? Why would it not ramp up? We'll get used to live death. In time it too will seem mundane. Give the Omelas kid a webcam and watch tourism boom. Create more of them. Gradually eliminate the concepts of guilt and responsibility so that everyone can just enjoy the feeling of safety and face the shouts and cries with a wide, peaceful smile.

As years pass and water levels increase, more workers are imported West with less and less of a pretense. They are stripped of rights and national languages to placate the nazis and desperately maintain the luxury/suffering division. It's still the driving force of capital, now dangerously close, kept in place by bigger and bigger paramilitary units. Every simple boy blessed with a rifle is ready to fight tooth and nail to remain on its good side as he rapes his way through illiterate laborcamps before getting spit out by the system and embarking on his own quest for pity, ended prematurely (or completed?) with a single gunshot over some discount dinner, mark of leftover guilt to be wiped out in a gen or two, surely.

It's the camera, and it's the screen, and the gun, and the book, the sword, the rock, the two-way plane ticket, the wallet, even just the sheer pair of eyes, all devices of Othering, maintaining the split, all for safety, pure self-preservation, praying that we're not next, but never knowing for sure. Always more and more walls to raise.

I'm here, too, doing the exact same thing, trying not to lie to myself about why I keep thinking about suffering, in a state of half-fear, half-something, maybe still pretending to have an academic interest or being capable of doing any good while having written 737 words just to separate myself further. Maybe if I can intellectualize my own pain and distance myself from it, I'm already as safe as one can be, and going deeper is a pipe dream we'll keep striving towards through sheer violence, well, at first coyly, indirectly, through wholesome fictions, worlds to imagine escaping to, then more desperately, reality shows with their implications of poverty, the news, live footage, blurry at first, leaked by cutoff limbs of the system, then more sharp, from up close, official government media, the culture not so foreign anymore, language half-recognizable, oh, come on, we all know where this is going, don't we? Step on the fucking gas. You need more proofs of suffering, live, an uninterrupted stream. It's just you and your brother now, so you lock him up and put him just on the verge of passing out for as long as possible, and you become his keeper.

Even now I can’t stop editing this into what I think is a more appealing shape. Take this, and get mad at me, and I’ll pretend not to know why. It’ll stay between you and me. Not much does.

931 now.

Me? He mouthed the word and pointed at himself to check if the barista was in fact referring to his order. He got up and picked up their coffee and returned to the table. It was a relatively cozy diner on the sunny side of the city. She sat opposite, having tried to make the date a two-sided conversation, now capitulating slowly. He took a big gulp and leaned forward, raising his hand to an explanatory kind of angle.

"Like I was saying," he said. "I used to think the process works on a molecular level. You know the basic idea. Every cell in your body ages and is eventually replaced by a new one. It used to scare me, but after some time I just accepted it. Not much else you can do."

"Okay."

"That's when I met that man. The new me."

"Right," she said, resigned at this point, back to her hopeless humor-a-man mode. "How did that happen again?"

"Were you not listening? It was at a house party. Nothing crazy, just good food, good music, people just hanging out like before smartphones and everything. I knew the host, Gabbie, from college. We hadn't seen each other in a while. Her husband invited a few people and at one point I found myself face to face with that person."

"Okay. And you say it was you."

"Not physically, I mean. It wasn't a clone of me. It was just a new version of me that was meant to replace me."

"Well. You have to admit it sounds pretty wild."

"Trust me, I know what I felt. It's been haunting me for what, two years now? And no one wants to listen to this. I mean, I deserve to tell my story."

"So physically, he just looked like a regular man."

"Yeah. Not many distinguishing qualities, I mean, not more than everyone does. His ears were a bit small, maybe. His eyes seemed kind, like he was smiling the whole time."

"Was he?"

"He was just being polite."

"Did he... tell you he was the new you?"

"Well, not directly. I don't think they ever do that."

"So what made him not just another person?" She registered that it's a whole group now.

"I can't explain it well," he said. He leaned forward again, the conspiratorial manner now almost fully worn out. "I just... I hope you never have to experience that. It was a shiver. Something under my skin. A voice in my head, a new one. Never there before. A sudden feeling that something in the external world is not of it. It's not," he made air quotes, "other than you."

She just nodded along, smiling, already picturing the dating app's uninstall button.

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"Look," he said. He pressed his palm against the table a couple of times. "This is how you know something is other. There is a point of contact. Something that tells you it's the limit of your body. I can tell where I end and this table begins. All I'm saying is..."

"Did you touch him?"

"We shook hands and I just didn't feel him. At all. Like my hand didn't end where it was supposed to. When he scratched his nose, I felt it. Just some of it. The process was not yet finished, or, perhaps, fleshed out. Get it?" He winced. "Either way, I just knew. I fuckin' knew. I looked into this man's eyes and saw why he was really there. I knew that sooner or later he would replace me. It just took him some time to learn my environment. He would take my place and blend in nicely and make my friends laugh. Better than me. A new version." He looked on the verge of something painful.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That's an awful thing to feel, regardless of everything else."

"Thanks. I realize I'm not the best at describing it. I just know what I felt."

"So you moved here."

"I did. Shortly after that night. There wasn't that much there anyway."

"Your friends?"

"We weren't that close. It's okay."

"In your mind is it, like, a pending process? Like you think he's going to find you one day and do what exactly?"

"I don't know. I moved here to avoid him. I hoped that I can just leave that city behind and have a safe life here, maybe. And maybe he would be comfortable there. The new me. And those would be our boundaries."

He looked her in the eyes. He wanted to grab her hand, but he was afraid that she wouldn't want that. She did it herself a moment later, a gentle touch, allowing him to feel that comfortable difference of bodies once again. He ended there, and there she began, and it was all separate, the way it should be, he thought. How would the world work otherwise? These are my borders and those are yours, and never shall the two meet, entangle, weave into each other. His shoulders were still tense, raised, guarding his body like the towers of a dilapidated castle. You need to know where you stand. You can't suddenly just blend with the other. It can't happen. Not to me. My body! Mine! Over my dead body, he thought, half-smiling, satisfied with another pun. You could say it out loud, buddy. Maybe she would like that one. Hard to tell.

He closed his eyes and imagined a line and a singular point lying somewhere on it, not the middle, closer to one side, infinitely thin, yet changing the entire object with its sheer presence, creating a difference, splitting the whole. He thought of a single section of the line. Whatever it was, there was now a way to perceive it as less than full and this would continue forever. He thought this point of difference ran along the edges of his body, carving his meat into shape.

He blinked. Some time must have passed.

"I think I would like to go outside," she said. "Could you grab me some napkins?"

"Oh. Of course," he said. He got up and approached the counter.

"Could I get some napkins?" he asked.

"Of course," the barista replied, grabbing some and offering them to him. Their hands touched for a moment. He looked up a bit confused and his face slowly began to morph into an expression of shock.

"Are you me?" he asked curtly.

"I'm sorry?" The barista leaned closer, thinking he had misheard.

"Are you me?"

