Gray
A LONG SHORT STORY POSSIBLY IN PROGRESS BY MICHAELA CATALANO
----
Allow me to clarify. This was my final for my creative writing class, and for the most part I'm happy with it. However, I'm not sure if it's finished. There is about another page and a half after what I've posted, but I'm not happy with it, and I'm not convinced there needs to be any more. For now, consider this the full story. If I ever come up with a way to end it, I'll edit this post with the new ending.
I would also like to mention that this is related to a larger work, and really understanding it would require knowledge that no one could possibly have at this juncture. However, I still think it is an enjoyable piece, so I'm posting it.
*Edited more recently*
It's been a while since I read this through, but I think it's safe to say that it is no longer representative of the current quality of my work, although I doubt it's awful, either.
I also want to note here that anything earlier than this is *particularly* not representative of the current quality of my work, except perhaps for Deep Blue, which was one of those gems that comes out far ahead of one's current level.
----
I might have been humming out loud. My eyes were shut. A pleasant rumbling was moving through my body up from my shoes and down my outstretched arm as it hung from the pole. All of the seats were taken.
I didn't think it was possible for anyone to hear me, even if I were humming out loud. I couldn't hear anybody else over the clattering of the wheels. I ignored the slight ache in my legs. The last eight hours had felt more like sixteen. Home hadn't sounded this good since yesterday.
"What's that?", somebody said. A kid, by the pitch of the voice.
"What's what, honey?" Vaguely interested, I opened my eyes and looked over. The girl was staring out one of the windows. Then, as quickly as her interest had been caught, it was lost.
"Nothing."
A few minutes later, the station came up and the car screeched to a halt. People filtered out. I took my time. I'm not a big fan of waiting in lines, and I enjoy bumping into people even less. As the last few people left, I yawned a bit too deeply. There was an odd haze to my vision. For a moment I thought my glasses were fogged, but that wasn't it. I wiped them off anyway and blinked a few times. It was gone.
From the station it was only a few minutes to home: my apartment. I resisted the urge to slump against the door and fumbled with my keys. After what seemed like ages I found the right one, and before I knew it I was inside. I shut and locked the door, stumbled into my room, kicked my shoes into a corner and flopped down on the bed. I suppose most people as tired as I was would have fallen asleep, but it's been a long time since rest has come easy to me. Usually, I have to make a conscious and protracted effort to fall asleep, and this night was no different. After a few minutes of squirming around on top of the sheets I felt a lot better.
I sat up, laid back down again, then rolled off the bed and made my way to my desk on my hands and knees before pulling myself up into my chair. I turned my monitor on, pushed the power button on my laptop and waited for a minute or two. Finally I was at the log-in screen. The only option was a small rounded square containing a picture of a chessboard. "Allen" was written in small letters, sans-serif, next to the icon. I clicked it and punched in my password. No one else ever used my computer; I lived alone. Even so, protecting it with a password made me feel better.
From there it was another minute or so before I touched anything. My laptop was pretty good (a few years prior, it had been very good), but I had it stuffed so full of crap that startup took an eternity. When I was satisfied that nothing would crash if I messed with it, I scanned my desktop. It was heavily cluttered and last night I had somehow randomized the arrangement of icons. Eventually I found what I was looking for. I opened Skype to the only log-in option available and waited the few seconds it took to process. I don't normally mind small delays but at that particular moment I was feeling impatient.
There! My friends list. Thirteen offline, six online. The fifth name from the top was the one I was looking for: "M Gray," adorned with a small image of a silver gear. I grabbed my headphones, turned up the sound, switched on the microphone, and double-clicked the name. It rang four or five times before she picked up.
"Hey," she said, sounding tired. "Long time no see." We hadn't spoken since... Well, since yesterday. Lately that had begun to seem like a long time. I laughed.
"You sound tired," I said. Her icon had changed, I realized. A wavy black line ran through the hole in the center of the gear. It looked like a piece of dark thread.
"Yeah." She yawned, and I fought the urge to follow suit semi-successfully. "Just a little beat. How are you?"
