The demon prodded him, switching back and forth between Green-O and something far worse: a face with only slits for a nose and a round dark hole for a mouth.
"What did you expect?" it asked. "Truly now, what did you expect for one such as you?"
He closed his eyes and tried not to listen.
"It's your lot in life," the demon whispered, its voice a breathy gargle. "I'm showing the truth to you. Don't you see now, what you are? The least of all my creations, the most wonderful. Breathe, Robert."
He tried to breathe and sucked in water. The drowning never ended; the panic never ended.
"Breathe for me."
He tried to get up. He plucked weakly at the sheets binding him to the little bed, pushing through the gulps that racked his throat and the pain that beat down on his head. He tried to lift his legs from the mattress but they wouldn't move. He lifted them with his hands but it made no difference.
The demon laughed. The stink of chlorine washed off him and Robert's throat convulsed. He vomited and gagged. In the moments before he suffocated for the thousandth time, he glimpsed the bright yellow cartoon characters on his socks.
Put there by his mother, like he was a child. They didn't move, no matter how much he strained to twitch them.
"Your legs are lost now," the demon grinned at him. "Like a foreign land. Suffer for me, child of the water. Show me what you are."
* * *
His mother came. A doctor came. For short periods he could emerge, gasping up through the water that fogged his vision and his hearing, long enough to hear snatches of their conversations.
They spoke to him and about them. He caught words like 'coma,' 'brain damage' and 'broken spine'. He tried to reach up and answer but every time the red demon poured piss and chlorine down his throat, pulling him back into the sweating dark.
Time passed like that, days or weeks or both, and the demon was always there, punishing him whenever he tried to speak or move. He drowned for days, lost in helpless panic, punished by the pain. There was no way out.
"There is one way," the demon whispered, hissing at him through the dark in the middle of the night. "I know a way."
He resisted, but the pain and panic never relented.
"Finish what you started. Jump for me."
"I didn't-" he tried to say, but the demon stuffed his throat.
"You did. You jumped. You dived. Surely you knew."
"I didn't."
"You dived into concrete, child. You ran toward me. Come all the way, now, let's finish this together."
He wept in the dark. He had nothing left to fight with. In the day when his mother stood by his side, a dark shadow like the moon, her presence hurt. When she spoke to him the words buzzed like piranha round his face, snapping at his eyes. When she stroked his shoulder or held his hand the pain radiated out from her touch.
"It will never be better," the demon whispered. "It will always be like this, hurt by all the things you love. It's the love that makes it worse, you know? You'd be better off if you'd just died in that pool. Your mother would be too."
He'd seen it in a movie, and one night he did it. It was no addition to the pain at all, no worse than the drowning he felt every moment of every day. He bit down on his tongue until blood welled down his throat and drowned him.
* * *
In the red darkness beyond he saw Zane again, but he was a man now, no longer a 15-year old boy. He still wore the same clothes though, with bullet holes where the Orandelles had shot him.
He took Robert's hand and they walked for a time, until they left the carnage in the forest behind and emerged alongside the Mississippi riverside, a beautiful and empty spot where they use to practice hucking footballs.
"You can't die now," Zane said.
Robert looked up at the face of his friend, grown and strong though he was pale from loss of blood.
"You won't be like me. You have work to do."
"It's good to see you, Zane," he said.
Zane smiled, flashing white teeth spotted with blood. "It's good to see you too, Robert. But I'm not ready to welcome you in yet. I saved your life that day. Do you think it was for nothing?"
"I didn't-"
"There's things you have to do still. Obligations."
He hung his head. "My mother, I know."
"Not your mother. There's a storm coming and you'll be at the heart. You remember the demon? You're going to save the world, little brother, not in spite of what you've become but because of it."
He gestured and Robert looked down. Now he was sitting in a wheelchair, with legs as thin as sticks. Zane too looked weaker now, frail and pale, like a freshly dug-up corpse. He was standing and Robert was sitting and their fingers barely touched.
"How can I save the world?" he asked. "What can I do, like this?"
"You'll be amazed," Zane said, smiling, "what a little faith can achieve."
"I can't even breathe," Robert said. He looked down at his lap. His hands were thin too, like kindling against his bare black thighs.
"Neither can I," said Zane. Now the top of his skull was missing. There were maggots rooting in the gray flesh of his brain. Both of his eyes were gone; dark holes into rotten meat. Still his mouth moved and his swollen tongue wagged between bloated purple lips. "I can't see and I can't hear, I can't speak, but I'm here aren't I? We don't get to make excuses, you and I, two gangbangers from Frayser. Who expected a thing from us? Who thought you would make the Olympic team? I see you now, Bobby, diving for gold. You're standing on the podium for us all, and I'm so proud."
He was crying now, in his wheelchair. Zane was dead. Zane had been dead for years.
"I can't even breathe," he said again. "I'm nothing. I'm the least of us all."
Zane grinned. A piece of his nose fell off. His teeth were still bright and white, though his gums had turned to slushy black and there was blood bubbling on his tongue. "That's not true. You're the most. You're my brother. Never forget that."
