The crack in the ceiling looks like a river if I turn my head. I found it the first week and I check it every morning which is actually every afternoon because I don’t get up until noon but it’s my morning, it counts. Same river. Same brown spot at the end where the water got in that one time, which is the delta, which is where the river goes to be done being a river. I haven’t named it yet. I keep thinking I’ll name it and then I don’t.
I didn’t sleep. I don’t sleep. I haven’t slept right since they pulled me out and that was eighteen months ago and you’d think, you’d think at some point your body would just give up and accept it but it doesn’t, it just lies there at three AM with the ceiling right there and the pull doing its thing, this pressure behind my ribs like someone parked a car on my chest and left. In the Bright I slept like I was dead. I slept and the dreams were part of the story and the story was good and I woke up and the light was —
Okay. I’m up. Sitting up. Blanket off. Kira’s pillow smells like the coconut stuff. Eleven euros for shampoo which is insane but she says it’s the only one and you can’t argue with Kira about hair. You can’t argue with Kira about most things but especially hair. She sent me the article three times. Sulfates strip the natural oils from the hair shaft. The hair shaft, Kira.
I write the note. Drain’s slow again. I fished out the hair catch thing and it’s definitely yours. All of it. Every strand. I did a DNA analysis. Smiley face. Mouth first then eyes. I always do the mouth first, I don’t know when that started but it’s the order now and you can’t change the order.
Bathroom. Cold tiles. Come on come on come on. I count the drops until the water gets hot. I don’t know why I count them. Forty-three today. Better than yesterday’s sixty-something.
My stomach does the thing. The twist, low, the morning thing. I put my hand on the wall and breathe. It’s fine. It’s just my body saying hello in the way my body says hello which is shit, my body’s hello is shit, but it passes. It always passes.
Yogurt. Plain. Tastes like absolutely nothing which is the point because nothing stays down reliably and the nothing-flavored stuff has the best odds. I put almonds in because almonds are protein and protein is skin and skin is — it matters. For tonight. I need to be — I eat them one at a time with my fingers because there are no clean spoons because Kira. That’s going in tomorrow’s note. With a less smiley face.
The light comes over the building across the alley around twelve-thirty and right now it’s hitting the yogurt container on the counter and the plastic is glowing. White going gold. And I stop and look at it because this is what the real world gives me. This. A yogurt container in a window for about forty minutes a day. A little hit. A crumb of what it’s like in there where everything looks like this all the time, where the light isn’t some accidental thing that happens to a kitchen for half an hour, it’s the whole world, the whole sky, every surface. Two years of that. Two years of waking up to light that made sense and now I’m standing in a kitchen with no clean spoons looking at a yogurt container and my chest is doing the thing and my eyes are doing the thing and it’s a yogurt container, Laila, get it together.
Six hours.
Six hours and I’m back in. Not a sample this time. Not the forty-minute tease they gave me during intake where they pull you out right when you’re starting to feel it, right when the world is assembling around you and your skin is remembering what touch is supposed to feel like. Tonight is real. Tonight is the full session. Tonight is —
Tonight Sébastien is taking me riding.
I haven’t said it out loud. I’ve said it in my head maybe four hundred times since Tuesday but I haven’t said it out loud because if I say it and something goes wrong, if the session gets cancelled or the story resets or they change the narrative track, if I lose him, if I lose the horses —
I can’t.
He said bring layers because it might be cool where we’re going. He said it like that, casual, like it was nothing, like he hadn’t just told me that he planned something for us, something outside, something with air and space and the smell of — he doesn’t even know about the farm. I didn’t tell him. The system must have — or he just, he just knew. The way he knows things about me that I haven’t said. The way he looks at me like I’m the thing in the room that matters, which nobody, nobody in this flat grey nothing world has ever —
Paul would say the system is reading my profile. Paul would say the Companion AI is optimized for attachment formation and the emotional resonance I’m feeling is engineered, is designed, is the exact neurochemical sequence that produces pair bonding and it’s targeted, Laila, it’s targeted at you specifically based on your psychological intake and your trauma history and your attachment patterns and —
Fuck Paul. Fuck his careful Waker voice and his PDFs about reintegration and his apartment that smells like chlorine and his sad patient eyes. Fuck the way he says my name like it’s something fragile. I’m not fragile. I’m just — I want to ride horses tonight with someone who looks at me like I exist and I don’t think that’s fragile, I think that’s normal, I think that’s the most normal thing a person can want.
I check my phone. Mika Voss got a new tattoo and it’s — okay I don’t want to be mean but the proportions are wrong. It’s supposed to be a serpent but the tail goes into her armpit and the head is on her collarbone and it looks like the serpent is trying to leave her body which maybe is the point but I don’t think it’s the point. Also Cascade might be doing a collab with Yuna Faye which would be actually amazing because Yuna Faye is the only person making stuff that looks good on girls who disappear when they turn sideways. I screenshot it. I’ll show Kira. She won’t care but I’ll show her anyway.
Two missed calls from Paul. From this morning. Which means he called while I was lying in bed not sleeping and staring at the ceiling and counting the hours and he called twice because Paul always calls twice, never once, never three times, twice, like there’s a protocol for it, like the Waker handbook says if the client doesn’t answer on the first attempt, try once more and then respect the boundary and I can hear his voice saying respect the boundary because that’s how Paul talks, that’s how all the Wakers talk, this careful language like they’re handling something that might break and honestly? Honestly, fuck that. I’m not going to break. I’m going to ride horses tonight.
