Psych133 Project: Novel-turned-short-story NaNoWriMo attempt!

NaNoWriMo Draft: Untitled (for now).

It wasn’t at all a serious setting – it should have been, she felt it should have, but there was an overwhelming and pervasive sense of silliness everywhere she looked. The students walking by all had absurd looks on their faces. Unreal. Flighty.

She takes up her pencil and chews on the end, staring at the notebook in her lap but not registering any of the information scrawled on the pages.

From far away a bell tolls twice. The pages flicker red for a moment; she sighs, tucks the pad into her bag, and pushes herself off the retaining wall. The chunks in the cement leave marks on her palms. Absently, she brushes off the dirt embedded in her hand and drifts toward her destination.

“Professor, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it on time but the skittles.

“Skitters.

“Ah. They were coming out of the closet.”

She hums a note and then another as she places one foot after the other on the asphalt road to Religion.

“Eric, have you ever…”

“Are you alright, Ceric? You’re not yourself today.”

He is walking next to her, the heels on his boots clicking delightfully against the blacktop.

“And when have you ever pinned down a singular Ceric?”

She turns to look at him, eyes narrowed in mirth, gold and then a laughing cyan. He nods in acknowledgement of her point and slips a finger through her hair.

“But you don … rebel … have notions of agency.”

She watches him gaze at the static surrounding his fingers before he blurs into her peripheral vision and then nothingness. His words fade with him and imprint themselves into her phonological loop. Notions of agency.

“Notions of agency,” she murmurs to herself as she studies her professor (she did not excuse herself) and the glint of his glasses.

She smiles to herself, a quiet smile, while he paces across the front of the room, reading out loud from the book in his hands. The fluorescent bulb above him hums almost imperceptibly, and as he turns to take a step in the other direction, the harsh blue glare flashes white across his wire frames. He takes them off in a sweeping motion, turning his attention to the class and initiating discussion.

“You could say that we are transforming, distorting our theology by saying that we are, somehow, … our theology, hmm, is embodied in, I think, in a sociological, institutional form. But those are secular forms, those aren’t religious forms. Those are simply the ways we do good works in society. But they’re not… they’re not about bringing religion into it. “

He laughs, a warm, self-conscious laugh, and a couple students chuckle along with him. Ceric tucks a leg under herself and leans over her notebook, a soft feeling settling into the bottom of her being.

 “I know this sounds very confusing. But this is the confusion we want to get a grip on, because it’s precisely what makes this religious form particularly sticky, I think.”

A student raises her hand.

“So are you… okay. So are you saying that this is the opposite of the Mahmood example? … Like, — “

“In many ways, it is–” the professor starts.

“I mean, are they–”

“Yeah. Yeah–”

“They’re, they were like… specifically debating what those women actually do… they’re not — they’re saying: those paths are going to help them be good women in society, but they’re not going to lead them to God — God would either happen upon them or… or he won’t. Is that what…? I mean, that’s kind of how it…”

“You mean, how God would happen upon these people?”

“No, but, like, these evangelicals would look at a religion where they’re like, simply hearing that some type of action would lead them to God, or to perform a duty to desire to be lead to God, they would say that these actions exist in a larger, like, goodness of society but that whether God is in it or not happens to be individual. Like, but maybe it’ll lead them to God, maybe it wouldn’t, but that’s not the purpose of it. I mean, is that what they would be saying? That any religion is …”

“Yes. They would say that the external practices, right, that are very central to Mahmood’s analysis, right– “

“Yeah, yeah.” The student succeeds in recalling this.

“Acting shyly and things like that. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“That… those are not vehicles through which one will become close to God. It is only through one’s heart and… and the grace of God, like Patricia noted, that one will get closer to God. So, I mean, I meant that, well, you know, if you have this very —

“I talked about that through very liberal ideas of the self. An idea that there’s a kind of core, that remains unchanged, that remains you, all of this sort of…”

The professor makes his way over to the chalkboard on wheels on the right side of the room. Leaning down, he picks up a piece of chalk from the tray below the board and draws a shaky circle on the board, and then another circle within it.

“This outer part of you– ” he indicates the area between the circles, “– is all your… what you’ve acquired in school, what you have to do on your job, that is, all of these things that impact upon you, and shape you into a particular being.”

He decorates the indicated area with an assortment of marks, one hand coming up to adjust the brim of his hat that is slipping back from his wide gestures. Ceric finds herself laughing at the diagram’s resemblance to a chocolate-sprinkle donut.

“Including this class, including, I mean, all the things that you have to do as a citizen, things you have to do as a family, all those things — they provide resources that you may use, and so on, to get a job, think with — but there’s this core of you. A center of, let’s say, your will, where your interests come from, where the core of your desire…”

Despite the donut, everything is starting to feel inconsequential again and then there is a blank nothingness that does not seem have an end. But it does end, as if a perceptual dial is suddenly twisted back to a normal level, and sight, sound, and feeling floods back into Ceric’s consciousness. She sits up in alarm, rubbing the drowsiness from her eyes and glancing at the notes of the student next to her. The professor is surprisingly still on the same point.

