I slept forever. I slept and slept and slept. And I woke to a different world. The snow was piled high up on the windows. Plows rolled down the street pushing so much snow that the parked cars on each side were covered in it, perfect white mounds with nothing visible underneath. I went to wake the kids, but they’d come and gone already. Richard, too. They must not have wanted to disturb me. I was still in my clothes from yesterday. I needed to shower and eat and get the hell back to work.
The phone rang as I was making breakfast.
“How are you holding up?” the caller asked.
“Who’s calling?” I said.
“Is this Terry?”
“No.”
“Terry, I just wanted to be sure you’re okay. With the storm. If you need anything.”
I told them it was a wrong number, and they didn’t apologize, or say anything. They just held the line and listened. I said that I was hanging up, and they yelled that name again, Terry, just as I disconnected.
At work we were on lockdown, of sorts. Not everyone could make it in. I wasn’t going to let some weather stop me, plus Dr. Nelson would probably worry if I didn’t show up. He’d think I’d died. He’d send a team. They’d need to collect me, clean up, hide the traces. Whatever. None of that was relevant. The buses were running, and all I did was bundle up like crazy, with so many layers that you could have thrown me from a building and it wouldn’t have hurt when I landed. “Unbreakable” was the word I kept saying to myself. Unless a car got to me. Unless someone used fire. I pictured myself flung from a window and falling gently into the snow. I’d be fine. I’d stand up and walk it off. Maybe I’d even ask to do it again, just one more time, because you don’t get to feel that way very often. You rarely get to feel that you could fall forever, without harm, as the world rushes by you.
In any case, nothing short of a family emergency was going to keep me from going to work. I took the bus with a few other cozy folks, and it was no big deal. Yes, the walking was slow, and yes, you could not hear a thing, not your feet on the ground, not the cars rolling by, but it was gorgeous and I think we should feel lucky when our world is transformed so wholly before our eyes, when everything is changed just by some snow. You live for things like that, and you don’t even know it. Then they happen and you almost want to lie down in it, roll around, and pray that it doesn’t go away.
They were calling me Terry at the office, and what a big goof that was. They must have seen the name in the logger, and then why not haze the mule with a bit of nicknamery? I smirked at them. I didn’t give a shit. Their names were worse. They were lucky if they even had names. I’d seen their bodies hung with needles. I’d seen them breathing through masks, crying at their desks. These were people who were drowning, who would be dead soon. I walked past their cubicles and saluted. Here’s to you, people of the grave. Sleep well, my friends.
There was a book of photos on my desk, which I assumed had been left by Nelson. In this stage of a trial he was always showing me pictures and whatnot, and I guess I was supposed to log my reactions.
I looked through the photos, and it was sordid and strange and not at all pleasant, a book of sorrows and loss and mostly unspeakable desolation. Nelson must have been wondering what I could handle, how low he could go. Unbreakable my ass, maybe he was thinking. Would I give in and buckle? I wasn’t going to try to control my reactions. It wasn’t as if you walked around deciding how to feel. That’s not how it worked. You don’t have your feelings, they have you.
The pictures were of people with hair, people licked clean. People with faces you wanted to set fire to. People you would fight on the street if you saw them, even if you loved humanity, even if you did not believe in death. However peaceful you think you are, however sweet and nonviolent and angelic—you have a fight in you if only it can get unlocked, and that’s what these pictures were doing, testing one’s absolute limits, tearing thresholds, one by one. A kind of violation of your own moral line. Pictures, horribly vivid, of people who couldn’t smile without showing who they really were, and it wasn’t pretty. Just a way that they opened their mouths and showed too much. People with obvious secrets. People with no inner life. And then people with no outer life, either, because they were just dead. Shots of corpses galore, although just before, moments or days or weeks or maybe years before death, but it’s all the same in the longer view. Pictures of children. Babies. Landscapes. Parts of the world that could not have existed. Made-up scenery, not just too good to be true, but too horrible to be true. A good deal of that. Someone’s nightmare of the world, the sort of thing that makes everyone wish there were no such thing as the imagination. And then more people, especially ones who could not have existed, which was the worst. Realistic in their features, and all of that, but clearly unreal all the same. Someone’s sick idea of what a person looks like. Perversion everywhere, as if we’d only been born to feel the very worst things, and it all begged a pretty big question about why one had to be a person in the first place.
I’d had enough. I looked over to where Nelson usually came from, the hallway, the wall, his whole mysterious wing, but I didn’t figure I would see him today. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t watching.
One time they strapped me to some sensors and the screen lit up with bright bursts of dots not when I spoke, but when I didn’t. So I talked and talked, because I didn’t care for those points of light. I could go my whole life without seeing them again. So who cares if I had to talk to keep them gone? I’d say what I needed to. We all do things to keep the wolf away.
The rest of the day was mostly chopped up into the usual workaday carcass: lots of data to wing around, and lots of filing. I pounded away at my terminal and I filled the screen with meaning. Lunchtime came and when people asked if I was going to eat I dragged myself after them and sat through the awful, wet gnashing, holding my breath. Later we heard on the intercom that more snow was coming, and it seemed that a decision went around to let us all get the hell out of there early. People cheered, and afterward it was like they’d forgotten to close their mouths. They were showing teeth, walking around, getting their things, bundling up, all the while showing teeth as if they were about to tear something apart with their mouths, if only no one was watching. I kept my head down because after a little while you can’t look at people like that. It starts to unravel you. It starts to be too much.
It was early enough in the day that I thought I could catch the kids coming out of school. Surprise them maybe. I stood at the fence with the other parents, and it wasn’t clear who was in jail, us or them. We clung to the fence and we watched the door of the school. We looked at our phones. For a moment it seemed that anything could come out of that door: water, mud, animals.
When the bell rang and the children poured out, the parents pressed against the fence, hollering and waving. The children rippled into the playground, scanning the world for their makers. How did you know, looking at these children, some of them so truly lifelike, which ones were yours? The problem wasn’t that none of them were familiar, it was that they all were. I knew all of these kids. Their faces, the little way they ran. Some of them fell over and righted themselves and ran on and my heart ached. I stood there as they paired off and ran to hug their parents, and after the dust had cleared none of them had run to me. Not even one. They’d all been spoken for. I was standing here in plain sight and my own little ones were nowhere to be found. I watched the door and waited. The school had gone quiet. Everyone was shuffling away.