I was dead fucking tired. "Pretty good," I said. "What are you up to?" By this point in a conversation I was usually opening Firefox and beginning to wander my bookmarks looking for updated sites, but I didn't particularly feel like it then. I leaned back in my chair and stretched.
She didn't say anything for a moment, evidently distracted by something. "Not much. Just hanging around, talking to people." I stretched again and my back cracked satisfyingly. "How was work?"
"Ah, you know. The usual. Shuffling through papers and typing things. Got no complaints, I guess." Actually, I did have a few complaints, but I didn't bother reliving them. I could have talked about how Ted from the cubicle over continually made a mysterious slurping noise that became extraordinarily annoying after the first four hours. I could have talked about how my boss had come in and begun a lecture that I lost track of after about a minute and hadn't stopped until I was about ready to drag him over to the copiers, stick his head in one and bash the lid against his skull until pictures of his brain came out. I could have mentioned the fact that my coffee had tasted eerily like ass, and that every time I took a tentative sip, I could hear someone giggling nearby, until I finally just chucked the whole thing and washed my mouth out in the sink.
None of these things seemed like a big deal any more, though. I didn't feel like ranting about anything, anyway, especially not to Gray, who had certainly done nothing to deserve any more irritation than she seemed already to receive on a day-to-day basis. "How about yours?", I asked.
"Oh, fine, I guess," she said. "Wes was being kind of a jerk."
"Who's Wes?", I asked, interested. Gray had never spoken about her work except to acknowledge that she did, in fact, have a job. She was usually really evasive about it. I wondered if she had let something slip she hadn't meant to, or if she was just inexplicably opening up to me about it.
"Oh, uh, just -- well, sort of my boss," she said, sounding slightly panicked. Let something slip, then. I still didn't know why she avoided the topic of her job. I didn't really care. I've had a few jobs I was ashamed of. Still, though, it was impossible not to be curious.
I knew better than to press my luck. "Oh. Well, that sucks." Wes. Wes. I decided to remember that name. Wes. It had to be short for something. Westley? Wesker? Was Wesker even a real name, or just a video game character? It occured to me, not for the first time, that I still didn't know Gray's real name, or even what the "M" in her screenname stood for. She wouldn't even tell me where she lived, except that it wasn't here.
"It's no big deal, really. Hey, listen to this." A window popped up. She was sending me a song, probably pirated. Neither of us had much problem with stealing music. Well, if she wanted to change the subject, that was okay. I listened to the song when it was finished, and it was pretty cool. We talked about it for a while.
Eventually, night came on properly, and not long after I felt a need to use the restroom. "I'll be right back," I told her. I muted my microphone. I don't really like thinking people can hear me when I should be alone. Sometimes I talk to myself or make weird noises without realizing it. I could hear her typing. Suddenly I felt like looking something up online, and I had no immediate desire to say anything, so I left the microphone off.
Listening in on her felt sort of voyeuristic and wrong, but at the same time, it was a little exciting. Maybe that says a lot about the boredom of my life. I guess it does. After a few minutes I had something to say, so I turned the microphone back on and told her I was back. We struck up a new conversation.
Later, after she had gone, I turned on the song she had sent me. I lay in bed, still wearing my headphones, and listened until I fell asleep.
----
Wednesday. Three hours into my shift, Ted starting making his goddamn slurping noise again. Intermittantly, like a fridge turning up and down. No one seemed to have messed with my coffee, though, and my boss left me alone. By comparison, yesterday seemed absolutely packed with thrills. All for the best, I suppose.
"Hey, Al." Ted hadn't been slurping in a while, and it was apparently because he was standing behind me. I almost jumped out of my chair.
"Jesus, you scared me," I said, unnecessarily. I swivelled around and looked at him. "Well? What do you want?" There was no outward sign of what was responsible for that awful sound that had emanated so ominously from his cubicle. I briefly wondered it could have been him drinking coffee, but I didn't see how he could make that much noise and have the coffee last so damn long.
