“What the hell is wrong with my eyes?” I asked louder than I wanted. I pulled at the handcuffs again. They held. I pulled harder.
“Oh for God’s sake.” Lena reached into her pocket and withdrew a pewter key with a pink plastic heart at the end. “I’ll take the cuffs off. We didn’t mean anything by it—we just haven’t used them in a while.”
“I chased a half-naked Santa yesterday but there is something wrong with you guys!”
“I get that you’re scared now Sam,” Amrith said calmly. “But believe it or not so are we. You nearly died. And if you did, it would’ve been our fault.”
“And now you’re in danger,” Lena added. She reached behind me and I felt her hands probe for the handcuffs. She found the keyhole, slid in the key, and twisted. The cuffs popped off my wrists.
“So, for the next little while, please just hear us out. Then you can decide what to do. We won’t bother you, and you won’t bother us.” Amrith said.
It sounded like a plan. And since Amrith had sped up to sixty, it wouldn’t be safe to karate chop his throat and steal the car.
“What’s wrong with my—” I began.
“You’ve been marked by a Stalker Man.” Lena said. She took away the handcuffs and slid them both onto her right hand. They clicked smartly over her wrist. “They’re like—ghosts. They live in Level Zero.”
“On ends of cycles, usually the Stalker Men are quiet, and Level Zero becomes this blank place.” Amrith said. He turned into a new street. “But tonight it looked like one was still running around.”
“Okay.” I did not understand any of that. “So what’s Level Zero?”
Lena brought up her Blackberry again. “Imagine,” she said repeated, “that the world works like Mario.”
She pressed clicked on a mushroom-shaped app. The Mario Bros theme song exploded out the speakers; the title screen for the arcade version of Super Mario sprang up on the Blackberry.
Lena held the Blackberry out to me so I could watch her play. She cleared the first level in thirty seconds. I wanted to scream but I kept my mouth shut.
“Level Zero is like, junk data.” She said, over the Mario song.
She entered the second level, the one that goes underground. She sent her Mario forward, and then jumped into a black space.
For a second, I thought she’d just jumped into a Game Over, but as the screen moved forward I saw a sliver of green; there was a platform there, hidden just at the edge of the screen. I’d played a lot of Mario but never noticed that platform before.
“Here, you ever see this glitch?” She asked. I shook my head.
Lena continued on the hidden platform. On screen, Mario started vibrating up and down. A green pipe appeared, and Lena walked into it.
The screen went black. The music cut.
“This is a hidden level.” Lena said. “The designers never programmed it in here—it’s just a bunch of random data and programs that somehow formed a world.”
The screen flashed back to colour.
Lena’s Mario stood in an overworld. The colour was off—mixed purples and pinks overlaid on the usual colour-scheme. And for some reason the fish enemies were flying through the air.
The music was back, but it sounded deeper, and slightly off-key. I didn’t like it.
“Cool huh?” Lena sent Mario forward, jumping over the flying fish monsters. The music bugged me but its atonality didn’t register on Lena’s face. “Later on you see Princess Peach just floating in the air. It’s creepy. Cracked.com said it was one of the creepiest video game glitches ever.”
“Anyway,” Amrith cut in. “Level Zero is like this hidden level we think.”
Lena turned off her Blackberry and tucked it into her jeans. “The Stalker Men live inside Level Zero. We think they’re junk data too—”
“Junk data?” I asked.
“We think the world is like a computer program.” Lena said.
Amrith grunted.
“Josh and Laurent and me think the world is a lot like a computer program.” Lena said. Amrith nodded.
I closed my eyes. I felt unmoored again—like a man who looks up to the stars and finds they’ve all changed. No more little dipper, no more Orion—just grid lines across a camera feed.
Somehow I was Mario now.
Amrith turned onto a bigger road. Streetlamps flew by the dark windows. Flecks of rain dotted the windows.
“Turn the heat up,” Lena murmured. Amrith swung a few dials on the dashboard.
“We can explain more when we get to Ossington.” Amrith said to me. He looked like he wanted to pat my shoulder, but thought better of it.
