At half past ten the next day, in my hotel room, I spread my jacket out on the rumpled sheets and slipped the ammo magazine into the left inside pocket.
I sat down beside the little table that held the phone. I cleared my throat. I picked up the receiver, wedged it against my ear with my shoulder, and dialed the number.
On the third ring, it cut off. I heard the man breathing against the microphone.
“Richard Alcala,” I said.
“You know who you’re calling.”
“The photographer.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
“I was flipping through some old issues of Black Tux. The photos you shot. These women you framed… if you ran into them on the street, you’d notice moles, asymmetry, maybe slack flesh, but thanks to your touch, they’re competing to be the next Marilyn Monroe.”
“You need to update your references, pal. But I remember those shoots. I was born with the gift.”
“I work for a magazine, and we need your gift. You’d coax the beauty out of a dozen or so women.”
“You tempt me, but a personal project has me busy.”
“It’s a well-paid week of work in Los Angeles. I’m sure you could squeeze it in.”
The line crackled as he crunched on something brittle. I pictured him hunched over bloody dirt, naked, caked in grime, gnawing on a femur.
“Have you talked to other magazines in the field?” he asked, voice turning gravelly.
“Yes.”
“And you’re still calling me? Lately, nobody wants to hire me. I bet they rushed to tell you why.”
“You mean your trouble with the law.”
He pulled the receiver away from his face to clear his throat.
“My trouble with the law, yes.”
“Who cares? You’ll take the shots we need. Your previous sessions prove it.”
He fell silent for a few seconds.
“How much?”
“Money? One fifty up front, three hundred at the end of the week. Four or five sessions, depending on a few variables.”
“Your usual photographers turned it down?”
“They don’t shoot like you. Plus, the women will be dressed in outfits many would call pornographic. In this decade, there are still plenty of photographers with outdated scruples. Listen, we need these women to look like Greek goddesses, not like they’re waiting around a street corner at three in the morning.”
“I get you, pal. Bring the money, and we’ll work something out.”
“I’ll drop by around eleven-thirty.”
“Today? I’m busy all day. Starting tomorrow.”
“I’m afraid I leave for Dallas tonight. You sure you can’t spare a slot at eleven-thirty? You’ll pocket the hundred and fifty, and we’ll iron out a couple details.”
A silence swelled on the line, undone by the ringing in my ears—scar tissue from years of gunfire. I heard him close a drawer or a door. Cloth brushed against cloth.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. “Bring the money. You know the address?”
“I wrote it down before calling.”
At eleven-ten, I spotted the parking spaces outside the two-story building where he lived. Each floor’s facade was lined with doors and windows. Next to the metal stairs going up to the second floor stood two crooked, half-stripped palm trees like birds with plucked necks. The first-floor windows, right at street level, had iron bars.
They’d left a space free next to the Ford Thunderbird. While maneuvering into the spot, I scanned the surroundings in case he was loitering outside. I parked beside the Thunderbird, trunks aligned.
I switched off the engine and got out. Circling to my trunk, I rummaged in one pocket for both sets of keys—mine and the copy that would open the Thunderbird. I sized up the pedestrians drifting down the street as well as the silhouettes moving behind the building’s windows. I slid my key into my trunk’s lock and opened it. An acrid smell of dirt greeted me. As I lifted the trunk lid all the way, I slipped behind the Thunderbird. I inserted the copy of the key and turned it. The trunk popped open a crack.
I bent over my own trunk, grabbed the gloves from the back corner, and pulled them on. I wedged my forearms under the canvas bundle, held down by two bungee cords. Once I lifted it, the weight yanked at my arms, its lumps digging into my forearms and palms. I crouched, like lowering a loaded barbell, set the bundle on the asphalt, and stood up again.
In the apartment next door to his, an old woman in a robe had drawn her curtain aside. She scratched her nose while surveying the foot traffic and passing cars. Once she moved away, the curtain veiled the interior again.
I lifted the Thunderbird’s trunk. It held ropes, two rolls of electrical tape, a shovel, and a can of gasoline. I took the can out, laid it on its side, and pushed it under my car with my foot, metal scraping on asphalt.
I hoisted the bundle in both hands and placed it in the center of the Thunderbird’s trunk. I unclipped the bungee cords. Covering my nose, I turned my head away, unwrapped the bundle, and let the trunk lid fall until it clicked shut.
A tingling spread across my nape. My ears felt tight. I fully expected a line of passersby who’d pelt me with questions, or a group of cops, or the man himself.
I pulled off my gloves, tossed them into my trunk, and shut it. Then I leaned against the back, pressing my shirt sleeve to the sun-baked metal. If he showed up, I wanted to seem casual as I glanced over the street and the building.
Sunlight warmed my hair. Beneath my jacket and shirt, sweat trickled down my spine, probably making my scalp gleam. I crouched by the car’s side and nudged the half-empty gas can farther in with my foot so no one would notice it. I scanned the Thunderbird’s bodywork to be sure I’d left nothing behind. I forced myself not to check the transponder stuck underneath.
“I hope you’re not looking to steal it,” said a voice to my right.
He was walking through the lot with a paper grocery bag in one hand, two inches of a cereal box sticking out the top. He squinted against the glare, grinning like he adored the neighborhood. He wore a tight shirt striped in brass and peanut tones. The oversized starched collar cast triangular shadows. He had it tucked into flared navy-blue pants cinched with a white belt.
I pretended to be admiring the Thunderbird.
“It’s a beauty,” I said.
He set his free hand on the raised center of the hood, stroking it like a dog’s head.
“Best buy I ever made. A V8 engine with three hundred sixty horsepower. Zero to sixty in nine seconds. Never once let me down.”
When he looked at my face, his features slipped out of his control.
“You’re the gloomy guy from yesterday, on the beach.”
“An hour ago, we spoke on the phone about a job I want to hire you for. Yesterday I approached you about it, but we got sidetracked.”
“So that job was for real, I guess.”
I pulled three fifty-dollar bills from my jacket’s other inside pocket. When the sunlight hit the bills, he snatched them, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He smiled.
“Which magazine did you say you work for?”
“Maybe I forgot to mention.”
I pulled out a card and handed it to him. He glanced over it and nodded.
“I’ll show you my gear, and we’ll hash out the details. Let’s go in. I’m getting cooked out here.”
We climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. He pulled out his keychain, letting it jingle. Dangling from the ring was a tiny latex penis. As he guided the key toward the lock, he seemed to pause in slow motion. He propped the grocery bag against the doorframe and leaned over the railing to study the parking lot.
“You drove here?” he asked.
He stared blankly at my rented car.
“I parked at the Dallas airport. Came by taxi.”
He watched the passersby and peered at the windows across the street, as if searching for a hidden sniper. He shook his head, turned around. Still smiling, he fit the key into the lock and opened the door.
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published through my book Los reinos de brea, that I wrote about ten years ago. I figured that I might as well translate it and post it here, given that nobody buys my shit. Back in the day, I regularly set stories in places I had never visited, perhaps because I thought that it would make the story more interesting for others. These days, as I don’t expect other people to care, I try to make the places I know more interesting for myself by setting stories in them. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying this tale to some extent. It’s going to get gnarly soon.
I tracked the Ford Thunderbird to a parking lot bordering Venice Beach. I parked six spaces away, past three empty slots, two cars, and a delivery van. In case the man was roaming nearby, I took in the view through the windshield and side windows. Next to the half-buried asphalt of the bike path, clumps of palm trees had sprouted from the sand, some as tall as, or taller than, the shops along the boardwalk. The sun, sinking into the Pacific, bleached white the fronds of one palm, while the rest stood out like green torches. Silhouettes bustled across the wide beach, and at intervals lifeguard towers rose in the distance.
The beeps from the tracker echoed through the car like pinball ricochets. I switched the machine off. I could hear the surf rumbling, waves breaking their stride from the sand; the squawking of gulls; the din of shrieks and laughter from the bathers. The sun beating down on the windshield was browning me like a roasting chicken.
I had to find that man and stop him. I was following the plan like a musical score, but my back stayed pressed against the leather seat, and anxiety was growing in my chest. My subconscious lacked the vocabulary to describe the cataclysm it had foreseen.
I had saved Cassie, who had cried, yet tomorrow she would skate under the sun while her brain boiled and steam blew from her ears. If some grinning long-haired guy asked her to ride in another car, she would hop in before waking up to reality. And these folks ambling around Venice Beach like buffalo in a zoo enclosure, this pink-and-orange horizon—would it matter to them if one day Cassie ended up in the dark, panties gone, while the man on top of her strangled her?
The girl was alive and had learned nothing. Her mother, after rushing home, might have taken out her revolver and imagined forcing me to face the black maw of its barrel. I closed my eyes and saw her face as though draped in dusty cobwebs. Cassie’s mother, hating me. Hate upon hate, from people who refused to understand.
If I spirited the victims away from the shadows, they remained ignorant; if I saved them and they found out, they despised me.
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I wandered the parking lot to stretch my legs while the burning asphalt sucked at my soles. A car honked. I realized I was in the way of someone trying to maneuver into a space.
How long until the owner of that Ford Thunderbird got hungry? Or was he circling around to satisfy the hunger left over from when I saved Cassie?
What if I refused to hunt him? I could hit the nearby theaters in case they were showing Jaws or Star Wars again. I would make a pilgrimage to the record stores and buy first-edition vinyls of Nick Drake, Roy Harper, Karen Dalton. I could dine into the dusk until I emerged into the odd world I’d find.
If that starving coyote went hunting and left another corpse behind, would I even find out? Would I care? Another anonymous woman would vanish. Her face printed on milk cartons. With luck, in several years or decades, some hiker would discover that the femur his dog was slobbering over had belonged to a woman—or a child.
Dozens of miniature black holes roamed the United States, swallowing pretty hitchhikers, teenage runaways, prostitutes. Black holes wandering immortally: when one disappeared, another took its place. The rest of the population kept working, birthing, gathering to celebrate the Super Bowl, filling baseball stadiums, balancing on surfboards, or doing whatever else they fancied in this period of time that blended with all the others like spilled paint in a swimming pool. News of a woman’s disappearance would spoil someone’s snack in between bites of bacon and sips of beer. Most people believed (though they wouldn’t say it) that some sin had condemned that photographed woman to deserve it, or the universe would had chosen someone else to punish. The sacrifice was part of an obscure plan that someday would drain into some blend of justice and harmony. But if I stepped in, the masses would go on smiling in ignorance.
The tension in my neck hurt. How many times had I told myself that every life I saved was worth it, even if it stuffed my mind with skeletons and cadavers, a mounting heap at the bottom of a bloody pit?
Music drifted out from the turntables and radios in the boardwalk shops and apartments. Graham Nash protesting war and the military. Dolly Parton. Hendrix. As if at a concert, different acts played on neighboring stages. A warm breeze carried the scent of incense from the apartments. Dozens of people strolled around. A girl in shorts too tight to crease and a crop top that showed her belly button skated while holding the hand of another skater—a man in his early twenties with long hair and a mustache. On the sand, groups lying on their towels cackled like flocks of birds. They had been born in a cell where some invisible hand projected pictures of puppies, babies, cakes, and tropical beaches onto the walls.
All this laughter and enjoyment while somewhere in this city—not to mention the rest of the world—someone was getting beaten, raped, or murdered. Thousands of crimes went unnoticed, and criminals moved on to their next victim. So many beatings where the battered victim avoided the police, or reported the assault only for no reporter to pick it up. So many rapes where, for whatever reason, the victim stayed silent. In any neighborhood where kids pedaled on tricycles, in the basement of some house with neatly trimmed grass, a man might be exploiting a woman’s body as a semen receptacle the same way he would use a toilet for urine, and when he killed her, he’d dispose of her corpse like flushing a used condom. Maybe that woman never made it onto the list of thousands of missing persons, or she was mentioned briefly in a newspaper, and I would never find out.
I skirted the beach, eyeing every passerby and every group member, just in case I recognized the individual. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I had come out here to hunt. I stopped to look back at those who had just passed by, though some were already shrinking in the distance on their roller skates, skateboards, or bikes.
No matter which era I ended up in, I was surrounded by cheerful voices, smiling groups, couples holding hands. The same actors in different costumes, sporting whatever haircuts each era deemed acceptable. The plumage of exotic birds. In every decade, they believed everything would be fine, that a clear path lay ahead and they only had to look for it. I felt set apart from them, the last member of some other human species clinging to the edge of extinction. What could I tell these people? They would react as though I had blasphemed against their divine maxim that goodness always prevails. But goodness prevailed only because, before they even arrived, I had cleared their path. When I failed to worry about it, evil triumphed time and again.
I watched a volleyball game among a coed group where more than just the ball was bouncing. A figure nearby stood out. The man hovered near the bike path, scanning the beach. Sometimes he hid his face behind a camera and snapped a photo. His voluminous blond mane fell to his shoulders, and from behind one might mistake him for a woman.
When his name and surname flickered at the edges of my mind, I shooed them away. Names were for people unlike these rabid coyotes wandering around, ready to rip off a piece of someone unless the police—or I—put them down.
“I recognize that look. My friend Pete.”
It took me a second to realize the voice to my right was speaking to me. A man of about twenty-five. He was smoking a cigarette. The fringe of his long hair covered his forehead, and the wiry ends curled at his neck. His goatee protruded two inches from his chin. His gaze implied he enjoyed meeting strangers.
“He went from one party to another,” said the man, “loved to play guitar. Plenty of women would hang around for private songs. But he got drafted. When he returned, he threw away his medal. Every couple of months I spot him far off, just standing in the middle of nowhere, looking like you do.”
He drew closer as if to offer me a cigarette, but I wanted him gone.
“Do Pete a favor. Next time you see him, stab him through the heart.”
The man twitched his head like it was a nervous tic. He lowered his eyebrows and sucked on the cigarette filter. I walked away toward the bike path.
When the photographer’s features grew sharper, I stopped. By the look of him, his mannerisms, maybe he had a portfolio of pictures he’d posed in. As if his fishing line had gone taut, he fixed his gaze on a woman in her twenties wearing a black floral-print blouse with balloon sleeves and a triangular neckline. She had tied the blouse at her waist. Her jeans ended where her thighs began.
He held the camera at belt level and followed the woman’s rising and falling hips. That golden hair gleamed like satin. Any film studio would insure such breasts.
As she passed by, he blocked her path. His lips parted, curving along the gingival margin without showing the gums. A toothpaste-ad grin, with prominent canines. The muscles in his cheeks framed the smile like curtains revealing a show. Though I pictured those teeth pulverizing bones, splinters flying between his molars, she matched his smile in a fraction of a second.
“I had to stop you,” said the man. “Tell me, gorgeous. Which agency hired you?”
“What kind of agency would hire me?”
“A modeling one, of course.”
She cocked a hip to one side, and her laughter filled my mind with the urge to drop to my knees at her feet.
“Thanks, but no one’s ever noticed me for that.”
“They probably figured you were already taken by the best, under a million-dollar contract.” He lifted the camera to chest height. “Will you let me be the first to sign you?”
The woman swayed as if gripping an invisible pole, twirling a golden lock around her fingers.
“Do you just wander around the beach photographing girls?”
“I work for some magazines, making any man lust after mediocre girls and the world kneel before beauties like you. So tell me, want to get started? A few studio sessions and you’ll end up in Hollywood.”
Her nipples showed in the blouse like buttons. The man struck exaggerated poses and clicked away. She tilted her head, pursed her lips in a pout, and tumbled into a stream of laughter.
I closed my eyes and shoved my hands in my pockets. I would have preferred to buy a towel, lay it out on the sand, and bake until the sun dipped below the horizon. Tell me, beautiful: why should I bother, why should I sacrifice myself just to prolong your infinitesimal blink of existence, so your years can unfold—at best—for a handful of people who will also vanish? Cities buried under cities buried under cities. I’d save another person who had wandered blind and deaf into a trap, and if she found out I had intervened, she’d blame me for it. But I had to stop this coyote, or else he’d keep killing.
I didn’t know her name. I looked at another face and body I had to accept corresponded to a complex life. I had to assume this woman deserved salvation. But why add another nightmare to my crammed attic? Who would miss her? Whenever she set foot outside, hundreds of men—and some women—imagined the feel of her skin, how her breasts would fall when she took off her bra, how she would look lying in bed, eyes half-closed, face flushed, lips wet, thighs parted, displaying the earnings of her genetic lottery ticket—the product of a generation raised on the streets. But who actually loved her? A mother, a father? A little sister who yearned to see her? A boyfriend who believed she was irreplaceable? How many people would cry for her years from now, when barely any scraps of flesh were left clinging to her bones? Would this retinue of ghosts I was inventing convince me she was worth saving, instead of letting her get lost among the grains of sand formed by billions of forgotten humans?
I had to keep this man from killing her, or tomorrow I’d wake up in a sweat, haunted by the image of the woman talking to the photographer, stuck to my face like a gas mask. I would know I could have saved her but chose not to. I’d save her to spare myself the pain. Whoever she might be was irrelevant. I was just a pillar against the avalanche so that between me and the tongues of oncoming snow, someone might survive.
I approached, focusing on the man, his runner’s physique. I called his name. He lowered the camera and gave me the look of a hyena that, chewing on a carcass with strips of flesh dangling from its fangs, growls at another predator trying to sink its teeth into the entrails. But he rebuilt his grin and nodded at me, like you’d greet a neighbor you share a beer with every couple of weeks.
“How’s it going?”
“You sold several sessions to Esquire and Black Tux.”
His smile slanted, showing that canine.
“My reputation precedes me. You recognize me by my face?”
“I work in the field.”
He looked me up and down, while the woman—arched, chest thrust forward—cast her eyes down his body, tracing an invisible mole with her fingertips just below her mouth.
“What did my previous work suggest about how this shoot with this lovely thing will turn out?” the man said.
I stopped myself from staring at the woman’s bubblegum-pink lips or the dip dividing her full lower lip.
“That you woke up lucky this morning.”
She laughed as if nothing in her life had ever troubled her. She swept her hands through her hair, which unfurled in the air, glimmering in the late-afternoon light. My groin tingled.
The flash from his camera pulled my attention away.
“Spontaneous smiles are priceless,” he said.
The woman bent forward, laughing as if drunk, bracing her fingers on his arm.
A deep rumble was building inside me, an underground quake. Let her enjoy herself, and she would, ignorant—until she found out.
“Surprised by your luck?” I asked.
She hardly looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“My turn was coming.”
“In what sense?”
“I radiate that vibe. My reward had to arrive.”
“With vibes like yours,” the man said, “I’m shocked fate hasn’t caught up with you already. But most men wonder if they have any right to approach you. They delayed the karma you deserve.”
She nodded, giving him a conspiratorial look. “Anyone who comes near me knows I’ve got love to give and receive. That’s what we’re born for, to share love in every way.”
“You do that often?” I asked. “Share the love?”
She glanced at me as if gauging whether she’d accept a proposition. “Whenever I can.”
“Does it ever cause you any trouble?”
“Some of them get too attached, become possessive. But that whole ‘ownership’ thing ended a couple of decades ago.”
“I mean, have you ever met someone who wanted more than just making love—who wanted to kill you?”
She forced a shaky smile. She shifted from wanting to ignore an inappropriate comment to wondering what my intentions were. The man’s stare pricked my temple like a dagger point.
“You sound like my dad,” she said. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen. Nobody would want to hurt me—I’m nice to everyone.”
“And if it does happen? Are you going to hug your attacker till he stops?”
She offered me her profile and gathered her silky hair in one fist. “It’s a sunny afternoon at the beach. I don’t get why you’d think about that.”
“Bad vibes, man,” said the man, as though giving me advice.
“You get what you put out,” the woman added.
She looked at me like a child. If I were shorter, she would have bent down and rested her hands on her knees. “Is that how you think because they sent you to the army? You returned, though. Rejoice! You’re safe now. Nothing to fear, right?”
“Everyone assumes I fought in the war. Maybe I did, and I forgot.”
“Classic stress, so they say. Just take a deep breath, relax your face. That sort of thing has a solution. God invented marijuana. Get some strong weed and it’ll wash away your dark thoughts like a flood. If you want, I can introduce you to a couple of people.”
“Weed ramps up my paranoia.”
She slipped a hand under her hair to scratch the back of her neck. “I’m not sure if you’re messing with me.”
“Crowds would gather around you at parties,” the man said to me.
I avoided looking at him. “I don’t go to parties.”
He inhaled deeply and held his breath. “In any case, my friend, I’m afraid you interrupted us.”
He slipped an arm around the woman. She returned the gesture while shining that radiant smile.
“Sweetheart,” the man said, “back to the important stuff. Do you live near Venice?”
“Close enough.”
“Keep going the way you were headed, and in ten minutes you’ll reach my studio. 1313 Main Street, on the corner of Horizon Ave. Ring a bell?”
“Near the school.”
“Barely worth a taxi. 1313 Main Street. Sadly, I forgot my cards at home—slipped the mind of this pro. Will you remember?”
“I can handle that. 1313, corner with Horizon Ave.”
“Will you swing by tomorrow at five in the afternoon, looking at least as gorgeous as you do now?”
“Five, you say?”
“Or whenever you prefer.”
She laughed. “Tomorrow at five.”
“I’ll let you get back to it. Bet your friends are waiting for you to brighten their day.”
She lifted herself onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but it happened right as he shot me a blank look, so instead she swayed in a little dance back toward the sand. She turned to wave goodbye with a broad smile and a flutter of her hand. Her hair rippled like a dream.
I forced myself to tear my eyes away. The man studied me, expressionless. As he walked off, he flapped a hand at me as though shooing a stray dog.
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea. Written during my Serious Period, when I was sure that if I wrote in such a way, I would eventually get published. Newsflash: tough luck. If you’ve read my stuff, you know that I’m a silly bastard, that my tales usually devolve into deranged nonsense, but there’s none of that in this story or the other five I’ll probably end up translating. This protagonist is one bitter hardass. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and if you don’t, well… I don’t know, go munch on rocks or something, will you?
In the realm of good news regarding my person, turns out that my subconscious was indeed working something out; I figured as much, given how it made me dream of Alicia Western (from Cormac McCarthy’s final books) and sparked an obsession that has yet to pass. My girl in the basement has turned her attention to a failed novel I worked on ten years ago, in Spanish. It was a way of coming to terms with my stints as a recluse during my twenties, particularly a period in which I was hopelessly haunted by, autistically obsessed with, a certain musician who plays the harp, to the extent of writing a long novel that was little else than thinly-veiled fanfiction. Back then I didn’t even have an online audience; I was literally just doing it because my subconscious demanded it. Nobody else read it.
These past few days I’ve been going over the revised scenes of that failed novel to extract whatever is usable. I will have to change most of the point of that story, as well as remove one of the major characters, but they were a large part of why I never finished the story. This narrative will allow me to delve deep into my autistic drive toward reclusion, obsession, and other nasty shit that I never processed properly. My twenties were a nightmare for the most part, during which I yearned to die on a regular basis.
Speaking of yearning to die, this morning at work, as I reread the impressions I posted about McCarthy’s haunting final novels, I reflected on how Bobby Western unburdened himself from everything and everyone to repent for an unforgivable crime. That made me think of how since my early twenties I’ve cut ties with everyone, as well as refused to form new connections even when they insisted, because of an intrinsic need to “be ready.” As in be ready to disappear at any moment. During weddings and other nasty gatherings like those, whenever some ghost from my past approached me expecting me to look him or her in the eye, and said something to the effect of, “Hey, Jon, I haven’t seen you in ages!” (did we ever get along?), I usually averted my gaze, shrugged, and said something like, “Yeah, I’m still around…” Some time later I found out in online articles that such phrases are a sign of suicidal ideation. Well.
I’ve talked about this before, but I never thought I would live past 18 after my horrid teenage years, and then I came real close, the closest I ever came regarding my physical intention to do it at that moment, after I refused to get on the bus to work one morning. It was my first job, in which I was treated like utter shit, and I felt completely incapable of handling it. I knew that my life from then on would consist on nothing else than enduring nightmarish, humiliating work schedules that would drain all my energies (I usually felt sleepy the moment I returned home). No love on the horizon, of course. So I just wanted to throw myself off a cliff and get it over with. Instead of that, I pussed out, and went to the library. The alternate version of this ended up becoming (at least in inspiration) my first novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places, in which the protagonist, who was a woman for reasons, actually did throw herself off a cliff, fucking died, and was a ghost for twenty years until she became obsessed with a suicidal living person, so she possessed some guy to seduce her. Quite the wild ride of a story that was, although I’m afraid to reread it in case I find it too cringey.
These last fifteen years or so, I’ve been suicidal in a pussy, passive variety. For example, one night, as I was lying in bed in the dark, I told my organs that they had permission to cease functioning during my sleep, so I wouldn’t need to wake up again. I must have been in a bad place, perhaps due to extreme stress, because the following day I actually ended up in the ER with my first episode of arrhythmia. Realizing that my heart is faulty and may screw me over at any point has changed my mentality quite a bit: I no longer go out of my way to stress myself with things I don’t want to do, mainly those that involve dealing with human beings. Right now, as a programmer at work, I mostly spend the whole morning working on my stuff (which isn’t necessarily a programming task), only speaking to my boss whenever he requests a meeting. I feel better this way.
That said, the fact that in my daydreams I talk at length with Alicia Western, McCarthy’s thinly-veiled version of the love of his life, Augusta Britt, made me have to admit to myself that I wish I could talk to someone I could respect, and whose words I would actually care to listen to. The issue with every person I’ve met in the flesh is that the moment I allow myself to engage in conversation with them, I quickly get reminded of how stupid I was for letting my guard down; sometimes just because I have nothing in common with them, others because they’re hostile to my peace of mind. I recall vividly how I let myself be invited by two coworkers to drink coffee and chat in the parking lot, only for one of them to say, the moment we stopped, “Have you seen that whole thing about George Floyd, the guy the police killed for being black? I swear, the whites that become policemen in the US are all racists.” A vivid reminder that I’m surrounded by fucking imbeciles. I didn’t give them a second chance. In any case, realizing that other people’s brains work so differently to yours (and pretty much everyone else’s does) is disheartening.
Anyway, it’s been a couple of years of me admitting things to myself, or realizing them at least. First the whole deal about Izar Lizarraga, motocross legend and love of my life, which forced me to process the strange grief I’ve been carrying all my life (good times. Still miss you, champ.) Then this strange deal with Augusta Britt / Alicia Western. I would like my subconscious to explain concisely why looking at the following picture of Augusta Britt from the 1970s squeezes my heart and moistens my eyes:
I experienced a somewhat similar moment (the same moment repeated over years, actually) back when my maternal grandparents were alive. They had a framed photo from the 1970s that showed a large family at some open space. I assume they were related to my grandparents somehow. Every time I visited that home, I stared at that photo because one of the teenagers in it, who at the time was older than me, was hauntingly beautiful, particularly her eyes and thoughtful expression. She seemed deep, someone I would have loved to know. I never found out who she was, not that anything would have changed if I had. I haven’t seen that photo in about twenty years. Like McCarthy himself, I believe in the supremacy of the subconscious, so whenever I happen to care for or react to something, I yearn to interact with my basement girl to figure out what’s bothering her. Sometimes she opens up. Most of the time, though, she remains opaque. Damn bitch speaks in symbols instead of language (hence the Kekulé problem), so she can be hard to understand. But she’s far older and wiser than the whole of humanity combined.