“…That remain a guiding center that directs your outer resources but is not shaped by them. Right?”

Ceric scans the classroom for the target of the question. It is still the same student. She watches the student nod, wondering about the simultaneous sluggishness and instantaneity of the movement. The professor continues.

“This idea that you remain you, the center of conscious self direction. Independent from all of the various sort of… socio-cultural impositions that may have shaped a person’s life. Right? But in Mahmood, you have a constant…you have a formation that transcends, and that includes the entirety of the self. Shouldn’t the self…”

The professor’s voice fades out and in again, almost pulsing. Ceric frowns and takes a swig of tea. Holding the thermos high above her face, she sticks out her tongue to catch the last drips of the lemony liquid.

Lemon. Bergamot.

She was never a fan of bergamot.

“… isolatable, self-directing center because … “

The summer heat is desiccating, as desiccating as the bead of acid pressed against the roof of her mouth. Again, she raises the halved lemon above her mouth and squeezes, relishing the rush of sensation. The shade is uncertain, shifting back and forth across her upturned face as the hot breeze plays with the leaves and, consequently, light.

“… and the inward and outward should become continuous and reflect each other as one becomes more pious.”

“We’re not attending a Christian school anymore,” Ceric says. She tosses the lemon aside and it disappears into the grass she is sitting in. “There’s no need for piety.”

Lying back, she closes her eyes and feels the blades of grass scratch her through the thin blouse she is wearing.

“Once I get home I’m changing out of this stupid uniform.”

“Where’s home?” a voice asks from above her.

Eric is leaning over her, his long black hair falling over his eyes. Ceric sits up in alarm, not at Eric’s presence, but at the sudden realization that she does not know where home is. He is looking at her with a concerned expression on his face.

“I… “

She glances around her.

Backyard. First grade. The lemon tree, under which she sits, behind a small whitewashed building, next to a bush that she used to hide behind. Her teacher has to be here, and she must know where home is.

“Ms. Koske’s gotta be here. Let’s check inside.”

It feels like miles of linoleum tiles. The hallways are cramped, painted a suffocating peach, the ceilings too high and the doors claustrophobically oaken. Plastic. They weren’t made of wood, of course –

“Eric, we’re on the wrong campus. How did we get here?”

“Ms. Koske wasn’t in. Her substitute told us to ask the principal.”

“Ah, that’s right…”

Ceric remembers now. Standing beside Eric, watching the children struggle with the problems in their booklets. The uniforms were different from what she recalled – collared shirts and trousers, for both girls and boys. Where were the skirts?

She places her freshly laundered cardigan and blouse on her desk next to her bed, stumbling over her backpack in the semi-dark. As she makes her way over her bed using the light coming from the bathroom, she is reminded of something she had planned to do for the past week or so.

“Mom…” she calls out.

“Yeah?”

Her mother walks into the room, a skirt draped over one arm, and opens the closet door to hang up the article of clothing.

“I want to cut my hair.”

“But–”

“I don’t care about the consequences,” Ceric preempts.

“Right now? It’s time to sleep, Ceric.”

“I’ve wanted to for weeks. I’m tired of long hair.”

“Alright, alright.”

“She said, ‘I don’t care about the consequences,’” she heard her mother relay to her father. “Does she even know what the word means?”

Ceric walks toward the light from the bathroom, blinking when it becomes much, much brighter.

“Eric, did I ever have a mother?”

“Did you ever have a home?” he replies, and the class laughs uproariously.

Ceric blinks and sits up straight up in her seat, looking around in a panic. She takes in the professor, now smiling at the class, and the students, arranged around a large set of tables in the center of the room.

Religion. Anthropology. Right.

She looks around to see if anyone had seen her nod off, but if they had, they gave no sign.

“… How do you know if Jesus is out there?” asks a student, a different one this time.

The professor tilts his head at her, the laughter still in his eyes.

“What do you mean ‘out there’? Like, out in the streets, helping out?”

The class laughs in unison again, and Ceric finds herself snickering before putting her face in her hands, groaning in irritation.

“Coffee… coffee. I need coffee,” she mutters to herself.

Why is the professor still going on after twelve? She needed to wake up and finish studying for her midterm, and then she had to get going on her project…

Ceric gets up, throwing her thermos into her bag and almost panicking when she realizes that she had not put the lid back on it. She shoves her hand into her bag to rescue her books, only to find that they are still dry.

“Huh.”

She sinks back into her seat in relief when she remembers that her thermos is empty. After scrutinizing her professor and deciding that he does not intend to acknowledge the overtime, she stands up again, leaving the classroom and closing the door not unloudly behind her.

Nobody seems to take notice.