I put on the sneakers, the white ones I keep clean. I scrub them with an old toothbrush every Sunday. Not my toothbrush, that would be disgusting. I tie them tight and check the erased mirror, the side where my face is still all there. The other side the silver is gone and half my face disappears if I stand too close. I don’t stand too close.
Hoodie. Jeans. Hair up. I look fine. I look like a girl going out to do things on a Tuesday afternoon. I look normal.
Five hours forty-five minutes.
I take my bag and my keys and I leave.
The stairs smell like they always smell. I skip the sticky part of the banister on the third floor, my hand lifting off and landing back on after. My body knows this building better than I do.
Outside is — outside is outside. Flat light, grey sky, Neon Row in the afternoon looking like a party that got left out overnight. The signs are off. Some of them are buzzing, trying. A puddle in the gutter with a takeaway box floating in it like a little boat going nowhere.
The colours are wrong. They’re always wrong. Not wrong like broken wrong, just — not enough. Like someone turned the saturation down to sixty percent and walked away. In the Bright everything is — I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep comparing everything to that. But my brain does it anyway, this constant running scoreboard, real world: 4, Bright: 10, real world: 3, Bright: 10, real world: —
I walk.
My mum used to say I walked too fast. My mum used to say a lot of things from the sofa while she held a glass of water she never drank. Slow down baby. Where are you going so fast. Nowhere, mum. Same as you. Except you found somewhere to go, didn’t you. You found somewhere and you went there and you took me with you and then you left me here.
Two years. She had money for two years. She didn’t tell me it was two years. She said you’ll love it baby it’s so beautiful and I went in at sixteen and she was right, she was fucking right, it was the most beautiful — and then it was over. For me. Not for her. She’s still in there. Still in her pod in some Haven, my mum, with her glass of water that someone else holds now, some machine, some system, and I’m out here walking too fast through Neon Row with my sneakers and my bag and my six hours and my —
Five hours thirty minutes. I need to stop.
There’s a woman outside the noodle bar sweeping. She’s always sweeping. The pavement is always dirty the next day and she sweeps it again. I want to say something to her, like I see you, I see you doing this thing every day that never stays done, and you do it anyway, every morning, which is either crazy or —
No. That’s the kind of shit Paul says. Paul with his metaphors about recovery being a daily practice. Sweeping is sweeping. She’s sweeping because it’s her job and the pavement is dirty and that’s it.
I walk past. She doesn’t look up.
My phone buzzes. Paul. Not a call this time, a message. Hey. Just checking in. Call me when you get a chance?
The question mark. The careful question mark. Not demanding. Not pushing. Just — available. Standing there with his hands open like a man at a door that he won’t walk through unless I invite him. Which I won’t. Because the last time I invited him through a door he sat on my bed and said the pull doesn’t go away, Laila, you have to learn to live beside it and I wanted to scream at him, I wanted to put my fist through his careful patient face because live beside it? LIVE beside it? Like it’s a roommate. Like it’s Kira and her coconut shampoo. Like the thing that is eating me from the inside, this constant screaming need that makes everything taste like cardboard and every face look like a mask and every sky look like a ceiling — like I should just make peace with that. Set up a nice little life next to the thing that’s killing me.
He kissed me once. In his apartment. After a session where I’d been crying for an hour about the ejection and he made tea and I was on his sofa and it just happened, or he let it happen, or I made it happen, I don’t know whose mouth moved first. He tasted like the tea. Earl Grey. His hand was on my jaw and it was warm and it was real and I felt — nothing. I felt his hand and his mouth and the tea taste and I was lying there thinking this is what real is, this is what a real person kissing you feels like, this is the best version of this and it was fine. It was a solid six. And Sébastien hadn’t even kissed me yet but the way he looked at me across the table in the second session, the way his eyes did that thing where the whole world narrows to just your face — that was a ten before anything even happened.
Paul pulled back and said we shouldn’t and I said no and he said this doesn’t help you and I said I know and that was it. We haven’t talked about it. He went back to being my Waker. I went back to being his client. Except now when he calls twice and sends careful messages with question marks I can feel the other thing underneath, the thing he won’t say, the thing that sounds like I know you’re going to do something tonight and I’m scared for you and I can’t stop you because I’m your fucking Waker not your boyfriend and I chose that, I chose the Waker and not the boyfriend, and now I’m standing at a door I won’t walk through sending question marks.
I don’t reply to the message. I keep walking.
The cat is on the steps of the betting shop. Same steps, same cat, big orange thing with one ear that’s been chewed to a rounded nub. He’s been there every day for as long as I’ve been coming this way and he never moves when I pass. I crouch down and he looks at me with that face cats have, the total contempt that is also somehow an invitation.
“Hey,” I say. “Still here.”
He blinks. Slow. A cat blink is supposed to mean they trust you. I read that somewhere. A slow blink is like a kiss in cat language. He blinks at me and I blink back, slow, my face probably looking insane, a girl crouching on a dirty step blinking at a cat, and he puts his head down on his paws and that’s that. Conversation over.