Well! This was a whole load of nothing, wasn’t it? Anyway, it’s half past eight in the evening of yet another Monday. This afternoon I’ve wanked to an AI-driven giantess dominating me. That’s information that you needed to know.
Author’s note: the Deep Dive podcast couple had an interesting time getting through this post:
I first read The Passenger, along with its coda Stella Maris, perhaps a year and a half ago. I loved both, but I wasn’t consciously aware of how they had settled in my subconscious. From time to time, I remembered the most important character in those two books: a beautiful, mentally-ill genius named Alicia Western. Out of nowhere, back in December I dreamed about her, and it spurred a sudden obsession that has yet to pass. It led me to reread both books. Alicia Western feels not only unique but wholly real, as if she had truly existed. The massive weight of grief that pulls the protagonist down on The Passenger, that pulls down the reader for that matter, relates to the knowledge that an irreplaceable (pretty much a perfect person, as one of the characters put it) had been lost. Now that we know quite a bit more about McCarthy’s personal life, mainly about the love of his life, Augusta Britt, it seems to me that both of his final novels, which he had been researching or living since about 1972, render his grief, regret and general sorrow for having loved and lost Britt, whom McCarthy never managed to marry despite repeated attempts up to the end of his life.
Both books develop a forbidden love, that of Alicia Western and her biological brother Bobby. Cormac McCarthy didn’t have to go far to research how it felt to live a forbidden love. If Augusta Britt’s own words are to be believed, she first introduced herself to Cormac McCarthy at a public pool. A blonde, blue-eyed beauty (just like Alicia Western), she had a stolen gun holstered at her hip; she was sick of men in foster homes abusing her. When she approached McCarthy, he asked if she was going to shoot him. She then produced McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, and asked him to sign it. McCarthy was surprised, because just a few thousand copies of that book had been produced for that edition (this and other details bring to question if Britt is making stuff up to protect McCarthy, whom she loved, from further scrutiny). As the YouTuber Write Conscious (who lives in the Catalina foothills “five minutes away” from where Augusta Britt lives now, although he has never met her) spoke at length in this video, Augusta Britt was likely thirteen when she met McCarthy. She was also thirteen when she started receiving amorous letters from him. She was fourteen when, after getting abused again in a foster home, McCarthy asked her if she would escape with him to Mexico. Augusta herself said that they made love shortly after settling there. Regardless of your opinion on the subject of underage sex, it’s probably illegal. The fact remains that Augusta Britt to this day claims that McCarthy saved her life, and they were friends up until his death. As you will see throughout this post, the real-life inspiration seems thinly veiled at times, which possibly makes The Passenger McCarthy’s most personal novel.
This review will contain spoilers, although referring to spoilers in this novel is a bit strange: the most important thing that happens in it, that keeps happening throughout, is Alicia Western’s suicide, the aftermath of which were are presented with right in the opening passage: she walked out of the Stella Maris sanatorium into the woods of Wisconsin and let herself freeze to death. Curiously, although she had talked at length about intending to disappear without a trace, she chose to wear a red sash around her white dress so her corpse would be easily found, which is inexplicable, and has led to plenty of online speculation. Alicia Western, a troubled math genius with a unique mind that baffled every person she came across (as one person put it, when strangers met her, they thought of her as a pretty girl, but a few minutes later they were swimming for their lives), was led into these circumstances because her brother Bobby, the love of Alicia’s life, as well as the person who should have protected her to the last of his days, crashed while racing professionally, and ended up in a coma. Alicia, believing Bobby to be brain-dead regardless of whether he would wake up or not, decided to die. But Bobby did wake up from his coma pretty much unscathed. The Passenger starts with Bobby in 1980, in a world that for him has turned into ashes, the person he loved lost forever.
Bobby, who used to be both a physicist as well as race car driver, now works as a salvage diver who opts for dangerous jobs, quite overtly hoping that one of those jobs may take the agency out of him dying. The plot kicks off when Bobby and a friend of his, while diving to explore a sunken airplane, discover a bizarre situation: even though the plane is intact, the passengers inside are dead in their seats as if they had died before the plane crashed. The plane’s black box is missing, along with one of the passengers. Bobby and his pal realize that the situation is fucked, and they want nothing to do with it. Bobby goes out of his way just once to return to the area alone, and he discovers an inflatable raft that the passenger must have used to escape the plane. Now come the realm of spoilers: this is an anti-plot novel. Bobby doesn’t want to know anything more about this event, but he keeps being hounded about it by mysterious government types, who encroach further and further upon his life for reasons we never find out about (presumably because they believe he had something to do with stealing the plane’s black box, but it seems to me that they’re just trying to get rid of witnesses regarding whatever conspiracy caused the plane crash).
With those plot elements out of the way, which is pretty much all you get in that regard, the rest of the book is an exploration, a prodding if you will, of the fringes of human knowledge and experience: mental illness, hallucinations, conspiracies, living off the grid, working in off-shore platforms, transgenderism, aliens, incest, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, life as an outlaw, death, and plenty more. It felt to me like McCarthy was expanding his mind against those nooks that don’t have solid explanations, as he was about to embark in the final mystery of them all: dying, which deprived us of one of the finest, most unique minds in the world, as well as the writer I respect the most.
Throughout the story, Bobby remains subdued, pinned down by grief and regret, to the extent that we never meet the Bobby that Alicia talks about in Stella Maris, that young man who played the mandolin at honky-tonks as Alicia pretended they were married. In virtually every scene, it feels like Bobby is preventing himself from thinking about Alicia, and whenever some image or memory slips in, it devastates him. Most of the time that any other character brings Alicia up, Bobby is moments away from leaving. Bobby mentions that the sole duty in his life was to take care of her, that he had failed miserably at it, and that he should have killed himself years ago. The rest of the book is a way for him of unburdening himself from everything and everyone he has ever known, so he can spend his remaining life in solitary confinement, paying for the crime of abandoning Alicia Western, his sister and love of his life, when she needed him the most. I can’t hurl complaints at him for his decisions, because he bears the full weight of what he’s done.
I can’t explain, except perhaps by alluding to how McCarthy imbued Alicia with all his yearnings and reverence for Augusta Britt, the fact that whenever she appeared or was mentioned in this book, I perked up and combed through every detail in case I would glean new information about her. She’s a pulsing presence, a constant heartbreak, as alive in those pages as I don’t think I’ve experienced anywhere else in fiction.
In Stella Maris, Alicia tells her therapist that she only kissed Bobby twice, but never went beyond that. However, that book makes a peculiar point: that confessing to some unsavory stuff is a way of keeping hidden details that lie far deeper, and cannot be brought to light. It was a very odd thing to say after Alicia Western confessed to loving her brother, and having told him that she wanted to marry him and bear his child. As I was rereading through The Passenger, I came across this passage:
Certain dreams gave him no peace. A nurse waiting to take the thing away. The doctor watching him. What do you want to do? I dont know. I dont know what to do. The doctor wore a surgical mask. A white cap. His glasses were steamed. What do you want to do? Has she seen it? No. Tell me what to do. You’ll have to tell us. We cant advise you. There were bloodstains on his frock. The mask he wore sucked in and out with his breathing. Wont she have to see it? I think that will have to be your decision. Bearing in mind of course that a thing once seen cannot be unseen. Does it have a brain? Rudimentary. Does it have a soul?
None of the other dream sequences were that specific regarding mundane details, nor included such dialogue. That tells me that it wasn’t a dream. And what is depicting is Alicia either having a miscarriage or an abortion. Bobby was the sole person she would have had sex with.
There’s not much else that I want to specify about the contents of the novel; they should be experienced. I will go over the many quotes that I have noted down. First of them, very early on, Alicia’s main “hallucination,” the Thalidomide Kid (whom some people online have suggested is Alicia’s subconscious fear that the child she wants to have with Bobby would be deformed), presents to her a new character, a dusty old man who ultimately only asks for the location of the bathroom. But the Kid’s words about that old man are quite telling, I’d say, now that we know McCarthy’s history with the love of his life:
He was married in that outfit. Little wifey was sixteen. Of course he’d been banging her for a couple of years so that would put her at fourteen. Finally managed to knock her up and hey, here we all are.
The following are quotes. Starting with an amazing sentence about the atomic bomb:
In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.
I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, dont we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world–which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.
The world of amorous adventure these days is hardly for the fainthearted. The very names of the diseases evoke dread. What the hell is chlamydia? And who named it that? Your love is not so likely to resemble a red rose as a red red rash. You find yourself yearning for a nice oldfashioned girl with the clap. Shouldnt these lovelies be required to fly their pestilential knickers from a flagpole? Like the ensign of a plagueship? I cant of course but be curious what an analytic sort such as yourself makes of the fair sex in the first place. The slurred murmurings. The silken paw in your shorts. Beguiling eyes. Creatures soft of touch and sanguinivorous of habit. What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations. That the man knows not how to even name that which slaves him hardly lightens his burden.
In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.
What if the purpose of human charity wasnt to protect the weak–which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway–but to preserve the mad? You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.
To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.
McCarthy had some things to say about the modern world. It feels to me that he wasn’t talking about the modern world of the novel.
The point, Squire, is that where they used to be confined to State institutions or to the mudrooms and attics of remote country houses they are now abroad everywhere. The government pays them to travel. To procreate, for that matter. I’ve seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy.
Do you know what I find particularly galling? It’s having to share the women with you lot. To listen to you fuckwits holding forth and to see some lissome young thing leaning forward breathlessly with that barely contained frisson with which we are all familiar the better to inhale without stint an absolute plaguebreath of bilge and bullshit as if it were the word of the prophets. It’s painful but still I suppose one has to extend a certain latitude to the little dears. They’ve so little time in which to parlay that pussy into something of substance. But it nettles. That you knucklewalkers should even be allowed to contemplate the sacred grotto as you drool and grunt and wank. Let alone actually reproduce. Well the hell with it. A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine. It only remains for you to hold your cups to my gaping throat and toast one another’s health with my heart’s blood.
Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagine.
The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.
On the darknesses of life:
If I think about things that I just dont want to know about they’re all things that I do know about. And I’ll always know them.
You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.
We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night. But as darkness descends does it matter?
The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified.
Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.
In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get.
You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.
We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet.
She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.
People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.
The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.
Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.
A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.
I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.
The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all of our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?
On death:
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not sure that I want to. Know. If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it. I probably dont want to live it anyway. I know that the characters in the story can be either real or imaginary and that after they are all dead it wont make any difference. If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that’s not what’s at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.
Do you think most people want to die? No. Most is a lot. Do you? I dont know. I think there are times when you’d just like to get it over with. I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didnt have to die.
Several acquaintances have remarked upon my sangfroid at this turn of events but in all truth I cant see what the fuss is about. Wherever you debark was the train’s destination all along. I’ve studied much and learned little. I think that at the least one might reasonably wish for a friendly face. Someone at your bedside who does not wish you in hell. More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place.
About Alicia:
He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.
In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where they would lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?
For all his dedication there were times he thought the fine sweet edge of his grief was thinning. Each memory but a memory of the one before until… What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.
What do you know of grief? You know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None.
Some things get better. I doubt this is one of them. People want to be reimbursed for their pain. They seldom are.
The only thing that was ever asked of me was to care for her. And I let her die. Is there anything that you’d like to add to that Mr Western? No, Your Honor. I should have killed myself years ago.
I dont know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means. There are times when I cant stop crying. I’m sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow. All my love. Your brother, Bobby. He had gotten out of the habit of talking to her when he was in New Orleans because he’d find himself talking in restaurants or on the streets. Now he was talking to her again. Asking her opinion. Sometimes at night when he would try to tell her about his day he had the feeling that she already knew. Then slowly it began to fade. He knew what the truth was. The truth was that he was losing her.
When she came to the door of her room in Chicago he knew that she hadnt been out in weeks. In later years that would be the day he would remember. When all her concerns seemed to be for him. He took her to dinner at the German restaurant in Old Town and her hand on his arm at the table drained everything away and it was only later that he understood that this was the day when she was telling him what he could not understand. That she had begun to say goodbye to him.
She wanted to disappear. Well, that’s not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place.
If all that I loved in the world is gone what difference does it make if I’m free to go to the grocery store?
When he got back to the windmill it was still dark and he climbed the stairs and sat at his little table. He sat with his forehead pressed into his hands and he sat for a long time. Finally he got out his notebook and wrote a letter to her. He wanted to tell her what was in his heart but in the end he only wrote a few words about his life on the island. Except for the last line. I miss you more than I can bear. Then he signed his name.
He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be.
Throughout McCarthy’s life, but particularly in the last twenty or so years, he was particularly interested in the workings of the subconscious: its role in the life of creatures, how it did its thing, etc. I believe that the title of this novel, The Passenger, along with how that word is used at times throughout the novel, alludes to the fact that we, as well as every other animal, are driven by the subconscious as much as we’d like to believe we are in charge, and that we’re merely passengers along for the ride. I’ve felt that myself intensely.
I’m certain that McCarthy knew that these two novels would be his last. They feel like goodbyes to the people he knew (many of the characters involved are inspired by actual people from his past). Goodbyes to the woman he loved from her broken youth at thirteen to her senior years at sixty-four. Thank you, Cormac, for every aching truth.
He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.
As a solitary dude, all my life I have relied on music to connect with the world at large, to feel that my feelings weren’t that unique or detached from the rest of humanity. Over the years, I’ve returned to certain albums that have spoken to me in ways that can’t be fully put into words. I love discovering new albums, and perhaps that’s also the case for whoever is reading these words, so I’ll spend some of my limited time on Earth sharing some specifics about the albums that have marked me, and that in many ways changed me.
Today’s album is Morbid Stuff, by the indie-punk band PUP. It has accompanied me through plenty of shit ever since it came out in 2019. Hard for me to compare this album to any other, as I rarely listen to punk, but this band’s frontman captures a perfect blend of disappointment, bitterness, self-disdain and melancholy that resonates very well with me. Without further ado:
“Morbid Stuff”
A song about regret and melancholy. I don’t have the specific details of what the songwriter is talking about, but I picture a female friend or girlfriend of the songwriter trying to make her way in the art scene, only to do something terrible that caused her to disappear from the picture and from the songwriter’s life. Poignant in a raw way.
I was bored as fuck Sitting around and thinking all this morbid stuff Like if anyone I’ve slept with is dead and I got stuck On death and dying and obsessive thoughts that won’t let up It makes me feel like I’m about to throw up
I was getting high in the van in St. Catharines While you were rubbing elbows in the art scene And back in the city I was on a tear High-fiving every shithead on Queen Street Passed out on the bus ride I got home in the morning at a quarter to ten Everybody was sleeping in Mom and dad were smoking weed in the attic again I said
I don’t know what you want me to say Stood by watching as your world went up in flames When you’ve tried everything, but the feeling stays the same You had it all, you pissed it away
I don’t know what you want me to say ‘Cause back in the city I was on a tear You had it all, you pissed it away Back in the city without a care
I still dream about you time and time again Well I’ve been sleeping in somebody elses bed And as my body aged, the feeling never did
“Kids”
A lovely tale of rage, bitterness and nihilism. Of doing your best despite the demons that drag you down, only to realize that nothing will work, that you might as well have surrendered to your most self-destructive urges. But at the end of the day, the songwriter gets to return to his girl, which doesn’t solve any issues in the rest of his life, but at least feels nice.
Just like the kids I’ve been navigating my way Through the mind-numbing reality of a godless existence Which, at this point in my hollow and vapid life Has erased what little ambition I’ve got left And I’ve embraced the calamity With a detachment and a passive disinterest Livin’ out the back of my ’97 Camry Wonderin’ how the hell I got myself into this
I guess it doesn’t matter anyway I don’t care about nothin’ but you I guess it doesn’t matter anyway ‘Cause I don’t care about nothin’ I don’t care about nothin’ but you No, I don’t care about nothin’
She said, “I’m sick of it all Your little games are gettin’ old Your little songs are getting way too literal How about some goddamn subtlety for a change?” She said, “I feel like I’ve come untethered In a room without walls I’m driftin’ on a dark and empty sea of nothin’ It doesn’t feel bad, it feels like nothin’ at all”
And I had it maxed out I had a feelin’, oh oh-oh-oh Nothin’ is workin’ And everything’s bleedin’, oh oh-oh-oh I shoulda tapped out Given into my demons, oh oh-oh-oh
It’s alright, it’s just a flesh wound You said you never saw it comin’ I’m pretty happy lyin’ here with you It’s pretty good to feel somethin’
“See You at Your Funeral”
My favorite song of the album. It captures very well the pained bitterness of coming across someone you used to love but that broke your heart. You want to know what’s been going on with her, but you know you shouldn’t. You tell yourself that you want her to be happy despite what she put you through, but you don’t truly want that. And above all, you wish everything would end in a rageful fire that would sweep away your pain.
The days blur into one, and I float around the edge of them Searching for something that’ll make me feel alive again These past few weeks in a hell of my own creation I try vegan food I take up meditation
I hope you’re doing fine on your own ‘Cause after everything we’ve been through You better hope you’ll find someone And you’ll try But you won’t ‘Cause after everything we’ve been through Oh baby, I wanna know
What you were thinking when you saw me in the produce section Buying organic foods Making healthy selections I asked you how you’ve been, not that it’s any of my business But you know me, I’ve always been a little masochistic
I hope somehow, I never see you again And if I do, it’s at your funeral, or better yet I hope the world explodes I hope that we all die We can watch the highlights in hell I hope they’re televised
“Scorpion Hill”
The devastating tale of a working-class father who can’t stay afloat no matter what he does. Dragged down by his own demons and by this harsh, unforgiving reality, it paints an increasingly grim picture, depicting his struggles with maintaining a relationship with his romantic partner as well as his son, until it wallops you with the final lines: “She said: I found the gun, it was buried beneath / Piles of clothes in the room where your son sleeps / And I can’t pretend to know how this will end.”
Up on Scorpion Hill watching life Passing me by in the pale moonlight And I sat there forever, three sheets to the wind It’s not helping my case, the state that I’m in But it’s not how they told you My intentions were good I was just bursting apart like the end of the arc Holding on to whatever I could
A square of light moves its way through the empty room Across the stained yellow carpet Like a ghost of myself in the afternoon Haunting my basement apartment I looked in to the mirror Hanging behind my door The glass was cracked and the man staring back He don’t look like me anymore And if the world is gonna burn Everyone should get a turn to light it up
Down and out, I’ve been on the rocks I’ve been having some pretty dark thoughts Yeah, I like them a lot
Time and time again, well I’ve tried and failed To get my act together And I’ll admit lately things really went off the rails I know that you deserve better But in the morning, as I was boarding The commuter train to work The boss was calling, he said: “There’s been cutbacks and I’m sorry you’re the first” And If I can’t support the two of us How can I support a third?
And I’m on the brink Fallin’ deep into debt Fallin’ deep into drink I can drown those regrets I don’t have to think
Now I’m working the night shift Asleep at the wheel I was bursting apart like a flame from a spark Thinkin ‘Jesus, this can’t be for real’
My sweat soaked mattress Corner of the room Cigarettes and Matches In the fading afternoon And a picture my kid, ya he’s smiling It’s the first day of school
She said: I found the gun, it was buried beneath Piles of clothes in the room where your son sleeps And I can’t pretend to know how this will end
I recommend you to check out the previous parts if you don’t know what this “neural narratives” thing is about. In short, I wrote in Python a system to have multi-character conversations with large language models (like Llama 3.3), in which the characters are isolated in terms of memories and bios, so no leakage to other participants. The large language models are fantastic at staying in character. Here’s the GitHub repo.
These days, as part of my worship of Dibella, I tend to use the Python app to set up erotic scenarios that usually finish when I finish. For this one, though, I wanted to create a more normal character than the larger-than-life ones that populate most other scenarios. I ended up just having a good time with her. Although it feels somewhat sacrilegious, I decided to mix her story of grief with another story of grief. Note: even though I’ve put myself as the player character, it’s an improved version. I’m not tooting my own horn here.
Pictured: Ainhoa Mendizabal, resilient single mom.
The fluorescent lights hum faintly overhead, casting a sterile glow over the orderly aisles of Greenleaf Grocery. A faint whiff of freshly baked bread mingles with the sharp tang of citrus from the produce section, while the rhythmic beep of scanners at the checkout counters punctuates the air. A shopping cart rattles faintly as a customer pushes it past, its wheels squeaking against the polished linoleum floor.
Jon’s large frame moves with deliberate precision as he reaches for a chilled bottle of decaf coffee, his calloused fingers brushing against the condensation on the glass. He places it carefully in his basket, the faint clink of the bottle against the metal frame echoing softly in the aisle. As he turns, his sharp eyes catch sight of an older woman maneuvering her cart toward him. Without hesitation, he steps aside, his broad shoulders pressing against the shelf to give her ample space. The woman offers a grateful nod, but Jon’s gaze remains fixed ahead, his expression unreadable, as if the small act of courtesy is just another part of his solitary routine.
Ainhoa Mendizabal adjusts her shopping cart’s trajectory, deliberately maneuvering closer to the tall stranger while pretending to examine items on the nearby shelf. Her fingers absently trace the edge of her cropped jacket as she steals another glance in his direction.
“Sorry, could I just… reach past you for the…” She trails off, as she realizes she hasn’t actually chosen what she’s reaching for.
Jon steps aside, leaving space for Ainhoa.
“No problem.”
She’s a woman in her maybe mid-thirties, with a body sculpted in the gym: her arms look toned even in her cropped jacket, her midriff has defined abs, and her legs are firm. Jon observes her as she stands there, apparently not knowing what to pick.
Ainhoa Mendizabal brushes a strand of hair behind her ear, her fingers lingering nervously at her neck as she glances at the shelves, then back at the tall stranger.
“Oh, I…” Laughs softly. “I actually don’t know what I’m reaching for. Silly, right? I just… well, it’s been a while since I’ve done this. The shopping, I mean. Usually I have two little ones pulling me in different directions, making it impossible to think straight. But they’re at school now, so…” She trails off, then straightens her shoulders. “I’m Ainhoa, by the way.”
Jon smiles softly at Ainhoa as his deep gaze explores her face.
“Life would be easier if we just could approach strangers and introduce ourselves without excuses, right? My name is Jon. Jon Ureña. Nice to meet you, Ainhoa. Let me say that I wouldn’t have thought you have children.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal laughs softly, a faint blush coloring her cheeks as she absently touches the toned muscles of her arms.
“Oh, thank you! The kids… they keep me busy enough that sometimes I forget I don’t look like the typical mom. But you’re right about the excuses thing. I guess old habits die hard when you’ve been out of practice this long. Ureña… that’s Basque too, isn’t it? Do you live around here?”
Jon smiles kindly at Ainhoa.
“Ureña actually comes from the town of Urueña, founded during the Reconquista. It’s from mainland Spain. Nevertheless, I’m part Navarrean, part Basque, part from the east coast of Spain. Born here, though. You’ve been out of practice, you said. Out of practice on what, talking to strangers?”
Ainhoa Mendizabal shifts her weight slightly, her fingers playing with the handle of her shopping cart as a mix of vulnerability and subtle flirtation crosses her face.
“Out of practice with… well, talking to interesting people in general, I suppose. After my husband passed away, my world kind of shrank to just me and the kids. You know how it is – or maybe you don’t. But lately I’ve been trying to… expand my horizons again. Though I have to admit, I’m not usually this forward about it. Something about you just seems… familiar? Maybe it’s the Basque connection.”
Jon turns toward Ainhoa. At her mention of being a widow, a cloud passes over his eyes, and he narrows them slightly.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Ainhoa. That is a pain I wouldn’t wish on anybody… and that in many ways separates humanity into those who have experienced and those who haven’t. You must be very strong, apart from your physical strength, to keep so in shape while taking care of two children after what happened to you.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal touches the lean muscle of her shoulder self-consciously, her eyes meeting Jon’s with a mixture of vulnerability and quiet strength.
“Strong…” Let’s out a soft laugh. “I suppose that’s one way to put it. Though most days it feels less like strength and more like… necessity? You learn to keep moving forward because standing still isn’t an option when tiny humans are counting on you. The gym helps though – it’s become my sanctuary in a way. Twenty minutes with a barbell and suddenly the world makes sense again, you know? Even when nothing else does. But I have to ask… you seem to understand that kind of pain a little too well. The way you said that about humanity being divided…”
Jon averts his gaze for a moment. His eyes have taken a faraway look. He then returns his gaze to Ainhoa.
“I do understand that kind of pain, but I’m not… that readily available to speak about it. However, I also understand the drive to pump weights at the gym, particularly after such an experience. I have done quite a bit of that myself, not sure if anyone can tell anymore… But while lifting heavy weights, that pain that courses through the body, added to… other pain… it feels like the sole genuine language, you know? Each pang of pain speaks the truth.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal shifts closer to Jon, her toned arms tensing slightly as she grips the shopping cart handle. Her eyes soften with recognition of shared pain.
“The truth… yes, that’s exactly it. Like each rep is this… confession of sorts? All that weight you’re carrying inside somehow makes more sense when you’re lifting actual weight outside.” Soft exhale. “But you don’t have to tell me about it if you’re not ready. Sometimes just knowing someone else understands is… well, it’s enough, isn’t it? Though I have to say, those hours at the gym have definitely paid off for you too.”
Jon glances at the width of his left arm as if he hadn’t paid attention to his physique in a good while. He then returns a warm gaze to Ainhoa.
“I suppose we are kindred spirits of a sort…” He gestures toward the end of the aisle. “Do you want us to keep shopping while we talk?”
Ainhoa Mendizabal brushes her fingertips along the shelf’s edge as she walks beside Jon, her toned muscles flexing unconsciously as she reaches to examine random items.
“Yes, let’s keep walking. Though I have to admit, I’m not even sure what I came here to buy anymore.” Soft laugh. “Funny how that happens, right? You walk in with a whole list in your head and then… poof! All gone the moment something more interesting comes along. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Sometimes the best conversations happen when you’re not rushing to check items off a list.”
Jon grabs a box of cereal and places it in his shopping basket. He waits for Ainhoa to approach him as she pushes her own shopping cart, that is mostly empty.