“When I first saw Level Zero, I nearly crapped myself.” Amrith said.
“Got it.” I put my head between my knees. Warm air spilled on the back of my neck. I swallowed. My stomach felt sick. The car shuddered, and my head bounced lightly against the glove compartment.
These people.
These disorienting people.
They’d called that dungeon thing Level Zero.
They’d casually wrecked conventional reality using Super Mario.
The car rumbled ahead. Streetlights drifted by, pouring strips of light across my feet. The rain picked up. I heard it patter on the glass like gravel shifting. I closed my eyes.
I had to be dreaming.
But, a voice in my head said, crystal clear, you’re not.
If Amrith and Lena were right, I’d discovered a glitch in the universe.
This was the discovery of the millennium.
A breakthrough in how we understood everything.
And the only people who knew about it were a bunch of nerds.
#
By the time we entered downtown, the last bands of orange twilight had sunk with the sun under Lake Ontario. Cars crammed the streets and headlights shone through rainy darkness. The clouds hung low, and the skyscrapers we passed to get to Ossington rose into a fog.
I still hadn’t woken up.
Amrith and Lena kept talking about Level Zero. It was ridiculous. Suspecting it was true made me want to throw up.
“We think Level Zero works like a computer program because of Laurent and Josh. They’re both physics masters.” Lena said. “You know quantum mechanics? How that cat is alive and dead inside a box? That trippy shit?”
I had never heard of Schroedinger’s cat referred to as “trippy shit” before, but I nodded. My stomach shifted, squeezed and swallowed.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Terror had kicked back the grand, heaving hunger that would have made me miserable, but that hunger had been replaced with a cold, draining sense of emptiness.
“Well they say that Level Zero is like, an inevitability of that stuff.” Lena “There’s this—”
Lena kept talking. I leaned my head against the window. My breath brushed fog against the cold glass. One of my eyes reflected bright blue in the fog.
I closed my eyes and warm tears welled behind my eyes. I pushed them back.
I didn’t have to believe this.
"And then there’s the Stalker Men.” Lena said quietly.
Amrith looked over at me. At my glowing eyes. He blinked and turned away.
“Uh, the Stalker Men are also like junk data.” Lena murmured to her lap.
“I wanted to call them Grudgers" Amrith said. “You know, like those monsters from the Grudge?”
“Love that movie.” I said absently. Fog danced to my words on the glass.
“Original Japanese right?” Amrith asked.
“American remake sucked so bad.” I agreed.
“Bit where that little kid is in the elevator?” Lena added.
“Awesome.” I said.
I waited for someone to tell me what the Stalker Men did. No one volunteered, so I extrapolated from the name that they stalked stuff.
Somewhere far away, an ambulance wailed.
We were near the Ossington-Bloor intersection now. I could see the familiar shops and landmarks. The Pizza Pizza that marked th
e border of the anomaly was coming up. Its green and orange sign glowed pure and bright in the gritty, rainy night. Despite my unease, the image of a hyper-real, steaming pizza burst into my mind. To my empty stomach, the image was good enough to set off a pang in my gut, like a prisoner rattling the bars of his cell. Oh man, the crust would be all greasy, and the cheese would still be slightly melted, and there’d be broccoli because broccoli tasted great on pizza and anyone who disagreed was stupid. Pizza was fucking awesome.
“What you caught Laurent and Josh doing was a speed run,” Lena said. The neon green-orange Pizza Pizza sign drifted behind her head and disappeared down the street. “That’s like, a competition we have. We link gates in Level Zero and race through—”
“You should call Haze,” Amrith interrupted. “Tell him we called it off.”
“I messaged him.” Lena said.
Amrith raised his eyebrows and tilted his head just slightly at me. Lena shook her head.
We reached Bloor and Ossington in silence. The rain tap-tapped the car roof and wound rivers down the windows. The rain hammered the streets, and pounded up a fog. I couldn’t see to the next block.
“Turn left,” I instructed Amrith.
Amrith turned. The headlights of the car flashed down the side street I was now so familiar with.
