Veneer

by Daniel Verastiqui

  Together, they watched the downpour.

  Ilya saw the sum total of Rosalia’s existence expressed in hundreds of thousands of pictures, from things that actually happened, like a junior high dance, to things Rosalia had only dreamt, like a school on the edge of a cliff with its playground hanging precariously over the edge.

  “Beautiful.” It was all Ilya dared to say because deep down she knew that pictures were just pictures and while enticing, they were only tiny encapsulations of the beauty within the artist.

  It was fortunate that Rosalia had such a command of reconciliation, that it allowed her to translate the beauty inside so that everyone else could share in it. Such talent languished in the ugly, even in Ilya herself. She thought about what was inside her, a mix of unrequited emotions and generational prejudices. There was nothing remotely beautiful except for the love she so desperately wanted to give away.

  A bluish-white picture caught Ilya’s eye as it fell in the corner of the room. It looked like an elongated light bulb at first, but as she turned to get a better look, she realized that it was an x-ray. Raising her wobbly hand, she pointed to it.

  “What’s that?”

  Rosalia mumbled, tried to look where Ilya was pointing. “Bitches wouldn’t let me into Deron’s room,” she said. “I had to sit outside. The doctors were looking at his x-rays in the wall. I reconciled...” She drifted off for what felt like minutes. “Onto my palette.” A thin smile. “I was born.”

  “Born?” Ilya turned back to Rosalia.

  “Bored,” she corrected, repeating the word a few times as if to verify it. “I reconcile everything I see.” She spread her hands in demonstration.

  “Do you ever make mistakes?”

  Rosalia huffed, blew a raspberry. When she finally spoke, the words came so quickly and so close together that Ilya had trouble understanding. “I reconcile what I see. I don’t even think about it. I could close my eyes and reconcile you and get every detail in your face from your eyebrows to your pupils to your lips to your teeth and chin and...” She ran out of body parts and trailed off.

  Ilya tried to ignore the warmth filling her cheeks. “So that x-ray is exactly what the doctors were looking at?”

  “Sure.” She rolled onto her side; her breath smelled vaguely of strawberries. “Why?”

  The question hung in the air for a long time during which Rosalia’s eyes darted back and forth over the features of Ilya’s face. They were mere inches from each other and for a moment, it appeared that Rosalia’s inhibitions would succumb to the Mellow and she’d close the distance with a kiss. Ilya reached out and placed her hand on Rosalia’s cheek and then slid it to the back of her neck. Her fingers moved tentatively, seeking out the hollow under the base of her skull, pressing firmly, trying to feel something: a lump, a scar, anything. Then, something hard pushed back against her finger, making her heart jump. She looked quickly to the ceiling again.

  “Are you sure that’s Deron’s x-ray?”

  Rosalia looked up. “Yes. I remember reconciling it.”

  “Are you sure it’s not yours?”

  She laughed the way she had on the tram; the questions weren’t really reaching her anymore. “My head isn’t shaped like an egg.”

  Ilya continued to prod, at one point feeling what she thought was a tiny scar. She ran her finger over it several times. “Do you see that little square on Deron’s neck?”

  “Yeah,” said Rosalia, as if noticing it for the first time. “What is that?”

  Whether from the Mellow or just the situation, Ilya struggled to get the next words out. There was apprehension on Rosalia’s veneer, reconciled concern for her lover’s welfare. Ilya could see the gears turning, could see her trying to imagine the different explanations for why this bright white speck appeared in Deron’s neck. It could have been something from the attack, a metal plate inserted to patch a crack in his vertebrae. And those were all reasonable explanations, to some extent, but only because she was missing a vital piece of the puzzle.

  Ilya removed her hand, hesitated before touching her own neck. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. Then, with just a hint of alarm, “But you’ve got one in your neck... and so do I.”

  PART THREE

  Deron was sitting at the small table in the dining nook, looking through the sliding door to the patio where two red-chested birds had stopped to survey their breakfast. They were vibrant, so out of place on the gray railing and against the equally gray backdrop of the patio walls. The only other color in sight was green, the tips of trees peeking over the wall. He couldn’t see the sky, couldn’t confirm whether it had lost its color too. One thing was for sure—reality was broken.

  He had spent most of Sunday in his room staring at the walls, touching them gently, trying to coerce them into changing. Thinking back to elementary school, he employed the old maxims, tried to remember what teachers had told him about reconciling. A lifetime of instant access to information on the network made him reach for his palette, but he quickly realized it would be as useful as an audio recording that taught the deaf how to hear. If he couldn’t reconcile a veneer, then he couldn’t use a portal. The reach of the veneer went far beyond his imagination. It covered everything, from walls to bed sheets, from magazines to chairs. His room used to have color; now it just looked like a reconciled picture that someone had shopped to grayscale.

  It wasn’t until Monday morning when his alarm went off that Deron realized the veneer wasn’t really gone; it was his perception that was flawed. There was sound emanating from the wall, but there were no numbers indicating time, no portal providing a black background to the red digits. He had to psyche himself up to reach out for it, to hit the snooze as he had a thousand mornings before. There was something ominous about the bland drywall, a possibility that it might suck the pale pink from his fingertips.