The grip between their hands broke. Zane tottered away over the marshy river bank until he collapsed into the water, and Robert was left alone.
* * *
Things were different when he woke next. The red demon was still there, but the veil of water fogging his eyes, ears and mind had lifted. He saw his mother sitting by his side in a puddle of warm lamplight, occasionally tapping her phone gently.
He tried to speak. Only a mumble came out but she heard it, and dropped her phone on the floor.
"Robert?"
He gave the faintest of nods. The demon was coming around already. She came over and hugged him, which put him back under for a time.
But he got better. Over days the demon receded further, allowing him the space to think, hear, see and even speak.
He had staggered, drawn-out conversations with his mother. He couldn't say much, with long breaks needed between every exchange, but they were conversations still. He asked her to turn the lights down. She did. He asked if he'd ever walk again.
She said no, with the same honest bluntness they'd always shared. The doctors had severed his spine after he almost drowned on his own blood, hoping it would stop the endless epilepsy-like assault on his mind.
"I was in a coma," he managed. She nodded, and described how he'd turned so deathly pale and tried to get up at times, with a strange white light burning in his eyes.
He didn't understand, and wanted to ask questions but the weight was descending and he closed his eyes.
Days later she was there with a wheelchair, rolling it round the narrow basement. "We'll get an elevator fitted here," she said, pointing at the stairs. "You can come and go as you please. The state will cover most of it. You can go to college now, they've got funds for the disabled."
He tried to smile for her. He even tried to get into the wheelchair with her helping him, but the weight in his head quickly grew too much. Seeing his legs flopped across the bed like dead tentacles brought the demon on hard.
"It'll come," hi
s mother said. "Piece by piece we'll push back the boundaries."
He tried to push them back, for her. He tried reading and watching TV. He tried to listen to her everyday stories from work as part of his rehabilitation, but exhaustion always set in quickly and persistence only brought on gasping panic attacks. He tried to push through but they grew so bad that even the anticipation of approaching his boundaries would set them off, starting a spiral into thumping pain that sometimes took days to fade away.
He stopped trying to get out of bed. Their conversations remained in bite-sized chunks.
A doctor came at times. They talked briefly in clipped sentences to avoid the pain. He'd broken his spine and was lucky his brain worked at all. There had been substantial brain damage when they fished him half-drowned out of the pool, and no one had expected him to be the same. The second round of operations changed something, but nobody knew how.
It was a miracle he was alive. The migraines were part of the cost of that. When he tried to explain that the pain and weight had set in before he jumped, his mother got a sad look in her eye.
"You think I tried to commit suicide," he said to her once.
"I don't think that. You were confused. You fell."
"I jumped. But I wasn't trying to die."
"I know that."
She said so but she didn't know it. That stung. That drove him to recover more than anything.
He made lists.
On the first list were the five stages of grief, from denial, anger, bargaining, depression to acceptance. Every day he looked at it and tried to chart his mood. The goal was acceptance and moving on, but how could he do that when the pain and panic were always there? Most days he swung between anger, denial and bargaining.
Anger came with the frustration of lying in bed. Anger came at Green-O for trapping him here in this shitty Frayser basement with no way out. Anger came that he would never dive again, never walk again, never swim again.
Denial came when he caught glimpses of his pathetic legs. He felt sick. He wept when his mother wasn't there to see, and cursed the God she believed in. He bargained with the room, with the boy bands on the walls, with the trophies in their cabinet.
Just give me one day. One hour. One minute. One step.
The depression muffled everything.
Still he tried, for his mother if not for him. To prove he wasn't going to abandon her and never had. The panic attacks crushed him and still he tried.
His second list was all the things he could think of to drive the demon back. TV was on it, radio too, books, comics, people, and he kept pushing his way along it, deeper into a life of sweat, pain and recovery, though there was hardly any progress to show for his effort and nothing to look forward to but years more of the same.
He cried when he was lost in pain, anger and depression. He gave up a hundred times then rededicated himself. At last, at the bottom of his second list, he came to Deepcraft, a world-building game he'd played for years.
And it was Deepcraft that changed his life.
5. DEEPCRAFT
It was the last step before the list ended, left until the end because it was the one thing he most wanted to keep. If he lost Deepcraft too then he was truly trapped in this basement, staring at these walls forever. It was his last bit of hope.
But there was nothing else left. He lay slackly with the game controller in his hands while his mother set the system up. Just directing her how to do it exhausted him. She looked exhausted too. He knew the constant failures were grinding her down just as much as him.
She turned the lights off, then left him alone as the Deepcraft boot screen loaded up and logged into the Internet. His avatar name hung there above his head, as always:
Deep Dive
He erased it before it triggered a panic attack, leaving the name slot blank.
The menu page was a simple and clean green. He scrolled through a list of the worlds he'd explored before: one a landscape of giant revolving question marks. He logged in. His avatar, a pale blue parrot with a pirate on its shoulder, the hangover of an old, old joke Zane once made, rode a train around a green plateau endlessly. He looked out of the windows and watched the huge question marks go by.
