The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  “What? I mean, who?”

  Rory begins to walk again. “Halfway up that potted palm, and then gone. He does that. Teases me.”

  “Rory.” I stare at the potted palm, wondering if this is some kind of joke. “I don’t see anything. Who’s ‘he’?”

  We’re almost at an exit, the glass wall flooded with sunlight. Rory squints through it. He goes rigid, breath coming fast. “I think he’s outside now. Shit! I can’t lose him.”

  “Lose who?” Still hauling Clint, I follow Rory out through the sliding doors.

  “He’s playing a game,” Clint says, as if this should be boringly obvious.

  “But I don’t see anything.”

  I dodge around Rory to look through the camera again, almost expecting to see a skull. There’s nothing in the viewfinder but sunlight, asphalt, parked cars, bottlebrush trees.

  He’s playing a prank on me. Unless—

  “Hedda,” Rory says, “Mireya said you made it to level thirteen. You should know what I’m talking about.”

  No. Goose pimples break out all over me, and I tug Clint closer. “Level thirteen? But you shouldn’t. I mean, did you? Did you get a skull?”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t post the link.” Rory gazes off into the parking lot. “I think I understand how it works now. Why Emily reacted that way. It’s some kind of hypnotic game transfer phenomenon, but it plays like the most amazing mixed-reality experience I’ve ever had.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you think Emily saw?”

  “Something she didn’t want to see. It doesn’t really matter what.” For the first time this afternoon, Rory turns to meet my gaze. His pupils are blown, and his whole face looks younger somehow. “You know that feeling when every alert you get on your phone makes you want to die? So you turn it off, but then you just want to die more, so you turn it on again?”

  “I don’t know.” Then I remember how I felt when my phone buzzed twice last night with alerts and I was almost too scared to check it. “Maybe.”

  “I think that’s what happens when the Randoms perma-kill you.” Rory’s voice has a dreamy note now. “It tells you Ur pathetic, and you go to the epic fail circle of hell, where you relive your worst online fail, over and over.”

  Clint squirms. My eyes scour the parking lot—still nothing there, or nothing that could possibly make sense of what Rory’s saying.

  Then I remember the image of me with horns—the image that vanished, or never existed at all. Is that my worst fail? “But what are you seeing? Is it even real?”

  “To you it is.” A strange expression passes over Rory’s face, like he’s seeing something grotesque and wonderful at once, and he bends and whispers in my ear, “Just don’t freak out. I think that’s the key. If you run from what you see, it’ll come after you. You have to face it head-on.”

  Then he straightens, brandishing the phone. “Over there. Gotta go!”

  He steps off the curb into the path of a cream-colored Lexus. I yell, “Stop!”

  The Lexus squeals to a halt with an aggrieved honk. Rory canters obliviously off across the parking lot, weaving among the cars.

  I start to follow, but Clint squirms free and heads back through the cloudy reflections on the glass doors. Just inside, Erika stands looking baffled, with the jacket draped over one arm and the other lugging bags. “Where were you?”

  “Just talking to a friend.”

  I watch Rory make his way across the lot. He keeps pausing to peer through the viewfinder, and twice he ducks as if hiding from an invisible observer.

  If you run from what you see, it’ll come after you. I saw something terrifying in the living room doorway when I was a child. I felt fingers close around my wrist on the plane. I saw a photo that wasn’t there. But Rory’s talk about a new circle of hell only half makes sense to me.

  “He’s playing a game,” Clint says authoritatively. “He said level thirteen.”

  “His screen didn’t show anything.” I scrutinize my brother. “Did you see something?”

  Clint clings to his mother’s hand and doesn’t answer.

  “What’s ‘mixed reality’?” I ask Dad.

  “Who told you about that?”

  “A friend.”

  “A cute friend?” Erika shoots me a shy smile. She sits touching elbows with Dad, wearing a flowered sundress, both of them relaxed in a way I haven’t seen before.

  To celebrate the first week of school, Dad left work early so we could all go to a movie. “They’re running it on thirty-five and not digital, so your mom won’t mind,” he told me with a wink, then explained about the different kinds of projection.