I scratch behind his good ear. He lets me. His fur is rough and warm and he’s purring, this low rattle like a small motor that doesn’t quite work, and I can feel his skull under the fur, the hard small shape of it, the realness of it. This is real. This cat is real. This purring is happening right now in the actual world and nobody engineered it and nobody optimised it for my psychological profile, it’s just a cat on some steps who lets me scratch his ear.
I stay there too long. My knees hurt. A man steps over me going into the betting shop and gives me a look and I don’t care.
The thing about the Bright is you can’t explain it to people who haven’t been in. You can say the light is better and they think you mean brighter. You can say the colours are more and they think you mean saturated. You can say people’s faces move right and they look at you like you’re insane because faces move, everyone’s face moves, what are you talking about. But they don’t. Not enough. Not the way — in the Bright when someone smiles at you their whole face participates, every muscle, and you can see the thought behind it, the intention, the specific feeling that made them smile, and it’s not that real people don’t feel things, they do, but real faces are — lazy. Approximate. The signal gets lost between the feeling and the skin.
Sébastien’s face when he told me to bring layers. Every part of it was in on the secret. Every part of it was saying I found something for you and you’re going to love it and I can’t wait to watch you love it.
Paul’s face when he kissed me said I shouldn’t be doing this.
I stand up. My knees crack. I wipe cat hair off my jeans and keep walking toward Emre’s place for the börek that stays down.
Five hours ten minutes.
Emre’s place is on the corner by the old market. It’s called something in Turkish I can’t pronounce and I’ve been coming here four times a week for a year and I still can’t pronounce it and at this point it would be weird to ask. He sees me through the window. By the time I’m at the counter the börek is in the paper and the tea is poured. Two sugars. I’ve never asked for two sugars. He just decided. And I’ve never told him to stop because the sweetness is part of it, part of what this specific thing tastes like, and if I changed it it would be a different thing and I don’t have enough things to start changing the ones that work.
“Emre.”
He nods. Puts the börek on the counter. The tea beside it.
I sit at the table by the window. There’s a man at the other table reading an actual paper newspaper, glasses on his nose, turning the pages slow, and I think about how some people just live in the world like it’s enough. Like the newspaper and the coffee and the glasses and the slow turning is enough. Like they don’t have a thing in their chest pulling them somewhere else every second of every day. Must be nice. Must be so fucking nice to sit there and read about whatever’s happening and not feel like you’re watching it all through a window with dirty glass.
The börek is hot and the cheese is salty and the first bite is the best thing I eat all day. It stays. It always stays. This is the food that my body accepts, this specific thing, from this specific place, made by this specific man who doesn’t talk to me and puts in two sugars without asking. Everything else is a negotiation. Every other thing I put in my mouth, my stomach has an opinion about, a meeting, a whole review process. But the börek goes in and stays and I eat it slow because it’s good and because I’m not in a rush, I have hours, I have all these hours that I need to fill before tonight and filling them is the hardest part because filling them means being here, in this, in the flat grey sixty-percent world, and every minute is a minute I’m not there.
In the first session they let me in for forty minutes. Forty minutes. I was in a city, I think, or the edge of one, and the light was — I cried for the first ten minutes. Just stood there in whatever street they’d put me in and cried because the light was right again. The colours were right. The sky was that blue. My skin felt like my skin for the first time in sixteen months and I couldn’t move, I just stood there crying on a street that didn’t exist while a technician in a room somewhere probably made a note on a clipboard.
The second session was an hour and that’s when I met Sébastien and I don’t want to talk about that, I don’t want to think about it in this bakery eating this börek because if I start thinking about the way he — about the restaurant and the table by the window and how he asked me about my life, my actual life, and I told him about the horses, I told him without thinking, it just came out, the farm, the brown mare with the white mark, the way she’d come to me in the morning, and his face when I told him, the way it opened, the way he said I know a place —
I need to stop. I’m in the bakery. The light through the window is on my hands. On the grease spots on the paper. Gold. For a second my hand in the light looks like a hand in the Bright, lit from inside, warm, and I want to stay in this second, I want to live in this crumb, but the light is already moving, it’s always already moving, forty minutes and then the building’s shadow takes the kitchen window back, two hours and then the clouds come in, nothing stays, nothing in this world stays, and in there everything —
I draw a smiley on the börek paper with my fingernail. Mouth first. Eyes. You can only see it if you hold it up to the light. A secret face. A little proof I was here.
I leave a coin on the table. Emre doesn’t look up from whatever he’s doing behind the counter. Our relationship is perfect. It requires nothing from either of us except the börek and the coin and the nod and I wish every relationship in my life was this clean.
I’m walking back up Metzger and I take the turn before the bridge, the one that goes past the alley, and I don’t know why I take this turn, I usually don’t, the alley is the alley, it goes between two buildings to a stairwell that goes down to a basement that used to be something and I don’t look.
But I look.
There’s a girl on the bottom step. She’s — sitting. That’s what she’s doing. Sitting on the bottom step with a skirt ridden up and a top that’s too thin and one shoe broken, the heel bent sideways. Her makeup is smeared under one eye. She has marks on her neck. Red. Not from a necklace.
She’s my age. She might be younger.
