Chapter 15: unmarked helicopters

"No, that's a good question. I don't really know who they are. I've had theories. I've asked him directly, even. But he's always been cagey. I doubt he's even sure anymore. Nick Bostrom might hypothesize his reality, the one out there, is a simulation, but now we both know it's more literal here. We're one of a couple vaguely interconnected simulations. His role in this, however? I suspect he's something of a cat's paw. They're still watching us, collecting data, sometimes subtly, sometimes with whirling blades in the sky as a kind of shrug from On High. For whatever reasons, they've elected not to excise him. Maybe they're afraid if he got back out, I'd be able to hitch a ride and come with."

— 28 —

The coroner's table comes with certain benefits. Cold steel metal serves an instrumental purpose. When you dissect a body, you cut into something that's sixty percent water. They leak.

That's why the tables are grooved. Why at the very center, behind the back where congealed blood will pool, there's a little grate to collect fluids. Letting things slowly drain somewhere for safe disposal.

My bed doesn't come with those same benefits. Though as I sit up and stare at my phone clock in bleary confusion, I wish I did. Just carve holes into myself and dispose of waste and all the need to to move. Rot here in the sheets and the cold.

Says it's Sunday. Nearly four in the morning. A couple of idle texts from Monika I don't want to read.

No use in going back to sleep. But getting up and being alive feels wrong.

Not counting what I threw up the other day, I'm not sure I've eaten any food in maybe four days. I don't really feel faint, though. I slug away those feelings with coffee and vitamins. The renal system is the only part of my digestive system that's alive as I try to do push-ups.

It's a funny feeling, not eating. I've done it before, gone to bed hungry to save money. Sometimes as a kid. Sometimes here as a young adult. The first day is the worst. Day two, your body realizes it's not getting food. Your body changes states. In nature, food is not a guarantee; that's a strange abnormality of civilization, one that our bodies still aren't evolved to presuppose. You start hungry the first day. After that, everything shuts down. Focuses all energy on staying alive, being able to fight. Your stomach goes silent, your intestines compress once they're empty. Color and smell feels stronger. You can't sleep. Keep your fluids up, and the human body can stay in this strange, ravenous limbo for a very long time.

I dress up for the weather and step outside for fresh air. About the only other thing I feel safe filling my body with.

Like whenever I go outside, I find myself by that stupid couch. Natsuki said opossums don't go to ground for the winter. I take a bit of something from the fridge out of my pocket, the crumbs falling into the snow, and set it on the old couch.

Standing there with hands in my pockets for warmth, I wait. And wait. Until there's a scratching sound. A very agitated opossum with a patch of fur that looks like Texas crawls out.

"Sup, buddy," I say.

Dustin sniffs.

"Where's your friend? Girlfriend, maybe?" I ask.

He makes a face.

"Trouble in paradise too, bro?"

Dustin turns his head sideways to grab the food I left for him.

"Has anyone else been feeding you?" I ask. "I'm worried for your health. You know I spoil you."

He looks up at me, gnawing the food. It takes me a moment to realize he's not really looking at me. Something above and behind me.

I turn to follow his gaze, the mist from my breath nearly blinding me. There, in the sky, is one of Monika's black helicopters. Looking for little green men or some other X-Files monster. It's flying over campus towards me. I stand and stare as it goes overhead.

Dustin makes a noise and ducks back into the couch for safety.

The helicopter keeps flying out past the city, slow and steady.

I keep staring.

Before I feel my legs moving on their own. Walking in the same direction as the bird. It's gone over the low-income houses, into the blurry borderlands that infest every city. The places you only ever see by casually browsing Google Maps. Islands of green punctuating the concrete jungle.

Monika said there was a major military base near here. Which one, though?

I keep walking and don't know what I'm doing.

I hop a fence and keep on towards the poorly developed land.

My pace quickens. The unmarked black helicopter does likewise. Like it knows I'm following it.

First through empty lots. Then through poorly maintained ghettos. The roads aren't conducive to following it.

My pace quickens. Until I realize I'm jogging through the snowy neighborhood in the middle of the night. This is the direction Natsuki had come from yesterday, right? These houses look like shit, but at least they're not high residency Commie blocks.