The street was dead. A few metres away the Bloor traffic honked and stopped and splashed the sidewalks with rainwater, but no one needed to go to this tiny road now.
Wet leaves and scraps of flyers lined the street. Laurent’s blue Yaris sat pulled to the side beside the pit, just after where the corridor made by the construction railing went back up to the sidewalk. Two shadows that looked like Laurent and Josh stood in the corridor, out of the rain.
Amrith pulled up behind them.
We got out of the car. The moon wasn’t out. The asphalt glared with the streetlamp’s reflected light. The road’s imperfections—the patchwork pavement, the shrubs and weeds poking through the sidewalk stones, all loomed bolder and bigger in the half-dark.
I winced. The rain fell cold on the back of my neck. Droplets pooled around my eyes and dripped down my nose like tears.
Behind me, Lena slammed the car door shut. A car roared past us and splashed cold, gritty water on my ankles.
The rain fell back as we entered the corridor. A sheet of cardboard above us, framed in yellow light, blocked most of it. Nevertheless, a thin mist poured off the sheet and fell down us like a waterfall.
Josh stepped towards us as we neared. His hood was pulled up. His face was hidden by the dark.
“The backpack was gutted,” Josh shouted as we approached. He held out a black plastic case. “And we found this near the railing.”
Rain beaded off the casing. I looked at Josh.
“It was already soaking,” Josh said. “Sorry.”
My backpack lay near the railing where I left it. It lay on its side empty and waterlogged. All the zippers yawned open; my laptop was gone.
I bent down and hoisted up the backpack. Water splashed out of it. Disgusted, I dropped it and kicked it to the railing, where it flopped against the metal beams.
“So you jumped in there?” Amrith asked, pointing to the pit. The rain muted his voice.
“After all my stuff powered off,” I said. I wrapped my arms around me and shivered.
The pit.
I glanced sideways at it, resenting its presence, half afraid of what I might see. But it looked normal now: empty, and mundane.
I spun on my heels to face the pit. Laurent and Josh parted for me.
I rubbed the wet metal railing with my palms. I’d been here only a few hours ago; I’d been awake then. Now I was drifting in some uneasy nightmare.
Water glimmered at the bottom of the pit, pinpricked with rain. The cardboard signs rattled in the wind. I put my sprained hand on them and tried to gather the cold into it to kill the pain.
Josh peeked over the top. He rolled his shoulders like a fighter entering the ring.
“I’m going in.” He said.
Josh grabbed the railing bars and yanked himself up. The wind and rain billowed his baggy hoodie. He scrambled up the fence without pause and mounted the top.
From down here, the climb looked small. Josh planted his feet one by one with a casual laboriousness, like he was on round three of a Stairmaster workout. It looked easy. But I don’t think I’d ever climb up that railing again: I knew how high it felt when you were up there.
And I knew what was on the other side.
Josh planted a foot on the top of the railing. Then he jumped.
Dropped.
Stopped in mid-air.
Fuck.
I groaned.
During the card ride, I’d hoped. I’d really hoped, that these people were just crazies. Even that I was crazy. It was a better explanation than the one Lena had explained back in the car, and therapy was cheap in Toronto.
But now, Josh walked on air. And I realized with a sinking feeling that the others hadn’t flinched. This was normal for them.
In the pit, Josh lifted his head side to side, angling his head away from the rain. Now, I noticed a glassy surface beneath his feet.
It was rainwater.
Now that Josh stood inside the pit, the rainwater streaming from above stopped just at his feet, sketching the invisible barrier that held him up.
Josh noticed the water slowly rising to skirt his shoelaces. He lifted his feet. I couldn’t see a sneer on Josh’s hidden face, but he could look disgusted with his entire body.
Josh looked around some more. He inspected the walls, ran his hands over the clay, and I think swore to himself a couple of times. Finally, he ran over to us.
“You said there was a barrier here?” He shouted.
I nodded.
Josh hugged his arms and looked around. He jogged over to where the blue line had been.