  The alarm cut off the second he touched the wall, giving credence to his perception theory. He tried to follow it to its logical conclusion, but kept dead-ending in blindness. The idea would have made sense had there been a physical clock in a dark room, but this...

  Nothing added up. First, the alarm had sounded, which meant software was running in a portal somewhere. Second, when he touched the wall where the portal should have been, he activated the mute function. If he had closed his eyes while doing this, the events would not have seemed that extraordinary. So what did that all mean?

  The question so consumed Deron that he began his morning routine without even noticing it. He put on a pair of pants and an undershirt and headed into the hallway. It was dark without the glow of the baseboards, but he had walked the path from his room to the stairs often enough to find his way without running into anything. The sight of the kitchen, usually filled top to bottom with colors that popped, as his mom put it, made him cringe. The description he had been avoiding since his initial discovery wormed its way into his head.

  Dead. Everything looked dead.

  It wasn’t until he sat down at the table and looked outside, watched the first rays of light come up, and saw the birds with their brightly colored feathers and yellow beaks. He didn’t know their names, didn’t really care. All that mattered was that there was still color in the world.

  “What’re you all smiles about this morning?”

  Oh yeah, thought Deron, remembering the other problem still plaguing him. It had to do with the strange woman roaming his house, an ersatz version of his mom that sounded the same, smelled the same, even told the same boring stories, but looked nothing like the woman who had raised him. This woman looked years older, had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, splotches on her cheeks and neck. The skin on her arms and legs was pale, marked by blue veins that turned a sickly purple in places. Whoever she was, she thought herself Deron’s mother. So far, his plan had been to simply play along, wait for the right moment to confront that issue.

  “Do you want breakfast?”

  “No,” replied Deron, watching the birds fly away.


  She seemed to know where everything was, had knowledge that his real mom couldn’t pass on in a single day. He tried to imagine the exchange, the information dump of so many collected years in the house. Most disturbing was the way she prepared her morning coffee, pulling blank containers from the cabinets as if she somehow knew their contents. It all added to a mystery Deron didn’t fully understand yet. Some things had color while others did not. The coffee can was gray, the scooper too, but when she dumped the grounds into the coffee maker, they were dark brown. Water looked like water, as did the milk when she poured it into a serving cup.

  “You don’t have to go to school if you don’t want to.” She spoke with her back to him. Through the sheer robe, Deron could see too much.

  He cleared his throat. “I’ll think about it.”

  The woman poured herself a cup of coffee as soon as it was ready and took a seat opposite Deron. She sipped silently, staring at him with the same eyes but a different face. Finally, she asked, “Can you fix your veneer? I don’t like this all-black look. It makes you look like a hoodlum.”

  Deron tried to remember how many times he had touched his face without realizing it. Sunday morning had been a mad dash to reconcile something, anything. It was possible that in the process he had ruined his veneer. There was no way to check, no real mirrors in the house that weren’t just portals with reflective software. It was all spurious: the mirror, the process of reflection, and even the image that came back.

  He stood and walked around the table, careful to keep his gaze on his mom’s face. Kneeling down beside her, he asked, “Can you fix it for me? I’m having... trouble.”

  Her face twitched, contorted in a way that somewhat resembled concern. It was then that he noticed the brown in her eyes was actually colorful, a gradient between amber and brown, nothing even remotely gray. She placed a finger on his cheek, blinked slowly. “There,” she said. “Good as new.”

  There was no sensation. His face and body had just changed appearance dramatically, yet he felt no warmth, no coolness—nothing. More confused than ever, Deron left the kitchen, left Ania staring blankly after him. He walked the darkened stairs, crossed the loft to his room, and shut the door. It was brighter now that the sun had come up and his first response was to reconcile the windows to blot out the daylight. He couldn’t, of course, but as he stood there staring at the unyielding glass, his mind drifted back to Saturday night.

  To the bus, to the windows.

  The ride back from Paramel had been uneventful save for a landscape that looked nothing like it had on the way over. The first mile from the gate was a wasteland, but in the miles between, it was different. For one, it wasn’t as empty as previously shown, didn’t have that nuclear fallout aura that made it seem so forbidding. What Deron saw under the glare of the moon looked inviting. There were trees, brush, and a wilderness of unexplored land, full of overgrown grass and small animals darting through it. The abrupt change in content had made no sense then, but now, looking through the windows that couldn’t hold back the sun, he realized it had all been a smokescreen.

  Someone had reconciled the windows on the bus to show passing scenery that fit in with the government’s storyline. It was the same with the windows in Swarm Survivor, just an overlay of veneer, a painting on a painting. He should have made the connection then, but the headache and the injury and...

  “Fuck all,” he whispered.

  Any semblance of control over the world was simply an illusion. The magic that let him change an object’s color was the same magic that veneered windows, only someone with a lot more skill had done those. Who could be trusted with such complete control over the world?

  Deron gasped, felt the air start to leak out of the room. There was something else going on, something beyond schools and police and government. Something controlled the veneer at the deepest level, kept everyone in line with what amounted to lies.

