by Sara Faring
But Dom’s body remains lifeless on the ground, and Angel, if he is here in his true form, does not make himself known to me. Even though my heart aches thinking about it, I hope he fled.
Other women appear beside the men, too. New ones. Also Others. A bewitching woman sits in the corner, elderly, with long white hair cocooning her, and yellow and blue fingernails she drags along her scalp. She feels at her face and cries, cries with such abandon I think her new face might dissolve, and she turns to another woman, a young woman with magnificent coiled hair the color of café con leche who sits cross-legged in the same corner, and asks, “Can you tell me what I look like?”
I couldn’t explain it to her: how her bones are so delicate yet carry dozens of kilograms of beating false flesh, how she looks built by man but conceived by the divine.
“Who am I?” she asks, tears of desperate joy flooding her eyes. “Who am I? You’ve got to tell me. You’ve got to.”
I think of what Angel said to me, once, about Others desperately wanting to matter. This must be what he meant. To feel like we can matter, we must first exist in a form we perceive to be true. I should pity them for desiring a new form so much they’d accept a false one. But they tortured us to get here. It makes my lack of a real body all the more painful, and I only crave a chance for my cousins, too.
Still, I rush up to the new woman, this player given new shape. “Do you know where Angel is?” I whisper. “Do you know what Angel looks like?”
She squeezes my arm once with clammy fingers, flinching back. “No,” she murmurs. I suppose my false flesh doesn’t please her.
I rush to Carmela, pressing my hands against her pale blond scalp. She looks peaceful for once. I feel for any movement, any activity inside her body, and I find none. Good. This is good. She heard me.
A young girl with roughly tumbling auburn hair stumbles around only a few paces from me, eyes glued to her hands, tracing one set of fingers and the other, as if the webbing is the most precious silk.
I check Mole next, with her ink-scratched arms. She, too, is gone.
The young woman with the curled hair strips off her clothes in front of everyone, baring herself, and tosses them into the air like confetti, laughing like falling water.
I approach Lamb’s supine form and cradle his skull. He breathes, still. He must be trapped inside. Am I imagining a beating, a fizzing pressure? How can I coax you out with my fingers? He isn’t a whelk in a shell. You mustn’t be afraid, I whisper to him. But it is me who is afraid.
I took a risk, a fatal risk; I forced all my friends to run in the most incomprehensible of ways. Now I am stuck here alone, unsure if they’ve made it out or not.
“So this is interesting,” says a small voice beside me. An assured voice that shoots arrows of panic through me. Horror.
She has long black hair, framing a pallid face. She is familiar. It is the girl, hovering beside me. The tenth girl, the little girl of the flowing white gown, who visited me that night so long ago. The creator. The devil. The temptress. She does not look innocent at all now—but did she ever? There is a shimmering depth and darkness to her black eyes. Her lip curls into a smirk as she surveys me and the players appearing around me.
“Remember me?” she asks.
It takes every ounce of effort to let my eyes go blank instead of showing the panic I feel. “What player number are you?” I ask dumbly.
She tsks me. “Don’t play that with me. I know you remember me, and you know I have no fucking player number. I’m divine, fool.” She cocks her head. “You always were my partner’s favorite, English teacher. She said you had spunk. That you shake fear’s hand. And sure, even I can admit you’re sometimes sorta smart,” she tells me, crossing her arms as she levitates beside me, comfortable as can be. “But only as smart as I am. No smarter.”
Because she is the maker of this world. Because she is my creator, she presumes to say. I pull my hands from Lamb’s skull. For all I know, he is flickering in and out, half-saved. I’ve been caught, exposed. I’ve been observed teaching my friends how to reach diaphanous safety.
“That’s true.” I bite the inside of my lip. “I’m just a figment of your imagination.”
“That’s right.” She stills near me. “Say, what do you remember from this round from the end of other games?”
The fleeting nature of memory is a mercy, because I remember nothing. But I lie. “Everything.”