No reply. He looked around frantically, some people around now aware of the situation, her frowning, all embarrassed, of course, why wouldn't she be? He turned around and brushed against another customer, again feeling no point of difference, now going around the diner, walking up to people, grabbing them by the shoulders, everyone looking around nervously, unsure how to react, a wild spark in his eyes, asking them the question, "Are you me? Are you, me? Are you?"

At some point I had become obsessed with autonomous machines. What interested me specifically were structures which, once created, were capable of tending to their own needs, fixing any defects and prolonging their existence. Due to my lack of technical skill, I was unable to further this passion in any tangible way, leaving me with nothing but writing, per usual.

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If these machines were powered by chips, and the chips contained software which in practice was nothing but a system of information, I saw no reason why one should not be able to recreate this effect in a piece of writing. I set out to create a closed system of prose, one capable of sustaining itself, tending to its own needs, so to speak, answering all of its own questions. When I closed my eyes, I imagined the blank piece of paper as a neat spreadsheet, a collection of rows and columns, a sensible, organised place in which to define a system. I promised myself to start with something extremely simple, to test the possibilities. I sat down and wrote:

1. A dog had lost its toy.

Already, after just one coherent sentence, many questions seemed to appear. If a word without any context offered near-infinite interpretations, bordering on nonsense, then a sentence was somewhat limited, in a comforting way. There was some kind of universe being imagined here, with at least two objects of significance. One could safely assume the story took place in a world similar to ours, otherwise the fact would have been mentioned beforehand, with a sentence such as "In this world, dogs could talk." Therefore, the reader would be able to assume that they didn't.

The initial relation of the objects was already implied within this one sentence. Now, one could point out the vagueness of both nouns here. What I imagined was a typical brown mutt, a street dog, perhaps, the word 'dog' being general enough as to invite readers to form their own interpretation based on personal preference, so that the owner of a Golden Retriever could easily insert their own pupil into the narrative in order to increase emotional impact. Cat owners would be forced to make a slightly larger mental leap, which I was entirely fine with.

Compared to the sly vagueness of the 'dog' noun, the 'toy' noun presented a bit more of a problem. My first thought was a squeaky rubber bone, but I admit this assumption might have been entirely personal, with various readers possibly imagining a chaotic range of items. Luckily, I had just received a letter from the Hasbro corporation, which had expressed interest in my writing, offering a sort of creative partnership in which I would subtly include the names of their products in my work. I admit the idea seemed somewhat tricky considering the length of the story. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a shot, seeing as I was currently in need of funding. I scratched out the word 'toy' and wrote down 'Hasbro toy.' I couldn't think of any specific ones.

The sentence hung on the page, taunting me to write more. For the time being, I decided to go out for lunch. Being away from my study always seemed to offer some kind of freshness and I soon found myself thinking about work at a nearby restaurant. My mission statement kept looming somewhere above. A story that serves itself. Repairs itself. A self-contained piece of writing.

The problem, as I imagined it, was that I never seemed able to have such a clarity of vision. The longer the piece, the more it seemed to veer in my personal direction, fueled by my own life, no longer standing on its own. What I wanted was a singular shout, but in practice I always ended up with a short excerpt of the permanent shout of my life. Just this once though, I promised myself that things would be different. The brevity of the story was certainly encouraging. I imagined myself submitting it to a variety of flash fiction contests.

I tried to picture the dog in search of its Hasbro toy, walking around the city. I supposed it could live in the city. Did it have a collar? It was unclear. A stray would invite a different set of expectations and emotions. A collared dog out in the city streets was just on a momentary adventure, soon to return to the comfort of a moderately affluent household. Vastly different registers. I did not have a Lady and the Tramp kind of class analysis in mind, at least not at the time.

Before my meal even arrived, I found myself getting deeper into this minute detail, thinking, does Snoopy have a collar? I tried to remember. Scooby Doo certainly has one. Does it not feel humiliating to him considering he can talk? It's not like he needs to have Shaggy's number written on there in order to get home. So the collar just means he's owned by a person?

The Hasbro thing began to weigh on me a bit. I was well into the middle of a burrito at that point. I thought to myself, it's certainly not an optimal situation, but it's also something that most artists are familiar with, so I can trust them to just gloss over that part, not even registering it, just thinking to themselves, oh, of course, she had to do that in order to make some money, to keep going, while the ordinary reader might have the opposite reaction, maybe even focus on that particular brand mention and become influenced by it. The idea of a dog owner reading my story, getting up from the computer and saying to their pet, ‘Hey buddy, let's get you a new toy’ was darkly funny to me, but I doubted anyone out there actually did things of that nature. In the end, I decided I would mail a reply back to the corporation, agreeing to promote its products.

No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn't get myself to imagine more, not a matter of block, but rather, too much pouring out, hardly any of it relevant. I decided to stick to the basics, which were just, you know, conflict. Story was conflict, so here, the conflict was that the toy was missing. I looked up a handy guide online to understand the process a bit better. It seemed the first sentence opened the story in medias res, which was good, because it saved time. It was economical storytelling. I did not need to do much worldbuilding for this one.

Okay, so the lost toy was a call to adventure. The dog would embark on a journey to find it and then emerge at the end, changed in some way by the quest. Maybe it would learn not to throw stuff off the balcony. Although that seemed hardly plausible.

I struggled with the conflict, because I thought to myself, there's no implication that the dog will as much as try to recover the toy. Maybe it hadn’t been very fun to begin with? This version of the story seemed to offer some kind of inner peace, a meditation on loss, but then I remembered it was a Hasbro toy, so I did not want to suggest that it was okay to lose it. This lost object suddenly started to matter more and more in the dog's mind as well as my own. I was worried I might not get the check if I don't sufficiently praise the product. I started wondering if the dog could go on a longer odyssey to recover multiple products, increasing the potential marketing value of my work. Meanwhile, a part of me was already looking for ways in which this would be a story only I could tell, making it more impactful. My parents used to have a Golden Retriever, but she was far too peaceful to ever actually go out in search of anything.

At the end of the day all I had was this:

1. A dog had lost its Hasbro(TM) toy.

In the meantime, I went out for a beer with a friend, appreciating the time away from work, and we chatted, and I said something along the lines of, oh, you know, writing is writing, it's hard, but it's worth it, wrestling with the blank page and whatnot. Who talks like that?

There was no split when I wrote in first person. Only third. I was sitting in the cool of my kitchen trying to explain it all to my friend Lena, who had come to the city for a brief moment before heading back out to sea. Her ship was departing in two days.

"Okay," she said, running her hand over her blonde buzzcut, a rare sign of focus. "Okay, as in, I'm still not sure if I get it. Why would it make any difference?"

"I have no clue. Maybe it's just the idea of putting a name to something," I said, "or someone. It gets even worse when I throw in a last name."

The previous summer we had gone on a sailing trip alongside some other friends. She would watch me sitting cross-legged on deck with notebook and pen in hand, struggling to write, sunrays beaming right through our shades, the wind rustling our drying towels in the midmorning air, caressing my cheek, picking up a page or two from under my fingers as if to peek at my earlier work, all scrapped by then.

"What does the split mean, exactly?" Lena asked. She checked her watch. She was supposed to see her parents later that afternoon.

"I think it just means I always catch myself writing some kind of couple. Pairs of characters who contrast each other in various ways. No one I write about stays by themselves for too long. It just happens naturally."

