Cerulean turns to face me. His character is a giant blue parrot with a little pirate on its shoulder, which is his idea of a joke.
"This is bullshit," he says.
It's a lovely, warm greeting.
"Hello, Cerulean," I type back, with my words popping up as little comical speech bubbles above my head. "What is?"
"This." He points at one of the shelves, on which there's a rack of colorful videogame-style mushrooms that are glitching through the shelf base. "I spent hours crafting these, and now this. What kind of damn mushrooms are these?"
I chuckle. Cerulean can get very upset about the smallest things. It's not funny really, more a part of his condition, but still I have to laugh.
"It's just bits," I type.
"Shit bits," he returns, "shitty little bits."
"Shiny bits," I counsel. "Sweet and tasty."
He gives me a look that would be exasperated, if giant blue parrots had that much expressive range, but instead looks mostly cute. I make my avatar smile. It's important we both stay within our normal emotional range, because, well, we'd both die if we didn't.
"This damn place," Cerulean huffs, and starts waddling away down the shelves. "Damn mushrooms. Are you coming?"
I grin and follow. This damn place saved my life. The real world Yangtze warehouse it's modeled on saved my life too. It seems I owe my life to lots of weird little things.
* * *
It was two months in to my convalescence after the coma, hiding out in my parents' dark Iowa basement, reading old comics and in-line skating around the dehumidifier and ping pong table, when I realized that I had a choice to make: man or mouse.
"You'll be with us again soon," my mother would often say, when she brought down my lukewarm milkshakes or diet mayo tuna sandwiches. "Coming back to the land of the living."
I appreciated everything she did, but it pissed me off. I'd been through this terrible thing and here now it was continuing. My brain was weak, my body too, I could hardly stand to be around other people and TV made my brain twinge like crazy, but I wasn't some feeble dying goat incapable of doing anything for myself.
"Baby steps," my doctor said when he discharged me. "Think of it like mental rehab. Your brain has to get re-accustomed to stimulation step by baby step."
So I got a job.
I researched the least mentally demanding work out there, in the dullest, darkest environment, and came up with picker at a Yangtze online shopping fulfillment center. They're the people who collect the stuff we order on the website, who labor all day in vast windowless warehouses that cover about a square mile each.
I applied and they took me on. Two days later I turned up and nodded through a twinge-inducing but mercifully brief induction. The supervisor gave me a simple gizmo called a 'diviner', which I was to follow as it flashed left-right directions through the warehouse. I picked up the stuff it highlighted then put it on conveyor belts for the packing department, ad infinitum, like a rat in a maze.
I loved it. All day I walked down dark climate-controlled shelving corridors, making no decisions for myself, just following the diviner to pick up limited edition basketballs, sets of tea knives, greetings cards, self-published books from the cranky print-on-demand machines, talking teddies, butt-shaped pillows and so on. Whatever the diviner demanded, I collected.
It was a lovely monotony. I got back into some kind of physical shape, and built up my stimulation endurance. If any order was too weird, I'd count backwards from one hundred to distract myself. I got good enough that the twinges mostly went away and my thinking cleared up.
I got so good at the job I could anticipate turns even before the diviner told me where to go. With all that extra brain-space, I started to notice the other pickers. They were all weirdos. Hank for example was a bitter redneck who got 'stranded' in Iowa after his community college kicked him out for selling weed, and he washed up on the fulfillment center's shore to make ends meet. In lieu of completing his studies he'd signed up for an online 'sexual mastery class,' and often would try out conversational gambits on me when our paths intersected through the warehouse, like lonely little ants at a scent-trail crossing.
"So when she says her name, you say, 'You should speak a little louder, you must be the shy one in the group'," he told me once.
"It's embarrassing her," I said.
"Right, it's putting her on the spot, meaning you control the spotlight. It's cool stuff man, neuro-linguistic programming from the top artists in the game."
"Does it work?"
"I haven't tried it yet."