  We walked under trees strung with lights to the downtown theater, where we watched a black-and-white movie about a haunted house. I kept having to close my eyes and remind myself it wasn’t real. Scary books I can deal with, but seeing a ghost float through a hallway or hearing it rap on a wall made me jump every time.

  Now, sitting on the outdoor terrace of the ice cream shop, I still feel woozy from my jangled nerves, like one of the surfers at Stinson Beach after a wipeout.

  “In mixed reality, real and digital objects interact,” Dad says. “Very hot field in the gaming and simulations industry. So, for instance, if you were looking through your phone, and you saw a sparkly purple goblin sitting right there”—he indicates the nearest table—“it would be mixed reality. Either that, or you’ve gone batshit.”

  I wince. Someone called Emily that.

  Erika nuzzles against Dad and reprimands him for his language. Deprived of his phone and tablet for the evening, Clint is busy ramming a tray of sugar packets against a saltshaker and making boom smash noises.

  “Mike,” Erika asks, “have you called Marnie Golden yet? The Realtor?”

  They start talking about some property that Erika wants Dad to sell so they can have more “liquidity.” I half listen, watching Clint shoot a finger gun across the terrace.

  “I’m zapping the purple goblin,” he tells me.

  I point my own finger gun. “Bam bam! You’re dead.”

  Clint giggles. “I’m beating level thirteen.”

  Did he pick that up from Rory? “There’s no level thirteen,” I say sharply.

  Clint drops his eyes, and I feel a pang of guilt.

  Erika complains that the property up north is going to waste, but Dad assures her they won’t need extra cash once he signs the contracts on his latest project. “Don’t worry, I can feed the college funds and still cover the day-to-day.”

  My head jerks up. Funds plural? Is he planning to send me to college for real?

  Erika pats my hand. “Are you okay, Hedda? You jumped about a dozen times during the movie.”

  My face goes hot, because no one else seemed scared, not even Clint. But I know the experience will stay with me, disturbing my sleep, if I don’t talk about it. “It was just… once you were inside that house, it felt like there was no outside. It was like being in hell. Where would anyone get an idea like that? Why would they put it up on a screen for everybody to see?”

  “I wonder that myself,” Erika says, while Dad says, “To exorcise inner demons.”

  “What does that mean?” I think of my Glare dreams. Maybe Dad would understand, since he used to have nightmares, too.

  But his eyes have that glazed look they always get when he stops listening to me. “Like you said, when you’re stuck inside a nightmare, you forget there’s an outside. Maybe when you put your nightmare outside you, when you turn it into a book or movie, it loses the power to hurt you.”

  “That movie wasn’t scary. It was a million years old,” Clint announces with the assurance of a professional critic. “But I liked the part where the giant hand came out of the closet and grabbed the professor.”

  “Like this?” Dad pretends to give Clint a lethal handshake. Clint spread-eagles and fakes a backward plunge off his chair. An ache hatches in my chest as I try to imagine Dad ever being that relaxed with me.

&n
bsp; But when he releases Clint, he turns to me, his eyes going wistful. “Remember our Sunday-afternoon double features, Hedda? Every week while your mom went to yoga, we fired up my old DVDs.”

  “You forced your childhood favorites on her?” Erika teases.

  “I had to make sure my daughter grew up with good taste.” Dad’s looking at me like his head is full of fond memories of us making popcorn and watching screens.

  Mine isn’t, but I say, “I remember.”

  “My proudest moment as a parent—well, one of them—was when your mom and I were having a stupid argument, and you quoted the classic line from WarGames: ‘The only winning move is not to play.’”

  Not to play. I should have followed my own advice. I wonder if Rory’s still off chasing invisible things in his viewfinder, maybe still in that same parking lot, and hairs prickle on the back of my neck.

  Dad keeps on gazing at me like he’s seeing a different version of me—young, impressionable, eager to love all the things he loves. A version I could still be.