It keeps flying. Further and further into the night. Until I can only really track it by the roar of the blades.

My pace quickens. I'm running. The cracked, unmaintained roads end. It just trails off into a quiet death in a snowback. My breaths are the only thing hot about me. Every one I take, every exhale of mist, I lose warmth. But I keep running, because I know I'm fast. As the snow ends and I enter a dark forest.

Further and further away from the halogen lights of civilization into the midnight unknown.

Chasing that fucking noise even when the trees block the stars.

I slip on a patch of ice. I hit the ground hard, getting wet snow and red Georgia soil on my jacket. I brush it off as the cold soaks through to my arm. I need to keep going. I need to follow this fucking thing.

Until the ends of the earth.

I can run miles without problem. Fast. The uneven terrain, the ice and snow, the forest, it's only a mild barrier.

So long as I can hear the whirling blades, I have a direction I can sprint.

And I can feel the nutritional void in my legs and thighs. Running miles, that kind of distance, without carbohydrates gives me a feeling of lacking some essential component to being itself. That I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be doing it. My soggy arm goes numb from the cold, molecular friction slowing down, and my body automatically retreats the hot blood to keep my hollow core alive.

I exhale. I pant. I force out heat and mist.

There's a fence. I leap and haul myself over the edge. My fingertips stick to the frozen wet metal, peeling off with a barely audible sssp like tearing the film off a new TV.

I hit the ground and roll into the snow. Gasping for breath as I crumble into an odd tangle of limbs I can no longer feel. I feel parts of my esophagus choke up with ice crystals and cough them out, a bloody and raw slush. My stomach churns at the mess in front of me, and looming acid and bile warms the back of my throat.

People can say they like the cold. They like the winter. That's not true. Human existence is bound to a narrow band of temperature, beyond which we boil, beyond which everything becomes an immutable husk until the spring thaw. What we like is the predictability of the seasons. The ability to forecast it and prevent it. And spit in its face because we can build a fire and bundle up.

The whirling blades are louder than ever.

I push myself off the snow, leaving gorey fingerprints. Hold my unfeeling arm to my chest as I stumble forwards after it.

And find myself in a clearing. The stars infest the sky like a pox.

The unmarked helicopter is hovering.

I stand there. It rotates towards me, the blades kicking up a snowstorm that stings my eyes and blinds me. Freezing my eyes shut. I force them open with the torn remnants of my fingers. My blood is alive and it flinches, trying to desperately claw back up my arms into the safety of my heart. Refusing to return to the feelingless nothing of my extremities.

I expect the screaming helicopter to cast down a spotlight. For men in black to rappel down. Take me to some dark government facility to peel away at whatever's left of my skin and leave me raped and gutted on some mortician's table.

In this explosion of sound and ice, I feel reduced to a crawling, barely coherent thing at the extremities of a disintegrating world. Up and down, hot and cold, become mere vague abstractions I can't quite pinpoint anymore.

"Hey!" I scream, tasting blood and stomach acid. My own voice is hoarse and raspy. "Hey! Who the fuck are you?"

It hovers.

"Answer me, you cocksucker!"

The helicopter dips forward, like a nod of divine acknowledgment. You are here. I see you. And do not care. Before the force of the blades sucks it inevitably forwards, back towards the city.

The snow calms down.

I cough. I inhale with a sucking sound. Out that way, the way I had been going, lies nothing. A dark void stained white with disrupted snow. Needle-fingered tendrils of death where the world simply has no opinion of me. Reality ceases to have any tangible meaning.

I wasn't meant to go this far. The world simply ends.

The way the helicopter went, it's back towards the city. Towards home and halogen lights and the university and everyone I know.

Monika may kill me. The indifferent cold will.

I swear. Spit out blood. And trudge back the way I came, blind but for an indescribable internal compass. I haul myself over the fence. Choke as I hit the snow on the other side. And keep walking and walking.

There's no more sound of the helicopter. There's nothing at all. The world recedes behind me with every stick I take, closing on me to become nothing more than some vague dark space you might overlook on a Google Maps walkabout of your home.

It took forever to get to the edge of the world. I seem to take thirteen steps through a numb lack of thought before I'm back on that broken road. The morning sun gives me a noncommittal glance.