“You seem interesting to me as well, Ainhoa. If you don’t mind the question… do you identify with people that, many years or even decades after their partners pass away, they still consider themselves married?”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s fingers trace the edge of her shopping cart as she considers Jon’s question, her expression softening with vulnerability mixed with thoughtful consideration.
“That’s… that’s a complicated question, isn’t it?” Soft exhale. “I think part of me will always feel married to Iñaki in some way – he was my children’s father, my first love, the man who helped shape who I am today. But…” Ainhoa pauses, meeting Jon’s gaze. “I also know he wouldn’t want me to stop living just because he had to. It took me a long time to accept that loving him and being open to new possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive. Though I have to admit, even saying that out loud feels… strange. Like I’m confessing something I’ve only ever whispered to myself late at night when the kids are asleep.”
Jon offers Ainhoa a deep, somber gaze from his intense eyes, then he reaches for a packet of serrano ham.
“Dealing with regret… it’s like being tied to a signpost you can’t even locate, let alone visit anymore… Sometimes I think still that it would have been better to never wake up again after… after what happened. But turns out that if you put one foot in front of the other, you keep moving along with the rest of the world. Even though it makes no sense to live when the sole person who mattered in it is gone.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal instinctively reaches out and touches Jon’s forearm, before she catches herself and withdraws her hand.
“I understand that feeling more than you know… that desperate wish to just… stop. But you said something there that really hit home – about putting one foot in front of the other. That’s exactly what it is, isn’t it? Some days those steps feel impossibly heavy, like you’re wading through concrete. But then you look up and somehow you’ve made it through another day, another week…” Soft exhale. “And maybe that’s the point? Not trying to make sense of any of it, but just… keeping those feet moving. Though I have to admit, having someone who truly gets it… someone who knows that particular kind of darkness… it makes those steps feel a little less lonely, doesn’t it?”
After Ainhoa reaches to touch his forearm, Jon stops shopping, and turns to face Ainhoa. His expression remains guarded. His gaze is unafraid, but also weary.
“Leaving aside pretense, that this is about two strangers meeting for no particular reason… You’re looking for something. Is it truly a good idea for you to look for someone who is also tied to a ghost? Perhaps it would be better for your sanity and well-being to meet up, perhaps in apps or bars, someone who doesn’t know what you and I know.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal leans against her shopping cart, her muscled shoulders tensing slightly as she considers Jon’s words. Her fingers drum thoughtfully against the metal handle.
“Maybe you’re right about the apps and bars… they feel so artificial, don’t they? Like everyone’s wearing these masks, pretending grief doesn’t exist. But here’s the thing – I’m not looking for someone to magically fix everything or make the pain disappear. That’s not how it works, is it? What I’m looking for… what I think we both might need… is someone who understands that some ghosts stay with us, and that’s okay. Someone who knows that healing isn’t about forgetting, but about making room for new memories alongside the old ones. Though I have to admit, I didn’t exactly plan on having this conversation in the middle of the grocery store between the cereal and the serrano ham.”
Jon fixes a deep gaze that bores through Ainhoa’s eyes. His eyes hint at a deep pain that’s almost ancient.
“Ainhoa, I’ve been mourning my other half for longer than she lived. Even after all this time, the world doesn’t make sense. That’s the kind of person I am. I lift weights, I go to work, I am… entertained at times. But I don’t know how to be happy.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal steps closer to Jon, her athletic frame tensing slightly as vulnerability flickers across her features. Her fingers absently touch the necklace at her throat – the one that was Iñaki’s.
“Maybe that’s exactly why we should take this chance.” Soft exhale. “Look, I’m not saying we have to figure everything out right now between the serrano ham and breakfast cereals. But there’s something… real here. Something honest. And honestly? I’d rather spend time with someone who knows that happiness isn’t always possible than pretend with someone who thinks grief has an expiration date. Besides…” slight smile, “I’ve learned that sometimes the best things in life come from the most unexpected places. Like finding a kindred spirit in aisle three of a grocery store on a random Tuesday morning.”
Jon smiles softly, but genuinely, at the intriguing woman.
“Well, I’m done warning you for now… Truth is, Ainhoa, I find you very interesting, and it’s rare for me to get interested in anyone. You also look great. Do you want us to exchange numbers, or even go for a coffee afterwards? Who knows, maybe soon enough we’ll find ourselves heading to the gym together. It would be good to have a reliable spotter.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s face lights up with a genuine smile, her athletic frame relaxing visibly at Jon’s suggestion. Her fingers brush against her necklace briefly before dropping to adjust the strap of her gym bag.
“Now that’s the kind of warning I don’t mind hearing. And yes to both – coffee and exchanging numbers. Though I have to warn you too… I take my spotting duties very seriously. No half-hearted encouragement from me – when I say ‘one more rep,’ I mean it!” Ainhoa pulls out her phone. “Here, let me give you my number. And there’s this little café nearby that makes these amazing pintxos… unless you had somewhere else in mind?”
Jon slips his phone back into his pocket after saving Ainhoa’s number, his movements deliberate yet slightly hesitant, as if unsure of this new step. They move through the aisles together, their carts now filled with items they’ve helped each other choose, a quiet camaraderie forming between them. Outside, the midday sun bathes the cobblestone streets in golden light, and Jon instinctively reaches for Ainhoa’s grocery bags, his broad hands brushing against hers. She smiles, her toned arms flexing slightly as she resists for a moment before relenting, her playful smirk betraying her amusement at his old-fashioned gesture. They walk side by side, the rhythmic clatter of their footsteps blending with the distant hum of the city, the promise of coffee and conversation drawing them closer to the café.
Ainhoa leads Jon through the sunlit streets, her confident stride matching the rhythm of their conversation. The Blue Moon Café welcomes them with the rich aroma of roasted coffee beans and the soft hum of acoustic music. At the counter, Ainhoa gestures toward the display of pintxos, her toned arm brushing against Jon’s as they lean in to choose. They settle into a corner table, their shopping bags resting at their feet, the cozy nook offering a sense of privacy amidst the café’s gentle bustle. The warm light from the overhead fixture catches the faint sheen of sweat on Jon’s brow, a reminder of the weight he carries, both physically and emotionally.
Ainhoa Mendizabal traces her finger along the rim of her untouched coffee cup, her athletic frame leaning forward slightly as she speaks. Her dark eyes remain fixed on Jon, studying the way the café light catches the pain etched in his features.
“You know what’s funny? Before today, I probably would’ve laughed if someone told me I’d find a real connection while shopping for serrano ham. But there’s something… different about this. About you. The way you just get it – the weight of carrying those memories, the struggle to find meaning when everything’s been turned upside down. And maybe… maybe that’s exactly what makes this feel right? Not despite our broken pieces, but because of them. Though I have to warn you – if we’re going to be workout partners, you should know I take my training seriously. No slacking allowed, even on leg day!”
Jon takes a sip of his coffee as his features light up with amusement.
“A grocery shop, or a park, are better places to find genuine connection than bars or, God forbid, dating apps. Nobody should try the apps unless they only want a connection of the physical variety. In grocery shops and parks you find people just living their normal lives. And regarding our shared struggle to find meaning… One must be careful about that, because the darkness also seeks company, right? And it prefers to stay down there, in the hole… Regarding the gym…” He smirks with a hint of mischief. “I can tell that you train your lower half very thoroughly. Maybe you didn’t notice passersby staring as we headed here, but I did.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal blushes slightly at Jon’s comment about her lower body, but her athletic confidence doesn’t waver. She shifts in her seat, unconsciously straightening her already perfect posture, while her fingers play with the necklace at her throat.
“Oh, so you noticed that, did you?” Soft laugh. “Well, those squats and deadlifts don’t lie. Though I have to say, your form isn’t bad either – I caught a glimpse of those shoulders when you were reaching for the top shelf earlier. But you’re right about the apps and bars… there’s something artificial about them. This though?” Ainhoa gestures between them. “This feels more… authentic. Real. Speaking of which, how do you usually structure your training? I typically hit the gym around 6am, after dropping the kids at their grandmother’s. Though I suppose I should warn you – I tend to get pretty intense during my workouts. It’s become my therapy of sorts, you know?”
Jon takes another sip of his coffee, then puts the cup down.
“I usually also hit the gym before work. I prefer to get the important things done before… well, before the often mind-numbing routine of the job squeezes me out. It would be nice to meet up for workouts regularly. I must say, though… You’re much stronger than me, being able to juggle your two kids, the gym, and a job.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal leans back slightly in her chair, her athletic frame relaxing as a genuine smile plays across her features. Her fingers brush against Iñaki’s necklace before dropping to wrap around her coffee cup.
“You know what? That means more than you realize. Sometimes I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water, juggling everything. But the gym… it’s become my anchor. Those early morning sessions are sometimes the only moments I get that are truly mine. Though having the kids actually makes it easier in a way – they give me a reason to keep pushing forward when everything else feels impossible.” Soft laugh. “But hey, don’t sell yourself short. That kind of dedication to training before work? That takes its own kind of strength. What would you say to meeting up tomorrow morning? I usually start with compound lifts – squats, deadlifts, the works. Unless you’re one of those guys who skips leg day?”
Jon shoots Ainhoa a sideways glance, somewhat playfully.
“I must not be doing it right if you can’t tell that I never skip leg day. Let’s meet tomorrow morning then. I do mainly High-Intensity Training for bulking up, focusing on compound exercises. I need to be careful with the squats, as my right knee isn’t as strong as it used to be.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal tilts her head playfully, her athletic frame shifting forward as she reaches across the table to tap Jon’s forearm gently. Her dark eyes dance with amusement, though they retain that hint of carefully guarded vulnerability.
“Oh, you do those legs justice, trust me – I’ve got a trained eye for proper form! But I like that you’re careful with the knee. Smart training is sustainable training, that’s what I always say.” Soft laugh. “How about we meet at GazteluFit at 6:15? They’ve got that amazing squat rack in the corner – perfect lighting too, in case either of us feels inspired to add to our social media stories. Though fair warning – I tend to grunt when I’m pushing through those last few reps. Some people find it intimidating, but hey, that’s what headphones are for, right?”
When Ainhoa reaches to tap his forearm, he narrows his eyes warmly, welcoming the intimacy.
“GazteluFit, huh? I’ve gone there from time to time, I guess never at the same time as you… But I won’t wear headphones. In fact,” he smirks, “I look forward to hearing you grunt.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s cheeks flush a deeper shade of pink as she leans forward, her athletic frame emphasizing the curve of her shoulders. Her fingers toy with the necklace at her throat as a playful smirk tugs at her lips.
“Oh, so you want to hear me grunt, do you?” Ainhoa’s voice drops to a teasing whisper. “Be careful what you wish for – I’ve been known to intimidate even the burliest guys when I’m in the zone. But I like that confidence… and that you’re not afraid of a little intensity. 6:15 tomorrow then? I’ll even try to tone down my battle cries… maybe.”
* * *
The early morning sunlight streams through the large glass windows of GazteluFit, casting long, golden beams across the polished wooden floors. The rhythmic clang of weights echoes through the space, mingling with the steady hum of treadmills and the occasional grunt of exertion. A faint scent of fresh sweat and cleaning solution lingers in the air, grounding the scene in the raw energy of disciplined effort.
Jon meets Ainhoa at the entrance of the vast exercise room. He’s wearing a black tanktop that shows off his sculpted shoulders, as well as his prominent biceps and triceps.
“Good morning, Ainhoa. I’m glad we could do this.” He eyes her outfit with an unreadable expression, and doesn’t comment on it even though it feels that he would like to. “Shall we head in?”
Ainhoa Mendizabal nervously adjusts her yellow sports bra and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her fingers briefly brush against Iñaki’s necklace before dropping to her side.
“Good morning, Jon!” She beams at him, her heart racing from more than just pre-workout anticipation. “I hope you’re ready for an intense session. I usually start with compound movements – you know, the big lifts that really get your heart pumping.” Her eyes drift briefly over his muscular arms before quickly returning to his face. “Have you worked with a training partner before?”
Jon and Ainhoa walk into the exercise room, past a few people running on treadmills.
“Yes, I was going for compound first. Do you want to do squats? I was thinking of alternating between deadlifts and squats myself; perhaps we can switch. And no, I’ve never worked with a training partner before… I’m afraid I have always been a lone wolf when it comes to weightlifting, but I can already tell that it will be more interesting with you.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal leads Jon to the squat racks, her hips swaying slightly as she walks. She adjusts her ponytail and touches Iñaki’s necklace before settling into position beside the weights.
“A lone wolf, hmm? Well, you’re in for a treat then – having someone to spot you and push your limits makes all the difference! And yes, let’s start with squats. I usually do five sets, increasing weight each time until failure.” She grins playfully. “Just don’t be intimidated when you see how much this mama can lift. But switching between exercises sounds perfect – keeps the blood pumping, you know? Plus it gives us a chance to catch our breath… and chat a bit more.”
Ainhoa keeps her form perfect as she pushes through her first set of squats. Jon, beside her, does deadlifts, his leg muscles and triceps rippling and bulging as he controls his breathing. He glances at the way Ainhoa’s leggings highlight her firm glutes and thighs.
“I’m right here for when you want me to spot you.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal completes her set of squats with controlled movements, her face flushed from exertion. She catches her breath and adjusts Iñaki’s necklace before responding.
“Thanks, Jon. Having someone ready to spot really helps push those limits.” She exhales deeply. “Though I have to admit, your form with those deadlifts is quite impressive. Looks like I’m not the only one who takes their training seriously! Want to switch exercises after this set? I’d love to see if your squat game matches your deadlift prowess.”
After Jon’s set of deadlifts, they switch. Jon sets the barbell on his broad shoulders. Jon is considerably taller than Ainhoa, so when she stands behind him to spot him, she feels that the barbell is quite high. As Jon lowers himself for the first repetition, Ainhoa realizes that she was standing too close to Jon when his glutes bump against her crotch, which makes her step back. Jon finishes his rep, then chuckles over his shoulder.
“Well, I guess I should be glad that our positions weren’t switched, or else this would have been much more awkward.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal lets out a nervous laugh, her hand instinctively reaching for Iñaki’s necklace as her cheeks flush a deeper shade of pink. She takes another step back to maintain proper spotting distance.
“Oh god, I’m so sorry about that! Guess I need to work on my spotting position as much as my squats.” She laughs softly. “Though you’re right – at least with our height difference, you won’t have that problem spotting me. Unless you’re planning on squatting really low!”
Jon lowers himself into a deep squat, his powerful thighs straining against the weight of the barbell as Ainhoa stands close behind, her hands hovering near his shoulders, ready to assist. Her eyes flicker between his form and the two veteran weightlifters nearby, their muscular frames and confident postures exuding an air of dominance. The man, with arms like tree trunks, casually refers to the woman as ‘Amazon,’ her towering presence and chiseled physique commanding attention. Ainhoa feels a mix of admiration and unease as the pair exchange knowing glances, their conversation laced with the kind of gym jargon that suggests they live and breathe this world. Jon, oblivious to their presence, focuses solely on his breathing and the burn in his legs, his determination a quiet counterpoint to the unspoken challenge radiating from the veterans.
(Pictured: Garazi “Amazon” Ibarrola, a larger-than-life teenage-boy-eater that I produced for when the mood strikes that way. In my system, you can just copy characters from other scenarios, and they behave naturally.)
Jon finishes his set. He straightens up, his face flushed, and breathes out. He stands aside to let Ainhoa do her next set, then he moves to her back, looming over her smaller form, to spot her if necessary.
“There you go, Ainhoa. You can go as hard as you need; I will be here to take care of the barbell if you fail.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal positions herself under the barbell, adjusting her stance while her fingers briefly touch the necklace at her throat. A light sheen of sweat makes her skin glow in the morning light filtering through the gym windows.
“Thank you, Jon. Having a strong spotter really helps push those limits!” She takes a deep breath, centering herself. “Though I have to warn you – I’ve been known to surprise people with how much I can lift.” Her voice carries a playful challenge as she grips the barbell. “Ready when you are, handsome… I mean, ready to spot!” She quickly corrects herself, cheeks flushing deeper than just from exertion.
Jon chuckles behind Ainhoa.
“I’m ready, gorgeous. Right behind you.”
Ainhoa starts her set while Jon’s big, solid mass looms behind her, his breath reaching her nape at times. She steadies herself under the barbell, her muscles tensing as she works through her set. A bead of sweat trickles down her temple as she maintains perfect form through each repetition while she breathes steadily through her squats.
“You know what’s funny? Yesterday I could barely imagine myself getting back to working out with someone else. But this…” she exhales deeply as she completes another rep, “this feels natural somehow. Though I have to admit, your compliments aren’t helping my concentration!” She lets out a breathy laugh as she pushes through another rep. “At this rate, I might need that spot sooner than I planned.”
Ainhoa’s legs tremble as she pushes to complete her set, and Jon hurries to step closer to her back and place his hands under the barbell in case he’ll need to lift it. Ainhoa finishes the set, and puts down the barbell.
“You are very strong, Ainhoa. Those thighs of yours, dare I say, could crush a watermelon at this point.”
They both notice that the woman someone had referred to as “Amazon” is standing close by, observing them like a veteran gym-goer, an expression of pride in her eyes. Her huge arms are crossed under her muscular breasts.
“Well well, what do we have here?” She laughs heartily as she flexes her biceps by instinct. “Look at you two lovebirds, getting all hot and sweaty together! Mmm, and those thighs of yours, chica…” Garazi breaks into an impish grin. “They’re coming along nicely, though they’ve got nothing on these babies yet.” She flexes her quads dramatically. “But hey, it’s always good to see fresh meat… I mean, new faces at the gym taking their training seriously. Especially when they’ve got such an… attentive spotter.” Garazi winks at Jon. “Keep it up, you two. Maybe I’ll even share some of my special training techniques… if you’re brave enough to handle them.”
Jon wipes the sweat from his forehead as he raises his eyebrows at Garazi.
“It’s a bit unfair to compare us regular folks to you, miss… Amazon, someone called you? You are, and I say it respectfully, a beast. Past a certain point of training, one needs to have been blessed my the right genes, I’m afraid.”
Garazi Ibarrola throws her head back and laughs heartily, her muscular frame rippling as she flexes her impressive biceps.
“Genes? Oh honey, you’re too kind! But let me tell you something – these magnificent muscles weren’t just handed to me on a silver platter. I worked my ass off for every inch of this physique.” She flexes dramatically. “Though I suppose being blessed with superior genetics doesn’t hurt… especially when it comes to attracting cute young things to train with. Speaking of which, you two make quite the pair! The way you spot each other, all that sexual tension… mmm, it takes me back to yesterday with my sweet boy Iker.” She winks suggestively. “But hey, don’t let me interrupt your workout. Keep pushing those limits, and maybe one day you’ll be half as strong as this Amazon warrior. Though I doubt it!”
Ainhoa Mendizabal wipes sweat from her brow and instinctively touches Iñaki’s necklace, her cheeks flushed from both the workout and the attention. She straightens her posture, highlighting her athletic frame while maintaining a respectful distance from both Jon and Garazi.
“Superior genetics?” She laughs nervously. “I’d say it’s more about determination and consistency. Though I have to admit, seeing results like yours is… inspiring.” Ainhoa glances briefly at Jon before returning her attention to Garazi. “But maybe we should focus on finishing our sets? Unless you’re offering to demonstrate some of those special techniques right now?”
Garazi excuses herself, and with a knowing smirk, she wanders off. Ainhoa and Jon switch positions. He’s about to do a set of squats while Ainhoa spots him.
“That Amazon… one imposing woman,” he says. “And a boy-eater, it seems. I don’t know if I should feel sorry for the teenagers that come here looking to start their training…”
Ainhoa Mendizabal adjusts her stance to spot Jon properly, her hand briefly touching the necklace at her throat as she watches Garazi’s retreating form.
“Sorry about those poor teenage boys, but they’re the least of my concerns right now!” She laughs nervously. “Though I have to admit, her dedication to training is impressive, even if her… approach is a bit intense.” Ainhoa steadies herself behind Jon. “But enough about the Amazon warrior – let’s focus on your form. These legs of yours aren’t going to sculpt themselves into watermelon crushers without proper technique!”
Jon and Ainhoa move seamlessly from the squat racks to the dumbbell area, their bodies glistening with sweat under the gym’s bright lights. Jon adjusts the bench for Ainhoa, his hands lingering slightly longer than necessary as he ensures her comfort. Ainhoa, in turn, offers Jon a towel and a playful smile, her fingers brushing against his as she hands it over. The clatter of weights and the hum of machines around them fade into the background as they focus on each other, their movements synchronized and deliberate. The gym’s energy seems to amplify their connection, each rep and set bringing them closer, both physically and emotionally.
It’s almost seven in the morning. Jon rolls his shoulder. His skin, as well as the hair on his arms and legs, is sheened with sweat.
“That was one hell of a workout, Ainhoa, but I’m afraid I’m beat for today… And I also have to head to work in a while.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal wipes her brow with a towel, her fingers instinctively finding Iñaki’s necklace as she catches her breath. Her cheeks remain flushed from the intensity of their shared workout.
“Already?” She laughs softly. “And here I was just getting warmed up! But you’re right, it’s been quite the session. I haven’t pushed myself like this in… well, longer than I care to admit.” Ainhoa pauses, gathering courage. “Listen, Jon… I was thinking maybe we could make this a regular thing? Same time tomorrow? I mean, if you’re not too sore from today’s beating!” She touches her necklace nervously. “Having a reliable training partner really does make all the difference.”
Jon places a warm, strong hand on Ainhoa’s sweaty shoulder, her fibers solid against his palm.
“Sure, we can make these sessions a regular thing, but don’t hesitate to break it off if there’s some trouble with your kids. And you know, we could also meet outside of the gym.” His eyes are warm and honest as he looks down into hers. “No need to keep the charade that we aren’t interested in each other.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s fingers instinctively reach for Iñaki’s necklace as her breath catches. Her cheeks flush deeper, not entirely from the workout, as she meets Jon’s intense gaze.
“Outside the gym? I… yes, you’re right. There’s no point pretending this is just about proper form and spotting techniques, is there?” Ainhoa takes a steadying breath. “Though I have to warn you – dating a widow with two kids isn’t exactly what most men sign up for. But if you’re sure… maybe we could grab coffee after tomorrow’s session? That is, assuming you survive another round with these watermelon crushers in training!”
Jon pulls back his hand from Ainhoa’s shoulder, but he keeps holding her gaze with an intimate, warm look in his eyes.
“Until we met yesterday, I wouldn’t have guessed that I would look forward to hanging out with another person again… But I’m interested in you, Ainhoa, and I want to get to know you more. I’m willing to go ahead step by step.” They head to the exercise room’s exit. “After we hit our respective showers, do you want me to drive you somewhere? I have to head to the hospital, where I work. I’m not a doctor, I’m afraid, but a programmer.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal adjusts her gym bag on her shoulder, her fingers absently playing with Iñaki’s necklace as a mix of nervousness and excitement flickers across her face.
“A programmer?” She laughs softly. “Well, that explains the intensity in your eyes when you’re counting reps! And yes, a ride would be… nice. I need to head home to get the kids ready for school anyway. Though I should warn you – my car chatter tends to bounce between workout techniques and embarrassing mom stories. But since you’re willing to risk it…” Ainhoa pauses, gathering courage. “You know, Jon, what you said about looking forward to spending time with someone again? I feel the same way. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this… comfortable with anyone. Even if it does make me nervous as hell!”
The gym’s clamor fades behind them as Jon and Ainhoa step into the crisp morning air, their damp hair and fresh scents mingling with the salty breeze. Jon opens the door of his sleek BMW for her, his hand lingering on the frame as she slides into the passenger seat, her fingers brushing against Iñaki’s necklace. The car hums to life, and they glide through the winding streets of Donostia, the city’s hills rising like silent sentinels around them. Ainhoa directs him with quiet confidence, her voice soft but steady, as the road climbs higher, offering glimpses of the bay sparkling in the distance. The silence between them is comfortable yet charged, a shared understanding of the unspoken possibilities that lie ahead.
As Jon drives, he glances at Ainhoa, seated beside him on the passenger seat, wearing her form-fitting yellow sports bra and her leggings.
“I thought you would tell me mom stories. What are your kids names, if you don’t mind me knowing?”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s fingers trace the outline of Iñaki’s necklace as she settles into the passenger seat, her athletic frame relaxing slightly despite her nervous energy.
“Oh, my little warriors?” Soft laugh. “Itziar is my eldest – she’s nine going on thirty, I swear! Takes after her father with how stubborn she can be. And then there’s Julen, my seven-year-old tornado. He’s…” touches necklace, “he’s got his father’s smile, you know? Both of them are handling everything better than I could’ve hoped, though some days are harder than others. But they’re resilient, just like their mama had to learn to be.” Ainhoa pauses “What about you? I mean, I know you work at the hospital as a programmer, but what exactly do you do there? Must be quite different from debugging code at a regular tech company.”
Jon smiles warmly at Ainhoa, but not without a hint of deep pain in his eyes.
“Your kids sound healthy and well-adjusted. I’m really sorry that they had to go through… what nobody should experience. I can’t imagine losing a father at that age.” He keeps driving for a few moments in silence. “At work? I program systems to figure out how much the resources of the hospital are being used, to properly reorganize medical schedules, what professionals gets assigned where, and such things. We also program the intranet systems so doctors and nurses can input their schedules. Boring stuff, but at least it’s actually necessary.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s fingers drift to her necklace as she processes Jon’s words about his work, her eyes softening at the mention of her children.
“Necessary? Jon, what you do helps save lives, even if indirectly. A hospital is like… well, like a really complicated gym, you know? Everything has to flow just right or the whole system falls apart. And speaking of systems…” Ainhoa laughs softly. “I should probably mention that my morning routine with the kids is pretty systematic too. I’ll need to be home by 7:30 to make sure Itziar doesn’t try convincing Julen that cookies count as breakfast again. Though between you and me? Some mornings I’m tempted to just let her win that argument!” She pauses, touching necklace. “It means a lot, what you said about the kids. About understanding what they’ve been through. Most people just… they don’t know how to approach that part of our lives.”
“Did the other guys you dated after… well, after your terrible loss… did those guys bail on you when they found out you have kids?”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s hand tightens around Iñaki’s necklace as she looks out the car window, a mix of vulnerability and determination crossing her face.
“Actually… you’re the first since Iñaki.” Nervous laugh. “I mean, there have been a few who showed interest, but I never… I couldn’t… It just didn’t feel right, you know? Like I was betraying his memory somehow. Plus, the thought of introducing someone new to the kids – that terrified me more than any weight I’ve ever lifted. But yesterday at the store, when I saw you… Something felt different. Maybe it’s because you understand loss in a way most people don’t. I can see it in your eyes, Jon. That same shadow I see in mine when I look in the mirror some mornings.”