Josh reached into his pocket. The darkness didn’t let me see much. He put a shadowed arm to the wall and tapped it.
Josh ran back to us. The rain was piling up. Wide puddles were forming on the surface, but they moved strangely; drifting into strange shapes, forming and dispersing by themselves to no apparent force. And it could have been my imagination, but the water seemed to vibrate—almost imperceptibly, like a hummingbird’s wing. I remembered how force had cancelled out when I landed on the barrier. Maybe the water’s behaviour was somehow affected.
“Gate’s gone!” Josh shouted. “Need a blank!”
Laurent turned away from the railing. He flexed his jaw and shook his head like he’d just heard some bad news.
Lena reached to her face. Her hands spun around her ear, and came back with one of her plain, golden earrings. She slipped her arm between the railings.
“Heads up!” Lena shouted. She flicked the earring like a coin, and it flipped up to Josh’s face. Josh snatched it out of the air. He jogged back to the wall, and held the earring against it.
Amrith patted my shoulder and leaned in to my ear. “The Stalker Man must have put in a fake barrier. We always thought it was possible but it’s never been done before.”
I didn’t know what that meant for me; I stared at Josh, still holding the earring against the wall.
“He’s getting a vibration now,” Amrith said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to track the Stalker Man based on what we find. Then we can keep you safe.”
“Keep me safe from what?” I asked.
Amrith bit his lip.
Inside the pit, Josh pocketed the ring and trotted over. He grabbed the railing, pulled himself up, and made a quick climb over. He gripped the top of the fence and slowly climbed down the other side, returning to us. By the time I remembered to look, the barrier was gone. I don’t know what happened to the water.
“It’s a fake program,” Josh announced as he came down. The wind roared as he spoke, and threw the rain sideways. “My gate’s gone.”
“What do Stalker Men do?” I asked Amrith.
“Chri
st,” Laurent muttered. He kicked the fence.
“What do Stalker Men—” I began.
“How smart do you think this one is?” Lena asked.
Josh dug around in his pocket, retrieved the gold earring, and thrust it at me. I took it on reflex.
“Smarter than this fucker.” Josh sneered.
I punched Josh.
The blow came fast, before I knew I'd thrown it. My fist hurtled from my hip, shot out, and sank into Josh's ribs. Impact shook my arm.
It was stupid. But so was he.
I didn’t hear much after that. The scene went slow and fast at the same time. Laurent went to Josh and Amrith held up a hand and shouted something mediating. I shouted something back and jammed the earring into my pocket.
I backed away. Laurent and Amrith stepped towards me but I balled my fists and they backed off.
They grew smaller and smaller as I retreated: Josh kneeling on the ground clutching his side. Laurent swearing. Lena hiding her face in her hands and Amrith watching me go.
#
My car was in the parking lot I left it in. I’d paid for all-day parking, so I didn’t even have a ticket. I drove home and didn’t think about anything.
I live on the second floor of Horizon Apartment Complex, room 217. The building sits a few blocks away from Lakeshore, right next to an empty field that’ll probably be a new apartment building soon. The apartment is in Etobicoke, hovering between Toronto proper and Mississauga’s Port Credit.
The lights were off when I came in. Greg wasn’t in either. Good. I’d rode the elevator to get up, and my eyes were still blue. I didn’t want to explain why. I wasn’t sure I could explain.
I’d noticed something about my eyes: they only glowed in the dark. In lighted areas, they just looked dark blue, like I’d put on contact lenses.
I don’t have a lot of girls over to my apartment, but when I do they called it ‘unique.’ I’m not sure what that meant. We aren’t allowed to paint the off-white walls, but Greg had put up a lot of paintings—some reprints, most originals from Toronto artists. The furniture is a little schizophrenic since most of it we got from garage sales or Ikea.
But it’s clean, quiet, and most of our neighbours are old people who don’t bother us. It’s also a distance from my parents in Brampton.
I closed the door behind me and turned the lock. It thudded into place and I felt a bit better.
The earring felt cold in my pocket. Might have been my imagination. I took it out and left it on the table in my hallway.