My legs remain shaky. Like a newborn fawn fresh from a gangbang.

I stand behind someone's idling car, warming up my fingers in the toxic exhaust. Poisoning myself hot until the owner comes back outside and screams at me to get away from his ride. When I just stare at him, rubbing my hands together, he draws a handgun.

"Fuck away from my car, boy!"

The barrel is black. He's got no trigger discipline.

"Go on, git!" he screams.

I eye him skeptically, shrug, and walk off silently.

— 29 —

Can't say exactly where I am. And it doesn't help that I keep my eyes to the cloudy sky. Just moving forwards because the friction and sweat-chafing warms me up. Hands in my pockets because I don't know what else to do with them.

There's a familiar thoroughfare I eventually find by following the roads like water down the grooves on someone's back. The snowplows have done good work since my coffee date. I cross the street and find myself back on university grounds, from the wrong side as I usually come from. Like I'd circled the entire city, something going down the drain.

Everything is going numb again as I find the Laster Student Center. I go inside for the heat. The smell of food makes my shriveled stomach twist into a knot. I lean against a wall and fight back the urge to throw up. Enough students still live on campus that even on a Sunday morning it feels packed with life. Some of it is human. Others are the garish holiday lights, red and green. There's a big tree set up in the middle of the atrium, non-denominational and inoffensively bland in appearance.

I rub my hands together. There's lingering discoloredness. The knuckles are swollen and cracked open from the dryness. The feeling creeps back into my digits, each heartbeat a new throb of some dull ache I barely register. Just more background noise. More fog to add to the jumbled mess of my mental innards.

The indefinite buzz of my own name catches my attention.

I look up languidly to see Yuri standing there, coffee cup in a little cardboard sleeve in her hand, book tucked under her arm. White sweater that's only thick enough to survive brief jaunts from one building to another.

"Wow. It is you," Yuri says, and then just sort of stands there as I don't reply. She brings her arm against her chest, almost defensively. "Are you okay?"

I try to speak. The moment I vibrate my voice box, I feel the rawness from the part of my own throat I choked out. The sudden shock makes me stagger. I end up just shaking my head, leaning further against the wall.

"What happened?"

This time I'm prepared for it. "Fed a wild animal. Chased a helicopter. Got held at gunpoint."

"Oh my god!" she says, hand covering her hot mouth. Has to be at least ninety-eight degrees in there, and I wish I could steal it all for myself.

"Weekends are what you make of 'em," I croak, messaging my Adam's apple.

Yuri maintains that position. "Do you… do you need help?"

I shake my head.

"You're clearly not okay," she says more harshly. Then sucks on her lips. "I mean, at least sit down. I, you know, I don't want to just walk around with coffee. It needs to cool off. Please."

Her expression is nervous, but there's something firm in there. Argue all I want, I worry this is something she'd fight me for, and I lack the energy to do so.

"I wish my life would stop being a conga line of various women in various coffee shops," I say.

Yuri does that thing with her arm again, half-turned away. A hesitant expression. "Is… is that a yes?"

I shrug. Follow her. Find a seat at the far edge of the little coffee shop inside the LSC. Next to the window. Yuri sits, drumming her fingers on the cardboard sleeve. It's a routine, soft rhythm. I look outside, at the thin strip of glass that keeps me from an untenable internal body temperature.

"It's nice outside," she says nervously, moving her fingers from the coffee to her copy of Blood Meridian. "Snow, I mean. This early. I saw it coming in my tea leaves last week. I'm glad, y'know, this sweater I bought was worth it."

"You… read tea leaves?" I shake my head. "You're a psychic?"

Yuri holds up her hands, waving them at me. "What? No, no, of course not! Tasseomancy is just, like, a fun hobby!"

"You're a hobby witch?"

"No!" she says, louder than she realized. Then she curls back in on herself, clearing her throat. "I mean, no. I like brewing tea, very old-fashioned tea. My mother used to think it was fun to look at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup and tell me my fortune. I don't, like, believe them more than I would a tarot reading, but that doesn't make them any less fun."

I squint. "So, you admit it's bullshit, like essential oils."

"Essential oils are very valid in specific circumstances!" she says quickly, almost snapping at me. Making a little chopping motion in the air.