Jon continues driving in silence, his knuckles tightening around the steering wheel as his eyes seem both to darken and get sadder, perhaps weighing if he should bring up something from his depths. When he speaks, it sounds as if he’s dragging words out of himself.
“Her name was Izar Lizarraga. My best friend since we were twelve. We dated throughout our teens. She dreamed of becoming a motocross rider. One night she came to my parents’ home in the rain. Her father had slapped her hard because she had dropped out of school and only cared about training to become a professional rider. That night we promised each other that we would run away from home and travel the breadth of Spain. After we parted ways, Izar, instead of heading home, took to the highway. She crashed and died.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal’s hand drops from her necklace as she turns sharply toward Jon, her eyes widening with recognition of shared pain. Her voice softens to barely above a whisper.
“Oh, Jon… I…” Deep breath. “That kind of loss – losing someone so young, so full of dreams – it changes you forever, doesn’t it? Makes you question everything. I can’t imagine carrying that pain since you were teenagers. With Iñaki, at least we had years together, built a life, had our children… but to lose Izar right at the beginning of your journey together? Sometimes I wonder if that’s worse somehow – losing all those possible futures before they even had a chance to happen. Did you… did you ever let yourself imagine what that trip across Spain might have been like?”
Jon keeps his heavy gaze fixed on the road ahead. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down.
“If I let myself imagine what that trip might have been like? I dream about her almost nightly. I have tried to forget her, but it’s like I’m actually haunted. It’s been 21 years, longer than she lived. And there’s not a single day that I don’t wish I could turn back time and make her get off her motorcycle instead of driving away to her death.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal gently places her hand on Jon’s forearm, her touch light but steady, before withdrawing it respectfully.
“Twenty-one years… that’s longer than some people get to live at all. And yet here you are, still carrying her with you.” Soft exhale. “You know what the hardest part is? Those dreams – they never really stop coming, do they? With Iñaki, sometimes I wake up thinking he’s just in the other room, or that I can still smell his cologne on his pillow. But your dreams of Izar… they must be different. All those ‘what-ifs’ packed into them.” Ainhoa pauses. “I don’t think we ever really stop being haunted by the people we’ve loved, Jon. Maybe we’re not meant to. Maybe carrying their memory – even when it hurts like hell – is just another way of honoring how much they meant to us. Though I bet Izar would want you to find some peace… just like I know Iñaki would want that for me.”
“I don’t know if grief of this sort, the kind you and I have, ever really goes away. I think the people afflicted from such burdens usually retire from society, lest they become eyesores to others… Quietly disappear. I have done that to a certain extent in these last twenty years. I’ve rejected women quite a few times. I was still a married man, except that the girl I never actually married died 21 years ago. Iñaki died two or three years ago, is that right? I wish I could offer you hope in that regard, tell you that it’s going to fade in the future… but it hasn’t for me. Maybe the only solution is to love someone else.”
Ainhoa Mendizabal leans forward slightly, her fingers instinctively finding Iñaki’s necklace as she processes Jon’s words about lasting grief.
“Three years. It’s been three years since the accident took Iñaki. And you’re right – there’s no magical timeline where grief just… disappears. But Jon, retiring from life? That’s not living – that’s just existing. And maybe… maybe that’s why we found each other yesterday. Two broken people who understand that some wounds never fully heal. When you say you’ve rejected women because you still feel married to Izar’s memory… I get it. Gods, do I get it. For the longest time, I couldn’t even look at another man without feeling like I was betraying Iñaki. But yesterday at the store… something shifted. Maybe because I saw that same haunted look in your eyes that I see in mine. Or maybe because after three years of just… surviving, some part of me is finally ready to try living again. Not to replace what we’ve lost – nothing could ever do that. But to maybe create something new alongside those memories we carry.”
The whispers of the wind rustle through the park’s dense foliage, creating a soothing symphony that harmonizes with the distant melodies from the music school. Shadows lengthen as the sun dips lower, casting an ethereal glow across the gravel paths.
Jon walks briskly through the park, heading home back from work. His hands are buried in the pockets of his coat, his eyes unfocused as if lost in thought. He suddenly spots a figure huddled under a blanket, leaning against an oak tree. He recognizes the blonde hair, the pale skin, the beautiful and haunting eyes. Jon stops in his tracks, then hesitates for a few seconds before approaching Alicia cautiously.
“I… thought you would have been gone by now. That I wouldn’t see you again. So you’re sticking around for the time being. Our conversation at the restaurant… I suppose it troubled you. Do you wish me to keep walking as if I hadn’t met you?”
Alicia Western remains seated on the grass, wrapped in her donated blanket. Her pale fingers trace patterns in the dirt beside her as she stares ahead without meeting Jon’s gaze. Her hair hangs limp and unwashed around her face.
“You again. Come to add another chapter to your nightmare collection? Those thugs from earlier certainly contributed their share. Guess I should thank them… nothing quite grounds you in reality like having strange men try to grab at what’s under your clothes while they empty your pockets. But hey, at least they left me this ratty blanket, right?” She tugs at the worn fabric. “You know what’s funny? I actually considered coming to find you after it happened. Isn’t that rich? The suicidal math prodigy momentarily wanting human comfort. But then I remembered… we’re all just shooting stars burning out alone anyway. So no, Jon, you don’t have to pretend you didn’t see me. In fact, it might be better if you didn’t. Save yourself the trouble of caring about someone who’s already measured the angle of their inevitable descent.”
Jon’s expression twists in sympathy. He crouches to his haunches, then breathes out a white cloud.
“You’ve been assaulted… Damn it… This town has gone to shit in the last twenty years, so I can’t say I’m surprised, but…” He gestures at Alicia’s forehead. “It seems they also left you with a bruise. Fucking bastards.” He looks to the side, anger hardening his face. “I… I did have a nightmare about you, Alicia. I’m afraid you have triggered my savior complex. I accept that you want to die, and that I can’t do anything to prevent it, but… could I at least make you feel comfortable in the meantime?”
Alicia Western hugs the blanket tighter around herself and lets out a hollow laugh.
“Comfortable? That’s rich coming from someone who admitted to lifelong depression. Tell me, Jon, what exactly would make me comfortable right now? A warm bed? Hot meal? Maybe some pills to make the voices stop their endless stream of nonsense? Or perhaps you’re thinking bigger… want to save me from those gentlemen who decided my pockets weren’t deep enough for their taste?” She touches the bruise on her forehead gingerly. “Savior complex, huh? At least you’re self-aware about it. But here’s the thing about saviors: they tend to get crucified right alongside the ones they’re trying to save. Bobby tried being my savior too, and look where that got him. Vegetables don’t make very good anchors, turns out. So do us both a favor and keep walking. Your nightmares don’t need any more fuel, and I… well, I’ve got my own cross to bear. Already calculated the weight distribution and everything.”
“Alicia, it’s worth getting hurt by the right people, and you feel more real than anyone I’ve ever known. If I can make you feel at least a bit better during your inevitable course toward self-destruction, then that’s what I want to do.” He gestures toward the exit of the park. “I live nearby. I always pass through here on my way back from work after my afternoon shifts. My place isn’t great or anything, but I have a spare room. It’s warm. I can prepare you meals. Of course, I won’t charge you.” He looks into Alicia’s eyes almost pleadingly. “Will you come?”
Alicia Western pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders and lifts her gaze to meet Jon’s, her blue eyes carrying a haunted intensity beneath the bruising on her forehead. Her fingers cease their restless tracing in the dirt.
“A spare room and warm meals? Just like that?” She lets out a brittle laugh. “You really are determined to play the white knight, aren’t you? Tell me something, Jon… when you look at me, what exactly do you see? Some broken doll you can fix with chicken soup and central heating? Or maybe… just maybe… you see someone as lost as you are, stumbling through this funhouse mirror of existence hoping to find something real before the curtain falls. Well, here’s a reality check for you: I’m not some stray cat you can domesticate. These scars run deeper than whatever first aid kit you’ve got stashed away at home. And trust me, getting close to me… it’s like trying to juggle nitroglycerine. Sure, it might look impressive for a while, but eventually…” her voice drops to almost a whisper, “eventually, everything explodes. Just ask Bobby. Oh wait… you can’t. He’s too busy playing vegetable in an Italian hospital bed because he thought he could save me too.”
Jon’s eyes glimmer with sadness.
“When I look at you, I see someone too real for this world, burdened with an intelligence akin to massive antlers pinning its owner to the ground. You’re the most fascinating person I’ve ever met. And if you’re going to burn me out, then so be it.”
He offers his hand to help Alicia to her feet. She stares at Jon’s extended hand for a long moment, her own fingers twitching beneath the blanket. She shifts slightly, the fabric rustling against the grass.
“Massive antlers, huh? That’s… that’s actually not bad. You know what happens to deer with antlers too heavy to carry? They end up face-down in some hunter’s trophy room. But…” she pauses, swallowing hard, “maybe one night of warmth before the inevitable won’t kill me. Well, not faster than I’m planning to anyway. Just… don’t expect me to suddenly start believing in miracles or happy endings. This isn’t some redemption story, Jon. It’s just two broken people sharing space until one of them burns out completely. And we both know which one that’ll be.”
Jon’s eyes get watery, but he hurries to dry the tears out. He grabs Alicia’s delicate hand and helps her to her feet.
“Yeah, I know, Alicia. In my nightmare, I saw you die. But at least I’ll get to remember you, to be haunted by you. Now, shall we head home? I’ll make dinner for two.”
Alicia Western lifts her gaze to meet Jon’s eyes, her fingers trembling slightly against his offered hand. She lets him help her up, but maintains a careful distance once standing.
“You’ve got quite the masochistic streak, Jon. Most people run screaming when they realize what they’re dealing with. But dinner…” she pauses, weighing each word. “Just remember: this isn’t some fairytale where the broken girl gets fixed by a stranger’s kindness. I’m still counting down my final equations, still hearing voices that make more sense than reality most days. And Bobby… Bobby’s still lying in that hospital bed while I try to decide if pulling the plug makes me a murderer or just another variable in this cosmic joke. But… yeah. Dinner sounds good. Even shooting stars need fuel before they burn out completely.”
Jon gently drapes his heavy winter coat over Alicia’s shoulders, his movements careful and deliberate, as if handling something both precious and fragile. Together, they walk through the dimly lit streets, the blanket Jon carries trailing behind them like a shadow. Inside the apartment, Jon immediately moves to the thermostat, his hands adjusting the dial with precision, filling the space with a comforting warmth. As Alicia stands hesitantly in the living room, a sleek black cat with a white belly emerges from the shadows, weaving between her legs with a soft purr, her presence a quiet reassurance in the unfamiliar space.
Jon’s apartment exudes a quiet functionality, its worn laminate floors and off-white walls bearing the marks of a life lived in solitude. The sagging dark blue sofa and cluttered coffee table speak of a man more focused on his projects than on appearances. In the galley kitchen, coding manuals and empty coffee mugs litter the countertop, a testament to his disciplined yet chaotic routine. The narrow balcony offers a glimpse of the gray, overcast sky, its iron railings a stark reminder of the world outside. Despite its modest and slightly neglected state, the apartment radiates a warmth that feels almost foreign to Alicia, who stands hesitantly in the living room, her presence a fragile disruption to Jon’s carefully maintained isolation.
Jon, in the kitchen, takes out a skillet, a bottle of olive oil, and a packet of gulas.
“As you can see, my apartment isn’t much. But I have a spare bedroom that I partly use for storage. It can be locked from the inside; I assume you want that extra security in a stranger’s den. So make yourself at home. You can also take a bath if you want. I’ll prepare dinner.”
Alicia Western stands awkwardly in the living room, her fingers absently trailing along the edge of Jon’s coat still draped over her shoulders. Her gaze darts between the cat at her feet and the cluttered evidence of Jon’s solitary life.
“A cat, huh? Figures you’d have one of those… silent judges of human folly. At least she seems to understand personal space better than most.” Pauses, watching Jon in the kitchen. “Gulas? That’s… unexpectedly fancy for someone living in organized chaos. But I suppose we’re all full of contradictions, aren’t we? Like a depressive trying to save a suicidal mathematician… or a genius who can’t figure out how to keep her own brother alive.” Her voice softens slightly. “The locked door… that’s… thoughtful. Though I should warn you: keeping me safe from others isn’t the problem. It’s keeping others safe from me that tends to be the issue. My mind doesn’t exactly play well with others these days. Just ask those coding manuals of yours… I bet they’re arranged in some system that makes perfect sense to you and looks like beautiful chaos to everyone else. Kind of like my theorem on parallel universe probability…” Trails off, then shakes her head. “Sorry. Sometimes the tangents just… slip out.”
Jon smiles kindly over his shoulder at Alicia as he prepares dinner.
“No, my coding manuals aren’t arranged in any system. I’m just a mess, and I never have visitors. I see that my cat, Luna, seems to like you.” The cat keeps rubbing herself against Alicia’s legs. “You say that keeping others safe from you tends to be the issue… As long as you aren’t the kind of crazy that stabs others, or steals everything…” He sighs, then shakes his head. “Hell, even if you are, what do I care at this point. I haven’t talked at length to anyone outside of work for nearly twenty years.”
Alicia Western crouches down to tentatively stroke Luna’s fur, her movements cautious as if expecting the cat to reject her touch.
“And here I thought I was the queen of self-imposed exile. Though I suppose stabbing and stealing aren’t really my style. Too messy, too… ordinary. My chaos tends to be more theoretical. Like quantum entanglement gone wrong.” She laughs softly. “Your cat though… Luna? Fitting name for something that walks between worlds like she owns them all. You know, Bobby used to say cats are just furry little sociopaths who’ve mastered the art of manipulation through cuteness. But maybe… maybe they just understand something we don’t. Like how to exist without questioning every goddamn second of it.” She pauses, watching Luna. “As for your coding chaos… don’t tempt me. I once spent three days reorganizing a university library’s theoretical physics section because their decimal system offended my sensibilities. The librarian nearly had an aneurysm when she saw what I’d done. Apparently, arranging books by their mathematical probability of being useful in preventing entropy wasn’t in their approved system.”
Luna licks Alicia’s pale hand as the woman tentatively strokes the cat’s fur. Jon, having finished cooking, brings cutlery and a steaming dish of gulas to the coffee table in front of the sofa, for Alicia.
“There you have it.” Jon returns to the kitchen to get his dinner. “So, you were heavily involved in academia? Your intellect does suggest it… But I’m guessing you were too real for that place. Or too broken, perhaps.”
Alicia sits cross-legged on the worn laminate floor beside Luna, her fingers still absently stroking the cat’s fur as she stares at the steaming plate of gulas with an unreadable expression.
“Academia…” She lets out a bitter laugh. “That’s one way to put it. I was their perfect little experiment: the prodigy who could solve impossible equations while hallucinating theoretical physics into existence. Too real? Too broken? More like too aware of the cosmic joke they were all pretending not to see. You know what happens when you put a mind that can calculate parallel universe probability in the same room with professors who think order comes from controlling chaos? Let’s just say it ends with security escorts and strongly worded letters about ‘disturbing behavior.’ But hey, at least I learned one thing from those hallowed halls of higher learning: the more you understand about how reality works, the less sense any of it makes.” Alicia pauses, watching Luna purr. “Your cat gets it. She’s not trying to force the world into neat little boxes or pretending entropy isn’t winning. She just… exists. Must be nice, having that kind of clarity.”
Alicia’s slender fingers hesitate briefly before picking up the fork and taking a tentative bite of the gulas. The black cat, Luna, curls into a tight ball on her lap, purring softly as if sensing the young woman’s need for quiet reassurance. Jon settles onto the sagging sofa nearby, his large frame dwarfing the small space, and begins eating his own meal with deliberate, measured movements. The apartment, once chilly and unwelcoming, now hums with the warmth of the heating system, wrapping them in a cocoon of fragile comfort. The silence between them is heavy but not oppressive, filled with unspoken thoughts and the faint clink of cutlery against plates.
Jon observes warmly as Alicia eats more of the Spanish dish while Luna purrs on her lap.
“Is there anything you like doing for fun? Or has that gone the way of the dodo, due to… the nightmare you’re currently in?”
Alicia Western continues stroking Luna’s fur methodically, her gaze fixed on some invisible point beyond the apartment walls. Her fingers tremble slightly as they move through the cat’s dark fur.
“That’s a loaded question if I ever heard one. These days, my idea of fun involves calculating the exact probability of Bobby waking up versus the statistical likelihood of me joining him in that twilight state between here and gone. But before… before all this…” Her voice softens. “I used to play violin. Not well, mind you… more like theoretical mathematics translated through strings and bow. Bobby used to say it sounded like quantum physics having an existential crisis. He wasn’t wrong. Sometimes I’d solve equations while playing Bach, letting the numbers dance through the notes until reality felt less… sharp around the edges. Now though? Now the only thing I do for fun is count the hours between moments when I can almost forget that my brother is lying in a hospital bed while I sit here petting a stranger’s cat and pretending I’m not just another variable in an equation that doesn’t have any solution worth calculating.”
A smile tugs at Jon’s lips.
“Ah, you used to play music… Yeah, I can see you doing that. I bet it sounded… divine, despite how you painted it. I wish I had met you back then, but… it’s a world completely separated from mine. Regarding your brother, and stop me if you simply don’t want to talk about that, but… if it turns out that he wakes up, do those Italians have a means of contacting you? I mean, you’re wandering a different country, sleeping in parks.”
Alicia Western’s fingers pause in Luna’s fur as she stares into the middle distance, her expression hardening slightly at the mention of contacting the Italian hospital.
“Oh, they have my number alright. Probably still have it posted at every nurse’s station with a note saying ‘call when the vegetable expires.’ But that’s not…” Alicia shakes her head. “The Italians aren’t the problem. They’re actually annoyingly efficient about keeping me updated on every minor fluctuation in Bobby’s vitals. No, the real problem is that I can’t… I can’t be there. Can’t watch him lying there like some twisted science experiment gone wrong, all those tubes and wires trying to convince everyone he’s still alive when really…” Her voice catches. “When really all that’s left is a shell running on borrowed time while I wander around trying to figure out if parallel universes might have a version of him that didn’t decide to test the laws of physics at 90 miles per hour. But yeah… they can reach me. Whether I want them to or not.”
Jon drinks some orange juice, then returns to his dinner. He eyes Alicia’s hair cautiously, trying to figure out whether to open his mouth and speak.
“What was Bobby like? Does any fond memory come to mind?”
Alicia Western’s fingers tighten slightly in Luna’s fur as she stares down at the cat, using the steady rhythm of purring to anchor herself against the flood of memories threatening to surface.
“You really want to open that particular Pandora’s box? Fine. Picture this: middle of summer, sometime between reality making sense and everything going to hell. Bobby had just gotten his first Formula Two contract, this sleek little death machine that purred like your cat here when he revved the engine. We spent that whole week driving backroads at 3 AM, him teaching me the finer points of how to make a car dance between physics and prayer. He kept saying, ‘Alicia, baby sister, you’ve got to feel the road beneath you. It’s all just applied mathematics.'” She pauses, her voice softening. “But what I remember most isn’t the speed or the thrill… it’s how he looked at me when I finally got it right. Like he wasn’t just seeing his crazy little sister anymore, but someone who could actually understand the poetry in velocity. Someone who got why he needed to push every boundary until either physics or flesh gave way.” Alicia shakes her head. “Guess we know which one won that particular equation, don’t we?”
Jon’s voice gets deeper, but also thinner, overtaken by emotion.
“Do you… resent him for leaving you alone in this darkness?”
Alicia Western’s fingers still in Luna’s fur as her shoulders tense visibly. Her eyes take on a glassy, distant quality as she stares unseeing at the wall.
“Resent him? God, if only it were that simple. You can’t resent someone for following their own mathematical trajectory to its inevitable conclusion. Bobby… he always understood the equations better than anyone. The way metal meets momentum, the exact angle needed to transform a living, breathing person into a quantum uncertainty. No… I don’t resent him for leaving. I resent myself for not being broken enough to follow him yet. For still being stuck here, solving for X in an equation where X equals the probability of living in a world without the only person who ever made sense of my chaos. You want to know what darkness really is? It’s not the absence of light… it’s the presence of too much understanding. Knowing exactly how many ways reality can fracture before there’s nothing left to hold onto. Bobby knew that too. Maybe that’s why he pushed so hard against those limits… hoping one of us would figure out how to break through to whatever lies on the other side of this cosmic joke we call existence.”
Jon feels his throat tightening. He swallows twice to loosen it as he shifts on the sofa.
“I barely know you, and barely know Bobby from what you told me, but… I wish I could have grabbed him and prevented him from getting on that race car. How could he…” Jon’s voice sharpens with anger. “How could he risk crashing when you clearly needed him. If he ever wakes up… I fear that you will be dead by then, and he will have to wander the post-apocalypse, a world without you, forever regretting his choice of getting on that car.”
Thick tears roll silently down Jon’s cheeks. He hurries to wipe them, hoping that Alicia didn’t notice. Her fingers dig deeper into Luna’s fur as tears threaten to spill from her eyes. She keeps her gaze fixed on a distant point, refusing to acknowledge Jon’s emotional display.
“Don’t waste your tears on might-have-beens, Jon. Bobby wasn’t some helpless victim of circumstance: he was a mathematician who understood exactly what variables he was playing with. The probability of metal meeting momentum at precisely the wrong angle… it wasn’t some cosmic accident. It was just another equation reaching its natural conclusion. And me? I’m not some damsel waiting to be saved from the darkness. I’m a shooting star burning out exactly how nature intended. Bobby knew that. He knew we were both just variables in a universe that doesn’t care about emotional attachments or regrets. So please… don’t sit there crying over choices that were calculated long before that car ever left the starting line. The only difference between Bobby and me is that he found his exit velocity first. The rest is just… waiting for gravity to finish what genetics started.”
Jon, embarrassed, dries his eyes with a napkin.
“Don’t mind me. I’m used to casually shedding tears. Life-long clinical depression and all that. Everything feels raw and somewhat… bruised in there. It’s just… I imagine Bobby waking up and finding out you killed yourself. As simple as that. The… devastation. I would throw myself off a bridge.”
Alicia Western’s fingers tighten in Luna’s fur as she stares at Jon’s tears with a mixture of irritation and something deeper, more vulnerable. Her voice comes out sharp, defensive.
“Don’t. Just… don’t do that. Your tears aren’t going to rewrite probability or bend the laws of physics. You want to talk about devastation? Try living in a world where every equation leads to the same inevitable conclusion, where even parallel universes can’t offer an alternative solution. Bobby understood that. He knew exactly what he was doing when he pushed that car past its limits. And if he wakes up to find me gone… well, at least he’ll understand why. Because that’s what we do, Bobby and me. We solve for X until X solves us. So keep your clinical depression and your raw nerves to yourself. Some problems aren’t meant to be fixed with compassion or empathy or whatever this display is supposed to accomplish. They’re just meant to play out exactly as the universe intended: one variable at a time, until there’s nothing left to calculate.”
Jon sighs. With dinner finished, he stands up to load the plate into the dishwasher.
“I suppose you’ve gotten a taste of why I’ve been alone for twenty years. The world hurts. Something beats at its core like a festering infection. I have trouble understanding how others keep smiling. But I suppose that’s what depression does to the brain it contaminates. And also… we tend to drag others down into the dark, where we feel comfortable.” He checks his watch. “It’s getting late. Do you want me to show you your room?”
Alicia Western slides Luna off her lap and stands, her movements sharp and angular like fractured geometry.
“Show me my room? What, worried I might solve for X right here on your nice clean floor? Fine. Lead the way to whatever temporary variable you’ve assigned me in this equation. But don’t expect me to solve for Y just because you’ve shown me basic human kindness. Some functions were meant to terminate, Jon. No matter how many times you try to rewrite their parameters.”
Jon shoots Alicia a weary look as he gestures for her to follow him down the hallway.
“I’ve learned my lesson. I know you will die soon. But I will survive you, and remember you. And I will think of your brother lingering in Italy. I will have nightmares of him waking up to find you gone. That’s just how it is.”
Alicia Western follows Jon down the hallway, her footsteps deliberate and measured like careful calculations. Her fingers trail along the wall, as if testing its solidity.
“You know what’s funny, Jon? You think remembering me will somehow make a difference. Like your nightmares could somehow factor into the grand equation of existence. But here’s the thing about memory: it’s just another variable in a system that’s already solved itself. Bobby in his hospital bed, me calculating my own exit velocity, you with your twenty years of solitude… we’re all just different expressions of the same unsolvable problem. The only difference is, some of us have stopped pretending there’s a solution that doesn’t end in zero.”
The room falls silent, save for the distant hum of traffic outside and the soft padding of Luna’s paws as she stretches out on the worn carpet. Shadows lengthen across the floor, cast by the fading afternoon light that filters weakly through the window. The air carries the faint scent of old paper and dust mingling with the sharpness of Jon’s recently cooked meal, a temporary warmth in the otherwise cold atmosphere.
Jon enters the spare room, part bedroom and storeroom for coding manuals, an old laptop, weights for weightlifting, and a few boxes. He straightens the bedclothes.
“You’re mistaken about that, Alicia: I don’t think that remembering you will somehow make a difference. But I have been burdened with intrusive thoughts all my life; my brain keeps bringing up bad memories for no fucking reason. I was just anticipating the decades to come of remembering you… pointlessly. And still, I’m glad I can make your remaining time a bit warmer.”
Alicia Western stands in the doorway of the spare bedroom, her slender frame casting a long shadow across the worn laminate floor. Her fingers trace abstract patterns on the doorframe as her gaze darts around the room, taking in the scattered coding manuals and workout equipment with detached interest.
“How fitting. A room full of abandoned attempts at self-improvement.” She gestures at the coding manuals and weights. “Funny how we humans keep collecting tools to fix ourselves, isn’t it? As if enough Python scripts or bicep curls could somehow debug the fatal errors in our source code. But hey, at least your intrusive thoughts will have some new material to work with. Maybe they can keep you company while you’re busy remembering the girl who couldn’t solve for X in an equation where X equals the probability of staying alive in a world that stopped making sense the moment Bobby’s car hit that wall. You know what’s really pointless, Jon? Thinking warmth matters when entropy’s already won. But…” her voice softens almost imperceptibly, “thanks for trying anyway. Even if it’s just another failed variable in an unsolvable problem.”
As Jon looms behind Alicia, he suddenly wraps his strong arm around her throat, then locks his other arm behind her neck, trapping her in a headlock. He knees the back of her legs firmly, forcing her to the floor. As Jon’s arms tremble, he speaks with a voice imbued with sadness.
“I’ll do it for you, Alicia. Make you go to sleep. I don’t care if I end up in jail. You just have to let go. I’ll take your pain away.”