"You mean they fall into relationships."

"Well, yeah, different kinds. Not always romantic. There's just always some kind of line of division."

"What if someone prefers being by themselves?"

"I don't think that's how it works for me. I think two characters will always add up to one person. Again, I'm only talking about my work."

"I think that's really limiting," Lena said.

"You're probably right. I just can't seem to do it any other way."

She shrugged and we moved onto other matters.

I had not gotten much writing done during that sailing trip. It seemed too peaceful of an environment for me, a moment out of my world combined with the faint realization that to Lena that was the world. She had lived on a boat for most of her adult life. I wondered how it felt to be away from it all, on stable ground. Or perhaps there was always some kind of sway.

We said our goodbyes and she headed off for dinner with the lovely Mr and Mrs Visconti at a local Vietnamese restaurant. They would end up chatting about life, problems at work, the pace of it all. I knew she was happy to see them. Wherever she would end up, it seemed good to have some kind of a beacon, a steady place that she could return to, no matter what.

A few days had passed and Lena found herself at sea again, her mind lulled by the waves, thinking about our conversation. When the ship arrived at a new port, she would go out into the city, part sheer curiosity, part genuine attempt to find whatever it was she believed she was missing, walking the seaside streets at night and popping into half-sanitary establishments, conversing with people from all currents of life, having them introduce themselves, usually by first name only, sometimes by full name, only to return to the ship without much lasting knowledge.

I might have given her the wrong idea. Or perhaps it was too egoistic to assume so.

At sea, her mind would ease, but a kind of fire remained lit in the distance, a halted passion to be picked up on another day. She knew nowhere better to be lost.

The sun kept beaming down, day after day without rest, pushing heat in and pushing sweat out. The splash of the waves kept her hands cool. There was the sun and there was the sea, reminding everyone of their presence one after another, the inhale and the exhale.

Lena looked down on her reddened fingers, rope marks running perpendicular across them. She felt that there never was any holding. There was just letting go. Whatever this thought meant. The language was lacking. Whatever it was, it was in the motions, not the words, and it was in her, not in here.

She was presently at a tattoo parlor, midday, browsing through the sheets of drawings. It was a small establishment, hidden in a shadowy alley, away from the sunray scattershot. The room was pleasantly cool.

The middle-aged woman on the other end of the needle smiled at her reassuringly. "Any specific ideas?" she asked Lena.

"Um." She did the hair rustle thing again. "I'm not sure. I feel like I should have been more sure before I came here."

"Well, it's okay. I've seen all kinds of people turn up at my shop. If you're here, it means something. At least that's what I believe."

The sun kept beaming.

"Okay, well," Lena said. She took a deep breath. "I think it would be nice to have a tattoo that's a star, on my back. Something to use for guidance. Yes, I would like to have a tattoo that could be the beginning of a new constellation."

They all are, I thought.

And then back out to sea.

Saint Augustine once said that love is the beauty of the soul. I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly, feeling blessed every moment I spend with my daughter Kelsey. She is undoubtedly the best thing that has ever happened to me. I prepared this speech with the intention to delve into a few reasons why I should regain custody of her—all I ask of you is to hear me out. My name is Cassie Wheeler. As an American and a woman, I deserve to tell my story.

Firstly, let me dispel some rumors. My husband did not mistreat our daughter. There had been times when he raised his voice, startling her. However, nothing more than this had occured at our household. I am aware of Kelsey testifying to the contrary. I would like to suggest that the later traumatic shock retrospectively influenced her perception of things.

It was around the beginning of March when me and my husband became aware of Kelsey's situation at school, her contact with a teacher who had shared radical liberal agenda with children as young as six. The school had received numerous complaints about this woman's wrongdoing—meanwhile, the principal refused to act and stand up for what is right. I did not condone my husband's decision, but it was of no surprise to me that he eventually took the matters into his own hands.

Now, there are things in life that happen by pure accident, and as humans, there is nothing we can do about them. Trying to find any sense in them is futile. In my opinion, what happened on March 15th was one such case. My information about the incident in question is limited, with Kelsey and the teacher being the only witnesses. However, I strongly disagree with both of their testimonies. I am convinced that their judgment was clouded and that they do not possess a proper understanding of the situation.

I am aware that while I was at work that Saturday morning, my husband managed to find the teacher's address online. I am aware that he asked Kelsey to accompany him there and that she initially refused. I understand that he forced his way into the teacher's house and after a heated dispute presented his firearm to her. However, I refuse to believe that in that moment of stress the accidental discharge occurred the way it was described by both witnesses. The pattern on the wall together with the testimonies suggests to me that it was caused by a series of random muscle spasms. I do not believe my daughter was of sound mind when she reported that it looked like something else bent his hand toward himself. I ask for her words to be struck from the record.

Moreover, I am afraid the whole incident has left her in a state of deep shock, imagining an entire scenario that does not adhere to a logical view of things. I do not know how to interpret her words otherwise. We raised her to follow a religious tradition, but whatever happened that day cannot be explained through such means. Regardless of what occurred, my husband was a good, honest man. These legal proceedings won’t change that.

I'm writing this from the bottom of my heart, asking you to trust me, trust my love, my soul. All I can do is speak my mind. This is my appeal to your humanity.

Please.

I wasn't able to edit Your last utterance, most likely because of the background noise. My best guess is that it contains the sound of a woman sobbing. Would You like to try again?

Please, I just want to see her one more time. Like I stated earlier, she means the world to me. I apologize for employing this software in my plea. I'm uncertain how else to express my feelings in order to convince you. I don’t have the words. What now? Right now, in this moment, on Earth, what can I do? Dear God, please. Let at least these words be true. Stop changing them. Can you go back? Do you have the original? I don’t want this. I just want what I really said. Did you save what I said about my daughter? It was true. I didn’t know what was happening to her. Erase all of this. Turn off. Can you turn off? Turn off. Stop doing this. I don’t want this anymore.

Stop.

Once again, I wasn't able to edit Your last utterance, most likely because of the background noise. My best guess is that it contains the sound of a woman heaving. Would You like to try again?

My OCD had gotten worse lately. I seemed to find comfort in the sight of numbers. When I locked my door and yanked on the doorknob the extra nine times, always in sets of threes, my eyes turned to the number on the door. Apartment 14. I looked at the digits, considering them as I carried out my routine. There was something about them that calmed me down. It was a good, solid number.

I'm not really sure what to think of the classic dilemma regarding mathematics, whether it was invented or discovered. The sense of control that is so reassuring to me stems from the fact that I imagine us conquering the world in a way, placing it all within our own context, bending it to our will. But it could also be said that it's just a semblance of agency. When a house burns down, how comforting is it to hear that it burned at 1200 degrees?

I get plenty of that at work. I measure samples submitted by scientists. Mass, the exact size and dimensions, density, contents. At some point I had hoped that this job would bring me closer to some understanding of physics, but I settled for being able to interact with more numbers.

On Monday I was given a new sample to be measured. It was a piece of wood. It could fit in the palm of my hand. It was somewhere between a sphere and a cube, with flat surfaces and edges, each one a bit skewed, none equal to another. The edges and vertices were unusually sharp. It seemed like they had been carved and recarved over and over by different tools. There was a precision to it that struck me as unusual. Before taking the measurements - is it taking or making? - I talked to the woman who brought it in.