  “And you were right,” he says. “We wasted so much time playing games we couldn’t win that we—I—lost track of the things that mattered.”

  While Erika takes Clint up to bed, I find Dad in the kitchen. He’s making coffee, which means he’s headed back to the office, though it’s nearly ten.

  I fiddle with a small brush he’s left on the table, its soft bristles bleeding dirt-like grounds. “Dad, I’m still wondering about Caroline Westover. Why did Mom think she had video game psychosis?”

  Dad removes a steaming kettle from the burner and places it on a pad. “Confirmation bias. Once Jane started thinking technology was dangerous, she saw evidence of it everywhere.”

  “But Caroline was an aspiring game designer, right?” I paint my wrist with the brush, the dark grounds outlining fine hairs. “The newspaper articles said she was testing software. Was it a game?”

  Dad trickles hot water into a plastic cylinder, careful as someone doing a chemistry experiment. “At the time, Sinnestauschen was working on native advertising that could be embedded in free games. I only know what your mother told me, but apparently Caroline had an idea—a game that would condition players to associate particular images with good feelings and then use text messages to bring those associations into their daily lives.”

  My skin starts to crawl. “What kind of images?”

  “Well, like product logos. For her prototype, she used random images—Norse runes, I think. But the theory was that, if you could get players to associate a company’s logo with safety and winning, they’d be more likely to respond to that company’s ads.”

  Runes carved on trees, marking them as safe. “How’d the game work? Do you know?”

  “It was supposed to be a first-person survival horror game. According to Jane, the idea was to evoke fear, our most primal reaction, so players would feel an equally powerful need for safety. Fear puts people in a suggestible state”—he chuckles—“as all politicians know.”

  Power of suggestion. “You mean, like, the game would hypnotize the players?”

  “Now you’re back to your mom’s mind-control theory. Nothing that radical is possible, believe me. But you can nudge people in one direction or another.”

  Dad presses the plunger on top of the cylinder, holding it down, and the hot liquid inside seethes and hisses into his cup. The sound seeps into me, becoming a rushing in treetops, a slither in dry leaves.

  Could Caroline have put her own nightmares into the Glare? Did she free herself that way?

  “Did Caroline ever actually make this game?” I ask.

  Dad holds the cylinder over the trash and gives it a sharp tap. A disc of wet grounds tumbles out. “No idea. Maybe your mother knows, but I have a feeling she wouldn’t want you even knowing enough to ask these questions. Is there a reason you keep wondering about Caroline?”

  If I tell him I played the Glare again, he’ll tell Mom. I tug my sleeves down, covering the scars. “Just curious, I guess.”

  My fingers are poised over the keyboard. There are so many things I want to know, to ask. Are you Caroline? Did you create the Glare? Did my mom know about what you were doing, and what it did to you, and take me away so that would never happen to me? If I can’t trust what I think I see with my own eyes, any more than you could, what do I do?

  In the end I don’t write anything. But before I go to bed, I hide my phone in the closet where it can vibrate all it wants, and I won’t hear.

  I stand in a green forest dotted with red, the square black tower rising above me.

  The sky is gray. Wind thrashes the trees, a storm rising, and I run for the tower. Where’s Ellis? He needs me; he always does, and maybe I need him, too.

  My shoes dig into the forest floor, soggy with fallen leaves. Despite the roar of the treetops, I can hear things moving in there—slithering, sliding.

  A boy rockets toward me, legs a blur. Not Ellis, but Rory. “They’re coming!” he cries.

  “What? I don’t see anything!” Now the eerie keening rises above the wind, coming from all sides at once. “Find a safe tree, quick!”

  The forest floor begins to swell around Rory, like giant worms are burrowing in the dead leaves. He staggers to a stop as the furrow grows—circling him, penning him in. He tries to take a step, and—

  A cry. A flash of white. The wind sends leaves swirling high in the air.

  Fighting the storm, I run toward Rory, twigs and needles stinging my face. As I reach the spot where he should be, the wind falls. The forest goes silent as a church.

  My blood pumps like thunder.