I lean away from her.

She clears her throat. Cheeks red, a temperature I envy. Gripping her coffee and swirling it around, she says, "Humans react to scents strangely. Oils for that purpose do have an effect. We actually remember smells more than we do sight. If you think about it, you can remember how your mother probably smelled as a little kid more than her dresses."

"Yuri, I don't—"

"Try it," she insists. "My mother enjoyed jasmine, lavender. It was often the teas she brewed, but it's stuck with me. My oldest memory is a lovely scent, not her voice or her face."

I stare.

"It's the little oddities, the peculiarities, that prove we're alive, we're human," she says more firmly, white-knuckling her coffee. "Try it."

"No," I whisper. "I don't want to. Don't make me, Yuri."

She sucks on her lips. "Why's that? Do you have troubled memories of her? Something you'd rather not bring up, perhaps."

"Could you not?"

But she's lost thinking, rubbing her chin. "Broken family? That's a terribly common problem nowadays and it causes a lot of children great harm. I'm lucky I have two loving parents."

"Really, Yuri?"

The girl just keeps on going. "Of course, given what little I know of you from what Sayori's said, I'd suspect it'd be more of a lack of a father figure. Unless… is your mother dead?"

"Yuri!" I say sharply.

She blinks. Grimaces. "Right. Sorry. Nevermind. Got carried away."

"Mhm."

Yuri sips her coffee. There's lingering steam from the lid. When she puts it down, she plays with her fingers. "Why do you say I'm Ukrainian?"

"Because 'Russian' isn't a very PC word these days. You can't call people that anymore."

"I… see."

"Yeah."

Another pause. She keeps fidgeting.

"So," she says.

"So," I repeat.

"So," she says again.

I stare at her coffee. "So… you and tea readings, oils, and general witchcraft."

"Only gemstones, and only for certain toxins."

"Such as?"

Yuri gives me a weird smile. "They cure me of 'not having enough shiny things' toxins."

I blink. "Was… was that a joke?"

She shrinks in on herself. "I'm sorry. I thought it was funny."

"No, no, it was…" I swallow and suppress a cough. I don't want to choke up my fluids over her and the table. "Very funny."

"You didn't laugh."

"I'm very reserved."

"I see." She sips her coffee, squinting off to the side.

"You're stuttering a bit less," I say.

Yuri scowls. "I don't have a speech impediment."

"I didn't—that's not what I was…" I sigh. Shake my head.

Sip.

"You look comfy?" I try, gesturing at her sweater.

Yuri fidgets. "I guess."

I look back outside at the sky. Nothing of note up there anymore. "Hate the snow."

"Why?"

"It hurts."

She tilts her head fractionally. "Isn't that why it's so lovely?"

I stare.

Yuri plays with a frayed end of hair. "Because it's unpleasant, we secretly seek it out. You go to the gym. You tear your body apart." She picks up the book she placed on the table. "This book you got me is incredibly unpleasant: it's full of violence, bodily violation, and every matter of gorey depravity. One of the main characters is a pedophile, but that only makes the horror and discomfort all the more poignant."

"I'm not sure I follow."

She sighs, almost like she's frustrated. It's a rather disquieting sound coming from her. "You told me yourself about Blood Meridian. You couldn't tell if you loved it or despised it because of such qualities, and that's why you were drawn to it. That's art, that's the purpose of good poetry, a Stanely Kubrick film, or confronting a radical new way of thought."

Yuri brushes away a strand of hair. "We live in a society where we've smoothed out so many of the hard edges. We've made everything palatable, marketable. We judge so many social media activities based on our ability to engage with via liking it. Everything remotely worrisome or truly thought-provoking gets its ad-revenue stripped and effectively silenced."

"What?" I ask.

She holds up a finger, and I swallow nervously. "We've designed modern society so that nothing is meant to cause pain. Uncomfortable thoughts. In the service of greater communication, because comfort, a lack of pain, ensures smooth operations. Pain is antithesis to this. It is disruptive by its nature. It creates something new in its destructive wake, sometimes better, sometimes worse. By attempting to make everything Instagrammable, sandpaper everything down, we've lost something of ourselves. Misery is an essential component to happiness."

"How does this relate at all to disliking the cold, Yuri?"