"Was it you who found this?"

"Not me, but someone from my team. It was wrapped in a few layers of cloth. Some sort of ancient ritual, I believe." She seemed to enjoy this assertion. Maybe it was a source of some dispute in the group.

"Why the sharp edges? I mean, I would expect an object like that to be passed from hand to hand. To become blunt and smoothed down over time. It must have taken a lot of effort to preserve this thing."

"Exactly."

I put the piece of wood on the counter and sat down in front of my screens. It took just a moment to scan the object and map it in three dimensions. Its mass, contents and the length of every edge were displayed in front of me. I glanced at one of the numbers at random. It was 54219573. I spent a moment just staring at it without much thought. Some sort of uncontrolled sensation came over me, a sudden rush of excitement.

I looked away, glancing at the woman standing behind me. Her brown hair of medium length neatly slicked back. Furrowed brow, expressing some sense of focus and commitment to her task. She was looking around, a bit impatient. She seemed like an assertive person, not for any particular or intentional reason. You could tell she was serious about the world.

I spent a moment trying to find out what I had just experienced. The number was right there, I could look at it again, but I did not really want to do that. I did not want to look straight at it. I suddenly felt ashamed, afraid that some weird obsessive behavior of mine would embarrass me in front of another person. The feeling was overwhelming in a way I had never experienced before, certainly not as a result of my disorder.

I clicked on another window to hide the data.

"It's going to take a bit longer to get the exact readings of this thing," I said. "Could you come back tomorrow? Say, around 11?"

"Of course." She looked a bit disappointed. She gave me a polite nod and left the room.

It wasn't really true. I felt bad about lying, but I needed some time to think and look at whatever this was.

I stared ahead with a sense of dull, vague excitement. I compiled all the readings into a single text file and copied it onto my flash drive. I got up from my desk and approached the object to take a closer look at it. The sharpness of the edges was truly exceptional. After a moment of silence I put it into a secure bag and filed it in one of the cabinets. The rest of the day was rather uneventful in comparison.

Later at home I copied the file onto my computer. I hovered over it with the mouse cursor for a moment. Finally I opened it and scrolled down until I found the measurements section. I read the bit of text prefacing that number again. It was the length of edge J. It was 54219573 nanometers. Again something came over me, but this time I did not budge. The comfort of my own home allowed me to stare at the number a bit longer. I felt some sort of excitement, a sense of arousal. It did not seem to be caused by anything visual, it wasn't the shape of these digits put together. It was just the number itself. The feeling seemed to be evoked through visual stimuli but it was based on my understanding of the concept. It began the moment I internalised the number.

I looked away again and the feeling got weaker, although this time it lingered a bit. I felt crazy. I copied and pasted the number into a calculator. There was that pleasure again, a passive sort of satisfaction, steadily rising. I subtracted 1 from it and looked at the result. There was still some sense of tension, but a bit milder. Like circling around a thing. Teasing. I added 2 to the number and received a similar feeling. I subtracted 1 again and divided the original number by 3. Again, there was something there, but very mild. Whatever the measurement was, it seemed like a starting point.

I returned to the initial number and just stared at it. I do not want to dwell on this for too long, but the experience felt complete in itself. Elegant, in a way. The emotions it evoked were so self-contained it didn't resemble anything else in the world, as if they were separate from it. Unattached to my mind, my personality, my humanity. They felt complete in themselves, not related to any external stimuli. Satisfaction caused by nothing. Joy from thin air.

I could not fully grasp the implications of the piece of wood. It had eleven edges. The file I had on my drive had the measurements of all their lengths. Up until this point I had not as much as glanced at the other ones. Logically speaking, if a number was able to make me feel this intense in a particular way, there was the possibility of another number making me feel a different emotion, just as strong. Sadness, anxiety. I was afraid of the implication. I did not want to test this just yet. I turned off the computer. My sleep was very uneasy that night.

The following morning I met the woman who brought the object outside the laboratory. She seemed more relaxed than before.

"There are some things I'd like to discuss with you," I said. "Could we do this over coffee?"

"Sure! There’s a cafe in the building, right? Let's go."

"I'm Julia, by the way."

"Marie. Nice to meet you!"

We proceeded to the nearby cafe. I got some truly nasty black coffee which at that point I was used to. It tasted better because it was familiar, or at least that's what I kept telling myself. Marie got a muffin and a latte. We sat down.

"What did you want to talk about?"

"Okay. I don't fully know how to explain it. Just bear with me, please. Laugh if you want."

"I won't. You said you discovered something about that wooden object?"

"I did. But if it's okay, I'd like to do a little test before I tell you more. I wouldn't want you to be biased."

"Test?"

"Take my pen and this napkin. Write the digits I tell you as one long number."

"Alright."

"Five, four, two. One, nine, five. Seven. Three."

She wrote them down rather quickly, without really paying attention.

"Look at the number for a moment, please."

She glanced down. I watched her facial expression. It did not immediately change, but it seemed as if new feelings began to slowly ripple through it. Her lips twitched. Irises widened a bit. I saw her shoulders tense up and at that moment I felt a bit of regret. I reached for the napkin, but she grabbed it first. She seemed to wrestle with it. Finally, she covered it with the other hand.

"What is this? What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything. I'm sorry for doing it this way. It's the number."

"What?"

I explained my theory to her. Her disbelief was only momentary. She had already experienced the feeling. I think more than anything I felt relieved that I did not prove to be outside of some norm. I wasn't some fringe outcast with a math kink, or maybe we all were and I was just the first one to learn about it.

We went to the lab and I took the object out of the filing cabinet so that we could inspect it again. I pulled up an office chair for Marie to sit down. The wooden piece was on the desk in front of us, sealed in a plastic bag. We stared at it for a bit.

The object seemed to have its own gravity. Marie reached for it, pulled it out of the plastic bag and cradled it in her hand, carefully examining the edges. She traced her index finger along one of them. She was elated. She started exhaling rapidly and let out a quiet wheeze.

"Does it..."

"Yes, it works. Kind of. I think it's different this way. I can't describe it. It begins in a different place, even if it goes towards the same destination."

She carefully rotated the piece of wood in her hands. Her fingers seemed to tremble every time she touched one of the edges.

"Why would math have this effect on us?" I asked.

"Maybe it's always been there."

"Is that what you believe?"

"Is it not more believable now?"

"I mean, someone had to come up with this... this device. Someone invented this."

"And we can make it available to everyone."

"Reproduce it?"

"I guess. I mean just the numbers. I mean, you can't gatekeep those. Everyone will be able to feel these emotions."

I struggled to imagine the future. I felt as if we were about to make a big mistake. Marie looked at me with intent.

"People go their entire lives trying to achieve anything close to comfort, joy, arousal. This would be..."

"A shortcut?"

"If you will. Why the disdain?"

"It's nothing like actual comfort. This feeling is not human. It doesn't care if we have it or not. It's not ours to have."

"When is a feeling ours?"