—

It is not until she sinks into the clutches of the couch in a coffee shop across campus that she remembers with a great deal of embarrassment that the class ended at twelve-thirty and not twelve. She tilts her head back in frustration, kicking at the carpet with her shoes.

“Eric, why does this crap always happen to me?” she asks him as he lounges on the arm of her seat.

“It was your choice, wasn’t it?” he says. He is raising an eyebrow at her.

“Shut up. I didn’t assign them.”

“But you chose to wait until now to start on them.”

“One two of them. I was busy with the rest.”

She ignores Eric, ending the conversation and concentrating on keeping her eyes open for the stretch of time between now and receiving her messiah-in-a-cup (with a double serving of whipped cream on top). She scans the room, focusing her attention from customer to customer. The majority of the customers were students with their laptops, sitting toward the glass windows with their backs to the room.

“Apple apple apple apple apple goose.”

Hipster laptops. Hipster scarves. Hipster sweaters. Hipster shoes. Ceric squints, her vision narrowing. All of her attention is on the ragged cloth star on the left side of one student’s shoe. The thread holding the star there is red. The whole shoe is red. The socks under the conspicuously short, folded up jeans are red. A bright, larger-than-life red, smacking of things too obscure for her to have heard of. White and red —

“Ceric,” Eric says, interrupting her train of thought.

“What do you want?” she snaps, turning to him, only to startle when she sees a nervous-looking employee holding her coffee. “Ah, sorry, I …”

The waiter reaches into his pocket with a shaky hand and checks a slip of paper. “It is Ceric, r-right?”

“Yes, um, yeah, that’s me, I just thought you were someone else,” she mutters and relieves him of the drink.

A few minutes later, she walks purposefully out of the establishment, the world wonderfully clear for a moment.

—

With a jubilant kick, she sends the pebble flying.

“Eric! Isn’t the world grand?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Caffeine. Caffeine. It’s magical. Whoever invented the stuff is my new religion.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure you’ve had enough for it to work as well as you’d like.”

“Hey, don’t shake my belief. It’s still a fledgling faith.”

Eric shrugs and smiles. “So you’ve drugged yourself. Ineffectively. What else is on the agenda for your lunch break?”

“Chicken strips. Or a rice bowl. Oh, a panini with so many different kinds of cheeses… “ Ceric looks at Eric with a silly grin. “We’re going to Ramona’s.”

Ceric takes a sharp right and skips halfway across the bridge. Feet planted firmly on concrete, she leans over the railing and marvels at the sparks of sunlight dancing on the waves in the stream five feet below her. Her eyes are automatically drawn in the direction of the current. She follows the course of a thin pine branch, loaded with dozens of still-green needles, down the flow away from her and then into a hollow in the bank, where the sunlight, also following the current, pooled and blended with the water, creating soft and dark shadows deeper than physically possible.

The spray of needles floats on the surface of this chiaroscuro and spins lazily, first one way, then another for a brief moment, manipulating the film of tension into an intricate pattern of reflections. Ceric reaches out a finger, pulling together shadows from the riverbed as the surrounding scenery becomes dimmer.

“Ceric! Cut it out!” a familiar voice rings out.

She sees a flash of carrot-orange and feels a hand clamp down on her arm, pulling her back from the railing.

“Eric?”

“No, Kevin. I don’t believe we’ve met before,” the voice replies, and Ceric turns to see a tall redhead frowning down at her. A backpack too small for him hangs over one broad shoulder and his freckles burn into her vision. Silvery jersey shorts, shoes meticulously cared for. Spotless, blindingly white. White and red.

Jock, she thinks. She pulls away from him.

 “Listen, kid, if you’re going to be tripping on acid, don’t do it where you can fall off a bridge and drown yourself,” he says after giving her time to acknowledge his presence.

“I’m… who do you take me for?” Ceric says, stepping back defensively.

Kevin’s arm shoots out again to pull her away from the railing.

“Someone who should be at home with a friend looking after them. Do you have someone you can call to walk you back?”

“I have to get to class,” Ceric says, gritting her teeth.

Kevin shakes his head.

“You have to get home, kid. You’re not looking well at all.”

“I’m fine. I can’t miss my exam.”

Ceric tugs her sleeve back in order and starts off toward Ramona’s again. With a shrug, Kevin continues down the bridge the other way, but not before giving her a wry look.

“I’m fine,” Ceric repeats to the air in front of her.

—

The panini she holds in her hands is warming and calms her down. There’s nothing as grounding as cheddar, pepper jack, more cheddar, more pepper jack, and three different kinds of meat grilled and wrapped wonderfully in toasted sourdough. Ceric opens her mouth and takes a large bite.

Ramona’s would be a relaxing place it weren’t for the obnoxiously flashing LEDs along the wall. It isn’t even close to Christmas.

“Why are these lights up?” Ceric asks as an employee  passes by her with a broom and dustpan.

“What lights?”