  Lies as unreal as the woman claiming to be his mom.

  Deron considered the possibility that his imposter theory was just a way to deal with the truth about a mother who was barely recognizable anymore. No longer was she the picture of regal beauty that her veneer made her out to be. Underneath, she was still human, but that ancient kind that showed their age in their skin. It pained him for many reasons, for the face of a woman closer to fifty than forty, for the knowledge that the process would never stop. She would keep decaying, little by little, until she was dead.

  Worst of all was the ignorance. Had she ever looked at her true image in a portal? Had anyone in the world for that matter? Was everyone just lying to themselves, letting death sneak up on them, suffering a heart attack with the face of a college graduate or a stroke at what looked like a professional thirty?

  There was a tickle in his nose and Deron dropped out of the cloud long enough to realize his eyes had started to water. He stared at his lap, at the previously black jeans. A moment went by when he thought of nothing but Rosalia’s face only to see it consumed by a vortex of questions that blotted out all input.

  A million miles away, he heard the door open.

  “I’m leaving for work now,” said Ania, said the middle-aged woman with streaks of gray in her hair.

  “Okay,” said Deron, standing and walking to the window. He took in the selectively colored world outside.

  “I’ll call the school and tell them you won’t be in today.” She paused as if she wanted to say something else. “Don’t watch too much TV,” she said finally, her voice uneven.

  “Don’t worry,” replied Deron to the closing door. “I can’t.”

  22 - Rosalia

  Rosalia was already imagining the discussion in her head when she stepped onto campus. Her route from home brought her into the parking lot, but over the last few weeks, she’d developed a habit of circling around to the courtyard at the front of the school to sit with Ilya. She got to school by bus and since it usually dropped her off early, Rosalia would often find her sitting on the evercrete wall that surrounded the plaza.

  Ilya explained that school didn’t really start until eight o’clock, so even though they had the option of going inside, she preferred to spend as much of her life outside Easton Central’s walls as possible. Today was no different, except that instead of having her head buried in her palette, she was actively scanning her surroundings, probably in anticipation of Rosalia, of the impending conversation.

  It would start with a question that expressed her struggles with understanding men, the entire gender in general, and Deron, specifically. And if she knew anything about Ilya, her attentive confidant would reply with some old-world wisdom probably passed down from her grandmother, which would make sense in a logical or mystical kind of way but wouldn’t apply to her current situation.

  More than anything, Rosalia wanted to know what Deron was thinking when he did certain things or how to predict what he would do if she said certain words, made certain advances. There was no ancient insight for that, just conjecture, no better than Ilya’s or asking a random person on the street. The only way to test her theories would be to try them out on her boyfriend, and the wrong move could lead to disaster.

  Rosalia shrugged when Ilya asked her why Deron had stood her up Sunday night. It seemed like the right response—a mix of ignorance and apathy, a nonverbal statement when no words would do it justice. Of course, she wanted details, as anyone who was living vicariously through her friend would. Sparing no mundane moment, Rosalia recounted the day, starting from Ilya’s departure Sunday morning. She had spent the day reconciling her outfits, trying to find the right colors to compliment the undergarments she had purchased. Around noon, she started sending instant messages to Deron. The fact that he didn’t respond didn’t bother her until dinner had come and gone. The romantic evening she imagined in her head was shattered, but even then, she was optimistic. After checking her veneer for the thousandth time, she set out for Deron’s house.

  The next part made Ilya frown, out of concern, empathy
, something. Rosalia described the evening, the chill in the air, the breeze blowing down the street, and the feel of her clothes as they moved across her body. She didn’t have the right words to say it was sensual without sounding dirty, so she went straight into the approach to Deron’s door.

  His bedroom window was dark, along with the rest of the house. She knocked on the door and waited. His mom answered, flustering Rosalia. Ania didn’t actively dislike her; she was just leery of any girl that could get her little boy into trouble. Rosalia asked for Deron and Ania disappeared without inviting her in. She could only watch through the frosted glass as a shadow trudged up the stairs.

  Ilya asked why Ania didn’t just let her go up or at least let her wait inside. Again, Rosalia shrugged, tried to explain the complicated relationship between them, but her words came out disjointed. Waving the topic away, she continued the story at the point where Ania came back downstairs and told her that Deron wasn’t feeling well, that he needed to get some rest. Rosalia asked to go up and when rebuked, even begged. His mom simply wouldn’t budge.

  All the dreams, the fantasies of a special night with Deron, were engulfed in a blue flame and crumbled into a heap. And from those ashes rose more questions, most important of which being why he didn’t want to see her.

  “Have you talked to Sebo?” asked Ilya.

  “No, why?”

  “I’ve seen the way Deron looks at you. I don’t think he’d pass up a chance to see you unless he had good reason. Or someone had convinced him not to.”

  “Sebo’s not that kind of guy.”

  Ilya ignored her and tried to change the subject. “Well, so you didn’t get to give him your cherry. At least we had some fun on Saturday, right?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, recalling the feel of Mellow in her veins.