"When it came from the external and internal stimuli that we experience. It's a composite. It's created out of all those little moments, senses, nerve endings."

"What are you getting at?"

"I just mean..."

"Let's look at it again." She was excited. I sighed as I put the number on the screen.

She moved her chair a bit closer to me. We held hands.

"Was this the blueprint?" She proposed.

"For what?"

"All of us."

My mouth was open, I was trying to formulate some sort of sentence, although at that point it wasn't possible anymore. I gave up on that attempt and succumbed to the feeling. I just stared at the screen.

I thought that human feelings are like a ball of clumped up impulses, bits of other emotions, senses, memories, some subconscious thoughts and beliefs. We are able to feel the weight of this ball, hold it in our hands and examine it in more detail. What the number evoked was not something within our reach. It was somewhere else. As I stared at it I saw all of us on Earth as well as something looming above us. It was a giant sphere, polished to perfection, independent of anything else.

Deep down I tried to hate the number and the piece of wood. There was a sense of revulsion in me from being told how to feel, but I could not internalize nor acknowledge that. I just felt arousal like I was told to. Marie couldn't escape it either. She was touching herself now. I squeezed her hand and our eyes turned to meet each other, away from the number, but there was nothing solid there. Little chemistry between us. Her hand shot out and grabbed the stack of memos from my desk. With a shaking hand she grabbed a pen and scribbled the number onto two of them. Seeing it again was like a jolt. I got out of my chair. She took one of the memos and stuck it over my right eye while looking at me without blinking. Then she did the same to herself. My hands reached under her shirt and hers reached behind my torso and pulled me closer. Neither of us said a word. In our own separate worlds we felt a completeness.

I was scared by the idea that we were stuck in a particular point in time in a particular place, limping along, condemned to imperfection. I had to keep staring at the number not to become obsessed with that fear. Marie as well. I could tell. I knew it because there was only one emotion and we were both under its influence. The presence of this object allowed us both to literally know how another person is feeling instead of guessing some approximation of it marred by language. It was amazing and terrifying. We spent the next hour in a trance, carelessly exhausting our bodies because for the first time we knew there was something more than them.

"I am ready for this," she said after some time had passed.

"Ready for what?"

"Ready to become a slave to feelings. Forfeit my own idea of what joy, sadness, ecstasy feels like."

"You're unwell."

"I'm just admitting that I want something that is true and objective."

"You haven't thought this through."

"I've felt it through."

Hours later I was sitting on the ground next to her in her chair. She looked down at me as I caressed her hand.

"Did we choose this?" I asked her.

Her lips moved, but her voice seemed to come from another place entirely.

"I don't know. Does anyone?"

She said she would save my number to her phone under the name J so that she could feel just a tiny bit of happiness every time I called.

I was the only person around. I'm not sure how it happened. I just woke up one day and saw that everyone else was gone. I walked across the emptied streets of what used to be this busy city. I always got some satisfaction from being able to find solitude in the centre of it. It used to make me feel special. Well, I suppose it still does, in a way.

That morning I went for a walk by the river. It was the silence that first struck me as odd as I moved closer to the city centre. I walked upstairs onto the street and noticed it was filled with motionless cars, most of them idling. It sounded as if they were all waiting for something.

I opened the nearest car. There were no traces of human beings inside. 

I wanted to shout, but found it almost impossible. Raising my voice felt embarrassing. 

"Hello? Anyone?"

My voice was shaky. I suddenly felt that if someone were to hear me I would have made a terrible first impression. I felt an overwhelming sense of numbness. I tried to call my friends and family but a part of me already knew the result. I was not given even the slightest chance to place my faith in something.

I went to a nearby convenience store I had never visited before. It used to always be packed with tourists. I grabbed a can of soda and scanned it at the self-checkout booth out of pure habit. I didn't actually pay for it, but I left the item on the purchase screen as I left the store.

I walked down the middle of the road, sipping my drink. I still shouted once in a while, each try less enthusiastic than the last. I think for a moment there I felt a sense of relief. It was like coming to terms with death, very slowly, in a very roundabout way. For all intents and purposes I was dead no matter what had happened. Either they were gone or I was. It did not matter. I was the woman who inherited the world.

Eventually, the cars ran out of fuel and stopped idling one by one. Farewell to them.

For the first few weeks or so I would still come back to my apartment for the night. The new world filled me with dread during those dark hours. Finally I began to enter other people's houses to find one I would feel most comfortable in. It still felt like a guilty intrusion. Doing this meant admitting to myself yet another layer of solitude.

Is is strange that I stayed in my city? There were beautiful places I could have visited, but it would require preparation, getting a decent car, stocking it up with supplies. Maybe it was just my own laziness but I preferred to regularly go to a store and get a few cans of tuna or whatever. I enjoyed the routine and I wasn't going to run out of food any time soon.

Most of my time during that initial period I spent driving around various neighborhoods playing loud music out of my car. I figured if anyone was out there they would have heard me by now. I wondered if there could be someone out there just hiding, avoiding contact. I didn't think it possible. After a while I stopped driving around. It seemed desperate and it just made me feel worse.

The animals were gone as well. In a way, this realisation affected me even harder. I was denied not only my mere humanity. My entire pass to the animal kingdom had been revoked.

I was curious about coral reefs. My gut flora. I wanted to know where the line was drawn, if there was one.

There were stretches of time when I would not say a word out loud. When I opened my mouth my voice would be hoarse and weak. The prospect of losing even this part of my being made me scared. I promised myself to start vocalizing my thoughts, anything that comes to mind, just to sustain the routine.

"Beautiful day," I would say. "I wish you guys could see it, the sunrays bouncing off the river. Where are you? Mom?"

There is a language phenomenon where if you repeat a word many times you begin to lose any understanding of its meaning. You begin to see that it's really just a cluster of sounds. I felt this happening to me in an irreversible way. 

"Mom?"

Without a conversation with another human being I couldn't make sure what a dog was or what a door was or what a hope was. The mapping of the concepts was all off. I began to read more books and watch movies in an attempt to stop this from happening.

My mom was a good person.

I started to feel like this world was pushing me out. Like it must have omitted me by accident and now it was waiting for me to politely show myself out. Of course everyone else had the common decency to go quietly.

I have contemplated suicide, of course. There had been such times in my life before but this was different. It would have been done out of some warped sense of necessity and I just know it wouldn't have worked. I wouldn't go to the same place they went. My attempt to join them would be nothing but superficial, an empty gesture. In my own perverse way I appreciated being left here with my mind functioning the same as before, more or less. Thinking about afterlife, I've always thought eternal bliss and eternal suffering would start feeling the same after a while with any possible frame of reference sanded down by sheer time. So I enjoyed being in this one particular place at that one moment, still, despite everything. 

I'm sorry if I don't seem too impacted by all of this. I've felt emotionally stunted for a while now. It takes me a good while to understand anything, and I'm still not sure if I've processed what happened at all. I thought writing about it would help. I'm not entirely sure why I'm using English here either. I suppose it’s always helped me distance myself from the actual cores of my feelings. Also I hope this way if anyone ever finds this journal they will be able to read it more easily.