“The Christmas lights. The really annoying ones.”

The employee looks at her, confused, and turns away to sweep under another table. Ceric sighs, leaning her head against the wall and rolling her eyes.

“Why do people keep treating me like I’m crazy?”

Eric puts his drink down across the table and laughs.

“Bluetooth or crazy?”

His voice is oddly feminine.

“What do you mean?”

A pair of female students walk by, giggling nervously. Ceric turns from the girls back to Eric, only to find the chair empty.

“Eric?”

No answer. She takes another bite out of her sandwich and puts it down to take a notebook and pencil box out of her bag. She filters through her various writing implements and chooses a fine-point pen. Black. Uni. The pen reassures her that its special ink will protect her from fraud.

She opens her notebook, flipping through the text-covered pages to find a blank surface to write on. She needed an outline of the material; she knew she didn’t understand it well enough. Not early. Brain structures, the motor functions of the cerebellum, John Watson’s turbulent childhood…

She finally finds a clean side of a page between Little Albert and Gestalt principles. She puts the tip of her pen down on the paper, watching the ink flow down the metal and into the porous surface of the page, spreading into a black pool of viscous liquid, accentuated by spikes in absorbance between the particles.

With an inordinate amount of effort, Ceric lifts the tip of the pen and places it a line further down.

December of 1987.

She puts the pen down and scratches her head. A diary entry? The year when that article was written? Or a “daily page”, as her reader had described? The bustle of the eatery around her becomes secondary to the thoughts being spoken aloud in her head.

Figment of your imagination but nobody said anything about that I still have most of my sandwich to finish. I’m hungry why aren’t I eating? It’s too far away I don’t want to reach out that far I want to curl up into an ummoving ball.

She picks the pen up again and forces a word down.

Why

“Ugh.”

The paper is difficult to see through the golden sparks drifting through her field of vision.

are these

The “h” is considerably less legible than the “t”, and the “ese” trails off the page in an almost linear scrawl.

The Christmas lights are blinking out one by one, leaving the restaurant dark save the lights in the refrigerators for the drinks and cold sandwiches. Voices swirl around her and as she sits there with her head in her arms, she strains to catch snatches of conversation.

“… Red Line, the anime, no, Josh don’t–”

“Yeah.”

“Let me search for it on my computer.”

“Frogs!”

“Oh my god. Show her Funky Boy.”

“I knew you would love it.”

“Actually, I should show you the whole thing. Maybe later over the weekend. It’s an hour and forty minutes.”

Is it the weekend already? What is she doing in school? She racks her memory. If she is in Ramona’s, she must have been on this end of campus to complete a project in Wurster.

That’s right. I had to finish my wire frame for my sculpture, but I got locked out of the studio Friday evening.

Should I try to get into the studio again? But if it’s this dark, the building is probably locked. I don’t want to walk back home alone in the dark. Is it dinnertime yet? Have I slept through dinnertime?

Ceric raises her watch to her face and tries to find the button to illuminate the display. After several attempts, she gives up and gets up to take her cell phone out of her pocket. It is warm from having been nestled in her clothing for hours. She slides her finger along the screen and taps the phone icon, waiting for the contact screen to load. When it does, the names are all unrecognizable.

What is this? Did someone screw up all my contacts? Damn, I wish I actually took the time to memorize the important numbers.

She stuffs the phone back into her pocket and makes her way to the door, throwing all her weight against the heavy metal to force it open. It yields a foot or two, just enough for her to slip out into the chill evening air.

Where to go from here?

Ceric looks upward, taking in the silhouette of the building against the star-sprinkled sky. The windows are dark, the rooms empty. There is no one walking about the front of the building, either.

This can’t be right for a Friday night.

Shivering from the cold and a pervasive feeling of uncanniness, Ceric takes out her cell phone again. This time, the phone does not respond to her attempts to wake it from sleep.

Useless piece of crap. It’s never worked for me. Every time I try to call –

Ceric’s eyes widen. Her phone never works in dreams. She must be in a dream —

As if cued, students start walking out of the building she just came from and lights turn on behind her, one by one. She turns in a full circle, taking in her surroundings. The street to the south is busy, headlights and taillights streaming by in what would have been a constant torrent of white and red if it weren’t for the crossing of pedestrians every twenty seconds or so. To the north is the music building — Hearst Hall, was it? — light spilling out from the hallway outside of the auditorium. Suited guys and dressed-up girls, all in black, some carrying instrument cases, some wheeling equipment into the building, fill up the courtyard a few dozen yards away. To the west, barely visible, is the grassy field, used sometimes for soccer and sometimes for something Frisbee-related. It is empty, not surprisingly for an unlit field on a cold evening.

Everything seems so normal.

Ceric takes out her phone again and tries to activate it, but it remains unresponsive. If this is a dream, does this mean she can control the contents of it? She tries to imagine the tree in front of her uprooting and falling over, but the mental image she conjures feels flat and unconvincing. The tree remains firmly in the ground.