"Heard about these people having seizures, Al?", he asked. Why had he just said my name again? God damn it, I hated people who did that. You have my attention! It's not going to waver so fast that you need to keep addressing me formally.
"No," I replied.
He nodded significantly. "It's some weird stuff, Al."
"Don't call me Al," I snapped. I hate being called Al. My last name is not Bundy. I'm not a redneck. Allen isn't a long name. It's not hard to say it.
"Sorry, man," he said. "Anyway, this stuff has been all over the news. Heard there've been random outbreaks of seizures among people all around the city. Pretty weird, huh? I think I saw it happening on the way home from work. A couple guys just standing in the middle of the crosswalk." I wasn't sure why he was bringing this up. I never get bored enough to talk to anyone at work, especially not bored enough to gossip.
"No, I hadn't heard," I told him. "I haven't seen any of it, either." Except maybe that wasn't true. There was that girl on the subway... But she was a kid. Hell, I space out once in a while, and by once in a while, I mean constantly. "Well... is that all you've got to say?"
He looked hurt. "Uh, I guess." He stood there a little longer, maybe expecting me to say something, and when I didn't he went back to his cubicle. I turned back to my work, and sure as shit, less than five minutes later, the slurping sound resumed.
On the subway again, I found my mind wandering to the seizures Ted was talking about. Now that I thought about it, it was kind of worrying, although, living in America, I'd seen my share of scares, few of which ever panned out. I had known enough about computers to see that Y2K was bullshit, though I will I confess, as the moment arrived, I had felt a twinge of anxiety. Most other events of that sort had fallen equally flat.
This time, I had been lucky enough to get a seat, and the subway car seemed oddly quiet, subdued. Of course, that was probably just me being paranoid. The little girl from the other day wasn't there. I wasn't sure why I had expected her to be. I watched the other people in my compartment with idle interest. There was a middle-aged man across from me reading a newspaper. A young woman off to the left staring at the floor. A man and woman who looked like they were together who occasionally muttered things to each other. The compartment was fairly empty.
For a little while, my thoughts turned to Gray, and I wasn't sure why. I found myself wondering what she looked like. She wouldn't send a picture, but she certainly wasn't the sort to have low self-esteem, and her voice seemed as though it had to belong to an attractive person. I wondered if it was connected at all with her reluctance to talk about her life. I really didn't know much about Gray except for her personality, likes, and dislikes, which I knew almost too well.
As I thought of these things, I stared at the tunnel wall through the far window. The train was moving too fast to make out any details but sometimes the wall flickered lighter or darker. The dim lights along the ceiling were fairly far apart, but they still flashed by regularly. At one point, just as I was beginning to space out again thinking about Gray, I could have sworn I saw one of the lights, dimmer than the rest, shoot by on the floor of the tunnel. Maybe one of them had fallen down? But if it did, it couldn't still be working.
The train slowed and shuddered into the station. This time the passengers filtered out much quicker than the previous day, seeing as there were a lot less of them. As I exited I heard an excited babble off to my left. Four or five people were gathered around a young man who was standing completely still, staring with his head cocked at one of the concrete pillars in the station.
"Is he okay?", a voice said. "Is he having a seizure?"
I was tempted to take a closer look, but I didn't give in. As I was leaving, I heard another voice, much clearer.
"He's moving! Hey, buddy, are you okay?" I turned back. The young man was staring at the onlookers, baffled. "You been standin' there for two minutes."
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, looking confused. The little crowd around him moved away as he left, occasionally glancing back at them, clearly put off by their seemingly unwarranted attention.
I went home and repeated my ritual of recouperating from the day's events in bed.
"So, how was work?", Gray asked me later, during a slow point in our call. I decided not to mention the mystery of Ted's supremely odious personal habits, or his bizarre attempt at conversation. I found myself wondering about the seizure thing.
"Okay, I guess. Nothing exciting happened. Not that I expected it to." After a moment, I began to feel the strange desire to mute my microphone like I had the other night. "I'll be right back," I told her. I flicked the switch to the off position and leaned back, eyes shut, relaxing. I sat there for a while in silence and listened to her breathing, which was faintly audible. You can call me creepy if you want. I won't argue. I had been stressed out all day for reasons I wasn't completely in touch with, and even though we weren't talking right then, knowing she was there made me feel calm and content.