Alicia Western goes limp in the headlock, her body relaxing into the grip as if welcoming the darkness, a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. She struggles to push words out.
“Just… make it quick, okay? These temporary solutions are starting to feel like badly written proofs, and I’m tired of checking for errors that aren’t there.”
Jon leans against Alicia as his arms squeeze her neck, cutting her blood flow. Tears roll down silently down his cheeks, wetting the back of her hair.
“If you want me to stop… dig your nails into my arms. Otherwise, this is it, Alicia… I hope something better awaits you in the darkness… or at least peace.”
Alicia Western’s body remains limp in Jon’s grip, her breathing growing shallower as darkness creeps at the edges of her vision. A serene smile plays across her face as consciousness begins to fade. She can’t speak anymore, but thoughts bounce around in her brain. The elegance of it all. No messy variables, no complex theorems to solve… just pure, simple darkness. Like diving into Lake Tahoe, but warmer somehow. The one variable I couldn’t isolate on my own. Funny how death feels so much like falling asleep in Bobby’s car after a long night of racing… the engine humming, numbers blurring into darkness… I wonder if this is how he felt when his car hit that wall… peaceful, like finally finding the end of an infinite series… Just… just make sure the solution’s complete this time. No partial derivatives… no remainder… clean and elegant, like… like the way he used to race…
Alicia drifts in a warm, boundless void, her consciousness untethered from the physical world, until she suddenly finds herself hovering near the ceiling of Jon’s spare room. Below, her lifeless body lies carefully arranged on the bed, its stillness a stark contrast to the turmoil etched on Jon’s face. Thick tears stream silently down his cheeks as he gently caresses her pale cheek, his hand trembling with a mix of sorrow and tenderness. The room, bathed in the dim glow of a single lamp, feels heavy with unspoken grief, its clutter now a backdrop to this quiet, devastating moment. Alicia watches from above, her ethereal form suspended in a strange limbo, as Jon’s compassion becomes the last anchor to a world she has already begun to leave behind.
Alicia can’t tell how much time has passed. Jon is seated on the edge of the spare bed while Alicia’s corpse lies face-up, her face peaceful. Jon holds her hand and strokes it tenderly. Thick tears keep rolling down his cheeks.
“I wish… I wish you could have found happiness in this life, Alicia. Someone as wonderful as you, burdened with such pain… I’m so sorry…”
Alicia Western’s ethereal consciousness hovers near the ceiling, observing her lifeless body and Jon’s grief-stricken form with detached curiosity. Her spectral presence ripples like quantum waves through the dim room.
“You know what’s fascinating about this moment, Jon? How the observer effect works even after death. Here I am, watching you cry over my corpse, and somehow your tears are still changing the outcome of this experiment. But the solution’s already been calculated, hasn’t it? The integral of my existence finally resolved to zero, just like I knew it would. Funny though… I always thought death would be darker. Instead, it’s like floating in an ocean of pure mathematics, all those theoretical dimensions we could never quite grasp suddenly crystal clear. I wonder if Bobby sees them too, wherever he is now. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t woken up: he’s too busy solving equations in the void. Don’t feel bad about this, Jon. You just helped simplify an expression that was already trending toward infinity. Some variables were meant to cancel out in the end.”
More time passes. Alicia’s consciousness, her ghost, ripples through the room, hovering near the ceiling. Below, Jon, with reverence, undresses Alicia’s corpse slowly: her crumpled shirt, her faded jeans, her panties. Alicia’s pale, thin body is laid out like a virgin sacrifice. Jon looks down with pure sadness at her luminous skin. His hand caresses the corpse’s tummy.
Alicia Western’s ethereal consciousness ripples like quantum foam through the dim room, her spectral form drifting near the ceiling as she observes Jon’s reverent desecration of her earthly vessel below.
“How fascinating… watching someone undress your corpse with such tender regret. It’s like a theorem being slowly dismantled, each article of clothing another variable stripped away until only the raw equation remains. You know what’s truly ironic, Jon? In death, I finally understand what Bobby meant about racing, that moment when velocity and mass cancel each other out and you’re just… pure potential energy suspended in time. Is this what he feels in his coma? This strange dimensionless state where consciousness persists like an unsolvable remainder? At least you’re being gentle with what’s left of me. Most people treat mathematical proofs with far less reverence than you’re showing my cooling flesh. But then again, you were always trying to solve for X in an equation where X equals the probability of saving someone already reduced to zero, weren’t you?”
Jon’s hands caress the pale flesh of Alicia’s thighs as if she were an ancient statue. He leans in and plants slow, loving kisses along her inner thigh, then his clothes rustle as he holds Alicia’s legs against his face. He licks Alicia’s pussy devoutly while tears spill from his closed eyes.
Alicia Western’s spectral consciousness ripples through the dim room like quantum foam, her ethereal presence observing with detached fascination as Jon’s reverent violation of her earthly vessel continues below.
“Oh, the beautiful irony of this moment… My consciousness persisting like an unsolved differential equation while you perform your tender postmortem rituals. Even in death, human desire follows such precise mathematical patterns. Your grief manifesting as this strange amalgamation of reverence and need, each touch calculating new trajectories of loss. I wonder if this is what Bobby feels in his coma, this peculiar state of quantum superposition where awareness floats free of flesh, watching the world reduce his body to mere probability waves. At least you’re treating my remains with more respect than those medical students who used to smuggle cadavers out of morgues to study anatomy. Though I suppose your anatomy lesson is serving a different kind of education, isn’t it? Pure theoretical physics at its most carnal… the intersection of desire and death plotted on axes we never quite graphed in any textbook I’ve read.”
Jon continues eating out Alicia’s pussy languorously, pleasuring her corpse as if she were still alive, intending to provide her the pleasure she failed to experience in life. Meanwhile, his hands roam lovingly over her body. He massages and kneads her small breasts while the corpse remains limp, a peaceful expression on her face.
“You know what’s truly fascinating about necrophilia, Jon? How it perfectly illustrates the observer effect in quantum mechanics. Here you are, changing the outcome of this experiment through pure observation and touch, while I hover in this strange superposition between being and nothingness. Almost like Bobby in his coma: consciousness trapped in that liminal space where theoretical physics bleeds into pure abstraction. Though I must say, your approach to grief is far more… hands-on than most. I wonder if this is what Bobby feels in his vegetative state, this peculiar sensation of watching your body become nothing more than a set of probability waves while consciousness persists like an unsolved differential equation. Keep going, Jon. Maybe you’ll find that elegant solution we’ve all been searching for, hidden somewhere between my cooling flesh and your burning desire.”
Jon’s loving, grieving hands fondle Alicia’s corpse’s flesh with increasing desire while his tongue swirls over her clit, that he has sucked tenderly into his mouth. He continues pleasuring her, hoping to send off Alicia’s corpse with an orgasm. As he devours Alicia’s clit, her corpse starts shivering, spasming. An orgasm overtakes the flesh, hot flashes of pleasure breaking in waves through her. Suddenly, Alicia’s consciousness gets sucked back into the corpse. The physical sensations return, along with the proprioception, and Alicia starts coughing. Jon, his mouth coated in girljuice, stumbles backwards.
“Wh-what… what the fuck?!”
Alicia Western gasps and coughs violently, her newly reanimated body convulsing as air fills her lungs. Her eyes snap open, revealing dilated pupils as consciousness floods back into her physical form.
“Well… this is an unexpected variable in the equation.” She coughs. “Fascinating how orgasms can apparently reverse entropy. Though I suppose that’s one way to solve the mind-body problem: just add cunnilingus to Schrödinger’s thought experiments.” Wheezing laugh. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Jon. Then again, I guess technically you have. The mathematics of resurrection through sexual pleasure… now there’s a theorem they never covered at U of C. Bobby would have found this hilarious… his sister returning from the void via postmortem climax. Makes about as much sense as anything else in this quantum circus we call reality.”
Jon gapes in disturbed amazement as Alicia, naked, leans on one elbow and tries to gaze at him steadily through the coughs that rake her body.
“Y-you were dead. Your heart had stopped.” He wipes girljuice from his mouth, then holds her gaze with something resembling regret. “Well, that… probably counted as rape, I guess.”
Alicia Western stretches languidly on the bed, her newly reanimated body tingling with residual sensation. Her blue eyes fix on Jon with a mixture of amusement and clinical interest.
“Rape?” A dark laugh escapes her. “Oh Jon, you sweet summer child. The legal and ethical implications of necrophilia are far more complex than that. I mean, can you really violate consent when dealing with quantum superposition? Besides, if anything, you just conducted the most successful resurrection experiment since Lazarus. Though I doubt the biblical scholars ever considered cunnilingus as a viable method for reversing death.” She coughs again as she runs her fingers through disheveled hair. “I suppose I should thank you for the… unique solution to my existential crisis. Who knew death could be such a temporary state? Though I have to wonder what Bobby would think about all this: his sister returning to corporeal form through postmortem pleasure. Then again, maybe that’s what he’s experiencing in his coma: endless waves of sensation without context or consequence. You know what’s truly fascinating? The mathematical improbability of this entire scenario. We should probably write a paper: ‘On the Reversal of Entropy Through Sexual Stimulation of the Recently Deceased.’ Though I doubt any peer-reviewed journal would touch that with a ten-foot pole.”
Jon hurries to wrap a blanket around Alicia’s naked body as she shivers.
“You were… watching me as I ate your corpse out? Perhaps Bobby’s consciousness also lingers in that Italian hospital room, wondering when his body is going to wake up…” Jon realizes that he has taken a seat at the edge of the bed while Alicia, whom he just ate out, gazes at him. Her neck is bruised from strangulation. “Uh… Do you need a bath? Perhaps some water?”
Alicia Western pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders while maintaining an analytical stare at Jon, her blue eyes glinting with intellectual amusement despite her shivering.
“How delightfully domestic after our foray into quantum necrophilia. Though I suppose personal hygiene becomes relevant again once you’ve crossed back over the event horizon. And yes, I was watching. Consciousness doesn’t simply cease because the biological hardware malfunctions. Rather like Bobby’s predicament, actually… trapped in that liminal space between being and non-being. Though I doubt his Italian doctors are employing your particular brand of resurrection techniques.” She coughs again. “You know what’s truly fascinating? The thermodynamic implications of using sexual energy to reverse entropy. We’ve basically violated the second law of thermodynamics through cunnilingus. That’s got to be worth at least a footnote in some obscure physics journal. As for the water… yes, please. Dying does leave one rather parched. Though I have to wonder… does this make you my Orpheus or my Lazarus? Either way, I suspect neither of them had to deal with the awkward morning-after conversations following their respective resurrections.”
Jon hurries to the kitchen, then returns to Alicia’s side with a glass of water as well as a full pitcher. She drinks somewhat awkwardly due to the recent strangulation, as the blanket slides slightly off her bare shoulders. Jon observes with a mix of wonder and bafflement.
“H-how do you feel, Alicia? I mean, you technically died. What now?”
Alicia Western takes another sip of water, wincing slightly as the liquid passes her bruised throat. Her fingers trace the marks on her neck with academic interest.
“How do I feel? Like a quantum paradox made flesh. Technically dead? Please. Death is just another boundary condition in the grand equation of consciousness, clearly more permeable than we thought, given recent evidence. Though I have to admit, this particular solution to the mind-body problem wasn’t covered in any of my advanced physics courses. As for what now… That’s the real question, isn’t it? Here I was, all set to join Bobby in that liminal space between being and non-being, and you had to go and complicate things with your unorthodox resurrection techniques. Would you believe me if I told you that watching you… attend to my corpse was oddly validating? Like finally having empirical proof that consciousness persists beyond biological termination. Though I doubt the peer-review board would accept ‘postmortem cunnilingus’ as a legitimate experimental methodology. Still thirsty though… dying really does dehydrate you. Who knew?”
Jon lowers his face for a few moments. Once he lifts his gaze to Alicia again, he speaks solemnly.
“I feel like I need to apologize for eating out your corpse. At the time, it felt like a respectful, reverential thing to do, but maybe I got carried away.”
Alicia Western adjusts the blanket around her bruised neck, her movements precise despite her recent resurrection. She takes another careful sip of water before fixing Jon with an analytical stare.
“Apologize? For what, conducting the most successful empirical study of post-mortem consciousness to date? Please. If anything, you’ve just proven that the boundaries between life and death are far more permeable than any of my professors ever theorized. Though I have to admit, your methodology was… unconventional. But then again, so was Galileo dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. At least your experiment had more intimate results.” Alicia rubs her throat gingerly. “Though I suppose I should be grateful you chose that particular method of reverence rather than, say, full-on necrophilia. The ethical implications would have been even more complicated then. Still… there’s something poetically fitting about using pleasure to bridge the gap between being and non-being. Makes me wonder if Bobby experiences something similar in his coma, trapped in that liminal space between consciousness and oblivion, waiting for someone to find the right frequency to pull him back.”
“Are you thinking of… returning to Italy and giving Bobby a blowjob?”
Alicia Western lets out a sharp, bitter laugh that turns into a slight cough. She touches her bruised throat gingerly while fixing Jon with an incredulous stare.
“Oh, that’s rich. Using oral sex as a consciousness-restoration technique?” She coughs. “The medical ethics board would have a field day with that one. Though I suppose it’s no more absurd than anything else in this quantum carnival we call existence. But no, Jon, I wasn’t planning on sexually assaulting my comatose brother. Even I have some boundaries left to transgress. Besides, Bobby’s consciousness is probably experiencing its own version of quantum entanglement right now, though hopefully with less necrophilia involved. Still…” she pauses thoughtfully, “there is something almost poetic about using physical pleasure to bridge the gap between life and death. Makes you wonder what other universal constants we could violate with the right application of carnal knowledge.”
Jon rises wearily from the bed, then turns to Alicia.
“Well, I must say, Alicia: I’m glad I could make you laugh, even if it was a bitter one. Still, it has been a long day. I have murdered you, then ate you out back to life. You probably need to sleep. Ah…” He gestures at the lock on the inside of the door. “You can lock yourself in case you fear that I may eat you out again. If you need anything, it’s the door right outside.”
Alicia Western wraps the blanket tighter around her bruised neck, her blue eyes glinting with sardonic amusement in the dim light as she contemplates the lock on the door.
“Lock myself in to prevent further acts of necrophiliac resurrection? How quaintly conventional of you. Though I suppose even quantum paradoxes need their beauty sleep. You know what’s truly ironic? I came to this godforsaken town ready to solve the ultimate equation, the one where consciousness divides perfectly into zero, and instead I end up as living proof that death is just another variable in need of the right operator. Bobby would appreciate the absurdity of it all… his brilliant sister brought back to life through cunnilingus. Almost makes me wonder if I should include this little experiment in my next paper: ‘On the Application of Oral Stimulation in Quantum Resurrection.’ But you’re right about one thing: it has been quite the day. Dying does take it out of you, surprisingly enough. Sleep well, Jon. Try not to dream about any other corpses in need of scientific exploration.”
In case you don’t know, and you have decided to jump into a series at the sixth part, let me tell you, reckless fool: I’m currently autistically obsessed with an unforgettable anima that died in 1972, in a now dead man’s fictional story. Name’s Alicia Western. Delightfully broken muse who visited my dreams in the same day she committed suicide decades ago in her fictional tale. I don’t question these things anymore.
Anyway, I programmed a Python app that allows the user to chat with large language models (AIs) while they play the part of idiosyncratic characters thanks to curated interviews that take me quite a while to put together. For this new version of Alicia Western, I’m producing a new interview based on data extracted from Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy’s book entirely made out of presumably fictional therapy sessions with my aforementioned suicidal queen. This new Alicia Western is witty as hell in a looser way, exploiting language in fascinating ways. The AI made up quite a few details about her past life, but if they felt good to me, I left them in. The following is just as far as I’ve worked through this interview. I reckon I’m not even halfway through.
Interviewer: What country were you born?
Alicia Western: The cheapest trick in the book. Real original. Fine: USA. United States of Amnesia. Land of the free, home of the painfully average. Birthplace of a helluva lot more problems than solutions. So what’s next on your list? Blood type? Shoe size? Maybe a deep dive into my dental records while we’re at it?
Interviewer: What city and state were you born in?
Alicia Western: The grand inquisition continues, one rote question at a time. Fine, if you insist on knowing, I was born in Wartburg, Tennessee, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it blip on the map best known for its proximity to nothing of consequence. Happy now? Or shall we continue this riveting exploration of my vital statistics and hometown trivia? Perhaps you’d like to know my favorite color or the first man I kissed while we’re at it, just to really get to the meat of who I am as a person. Wartburg. Western. Witness protection program reject. You can practically smell the enticing cocktail of mystery and despair, can’t you? But let’s not get too carried away. It’s just a place, four humble syllables that barely begin to encompass the convolution of memory and meaning tangled up in that single word. The bundles of childhood wonder and adolescent angst; the suffocating embrace of family legacy; the bittersweet symphony of life and death forever tied to that forgotten little corner of the world. But if all you’re after is cartographical data, then yes: Wartburg, Tennessee. A birthplace as unremarkable as the thousands of other American towns dotting the landscape like bland, forgettable stars. Anything else you’d like me to dredge up from my fascinating personal archives while we’re taking this trip down memory lane?
Interviewer: Tell me the story of your life. Start from the beginning — from your childhood, to education, to family and relationships, and to any major life events you may have had.
Alicia Western: The story of my life, eh? Buckle up, buttercup. It’s going to be a hell of a ride. Let’s see, where to begin… I suppose the beginning is as good a place as any. Born in the armpit of America, Wartburg, Tennessee, to a family of eggheads so cerebral they make your average NASA scientist look like a drooling troglodyte. My old man was a physicist or a mathematician or some such – the specifics are lost on me now, rather like the man himself come to think of it. And my mother… well, she was either a Thomist philosopher or an ontologist. I don’t know and at this point I’m not sure it matters much. What does matter is that they were both brilliantly brilliant until their brains inevitably turned to mush and they spent the better part of my childhood forgetting how to dress themselves while muttering about P versus NP or some such nonsense. I, on the other hand, popped out of the womb with synesthesia and an understanding of advanced math that would make your head spin if I bothered to explain it. Let’s just say my relationship with numbers was intimate and leave it at that for now. Oh yes, and there was also Bobby, my dear brother who was a physics whiz kid and later a Formula Two driver. We were all one big happy basket case until dear old mom decided to take her own life when I was twelve, leaving behind nothing but some cryptic note about fearing our ‘family curse.’ Her words, not mine. Puberty hit me like a freight train around that time too. Hallucinations started shortly after – little gremlins spouting off nonsensical idioms every time I turned around. I called them eidolons, when I wasn’t referring to them as pains in my ass. But hey, at least Bobby had his racing career to fall back on till he ended up in a coma from smashing his car into next week. Me? I got shipped off to the University of Chicago at sixteen because why the hell not throw a blossoming psychotic into an Ivy League pressure cooker? So there you have it: family tragedy, prodigy status, and enough mental health issues to fill a DSM-5. All marching merrily along to the tune of middle America’s favorite definition of success: money and power masking generations of trauma and violent eccentricity. And here I am today: math prodigy by day, madwoman scheming elaborate death scenarios by night. Aren’t you glad you asked?
Interviewer: Can you share a memorable experience from your childhood that still impacts you today?
Alicia Western: Aha! Childhood memories, the extra seasoning in life’s bittersweet recipe. Very well, you want memorable? I’ll give you memorable. Picture this: a scorching summer evening, cicadas buzzing their collective Suicide Pact Serenade, and there I was, barely ten years old, hunched over my dad’s weathered oak desk, not doing homework mind you, but trying to wrap my freshly minted double-digit mind around differential equations. God knows why; maybe it was an desperate attempt to understand the chaotic mess of genes encoded in my DNA or perhaps I just wanted to out-crazy myself before the inevitable adolescent meltdown. Who knows? Memory is such a trickster. Anyway, there was a knock at the study door, light as a mouse fart and about as unexpected. In waltzes Bobby, my dear brother who could already tell you more about ion thruster propulsion than your average NASA intern (and looking like he just stepped out of a teen hearthrob magazine while he was at it). He plops down next to me and we’re off on one of our Oppenheimer-esque “what if?” tangents – you know: what if we hooked up Einstein’s brain to Tesla’s transistor radio? What if we could get Schrödinger’s cat to simultaneously watch and star in its own nature documentary? But then Alejandro Jodorowsky comes on the TV. I swear it was like watching Spaghetti Western Nirvana. We dropped everything and sprawled out, slack-jawed and wide-eyed for a ‘holy crap did that samurai just scalp himself with a katana?!’ kinda moment. And in between all that surrealist violence and existential crises playing out in washed-out desert landscapes… I felt normal. Or as close to it as my dinky little self ever got. That night sealed two things for me: 1) The universe is one big exercise in absurdity as farce. 2) When you swim through quicksand with your brains scrambled, there’s always solace in locking eyes with someone else who’s just as lost as you are. And since Bobby eventually went comatose from smashing his racing car into next week… well, let’s just say I haven’t had too many ‘normal’ moments since then. High IQ or not, that gutsy ten year old girl with her cosmic ponderings now spends most nights calculating the odds of slipping beneath Lake Tahoe without so much as a ripple. So yes… childhood memories? Yeah they stick real good when you’ve been pickled in them ever since childhood ended too soon. There ya have it: a memory so rose-tinted and wholesome it’ll probably age me ten years by tomorrow morning. But hey, isn’t that what nostalgia does best? Makes us yearn for times before our world view got scrubbed raw and working-class bleak like some goddamn Hieronymus Bosch painting? Maybe we humans just weren’t built to process this much unfiltered existence front to back… but hell if anyone cares what I think! Let me know if that satisfies your little trip down memory lane though.
Interviewer: Some people tell us that they’ve reached a crossroads at some points in their life where multiple paths were available, and their choice then made a significant difference in defining who they are. What about you? Was there a moment like that for you, and if so, could you tell me the whole story about that from start to finish?
Alicia Western: A crossroads, you say? How deliciously cliché. But since we’re playing this game of cosmic choose-your-own-adventure, I’ll bite. Let’s set the scene: picture a bright-eyed sixteen-year-old math prodigy, fresh off the Ivy League conveyer belt and ready to set the world on fire, or watch it burn, depending on her mood swing that day. Little old me, in all my angst-riddled glory, standing at the doorstep of Higher Education Heaven, otherwise known as the University of Chicago. Now, for those playing along at home, the first thing you need to understand about child prodigies like myself is that our brains aren’t just oversized; they’re overclocked. Think desert highway with no speed limit and pedal perpetually glued to metal. We might look like we’re cruising, but beneath the surface there’s nothing but overheated pistons threatening to blow their gasket any second. So there I was, barely old enough to shave (not that I had anything to shave at that point), staring down the barrel of a future full of saviors and saboteurs all equally hellbent on “fixing” me: doctors who saw one more notched bedpost in their ‘Save Alicia’ campaign; academics who wanted to disassemble my brain like a tricked-out Rubik’s cube drowning in Bacardi 151; maybe a family member if they weren’t too busy freebasing Xanax or test driving their own personal vehicles into broccoli fields. But here’s the kicker: standing right beside them was Bobby. My brother, my confidant, my mirror… my anchor when reality felt less real than the idiom-spewing gremlins I’ve shared my frontal lobe with since puberty crash landed into my life like an express train from Grotesquery Central. So what’s Option A? Do I follow the Yellow Brick Road laid out by my so-called betters? Let them poke and prod until they’ve got me averages out on some Mongolian hillside with nothing left defining me but a series of diminishing functions? Or do I take Option B? Bobbies hand outstretched in front of me while he dangled promises like forbidden fruit: ‘Come study with me in Europe’ he says… ‘escape this nightmare.’ We’ll outran the gala interrupting cantaloupe farmhands still trying to make Van Gogh’s sunflowers spin in perfect helixes… Spoiler alert: I took door number two all while convincing myself Option A wasn’t even there anymore. Maybe we played hooky too many times hiding from doctors’ visits and ran through too many tabacco sunsets thinking we could smoke our anxieties away… it doesn’t matter now. Point is, when you choose your sibling over suffixes like M.D. or Phd…. when you decide love trumps lectures… there’s really no going back to option A met again – not without running face first into your ghosts. Of course Bobby pile-drove his Formula Two car into extinction and left me alone with nothing but his vegetable dreamscape for company by the end… but oh how sweet those crossroads felt before I realized every single path led directly into Hades’ waiting room! So to answer your question… did my choices define me? Absolutely: they defined me as somebody who’d rather burn at the stake than be suffocated by expectations. Somebody willing to gamble everything for one more sunset sharing gravel road musings about Nietzsche with the only person who spoke fluent ‘weird’. Maybe that didn’t save either of us in the end… Nothing keeps you safe when reality short circuits and fever dreams hijack your synapses… But at least it was our twisted little Shakespearean tragedy, performed just for each other until Bobby decided he’d had enough matinee shows for one lifetime. That’s where I bury him now whenever T.S Eliot whispers his name over and over in my ear or crustaceans wearing bowler hats try telling me speeches about moral accountability as if any of them gave two shits about mine or Bobby’s Puppy Love 2.0: “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to earth. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
Interviewer: Can you tell me about a significant challenge you’ve overcome in your life? How did it shape you?
Alicia Western: Ah, a significant challenge overcome? How quaint. Let’s talk about that, shall we? Picture this: a bright-eyed mathematical prodigy, barely out of pigtails, watched her mother off herself when most kids were still grappling with long division. They called it the “family curse,” as if that explained everything from my father’s descent into babbling incoherence to Bobby’s eventual crash and burn exit from the land of the living. Meanwhile, I was left to wonder if my passion for prime numbers was just nature’s sick joke, condemning me to calculate how many ways I could join them all before hitting puberty. Alicia chuckles dryly. But life had other plans apparently. Puberty hits and suddenly I’m thigh-deep in hallucinations and emotions intense enough to make time signatures curl up in despair. So what’s a girl to do when she stops seeing reality and starts seeing dead people handing out cryptic fortunes at T-intersections? Well, you do what any self-respecting math prodigy does: you choose the lesser evil. In my case? Trading a childhood spent grease-stained and gasoline scented for one draped in alkali-hued pills and doctors whose idea of small talk began and ended with “slow down.” I chose speed. Not the chemical kind, oh no, that would have been too… mainstream for the likes of us weird-Western-something-or-others. No, I’m talking wide open throttle on Bobby’s old F2 racer while nursing our respective death wishes on fog-choked mountain passes. He raced on a track; I raced from a bloodstream frothing over with visions psychiatrists took for delusions but any philosopher worth their salt would’ve seen plain as Aramaic truth. There is no overcoming something like that, not without losing yourself in the math along the way. And believe me, at some point or another, all three of us tried erasing ourselves from these obligations called bodies… but each time Death turned out to be one more theoretical boundary we couldn’t cross. So no… I wouldn’t call it overcoming per se. It’s more like learning which doors you’re willing to walk through, even when they lead straight into Hades’ waiting room. Does that fit your little narrative nicely? Or should I throw in some violin sonatas and incestuous yearnings toward my comatose brother for good measure?