She gives up on the notion of explicit control and wonders if her friends exist in this internal universe. With her phone broken, she can’t call, but she can certainly walk.

She takes a step, and then another. The ground seems solid enough. She follows the asphalt down to the sidewalk, then waits at the crosswalk for the flow of cars to thin. Two vehicles slow down as they approach the striped pavement and she nods to them as she crosses.

How many blocks was it… does it connect to College?

On the other side of the street now, she looks around for familiar landmarks. She is in front of Cafe Strada, alright, but she does not know the buildings around it well enough to convince herself that she is in the right place. And who can say with certainty that the layout of the city will be the same as in real life?

The doubt settles into the chinks between her thoughts and she starts to grow more and more concerned as she continues down the street. She walks by several stores, some familiar and some not, and several fraternity houses, some familiar and some not. The ones that are familiar give her much relief, but she cannot trust that she remembers the area well enough for her brain to replicate it.

She tries to follow the street with her eyes, but the houses and apartments along the side of the road ahead are nondescript and provide no reference points. She can only hope that the ones close enough to her become high-definition — meaning-wise — enough for her to identify them in order to know where to turn.

For what seems like miles, she trudges down Bowditch, but the expected fenced-up copse and church never make their appearance.

Bowditch dead-ends at Dwight, yeah? When will Dwight show up?

She slows down and eventually stops, standing still in the middle of the sidewalk. She isn’t going to get anywhere at this rate. Where is she, even? Has she moved a significant distance? She turns around, scanning the unfamiliar horizon and architecture, rising high and curving inward as if she is looking through a fish-eye lens — twenty dollars, not even two hundred.

“Where did you get a deal that good?”

“Amazon. It’s not amazing in terms of quality, but it’ll do the job.”

The walls with their empty windows are a beautiful, stark white against the velvety blue of the night. Ceric reaches into her pocket automatically and sets up the camera on her phone, kneeling on one knee to frame the photo. The tops of the buildings curve together, forming a circle of edges in the center of her viewfinder. Although the phone is not enough of a camera to catch the details of the scene, she tries her best to hold the phone still as she taps the aperture icon on the screen.

“You’ve even got a macro lens there.”

“That’s ten dollars.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I kid you not. Ten dollars.”

She looks over at his screen as he opens a new tab, navigates to the online store, and finds his past purchases. With a smile and a raising of his eyebrows, he tilts his screen toward her. She nods in acknowledgement of the proof.

“I should be able to take really clean close-ups now,” he says.

Ceric smiles at his satisfaction, and he looks down at the beige carpet for a second, adjusting his position on the sofa before turning the computer back to face him.

“So, Max, what’s your photo assignment for this week? You’ve got two days before your Sunday cram.”

“Well, the theme is metamorphosis this time, but I don’t remember all the details.”

Ceric nods, her curiosity captured. He continues to fiddle with his computer for a bit before putting it down on the crowded coffee table in a decisive movement.

“Lemme grab the assignment sheet from my room.”

He stands up, tugging his sweater vest down over his jeans as he scoots by her through the narrow aisle between the sofa and the table. Ceric tucks her feet in to give him more room and, once he has passed, turns and puts her feet up on the arm while lying back on the now-vacated seat. The leather is warm from his body heat and Ceric lowers her feet to the sofa, curling up on her side with her back against the cushions. Max wouldn’t mind if she took a quick nap, would he? He is taking a while, and she is tired from a long day at school.

It doesn’t take long for her thoughts to become illogical, and she notes that she is falling asleep more quickly than anticipated. From behind her closed eyelids, she can see vague formations that might be a viable location if she squints hard enough, and she can hear a quiet murmuring in the background as well, pre-words that can become words if she listens closely enough.

Through the patterns of rainbow static, the concentric circles of artifacted purple and green, she can make out the ropes surrounding her, taut and climbable, and the only way she can move around.

“Tilt your face toward the camera a bit,” she hears Max say, and she reaches out a hand to feel for a handhold.

Handhold found, she sweeps out a foot as well, stopping once it catches on a rope. Once oriented, she turns toward the sound of his voice and leans in, limbs askew and face obscured by the black cloth mask over her face.

“That’s perfect. Ooh, that’s creepy.”

She hears the snap of the shutter and moves through the ropes, picking her way upward among the cords before hooking her legs around a horizontally oriented stretch and letting go with her hands. With that, she is swung downward by gravity. The shutter snaps again.

She grabs hold of the closest support and tries to move herself right-side-up again, but when she puts her full weight on her feet, she finds that there is no rope there.

With a painful jerk, she finds herself in a darkened but familiar room, illuminated only by faintly glowing stars all along the walls and ceiling.

When did I get home? When did I fall asleep? Did that Kevin person bring me back?

She is covered by several blankets, soft against her skin. After a moment, she realizes that she has no clothes on.