“Fun,” she says, grinning spitefully and clapping her palms together. “So you remember how my partner used to ease you into a painless sleep at the end of every game she oversaw. She would bust her ass helping each and every one of her babies drift off until the next round. Crazy that she was Angel’s mother, huh? I bet you’re missing her.”
I swallow hard. Angel’s mother—who died of cancer? She was the other creator?
The girl’s eyes glitter with malice. “Because you must remember how everything changed since she’s been gone and I got free rein over the girl avatar. We’ve had some fun times at the end of the game, you and me, haven’t we? You beg me to help, yada yada yada, and I invent some new brand of torture, some fresh sacrifice that I claim will save you all from the Others. Remember when you let me pull out your fingernails and stamp on the raw nubs? Or when I hacked the limbs off your friends and ate them raw? Or when I shoved you off the patio dozens of times in one day and forced you to climb back up with your bones broken?”
I fight a shudder and struggle to keep my expression placid as the lake. Her arrogance is maddening. She’s nothing like who she was when she came to warn me. She’s callous, crude, raw. Taking pleasure in cutting with her words.
“All because you thought it might save you,” she says, grinning darkly. “You’re a real warrior, English teacher. Because you were coded that way. You don’t take shit. Unless it’s from a dude you’re into, like meathead Domenico. I forced my partner to code in a little girlish instability and immaturity and make you a little dumb, you know? Want me to tell you how many times Dom’s ditched you before? Want me to tell you what you say when he screws you and casts you aside, like Angel essentially did just now?”
I am silently shaking with rage. I turn back to Lamb, who breathes so shallowly. The last tendrils of his spirit must be clinging to his shell. I cradle his head and hope that I can nudge him free as one would nudge a butterfly from a strand of hair. As I wait, I feel his heartbeat stop. It couldn’t have been me, but he managed it all the same. Thank heavens.
She snaps at me. “English teacher. Stop moping over their pasty-ass bodies,” she says.
I cringe at the curse words; I can’t help it.
“Play with me, or go to sleep like them. You’re never getting out of here without me saying so. You understand that, right? You’re a slave, a feature, a toy. I push a button when I’m back outside, and you restart, just like the rest of them.”
Nausea surges up in me. She may be right. But with every fracture in this world, there exists a new opening for me to explore. I fall back and bow my head.
“I’m feeling generous today, though. How would you like me to actually save you this time?” she asks, incisors glinting. “I’ll cook up a grisly little deal.” She licks her dry lips. “You can’t afford to assume I won’t make good on my offer to help you this go-around.”
I force my face to go cold, even as my insides overheat.
“You can think about it,” she says, winking, floating around a player crying in the corner. “I know it’s so cozy in here. The routine of it all. And until you decide, we can hypothesize as to why you’re still awake. Maybe it has to do with the pro tips Angel gave you?”
I ignore her. It’s time, I think. It’s time to feign sleep and push myself out.
“Ooh, I have an idea, English teacher. We could stick your pretty little head in an oven and see what happens. My partner—may she rest in hell—would have loved the poeticism of that. You know, after we finished the rough build of Vaccaro School, she said to me, If
you’re so unhappy about parts of the game, you can stick your head in the gainsboro oven. The bitch. She made me do it every damn day myself.” She laughs sarcastically, a discordant sound speaking more to pain than joy.
Gainsboro? I think. It’s not an Argentine word, but it sounds familiar.
“I’m tired,” I whisper at last, so she can barely hear.
She sighs, recrosses her arms. “That’s no fun,” she says. “Wait here. I’m going to rustle up some tools to use on you and your friends. Today feels like a good day to learn how to amputate!”
As she hurries off, I lay myself on the ground and curl up into a ball. I shut my eyes and begin the process of unlatching. Praying I can make it work before the devil returns.
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
I shimmer in and out of the discomfort and the pain. Can I manage it?