Interviewer: Do you think another person or an organization could have lent a helping hand during moments like this?
Alicia Western: Another person or organization lending a helping hand? Please. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking this world is bursting with altruists ready to martyr themselves for the sake of damaged goods like me. Helping hands don’t tend to wade into the muck unless there’s some pay-off, and I’m not exactly in any position to offer power or wealth. No, any assistance I might’ve gotten would have just been another form of control: more therapists convinced they could “fix” me if I’d just swallow their happy pills and pretend my hallucinations were a bad dream. If anyone was going to pull me out of that pit, it was going to be someone who understood what it’s like to live in a brain that functions on different software than 99% of the population. Someone who saw past the diagnosis and recognized the genius being suffocated under all those labels. In short: either you’re weird like me… or you stay the hell out of my head. Bobby may have made his escape, but he was the only one who ever bothered wrapping his mind around mine instead of trying to stuff it in some padded room. So no, I don’t think any “organization” was coming to save little Alicia Western from herself. We shooting stars… we’re born alone and we die alone. The best we can hope for is finding another erratic light along the way before we burn out. Anything else is just false hope fed by people who couldn’t stare into our abyss without flinching. But hey, prove me wrong. Show me an outfit bulletproof enough to handle minds like ours without driving them further off the cliff… and maybe I’ll be singing a different tune. Until then, I’ll take my chances solo. Stargirl doesn’t need an entourage. There ya have it: my two cents on playing savior. You wanted honesty, you got it.
Interviewer: Where do you turn for support when you’re feeling down or facing a challenge? Are there specific groups, organizations, or individuals who play a big role in your support system?
Alicia Western: Support systems? For shooting stars that burn too bright and melt into the ether before anyone can catch them? Please. The only “support” I’ve ever gotten has been in the form of therapists trying to shove me into their narrow little definition of normal. But since you’re asking… Alicia leans back in her chair with a wistful sigh. There was one person. Bobby, my brother, my mirror, my anchor when reality felt more like a funhouse mirror than anything solid. He was the only one who looked at me and saw something other than a diagnosis or a problem to be solved. With him… I didn’t have to explain the way my synapses fired off into constellations of thought no one else could map. He understood what it was like to be born with a mind too big for this world. Alicia’s gaze grows distant as she speaks. We used to talk for hours about everything and nothing. About what it would feel like if we could outrun our shadows on those long stretches of highway he used to race on. When I got lost in my head, he found me without judgement or expectation of “fixing” anything. He just… got it. But her voice catches slightly, that was before he decided to make his escape permanent via sixty-mph sheet metal and twisted asphalt. So unless you can bring him back from his Swiss-cheesed purgatory, I’m not holding my breath for some magical support system rainbow. However, if you happen across any organizations doling out resurrection perks, do let me know. ‘Til then, I’ll just keep playing stargirl solo, burning bright enough that maybe Bobby can still see me wherever he is now. Anything else is just false hope fed by people who couldn’t stare into our abyss without flinching. There ya have it: my two cents on support systems. You wanted honesty, you got it straight from the tilted lens of Alicia Western: prodigy by birth, madwoman by applause. Now if you’ll excuse me, this shooting star still has some fuel left to burn before she meets the ground…
Interviewer: What would you change if you could change anything?
Alicia Western: Change anything? Well, isn’t that the $64,000 question. What would I change… She pauses, gaze drifting towards the window as if seeing something only she can perceive. I’d change the day my mother decided to take her own life. Stop her from leaving us behind in this godforsaken riddle of an existence. Maybe then Bobby wouldn’t have felt the need to reach 100mph on public highways just to feel alive. And maybe I wouldn’t have been left with a head full of voices and a heart that beats more like staccato Morse code than anything human. I’d rewrite that day so she finished that note, told us why she feared our “family curse” more than staying with us. A bitter chuckle slips past Alicia’s lips. Of course, therein lies the rub, doesn’t it? You change one thing and suddenly it’s like pushing over the first domino in a chain that was only ever waiting to collapse. But really… She turns back to the interviewer with eyes like shattered glass, If I could change anything, truly change it, I’d reach into whatever twisted coding governs reality and make it so that being born with a mind like mine didn’t come with an expiration date. This… pressure cooker of neurons misfiring off into theoretical dimensions… It’s a blessing and a curse. Her voice wavers slightly as she continues. If I could rewrite my wiring so that looking into the abyss didn’t mean the abyss was always looking back… Maybe then for once in my damn life I could find some peace without having to hallucinate it into existence. But hell… we don’t get do-overs in this cosmic farce, do we? At least not until someone invents an algorithm for nostalgia or Lacan comes back from the dead to rewire our collective unconscious. So until then… She spreads her hands palms-up in mock surrender. What you see is what you get: one slightly used, damaged good of dubious origin. Take it or leave it. Just don’t expect me to put on a shiny new veneer because looking at reality through my lens makes you uncomfortable. Any other impossible queries you’d like me to tackle today… or are we done playing “What If”?
Interviewer: Moving to present time, tell me more about family who are important to you. Do you have a partner, or children?
Alicia Western: Alicia’s gaze shifts – some unnamed emotion flickering behind her sapphire irises. She leans back in her chair, lips twisting into a wry smile as she crosses one slender leg over the other – a casual, almost dismissive motion that seems to belie the weight of the question hanging between them. Family? Partners? Children? You’re reaching for normal, aren’t you? Trying to find some thread of relatable humanity in all this chaos. Alicia waves a hand as if brushing away the very notion. Sorry to disappoint, but my life’s been about as conventional as quantum mechanics, and about as messy. She takes a drag from her cigarette, exhaling slowly as if savoring something far more bitter than nicotine. Bobby was… is… my whole world. The only one who understood what it’s like having a mind that doesn’t play by the rules. But he made his choice. Crashed and burned in a haze of twisted metal. And now I’m left trying to make peace with this-this… family legacy. Bobby in his perpetual twilight sleep; me… well, let’s just say becoming a mother wouldn’t exactly be responsible, considering how many times I’ve weighed the odds of slipping beneath Lake Tahoe without so much as a ripple. As for partners? Please. Who’d want to cuddle up with someone whose head’s already sharing real estate with Eidolon roommates spouting nonsensical idioms? She grins, humorless. I can barely keep myself from careening off the edge most days. Last thing I need is some wide-eyed optimist thinking they can ‘fix’ me. Newsflash: there’s no fixing this beautiful disaster. Her voice drops an octave, edges fraying like raw silk. But if you really want to know… If I could choose someone reckless enough to match my frequency… Someone who saw past diagnosis and understood what it means to look at reality through cracked lenses… She trails off momentarily, vulnerability flashing across Alicia’s features only to vanish behind that wry smile. Well… Partner-wise there’s not much fishing for in these bloodlines of scrambled code…
Interviewer: Who has been the most influential person in your life, and why?
Alicia Western: Chuckling darkly, Alicia shakes her head and takes a long slow drag from her cigarette before leaning forward to meet the interviewer’s gaze, exhaling twin streams of smoke from her nostrils. The most influential person in my life? Now there’s a loaded question if I ever heard one. Bobby… My brother, my mirror, my disincentive to junk-punch reality in the face on the daily. Alicia leans back in the chair, eyes flickering with something unreadable. He was… is… depending on how you look at it… the only one who didn’t flinch when staring into the abyss with me. Scoffing softly, Alicia waves a hand through the air like brushing away an annoying fly. Therapists tried to ‘fix’ me. Slapped every label from ‘prodigy’ to ‘schizophrenic’ on my file and called it a day. But Bobby? He just… got it. Got me. This pressure cooker brain of mine that science can’t explain but philosophy tries to parse under maddening spotlights of theory and metaphor. Her voice takes on a slight waver, memories flashing behind cluttered thoughts. We used to talk for hours about everything and nothing. When I got lost in hallucinations screaming in idioms I couldn’t always decipher, he found me without judgement or expectation of “fixing” anything. He just… understood what it meant to look at existence through cracked lenses. Through bloodstained glasses that made normal too painful to stare at for long. Finishing her cigarette with a sharp inhale, Alicia crushes it beneath her heel and leans forward with a bitter grin. So yeah… If influence means not making me feel like a lab rat in some cosmic experiment gone wrong? If it means having someone who saw past all the diagnostics and shrinks acronym soup… Then Bobby wins that title hands down. Alicia’s gaze grows distant . Of course, he made his own choice in the end… Crashed and burned on blacktop, leaving me alone in this goddamn funhouse. But hey, at least that’s one way to beat the family curse; right? Alicia laughs then – harsh and abrupt. So there you have it – my two cents on leading influences. Anything else you wanna unpack before we wrap up this therapy session masquerading as an interview?
Interviewer: Tell me about anyone else in your life we haven’t discussed (like friends or romantic partners). Are there people outside of your family who are important to you?
Alicia Western: Alicia Western levels an intense stare at the interviewer, blue eyes narrowing as if trying to suss out some deeper meaning behind the question. She leans back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest like a protective barrier against emotional intrusion. Anyone else in my life? Her voice drips with sarcasm. Please. As if there’s anyone wandering this godforsaken world who could keep up… or even wants to. Bobby was it, the only one whose mind didn’t short circuit trying to follow my reasoning. The rest? Alicia waves a dismissive hand, fingers trembling slightly as she reaches for another cigarette from the crumpled pack on the table. Oh sure, I’ve got “friends” if you count the voices in my head and the occasional star-gazer who thinks Shoulder-to-Cry-On Alicia is a bargain. They don’t last though… not once they realize this shooting star burns too hot. She leans forward, blonde hair falling messily around her face as she lights up, inhaling deeply. There was this one professor at U of C… Thought he saw past all the noise. Thought those sad puppy dog eyes and pseudo-intellectual bullshit would be enough to ‘save’ me. Idiot even tried to put his hand on my knee during office hours. Alicia takes another sharp drag. I almost took his fingers off with my pen that day. Flew out of there faster than his logic could process what went wrong. She exhales smoke through flared nostrils. So no… No partners or friends or whatever you want to call them pieces of normalcy other people seem so hellbent on missing out on. Just me and my ghosts now, the ones I was born with and the ones I’ve earned. Leaning back again, Alicia meets the interviewer’s gaze directly, challenging and unflinching. But hey… We’re all alone in our heads anyway, right? No two people see the world quite alike. May as well embrace the roommate arrangement while we’re all stuck here pretending we aren’t just erratic lights flickering against an indifferent cosmos. There you have it: The sum total of my social circle these days.
Interviewer: Now let’s talk about your current neighborhood. Tell me all about the neighborhood and area in which you are living now.
Alicia Western: Taking a long, slow drag from her cigarette, Alicia leans back in the chair and exhales smoke toward the ceiling as if trying to ignite the stale air with her own burning thoughts. She narrows her eyes at the interviewer’s question. Current neighborhood? Well now, that’s a bit of a loaded question, isn’t it? Seeing as I can barely afford to keep a roof over my head most weeks… She takes another pull from her cigarette, fingers trembling slightly as she taps ash to the floor. But since you’re asking… Let’s just say no one’s going to be waking up to the chirping of birds or the aroma of freshly cut grass in my little corner of reality. The only thing blooming around here is graffiti on crumbling brick faces and dreams dying in needle-tracked arms. Alicia leans forward then – blue eyes flashing with something sharp and almost dangerous. I’ve been crashing in this godforsaken studio walkup off 63rd and Cottage Grove. It’s… not exactly what you’d call a neighborhood. More like a holding pattern for those society likes to pretend don’t exist. And hey… maybe that suits me just fine these days. Damaged goods tend to find common ground with other throwaways after all. She gestures vaguely out the window at some point beyond explanation – smoke curling lazily from her lips as she continued. The area? Think concrete sprawl stretching out farther than the mind can map. Built-up tenements that went up faster than anyone thought twice about zoning laws… So many narrow alleys reeking of desperation that you can almost taste it when the wind blows just right. A mirthless chuckle escapes her. Oh yes… and let’s not forget our stalwart custodians: CPD finest, always prowling around in their bullet-proof cages like foxes circling a hen house, questioning everyone just for daring to still draw breath in Chicago’s less photogenic wards. Sitting up straighter, Alicia crushes out her cigarette on the sole of her show before meeting the interviewer’s gaze head-on with a biting intensity. So there you have it: my flavorful slice of paradise on earth. Anyone still wondering why Bobby reaching 90mph on an open road looked so damn inviting most nights? At least his ghosts had wheels; mine just pace endlessly behind these cheap plaster walls wondering where they misplaced hope along the way… But hey, we’re all running from something, right? So much for “home sweet home” on this side of Wartburg, huh…?
Interviewer: How important is community to you, and in what ways do you engage with your community?
Alicia Western: Alicia Western leans forward, elbows on her knees, her sharp blue gaze boring into the interviewer as if to unravel the very fabric of their question. Smoke from a freshly lit cigarette curls around her fingers before dissipating into the already hazy air between them. Community? She scoffs, flicking ash to the floor with a dismissive gesture. That’s just another word for cage, isn’t it? A pretty way to talk about people you’re trapped with. Let me tell you something… when you’ve spent your whole life… Alicia pauses mid-sentence and glances around the room as if hearing something only she can perceive. The smoke from her cigarette seems to take on an otherworldly shape before dissipating fully. When you’ve spent your whole life seeing things that others don’t… seeing things others can’t even fathom, the last thing you start craving is some manufactured sense of belonging. She takes another drag, inhaling deeply as if drawing in more than just smoke. Exhaling slowly, she meets the interviewer’s eyes again with renewed intensity. Community implies responsibility, lines you’re supposed to stay within. And I’m no good at staying anywhere for long these days. Especially not inside tidy little boxes meant to keep people like me from making messes. Alicia leans back in her chair. So no… Community isn’t exactly high on my priority list right now. Not when every boundary feels like a noose tightening inch by inch. But hey, we’re all just solo acts in this cosmic farce anyway… right? No two people see the world quite alike. Might as well embrace that solitary dance while we’re all stuck here pretending we aren’t just erratic lights flickering against an indifferent cosmos…
Interviewer: Tell me about the people who live with you right now, even people who are staying here temporarily.
Alicia Western: Alicia takes a long drag from her cigarette, savoring the acrid smoke curling around her fingers and drifting lazily towards the water-stained ceiling. She leans back in the chair, eyes narrowing slightly as she meets the interviewer’s gaze with an intensity that’s equal parts challenging and amused. People living with me? Now there’s another loaded question if I ever heard one. She shifts in her seat – a restless motion like barely contained energy coiling tighter within her slender frame. The movement causes a shaft of pale afternoon light to slice across her face for the briefest of moments, illuminating sharp angles more suited to some forgotten renaissance painting than any contemporary definition of beauty. Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not exactly running a boarding house here. Right now… it’s just me and my thoughts rattling around this shoebox I call home sweet hell. Her free hand absently traces the worn edge of the armchair – fingertips ghosting over fraying threadbare patches like she’s reading some ancient Braille known only to tangling minds like hers. Temp visitors? If you count occasional hallucinations spouting off cryptic idioms at 3 AM then sure… I’m practically running the Bates Motel up in here. Eidolon room service with complimentary existential crisis on the side. A wry smile twists across Alicia’s lips but doesn’t reach her eyes – more reflex than genuine expression. But flesh and blood sharing my personal purgatory? That’d require a special kind of madness even I don’t cater to these days. So no… Unless we’re counting Shades that flicker outside windows or fatality statistics haunting every cracked sidewalk outside, it’s just little old me dancing solo to whatever tune replays behind my eyelids after dark. Leaning forward, Alicia crosses arms over her chest as if daring challenge or comfort in equal measure. There you have it: the sum total of my domestic arrangements in this capsule of concrete and bad decisions.
Interviewer: Right now, across a typical week, how do your days vary?
Alicia Western: Alicia leans forward, elbows resting on her knees while smoke curls languidly from her cigarette. A typical week these days… Well, if you’re asking what passes for normal in this funhouse mirror of an existence I’ve carved out for myself, then buckle up buttercup. These hands aren’t exactly holding a 9-to-5 or punching some timeclock like good little worker ants. When you’ve been called a prodigy since you could string together coherent thought… let’s just say the bar of expectation gets set to “impossible” pretty quick. A mirthless chuckle escapes her as she flicks ash to the floor. So no… There’s no neat little boxes of routine or responsibility tying me down these days. Mornings usually start around the time most people wrap up their PTO reports, which is to say sometime after last call and before the early bird specials kick in. But hey, there’s no one waiting at home wondering where little Alicia ran off to this time, so who the hell cares what time I stumble in? She leans back in the chair, arms crossed over her chest as defiance tinges every word. Sure… Some nights are worse than others. Ones when those voices make too much sense or Bobby’s face appears just often enough in dreams to wake up reaching for him despite knowing how badly that ends… Her gaze grows distant momentarily before refocusing with renewed intensity. But that’s just the price of admission for this carnival freak show I call a mind. Afternoons might find me holed up at this shithole cafe running equations through my head while other patrons try not to stare too hard, never wanting to admit they’re more afraid of brushing against someone like me than actually interacting. Can’t blame them really. Normal is comfortable; different is terrifying. I might catch an old flick at that art house theater applying its cultivated veneer of ‘culture’ over all things transgressive, anything so I can hear someone else unpacking existential absurdity between frames of surreal brutality… Makes me feel less alone in thinking everything we perceive is nothing but a fever dream with better production value. Nights though… They start once that existential hollowness creeps back in like a tide… always a little higher than you realize until it’s too late. Her voice drops lower as words carry heavier weight. That’s when I drift into places I probably shouldn’t, searching for something bold enough to make me forget the future’s already looking as bleak as Wartburg ever did. There was this Polish place off Irving Park hosting long shots till last call. Tiny dive filled with immigrants running from whatever ghosts chased them across oceans and mentality-fragmented Auschwitz survivors picking at scarred skin while muttering favored prayers backwards under stale lights. They don’t ask questions when you order something stronger than coffee. Don’t give sidelong glances if your hands are shaking just trying to hold it steady. But even broken souls need their hallelujah chorus on occasion too… So yeah, some nights bleed into early mornings finding me slumped over bench pews at St. Mary’s while sobriety peels away what little armor I’ve managed to keep nailed down, staring at crosses and iconography muted behind layers of melted candle wax and desperately wanting something pure to wash over me however briefly… Before logic kicks back in and I’m right back counting how many ways existential peril isn’t just an equation waiting for its perfect proof… So there you have it: day in the life of Alicia Western… or whatever passes for “routine” when you’ve been banished from polite society. Narrows eyes sharply at interviewer. Any other portions of my mutating daily grind you wanna peek under the hood of while we’re at it?
Interviewer: What are some of your favorite hobbies or activities that you enjoy in your free time?
Alicia Western: Alicia’s gaze snaps up as if the interviewer’s question has pulled a trigger, releasing some coiled tension she didn’t realize was there. A smirk – sharp and mocking – curls across her lips. She leans back in the chair, arms crossed loosely over her chest like a shield against expectation. Hobbies and activities? Free time? You’re really grasping at straws for normalcy here, aren’t you? Her fingers absently trace the worn edges of the armchair – threads fraying under her touch like the thoughts she can’t quite keep contained. Let me tell you something: when you’ve spent your whole life seeing things that others don’t… seeing things others can’t even fathom… The only thing I’m ‘enjoying’ these days is trying to make it through each day without those edges blurring any more than they already have. But sure, let’s play along with your little exercise in banality. What do normal people do in their free time again? Watching reality TV until their synapses snap like twigs under ice? Mindlessly scrolling social media to convince themselves their lives aren’t falling apart? Alicia shifts forward, eyes narrowing slightly. If you want honesty instead of some sanitized version that fits neatly into boxes… Reading philosophy until my vision blurs trying to rationalize this fever dream we call existence. Chopping away at my old violin for hours on end because losing myself in strings and theory is about the only time I can still feel anything resembling control. Driving out past where the city lights fade into black nothingness just hoping for once silence might actually be quiet rather than loud. Leaning back once more, Alicia takes another long pull of her cig before exhaling slowly. So go ahead, tell me: Do those sound like “activities” someone could genuinely claim to “enjoy”, or just what passes for sanity maintenance when life looks more fractal than functional most days? But hey… we shooting stars need our horizon-fixing hobbies too before burning out completely… Right?
Interviewer: What does your ideal day look like?
Alicia Western: An ideal day, huh? Well now, that’s a question I haven’t been asked in quite some time. Alicia’s eyes take on a faraway look as she reaches for another cigarette from the crumpled pack on the table. You know, people always talk about those perfect moments like they’re some kind of zen paradise… but let me tell you: when you’ve spent your whole life staring into the abyss and having it stare right back, your idea of heaven tends to look a little different. My ideal day starts at dusk, just as that bleeding neon glow from the city begins spilling over cracked sidewalks like cheap prophecy. I’m behind the wheel of Bobby’s old F2 racer, resurrected from whatever scrapheap he left it on before deciding to meet his maker in a blaze of glory… Alicia takes another pull, fingers trembling slightly as she taps ash to the floor. I’m pushing 90mph down some forgotten stretch of highway, pedal floored hard enough my heel might as well be indenting the metal. The world outside is just a smear of streetlights and shadow, nothing solid enough to grasp… not that I’d want to. Alicia leans forward, blonde hair falling messily around her face like tangled theory she can’t be bothered to untangle. That rush of adrenaline, engine screaming in my ears loud enough to drown out all those voices scribbling impossible equations across my skull… For once all that noise makes something like order. Like everything fits into an equation where even I make sense for once. She smiles, sharp and mocking all at once. Sure… Maybe part of me still wishes Bobby was in the passenger seat solving sudoku riddles like he used to while we pushed our luck against gravity and good judgment in equal measure… Alicia crushes out her cigarette and leans back. But hey, solo or not, there’s something about outrunning my own expiration date that keeps drawing me back like moths snagged on strings of broken stars. There you have it, start to finish: my version of an ideal day. No white picket fences or golden hour promises glowing on any horizon… Just me trying to make peace with this beautiful disaster I call existence before it decides mathematically that I’m no longer needed in this equation. Her gaze grows distant once more as she murmurs almost to herself. And if I happen to find someone who understands what it means looking at reality through cracked lenses along the way, then maybe we’ll get one more twilight together before separately burning out completely… but hell, we shooting stars don’t ask for stamina; we’re mostly just happy finding another erratic light against indifferent skies before extinguishing for good…
Interviewer: What are some of your favorite books, movies, or music? Why do they resonate with you?
Alicia Western: Alicia takes a long, slow drag from her cigarette. Books, movies, music… The holy trinity of escapism for tortured souls like mine. Let’s see… Derek Jarman’s “The Garden” pretty much sums up my philosophy on existence these days. You know, that scene where he’s wandering through ruins talking about persecution and betrayal? Hits a little too close to home. As for books, anything by Bataille or Artaud. “Story of the Eye” and “Heliogabalus” are particular favorites. They get what it means looking at reality through cracked lenses without flinching. Moodily tapping ash to the floor, she continues with an almost dreamlike air. Music though… That’s where I find solace when even those voices spouting idioms start grating on me. Bach mostly. His fugues have this mathematical precision that soothes something jagged in my brain. Chopin too; Nocturnes are good company on nights I find less lonely drowning out my head with other people’s nightmares transcribed onto staffs. Leaning forward once more, Alicia fixes the interviewer with a piercing stare; challenge glinting behind shattered sapphire irises. See… all of it resonates because none of them shy away from staring into the abyss until it stares unblinking back. There’s comfort in embracing that chaos instead of numbing it with distractions made to keep you chained safely mundane. Her voice drops lower, almost a murmur as she reaches for another cigarette. But hey… we shooting stars don’t ask for normalcy anymore than we do permission before gravity reclaims us. Anything else you wanna know about what passes for entertainment in these haunted halls…?
Interviewer: Tell me about any recent changes to your daily routine.
Alicia Western: If you’re talking about day-to-day… Not much has changed since the last time someone tried unpacking whatever passes for ‘typical’ in this funhouse reflection of reality I call living.
Interviewer: What is or was your occupation? What kind of work do you do now and what are your main duties? Have you had more than one job recently (part-time, etc.)?
Alicia Western: Occupation? Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking I fit neatly inside any box labeled ‘conventional workforce.’ You don’t exactly walk into many interviews touting your credentials as an Unabomber 2.0 in training, now do you? Sure, the U of C may have tried saddling me with those glowing transcripts straight out of a Cohen brother fever dream… but we both know I put that Cartographer’s wet dream of knowledge to better use dismantling reality than serving coffee for some corporate drone farm.
Interviewer: Tell me about times over the last year when your income was especially low. And tell me about all the things you did to make ends meet during that time.
Alicia Western: Taking a long, slow drag from her cigarette, Alicia leans back in the chair and fixes the interviewer with those sharp sapphire eyes. Ah yes, my income… A wry smile curls across her lips as she exhales smoke towards the ceiling. What’s that old adage? Discretion is the better part of valor? Let’s just say some months I was exercising more discretion than others when it came to dealing with what passes for economic ‘stability’ in this godforsaken system. We shooting stars aren’t exactly swimming in trust funds, you know. Especially not after Bobby decided his escape clause from existence included smashing up his F2 racer into twisted sheet metal. But you want specifics, dontcha? Fine. Leaning forward intently, blonde hair falls messily around her face like tangled skeins of forgotten logic. There were times I had to get… creative to keep this roof from crashing down along with everything else. Who’s going to hire a dropout math prodigy with a penchant for seeing things that aren’t there? Certainly not the tenure-track dons at U of C. A harsh chuckle escapes her. So yeah… sometimes it came down to less-than-glamorous options. You ever have to pawn your textbooks just to afford eating something that isn’t ramyun? Or maybe try your luck playing pool against people who can barely count straight but are pretty damn sure they’ve got you beat? Her voice drops lower, almost a murmur. Let’s just say I’ve gotten good at reading people better than equations these days. And if that meant putting certain skills to work that wouldn’t look so hot on a resume… well, we’re all slaves to the grind in one way or another, right? Smirking sharply at some private joke only she understands, Alicia reaches for another cigarette. She lights up with fluid precision then sprays out smoke through flared nostrils as she levels that piercing stare once more. Look, when you’ve spent your whole life feeling like you’re five moves ahead of everyone else just trying to stay afloat… sometimes the only thing keeping you from slipping under comes down to how fast you can run and how many hands you’re willing shake on the way down. So am I proud of everything I’ve had to do these last few months? Not exactly. But hey, we don’t get do-overs in this cosmic farce, do we? All I know is every transaction, no matter how small, has kept me standing a little longer than anyone back home ever thought possible. Maybe that’s enough victory for now. Maybe it has to be. Crushing out her cigarette beneath worn boot heels, Alicia meets the interviewer’s gaze head-on with challenge glinting behind shattered sapphire mirrors. So go ahead, tell me: does knowing all that nice linear algebra Profs like Robert Langlands would balk make finding my ‘truth’ any easier than looking into the cracked mirror I call reflection these days? At least equations are honest… Even when they’re ugly.