Bobby was six foot seven and really into North Korea. Sometimes he wore the red star of North Korea on a T-shirt he'd clearly printed himself, as if daring our overlords to kick him out. I don't think the supervisor ever noticed, he probably thought it was a basketball shoe logo.
Linda from Arkansas was working her way around all the Yangtze fulfillment centers in the US, for a travel memoir she was writing.
"It's like the travel book by the guy who hitch-hiked round Ireland with a fridge," she told me once. "You've got to have a gimmick. This is my gimmick."
I loved it. Here were weird people, all with their own strange aspirations just like me, and I was handling it. When I needed time apart, I'd turn at a crossing when it looked as if we were going to intersect. A simple shrug of the shoulders and a point to the diviner would explain all.
The gods are rerouting me, that shrug said. It's just my fate.
It was Lucy on the print-on-demand machines, that clattery industrial corner of the center where books were baked in great X-ray like kilns, who put me onto Deepcraft.
I liked to stay near the printers for as long as I could before the sound made my brain twinge, watching pages slip in and out of the runners, forming up gradually into newly birthed books, their binding still tacky. These were dreams being made, just like my brain was rebuilding itself.
"I print my own here," Lucy told me once. She was a chubby girl with poorly dyed blue hair. We all called her Blucy. "I write romance with Amish vampires in the post-apocalypse. It's a big niche. They let me print them at cost."
I nodded. She showed me one of her books. The cover was awful, just clip-art of something representative of each of those genres horribly overlaid.
I made her one much better that night, stretching my brain's limits to the max. I had twinges for the following week, but she went wild for it. She invited me to play Deepcraft with her.
"It's just like digital Lego, Amo, you can turn down the danger and everything so there's no random events like falling into lava, no roaming zombies, nothing to make you scared or set off stress alarms, just a sandbox to build in. I make weird ruined worlds for my characters to live in. I think you'd get a kick out of it."
We went in together at her place, viewing one of her post-apocalyptic worlds through split-screen. It was funny to see the broken elevated roadways and tattered skyscrapers she'd envisaged built in chunky 3D blocks. Her ruins were fun and bright, like her writing. The game itself was intuitive and repetitive, involving grinding out ores by digging, then crafting them into tools and materials to create buildings.
It was fun. At home I built a miniature version of the fulfillment center; lovingly stacking up the long clean corridors, fitting it with low lights, stocking the shelves with whatever weird products I could craft, even hand-coding the mod for a diviner.
At the same time I started making covers for all Blucy's books. She never paid me, but she put me onto her writer friends who wanted covers, and they did pay. The work ran me down, but then I'd go in Deepcraft and grind out ores for hours, add to my fulfillment center, and wander it in a trance. In god mode I added non-player characters modeled on my co-workers in real life, who wandered its corridors endlessly online, forever doomed to think of little nuggets of information they wanted to pass on.
It was wonderfully soothing, and it sped up my recovery so much that I was able to make more covers. I
had enough cash and energy after eight months to quit the picking job and go full time with the covers.
"Don't go," my mother said, when I told her I was heading back to New York. "That place broke you. I couldn't bear for it to happen again."
My dad patted me on the shoulder and stood by.
I came back to New York on a Greyhound, quietly defiant. I worked on art that would've bored me to tears before. I went to Sir Clowdesley's as mental therapy to build up my tolerance. I crafted goods to sit on my Deepcraft warehouse shelves, even opening it up for others to run online and critique.
On one of those runs I met Cerulean.
* * *
Together we walk; him a parrot, me a hipster in cargo shorts. We have our diviners synced. We do this for hours, most nights, ever since Cerulean found it. After a few weeks of glimpsing him hovering constantly just at the edge of my vision, we talked, haltingly at first, but in time the story came out, and we realized we had more in common than just about anyone in the world: we'd both died multiple times.
"I met a girl," I tell him.
He stops his parrot in the act of reaching for some generic Ken doll-alikes. "What?"