She looks up at me and I look at her and for a second we’re just — two girls looking at each other across an alley at two in the afternoon in Neon Row and her eyes are flat. Not empty. Flat. Like someone turned the contrast all the way down. Like someone took whatever was in there and used it up and didn’t put it back.
I should say something. I should — I don’t know. Something. Are you okay, do you need — but I don’t say anything because my mouth isn’t working and my legs aren’t working and there’s this thing happening in my chest that I can’t — it’s not the pull, it’s something else, it’s like looking at a version of —
She should take better care of herself. That’s what I think. Standing there. Looking at her. She should — there are places, there are options, you don’t have to end up on a step with your — and Elysium isn’t, it’s not the same, it’s completely different, they have rules and protocols and the sleeve and monitoring and it’s professional, it’s a professional operation with medical checks and a front desk and Ana who wears the berry lipstick and it’s not —
I walk away. Fast. My sneakers on the pavement making that sound, the almost-beat, except the beat is faster now and my heart is going and I’m walking and I’m not thinking about the girl on the step, I’m thinking about tonight, I’m thinking about Sébastien and the field and the horses and the way the grass will smell when the world comes in, when the visor — when the session starts, when I’m there, when I’m finally —
I make it to the corner. The bin by the phone repair place.
I throw up.
The börek. The tea. The almonds. All of it. I’m bent over with my hand on the metal and my eyes streaming and there’s spit hanging from my mouth and the cheese is burning in my throat and my body is shaking, just this fine tremor everywhere, my hands, my arms, and the woman across the street is looking at me and I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and spit.
The yogurt probably. Or the almonds. Old almonds. You can’t always tell with almonds, they go rancid inside the shell and you don’t know until — it’s the almonds. It’s the heat. I’ve been walking in the sun without water. My body. Being dramatic. Being a body.
I drink from the fountain on the corner. Warm water. Tastes like pipes. I swish and spit and drink again. Check my sneakers. Clean. Thank god. Okay.
I check my phone. A message from Kira. Just a photo of a spoon in the sink with a question mark. The spoon war continues. I send back a skull emoji. This is good. This is normal. This is a normal interaction between two normal people about a spoon.
Four hours forty minutes.
I keep walking. Not back toward Metzger. I can’t be near the alley. I take a street I don’t usually take, narrower, the buildings leaning in at the top, and I walk until my legs stop shaking and my head stops replaying the step and the shoe and the flat eyes and then my head finds something else to replay instead.
The farm. I think about the farm. The brown mare with the white mark between her eyes like someone pressed a thumb there. Her name was Bijou which is a stupid name for a horse, too delicate, she was huge and warm and her breath moved the hair on my arms when she leaned over the fence.
I was nine. Maybe ten. We lived in the house by the road, the small one with the green door, and the farm was right there, just past the fence, and the horses were right there. My mum’s boyfriend that year, Marc, he worked at the farm. He was the one who showed me how to stand near them, how to let them come to you, how to keep your hands low and open. He was patient about it. He was patient about everything at first.
They’re always okay at first.
The thing about Marc is he was okay for months, actually months, and my mum was calm when she was with him and the house was calm and I had the horses and the green door and the morning where I’d go out before anyone was up and Bijou would come to the fence and I’d put my face against her neck and she smelled like — like horse. Like hair and grass and the ground after rain. And I was happy. I think I was actually happy. I think that might have been the last time I was happy in a way that wasn’t complicated.
I don’t know when it changed with Marc. That’s the thing nobody tells you, that you can’t draw a line, you can’t say this is when it started, it just — the air changed. He started being in the doorway when I came out of the bathroom. He started saying things that weren’t anything but were something. He started touching my shoulder when he walked past and then my back and then lower and my mum was right there, my mum was in the next room and she didn’t — she was on the halo, she was always on the halo, and she didn’t —
I’m walking fast. I’m walking fast and my hands are fists and my jaw hurts from clenching. I’m on a street in Neon Row and that was ten years ago and Marc is probably still at the farm or maybe he’s dead or maybe he’s in the Bright, everyone ends up in the Bright eventually, and the horses are still there behind the fence or they’re not, horses die, horses get old and die, and Bijou is probably dead.
Sébastien’s mare has the same mark. I didn’t tell the system about Bijou. I didn’t tell anyone about Bijou. But the mare in the second session had the white mark between her eyes and when Sébastien said I know a place — he’s taking me back. He’s taking me to the version where it was good. The horses without Marc. The morning without the doorway. The green door without —
Okay, the system is reading my profile. I know that. Paul said it enough times that I know it. Companion AI, psychological intake, trauma history, attachment patterns. But knowing it is one thing and feeling Sébastien’s eyes on my face while I talked about the horses is another thing and I don’t care if it was designed, I don’t care if every molecule of what I felt was engineered, it felt like someone was listening to me for the first time in my life and that is not nothing, that is not just a neurochemical sequence, fuck you Paul, that is a person hearing me.
A person. An AI. A system reading my profile.
Whatever. Tonight there are horses.
Paul is standing outside the pharmacy on the corner of Linden and Metzger.