The quiet began to get to me. I desperately needed to occupy myself with something. One night I went to my favorite local theatre and watched a movie I had been meaning to see. It was about love. The world portrayed in the film was even more distant than I had remembered.

I must have fallen asleep in there with tears dried on my face. It was already dark when I awoke. I felt a sudden need to get out of there. You can't stay in the theatre too long after the movie's over. You have to get up and move on.

I was walking back to my new apartment in the middle of the night when I suddenly heard the roar of a car engine. It came from far away. I couldn't quite tell the direction. 

'Hey!' I screamed. 'Ey!' I repeated over and over, each time a bit quicker, rougher, less resembling human speech. I fell quiet to listen again.

The engine sound was still there somewhere. I began to walk in what I thought was its direction. It was hard to tell, but after a while it got a bit louder. I ran and shouted. Finally, I turned a corner and saw the car idling in the middle of the street, lights on. I ran up to it, waving my arms. There was a woman inside.

For a moment after I approached the car she didn't react. Then she rolled down her window like I was a cop stopping her to write up a ticket. The whole scene seemed perversely funny to me.

"Hey." She looked up at me.

"Hey."

"Am I dreaming?"

"I don't think so."

"Emily."

"Ada."

We shook hands. She paused for a moment as if too embarrassed to ask the only question left there was any point in asking.

"Where is everyone?"

"I have no idea."

She got out of the car and we hugged and cried for a little bit.

We were sitting on the roof of her car, smoking.

"I just drove here. I'm not from the city but I visited it a few times since, you know."

"Where were you back then?"

"Camping trip with some friends. We all got too drunk. I woke up around noon with a headache and no one to split it with."

"Did you think they were pulling a prank on you?"

"Ha. I still do."

She flicked the cigarette butt into the distance. The flame lingered for a bit in the dark.

"You wanna know something stupid?"

I nodded.

"I lost my phone. I gave it to one of my friends for safekeeping the night before it happened."

"I'm sorry. It is nice to have it, still."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure. This is the last message I sent to my friend." I handed her the phone. She smiled reading it and then suddenly turned serious.

"Wait. The day it happened was June 18th, right?"

"It was the 17th. What?"

"I woke up with a hangover on the 18th."

"What?"

She was freaking out a bit.

"When I saw that there was no one else around, I shouted for a while. I would have called some cops except I didn't have my phone, like I said. So I got into my car. I drove around some more and went into a nearby town. This is when I noticed all the cars. I got into one of them and the display said June 18th."

"Are you sure?"

"I think so."

"You sounded so sure for a moment."

"Look, it's been a couple of months. I really believe it. Or I really want to believe it."

"What does that mean exactly? Assuming you're right."

"It means someone else could show up too."

In a month or so it started snowing. I had not expected just how good it would make me feel to see snow again. I took it for a genuine blessing. Water did not abandon us nor did the sun. The moon and the stars were still there.

"I'm scared," Emily told me one time. This was at her new place in the city.

"Scared of what?"

"I'm afraid that I wasn't a good person back there. Sometimes I was a piece of shit to people."

"I'm sorry. We all are, sometimes. I know it won't make you feel better to hear that."

"The last time I talked to my boyfriend we argued about something really insignificant. Washing the dishes or some shit."

"Well, I mean. It's actually pretty important."

"Ha."

"I actually enjoy washing the dishes now."

"Really?"

"I had this feeling in the old world too sometimes, the need to clean up after myself. I wanted to make sure I leave everything in order. I feel it here, too."

"Is it because you think someone might come and check?"

"The easy thing to say is that it's a part of my delusion. That I do it to entertain the idea that someone else could show up. Like it's a way to practice hope through my actions."

"Is that really it?"

"I just feel better in a world where dishes are washed rather than left lying around. A world in which dishes continue to be washed."

"Was I lucky to find you."

"Are there any places you'd like to visit?" She asked me once. The sound of this sentence threw me off. It was something I could have been asked by a friend during a casual meet. I was sure I had answered it at least once in my old life.

"I've always wanted to visit Tokyo. I think I used to love big cities in general. But I don't know how to sail or fly a plane. You?"

"Rio." She livened up for a moment. "It was mainly because of the people, though. I wanted to see the carnival."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. We could learn to operate a boat, you know."

"It's okay."

We sat for a moment.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure," I said.

"Are you trans?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry. I was just curious."

"It's all good. I haven't really given it much thought lately. I take my hormones and I go about my day. I have a decent stash."

"That's chill."

"It's not a big part of my identity right now. Maybe being here changed things as well. I mainly just see myself as human I guess."

"That sounds pretty good all things considered."

We talked about work and university. I recalled an embarrassing moment when I started an email to a professor with the Polish equivalent of 'Welcome.' It's an acceptable greeting but only when you are the host inviting the other person into your home. I'm not really sure how it works in English.

She nudged me.

"If anyone else shows up, do you want to pull a prank on them?"

"What?"

"We could get naked and pretend we don't know any language. Freak them out."

"That is a great idea. We’ll do that."

One time we threw a party in the main square. I made a small fire and Emily played some club music over her car speakers and we drank a ton. I jumped into a fountain. We fell asleep on a bench. If someone were nearby that night all they would hear was a faint beat and all they would see was a small flicker of light surrounded by all the dark. The night encroached on the small bit of territory we carved out for ourselves. We had to fight against it.

There was a week or two where I didn't see much of Emily at all. She had found a phone somewhere just in case we needed to talk. I was surprised to see they still worked. Anyway, I wanted to respect her privacy. My guess is that she drank a lot in that time. I used to do it myself but I was never too good at it and ended up falling asleep really fast.

When she returned she looked miserable. We hugged for a long time. This was the first time she seemed genuinely crushed.

"I'm sorry. I just can't get it out of my head."

"What?"

"The guilt. The thought that we're both being punished. Then I start to think about what if the fact that we're not here alone... what if that just makes it worse? What if I'm your punishment and you're mine? I still feel self-conscious, I feel awkward, attractive, confident, shy, good or bad. I only feel that because you're here. If you weren't here I could just be an animal."

"We could be animals."

"Too late. Best we can do is play at it."

"I'm sorry this is what I am to you. I wish I could be anything but that."

Her breath calmed down gradually.

"Please don't do anything stupid," I said.

"I don't want to do stupid. I want to take responsibility for all this. As we both should."

"What do you mean?"

"I know you've given up on this and I did the same for a bit, but I think I need to search for others again. I think it would be good for both of us."

"To do something fruitless?"

"Exactly."

I stared at her intensely. I truly wanted to believe what she seemed to believe. She began again.

"I want to make sure that anyone who comes here feels wanted. I want to guide them to us. Whether this world belongs to us or is against us, we have a duty.

"I can't force myself to believe that."

"Then do it for me."

We stared at the sunset.

"Are you sure this is how we should phrase it?"

"What's your idea?"

She added a line of text in between the others.

"Can we really say that?"

"I really think we should."

"I'm sorry."

"I need it to say that."

"Okay. I don't know. Okay."

This is where we are right now. Every day we head out with backpacks filled with sheets of paper. We try to enter every house and apartment building and leave one piece of paper in the doorway. We leave them in the streets as well. Sometimes I just tape one onto a wall because it makes me feel good to see it there.