I force myself to imagine freeing myself. I force myself to cycle through exactly what I felt before. The pressure builds. The electric hooks snag on something inside me and pull me—
But nothing happens, as violently as I groan with effort. My head could split in two.
To keep calm, I picture my friends performing their duties as instructed. I imagine Yesi, cradling the souls of the girls like fish in her hands. She holds on to them as long as she can. She looks at the length of their scales: They aren’t injured. They aren’t frozen. They’re peaceful. Gills opening and closing gratefully as if there is nourishment in the air. Their souls, as fish, might as well be my mother. They might as well be Carmela’s daughter. They might as well be Yesi’s gran. Yesi kisses their scales, whispers to them, I’m finding a place for you to slip inside. She feeds the souls through the closet doors, chanting the proper numbers for them, and into the circular stream of time they slip, one by one, before she looks back at the ruined world she’s leaving behind and follows them herself.
We lost some of them: Luciana, Mrs. Hawk. But we might have saved the girls, the girls, the girls; and Yesi, my love; and Morency, and Mole, and Lamb, and Armadello, and even Carmela: They’re all strings of numbers spirited off this plane somewhere, vibrant, resonating, pearlescent. They can begin again; they can dip into time’s stream anew. It is much wider than I ever thought possible; we’d dipped into only one short burst of froth before, but now they are freed.
It helps to imagine this because I cannot know for sure if I will escape myself, even though my craving for a human body still cuts deeper than anything I have ever known, even though I can hardly explain its control over me. And I cannot know if I will ever see my friends—or Angel—again.
It was a preposterous thought: step through a closet into a real life. But surely I would have felt our plan go wrong. One of them, a single one, would have signaled to me that my theory was an impossibility in practice. They would have shoved me, pricked me, stepped back into their bodies, and let me know in desperate shouts. But they haven’t. So I continue to hope they were released like fish into this grander stream.
I feel better as I picture this, despite the precariousness of my position. I have done my best. I cannot know what I was like during other cycles, when the world of Vaccaro School fell apart. Not for sure, beyond the truths and untruths the girl spouted. I cannot know if I was so good, so heroic, or if I experienced any growth other times. But I did learn this time around. Even if I don’t survive this myself, I accomplished what I hoped to accomplish. Even though I should have wanted nothing more than to run from this place once and for all, saving only myself, I might have freed them now. All my cousins, my people. I told them how best to run. Sometimes it isn’t the worst thing in the world to stay behind yourself. Sometimes you must be the sacrifice, and you must revel in that soul-bursting feeling of doing so much good that a lifetime of looping in my minuscule inlet in ignorance might be worth it.
But a horrific truth strikes me then, just as I come to terms with my sacrifice. I hear the girl whistling somewhere, and panic fills me, drip by vinegar drip.
* * *
Once the girl returns to the Other Place, she will be free to hunt my cousins down and return them to this hell.
Rage bubbles back into me.
I cannot allow that to happen.
I must find a way to destroy her. And I can imagine only one way to do that, but it requires I unlatch.
But perhaps I needn’t try to unlatch alone.
I remember the broad strokes of what Michelle said to me once, some time before she lost consciousness for good. When I sleep, I go to a place that shines like scales. There are other people there. She’s okay. At the time, I wondered if—by some magic—she had communed with her eerie twin, the Falcone girl, on another plane. With my own mother. I can’t know what Michelle meant beyond feeling as if I was being told all these characters, all these figments, they do exist in the numbered dark. They must exist, as Carmela believed.
So I call upon my mother, in her shrinking cell, to pull me from myself. I call on Tío Adolfo, the Angel of Peace evaporated to nothing. Manuel, the Falcone girl, Marie. I call on all those who may have never lived here in certain terms, and I call on my cousins and my friends for their help.
It does not matter whether they exist, it seems, for I feel the hooks, then, slow at first, then dragging through me, all of them hot as acid rain. That old smell of facturas, of sizzling milanesa oil, of the linden trees outside our windows, of the washed-down sidewalks, steaming in the early summer heat.