  I find a great ocher pile of leaves and pine needles, and in the center, a pale living hand. It flaps desperately, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the forest floor.

  I kneel and tear at the pile of leaves, scooping them up in mucky armfuls to free him, but the keening slices through my eardrums. My whole body freezes, my breath dying in my throat.

  And I wake gulping great mouthfuls of air, staring into the darkness.

  The physics teacher drones at the bottom of the small amphitheater, bending to scribble on the SMART Board, challenging us to produce a convincing proof the Earth isn’t flat. I want to pay attention, but her monotone voice blurs the sentences into a featureless mass, and every few seconds she blinks like clockwork: phrase phrase phrase blink. Phrase phrase phrase blink.

  My eyelids slip shut—then snap open as people behind us rustle and giggle. Mireya gives me a nudge with a quick glance over her shoulder.

  I turn as discreetly as I can and see Ellis lounging in the back row. He’s mouthing the teacher’s words a millisecond after her, doing a spot-on imitation of her lecturing-blinking routine. People around him are cracking up. When a girl whinnies with laughter, the teacher wheels to look straight at Ellis, whose face is now innocently blank.

  Mireya shakes her head and mouths, He’s a dick, but she’s smiling, too. I face front and fold my arms on the desk, trying to ignore the warmth in my cheeks. How can a boy who refuses to take anything seriously insist we’re all in danger from a game?

  The teacher’s making good points, regardless of her poor presentation style. She’s saying we shouldn’t take anything on faith, which makes me think of Rory staring into that phone.

  What did he see?

  The Earth is round. Games are games. And the forbidden fruit keeps passing from person to person. I haven’t told Ellis yet that Rory and Anil played it as well as Emily, or about Rory’s strange behavior, or that they all played it because of me. I’ve been looking out for Rory today, but I haven’t seen him.

  The phone buzzes in my backpack, vibrating against my calf.

  I go taut, heat prickling behind my temples. Mireya’s sitting right beside me, and Erika hardly ever texts me. I’ll have to wait until the end of the period to check it. Twenty-seven minutes of trying to focus on angles and vectors and satellite footage and—

  Something white moves at the edge of the SMART Bo
ard.

  I blink to clear my eyes. The white thing detaches itself from the glowing background, long and fluid as a snake—no, as an arm.

  It’s my imagination. A trick of the light showing me a disembodied human arm with a flicker of rapid movement at the end—five radiant outlines, like fingers. But it’s not going away.

  I stop breathing as the fingers lick at the edge of the screen. They flinch, a tiny under-the-skin shiver that makes me think of a nervous cat, and then the whole armlike shape floats away from the board, into midair. Its whiteness is flecked with seething blue like the board itself, yet somehow it’s solid and three-dimensional against the drab classroom.

  Does anyone else see this? No. The teacher keeps talking about confirmation bias. Isn’t that what Dad told me Mom’s problem was? Once you start looking for something, you find it everywhere, whether it’s evidence of the evil of video games or—whatever this is. Rory planted the idea in my head, and now I’m seeing things, too.

  The rustling in the back of the room has died down, except for the occasional hiccup of stifled laughter. I inch away as the pale arm floats upward, still connected to the SMART Board where a shoulder should be. It seems close and far at once, its half-thereness confusing, and its ghostly fingers extend as if in benediction. Toward me.

  Tiny hairs go erect on the nape of my neck.

  In front of me, a boy raises his hand and says something about sending a spaceship into orbit. Behind me, a girl giggles.

  My senses are going weird again, voices slowing to a demonic drone. The room telescopes, so I’m not sure if the spectral hand is wavering twenty feet from my face or two.

  It’s not real. Forget about Rory. As a child, I saw things like this and lost touch with reality, and I hurt myself and was banished from the Glare forever. But I can control myself now, and that’s why I’m here, I can, I can—

  I’m standing up right in the center of the amphitheater—sounds deafening, colors blinding, blood thudding painfully in my temples. My throat is tense with expelled words, but I don’t know what I said.