Well, I sure hope that Kevin person wasn’t the one who brought me back!

Surprised and agitated, she wraps herself further in the blankets and sits up, scanning the room for any signs of disturbance. The closet door is closed just the way she always closes it; her schoolbooks are where she always places them; her backpack is by her desk, and her computer is hibernating. So it seems she got home by herself…

Oh, but did I remember to charge my cell phone?

Ceric turns and reaches behind her to where her phone is sitting on top of a low bookshelf. It appears to be plugged in.

Well then.

Satisfied with her inspection, she tucks her knees close to her chin and huddles in the warmth of her bed. How long does she have until class the next morning? Did she remember to set an alarm?

The concerns overwhelm her desire to drop back into sleep, so she slowly brings her wrist up to her face to set an alarm for the next day, but stops before she presses the Indiglo button on her watch.

Huh.

What is the next day? Is it a weekday? A weekend? She tries to remember what she did before passing out in bed, but her mind offers her no relevant memories. Come to think of it, she can’t remember when or how she passed out in bed, either… she must have been really drunk, or something. The level of amnesia impresses her.

Well, the very earliest I have to get up is nine for my ten o’ clock class, so I’ll go with that, she thinks, and reaches for her watch again, this time to turn the alarm off.

But the dolphin isn’t mine to give away — why are they trying to take it away from me

She tries to tell them that they can’t do that, they don’t have a right to do that, but they aren’t listening.

“It’s alright. I’ll go back in time and stop the person who requested the dolphin in the first place,” her father says.

“You can really do that?”

“Yeah, you just adjust this bit so the power can actually get through and…”

Ceric looks up to see the top level of the bunk bed covered in wire and gadgetry. Two small arms, tipped with what looks like small drill bits, hang down from either side, facing each other. As her father fiddles with a knob, a thin arc of blue electricity, the kind one would see in a plasma ball, reaches out from the right arm and advances toward the left.

“No way,” Ceric breathes, “this kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life.”

“But it can!”

She tries to make sense of the display the crowd is so engaged in, but she is lying on her side and can’t get up to see it the way it is intended to be seen. She can catch screenshots of supposed fog display, but they make no sense to her and she is frustrated by her inability to get up. She pushes against the bed, putting all her strength behind her arm to lift herself up, but the process is slow, and when she looks back toward the bed she is still firmly against it.

She looks back at the display, perceiving now the rippling but shallow pool of something like oil against the black desk, but not the rings of fog rising up that she was told she should be able to see. Once or twice, she catches from the corner of her eye some coloured rings travelling up a pole next to the desk, but once she puts it in the center of her field of vision, she can see that it is just the reflection of the light from the window on the three lamps sharing a pole.

“Ceric, it’s already 2:44. It’s time to get up,” her sister says.

“I’m getting up, I’m getting up…”

Ceric cracks open her eyes to find herself in her bedroom at her childhood home, the afternoon sunlight tinting the walls a warm ivory through the blinds. She is in one of the twin beds on one side of the room, and her sister has just come through the door, followed by their mother.

Their mother says something that Ceric can’t quite hear, but she gets the gist of it. It is in a tone that she hasn’t heard in years: healthy, kind, and motherly.

Right, she got better, and right now it doesn’t look like she’s going to relapse, Ceric extrapolates from the memories of negative results and uplifting doctor’s statements forming and dissipating as if in explanation. It is a relief to see her mother able to extend her generosity to others, to have the capability to be able to care for others again. Ceric can’t place why she remembers a long, long absence before this moment, but she brushes the contradictory information aside as she marvels in the absolute rightness of this instant.

The moment passes but the peace stays, and Ceric pushes the blankets aside. The bookshelf at the foot of the bed she is in has been converted into a wardrobe of a sort, and she watches her sister browse through the clothing on the rack. Somewhat surprisingly, there is nothing that Ceric tags as appealing. There is a dress, periwinkle blue with red flowers arranged in regular rows over the cloth.

Why would anyone, much less my sister, want a dress like that?

Next to it is a white dress, lined with lemon-green at the hem. As Ceric pulls at the dress to get a better look at it, she remembers a sweater of the same colour that would match perfectly with it. She turns to her sister to ask her about the dress but she is no longer there. Ceric assumes she went downstairs and stands there for a minute more, looking through the articles of clothing.

Chartreuse, “and I knew immediately that Karen would like that mug. So I got it for her. I think the one I got for Rosa was a dark, magenta-y colour…”

“We started the participant already,” William says in his soft voice as Ceric trots into the lab.

“Ah crap, I’m sorry,” Ceric says, blushing deeply, scrambling to find the subject’s demographic sheet and number.

“It’s alright,” he says, but his expression says otherwise.

He picks up his bag and turns to Ceric before exiting. “You’ve run Triads before, yeah?”

“Mhm.”

“Alright. Don’t forget to run Molecule Under afterward.”