It was OK, but then it was familiar, and familiar things didn't hurt much.
He logged out and tried other worlds. Anything with water started him on a panic spiral downward, so he avoided oceans, rivers, fountains and rain, bridges, piers, swimming pools, sometimes even bathrooms and kitchens. Getting attacked by the in-game zombies brought on the pain too so he turned them off. Forests were bad too, so he spent his time in cities and underground bunkers and abandoned military complexes.
After that first day of several hours in the system, he was left sweating and gulping. It was hard to say if it helped at all.
The next day he returned, and tried to make a game of it by taking screenshots of the new places he visited and storing them, like new medals on a virtual shelf. That way his progress was clear, and each dive into Deepcraft was a step further out.
In a few days he explored all of his old mods, then logged into Deep-pedia to find something new. All the worlds were recorded there in long dizzying lists. He filtered out any reference to water as best he could with search terms, then picked one that caught his eye.
New York as Destroyed in the Movies
It helped. There was something familiar about roaming iconic locations like Times Square and Coney Island, destroyed in some places by aliens, in others by demons, in others by ice. He could roam the city all day, acclimatizing to each slightly shifted reality. He made progress but it was lonely.
The only other person who visited the world was its maker, who came and went in silence, adding features to his creation. Robert tried to talk to him but he either didn't speak English or wasn't interested.
He logged out and searched Deep-pedia, until a new mod came up through his search filters.
Yangtze Fulfillment Center.
It piqued his interest after years spent working in a Yangtze center, and he logged in. It was a large dim warehouse stocked with goods on floor-to-ceiling shelving, just as you would expect, but soothingly dark and calm. At once he felt comfortable, and wandered the shadowy aisles for a time, looking at the various boxes of produce on the shelves. They were all beautifully crafted, with intricate graphics drawn down to the smallest details on product labels, with price tags and scuff marks on boxes.
Non-player characters wandered the aisles with him, obviously meant to be pickers collecting goods for delivery, ordered off the Internet. Sometimes they tried to engage him in conversation. A skinny guy was very persistent in talking about pick-up lines. A chubby girl called Blucy with bright blue hair kept trying to sell him copies of her book about Amish vampires, printed on the Yangtze's own print-on-demand machines, which chuckled away to themselves in a corner of the warehouse.
There was no outside; no doors and no windows. It was just the warehouse, and it was good, but there wasn't much to do and he couldn't pretend it was pushing the boundaries to stay. He was preparing to leave when a pop-up box asked him:
Would you like a diviner?
He clicked yes. Diviners were the modified tablets that Yangtze used to direct its pickers round the warehouse, collecting goods to be packed. One popped into his parrot-hand and he studied it. The screen said:
3-foot diameter trampoline
An arrow blinked forward. He followed it forward, as he'd done many times in south Memphis. Soon it blinked left and he followed it left. On the way down that aisle he passed another player, a normal-looking male avatar wearing shorts and a T-shirt, carrying a diviner too. They didn't speak. Robert flipped the visuals to display more data and saw the 'maker' tag hanging over the guy's head, along with his name:
Amo
It wasn't a normal name but it didn't hurt his head. It intrigued him that anyone would make a mod so simple, but the calm dark seemed to keep that interest within the boundaries he could manage.<
br />
He continued on toward his trampoline. There was a certain satisfaction in collecting it. Next was a sanding belt.
He played for hours, moving digital bits around in the dark. He couldn't explain why he enjoyed it, but the simplicity of the mechanism, with no points, no winning and losing, and very small bursts of very mild excitement when he made a collection, all interspersed by long sections of following directions in the dark, somehow kept him engaged.
Over the next several weeks he came back every day. He made a note of the times Amo was there and timed his visits so they could run the shelves together. They never spoke but it felt good, a kind of companionship.
Then they spoke.
"Hello, Cerulean," Amo said, as they were walking down an aisle toward each other. The words popped up in a speech bubble over his character's head.
At first Robert didn't think Amo was talking to him. His name wasn't Cerulean; he didn't even know what it meant. He walked on. An hour or so passed then they crossed paths again.
"You don't have a name," Amo typed. "I could call you parrot, but I prefer Cerulean. It's the color of your feathers. Unless you'd rather not talk."
Robert blinked in the real world. This 'Amo' was talking to him. It felt bizarre, as if an inanimate object like a toaster had suddenly started to whistle.
The demon stirred but he typed an answer anyway
"Hello, Amo," his parrot said on their next crossing.
It set his heart racing and his mind pounding, which he didn't understand. He'd spoken to other people in Deepcraft before, but not like this. This seemed to matter more, like there was something important riding on what he said and did next. He logged out, dreading their next crossing.
It happened the day after.
"You're here," Amo typed shortly after Robert logged in. It was sent as a private message without waiting for them to cross paths.
The same excitement and dread rose up, and this time he pushed into it. "It's a good maze."
"Thanks. It's a fulfillment center. I used to work in one."
The diviner popped up and Robert followed its directions automatically. "Me too. I never thought I'd want to come back, though. And to work for free."
Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 4