Yuri pushes a frown to the side of her mouth. "Because sometimes, pain is the only thing we can know for real. Did you know once it gets too cold, the body can no longer process temperature? Only as pain."

"I do, yes."

She nods happily. "Then you know that when you suffer pain, you are at your most aware, most real. You become intensely aware of your own body and thoughts when they hurt, drawing your attention to the little bits of being real you could otherwise passively ignore as the background hum of going about your business." Yuri grows more animated as she talks, her sentences clear, making little motions almost imitative of somethone gesturing to accent themselves, bogged down by some bashful sense of self-awareness. Like she's got weights strapped to her limbs.

"In a very real sense," she says, gazing at her arm under its long-sleeve, "you can accurately say, 'I feel pain, therefore I am.' Pain is true. Pain is the journey, the gap between the comfort where you are and the comfort where you're going. Misery is required to know joy. When you love someone, is it merely a passive state of being, or something active?"

"Uh… what's going on right now? Hello, can you hear me?"

"I know I love my parents because being separated from them for so long, while exciting and new, is also somehow painful. I miss them. I look forward to curing this pain by seeing them again. Pain brings us to that truth. The truth is, inherently, painful. If some political policy makes you feel good without any second thoughts, you're being sold snake oil. If you never fight with a lover, never butt heads, you're both lying to yourselves."

I think of Monika and shift uncomfortably. There's nothing real there, and it hurts.

She sips her coffee. "So that's why winter is pleasant. The cold hurts. We can protect against it, but that doesn't make it any less real. Same reasons why pleasant books can be nice, but unpleasant ones stick with us. Change us. Through that feeling we know ourselves to be real. And there's something uniquely comforting in that." Yuri smiles sadly. "Do you understand?"

"I…"

"I have books on this for further clarification!" she says happily, then grimaces. "Hegel and Žižek and Byung-Chul Han. I've been basically…" She laughs nervously, rubbing at her arm. "Basically been paraphrasing my recent nonfiction reading list. That's not weird, is it?"

"Not terribly."

She breathes. "That's a relief. I, like, I mean, it helped me process troubling thoughts. Gain better perspective on myself. Monika likes to talk about being real with people sometimes, but it felt superficial to me."

"Oh." I flex my fingers. The tips still hurt.

"Hm?" she hums suddenly, reaching down into a pocket. For her phone. She frowns at it heavily.

"What?" I ask.

"One second," she says. "Sorry! It's Monika."

I swallow. "What's she asking?"

Yuri squints. Holds the phone closer to her face. Gives me a skeptical look.

"Yuri," I say cautiously.

"One sec. Sorry!" She types away furiously at the screen.

"What does she want?"

"Hm?" she asks, looking up at me. "Oh, nothing. She's just making sure we're all okay, what with this snow and all.

"Anything about me?"

She nods. "Yes. You're included in that we."

Funny, because my phone didn't buzz if Monika was hitting up the lit club group chat.

I can feel the chilled tarp of skin over my bones and muscles attempting to pick itself up and slither away. I put my hands on the table, pushing myself up.

Yuri frowns. "Wait, did I say something wrong? Where are you going?"

"Away."

"O-oh," she says, looking down at her coffee. Tapping her fingers against its sleeve. "Well, uh, it was nice seeing you. I had fun. I think?"

"Yeah," I say.

Then I pause.

"Hey, can I have your coffee?"

"What, no!" she says. "I bought this myself!"

"Please?"

Yuri frowns. Makes an uncomfortable noise. Then sort of slouches as she pushes the cup towards me. "One condition."

"Name it."

She takes a breath, holding a hand to her chest. "When we finish our books, let's choose one together. Read it that way. Something new to us both so we can discuss it in the moment."

I arch an eyebrow. "Is reading with me really that important?"

Yuri looks down into her lap. "It's nice."

I think it over for a very long moment. Before eventually nodding. "Sure. Yeah, that sounds fun."

She gives me a little smile, pushing her coffee forwards. I take it and inhale it all in a single pulling, letting the hot and overly sweetened drink burn my empty stomach.

"Thanks," I say.

"Mhm."

And I leave. Her, the literature club, this university. Anything that lets me get away.

For however long that'll last.