I explain.
For Cerulean this is great and juicy gossip, because Cerulean spends all day in the darkness. He died in a coma too, just like me, but his coma hit while he was about to do a high-level dive at competition, on track to become an Olympic competitor. Unconsciousness hit at the edge of the thirty-foot dive platform and he fell, breaking his back and half-drowning in the pool before anyone could get him out.
He's much worse off than me, essentially a paraplegic, and far more sensitive to stimulation. Now we are each other's support systems.
Cerulean's pirate stomps excitedly round his feathery shoulder as I finish explaining.
"That is crazy," he types. "Mayor and a date?"
"A lot happened today."
"Are you coping OK?"
I shrug in the real world. "I'm OK now. I twinged pretty hard after I invited her, and I'm worried about what might happen on the date, but yeah."
"Damn. You're a brave man Amo, I couldn't do that. But maybe it's just what you need."
I laugh. "If I don't die."
We walk again. Our diviners click in synchrony. Up ahead Hank is coming for us. He'll probably tell us about a new pick-up trick he's learned, replete with a link. I actually programmed him to do that, so his character doesn't get completely dull; he's really just the outer skin on a few blog feeds about picking up girls.
I need less of that topic right now, thank you. I steer me and Cerulean left.
"In other news, I've decided what to do with my comic."
"The last panel?"
"I'm going to use it," I say. "I've finished it, and I promised to show it to you first. Can you handle it now?"
"Hang on a second." There's a pause before he goes on. "Just taking some aspirin. OK, hit me."
I hold out a piece of paper in game. He takes it in his wing.
"Feast your eyes," I type, "slowly."
He raises the paper. I wait. Right now the image will be unfolding across his screen. His brain will probably twinge quite hard. I hope it's worth a headache.
"Oh man," Cerulean types.
I bring the panel up too. It's another image of the tower of zombies in Times Square, but seen from a different perspective. This one's not from thirty stories high, floating clean above the fray, but right down in the dirt of rotten bodies.
The angle is tilted sharply, looking up through a frame of zombie flesh to the tower, all the way to the empty sky, where there is a hint of a shape written in the clouds, which might be the face of the hero's wife. It's a purposely faint resemblance, written in cottony wisps.
She was lost to the infection near the beginning of the book. Even the hero himself succumbed pages earlier, beaten down and chased through the streets of New York, dying in an ignominious alleyway behind the theater showing Cats.
In this final panel we see through his zombie eyes, and what he thinks may be his wife in the clouds.
Cerulean speaks.
"Jesus, Amo, this is beautiful. I can almost not handle it."
I get a twinge of emotion, because this image means a lot to me too. I think it came out of my coma. After I woke I felt like I understood the hunger of the zombies, these creatures I'd been sketching and painting for so long. I realized that no matter how much they consumed, it could never be enough. There weren't enough brains in the whole world to fill the holes carved out of them.
"I feel just like this," Cerulean says. "I'm like this sucker at the bottom reaching for clouds, but it's all an illusion."
I clear my throat. I pull away the goggles for a minute and rub my eyes. I've been keeping this to myself for months. My brain starts to twinge. I put them back on.
"I need to walk the darkness," I type.
"Me too."
We walk side by side. Occasionally our synchronized diviners click left or right and we follow to collect. It helps.
"It felt like this for me too," Cerulean says eventually. "The coma. I was diving, but it was a dive that never ended. I knew if only I could hit the water clean then everything would be all right, but I couldn't, and I never did get clear."
"You did, Cerulean. We both came out of it."
His parrot avatar laughs. "Not me. I'm a cripple Amo; I'm just like this guy. I can't even get out of bed. My mom has to clean it up when I piss in my pants."
There's nothing to say to that. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you feel sad."
"Screw sad, this is better. I'm in awe, Amo. This is beautiful. Now let's just shut up and work."