“Yeah.”

William turns back to the exit and Ceric walks into the meeting room after the lab door clicks shut behind him. The desks along the walls are occupied save the one closest to her. Ceric winces at this, as it means the one person in the lab who seems to take care of her in some way is not here.

“Hey,” Ceric says to the occupants of the room.

Karen and a research assistant are hunched over her laptop, discussing the analysis of data. After a second or two, Ceric leaves the room to sit at the Formica table in the lobby.

Thirty minutes? Forty minutes? No, Ceric remembers, Triad takes two hours.

The speckles in the Formica cease to amuse her soon enough, and she stands up to check on the subject in the darkened room where the booths reside. A few steps in, she notices that the room is much less crowded than usual and that she can actually take five steps without running into stray chairs and posters standing against the shelves protruding into the center of the room. The room is also significantly darker than usual.

An eerie feeling nags at Ceric and she turns around to look back at the lobby. It seems to remain unchanged, but she does not like how the picture of an eye pasted across the glass pane in the door is staring down at her.

After glaring at it long enough to make a point, she resumes her search for Booth C.

“Hullo,” she calls out. “Is anyone in here?”

To her disappointment, the barn-styled booths are nowhere in sight and do not seem to be getting any closer as she moves further into the room.

“Karen, did you guys remodel the booths… to be invisible? I know there’s the whole colour accuracy thing, but I’m pretty sure making sure the participant is able to find the booth is a higher priority.”

Perhaps Karen is still absorbed in her data analysis. She does not give an answer, and Ceric finally decides that the current situation is too uncomfortable for her to stay in. She turns around and walks out of the room, ready to return to her papers in the lobby. When she reaches it,  however, the furniture has been rearranged and the whole structure has been remodeled.

“How am I supposed to find my stuff now?” she exclaims, throwing up her hands in exasperation.

The patients in the chairs against the now-posterless walls look at her disapprovingly.

“Sorry,” she whispers, and walks over to one of the well-cushioned seats to sit down.

There is a nervous air in the room, as if the patients know something that she doesn’t, and that the knowledge is an important piece of information to have.

“Is something wrong?” Ceric asks her sister, who is sitting next to her.

Her sister shakes her head, but her eyes are focused on something past Ceric, and her expression is a fearful one. Ceric turns to follow her gaze. The doctor is standing there, holding a clipboard and wearing a white lab coat. His face is terribly familiar, but she cannot place where she had seen those black-framed glasses, that dark beard.

“Ceric?” he calls out.

Ceric stands up, but does not walk toward the doctor.

“Ceric, come here. I need a score from you.”

The doctor starts to walk toward her, slowly and menacingly. Maybe it is only menacing due to the way the patients are reacting, but Ceric does not give him the benefit of the doubt. She backs away from him, glancing behind her every few steps to locate an escape. When the doctor picks up his pace, Ceric turns around and bolts for the door, wrenching it open and dashing into the hallway outside, not daring to look back. She knows he is following.

The hallway is long and dim, dark beige and tiled and reflective. Nondescript people are walking through it, doing nondescript things – Ceric does not have time to observe. She scans the stretch of hall ahead of her for likely-to-be-unlocked rooms she can hide in while she is far ahead enough for the doctor to not see where she disappeared into, but none of the rooms look promising and her lead is shortening by the second.

A door, partially open, seems to lead to a stairwell. Good enough. Ceric swings the door open and runs up the stairs as fast as she can. The doctor should have been far back enough that he wouldn’t have noticed the door opening and closing, but as she turns up the next flight of stairs, she hears his hurried footsteps close behind her.

Fuck.

She starts taking the steps two at a time, hoping for a door at each floor, but there are none. The stairs continue up without interruption, spiraling and spiraling, giving her a terrifying view of the doctor closing in on her.

All too soon, she reaches the top of the stairs as the doctor is fewer than ten feet away. There is a door at the end of the stairs, and somehow she knows it leads to the roof where she would be trapped if she proceeds. But it is better than having it end here, isn’t it?

She tugs on the handle as hard as she can, watching in terror as the doctor approaches. Nine feet. Eight. Seven.

The handle does not budge. She tugs harder, almost crying in fear.

Six. Five.

The doctor is close enough to reach out and grab her. Desperately, she runs to the other side of the stairwell, toward the railing.

I won’t let him have me.

She grabs the rail with her hands and throws herself in an arc over the edge just as the doctor’s hand brushes her sleeve.

As she falls, she wonders why she can’t see the ground rushing up toward her.

—

She remembers a profound nothingness and too much unaccounted time. The cafeteria is still bustling and the sun is still streaming through the glass in the doors. With some amount of suspicion, she takes her phone out of her pocket and unlocks it. The screen complies, lighting up and bringing her both good news and bad: 16:43. She is awake, but she had not only utterly failed to study for her exam, she had failed to get to her exam.