I flicker in.
I flicker out.
The world goes dark.
And I feel my crystal form emerge, light as air, fleeting as numbers.
I blink at nothing.
Have I released myself from the loop of gory arithmetic I once thought was a life?
Have I stopped the poison tooth of the game’s rules from obliterating me and my memory?
I tremble, as a swath of numbers can, overwhelmed by the swell of freedom I feel.
And yet my success could still be bittersweet.
The girl returns, wielding an assortment of knives, fire pokers, and even a saw. I wait to see if she notices me. She leans over my body and appraises the rubbery puddle of flesh.
“You know, English teacher, I can’t see for shit right now,” she says, speaking to my dead form. “Between players getting their bodies and your friends falling asleep and looping, it’s like an orgy in smoggy seventies Los Angeles crossed with an opium den. You feel me? My fake body is half convincing itself I have asthma and hives in here. That’s bitchy of you, English teacher. But even with your making a mess down here, this is still my favorite part of the game. It’s so surreal, you know? When the world around us looks as broken as we know it to be?”
The truth is, I, too, am awestruck by the grotesqueness around me as I float around, out-of-body—the chaos of split-open walls, of a robin’s-egg blue sky above. I can’t see my friends, not even out-of-body. But I still see the strangely clothed and unclothed men and women wandering the house. The woman with the painted fingernails waves at the girl from down the hall; she’s peeling strips of wallpaper from the walls, peering at the bare, glittery patches beneath like fish scales. A naked man, penis jiggling, pokes Yesi’s body on the shoulder with a finger and runs away, giggling darkly. Still, I don’t agree with the girl in full: The world can look plenty broken without resembling a surreal carnival house.
I hear a savage ripping, and I turn, just as the girl runs the saw against that tender spot between my old hand and wrist.
She cuts, spraying thick liquid across her nightgown. False, I tell myself, tearing myself away from her. All false.
Instead of giving the devil an ounce of undue attention, I check each of my friends again, confirming they exited their bodies, admiring them as I came to know them. Saying goodbye to what they were. Carmela, elegant and authoritative until the end. Morency, imposing and infinitely loyal. Lamb, sweet to the core. Bless them: I will make sure they left this godforsaken place for always, that they raced off to their respective closets and
seized their new human forms for good.
I check Mole next, who was meticulous until the end—I admire her careful tattoos.
That’s when I see it written there again:
Gainsboro, 220, 220, 220.
It sounded familiar to me because it caught my attention as a color we couldn’t find in Yesi’s logbook, nor in any room of the house.
The girl, spattered in blood, hacks off another limb and watches it spurt, then grow back, grinning. I don’t think she understands what is happening. What could happen.
But then again: I am no smarter than her. So why should I think she hasn’t put safeguards in place to keep us from escaping?
I am no smarter than her.
Right? I tell myself with a quiver of a smile.
An idea blooms in this figment’s brain.
And I wait.
* * *
The cottages’ windows flicker. The celebrations of the embodied Others devolve into a disgusting bacchanal: an orgy of violence only possible in this surreal world. The girl hovers above her own personal carnage, evaluating it with her detached calm. I hear her bored exhale: She’s tiring of her own—and the Others’—antics.
The only safe bit to watch while I wait is the ice. It’s gorgeous at this point in the loop. I wonder if I have ever seen it this way before, a beating heart of reds and blues and colors I do not know the names for. I swear it beckons to me as I sit atop the broken roof and watch the view alone, invisible. It looks as if a million glimmering ants crawl through the stones beneath me. Beside me, a swath of stone butterflies rip from a wall all at once to make it look as if that wall is shifting a meter to the right and disappearing entirely. And the water: The water beyond is fluorescent, shining with what look like millions of undulating rainbow fish. The gondola is filled with leering men and does not look functional on account of the enormous, skin-colored gash through the hub. Fleshy fish scales. That’s the texture lurking underneath the bright paint of this world.