We work. We walk. I think about Lara. Despite Cerulean, or maybe because of him, I start to feel something different from my usual mixture of fear, guilt and self-pity.
Fulfillment. Finishing my comic is a big thing for me, and Cerulean's reaction inspires me. My brain twinges with mixed emotions so hard I think I might pass out, but I don't care. This is what life is for.
Only after we've completed the full circuit do I notice he's logged off already. I don't blame him. I log off myself, and roll from my chair into bed. I am exhausted. I am excited. Things are changing for me, and tomorrow is going to be a wonderful, terrifying day. I can't wait.
3. LARA
I wake up at 7am and get to work. I don't eat breakfast and haven't since the incident, but a brew of detoxing decaf green tea gets my brain gently firing. Slotted into my chair I start the next round of book cover bids, like a farmer out sowing seeds on fallow ground.
Around mid-morning Cerulean messages me.
Sorry to bail on you last night. Amazing. My head is splitting now, but at least I'm not bored. I promote you to supervisor.
I smile and reply.
First order of business, fix those mushrooms. I'll catch you in the darkness after the date.
He answers in seconds.
She'll love you. Good luck.
He logs off. I do some more work, some light exercise, then think about some lunch, but I'm still not hungry. My doctor thought this lack of appetite was strange, an outgrowth of my broken brain, but after plenty of tests they found I wasn't starving, I wasn't even losing muscle mass, so there was no real problem.
"Like I said, you'll be a case study for years to come," he said as he discharged me, with his red glasses off. "Maybe in your brain lies the key to solving third world hunger. Or even the next diet fad."
I need to plan for the date.
I bring up the French restaurant on the Internet, it's called 'Rien', meaning 'Nothing,' which is just fabulously avant-garde. It's a bit out of my price-range but I can afford to splash out. I dig into their About page and find that the singing cat is actually a mechanical automaton that works on similar principals to a Roomba hoover, patrolling the floor and singing for his supper. Guests toss him a few crumbs and he moves on.
The logarithmic light show has a guest video
jockey tonight. I click through and book a table for two at seven, then I bring up my phone and open the notes folder. There lies Lara's number. I don't give myself any time to prepare, I just punch it in.
After three rings she answers. "Hello?"
"Hi, it's Amo. We met in Sir Clowdesley yesterday. How's it going?"
I can hear the smile in her voice. "Ah, the zombie mayor! Have you got your art ready to show me?"
Zombie mayor is not a good nickname. "I've got it. I've got a booking at the French place too, Rien, at 7."
"OK great. I can meet you outside, I checked it out. The cat looks fun."
I smile. "Yeah, I think so. I'll see you then."
"See you, Amo."
She hangs up. I slump back.
My heart is hammering, there's sweat on my temples, and my head is starting to twinge hard. Crap. I'm going to die.
I flop off the chair to the floor, with my eyes throbbing sharply already. I drape the video screen goggles on and plug in my earphones, but I don't log in to Deepcraft; I'm too close to the precipice even for that, what I need now is nothing.
In the silence and dark I count down from a hundred. I flex each of my fingers in turn, then my toes. This is the worst it's been for months.
An hour passes, two, and gradually the twinges ebb. My breathing eases and my body unclenches. I lie there wondering how on earth I'm going to sit at a table with this woman.
I don't have an answer. I'm just going to do it.
I get back to work making covers. I need my routines. By five I'm hungry, so to satisfy the dinner routine I warm up another batch of bolognese and eat a few mouthfuls only. I'll be eating again in two hours.
I get dressed. Agonizing over what to wear is not a profitable use of my limited mental resources, so I go with my standard smart casual: gray flannel pants, dark cotton shirt, brown loafers and dark gray sports coat.
I pack my bag with my laptop and head out the door.
It's a gray day outside and getting dark already. I ride the train, see more posters for movies I can't watch, and get off. I arrive early and wander up to Madison Square Park with my jacket hood pulled over my head. I kill time wandering for ten minutes, and then head back.