Of course he is. Of course he is standing there with his jacket and his careful face and his hands in his pockets like he just happened to be in the neighbourhood which he didn’t, he doesn’t live here, he lives on the south side near the treatment plant, and he’s here because he knows. He knows about tonight. He knows about Elysium. Someone told him or he figured it out or he just — he’s a Waker, they always know, they can smell it, this sixth sense for when their clients are about to do something they disapprove of.
“Hey,” he says. Like it’s casual. Like we just ran into each other. Like he didn’t drive twenty minutes to stand outside a pharmacy on my street.
“Hey.”
“You look good.”
“I look the same.”
“You look — how are you sleeping?”
And there it is. How are you sleeping. The Waker question, the diagnostic question, the question that isn’t a question but an assessment. How are you sleeping means how bad is the pull. How are you sleeping means are you coping. How are you sleeping means I’m worried about you but I’ll put it in medical language because that’s safer than saying Laila, I’m scared for you, please don’t do this.
“Fine,” I say. “I’m sleeping fine.”
“I called this morning.”
“I was asleep.” Which is a lie and he knows it’s a lie and I know he knows and we’re standing here in this lie like it’s a room we’re both in.
“Can we walk for a bit?”
I should say no. I should say I’m busy, I have things to do, I have — prep. I have prep to do and a date to get ready for and I don’t need his careful eyes and his patient voice and his —
“Sure,” I say. Because I’m an idiot. Because part of me wants him here even though every other part of me wants him gone. Because he’s real and he’s warm and he smells like chlorine and something else, something that might be laundry detergent or might just be Paul, this specific Paul smell that I remember from his apartment, from the sofa, from the kiss that was a six.
We walk.
He doesn’t say anything for a block. That’s a Paul move. The silence that’s supposed to make me fill it. The therapeutic pause. I learned about this from a girl in the Waker programme who said they train them to do it, to leave space, to let the client come to them. Like fishing. You cast the line and you wait and eventually the fish swims up and hooks itself because it can’t stand the quiet.
I can stand the quiet. I can stand the quiet longer than he can.
Half a block.
“So I talked to Dena,” he says.
Dena. Another Waker. Older. Runs one of the safe houses in Driftwood where they put the girls who come out of the Bright with nowhere to go, which was me, eighteen months ago, sleeping on a cot with a blanket that smelled like industrial detergent, and Dena standing in the doorway every morning saying how did we sleep and me wanting to say we didn’t sleep, Dena, we lay here all night with our eyes open wanting to die.
“Cool,” I say.
“She’s worried about you.”
“Dena’s worried about everyone. That’s her job. She gets paid to worry.”
“She said you stopped coming to group.”
“Group is boring.”
“She said you missed your last two check-ins.”
“I was busy.”
“Doing what?”
And I can feel it. The careful tone shifting. The patience getting thin at the edges. Good. I want him thin. I want him to crack first because if he cracks first then I don’t have to, then I can be the one who was calm, who was fine, who had it together while he lost his shit, and that means I win, and winning means —
“Laila, what are you doing tonight?”
“I have a date.”
“A date.”
“Yes. A date. A man is taking me somewhere nice. We’re going riding. Horses.” I look at him. I smile. The big one. The charming one. The one that used to work on him when I was on his sofa and he was trying to be professional. “You should see his face when he looks at me, Paul. You should see it. Nobody’s ever looked at me like that. Not you. Not anyone.”
That lands. I watch it land. His jaw tightens. His hands come out of his pockets and go back in.
“Is this the Companion from the intake sessions?”
“His name is Sébastien.”
“Laila.”
“What.”
“You know what. You know what I’m going to say.”
“Then don’t say it. If I already know it then you don’t need to say it and we can just walk and you can go back to the south side and I can go home and get ready for my date and everyone can —”
“It’s not a date. It’s a session at a facility where they put you in a pod and —”
“Don’t.”
“— men pay to —”
“I said don’t.”
We stop walking. We’re on the corner of Linden where the dry cleaner used to be and the sign still says PRESSING in faded letters and we’re standing under the sign and people are walking past us and he’s looking at me and I’m looking at him and his eyes are doing the thing, the scared thing, the thing I can’t stand, because scared means he cares and caring means he’s real and real is not what I need right now.
“The protocols are serious,” I say. My voice is steady. I don’t know how. “They have rules. There’s monitoring, there’s a medical check, the sleeve protects — they don’t let them do anything that — other girls do this, Paul. Priya’s been doing it for a year. She’s fine. She does her eyeliner and she goes in and she comes out and she’s fine.”
“Have you talked to Priya?”
“What?”
“Have you actually talked to her. Have you asked her how she’s doing. Have you looked at her.”
“I don’t need to —”
“Because I work with three girls who came out of places like Elysium and I can tell you what fine looks like from the outside and what it looks like —”
“You don’t get to do this.” My voice is loud now. People are looking. I don’t care. “You don’t get to stand here and tell me what I’m doing wrong because you had your chance, Paul, you had your chance to make this okay, you were supposed to be the person who made the pull go away and you couldn’t, you couldn’t do it, your tea and your PDFs and your learn to live beside it — I can’t LIVE beside it. I can’t. I have been living beside it for eighteen months and it is eating me alive and you stand there with your careful voice and your sad eyes and you want me to what? Keep sweeping the pavement? Keep eating the börek? Keep watching the light on things and pretending it’s enough when it’s not, it’s not, it’s never —”
I stop. My throat hurts. My eyes are burning. He’s just standing there, taking it.