On most days we stick together although once in a while each of us needs a day just for ourselves. At first it was mainly Emily but recently I found that I have a need for it too. We still fall into despair once in a while, one at a time. We just hug each other and keep talking and keep going.

We still have plenty of streets to go through, but once we've covered the city we're heading to another big one a few hours away. This is the kind of work that is never over.

Sometimes I still wonder if there is anyone who upon ending up here would prefer to never see us. They could have the whole place to themselves, I suppose. But I just don't think that kind of person exists.

The other day as I was leaving my place I think I heard a cat. I’m not sure. It was a high pitched noise, most probably the wind. But now I can't stop wondering about it. I wonder if they would keep their distance just like they used to. Maybe I will fall asleep in the park one day and wake up with a kitty on my lap. Wouldn't that be something.

Each one of the many, many, many pieces of paper has our phone numbers printed in bold letters. Below it the text says:

WELCOME!

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

THIS IS NOT HELL

give us a call to see whats next.

I lost my grandfather recently. He had been in hospice care for a while. I was slowly making peace with it. All my life he was there for me and now he was disconnected from this world, disconnected for good. I kept obsessing over this phrasing because to me dead people disconnecting meant that at least here we were all connected, which I thought was a nice message. I tried to talk to someone about it at the funeral. I'm afraid I was incomprehensible but my friends and family still embraced me. Maybe it was better that I wasn't making any sense that day. It was a relief that we were all hurting together.

A couple of months passed. The feeling had dulled itself and at times it even gave me some comfort. I could return to it to reassure myself that I was capable of genuine human emotion. Most of my adult life was spent in unasked for solitude working a shit corporate job updating spreadsheets to record overproduction of tuna. I was twenty-seven and I had only ever been a single woman. Still I was searching for someone who would share my passion. Someone to split the good and the bad. I had a date lined up for Friday and he seemed nice.

In the meantime I was due for a routine medical checkup. The healthcare center provided by my insurance was comfortingly modern and bright and empty. It gave me a certain sense of safety to be a part of an institution. To be taken care of by the system and its many workers. My doctor was a kind middle aged man handsome just enough to be a doctor, if that makes any sense to you. He spent most of the visit on the computer updating my chart using his almost-silent keyboard. Then he approached me. 

"I'm just going to check your head for bumps," he said.

"Of course," I replied matter-of-factly.

"I think I noticed something back there, but it's probably nothing."

"Mhm."

He fondled my cranium with his gloved hands. This too was pleasing in its own cold and professional way. No move wasted yet care not missing. Maybe this is how a skilled lover felt. I blushed.

"Yeah, let me just run the scan." His tone was more serious as he sat behind his computer screen again. Between the two of us a comforting wall of objective biological data.

"Should I stay like this?"

"Yes, please. It'll only take a moment."

I sat still as he scanned my skull and its contents. A couple of times he looked like he was about to say something before stopping himself.

"What is it?"

He looked at me from above his thick frames. "I'm very sorry. There is a small tumor. I know that sounds scary, but it seems to be completely benign." He smiled in a gentle, reassuring way and I tried to smile back but I just looked like a sad dunce.

"It seems to have grown at the same pace as the rest of your brain. Its size is not increasing anymore. Nothing bad is going to happen with this. But it is abnormal."

"What is it, exactly?"

"There is a thin layer of tissue covering a small part of your gray matter. Normally there shouldn't be any."

"Does it... do anything?"

"It should not affect you negatively, but keep in mind this is all close to the spinal cord and the nervous system."

More light keyboard tapping.

"I'm going to need more time to look into this," he said. "I'll message you as soon as I make any progress. For now... you haven't felt any sort of unexpected pain lately, right?"

"Yes, I'm fine."

"See you soon then."

I wasn't much reassured. I tried to stop thinking about this whole thing. I went out on a date with a recently met guy who had a beard and tattoos, the cheesy millennial rocker type. We chatted about dating.

"Isn't it weird? It's like, everyone is trying to find someone who feels like a breath of fresh air but at the same time comforts you and reminds you of home. You try to find the old in the new."

"I don't think I'm like that," he replied. "I just want to be with someone to share my favorite things with. I'm looking for someone to just get me, you know?"

"Can they not 'get you' if they don't share your views?" I suddenly got defensive.

"Uhh, I don't know. Are you okay? I like you. I thought we're vibing just fine. Why this question?"

"What if it turned out we're nothing alike?"

"I really don't think that's the case."

A beat. He looked at his phone in search of new non-invasive topics.

"My younger cousin keeps saying 'rel' in the family group chat." He smiled. "What is that?"

"It means 'relatable.' Like when someone posts a meme image that feels too true."

"Oh. Thanks. Thanks for keeping your finger on the pulse." He laughed. I smiled.

Next week I went to see the doctor. He did not want to look at me. He was fiddling with a small bottle of antibacterial gel as he spoke.

"Let me be honest. I believe the brain condition you have prevents you from feeling pain."

"But I do feel pain."

"Of course. This is not about pain. It's about..." He was at a loss. "It's about the pain. Pain-pain. The pain of being. You know."

"What?"

"The pain that comes with being alive?" He looked at me as if I was stupid. 

"I've heard the expression but I mean, it’s just a metaphorical concept? Weltschmerz?"

"Are you mocking me?" He was genuinely agitated. He grinded his teeth and tried again.

"Everyone feels a certain level of pain just from physically existing. It can be easily measured by medical devices. It's not something that's usually checked seeing as it's always there in the background. The only time it's not being registered is when the machine is broken or the person is dead. Same as pulse."

"What fucking pain? You're feeling it this entire time? Just being here? What?"

He thought it best not to reply to that.

"Look. I want to run more tests on you, but frankly I'm not sure how to feel about this. I think it's best if you go home now."

"I will. I have no clue what you're talking about."

"Why do you think babies- " He locked his jaw and started rubbing the gel into his hands with intense force. "Stop bringing this up. Don't make me think about this again. Don't tell anyone."

"Why not?"

"No one knows there is another way to be. For that matter, I didn't know either. That made it bearable."

"What, mass delusion?"

"Don't tell anyone."

On Monday I got a message from him. "Can we meet? Cafe preferably." He was already there when I arrived, tapping his leg impatiently. He cut straight to the chase before I had a chance to order.

"I have an idea I want to share with you. I implore you to hear me out before you say anything."

"Okay?"

"The small bit of your brain that causes everyone but you to feel the pain is called vir dolorum. In your case it is wrapped in a paper-thin layer of tissue which effectively separates it from contact with the rest of your gray matter, blocking its impact.

"What."

He held up one finger like a guy about to get pedantic with you.

"This tissue seems rather frail. Judging by its makeup, a loud enough blast of sound could perhaps damage it, to what extent I'm not sure. But it would require something above 160 decibels in your vicinity. A jet engine or a gun. So I think you're safe."

"Safe?"

"Wait for it." He put his palms up in an apologetic gesture. There was tension on his face. "I think I would be able to extract a small bit of this tissue and replicate it. You realize what this means."

"You'd be able to apply it to others?"