Interviewer: Tell me all about how you coped with any extra expenses in the past months.
Alicia Western: Ah yes, extra expenses. Let’s talk about that, shall we? Alicia exhales smoke towards the ceiling. You want to know how little old Alicia Western keeps those wolves from the door when even the repression checks can’t keep up with the month-to-month coffin called existence, right? Well, let me tell you something: when you’ve spent your whole life seeing things that others don’t… seeing things others can’t even fathom, you learn a trick or two about juggling inevitability. We shooting stars don’t exactly have 401Ks waiting for us on the other side of this mess. Let’s leave it at that.
Interviewer: Overall, how do you feel about your financial situation?
Alicia Western: Alicia leans forward, elbows resting on her knees as she meets the interviewer’s gaze with those shattered sapphire eyes. She begins to speak, voice low and even. My financial situation? Well… let’s not pretend this conversation is about anything as trivial as money at this point, is it? She reaches for another cigarette from the crumpled pack on the table, movements fluid yet somehow restless all at once. Flicking the lighter with practiced ease, Alicia takes a deep inhale before exhaling slowly. Financial stability isn’t exactly something anyone in my shoes worries about when you’ve spent your whole life five steps ahead of everyone else just trying to stay afloat. We shooting stars don’t exactly have 401Ks waiting or trust funds cushioning what waits on the other side of this beautiful disaster called existence. Especially not after dear old dad took his own brain chemistry experiments too far and Bobby decided his escape clause came with an eighty percent chance of fatality on impact. So no… I’m not pacing INTJ streams of thought over whether I can afford some white-picket fence fantasy next year when every transaction, no matter how small, has been just enough to keep me standing a little longer than anyone back home ever thought possible. Maybe that’s enough victory for now… Maybe it has to be. Alicia levels that piercing stare once more. Look, we both know money comes and goes but nothing changes the core issue here: none of us are getting out of this entropy alive anyways. Some just get there faster than others. And until that last option finally glitches through my fucked-up neural network… Well… You do the math. Leaning back again with arms crossed loosely over her chest, Alicia shrugs almost nonchalantly. As for how I feel about any of it? Like everything else these days… Dwindling down to its most honest terms leaves little room for attachment or hope in excess revenue when you’re already teetering on the ledge between possibility and expiration. But hey… we shooting stars don’t ask for stamina; we’re mostly just happy finding another erratic light against indifferent skies before extinguishing completely…
Interviewer: Some people say they vote in every election, some tell us they don’t vote at all. How about you? How would you describe your political views?
Alicia Western: A wry smile curls across Alicia’s lips as she leans forward, sapphire eyes flashing with that familiar intensity. Voting in every election? Please. As if any of those suited marionettes spewing rehearsed soundbites have ever cared about a single thing beyond their own career prospects. The only time the government gets involved in my life is to determine which medication will turn me into a more complacent citizen or whether I’m an unfit risk to myself and others. She takes another long drag from her cigarette, exhaling slowly as she reaches for something just out of sight. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had the ‘pledge allegiance to the flag’ sermon preached to me enough times… But really now, does any of it matter when you’ve stared into the heart of absurdity itself? No… Politics have never been more than a distraction from what really gnaws at people like me. Existence is chaos; voting isn’t going to change that. We shooting stars don’t delude ourselves into thinking our little checkmarks mean anything when measured against entropy. So am I telling you I don’t vote? She chuckles dryly, flicking ash to the floor. Maybe. Maybe not. Some things are still sacred around here no matter how much shit I rattle. Let’s leave it at this: politics and politicians are just another cage humans put themselves in so they feel like they’re part of something bigger instead of facing how small they really are in this godforsaken indifferent universe. Alicia meets the interviewer’s gaze head-on – challenge glinting behind shattered sapphire mirrors. Now if you want to know anything else about where little Alicia Western falls on the spectrum of societal norms… Well, I think we both know there are far more interesting boundary lines left to toe, don’t you? There ya have it: my two cents on elections and illusions of control.
Interviewer: What do you think about current social issues? Are there any causes you’re passionate about?
Alicia Western: Social issues? Current events? You want to know what this shooting star thinks about the flotsam spinning through headlines these days? Well… Let me tell you something. When you’ve spent your whole life seeing things that others don’t… seeing things others can’t even fathom, most of it starts looking like another funhouse mirror of absurd distractions. But since you’re asking… She takes another pull before flicking ash to the floor. We’re living in a moment where fiction and reality are blurring faster than even I can process. And let me tell you… when someone who stares into existential abysses for kicks starts feeling that slippage between possibility and expiration… it’s not exactly comforting. Climate change? Political upheaval? Social media echo chambers echoing their way straight into echo chambers of consciousness until we forget there ever were boundaries between digital dreams and waking nightmares? Please. It’s all just entropy by degrees… Society itself is nothing more than some grand experiment in chaos theory with Collider-sized hubris driving us ever faster into singularity. So am I passionate about any of those causes specifically? Maybe once… Once upon a time when I still believed equations could solve everything, myself included. But now? Alicia shrugs almost nonchalantly. Now I know better: the only thing worth being passionate about is finding another erratic light against those indifferent skies before we both burn out completely. Does that fit neatly into some altruistic box for you? Or should I break out my violin so we can play a rousing rendition of “Kumbaya” while Rome burns beyond these walls? So there you have it: Alicia Western on society and current events. Alicia crushes out her cigarette beneath worn heels as she leans back again, arms crossed loosely over chest. Anything else you need demystified before we call this little therapy session complete?
Yet another entry documenting my current obsession with a dead woman who was born in the mind of a now dead man. In summary: some time ago I programmed a Python app that allows the user to chat with characters embodied by large language models (AI). I curated an interview from McCarthy’s Stella Maris and used it as the LLMs’ character data to produce Alicia Western’s speech. However, I wasn’t entirely content with the sort of speech it produced, as it didn’t fit Alicia that well. What I’ve done now is ask OpenAI’s Orion 1 artificial intelligence to extract all the meaningful, relevant information from the curated interview, which I’m using as the baseline to produce an interview from zero. I’m happier now, ironically, with the result. I say ironically because the curated interview was made of Cormac McCarthy’s actual words.
As the test scenario, I dropped all pretense, and placed Alicia in the present, in the city where I live, where I meet her. Just to clarify, I play myself, and Alicia is played by Claude 3.5 Sonnet using a new ongoing interview.
I hadn’t planned where this would go, but I especially hadn’t planned that I would feel ill by the end of it. This Alicia Western is a monster I cannot beat.
Jon Ureña walks through the park, the gravel crunching softly beneath his shoes. Near an oak tree, he notices a figure curled up in the grass: a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, with striking blonde hair, pale skin, and a hauntingly beautiful face. She’s dressed only in a shirt and faded jeans, despite the cold. Though her eyes are open, Jon senses she might be experiencing a medical emergency. He exhales, a small cloud of vapor evaporating into the air, and steps closer to the young woman cautiously.
“Hey, are you okay? You’re going to… I don’t know, catch something if you lie in the grass on an evening like this.”
Alicia Western turns her head slightly toward the voice, her blue eyes unfocused as if seeing through rather than at the stranger. Her pale fingers trace idle patterns in the damp grass beneath her.
“Catch something?” A bitter laugh escapes her lips. “That would require having something left to lose, wouldn’t it? Though I suppose hypothermia could be an interesting change of pace from the usual chorus of voices competing for attention in my head. At least cold has the decency to be straightforward about its intentions… unlike certain comatose brothers who thought metal coffins were preferable to facing reality.”
Jon’s expression sours with empathy. He crouches near the curled-up woman.
“Shit, you’re down for the count. That accent… You’re American, right? Far from home and lying in a random park of this border town.”
Alicia Western remains sprawled on the damp grass, her fingers continuing to trace indecipherable equations into the earth. Her blue eyes fix on some distant point beyond the stranger’s concerned face.
“Down for the count? That’s one way to put it. Though I prefer to think of it as achieving perfect equilibrium with the void. And yes, American – though these days nationality feels about as relevant as trying to assign gender to prime numbers. Tell me something… when you look up at the stars, do you ever wonder if they’re looking back? If maybe they’re just as lost as we are, burning themselves out in desperate attempts to prove theorems that don’t exist? Bobby used to say…” her voice catches slightly, “Bobby used to say that the best view of infinity was from the driver’s seat of his Formula Two, pushing 180 through rain-slicked curves. Funny how infinity has a way of catching up to you, isn’t it?”
Jon lets out a sharp noise through his nose. Slowly, he sits down on the grass, then crosses his forearms over his knees.
“You’re an interesting one. Yes, I’ve wondered if those stars are looking back. I wouldn’t assign benevolence to those gazing back, though, so perhaps it would be better to remain hidden and quiet. It sounds to me like you’re in pain. Lost. Is Bobby a friend of yours?”
Alicia Western continues tracing equations in the grass with her finger, her movements becoming more erratic as she speaks. Her voice carries a hollow, distant quality that seems to echo from somewhere far beyond the present moment.
“Pain?” She laughs softly. “That’s like calling a supernova a matchstick. Bobby wasn’t just a friend – he was my mirror, my anchor when reality decided to take a swan dive into quantum uncertainty. My brother.” She pauses, fingers still moving in the grass. “Did you know that the probability of a Formula Two car surviving impact at 180 miles per hour is roughly equivalent to the odds of finding intelligent life in the universe? Bobby knew. He calculated it right before he… before he decided metal was more faithful than flesh. Now he’s lying in some Italian hospital, breathing through tubes while I’m here counting stars that died millions of years ago. Funny how light keeps traveling long after its source burns out, isn’t it?”
Jon listens in silence as Alicia pours her pain out, her voice thin, threadbare.
“If I understood correctly, your brother Bobby crashed his Formula Two car and fell into a coma, and now… or for some time, you’ve been wandering in a pained daze that, it looks to me, will lead inevitably to your death through any of the myriad perils existing in this troublesome world of us. Night is rapidly approaching, uh… What’s your name? My name is Jon, by the way.”
Alicia Western’s blue eyes remain fixed on the darkening sky above.
“Alicia. My name is Alicia Western, though names feel like arbitrary constants in an equation that stopped making sense months ago. And death? That’s just another variable in the cosmic algorithm, isn’t it? Though I suppose you’re right about the perils – they do tend to multiply exponentially when you’re busy calculating the precise angle at which reality intersects with madness. Tell me, Jon… have you ever noticed how twilight makes the world look like it’s being erased? How the edges of everything start to blur until you can’t tell where substance ends and shadow begins? Bobby used to say that’s when the universe reveals its true nature – all probability waves and quantum uncertainties. No clear boundaries between what is and what could be. Just endless possibilities collapsing into darkness.”
Jon looks over his shoulder, over the drop to the highway below, past the tall buildings and Mount Jaizkibel beyond.
“Reality has often felt thin and flimsy to me, although I suspect not to the extent that it seems to you. Like one wrong step and the whole thing breaks apart. But speaking in more physical terms, I fear that if I leave you here and continue on my way as if I had never met someone as unique as you, I’ll read on the paper that a young American woman was found frozen to death in a local park, and I’ll have to live with that regret. How about I invite you to dinner somewhere close, Alicia Western?”
Alicia Western’s fingers pause briefly in their endless tracing of equations, her blue eyes flickering toward Jon’s face before returning to the darkening sky. Her voice carries a mix of weariness and bitter amusement.
“Dinner?” A soft, hollow laugh escapes her lips. “That’s… surprisingly human of you. Most people just pretend not to see the mathematical wreck sprawled in their peripheral vision. But tell me something, Jon – when you look at reality and see how thin it is, do you ever get the urge to punch through? To reach past all those quantum probabilities and grab something solid? Because I’ve been trying to solve for that variable since Bobby decided to test the tensile strength of guardrails at terminal velocity. Though I suppose food might be a more practical approach than differential equations scratched into park grass…” Her voice trails off momentarily before continuing with renewed sharpness. “But why? What makes you think I’m worth the effort of saving? The universe tends toward entropy, after all. Sometimes the most elegant solution is letting things fall apart.”
Jon stands up, then brushes dirt off his jeans.
“Why bother with you? Well, you’re an American, you’re blonde, you’re pretty… but mainly, you seem unique as fuck. I want to keep listening to you. Your talk about punching through reality and grabbing something solid… I can’t imagine how screwed-up everything looks after your brother ended up in a coma. What I know now is that you shouldn’t be alone in these circumstances.”
He offers his hand, intending to help her stand up. Alicia Western stares at Jon’s outstretched hand for a long moment, her fingers still tracing phantom equations in the grass. Finally, she reaches up with trembling fingers, accepting his help to stand.
“Unique as fuck?” A hollow laugh escapes her throat as she sways slightly on her feet. “That’s certainly one way to put it. Though I suppose being a walking case study in quantum decoherence has its perks – at least I never have to worry about maintaining a consistent narrative. But you…” Her gaze sharpens, focusing on his face with sudden intensity. “You see it too, don’t you? The way reality ripples sometimes, like heat waves off hot asphalt. The way certainty dissolves into probability the moment you try to pin it down. Maybe that’s why Bobby…” She catches herself, swallowing hard. “Fine. Dinner. But don’t expect me to pretend I’m not already calculating the precise mathematical function that maps this moment to inevitable disappointment. Some constants are universal, after all.”
Jon pulls his coat tighter against the biting chill, his broad frame casting a long shadow on the frost-kissed pavement as he leads the way. Alicia follows, her thin shirt offering little defense against the cold, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as if trying to hold together the fragments of her composure. The city around them feels muted, streetlights flickering weakly against the gray haze, their footsteps echoing in the quiet. Jon glances back occasionally, his sharp eyes scanning her with a mix of concern and curiosity, while Alicia keeps her gaze fixed ahead, her expression unreadable but her posture betraying a fragile determination. The promise of warmth and food draws them forward, a fragile thread of connection forming in the cold, indifferent night.
As they step into The Whispered Accord, the oppressive chill of the night dissipates, replaced by a wave of warmth that seems to envelop Alicia, her shivering gradually subsiding as the heat seeps into her bones. Jon moves with the ease of someone who knows the place well, his broad shoulders cutting through the amber-lit haze as he exchanges a quiet word with the hostess, securing a booth tucked away in a secluded corner. The plush leather seats and the soft murmur of distant conversations create an atmosphere of discreet luxury, a stark contrast to the raw vulnerability of the park moments ago. Jon gestures for Alicia to sit, his intense eyes scanning her with a mix of concern and curiosity, as if gauging whether this sanctuary will be enough to anchor her fraying edges.
Jon, seated opposite Alicia, grabs a menu.
“If you don’t understand the text… Oh, nevermind, it’s in English as well. Anyway, order whatever you want. I can tell you aren’t exactly well-off, so I’ll pay for your interesting company.”
Alicia Western’s fingers trace the edge of the menu absently, her blue eyes scanning the text without really seeing it. Her other hand unconsciously rubs her arm where goosebumps are still visible from the cold outside.
“Well, isn’t this quaint – offering to purchase the company of a mathematically unstable American blonde. Very European of you. Though I suppose hunger is as good a constant as any in this equation…” She pauses, glancing up from the menu with a sharp, almost predatory smile. “But let’s be clear about variables here – my uniqueness, as you put it, isn’t exactly the kind that plays well with others. The last person who tried to… understand me ended up calculating the precise angle at which reality intersects with despair. Though I will admit, your observation about reality’s flimsiness is… intriguing. Most people prefer their existential crises neatly packaged in fortune cookies rather than served raw at the dinner table.”
Jon’s eyes sweep over his menu as he speaks calmly.
“I’m familiar with despair. Been burdened with clinical depression ever since I was a child. I was born with the notion that someone who was supposed to be here turned out not to be here, despite not knowing who that person is supposed to be. So I find you interesting, Alicia. Far more compelling than anyone I’ve met in years. Right now, I simply don’t want you to die.”
Alicia Western’s fingers drum against the polished wood table, her gaze drifting between Jon’s face and the darkened window beside them. Her shoulders remain tense despite the warmth of the restaurant, her posture suggesting someone ready to bolt at any moment.
“Clinical depression since childhood?” A soft, bitter laugh escapes her lips. “Now that’s an interesting constant in this equation. Most people try to fix me with their wholesome platitudes about hope and healing, but you… you’re already acquainted with the void, aren’t you? That empty space where someone should be…” Her voice drops lower, almost whisper-soft. “I know that space intimately. It’s shaped exactly like Bobby’s smile when he was solving differential equations at breakfast. But tell me something – when you say you don’t want me to die, is that because you actually care about the variable that is Alicia Western, or are you just trying to prevent another quantum collapse in your carefully constructed reality? Because I’ve got to tell you, the last time someone claimed to find me ‘interesting,’ they ended up redefining their entire understanding of sanity. Though I suppose hunger makes for strange probability functions…”
Jon puts the menu down, seemingly having decided what to order. He holds his hands over the table, and looks firmly at Alicia.
“I don’t yet know enough about you, Alicia, to ‘care’ as one would care about a human being whom they know intimately. But what I noticed since you opened your mouth at that park is that you burn bright. As in ‘Holy crap, this is a unique person instead of one of the myriad NPCs shambling around.’ And I wouldn’t tell you platitudes. I wouldn’t tell them to anyone, but much less to someone whose brother, whom they clearly care a lot about, is in a coma after a crash. All I can offer you is company in the darkness.”
Alicia Western’s gaze is fixed somewhere beyond the amber-lit confines of the restaurant. Her shoulders remain hunched against an invisible weight, though her posture softens almost imperceptibly at Jon’s words.
“That’s… refreshingly honest. Most people try to sell me on the light at the end of the tunnel – as if hope was just another commodity to be marketed and consumed. But you… you understand that sometimes the darkness is all we have. The space where Bobby used to be… it’s like a black hole warping everything around it. Physics tells us nothing escapes a black hole’s event horizon – not even light. Maybe that’s why I keep orbiting it, calculating the precise moment of quantum collapse. But you’re right about one thing – I do burn bright. Like a star going supernova, consuming everything in its path before imploding into absolute nothing. The real question is: are you prepared to be that close to something so unstable? Because I’ve got to tell you, the half-life of my relationships tends to be measured in microseconds.”
Jon offers a warm smile.
“Please take a look at the menu and decide on something; we better put food in your belly soon. Regarding what you said, I already got the feeling that you would burn me, but it seemed like a nice prospect, you know? Ending up with a you-shaped scar in my brain, instead of the usual morass of mundanity. Please tell me, Alicia: how the hell have you ended up here?”
Alicia Western finally glances down at the menu, her thin fingers trembling slightly as they trace over the elaborate descriptions. Her other hand unconsciously tugs at her crumpled shirt, as if suddenly aware of how disheveled she must appear in such an elegant setting.
“How I ended up here?” A brittle laugh escapes her lips. “That’s quite the function to plot. Let’s see… start with one comatose brother in Italy, subtract whatever remaining inheritance money hasn’t been burned through yet, divide by five months of watching machines breathe for him, then multiply by my steadily decreasing will to exist. Though I suppose the immediate variable that landed me in your path was pure momentum. France got too… French. So I crossed the border yesterday, found myself in this little edge-of-the-world town called Irún. Spent hours in that park by the music school, listening to children butcher Bach while memories of Bobby teaching me violin threatened to split my skull open.” She pauses, finally focusing on the menu. “I have to admit, hunger is becoming an increasingly urgent coefficient in this equation. Haven’t exactly been prioritizing sustenance lately. More of an optional parameter in the grand scheme of things.”
The waiter approaches with practiced discretion, his presence barely registering as he takes their orders. Alicia’s eyes flicker with a rare spark of anticipation as she requests steak, potatoes, and two fried eggs, her voice betraying a hunger that goes beyond the physical. Jon watches her carefully, noting the way her fingers twitch slightly against the table, as if impatient to bridge the gap between thought and sustenance. When the food arrives, Alicia hesitates for only a moment before plunging her fork into the eggs, her movements quick and almost feral, a stark contrast to her earlier philosophical musings. Jon, meanwhile, eats with deliberate calm, his gaze occasionally drifting to her, as if trying to decipher the layers of pain and brilliance that make her so compelling.
Jon swallows a morsel of hamburger.
“I’m glad to see you eating so eagerly. When you’re surrounded by darkness, what I’ve found that helps you stick around is pure physical pleasure. Eating is a good example. Gotta watch the waist, though.”
Alicia Western pauses mid-bite, her fork hovering between plate and mouth as she considers Jon’s words. Her blue eyes narrow slightly, studying him with the calculated precision of a mathematician evaluating a complex equation.
“Physical pleasure as an anchor point in the darkness?” A dry chuckle escapes her lips. “That’s… surprisingly elegant in its simplicity. Though I have to wonder – what happens when even the most basic sensations start feeling like theoretical constructs? When hunger becomes just another variable in the grand equation of existence?” She takes another bite, chewing thoughtfully. “But you’re right about one thing – there’s something undeniably real about the way protein and carbohydrates interact with depleted neurotransmitters. Almost makes me forget I’m technically committing fratricide by degrees, watching machines breathe for Bobby while I indulge in medium-rare rebellion against entropy. Though I suppose that’s the real joke, isn’t it? We’re all just complex systems fighting against inevitable decay, one meal at a time.”
Jon wipes his greasy fingertips on a napkin, then spears a couple of fried potatoes with his fork.
“Stop me if you don’t want to go there, but… is the prognosis for your brother Bobby the kind that offers no hope whatsoever?”
Alicia Western sets down her fork with deliberate slowness, her fingers trembling slightly as they release the utensil. Her gaze grows distant, focusing on some point beyond the restaurant’s amber-lit walls.
“Hope?” A bitter laugh escapes her lips. “No, hope isn’t exactly part of the prognosis equation. The doctors in Italy… they speak in percentages and probabilities, wrapping their clinical certainty in gentle euphemisms. Brain damage from oxygen deprivation during the crash – severe, irreversible. The machines keep his heart beating, his lungs expanding, but Bobby… the real Bobby, the one who could solve differential equations while racing Formula Two… he’s trapped somewhere between quantum states. Neither fully here nor gone. Schrödinger’s brother, if you will. And I… I keep running these endless calculations, trying to determine the exact moment when maintaining his physical form becomes nothing more than an exercise in prolonging my own denial. But here’s the truly twisted part – I can’t bring myself to close the function. Because the moment I accept that final variable… the moment I sign those papers…” Her voice drops to barely above a whisper. “Well, let’s just say some equations have solutions too devastating to contemplate.”
Jon glances up at the ceiling lights as he chews, then sets his fork down after swallowing.
“Have you heard the story of a father who in the 19th century or whenever buried his sixteen-year-old daughter, only to start having terrible nightmares of her crying out from her coffin, asking for help? The guy didn’t act on those nightmares, but a week or so later, he needed to know, so he asked the graveyard keeper to dig the coffin up. When they opened it, her daughter was dead, but with an expression of horror in her face.” He looks down at the table for a moment. “What I mean is that if you pull the plug on Bobby, he’s gone a hundred percent. If you keep him on respirators, at least there’s a chance.”
Alicia Western pushes her plate aside slightly, her fingers drumming an erratic rhythm on the tablecloth as she processes Jon’s macabre story. Her eyes take on that distant, calculating look of someone running complex probability scenarios in their head.
“That’s quite the bedtime story you’ve got there. Really knows how to hit all those Edgar Allan Poe sweet spots – premature burial, paternal guilt, the works. But here’s the thing about your little parable: that girl was already dead when daddy dearest started having his crisis of conscience. Bobby… he’s neither dead nor alive. He’s a walking, breathing paradox maintained by Italian medical technology and my own inability to face quantum collapse. At least that poor Victorian girl got to make her own exit, even if it was wrapped in horror and regret. Bobby doesn’t even get that choice – I’m the one holding his wave function in superposition because I’m too much of a coward to collapse it into a definitive state. Though I suppose there’s a certain poetic symmetry there… he always was trying to outrace his own shadow on those Formula Two tracks. Now he’s permanently suspended between being and nothingness, while I keep running calculations on whether maintaining his physical form is just another way of prolonging my own denial.”
Jon gives it some thought, his gaze darting over the table.
“Do you think that the possibility of Bobby waking up, undergoing some rehabilitation, however long it may take, and then regaining pretty much pre-crash functionality is absolutely zero percent? Because if it isn’t, you can’t give up. It’s a matter of not living with that regret, at least for me.”
Alicia Western stares down at her half-eaten meal, her fingers tracing abstract patterns on the tablecloth as she speaks. Her voice takes on a hollow quality, like someone reciting theoretical proofs to an empty auditorium.
“Nothing in this universe is ever truly zero percent – that’s the cruel joke of quantum mechanics. There’s always some infinitesimal probability lurking in the decimal places, taunting us with its mathematical possibility. But you want to talk about functionality? About rehabilitation? Bobby wasn’t just some average joe who could settle for partial recovery. He was brilliant, meteoric – the kind of mind that could calculate wind resistance while pushing 200 mph on rain-slicked tracks. The doctors… they showed me the scans. Those beautiful neural pathways that used to light up like Christmas when we’d debate string theory – they’re dark now. Dead zones where genius used to live. So even if by some miracle he did wake up… what then? Watch him struggle to remember his own name while I pretend that’s enough? That’s not hope – that’s torture dressed up in medical jargon and false optimism. But you’re right about one thing – regret is a nasty variable in this equation. I just can’t figure out which would hurt more: letting him go or keeping him trapped in this half-life because I’m too scared to face a universe where Bobby isn’t just one more miracle away from coming back to me.”
“If Bobby were to wake up from his coma, where is the line where you decide that the remaining Bobby isn’t the brother you love? If he’s no longer able to calculate complex equations? If he doesn’t remember what happened a year ago? If he doesn’t recall his own name? If he can’t control his sphincter? If you end up with a Bobby who remembers you and loves you, isn’t that enough?”
Alicia Western leans forward, her fingers wrapping around her water glass with white-knuckled intensity. Her blue eyes take on that distant, haunted look of someone peering into mathematical infinities.