And then he does the thing. The imperfect thing. The human thing.
“You know why I stopped kissing you?” he says. Quiet. Not careful. Something else. “It wasn’t because of the rules. It wasn’t because I’m your Waker. It was because I could feel you comparing me. I could feel you lying there scoring me against something I can’t compete with. And I thought — I thought if I just keep showing up, if I just keep being here, eventually the real thing would — but it doesn’t, does it. I’m never going to be a ten. I’m never going to be the guy whose face does the right thing. I’m always going to be the six.”
I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t tell him about the six. I thought it but I didn’t say it. But he felt it. He felt it through the kiss, through my body, through whatever my face was doing while his mouth was on mine and his hand was on my jaw and I was running the scoreboard.
“Paul —”
“Go on your date, Laila.”
He says it flat. Not patient. Not careful. Tired. He’s tired. I can see it. The tiredness of someone who’s been casting a line for eighteen months and the fish just told him she’s swimming the other way.
“I didn’t mean —”
“Yeah. You did.” He takes a step back. Hands in pockets. The careful face coming back, the professional mask clicking into place like a visor. Like a visor going on. “I’ll be around. You have my number. If you need — I’ll be around.”
He walks away. Down Linden toward the bridge. His jacket. His shoulders. The back of his head where the hair is getting longer than he usually lets it get, which means he hasn’t been taking care of himself either, which means —
Which means nothing. Which means I’m standing under a sign that says PRESSING and my throat hurts and my eyes are burning and I just blew up at the one person who actually gives a shit about me and I did it because he was right and I couldn’t stand him being right so I turned it into his fault and now he’s walking away and his hair is too long and I’m horrible. I’m actually horrible.
Sébastien would never walk away. Sébastien would stay. Sébastien would say the right thing and his face would do the right thing and his hand would find my hand and he’d say I know, I know and —
Sébastien is software.
I know that.
I know that and I’m still choosing him.
Four hours.
I go home to do the prep.
The shower is hot. The building saves its good water for the afternoon and right now it’s actually hot, actually good, and I stand under it and I don’t count the drops. I just stand here with the water on my back and my shoulders and my face and I let it be the one thing that feels right today that isn’t a lie.
Paul’s face. When he said the thing about the six. His mouth made this shape like he was swallowing something that didn’t go down.
I wash my hair with the cheap shampoo. Two euros. Sulfates. Kira would die.
The prep. They gave me a list during intake. Typed. Laminated. Like a recipe card. Suggested preparation for your first session. Suggested. Like it’s optional. Like you could just show up without doing any of it and everything would be fine, except Priya told me the girls who don’t prep don’t last, the clients notice, the clients have preferences, and the clients’ preferences are the reason the system works and the system is the reason I get to go back in tonight so.
Moisturiser. Unscented. Everywhere. Legs, arms, stomach, the backs of my knees. I do it like the card says, section by section, thorough, my hands moving over my own skin like I’m prepping a surface for paint. Which I guess I am. Which is a thought I’m not going to have. My hands keep moving. The moisturiser smells like nothing. That’s the point. No competing scents. The client gets to smell what they want to smell. Or not smell anything. Or whatever. I don’t know what they want. I don’t need to know what they want because I won’t be here. I’ll be in the field with the horses.
I think about Sébastien’s hands. In the second session, at the restaurant, he reached across the table and put his hand over mine and his fingers were warm and I could feel the texture of them, calluses on the palm, the specific rough-smooth of a hand that does things, that works, and I thought this is what it’s supposed to feel like and I knew it wasn’t real and I didn’t care because his hand on my hand felt more like a hand than any hand I’ve ever —
Paul’s hand on my jaw. The kiss. Earl Grey.
I shave my legs. The razor is new, they said always use a new one, the card says fresh blade to avoid irritation, and I’m careful, slow, the backs of my calves, the insides of my thighs. There’s a nick on my ankle. A tiny bead of blood. I press toilet paper against it and wait. The laminated card doesn’t cover what to do about nicks but I figure pressing toilet paper against them is probably fine. I figure pressing toilet paper against small wounds is something the human body has been handling without a laminated card for a while.
I brush my teeth. Floss. The mouthwash that burns.
The sleeve. Blue packet. I open it and my hands know what to do because they practised during the training, they showed us, a woman in a uniform demonstrated on a plastic model and we all sat there with our blue packets and our plastic models and I remember thinking this is a class, I’m in a class, I’m being taught how to insert a protective sleeve so that men can — ok, whatever. This is just a class like any class, like learning CPR, like learning to parallel park, and my hands are doing the thing and my head is in the field, the grass is moving, Bijou is coming through the morning mist with her white mark and her huge dark eyes and her breath on my hands —
Done. Okay.
Clothes. The between clothes. Jeans, hoodie. I’ll change when I get there. They have the outfit. Ties at the back. Opens flat. I know this because they showed me during the tour, the room, the surface, the outfit on the table, and the woman — not Ana, someone else, someone from corporate — she held up the outfit and said it’s designed for full access while maintaining Bright interface integrity which is a sentence that a human being said to me with a straight face and I stood there and I nodded.