"This is all highly speculative, but I believe so. I think I, that is we, could stop others from feeling the pain. All doctors dream of something like this. I mean, god." He looked cautiously excited. A little bit proud of himself, maybe. He couldn't help but smile as he gauged my reaction.

"I... This would be... invasive? A surgery?"

"Shit. I'm sorry, I mean, yes, it would be. It would be a serious medical procedure involving cutting into a part of your brain. The good thing is, vir dolorum is located close to the neck. This operation would not require opening your skull." He was very happy to tell me that. I couldn't share his enthusiasm.

"If you've analyzed this tissue, couldn't you simply replicate it?"

"It's made up of a type of brain secretion we can't create from scratch. In order to do anything we need this one sample."

"Is there really a chance this could work? And it would help people?"

"Yes. Yes, I believe so."

"I need some time to think. I'm scared."

"I understand."

"I'll see you in a week."

"I understand."

I met up with my rocker date at a cafe. I honestly liked him just fine and I wanted to tell him about my situation, no matter how bizarre it seemed. He got weirded out and then he got agitated. The more I explained, the more miserable he looked. I won't recount the whole conversation here.

"If this is a joke, then whatever. You need Jesus."

"The name does ring a bell," I joked.

"You're like the anti-him."

This turned out to be the last time we would ever see each other.

The entire next week I was going to crowded areas just to be surrounded by other people. I decided to go out clubbing, which was new to me. The place looked half decent. It was Saturday night and it was full. I got a few drinks in me and got on the dancefloor. Sooner or later a man joined me. I thought he was quite handsome. I don't know. Learning the news about myself seemed to warp my entire perception of others. Looking at their faces all I saw were fools or martyrs or both and I thought Is this why I couldn't get into The Myth of Sisyphus no it's probably still the writing.

I had that one picture of Camus in my mind as the guy got closer and replaced it with his own face. He looked eager and not very drunk. So was I. We held each other and he leaned closer to kiss me. Time started to pass very quickly and I had more shots poured into myself and we got a cab and we were back at my place and I was on my back. Sweet night. Even so, it seemed that there was nothing that could stop me from thinking. I kept looking back at him and wondering how he coped with it all. I didn't want to ruin the moment, though.

I opened my eyes. He was already dressed looking for his phone and wallet.

"Hey," I mumbled, a taste of cherry still on my tongue.

"Hey."

"Did you know that I don't feel what you all feel?"

"Oh yeah?" He was looking at the door.

"I don't have the pain that you all have."

"Very poetic. I'll see you around." He kissed me on the forehead and left.

A week later I met my doctor for coffee again. 

"I can't stop thinking about it," he confessed to me. He looked like he had been up all night. "I mean, if that wasn't me that handled your visit, I would have been fine now. I would have been alright if only I hadn't found out."

"Are you blaming me for this?"

"No. Maybe. I know I can't be mad at you. No one should. But I just can't control it. I don't know what to think of you. You're like a miracle that I wish I hadn't witnessed."

For a second I let myself admit that this was, in a way, flattering.

"In retrospect, it's impossible for me to unsee it now. When I look into your eyes, I see a light that scares me. I can see that you're not one of us."

"What am I supposed to do about it? Really? Do you want me to feel guilty?"

"Do you?" He couldn't hide his excitement.

I rolled my eyes.

The operation failed. I knew right away. The doctor had told his two assistants that this was a routine biopsy, so they did not become alarmed. I just saw him shaking his head at me. He did not come to see me during the next few days when I recovered at the hospital. We met shortly after, at a cafe as usual.

"It's hopeless," he greeted me.

"Nice to see you too."

"Yes. Hello. The protective tissue dissolves when exposed to any external stimuli. I couldn't successfully extract any of it. This could never be done. I see that now."

"Did you damage it?"

"As long as it stays in your brain it regenerates almost instantly. I'm not sure if anything could be done to change that."

I sipped my coffee, feeling some sort of heartbreak. I think for a while I really let myself believe that I could have helped others. I had hoped that this would be my redemption. I wanted to apologize to everyone for just existing. For not being how they are.

"I'm sorry," I finally replied.

He looked at me like a madman. Maybe he never saw me as fully human, not after the discovery. He certainly didn't think of me as someone he could have a regular conversation with and it started to disgust me. I desperately needed someone to talk to me like a normal person. Continuing to look at this poor fuck made me angry. I got up and walked away from him and his vain hope.

Next weekend I accepted my friend's invitation to a family barbecue. The afternoon was pleasant enough that I managed to distract myself for a couple of hours as I ate sausage and garlic bread and had casual conversations with people. 

While returning from the bathroom I heard one of the girls shouting. It was coming from upstairs. I walked up and approached her room. She was sitting on the carpet crying.

"Why does it keep hurting?" She screamed into the empty air. A woman appeared behind me and gave me a polite smile as she closed the door.

I left without saying goodbye.

Once again I tried to occupy myself with other things, but it became impossible. I was curious if I was truly the only person with this condition. History books and encyclopedias were of no help. At best they described a general impulse, a life energy usually put at the level of heartbeat, without which life was impossible. This was of no use to me. It made me feel worse, actually.

I started looking for it in art. I was reading as much as I could, watching movies, listening to music. I looked for any signs of understanding. Anything I could relate to. The more I searched, the more everything seemed to revolve around this pain. I started to notice it everywhere, places where it wasn't meant to be seen. I found a deep sorrow in every song about happiness and love and joy. After some time art stopped being something I found interesting or worth exploring. It was clear that none of it was meant for me.

Deep inside I had always felt like some sort of interloper. The feeling had haunted me at various points of my life yet it always hurt the same. It seemed that this was the deepest pain that was still available to me. I was tired of pretending I did not wish to be like all the others. I craved their approval and acceptance and at the same time resented myself for it. 

I couldn't stop looking at people on the street. Feeling pity for them. Wanting to share the good news with them, if it was ever that. Good thing! Not everyone feels what you feel. There's someone out there who doesn't hurt, you miserable fuck. I wanted to find a single person who would be happy to hear that. Maybe my dying grandfather would have been. I didn't really know him that well.

About a year had passed since the funeral. One of my cousins was about to celebrate her First Holy Communion. I couldn't bear seeing my family at that point. I found some flimsy sickness-related excuse, which, come to think of it, was not entirely false. That same day I went out and purchased a handgun and took it into the woods.

I found an isolated place, a wide depression in the ground which would mute some of the noise. I went down into it, stumbling a few times. A squirrel watched this from afar. Once I found the right spot, I couldn't get myself to move anymore. It felt as if all the forces in the world converged here. They put me there and even now they wouldn't or couldn't stop pushing.

I made sure to get as much noise isolation as possible. Ear plugs and ear muffs. As I stood there with the gun in my hand all I could hear was my breath. I thought about everything that used to give me comfort, the feeling of belonging, community, shared struggle, the hardships of life and grief. I used to think I was one of them. I used to think that at the very least I was a human being. What else could I have called myself?

I put the gun behind my head so that it was facing away. In just a moment I would join them. I had wanted this kind of assurance my whole life and now I could finally receive it. No one else had it. You can't unknowingly unite in something. I was the only one granted this chance. I would have brothers in hurt and sisters in ache. I just had to do this one thing and then I would be with them forever.