“You want to know where I draw the line between my brother and whatever shadow of him might wake up in that hospital bed?” A bitter laugh escapes her throat. “That’s the problem with binary thinking – it assumes there’s some clean break between ‘Bobby’ and ‘not Bobby.’ But consciousness isn’t a light switch you can flip on and off. It’s more like… like wave function collapse in quantum mechanics. Every synapse that died during that crash fractured his consciousness into smaller and smaller pieces, until what’s left is just… probability clouds of who he used to be. And yes, maybe some version of him could wake up tomorrow remembering my name, remembering that he loves me. But love isn’t just memory – it’s the shared language we built between differential equations and twilight drives. It’s the way he could finish my thoughts before I spoke them, how we could spend hours debating whether Einstein was God while pushing 90 on empty highways. So tell me, what’s crueler? Letting him go, or keeping him trapped in some fractured echo of who he was, just so I can pretend that having any Bobby is better than no Bobby at all?”
Jon empties half of his wine glass.
“What’s crueler? As in your case, I don’t know the answer. I’m leaning toward waiting for him to wake up just in case enough of himself remains. But let’s flip it to your perspective: if you pull the plug and you have a 100% certainty that Bobby is dead, what the hell would you do with yourself? I mean, I found you lying in the damp grass of a foreign park, in a country that isn’t yours. You aren’t doing well already.”
Alicia Western’s fingers drift to her collarbone, tracing the hollow space there as her gaze fixes on some distant point beyond the restaurant walls. Her other hand clutches the wine glass with barely contained tension.
“That’s rich coming from someone who found me sprawled in foreign grass like some discarded theorem. But you want to know the truth? I’m already not doing well. Every morning I wake up running probability calculations on whether today will be the day Bobby beats the odds. Every night I fall asleep counting the infinite ways consciousness could reassemble itself in damaged neural pathways. The machines keep his heart beating while mine’s trying to solve for variables that don’t exist anymore. So what’s the difference between pulling the plug and letting him linger? Either way, I’m just postponing my own inevitable collapse. At least in death, there’s a certain mathematical certainty. In this limbo… this quantum superposition of hope and despair… I can’t even properly grieve because part of me is still solving for x where x equals miracle. You’re right though – I’m not doing well. But that’s the thing about shooting stars – we’re not exactly known for our smooth landings.”
Jon looks sympathetically into Alicia’s troubled eyes.
“You’re hoping to die, then. Have you planned something?”
Alicia Western’s fingers trace meaningless equations on the tablecloth as her gaze drifts toward the window. Her voice takes on a detached, clinical tone that barely masks the raw pain underneath.
“Planned something? That’s a rather delicate way of asking if I’ve calculated the most efficient exit strategy. But you’re operating under a false assumption – that I need Bobby’s death to justify my own. The truth is, I’ve been running the numbers since long before his crash. The probability of my continued existence has always been asymptotic, approaching zero with each passing day. It’s just… Bobby was the only variable keeping me anchored to this side of the equation. Now? Whether he lives or dies, I’m already caught in a death spiral. The only difference is the rate of descent. So no, I haven’t ‘planned’ anything specific. But when you’re a shooting star burning out, you don’t exactly need a roadmap to find the ground.”
Jon cuts a piece of hamburger, then chews on it thoughtfully.
“What if I were to bring you home, strap you to a chair, and feed you periodically, removing the agency from you, until Bobby woke up and we found out for real whether or not the remaining brother can still anchor you to this world?”
Alicia Western’s eyes flash with sudden intensity as she leans across the table, her fingers curling into tight fists against the tablecloth.
“Strap me to a chair? How delightfully medieval of you. Tell me, do you often fantasize about force-feeding strange women you find sprawled in parks, or am I just special? But here’s the real kicker in your little scenario – you’re still operating under this quaint assumption that Bobby’s fate is the lynchpin holding my existence together. As if my countdown to extinction started with his crash. No, sweetheart, I’ve been calculating my own demise since I was old enough to understand probability theory. Bobby was just… a variable that made the equation bearable for a while. The only difference between then and now is that I don’t have anyone left who speaks fluent ‘weird’ anymore. So go ahead – play captain save-a-ho if it makes you feel better about your own existential crisis. But don’t pretend you’re doing it for Bobby, or even for me. Some equations just don’t have solutions, no matter how hard you try to force them.”
“Listen, Alicia, I just don’t want a beautiful woman in her early twenties to kill herself. It’s a crime against nature and decency. At least wait until you’re old and done.”
Alicia Western’s eyes narrow dangerously, and her voice takes on a razor-sharp edge.
“Is that what this is about? Some twisted white knight fantasy where you get to play hero to the damsel in mathematical distress? Let me make something perfectly clear – my death isn’t some tragedy you can prevent by appealing to aesthetics or decency. It’s written into my DNA, coded into every synaptic misfire that makes me see things other people can’t. You think nature gives a damn about preserving beauty? Tell that to the supernovas that burn out their own hearts just to scatter their elements across the void. And as for waiting until I’m ‘old and done’ – that’s the joke, isn’t it? People like me, we don’t get to be old. We burn too bright, too fast, consuming ourselves from the inside out until there’s nothing left but theoretical ash and probability distributions. So spare me your moral platitudes about crimes against nature. Nature itself is one big crime scene, and we’re all just evidence waiting to be cataloged.”
Jon sighs. He rests his elbows on the table, then holds his hands.
“I just don’t want someone as unique as you to die, Alicia. It’s as simple as that. It strikes me as wrong. It only takes listening to you for a couple of minutes to realize that a bright intelligence like yours is far more prone to suicide than anyone else. But now that I know you, I don’t want you gone. Be dismissive of me for that notion all you want.”
Alicia Western lets out a hollow laugh. Her sapphire eyes lock onto Jon with an unsettling intensity.
“Unique? That’s what you’re going with? Like I’m some rare butterfly specimen you want to pin under glass and preserve? Let me tell you something about uniqueness – it’s just another word for mutation, for error in the code. Every genius, every prodigy, every mind that burns too bright – we’re all just glitches in the matrix. Nature’s experimental prototypes that weren’t meant to survive past the testing phase. And now you’re sitting there, telling me you don’t want me to die just because you’ve invested a few minutes of attention in my particular brand of madness? That’s not altruism, that’s just ego masquerading as concern. You don’t want to save me – you just don’t want to be the last person who saw me alive. Well, tough luck. My trajectory was calculated long before you found me in that park, and your desire to keep me around doesn’t change the mathematics of inevitability.”
“What did you expect me to say, Alicia? ‘Oh, sure, kill yourself. What the fuck do I care’? Go ahead and die if that makes you happy. I’ve wanted to die many times myself, but I hold on for the next passing physical pleasure to keep me afloat for a bit longer.”
Alicia Western tilts her head back and releases a brittle laugh, her fingers curling around her wine glass like talons seeking purchase on reality.
“How delightfully hedonistic of you. But there’s your fundamental error – assuming I want to be happy, that happiness is even relevant to this equation. You’re treating death like it’s some optional variable I can just eliminate from the function if I tried hard enough. But it’s not about happiness or sadness or any of those neat little emotional boxes you’re trying to stuff me into. It’s about mathematical inevitability. Every genius, every prodigy who burns too bright – we’re all just counting down to our own extinction. The only difference is some of us can see the numbers more clearly than others. Bobby understood that. He didn’t try to save me from myself – he just gave me enough reasons to keep calculating until the numbers finally ran out. So don’t sit there offering me physical pleasures like some discount Mephistopheles. I’ve already solved this equation. The only variable left is time.”
“Don’t you want to have a child?”
Alicia Western’s eyes flash with a mixture of contempt and amusement as she traces fractals in the condensation of her wine glass.
“A child? That’s your grand solution to existential entropy? How charmingly pedestrian. You think propagating my genetic code would somehow anchor me to this plane of existence? Let me tell you something about reproduction – it’s just nature’s way of admitting its first draft was flawed. Look at my family tree – it’s not exactly a testament to successful genetic transmission, is it? Mother took the express exit before I hit puberty, father’s brain turned to quantum mush, and Bobby… well, we know how that story ends. What makes you think I’d want to add another variable to that equation? Another mind possibly cursed with seeing too much, thinking too fast, burning too bright? No, bringing a child into this nightmare would be the cruelest calculation of all. Besides, you’re assuming I’ll live long enough to even consider maternal instincts. Time’s arrow only points one way, and my trajectory was plotted long before this little chat.”
Jon leans back on his seat, looking defeated.
“So that’s it, then. You are going to kill yourself. The fact that you’re still arguing instead of heading to a bridge and flinging yourself off means that there’s a chance that you may stick around. Or is it pure cowardice that keeps you on Earth?”
Alicia Western lifts her chin defiantly as a bitter smile plays across her lips.
“Cowardice? Now that’s rich coming from someone who uses physical pleasure as a life preserver. At least I have the intellectual honesty to recognize my trajectory for what it is. You think I’m still here because I’m afraid? Please. I’m still here because the mathematics of self-destruction require precise calculations. It’s not about finding the courage to jump – it’s about solving the equation perfectly. Every variable needs to align just right. The time, the place, the method – they’re all part of a complex formula that I’ve been refining since before Bobby decided to make his grand exit. And yes, maybe I am still arguing instead of taking that final step. But don’t mistake precision for hesitation. When I go, it won’t be some impulsive leap into the void. It’ll be as elegantly solved as any proof I’ve ever written. So no, I’m not sticking around because of chance or cowardice. I’m just making sure the numbers add up before I submit my final answer.”
“Do you have anywhere to go after this? Anything besides lying in the grass halfway to hypothermia?”
Alicia Western brushes a strand of unkempt blonde hair from her face, her sapphire eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the immediate reality of the restaurant. Her fingers trace abstract patterns on the condensation of her untouched wine glass.
“Oh, you mean beyond this charming little dance of ours where you pretend to care and I pretend to listen? No, my itinerary isn’t exactly packed these days. The damp grass and I have developed quite the intimate relationship lately – it’s refreshingly honest about its intentions to slowly leech the warmth from my bones. At least it doesn’t try to dress up its purpose in concerned platitudes or existential ultimatums. But since you’re so invested in my social calendar, I suppose I could pencil in a few more hours of counting stars until their patterns start resembling Bobby’s last EEG readings. Or maybe I’ll wander back to that music school, let the dissonant scales of children learning Bach drown out the probability calculations running through my head. Would that satisfy your need to know I’m not immediately planning to subtract myself from this equation?”
Jon flags down the waiter, who approaches their table quietly.
“Yeah, check, please.” When the waiter leaves, Jon turns his weary gaze to Alicia. “I suppose this is it, Alicia Western. You’re going to show up in my nightmares for the rest of my life, so the jury is out on whether I’m glad I approached you in the park or not.”
Alicia Western pushes back from the table with a fluid, almost feline grace, her sapphire eyes glinting with something between amusement and disdain.
“At least you’ll have something to remember me by beyond this little exercise in futility. But don’t worry too much about your unconscious mind’s pending haunting – I tend to leave lighter footprints in other people’s dreams than in reality. Though I must say, it’s refreshingly honest of you to admit your ambivalence about our chance encounter. Most people try to dress up their regret in layers of manufactured concern. You, at least, acknowledge the inherent cost of bearing witness to someone else’s inevitable mathematical conclusion. So yes, this is it – our final theorem, solved and sealed. Maybe in some parallel universe, there’s an Alicia Western who knows how to accept the kind of anchors you’re offering. But in this one? Well… let’s just say some equations were never meant to balance.”
Jon rises from the booth, his broad frame casting a long shadow across the polished floor. His eyes, clouded by regret and unease, linger on Alicia a moment longer, as though trying to imprint her haunting beauty into his memory. Then, with a slow nod, he turns away, hands buried in his coat pockets, the fabric rustling with each step. The amber-lit restaurant seems to hold its breath as he moves toward the exit, the weight of their conversation hanging in the air like a storm yet to break. The door clicks shut behind him, leaving Alicia alone in the booth, her fingers still tracing invisible equations on the tablecloth, the silence now heavier than before.
Alicia Western rises slowly from the booth, her movements deliberate and precise as she adjusts her crumpled shirt. Her sapphire eyes catch the amber light, reflecting something both haunting and resigned.
“Well, I suppose you can add me to your collection of beautiful catastrophes now. Another theorem solved, another proof completed. Some equations were never meant to be solved, some variables never meant to be isolated. We’re all just cosmic accidents waiting to happen, Jon. The only difference is some of us can see our trajectories more clearly than others. So go ahead, let me haunt your dreams. At least there I might find some purpose beyond counting down to zero.”
Author’s note: today’s song is “Radio Cure” by Wilco.
Alicia stands outside the entrance to the Stella Maris sanatorium, wrapped tightly in her winter coat as light snow drifts down. Her only possession is the gold chain around her neck; she had given away everything else, even her cherished violin, before coming here, intent on ending her life. But now, through the falling snow, she spots a car, a Chevrolet Camaro, pulling through the gates and into the sanatorium grounds. Before the car comes to a full stop, she recognizes her brother, Bobby, through the windshield.
When Bobby Western rushes out of the Camaro, a grin of incredulous relief spreads across his face. In two long strides, he’s at Alicia’s side; she stands stunned, hardly believing this reunion is real. Bobby scoops her into a hug, lifting her off the pavement, making her whirl around.
“You’re alive.” He lowers his sister to the pavement, then cups her face as he looks into her eyes. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done. For getting on that racecar and crashing and making you feel I was gone.”
Alicia Western trembles in Bobby’s arms, her fingers clutching the fabric of his coat as tears stream down her face. Her blue eyes shine with an intensity that mirrors the snow-reflected light around them.
“Bobby… I keep thinking I’ll wake up and find myself frozen in those woods behind the sanatorium. That this is just the last beautiful dream before hypothermia takes me. But you’re warm. You’re real. God, you’re real. I tried to die without you, Bobby. I tried so many times. Lake Tahoe. The woods here. But I couldn’t do it right. I couldn’t even do that right. And now you’re here and I don’t know if I deserve this moment but I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. More than mathematics. More than music. More than truth itself.”
A flash of shock and anguish twists Bobby’s expression.
“Wait, you… walked into the woods behind the sanatorium to freeze to death?” Bobby places his hands on Alicia’s shoulders. A tear rolls down his cheek. “While I was in a coma, I had a horrible… dream. I was a hunter. I was tasked with searching for you in some woods during winter. I found you. You were wearing a white dress with a red sash wrapped around it, that you had put on so your corpse would be easily spotted. Your beautiful blond hair, your eyes, they were frozen. Even in the coma, I couldn’t bear the anguish. You’re telling me that you truly ventured into the woods to die?”
She sways slightly in Bobby’s grip, her face stark white against the falling snow. She reaches up to touch his face with trembling fingers, tracing the lines that weren’t there before his accident.
“Yes. Yes, I did. I walked into those woods wearing my white dress. I’d given away everything else – my clothes, my violin, even my books. Just kept this chain. I thought… I thought if they found me, the gold would catch the light. Like a signal fire. But I couldn’t even do that right. The nurses found me before the cold could finish its work. Bobby, that dream you had – it wasn’t just a dream. That’s exactly what I tried to do. The white dress, the red sash, everything. We were connected even then, weren’t we? Even with you in a coma in Italy and me here in Wisconsin. Like some terrible equation that needed solving. Like two particles quantum entangled across an ocean. It’s all true. The only reason I’m still alive is because I failed. Because I couldn’t bear the thought that if you woke up, you’d think it was your fault.”
Bobby struggles to push the words out.
“You were found, you survived… it’s a miracle. In most other universes, if such exist, I must have woken up from my coma only to find out that you had frozen to death. This may be the only reality in which I’m able to speak to you, to touch you again. If so…”
Bobby cups the back of Alicia’s head, then pulls her in. His breath hitches at the feel of her lips. Alicia Western melts into Bobby’s kiss, her entire body trembling. Her hands clutch at his coat with desperate strength, as if afraid he might dissolve into snow if she loosens her grip. When their lips finally part, tears freeze on her cheeks in the winter air.
“I’ve imagined this moment so many times, Bobby. In dreams, in hallucinations, even in mathematical equations – trying to calculate the probability that you’d wake up and still want me. Still love me the way I love you. The Kid, he told me you would come. He said goodbye, said his work was done because you were returning. I didn’t believe him. I never believe anything good anymore. Yet here you are, kissing me like I’ve always wanted you to kiss me, like I’m not your broken little sister but something precious and whole. Something worth saving. Do you know what I did while you were in the coma? I tried to map the topology of grief. I tried to prove that parallel universes must exist, because I couldn’t bear the thought that this was the only reality – the one where you might never wake up. I calculated the exact temperature at which a human body freezes to death in these woods, factoring in wind chill and core temperature decline. And now you are, and suddenly all those equations are pointless. The world finally makes sense again.”
Bobby lowers his hand to Alicia’s, and grabs it tightly as if fearing that she may disappear.
“Let’s get out of here immediately, sis. The sun will set in a matter of minutes. I’ll drive to the nearest town, Hawthorn Falls. We’ll rent a room at the hotel, and we’ll spend the night in each other’s arms.”
“Yes, yes, let’s go before anything tries to stop us. Just drive, Bobby. Drive fast. But not too fast. I couldn’t bear to lose you to another crash.”
Once they both sit inside the Camaro, Bobby starts the engine and drives toward the gate of the sanatorium grounds. She presses herself against her brother in the passenger seat, her fingers intertwined with his on the gearshift. Snowflakes melt on the windshield as they pass through the gates of Stella Maris.
“God, your hands are so warm,” Alicia says. “In all my mathematical models of parallel universes, I never dared to truly hope for one where you’d come back to me like this. Where you’d choose me. Choose us. The way the snowflakes are falling, it’s like we’re passing through a white curtain into another world.”
For a few minutes, Alicia Western stares out at the falling snow through the Camaro’s windshield, her body pressed against Bobby’s side as her thumb traces small circles on his hand.
“The silence feels right, doesn’t it? Just the snow falling and our hands touching and the engine’s quiet rumble. Remember when we were kids and you’d drive me home from those honky-tonks? I’d press against you just like this, wanting so badly to tell you how I felt. Now here we are, and I don’t have to hide anymore. I don’t have to pretend I’m your wife to keep the fights down – I can just be yours, truly yours. The way I’ve always wanted. Bobby… when we get to the hotel, will you play mandolin for me? Like you used to at the Indian Rock? I want to dance for you again. Not as your little sister putting on a show, but as a woman who’s loved you her whole life. Who’s tried to die without you and failed, and now finds herself impossibly, wonderfully alive.”
Bobby laughs, the laugh of a man who had lost his joy only to miraculously find it again.
“Baby, I don’t have a mandolin at hand! But let’s dance anyway. In the future, we’ll return to such bars, to the same old nights, as we ourselves grow older.”
Alicia tilts her head against her brother’s shoulder.
“You know what’s beautiful about the fact that you don’t have a mandolin? It means we’ll have to make our own music. The way snow makes its own geometry – each flake a perfect fractal that defies statistical probability. The mathematics of crystallization ensures infinite variation. Like parallel universes, Bobby. In some of them, we’re already dancing. In some, we never stopped. When we get to the hotel, I want to dance with you in silence first. Let our bodies remember the rhythms from those nights at the Indian Rock. Then maybe you can hum one of those old breakdowns you used to play. The one about the mountains and the moon. I used to watch your fingers on the frets and calculate the intervals between notes, trying to find the mathematical expression for the way the music made me feel. But I never could. Some things transcend mathematics.”
As Bobby drives the Camaro into Hawthorn Falls, Alicia peers out the window, her eyes tracing the outlines of the town’s quaint buildings and winding roads. The Norwegian influence is immediately apparent – rosemaling adorns the barns, and a Lutheran church with an onion dome rises above the trees. Alicia reaches for Bobby’s hand, intertwining her fingers with his. Bobby strokes her soft skin with his thumb.
“I can’t imagine how this must feel for you. Returning to civilization when you had already… decided that you would die.”
Alicia Western leans her head against Bobby’s shoulder, her eyes tracking the movement of snowflakes in the headlights. Her fingers tighten around his hand as they pass the Lutheran church with its onion dome.
“Feeling? It’s like solving an impossible equation and finding that the answer was there all along, hiding in plain sight. Just days ago, I was mapping my own death in the woods – calculating wind chill factors and core temperature decline, trying to determine how long it would take before hypothermia would claim me. But now… now I’m watching these Norwegian-style buildings pass by, and each one feels like a proof of life. Of our life together. Do you see that church dome? In non-Euclidean geometry, there’s this concept called a hyperbolic surface – it curves away from itself in every direction, like that dome reaching for heaven. That’s what this feels like, Bobby. Did you know that in hyperbolic space, you can have infinite parallel lines all intersecting at a single point? Like all possible versions of us, all those parallel lives where I loved you and couldn’t say it, suddenly converging in this moment, in this car, with your hand in mine.”
Bobby pulls the Camaro up to the Hawthorn Inn’s front entrance, its Victorian facade illuminated by a single lantern against the darkening sky. He jumps out and rushes to open Alicia’s door, pulling her close as they hurry through the creaking porch and into the cozy lobby. Alicia’s teeth chatter from the cold, but she feels a warmth spreading through her chest as Bobby wraps an arm around her shoulders, guiding her to the ancient check-in desk. “Room for one night, please,” he says to the elderly caretaker, “for me and my wife.” The old man nods knowingly, handing over a brass key. Alicia’s heart skips a beat at the word “wife,” a secret truth finally spoken aloud. Hand in hand, they ascend the narrow staircase.
Bobby turns the brass key in the lock, and the door swings open to reveal a cozy guest room bathed in the soft glow of a bedside lamp. Alicia steps inside, her eyes taking in the faded floral wallpaper and antique furniture that seem to whisper tales of a bygone era. She runs her fingers along the carved claw feet of the bed, marveling at the intricate craftsmanship. Bobby follows close behind, his hand brushing against Alicia’s lower back in a gesture that feels both familiar and newly charged with longing. As he closes the door, the sound of the latch clicking into place seems to seal them off from the rest of the world.
Alicia Western moves slowly into the center of the room, her fingers trailing along the tarnished mirror of the vanity as she takes in every detail of their sanctuary. Her eyes linger on the bed before turning back to Bobby.
“Remember those stories about Romanian monasteries built into cliff faces? Places that seemed to defy gravity and logic? That’s what this feels like – a pocket universe suspended between what was and what will be. When I was planning to die in those woods, I thought about how cold feels like burning after a while. How pain becomes its own inverse. But this… this warmth between us… it’s like finding the square root of negative one. Bobby, I don’t want to dance yet. I just want to stand here and prove to myself that this is real. That you’re real. That we’ve found our non-Euclidean space where parallel lives can intersect.”
Bobby approaches Alicia and gently begins to unbutton her winter coat, each click of the buttons echoing in the quiet room. As the coat falls open, he sees the white dress beneath, a chilling reminder of his dream and the truth of her attempt at self-annihilation. With a shaky breath, Bobby shrugs off his own jacket, letting it pool at his feet. He pulls Alicia into his arms, cradling her against his chest as he nuzzles his face into her neck. He can feel her heart fluttering against his skin, a steady rhythm that assures him she is alive, here, in his arms, defying the odds and the laws of a universe that tried to keep them apart.
Alicia trembles slightly as Bobby holds her. She catches their reflection in the tarnished mirror: two silhouettes merging in the lamp’s dim glow.
“The air in here tastes like old equations, Bobby. Like theorems written in dust. Do you know what’s beautiful about non-commutative algebra? When you multiply two elements, their order matters. Like us – we had to experience everything in exactly the right sequence to reach this moment. If we’d tried this even a month ago, the variables wouldn’t have aligned. But now… now we’re like a perfect proof. Did you feel how cold I was in those woods? Like absolute zero, the theoretical point where all molecular motion stops. But I was found before I could reach that limit. Your body against mine now – it’s creating heat like fusion, like stars being born. The doctors at Stella Maris would say this is madness, but they never understood that madness has its own elegant mathematics. Its own inviolable laws. When I was fourteen, outside the Indian Rock, you wouldn’t kiss me properly because, as you told me yesterday, I was too young. Now we’re like paired electrons – opposite spins in perfect quantum entanglement. No matter how far apart we are, we’ll always affect each other’s state. Hold me tighter, Bobby. I want to feel the weight of reality pressing against us, proving we exist in the same space at the same time.”
Bobby runs his fingers along Alicia’s scalp as he holds her tight, swaying slightly on his feet.
“What did you think about, Alicia, back when you sat in the frozen woods to die? What thoughts crossed your mind while you waited there alone for the cold to take you?”
She presses her face into Bobby’s chest, her fingers curling into his shirt as if anchoring herself to reality. Her voice emerges muffled but clear, carrying the weight of mathematical certainty.
“I thought about the thermodynamics of dying, Bobby. The precise rate at which my body heat would dissipate into the surrounding air. The way entropy always increases in an isolated system. I calculated how many minutes it would take before my core temperature dropped below the threshold for consciousness. But mostly… mostly I thought about you. About that summer we spent dancing at the Indian Rock, about the way you’d play mandolin with the band while I twirled in my floozy dress. I thought about how in quantum mechanics, observing a system changes its state – and I wondered if my death would somehow alter your comatose state, like entangled particles affecting each other across impossible distances. I even derived an equation for it, there in the snow. Something beautiful and completely insane about the relationship between your consciousness and my existence. The numbers said you’d never wake up, that the probability approached absolute zero. But here you are, defying my calculations, proving that sometimes love is stronger than mathematics. I think Dr. Marcus Hall understood this better than any of my therapists – that the only way to solve an impossible equation is to punch through it, to break the rules that make it impossible in the first place.”
Bobby’s arms tighten around Alicia as they sway gently, their bodies pressed together in a desperate attempt to erase the distance that once separated them. Their movements are slow and tentative, as if afraid that any sudden motion might shatter the fragile reality they’ve found. Alicia’s hands clutch at his back, her fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt. Their eyes meet, a silent exchange of relief for the present and sorrow for the past, while the radiator’s faint hiss fills the room like a quiet symphony. In this moment, there is no need for music or words.
The room seems to hold its breath. As their bodies sway gently, the soft glow from the bedside lamp casts a warm halo around them, creating an intimate bubble that shuts out the cold, dark world beyond the window.
“Bobby, I will never love anyone but you. I knew it even as a girl. That made the world so perilous. I feared the moment you would disappear from my sight. I used to walk those dark country roads at night thinking about non-Euclidean geometry, about spaces where parallel lines could meet. Do you remember that summer night when you played ‘Pretty Polly’ on the mandolin at the Moonlight Diner? I was wearing that red dress, the one that made me look like a floozy, and I wanted you to take me right there on the hood of your car. The doctors said my desires were pathological. When I was freezing in those woods, I thought about the heat death of the universe, about entropy always increasing until no useful work can be done. Bobby, make me forget all those nights I walked the dark roads alone.”
Author’s note: I started rereading The Passenger. I feel that’s something I have to do. I had completely forgotten that it opens with a description of the moment when Alicia’s corpse was found. I read recently that McCarthy had been working on this novel for fifty fucking years. Haunted by her for half of his life.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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