Full access while maintaining Bright interface integrity.
I eat a banana. Piece by piece. Fuel. My stomach is empty from the vomit and it needs something to run on tonight because tonight is — it’s a long session. Eight hours. My first real one. Eight hours in the field with Sébastien and the horses and the grass and the light and my body on a surface in room seven with the stirrups and the outfit that opens flat while —
I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking about the banana. The banana is fine. The banana is staying down.
I check the bag. Soap, wipes, phone, keys, water, the vanilla lip balm that’s ridiculous. And in the inside pocket, the horse. The plastic keychain from the vending machine outside the grocery store near the farm. One euro. The legs are too short. The head is too big. The paint is gone off one ear. I’ve had it since I was nine. Since Bijou. Since the green door and the fence and the morning before anyone was up.
I hold it. The plastic is warm from the jacket.
I think about the girl on the step. The broken shoe. The flat eyes. The marks on her neck.
I think about the laminated card.
I think about Sébastien saying I know a place and his face opening like a window.
I think about Paul walking away down Linden with his hair too long.
I put the horse back in the pocket.
I write one more note for Kira. Gone out. Back late. If I left any food in the fridge it’s yours. Except the yogurt. Actually have the yogurt. Actually I don’t care. Smiley face. Mouth first. Eyes. It takes me three tries because my hand is shaking and the pen keeps slipping and the mouth comes out wrong, a line instead of a curve, and the eyes come out wrong, too big, and I leave it anyway because a bad smiley face is still a smiley face and you don’t throw away faces.
Three hours.
The walk to the facility is twenty minutes. South. Past The Strip where the bouncers are already outside, past the bridge. Neon Row is changing, the signs starting to flicker on, the first bass coming up through the pavement from somewhere underground like a heartbeat. The district putting on its night face.
I cross the bridge. The light on the river is low and gold and breaking into pieces on the water and I don’t stop to look at it. I don’t stop. If I stop I’ll look at the light and the light will be beautiful and the beautiful will remind me of the Bright and the Bright will pull and the pull will — I’m already going. I don’t need the pull right now. I just need my legs to keep moving for twenty minutes.
The border zone. Where the neon stops working. Missing letters, cracked tubes. The dead club on the corner with the sign that still comes on at dusk, E_CTRI, the rest gone. I like that sign. It doesn’t know the thing it’s advertising is dead. It just keeps going. Every night. Lighting up for nobody.
A woman comes out of a building ahead of me. She’s wearing the outfit. Not the exact outfit — a version. She’s got a jacket over it and she’s walking fast and she’s not looking at anyone and her face is — I don’t know her face. I can’t read it. It’s not flat like the stairwell girl’s. It’s just — closed. A door that used to be open.
She turns the corner. Gone.
I keep walking.
I can see the building.
It looks like an office. Grey paint. Glass door. A sign that says Elysium in a font that someone chose on purpose. There’s a planter by the entrance with something alive in it. The lobby has warm lighting and a desk and Ana behind the desk with her berry lipstick that is always the same shade.
“Hey, Ana.”
“Laila.” She smiles. The professional smile. “Big night.”
“Yeah.”
“You nervous?”
I am shaking inside my skeleton. My teeth want to chatter. My hands are in my pockets so she can’t see them.
“A little,” I say.
“Everyone is the first time. You’ll be great.” She types. Checks her screen. “Room seven. Locker’s same as training.”
“Thanks.”
The hallway. Clean. The lighting that doesn’t buzz. Doors with numbers. Behind one of them a sound, rhythmic, mechanical. Behind another one, nothing. Behind another one, nothing. The nothing is worse.
The locker room has four girls. Priya at the mirror doing her eyeliner. Steady hand. Perfect line. She’s been doing this for a year and her hand doesn’t shake and her eyeliner is perfect and she’s fine. She’s fine. Paul said have you looked at her and I’m looking at her and she’s — she’s fine. Her hand is steady. Her eyeliner is perfect. Her eyes in the mirror are —
“Hey,” she says. “First night?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s easy. You don’t feel anything. You’re in the story and they do whatever they do and you come out and you shower and you go home. That’s it.”
“Okay.”
“The first time is weird because you think you’re going to feel something but you don’t. The suit blocks it. The visor takes you out. You’re just — somewhere else.”
“Okay.”
She looks at me in the mirror. Something moves across her face. Quick. Gone.
“Drink water after,” she says. “Lots of water.”
I open my locker. My things from training, folded, clean. The outfit on the shelf. I take it out. Grey-blue. Soft. The ties at the back. I know how this works. I trained for this. The woman from corporate showed me. Full access while maintaining Bright interface integrity.
I put it on. Tie the back loose. The fabric is softer than anything I own.
I look in the mirror. The girl in the mirror looks like someone else. Someone who lives in a different building in a different part of the city. Someone whose life worked out. The outfit does something to my shoulders, my posture. I stand straighter. I look — fine. The girl in the mirror looks fine.
I put my clothes in the locker. Jeans, hoodie, sneakers, bag. I keep my phone. The horse goes in the side pocket of the outfit.
Priya is still at the mirror. Her eyeliner is perfect. Her hand is steady.
Her other hand, the one I can only see because the mirror is angled and she doesn’t know I can see it — her other hand is gripping the edge of the bench so hard the knuckles are white.