Pale and aggravated, Ceric stumbles out of the chair, grabbing her cold sandwich and bag. Berkeley time is a useless notion at this point, she thinks as she pushes her way out the door.

The way to Barrows is long, the afternoon sun still hot and causing the asphalt to radiate with heat. She steps gingerly, an uncanniness still tinting everything she looks at. The lamp posts by the side of the path stretch impossibly high into the air, spanning the width of the road to create a row of arches over her head.

What’ll my professor think of me – why am I so lame – how am I supposed to explain this – I spent hours last night studying for this, how did I fuck this up so badly –

A hot breeze, hardly calming, rustles through the bushes and stirs the waves of heat into something more coherent than Ceric would have liked. She averts her eyes from the eddying articulations of warped perception and half-runs down the stairs to hall she is heading to. There is an unpleasant quality to the pavement, a lack of substance, and in some places in her peripheral vision, a lack of existence.

She turns her back on the scene and tugs on the handle of the door to the building.

“Ugh!”

Her hand shoots back, and she stares wildly at the door.

There had been a squirming between her palm and the metal, but there is nothing on the handle now.

Swallowing her apprehension she turns her hand over to look at her palm. Spotless.

What the hell was that?

With an almost debilitating sense of dread, she looks around her.

What was not on her hand or the door handle was cloned and multiplied a hundredfold on the ground around her. Ceric stares in horror at the small writhing forms on the pavement.

They were less clear close up and against the light concrete, only barely visible bendings of light, jelly-like and clear as glass, but further away, especially against darker backdrops … Ceric watches in morbid fascination as the many-limbed forms merge into each other and split apart, all the while staring at her with their beady, translucent eyes. For what seems like minutes, she stands, unable to move, watching them watch her, all thoughts of her exam evaporated.

Then one of them moves an appendage toward her.

With a cry, Ceric grabs the handle of the door again and rushes inside, trying to get as far away as possible from the horrid forms.

In her panic, she does not see her professor about to leave through the same exit, and crashes through him.

“Ceric? What’s wrong? What happened outside?” he says, looking around for second before grabbing her upper arm to stabilize her.

“I – there are – there are these things - they’re just outside, they’re waiting for me, I don’t know what they want, I just want to get to my exam–”

She stares at her professor for a second, remembering a lobby much like this one, an oppressive hallway, running, a spiral staircase…

His face, his beard, his glasses, his grip around her arm…

Ceric lunges away from him as she puts two and two together.

“It was you!” she exclaimed, backing away from him toward the other side of the lobby. “You were the one chasing me down the hall! You even followed me up the stairs! How far do you have to go before it’s enough?!”

Her professor startles before shaking his head in disbelief.

“Ceric, what are you talking abo–”

“You knew I was coming late, that’s why you’re out of class – why are you even out of class anyway, you’re supposed to be proctoring the test–”

“–I forgot to get some of the forms from my car,” he interrupts, trying to make his way to her without triggering another reaction, “now just calm down, sit down, have a seat here, I’m going to call–”

“You sent them!–” Ceric accused, her eyes roaming the room, her back pressed against the wall furthest from the large glass windows facing the horrendous forms leering at her from outside.

“What are you talking about? What did I send?”

“Those things! They’re trying to get in, they’re trying to get me, you’re trying to get me–”

Ceric jumps away from him when he takes another step toward her. He holds his hands up in the air, stopping in his tracks.

“Listen, I promise I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to call for help and everything is going to be alright, okay?” he says.

“Why would you want to help me? You want something from me and I’m not going to give it to you,” she replies, and inches toward the stairs leading to the basement, keeping her eyes on him and the creatures that are now plastered against the windows, forcing their way through the glass.

“I don’t know what’s happening but I don’t want you to hurt yoursel– CERIC, WATCH OUT!” he yells, eyes widening as she whirls around to make her escape.

She sees a flash of his hand coming toward her again. In what feels like slow-motion, she twists her body around to dodge it. And then the floor disappears beneath her as her professor watches in horror, unable to pull her back.

Where have I seen this before–

Her professor looking down at her from above, the ground…

No, she can see the ground this time.

Time resumes its flow and she feels an impossibly loud crack through her head. A heavy and inky darkness fills her already-narrowing consciousness.

She feels the coolness of tiles against her cheek and hears the quick footsteps of her professor, stopping right beside her. A rustle of fabric, a knee impacting the floor beside her, warmth, a finger lifting her eyelid. She blinks against the finger, not wanting to see his pale and set face.

It’s over. I can’t run any more.

And then stiff white sheets, an uncomfortable mass of plastic mistaken for a mattress, jostling.

—

“Concussion… you mentioned hallucinations?”

“… delusional, she’s never…”

She feels a cool hand against her forehead in the darkness.

“No, not schizophrenia. Sleep deprivation. Yes, five nights.”

That voice.

“Eric?”

She reaches out a hand toward him, but there is no one there.