A couple of minutes later, I heard a phone ringing on her side, to my slight surprise. I couldn't recall her ever getting a phone call from anyone before, which, in retrospect, was a little bit weird. Then again, I hardly ever get phone calls, but maybe that's because I do all my talking online. She sighed and the phone stopped ringing.
"Yeah? What do you want?" There was silence for a moment. "Are you kidding me? No it's not okay. I know you're trying, so am I -- how can you be so nonchalant about this? Listen, Wes. I'm not sure this was a good idea after all. No, I --" She sighed, sounding resigned. "Fine... Fine, but only because we're finally getting close. Yeah. No. Yeah, I'll see you tomorrow. Good night." She set the reciever down with an audible click.
So that's what it was about, or at least partly about. I should have known. I felt slightly sick to my stomach, and actually a little bit angry, which just made me feel worse. I didn't have any right to be angry.
It was a while before I could bring myself to talk to her again, and I faked my way through another ten minutes or so before lying and saying that I was tired and going to get some sleep. I turned on her song, and lay in bed until I couldn't think any more.
----
"You look like shit, Al." Ted, oh, Christ, leave me alone, you asshole. Once again he had somehow managed to appear in my cubicle without alerting me to his presence. I didn't want to talk to him, of all people. The Slurping Wonder was the last person I needed to be bothered with. I ignored his comment, hoping he would take the hint and just go back to his damned job.
"Al? Hey, can you hear me?" I turned to face him.
"Yeah, I can fucking hear you. What do you want from me?"
His eyes narrowed a little. "Hey, you don't have to be a jerk. You were spacing out something fierce. I thought maybe, you know..." I had a feeling I knew what he was talking about. How would he even see me from his cubicle? Did he just walk around at random, watching people? Actually, he probably did, come to think of it.
"No, Ted. I'm not having a seizure. I'm having a shitty day is what I'm having. Just leave me alone." I turned back immediately to my desk and pretended to work on something. When I looked back again a minute later, he was still standing there. He wasn't staring at me, though. He was looking at a paperclip on my desk as though it were the most amazing thing he had ever seen, standing there perfectly still.
The subway car's rattle was weirdly comforting that day. Why now, of all times, I felt the need to cling to familiarity, I couldn't say. After a while, I began to hear two people talking quietly, and I took a casual look around the compartment. There were five people in it this time.
Off to my right, two teenage girls, reading books. Score one for the literate. To the left, what might have been the same woman from the other day, sitting in a different seat this time, still staring idly (but not fixatedly) at the floor of the car. Across from me, a man and a woman. Maybe the same couple from the other day, I couldn't be sure. Occasionally they spoke to each other, but I couldn't hear what they were saying.
I took to staring out the window at the subway wall again. The same flicker of light and dark wall sections flowing by, almost hypnotically. The smear of lights lining the ceiling, flashing, coruscating white suns, writhing in the dark.
I started suddenly. I must have fallen asleep. I must have been in worse shape than I even knew. All day long, though, I had been unable to think about Gray. Or was it that I had been unable to think of anything else? There was the sound of screeching brakes, and the station slipped into view. As I was disembarking, the young couple passed me by, and I happened to catch the eye of the man. He held my gaze for a moment, and then grinned a strange sort of half-grin, muscles barely contorted but teeth still showing. Then contact broke and we went our separate ways.
It was raining, raining hard. The short walk to my apartment had never seemed longer. Looking up, the rain was like a shower of stars falling from dark nebulae far above me. I loved rain, but today I felt what most people feel in such weather. Cold and gloom.
I took a shower. After I had dried off, I considered just going to bed. I wanted to talk to Gray, but at the same time... I couldn't describe it. I wasn't mad at her or myself. I just felt hollow.