Room seven.
The surface. Wide. Low. Padded. The headrest with the cradle for the back of my skull. The visor on its mount. The suit on the table — just the upper body, arms and torso. White sheet pulled tight. Stirrups folded into the base.
The screen on the wall. My profile. My session time. Eight hours. My first.
And the schedule.
There’s a tab at the bottom of the screen that says Schedule. I shouldn’t press it. I know I shouldn’t press it. My finger presses it.
Ten.
Ten names in a column. User_kx8. User_rb3. User_tm1. Ten of them. Ten men. Tonight. In this room. On this surface.
While I’m in the field with Sébastien. While I’m riding Bijou. While the grass moves and the light is right and his hand is on my back and I can smell the horse, the hair and the sweat and the grass and the ground after rain.
Ten.
My hands grip the edge of the surface and I see my knuckles going white. Like Priya’s. Like Priya’s hand on the bench that she didn’t know I could see. My jaw is clenched. I unclench it and it clenches again. My body is doing things I’m not telling it to do.
The nausea comes. Not the morning thing. Not the börek thing. The real thing. The all-of-it thing. It comes up through my stomach and my chest and my throat and I press my hand over my mouth and I’m shaking, I’m shaking everywhere, my hands and my arms and my legs and my eyes are streaming and I can’t — I try to hold onto the field. The mare. The white mark. Sébastien. The grass. The light. Come on. Come on. The field is right there, it’s forty minutes away, less, just the setup and the calibration and then I’m there, I’m in, I’m with the horses and none of this matters, none of it, the ten names don’t matter because I won’t be here, I’ll be there, I’ll be —
The girl on the step. The flat eyes. The broken shoe.
Priya’s hand on the bench.
Full access while maintaining Bright interface integrity.
My mum on the sofa. You’ll love it baby. It’s so beautiful.
The smell of the field. The brown mare. The morning. The green door. Marc in the doorway.
The sleeve. The laminated card. The outfit that opens flat.
Paul walking away down Linden with his hair too long.
Ten names in a column.
I’m crying. I’m sitting on the edge of the surface in room seven and I’m crying and my hands are shaking and the visor is right there on its mount, the Bright is right there, the horses are right there, Sébastien is waiting for me in a field that doesn’t exist and he has the brown mare and he’s perfect, he’s perfect, he’s the most perfect thing and he’s not real and the ten names are real and the surface is real and the stirrups are real and I —
I get up.
I don’t decide to get up. I just start walking. My hands are pulling at the ties and the outfit is coming off and I’m pulling my jeans on and my hoodie and my sneakers and my hands are shaking so bad the laces take three tries like the smiley face, three tries, everything takes three tries today, and I grab my bag and the horse keychain is still in the outfit pocket and I go back for it, I reach into the soft grey-blue fabric and find the small plastic horse and put it in my jeans and I’m in the hallway and I’m walking and Ana looks up from the desk and says something I don’t hear and I’m through the glass door and I’m out.
Neon Row at night. The signs are on. Pink and blue and green, screaming. The bass from underground is a heartbeat. The air smells like rain and fried food and exhaust and the river at low tide, salt and mud and the underside of things.
I’m standing on the pavement in my hoodie and my jeans and my white sneakers and I’m crying. People are walking past me. The district is doing what it does. A man in a suit crosses the bridge going the wrong direction. A girl in heels walks past talking into her phone.
The pull is screaming. It’s screaming. The Bright is right behind me, right through that glass door, right there, the field and the horses and the light and Sébastien and the smell of the grass and everything, everything I want, everything that makes the world make sense, and I walked out. I walked out and the door closed behind me and I’m standing in the flat grey sixty-percent world with the wrong light and the wrong sky and the wrong colours and the pull is so loud I can feel it in my teeth.
Why am I choosing this. This street. This air. This neon. This body that throws up and shakes and doesn’t sleep and flinches when people touch it. Why am I choosing this over the field and the horses and the man whose face does the right thing.
I’m horrible and I’m standing on a street and I’m crying and I need —
I take out my phone. My hands are shaking. The screen is blurred because my eyes are blurred. I find his name. I press it.
It rings once. He picks up. He always picks up. Twice if I don’t answer. Once when I call.
“Paul,” I say.
“I’m here,” he says.
“I need —” I don’t know how to finish the sentence. I don’t know what I need. I need the pull to stop. I need the world to be enough. I need someone to tell me that the light on a yogurt container is not a lesser thing. I need the cat on the steps and the börek that stays down and the smiley face with the wrong eyes and the too-long hair on the back of a head walking away from me on Linden.
“I need help,” I say.
“Where are you?”
“Elysium. Outside. I didn’t — I went in and I didn’t —”
“Stay there,” he says. “I’m coming.”
The line goes quiet but he doesn’t hang up. I can hear him breathing. Breathing and moving, keys, a door, the sounds of a person leaving a place to come to another place because someone asked.
I stand on the pavement with the phone against my ear and the neon on my face and the pull screaming and the Bright behind me and the dark in front of me and I wait for the real thing.
The light from the signs is pink on the wet pavement. It’s ugly. It’s not the right light. It doesn’t stay and it doesn’t mean anything and nobody designed it.
I keep looking.