It was only about fifteen minutes before I called her. She sounded tired again, but I didn't ask why. We talked about all kinds of things, and I almost felt okay again. Almost. I was finally getting to a level of exhaustion at which I could barely function, and I thought maybe if I took a break from talking, I'd get some energy back, so I told her I had to go to the bathroom and muted my microphone.
I reclined lethargically in my chair and thought about the day. Now I was beginning to be a little worried about the mass seizure scare. For some reason, the image of the man on the train's grin came back to me. It was a terrible expression. His eyes had been black... Pitch black. There hadn't seemed to be any light reflected by them at all. There was only darkness, as though his pupils opened onto the vastness of space.
----
You have every right to be angry. She hurt you. She injured you, as sure as if she had planted a knife in your back, didn't she? She must have known how you felt about her. She waited until you could hardly stand it and she broke you down. She broke your heart's back on her knee and laughed.
There is light here, in this dark place. There is nothing to be afraid of, here where the walls close in. There is no death here, though a tomb it may be. Can you hear it? The sound of water, dripping, serene. Perhaps someday that water will fill the world. Would you like that? Water to wash away all these people and their games.
I awoke slowly. A minute later, my alarm went off, and I pulled myself out of bed.
----
Midway through the day, I had to go to the copy room, and to my unpleasant surprise, both Ted and my boss were already there, talking to each other. They didn't pay any attention to me except for Ted nodding slightly in my direction, a gesture I ignored. Twenty pages copied and two minutes in, they fell silent.
When I finished my copies and started to leave I realized they hadn't left as I had thought they had. They stood gazing, statuesque, Ted's eyes fixed on the ceiling lamp, my boss staring down at a pin someone had left on floor. The pin was nearly invisible but for the tiny gleam of light reflecting off of it. Several other co-workers came in, and we gathered around, watching in morbid fascination. No one knew quite what to do.
"What do you think is happening to them?" It was somebody I had never bothered speaking to before. I didn't know his name. He looked awed and afraid at the same time.
"I don't know," I told him.
"I guess people really are having these
below the ground, where the echoes on the walls are all the world, where darkness presses in, suffocating. You are here already. Don't you know what you need? She doesn't love you. She will never love you. She is dark. You are bright and warm. There is nothing inside her but night. She will take you in and then you will be dark, too. You will be nothing but
"Al! Al!" Ted was shaking me by the shoulder, shouting my name. "Al, Jesus Christ, are you okay?" I was fine, what was he talking about? Only it felt somehow like he was above me. I could feel the wall pressing against my back, and I couldn't remember how I had gotten there. Hands grabbed me and pulled me away from the wall, struggling as though they were fighting gravity, and I felt the rasp of rough carpet against my skin.
Even the roar of the subway car seemed quieter that day. I hung on to my seat with both hands. Through the window was that ever-present flickering of light gray and dark gray, light and dark.
The only people in the compartment aside from me were the man and woman from the other day. They spoke in hushed whispers and though I strained my ears, I could never make out more than a word or two. Once or twice the man touched her arm as he spoke, and I could tell that it made her uncomfortable. I shut my eyes and fell asleep.
The sound of the train arriving at the station awoke me. I got up at once and headed for the door. As I passed through I noticed a middle-aged man standing outside the car. He stood with his arm hesitantly outstretched, like a character in a movie put on pause.
"It's happening all the time now. You can feel how close it is. We've got it. We're really going to do this." The man and woman from the train were watching him. The woman's face was expressionless. The man was laughing out loud, his mouth open in that half-grin, the hateful smile of a corpse, drawn tight by decay.
Suddenly they were gone and the man who had been having a seizure was tapping me on the shoulder.
"Sir? Sir, are you all right?"
It was still stormy. Water poured down from above. I remembered my dream. I felt as though I were drowning. I felt like the entire world had turned to liquid, swirling around me so that I could never catch my breath.
At home, I called Gray. "Hey," I said. "How was your day?"
"Okay," she told me. Through my headphones I could hear the monotonous tapping of rain.
Not long after, I lied and said that I was going to take a shower, and flicked off my microphone. A few minutes later, her phone rang, and she answered at once.
